INTERTEXTUALITY

THE F RENC H LI EUTE NANT’S WOMA N

  John Fowles’ self-reflexive novel, with multiply
ending is a historiographic metafiction, which
draws attention to a work's status as an artifact
and forces readers to be aware that they are
reading a fictional work .
Like many postmodern novels The French
Lieutenant’s Woman questions a possibility of
representing the truth

It’s not just an “imitation of Victorian novels”, its

gripping narrating is accompanied by a carefully
metafictional framework
THE TEXT IS NOT A UNIFIED, ISOLATED OBJECT
THAT GIVES A SINGULAR MEANING, BUT AN
ELEMENT OPEN TO VARIOUS INTERPRETATIONS
 due to intertextuality the action the text includes comments on the
of the novel is placed in a narrative time as well as the time
historically appropriate context, of the writing of the novel, to
the contemporary reader has remind the reader that this novel -
‘realer than real’ Victorian like any novel, even XIX century
atmosphere, as if such a reader novel is a piece of rhetoric
simply reads Victorian texts constructed by its author, a
realistically drawn world but not
‘the real world’
 Various forms of intertextuality
The perfect combinations of the world of logic and reason with the
fictional world of love, separation and reunion - man of science
(Darwin) and social thinker (Marx) are posited alongside the men
of fiction and poetry (Tennyson, Hardy, Arnold, Austen)

 Hypertexts - the texts of the Victorian novelists (Thomas

Hardy, Charlotte Bronte, George Eliot, Jane Austin), author
reflects the traditional themes, scenes and plots of Victorian
novels

 Paratexts – the title of the novel, epigraphs to each chapter

There are some similarities between Sarah, the main character of
the novel, and Tess of the d’Urbervilles, as well as Eustacia Vye
and Sue Bridehead; Sarah also resembles Hawthorne’s Hester
Prynne from Scarlet Letter

In concert with it Fowles' refers to Sarah as both a Victorian

character and as a desirable “modern woman”: “Modern women
like Sarah exist, and I have never understood them”
(Fowles 1992:85)
Ernestina and Charles are enjoying a walk at the
Cobb: “These are the very steps that Jane Austen
made Louisa Musgrove fall down in Persuasion”

– the combination of clearly fictional, intertextual

and real elements augments and at the same time
subverts the impression of realism
In postmodernism, a text that is not influenced by
intertexts is almost considered to be an
impossibility, novels have always used
intertextuality, which has traditionally been
recognized as interaction between the reader and the
author
 “There were no Doric temples in the Undercliff;
but here was a Calypso” (Fowles 1992:125).

The allusion evokes the same feelings in both the

reader and Charles - Sahar is Calypso, a temptress, a
demon, a wicked woman who for some reason
wanted to seduce Charles
 “He had come …in full armour, ready to slay the
dragon – and now the damsel had broken all the
rules. No chains, no sobs, no beseeching hands”
(Fowles 1992: 381)
Charles and the reader certainly have the same
perception: the main character is just a poor knight
with dull armor, and his chivalrous acts seem to do
more harm than good.
 
 Intertextual references are employed to place the action of the
novel in a historically appropriate context, to represent
Victorian society to the contemporary reader, to set up possible
interpretations about the main characters

 In concert with it the implicit purpose of intertextuality is to

have a critical or ironical stance towards the texts that are used
and towards the book itself, to make the reader realize two
things at a time: that it is a fictional text, while this very text at
the same time tries to convey a realistic impression of XIX
century England