The French Lieutenant’s Woman

Published:1969 Set: between 1867 and 1869 Historiographic Metafiction Linda Hutcheon “ well-known and popular novels which are both intensely self reflexive and yet paradoxically also lay claim to historical events” (A Poetics of Postmodernism, 1988)

The French Lieutenant’s Woman There is only one good definition of God: the freedom that allows other freedom to exist" (Ch. XIII)

The French Lieutenant’s Woman “Every emancipation is a restoration of the human world and of human relationships to man himself.” (Marx, Zur Judenfrage, 1844)

The French Lieutenant’s Woman years after the publication of Darwin’s The Origin of the Species Publication of the first volume of Marx’s Kapital (class conflict) 2 years after 1867: John Stuart Mill’s The Subjection of Woman

The French Lieutenant’s Woman “imitate[s] the Victorian proclivity for incorporating historical and sociological generalization into the fabric of fictions, amplifying the dimensions of the novelist’s interests, creating a fiction that is almost encyclopedic in its absortion of all aspects of culture” Fred Kaplan

The French Lieutenant’s Woman "I have but a man and a maid, ever ready to slander and steal " (Ch. 49)

The French Lieutenant’s Woman Manipulation of the reader: -Delay and intercut of events -Deliberately deceiving the reader -Authorial interventions, comments and digressions

The French Lieutenant’s Woman “The green merino shawl was round her shoulders, but could not quite hide the fact that she was in a long-sleeved nightgown." (Ch. 46)

omnipotent god “not at all what we think of as a divine look, but one of distinctly mean and dubious [...] moral quality." (Ch. 55)

The French Lieutenant’s Woman "begat what shall it be-let us say seven children" (Ch. 44)

The French Lieutenant’s Woman "I said earlier that we are all poets, though not many of us write poetry; and so are we all novelists, that is, we have a habit of writing fictional futures for ourselves although perhaps today we incline more to put ourselves into a film" (Ch. 55)

The French Lieutenant’s Woman "No. It is as I say. You have not only planted the dagger in my breast, you have delighted in twisting it" She stood now staring at him (Ch. 60)/at Charles, as if against her will, but hypnotized, the defiant criminal awainting sentence. He pronounced it " A day will come when you shall be called to account for what you have done to me”(Ch. 61)

The French Lieutenant’s Woman He hesitated one last second, his face was like the poised-crumbling wall of a dam, so vast was the weight of anathema pressing to roar down. (FLW Ch 60; Ch 61)

The French Lieutenant’s Woman “historical metafiction: Novels which combine an attention to verifiable historical events, personages or milieu with a self-reflexive awareness of their status as artifacts and the literary conventions they employ" (Linda Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction, New York, Routledge, 1988, pp

The French Lieutenant’s Woman “The process of making stories out of chronicles, of constructing plots out of sequences, is what postmodern fiction underlines. This […] focuses attention on the act of imposing order on that past, of encoding strategies of meaning-making through representation" Linda Hutcheon, The Politics of Postmodernism,London, Routledge, 1989, pp