Victorian Age Revisited

As one of the greatest post-modernist novels, John Fowles' The French Lieutenant's Woman is frequently debated by critics in the international literary circle. Numerous critical works approached its controversial narrative discourse and its profound themes as well from different aspects, such as those of traditional historicism, neo-historicism, existentialism, feminism, and the postmodernism, etc. The present thesis is an attempt to approach The French Lieutenant's Woman from the aspect of its narrative discourse so as to reveal the dialogic nature of the novel. By discussing and analyzing the dialogues at different levels, the paper will demonstrate how the dialogues between characters, between the author and the reader, between the tradition and modernity, between historical context and fiction (text), successfully help reconstruct a dynamic and polyphonic Victorian society with its multiple facets and voices, instead of a merely monologic picture of it. Hopefully, by approaching this novel in this manner, we can obtain a new perspective of Victorian history, and we can better understand the features of the postmodernist writing. The present thesis will be divided into four chapters, in addition to an introduction and a conclusion.Chapter One examines Fowles' notion of novel writing, concerning the roles of the author, the characters, and the reader, which coincidently corresponds with the idea of dialogism advanced by M. M. Bakhtin.Chapter Two studies the dialogues constituted by the major characters in this novel, which unfold the complicated, conflicting and multi-layered Victorian ideologies and the struggles of the different forces for power.Chapter Three analyzes the features of metanarration, in an attempt to show the metafictional narrator's undermining of the traditional realism, which indicates the author's as well as the narrator's dialogic stance and to illustrate bow the dialogues between the narrator and the characters, between the author and the reader are achieved.Chapter Four discusses the dialogue at grand level, namely a macroscopic dialogue, in which the tradition and modernity, history and fiction (literature) are interwoven with each other to represent a multi-polar and dynamic Victorian History.Finally, a tentative conclusion will be drawn from the preceding studies to present thesignificance of The French Lieutenant's Woman as a dialogic novel: It presents characters better as human beings; it reveals not only the dominant, the known but also the marginalized aspects of the complex Victorian society; it allows more imagination and active participation of the reader in making meaning, and enables the novels (literature) to teem with more tension and vitality than the traditional monologic novel.