The French Lieutenant's Woman by John Fowles

The novel actually deals with how we create the world, instead of how we perceive it, being concerned with the relationship between life and art and how they influence each other, (which can be identified as its theme). On the one hand, the author recreates a remote realm of the past, while, on the other, he rips it apart, showing it to us in dribs and drabs. It is apparently a book about another time and place, it is a book about otherness revealing certain truths and values of 19th century life, but it is also a book about illusion and trickery. Hence, the charm of perusing it from cover to cover. Yet, it is not so, since it then proves to become a 20th century rendition in an unstable and postmodern context.

The imagery is prismatic, mirroring multiple realities, within the boundaries of Baudrillard’s ‘simulacrum’ even mentioning a ‘liquidation of all referentials’ (Baudrillard 167), leading to a fantastic non-dependence of images and a confusingly floating effect like that of a dream.Ī first glimpse at this novel could be either a misleading travel to a dim and distant past that is the Victorian world of the 1860s or a perfect historical reproduction. The French Lieutenant’s Woman can be defined not as a literary island but as an important part of Fowles’ subtle, mythical and anachronistic writing, dwelling upon timelessness as closely linked to metafiction. The horizontal perspective, the form, could be used in class as basis for teaching translation or literature to bilingual classes. In a nutshell, all the elements that pinpoint Fowles’ uniqueness as a stunning novelist always fidgety and mischievous, always an eye-opener to his readers, never ceasing to amaze.

I will try to analyse these issues following two main coordinates: a horizontal one, as a matter of form, (aimed both at the literary analysis and the translation chapter), and a vertical, unseen part, that of metafiction and metalanguage. Key words: deconstruction, juxtaposition, metafiction, simulacrum, timelessness, intertext, postmodernism.Ībstract: The aim of this paper is to tackle what I consider to be the most important aspects of John Fowles’ The French Lieutenant’s Woman, exploring the concepts of existential authenticity, intertextual organization, temporal organization, space, historicity, materialized into a plethora of mythic quest archetypes in a Godgame literary manner. By Camelia Barbu, Colegiul National 'Ienachita Vacarescu', Targoviste

The French Lieutenant's Woman by John Fowles