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The French Lieutenant’s Woman
The French Lieutenant’s Woman
• Published:1969• Set: between 1867 and 1869• Historiographic Metafiction• Linda Hutcheon “ well-known and popular
novels which are both intensely self reflexive and yet paradoxically also lay claim to historical events” (A Poetics of Postmodernism, 1988)
The French Lieutenant’s Woman
• There is only one good definition of God: the freedom that allows other freedom to exist" (Ch. XIII)
The French Lieutenant’s Woman
• “Every emancipation is a restoration of the human world and of human relationships to man himself.” (Marx, Zur Judenfrage, 1844)
The French Lieutenant’s Woman
• 1867• 8 years after the publication of Darwin’s The
Origin of the Species• Publication of the first volume of Marx’s
Kapital (class conflict)• 2 years after 1867: John Stuart Mill’s The
Subjection of Woman
The French Lieutenant’s Woman
“imitate[s] the Victorian proclivity for incorporating historical and sociological generalization into the fabric of fictions, amplifying the dimensions of the novelist’s interests, creating a fiction that is almost encyclopedic in its absortion of all aspects of culture” Fred Kaplan
The French Lieutenant’s Woman
• "I have but a man and a maid, ever ready to slander and steal " (Ch. 49)
The French Lieutenant’s Woman
Manipulation of the reader: -Delay and intercut of events-Deliberately deceiving the reader-Authorial interventions, comments and
digressions
The French Lieutenant’s Woman
• “The green merino shawl was round her shoulders, but could not quite hide the fact that she was in a long-sleeved nightgown." (Ch. 46)
• omnipotent god• “not at all what we think of as a divine look,
but one of distinctly mean and dubious [...] moral quality." (Ch. 55)
The French Lieutenant’s Woman
• "begat what shall it be-let us say seven children" (Ch. 44)
The French Lieutenant’s Woman
• "I said earlier that we are all poets, though not many of us write poetry; and so are we all novelists, that is, we have a habit of writing fictional futures for ourselves although perhaps today we incline more to put ourselves into a film" (Ch. 55)
The French Lieutenant’s Woman
• "No. It is as I say. You have not only planted the dagger in my breast, you have delighted in twisting it" She stood now staring at him (Ch. 60)/at Charles, as if against her will, but hypnotized, the defiant criminal awainting sentence. He pronounced it " A day will come when you shall be called to account for what you have done to me”(Ch. 61)
The French Lieutenant’s Woman
• He hesitated one last second, his face was like the poised-crumbling wall of a dam, so vast was the weight of anathema pressing to roar down. (FLW Ch 60; Ch 61)
The French Lieutenant’s Woman
• “historical metafiction: Novels which combine an attention to verifiable historical events, personages or milieu with a self-reflexive awareness of their status as artifacts and the literary conventions they employ" (Linda Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction, New York, Routledge, 1988, pp. 105-123
The French Lieutenant’s Woman
• “The process of making stories out of chronicles, of constructing plots out of sequences, is what postmodern fiction underlines. This […] focuses attention on the act of imposing order on that past, of encoding strategies of meaning-making through representation" Linda Hutcheon, The Politics of Postmodernism,London, Routledge, 1989, pp. 66-67
