The French Lieutenant Woman
The French Lieutenant Woman
John Robert Fowles was an English novelist, much influenced by both Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus, and critically positioned between modernism and postmodernism. Fowles was named by the Times newspaper as one of the 50 greatest British writers since 1945. The period of the 1960s was followed by The French Lieutenant's Woman, a period romance set in Lyme Regis, Dorset, another location in which Fowles was deeply absorbed.
As John Fowles builds his novel on the tradition of Victorian romance even the title corresponds to the dark, mysterious woman of the typical Victorian romantic novel.
The narrator touches upon those aspects of Victorian society that would appear most foreign to contemporary readers: Victorian attitudes towards women, economics, science.
At the novel’s start, Charles is visiting his fiancée in Lyme. Charles meets Sarah and he is told her story: she was seduced and abandoned by a French sailor and has since been an outcast in the provincial town. Charles encounters Sarah several times during his stay in Lyme and finds himself drawn to her, struck by how different she is from other women. After a chain of events, Charles and Sarah consummate their relationship which leads to their re-thinking of life and society conventions.
The novel has two protagonists, Sarah Woodruff and Charles Smithson. Both of them are character types commonly found in a nineteenth century romantic novel. These lovers are doomed from the beginning. Sarah is an outcast, rejected by Victorian society. We can see it in her opposition to Ernestina while the narrator describes them. As for Ernestina she is directly described as the ideal Victorian young woman, innocent and intelligent by the words from the semantic field of tenderness “delicate, fragrance”. And in the case of Sarah, the narrator stresses her strangeness and her difference from her Victorian counterparts in dress, behavior and attitude. For example, a metaphor “born with a
John Robert Fowles was an English novelist, much influenced by both Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus, and critically positioned between modernism and postmodernism. Fowles was named by the Times newspaper as one of the 50 greatest British writers since 1945. The period of the 1960s was followed by The French Lieutenant's Woman, a period romance set in Lyme Regis, Dorset, another location in which Fowles was deeply absorbed.
As John Fowles builds his novel on the tradition of Victorian romance even the title corresponds to the dark, mysterious woman of the typical Victorian romantic novel.
The narrator touches upon those aspects of Victorian society that would appear most foreign to contemporary readers: Victorian attitudes towards women, economics, science.
At the novel’s start, Charles is visiting his fiancée in Lyme. Charles meets Sarah and he is told her story: she was seduced and abandoned by a French sailor and has since been an outcast in the provincial town. Charles encounters Sarah several times during his stay in Lyme and finds himself drawn to her, struck by how different she is from other women. After a chain of events, Charles and Sarah consummate their relationship which leads to their re-thinking of life and society conventions.
The novel has two protagonists, Sarah Woodruff and Charles Smithson. Both of them are character types commonly found in a nineteenth century romantic novel. These lovers are doomed from the beginning. Sarah is an outcast, rejected by Victorian society. We can see it in her opposition to Ernestina while the narrator describes them. As for Ernestina she is directly described as the ideal Victorian young woman, innocent and intelligent by the words from the semantic field of tenderness “delicate, fragrance”. And in the case of Sarah, the narrator stresses her strangeness and her difference from her Victorian counterparts in dress, behavior and attitude. For example, a metaphor “born with a