The mistress of the French lieutenant (novel)

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The mistress of the French lieutenant (original title: The French Lieutenant's Woman ) is a 1969 published postmodern historical novel by the British writer John Fowles . A conventional love story is told on the surface, which is set in Victorian England: 32-year-old Charles Smithson, likely heir to a nobility title, is engaged to Ernestina Freeman, the handsome daughter of a wealthy cloth merchant, but at the same time feels like the social outsider Sarah Woodruff, who is said to have been the mistress of a French lieutenant. The fictional characters and the chronologically told story correspond to the style of a nineteenth-century novel, but at the same time the novel is characterized by metafictional breaks , intertextual references and philosophical explanations.

The French lieutenant's mistress is now considered a 20th century classic. The US American magazine Time selected the novel as one of the best English-language novels published between 1923 and 2005 . The British newspaper The Guardian named him in the list of 1000 novels everyone must read.

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The Cobb in Lyme Regis, where Charles Smithson and Sarah Woodruff first met

The novel begins with a description of the "Cobb", the mighty harbor wall of the small port town of Lyme Regis in the county of Dorset in England , which is known, among other things, for the fossils that are found in its cliffs. The year is 1867. There are two strollers on the Cobb: Charles Smithson, a gentleman whose financial situation does not allow him to do any paid work, and his fiancée Ernestina Freeman, daughter of a wealthy merchant. At the far end of the Cobb, they see Sarah Woodruff looking out over the water. Ernestina Freeman tells her fiancé what she knows about this young woman. When a French naval officer spends a few days in Lyme Regis due to a shipwreck, Sarah Woodruff falls in love with this man. He leaves her with a promise to return for her, but does not keep that promise. Sarah Woodruff spends the little free time she has waiting on the Cobb and gazing out to sea. In the village she is considered a dishonored, half-crazy woman, and some of the townspeople refer to her as the French lieutenant's whore. The former governess has found shelter with the ruthless and tyrannical Mrs. Poulteney, who means by this to prove her Christian charity.

Charles Smithson is fascinated by the young woman whose face seems to radiate so much sadness. Several encounters take place between him and her, during which he gradually learns the story from her point of view. She is by no means on the Cobb because she is waiting for the French lieutenant to return. He was married and cheated on her even before he returned to France. She perseveres in Lyme Regis because she does not want to escape her shame and consciously lives in the role of a social outsider. A willful breach of a strict ban on Mrs. Poulteney leads to the fact that the wealthless loses her last place to stay in Lyme Regis. Charles Smithson gives her money and Sarah Woodruff moves to Exeter.

Charles Smithson is increasingly aware of how drawn he is to Sarah Woodruff. Marriage to Ernestina Freeman will be a conventional Victorian marriage. She is significantly younger than him and has little understanding of his scientific interests. Sarah Woodruff, on the other hand, promises to be a more equal partner. The marriage of his uncle to a much younger woman who could bear him children also calls into question his prospect of a substantial inheritance and the title of baronet. This will make Ernestina Freeman the wealthier spouse. Her father is ready to tolerate this and also accepts that his daughter can no longer expect a title of nobility. However, he expects Charles Smithson to play a role in his father-in-law's trading house in the future. On the way back to Lyme Regis, Charles Smithson stops in Exeter, where Sarah Woodruff lives at the time.

At this point the narrator, who has addressed the reader several times before, ultimately offers the reader three different endings for the novel.

  • Charles Smithson decides not to visit Sarah, but instead travels to Lyme Regis to assure Ernestina of his love. They get married and Charles Smithson joins his father-in-law's company, which still ensures great fortune for his descendants. However, the narrator dismisses this ending as a daydream for Charles.

Before introducing the two alternate endings of the novel, the narrator shares a compartment with Charles Smithson during a train ride. He flips a coin to determine which of the two alternative novel endings he will tell first, because from his point of view they are equally possible.

  • In the second end of the novel, Charles Smithson seduces Sarah, who is bedridden because of a sprained foot, and then realizes that Sarah was still a virgin. He breaks his engagement to Ernestina and sends a letter to Sarah's hand, but his servant never gives this letter to the recipient. Socially ostracized because of his breach of engagement, Charles travels through Europe and North America. Sarah, on the other hand, is leaving Exeter to go to London. When they find each other two years later, Sarah lives with artists and enjoys a free, artistically creative life. He learns from Sarah that they have a daughter together. Even if the reunion of Charles Smithson and Sarah Woodruff was not effusive, Charles leaves the house hoping that they will find each other again.
  • For the third end of the novel, the narrator sets the clock back only 15 minutes. The reunion between the two remains cool. Sarah does not mention any child they have and shows no interest in relaunching the relationship with Charles. Both Charles and the reader have to grapple with the question of whether Sarah Woodruff only used the relationship to break out of Lyme Regis.

