French lieutenant's woman summary.

French Lieutenant's Woman

On a windy March day in 1867, a young couple walks along the pier of the ancient town of Lyme Regis in southeast England. The lady is dressed in the latest London fashion in a tight red dress without a crinoline, which in this provincial outback will not be worn until next season. Her tall companion in an impeccable gray coat holds a top hat respectfully in his hand. They were Ernestine, the daughter of a wealthy merchant, and her fiancé Charles Smithson from an aristocratic family. Their attention is drawn to a female figure in mourning on the edge of the pier, which resembles a living monument to those who died in the depths of the sea, rather than a real creature. She is called the unfortunate Tragedy or the French Lieutenant's Woman. Two years ago, during a storm, the ship was lost, and the officer thrown ashore with a broken leg was picked up by local residents. Sarah Woodruff, who served as a governess and knew French, helped him as best she could. The lieutenant recovered, left for Weymouth, promising to return and marry Sarah. Since then, she has come out on the pier, "elephant and graceful, like the sculptures of Henry Moore," and has been waiting. When young people pass by, they are struck by her face, unforgettably tragic: "sorrow poured out of him as naturally, unclouded and endlessly as water from a forest spring." Her blade-gaze pierces Charles, who suddenly feels like a defeated enemy of a mysterious person.

Charles is thirty-two. He considers himself a talented paleontologist, but has difficulty filling the "endless enfilades of leisure." Simply put, like every smart Victorian slacker, he suffers from a Byronic spleen. His father made a decent fortune, but lost at cards. The mother died very young along with her newborn sister. Charles tries to study at Cambridge, then decides to take holy orders, but then he is hastily sent to Paris to unwind. He spends his time traveling, publishing travel notes - "fussing around with ideas becomes his main occupation in his thirties." Three months after returning from Paris, his father dies, and Charles remains the only heir to his uncle, a wealthy bachelor, and a profitable fiancé. Not indifferent to pretty girls, he deftly avoided marriage, but, having met Ernestine Freeman, he discovered in her an extraordinary mind, pleasant restraint. He is attracted to this "sugar Aphrodite", he is sexually unsatisfied, but makes a vow "not to take random women to bed and keep a healthy sexual instinct locked up." He comes to the sea for the sake of Ernestina, with whom he has been engaged for two months.

Ernestine is staying with her Aunt Tranter in Lyme Regis because her parents have got it into their heads that she is consumptive. If only they knew that Tina would live to see Hitler's attack on Poland! The girl counts the days until the wedding - almost ninety are left ... She knows nothing about copulation, suspecting gross violence in this, but she wants to have a husband and children. Charles feels that she is more in love with her marriage than with him. However, their engagement is a mutually beneficial affair. Mr. Freeman, justifying his surname (a free man), directly reports his desire to intermarry with an aristocrat, despite the fact that Charles, carried away by Darwinism, with pathos proves to him that he descended from a monkey.

Bored, Charles begins to search for fossils, which the surroundings of the town are famous for, and accidentally sees the French Lieutenant's Woman, lonely and suffering, on the Ware wasteland. Old Mrs. Poultney, known for her tyranny, took Sarah Woodruff as a companion in order to excel in charity. Charles, whose duty it is to pay visits three times a week, meets Sarah at her house and is surprised at her independence.

The dull course of dinner is diversified only by the persistent courtship of blue-eyed Sam, Charles's servant, for Miss Tranter's maid Mary, the most beautiful, direct, as if poured girl.

The next day, Charles again comes to the wasteland and finds Sarah on the edge of a cliff, crying, with a captivating gloomy face. Suddenly, she takes two starfish out of her pocket and hands them to Charles. "A gentleman who values ​​his reputation should not be seen in the company of the Whore of Babylon Lyme," she says. Smithson understands that he should stay away from this strange person, but Sarah personifies the desired and inexhaustible possibilities, and Ernestine, no matter how he persuades himself, sometimes looks like "a cunning wind-up doll from Hoffmann's fairy tales."

That evening, Charles gives a dinner in honor of Tina and her aunt. Also invited is the brisk Irishman Dr. Grogan, a bachelor who has been courting the old maid Miss Tranter for many years. The doctor does not share Charles' commitment to paleontology and sighs that we know less about living organisms than about fossils. Alone with him, Smithson asks about the oddities of the French lieutenant's Woman. The doctor explains Sarah's condition with bouts of melancholy and psychosis, as a result of which grief for her becomes happiness. Now meetings with her seem to Charles filled with philanthropic meaning.

One day, Sarah takes him to a secluded corner on a hillside and tells the story of her misfortune, remembering how handsome the rescued lieutenant was and how bitterly she was deceived when she followed him to Aimus and gave herself to him in a completely indecent hotel: "It was the devil in the guise of a sailor !" The confession shocks Charles. He discovers in Sarah passion and imagination - two qualities typical of the English, but completely suppressed by the era of universal hypocrisy. The girl admits that she no longer hopes for the return of the French lieutenant, because she knows about his marriage. Descending into the hollow, they suddenly notice Sam and Mary hugging and hide. Sarah smiles like she's taking off her clothes. She challenges the noble manners, the learning of Charles, his habit of rational analysis.

At the inn, a terrified Smithson is in for another shock: an elderly uncle, Sir Robert, announces his marriage to the "not pleasantly young" widow Mrs. Tomkins and, consequently, deprives his nephew of his title and inheritance. Ernestina is disappointed by this turn of events. Smithson also doubts the correctness of his choice, a new passion flares up in him. Wanting to think things over, he is going to leave for London. A note is brought from Sarah, written in French, as if in memory of the lieutenant, asking her to come at dawn. Confused, Charles confesses to the doctor that he had secret meetings with the girl. Grogan tries to explain to him that Sarah is leading him by the nose, and as proof he gives him a report on the trial that took place in 1835 on one officer. He was accused of writing anonymous threatening letters to the family of the commander and violence against his sixteen-year-old daughter Marie. A duel followed, an arrest, ten years in prison. Later, an experienced lawyer guessed that the dates of the most obscene letters coincided with the days of Marie's menstruation, who had a psychosis of jealousy for the young man's mistress ... However, nothing can stop Charles, and with the first glimpse of dawn, he goes on a date. Sarah is driven out of the house by Mrs. Poultney, who is unable to bear the willfulness and bad reputation of a companion. Sarah hides in the barn, where her explanation with Charles takes place. Unfortunately, no sooner had they kissed than Sam and Mary appeared on the threshold. Smithson takes a promise from them to remain silent and, without confessing anything to Ernestine, hastily travels to London. Sarah is hiding in Exeter. She has ten sovereigns left by Charles as parting, and this gives her a bit of freedom.

Smithson has to discuss the upcoming wedding with Ernestine's father. Once, seeing a prostitute who looks like Sarah on the street, he hires her, but feels a sudden nausea. In addition, the whore is also named Sarah.

Soon Charles receives a letter from Exeter and goes there, but, not seeing Sarah, decides to go further, to Lyme Regis, to Ernestine. Their reunion ends with a wedding. Surrounded by seven children, they live happily ever after. Nothing is heard of Sarah.

But this ending is uninteresting. Let's get back to the letter. So Charles hurries to Exeter and finds Sarah there. In her eyes, the sadness of expectation. "We shouldn't... this is crazy," Charles repeats incoherently. He "bites his lips into her mouth, as if he is hungry not just for a woman, but for everything that has been banned for so long." Charles does not immediately realize that Sarah is a virgin, and all stories about the lieutenant are lies. While he is in church begging for forgiveness, Sarah disappears. Smithson writes to her about his decision to marry and take her away. He experiences a surge of confidence and courage, terminates the engagement with Tina, preparing to devote his whole life to Sarah, but cannot find her. Finally, two years later, in America, he receives the long-awaited news. Returning to London, Smithson finds Sarah in the Rosetti house, among the artists. Here, a one-year-old daughter named Aalage the Brook is waiting for him.

No, and this path is not for Charles. He does not agree to be a toy in the hands of a woman who has achieved exclusive power over him. Sarah had previously called him her only hope, but when he arrived in Exeter, he realized that he had switched roles with her. She keeps him out of pity, and Charles rejects this sacrifice. He wants to return to America, where he discovered "a particle of faith in himself." He understands that life must be endured to the best of his ability in order to again go out into the blind, salty, dark ocean.

"The Problematic of Fowles' Novel
"The French Lieutenant's Girlfriend"

1. Introduction. Literature review

"I must use the novel as a means of expressing my views"
(John Fowles)

An extensive and serious literary literature is devoted to the analysis of the novel "The French Lieutenant's Woman". However, the opinions of researchers differ significantly both about the nature and genre of the novel, and its internal interpretation.
The novel "The Woman of the French Lieutenant" is interpreted by researchers as a historical novel or romance (romance) (for example, I. Kabanova in her dissertation "The Theme of the Artist and artistic creativity in the English novel of the 60s and 70s. (J. Fowles and B.S. Johnson)" - 1986), then as a novel of spiritual search (guest) (for example, V. Freibergs in the dissertation " creative path J. Fowles", 1986), then as an experimental novel.
So, characterizing the novel as a whole, V.V. Ivashev writes: "The French Lieutenant's Woman" is an experimental novel: the author seems to be talking to the reader, intervening in the narrative, demonstrating her presence in it and creating the illusion of a novel within the novel. He resurrects the prose of the 19th century, the characters copy him famous heroes Dickens, Thackeray, Hardy, Bronte and other classics of realism, but in the light of the twentieth century. "French Lieutenant's Woman" reveals typical features fiction of our time - a philosophical trend, the complexity of the structure, searches in the realm of realistic form".
A. Dolinin, in the preface to the publication of the novel, refers the novel "The Woman of the French Lieutenant" to the novel of the path, where the formation of the hero is of decisive importance and where he is subjected to a series of trials.
In support of his point of view, he cites the following reasoning:
"Spatial movements and the symbolism associated with them in The French Lieutenant's Girlfriend are no less significant than those of Bunyan and Byron, and also metaphorically correlate with the fate of the characters, with their inner world. So, let's say, all the first meetings of Charles with Sarah are meetings, abruptly changing his fate - take place during his country walks, in the lost and regained paradise of nature; like Bunyan's pilgrim, he is tempted by the City of Worldly Vanity - the London of haggling and secret debauchery; like Childe Harold, he flees from England to exotic lands .. Pulling his heroes out of their familiar environment... and sending them on a symbolic journey, Fowles quite consciously focuses on mythopoetic ideas about the path and on those literary genres by which these ideas were assimilated".
Giving an assessment of the problems of this novel as a whole, A. Dolinin rightly notes that "Fowles forced none of his heroes to make their choice in a situation so complex and difficult, so fraught with disastrous consequences, as Charles Smithson, the protagonist of the novel "The French Lieutenant's Girlfriend". At the end of the analysis, he concludes: "... although Fowles's views are contradictory, although he sometimes exaggerates the importance of the moral, ethical and biological spheres of being to the detriment of the social sphere, the general humanistic orientation of his novel, his faith in the triumph of "man in man", his passionate criticism of bourgeois conformism cannot but arouse our sympathy and respect".
With all the review of critical literature, it should be noted that Russian and Ukrainian literary critics (for example, I. Kabanova, V. Freisberg) were most inclined to evaluate the prose of J. Fowles in the context of the realistic tradition (see,). English and American researchers (in particular, S. Lovedy and others) are rather more supportive of the idea of ​​the postmodern basis of the writer's poetics (see,). The idea of ​​J. Fowles as a totally postmodern writer has been formed recently (see, for example, reviews by I. Ilyin, V. Kuritsyn -,). This point of view is shared by modern foreign researchers of the work of J. Fowles: R. Bourden, T. D "Heyen, R. Rignon (, ,). This approach, of course, is not without reason. In the prose of J. Fowles, as noted by researchers, already at the level of the name-sign of a character, a constant feature of postmodern aesthetics is realized - a game of quotation clichés.Thus, in the mentioned novel, there is a technique for creating anagram names: the main character Charles and his beloved Sarah (Charles - Sarah).
It should be noted that it is precisely in the discrepancy between the philosophical and aesthetic side of the work of Fowles and traditional methods his research, I think, is the complexity, and often the fallacy of the conclusions of many of the studies carried out, relating primarily to the problematic side of the writer's works and, in particular, his key novel "The French Lieutenant's Woman". This discrepancy has been noticed by some researchers. So, S.A. Vatchenko and E.V. Maksyutenko write: "Recently, researchers have increasingly correlated the work of John Fowles with such a philosophical and aesthetic phenomenon as postmodernism, although, paradoxically, turning to the analysis of the writer's novel prose, they rely on the traditional literary apparatus. And, as a result, the emergence of summary descriptive, and sometimes polar assessments of the problem-thematic richness and specificity of the artistic form of J. Fowles' novelistics".
So, as we can see, in the critical literature devoted to the analysis of the novel work of John Fowles, there are serious and significant differences, including regarding the genre nature, concept and problem saturation of Fowles' novel "The French Lieutenant's Woman", which makes his further research in context of the analysis of its compositional and problematic features.

