Englishness, Ideology, and Identity: Debating Conceptions of Britishness and Englishness
Defining Englishness remains a difficult endeavour, that is why we would first focus on some corner-stones throughout history that have led to the current understanding of Englishness from a diachronic perspective. Thereafter, we would outline how Englishness and Britishness tend to be distinguished nowadays in a synchronic approach. When taking a look at the historical progress of how national identity was understood, it is remarkable that the term “Englishness” itself was apparently first introduced as late as 1805 [44, p. 1], and the first book with a title containing the term was published only in 1956 [57]. As Paul Langford remarks, the “invention” of the term is thus of relatively recent origin, which does not mean, however, that an idea of national identification had not existed earlier [44, p. 1]. Antony Easthope argues that “the great foundational moment for Englishness” [26, p. 28] was the period between 1650 and 1700, i.e. before the Acts of Union and the “forging” of a common British identity that Linda Colley traced in her seminal publication [11, p. 21].
However, before “discovering” a distinct national awareness that opposed an overall British identity at the beginning of the 20th century [42, p. 202], the English rather identified themselves in terms of regional identities and “thought of themselves as either locals or cosmopolitans” [42, p. 120]. According to Linda Colley, the conception of Britishness was fundamentally forged in the course of the Acts of Union in 1707. For decades then, the English as the majority of the British were not clearly identified, as Christopher Bryant points out: “For the English, Britishness came to subsume Englishness, so that the two were often indistinguishable; for the Scots, the Welsh and later the Irish, Britishness was more of an overlay” [16, p. 394]. As Krishan Kumar remarks, English national identity was not a clear-cut concept but rather was connected to the project of imperialism, since the English would take pride in their role as empire-builders [42, p. 10]. A significant “moment of Englishness” can be identified at the end of the 19th century [42, p. 25]. In his study “Englishness: Twentieth Century Popular Culture and the Forming of English Identity”(2009), Simon Featherstone aptly shows that a number of literary accounts and performances in popular culture of the early 20th century illustrate a rediscovery if not a revival of English traditions [28]. Englishness became associated with images of what we now mainly think of as a traditional, rural, idyllic England closely connected to the landscape as a counterpoint to the industrialized cities and areas. Literature helped to create and disseminate images connected to this “original” perception of national identity.
In recent decades, the attention to the problem of self-identification has increased. One of the types of identity is national identity, which is understood as a complex of “collective attitudes and beliefs that characterize a group of people as a nation” [3, p. 158]. This notion acquires relevance in the modern world, which is under the influence of globalization processes and counter anti-globalism.
One of the first problems of national identity was delivered in respect of British culture, which has the highest level of public reflection. As a result, the notion “Englishness” has appeared, describing the features of national character and the way of life of the British. It is believed that the main components of “Englishness” were issued by the end of the 19th century. [13, p. 2] The term “Englishness” in the contemporary literary criticism is the subject of constant discussion and clarification.
In order to explore and highlight the differences between Englishness and Britishness as they have been understood in the last two decades, we propose to examine them on two levels from a synchronic perspective: firstly, in terms of the context in which they are referred to, and secondly, with regard to the attributesthey tend to be associated with. On the first level, concerning the contextin which the concepts are used, it is apparent that Britishness is more often a reference in political and legal discourses requiring political correctness, while the term Englishness is predominantly used in the cultural sphere. Bearing this in mind helps to explain why narratives originating from a national political and media context (e.g. the BBC) generally refer to Britain and Britishness.
In contrast to Britishness, Englishness is generally referred to in cultural discourses, including literary ones [13, p. 27]. In addition to novels, this is also mirrored in the disciplines that are interested in Englishness; publications about literature, (popular) culture, music, art, media, tourism, architecture, humour and many more are almost exclusively concerned with Englishness and not with Britishness. Although the narrative that would be analyzed in this study at times also challenge ideologies linked to ideas of Britishness, our own study is primarily concerned with constructions Englishness. This also holds true for the second level that needs to be discussed when differentiating between Englishness and Britishness.
On the level of attributesthat tend to be attached to each of the concepts, a main distinction between Englishness and Britishness may at first glance even seem surprising: the focus on a redefined perception of Englishness does not, as could be suspected, entail exclusive values connected to a white, male, middle-class identity in the way it was understood in the earlier 20th century. Instead, Krishan Kumar observe that attributes have become attached to this new version of Englishness that involve inclusion, democracy and egalitarianism, multiculturalism and openness to other cultures, while Britishness tends to be associated with aspects such as backward looking traditionalism, hierarchy, conservatism, imperialism and xenophobia [42, p. 105]. This is also reminiscent of a statement by Bernard Crick, who observed already in 1991: ‘“British’ is a political and legal concept best applied to the institutions of the UK state, to common citizenship and common political arrangements. It is not a cultural term, nor does it correspond to any real sense of a nation” [24, p. 97]. Britishness might then be seen as “a set of institutions and bundle of interests” [33, p. 7] attached to a multinational state rather than a common feeling for a shared national identity.
Literature is, and always has been, a central medium for the negotiation of national identity, and English literature can look back on numerous narratives that deal with the state of the nation, national character and identities. The impression that the English literary canon is often reduced to a number of outstanding authors and their works has been highlighted in several studies concentrating on the relation between literature and Englishness. The English canon underwent a comprehensive process of “formation” during the first half of the 20th century, and has since exerted a tremendous influence on national culture and identity: “English culture, at its deepest level, is seen as created by a series of great “national” poets, dramatists and novelists. Their writing embodies values, whole ways of life, which express the aspirations of the national culture at its best and most characteristic” [42, p. 215]. The English preference for structuring the national literary history and heritage according to outstanding writers and “a clear preference for particulars [...] and concrete “facts” [50, p. 166] mirrors the way in which both Englishness and the English canon are organized in general; this is to say that instead of promulgating abstract definitions and trends, individual authors (in English literature) and icons (of Englishness) tend to be listed as pars-pro-to to elements as a means of facilitating an understanding of the overall notion of Englishness and its canon. As such, this approach itself exemplifies a “deep-rooted philosophic tradition” [26, p. 5] of the English, namely empiricism.
