On a visit to Lyme Regis, Charles meets 'the French Lieutenant's Woman', also 'the French lieutenant's whore', Sarah Woodruff. She is also a Victim of Circumstance. She has a lot of hair which is frequently loose and she likes looking out to sea, because she's Deep. More specifically, she's sad because she's unable to be sexually and intellectually free, because she's hampered by the oppressiveness of Dorset society and the knowledge that if she goes to London she'll probably end up exactly what the Lyme residents think she is. She likes to walk in the Undercliff, a very beautiful strip of land west of Lyme, which is full of ancient woodland and fossils, and equally full of canoodling couples (mostly also Victims of Circumstance).
Ernestina is young, pretty and reasonably clever, with no apparent interests or individuality except her determination to marry Charles. She is obviously also a Victim of Circumstance.
OK, it's easy to criticise the slightly cardboard characters, but the real trouble comes from the narrator. Fowles is desperately trying to do that postmodernist thing where you repeatedly call attention to the fact that this is all fiction. He playfully puts himself in and out of scenes as an observer, toying with the characters' fates, telling you forcefully how to interpret their thoughts and actions, linking each to some generalisation about the Victorian age. He's aping the classic Victorian omniscient narrator, but he's way more dictatorial, and not half as funny, as Charles Dickens or George Eliot, and he gets in the way. The characters stop being characters and become allegories. We lose interest in what happens to them: if all outcomes are equally possible, then somehow all outcomes become equally unimportant. (I have the same problem with Borges, who frequently doesn't engage me emotionally at all.) The final scene fragments in all sorts of directions, but unfortunately I had pretty much stopped caring which one might be the 'real' ending.
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| Meryl Streep as Sarah in the film version (1981) |
Although Fowles clearly loves postmodernism (he places himself proudly in the age of Barthes), it's kind of like your grandfather trying to do postmodernism. He questions, but he doesn't question enough: the Victorians were all like this and we can see that in how this character behaves in this story I've written. This woman (Sarah) was unusually clever, but she was still very feminine and passive and had a very nice body. This woman (Ernestina) is a shallow idiot, but, poor little thing, it's because she's so young and hasn't been taught any better. This woman (Mrs Poulteney, a local busybody and sort-of-philanthropist) is very religious and therefore is a bitch because that's what Victorian notions of piety made you into.
One thing which really stops it coming to life is simply a lack of individualising detail. Ernestina could be any rich young woman from trade. Charles's only distinguishing character traits are his interest in Darwinism and his emotional confusion, which are hardly enough for the protagonist of a 470-page novel. Ernestina's Aunt Tranter is a classic generous-hearted, generally ignorant spinster. The novel seemed to me the worst kind of allegory, where the author is so busy making the characters illustrate the Conflict of Ideas that he forgets to make them into real people. The only place this lets up is Charles's manservant, Sam, who is a real Cockney dandy, wants to open a haberdasher's shop, and falls in love with Aunt Tranter's maid, Mary. He's accidentally the most interesting character in the book, and my heart warmed to him.
Fowles peppers the novel with references to contemporary sources, including a lot of Hardy, Tennyson, Clough, and Matthew Arnold, as well as Darwin, Marx, Malthus and other social commentators. Each chapter has two quotations set against one another, clearly designed to undercut the beautiful image the Victorians had of themselves with the socio-economic reality. This gets old very quickly. He does a pretty poor parody of Henry James (at least compared to Max Beerbohm's priceless 'The Mote in the Middle Distance'), and chats vaguely about Christina Rossetti being a raging hysteric so blithely that it made me really quite cross.
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| The Undercliff in Dorset, which is actually really nice and worth a visit |
I think, basically, the novel hasn't dated very well. Some of the social assumptions Fowles portrays in the 1860s, such as gender essentialism, were still fairly prevalent in the 1960s, and he unthinkingly reproduces just as many social conventions as he satirises or attacks. Women are either spinsters or objects of sexual desire. At points it's sickeningly complacent and misogynistic, and even leering. In one scene that sticks out a mile, he shows Sarah sharing a bed with another maid in the house in Lyme. BUT DON'T WORRY, he says, YOU MUSTN'T THINK THEY'RE LESBIANS. Phew, I thought, wiping my brow which was already beaded with anxious sweat. Thank goodness for that. (Actually, I genuinely was quite relieved, because I didn't want to see the excruciating mess Fowles would probably made of a real lesbian plotline.)
The novel is dry and sometimes funny, but not consistently, and neither the 'meta' bits nor the actual narrative are successful: the former seems dated even for the 1960s, after the much more interesting challenges that modernism made to Victorian prose fiction; and the latter is just plain lacklustre. The Magus and The Collector are not without their intellectual pretensions, but at least you want to know what happens at the end. Read them instead.
