Games with Fictions: Readings of the Female Masquerade

in Fowles’s The French Lieutenant’s Woman

In this paper I wish to discuss the multiple games that are played with images of

the Victorian female in John Fowles’s The French Lieutenant’s Woman, where

the figure of the female other is dominant. As I am going to illustrate, the

identification of the woman with the other without, marks her liberation from an

imposed femininity, and reflects the release of the text from its conventions and

its opening up to multiple possibilities.

The novel, through the constant play between the within and the without,

through the interchange of masks and personae, seems to celebrate fictional

games and the plurality they involve. The narrative focuses on the paradox of

devising dividing lines, of imposing order where disorder reigns. The Victorian

period – the without that the narrative inhabits – with its preoccupation with an

order and fixity seriously disturbed by various emerging narratives, and perceived

through the eyes of the postmodern, becomes an ideal setting for this endeavour.

The focus falls on the female character who is caught in multiple fictions,

rejoicing over her artificiality which is, after all, supposed to be woman’s nature.

Nietzsche wrote, notoriously, in Beyond Good and Evil:

[woman] does not want truth: what is truth to a woman! From the

very first nothing has been more alien, repugnant, inimical to woman

than truth – her great art is the lie, her supreme concern is appearance

and beauty. Let us confess it, we men: it is precisely this art and this

instinct in woman which we love and honour … . (164)

Willingly embracing her multiple selves Sarah, the main character in the novel,

delights in woman’s close affinity with the “art” of lying. It is because of the

enigma of her fictions that Charles falls for Sarah, for the mystery that she

represents and for the numerous constructs that she makes up in her effort to

seduce him.

Sarah is a woman of multiple appearances, multiple masks that she can

put on or take off at will, in order to gain her goals, thus leading the

spectator/reader to the void of her fictions. It was Joan Riviere in her influential

essay “Womanliness as a Masquerade”, published in 1929, who introduced the

concept of the female masquerade and the void it entails. Riviere points out that

“Womanliness … could be assumed and worn as a mask, both to hide the

possession of masculinity and to avert the reprisals expected if she was found to

possess it” (33). However, the masculine “nature” of the woman is also presented

as an artificial construct: “She has to treat the situation of displaying her

masculinity to men as a ‘game’, as something not real, as a ‘joke’” (39, my

emphasis). Both the feminine and the masculine nature of the woman, therefore,

are treated as veils, masks. Illustrating how the interplay of conflicts in modern

woman is resolved through the seduction of the masquerade, Riviere presents a

void in the games with masks that women have to play, since both the feminine

and masculine identity of her woman are treated as masks.

This void is celebrated in Fowles’s novel where the reader is presented

with a continuous interplay of words, texts, voices, spectacles that woman is

associated with. Origins are lost in a web of myths, stories and histories, while

the narrative becomes an endless mise en abyme of multiple texts which reflect

the fictional process.

Sarah is imprisoned, beginning from the title, in the role of the “French

Lieutenant’s Woman”. Captured within this persona fabricated by the text, within

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Charles’s gaze,1 within the gaze of the community, within the multiple stories

constructed by the people of Lyme, within the dominant Victorian images of

femininity,2 and within Victorian discourses, Sarah Woodruff seems to flow in a

sea of masks. Instead of appearing trapped within this game of multiple selves

however, Sarah manages to become its master. Not only does she embrace her

personae, but – as is revealed in Chapter 47 – she is the one who produces them.

She is presented as the author of her images, a spider weaving the web that

imprisons Charles and the unaware reader of the novel. From the seduced and

abandoned Victorian woman, she becomes the seducing and abandoning female.

Tony Jackson points out in his article “Charles and the Hopeful Monster:

Postmodern Evolutionary Theory in The French Lieutenant’s Woman” that

“[Sarah] … lead[s] Charles to retrace the painful steps of seduction,

abandonment, and public estrangement that reinforced her ‘natural’ condition”

(232).