1. The specifics of the style of J. Fowles
One of Fowles' constant and specific devices is to play with fashionable schemes of popular literature. So, in his book "Mantissa" (1982) the "sexual exploitation" of the modern bestseller is parodied, in "The Magician" (1966) - an occult novel, in the story "The Riddle" - a detective story, in "The Girlfriend of a French Lieutenant" - a "Victorian" novel, in "Daniele Martin" (1977) - an autobiographical novel, in "The Collector" (1963) - "black novel".
Fowles is characterized by a conscious appeal to mythopoetic plot schemes, which he turns inside out, a constant play with various literary overtones. Even in "The Collector", his first novel, he alters the well-known fairy tale story about the abduction of a beauty by a monster. In his novel, the kidnapper - bank clerk Frederick Clegg, who won a large sum of money on a tote and planned to create a collection of beautiful girls to satisfy his passion for possession and power - unlike the myth, does not love his prisoner Miranda, a bright victim, but treats her as to a thing, an exhibit of a collection that indifferently mortifies. The victim is unable to re-educate the monster, awakening love in him. The hero of The Magician, in contrast to The Collector, is not a representative of a dull, ignorant and conformist mass with no conditions for spiritual awakening, but the spiritual monster Nicholas Urfe, who belongs to a privileged minority of selected intellectuals from a prosperous bourgeois family.
"The plot of the "Magic",- notes A. Dolinin, - there is a plot of the hero’s re-education, his ritualized “initiation” into the mystery of being.” Getting into the “magic theater” arranged for him by the mysterious magician Conchis and his beautiful assistants, Nicholas goes through several cleansing and initiatory rites-performances in order to return to real life renewed, matured, disillusioned".
The complex, multi-stage structure of The Magician, with many inserted short stories and a parody game of different styles, with false moves and literary allusions, corresponds to Fowles' intention - to debunk and ridicule all systems of illusory ideas about the nature of reality created by mankind throughout its history - starting with faith in the almighty God and ending with blind faith in the absolute power of science. To all these systems based on blind faith or pseudomorality that reduce the human lot to dependence and obedience, Fowles opposes the idea of ​​free will. He defends this idea in all his works, including "The French Lieutenant's Girlfriend". The end of this novel is a kind of game with readers.
Just as Sarah plays with Charles, testing him and pushing him to realize freedom of choice, Fowles plays in a romance with his readers, forcing him to make his choice. To do this, he includes in the text three versions of the final - "Victorian", "fictional" and "existential". The reader and the hero of the novel are given the right to choose one of the three endings, and hence the plots, of the novel. The first trap (ch. XLIV) is the "Victorian" ending, in which Charles marries Ernestine and lives to be 114 years old. After a few pages it turns out that we have been fooled, and the author openly laughs at those who did not notice the parody of this chapter. The situation is more complicated with the other two variants of the final. Fowles is cunning when he tries to assure the reader that they are absolutely equal in rights and that their sequence in the text was determined by lot. The second trap awaits the reader in the LX chapter - the "sentimental" finale, in which Charles, as in a fairy tale, finds not only his beloved woman, but also a child. This happy ending smacks too much of literary convention to be true.
"If the novel really ended this way,- writes A. Dolinin, - then the hero's pilgrimage would acquire an achievable goal, would turn into a search for some sacred symbol, with the acquisition of which the wanderer ends his journey. For Fowles, the formation of a person does not stop until death, and the only real, not illusory goal of life's wandering is the path itself, the continuous self-development of the individual, its movement from one free choice to another ".
Therefore, the only "correct" variant of the ending becomes the last LXI chapter - the "existential" ending: the variant of the main character choosing freedom, a particle of faith in himself, understanding that "life must be endured endlessly, and again go out - into the blind, salty, dark ocean." In the third variant of the ending, Fowles turns the situation of the novel around and puts Charles in the position of Sarah, and only then does the hero begin to understand this mysterious woman who possessed something that others could not understand - freedom. In this finale, the hero's last illusion collapses - the illusion of saving love, and he loses Sarah in order to continue his difficult journey alone through a hostile and homeless world, the path of a man who has lost all the supports that the "world of others" has provided him, but who has found in return "a particle faith in yourself."
In 1981, a film of the same name was made based on Fowles' novel (directed by K. Reis, script by G. Pinter, M. Streep as Sarah and Anna). The film adaptation uses a coup (a love affair during filming between the actors playing the roles of Sarah and Charles) to represent two times (modern and Victorian era) and one concept of human existence. The "sentimental" ending is given to the Victorians in the film, and our contemporaries play out the existential drama of free will.
The three endings are far from the only witty device Fowles used in his game with reader expectations. An important feature style of the novel is a literary pastiche.

It should be noted that literary critics identify several main ways of literary deformation of the source material:
1. Verbatim copying, "plagiarism". A classic example is the third book of Gargantua and Pantagruel, where Rabelais simply rewrites entire pieces from Pliny the Elder's Natural History. Nevertheless, the very fact of the emergence of a new signature, the assignment of this text to other authors who have their own value-semantic perspective, and even more so the inclusion of this text in a new context, changes the meaning of "rewritten": "plagiarism" does not literally reproduce, but certainly shifts this meaning. Hence the role assigned to "plagiarism" in the theories of the transavant-garde: "Everything that is written is only material for census"; "everything that can be written must be rewritten"; "everything you want to rewrite is yours"; "rewriting is the ideal form of creativity".
2. Imitation, or the creation of "mimotexts" (Gerard Genette). In imitation, the object of representation is not a separate text, but someone else's "manner", which includes both the subject-semantic (plot, characters, etc.) and style levels. “Mimotext” is an “original”, that is, a newly composed text, but composed according to the rules of a fairly stable and well-known literary code to the audience, a text that is “similar” to samples belonging to the imitated group of texts.
3. Stylization (pastish). Like imitation, stylization seeks to keep character traits however, firstly, it imitates only its style (and not the theme) and, most importantly, secondly, it makes one feel the very act of imitation, that is, the gap (disguised in "mimotexts") between the stylizing and stylized planes. As M. Bakhtin noted, "Stylization stylizes someone else's style in the direction of its own tasks. It only makes these tasks conditional." The attitude to convention just allows us to call stylization "active imitation", although this activity is distinguished by delicacy: stylization loves soft pressure, slight sharpening, unobtrusive exaggeration, which create "some alienation from the author's own style, as a result of which the reproduced style itself becomes object of artistic representation" and the subject of aesthetic "play". Stylization creates "images" of foreign styles.
4. A parody that Yu.N. Tynyanov called "underlined" stylization.

In "The French Lieutenant's Friend" the third type of stylization is used (generally - under the "Victorian novel") with elements of the second (creation of "mimotexts", representing models of imitation of the manner of individual authors) and the fourth (parodic) types. The novel is a constant game with literary overtones, and the main place among them is occupied by the works of English writers of the era to which the novel is dedicated. Fowles, who knows and appreciates the realistic novels of Victorian prose writers, deliberately builds The French Lieutenant's Girlfriend as a kind of collage of quotations from the texts of Dickens, Thackeray, Trollope, George Eliot, Thomas Hardy and other writers. Fowles' plot moves, situations and characters usually have one or more well-recognized literary prototypes: for example, the love plot of the novel should evoke an association with Eliot's "The Mill on the Floss" and " blue eyes Hardy; the story of the unexpected marriage of the old baronet Smithson, because of which the hero loses his inheritance and title, goes back to Pelham, or the Adventures of a Gentleman by Bulwer-Lytton; Sarah's character resembles the heroines of the same Hardy - Tess ("Tess of the genus d" Urberville") and Eustacia Vai ("Homecoming"); Charles has common features with numerous heroes of Dickens and Meredith; in Ernestine, they usually see a double of Eliot's Rosamund ("Middlemarch"), in the servant of Charles Sam - an obvious roll call with the "immortal Sam Weller" from the Pickwick Papers, etc. the same surname Benson as the butler in Meredith's The Trial of Richard Feverel. There are in the novel and quotes at the level of style. Remembering Henry James, the narrator immediately begins to build a phrase in his ornate manner.
True, as A. Dolinin notes, "The open, tantalizing literariness of The French Lieutenant's Girlfriend should by no means be regarded as a demonstration of the writer's stylistic skill. For modern Western art, in general, it is extremely characteristic of a conscious appeal to someone else's word and someone else's style, the constant inclusion in the new text of borrowings and reminiscences from a wide range of texts of previous eras The theme of literature, in particular, becomes literature itself, the theme of a literary text is this text itself in comparison with a number of its subtexts and "prototexts". It is enough to recall, for example, the work of Nabokov or the Argentine writer Jorge Luis; Borges, which had a very strong influence on the poetics of postmodern prose, in order to understand who Fowles follows, building his book as an intellectual "novel within a novel", and to which tradition he adjoins".

