It was Harold Pinter’s brilliant film that led me to read The French Lieutenant’s Wife. The haunting image of the still, mythical figure clad in black, looking out to sea from the edge of The Cobb, sets the stage for a staggeringly beautiful film.
I first read the book in 1981. The copy was old, from the local book exchange, with the cover torn. He was twenty-one years old, a medical student, and hadn’t read much contemporary literature. In the most masterful way, the author transports us to the 19th century, an era about which he knew very little. The reader is allowed to listen, to speak among the well-born and among the plebs.
What follows is an intriguing, philosophical, and even humorous narrative. It is loaded with mystery and full of memorable words and verses.
“But where the telescopist would have been in the sea was with the other figure on that shadowy curving seawall. He was standing just at the far end of the sea, apparently leaning on an old upturned cannon like a bollard. His clothes were black. The wind moved them, but the figure remained motionless, staring or out to sea, more like a living memorial to the drowned, a figure from a myth, than any fitting fragment of insignificant provincial day.”
Staring at the “desperate” figure, Sarah Woodruff, clad in black, are the doomed lovers: Charles Smithson, one of London’s most handsome and sought-after bachelors, and his fiancée, Ernestina Freeman. Sarah is an enigmatic character who is believed to be insane and ostracized due to her affair with a French officer, who later abandoned her. But when Charles first saw her at the Cobb, to him there was no madness on her face: no mask, no hysteria. If there was any madness of her, she was in society because of her lack of empathy for the woman’s pain.
Even when Sarah turned to look at him: “It was not so much what was positively in that face that remained with him after that first meeting, but everything that was not as he had expected; for his was an age when the look favored female was the demure, the obedient, the shy”.
While Sarah’s “look” lasted no more than a few seconds, it lit a fire in Charles, causing him to reject the values that were the foundation of his Victorian society.
Like Ryabovich, in Chekov’s story “The Kiss”, desperate for a kiss from a strange woman, Sarah’s “look” provokes in Charles a mad exaltation. It is the most crucial moment of the book. The woman’s “look” destroys Charles. He loses control and an obsession with Sarah takes over his heart.
The book is mainly about the apocalyptic convergence of their paths. One day, as a poodle, Charles follows Sarah into the woods:
“I’ve come because I’ve convinced myself that you really need help. And while I still don’t understand why you honored me by taking an interest in your…” he hesitated here, because he was about to say “case,” which would have given away that he was playing doctor in addition to the gentleman: “… I have come willing to hear what you wanted me to hear.”
“I know of a secluded spot nearby. Can we go there?” she said.
In an act of madness, Charles joins her. From the beginning of the book, the reader can almost smell the fate that awaits him. We accompany Charles on his doomed journey, with sadness and pity. We wonder: why would a man abandon his position for a woman he barely knows? Perhaps there was a fickle part of his soul that would not allow society to rule. For Sarah, Charles was the dupe of the ages, a tool for stabbing a dagger, metaphorically, into the very heart of high society.
The French Lieutenant’s Wife, a book with two endings, is a charming tale and meticulously written. John Fowles populates his story with many interesting characters. The reader is equally captivated by the beginning and the end of the book. The writer is very much the craftsman, with nearly every sentence perfect.
More than half a century after its first publication, its theme is still fresh as modern societies still retain the double paradigm of the rich, destined for a life of privilege, and the miserable fate of the poor. Curiously, many of our lives have a presence in the book, evoked less literally than philosophically. A novel that seemed so strange to me in my youth contained a chart of my future and the unwise decisions I was going to make with my life.