French Lieutenant Research Articles

Virtual and Reality: Postmodern Narrative in The French Lieutenant’s Woman

Virtual and Reality: Postmodern Narrative in The French Lieutenant’s Woman

Deconstruction and Subversion: The French Lieutenant's Woman under the Perspective of Postmodern Deconstruction

Postmodernism is a movement that begins in the 20th century. The movement involves many fields, such as philosophy, art, and literature. The novel The French Lieutenant's Woman is a novel which was born in that period. As a metafiction, it has the feature of deconstruction that can be seen in the structures of the novel. At the same time, the deconstruction can be seen in the plots of the novel as well. The novel can be regarded as a typical work of postmodernism and deconstructionism. And this paper focuses mainly on reveling various deconstruction phenomena in the novel and tries to help readers to understand metafiction and deconstructionism better.

Metafiction and Its Elements in The French Lieutenant’s Woman Novel by John Fowles

Metafiction and Its Elements in The French Lieutenant’s Woman Novel by John Fowles

Postmodern Feminism in John Fowles's the French Lieutenant's Woman: From Madness to Liberation

Historically, women are associated with inferiority, weakness, passivity, and emotionality, while men are linked with superiority, power, activeness and rationality. These binary oppositions between the two genders are reflected in the social hierarchy. Whenever women have tried to reclaim authorship, feminine freedom, and control over their own lives, they have been labelled as hysteric or mad. Nonetheless, from the second part of the twentieth century, postmodern feminists set out to deconstruct these false man-made conceptualizations and definitions imposed on women by embracing hysteria and madness. Ironically, they celebrate madness and turn it against itself as a way to agency and liberation. This article will argue that John Fowles’s The French Lieutenant’s Woman’s heroine, Sarah, represents the postmodern female author who deconstructs the patriarchal ideal of femininity or “the eternal feminine” and constructs a new feminine self in the Victorian era. Ultimately, it will demonstrate that Sarah deconstructs the myth of the eternal feminine by embracing madness and storytelling. Moreover, she creates and contracts her feminine identity and shows authorial control over her own life story which influences others, such as Charles.

ДРЕВО ПОЗНАНИЯ ВЭРСКОЙ ПУСТОШИ: ПЕЙЗАЖ В РОМАНЕ ДЖОНА ФАУЛЗА «ЛЮБОВНИЦА ФРАНЦУЗСКОГО ЛЕЙТЕНАНТА»

The article studies the poetics of landscapes in John Fowles’ novel “The French Lieutenant’s Woman”. The features of the composition of landscapes, key mythological, literary and pictorial allusions, the role of some landscape images (wind, ash, ivy) are considered. A link between the descriptions of natural landscape and the development of the theme of initiation is revealed.

ADIALOGUE BETWEEN THE NINETEENTH AND TWENTIETH CENTURY IN JOHN FOWLES’S THE FRENCH LIEUTENANT'S WOMAN

John Fowles’s The French Lieutenant's Woman (1969) is generally acknowledged as a postmodernist neo-Victorian novel. Presumably, it parodies Victorian conventions and represents a critical comment on the Victorian age. However, the aim of this research is to problematize the claim that the relationship between the Victorian and the postmodern age in this novel is much more complex. Fowles attempts to link these two apparently very different periods. The nineteenth century represents the source of English identity and an undeniable influence on the present. Nonetheless, the present also influences the past. The events which took place during the course of the twentieth century changed the way we conceptualize the past. Fowles implies that the past does not exist – what does exist is our deconstruction of the past. Still, Fowles reaches beyond this deconstruction. He believes that a novel should introduce something new and authentic. One of the key postmodernist concepts is that parody and irony represent the only possible originality. Still, apart from parodying the conventions of both the nineteenth and the twentieth century, The French Lieutenant’s Woman deals with existentialist dilemmas that might be applied to both periods.

Female Liberation in John Fowles’ The French Lieutenant's Woman

The researchers intend to analyze John Fowles’ The French Lieutenant's Woman to depict how the female protagonists reject the notion of being eunuchs and experience liberation and revolution within the social context. To carry out this study, the researchers analyze the female characters. This masterpiece revolves around the notions of love and sexuality. The French Lieutenant's Woman has been analyzed from different aspects of feminism. However, in this research, the purpose is to depict how Victorian women are able to break the phallocentric discourse by negating sexual differences and becoming eunuch subjects. The beginning of the novel shows Charles’ engagement with Ernestina mostly based on the social doctrines of the Victorian era. In fact, there is no love between them and what binds them together is social expectation. Ernestina is the symbol of a woman who desires to be a female eunuch and obey the principles of the nuclear family. On the other hand, Sarah is a rebellious character who selects love over the social doctrines of Victorian society. The present research is conducted based on Luce Irigaray and Germaine Greer's theories in which the role of Victorian women is analyzed.

