A Postmodernist Reading Of The French Lieutenant's Woman

John Fowles's The French Lieutenant's Woman is an excellent postmodernist fiction. From a 20th century perspective, the novel tells a tortuous love story happening in Britain of the Victorian Age in the 19th century. Sarah and Charles, the heroine and the hero of the novel, shaking off social prejudice and restrictions, struggle to acquire freedom and independence. In the postmodernism context, this thesis will discuss the perfect combination of narrative techniques and thematic meanings. The thesis consists five chapters.Chapter One: Introduction. It introduces the historical background and the significance of the creation of this novel, and introduces how this thesis is structured. Chapter Two: The Situation of the Novel—Literature in Postmodern Context. This chapter introduces the historical inevitability of postmodernism and its characteristics. Chapter Three: Postmodern Narratives in The French Lieutenant's Woman. This chapter is to discuss three postmodernist narrative techniques—the ironic first-person narrator, the open ending, and intertextuality, and to analyze how the three narrative techniques embody the thematic meanings of the novel.Chapter Four: Postmodernism and Humanism in The French Lieutenant's Woman. This chapter discusses the novel's criticism of the Victorian ideology and the existential freedom embodied in characters' subjectivity.Chapter Five: Conclusion. The French Lieutenant's Woman is a novel both reconstructs and deconstructs the Victorian society. It criticizes the ideology of Victorian society and conveys a kind of existential freedom. Even today, it still has great literary and social significance.