Sarah embraces a plural discourse of mysterious, romantic, seductive,

untamed personae. She can put on and take off her masks at will. She cannot be

contained only in one image, the one that is prepared for her by the title of the

text. She becomes Sarah Woodruff and Sarah Roughwood, the French

Lieutenant’s woman, the French Lieutenant’s whore, Tragedy, the Virgin Mary,

Eve, a serpent, a witch, a wild animal, a tiger, a London whore, a fallen woman, a

sinner, the scarlet woman of Lyme, the wicked woman of Lyme, a siren, a

Calypso, a specimen of the local flora, a sacrificial victim, an unfortunate

1 As Barry Olsen observes in his work John Fowles: “The impression created by Sarah

Woodruff is given to us from the perspective of Charles” (69).

2 Nina Auerbach, in her work Woman and the Demon: The Life of a Victorian Myth, suggests

that “The towering woman who in so many guises possessed the Victorian imagination appears

in art and literature as four central types: the angel, the demon, the old maid, and the fallen

woman” (63).

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woman, a woman of exceptional courage, the woman who stared, the woman in

black, a melancholic, a hysteric, a public scandal, a flame, a remarkable person,

an outcast, a frightened penitent, sweet and mysterious, dangerous, a sweet

enigma, an oxymoron, Delphic, a Sphinx.

The game with the texts is promoted even further by Sarah’s deliberate

enactment of many of her images. She performs, among others, the discourse of

Tragedy, of the fallen woman, of Mother Nature. As Katherine Tarbox suggests

in her article “The French Lieutenant’s Woman and the Evolution of Narrative”:

[Sarah] works to make it appear that she is living the fallen-woman

plot. Charles feels that she had “fallen into the clutches of a plausible

villain” (175). But at the same time she games with “fall” as a

concept, a gesture, and a word. Through a parody of falling she

locates an other sense of falling and turns the grim falling action of

the scarlet-woman plot into a liberatory flight. (94-95)

The importance of Sarah’s fall – a concept repeated throughout the

narrative in different forms – is foregrounded in the text, because it is through her

fall that she is introduced into the fiction of the Other woman. Sarah, as she

herself states in her confession to Charles, decides to undergo a sacrifice, in order

to enter the domain of the without:

“I [sacrificed a woman’s most precious possession] so that I should

never be the same again. … I do not mean that I knew what I did, that

it was in cold blood that I let Varguennes have his will of me. It

seemed to me then as if I threw myself off a precipice or plunged a

knife into my heart. It was a kind of suicide. … I knew no other way

to break out of what I was. …” (171, my emphasis)

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It is the fall in the sense of the loss of her virginity – the spilling of her blood –

that causes Sarah’s break from what she was, and signals her entrance into the

plurality of her fictions. The end, her “suicide” as she calls it, is a new beginning,

a beginning which is going to take her out of the silence of her existence. Maurice

Blanchot in his work The Space of Literature has elaborated on the close affinity

between suicide and writing. According to his suggestions, every suicide marks

the desire for a new beginning:

The weakness of suicide lies in the fact that whoever commits it is

still too strong. He is demonstrating a strength suitable only for a

citizen of the world. Whoever kills himself could, then, go on living:

whoever kills himself is linked to hope, the hope of finishing it all,

and hope reveals his desire to begin, to find the beginning again in the

end, to inaugurate in that ending a meaning which, however, he

means to challenge by dying. (103)

Sarah’s “suicide” does bring new life and new texts. It can be seen as a plural

concept and can accommodate multiple readings; it implies, among other things,

her literal fall (from the cliff, or from the stairs of her hotel in Exeter – another

fictional fall, her fall at Charles’s feet), the primal fall from Eden and the

seduction of man, but also the fall of Mother Nature through evolutionary

discourse, that I shall briefly focus on.

Sarah seems to stand for the New Nature of many Victorian artists that has

replaced the Great Mother, the loving nurturing mother; has evolved into a new

being, an enchantress who lays a trap for men and thirsts for their blood. Three of

the epigraphs used in the novel are from Darwin’s The Origin of Species, all

underlining the change of conditions and the inevitability of evolution; the

principle of “natural selection” is going to cause the suffering of many species

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unable to conform to the changing environment (pp. 17, 145, 360).3 James Eli

Adams in his article “Woman Red in Tooth and Claw: Nature and the Feminine

in Tennyson and Darwin” presents the transformations that took place in the

feminine representation of nature in the poetry of Tennyson after the introduction

of the theory of evolution.4

The epigraphs from Tennyson, abundantly used in the novel, foreground the

image of a new being that Sarah comes to embody: the New Great Mother,

motherly and at the same time ruthless. The novel appears to offer a

personification of the paradox of Darwin’s female nature, with a Sarah who

manipulates Charles, whose fall gradually transforms him into a new being.

