French Lieutenant’s Woman Essay and Techniques Postmodernism

Examine how FLW represents a postmodern delegacy of thinking. Postmodernism encompasses a reinterpretation of unmixed ideas, forms and practices and reflects and rejects the ideologies of previous movements in the arts. The postmodern movement has made way for virgin ways of thinking and a new theoretical base when criticising art, lit durationture, sexual activity and history.John Fowles 1969 historical bricolage, The French deputy sheriffs fair sex, utilises the ideas of postmodern theorists such as Foucault, Barthes and Sartre amongst others to form a postmodern double-coded discourse which examines values built-in in the nice era from a ordinal century context. The sassys use of intertextuality, metafiction and its irreverent attitude grass be seen as a postmodern parody of Victorian fiction and the historical novel.For the goal of examining the values and ideologies of the Victorian era in comparison to the postmodern paradigm, Victorian conventions atomic number 18 sh profess juxtaposed with postmodern techniques such as the springial attack and alternative endings. Sarah Woodruff is different from other characters in The French lieutenants Woman because she is epistemologically unique and because the narrator does not have advance to her inner thoughts in chapter 13 the condition directly addresses the reader and states that he gives his characters the free will to determine their outcome in his novel.In a typical Victorian context, the protagonists inner conflict and motives would be exposed to the reader. Fowles denies his right as the precedent to impose definition of characters and in this way recognises the age of Alain-Robbe Grillet and Roland Barthes in bringing about the death of the author and the birth of the reader. The reader must interpret the text in ways (s)he views it and is forced to actively engage in the text. Fowles also introduces the author as a god-like figure (who turns back time) to craft multiple endings. He (the author) allows Sarah to act in an existentialist way to determine her outcome in the novel.It allows her to exercise her individuality, making her stand as a lone libber figure amongst the tides of Victorian conventionality. The novel rewrites Victorian sexuality and in this way is an example of the way the sexual r maturation of the 1960s is described in the historical novel of its time. Foucault described the Victorian dot as the booming age of repression and he revises the notion that the Victorian era was silent on sexual matters in his works. Both Foucault and The French Lieutenants Woman claim that the forms of power and resistance be historically conditioned.For example, Sarahs system is still institutionalised at the end of the novel since she appears except as a minor character in Rosettis house. The fact that Sarah is an anachronic creation points to the idea that the novel is not about the Victorian era but a critique of relative values in their context. The metafictional complex body part of the novel flourishingly elucidates that Sarah seems to be subordinated in the patriarchal power of the coeval narrator- it also endeavours to show that even the most emancipated groups during the Victorian period could not carry the liberation of women completely.This is a reflexion of what Fowles deems backward in the context of his society, and is app arent in Sarahs repressed sexuality and the vociferous disparity regarding notions of female sexuality Ernestina is always confined within the rigid boundaries of patriarchal, societal convention- this is shown by the way she represses her sexual desire for Charles, being field of study with the most chaste of kisses. In this way the novel represents the truth as a form of pleasure in a Foucauldian sense.The institutionalisation of prostitutes, a slightly clandestine pastime for Victorian gentlemen, is a situation that reflects the obvious falsehood of Victorian society when compared to Sara hs situation. She (Sarah) is labelled a fallen women (hence her dub Tragedy) and is ostracised because of her free-will and feminine misconduct. Charles finds her forwardness rather intimidating as it goes against his beliefs that the stratification of society is a vital element of social stability. This enforces Charles Darwinian beliefs about the social hierarchy (in reference to Social Darwinism).Darwinian evolution finds its expression by creating a new way of thinking. Fowles novel represents the spacious crisis of Darwinian Victorian England and traces its impact on society. Charles marvels his religion in the Church, admitting he is agnostic, and the narrator himself labels Charles as having agnostic qualities. At the end of the novel Charles has travel a modern man and Sarah the hopeful monster who feels alienated in Victorian culture without being able to conceptualise Charles intuitive rationality of her otherness and modernity.Darwinian evolution and nineteenth centu ry psychology are portrayed in The French Lieutenants Woman as providing a corrective culture dominated by narrow given(p) Evangelicalism. Examples can be observed in Mrs Poulteneys fickle attempts at being charitable, her dismissive attitude towards her duty to the church which is merely a habitual pastime for her, and her decision to dismiss Sarah. Then novels intertextuality is made up of its bricolage of history and fiction.Victorian epigraphs (and the irony used in them) serve to reconstruct the cultural milieu of the age using representations of facets of its literary world with the poe turn up of Hardy, Tennyson, Arnold and Clough. It provides a context within which the characters try to construct their subjectivities where they can emancipate themselves from the novels dominant political orientation (this is an example of how Freuds ideas about literatures subjectivity are utilised).Also, the footnotes reinforce the authors presence and allude to the fact that the author is omnipresent (in the novel). The alternative endings represent two types of Victorian endings and the last, a more postmodern, existentialist one. Fowles plays with different endings to epitomise the early postmodernist problem of tasty form and representation and this technique agrees with Umberto Ecos idea that literature has bareness and can be interpreted in many ways.The postmodern hyphen is successful in creating a tension between these endings within a single text. The last alternative ending in chapter 61 can be construed as the existentialist one. The existentialist theme dramatises the struggles of individuals to define themselves and to gather in moral decisions about the conduct of their lives in worlds which deny them of freedom. Both Charles and Sarah are searching for themselves, trying to find their own existences by rebelling against the norms of tradition Charles by embracing Darwinism nd declaring himself agnostic (in line with the Nietzschean existentialis t ideology) and Sarah by redefining herself (such as labelling herself Mrs) and avoiding the hypocrisy of Victorians towards sexuality and human relations. Like Charles and Sarah, the reader is free of usage (by the author) and we can manoeuvre our position in the narrative to create our own meaning. The use of the existentialist theme in The French Lieutenants Woman makes the reader aware of Sartrean-style thinking which was not in existence in Victorian times but was conceptualised in Fowles era.It is successful in allowing the reader to criticise and contrast the differing ideologies present at the single times and, by highlighting the shift in values, Fowles effectively expounds a new way of thinking. Fowles successfully blends the Victorian novel with postmodern ideologies and twentieth century sensibility by applying paradigms which lead to the reader being allowed to question previously held values, in particular relative values which change concord to context, such as sexu ality and religion.Through his pastiche of traditional Victorian romance, and historical narrative Fowles deconstructs his novel and makes the reader aware of contextual codes and conventions through ironic, metafictional comments Perhaps it is only a game. Perhaps you suppose the novelist has only to pull the right strings and his puppets will behave in a lifelike manner -The French Lieutenants Woman Chapter 13 *