讀到一段幾年前精讀過的小說 The French Lieutenant's Woman 真令人高興. 所以找一篇評論分享之.
法國中尉的女人
The French Lieutenant's Woman (第12章)
I will not make her teeter on the windowsill; or sway
forward, and then collapse sobbing back onto the worn carpet of her
room. We know she was alive a fortnight after this incident, and
therefore she did not jump. Nor were hers the sobbing, hysterical sort
of tears that presage
violent action; but those produced by a profound conditional, rather
than emotional, misery--slow-welling, unstoppable, creeping like blood
through a bandage.
Who is Sarah?
There seems to be as much confusion today over what Charles Darwin meant in
The Origin of Species
as existed in the society that received it over a century ago.
According to anthropologist David Rindos, part of the confusion stems
from the introduction of a concept known as social Darwinism by Herbert
Spencer in the late nineteenth century, which asserts that the
intelligent people of a society
will become powerful and wealthy through what Spencer, and
not
Darwin, called "the survival of the fittest" (66). Darwin refused to
advance or support Spencer's theory, but because his name was associated
with it, people mistake his notion of adaptation for a vertical process
from a lower state to a higher one. In his documentary
Darwin's Revolution in Thought, Stephen Jay Gould explains that
when the elephant migrated to Russia, the hairiest were the most able to
survive its harsh winters. But the wooly mammoth, he says, was
not
better in any cosmic sense than the elephant. Darwin clearly rejects
Spencer's hierarchical concept when he writes in his notebooks: "It is
absurd to talk of one animal being higher than another.–
We consider those, where the {cerebral structure/intellectual
faculties} most developed as highest.– A bee doubtless would when the
instincts were–" (Barrett et al. 189).
This confusion over Darwin's theory has led to some confusion over John Fowles's
The French Lieutenant's Woman, in which Darwinism is a prevalent theme. The fact that Fowles does
not
share the popular misunderstanding is demonstrated when the narrator
says: "In a vivid insight, a flash of black lightning, [Charles] saw
that all of life was parallel: that evolution was
not
vertical, ascending to perfection, but horizontal" (165). Prior to this
reference, the narrator describes the "Horizontality of Existence" (80)
as one of the novel's possible themes. Given the underlying theme of
horizontal evolution, Fowles indicates that we cannot apply the same
literary concepts of character growth and development to the characters
in
The French Lieutenant's Woman as we might to other literary
characters. Charles may change, but he cannot "improve" except in a way
relative to his local environment, namely the end of the Victorian
Period in England. Yet, some scholars view Sarah as a mentor or teacher
(Hutcheon 123) whose function is to guide Charles to an improved state
of his own (Huffaker 109). Similarly, although critics speak frequently
of the multiple endings as indications of the evolution of the modern
novel (an observation with which I wholeheartedly agree), most suggest
that the last ending is the best of the three and that, in a like vein,
the Victorian conventions are inferior to the modern ones. However,
Fowles indicts Charles for this same superiority complex and the fact
that he "had
not really understood Darwin" (45).
I wish to contribute four new ideas to the current scholarship surrounding Fowles's
The French Lieutenant's Woman. First, I wish to show how all of the major characters,
not
just Sarah or Charles, are portrayed as agents of evolutionary change.
Tony E. Jackson discusses Sarah as a "hopeful monster" defined by Gould
in
Panda's Thumb. I wish to show that the same is true of other
characters. Specifically, we see Mrs. Poulteney, Sam Farrow, Mr.
Freeman, and Ernestina–in addition to Sarah and Charles–transitioning
from a past culture to a future one and possessing, simultaneously,
traits from both periods. Second, I
will illustrate that, contrary to popular opinion (Huffaker 113, among others), the last ending does
not
suggest that Charles has learned an important lesson, but that it
actually provides Charles with the worst chance for genetic and cultural
success. Ironically, the third ending also provides us with the modern
protagonist and an indication that the form of the novel itself is an
agent of evolutionary change. Third, I
will
demonstrate how the choice of endings emerges as the novelist-narrator's
own cultural adaptation from the role of an omniscient creator to that
of a self-conscious one who admits, in the vein of contemporary
postmodern narrators, the artificiality of his enterprise. Finally, I
will show how the evolution of character, form, and narrator do
not
illustrate a "freedom" from anything, but rather, more emphatically
prove the lack of freedom even in a culture that thinks itself liberated
from an omnipotent god.