One of the most influential wartime narratives is George Orwell’s 1941 essay on English national identity, which presents a paradigm in the discourse on Englishness: Orwell hints at the particular habits, the unique weather conditions and the countryside as distinct features of Englishness. The English novel as it existed between the mid-nineteenth and early twentieth century can be characterized by realism as a traditional mode of writing; this in turn has become associated with literary representations of a traditional concept of Englishness. As an innovative mode of writing, the role of postmodernism in twentieth-century English literature and in representations of Englishness is evaluated differently and is thus a crucial topic when considering questions regarding literary tradition and innovation. Similarly, comical understatement and irony have been evaluated as traditional English features [26, p. 96.], but are also prevalent aspects of postmodern novels. Apparently, a number of essential and canonized works by celebrated authors who tackled questions of national character and identity have influenced the way in which the concept of Englishness has developed throughout history. Scholars have been able to identify “heydays” in cultural and literary history that have formed and fostered traditional images of Englishness.
John Fowles is one of the first who began to consider that question in his works. In 1964, he wrote an essay, “On Being English, not British”, and in his novel “The French Lieutenant’s Woman” (1969) he illustrated his ideas by creating a stylized Victorian novel. The author seeks to show that “Britishness” has no relationship to “Englishness”. In his essay, he notes, “Britain” is a passport word, comfortable for politics and organization. In all fundamental cases of personal order, I am English, not British” [31, p. 3].
Chapter 2.
ENGLISHNESS: THE CONCEPTION OF ENGLISH NATIONAL IDENTITY IN JOHN FOWLES’S NOVEL “THE FRENCH LIEUTENANT’S WOMAN”
John Fowles’s reputation as an important contemporary author rests on his novels and essays that incorporate elements of mystery, realism, and existential thought. An allusive writer, Fowles has experimented with such traditional prose forms as the mystery novel, the Victorian novel, and the medieval tale, and his writings are characterized by strong narration; vital, resourceful characters confronted with complicated situations; and lavish settings permeated with references to historical events, legends, and art. Other distinguishing features of Fowles’s works include his rejection of the omniscient narrator and his use of ambiguous, open endings lacking resolution. Fowles believed his responsibility as an artist demanded that his characters have the freedom to choose and to act within their limitations. This practice parallels his conception of “authentic” human beings, or people who resist conformity by exercising free will and independent thought [12].
It was in England’s south-western countryside, where the family moved to escape the German air raids of World War II, that Fowles first experienced the “mystery and beauty” of the natural world, the importance of which is evident in his fiction, philosophical writings, and his avocation as an amateur naturalist. As a novelist Fowles made his debut in 1963 with his novel “The Collector”. Though not his first attempt at a novel – Fowles had produced several manuscripts since 1952 – it was the first he deemed worthy of publication. Fowles’s second novel “The Magus” appeared in 1965. Since 1966, Fowles has lived in Lyme Regis, a coastal town in southern England and the setting for “The French Lieutenant’s Woman” published in 1969. This novelis considered his best work. It is a pastiche; an attack on Victorian conventions. Malcolm Bradbury holds that the novel is “telling one of the era’s key fables the male hero faced with the choice between the fair and the dark lady, between sentiment and sensuality, social reaffirmation and danger” [14, p. 168]. It is a picturesque description of two epochs – the 1860s and 1960s, – the confrontation of the Victorian and the modern is reported, as Marie-Claire Simonetti has pointed out, “a highly self-conscious, contemporary narrator who comments on the nineteenth-century narrative from a twentieth-century perspective” [55, p. 301]. “The French Lieutenant’s Woman” was followed in 1977 by “a very long novel about Englishness” entitled “Daniel Martin”, which is also full of observations on aesthetics, philosophy, cultural history, the difference between Britain and the United States, archeology, and myth. In his murder mystery “A Maggot” (1985), Fowles returned to the layered structure of “The Magus”. He has also published poems, short stories, screenplays, translations, and diaries. The author’s philosophical basis for much of his work can be discerned in his early collection of essays and aphorisms, “The Ariosto” (1964), originally subtitled “A Self-Portrait in Ideas”, elucidating Fowles’s evolving personal credo in the context of explorations of other philosophies, notably existentialism, which seems to have had some influence on him, as have the ideas of Jung.
John Fowles (1926-2005) has the distinction of being both a best-selling novelist and one whose work has earned the respect of academic critics. He has tremendous narrative drive, the ability to compel his readers’ attention from the beginning of his novels to the end. Fowles also includes the erotic in his novels because, he has said, “I teach better if I seduce”. “What he seeks to teach us, in large part, is the importance of striving to understand ourselves better, and of founding relationships on friendship and trust rather than merely on sexual attraction. The right kind of relationships, he emphasizes in his fiction, can be highly educational, and especially so for the male of the species, since men, in his view, are more likely than women to need help in coming to terms with their sexuality” [8, p. 398]. For Fowles, just as it is important that sensitive, intelligent men explore the feminine component within themselves, so it is important that such men throw off the shackles of convention and freely discover their authentic selves – the people they really are.
Moreover, John Fowles is an anomaly, almost a literary contradiction. He is both a traditional writer and an innovative metafictionist. Fowles draws upon past literature but changes the direction of the tradition in which he writes. He simultaneously accepts and rejects the literary past, while at the same time, he questions contemporary avant-garde attempts to redefine the novel genre. His fiction is a centrifuge in which past, future time and space are wrapped together.
Critical reaction to Fowles’s work, which continues to be the focus of much literary debate, has centred on his treatment of historical and existential themes and his narrative methods. Scholars have noted, for instance, that in both “The French Lieutenant’s Woman”and “A Maggot”, Fowles assumes a modern authorial consciousness, presenting history as incomplete and thoroughly connected with the present. Commentators have looked to such devices as the god-game and recurring traits ascribed to his characters to thematically link Fowles’s works. They note that his characters frequently live outside the conventional moral boundaries of society and typically reach crucial turning points requiring a re-evaluation of self. The women are intelligent and independent, while the men are usually uncertain and isolated, in search of answers to the enigmatic situations in which they are enmeshed. In most cases, however, they do not find simple solutions; rather, their quests for answers result in additional mystification.
Critics argue that Fowles’s concern with mystery and ambiguity, which is particularly evident in his reluctance to provide authoritative resolutions to many of his works, prompts active audience participation in the quest for answers and emphasizes that reality is illusory and alterable. Describing Fowles as a literary explorer, Ellen Pifer has commented: “Fowles has investigated a wide range of styles, techniques, and approaches to writing… He has affirmed the resources of language and at the same time delineated the strictures inherent in representing reality within literature and art. By acknowledging these limitations, yet continuing to struggle against them, Fowles has indeed proved himself a dynamic rather than a static artist” [51, p. 26].
