Irony In The French Lieutenant's Woman

The French Lieutenant's Woman, which is regarded as John Fowles' masterpiece, is an original and experimental novel.Irony is an important artistic device in the creation of the novel.Its artistic characteristics revolve around the perceived notion of an incongruity, a contrast or a contradiction between appearance and reality, expectation and outcome, the surface meaning and the deep meaning, frequently in such a way so as to stress absurdity or paradoxical nature of reality present in the contradiction between substance and form. The thesis discusses irony as an artistic device used in characterization, narration, and theme of the novel to gear up the form and the content of the novel.Chapter 1 offers a discussion of irony in characterization in the novel The French Lieutenant's Woman.The narrator holds a detached ironic attitude towards the ninetieth-century Victorian characters.With an intelligent sense of humor, the narrator understates or overstates the absurd inconsistencies of the characters that are portrayed. The narrator also puts a sharp contrast between their appearance and their inner mind, their sayings and their doings, their success of deception and their exposure.The irony in characterization will alert the reader to the Victorian social evils such as conservativeness,self-important and hypocritical in ideology and ethics, which are retained by such people as Ernestina and Mrs.Poulteney, and partly by Charles.Chapter 2 explores irony in narration. The narration I mean here relates to a sequence of events.To some extent situation is closely connected with narration. Situational Irony is woven into narration of the novel with subtlety and skill.Situational Irony can be sub-divided into Irony of Events and Irony of Incongruity. Irony of Events concentrates on exposing the series of frustrations from which Charles and Grogan suffer a lot. With Irony of Incongruity, the incongruity between male intellection and female intuition is highlighted in front of the readers.In this process the narration becomes more dramatic.Chapter 3 analyses irony in thematic presentation. Fowles has explored the thematic issues on human freedom and human progress. Superficially, he supports that individual freedom should yield to social responsibility and one can only evolve by natural selecting its physical development. In fact, the deep meaning Fowles expresses is opposite to the surface meaning. What Fowles really means is that to gain real freedom one should give up social responsibilities.Physical development never means evolution and one can only evolve by spiritual development. The incongruities between surface meanings and deep meanings of the novel endow the themes of the novel with a charming profundity.In conclusion, it is because of Fowles'creative and effective use of irony as an artistic device that The French Lieutenant's Woman has illustrated his philosophy about social morality and human nature.