Un mensonge qui dit toujours la vérité’ : le discours de la victime dans The French Lieutenant's Woman de John Fowles

Abstract

By featuring an unjustly ostracized heroine and by denouncing the social evils of the Victorian era, John Fowles’s The French Lieutenant's Woman appears in a first stage as a novel of the Victorian victims - which is also the case of a whole range of other contemporary novels coined retro-Victorian novels. In a second stage, the carefully highlighted discourse of the victim presents itself as a lie : the protagonist admits having made up her status as a fallen woman and the narrator reveals his complicity in the making up of the stratagem. In the case of the narrator, this duplicity belongs to a metafictional logics of unveiling of all the novelsitic principles. In the case of the heroine, her lie paradoxically strengthens her victimhood in so far as this lie is presented as the only solution left to a woman of humble origins to call attention to the injustice of her condition : is this not what Jean Cocteau meant when he spoke of “un mensonge qui dit toujours la vérité” ?