John Fowles’s novel, “The French Lieutenant Woman”, published in 1969, produced a lot of controversy in the literary and critical circles. James Aronson, in the Antioch Review, stated that with this novel, Fowles showed himself to be “a novelist as great as [Joyce] Carey and [E. M.] Forster” [20, p. 7]. Paul Edward Gray of the Yale Review called it “a modishly-framed imitation of Victorian fiction” that was nonetheless “remarkably satisfying” [20, p. 5]. Some critics saw the virtues of the book in comparison to his later works. Denis Donoghue, in a negative review of “Daniel Martin” for the New York Review of Books, notes that “The French Lieutenant’s Woman” is Fowles’s “best work because he found for that occasion a major theme of great historical and personal importance, and he commanded a language at least adequate” [20, p. 15]. But not all reviewers were as pleased. Jonathan Keates of The New Review, after reading the work, felt “irritated at having to endure a drenching from a mixture of archly self-conscious detachment, toe-curling patronage, and a set of opinions, stated or implied, on the Victorians which I didn’t share” [20, p. 16].
Fowles was accused of mimicking the Victorian novel’s narrative techniques; nonetheless, the work is not a copy of the Victorian novel, but an exploitation of the narrative form. Fowles returns to an early form of fiction as a way of constructing his own novel.
“The French Lieutenant Woman” is a novel, which bridges the Victorian literary tradition with the experimental tendencies stimulated by the new postmodern era. This means that, on the one hand, it draws upon the legacy of the Victorian novel genre, but, on the other hand, it transforms it, using the innovative and experimental “devices”, and thus re-shaping the traditional historical fiction into the postmodern genre of historiographic metafiction. The novelthus playfully re-works the tradition and breathes new life into the novel genre. “The French Lieutenant’s Woman”both challenges the conventional constituents of fiction, yet, it simultaneously installs what it challenges by overtly showing the possibilities of the continuation of the “old” within the “new”.
2.1. Lyme Regis: Spatial Construction of Middle-Class Identity in John Fowles’s “The French Lieutenant’s Woman”
History is one of the main themes explored in “The French Lieutenant Woman” which is set in Victorian England of 1867 and is full of historical details and information about the Victorian time. The panorama of Victorian England offers close-ups of typical activities and lifestyles of urban and rural England, as well as numerous discussions of politics, science and economics in the 19th century.
However, it is more than a historical novel as many scholars see it, the novel becomes an original modern expansion upon older traditional narrative forms. “The French Lieutenant Woman”is not a classical realist fiction, which would remain and operate only within the past Victorian times. It is a historiographic metafiction, which breaks traditional patterns of historical novels, and thus considerably changes the expectations readers might have. Moreover,“The French Lieutenant’s Woman”, is a typical example of historiographic metafiction. Throughout the novel, real-world figures not only from the Victorian, but also from the 20th century context, are constantly referred to. Some of the most significant personages of science, history, politics, sociology, and art are mentioned to authenticate the context of the time: Darwin, Marx, Disraeli, Gladstone, Mills, Austen, Hardy, Tennyson, Arnold, and Rossetti to name but a few. Some of the personages enter the world of the characters, some remain in the world of the narrator; some of the personages remain only characters’ topics of discussions, some interact with them. The allusions to and the employment of the real personages help to introduce the milieu of the Victorian era and to reinforce the authenticity, credibility, or the illusion of reality.
The novel sets on in the small English town of Lyme Regis and its Cobb, a harbour quay, an apparently idyllic setting. Close to the sea and rich in nature’s beauty, it is a traditional romantic location, with all the opportunities of atmospheric description that an author could want. The novel starts out by meticulously describing the setting and atmosphere of Lyme Regis, which is important in connection with the romantic aspect of the book. In addition, the opening sentence establishes the temporal location of the action: “One incisively sharp and blustery morning in the late March of 1867” [30, p. 2]. The verb tense of the opening clause, “an easterly is the most disagreeable wind in Lyme Bay” [30, p. 2], asks the reader to see the event and its narration as simultaneous. This narrative technique evokes a feeling of magnitude and pulls us into the fictional world of the story. When Fowles later includes subtle references to the 20th century “as full of subtle curves and volumes, a Henry Moore or a Michelangelo” [30, p. 2], we realize that the oscillated present is in fact Fowles’s own residence in Lyme, 1967, the date of the novel’s origin. (In “The French Lieutenant’s Woman”,Fowles mimics the openings of Victorian realism, the third-person objectivity of nineteenth-century realism with a unifying perspective centred in the narrating consciousness.)
The setting throughout the novel is predominantly Victorian. Most of the novel’s action takes place at Lyme Regis (Dorset), which serves as a graceful spatial metaphor that explicitly exposes the way that a human being imposes narrative order on non-narrative experience. With its charming system of roads, paths, streets and cart trades, it connotatively invites the reader to sit back, relax and begin a gradual process of immersion into an imaginary though life-like world. It is an impress on a landscape with its sombre grey cliffs masked by dense woods, wild engulfing channel waters and caves of mysterious geologic and cosmic enchanting mysteries. The provincial Lyme Regis in “The French Lieutenant’s Woman” was one of many small towns and villages in southwest England scattered along the coast. It consisted largely of small houses surrounded by hills on one side and the sea on the other. The Cobb was built along the shore and it is a promenade where people could enjoy the sea air while taking a walk. A section of the hills, known as the Ware Commons, was a meeting ground for most young couples and where Charles Smithson and Sarah Woodruff, the major characters of the novel, met clandestinely.
Lyme’s community was close-knit and provincial. Unlike the larger metropolitan areas such as London, here people upheld the prevailing social norms.
Life of Victorians was controlled by a rigid hierarchical society in which each order and occupation had a fixed position. At the beginning of the Victorian age, the upper class, consisting of the peerage (titled) and landed gentry (untitled) made up of about 300 families, controlled society and its politics. As most of the nobility were members of landowning upper-class, and the owning of land was a prerequisite and qualification for the right to vote in county constituencies until the Reform Act 1832, Parliament was in hands of the aristocracy [53]. However, with expansion of the middle class and consequently non-landed wealth, the bourgeoisie gradually grew in power and became more influential. Thus, landowning wealth of aristocracy was now becoming less significant than business wealth. Many industrialists, conscious of their importance, realized their need for direct representatives in Parliament. The Act extended the franchise and the number of people enabled to vote has increased of more than 60% granting seats in the House of Commons to representatives of large cities that had originated during the Industrial Revolution and still leaving about 95% of population with no vote, including women and working class males since the requirement to vote was to possess property worth £ 10 [54].