Before I demonstrate the ways in which the characters function
as agents of evolution, I should briefly explain the connection between
Darwin's genetic evolutionary theory and Fowles's more specific
concern, the evolution of culture. Like genetic selection, cultural
selection is a horizontal adaptation to changes in local environments,
and it should
not be confused with social Darwinism. As Rindos maintains, "[c]ultural selection is
not
distinct from natural selection in the manner in which it works" (65).
He asserts further, however, that cultural evolution is faster:
Whereas genetic recombination and transmission occur only once in a generation, cultural recombination and transmission are not limited in this manner. The [cultural] system will
have a higher mutation rate, a larger number of recombination episodes,
and, hence, more potential selection episodes per unit of time. Also,
given the fact that cultural information, unlike genetic information,
flows unimpaired among all members of the culture and even between
cultures, we should also expect that the rate of cultural evolution will
be greater than that of genetic evolution. Indeed, part of the additive
fitness of the genetic capacity for cultural behaviors is the capacity
it gives individuals to change behavior traits rapidly. (72)
Additionally, as anthropologist Jared Diamond explains,
genetic selection involves more than the acquiring of new traits: "The
long list of ancestral traits that were lost or reduced in the course of
human [genetic] evolution includes tails, body hair, wisdom teeth, the
ability to synthesize vitamin C, the size of our teeth and appendix, the
thickness of our skulls, and the bony browridges over our eyes" (64).
It follows, then, that cultural evolution would involve the same process
of both acquiring and losing behavioral traits.
With our twentieth-century hindsight, we are capable of
perceiving most of Fowles's characters transitioning from an earlier
cultural behavior to a later one. We find Mrs. Poulteney, for example,
between the prudent Puritanism of the early part of the Victorian Period
and the extravagant pomposity of the latter part: "With the vicar Mrs.
Poulteney felt herself with two people. One was her social inferior, an
inferior who depended on her for many of the pleasures of his table . . .
; and the other was the representative of God, before whom she had
metaphorically to kneel. So her manner with him took often a bizarre and
inconsequential course. It was
de haut en bas one moment,
de bas en haut the next; and
sometimes she contrived both positions all in one sentence" (24). The
prudent Puritanism in her fears God and forces her to "cautiously
examine[ ] her conscience" (24); but the extravagant pomposity in her
manifests itself in her hoarding of wealth (24) and in the sharp,
unmerciful edge of the tone with which she, like many upper class ladies
of her day, speaks to her servants. As the narrator explains: "what
drove the new Britain was increasingly a desire to seem respectable, in
place of a desire to do good for good's sake" (17). Mrs. Poulteney, like
the other characters I
will discuss, exemplifies one of the epigraphs to the third chapter from
The Origin of Species which states that "the chief part of the
organization of every living creature is due to its inheritance" (15).
Consequently, Mrs. Poulteney's character, a mixture of both past and
future cultural traits, has a certain duplicity.
Evolutionary change is
not exclusively
for the rich in Fowles's novel, for Sam Farrow, Charles's servant, also
represents a move from one kind of species to another: the move from a
member of the lower class to one of the middle class. Although later in
the novel his transition is more obvious when he takes a job with Mr.
Freeman's company and moves his new family into a house of his own, the
change is noted much earlier by the narrator as something
not specific to Sam's individual case:
The mid-century has seen quite a new form of dandy appear on the
English scene; the old upper-class variety, the etiolated descendants of
Beau Brummel, were known as "swells"; but the new young prosperous
artisans and would-be superior domestics like Sam had gone into
competition sartorially. They were called "snobs" by the swells
themselves; Sam was a very fair example of a snob, in this localized
sense of the word. He had a very sharp sense of clothes style–quite as
sharp as a "mod" of the 1960s; and he spent most of his wages on keeping
in fashion. And he showed another mark of this new class in his
struggle to command the language. (39)
The narrator goes on to explain that Sam Farrow is different
from the Sam Weller as he is portrayed decades earlier in Charles
Dickens's
Pickwick Papers in that the latter "was happy with his
role" (40) while the former "suffered it" (40). There remains something
of the Cockney in Sam Farrow–his wrong a's and h's–but he and his class,
according to Fowles, are in flux as they adapt to the changing economy
of their time. The narrator tells us that Charles "began to wonder if
there wasn't something of a Uriah Heep beginning to erupt on the surface
of Sam's personality;
a certain duplicity" (259, my emphasis).
