The French Lieutenant’s Woman and the Possibility of Feminism Rosie O'Riley 12th Grade

The French Lieutenant's Woman is a 1969 postmodern historical fiction novel by John Fowles, written in a double narrative form alternating between the Victorian era and the present day. Currently, some literary debate surrounding the novel concerns its validity as a Feminist text. There are various obstacles in the novel in terms of character definition, the plot itself, and the authorial methods used by Fowles. The novel fails to realise certain aspects of traditional Victorian feminist writing, the style in which the writer intended it to be interpreted. Sarah Woodruff is a clouded central figure as opposed to a strongly defined protagonist usually featured in Feminist texts.

Can Sarah be said to be an “independent female protagonist”? Given that the narrator acts in an almost manipulative voyeuristic way, this leads us as readers to believe that Sarah is never autonomous as her thoughts remain outside of the novel. In doing this, I feel the narrator is not reliable since we are never fully given the opportunity to empathise with her due to the absence of her point of view. Magali Michael, an anti-feminist critic of the novel, claims “if the novel is created within a masculine ideology and only masculine perspectives are...