Sarah Woodruff (Meryl Streep), dressed in a black hooded gown, staring out across the stormy waters at the end of The Cobb in Lyme Regis, has become a classic scene in modern cinema and also a symbol of a doomed love affair.
[The Cobb in Lyme-Regis]
This is also how the novel The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1969) by John Fowles starts. Gentleman-amateur archaeologist Charles Smithson and his beautiful but spoiled fiancee Ernestina Freeman take a walk on the Cobb, and driven by curiosity, Charles accosts a mysterious woman standing at its end. He later finds out her name, Sarah Woodruff, a governess who had an illicit affair, it is rumored, with a stranded French ship captain, but who was left in the lurch by her lover when he again departed for France. In Victorian eyes, she is a "fallen woman," taken in out of charity as companion (Sarah has a beautiful voice which is important for Bible readings) by the strictly Christian Mrs. Poulteney, who is more cruel than a Nazi camp guard.
Thirty-two-year-old Charles is a "gentleman," the probable heir to a nobility title, and with enough wealth to travel abroad and never having to work (work is vulgar to him). Ernestina is the handsome daughter of a wealthy draper; marriage with her will bring Charles a fortune, although he feels he has to stoop down to the level of trades-people - her father is a successful businessman, who dotes on his daughter, but in Charles' eyes a real gentlemen doesn't have to work.
On his fossil hunts, Charles happens to meet the enigmatic and troubled Sarah, who likes to walk alone in deserted areas, although that has been forbidden by her mistress. Charles gets interested in her - already during their first encounter, he is struck by the passion in her face. She is not a demure, doll-like girl like his fiancee, the ideal of Victorian society, but a real person with a strong individuality (she is like a contemporary woman trapped in the Victorian age). She is also good in seeing through other people, and from the first she must have understood Charles' unhappiness with his fiancee, although he himself is also a rather repressed and at times very formal Victorian.
During stealthy meetings in the Lyme Regis Undercliff, Charles hears Sarah's story and gradually love develops between them. But then Sarah is observed when she comes out of the Undercliff, and is instantly dismissed by Mrs Poulteney. Charles gives her money to travel to Exeter, where he promises to join her. After things between Charles and Sarah have reached the boiling point in the small room of an inn in Exeter, he breaks his engagement (although that means he will be ostracized by Victorian society), but then, strangely, Sarah disappears... For many years he looks for her, searching even in America, but when they meet in the end, what will be the conclusion?
[Poster of the eponymous film]
This is not just a period novel, or a love story. What makes the book so interesting, is that Fowles tells his 19th c. plot from a 1960s point of view, with the necessary ironic distance. Like 19th c. novels, there is a chatty narrator who intrudes on the story, but the modern element is, for example, that he also gives interesting details about life in Victorian England and the intellectual climate of the times. Fowles even dedicates a chapter to a discussion about sex in
Victorian England, such as that one in every 6,000 houses in London was a brothel - the Victorians took sex seriously by not talking about it, but they were very busy doing it. In
addition, Fowles offers its reader three different endings for the
novel. The author even appears in the story as a bearded
gentleman and by turning back his watch 15 minutes, undoes a happy
conclusion that sounded unrealistic. Even so, the story remains real and
plausible, which proves Fowles' great art. (Of course, only the final ending is real, the other two are more like discarded drafts).
There are also interesting subplots. The major one concerns Charles' servant
Tom, who pursues his own love interest with Mary, the maid of Ernestina.
Here there is no repression at all, the so-called "lower classes" had a
rather free sex life and usually didn't marry until the physical aspect
of the relation had been tried out - just as in contemporary times.
Tom is an ambitious Cockney - there is submission in words, but not so
much in deed, as Tom actively plots to get money from Charles - if
necessary by contortion - to be able to set up his own shop in London.
It makes the book an engaging parody of the Victorian novel. But The French Lieutenant’s Woman is much more than that. Fowles places is characters in a long historical perspective. Sarah Woodruff embodies the very qualities that the 19th century tried to repress: passion and imagination. The novel is about life, about finding a place for yourself, about freedom and emancipation. Sarah is a very complex personality: in the end we understand she has been manipulating Charles and has lied to him about the French captain (with whom she never had a real affair). There is the strong suggestion that she has used the weak and idle Charles as a means to obtain her own freedom. Did she ever love him? We will never know - in the end, Sarah does her own thing, leading a Bohemian life as an artist, and rejecting Charles because marriage would bring new shackles. Of course this is much better than the usual Victorian ending, "Reader, I married him."
By the way, Fowles' novel started a new trend in English literature, that of the "Neo-Victorian novel." Some writers who followed in his footsteps were A.S. Byatt (Possession, Morpho Eugenia), Sarah Waters (Tipping the Velvet, Fingersmith) and Michel Faber (The Crimson Petal and the White). All in their own way, these novels broke the veil of the conventional Victorian historical novel, by writing from a radical contemporary perspective.
A great book about the values of life, written with irony and intelligence. During 1981, director Karel Reisz and writer Harold Pinter adapted the novel as an eponymous film. The contemporary perspective was brought in by not only filming the novel, but also telling a story about the filming of the novel and letting the two actors who play Charles (Jeremy Irons) and Sarah (Meryl Streep) have a love affair on the set. The multiple endings are brought in by having both stories end in a different way (in the film, different from the novel, the Victorian lovers in the end find happiness, but not so the contemporary actors). It is beautiful and elegant film, with excellent performances.
Photo of The Cobb: Malcolm Etherington, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
