Nistor

Nistor Cristina Ioana

English Major, Second Year
Group 3
Professor: Ioana Zirra
Faculty of Foreign Languages and Literatures
University of Bucharest
16th of May 2014

The postmodernist revision of Victorian with self-reflexive literary means in

The French Lieutenant`s Woman

Literary postmodernism is a late 20th century movement that emerged as a continuation of

modernism in the sense that rejected reason and the real, but unlike the latter, it exhibited the
meaninglessness of life by questioning and parodying the past from a present perspective, instead of
making use exclusively of imagination.
There is no clear definition of postmodernism, but it can be easily understood by comparing it with
modernism. The postmodernist kind of literature, as opposed to the modernist one, lacks selfconfidence (Bauman in tefnescu, 118) and is oriented towards history as a reference point for
the existential issue. Both the modernists and the postmodernists focus on the inner world with the
difference that modernists appeal to sheer imagination -as a mark of their self-confidence- to
demolish reason, whereas postmodernists, by virtue of being rather self-conscious (Bauman in
tefnescu, 118), need to question reality in order to undermine the social norms based on reason
and reveal the irrelevance of existence. Postmodernists have a reflexive attitude (tefnescu, 118)
that helps them prove the absence of reason, while modernists resort to autonomous imagination
(tefnescu, 119) as a rejection of reason and the real. Besides being self-conscious, postmodern
literature is also self-reflective and not only the past is questioned, but sometimes the nature of the
text itself and the extent to which the author interferes in the novel, too. (Didiulyt, 9).
A good example of postmodern literature is John Fowles` novel The French Lieutenant`s Woman
(1969). The French Lieutenant`s Woman looks back on the Victorian period, parodies it from a
XXth century point of view and questions the Victorian life in a way that doesn`t allow a reasonable
answer. The means of parodying the Victorian Age and, at the same time, the Victorian novel, are
the intertextuality of the text and the self-referential characteristic of the novel that enables the
author to reflect upon his work, criticize it and modify it just before our eyes.

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Further on in this essay, we will be looking at the way in which intertextuality and self-reflective
means combine and offer the image of a parodied society in a novel that is, by virtue of the selfreferential characteristic, a parody of the Victorian novel in itself.
Postmodernism, parody and intertextuality are three closely related terms according to the
contemporary critic, Linda Hutcheon:
Parody often called ironic quotation, pastiche, appropriation, or intertextuality - is usually
considered central to postmodernism But this parodic reprise of the past of art is not nostalgic;
it is always critical. It is also not ahistorical or de-historicizing; it does not wrest past art from its
original historical context and reassemble it into some sort of presentist spectacle. Instead,
through a double process of installing and ironizing, parody signals how present representations
come from past ones and what ideological consequences derive from both continuity and
difference (Didiulyt, 12)