Individual aspects of the novel

History of origin

John Fowles has repeatedly emphasized that for him writing is an organic process. At the beginning of the writing process, he did not know how the novel would develop. In the case of The French Lieutenant's Beloved , it was for him the image of a woman looking out over the sea from the Cobb and turning her back on Lyme Regis. For him, this image meant both that a woman was marginalized and that she marginalized a man in some way.

John Fowles makes his first chapter, the first verse of Thomas Hardy's poem The Riddle - The mystery ahead:

“Stretching eyes west
over the sea,
wind foul or fair,
always stood she
prospect-impressed;
Solely out there
Did her gaze rest,
Never elsewhere
Seemed charm to be. "

- Thomas Hardy: The Riddle

In this poem, too, a female figure is thematized who constantly observes the sea without being distracted by other things.

Narrative perspective

The novel is reported from the perspective of an omniscient or authorial narrator, who repeatedly interrupts the story of the novel to comment. For example, the narrator assures that he has a jug that once belonged to Sarah.

“The two purchases had cost Sarah no more than nine pence in an old china shop; the pitcher was cracked and would get one more crack over the years, as I can confirm, because I bought it a year or two ago for significantly more than the three pennies Sarah had to spend on it. "

This narrator commentary is a feature that the novel shares with many works from the 19th century. Something similar can be found, for example, in the novels of George Eliot and Anthony Trollope , both successful writers of the Victorian era . For literature that was written in the second half of the 20th century, however, this narrative form is extremely unusual. According to some literary scholars, John Fowles chose this narrative style deliberately and not imitated, but parodied . Others have pointed out that the early appearance of the so-called "intrusive narrator" also had a parodic function. In the conventional Victorian novel, on the other hand, this narrative form served to underline the truth of the plot. Fowles, on the other hand, uses it to ironically break up the plot . For example, he also plays with the form of the narrator type who is omniscient:

"Later that night you might have seen Sarah - although I can't imagine who through, except perhaps an owl flying by - standing at the open window of her unlit bedroom."

Post-time point of view and narrative-theoretical structure

John Fowles keeps reminding his reader that he is reading a novel that was written in the 1960s. Fowles does this by making references to events that clearly occurred after the Victorian era:

"Mrs. Poulteney used "person" as two patriotic French people might have used "Nazi" during the occupation. "

“Sam's surprise suggests that his real ambitions were theater. He did everything except drop the tray he was carrying, but of course we are still ante Stanislavski . "

This makes it clear to the reader that he is being told events that are subject to a different value system and a different world of ideas. Fowles also uses this means to create an ironic distance from the plot of the novel.

Accordingly, Fowles does not use this connection in the narrative conventions as well as in the patterns of action and morals to the Victorian novel to reconstruct the past, but to address the change of epochs from the 19th to the 20th century. The reader in Fowle's novel is not enlightened through identification with characters from an illusory world, but through the conscious confrontation with a fictitiously conveyed historical experience. In this way, the narrative-theoretical and aesthetic structure of Die Geliebte des French lieutenants serves to raise moral awareness or educate the reader.

At the same time, Fowles as an author creates characters who make themselves independent of their creator and claim autonomy, which the author in turn respects. In this way, the fictional world outlined in the novel receives, on the one hand, resemblance to reality, on the other hand, the author himself appears and identifies himself as a contemporary of Alain Robbe-Grillet and Roland Barthes , in order to represent himself as the designer of a world that Embodied principle of freedom.

Governess novel

The Victorian governess novel is a specific literary genre that includes works that were almost exclusively written by British authors during the 19th century or the early years of the 20th century. Only Anne Brontës Agnes Gray (1847) and Charlotte Brontës Jane Eyre are considered significant works in literary history . The main themes of the narratives assigned to this genre are the protagonist's loss of social status, the thematization of her unclear position in the household of her employer and the insistence on her own set of values ​​in relationships with the people around her. The distinction between women, whose sphere of activity is exclusively their own household, versus women who are forced to pursue gainful employment takes up a great deal of space. Most of them, however, also describe a maturing process of their central acting person and thus show elements of the educational novel.

Fowle's novel has parallels to this genre. For the farmer's daughter Sarah Woodruff, the (semi) education and the governess post that it gained meant a social advancement. Her relationship with the French lieutenant is followed by social exclusion, which she initially willingly accepted. In Mrs. Poulteney's house, however, she is only a person who is tolerated out of bigotry Christianity and who has the function of an entertainer. Opposed to her is Ernestina Freeman, whose personality seems to promise to develop into the "angel in the house", the image of a perfect wife and mother created by the Victorian writer Coventry Patmore .