The upper class valued history, heritage, lineage, and continuity of their family line. They believed that they were born to rule and that it was their “nobles oblige”, their duty, to take care of society. The nobles were landed gentry and so they did not have to work, and instead enjoyed an idle life in luxury. In most cases their wealth derived from one or more estates, which included fields, pasture, timberland, hunting grounds, castles, etc. Nobles were expected to live “nobly”, from the proceeds of their property. Work involving manual labour or any professions, with the exception of military service, was frowned upon and considered as derogation from noble status. In case their position was threatened by financial difficulties they adapted and opened up their ranks to the wealthiest of the middle class to maintain their noble lifestyles [58].
Charles Smithson, the main character of the novel, is a typical representative of aristocracy. Although he did not possess a title, he was born in a family with close ties to nobility, had considerable education and respectable income. Charles was a lucky man, despite the fact that his father lost his land and fortune at the gaming tables leaving Charles with an insufficient income, Charles was to inherit from his unmarried uncle. As an heir to a title, he naturally was a good catch for single rich women. He considered himself a scientist, but Fowles points out that his main “distinguishing trait” was laziness: “How could one write history with Macalay so close behind? Fiction or poetry in the midst of the greatest galaxy of talent in the history of English literature? How could one be a creative scientist, with Lyell and Darwin still alive? Be a statesman with Disraeli and Gladstone?” [30, p. 7]. Idleness was a common trait of members of his class.
Fowles emphasizes that Charles’s identity and conduct was inherited and deep-rooted in the traditional social system. Though Charles was quite an interesting young man “his travels abroad had regrettably rubbed away some of that patina of profound humourlessness (called by the Victorians earnestness, moral rectitude, probity and a thousand other misleading names) that one really required of a proper English gentleman of the time” [30, p. 8], he is stacked in his class. Fowles portrayed Charles as a member of declining lifeless class, not able to survive in the world which was rapidly changing. For this purpose the author refers to Charles Darwin’s “The Origin of Species” in the epigraph to Chapter 3: “But a still more important consideration is that the chief part of the organisation 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” [30, p. 3].
In spite of his awareness of the narrow-mindedness of English moralistic society, Charles felt bound by the values of his era. He was not ready to revolt and was, indeed, a gentleman of the Victorian age, until he met Sarah Woodruff. From that moment he gradually viewed things differently. He started to see the bigotry of the ideals of Victorian Age, the ideals held by Mrs. Poulteney and even his wife-to-be Ernestina Freeman. Sarah and her resistance to Victorian restrains inspired Charles’s self-awareness. Dissatisfied with his useless life, he realized that he was to marry Ernestina only because she was naive, innocent, unquestioning and loving, a wife fitting for the perfect Victorian gentleman, which he was not.
However, he found himself too deeply rooted in the system, unable to challenge his destiny. For instance, when Charles came to Ernestina’s father to inform him of his changed prospects (resulting from his uncle’s marriage) and secretly hoping that he would be freed from the engagement to Ernestina, he got stunned by Mr. Freeman’s astounding offer. Mr. Freeman suggested that Charles could inherit his business and offered a partnership in his business. He asked Charles if commerce was abhorrent to him as business was not considered worthy of a gentleman. Charles was shocked with the idea of working in commerce, but assured Mr. Freeman that “my hesitation is in no way due to social considerations” [30, p. 122]. Mr. Freeman reminded him about their disagreement on theory of evolution and pointed out that “In order to survive, it must adapt itself to changes in the environment. …I have spent my life in a situation where if one does not – and very smartly – change oneself to meet the taste of the day, then he does not survive. One goes bankrupt. Times are changing, you know. This is a great age of progress. And progress is like a lively horse. Either one rides it, or it rides one. Heaven forbid I should suggest that being a gentleman is an insufficient pursuit in life. …But this is an age of doing, great doing, Charles. You may say these things do not concern you – are beneath you. But ask yourself whether they ought to concern you” [30, p. 122, 123]. Later, when Charles considered Mr. Freeman’s offer again, he found it unacceptable and even offensive, “he was a gentleman; and gentlemen cannot go into trade” [30, p. 122].
However, owing to industrialization, which brought improvement and transformation in many spheres, the social stratification was shattered by means of social mobility. The middle class grew more quickly than ever before, comprising around 20 percent of the occupied population with greater differences of wealth, social position and kinds of work. These layers of the subclass were keenly aware of their subtle grades of distinction. Their incomes “ranged and stretched all the way from the bare competence of the clerks, small shopkeepers and schoolteachers of the lower middle class, struggling to keep up genteel appearances and often not able to afford a domestic servant, up to very wealthy families with three or four indoor servants and maybe an outdoor staff as well looking after the garden and the private carriage” [56, p. 173].
The new middle classes, having acquired their wealth, were not only demanding their rights to control the Parliament but also a share of the social position of the privileged upper classes. For a middle class member striving to gain respectable social standing and political power, it was quite difficult to penetrate these elite enclosed communities united by family relationships. As we can see in Fowles’s novel, Ernestina Freeman, a daughter of a wealthy tradesman, was trying to rise in social class by means of a union with the aristocratic Charles Smithson. Charles and Ernestina’s case demonstrates that money often married into a titled family: Charles Smithson, heir to his aging uncle’s wealth and title, represented the declining aristocracy while his bride-to-be Ernestina Freeman, heiress to the fortune her father had gained as an owner of a drapery and clothes sales department store in London, epitomized the rising wealthy middle class. Both of them were fully aware of the fact that their engagement was a legal contract that could benefit each of them. Especially for Ernestina, marriage meant an entrance into the aristocracy, raising of her social status, from a meaningless tradesman’s daughter to nobility. In this way the new gentry appeared, combining a titled birth with wealth and education. “The French Lieutenant’s Woman” sees this social mobility as one of the forms of emancipation, and it is one of the themes of the novel.