Bakhtin`s idea of intertextuality can be summed up as follows: Language in the novel not only
represents, but itself serves as the object of representation. Novelistic discourse is always criticizing
itself.
The equation between parody and intertextuality can be proved by comparing Hutcheon and
Bakhtin`s definitions of these terms. Hutcheon affirms that Postmodern parody is a kind of
contesting revision or rereading of the past that both confirms and subverts the power of the
representations of history (Didiulyt, 13). From Bakhtin`s point of view, what is typical of a novel
is the image of another`s language and outlook on the world, simultaneously represented and
representing (Bakhtin in tefnescu & Surdulescu , 4).
In The French Lieutenant`s Woman, characters` behaviour and thoughts and the excerpts from
Darwin`s theory, various social documents and Victorian authors` writings which precede each
chapter are not the primary means of representation, but the object of representation (Bakhtin in
tefnescu & Surdulescu 4). In other words, language in this novel represents Victorian mentality
(Fowles` novel confirms the existence and characteristics of the Victorian age) and at the same time
its representation is parodied (the history is subverted) by the author.
As I have already said, each chapter of the novel is preceded by excerpts from Darwin`s Origin of
the Species, Victorian literature or from Victorian social documents. Moreover, the author makes
reference to real documents throughout the text (the case of Emile De la Ronciere) and even places
Sarah in the house of some renowned Pre-Raphaelites. This technique is meant to create an
historical frame for the fictional story, in order to make it valid and reenact the past that needs to be
questioned.
Charles Darwin`s treaty on science does not offer a context for Charles` passion for paleontology
only, but it also allures to the evolution of man, to the unavoidable change of the world that requires
the change of the mentalities. According to Darwin`s discoveries, the beings that are able to adapt to
change are the only survivals. The characters that evolve and exceed the Victorian rigid social
norms are Sarah Woodruff and Charles Smithson.
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Sarah is represented from the very beginning as a rebellious woman that had already undergone
change and become the symbol of freedom. She became an outcast of her own will, married
shame and confined herself to solitude. She suffered from being cheated on by the French
lieutenant and as she couldn`t bear the pain mixed up with shame and disgust of life she had to
undergo a painful change in order to cope with her existence. In doing this she had to destroy the
image that society wanted of her, she had to assume her new state of an outcast so that no insult
could touch her. In other words she underwent the darwinian process of adaptation. In a way, she
committed suicide by giving up all the aspirations, all the chances she might have had and thus,
turned her back on the cruel, narrow-minded society in an act of defiance. The parody is partly
based on the antithesis between Sarah, the symbol of change and the conservative Ernestina as well
as Sarah`s relation with Mrs. Poulteney.
Nevertheless, the parody is mainly based on the construction of Charles as a typical Victorian
gentleman who is gradually changing throughout the text under Sarah`s influence. By virtue of
being the representative of his historical period, Charles is presented as having several
shortcomings: he is endowed with the now useless methodical spirit, he denies what he likes for the
sake of respectability, but he is aware of that, he`s always trying to save the appearances either by
concealing his impulses (towards Sarah) or by refusing to work in the trade. In spite of all these, we
can see Charles changing because he realizes most of his flaws:
Like many of his contemporaries he sensed that the earlier self-responsibility of the century was
turning into self-importance: that what drove the new Britain was increasingly a desire to seem
respectable, in place of the desire to do good for goods sake.
P.S. On re-reading what I have written I perceive a formality my heart does not intend. Forgive
it. You are both so close and yet a strangerI know not how to phrase what I really feel. Your
fondest C. [...] but those letters had been agony to write, mere concessions to convention, which is
why he had added that postscript
Grogan, would you have had me live a lifetime of pretense? Is our age not full enough as it is of
a mealy-mouthed hypocrisy, an adulation of all that is false in our natures?

Not only the Victorian age is parodied, but also the Victorian novel. By using self-reflective literary
means, Fowles became the author of a pseudo-Victorian novel.
In chapter 13, he starts his confession to the reader with the sentence I do not know, which shows
the kind of insecurity that Victorian novelists lacked, for they were seen as gods. Fowles
pretended that he knew everything about his characters in order to maintain the spirit of the
Victorian novel.
I do not know. This story I am telling is all imagination. These characters I create never existed
outside my own mind. If I have pretended until now to know my characters minds and innermost
thoughts, it is because I am writing in (just as I have assumed some of the vocabulary and voice
of) a convention universally accepted at the time of my story: that the novelist stands next to God.
He may not know all, yet he tries to pretend that he does. But I live in the age of Alain Robbe-

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Grillet and Roland Barthes; if this is a novel, it cannot be a novel in the modern sense of the
word.

Fowles was not in complete control of his novel, and neither did he want. He granted his characters
freedom, although he had the possibility of doing whatever he wanted with them as a novelist. But,
as his characters are released from the strict pattern of the Victorian novel and almost become alive,
he would need permission in order to follow them everywhere and instil his own thoughts and ideas
upon them.
But I am a novelist, not a man in a gardenI can follow her where I like? But possibility is not
permissibility. Husbands could often murder their wivesand the reverseand get away with it.
But they dont.

Fowles wishes to make us understand what happens behind a novel, in order to be able to
understand the novel itself. This kind of transparency is aimed at showing the inutility of the
Victorian norms in literature that mislead the readers into thinking that every author has a certain,
unalterable plan for his novel.
You may think novelists always have fixed plans to which they work, so that the future
predicted by Chapter One is always inexorably the actuality of Chapter Thirteen. But novelists
write for countless different reasons [] Only one same reason is shared by all of us: we wish to
create worlds as real as, but other than the world that is. Or was. This is why we cannot plan. We
know a world is an organism, not a machine. We also know that a genuinely created world must
be independent of its creator; a planned world (a world that fully reveals its planning) is a dead
world. It is only when our characters and events begin to disobey us that they begin to live.