2. The "Victorian novel" and the Victorian context in Fowles' novel
Fowles places the action of his novel a hundred years ago, in Victorian England. And this is not a simple whim of the artist. The fact is that in the UK in the 1960s a fashion for "Victorians" arose, and sentimental love, adventure and erotic novels from Victorian life began to appear one after another, several sensational ones designed for the mass reader appeared. historical research, in which an attempt was made to break down stereotypes about Victorians as slaves to decency and puritan morality.
The "Victorian era" in England - named after Queen Victoria, who reigned from 1837 to 1901 - is called the second half of the 19th century. For this era, according to G.K. Chesterton, is characterized by the "great Victorian compromise" - a compromise between the big bourgeoisie and the aristocracy. It was a time of outward prosperity in Great Britain and an increase in, at first latent, a deep social crisis. Period 50-60s. (the duration of the novel) - a period of relative economic prosperity - however, quite illusory and affecting only " the mighty of the world this."
Pondering the idea of ​​"The Girlfriend of the French Lieutenant", the writer addressed himself with the following memorandum: "What you're trying to write is not a book that one of the Victorian novelists forgot to write, but a book that none of them could have written. ... The novel must relate directly to the present time of the writer - so don't pretend you're living in 1867, or get the reader to understand that you are pretending."
Of course, it is not without reason that Fowles chooses the Victorian era as the setting for his novel The French Lieutenant's Girlfriend. In his opinion, Victorian England is connected with the England of today by blood ties, and if we do not understand one, we risk never understanding the other. This is one of the reasons for this choice. The second reason is that Fowles sees a direct parallel to the crisis state of the bourgeois intelligentsia in the second half of the 20th century, so he dates his novel not to the beginning of the reign of Queen Victoria (1837), but to the 60s, when, under the influence of Darwin's theory and other discoveries perceptions of the world began to change rapidly. Thus, the historical time of the novel turns out to be a critical, transitional era of the emergence of new forms of social consciousness, and Victorian England appears here not just as a spectacular backdrop, but as a kind of "character" of the book. In such a presentation of the material, there is a tangible connection with the historical novels of Walter Scott, in which the action always takes place at the junction of two eras, at moments of social upheaval, and Fowles emphasizes this similarity by using Walter-Scottian techniques in the form of poetic epigraphs to chapters and interlinear author's notes to the text. However, these echoes with classic examples of the historical novel genre are nothing more than a subtle game.
Fowles considers the Victorian era as a certain socio-cultural system that prescribes a rigid set of behavioral norms and ways of modeling reality to a person. This system is repressive, because it suppresses living human feelings, outlaws passion and imagination, imposes restrictions on interpersonal relationships, establishes a false hierarchy of moral values, in which duty is considered the main virtue. The consequence of this system is lies, fear, hypocrisy, hypocrisy, a distorted view of the world. To confirm his conclusions, Fowles introduces extensive documentary material into the text - quotations from contemporaries, reports and summaries, excerpts from the press, statistical calculations, even quotations from the works of Marx.
Fowles dedicates his novel to the criticism of this system, which enslaves the individual.
Already from the first paragraphs of the book, where the pier of Lyme Regis is compared with the sculptures of Henry Moore, Fowles makes it clear that the story is being told from the perspective of our contemporary, from a time distance of a hundred years.
"Contrary to the narrative strategy prevailing in Western prose of the 20th century,- writes A. Dolinin, - according to which the author must identify himself with the subjective "I" of the hero and thereby, in the words of Joyce, "leave his creation, become invisible and indifferent", Fowles defiantly introduces the author's "I" into the text - his narrator directly addresses the reader, comments described events from the point of view of modern knowledge, ironically compares different time layers. He knows what his heroes cannot know; he refers to Freud, Sartre, Brecht, while they refer to Darwin and Tennyson; his (and our) past and present is their future. In this context, all the numerous borrowings from Victorian novels take on a parodic tone, enter into a dialogue with the narrator's ironic "voice", and become the object of the author's polemical reflection. Recreating with their help the Victorian "picture of the world", Fowles at the same time disputes its truth; lovingly quoting the "text" of Victorian culture, he at the same time opposes to it the "texts" of modern culture".
This controversy with the Victorian "picture of the world" is conducted in "The French Lieutenant's Girlfriend" at various levels: philosophical, textual, plot, psychological, moral. Describing "from within" the Victorian era, the author uses techniques that became available in the twentieth century. So, as A. Dolinin notes, he "not only touches on subjects forbidden to Victorian culture, not only subjects his characters to psychoanalysis and existentialist verification for "authenticity", but also blows up the very structure of the Victorian novel from within. It would seem that, building the narrative from the author's first person, the writer simply stylizes it as classical Victorian prose, because for her it was the most common way of constructing a text. But here, too, we are not dealing with imitation, not with copying, but with a parody, the purpose of which is to reveal the "bad conventionality" of the old system".
Creating a "Victorian" novel, Fowles could not do without his main figure - the omnipotent, omniscient narrator. And Fowles resolutely introduces him into the novel, contrary to the tradition coming from D. Joyce, according to which the writer must "leave his creation, become invisible and indifferent."
However, only at the beginning of the novel does the narrator in Fowles take the same position in relation to the characters and the reader as the traditional narrators of the Victorian writers - the position of a novelist who, according to Thackeray's programmatic definition in Vanity Fair, "knows everything" and the word which the reader unconditionally trusts. But already in the thirteenth chapter (opening with the key phrase: “I don’t know”), the narrator’s position changes dramatically - he takes off the mask of an omnipotent and omniscient creator who “knows the innermost thoughts and feelings of the heroes”, and turns into a “god of a new type”, declaring the freedom and autonomy of his creatures into a special character whose self-irony undermines the reader's confidence in his authority as the monopoly owner of the truth. From now on, the author disclaims responsibility for the development of the plot and invites his characters and readers to share it with him. Quite in the spirit of J. Cortazar, who was also looking not for a reader-consumer, but for an accomplice and co-creator, Fowles invites his reader to keep a distance in relation to the novel - an “ironic perspective”, in order to push the interlocutor to the point of view of an observer reflecting on the main novel ideas, and last but not least, over himself.

3. Analysis of the problems of the novel
Speaking about the literary manner of Fowles, it should be noted that in his homeland, in the UK, Fowles does not cause enthusiasm among the literary establishment - rather, bewildered silence and deaf irritation. As I. Repina notes, "in all honesty, such a reaction should be recognized as much more adequate: the creator of "The Magus" and "Women of the French Lieutenant" is a deliberately "wonderful" writer, clumsy, intelligible only to a few. Fowles' method is close to classical avant-gardism, which declares the complete autonomy of reality from sign systems, things - from words, truth - from the text ".
We cannot fully agree with this. The Fowles method is not autonomous in itself, but is located in close connection with the problems of his works and with the author's concept, which the author sets out on their pages. It can be said that the author's method complements the problematic - rather ambiguous and often rather (and deliberately) contradictory (a typical example of which is the three-part finale of "The French Lieutenant's Girlfriend"), being both a means of its presentation and complicated interpretation.
Before talking about the problems of the mentioned novel, one should first trace it storylines in their symbolic and metaphysical correlation.