The growing number of wealthy businessmen moved away from their factories into the countries and had expensive houses built for them. Proud of having made so much money the new magnates naturally wanted to display it and show the world what important people they were. The more spectacular and decorative the house was, the grander it would be. Apart from the fact that Victorian middle-class valued domesticity and was the most home-centred group in British history, home was actually a sign of social status. In other words, the size, style and location of the house spoke of the owner’s precise place in the social hierarchy. These enormous houses were often a mixture of different styles, from imitation of romantic Gothic style of churches and castles with gables, turrets and battlements, long halls and narrow windows, grandiose but unpractical for a dwelling place, to the latest notions of comfort and convenience: supply of water closets, bathrooms, central heating, gas-lighting, hydraulic food and luggage lifts and last but not the least plumbing arrangements as attention to hygiene increased. Another typical Victorian feature was extensive wings for servants. Servants were moved out of the attics and basements and separated from the family rooms for the sake of domestic privacy. The another very common additions were billiard rooms, smoking rooms and gun rooms and other male territories created in order to protect delicate ladies from seeing anything unfitting [56, p. 152 -157].
In “The French Lieutenant’s Woman”, Mr. Freeman is most representative of “new recruits” to the upper middle class. Although he looked down on aristocracy, he was determined to be a perfect gentleman in manner and appearance. His study in the spacious Hyde Park house, where “little was not in the best of contemporary taste, gave no hint of his profession. The walls were lined by suitably solemn-looking books; a bust of Marcus Aurelius; one or two large but indeterminate engravings” [30, p. 120]. To separate his work from family and gain respect of the society he “had a newly built mansion in the Surrey pinewoods, but his wife and daughter lived there a food deal more frequently than he did. He was in his way a forerunner of the modern rich commuter, except that he spent only his week-ends there – and then rarely but in summer. And where his modern homologue goes in for golf, or roses, or gin and adultery, Mr Freeman went in for earnestness” [30, p. 120]. So the rich people, like the Freemans, could choose their dwellings according to their personal needs and tastes. The poorer, however, could only accept what was available and adapt to their conditions. Most of the working class people had to find a house or even just a room they could afford. Their irregular employment, unreliable earnings and the necessity of living close to factories resulted in worse housing conditions than those of wealthier classes. The most unfortunate ones had to live in cramped back to back houses or slums. Freeman’s employees were terribly exploited and lived in subhuman conditions, but by Victorian standards, “Freeman’s was an exceptionally advanced establishment, a model of its kind. When he went to heaven, he would have a happy labour force behind him; and his heirs would have the profit there from” [30, p. 120].
As Thompson comments, all the layers of society were graded according to the size of house they occupied since house structure determined their social structure and social behaviour. Thus, between these two extremes of wealth and poverty there is a complicated territory of different housing types and living conditions, a series of “stepping stones that became more elaborate in reflecting the increasingly fine and intricate social distinctions within Victorian society. Social mobility was a matter of individuals or families stepping from one stone to another; social change a matter of altering, enlarging, and regrouping the stones” [56, p. 153].
With its rising authority the prosperous middle class started to enforce its values within the society from the late 1830s and even strongly in the middle of the century. Not only economic success and intellectual achievements in industry strengthened the power and status of the bourgeoisie, but their devotion to individualism and an eager Evangelical Christianity were systematically implanted in the culture. The impact of the middle class on culture played a significant role in shaping the nation’s character.
Middle class ideas, aspirations, and values such as the importance of work, the individual’s responsibility for self-improvement, the distinct and separate roles for men and women or the earnest commitment to duty prevailed in the shaping of the country’s self-image in public and private life – the sphere of the marketplace and the sphere of the home. However, these middle class principles are also parallel to the cultures of upper and working classes with which the middle class crossed and competed [49, p. 4].
Through the image of Mr. Freeman in “The French Lieutenant’s Woman”, his manners, life principles, and behaviour, Fowles reflected the actual power of middle class over declining aristocracy. Mr. Freeman looked down on Charles and his class as one of the worthless idlers, men of fine manners and unpaid bills. When Charles was forced to sign a statement of guilt he was humiliated: “Charles flushed red. Mr Freeman’s eyes bored into him. He could only lower his head” [30, p. 176]. Charles was deprived of inheritance, title, wife and even his honour. He was a victim of evolution, an example of a gentleman – a dying species. However, Sam’s revolt against his master when he needed to “consider (his) own situation” and his effort to control his Cockney fire while using gentleman’s finer weapons, on the other hand, was an example of working class potency to break the stranglehold of subordination. Indeed “it was such an age of change! So many orders beginning to melt and dissolve” [30, p. 140].
The evolution of society is clearly visible in the novel, while Sam and Mary, like the Freemans, are also rising on the social ladder. Through Sam’s engagement in commerce, Sam and Mary are able to elevate themselves to the position of the middle class. At the same time the tradition of the lower class respecting the superiors and the higher class protecting the lower classes is not always valid anymore. Citing from Matthew Arnold’s critical essay in an epigraph Fowles demonstrates the transformation of the society: “…the strong feudal habits of subordination and deference continued to tell upon the working class. The modern spirit has now almost entirely dissolved those habits… More and more this and that man, and this and that body of men, all over the country, are beginning to assert and put in practice an Englishman’s right to do what he likes: his right to march where he likes, meet where he likes, enter where he likes, hoots as he likes, threaten as he likes, smash as he likes” [30, p. 164].
Fowles makes allusions to class struggle and revolution. Firstly, he mentions the improbability of revolution due to prosperity of the “sixties” and “…the beavered German Jew quietly working… in the British Museum library; and whose work in those sombre walls was to bear such bright red fruit” [30, p. 6] and the appearance of the first volume of his “Kapital” only six months later. Secondly, he places the quotation of Marx’s “Kapital” into the epigraph in chapter seven, which introduces and describes Sam’s character [43, p. 104]. This epigraph aims to bring out Sam’s social status as a servant. In the same chapter the reader learns about Charles’s behaviour towards his servant. On the one hand, the author reassures us that Charles was a benevolent type of master to his servant and that he felt “a kind of affection” to Sam Farrow and did not exploit or mistreated him. On the other hand, the reader sees that Charles’s attitude was distressing and arrogant. His superior position of a master toward his servant, and of an upper-class member towards the lowest one on the social ladder, allowed Charles to bully and insult Sam. By quoting Latin to him, accusing him of being drunk, reminding him that he was “born in a gin palace”, calling him a Cockney, mocking Sam’s bewitchment by Mary and after accusing Sam of being too “fast” with her, told him, “if you’re not doubtly fast with my breakfast, I shall fasten my boot onto the posterior portion of your miserable anatomy” [30, p. 18]. Charles unintentionally demonstrated his superiority. Charles, who “could not have imagined a world without servants”, was aware that Sam was “too young to be a good manservant and besides, absent-minded, contentious, vain” and that there are “better machines” to be found [30, p. 19]. He regarded Sam as his companion especially for his ability to amuse him. Nevertheless, Sam detested his job and got angry with his master’s offensive manner.