The Dialogism in The French Lieutenant’s Woman

The French Lieutenant’s Woman is the English novelist John Fowles’ representative work, which shows the author’s concern on the theme of freedom through the romantic entanglements of the hero and heroine, using special art of dialogue. Based on intensive reading and exhaustive textual analysis, applying Bakhtin’s theory of dialogue, this paper analyzes the dialogic features of this novel from two aspects: the great dialogue among the author, the readers and the characters, and the micro-dialogue in the characters’ inner worlds. The findings are helpful for readers to have a better understanding of The French Lieutenant’s Woman from a new perspective and feel Fowles’ and Bakthin’s respect for human values.

HOW TO COPE WITH POSTMODERN TEXTS: TEXTUAL ANALYSIS OF INTERTEXTUALITY, PARODY, AND PASTICHE IN READING POSTMODERN TEXTS

This work explores how postmodernism has developed its own literary style reflecting the social, political, religious as well as philosophical and intellectual mood of the era. Postmodern texts have been created and recreated out of a blend of varied texts from previous periods, and they succeeded in creating a more conscious and questioning audience. Throughout the postmodern period, readers replaced authors and writerly texts replaced readerly texts. Literary texts began to be deconstructed according to the notions and theories of scholars and philosophers such as Roland Barthes, John Barth, and Jean-François Lyotard. In an attempt to succeed in producing new texts, postmodern writers established a sort of textual relationship between metanarratives and little narratives, applying intertextuality that is in a close interrelation with parody and pastiche – two complicated terms often miscible to one another. This study seeks to clarify the meaning of postmodern literary works by highlighting some postmodern literary devices such as intertextuality, parody, and pastiche in The French Lieutenant’s Woman by John Fowles, Night Train by Martin Amis and The Crying Lot of 49 by Thomas Pynchon.

ПОСТМОДЕРНИСТСКАЯ РЕАЛЬНОСТЬ ДЖОНА ФАУЛЗА («Женщина французского лейтенанта»)

The present paper is aimed at studying the artistic mind of the modern English writer John Fowles as the creator of the original worldview in its postmodern style. It has been specified that British artistic culture does not demonstrate neither the extremes, peculiar to the art of “transition” or “frontier” nor sharp denial of everything that seemed inviolable. Inclining towards realistic forms of the English classics, a lot of postmodern authors, including Fowles, prefer a synthesis of the old with the new. This applies both to postmodernism and all avant-garde and neo-avant-garde movements, aimed at fundamental changing of the general ideas about the beauty and ugliness. “The French Lieutenant’s Woman”, written by John Fowles, proposes such a postmodern synthesis in the context of the “playing with the past” thesis. In his novel, the author presents a special type of “new reality”, corresponding to the period of the profound changes inside the movement during the period starting from the end of the 19th century till the end of the 20th century. Instead of the typical for English literature “hero in search”, the novel under consideration demonstrates an existential type of a man. The above-mentioned hero, who is embodied in the images of Charles and Sarah, seeks his individual freedom and “corrects” his own destiny. It should be emphasized that gaining true freedom is possible only through overcoming various life and social obstacles associated with breaking class and social ties, as well as with great internal suffering. Fowles’s peculiar style of narration helps to reveal the main theme of the novel. The author uses postmodern irony, which is meta-irony, and pastiche. The method of “overlapping epochs” forms an original intertext whereby the semantic field of the novel increases. The literary significance of the outlined method is multifaceted: an elitist reader perceives text-subtext-intertext; a “mass” reader gets acquainted with the work at the level of an entertaining storyline. The author of the article also analyses a mythological component of the novel “The French Lieutenant’s Woman”. A mention should also be made that Fowles in the analysed work acts both as a creator and a destroyer of the socio-ethical and literary myth of the Victorian era. Of primary interest to the writer was the literary myth of the time of Queen Victoria, which in the minds of readers has long been romanticized and become a legend. Therefore, the article shows the connection of everything that happens according to the tradition of English romantic narration and the principles of reformation of characters and situations that no longer correspond to the romantic worldview. The ironic understanding of the gentleman’s code of honor and the object of his passion, the reduction of love conflicts and places of romantic meetings are illustrated by specific examples from the text of the novel. The present paper has also devoted considerable attention to the psychology of the protagonists as well as the problem of the plot and compositional unity of the novel “The French Lieutenant’s Woman”. It is proved that the development of the storyline of the novel is a polystructural and polysemantic phenomenon. If Sarah’s character combines the traditional features of both “woman with a secret” and “infernal woman”, then respect for Charles’s traditional aristocracy is being called into question: it is repeatedly mentioned that he did not receive a Cambridge diploma, that he is an amateur paleontologist, that he considers the possibility of getting married for money, and that there is a very strong element of carnal passion in his romantic relationship with Sarah. The article offers the author’s commentary on the compositional completion of the novel. It is argued that the trinity of the epilogue, first of all, explains the “world-chaos” antithesis. The formula of the dissipating world, according to the author of the article, was supposed to become the basis of the postmodernist text in the original version of the novel “The French Lieutenant’s Woman”.

