The French Lieutenant's Woman

As John Fowles's most successful novel, The French Lieutenant's Woman wins for him tremendous popularity as well as the focus of academic reviewers after its publication in 1969. The story is a pastiche of the Victorian fiction. It ranks high among the postmodern novels because of the open ending, pervasive mystery and the existentialist theme. Different from many postmodern writers who sever the relation with their literary antecedents, Fowles's success, however, exists in his reference to literary tradition. By examining the narrative techniques in the novel, the author of this thesis tries to exhibit the tension aroused through injecting Sarah Woodruff, the symbol of postmodern features, into the traditional Victorian world. The interplay of the tradition and the present brings the meaning of existential freedom. In this case, the form is in harmony with the theme of the novel.This thesis consists of six parts:Introduction gives a brief survey of the background against which The French Lieutenant's Woman was written and focuses on the predicament of the postwar writers, on the basis of which there emerges the purpose of this thesis.Chapter One exhibits the theme concerning individual freedom in terms of plot and structure of the novel.Chapter Two focuses on Fowles's propagation of his existential ideasthrough the injection of the postmodern techniques into a traditional Victorian text. With the shift in the traditional omniscient point of view, the character's limited point of view and the modern outside point of view, Fowles succeeds in creating Sarah Woodruff as a mysterious figure who brings freedom to both the narrator and the protagonist.Chapter Three concentrates on the "tale within a tale" structure, which enables Sarah to make fiction of multiple meanings to Charles. This process is in parallel with the narrator's self-conscious fiction-making. The focus is on the social concerns of the fiction-making as well as the fictionality and plurality this process brings about. Sarah's multiplicity deconstructs Charles's conventional knowledge and thereby sets Charles free to make his own choice. Accordingly, Fowles's imitation and subversion of the traditional narrative modes with the self-conscious narration still directs the reader to the realization of freedom.Chapter Four attempts to examine Sarah as a woman who tries to acquire individual freedom, instead of only being a "means" and "fantasy" of the male character. It is at this point that Fowles's evocation of the freedom of both men and women is achieved.Conclusion gives a general summary of this thesis and emphasizes that Fowles's humanistic concern with human being's quest for self-knowledge through the interplay of past and present reorients a way out for the novelists in predicament.