Mr. Freeman and his daughter, Ernestina, represent more advanced (but
not
superior) examples of this economically adapting species to which Sam
belongs, for, though Freeman is very wealthy, his father had been a
draper, and one
can see that Sam's progeny have a
similar chance to aspire to Ernestina's class. The narrator explains
the predicament of the "new recruits" to the upper middle class: "Some
chose another version of cryptic coloration and went in very
comprehensively (like Mr. Jorrocks) for the pursuits, property and
manners of the true country gentleman. Others–like Mr. Freeman–tried to
redefine the term. Mr. Freeman had a newly built mansion in the Surrey
pinewoods, but his wife and daughter lived there a good deal more
frequently than he did" (222). The narrator goes on to tell us that
Freeman is "a forerunner of the modern rich commuter" (222) and that he
currently behaved partly like a businessman and partly like a gentleman,
but firstly like the former (223-24). The duplicity of his character
infiltrates his place of business, for as he was both "an imitation of
an earlier generation of Puritan profiteers" (223) and just like "some
tycoons of our own time . . . covering excellent investment with a nice
patina of philanthropy" (223), his establishment, though "atrocious[] . .
. by our standards" (223), is "exceptionally advanced . . . , a model
of its kind" (223).
Ernestina's change, although economically based like her
father's, is more similar to Sam's in its connection to fashion. As part
of the "revolt against the crinoline and the large bonnet" (10), she
dresses a little too sharply for the small town of Lyme, and, although
she has "exactly the right face for her age" (26), there is "a minute
tilt at the corner of her eyelids, and a corresponding tilt at the
corner of her lips" (27) that the "orthodox Victorian would have perhaps
mistrusted" (27). The narrator explains that she "was so very nearly
one of the prim little moppets, the Georginas, Victorias, Albertinas,
Matildas and the rest who sat in their closely guarded dozens at every
ball; yet
not quite" (27). Likewise, it is
Ernestina who effects the change in Aunt Tranter's house which is
"inexorably, massively, irrefutably in the style of a quarter-century
before" (27). Like Ernestina, who is part Victorian and part modern–like
the novel itself–Mrs. Tranter's house is in transition, as it has an
"emphatically French" room of the modern taste amid the old furniture
and decor of two and a half decades before. But if Ernestina represents
the evolving economy and fashion, she remains an archaic species when it
comes to female sexuality and the New Woman. For "whenever the physical
female implications of her body, sexual, menstrual, parturitional,
tr[y] to force an entry into her consciousness" (29), she simply tells
herself "I
must not" (29).
Sarah, on the other hand, represents the more emancipated
woman who refuses to submit to male authority. It seems significant that
we witness submission in Sarah only when she serves a female employer,
and her submission to Mrs. Poulteney has limits, particularly when she
breaks her rule about wandering near Ware Commons. She seems bent on
destroying the male fantasy of provider and protector when she
undermines Charles's engagement to Ernestina and when she expresses her
desire to "be what I am,
not what a husband, however kind, however indulgent,
must
expect me to be in marriage" (353). The narrator describes Sarah as a
kind of unrecognizable hybrid pointing to the future century: "[Sarah]
turned and looked at [Charles] then. . . . We
can sometimes recognize the looks of a century ago on a modern face; but never those of a century to come" (146).
Yet, Sarah remains far from the liberated woman of the
twentieth century. Despite the emphatic implication in the novel that
Sarah is a lesbian, the narrator remarks: "As regards lesbianism,
[Sarah] was as ignorant as her mistress" (129).