George Levine in his work Darwin and the Novelists: Patterns of Science in

Victorian Fiction stresses this paradox entailed in Darwin’s view of nature:

Using metaphors to reverse the implications remythologizes the world

[Darwin] has tried to demystify. The scrutinizing, meticulous, always

alert “natural selection” is usefully imagined as a living active force,

ranging through a world shaped not by some external, designing

intelligence, but by the multitudinous possibilities and chance

collocations of local and individual entities and conditions. “Natural

3 Darwin, explaining his theory of natural selection in The Origin of Species, does not avoid

commenting on the superiority of a female nature over mankind: “Man can act only on external

and visible characters: nature cares nothing for appearances, except in so far as they may be

useful to any being. She can act on every internal organ, on every shade of constitutional

difference, on the whole machinery of life. Man selects only for his own good; Nature only for

that of the being which she tends. Every selected character is fully exercised by her; and the

being is placed under well-suited conditions of life” (132, my emphases).

4 Although James Eli Adams presents Tennyson reacting to an evolutionary discourse

introduced by Darwin, it is well known that the poet wrote In Memoriam in 1849, that is, ten

years before Darwin’s The Origin of Species was published (1859). However, Tennyson must

have been influenced by the discourse of evolution as it was introduced by Lyell in The

Principles of Geology (1830-33).

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selection” answers no prayers, and though Darwin makes it motherly,

careful, intent, seizing the best opportunities for its children, it can be

relentless. (117)

This “relentless” nature, therefore, seems to the Victorian poets to destroy its

children, to come in direct contrast to the nurturing qualities of Mother Nature,

since “the vision of incessant struggle” that Darwin presents “also invites a more

somber image of nature: not a nurse, but an angel of death, a monstrous agent that

rigidly and impersonally lays waste its own dependents” (Adams, 13). Nature,

which seems to destroy its children, becomes a new terrifying female being, the

double of the dead Great Mother.

Sarah, perhaps in an embodiment of this new being, is after her second

fall transformed from a Woodruff into a Roughwood (she changes her name and

disappears after Charles’s seduction and her second fall), a personification of the

rough wood that lies in the without of the community, considered as the place of

sin, the site where lovers go to satiate their forbidden desires. The narrator in

Chapter 12 informs us that the place was “a de facto Lover’s Lane” (92); “one

had only to speak of a boy or a girl as ‘one of the Ware Commons kind’ to tar

them for life. The boy must henceforth be a satyr; and the girl, a hedge-

prostitute” (93). Moreover, we are informed that “a committee of ladies,

generalled by Mrs Poulteney, had pressed the civic authorities to have the track

gated, fenced and closed” (93); that was very much the method Mrs Poulteney

wished to apply to Sarah, in order to suppress her wild nature, which insisted on

remaining outside her control in the without of the community.

Sarah Roughwood, in one of the predominant metaphors in the novel, is

transformed into a woman “red in tooth and claw”, to use a line from Tennyson’s

In Memoriam, the new Mother Nature which has the power to select and preserve

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only the fit. It is quite significant that the fourth and most important encounter

between Sarah and Charles starts with an epigraph from Tennyson’s In

Memoriam: “Are God and Nature then at strife, / That Nature lends such evil

dreams? / So careful of the type she seems, / So careless of the single life?”

(160). The epigraph at this point in the narrative seems to ring a warning bell

about Sarah’s nature. It appears at the moment when she is going to stage her best

performance for Charles and finally lure him into her fictions. She appears fragile

and hurt in the warm glow of the fire, ready to be seduced by the male. However,

as the reader and Charles later realise the whole episode was a mere performance

aiming to seduce Charles.

