HistoriographicMeta-Narrative In The French Lieutenant’s Woman And Its Film Adaptation

British novelist John Fowles’famous work The French Lieutenant’s Woman marked the beginning of a new period in which the influence of Fowles’ work entered the academic circles of literature.As evidenced by his characterization of Sarah,Fowles’citations of historical accounts and postmodern arrangements of embedded narrative structure and multiple endings,this work can be classified as a"historiographic metafiction",a work with a strong self-reflexivity,but also paradoxically pointing to historical events and real people.In this novel,Fowles exposes the fictionality of the text,which indicates that history,like fiction,is the construction of language and follows the common principle of discourse.In 1981,the film adaptation of The French Lieutenant’s Woman,directed by Karen Reisz and Harold Pinter,was released.This film adopts the structure of "Play within a play",which also reconstructs the undercurrent of the meta-historical narrative in the novel with the characteristics of its film medium form.The original and the adaptation in various degree present the features of historiographic meta-narrative from several perspectives.In the first place,the subversion of the self-reflexivity and power-controlling mechanism in the text reflected in the director’s absence and the actors’ autonomy in determining the development of the plot.The actors are given autonomy by the director,and assume the function of self-referential disclosure of the plot to the audience.As opposed to the authors who constantly "intrude" into the text in the metafiction,the director’s character does not interrupt the development of the plot so much as a figure standing higher than the narrative level of the film.Alternatively,the adaptation integrates the background and context of historical records into the self-regulation and control of actors in historical actions.It strengthens the self-discipline of history writing,that is,history a work of art on which the readers can reflect.The film’s attempt to reduce the seemingly all-encompassing history of the 19th century to a "romance" between the hero and the heroine personifies the grand narrative,and achieves the transformation from "grand story" to "small story".But this kind of deletion also inevitably weakens the richness and heteronomy common in historiography metafiction,the latter of which refers to the influence of such social factors in the social system,as economy,politics and religion,on the writing of history.The subsequent chapter analyzes how the film reveals itself to the fiction mechanism in the process of reshaping the female subjectivity,which has been neglected by history for a long time.From the point of view of Sarah the heroine in the novel,she rewrites her story through a series of lies and actions.The emphasis on her status as a painter also highlights her function as the creator of this meta-history.Meanwhile,Anna the heroine in the film plays a role as an intruder between the two narrative layers:she continues to provide context and interpretation for Sarah from a reader’s perspective,and she is the decider of the script’s ending and assumes the writing of the past and the present.The position exchange between the two women who are always stared at in the development of the plot and the two men who are staring,namely,Charles and Mike who plays Charles’s role is also explored.These two male characters both tried to interpret or over-interpret those women in their eyes,and their over-projection of history also led them into their own imagination of the two women’s suffering from paranoid and other mental illnesses.The embedded structure of both the original and the movie plot disintegrate and reconstruct the historical narrative through the interaction of language and image.The contrasting relationship between the two narrative layers,and symmetrical and cyclic features of the plot arrangement as well as the unchanging state of the characters under the guise of a recurring plot show the static semantic system covertly contained by the two versions of narratives.In both versions,the juxtaposition and the cross-cutting of historical narrative times and spaces create the historical narrative that extends beyond time and space by language and by image.The multiple endings respectively also reveal their reconstruction of postmodern narrative units.