“The French Lieutenant’s Woman” by John Fowles . [N8]
09.03.2012
[Spoiler (click to open)]
So... I was reading this perfectly awesome book and then I got hit by a big dose of misogyny. Which was later proven to be untrue in the case of the heroine, although I’m not sure if the implication is that it’s untrue in other cases (that women will fake diseases/set fire to things to get attention). The narrator, who is a modern man, normally tells you what he means so I’m waiting for him to clarify. Ok, finished. Misogyny not too bad for a book published when this was, like, to normal levels? I was terribly bothered by it later on because the narrator is a Brian Kinney type of asshole, he insists on telling the truth about everything and everyone and that results in a lot of veiled insults that make you laugh coz they are pretty true. I do wish the heroine had been more of a person and less of a 'mystery' (as a teacher pointed out, the mystery of Sarah was that there was no mystery). Her actions remain unexplained even when she gives an explanation and if that flew with any men because they could not understand women in their lives, it certainly doesn't with me.
✡ Perhaps you suppose that a novelist has only to pull the right strings and his puppets will behave in a lifelike manner; and produce on request a thorough analysis of their motives and intentions. Certainly I intended at this stage (Chap. Thirteen-unfolding of Sarah’s true state of mind) to tell all-or all that matters. But I find myself suddenly like a man in the sharp spring night, watching from the lawn beneath that dim upper window in Marlborough House; I know in the context of my book’s reality that Sarah would never have brushed away her tears and leaned down and delivered a chapter of revelation. She would instantly have turned, had she seen me there just as the old moon rose, and disappeared into the interior shadows.
But I am a novelist, not a man in a garden-I can follow her where I like? But possibility is not permissibility. Husbands could often murder their wives-and the reverse-and get away with it. But they don’t.
You may think novelists always have fixed plans to which they work, so that the future predicted by Chapter One is always inexorably the actuality of Chapter Thirteen. But novelists write for countless different reasons: for money, for fame, for reviewers, for parents, for friends, for loved ones; for vanity, for pride, for curiosity, for amusement: as skilled furniture makers enjoy making furniture, as drunkards like drinking, as judges like judging, as Sicilians like emptying a shotgun into an enemy’s back. I could fill a book with reasons, and they would all be true, though not true of all. Only one same reason is shared by all of us: we wish to create worlds as real as, but other than the world that is. Or was. This is why we cannot plan. We know a world is an organism, not a machine. We also know that a genuinely created world must be independent of its creator; a planned world (a world that fully reveals its planning) is a dead world. It is only when our characters and events begin to disobey us that they begin to live. When Charles left Sarah on her cliff edge, I ordered him to walk straight back to Lyme Regis. But he did not; he gratuitously turned and went down to the Dairy.
Oh, but you say, come on-what I really mean is that the idea crossed my mind as I wrote that it might be more clever to have him stop and drink milk ... and meet Sarah again. That is certainly one explanation of what happened; but I can only report-and I am the most reliable witness-that the idea seemed to me to come clearly from Charles, not myself. It is not only that he has begun to gain an autonomy;
I must respect it, and disrespect all my quasi-divine plans for him, if I wish him to be real.
In other words, to be free myself, I must give him, and Tina, and Sarah, even the abominable Mrs. Poulteney, their freedom as well. There is only one good definition of God: the freedom that allows other freedoms to exist. And I must conform to that definition.
The novelist is still a god, since he creates (and not even the most aleatory avant-garde modern novel has managed to extirpate its author completely); what has changed is that we are no longer the gods of the Victorian image, omniscient and decreeing; but in the new theological image, with freedom our first principle, not authority.
✡ Mal (if I may add to your stock of useless knowledge) is an Old English borrowing from Old Norwegian and was brought to us by the Vikings. It originally meant “speech,” but since the only time the Vikings went in for that rather womanish activity was to demand something at axeblade, it came to mean “tax” or “payment in tribute.” One branch of the Vikings went south and founded the Mafia in, Sicily; but another-and by this time mal was spelled mail-were busy starting their own protection rackets on the Scottish border. If one cherished one’s crops or one’s daughter’s virginity one paid mail to the neighborhood chieftains; and the victims, in the due course of an expensive time, called it black mail.
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