John Fowles’ The French Lieutenant’s Woman: Critiquing Victorian Values through Metafiction

This article explores John Fowles’ employment of Metafiction in the French Lieutenant’s Woman. It makes the case that Fowles’ metafiction is motivated by the author’s postmodernist desire to comment upon, undermine and critique the dominant and authoritative narratives in history, the understanding of history and in literary history. Fowles’ novel’s metafiction critiques the Victorian ideology through interweaving metafictional elements into a novel set in the Victorian era and, at least initially, following a conventional kind of plot premise. The Victorian ideology is critiqued through a metafictional reimagining of tropes of Victorian fiction. The novel breaks through the constraints of Victorian fiction in such a way as to fragment itself into multiple conflicting endings. Each of these endings violate the conventions of Victorian fiction in form and content, whilst remaining historically rooted and plausible. The multiple endings expose the fictitiousness of the novel and express John Fowles’ beliefs about the absurdity of human social life.

«Внутренний» другой в творчестве Джона Фаулза

The problem of the national is among the main ones in works by English writer John Fowles. This can be seen both in his fiction works and essays. This article discusses the role of the image of the ‘internal’ Other in the process of building his concept of ‘Englishness’. In his essay On Being English but Not British, the writer analyzes the relations between Englishmen and the inhabitants of Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland, and puts the latter on a par with Australians and Americans, however, pointing out their interdependence with the English. The Welshmen Henry Breasley and David Jones act as the ‘internal’ Other in The Ebony Tower and A Maggot. They are endowed with typical Welsh characteristics such as a penchant for drinking, greed, and cunning. Both characters are presented through the perception of English characters, which allows the author to play with the stereotypes about the Welsh circulating among the English. There is an Irishman Dr. Grogan in the novel The French Lieutenant’s Woman. The protagonist Charles Smithson also attributes to him traits of the Irish national character such as talkativeness, foolishness, frivolity. At the same time, Grogan acts as a kind of arbiter, trying to explain the behavior of the characters from a scientific point of view. In Daniel Martin, actress Jenny appeals to her Scottish roots, but she does not take it seriously. That is why the main character also endows her with stereotypical features. However, she subsequently abandons them for the sake of ‘Americanness’, thus losing her identity. ‘Internal’ Others do not play a significant role in the writer’s conception of national identity. The writer focuses on the English characters, making the internal ‘others’ a kind of backdrop for them.

Zo(o)graphies: Darwinian ‘Evolutions’ of a Fictional Bestiary

The essay puts to the test Darwinian evolutionist theories, especially the key concepts of adaptation, natural selection and survival of the fittest, in the reading of several plots and fictions (some of them Ark-related animal fictions) concerned with evolution, trauma, adaptability, mimicry/mimesis and survival: Julian Barnes’s Flaubert Parrot and A History of the World in 10½ Chapters, Timothy Findley’s Not Wanted on the Voyage, Robert Kroetsch’s The Studhorse Man and John Fowles’s The French Lieutenant’s Woman. Weaving its critical argument with reference to several of Derrida’s reflections – on the impossibility of a pure origin, the proximity between commencement and commandment, the logic of obsequence, or relation between being and following (je suis), applied deconstructively to the traditional hierarchy between the human and the animal, mastery and monstrosity, and logos and bêtise, etc. – ‘Zo(o)graphies’ is structured in a series of interlinked tableaux, bestiaries as well as insets (Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow, Jacques Derrida’s Glas). Following from the opening evocation of Peter Greenaway’s Vermeer-themed film A Zed and Two Noughts, which introduces the joint semantics of zographein: to paint from life, and zoon: animal, discreetly at work throughout, this study will eventually attempt to recast the problematic of the evolution of literature and literary forms as involution and regression.

Сomparative analysis of female images in F.M. Dostoevsky’s and J. Fowles’s novels (based on the novels of Dostoevsky “Crime and Punishment”, “The Brothers Karamazov” and Fowles “The Collector”, “The Mistress of a French Lieutenant”, “The Magus”)

