A Study of the Construction of Female Identity: John Fowles’ The French Lieutenant’s Woman

Challenging the formal, existential and intellectual problems of its era, The French Lieutenant’s Woman aroused controversy in the reading public and especially among literary critics after its publication in 1969. Like Fowles’ former novels, The French Lieutenant’s Woman reflects its author’s constant concern with themes such as the role of the artist in creating a literary work, individual freedom, the issue of identity etc. Although the novel explicitly touches on other issues such as the hypocrisy of religious belief, which is represented in the figure of Mrs. Poulteney, or class conflictillustrated in upper class attitudes toward their servants- The French Lieutenant’s Woman has also greatly appealed to feminist critics. John Fowles once said that The French Lieutenant’s Woman grew out of the image of a cloaked Victorian woman standing at the end of a quay and staring out to sea. With her back turned, [the woman] represented a reproach on the Victorian age. An outcast (as cited in Foster 1994). This picture of a socially outcast woman, which remains central to the novel, has generated diverse interpretations by feminist and pro-feminist readers. These perceptions range over those who consider The French Lieutenant’s Woman as an almost ideal feminist fictional work (Byrd, 1984, p. 306) and those like Magali Cornier Michael(1987), for instance, who assume that the novel is a traditional representation of women’s role and thus, falls short of being a feminist novel (p.235).