FACULTY OF HUMANITIES DEPARTMENT/ENGLISH LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE MOSTAR

SEMINAR PAPER
STRUCTURE AND STYLE IN THE FRENCH LIEUTANT'S WOMAN

PROFESSOR: prof.dr. SANJA OTARI v.asst. AIDA DIHO

STUDENT: ADNANA HODI

CONTENT:

INTRODUCTION.............................................................................................3 BIOGRAPHY....................................................................................................4 STYLE OF THE NOVEL..................................................................................6 NOVEL'S STRUCTURE ...................................................................................7 CONCLUSION...................................................................................................8 LITERATURE....................................................................................................9

INTRODUCTION

This seminar paper is about structure, style, and technique in The French Lieutenant's Woman. First i will say a few words about the author. Then I'll elaborate the topic of this seminar. I'll try to explain the most important things related to structure,style and technique in the novel The French Lieutenant's Woman. In the end cnclusion will be given and it will include my personal opinion about the theme.

BIOGRAPHY (JOHN ROBERT FOWLES)

John Robert Fowles was born March 31, 1926 in Leigh-on-Sea, a small town located about 40 miles from London in the county of Essex, England. He recalls the English suburban culture of the 1930s as oppressively conformist and his family life as intensely conventional. Of his childhood, Fowles says "I have tried to escape ever since." Fowles attended Bedford School, a large boarding school designed to prepare boys for university, from ages 13 to 18. After briefly attending the University of Edinburgh, Fowles began compulsory military service in 1945 with training at Dartmoor, where he spent the next two years. World War II ended shortly after his training began so Fowles never came near combat, and by1947 he had decided that the military life was not for him.Fowles then spent four years at Oxford, where he discovered the writings of the French existentialists. In particular he admired Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre, whose writings corresponded with his own ideas about conformity and the will of the individual. He received a degree in French in 1950 and began to consider a career as a writer. Several teaching jobs followed: a year lecturing in English literature at the University of Poitiers, France; two years teaching English at Anargyrios College on the Greek island of Spetsai; and finally, between 1954 and 1963, teaching English at St. Godric's College in London, where he ultimately served as the department head. The time spent in Greece was of great importance to Fowles. During his tenure on the island he began to write poetry and to overcome a long-time repression about writing. Between 1952 and 1960 he wrote several novels but offered none to a publisher, considering them all incomplete in some way and too lengthy. In late 1960 Fowles completed the first draft of The Collector in just four weeks. He continued to revise it until the summer of 1962, when he submitted it to a publisher; it appeared in the spring of 1963 and was an immediate best-seller. The critical acclaim and commercial success of the book allowed Fowles to devote all of his time to writing. The Aristos, a collection of philosophical thoughts and musings on art, human nature and other subjects, appeared the following year. Then in 1965, The Magus--drafts of which Fowles had been working on for over a decade-- was published. Among the seven novels that Fowles has written, The Magus has perhaps generated the most enduring interest, becoming something of a cult novel, particularly in the U.S. With parallels to Shakespeare's The Tempest and Homer's The Odyssey, The Magus is a traditional quest story made complex by the incorporation of dilemmas involving freedom, hazard and a variety of existential uncertainties. Fowles compared it to a detective story because of the way it teases the reader"You mislead them ideally to lead them into a greater truth...it's a trap which I hope will

hook the reader," he says. 1The most commercially successful of Fowles' novels, The French Lieutenant's Woman, appeared in 1969. It resembles a Victorian novel in structure and detail, while pushing the traditional boundaries of narrative in a very modern manner. Winner of several awards and made into a well-received film starring Meryl Streep in the title role, it is the book that today's casual readers seem to most associate with Fowles. In the 1970s Fowles worked on a variety of literary projects--including a series of essays on nature--and in 1973 he published a collection of poetry, Poems. He also worked on translations from the French, including adaptations of Cinderella and the novella Ourika. His translation of Marie de France's 12th Century story Eliduc served as an inspiration for The Ebony Tower, a novella and four short stories that appeared in 1974. Daniel Martin, a long and somewhat autobiographical novel spanning over 40 years in the life of a screenwriter, appeared in 1977, along with a revised version of The Magus. These were followed by Mantissa (1982), a fable about a novelist's struggle with his muse; and A Maggot (1985), an 18th century mystery which combines science fiction and history. In addition to The Aristos, Fowles has written a variety of non-fiction pieces including many essays, reviews, and forwards/afterwords to other writers' novels. He has also written the text for several photographic compilations, including Shipwreck (1975), Islands (1978) and The Tree (1979). Since 1968, Fowles lived on the southern coast of England in the small harbor town of Lyme Regis (the setting for The French Lieutenant's Woman). His interest in the town's local history resulted in his appointment as curator of the Lyme Regis Museum in 1979, a position he filled for a decade. Wormholes, a book of essays, was published in May 1998. The first comprehensive biography on Fowles, John Fowles-A life in two worlds was published in 2004, and the first volume of his journals appeared the same year (followed recently by volume two).

