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Postmodernism aesthetics in The French Lieutenant’s Woman and The Bloody

Chamber and Other Stories

Ana Martínez Ramón (20276793)

Department of English, Universitat de Barcelona

Narrativa Modernista i Postmodernista en Anglès

Gemma Lopez

January 19, 2023

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Postmodernism aesthetics in The French Lieutenant’s Woman and The Bloody

Chamber and Other Stories

Postmodernism is a movement that incorporates elements from the previous movement,

modernism, but from a different perspective, one that is ironic and cynical. This movement is
based on progress and evolution and on the aim of escaping definitions. Fragmentation, paradox,
an unreliable narrator, surrealism or intertextuality are some of the elements of the postmodernist
aesthetics. Every movement comes from a series of events that changed people’s minds. In this
case, postmodernism happened because of the change of mind that caused the holocaust and the
Hiroshima and Nagasaki explosions; the ‘death’ of modernism because of the death of Joyce and
Woolf (1941); and the change of how we relate to ourselves and to one another thanks to the
Civil Rights Movement. Moreover, postmodernism makes ample theory. For example, the one
from Lyotard, that proposes that the world is organized through big narratives or a metanarrative;
or Dérrida that talks about the concept of deconstruction and the binaries; and one of the most
significative theories, “the death of the author” by Barthes, that changed the way the readers read
by killing the function of the author in the text, and that implies the birth of the reader. In this
essay I will compare the postmodernist elements of intertextuality, parody and metafiction on
The French Lieutenant’s Woman (2010) by John Fowles and The Bloody Chamber and Other
Stories (1993) by Angela Carter.

First of all, intertextuality is the use of many different texts to construct one text. On The
French Lieutenant’s Woman we can clearly see the use of external texts on the epigraphs and the
footnotes. The secondary sources on the epigraphs are used “to frame each chapter and somehow
direct its reading (though often through irony and parody) [and] to establish associations among
the texts (belonging to different aesthetic and cultural traditions)” (Azerêdo, 2021, p. 42). For
example, the epigraph on the first chapter comes from “The Riddle”, and that indicates to the
reader that there is some mystery and positions the text into a language game. Also, on chapter
seven the epigraph is about the “employment of a […] part of the working class” (Fowles, 2010,
p. 30) indicating that the chapter is going to discuss the working class. Apart from that, the
secondary sources are a mixture of fiction (Hardy, Arnold, Austen) and essay writers (Marx,
Darwin, Tennyson) so that the reader notices they are reading about fiction and politics and
philosophy at the same time. There is also intertextuality inside the text. As when the narrator
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says, “to be free myself, I must give him, and Tina […] their freedom as well […] the freedom
that allows other freedoms to exist” (Fowles, 2010, p. 77). This quote is a clear reference to the
philosophy of existentialism and the narrative freedom we can se in “The Death of the Author”
(1967) by Roland Barthes. Intertextuality can also be seen in The Bloody Chamber as its “stories
are rewritings of some of the best known classical fairy tales” (Seago, 1996, p. 3). She used
intertextuality to rewrite these tales by adding a feminist or Marxist reading. For example, on the
stories “The Courtship of Mr. Lyon” and “The Tiger’s Bride” there is resemblance with “Beauty
and The Beast” because of the domestication of sexuality and because of the improvement of the
male character because of her sacrifices. Moreover, the author provides a re-writing of “The
Little Red-Riding Hood” but adapting the story into a postmodernist tale in which the heroine is
the ‘werewolf’ and she is “a self-reliant little girl, quite capable of dealing with the dangers of
the wolf herself, she is not just substituting an active heroine for a passive victim” (Seago, 1996,
p. 4). Finally, what Carter is doing is creating her own text with a series of other tales and
fictions to “absorb [them] and penetrate into each other for a fresh intertextual narrative” (Bartu,
2014, p. 51).

