Conclusions

Under the influence of postmodern innovations in both history and fiction, historical novels developed into a new form. Historiographic metafiction is one kind of postmodern novel which rejects projecting present beliefs and standards onto the past and asserts the specificity and particularity of the individual past event. It also suggests a distinction between events and facts that is one shared by many historians. Since the documents become signs of events, which the historian transmutes into facts, as in historiographic metafiction, the lesson here is that the past once existed, but that our historical knowledge of it is semiotically transmitted. Our understanding of “historiographic metafiction” is informed by the Canadian academic Linda Hutcheon, who has coined the term and has provided both a definition and commentary on it. L. Hutcheon considers historical consciousness and reflection upon history to be fundamental in the postmodern literary experience; according to her, historiographic metafiction perfectly represents the poetics of postmodernism. In its contradictory nature, historiographic metafiction refers both to the world of history and that of fiction, namely it is the meeting point of history and fiction, allowing us to approach the subject of history and historical study from the related area of literature.

“The French Lieutenant’s Woman” by John Fowles is clearly a case of what L. Hutcheon has labelled historiographic metafiction. As we have already discussed above, historiographic metafiction shares with other examples of postmodernist literature a critical attitude towards representational strategies. As metafiction, it is conscious of its own fictional status; on the level of historicity, it is conscious of the fact that much of what is passed on as a history represents not so much the state of affairs of a bygone era, but reflects also the preferences and prejudices of those who wrote these accounts. A lot of postmodernist literature, and especially historiographic metafiction, is conscious that what we are reading does not have to be a neutral and objectivist of things as they really happened – but then it is already conscious that such texts sometimes are our only possibility to learn something about the past at all. As a paradigm case of historiographic metafiction, “The French Lieutenant’s Woman” is obsessed with all of these questions.

By using metafictional elements, the postmodern authors point out a difference between reality and its linguistic representation and they emphasize the fact that a language works on different principles than reality. At the same, the use of metafictional elements points out the fictionality of fiction, involves a reader in a creation of meaning of the literary (artistic) text, and shows a difference between the past and contemporary forms of art, between the past and present sensibility and the vision of the world. For example, the first chapters of Fowles’s “The French Lieutenant’s Woman” begins as a traditional Victorian realistic novel, but later a narrator suddenly breaks a narrative and directly addresses a reader by commenting on the previous plot, possible development of the story and on the writing techniques. Thus direct addressing a reader and the comments on the fictionality of fiction become metafictional elements through which Fowles emphasizes a fictionality of his fiction, draws a reader to participate in the construction of meaning, and makes a difference between the past and present forms of arts and sensibility – a traditional Victorian novel and its metafictional transformation into a postmodern novel. At the same time, by using a realistic form, Victorian characters, setting and sensibility based on rationality (Darwinism, Marxism, Realism in literature) and their transformation into postmodern characters through the use of contrast, irony and parody, the writer shows a difference between the past and present sensibility (and forms of art). The past sensibility is based on rationality and a belief in objective truth which is contrasted with the present sensibility based on plurality, openness, radical doubt and skepticism towards any unifying visions of reality.

Hence, the novel seems to be a historical account of Victorian England or imitation of a Victorian love story; yet the play of intertextuality, such as footnotes and epigraphs from fictional and historical sources, and the shifting of viewpoints from the Victorian age to the 1960’s are features that make the novel innovative and postmodern. Fowles claimed that his aim was not to emulate Victorian works but to write something new. Indeed, in “The French Lieutenant’s Woman” he constantly flouts the traditional literary rules by furnishing the novel with three possible endings, rejecting the features of the all-knowing and all-seeing author, installing himself in the story, and finally granting his characters and his readers’ freedom and independence.

Life of Victorians was controlled by a rigid hierarchical society in which each order had a fixed role. To depict social constraints in society’s structure, Fowles introduces typical class representatives: Charles, a nobleman enjoying a gentleman’s pleasures yet following dictates of the society, real gentleman and the bright representative of the notion “Englishness”; Sam, a servant of an exploited lower class, who actually has more freedom than the aristocracy; Mr. Freeman as a member of the middle class who despises the idle and unproductive noblemen; his daughter Ernestina is demure and shy, the ideal of Victorian womanhood and a counter to Sarah, a fallen woman etc. At the same time, we can see that the social stratification, as subject to evolution, is changing by means of social mobility. Aristocratic class is disappearing while the middle class is rising. As the reader witnesses, Charles is described as a living fossil naturally selected for extinction so that the fitter and more productive classes may survive. In this sense it is not only the middle class Freemans who are rising on the social ladder, but also the lower class servants, Sam and Mary, are able to pursue their dreams.

The most socially and economically oppressed group in Victorian England was women. Unequal to men in nearly every way, a middle-class woman’s role was to be a submissive creature, a wife, a mother and a keeper of the household, in other words, “The Angel in the House”. However, due to an imbalance in numbers between the sexes, there were many “redundant” women who failed at the marriage market and therefore were unable to become ideal women. Not only does Sarah fail to gain this domestic bliss, but she rebels sexual constraints with her deviant behaviour. While Sarah is passionate and therefore abnormal, Ernestina represents an asexual Victorian ideal, thought in contrast Charles, as a man, and is expected to freely indulge his passions.

Darwin’s discoveries shattered Victorians’ belief in God’s creation. Fowles applies the theory of evolution and natural selection to his work and enables his characters Charles and Sarah to evolve and change their predestined path. Sarah is in fact a type which can be often found in Victorian novels. She is an unmarried educated woman who was left destitute to the only possible respectable employment, that of a governess. Contrary to typical heroines, Sarah is always “ill placed” and feels she does not fit. Not able to socialize and accept her assigned position in the society, either as a farmer’s wife or a governess, she prefers to be an outsider. Living in Victorian age and refusing to adapt to society’s norms, she is bound to be viewed and stigmatized as a fallen woman by the majority. Dr. Grogan explains her deviant behaviour as a case of mental disorder; Mrs. Poulteney, who represents “Britishness” and embodies British forces and authorities in the novel, sees Sarah as a convenient charity project. For Charles, Sarah symbolizes a mystery – an intelligent, spirited and sexually exciting woman.

The main character, Charles, is rather conventional throughout most of the novel. Although he likes to see himself as a modern thinker and a Darwinist, “not like the majority of his peers and contemporaries”, he remains faithful to duty and comfortable path of a gentleman. He is safe in the world of “iron certainties and rigid conventions” and unable to adapt to the evolving environment while Sarah, ever courageous, struggles to free herself from Victorian conventions and to shape her own destiny. Evolving from a governess to a fallen woman and finally to a New Woman, happy and emancipated, she finds her own identity and place where she belongs. Charles’s development, triggered by Sarah’s manipulation, is a long and painful process, a journey to an uncertain and dangerous destination. Some of the steps he takes are failures, such as his marriage to his fiancé in the first ending. However, Charles chooses love over security and is forced out of the society for breaking his engagement to Ernestina. Finding Sarah, a different independent woman who rejects his protection and her predestined role of a governess or a fallen woman in despair, Charles needs to revise his conventional views of a woman’s role, which enables him finally to walk towards his own future.