John Fowles’ The French Lieutenant’s Woman: Critiquing Victorian Values through Metafiction

Abstract

This article explores John Fowles’ employment of Metafiction in the French Lieutenant’s Woman. It makes the case that Fowles’ metafiction is motivated by the author’s postmodernist desire to comment upon, undermine and critique the dominant and authoritative narratives in history, the understanding of history and in literary history. Fowles’ novel’s metafiction critiques the Victorian ideology through interweaving metafictional elements into a novel set in the Victorian era and, at least initially, following a conventional kind of plot premise. The Victorian ideology is critiqued through a metafictional reimagining of tropes of Victorian fiction. The novel breaks through the constraints of Victorian fiction in such a way as to fragment itself into multiple conflicting endings. Each of these endings violate the conventions of Victorian fiction in form and content, whilst remaining historically rooted and plausible. The multiple endings expose the fictitiousness of the novel and express John Fowles’ beliefs about the absurdity of human social life.