Summary of the novel as follows.
On a windy March day in 1867, a young couple walks along the pier of the ancient town of Lyme Regis in southeast England. The lady is dressed in the latest London fashion in a tight red dress without a crinoline, which in this provincial outback will not be worn until next season. Her tall companion in an impeccable gray coat holds a top hat respectfully in his hand. They were Ernestine, the daughter of a wealthy businessman, and her fiancé, Charles Smithson, from an aristocratic family. Their attention is drawn to a female figure in mourning on the edge of the pier, which resembles a living monument to those who died in the depths of the sea, rather than a real creature. She is called the unfortunate Tragedy or the French Lieutenant's Woman. Two years ago, during a storm, the ship was lost, and the officer thrown ashore with a broken leg was picked up by local residents. Sarah Woodruff, who served as a governess and knew French, helped him as best she could. The lieutenant recovered, left for Weymouth, promising to return and marry Sarah. Since then, she has come out on the pier, "elephant and graceful, like the sculptures of Henry Moore," and has been waiting. When young people pass by, they are struck by her face, unforgettably tragic: "sorrow poured out of him as naturally, unclouded and endlessly as water from a forest spring." Her blade-gaze pierces Charles, who suddenly feels like a defeated enemy of a mysterious person.
Charles is thirty-two. He considers himself a talented paleontologist, but has difficulty filling the "endless enfilades of leisure." Simply put, like every smart Victorian slacker, he suffers from a Byronic spleen. His father made a decent fortune, but lost at cards. The mother died very young along with her newborn sister. Charles tries to study at Cambridge, then decides to take holy orders, but then he is hastily sent to Paris to unwind. He spends his time traveling, publishing travel notes - "fussing around with ideas becomes his main occupation in his thirties." Three months after returning from Paris, his father dies, and Charles remains the only heir to his uncle, a wealthy bachelor, and a profitable fiancé. Not indifferent to pretty girls, he deftly avoided marriage, but, having met Ernestine Freeman, he discovered in her an extraordinary mind, pleasant restraint. He is attracted to this "sugar Aphrodite", he is sexually unsatisfied, but makes a vow "not to take random women to bed and keep a healthy sexual instinct locked up." He comes to the sea for the sake of Ernestina, with whom he has been engaged for two months.
Ernestine is staying with her Aunt Tranter in Lyme Regis because her parents have got it into their heads that she is consumptive. If only they knew that Tina would live to see Hitler's attack on Poland! The girl counts the days until the wedding - almost ninety are left ... She knows nothing about copulation, suspecting gross violence in this, but she wants to have a husband and children. Charles feels that she is more in love with her marriage than with him. However, their engagement is a mutually beneficial affair. Mr. Freeman, justifying his surname (a free man), directly reports his desire to intermarry with an aristocrat, despite the fact that Charles, carried away by Darwinism, with pathos proves to him that he descended from a monkey.
Bored, Charles begins to search for fossils, which the surroundings of the town are famous for, and accidentally sees the French Lieutenant's Woman, lonely and suffering, on the Ware wasteland. Old Mrs. Poultney, known for her tyranny, took Sarah Woodruff as a companion in order to excel in charity. Charles, whose duty it is to pay visits three times a week, meets Sarah in her house and is surprised at her independence.
The dull course of dinner is diversified only by the persistent courtship of blue-eyed Sam, Charles's servant, for Miss Tranter's maid Mary, the most beautiful, direct, as if poured girl.
The next day, Charles again comes to the wasteland and finds Sarah on the edge of a cliff, crying, with a captivating gloomy face. Suddenly, she takes two starfish out of her pocket and hands them to Charles. "A gentleman who values ​​his reputation should not be seen in the company of the Whore of Babylon Lyme," she says. Smithson understands that he should stay away from this strange person, but Sarah personifies the desired and inexhaustible possibilities, and Ernestine, no matter how he persuades himself, sometimes looks like "a cunning wind-up doll from Hoffmann's fairy tales."
That same evening, Charles gives a dinner in honor of Tina and her aunt. Also invited is the brisk Irishman Dr. Grogan, a bachelor who has been courting the old maid Miss Tranter for many years. The doctor does not share Charles' commitment to paleontology and sighs that we know less about living organisms than about fossils. Alone with him, Smithson asks about the oddities of the French lieutenant's Woman. The doctor explains Sarah's condition with bouts of melancholy and psychosis, as a result of which grief for her becomes happiness. Now meetings with her seem to Charles filled with philanthropic meaning.
One day, Sarah takes him to a secluded corner on a hillside and tells the story of her misfortune, remembering how handsome the rescued lieutenant was and how bitterly she was deceived when she followed him to Aimus and gave herself to him in a completely indecent hotel: "It was the devil in the guise of a sailor !" The confession shocks Charles. He discovers in Sarah passion and imagination - two qualities typical of the English, but completely suppressed by the era of universal hypocrisy. The girl admits that she no longer hopes for the return of the French lieutenant, because she knows about his marriage. Descending into the hollow, they suddenly notice Sam and Mary hugging and hide. Sarah smiles like she's taking off her clothes. She challenges the noble manners, the learning of Charles, his habit of rational analysis.
At the hotel, a frightened Smithson is in for another shock: an aged uncle, Sir Robert, announces his marriage to the "unpleasantly young" widow Mrs. Tomkins and, therefore, deprives his nephew of his title and inheritance, Ernestine is disappointed by this turn of events. Smithson also doubts the correctness of his choice, a new passion flares up in him. Wanting to think things over, he is going to leave for London. A note is brought from Sarah, written in French, as if in memory of the lieutenant, asking her to come at dawn. Confused, Charles confesses to the doctor that he had secret meetings with the girl. Grogan tries to explain to him that Sarah is leading him by the nose, and as proof he gives him a report on the trial that took place in 1835 on one officer. He was accused of writing anonymous threatening letters to the family of the commander and violence against his sixteen-year-old daughter Marie. A duel followed, an arrest, ten years in prison. Later, an experienced lawyer guessed that the dates of the most obscene letters coincided with the days of Marie's menstruation, who had a psychosis of jealousy for the young man's mistress .. However, nothing can stop Charles, and with the first glimpse of dawn, he goes on a date. Sarah is driven out of the house by Mrs. Poultney, who is unable to bear the willfulness and bad reputation of a companion. Sarah hides in the barn, where her explanation with Charles takes place. Unfortunately, no sooner had they kissed than Sam and Mary appeared on the threshold. Smithson takes a promise from them to remain silent and, without confessing anything to Ernestine, hastily travels to London. Sarah is hiding in Exeter. She has ten sovereigns left by Charles as parting, and this gives her a bit of freedom. Smithson has to discuss the upcoming wedding with Ernestine's father. Once, seeing a prostitute who looks like Sarah on the street, he hires her, but feels a sudden nausea. In addition, the whore is also named Sarah.
Soon Charles receives a letter from Exeter and goes there, but, not seeing Sarah, decides to go further, to Lyme Regis, to Ernestine. Their reunion ends with a wedding. Surrounded by seven children, they live happily ever after. Nothing is heard of Sarah.
But this ending is uninteresting. Let's get back to the letter. So Charles hurries to Exeter and finds Sarah there. In her eyes, the sadness of expectation. "We shouldn't... this is crazy," Charles repeats incoherently. He "sticks his lips into her mouth, as if he is hungry not just for a woman, but for everything that has been banned for so long." Charles does not immediately realize that Sarah is a virgin, and all stories about the lieutenant are lies. While he is in church begging for forgiveness, Sarah disappears. Smithson writes to her about his decision to marry and take her away. He experiences a surge of confidence and courage, terminates the engagement with Tina, preparing to devote his whole life to Sarah, but cannot find her. Finally, two years later, in America, he receives the long-awaited news. Returning to London, Smithson finds Sarah in the Rosetti house, among the artists. Here, a one-year-old daughter named Lalage the Brook is waiting for him.
No, and this path is not for Charles. He does not agree to be a toy in the hands of a woman who has achieved exclusive power over him. Sarah had previously called him her only hope, but when he arrived in Exeter, he realized that he had switched roles with her. She keeps him out of pity, and Charles rejects this sacrifice. He wants to return to America, where he discovered "a particle of faith in himself." He understands that life must be endured to the best of his ability in order to again go out into the blind, salty, dark ocean.

The problematics of the novel, as can be seen already from a cursory presentation of its content, breaks down into a number of semantic definitions, without being exhausted by them in full. This is the problem of freedom and choice, and a feminist motive, the existence (semantic correlation) of human life, the theme of bourgeois and free love, happiness and sacrifice, etc. etc.
The source of external conflict in the novel is the traditional love triangle: Charles - Sarah - Ernestine. But the meaning of the relationship between these persons goes far beyond the framework of a love story, turning into a problem of human existence (existence) in general - a problem of Fowles' own time.

Let's give brief description these characters by the time the novel that brings them together begins.
Charles Smithson thirty two years. He considers himself a talented paleontologist, but has difficulty filling the "endless enfilades of leisure." As the author ironically points out, "for Charles, as well as for most of his contemporaries, equal to him in status in society, life went unconditionally at the pace of the adagio" , "main hallmark Charles was lazy", and he "was fully infected with Byronic spleen in the absence of both Byronic outlets - genius and debauchery". His father made a decent fortune, but lost at cards. The mother died very young along with her newborn sister. Charles tries to study at Cambridge, then decides to take holy orders, but then he is hastily sent to Paris to unwind. He spends his time traveling, publishing travel notes - "fussing around with ideas becomes his main occupation in his 30s". Three months after returning from Paris, his father dies, and Charles remains the only heir to his uncle, a wealthy bachelor, and a profitable fiancé. Not indifferent to pretty girls, he deftly avoided marriage, but, having met Ernestine Freeman, he discovered in her an extraordinary mind, pleasant restraint. He is attracted to this "sugar Aphrodite", he is sexually unsatisfied, but he vows not to take random women to bed and "keep a healthy sexual instinct locked up". He comes to the sea for the sake of Ernestina, with whom he has been engaged for two months.
Ernestine is a typical representative of the new bourgeois world and a spoiled girl. "Ernestina's face was completely in the style of her era - oval, with a small chin, gentle as a violet". Her parents got it into her head that she was prone to consumption, so she stayed with her Aunt Tranter in Lyme Regis, counting down the days until her wedding. She knows nothing about copulation, suspecting gross violence in this, but she wants to have a husband and children. As Charles feels, she is more in love with marriage than with him. However, their engagement is a mutually beneficial affair. Mr. Freeman, justifying his surname (a free man), directly reports his desire to intermarry with an aristocrat.
Finally, Sarah Woodruff, whose past seems rather dark. In the city she is called the unfortunate Tragedy or the French Lieutenant's Woman. Two years ago, during a storm, the ship was lost, and the officer thrown ashore with a broken leg was picked up by local residents. Sarah Woodruff, who served as a governess and knew French, helped him as best she could. The lieutenant recovered, left for Weymouth, promising to return and marry Sarah. Since then, she goes to the pier "elephant and graceful, like the sculptures of Henry Moore", and waits. Describing Sarah, Fowles from the very beginning notes what distinguishes her from ordinary people.

"Sarah's appearance immediately caught the eye, and therefore, despite the lack of a dowry, she had fans. But every time her first innate curse began to act - she saw through these too presumptuous applicants for her hand and heart".

Her innate curse was intuition.

“Like a computer unable to explain the processes taking place in it, she herself, not knowing why, saw people as they really were, and not as they pretended to be. Not only did she correctly judge people from a moral point of view Her judgments were much deeper, and if she had been guided by morality alone, she would have behaved differently. " .

Sarah occupied an intermediate position in terms of class.

"Father pushed her out of his estate, but could not open her way to a higher one. For the young people with whom she stood on the same rung of the social ladder, she was now too good, but for those whose run she would like to climb, -remained too mediocre

The beginning of the novel immediately confronts Charles and Sarah on a deserted pier, where the attention of young people is attracted by a female figure in mourning, and when they pass by, they are struck by her face, unforgettably tragic:

"sorrow poured out of him as naturally, unclouded and endlessly as water from a forest spring" .

Her blade-gaze pierces Charles, who suddenly feels like a defeated enemy of a mysterious person.
The further actions of the novel develop as a whirl (at first involuntary, random, then more and more conscious and at the end - obsessive) of Charles around the personality of Sarah. However, Fowles destroys the traditional melodramatic story about the love of a rich aristocrat for a poor girl with numerous tricks, among which are the following:
- the introduction of a triple ending (Victorian, happy and existential);
- the image of Sarah's unusualness (her self-incrimination regarding the relationship with the mythical lieutenant can be interpreted as taking on the sins of the city, which gives an evangelical sound to her image: "she exposed her sin for a purpose..." );
- clearly perceptible irony in the text, permeating the narrative ("so a rare flower - forgiveness - illegally took root in Marlborough House, and when the doctor, having examined the maid, found her pale infirmity, Mrs. Poultney discovered a certain perverse pleasure in seeming to really good");
- abundant philosophizing of Charles with various people, in particular, with Dr. Grogan and Dr. Mattei about Darwinism, human nature and, in particular, the phenomenon of Sarah;
- a grotesque depiction of individual characters, giving them comical features (with special sarcasm, Mrs. Poultney, in whom Sarah serves, is introduced with special sarcasm, and even her death is played out in a comic way).

The characters that have a special impact on the traditional triangle include Dr. Grogan, who acts as a sobering rational principle, giving his own assessment of what is happening, and at the same time as a catalyst for events. So, in particular, his interpretation of Sarah's behavior in a psychological and psychopathological way, interesting in itself and causing a surge of suspiciousness and distrust of Charles to the object of his attraction and even his firm decision to stop this story, deep down has the exact opposite effect, arousing additional interest to the personality of Sarah and provoking similar intemperate and previously unusual actions. Grogan's explanations are influenced by psychological school of the twentieth century and, above all, neo-Freudianism, which gives this image some visionary features. He is that direct authorial voice from the future, the voice of a sober analyst, called upon to question everything, which gives the narrative a touch of irony, two-dimensionality. At the same time, he acts as a counterbalance to Charles's scientific and rational thinking, opening before him the abyss of the unknown in the human soul. His options for explaining the reasons for Sarya's behavior go into hidden melancholy:

"Apparently, this woman is addicted to her melancholy, like a morphine addict to morphine ... Her sorrow becomes her happiness. She wants to be a victim. Drawn to the slaughter. Where we would recoil back, she flies forward. She is obsessed ... Dark case. Extremely dark case" .

