Patulea Iulia Cristina

Anul II B Seria II Grupa 6

Romana - Engleza

Ernestina and Sarah in the view of Charles in

The French Lieutenant’s Woman
The present essay focuses on the way in which Ernestina and Sarah are viewed by Charles.
It focuses on the relationship between them, the antagonism between the two women and Charles
feelings about both of them.
Firstly, I will make a short presentation of John Fowles and a short summary of the novel.
John Robert Fowles was an English novelist and essayist who was born March 31, 1926.
During his life he wrote, among others, the French Lieutenant’s Woman which appeared in 1969.
The novel seems to be Victorian if we are to take a look at its structure and detail, but the author
stretches the boundaries to whom we were accustomed in the Victorian age rewriting them into a
modern manner.
The novel has 61 chapters and each chapter begins with a quotation from various authors
and sayings among which it is to be reminded among others Hardy The Riddle Charles Darwin The
Origin of Species, Jane Austen Persuasion:
“Stretching eyes west
Over the sea,
Wind foul or fair,
Always stood she
Prospect-impressed;
Solely out there
Did her gaze rest,
Never elsewhere
Seemed charm to be.” (Fowles 9)

“But a still more important consideration is that the chief part of the
organization of every living creature is due to inheritance; and consequently,
though each being assuredly is well fitted for its place in nature, many structures
have now no very close and direct relations to present habits of life.” (Fowles
15)

“… with its green chasms between romantic rocks, where the scattered forest
trees and orchards of luxuriant growth declare that many a generation must have
passed away since the first partial falling of the cliff prepared the ground for
such a state, where a scene so wonderful and so lovely is exhibited, as may more
than equal any of the resembling scenes of the far-famed Isle of Wight…”
(Fowles 58)

Before the beginning of the story, the novel starts with a fragment from Hardy’s The
Riddle which describes a woman who stood at the shore watching over the sea. As it will be seen

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during the first chapter, the scene described in The Riddle is similar with the scene in which the
protagonist, Sarah Woodruff, is firstly seen by Charles.
The novel begins with a description of Lyme Regis and its Cobb a harbor quay where the
three main characters live: Ernestina, Sarah and Charles. The narrator makes a surprising
description of the Cobb comparing it to works of Henry Moore or Michelangelo:
“Primitive yet complex, elephantine but delicate; as full of subtle curves and
volumes as a Henry Moore or a Michelangelo; and pure, clean, salt, a patagon of
mass. I exaggerate? Perhaps, but I can put it to the test, for the Cobb has
changed very little since the year of which I write; though the town of Lyme has,
and the test is not fair if you look back towards land.” (Fowles 10)

Charles is a middle-aged bachelor who has a passion for paleontology. He is engaged with
Ernestina and because of that he needed to court her as it was accustomed in that time, so he spoke
in many occasions with her father. In one of their encounters, the two of them had an argument
about Darwin’s opinion about the origin of species:
“Your father ventured the opinion that Mr. Darwin should be exhibited in a cage
in the zoological gardens. In the monkey house. I tried to explain some of the
scientific arguments behind the Darwinian position. I was unsuccessful. Et voilà
tout. (…) He did say that he would not let his daughter marry a man who
considered his grandfather to be an ape. But I think on reflection he will that in
my case it was a titled ape.” (Fowles 12)

Charles is a passionate about Darwin and this could be a possible explication about his
obsession into classifying and naming, as the narrator says:
“Charles called himself a Darwinist, and yet he had not really understood
Darwin. But then, nor had Darwin himself. What that genius had upset was the
Linnaean Scala Naturae, the ladder of nature, whose great keystone, as essential
to it as the divinity of Christ to theology, was nulla species nova: a new species
cannot enter the world. This principle explains the Linnaean obsession with
classifying and naming, with fossilizing the existent. We can see it now as a
foredoomed attempt to stabilize and fix what is in reality a continuous flux, and
it seems highly appropriate that Linnaeus himself finnaly went mad; he knew he
was in a labyrinth, but not that it was one whose walls and passages were
eternally changing. Even Darwin never quite shook off the Swedish fetters, and
Charles can hardly be blamed for the thoughts that went through his mind as he
gazed up at the lias strata in the cliffs above him.” (Fowles 45)

As Fowles says, the vision of Sarah appeared to him one morning as he lay half asleep.
(Katherine Tarbox 60)
Sarah stands out because she is at the same time both unhappy and lonely and also
independent and mysterious. (Oana Florina Avornicesei 88) She lures Charles into falling in love
with her and breaking his engagement in order to marry her. She is thought to have had an affair

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with a French lieutenant, but when she attracts Charles into her room, it turns out that she is a
virgin. She had lied because she found her lover with another woman, but the author seems to be
unable to understand her true motives because he never explains them to the reader. (Eliana
Cristina Ionoaia 115) This procedure may have been used in order to maintain the reader’s
attention throughout the novel.
Secondly, I would like to explain the relationship between Charles and Ernestina and also
that of Charles and Sarah.
Charles and Ernestina communicate in an elegant way, in a Victorian-like way of talking:
“My dear Tina, we have paid our homage to Neptune. He will forgive us if we
now turn our backs on him.
You are not very gallant.
What does that signify, pray?
I should have thought you might have wished to prolong an opportunity to hold
my arm without impropriety.
How delicate we’ve become.
We are not in London now.
At the North Pole, if I’m not mistaken.
I wish to walk to the end” (Fowles 11)

