The French lieutenant’s whore and pier poetry

Fowles, Part II

I

IN 1969, John Fowles's classic novel The French Lieutenant's Woman appeared. Widely translated and discussed in depth. The story of Charles Smithson and Sarah Woodruff. He, an amateur naturalist, she a former governess and free-spirited woman. A love affair that goes awry.

John Fowles was an expert on Victorian literature and all the codes of this type of text are exploited and deconstructed. Karel Reisz's 1981 film was brilliant, reaping prestigious Bafta and Golden Globe awards. With Jeremy Irons and Meryl Streep. Harold Pinter was the writer of the film script.

II

Arguably, more studies have been written about this novel than about any other contemporary text. The Canadian theorist and author of A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction (London & New York: Routledge, 1988), Linda Hutcheon, refers to it as historiographical metafiction. Thus, a text that inflects into its ways of telling, but at the same time refers to important historical events. Hutcheon's doctoral thesis at the University of Toronto was titled: “Narcissistic narrative: the paradoxical status of self-conscious fiction" (1975).

This novel has three endings. In metafiction, there rarely is closure. And by choosing different endings, Fowles activates the way the conventions of the Victorian novel differ from those of a modern text.

The same process occurs in Nicholas Ray's brilliant 1950 film In a Lonely Place. With Humphrey Bogart and Gloria Grahame. A writer of film scripts, Dixon Steele, is suspected when the girl who was supposed to have “summarised" a book for him is murdered. His neighbour is his alibi. She saw the girl leave, but Steele remains the prime suspect. The neighbour is beautiful, but a third-rate actress. A relationship develops, but his aggressive temperament causes the relationship to crumble. Over and over again, the viewer is aware of the play between his experience and the end of the film you see: “I was born when she kissed me, I died when she left me, I lived a few weeks while she loved me ..."

There was a different ending, which fell away: The new loved one too dies like the innocent girl.

Lonely woman on a wharf

How did Fowles start his novel? He claimed in a 1966 interview that he had “seen" a woman. Lonely on a wharf staring out to sea ...

The story takes place in the mid-19th century. Sarah Woodruff is seen as “the French lieutenant's whore". A humiliated woman from her relationship with one Varguennes, a ship's officer who had abused and abandoned her. He returned to France and got married. She became a maid to one Mrs. Poulteney, a strict woman, and in her spare time she stood on the pier.

The so-called omniscient narrator provides footnotes and references. And provides keys for the reader to Darwin, Karl Marx, Matthew Arnold, Tennyson and Thomas Hardy.

American poet Anthony Hecht (1923-2004) parodied Matthew Arnold's famous “Dover Beach":

The Dover Bitch

A Criticism of Life: for Andrews Wanning

So there stood Matthew Arnold and this girl
With the cliffs of England crumbling away behind them,
And he said to her, “Try to be true to me,
And I’ll do the same for you, for things are bad
All over, etc., etc.”
Well now, I knew this girl.
It’s true she had read Sophocles in a fairly good translation
And caught that bitter allusion to the sea,
But all the time he was talking she had in mind
The notion of what his whiskers would feel like
On the back of her neck.
She told me later on
That after a while she got to looking out
At the lights across the channel, and really felt sad,
Thinking of all the wine and enormous beds
And blandishments in French and the perfumes.
And then she got really angry.
To have been brought
All the way down from London, and then be addressed
As a sort of mournful cosmic last resort
Is really tough on a girl, and she was pretty.
Anyway, she watched him pace the room
And finger his watch-chain and seem to sweat a bit,
And then she said one or two unprintable things.
But you mustn’t judge her by that.
What I mean to say is,
She’s really all right. I still see her once in a while
And she always treats me right.
We have a drink
And I give her a good time, and perhaps it’s a year
Before I see her again, but there she is,
Running to fat, but dependable as they come.
And sometimes I bring her a bottle of Nuit d’ Amour.

From: The Hard Hours (1967)

A parody implies that you need to understand the codes you are parodying or thrashing.

III

The feminist issues in the novel are also commented on. For this reader, The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne from 1855 is the most striking intertext. Hester Prynne who has an illegitimate child and must wear the red letter A for Adultery. It is set between 1642 and 1649 in a narrow Puritan community in the Massachusetts Bay Colony.

In all these texts, the woman is always the culprit, the harlot, while it appears the man can get on with his life.

And the conversation between Darwinism and religion is similarly pertinent in Fowles's book. Matthew Arnold is used in mottos along with Martin Gardiner's views on evolution. In chapter 61, the narrator writes that it is a “time-proven rule" never to introduce new characters, except so-called lesser figures, to the reader at the end of a novel. Why this further revelation? Didn't Fowles want to say goodbye to his story?

Linda Hutcheon claims that this points to the power of the writer and his freedom in so-called “political double-talk" in A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction (206–207).

Novels don't have to be mimetic. They create a new world in which the author can and may manipulate the reader. Publisher and author alert in advance that there are no pagination errors in the final chapter and Fowles likewise refers the reader to the Human Documents of the Victorian Golden Age to grasp the reality behind his fiction. Later on, readers get used to these games. In later exponents of metafiction, you can read the book as given or follow other routes.

Donald Barthelme and Julian Barnes, in particular, play mind games. In the film version of The French Lieutenant's Woman, the making of the film is foregrounded to embody auctorial involvement and interference in the story.

IV

And look at what happens between Hecht and Matthew Arnold's poem:

Dover Beach

The sea is calm tonight.
The tide is full, the moon lies fair
Upon the straits; on the French coast the light
Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand,
Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay.
Come to the window, sweet is the night-air!
Only, from the long line of spray
Where the sea meets the moon-blanched land,
Listen! you hear the grating roar
Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,
At their return, up the high strand,
Begin, and cease, and then again begin,
With tremulous cadence slow, and bring
The eternal note of sadness in.
Sophocles long ago
Heard it on the Ægean, and it brought
Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow
Of human misery; we
Find also in the sound a thought,
Hearing it by this distant northern sea.
The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.
Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.

Indeed:

And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.

The novel still is particularly captivating in these years of ours. It is set in 1867 and the presence of the sea is striking, something that is an important theme in Arnold's work. The two walkers talk about Darwin. Ernestina Freeman rebukes her fiancé, Charles, 32, about his views. Her religious father is particularly troubled by evolution. He lives on an inheritance from his uncle and we are aware of his visits to prostitutes. Then there's Sarah Woodruff, a whore, aka the French lieutenant's hoo-er as she's typified in Lyme Regis.

An undelivered letter which further complicates everything between Sarah and Charles. The community that turns against him, because he has abandoned Ernestina. Class and snobbery. Religion versus evolution. Male freedoms contrasted with women's restraints. A love story complicated by the entry of an authorial narrator with clever references and mottos.

For a lekker snotty review, read this one.

For a modern reflection on Thomas Hardy there is always Elizabeth Lowry's novel The Chosen, which asks important feminist questions: The silenced woman observed anew by a modern woman. Hermione Lee's important biography of Virginia Woolf (1996) is observed anew.

V

Here is the entire text of the novel by Fowles.

My copy cost R2,10 in 1979.

(To be continued)

♦ VWB ♦

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