The author gives life to his characters and then he lets himself be inspired by them, he lets himself
be influenced by their own free-will and writes according to their wishes instead of his.
but I can only reportand I am the most reliable witnessthat the idea seemed to me to come
clearly from Charles, not myself. It is not only that he has begun to gain an autonomy

There is a slight difference between the notion of god from a Victorian point of view and the same
notion from a postmodernist point of a view. In postmodernist literature, an author still remains the
god of his novel, but he acts according to the theological principle of freedom, not according to the
Victorian principle of authority:
what has changed is that we are no longer the gods of the Victorian image, omniscient and
decreeing; but in the new theological image, with freedom our first principle, not authority.

(Fowles, John )
As opposed to the Victorian novel, The French Lieutenant`s Woman has three different versions
of the ending. The first one is actually what Charles, as an autonomous character imagines on his
way back to Lyme Regis. He sees himself delivered of Sarah`s influence and spending his life in
company of his wife, Ernestina and their seven children. The author dismisses this ending because it
would have been too obvious, as if it had been planned, taking into account the author`s previous
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certitude that Ernestina must, in the end, win Charles back from his infidelity . Fowles inserted
this ending in order to show that in a novel it is the characters that choose how to live their lifes and
that the author has to adapt its story to their free-will, not to his plans.
The last two sceneries are directed by the author. The first one can be viewed as the classical ending
of any Victorian novel and the second one is its opposite alternative. It is at the reader`s latitude to
decide whether the first one or the second one is the true ending, depending on the way in which we
perceive Sarah. We may say that it is the complexity and the unfathomable conscience of this
character that ultimately leads to two possible endings. (But what the protagonist wants is not so
clear; and I am not at all sure where she is at the moment) (Fowles, John 173).
The author does not decide for his characters, neither does he read their minds accurately, but he
rather comes close to them and observes them. There are two sequences in the novel where the
author merely sits next to or finds himself in the immediate neighbourhood of his characters,
wondering what is to be done, confessing his dilemmas to the reader.
Now the question I am asking, as I stare at Charles, is not quite the same as the two above. But
rather, what the devil am I going to do with you? I have already thought of ending Charless
career here and now; of leaving him for eternity on his way to London. But the conventions of
Victorian fiction allow, allowed no place for the open, the inconclusive ending; and I preached
earlier of the freedom characters must be given. (Fowles, John 173)
So be it. And I am suddenly aware that Charles has opened his eyes and is looking at me. There
is something more than disapproval in his eyes now (Fowles, John 174)
...the extremely important-looking person that has, during the last scene, been leaning against the
parapet of the embankment across the way from 16 Cheyne Walk, the residence of Mr. Dante
Gabriel Rossetti [...] I did not want to introduce him; but since he is the sort of man who cannot
bear to be left out of the limelight, the kind of man who travels first class or not at all, for whom
the first is the only pronoun, who in short has first things on the brain, and since I am the kind of
man who refuses to intervene in nature (even the worst), he has got himself inor as he would
put it, has got himself in as he really is. (Fowles, John 197)

The mystery Sarah is surrounded with and the fact that an author should situate himself on the part
of one of the characters and arrange the fight in such a way that his favourite may win, prevent
Fowles from deciding over a single version of the ending. Moreover, as he has already decided to be
impartial and not interfere in any way in the course of the events, he cannot follow the Victorian
pattern. So, in the 55th chapter we are warned of the existence of two endings in the novel:
So I continue to stare at Charles and see no reason this time for fixing the fight upon which he is
about to engage. That leaves me with two alternatives. I let the fight proceed and take no more
than a recording part in it; or I take both sides in it. I stare at that vaguely effete but not
completely futile face. And as we near London, I think I see a solution; that is, I see the dilemma
is false. The only way I can take no part in the fight is to show two versions of it. That leaves me
with only one problem: I cannot give both versions at once, yet whichever is the second will
seem, so strong is the tyranny of the last chapter, the final, the real version (Fowles, John 173)

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In conclusion, we may say that the concept of intertextuality applies successfully to the novel The
French Lieutenant`s Woman and that the self-reflective means abolish the Victorian literature
pattern and confers authenticity to the postmodernist novel.

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Works Cited

Surdulescu, Radu & tefnescu, Bogdan. Contemporary Critical Theories. A Reader: Mikhail Bakhtin,
The Prehistory of Novelistic Discourse. Department of English, University of Bucharest, 1998, pp:
4:5
tefnescu, Bogdan. Postcommunism/Postcolonialism: Siblings of Subalternity. Bucharest:
University of Bucharest, 2013, pp:113:119
Didiulyt, Margarita. Imitation And Parody Of The Victorian Novel In John Fowless The French
Lieutenants Woman. Vilnius, 2006, pp: 9-13