The text, therefore, seems to envelop Sarah within Tennyson’s image of

Nature as “a woman red in tooth and claw”. The nature that Charles enters in the

novel, the “English Garden of Eden” (71) and “one of the strangest coastal

landscapes” (70), as it is described by the narrator, shares many of Sarah’s

qualities:

The cultivated chequer of green and red-brown breaks, with a kind of

joyous indiscipline, into a dark cascade of trees and undergrowth.

There are no roofs. If one flies low enough one can see that the terrain

is very abrupt, cut by deep chasms and accented by strange bluffs and

towers of chalk and flint, which loom over the lush foliage around

them like the walls of ruined castles. From the air … but on foot this

seemingly unimportant wilderness gains a strange extension. People

have been lost in it for hours … It has also, like all land that has never

been worked or lived on by man, its mysteries, its shadows, its

dangers – only too literal ones geologically, since there are crevices

and sudden falls that can bring disaster … (70-71)

8

So this dark, lush and dangerous landscape can “bring disaster” if one is not

careful and falls into one of its traps, if one, instead of keeping a safe distance –

the “from the air” – decides to enter it and walk in it. It is a nature full of mystery

and secrets which Charles is determined to discover. Charles’s desire to conquer

this unknown wood is identified with his desire for Sarah Woodruff, and the

unknown, mysterious territory that she inhabits. She is a new land, full of games

and enigmas, that lures him into her domain and kills him.

In Chapter 47 the reader, together with Charles, suddenly realises that

Sarah’s “suicide” was fictional; in reality, her blood has not been shed, the knife

has not plunged into her. After her actual “suicide”, all Sarah’s falls until then,

literal or metaphorical, are revealed to have been fictional. As Peter Conradi:

“Charles discovers that, despite having played the role of fallen woman, Sarah

was in fact a virgin. She thus combines both halves of the Victorian typology: at

exactly the point when she ceases to be a virgin she begins for the first time to

appear to have been one” (65).

However, although her actual fall comes at this moment, the concept of the

woman’s fall is suddenly blurred. It is the male fall that is foregrounded with a

Charles, wearing a blood-stained shirt and behaving like the seduced one who,

“thunderstruck”, realises that he has just lost his most precious virtue. In an

important scene, the narrator describes Charles a few minutes after the seduction-

scene:

Some fifteen minutes later you might have seen Charles stark naked

and engaged in an unaccustomed occupation: that of laundering. He

had his bloodstained garments pressed against the side of the vast hip-

bath that had been filled for him and was assiduously rubbing them

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with a piece of soap. He felt foolish and did not make a very good job

of it. (355)

Sarah leads Charles to a murder/fall, the murder of his fixed order, and he

struggles – through this blood-laundering – to get rid of the evidence of the

crime. However, there is no turning back; he has already fallen into Miss

Roughwood’s crevices, into her (textual) abysses, and now he has to inhabit the

plural discourse of the without. As Katherine Tarbox suggests: “He is the

seducer, the seduced, abandoner and abandoned, hero, heroine, victim and villain

all in one” (98).

Sarah seems like a Siren calling Charles to her fictitious and mysterious

domain of the without, arousing his desire, but somehow never satisfying it.

Charles does not follow on the footsteps of his ancestor Odysseus; he keeps his

ears open and, not being tied by any sailors, is doomed to be lost to the

temptation. Sarah, like the Sirens’ song, remains an absence, a monstrosity that

seduces him, leaving only her image behind. “Sarah … lances her way into

Charles’s imagination, imprinting there her face, indeed her whole being. … She

is ontologically doubled in the novel, and in a very real sense she inhabits

Charles, haunts him” (Tarbox, 97). She arouses his desire, destroys him and his

order, leads to his fall, but never satisfies his desires. At the moments she seduces

him – or vice versa – she refuses to play this role any longer and abandons him.