Citation taken from the web page http://www.fowlesbooks.com/biography.htm

STYLE OF THE NOVEL

In The French Lieutenant's Woman, John Fowles does not merely recreate a Victorian novel; neither does he parody one. He does a little of both, but also much more. The subject of this novel is essentially the same as that of his other works: the relationship between life and art, the artist and his creation, and the isolation resulting from an individual's struggle for selfhood. He works within the tradition of the Victorian novel and consciously uses its conventions to serve his own design, all the while carefully informing the reader exactly what he is doing. His style purposely combines a flowing nineteenth-century prose style with an anachronistic twentieth-century perspective. Fowles is as concerned with the details of the setting as were his Victorian counterparts. But he is also conscious that he is setting a scene and does not hesitate to intrude into the narrative himself in order to show the reader how he manipulates reality through his art. Like Dickens, Fowles uses dialogue to reveal the personalities of his characters and often he will satirize them as well. For example, Charles' attitudes toward Sarah and Ernestina are revealed in the way he talks to them. He is forever uncomfortable with Sarah because she won't accept the way in which he categorizes the world, including his view of her. Sarah's responses to the world around her, as seen through her words and actions are consistent, for she is already aware of herself as an individual who cannot be defined by conventional roles. However, Charles changes, depending upon whom he talks to, because he really does not know who he is yet, and he sees himself as playing a series of roles. With his fiance, he is indulgent and paternal; with his servant Sam, he is patronizing and humorous at Sam's expense, and with Sarah, he is stiff and uncomfortable. When he attempts to respond to Sarah's honesty, he hears the hollowness of his own conventional responses. Fowles does not recreate his Victorian world uncritically. He focuses on those aspects of the Victorian era that would seem most alien to a modern reader. In particular, he is concerned with Victorian attitudes towards women, economics, science, and philosophy. In this romance, Fowles examines the problems of two socially and economically oppressed groups in nineteenth-century England: the poverty of the working and servant classes, and the economic and social entrapment of women. While the plot traces a love story, or what seems to be a love story, the reader questions what sort of love existed in a society where many marriages were based as much on economics as on love. This story is thus not really a romance at all, for Fowles' objective is not to unite his two protagonists, Sarah and Charles, but to show what each human being must face in life in order to be able to grow.

NOVEL'S STRUCTURE

While Fowles has titled his book The French Lieutenant's Woman, Sarah Woodruff is not really the central character. She does not change greatly in the novel as it progresses, for she has already arrived at an awareness that she must go beyond the definition of her individuality that society has imposed upon her. Because her situation was intolerable, she was forced to see through it and beyond it in order to find meaning and some sort of happiness in her life. In the early chapters of the novel, she perhaps makes one last effort to establish a life within the norms of Victorian society. She chooses the role of the outcast, the "French lieutenant's whore," and also falls in love with Charles or causes him to fall in love with her. But even as she draws Charles away from his unquestioning acceptance of his life, she finds that she does not want to be rescued from her plight. She has already rescued herself. Charles, it seems, is the actual protagonist of this novel, for he must travel from ignorance to understanding, by following the woman whom he thinks he is helping, but who in fact is his mentor. He must discard each layer of the false Charles: Charles the naturalist, Charles the gentleman, Charles the rake, and perhaps even Charles the lover, in order to find Charles the human being. The knowledge he arrives at is bitter, for he has lost all his illusions, as Sarah discarded hers sometime before. But the result itself is not bitter. Although Charles and Sarah are not reunited, for life's answers are never as simple and perfect as those of art, they both achieve a maturity that enables them to control their lives as long as they remember to look for answers nowhere but in themselves. Fowles has taken two traditional romantic characters, a young hero and a mysterious woman, and has transformed them into human beings. There is no French lieutenant to pine after, and Sarah's life is not a tragedy that echoes her nickname in Lyme. Charles' gift of marriage is not a gift at all. While the novel could have ended with the couple's reconciliation, as it might have had it been a traditional romance, Fowles does not end it there. In the second ending, Sarah rejects the familiar security that Charles offers and both are forced to go on alone. Fowles' novel echoes the doubts raised by such novelists as Thomas Hardy, and by such poets as Matthew Arnold and Alfred Lord Tennyson, about the solidity of the Victorian view of the world. The world was changing and old standards no longer applied, though they lingered on long after many had discarded them in their hearts. This theme that was approached by writers in the nineteenth century is picked up again by Fowles and carried to a logical conclusion. The novel is therefore actually a psychological study of an individual rather than a romance. It is a novel of individual growth and the awareness of one's basic isolation which accompanies that growth.

CONCLUSION
Of all John Fowles' novels The French Lieutenant's Woman today holds a very special place in the canon of post-war English literature. From the god-like stance of the nineteenth-century novelist that he both assumes and gently mocks, to the last detail of dress, idiom and manners, his book is an immaculate recreation of Victorian England. Not only is it the epic love story of two people of insight and imagination seeking escape from the cant and tyranny of their age, The French Lieutenant's Woman is also a brilliantly sustained allegory of the decline of the twentieth-century passion for freedom.

LITERATURE:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_French_Lieutenant%27s_Woman http://coversgirl.blogspot.com/2007/09/book-review-french-lieutenants-woman-by.html http://www.fowlesbooks.com/biography.htm http://www.fowlesbooks.com/novelsof.htm http://www.cliffsnotes.com/study_guide/literature/french-lieutenants-woman/about.html http://lib.store.yahoo.net/lib/monkeynote/pmFrenchWomanSample.pdf