Secondly, the element of parody in postmodernist text is used by imitating the style of
writing of a certain period to criticize its sociopolitical problems. The French Lieutenant’s
Woman uses Victorianism as an excuse to write about speculation, because there is a mixture of
a woman with the knowledge of the 20 th century into the 19th century. We could se an example of
this parody on chapters twelve and thirteen, where at first Sarah is seen as the prototypical
“Victorian fallen wom[a]n, desperate and helpless, flirting suicide” (Azêredo, 2021, p. 54), but
then, we could see how the narrator parodied the situation by making her a modernist woman
who does not care what the others say, in fact she creates this figure of fallen woman herself.
This is well shown in Chapter 13, when the narrator says: “I report, then, only the outward facts:
that Sarah cried in the darkness but did not kill herself; that she continued, in spite of the express
prohibition, to haunt Ware commons” (Fowles, 2010, p. 78). One of the most well demonstrated
parodies is that The French Lieutenant’s Woman is a novel written in a Victorian style that talk
about a Victorian story, but the novel is about freedom and the freedom of choice. This is
parodic because it is mocking the little choice of freedom of Victorian society where there were
societal rules for every choice. This can be demonstrated when Sarah is able to choose if she
wants to sin and she is able to talk about herself as a fallen woman. On the other hand, The
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Bloody Chamber also illustrates instances of postmodernist parody through the novel. Carter
uses language in a convoluted and sophisticated way, to intent to mimic 17 th century writers.
Although she writes in that style, she makes women the control of the narrative, she takes power
from the narrator and gives it to the female character; not a characteristic seen in 17 th century
fairy tales. She uses tales because they can be adapted and readapted. Also, she “subverts the
themes of sexuality, desire and liberation in relation to women by parodying the conservative
fairy tale genre” (Bartu, 2014, p. vii). This parody is exemplified in all the stories she wrote. On
“The Company of Wolves”, for example, she retold the “The Little Red Riding Hood” by
making the female character not be fearful but she is the one who confronts the ‘enemy’: “She
will lay his fearful head on her lap and she will pick out the lice.” (Carter, 1993, p. 181). Hence,
The Bloody Chamber is “a collection of ten classical revised fairy tales [that] uses postmodern
parody [to create] independent content and ideology” and she retells the classical fairytales “in a
parodic manner while paying homage to the tradition” (Bartu, 2014, p. 52).

Finally, metafiction is to write about fiction without intention of imitating reality, it is

fiction about fiction. On The French Lieutenant’s Woman the narrator is constantly reminding
the reader that it is a novel about fiction that he is ‘inventing’. As we can see on chapter 13 when
the narrator says “This story I am telling is all my imagination. These characters I create never
existed outside my own mind” (Fowles, 2010, p. 76). So then, Fowles clearly states that this is a
novel about fiction, does not want the readers to think he is trying to imitate reality. He “is a
pioneer of metafiction writing in which he constantly and in time reveals and derides the
falseness and deceiveness of his narrative” (Ji, 2013, p. 2054). Moreover, The Bloody Chamber
is also a good example to show postmodernist metafiction. The genres of Carter’s collection
have more to do with fiction that trying to imitate reality, we have Magic realism, that is a way
of introducing the reader to utopian and through reality, establishing a blurring of boundaries, or
gothic fantasy, or science fiction. Carter rewrote and defamiliarized these stories in a non-
realistic fiction to present “the reader with new insights into how society is structured” (Bartu,
2014, p. 50).

To sum up, postmodernism is based on evolution and progress, and it is similar to

modernism but writing from a cynical and ironic way. The elements of postmodernist aesthetics,
such as intertextuality, parody and metafiction, are well represented on The Bloody Chamber and
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on The French Lieutenant’s Woman. Intertextuality can be seen as an intertwinement of

secondary sources that help clarify or guide the reader through the novel, in the case of Fowles’
novel, through the epigraphs and footnotes. Parody is a postmodernist element that was used as a
mockery of a period and was utilized by writing in that period’s style but criticizing it’s socio-
political rules. Finally, we have metafiction, an element of postmodernism that centered on
created fiction and demonstrating that what the reader was creating was fiction, there was no
intention of doing or portraying reality.

Word count: 1469

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References

Azerêdo, G. (2021). Intermediality, intertextuality and parody: resonances of Jane Austen in

John Fowles’s The French lieutenant’s woman. Ilha do Desterro, 74, 41-59.

Bartu, C. M. (2014). Disenchanting patriarchal fairy tales through parody in Angela Carter’s The
Bloody Chamber and Other Stories and Emma Donoghue’s Kissing the Witch: Old Tales
in New Skins.

Carter, A. (1993). The Bloody Chamber And Other Stories. Penguin Group.

Fowles, J. (2010). The French Lieutenant’s Woman. Vintage Digital.

Ji, Q., & Li, M. (2013). Freedom in "The French Lieutenant's Woman". Theory & Practice in
Language Studies, 3 (11), 2052-2060

Seago, K. (1996). Intertextuality and the Fairy Tale in Angela Carter’s The Bloody
Chamber. Identity, Gender and Creativity: Women’s Writing in Germany, France and
Britain, 83-90.