Fowles also gives hints to the potential revolution. Sam was in a bad mood and easily irritated, was testing the blade of the cut-throat razor “on the edge of his small thumb, with an expression on his face that suggested that at any moment he might change his mind and try it on his own throat or perhaps even on his smiling master’s” [30, p. 18]. Comparing Sam Farrow with Sam Weller, Mr. Pickwick’s servant in Dickens’s “Pickwick Papers” and their mutual class struggle, Fowles points at the difference between the working class of the 1840s and 1870s. Unlike Sam Weller, who was loyal to Mr. Pickwick, Sam Farrow was not happy with his role, a “more like a modern working class man” and, aware of the fact that times had changed, was determined to be liberated from the social restraint, from his subservient position [43, p. 107]. The relationship between Sam and Charles were not at all ideal and their antipathy grew gradually.
Similarly, class distinction is portrayed in the relationship between Ernestina and Mary. Although Mary was a servant of Mrs. Tranter, who was very benevolent towards her, Mary had to serve to Ernestina while she was visiting her aunt. Ernestina was spoiled; she intimidated Mary and enjoyed giving orders. Though Mary was envious of Ernestina’s wealth and marriage, she was quite content with her role in the society and really liked Mrs. Tranter.
In spite of Fowles’s hints at the notion of revolution, there was no violent rising of the working class. Sam told Mary about his ambition, that he was dreaming of going into business: “His ambition was very simple: he wanted to be a haberdasher. He had never been able to pass such shops without stopping and staring in the windows; criticizing or admiring them, as the case might require. He believed he had a flair for knowing the latest fashion. He had travelled abroad with Charles, he had picked up some foreign ideas in the haberdashery field” [30, p. 56]. He wanted his dream to come true and change his life; however obstacles such as lack of education and money kept him aback. After he happened to catch Charles with Sarah in the cottage, Sam saw the chance. However, at that time Charles’s prospect of inheritance was endangered by his uncle’s marriage and Charles assured Sam that he would grant some sum of money from Ernestina’s dowry. When Sam found out that Charles visited Sarah in Endicott’s Family Hotel, he decided to betray Charles.
Later in the novel Mary and Sam were shown living comfortably in London, with a child and even a maid: “Even if it was hardly yet reflected in their accents and use of the language these two were rising in the world; and knew it. To Mary, it was all like a dream. To be married to a man earning over thirty above ten! When her own father, the carter, had never risen above ten! To live in a house that cost £19 a year to rent!” [30, p. 181].
Victorians were members of a confident nation, yet they lived in permanent fear: “fear of the social circle, fear of the newspaper, fear of being odd… still greater fear of what somebody may say” [37, p. 398]. The critical watchfulness over the moral message of the art was mirrored in lives of all Victorians and their conduct, which was constantly monitored and judged by the ever present eyes of society. But setting the tone for all classes of the mid-nineteenth century society it was the middle class with its virtues and attitudes of self-improvement, temperance, duty, thrift, and piousness which caused the spread of Victorian morality [58].
Unlike anonymous London or Exeter, Lyme Regis was a small provincial town where people’s conduct was being watched very closely. While in London Charles was able to pursue his desires anonymously, in Lyme he must be very careful in preserving a flawless reputation of a proper gentleman. As Ernestina puts it in reference to Sam’s unscrupulous behaviour: “There is a world of difference between what may be accepted in London and what is proper here” [30, p. 45].
In Lyme, where convention was observed and where a person or visitors were “certainly expected to allow themselves to be examined and spoken to” [30, p. 43], eyes of Victorian society were represented by the character of Mrs. Poulteney, who personified morality. Mrs. Poulteney is a vivid example of Victorian England’s rules and conventions in the novel. As the narrator writes about Mrs. Poulteney: there “would have been a place in the Gestapo for the lady; she had a way of interrogation that could reduce the sturdiest girls to tears in the first five minutes” [30, p. 9]. He describes her as a woman with two obsessions: “Mrs. Poulteney had two obsessions: or two aspects of the same obsession. One was Dirt – though she made some sort of exception of the kitchen, since only the servants lived there – and the other was Immorality. In neither field did anything untoward escape her eagle eye. She was like some plump vulture, endlessly circling in her endless leisure, and endowed in the first field with a miraculous sixth sense as regards dust, finger marks, insufficiently starched linen, smells, stains, breakages and all the ills that houses are heir to”. She guarded the morality in Lyme Regis but at the same time she was even stricter when monitoring the conduct of her unfortunate employees: “The failure to be seen at church, both at matins and at evensong, on Sunday was tantamount to proof of the worst moral laxity. Heaven help the maid seen out walking, on one of her rare free afternoons – one a month was the reluctant allowance – with a young man. And heaven also help the young man so in love that he tried to approach Marlborough House secretly to keep an assignation: for the gardens were a positive forest of humane man-traps – “humane” in this context referring to the fact that the great waiting jaws were untoothed, though quite powerful enough to break a man’s leg. These iron servants were the most cherished by Mrs. Poulteney. Them, she had never dismissed” [30, p. 9]. In other words Mrs. Poulteney was a sadist and it was understandable that her servants “took just so much of Mrs. Poulteney’s standards and ways and then they fled”. One of her butlers actually proclaimed: “Madam, I should rather spend the rest of my life in the poorhouse than live another week under this roof” [30, p. 9]. A gardener would be dismissed for being seen to come into the house with earth on his hands; a butler for having a spot of wine on his stock; a maid for having slut’s wool under her bed. Being a God-fearing woman, Mrs. Poulteney had acuity in practical matters, “believes in hell” [30, p. 9]. Trying to “win the seat to heave”, she has to let Sarah into her home (a woman of immorality and open sexuality in Mrs. Poulteney’s eyes) because “there [was] God to be accounted to” [30, p. 12].