Her actions, covered by a veil that hides “the secret meaning of her deeds”, will

always haunt him.5

5 Adams puts it in very interesting terms in his article: “… the figure of Nature identifies a new

conception of the natural world with the enigma of a femininity which withdraws from, or

openly defies, male desire. That desire and its frustration are in turn played out in two distinct

but related spheres: as the collective male desire that enforces dominant conventions of

femininity, and as an individual male’s demand for a more personal responsiveness on the part

of a particular woman. … What is “the secret meaning of her deeds”? Behind the veil, behind

10

Nature, then, is transformed into a Sphinx which presents man with the

ultimate enigma. It is relevant here to quote an excerpt from a chapter of

Carlyle’s Past and Present entitled “The Sphinx”:

Nature, like the Sphinx, is of womanly celestial loveliness and

tenderness: the face and bosom of a goddess, but ending in claws and

the body of a lioness. There is in her a celestial beauty … but there is

also a darkness, a ferocity, fatality, which are infernal. … Answer the

riddle, it is well with thee. Answer it not, pass on regarding it not, it

will answer itself; the solution is a thing of teeth and claws. (qtd. in

Adams, 8)

Fowles has incorporated this image into the character of Sarah, the alienated new

Sarah, in a personification of that Sphinx, refusing to provide Charles with any

answers about her actions. “‘Do not ask me to explain what I have done’”, she

tells him, “‘I cannot explain it. It is not to be explained’” (342).

How can the text be “mastered”, fully determined and understood? Words

seems to have their seduction, as the text envelops its subjects within its power,

while at the same time remaining always in the realm of the ungraspable, as

Blanchot points out in The Space of Literature:

The writer seems to be the master of his pen; he can become capable

of great mastery over words and over what he wants to make them

express. But his mastery only succeeds in putting him, keeping him in

contact with the fundamental passivity where the word, no longer

anything but its appearance – the shadow of the word – never can be

mastered or even grasped. It remains the ungraspable which is also the

unreleasable: the indecisive moment of fascination. (25)

the veil: the poet’s quest for solace is thwarted by that seductive yet disturbing emblem of

feminine mystery” (15-16).

11

The signified remains open, and the reader is left with multiple signifiers which

can be attached to it, in the same way that the novel offers multiple endings to the

narrative. Sarah, like a postmodern text, insists on remaining outside definition,

always flowing in and out, back and forth. Sarah’s enigma, made of fictions

coming from different ages, from past, present and future, always appears to

Charles outside the community barriers, in the forest or by the sea. It is

significant that at the very beginning of the novel she is introduced as “the other

figure” which “stood right at the seawardmost end … . Its clothes were black.

The wind moved them, but the figure stood motionless, staring, staring out to sea,

more like a living memorial to the drowned, a figure from myth, than any proper

fragment of the petty provincial day” (11, my emphasis). She is depicted as the

outside, that which cannot be contained within the “petty provincial day”, an

object of observation, an “it”, which however proves to be the subject of fictions.

The Victorian community fails to accommodate her, as she is “a figure

from myth”, or should we say “myths”, a figure that constantly plays with the

construction of fictions. Like the post-structural text, Sarah remains plural, a

fascinating game with absences. Wearing all these masks simultaneously, she

transcends all barriers and imprisonments and shows a unique quality of fluidity

and plurality, which comes to be shared by Charles and the text that

accommodates them. She is an oxymoron reproduced and presented in the text

through multiple games played on the characters and the readers by Sarah, by the

narrator and by the author-persona in a novel which oscillates between Victorian

realism and twentieth century postmodernism.

Sarah embraces and explodes meaning at the same time, remaining for

ever in the realm of the ungraspable. What are all these games if not a celebration

of the play-quality entailed in the construction of Sarah’s text. Writing within the

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discourse of post-structuralism, according to Robert Young, ceases to be a matter

of “a representation of something else [and becomes] the limitlessness of its own

‘play’” (18).