The purpose of the article is the comparative analysis of female images in F.M. Dostoevsky’s and J. Fowles’s novels. The basic method applied in given research is the method of the comparative analysis F.M. Dostoevsky’s and J. Fowles’s novels. Dostoevsky and Fowles are in searches of root of all evil. Both of them are assured that in human spirit are indissolubly merged kindly and angrily, God and Satan. In a shower of hero Dostoevsky indissolubly merge “an ideal of the Madonna” with “an ideal Sodom”. The woman is present at a life of the man as elements. The woman is only temptation and passion of men. In female images of the writer, unlike man’s characters, there is no change at soul level. Unlike Dostoevsky, products of Fowles testify to constant interest of the writer to a problematic “eternal feminist”. In novels of Fowles of the woman have the personal space. Dostoevsky’s heroes submit to life laws; they through great suffering come to humility. But heroes of Fowles to themselves create laws and submit only to the rules. The article contains important conceptual conclusions on the problems of the realistic novel of the 19th century and the postmodern novel of the 20th centuries, defines the peculiarities of the traditions of F.M. Dostoevsky and J. Fowles. The presented work provides an opportunity to take a fresh look at the cult works written in the 19th–20th centuries. F.M. Dostoevsky as the “founder” of neo-mythological consciousness — the cultural paradigm of the 20th century — gave J. Fowles valuable “tips” against the background of modern literary thought and his comparison with the mythopoetic thought of the English writer was especially embodied in mythological premises associated with the sphere of deepest questions of ethics and religious metaphysics.

Intermediality, intertextuality and parody: resonances of Jane Austen in John Fowles’s The French lieutenant’s woman

This essay aims at investigating the significance of Jane Austen in JohnFowles’s The French Lieutenant’s Woman. References to Austen’s Persuasionappear three times in Fowles’s novel, and the resonances of this intertextualdialogue substantially affect the politics of characterization and space(mainly the Cobb) in The French Lieutenant’s Woman. This discussionis theoretically based on the relationship between intertextuality,intermediality and parody, so as to consider the relevance of Persuasion(a pre-Victorian novel) in a work which has been generally considered bycritics as a parody of values and tenets of Victorian society and literature.What relationships are produced, in terms of both poetics and politics,when we think about the Austen-Fowles association?

Response to Gerald Prince

Response to Gerald Prince

The Characteristics of the Translator’s Footnotes to the Novel “The French Lieutenant’s Woman” by J. Fowles

The Characteristics of the Translator’s Footnotes to the Novel “The French Lieutenant’s Woman” by J. Fowles

The Metamorphoses of the Femme Fatale in H. Rider Haggard’s She and John Fowles’s The French Lieutenant’s Woman

his article explores the metamorphosis of the femme fatale in British literature from its Victorian model to its neo-Victorian counterpart. It contributes to the field of research on the femme fatale as an archetypal figure and a cultural icon in the contemporary literary scene. It also demonstrates how the figure of the femme fatale is employed as an instrument of subversion in dealing with issues of female emancipation, the threat to traditional gender roles, as well as the fear and anxiety of the encounter with the lethal woman in literature. Relying on Edward Said's Orientalism, the article shows how, in H. Rider Haggard’s Victorian novel She, the femme fatale, personified in his heroine She-Who-must-be-obeyed, perpetuates stereotypical representation of the Other through her subversive sexuality. Yet, in John Fowles’s The French Lieutenant’s Woman, this article shows how the new femme fatale, embodied in his heroine Sarah Woodruff, is different from her predecessor She. Such difference is illustrated through the various postmodern paradigms that Fowles playfully inserts into his new rewriting of the femme fatale. The study relies on Julie Sander’s theory of cultural appropriation to trace Fowles' re-presentation of the postmodern femme fatale. Keywords: Neo-Victorian; Orientalism; appropriation; femme fatale; H. Rider Haggard; John Fowles.

Karakterizacija v romanih Plamenice in solze ter Ženska francoskega poročnika

The subjects in postmodern narratives are extremely variable. Although there is no uniform definition that would define their characteristics, Aleid Fokemma offers starting points for their determination. The article discusses questions about the subject in postmodern literature and offers a comparison of the Slovenian postmodern novel Plamenice in solze by Andrej Blatnik and The French Lieutenant’s Woman by John Fowles as a starting point for insight into the characteristics of the postmodern literary character.

Linguoemotive modelling of epigraphs in the postmodern text by John Fowles (on material of the novel The French Lieutenant’s Woman)

This article deals with the problem of the design of the linguoemotive model of the epigraphs of a postmodern text. The research object is a postmodern text, the research subject is the linguoemotive models of epigraphs in modern English literary discourse. The material of the research is the postmodern novel The French Lieutenant’s Woman by John Fowles. The research methodology is based on the anthropocentric paradigm in the framework of communicative linguistics. Modelling is a process of the design and application of models. The aim of text modelling is to analyse and describe transfer, perception and interpretation of texts and situations verbally and non-verbally. Linguoemotive modelling of a postmodern text can be characterized as fragmented, incomplete, having different levels of generalization and interpretation. A situational emotive component that is presented linguistically enhances the sense of a text. The specificity of the novel The French Lieutenant’s Woman by John Fowles consists in emotively loaded epigraphs. Interaction of a text and a situation on the basis of emotion-modified propositions reflects the author’s idiostyle.