From Postmodernism, with Love: Neo-Victorian Sexual/Textual Politics in The French Lieutenant’s Woman

Abstract

Against the backdrop of the sexual revolution that the world was undergoing and of the textual
experimentation that literature was undertaking in the late 1960s, the silence of the female
characters populating Victorian fiction became nothing less than audible – the source of the
debate around the ‘sexual/textual politics’ to have dominated the end of the twentieth century.
With The French Lieutenant’s Woman, John Fowles gives a voice to his central character,
Sarah Woodruff, and, in so doing, constructs a woman who deconstructs the (predominantly
male) canon. Moreover, the novelist weaves her tale into his story and thus builds successive
layers of fictionality for the interrogation of outmoded patterns of thought and the associated
narrative strategies – symptomatic for the late Victorian era, yet lingering in the mindset of
readers a century later. To illustrate the general postmodern ‘dis-ease’ with tradition and the
particular subversive manner in which Fowles challenges expectations, the present study lays
focus on the cultural production of early Neo-Victorian novels, highlights parody and
metafiction as recurrent modes of writing, with frequent incursions into text, context, and
intertext.