The French The French Lieutenant’s womanLieutenant’s woman

Francesca Ferrante & Francesca GavelliFrancesca Ferrante & Francesca Gavelli

Narrativa Anglesa I Cinema 2009-2010Narrativa Anglesa I Cinema 2009-2010

The French The French Lieutenant’s womanLieutenant’s woman

IntroductionIntroduction The French Lieutenant’s woman (1969) is a The French Lieutenant’s woman (1969) is a novel written by John Fowles during the novel written by John Fowles during the post-modern period. It is about the post-modern period. It is about the tormented love story between the two main tormented love story between the two main characters: characters:

Sarah Woodruff and Sarah Woodruff and Charles Smithson.Charles Smithson.

The French The French Lieutenant’s womanLieutenant’s woman

IntroductionIntroduction

The love affair The love affair between Sarah between Sarah and Charles and Charles inspired the film inspired the film adaptation adaptation directed by the directed by the Jewish film-Jewish film-maker Karel maker Karel Reisz and Reisz and written by written by Harold Pinter in Harold Pinter in 1981. 1981.

The French The French Lieutenant’s womanLieutenant’s woman

IntroductionIntroductionThe movie reproduces a time bounce from The movie reproduces a time bounce from the Victorian era to the present introducing the Victorian era to the present introducing a contemporary affair between two modern a contemporary affair between two modern

characters:characters:

Anna and MikeAnna and Mike

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Even if it was published in the second half of the 20th Even if it was published in the second half of the 20th century, the novel takes place during the Victorian century, the novel takes place during the Victorian

era showing the contradictions of that time and era showing the contradictions of that time and trying to subvert them.trying to subvert them.

What is the point of writing/shooting a retro-

Victorian novel/film in the twentieth century?

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Cultural backgroundCultural backgroundThe French lieutenant’s woman is a Postmodern novel

What is Postmodernism?Postmodernism is a cultural, artistic and intellectual

phenomenon that spread in the Western countries after the WWII.

The frame for the development of this movement was the sense of dissatisfaction, loss of faith, sterility,

ideological exhaustion.

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Cultural backgroundCultural backgroundMain features/concepts of Postmodernism

To make what seems natural to be constructed

Nothing is natural, everything is constructed

Objectivity doesn’t exist

De-naturalization

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Cultural backgroundCultural backgroundHow is de-naturalization achieved?

ParodyParody is repetition with difference

The French Lieutenant’s woman is an example of Parody as reappropriation of past forms or critical representation, a tool for

the revision of past events, not just mockery.

Continuity and differenceIn the novel we find Victorian characters, but they don’t always act

as the conventions suggested, there we have the distortion.

An example could be Ernestina looking herself at the mirror and having sexual feelings

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The French Lieutenant’s woman is about the way we represent reality.

It is a reaction against the realistic novel of the XIX Century showing that realism is not the only

perspective of view.

Realism represented itself as a given, as a natural representation but Postmodernism changes

completely this perspective.

As Fowles says "Fiction is woven into all, as a Greek observed some two and a half thousand years ago. I

find this new reality (or unreality) more valid;"

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Fowles shows that XIX century novel

is not a slice of life but is something constructed. We

don’t see the whole, we just

access a selected part. The reader

construct and reconstruct the reality as many

time as the characters.

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Sarah plays different roles. She keeps constructing herself:

submissive, charming, artist, whore etc.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=faqZLeLOdcU&feature=related

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The French Lieutenant’s woman is a self-conscious representation

(Hutcheon)↓

What is represented is not natural, is always constructed

Awareness of fiction

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The narratorThe narratorBoth in the film and in the novel the figure of

the narrator is used and abused.

Fowles wants to perform the fictional magic but at the same time he wants to reveal us

this process.

He wants to “summon up a sense of reality while forcing us to attend to the nature and

falsehood of art” (Bradbury)

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The narratorThe narrator

The narrator isn’t objective and The narrator isn’t objective and invisible as in conventional modern novels, invisible as in conventional modern novels, but as George Gaston statesbut as George Gaston states

“we have a highly self-conscious, active, almost aggressive figure who manipulates, tantalizes, and informs us at every turn. As a result, he becomes such a powerful presence as the story unfolds that, in time, we become conscious that he is perhaps the major character in this fiction, and that this novel is ultimately less about a story than about the magic of story-telling”.

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The narratorThe narratorHow the script and the director translated the voice narrator?

Since Fowles's story is essentially a novel within a novel, their idea was to transform it into a movie

within a movie.

“Pinter has written a script which retains much of the Sarah-Charles story line but which replaces the active, con-temporary narrator with contemporary actors (Anna and Mike) who, while playing the roles of the protagonists in a movie entitled The French Lieutenant’s Woman, carry on a love affair which parallels and intersects the affair of the couple they are playing”. (Gaston)

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The French Lieutenant’s woman is also Self-contradictory in terms of forms

The natural way to reproduce reality was

PresentationDevelopment

ClimaxResolution

In naturalistic fiction everything coheres at the end

But this is just a way to reproduce reality!!!

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Postmodern fiction provides contradictory and different endings.

The French Lieutenant’s woman, both the novel and the movie give us

various endings but not a closure.

The narrator keeps contradicting himself and he gives us free choice of

interpretation.

The French Lieutenant’s The French Lieutenant’s womanwomanAnswerAnswer

The French Lieutenant’s woman is a novel/film created in the XXI century but it refers to the Victorian era because is Postmodern.

As a Postmodern text/movie it reproduces the past modifying it. It offers a parodic

interpretation of the Victorian conventions de-naturalizing and de-constructing them.

The role of the narrator is abused, the idea of realistic novel is subverted, the structure is

contradictory.

All these elements make the novel/movie a kind of repetition with differences.

The French Lieutenant’s The French Lieutenant’s womanwoman

BibliographyBibliography

Bradbury, Malcom. The novelist as Impresario: The fiction of John Fowles

Gaston, George. The French Lieutenant's Woman by Karel Reisz, 1981

Gutleben, Christian. “Nostalgic Postmodernism” Postmodernism as otherness. Editions Robopi. Amsterdam, 2001. 110

Hutcheon, Linda. The Politics of Postmodernism. New York: Routledge, 1989

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Thank you!!!