One of Sarah's most peaceful moments occurs when she sleeps
with another young woman in her arms: ". . . notice how peaceful, how
untragic, the features are: a healthy young woman of twenty-six or
-seven, with a slender, rounded arm thrown out . . . thrown out, as I
say, and resting over another body" (128). We are told that the body is
not
that of a man, but of a "girl of nineteen or so, also asleep, her back
to Sarah, yet very close to her, since the bed, though large, is
not meant for two people" (128). Though the younger girl, Mary, is probably
not
a lesbian because of her later love affair and eventual marriage to
Sam, the fact that it is Sarah's arm that makes the embrace suggests
that Sarah is. The narrator's subsequent dwelling on the word lesbian
and what it did and did
not mean to the people
of the nineteenth century is even more telling. The narrative suggests
that if Sarah had understood anything about lesbianism, she might
not have been such an enigma to herself and to Charles.
Charles, of course, is
not
coincidentally named for Charles Darwin. Already representative of a
change in process, he is the rising scientific element at a time when
Darwinism is
not popular; but he is an "ungifted
scientist" (45), and his comic attire–canvas clothes and heavy
boots–which he wears to play the part of the good paleontologist, makes
him a caricature
not too unlike his grandfather
who "had devoted a deal of his money and much more of his family's
patience to the excavation of the harmless hummocks of earth that
pimpled his three thousand Wiltshire acres" (16).
Despite his transitional behaviors, Charles fails to
experience the growth and emancipation in the final ending that so many
critics attribute him with experiencing. Carol Barnum suggests that
"[Charles] has evolved . . . to a higher life form, one that
will
enable him a greater chance of true survival in the psychic sense"
(74). Likewise, Huffaker maintains, with the popular Spencerian version
of evolution, that "Darwin's ideas of natural selection and survival of
the fittest are at the core of Fowles's philosophy, and since man is a
rational animal, the quality of fitness for him is intelligence–with its
corollary quality of kindness since it is difficult for a truly
intelligent man to be unkind. Charles, fortunately, has both qualities
and so is able to undergo the evolution necessary for survival" (109).
I cannot agree that Charles is motivated by kindness. If he were, he would
not have left Ernestina at the altar, so to speak, humiliating her and her family. He goes to Sarah,
not because he feels she needs him more than Ernestina does, but because
he needs her, and because he is inescapably, as Fowles's novel
suggests again and again, "as Marx defined it," a creature driven by the
pursuit of his own ends (365). As for Charles's intelligence, the image
of him scouring the Cobb for sand dollars in heavy boots and clothes
during the heat of the day speaks for itself. He imagines it takes Sarah
hours to find the specimens she offers him, but we know that she is
not
at liberty to take as much time during her afternoon excursions as he
is and that she is most likely just better at finding them.
Regarding Huffaker's claim that Charles "is able to undergo
the evolution necessary for survival" and Barnum's similar one, it is my
contention that this conclusion is only true of the first two endings.
If one considers the first ending that Charles creates, then Charles
succeeds in adaptation genetically and culturally, but
not as a constructed modern protagonist. Ironically, this first ending is often dismissed because it is created by Charles and
not by the narrator: ". . . the last few pages you have read are
not
what happened, but what [Charles] spent the hours between London and
Exeter imagining might happen" (226). Fowles even refers to his "two
endings" (
Wormholes 144). Yet, because the narrator conspicuously expresses
his wish to avoid the role of the omnipotent god (82), it seems likely
that he wishes us to consider Charles's version equally with his own. It
is also ironic that this first ending actually provides Charles with
his best chance at survival, for Darwin defines it as the struggle for
"personal reproductive success" (Gould), and seven offspring is pretty
successful: "Charles and Ernestina did
not live happily ever after; but they lived together. . . . They begat what shall it be–let us say seven children" (264-65).
Culturally, Charles accepts, albeit reluctantly, the fall of
the landed gentleman and the rise of earned money by accepting the
Freeman legacy. His aristocratic snobbery is sufficiently repressed to
the extent that he eventually becomes the very breed of man he despises.
If they survive–and we are told "[Charles and Ernestina's] sons today
still control the great shop [of Freeman's] and all its ramifications"
(265)–his offspring
will live on earned money because Uncle Robert's wealth and title
will go to his progeny, "
not one heir, but two" (265). Charles's children
will probably grow up without the hatred of the middle class that Charles exhibits, and the cultural evolution
will be well on its way. Even Uncle Robert's children, although they
will inherit the landed money and title,
will
more than likely have different attitudes than their father and cousin.