However, he does not exclude the game, swindle or psychological tricks of a sick or offended consciousness, confirmation of which is supported by a story about the trial of 1835 over an officer who was accused of making anonymous threatening letters, which, as it turned out later, was written by the “victim” herself, suffering from psychosis jealousy for a young man's mistress.
Grogan's story, framed as a standalone novella (chapter 28), serves as a warning beacon, a landmark stagnation before the ensuing climax, Charles's nightly meeting with Sarah in the cabin and his final decision to break up with Ernestine. Characteristically, Fowles, next to Sarah's traps, which she sets up for Charles, places similar warning signs everywhere, only whipping up Charles's deeds - Poultney's warning, meeting with Sam and Mary in the forest, Grogan's story, Sarah's own story shocking Victorian morals and Charles's feelings.
The symbolic load is also carried by the image of Sam, Charles's servant, who is by no means interested in changing the master's matrimonial plans.

Image of Sam- the image of a man of the new time, accustomed to purposefully go to his goal. It is he who, in a purely external plot, puts an end to the relationship between Charles and Sarah, without giving her a letter from Charles and thereby breaking their relationship for many years. But at the same time, he puts an end to his role as a servant, moving into the category of free people. He also dreams of the freedom that Charles does not give him - the freedom of his own realization, the right to do something himself. It is for this freedom that he, in fact, betrays Charles. Thus, here, too, as we see, Fowles' freedom turns out to be more important, no matter how burdened it may be.
Arguing with pseudo-Victorian novels fashionable in the late 60s, Fowles, as already mentioned, dates the action of his work to 1867, the middle of the reign of Queen Victoria, and carefully recreates the flavor of that era. However, the novel cannot be classified as historical. This is a masterful parody stylization. The novel has a strong intertextual predestination: the author plays with many literary associations, the source of which in most cases are the works of Victorian writers. Sarah is in many ways similar to the heroines of T. Hardy (Tess or Sue Bridhead), solid and strong personalities, which, however, fully corresponds to the "feminist" views of Fowles himself. In his novels, women are always the "bright beginning", the bearers of spirituality, a sense of connection and freedom in its hypostasis that does not contradict morality. Such are Miranda in The Collector (1963), Alice in The Magus (1965), Sarah in The French Lieutenant's Woman. In one form or another, in all the novels of the writer there is a couple of Miranda-Caliban, referring to Shakespeare's "The Tempest", revealing one of the tragic archetypes of the relationship between a man and a woman. The very love situation of the novel evokes associations with D. Eliot's novels; the character of Charles is reminiscent of the heroes of Dickens, Hardy and Meredith, his servant Sam Farrow calls to mind the immortal image of Sam Weller "from the Pickwick Papers" (this image was spoiled only by the last act committed by him in the service of Charles and costing him many years of suffering, when he did not give the letter to Sarah, having received an award from the mistress of his fiancee for this, which allowed him to finally open his own business - the theme of betrayal and reward in its various contexts (bourgeois, Victorian, existential) - can also be included in a number of problematic issues raised in novel), and the disgusting Mrs. Poultney resembles the numerous grotesque villains of Dickens. There is no doubt that the novel is connected with P. Bunyan's religious allegory "The Pilgrim's Progress", from which W. Thackeray once borrowed the brilliant image of "the bazaar of human bustle", with "Childe Harold's Pilgrimage" Byron.
Researchers also interpret Fowles' work in terms of the philosophy of existentialism, especially given the importance of the concepts of freedom for the entire work of the writer. This theme is also key in his novel The French Lieutenant's Girlfriend. The saturation of the novel with cultural reminiscences presented in an ironic or parodic vein creates all the conditions for a literary game, allowing the writer to "play hide and seek with the reader." The fundamental moments of such a game in the novel are the exposure of the literary device and the triple "liberation" of the author, characters and reader.
For Fowles, there is "only one good definition of God: freedom that allows all other freedoms to exist." The personification of this kind of freedom in the novel is the main character Sarah, a woman who chose responsibility for an imperfect crime and thus affirmed her right to a true existence. The antithesis of freedom is the Victorian repressive system, which prescribes a rigid set of norms of behavior and ways of modeling reality to a person, and thereby suppresses living human feelings, instead of them establishing a false hierarchy of moral values. In essence, all Fowles' novels are about freedom, about elephtheria, as it is indicated in The Magus, about the constant choice that a person must make. This is what Fowles' "mentors" (Conchis, Lilia, Sarah) teach their "disciples" (Nicholas Erfe, Charles Smithson). The hero of the novel, Charles, chooses constantly, but not always on his own.

freedom- this is the main theme in the work of Fowles. In essence, all Fowles' novels are about freedom, about elephtheria, as it is indicated in The Magus, about the constant choice that a person must make. This is what Fowles' "mentors" (Conchis, Lilia, Sarah) teach their "disciples" (Nicholas Erfe, Charles Smithson). This theme is also key in the novel "The Girlfriend of the French Lieutenant". The writer solves it in various ways: the relationship between a man and a woman, a person and society, a servant and a master, a novelist and heroes.

"... in order to find freedom for myself," writes Fowles, "I must give freedom to him, and Tina, And Sarah, and even the disgusting Mrs. Poultney. There is only one good definition of God: freedom, which allows the existence of all other freedoms".

Already the composition of the novel itself, free in form, providing for the author's monologues, inserted short stories (Grogan's stories in chapter 28, author's reminiscences), a direct introduction to the narrative (in the final chapters) of the author from the future, creating a special retrospective of vision; numerous discussions on the themes of freedom, emancipation, sublimation, sexual freedom - serve to reveal Fowles' intention. The originality and freedom of the composition is enhanced by the presence of a triple ending, with which Fowles pushes the limits of conventional novel time, as well as by free penetration into the minds of his characters.

The role in revealing the problems of the novel themselves is symbolic. landscapes as a place free from the conventions of the city and strict provincial life - it’s not for nothing that Sarah chooses to walk, despite all the prohibitions of Mrs. Poultney, it is these suburban areas wildlife; there are her meetings-dates with Charles. The landscape at Fowles is filled with mystery, freedom and pristine vitality and is the opposite of the entire Victorian age. This is what the place looks like under his pen:

"The shore landslide terraces are a very steep one-mile-long slope, caused by the erosion of sheer ancient rocks. Flat areas here are as rare as visitors. But this very steepness, as it were, turns the terraces and everything that grows on them, directly to the sun and, in combination with water from numerous streams that caused erosion, gives the area its botanical identity ... Like any land that has never been inhabited or cultivated by people, it is full of its secrets, its shadows and dangers " .
"This was the same place, the eastern part of which was called the Ware wasteland."

The chief charge against the Ware Waste was that "the country road leading to the cheese factory and further into the wooded pasture ... was de facto the Path of Love" .
In these "English gardens of Eden" Charles first embraces "a vague feeling of ill health, failure, limitation ...", he "tried to explain the inability of his age to understand nature by the inability to return back to the legend" . Against the backdrop of natural splendor and abundance that Charles encounters on the Ware Moor, the place where he meets Sarah sleeping looks unusual:

"The chalk walls behind this natural balcony, with its widest side facing the southwest, seemed to absorb the sun's rays, turning it into a kind of sun trap ... The outer edge of the stupa turned into a steep cliff thirty to forty feet high, densely braided with prickly bramble branches, and even lower down to the sea descended an almost sheer cliff" .

The sea, as the personification of an extreme degree of freedom, is the leitmotif of the novel. Sarah's imaginary lover, whom she is waiting for, standing on the edge of the pier, has gone into the sea; By the sea, secret meetings between Sarah and Charles take place, breaking the fate of Charles:

"Charles did not know that in those short moments, when he lingered over the expectant sea, in this bright transparent evening silence, broken only by the calm splash of the waves, the entire Victorian era went astray" ;

Through the sea, he goes to another free continent in search of the fullness of life; The novel ends with a symbolic parallel between human life (the river of life) and the water element, embodying the infinity of being:

"The river of life, its mysterious laws, its incomprehensible mystery of choice flows in deserted banks; and our hero begins to walk along the deserted bank of another river..." .

The personification of freedom is in the novel and the main character Sarah, a woman who chose responsibility for an imperfect crime and thus affirmed her right to a true existence. The antithesis of freedom is the Victorian repressive system, which prescribes a rigid set of norms of behavior for a person and thereby suppresses living human feelings, and instead of them establishing a false hierarchy of moral values. The hero of the novel, Charles, chooses constantly, but not always on his own.
The conflict of the novel is that Fowles places his hero in an unusual position, even catastrophic for the Victorian era, bringing him together with the mysterious Sarah, who has a reputation as a “fallen” woman, to whom Charles is irresistibly attracted. Sarah appears in the novel as the complete opposite of Charles's bride, Ernestine, in everything from appearance and clothes to ideals and desires, as well as demeanor. She is a poor governess, her clothes are modest and ordinary. But she shocks the respectable inhabitants of Lyme Regis by voluntarily taking on the role of a local whore. Throughout the novel, Sarah, unlike Ernestine, remains a mystery, representing, according to Fowles, "a reproach to the Victorian era."
Having no definite place in the social structure of society, being, as it were, in the gap between its levels, she is an exile, an “alien”, finding refuge only among the artists of the “Pre-Raphaelite brotherhood”, who rebelled against their time. It is the mysterious Sarah who acts as a tool that breaks (or at least dramatically changes) the fate of Charles, and Ernestine as well.
But the question arises: are her actions revenge on society, or a sincere desire to wrest Charles from his snares, or just a feminine whim that is not subject to her, or maybe some kind of test - herself and Charles? - or by an intuitive search for oneself, one's place in the world, a manifestation of human and female emancipation (this list can be continued indefinitely), - it is not given to us to know.
A. Dolinin characterizes Sarah as follows:
"Sarah with her life, her inner freedom, with its open, almost Renaissance sensuality, challenges Victorian morality, opposing universal human morality to it. In the context of the novel, she is perceived as the embodiment of “eternal femininity,” as the timeless “Anima,” and therefore, among Victorian hero types, she seems to be a messenger from another world, from the world of the future. Fowles emphasizes this special role of hers by the very construction of the narrative - easily penetrating into the minds of other characters, analyzing and explaining their secret motives, thoughts, feelings, the narrator in the novel stubbornly maintains an unchanged distance when it comes to Sarah, and never allows the reader to find out What is going on in her mind. Here, as in many other cases, the writer relies on a literary source - on the novel by the American romantic writer N. Hawthorne "The Scarlet Letter", the main character of which occupies the same marginal position of a sinner in the Puritan community of the 17th century as Sarah does in society. Victorian, and also filed by the author "from outside", without a final explanation of her paradoxical actions, as a messenger from another time" .
Charles perceives Sarah gradually, not only with feelings, but also visually. At first, she is for him a sphinx, a figure in black at the end of the pier at the barrel of the mooring gun, a symbol of sorrow.