The play-quality is further emphasised through the absence of teleologies;

the author/God-father has disappeared, just as the teleology of a divine being is

dissolved through evolutionary discourse. As George Levine suggests, “The

Darwinian narrative unfolds ‘naturally,’ that is, without external intrusion. It is,

as it were, self-propelled, unfolding according to laws of nature with no initiating

intention and no ultimate objective” (18). This brings us to the concept of the

dissolution of the relationship of filiation between author and text, which Barthes

discusses in “Theory of the Text”:

[textual analysis] will contest … the critical myth according to which

the work is caught in a purely evolutionary movement, as if it always

had to be attached to, appropriated by, the (civil, historical, affective)

person of an author, who would be its father. To the metaphor of

filiation, of organic “development”, textual analysis prefers the

metaphor of the network, of the intertext, of an overdetermined, plural

field. (43)

Sarah is a mirror image of the other author, a “god” with a small “g”, “the

freedom that allows other freedoms to exist”, not fully in control of the creatures

in her mind, to paraphrase the author-persona’s comment in Chapter 13 (99).

Apart from plurality, chance – an integral part of Darwinian nature – also

becomes an important rule of the game. When Sarah constructs her narrative for

Charles and envelops him inside it, there is always the illusion of the possibility

of escape. Sarah prepares the whole scene of Charles’s seduction into her text

(she buys the bandage, she prepares the room, she sends Charles only a card with

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her address, she performs the fall from the stairs of the hotel, she commands the

fire at the most crucial moment of tension), but he always seems to be left with

the choice. The letter with the address that she sent him “tormented him, …

obsessed him, … confused him”; as the narrator informs us it was an “oxymoron;

luring-receding, subtle-simple, proud-begging, defending-accusing. … But above

all it seemed to set Charles a choice” (328). Charles is faced with the “anxiety of

freedom – that is, the realization that one is free and the realization that being free

is a situation of terror” (328).

He is in that limbo state between the ultimate seduction by and escape

from the female text which has already written him within it. In the second of the

two endings, Charles decides to leave the imprisonment of Sarah’s narrative and

his eyes are directed towards the New Land of America. But what does this New

Land stand for, if not another Sarah, the unexplored territory that will contain

Charles’s desire for the unknown?

Seduced and seducing, free and unfree, the One and the Other, the New

and the Old, the text celebrates the ultimate plurality of Sarah’s fictions which

inhabit the within, but always belong to the without.

Works Cited

Adams, James Eli. “Woman Red in Tooth and Claw: Nature and the Feminine in

Tennyson and Darwin”. Victorian Studies 33 (Autumn 1989): 7-27.

Auerbach, Nina. Woman and the Demon: The Life of a Victorian Myth.

Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1982.

Barthes, Roland. “Theory of the Text”. 1973. Trans. Ian McLeod. Untying the

Text: A Post-Structuralist Reader. Ed. Robert Young. Boston, London &

Henley: Routledge & Kegan Paul. 1981. 31-47.

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Blanchot, Maurice. The Space of Literature. 1955. Trans. Ann Smock. Lincoln &

London: University of Nebraska Press, 1992.

Conradi, Peter. John Fowles. London & New York: Methuen, 1982

Darwin, Charles. The Origin of Species. 1859. Ed. J.W. Burrow. Harmondsworth:

Penguin, 1974.

Fowles, John. The French Lieutenant’s Woman. 1969. London: Vintage, 1996.

Jackson, Tony E. “Charles and the Hopeful Monster: Postmodern Evolutionary

Theory in The French Lieutenant’s Woman”. Twentieth Century Literature

42 (Spring 1996): 221-42.

Levine, George. Darwin and the Novelists: Patterns of Science in Victorian

Fiction. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1988.

Nietzsche, Friedrich. Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the

Future. Trans. R. J. Hollingdale. 1973. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1990.

Olshen, Barry N. “The French Lieutenant’s Woman”. John Fowles. New York:

Frederick Ungar Publishing, 1978. 63-89.

Riviere, Joan. “Womanliness as a Masquerade”. 1929. Formations of Fantasy.

Eds. Victor Burgin et al. London: Routledge, 1986. 35-44.

Tarbox, Katherine. “The French Lieutenant’s Woman and the Evolution of

Narrative”. Twentieth Century Literature 42 (Spring 1996): 88-102.

Young, Robert. “Post-Structuralism: An Introduction”. Untying the Text: A Post-

Structuralist Reader. Ed. Robert Young. Boston, London & Henley:

Routledge & Kegan Paul. 1981. 1-28.

Fotini ApostolouAristotle University, ThessalonikiGreece

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