Robert is much older than his wife–whose first husband was
not a gentleman, but a colonel in the Fortieth Hussars (161)–so she
will presumably outlive him, and it
will be her cultural behaviors that
will
find greater influence in the lives of the Winsyatt household. Hence,
the Victorian gentleman grows near to cultural extinction despite the
reproductive success of the individuals Charles and Robert, and
Charles's marriage to Ernestina exemplifies his own cultural adaptation
to the rising class of new money. Of course, this new class that Charles
reluctantly embraces is, like the wooly mammoth, neither better nor
worse in any cosmic sense than the aristocracy.
The second ending also demonstrates the success of Charles
both genetically and culturally, though it, too, fails to provide us
with the modern protagonist. Lalage is proof of his genetic success.
Charles evolves culturally by choosing a marriage based on the modern
motive of passion rather than on the Victorian one of economic status.
His choice is also made in an attempt to escape the "trap" (234) he
finds himself in when his uncle's money
will no longer sustain him as a gentleman. He
must do something, but rather than evolve into someone like Freeman, he embraces a woman of ill repute for whom he need
not work to maintain her social status and fashion. Yet, Sarah has been an enigma to Charles, and marriage
will surely destroy her mystery, which is her attraction to Charles. When Sarah (twice) shows Charles two (
not one or three) tests in her hands, she's
not
helping him into manhood, she's "grabbing him by the balls," so to
speak, and rendering him an almost helpless victim: "But [Charles] felt
the two tests [Sarah had given him] in his pockets; some kind of hold
she had on him" (115). In many ways, she becomes,
not
the protagonist or the helper of the novel, but the antagonist to
Charles, and a marriage based on the kind of compulsive obsession Sarah
encourages in him with her conscious manipulation
can
only further victimize him. Therefore, although this middle ending
suggests reproductive and cultural success, as in the first, Charles's
personal happiness seems doubtful.
Ironically, it is the final ending that provides the least
chance of survival, both genetically and culturally, for Charles. The
narrative does
not indicate that the young child in the stairwell belongs to either Sarah or Charles, so we
must
assume that he has yet to produce offspring. The "burning look of
rejection" that he issues Sarah just before his exit (364) indicates
that it may be some time before he involves himself with another woman,
if ever. Unless he performs differently with future prostitutes than he
did with the one who looked like Sarah, his chances of reproductive
success appear remote. The following passage suggests that he
will remain isolated, like Sarah, for the rest of his life:
"Without knowing why he stared down at the gray river, now
close, at high tide. It meant return to America; it meant thirty-four
years of struggling upwards–all in vain, in vain, in vain, all height
lost; it meant, of this he was sure, a celibacy of the heart as total as
hers" (365). If "a celibacy of the heart" translates into sexual
abstinence, then genetic success appears remote, indeed. Cultural
success for Charles seems as ubiquitous as genetic success, for he
cannot accept Sarah's implicit invitation to join her Bohemian
lifestyle, and he still thinks himself "superior" to her (364). His
refusal to see a relationship with her in any other way than the
traditional one of marriage makes him unfit for the new cultural
lifestyle Sarah embraces.
As Charles clings to his vision of himself as a Victorian
gentleman, he becomes selected out of existence. Notes written by
Fowles's wife, Elizabeth, indicate Charles's lack of development in this
final ending: "'. . . but [Charles] does
not
break through completely, for he has a sort of built-in conditioning.
His character demands that in spite of everything he remains a man of
his times'" (Higdon 353). Charles fails to evolve in this final ending,
for even the final passage which mentions the "atom of faith" Charles
has at last found for himself is undercut by the following phrase that
he "would still bitterly deny [his realization]" which is that life "is
to be, however inadequately, emptily, hopelessly into the city's iron
heart, endured" (366). To endure is
not to be
free. Freedom in the novel becomes one of those slippery concepts with
which even the narrator grapples uneasily and ineffectually, and I
will
come to this point again in a moment. For now, I wish to point out that
if Charles evolves at all in this last ending, it is as the literary
construct we call the modern protagonist. His prospects certainly don't
appear better than those in the first and middle endings. He seems like
the conventional modern hero now rather than the Victorian one–alienated
from everything around him including himself, finding that all the
order he has vainly attempted to give to life has failed him.