They make barriers with their words in order to keep away the feeling. As it is seen
throughout the novel, Charles often gets lost in his rhetoric and the narrator tells us that he has
more than one vocabulary which it is explained with the aid of Charles Darwin’s theory about
cyptic coloration which basically says that in order to survive, one needs to blend with one’s
surroundings. That is why Charles speaks in one way with Ernestina and in another way with
Sarah.
Charles fails to have a conversation with Sarah because he has no language to use with her.
(Tarbox 62) She represents a breath of fresh air, as Katherine Tarbox says, for Charles’ rigueur
although, at first, she is seen as a somewhat crazy person:
“Miss Woodruff is not insane. Far from it. But she suffers from great attacks of
melancholia. They are doubtless partly attributable to remorse. But also, I fear, to her
fixed disillusion that the lieutenant is an honorable man and will one day return to her.
For that reason she may be frequently seen haunting the sea approaches to our town. Mr.
Fursey-Harris himself has earnestly endeavored to show to the woman the hopelessness,
not to say the impropriety, of her behavior. Not to put too fine a point upon it, madam,
she is slightly crazed” (Fowles 33).

Sarah’s values are based on honesty, straightforwardness and integrity as Katherine Tarbox
says. Her emotions are seen through the eyes of Charles because he projects onto her his rebel half.
Both Charles and the narrator give information about Sarah, but they don’t know everything about

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her. So, the reader is left to decide if they stick with their descriptions or they will understand
Sarah as she really is: an independent woman who manages to take care of herself irrespective of
what people think about her. But she is not the only one who is distorted. Ernestina, his fiancée is
projected with Charles’ ideal perfection. The girl is his feminine equivalent and they share the
same characteristics. Both of them use rhetoric in their usual conversation, but eventually Charles
will see that Ernestina was only an idea for him. The same thing happens with Sarah. Charles sees
her as “the fictional character of his imagination”. (Tarbox 63 – 66) For him, she seems
independent and mysterious and she managed to change him as the author says:

“Charles did not know it, but in those brief poised seconds above the waiting
sea, in that luminous evening silences broken only by the waves’ quite wash, the
whole Victorian Age was lost. And I do not mean he had taken the wrong path”
(John Fowles, page 72)

Another important factor is that Charles is not the only one who characterizes Sarah, but
also Ernestina. She says only what she knows, mainly that Sarah is called by the fisherman “the
French Lieutenant’s Woman”. Here is what is says about Sarah in her conversation with Charles:
“But I can guess who it is. It must be poor Tragedy.
Tragedy?
A nickname. One of her nicknames.
And what are the others?
The fisherman have a gross name for her.
My dear Tina, you can surely—
They call her the French Lieutenant’s … Woman.
Indeed. And is she so ostracized that she has to spend her days out here?
She is… a little mad. Let us turn. I don’t like to go near her.
(…)
But I’m intrigued. Who is this French lieutenant?
A man she is said to have…
Fallen in love with?
Worse than that.” (Fowles 13)

Thirdly, I will point Fowles’ apposition between Ernestina and Sarah through the novel.
The first one is the good one and the second one is her opposite. One is faithful, the other one is
not. Ernestina is classy whereas Sarah dresses like a man. One is the adept of indoors events and
the other one is a woman of nature. Fowles choice of making them so opposite is so extreme that
they seem representation rather then people (Tarbox 65). Here is a description of Ernestina:

“Ernestina had exactly the right face for her age; that is, small-chinned, oval,
delicate as a violet. You may see it still in the drawings of the great illustrators
of the time – in Phiz’s work, in John Leech’s. Her gray eyes and the paleness of

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her skin only enhanced the delicacy of the rest. At first meetings she could cast
down her eyes very prettily, as if she might faint should any gentleman dare to
address her. But there was a minute tilt at the corner of her eyelids, and a
corresponding tilt at the corner of her lips – to extend the same comparison, as
faint as the fragrance of February violets – that denied, very subtly but quite
unmistakably, her apparent total obeisance to the great god Man. An orthodox
Victorian would perhaps have mistrusted that imperceptible hint of a Becky
Sharp; but to a man like Charles she proved irresistible.” (Fowles 27)

In this extract is to be seen the manner in which the author characterizes Ernestina. She has
the perfect face, the perfect eyes and she behaves as a young lady should, but as it is to be seen,
Ernestina is nothing but a pretty face, whereas Sarah is clever, intelligent and she could see into
people’s souls.

“Sarah was intelligent, but her real intelligence belonged to a rare kind; one that
would certainly pass undetected in any of our modern tests of the faculty. It was
not in the least analytical or problem-solving, and it is no doubt symptomatic
that one subject that had cost her agonies to master was mathematics. Nor did it
manifest itself in the form of any particular vivacity or wit, even in her happier
days. It was rather an uncanny – uncanny in one who had never been to London,
never mixed in the world – ability to classify other people’s worth: to
understand them, in the fullest sense of that word.” (Fowles 47)

It is possible that her sense of understanding others made Charles fall in love with her.
Maybe he got bored with the idea of Ernestina trying to be as rhetorical as he was and he wanted
someone who was able to understand him, someone like Sarah. And she did understand him, she
even changed him, making him end his Victorian way of behaving and she made him embrace the
new way, the Modern way.

As a conclusion I might say that relations in John Fowles The French Lieutenant’s Woman
are quite complicated, as Charles loves both Ernestina and Sarah and, to make matters even more
complicated, the author gives three different endings to the novel.

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Bibliography:
Primary source:
Fowles, John The French Lieutenant’s Woman, The New American Library, 1970, USA.
Secondary source:
Tarbox, Katherine The Art Of John Fowles, University Of Georgia Press, 1988, USA.
Catană, Simona Elisabeta The critical rub: to read, to write, perchance to dream, Editura
Universității din București, 2007, București.

Wikipedia contributors. “The French Lieutenant's Woman”. Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia.
Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, 15 Apr. 2012. Web. 17 May. 2012.