Closure in John Fowles' The French Lieutenant's Woman.

Gabriel Iliesiu – IB2 The French Lieutenant’s Woman

English A2 HL

2003-10-13

Closure in John Fowles’ The French Lieutenant’s Woman

The closure of a novel is always a daunting task for any author. Whilst some endings of novels are designed such that the main conflict is resolved, tying up all loose ends, some endings are also assembled to bring the story to a more open and ambigous conclusion. The focal point of this essay will revolve around the multiple endings of The French Lieutenant’s Woman in order to determine the function and purpose of each finale.

John Fowles's The French Lieutenant's Woman offers a rare opportunity to explore the way that previous and current paradigms are enfolded in attempts to define reality. In the novel, the gentleman-scientist Charles Smithson risks his future marriage to Ernestina Freeman when he engages in a liaison with the beautiful commoner Sarah Woodruff, a woman locally known as the forsaken lover of a French Lieutenant. After Charles consummates his relationship with Sarah, he abandons her - only to meet her in two seemingly parallel concluding chapters. In one version, Charles and Sarah reconcile to raise their child, while in the other they separate.

In the first of the three endings to The French Lieutenant's Woman, given in chapter 44, the gentleman-scientist Charles Smithson cuts short his budding affair with the enigmatic Sarah Woodruff and marries his insipid fiancee Ernestina Freeman. We are told that they did not live happily ever after, although they lived together and that they have seven children. Charles also ends up in the dreaded Freeman family business after his inheritance is lost when his Uncle's gold-digging wife gives birth to twin boys. At the start of chapter 45, however, we are told that this thoroughly traditional ending was not what happened, but what Charles spent the hours between London and Exeter imagining might happen. The first ending would leave Charles inexorably in the clutches of determinism, his future determined by a variety of social, literary, and theoretical traditions, and in this way the ending could be described less as imaginary and more as Charles's adherence to a script based on Victorian mores and the scientific views of his time.

Characterizing the subsequent narrative are not only Charles's own sense of realization that one is free and the realization of terror, but also our sense of the extent to which he is watched or observed. The narrator has, at this point, begun to make himself known as a self-reflexive, multi-layered, meddling "I" who styles himself as an omnipotent God-like being. Since by this point we have been goaded into hyper-awareness of our own vulnerability to the will of the narrator, we watch intently as Charles makes his way to

Sarah's quarters at the Endicott Family boarding house, lest ...

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Sarah's quarters at the Endicott Family boarding house, lest we be fooled again by a new imaginary ending. Charles's servant, Sam, also skulks along behind, realizing that his future is bound up with his self-absorbed master. Having in this way dismissed the first thoroughly traditional ending, the narrator punningly sets the stage for the final two "real" endings, and our seeming freedom to choose between them.

For the purpose of analyzing these final two endings, and the strategies involved, it will be helpful to review the basic textual differences. In the first ending, given in chapter 60, Charles and Sarah eventually come together after a fairly long separation, while in the second ending given in chapter 61 they meet a final time and decide to separate. The narration of the final encounter in both chapters includes two identical paragraphs but between which in chapter 60 and missing from chapter 61 is an expression of melodrama illustrating Charles’ despair and personal tragedy reflected in Sarah’s eyes, and that ultimately results in Sarah lowering her head. The deletion of this paragraph from chapter 61 thus has a twofold effect: our sense of the time-line of the novel has been altered by the excision of a moment from the lives of Charles and Sarah, and Charles has been relieved of the broader implication of tragedy which has been, up to this point, Sarah's province. Thus when the narrator continues in chapter 60, Sarah runs to block his exit, and subsequently gives him a reason to stay, whereas in chapter 61 the encounter concludes with Charles's departure. Whatever occurs in that moment in chapter 60 is obliterated in the third and final ending, where the former expression of outrage reflected in Sarah’s eyes goes unnoticed and unreflected. This moment which does not happen operates as a gap, or time warp in the text: not only have the endings been altered, but the flow of time as well. And here a further textual difference should be noted: whereas chapter 60 begins with a direct description of Charles's arrival at the house where Sarah is living, chapter 61 begins with self-conscious commentary by the narrator about turning back time.

To ignore the implications of time manipulation is to continue hypothesizing that the two final chapters represent two separate and independent endings to the same story from which the reader may choose. The paradox of one novel with two endings proposes two novels: one that ends this way and one that ends that, each with its own meaning. By this reading we are left with a "trick ending" where the author writes a three-in-one novel by simply tagging on endings. On these terms The French Lieutenant's Woman must be considered ambiguous, with the three endings each representing a separate

narrative which may be logically traced backwards. It is also possible to make a case for the idea of one novel which enfolds multiple endings into a single unity and without fragmenting into separate narratives with the appearance of each ending. In such a view, the first ending in chapter 44 represents the completion of the core story of Charles Smithson and the ensuing narrative provides a multi-layered "wrapping" of post-modern discourse about the core. In such a reading, the final two endings do not represent different results to the same series of events, but different results to a very different series of events. These different sets of events are present, not in what we see between Charles's meeting with Sarah in Exeter to London, but in what we do not see.

The absence of Sarah from the narrative after Exeter constructs, in effect, an implicit narrative, which superimposes one part of the pattern over another. The core story of Charles Smithson, appropriate to the Victorian Era, evolves along Darwinian lines, while the external wrapper of Sarah Woodruff engages a point-of-view more indicative of the post-modern reality of the author, narrator, and reader. We might hypothesize that what the novel is really about in the sense of meaning is how the wrapper is created about, or around, the core.

In conclusion, the multiple endings of The French Lieutenant’s Woman are designed and used to promote an overall sense of ambiguity. Whilst some readers may prefer to simply chose one of the endings, it is also possible to observe how the core narrative that involves the story of Charles Smithson, can be enveloped by the various endings which ultimately form an overall sense of meaning and unity. Thus the function of the multiple-ending narrative is not only that of Fowles being hesitant in creating a single and concrete ending.

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