"The wind fluttered her clothes, but she stood motionless and kept looking and looking at the open sea, resembling a living monument to those who died in the depths of the sea, a kind of mythical character, rather than an obligatory accessory of an insignificant provincial everyday life" .

Gradually, from meeting to meeting, this figure begins to “come to life”, filled with details and features, but this makes it even more unusual for Charles. So, on the Ware wasteland, he is forced to see Sarah sleeping upside down:

"A clear nose pattern, thick eyebrows, a mouth ... but he couldn't see his mouth".

On the third meeting, he is already carefully studying her face, and

"something in this face, which Charles carefully studied in profile, made him stay. He now realized that all his features were sacrificed to his eyes. These eyes could not hide the mind, the independence of the spirit; there was a silent refusal of any Thin, barely noticeable arched eyebrows were then in vogue, but Sarah's eyebrows were thick or, in any case, unusually dark, almost the color of her hair, and therefore seemed even thicker and sometimes gave her whole appearance that something boyish ... Her face was correct and very feminine; the hidden strength of her eyes corresponded to the hidden sensuality of her mouth, which was quite large, which again did not correspond to the generally accepted taste ... it was unnaturally tightly compressed " .

Finally, at the moment of their nightly meeting in the hut before Sarah's departure from the city:

"There was something spontaneous, unbridled in her appearance. It was not the unbridled hysteria or insanity, but the spontaneity that he heard in the king's song - the unrestraint and impatience of innocence" .

Sarah is the "teacher" of life. She becomes a tutor and mentor for Charles: she arranges “casual” dates, presents a fictitious confession, provokes with reckless actions and, finally, having surrendered to him, disappears without a trace. Charles never comprehends it.

"At first he realized that she was much smarter and more independent than she seemed, now he guessed other, darker qualities in her. Sarah's true nature would have alienated most Englishmen of his century" but not him.

"She looked him straight in the eye - and he again felt the merciless piercing of her gaze; she saw through him, saw him completely.
“You are an extraordinary woman, Miss Woodruff. I am deeply ashamed that I did not understand this earlier.
She repeated after him:
Yes, I'm extraordinary.
But there was neither arrogance nor sarcasm in her words: they sounded like a bitter statement of a simple fact. .

After two years of separation, Charles meets another New Woman in London, "whose appearance openly challenged the then generally accepted ideas about women's fashion..." .

"But after the first shock and fright - God, what has she become, what has she turned into ?! - a wave of unspeakable relief came. Her eyes, lips, such an expression of hidden challenge so characteristic of her face ... everything remained as before. She lived like this in the most blessed his memories, this appeared to him now - still amazing, but even more complete, flourishing, winged beauty butterfly, hatched from a black nondescript chrysalis " .

The style and color of her clothes change - from black at the beginning of the novel to brightly colored, with a predominance of scarlet colors, at the end of the story:

"she was wearing a bright blue skirt, tied at the waist with a crimson belt ... and a loose, airy blouse with white and scarlet stripes ... She tied her loose hair with a red ribbon" .

And this is no accident. The scarlet color is a symbol of liberation, a symbol of challenge.
What is Sarah teaching?
According to A. Dolinin, "falling under the spell of his beautiful temptress, Charles gradually begins to understand that even his enlightened version of Victorianism is only a "protective color" that hides reality, and that before meeting Sarah he was a "living dead" without freedom and love, an obedient executor of the will of the era with its “iron truths and inert conventions.” He realizes that his deepest aspirations and desires diverge from the requirements of the system, and he can make his choice: either “inauthentic” existence within the social structure, promising money, comfort, warmth of the hearth, or “genuine” existence outside of it, promising love, anxiety, disorder, homelessness and statuslessness, the coldness of open spaces".
But Fowles ironically describes the Victorian duality of thought:

The Victorian soul in general was almost not connected with the body, it hovered in the air while the animal began to swarm somewhere on the ground; and at the same time, due to an unfortunate miscalculation, an incomprehensible disharmony in the nature of things, the soul against its will was drawn after the low animal beginning, like a balloon on a string behind a wayward, capricious child".

For Fowles, the hidden processes of the present are revealed more often in relation to other times.
In a sense, the people of the Victorian era are much more responsible than the people of our century. Not without reason significant discoveries in science were made in those years. But, on the other hand, if you look deeper, despite all the conventions and stiffness of the Victorians, we are not freer in our choice than people of that era were in their time. Their existence continues into the present.
How can a person, an artist, stay alive? In this sense, Fowles' novel is historical. Like a historian, a writer listens to the speech of the people of his age, discovering in it the “melodies” of the past. And he, as an artist, freely, by the power of fantasy, creates other music on the basis of the past motive.
In his novel The French Lieutenant's Woman, John Fowles not only revealed the depth of the psychological analysis of the people portrayed (in portraying a character, Fowles easily penetrates into his psychology, whether it be Mrs. Poultney, Sam, Mary, Ernestine or Charles, and sometimes trying to cover the subconscious sphere, as, for example, in the scene depicting Sarah's dream with Mrs. Poultney's maid in chapter 19 -), but he also showed himself to be a true artist, a truly free novelist.

plays an independent role in the novel author's image. Fowles introduces him into the novel, contrary to the tradition coming from D. Joyce, according to which the writer must "leave his creation, become invisible and indifferent."
The omniscient and omniscient narrator was a traditional figure in the "Victorian" novel. However, in Fowles it plays a different role.
Already in the thirteenth chapter (opening with the key phrase: “I don’t know”), the narrator’s position changes dramatically - he takes off the mask of the omnipotent and omniscient creator, to whom "the innermost thoughts and feelings of the characters are known", and turns into a "god of a new type", declaring the freedom and autonomy of his creatures.

"The novelist," he writes, "is still God, for he creates (and even the most aleatoric avant-garde novel failed to completely exterminate its author); the only difference is that we are not Victorian gods, omniscient and almighty, we are gods of a new theological pattern, whose first principle is freedom, not power" .

From now on, the author disclaims responsibility for the development of the plot and invites his characters and readers to share it with him. Quite in the spirit of J. Cortazar, who was also looking not for a reader-consumer, but for an accomplice and co-creator, Fowles invites his reader to keep a distance in relation to the novel - an "ironic perspective" in order to push the interlocutor to the point of view of an observer reflecting on the main ideas of the novel and over himself.
Fowles does not judge his heroes, he gives them complete freedom, because, in his opinion, "a world created according to all the rules of art must be independent of its creator; a world worked out according to a plan ... is a dead world. Our heroes and events begin to live only when they cease to obey us" .
The author, as an independent character of the novel, not only goes into various kinds of ironic comments on the actions of his characters or individual topics (for example, the topic of sex in Victorian England), but also enters into a literary game with the reader, which manifests itself in three versions of the ending, in various stylistic imitations. text, in irony. Fowles' play is one of the components of freedom, allowing more freedom to handle artistic material and giving the reader the opportunity to choose. In chapter 61, he even introduces the real author-character as a person from the future, i.e. himself, and also in an ironic way.

Conclusion

The problems of Fowles' novel "The French Lieutenant's Woman" breaks down into a number of semantic definitions, not being exhausted by them in full. This is the problem of freedom and choice, and a feminist motive, the existence (semantic correlation) of human life, the theme of bourgeois and free love, happiness and sacrifice, etc. etc.
Fowles' novel "The French Lieutenant's Woman" combines the features of a retro novel and a psychological novel.
Paying much attention to the relationship of people in different historical eras, Fowles reflects in the novel on the circumstances under which a split personality, inconsistency of behavior and character is born in a Western man.
The main idea of ​​the novel is directed against conformism as such, and the humanistic orientation consists in affirming the triumph of the faith of “man in man”. Story about strange love Fowles makes Charles and Sarah the basis for his fundamental conclusions and reflections, paying much attention to the problem of sex, as well as the relationship of people in different historical eras. In essence, the novel ends when Charles, having learned that Sarah's connection with the French lieutenant is a myth invented by her for reasons he does not understand, leaves her, considering himself obliged to formalize the relationship, i.e. to legitimize his behavior by submitting to the Victorian prejudices of his father, whom he no longer respects.
The triple ending embodies three variants of attitude towards conformism: the first ending is conciliatory, symbolizing complete conformity with Victorian society and a break with oneself; the second ending is half-hearted, the hero breaks with society, but finds himself in Sarah, reconciling with her many years of playing with him, with his actual enslavement; and, finally, the third ending - the hero’s break with all sorts of conformism: Charles leaves society, but cannot stay with the woman who made him a toy, having achieved exclusive power over him, and thereby forgive her for his many years of suffering.
This path is not for Charles. Sarah had previously called him her only hope, but when he arrived in Exeter, he realized that he had switched roles with her, that she was holding him back out of pity. Charles rejects this sacrifice. He wants to return to America, where he discovered "a particle of faith in himself."
Thus, Fowles reverses the situation of the novel and puts Charles in Sarah's position; only then does the hero begin to understand this mysterious woman, who possessed something that others could not understand - freedom. In this finale, the hero’s last illusion collapses - the illusion of saving love, and he loses Sarah, not accepting her emancipation, in order to continue his difficult path alone through a hostile and homeless world, the path of a man who has lost all the supports that the “world of others” has provided him, but having found in return "a particle of faith in oneself."
The dark salty ocean of life, into which the hero goes, is true freedom, often bitter and harsh, but the only possible one, the symbol of which Sarah has been until now. And only freedom, according to Fowles, is true life.
The novel can be attributed to the novel of insight. In the process of a strange relationship with Sarah, Charles begins to see clearly, starting to look differently at his place in society. That is why he rejects Ernestine. That is why, after a few years, he will reject Sarah as well. The love story changes the fate of many characters in the novel: Charles himself, who chooses the path of free development and leaves for America; Sarah, who left the city and eventually joined the artistic milieu; Sam, who changed the comfortable role of a servant to the risky and vicissitudes of the life of a petty bourgeois; Ernestine, who was left without a fiancé and who knew in society all the shame of being rejected.
The quintessence of the semantic content of the novel, its problems lies in the last metaphorical paragraph of the novel:

"... he finally gained a particle of faith in himself, discovered in himself something unique on which to build; he has already begun - although he himself would become fierce, even with tears in his eyes, deny it - gradually realize that life (as no matter how surprisingly Sarah approaches the role of the sphinx) is still not a symbol, not the one and only riddle and not the one and only attempt to solve it, that she should not be embodied in one specific human face, that it is impossible, once unsuccessfully throwing bones, to drop out of games; that life is necessary - from the last strength, with a devastated soul and without hope of surviving in the iron heart of the city - to endure. And again to go out - into the blind, salty, dark ocean " .
In these words - a huge charge of optimism and faith in man.