This leads me to my discussion of the narrator and his own
adaptation to the changing cultural conventions around him. The
artificial narrator unifies the Darwinian theme. He, too, is
not
immune to change. Like the characters he invents, he is both a product
of the past and a creature of adaptation. Without the ability to adapt,
the narrator could
not survive natural
selection. So, in Chapter Thirteen, in an attempt to extend beyond his
Victorian "inheritance," and fully acknowledging the experimental
novelists who have already been culturally selected, he addresses us, as
he
must, and admits the artificiality of his enterprise: "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-Grillet and Roland Barthes; if this is a novel, it cannot be
a novel in the modern sense of the word" (80). The narrator seems to
imply less that his novel is
not a modern one
and more that modern novels, despite their rejection of convention,
cannot help but contain, like his, some part of their ancestry known as
convention, hearkening again the epigraph of the third chapter which
states that "the chief part of the organization of every living creature
is due to its inheritance" (15).
Some scholars have noted the narrator's evolution from a
Victorian to a modern one (Huffaker, among others). The need for the
narrator to adapt to the loss of authorial omniscience in the twentieth
century has already been illustrated. But I would contend that the
narrative does
not "parody" the conventions it
relies upon; it, rather, illustrates the necessary presence of the past
in the future–the "inheritance." I would also contend that the
narrator's intrusions do more than challenge what Huffaker calls the
"contemporary fixation upon the illusion of detachment" (101).
Interestingly, they foreshadow what would later be defined by literary
critics as the self-consciousness of postmodern literature.
Fowles, of course, could
not have thought of himself as a postmodern writer at the time he composed
The French Lieutenant's Woman, which was published in 1969, just as the look on Sarah's face could
not have been recognized by Charles as a look from a century to come (146). In
Postmodernism and Its Critics, John McGowan places the beginning
of the "postmodern" as a specific form of cultural critique around 1975
(ix). As has been observed in many of Fowles's contemporaries, such as
Kurt Vonnegut, Vladimir Nabokov, and Julian Barnes among others, the
postmodern tendency to subvert all systems and absolutes manifests
itself in the like subversion of literature. One result from this
subversion, which might today be recognized as a postmodern convention
(I
can hear the uproar against this phrase
already), is the self-conscious author who recognizes and admits that
his art, like life, is one more artificial construct: "This story I am
telling is all imagination. These characters I
create never existed outside my own mind" (80). This sounds much like Vonnegut's narrator in
Slaughterhouse-Five, published in 1966: "As a trafficker in
climaxes and thrills and characterizations, I had outlined the Dresden
story many times" (5). Fowles's narrator, perhaps without realizing it,
becomes a "hopeful monster" which eventually becomes selected, like his
contemporary postmodern writers, for cultural survival.
Moreover, the narrator's inclusion of all three endings
illustrates how genetic and cultural evolution are in part generated by
hazard. Gould states in his documentary
Evolution and Human Equality that history could have brought about unequal races among humans, but it didn't. He says that the process of evolution is
not
purely random because of the relationship between local environments
and natural selection. But he further explains that there does exist an
element of chance in the types of mutations and hybrids that occur–the
hairy elephant, for example. According to Gould, this means that the
history of evolution could
not possibly occur
the same way twice. Hence, Fowles demonstrates with his triple ending
the equally "plausible" ways his narrative
can
evolve. Rather than choose one over the others, he allows the narrative
to become a new hybrid of its own, void of a definitive ending, a
"hopeful monster" waiting to see if the vastly changing culture
will select it for success.