Intention and Effect

The three possible different endings of the novel, which Fowles presents to the reader as metafiction, serve to show different possibilities for action. In the first version of the end of the novel, the central figure of Charles Smithson behaves entirely in accordance with the conventions and morals of the Victorian era; in the second version the hero breaks with it romantically in order to face the existential risks of life alone and completely free of all ties in the third possible ending of the novel.

With these different novel endings, Fowles postulates the necessity of fictions, which are the prerequisite for humans to experience or fathom their environment and to act consciously. Fowler's work thus illustrates the transition from the modern to the postmodern novel, which no longer simply tries to depict extralinguistic reality, but in which everything becomes fiction.

In his essay Notes on an Unfinished Novel (1969), Fowles argues that the traditional functions of the novel ( "to entertain, to satirize, to describe new sensibilities, to record life, to improve life" ) are as important as the development of one new novel form. In The French Lieutenant's Women he accordingly combines the formal characteristics of the metaromans with an exciting plot, in-depth character drawing and a precise, at the same time authentic description of the social milieu , thereby attempting to popularize the new genre.

expenditure

Secondary literature

  • Josua Novak: The postmodern comic novel . Tectum Verlag, Heidelberg 2009, ISBN 978-3-8288-9859-2 .
  • Margaret Reynolds and Jonathan Noakes: John Fowles - the essential guide. Vintage Living Texts, London 2003, ISBN 0-09-946088-2 .
  • William Stephenson: Fowles's The French Lieutenant's Woman . Continuum, London 2007, ISBN 978-0-8264-9009-4

Single receipts

  1. ↑ 1000 Novels Everyone Must Read: The Definitive List , accessed July 27, 2014.
  2. ↑ Margaret Reynolds and Jonathan Noakes: John Fowles - the essential guide. Vintage Living Texts, London 2003, ISBN 0-09-946088-2 , p. 194.
  3. ↑ The complete poem can be found under the following link: Portable Poetry, Thomas Hardy: The Riddle
  4. ↑ Fowles: The French Lieutenant's Woman, p. 277. The original quote is: These tow purchases had cost Sarah ninepence in an old china shop; the Toby was cracked, and was to be re-cracked in the course of time, as I can testify, having bought it myself a year or two ago for a good deal more than the three pennies Sarah was charged.
  5. ^ Josua Novak: The Postmodern Comical Novel . Tectum Verlag, Heidelberg 2009, ISBN 978-3-8288-9859-2 . P. 25 and p. 26.
  6. ^ Josua Novak: The Postmodern Comical Novel . Tectum Verlag, Heidelberg 2009, ISBN 978-3-8288-9859-2 , p. 26.
  7. ↑ Fowles: The French Lieutenant's Woman, p. 93. The original quote is: Later that nicht Sarah might have been seen - though I cannot think by whom, unless a passing owl - standing at the open window of her unlit bedroom.
  8. ^ Fowles: The French Lieutenant's Woman . S. 104. In the original the quote is: Mrs Poulteney used person "as two patriotic Frenchman might have said" Nazi "during the occupation"
  9. ^ Fowles: The French Lieutenant's Woman . P. 328. In the original the quote is: “Sam's Surprise makes one suspect that his real ambition should have been in the theater. He did everything but drop the tray that he was carrying; but this was of course ante Stanislvaski ”.
  10. ^ Josua Novak: The Postmodern Comical Novel . Tectum Verlag, Heidelberg 2009, ISBN 978-3-8288-9859-2 , p. 27 and p. 28.
  11. ↑ See Hans Ulrich Seeber, Hubert Zapf, Annegret Maak: The novel after 1945 - on the way to postmodernism . In: Hans Ulrich Seeber (Ed.): English literary history . Verlag JB Metzler, Stuttgart 2012 (5th edition), ISBN 3476024210 , p. 414.
  12. ↑ Cecilia Wadsö Lecaros: The Victorian Governess Novel . Lund University Press, Lund 2001, ISBN 91-7966-577-2 , p. 34.
  13. ↑ Cecilia Wadsö Lecaros: The Victorian Governess Novel . Lund University Press, Lund 2001, ISBN 91-7966-577-2 , p. 29.
  14. ↑ Cecilia Wadsö Lecaros: The Victorian Governess Novel . Lund University Press, Lund 2001, ISBN 91-7966-577-2 , p. 32.
  15. ↑ See Hans Ulrich Seeber, Hubert Zapf, Annegret Maak: The novel after 1945 - on the way to postmodernism . In: Hans Ulrich Seeber (Ed.): English literary history . Verlag JB Metzler, Stuttgart 2012 (5th edition), ISBN 3476024210 , p. 413 f. The quote is taken from this source.