John Fowles

John Fowles

            Biography

Born in 1926 in the middle class family in a place called Leigh at Sea.

He was living in a province which suffocated him. He then explained that his background might explained why he became something of a misanthrope early on.

Unlike modernists, who were always depressed by the modern civilisation,

postmodernists are depressed with civilisation in general.

During the WWII, he was evacuated to Devon. He was educated at Bedford school; he served in the army as the lieutenant in the royal marines, after the war,

in 1950, he graduated from Oxford,

in 1956 he married.

From 1954 to 1963 he taught at the university of Poitiers in France and in schools in Greece and England, becoming the Head of the English department at the London College in Hampstead.

He as a scholarly career, which was his official profession for quite a long time, with writing being his part time activity for quite a while.

The situation abruptly changed in 1963 because the first novel came out under the title The Collector. It was well received and he then turned to full time writing.

In 1965 another novel becomes a success; it is published under the title Magus.

In 1965 Fowles retires in a small town in Dorset, which is the setting of the French Lieutenant’s woman, so in line with his dislike with mankind, he turns to solitude and nature. He believes that the novelist has to live in a self-imposed exile. He is also an active ecologist.

In 1969 The French Lieutenant’s Woman comes out, again it is filmed in 1981. The screenplay for the film version was written by Harold Pinter. It is one of very few examples of successful film adaptation of a novel. He published a collection of stories under the title The Ebony Tower in 1974 and in 1977 Daniel Martin, in 1985 A Maggot.

The Collector  1963

Magus  1965

 The French Lieutenant’s Woman 1969

            The French Lieutenant’s Woman

The French Lieutenant’s Woman was highly acclaimed and even considered as one of the best books that came from England since the war.

It is a mixture of  Victorian and postmodernist novel.

What makes it a Victorian novel is the setting. It also offers a brilliant picture of Victorian England, which is where the game begins.

He presents a panorama of various social classes, typical of 19^th century England. Characters are also typical of the Victorian novel. He perfectly recreates the style of writing of the time. Again, it is not a historical novel, despite all that.

It in not postmodernist novel when it comes to the form. He imitates the form of Victorian novels and recreates their style, but he does it ironically, so the novel is an ironic commentary of what he decided to put in his novel.

The novel presupposes that the reader should be well informed of the Victorian literature, values, gender roles and manners.

 He wrote an essay about how he wrote this novel, under the title “Notes on writing a novel”, which was based on a journal he was keeping at the time. The initial idea came to him in a waking dream of a woman standing alone on a deserted harbour wall gazing seaward, with her back turned to the village.

This vision came to him in the fall of 1966. He began working on a story about the woman from his vision, and he knew at the beginning that the woman from the vision was associated with a long gone age.

He reduced the illusion breaking comments by the narrator.

He also switched the order of the endings, so that the conventional happy ending would not come last.

.Postmodernist method in French Lieutenant's Woman

The postmodernist aspect of the novel is primarily reflected in the role of the narrator. What is the role of the narrator?

On the one had, the narrator is the omniscient narrator, in line with the tradition of the literary realism (he stops the action, discusses certain things, he was the construct, invention of the author, just like the rest of them, he is outside the world of action, not outside the novel, he also refers to the characters in the third person, he takes the reader by the hand, he sums up for the reader, he forms the opinion of the reader, leads him almost physically and mentally. The viewpoint of the narrator is external because the narrator looks at what happens to the characters and reports it, it is external, Olympian viewpoint.

He serves the function of the mediator between the protagonist and the reader. He may be similar to the author, but it is not necessary.).

On the other hand, Fowles uses this tradition of the all knowing narrator, and plays with it in a typical post modernist way, to suggest that such type of narrator was a convention as everything else, that he was made up by the author just like the characters. As readers, we can never tell if he is ridiculing or reinforces this tradition of the omniscient narrator. It turns out he is doing both at the same time. Since these narrators are all knowing, they intervene, they control the moves of their characters. But the twist that Fowles deliberately does here, he makes his narrator the all-knowing, but also makes him not intervene, not use his power. That is how Fowles plays with the tradition of the omniscient narrator.

Fowles also applies the theory of evolution to the social context. Sara would be a prototype of a free woman, she anticipates new times. Applying Darwin’s theory of evolution, she makes Sarah the species who will successfully adapt to the coming times. Charles is yet to become an emancipated men. On the other hand, Ernestina and most of the other characters are doomed to extinction, they fail to adapt and adopt the new norms.

Postmodernism is a very playful phenomenon. On one occasion, Charles needs to make up his mind about whether he would meet Sarah in Exiter or not. That is one of the moments where the narrator intrudes on the action and addresses the reader. He says: look at him now. So he stops the action and addresses the reader. The narrator suggest that he could make Charles do what he wanted him to do, such as, go to his fiancée and forget all about Sarah. Probably, he should go to his fiancée, the narrator says, which is a reflection of Fowles’ irony, here we have through the narrator Fowles speaking and ironising the right and wrong of the time, suggesting that there is no right and wrong, but simply right and wrong from the perspective of the particular set of norms and conventions.

According to Victorian norms, what would be right for Charles to do would be to go to his fiancée and forget about the mysterious woman. He should decide not to have an affair with her, because it is right from the Victorian perspective. “That is what he should do, but he won’t, what can I do?”, says the narrator, “I could intervene, but I won’t, I am just here, I want to make my characters free (another paradox, how can we make someone free, we can only grant freedom, which only means that they are not free).”

There is also an ending. At the end of the novel, Charles enters the house, sees Sarah and they have a typical Victorian happy ending. Another indication that Sarah has completely changed and accepted the new times is reflected in the fact that Charles finds her living in the house of the artists, Pre-Raphaelites (another postmodernist element), who rejected Victorian morality, which reinforces the theory of evolution applied on the social context. Fowles deliberately associates her, the invented character of his fiction, to the Pre-Raphaelite artists who truly existed, which is another postmodernist mix. There are fictitious characters, functioning on the same level with true personages who truly existed in history.

As a result, we are confused and the borderline between fiction and reality is very thin. In the traditional happy ending, he is happy to have found her, they decide happily ever after as husband and wife and miraculously, they even have a daughter, who is the child of love, born from one sexual encounter they had.

All of the sudden, the narrator reappears, takes his watch, winds the hands of the watch backwards 15 minutes, which suggests narrator’s unlimited control and power. We then see Charles re-entering the house and we see the whole episode rerun, but with a different outcome. It is very 20^th century like ending, more in tune with the expectations of the 20^th century reader, who feels the first type of ending to be sweet, but unrealistic.

She decides to let him go, they realise that their differences are too great to be bridged, she is not very happy about the idea of marriage.

She has simply found some model, some way of life that appeals to her. She also decides not to tell him of the child. This is much more realistic, much more down to earth ending.

On his way out, Charles sees the child, and it never occurs to him it could be his child. That is another example of intervention in the name of non-intervention.

Charles is the character that develops throughout the novel, he dares not to marry Ernestina, proving, in line with the Darwin’s theory, that he will adapt to survive.

Sarah does not grow, we already find her different at the beginning of the novel. Even her first appearance in the novel establishes her as a rebel, with her back turned to the village. Only her circumstances change, and she finds her place, she finds her true, natural environment, and she no longer seems to be an outcast.