This isn't a "terrible freedom" pursued by the
novelist-narrator anymore than Charles's multiple courses are. The
narrator is an ammonite, like Charles, "caught in the vast movements of
history" (262). The novel compares Charles to an ammonite more than
once, and this suggests that history is
not only
horizontal, but also circular: "Whatever happened to [Charles] such
moments would recur" (253) the narrator explains of Charles's moment
with the child of the Sarah-like whore. And, of course, we see him again
in the middle ending entertaining his own child with the watch in the
same way (358). After Charles's break up with Ernestina, the narrator
says that Charles "felt like a Judah, an Ephialtes, like every traitor
since time began" (302). We are also told that "he felt the enormous
apparatus rank required a gentleman to erect around himself was like the
massive armor that had been the death warrant of so many ancient
saurian species" (230). The narrator later asserts:
Perhaps you see very little link between the Charles of 1267 with all
his newfangled French notions of chastity and chasing after Holy
Grails, the Charles of 1867 with his loathing of trade, and the Charles
of today, a computer scientist deaf to the tender humanists who begin to
discern their own redundancy. But there is a link: they all rejected or
reject the notion of
possession as the purpose of life, whether it be of a woman's
body, or of high profit at all costs, or of the right to dictate the
speed of progress. The scientist is but one more form [of the same]; and
will be superseded. (234)
Fowles suggests that despite evolution, every species contains
part of its ancestry and each fights and often loses the same kinds of
battles fought and lost centuries before. Evolution means both change
and no change.
This kind of evolution that is both horizontal and circular
portrays a lack of freedom despite the contradictory moments in the
novel when Charles and the narrator imagine otherwise. For the narrator
says himself: "Darwinism, as its shrewder opponents realized, led open
the floodgates to something far more serious than the undermining of the
Biblical account of the origins of man; its deepest implications lay in
the direction of determinism and behaviorism" (99). Determinism and
behaviorism contradict the notion of existentialism. Charles may imagine
that he embraces a "terrible freedom" (Barnum 73), but the novel
indicates that his ability to choose freely is hindered by more than the
lack of a rational system on which he might base his decisions. His
freedom to choose is drastically limited by other forces, as the
narrator, too, discovers: "When Charles left Sarah on her cliff edge, I
ordered him to walk straight back to Lyme Regis. But he did
not;
he gratuitously turned and went down to the Dairy" (81). The narrator
discovers that even his own creativity is limited by other forces. As in
life, other people, natural elements, and chance limit the freedom of
individuals.
Yet Fowles contradicts himself even in his nonfiction essays.
In "The Blinded Eye," he says that "[m]y freedom depends solely on
[nature's] freedom. Without my freedom, I should
not want to live" (
Wormholes 268). Yet, he states in "An Unholy Inquisition," an
interview with Dianne Vipond, that "[w]e all know we've been born in
prison;
must accept the bars, yet crave freedom" (
Wormholes
369). Despite the narrator's claim that he is a god of "the new theological image, with freedom our first principle,
not authority" (82), his characters–and we readers–are no more free than he. Critics who
will have us believe that Fowles's novel "is about freeing modern humanity" (Huffaker 92) have missed the crucial point that
The French Lieutenant's Woman strives to
make:
that none of us are free, that freedom is an illusion like fiction, and
that we are "all in flight from the real reality" (82) which is this
lack of freedom. The narrator implores us: "I would have you share my
own sense that I do
not fully control these
creatures of my mind, any more than you control–however hard you try, . .
. your children, colleagues, friends, or even yourself" (82). The world
is too much with us, both the burden of the past and the pressure of
the future. God may
not be "[o]mniscient and decreeing" (82), but neither are the rest of us–novelist, character, reader, or otherwise.
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The French Lieutenant's Woman: The Evolution of an Emerging
Quester."
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Penkevill Publishing Company, 1988.
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The French Lieutenant's Woman. New York: New American Library, Inc., 1969.
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Gould, Stephen Jay.
Darwin's Revolution in Thought. Videocassette. Prod. Into the Classroom Video. 75 min.
Evolution and Human Equality. Videocassette. Prod. Insight Video. 60 min.
Higdon, David Leon. "Endgames in John Fowles's
The French Lieutenant's Woman."
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Huffaker, Robert.
John Fowles. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1980.
Hutcheon, Linda. "The 'Real World(s)' of Fiction:
The French Lieutenant's Woman."
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Jackson, Tony E. "Charles and the Hopeful Monster: Postmodern Evolutionary Theory in
The French Lieutenant's Woman."
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McGowan, John.
Postmodernism and Its Critics. Ithaca: Cornell U P, 1991.
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