On The Postmodernist Features Of The French Lieutenant's Woman: The Fusion Of Tradition And Experimentation

The French Lieutenant's Woman becomes John Fowles's greatest popular success and is widely acclaimed by many famous critics soon after its publication in 1969. Many critical essays have been contributed to the novel on its ideology and postmodernist narrative techniques. Through the systematic study of both its content and form, the dissertation proposes that the most distinctive feature of this book is its attempt to combine the scope and solidity of Victorian fiction with experimental narrative devices rather than total subversion of the great tradition of the realist novel.In terms of themes, the novel not only reflects the traditional theme of the critical realism literature ?harsh attacks on the Victorian age, but also reflects the existential themes of "freedom" and "choice", that is, in the nineteenth-century England, a society which has no freedom at all, how a woman of inferior social position attains her freedom and pays a high price for her choice. The fusion of tradition and experimentation is also reflected in its subject matters such as setting, plots events and characters. The novel vividly reconstructs the Victorian world, provides reader with the absorbing story, fascinating plot events and distinctive characters. However, Fowles represents the Victorian world from the perspective of a contemporary novelist and frequently compares the Victorian society with his own. He also breaks the stereotype of the development of the traditional novel's plot and grants great freedom to his characters.The fusion of tradition and experimentation is also reflected in the novel's form. In The French Lieutenant's Woman, Fowles employs mostly the language of Victorian style and even exaggerates its archaic qualities. Of course, he also plays the game of language but not to extreme as other postmodernist writers do. The book is structured like a traditionally well-made novel, but with variations, for instances, it breaks the linear narrative structure, chronological order and providesmultiple endings. The book's experimentation is best reflected on its narrative point of view. In the novel, a special persona is constructed who like the Victorian omniscient narrator, is able to intervene in his narrative and can probe the minds of his characters as he wishes. But at the same time, he is different from the Godlike narrator; he withholds the heroine's inner thought, promises to grant freedom to characters, and even appears in the novel as a character. As far as the fictionality is concerned, Fowles holds that fiction is woven into all. Thus in this book the persona always reminds the reader the fictionality of the novel.In 1960's, the novel, as a literary genre, faces great challenge from other forms of art, and some critics even say, "the novel is dead". However, Fowles firmly believes that "the novel will never die". He inherits and exceeds the great tradition of the realistic novel, keeping the novel as an art form to represent the truth of life, convey the powerful philosophical and moral message and to amuse the reader as well. And while carrying on the tradition of realistic writing, he experiments with the structure and narrative techniques. Fowles's attempt to blend the tradition and the experimentation in The French Lieutenant's Woman is very successful both artistically and commercially. He provides an alternative for the development of postwar English novel.