Transcript The French Lieutenant’s Woman

The French Lieutenant’s Woman
The French Lieutenant’s Woman
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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
digressions
and
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