In “The French Lieutenant’s Woman”, Mrs. Poulteney is a kind of an archetype of monitoring system of religious morality. This “Poulteneyism”, as Charles Scruggs argues, prevails over the Victorian society of “morality tight-laced”, supervises middle-class everyday life, and precludes any ideas of sexual and moral laxity from infiltrating [30, p. 99]. Mrs. Poulteney evaluated a person with the frequency of church attendance. The more frequently he/she attended the church, the more pious he/she was for God. She was the guard of morality in Lyme Regis and the very representative of male-dominated moral surveillance, devoting her whole attention to eliminate anything sinful and immoral. Therefore, Sarah was the one needed to be redeemed because of her sexual incautiousness. Only such a pious person like her could redeem Sarah from her sexual sin on behalf of God. However, the fact that Mrs. Poulteney took in Sarah as her maid in fact showed not only her hypocritical benevolent deed in religious practice but her desire to be a candidate for heaven. In fact, the public of Lyme Regis had the antipathy towards her licentious behaviours.
Another patriarchal figure in the novel is Dr. Grogan, though he declared himself to be an elite educated by scientific training and the advocator of Charles Darwin’s theory. Examining Sarah from pathological standpoint, he concluded that Sarah’s deviant behaviours result from the suffering of hysteria, caused by sexual repression. In addition to his medical perspectives of female hysteria, he employed the Victorian psychological theory of associationism – the study of the working of mental processes and the relationship between ideas and behaviours – to interpret Sarah’s malicious intention to arouse Charles’ sympathy. Sarah thus became a cunning schemer, like the female hysterics in medical literature cited by Dr. Grogan. Dr. Grogan’s medical theories and arguments for Sarah’s mental disorder epitomized the Victorian medical system. He unconsciously fell into the ideology of patriarchal sexual morality and phallocentric dogmatism about female sexuality. Sarah, an enigma to Dr. Grogan, resisted this man-dominated diagnosis. In the context of phallocentric society, she showed us the limitation of Victorian medical perspectives of female hysteria. She was not an insane female hysteric labelled by the law of patriarchal medicine. Rather, it is Fowles’s strategy to let Sarah be diagnosed as a hysteric, showing her non-conformity and unpredictability for the purpose of rebelling Victorian demonization of female sexuality and oppression over female pursuit of sexual liberation. She achieved her freedom through this artifice. Her reappearance with a fresh image as a New Woman contradicted the patriarchal analysis. Sarah was a fallen woman for the public of Lyme Regis and a hysterical patient for Dr. Grogan. Sarah’s tainted past was disclosed by her loss of virginity that caused the alias of “The French Lieutenant’s Whore”. The alias showed that she abandoned the most significant attribute of a Victorian feminine ideal, namely, her chastity. Such a licentious life convinced the public in Lyme Regis and Charles that she was really a fallen woman. She should be redeemed, since she was not on the normal and moral trajectory of Victorian society.
2.2. Englishness and Britishness: Communal and Individual Identities in “The French Lieutenant’s Woman”
Fowles’s idea of “Englishness” and “Britishness”, first expressed in his essay “On Being English, not British”, is illustrated and embodied in his novel “The French Lieutenant’s Woman”, the characters of which can be divided into “British” and “English”.
Charles Smithson is a bright example of the “Englishness” conception. He possessed all characteristics of a real gentleman. The meaning of the word “gentleman” is the following “a man of noble origin”. In the Victorian era, that word without changing its essence began to denote a man, perfect in every concern. Gentleman is a man capable to behave adequately under all circumstances, able to find a way out of any predicament, and capable to sacrifice his dignity in the name of saving the others in a hopeless situation. One of the main features of conventional gentleman was his origin. In his essay “On Being English, not British”, John Fowles wrote, “to be English, it is necessary that at least two of your four grandparents were English” [31, p. 3]. In this sense, Charles was a real gentleman. From the novel, we learn that his grandfather was a baronet, very fond of fox hunting and collecting books. His father had almost the same interests, thought he changed foxes and books for cards and ladies.
Another fundamental feature for being English was “to study in England” [31, p. 3]. Charles not only studied in England, he graduated from Cambridge. He inherited from his father a small fortune, had a sufficient independent income, therefore, he had no need to work. Mr. Smithson devoted his free time to science, palaeontology. He even considered himself a scientist (“And you forget that I’m a scientist. I have written a monograph, so I must be” [30, p. 4]), and as a real gentleman, he could not even admit the thought to work. A gentleman can not earn his living, he must possess a certain income [3, p. 158]. The taboo on manual labour was saved in Victorian society. Dealing with commerce was not welcome and possible only when necessary. Thence, when Mr. Freeman offered Charles to be engaged in trade, “fear and amazement” [30, p. 113] appeared at the face of the main hero.
One more feature that made Charles a real Englishman was his endurance. Patience and confidence were main trades of character of a gentleman. A gentleman would never present his thought directly, especially if they were caused by some feelings. Fowles names this “hiding in the woods”. Previously, almost all the territory of England was covered with woods, and English people could hide in the woods in literal sense, but as time passed and there left not many woods in England, English people “moved England into their thoughts” [31, p. 3] and began to hide their thoughts from other people. That is why English people possess such traits of character as the tendency to hide their emotions and the ability to hide the real face behind the mask. A perfect example of such a trait is the episode with Sir Robert, when Charles found out about his marriage, and as a result Charles was deprived of the heritage. Charles endured the news courageously, although it changed his plans for life greatly. He said no word of reproach and behaved himself gently, even though he “felt whipped and humiliated; a world less” [30, p. 91]. However, Charles never put his mask off his own face, and came to the only decent gentleman decision – “to take it calmly, to show the stoic and hide the raging boy” [30, p. 91].
One of the important features of English gentleman was his love for justice. In general the main feature of all English people is “maniacal aspiration for justice” [31, p. 3]. According to Z. Zinatulinna, every Englishman “has always dreamed to live in the most justify country” [3, p. 6]. Since the gentleman often occupied the highest posts, the law did not allow punishing him in the humiliating way in court, he was freed from the oath, because the truthfulness was perceived as his natural property. The Englishman, especially the gentleman, trusted people and inspired confidence himself. Mandatory fulfilments of its responsibilities, readiness to help were relevant features of a gentleman. Charles, as a real gentleman, followed these rules. His very first desire to assist Sarah was motivated by the aspiration to achieve justice. The words of dairyman hurt him: “And she been’t no lady. She be the French Loot’n’nt’s Hoer” [30, p. 37], and “He seemed to Charles to incarnate all the hypocritical gossip – and gossips – of Lyme” [30, p. 37].
