Rewriting Marx: emancipation and restoration in 'The French Lieutenant's Woman.' - John Fowles Issue

Twentieth Century Literature, Spring, 1996 by David W. Landrum

In Victorian tradition, John Fowles begins The French Lieutenant's Woman with an epigraph: "Every emancipation is restoration of the human world and of human relationships to man himself," from Zur Judenfrage by Karl Marx. Marxist considerations, especially ones that touch on the subject of human emancipation, are, by this technique, imported into the text as qualifying ideas affecting the reader's interpretation. The emancipations in the novel, however, do not take the form of rescue or revolutionary triumph, the ideas typically associated with Marxist emancipation. In The French Lieutenant's Woman, emancipation appears as dissolution, and this dissolution/emancipation pattern continues throughout the novel. As certainties crumble one after another, restoration and emancipation occur in a pattern that eventually extends from the characters in the novel to the author, the reader, and the text itself. Incessant shifting from one center to another, followed by the dislocation of each newly established center, gives the novel much of its rhetorical energy and provides it with a unifying thematic dimension that substitutes for a formulaic thesis. As this strategy unfolds, the meta-narrative of Marxism is affirmed in its recognition of the need for emancipation and restoration; but it is also subverted in relation to the substance and nature of the emancipations required to truly restore human relationships.

The plot of The French Lieutenant's Woman is constructed primarily around the developing relationship of Charles Smithson and Sarah Woodruff, and most of the critical attention the novel has been paid focuses upon this phase of the story. But it is in the secondary plot concerning Sam Farrow and Charles Smithson that aspects of class struggle, a phenomenon Marx proposed as the key to understanding human history, are a primary focus. Some class considerations are seen in the development of the main plot: Sarah Woodruff must compromise her personal freedom by working, out of economic necessity, for the tyrannical Mrs. Poulteney; Sarah's father is obsessed with the supposed gentility of his family and eventually is financially ruined and goes mad with this preoccupation; and Sarah's economic marginality is often emphasized. It is the parallel plot, however, dealing with Charles and Ernestina, and Sam and Mary, that more closely focuses on class conflict and illustrates the tensions that arise from social stratification. Charles Smithson is from a landed family and looks to inherit the title of baronet. He is characteristic of the leisured, monied class. He has never worked, occupies his time with paleontology and travel, and waits to inherit substantial wealth from an unmarried uncle. Ernestina Freeman is daughter to a man who represents the rising entrepreneurial class in England (her father operates a drapery and cloth sales store). Their impending marriage is indicative of the alliance of old money and new that was occurring in industrial England at that time.

Charles and Ernestina are each connected with a servant specific to their sex, socially inferior, and separated by the barriers of education, language (both Sam and Mary speak in dialect), money, manners, sexual mores, privilege - all the indexes of social stratification. As the novel develops, antipathy between the servants and their superiors grows, especially between Sam and Charles.

The importance of classical Marxism for the novel, and especially for the Sam/Charles phase of the plot, is emphasized early in the text (having been seen already in epigraphs). After discussing the economic dynamics that touch Charles Smithson and English society in general, the narrator adds:

Needless to say, Charles knows nothing of the beavered German Jew quietly working, as it so happened, that very afternoon in the British Museum library; and whose work in those somber walls was to bear such bright red fruit. Had you described that fruit, or the subsequent effects of its later indiscriminate consumption, Charles would almost certainly not have believed you - and, even though, in only six months from this March of 1867, the first volume of Kapital was to appear in Hamburg. (12)

The narrator adds, however, that decades of prosperity in England had "made the possibility of revolution recede . . . almost out of mind" (12). The reader has not yet been introduced to the character of Sam, but Sam is soon brought into the story along with a framing text that points to the conflicts experienced by Sam the servant and Charles his master. And despite Fowles's earlier disclaimer about revolution being unlikely, the entire episode in which Sam first appears is laced with direct and indirect allusions to class struggle and violent revolution. Also, an epigraph by Marx looms as the qualifying quotation in the chapter that describes Charles's and Sam's relationship.

Fowles places this epigraph at the beginning of the chapter introducing and describing Sam. From Capital, it is designed to bear on the reader's assessment of Sam's economic and social status: