Further evidence also suggests that Fowles does not subscribe to social Darwinism, a process described as possessing the same rapidity of occurrence. Social Darwinism is a concept introduced by Herbert Spencer in the late nineteenth century. It
asserts that the intelligent people of a society will become powerful and wealthy through what he (Spencer, not Darwin) called "the survival of the fittest." Darwin refused to advance or support Spencer's theory, but, because his name was associated with it, his horizontal theory of evolution became perceived by many as vertical. Social Darwinism describes a vertical progression and implies that an intelligent behavioural trait
is necessary for this kind of evolution. It suggests that the upper class is superior to the lower classes and that social mobility is desirable. Yet, Fowles illustrates that, far from being victims of a Social Darwinism, the lower classes are not as prone to cultural extinction as the upper. Cultural selection is harshest with the upper class, where convention reigns with a firm grip. By applying these ideas on the characters of the novel one could state that Charles and Ernestina are bound by elaborate convention, social ritual, and legal considerations in their engagement, whilst Sam and Mary can be direct, honest, and open with one another. Contrary to the theory behind social Darwinism, cultural selection is far more tolerant of variant/deviant behaviour among the lower classes. The vicar reminds Mrs. Poulteney: "The lower classes are not so scrupulous about appearances as ourselves" (33).
By returning to the concept of existentialism in the novel, Fowles' notion of natural selection contradicts the existential concepts that existence precedes essence and that individuals are capable of freely choosing one set of beliefs over another. Fowles demonstrates how individuals and the cultural species to which they belong shape one another in the process of cultural selection. This can be found thematically in his description of every major character in the novel. With his twentieth-century hindsight, the narrator is able to note that each character possesses some traits of a past culture while exhibiting new traits, which may or may not be selected for existence. Fowles uses his characters to illustrate one of the epigraphs to the third chapter from The Origin of Species, which states that "the chief part of the organization of every living creature is due to its inheritance" (15).
We find Mrs. Poulteney betraying a certain duplicity; for she depicts the extravagant pomposity of the late Victorian period while maintaining characteristics that are from her Puritan ancestors: "With the vicar Mrs. Poulteney felt herself with two people. One was her social inferior, an inferior who depended on her for many of the pleasures of his table; [...] and the other was the representative of God, before whom she had metaphorically to kneel. So her manner with him took often a bizarre and inconsequential
course. It was de haut en bas one moment, de bas en haut the next; and sometimes she contrived both positions all in one sentence" (24). Perhaps Mrs. Poulteney can be described in existential terms as behaving "inauthentically”
Still looking at the characters of the novel it is interesting to see the way Ernestina evolves throughout the novel. Ernestina represents the evolving economy and fashion, while still remaining an archaic species when it comes to female sexuality and the New Woman. For "whenever the physical female implications of her body, sexual, menstrual, parturitional, tr[y] to force an entry into her consciousness," she simply tells herself, "I must not" (29). The narrator seems sympathetic to this sexually frigid inheritance, for, after Charles's proposal, he says, "How can you mercilessly imprison all natural sexual instinct for twenty years and then not expect the prisoner to be racked with sobs when the doors are thrown open?" (71). The word "prisoner" suggests that Ernestina's actions are limited by her cultural inheritance.
Sarah, on the other hand, represents the more liberated woman. She becomes "adept at handling [Mrs. Poulteney] as a skilled cardinal, a weak pope" (50). She seems bent on destroying the male fantasy of provider and protector when she expresses her desire to Charles to "be what I am, not what a husband, however kind, however indulgent, must expect me to be in marriage" (353). The narrator describes Sarah as a kind of unrecognizable hybrid pointing to the future century: "[Sarah] turned and looked at [Charles] then. [...]We can sometimes recognize the looks of a century ago on a modern face; but never those of a century to come" (146). Yet, Sarah remains far from the liberated woman of the twentieth century. Jackson points out an important paradox in Sarah's character. She seems gifted with a kind of selfhood, yet she is unable to explain or understand her actions. Sarah is in a way what one could call a “hopeful hybrid/mutant” of evolutionary change, she lacks the hindsight to historicize herself that she "has experience without knowledge".
Charles, who begins as a better conformist than Sarah, experiments with nonconformity. Like the other characters, he possesses elements of both a past and future culture. Already representative of a change in process, he is the rising scientific element at a time when Darwinism is not popular; but he is an "ungifted scientist" (45), and his comic attire-canvas clothes and nailed boots-which he wears to play the part of the good paleontologist, makes him a caricature not too unlike his grandfather, who "had devoted a deal of his money and much more of his family's patience to the excavation of the harmless
hummocks of earth that pimpled his three thousand Wiltshire acres" (16). Charles also represents the dying species of landed gentry and, like Sarah, struggles with means for survival. Fowles shows us three equally "plausible" ways that Charles's struggle might turn out. Ironically, this first ending is often dismissed because it is created by Charles and not by the narrator: "The last few pages you have read are not what happened, but what [Charles] spent the hours between London and Exeter imagining might happen" (226). Fowles even refers to his "two endings" .Yet, because the narrator evidently expresses his wish to avoid the role of the omnipotent god (82), it seems likely that he wishes us to consider Charles's version equally with his own.
The narrator, too, is both a product of the past and a creature of adaptation. Without the ability to adapt, the narrator could not survive natural selection. So, in Chapter 13, in an attempt to extend beyond his Victorian "inheritance" and fully acknowledging the experimental novelists who have already been culturally selected, he addresses us, as he must, and admits the artificiality of his enterprise: "I do not know. This story I am telling is all imagination. These characters I create never existed outside my own mind. If I have pretended until now to know my characters' minds and innermost thoughts, it is because I am writing in (just as I have assumed some of the vocabulary and 'voice' of) a convention universally accepted at the time of my story: that the novelist stands next to God. He may not know all, yet he tries to pretend that he does. But I live in the age of Alain Robbe-Grillet and Roland Barthes; if this is a novel, it cannot be a novel in the modern sense of the word" (80). The narrator seems to imply that modern novels, despite their rejection of convention, cannot help but contain, like his, some part of their ancestry known as convention, hearkening again to the epigraph of the third chapter, which states that "the chief part of the organization of every living creature is due to its inheritance" (15).
In conclusion, the intertextual allusions to Darwin and his evolutionary theories are essential when looking at the character development in The French Lieutenant’s Woman. All of the characters evolve from one aspect and to a certain extent some characters such as Chalres, do truly break free from convention but in the same time they have to experience the aftermaths of their acts.