One more fundamental feature of the gentleman was his attitude towards the lady. In his work Z. Zinatulina states: “He directs the attention to lady only when he needs to get married and to make a good couple” [3, p. 159]. Charles also behoved like that. While he was young, he did not even think about getting married, only when he was 32 he realized that soon he would become the same as Sir Robert, and “his feeling that he was growing like his uncle at Winsyatt, that life was passing him by, that he was being, as in so many other things, overfastidious, lazy, selfish ...and worse” [30, p. 35]. Charles met Ernestina in London, at the very moment when he had decided to get married. He believed that she was not stupid, beautiful, and wealthy and possessed all the characteristics suitable for the role of the wife of a gentleman.
Nevertheless, when Charles decided to break up with Ernestine, he still followed the rules of “fair play”. For example, he could break up with Ernestina without clarification, he went to her and admitted: “That I have, after many hours of the deepest, the most painful consideration, come to the conclusion that I am not worthy of you” [30, p. 160]. Even more, he signed a document entitled “statement of guilt”, proposed by Mr. Freeman, that could spoil the reputation of Charles. Perfect reputation for a gentleman was one of the most important values.
The behaviour of a gentleman out of his social obligations was also regulated. He passed his leisure time in the club. Expulsion from the club was the greatest shame for the Englishman. Charles also went to his own club “He walked with no very clear purpose, in the general direction of his club in St. James” [30, p. 123].
Opposite to the notion of “Englishness”, including the notion “gentleman” stands “Britishness”. “Britishness” in the novel is represented by members of the Victorian society who carried all the negative features in terms of morals of that era. In the novel, Mrs. Poultney was presented as a typical image that embodied all the prejudices of time, thought she considered herself to be a fighter for morals. The author depicted “Britishness” of Mrs. Poulteney directly: “In her fashion she was an epitome of all the most crassly arrogant traits of the ascendant British Empire. Her only notion of justice was that she must be right; and her only notion of government was an angry bombardment of the impertinent populace” [30, p. 26]. Mrs. Poulteney embodied the hypocrisy of the Victorian era. She was highly religious but at the same time she did not comply with one of the most important Christian commandments – “Love one another”. She was very prudent: even the heavens seemed to her the Accounting Chamber. Mrs. Poulteney’s alienation from nature was an integral part of “Britishness”, being opposite to Charles attitude towards nature. Throughout the novel, Mrs. Poulteney never left her own house. For example, when describing her house the author called it “Marlborough House” to emphasize her aristocratic claims, her goal to have power, and a desire to have a leading position in the established society of Lyme Regis. She perfectly embodied Fowles’s idea of the British desire to show its strength. The author gave the diagnosis for Britain: the desire to be the strongest and the best. He argues that every British man believes that, “Britain is and should be the strongest country in the world” [31, p. 3].
Another representative of “Britishness” in the novel was Ernestina Freeman. The main goal of her life was to become a “lady”. Ernestina was very ambitious, prudent, wished to become an aristocrat, and willing to do anything to achieve this goal, in short, she behaved like an ordinary bourgeois. She was the daughter of the usual “draper”, who with the help of his own “entrepreneurial spirit” was able to get rich. Despite her “bourgeois” origin Ernestina struggled for becoming an aristocrat, and for violating “the law of the noble origin”. The origin of Ernestina and the environment of education determined her behaviour, she tried to calculate everything and immediately after the engagement began to think how to manage the house, a servant and “she liked every luxury, and to be waited on, hand if not foot; but she had a very sound bourgeois sense of proportion” [30, p. 107]. The slogan of the British ladies of the 19th century was “Be able to control yourself”. However, Ernestina was anything but restrained. For example, her reaction to the news of Sir Robert’s marriage was awful: she cried, increased her voice, although the real lady should never do so. Later, she realized her mistake (“I am shameful, I have behaved like a draper’s daughter” [30, p. 108]), but in fact she behaved naturally for her own class. One of the reasons that she wanted to marry Charles, was his status of a baronet. Even the process to conquer Charles’s heart was a good algorithm of actions: “Now Ernestina had seen the mistake of her rivals” [30, p. 34] and began to act: negotiated with parents, performed certain manipulations, and did everything to achieve her goal. As a true representative of the British Empire, Ernestina was a hypocrite. Even Charles stated that, “Bigotry was only too prevalent in the country; and he would not tolerate it in the girl he was to marry” [30, p. 45]. Fowles showed her hypocrisy through indicating the addressee of her diary: “She wrote there, but for herself and not for God. She wrote partly for his eyes – as, like every other Victorian woman, she wrote partly for His eyes” [30, p. 108], in other words for Charles.
The conclusion of the novel is a failure of “Britishness”, which confirmed the fiasco of Ernestina who could not realize her own noble ambitions. On the other hand, Charles Smithson argues the merits of “Englishness”. At the same time, both characters show the limitations of Victorian society, which constrain the development of the individual. So the characters of “The French Lieutenant’s Woman” are all stereotypes. Fowles has consciously created characters that at once are alive as well as comply with certain standard rules for the Victorian character. The focus of the book is on characters and their development, in contrast to a plot-driven novel. The book takes off in mediocre, and much of the traditional plot has already taken place, making room for a development of characters and narrative technique.
2.3. Sarah Woodruff as Challenging Englishness in “The French Lieutenant’s Woman”
The Victorian period viewed women as belonging to the domestic sphere. A great deal of repressive conventions, norms were imposed on women by the dominant patriarchal society, and a Victorian woman was expected to accept the norms unhesitatingly meeting the needs of her husband and her children. However, the picture changed with the emergence of the “New Woman”. The “New Woman” was a feminist ideal that emerged during the late nineteenth century, which pushed the limits set by the male dominated society. The “New Woman” was a reaction to the long held notions of femininity; it discarded the Victorian norms of sexuality and made itself free from the idea that a woman should be shut behind the four walls of a home. A new woman was characterized as living a single emancipated lifestyle, having adequate education and a new sense of dressing style. Sarah Woodruff in “The French Lieutenant’s Woman” is a perfect example embodying the image of a “New Woman”.
Fowles describes Sarah as “an independence of spirit… a determination to be what she was” [30,p. 51].Sarah was not influenced by the stereotypical and traditional roles of a woman. Her ideals about marriage were rather different from the ideals of other women in the Victorian society. Fowles uses a visual description of her appearance to symbolize the difference of opinions between herself and the people of her time: “Delicate, fragile, arched eyebrows were then the fashion, but Sarah’s were strong, or at least unusually dark, almost the colour of her hair, which made them strong” [30, p. 51]. She liked her eyebrows had a strong sense of what she wanted to do an