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There are works, the charm of which you comprehend only with age and the accumulation of a certain experience (reader's as well). Among these works is the novel by the English classic of our time, unfortunately, who has already left us, John Fowles, “The French Lieutenant's Woman” (1969). The beauty of this work becomes available when the reader has in store the experience of communicating with the texts of the English classics.

The title of the novel is a kind of euphemism, referring to the main character Sarah Woodruff, whom the inhabitants of Lyme Regis called with a more biting word.

When Fowles's novel was published, it was strikingly different from modern editions: printing and binding resembled old editions of Thomas Hardy, Thackeray, and the style of narration itself seemed taken from the past. But in the middle of the book, the essay turned into experimental prose: the author ran ahead, a century later, reported information about the fate of the characters, offered the reader different options for the ending to choose from. In general, he demonstrated the techniques of postmodern writing.

Of course, this is an intellectual novel: the purpose of the work is not the depiction of life, but the solution of more general issues of human existence. Heroes are carriers of certain ideas, in the work we observe a clash of different ideological principles.

This work by Fowles can also be viewed as a novel of a path in which the process of becoming a hero (more precisely, two heroes) is in the center of attention, and he himself is subjected to a series of tests. Charles Smithson's wandering takes place in a historically specific time and place: the beginning - the end of the sixties of the XIX century in Victorian England. But Sarah, who acts as the temptress of Charles, also goes through her own path of self-knowledge: she attracts him from the first meeting, she makes the hero do unthinkable things like her own. Like Sarah, Charles also defies Victorian morality in his own way.

The structure of the novel is complex: Fowles uses epigraphs for chapters and for the whole novel, interlinear author's notes to the text, in which he gives historical, linguistic and sociological explanations; all this is intended to remind readers that the narrator himself belongs to another time.

The work is preceded by an epigraph that allows us to understand the author's intention: “Every emancipation consists in the fact that it returns the human world, human relations to the man himself” (K. Marx. On the Jewish Question (1844)). And, indeed, throughout the story, we observe the process of returning the main characters to themselves: both Sarah Woodruff and Charles Smithson discover needs and desires in themselves that largely contradict the traditions and spirit of Victorian England, but only when the characters allow themselves live in accordance with their own aspirations, they find themselves.

“The French Lieutenant’s Woman” is reminiscent of the historical novels of Walter Scott, in which the action always takes place at the turn of two eras, at moments of major social upheaval. But historical novels assume the presence of historical figures as main or secondary characters, and the plots of such works are usually associated with what -or important historical events. Fowles has only fictional characters, and he also emphasizes their fictional nature in direct author's digressions: “Everything I talk about here is pure fiction. The characters I create have never existed beyond my imagination. If up to now I have pretended that I knew their innermost thoughts and feelings, it is only because, having mastered to some extent the language and “voice” of the era in which the action of my narrative takes place, I similarly adhere to the convention then generally accepted : the novelist is in second place after the Lord God. If he does not know everything, he tries to pretend that he knows. But I live in the age of Alain Robbe-Grillet and Roland Barthes, and therefore if this is a novel, then it is by no means a novel in the modern sense of the word” (Ch. 13).

The beginning of the events in the work refers to the end of March 1867. During this period, under the influence of the theory of evolution of Ch. Darwin and other natural scientific discoveries, ideas about the world and man were rapidly changing. The writer depicted a transitional era, when new forms of social consciousness arose. The plot of the novel does not go beyond private life, although the author gives a picture of the mores of Victorian England in great detail.

The era of the reign of Queen Victoria is portrayed as a specific socio-cultural system that dictates strict norms of behavior to a person. According to Fowles, this system suppresses human feelings, and condemns passion and imagination. Therefore, people begin to be afraid of themselves: this is how one of Ernestine's heroines forbids herself to think about sensual pleasures and even invents a prohibition formula "Do not dare": “... she came up with something like a commandment for herself - “don't you dare!” - and quietly repeated these words every time thoughts about the physical side of her feminine nature tried to invade her consciousness ”(Ch. 5).

Fowles introduces extensive documentary material into the work: quotes from the work of K. Marx “Capital”, testimonies of people of that era, statistical data (E. Royston Pike “Human Documents of the Victorian Golden Age”), fragments of the work of Charles Darwin published shortly before the described period “ The Origin of Species”, etc. Probably, it is this saturation with documents and information that causes bewilderment and confusion among readers who are not ready for such a peculiar manner of presentation.

The novel is distinguished by a special ironic style of narration, the author, indeed, acts as an omniscient observer who not only captures the external manifestations of the nature of the characters, but also shows us the underside of their actions hidden from everyone. This is especially noticeable in relation to the heroine of the second plan - Mrs. Poultney - a symbol of Victorian morals: “For this lady, there would undoubtedly be a place in the Gestapo - her method of interrogation was such that in five minutes she knew how to bring the most persistent servants to tears. (...) However, in her own, very limited circle, she was famous for her charity. And if it occurred to you to doubt this reputation of hers, you would immediately be presented with irrefutable proof - did not dear, kind Mrs. Poultney take in the French Lieutenant's Friend? (Ch. 4). It is precisely out of concern for her afterlife and feeling that there are few good deeds on her account that Mrs. Poultney decides to do a good deed - to give shelter to a young woman who has fallen into a difficult situation, enjoying a bad reputation in Lyme. Following the advice of the priest, Mrs. Poultney takes into her service companion Sarah Woodruff, who is considered the abandoned mistress of a French sailor.

Narration in the novel is conducted with a violation of chronological sequence: talking about events, the author returns to the past, closer and more distant, makes assumptions (who would Sarah be in past and future times, reports that “Ernestine was destined to outlive her entire generation. She was born in 1846. She died on the day Hitler invaded Poland” (Ch. 5)).

Composition The work is a constant alternation of stories from the life of Charles, Ernestine and Sarah, at the beginning of the novel, stories from the life of Mrs. Poultney are added to them. But from the very beginning it is clear that Sarah and Charles are at the center of the novel, and other characters are just a background.

The main characters, Charles Smithson and Sarah Woodruff, are opposed to each other: he is ordinary, lazy, but pretending to be unusual; she is an outcast, unusual in everything, accused of what was not. And although there is also the image of Ernestine in the novel, this heroine is not present in the version of the novel that is not connected with the banal ending. Fowles sought to show that a person can choose from several options for a life path: follow the traditions of his environment, time or resist them, rebel in the pursuit of freedom. Before meeting Sarah Woodruff, Charles played the role interesting person(his passion for paleontology helped him to maintain an appropriate image), after meeting with the strange Tragedy (as Sarah was called in Limes Regis), he discovers in himself a desire to violate boundaries. Charles takes part in the fate of the girl, breaks off the engagement with Ernestina. But after all, Sarah also strives to appear mysterious: she creates the illusion of her own guilt among those around her, consciously puts herself in the position of an outcast and watches the reaction of the townsfolk.

Irony permeates all levels of the novel: the writer sneers at the characters, the reader, composition and plot; it manifests itself in the way the characters are characterized, in the selection of information, in the manner of their presentation, while the author’s attitude is felt: “Mrs. Poultney discovered some kind of perverted planting in seeming really kind” (ch. 9). “Mrs. Poultney, from her earlier remarks, knew that she was many lengths behind the above-named lady in the race for the piety prize. Lady Cotton, who lived a few miles from Lyme, was famous for her fanatical charity” (Ch. 4).

Charles's characterization is also riddled with irony: “... as soon as he appeared in society, the mothers began to devour him with their eyes, the fathers slapped him on the back, and the girls smile coyly at him. Charles was very partial to pretty girls and was not averse to leading them and their parents, who cherished ambitious plans, by the nose. Thus he acquired a reputation for being haughty and cold, a well-deserved reward for the dexterity (and by the age of thirty he had become as skilled in this business as any ferret) with which he sniffed the bait, and then fled from the hidden teeth of the matrimonial trap that lay in wait for him ”( Chapter 4).

Charles' choice of one of the alternative life paths presented in the novel as a choice of one of two women: Sarah or Ernestine, as a choice between duty and feeling. That is why there are three versions of the final in the novel: “Victorian”, “fictional” and “existential”. The most prosaic and predictable ending - Charles's marriage to Ernestine - is given in chapter 44 (there are 61 in total): the hero follows the given word (duty) and leads a gray life of an unadapted person who has lost a potential inheritance and a baronial title.

The denouement, in which the hero remains forever with Sarah (fictional finale), contradicted the views of the author, who was important to show that the process of human development does not stop until death, is continuous, the person constantly makes a free choice. Losing Sarah (existential finale), the hero continues his difficult journey through a hostile world, this is the path of a person who has lost all support, but who has received in return "a particle of faith in himself."

In the novel there is a constant game with literary overtones, the main place among the sources involved is occupied by the works of English writers of the Victorian era: Fowles quotes C. Dickens, W. Thackeray, J. Eliot, T. Hardy, A. Tennyson, J. Austin and others. Scott: “Unconsciously, she judged people more by the standards of Walter Scott and Jane Austen than by the standards obtained empirically, and, seeing some literary characters in those around her, she believed that vice would certainly be punished, and virtue would triumph” ( Chapter 9). Naturally, some of the meanings of the novel elude the reader who is not familiar with the works of the above-named authors.

A peculiar character of the work is narrator: he directly addresses the reader, combines various time layers: he refers to Freud, Sartre, Brecht, authors who lived and worked much later than the period described. In the classic 19th-century novel, the narrator always seems to rise above the characters; in Fowles, he is in the position of an equal among equals. At critical moments in the plot, the “I” of the author is transformed into “he” and receives all the signs of the character, even a portrait characteristic. The author provides the vacated space to the reader, who offers co-participation and co-creation. Therefore, in the novel there is a constant semantic tension between the past and the present, fiction and reality.

In conclusion, we add that John Fowles' novel "The French Lieutenant's Woman" was filmed in 1982 by director Karel Reisch based on the script by Harold Pinter, who became a Nobel laureate in Last year Fowles' life.
The following material is about the film adaptation of the novel.

© Elena Isaeva

European and American postmodernism took shape in the late 60s - early 70s. Postmodernism arose, based on the philosophy of the end of human history, the philosophy of a person who succumbs to the dictates of psychophysiological needs. At first, postmodernism had some positive artistic results (the work of Garcia Marquez, Umberto Eco, J.-L. Borges, partly V. Nabokov (“Lolita”). quite expedient and productive, creative results, especially in the field of artistic practice, in postmodernism turned out to be insignificant.The false theoretical premise of postmodernists about the dying of artistic classics and the simultaneous desire of the same authors to prove the superiority of their aesthetic experience led to the formation of a certain centaur, when parts of the constructed building of postmodernism ( theory and its implementation) turned out to be little connected. nye, but still real truths. Aesthetic compromises of postmodernists between "high" and "low", which constituted the core of their poetics, led to the destruction of artistic integrity in a particular work.

