Conflict, Subversion And Reconstruction:a New Historicist Reading Of The French Lieutenant’s Woman

John Fowles (1926-2005) is a20th-Century English novelist of great renown in world letters. His representative work, The French Lieutenant’s Woman, has, since its publication in1969, won general critical and academic acclaim. In the light of New Historicism, this paper studies The French Lieutenant’s Woman by using Michel Foucault’s view of power and Hayden White’s Metahistory theory. It aims to reveal the power relations in the marginalized social-historical events of the Victorian age—Darwin’s advancing the theory of evolution, the change of the social status of the newly-emerging bourgeoisie, the disadvantageous status of the labouring class, the awakening of liberalism, the growth of the feminist movement, etc., and analyze the characters Charles’ and Sarah’s subverting respectively the Victorian social tradition and the patriarchal society, as well as the narrator’s subverting the traditional narrative mode. The paper concludes that Fowles, by stressing the "fictionality" of history in the novel, reconstructs a different but equally meaningful version of Victorian history, which he still declares "imagined". The thesis uses White’s theory of Metahistory that all historical texts are products of social-historical discourse and ideologies, going on to discuss the discourse structure of the novel and the ideologies of its author.The thesis consists of three parts:Introduction, body and Conclusion. The body is divided into three chapters. Chapter One probes the social and historical conflicts in the Victorian age involved in the novel. Chapter Two studies the changes of power relations by using the New Historicist concept of power which has been developed from Foucault’s view of power and reveals from three aspects the text’s subversion of history. Chapter Three analyzes the "fictionality" of text by using White’s Metahistory theory and deeply discusses the purpose of the author’s reconstruction of history. The conclusion summarizes the main viewpoints of the thesis and points out that all histories are "imagined" and that literary works reconstruct their own version of history by subverting the dominant ideologies, although these new versions of history are still "imagined" because they are affected by the author’s ideologies. Approaching a literary work from New Historicism makes a reader aware of the nature of the social-historical discourse and ideologies in the work, thus enabling him to gain a deeper understanding of one of its important dimensions.