One of the prominent representatives of postmodernism is John Robert Fowles, whose work is one of the most striking phenomena of modern literature. His works are distinguished by originality, originality, full of great skill. Each of them is a whole world in which the literary traditions of different eras are combined in the most bizarre way. This is achieved largely through the use of reminiscences by the writer, thanks to which the works of D. Fowles acquire a special sound.

The problems considered in his work, the phenomena of modern reality are comprehended through the prism of the events of the distant past and thus are revealed in new, and sometimes completely unexpected facets. Moreover, Fowles' appeal to the work of writers, the artistic traditions of the literature of previous eras, determined the genre, stylistic originality of his works. A vivid example of this is the novel "The French Lieutenant's Mistress".

An extensive and serious literature is devoted to the analysis of the novel "The French Lieutenant's Woman". However, the opinions of researchers differ significantly both about the nature and genre of the novel, and its internal interpretation. The specificity and originality of the narrative with all its spicy love plot, numerous everyday details in retro style, colorful characters and genre scenes, with the drama of ideas, the psychology of intimate relationships, the history of the formation of a person, interpreted as a choice between feeling and duty - all this makes the novel unique. .

J. Fowles defends the idea of ​​free will in all his works, including "The French Lieutenant's Girlfriend". The end of this novel is a kind of game with readers.

Just as Sarah plays with Charles, testing him and pushing him to realize freedom of choice, Fowles plays romance with his readers, forcing him to make his choice. To do this, he includes in the text three versions of the final - "Victorian", "fictional" and "existential". The reader and the hero of the novel are given the right to choose one of the three endings, and hence the plots, of the novel. The first trap (ch. XLIV) is the "Victorian" ending, in which Charles marries Ernestine and lives to be 114 years old. After a few pages it turns out that we have been fooled, and the author openly laughs at those who did not notice the parody of this chapter. The situation is more complicated with the other two variants of the final. Fowles is cunning when he tries to assure the reader that they are absolutely equal in rights and that their sequence in the text was determined by lot. The second trap awaits the reader in the LX chapter - the "sentimental" finale, in which Charles, as in a fairy tale, finds not only his beloved woman, but also a child. This happy ending smacks too much of literary convention to be true. “If the novel really ended in this way,” writes A. Dolinin, “then the hero’s pilgrimage would acquire an achievable goal, would turn into a search for some sacred symbol, with the acquisition of which the wanderer ends his journey. For Fowles, the formation of a person does not stop until death, and the only real, not illusory goal of life's wandering is the path itself, the continuous self-development of the personality, its movement from one free choice to another. Therefore, the only "correct" version of the finale becomes the last LXI chapter - the "existential" finale: the option of the main character choosing freedom, a particle of faith in himself, understanding that "life must be endured endlessly, and again go out - into the blind, salty, dark ocean" . In the third variant of the ending, Fowles turns the situation of the novel around and puts Charles in the position of Sarah, and only then does the hero begin to understand this mysterious woman who possessed something that others could not understand - freedom. In this finale, the hero's last illusion collapses - the illusion of saving love, and he loses Sarah in order to continue his difficult journey alone through a hostile and homeless world, the path of a man who has lost all the supports that the "world of others" has provided him, but who has found in return "a particle faith in yourself." The theme of self-knowledge also passes into the novel "The French Lieutenant's Woman".

Fowles considers the Victorian era as a certain socio-cultural system that prescribes a rigid set of behavioral norms and ways of modeling reality to a person. This system is repressive, because it suppresses living human feelings, outlaws passion and imagination, imposes restrictions on interpersonal relationships, establishes a false hierarchy of moral values, in which duty is considered the main virtue. The consequence of this system is lies, fear, hypocrisy, hypocrisy, a distorted view of the world. To confirm his conclusions, Fowles introduces extensive documentary material into the text - quotations from contemporaries, reports and summaries, excerpts from the press, statistical calculations, even quotations from the works of Marx.

Fowles dedicates his novel to the criticism of this system, which enslaves the individual. Already from the first paragraphs of the book, where the Lyme Regis mall is compared with the sculptures of Henry Moore, Fowles makes it clear that the story is being told from the point of view of our contemporary, from a time distance of a hundred years.

The action in it takes place a hundred years before its publication, in 1867. Fowles recreates the atmosphere of the Victorian era. In his characters and style one can recognize the characters and techniques of Ch. Dickens, W. Collins, E. Trollope, T. Hardy. But Fowles's task is not to engage the reader in an intellectual game of deciphering allusions - although this playful beginning is inherent in the story - but in deconstructing (or "deconstructing", in the terminology of postmodernism) the very type of Victorian novel. After 1945, interest in Victorianism as a kind of "golden age" steadily increased, which was especially noticeable against the background of the ironic contempt for the Victorian literature of the modernists of the 1910s and 1920s. Fowles is by no means a Victorian apologist. He looks at this era itself, and, mainly, at its mythology critically. Such a demystification, exposure of the Victorian ideology, is based both on K. Marx, Charles Darwin, and on the introduction of a time dimension contemporary to the author into the narrative. The French Lieutenant's Woman is the first attempt at self-reflexive meta-narrative (Lessing only hinted at it) in post-war English literature. The narrator in the course of action freely comes into contact with the characters, thereby destroying the illusion of lifelikeness, historical authenticity; story chapters, with a third-person narrative, are interrupted by essay chapters, where the narrator addresses the reader, giving various, including little-known (for example, the prevalence of prostitution and brothels), information about British life in the middle of the 19th century. In addition, the reader is offered several options for the finale.

The controversy with the Victorian "picture of the world" is conducted in "The French Lieutenant's Woman" at various levels: philosophical, textual, plot, psychological, moral. Describing "from within" the Victorian era, the author uses techniques that became available in the twentieth century. So, as A. Dolinin notes, he "not only touches on topics that are forbidden for Victorian culture, not only subjects his characters to psychoanalysis and existentialist testing for "authenticity", but also blows up the very structure of the Victorian novel from within. It would seem that building the narrative from the author's first face, the writer simply stylizes it as a classic Victorian prose, because for her it was the most common way of constructing a text.But here, too, we are dealing not with imitation, not with copying, but with a parody, the purpose of which is to reveal the "bad conventionality" of the old systems."

The French Lieutenant's Woman begins as a socio-psychological family novel (the main genre of Victorian literature). Charles Smithson, an amateur scientist and a gentleman with title and inheritance aspirations, is engaged to the wealthy heiress Ernestine. In romantic Lyme Regis, where he accompanies the bride, on the very pier from which Louise Musgrove, the heroine of Reasons (1818) by J. Austin, fell, he meets the local "sinner" Sarah Woodruff, and this meeting changes the lives of both. For a long time It seems to Charles that in his strangely developing relationship with Sarah, the roles are distributed traditionally: he sees himself as a knight saving a lady from trouble. The unusualness of this situation in his perception is due only to social distance. And Charles is proud of the strength of his love, which pushed him to a courageous step - breaking up with his bride. Up to this point, the content of the novel is only slightly more "risky" than was common among Victorian writers. But little by little, the narrative from the melodramatic story of an unsuccessful engagement moves into a completely different modality, unthinkable in a Victorian novel. This turn is connected with the image of Sarah. If Charles Smithson and Ernestina are characters from the world of J. Austin, then Sarah seems to belong to the 1960s, the time of Anna Woolf, the "sexual revolution", the terrorist Ulrika Meinhof. As a result, Charles painfully discovers that not he, but Sarah has always been the leader in their relationship, that she manipulated him much more subtle than Conchis manipulated Nicholas Urfe. Sarah is in sharp conflict with the moral and ethical standards of her era. Therefore, she deliberately puts on public display the image of a woman, fictitious in origin, but corresponding to her essence of character. Yes, she is a dangerous rebel. In an era when public morality allows sexual intercourse only in a form consecrated by marriage, Sarah deliberately incriminates herself in order to become an outcast. In fact, she was never the mistress of a French sailor, but this fiction gives her a status of exclusivity. Sarah's bright personality leaves its mark on the development of her relationship with Charles, whose attraction to her also puts him in the position of a social outcast. At the same time, it is precisely this rejection that makes him wander the world, deprives him of complacency. Sarah, even in her absence, makes him comprehend what happened between them, see the mistakes born of hasty indulgence of judgments, prejudices. Ultimately, Charles goes through all the stages of love in his development. The completeness of self-knowledge is the life ideal of all the heroes of Fowles.

In the Victorian novel, the characters, after making sacrifices in the name of love, are rewarded with personal happiness. Fowles is different. When Charles, after many years of searching, finds Sarah hiding from him in the London house of the Pre-Raphaelite D.G. Rossetti (that is, in a subtly bohemian environment that equalizes ethics and aesthetics), this completely emancipated woman is in no hurry to reward him for his devotion. Of the two endings of the novel, the first is "happy." Charles recognizes his daughter, whose birth he did not know. This ending looks less convincing if only because it is followed by a second denouement, at least conventionally perceived as final. This time, Charles and Sarah's date leads to their breakup. " New woman”, unlike the Victorian heroines, intends to maintain her independence, guided in her choice by the values ​​of an existential order. Sarah is the author of her own life, and this will of hers seems to challenge or balance Fowles' authorial will (which itself is a subject of constant reflection).

Fowles's novels of the 1960s led critics to recognize that English prose, which at first glance had become provincial, was actually in the process of developing the principles of postmodern storytelling, which put it on a par with the innovations of French and American literature. The national coloring of Fowles' postmodernism was reflected in the preservation of their plot basis, the system of recognizable characters, which was so resolutely rejected by the French "new novelists", the Americans W. Burroughs, J. Bart, D. Barthelme. These are both novels in the traditional, post-romantic, post-naturalistic sense, and "anti-novels" that reflect the "crisis of reality" in literature. In Fowles' novels, more clearly than their contemporaries, the desire for an "aesthetic compromise" (D. Lodge's expression), which was developed in a dispute between "traditionalists" and "experimenters", was expressed. This new state of the English novel was sometimes called "magical realism" or "hyperrealism", but regardless of the terminological preferences of individual researchers, the essence of the phenomenon was declared the same: the confrontation between representation and symbolism ended in their postmodern synthesis.

fowles postmodernism novel victorian

Bibliography:

1. Dolinin A. Pilgrimage of Charles Smithson // Fowles. J. French lieutenant's girlfriend. - L .: Fiction, 1985. - S.3-18.

2. Ivasheva V.V. Literature of Great Britain // History of Foreign Literature of the 20th Century. (1945-1980) / Ed. L.G. Andreeva. - 2nd ed. - M.: Publishing House of Moscow State University, 1989;

3. Ilyin I. Postmodernism // Modern foreign literary criticism. Encyclopedic reference book. - M.: Intrada, 2006;

4. Fowles J. - The mistress of the French lieutenant - M .: Tsentrpoligraf, 2003;

5. philol.msu.ru P.A. Nikolaev "Introduction to Literary Studies" - Internet publication.