Wickedness as a Source of Freedom in John Fowles’ The French Lieutenant’s Woman
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2019
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Abstract
The extraordinary women, who are strong enough to stand against conventions, have always been represented as evil and wicked in the literary canon. These female characters are labelled as wicked and portrayed from a one-dimensional perspective as purely evil. Various postmodern rewritings of these grand narratives aim to give these female characters voice and retell their stories from a female point of view trying to undo the patriarchal cultural myth that represents these extraordinary women as wicked. In these new versions, the perspective is reversed and the constructed socio-cultural conventions that underlie the representation of these characters as evil is laid bare. Therefore, the formerly evil women are granted a multidimensional representation, and they are, in a way, justified by being portrayed as victims of an oppressive society rather than monstrous characters. John Fowles, too, rewrites the Victorian codes of womanhood through the characterisation of Sarah in The French Lieutenant’s Woman. However, unlike many other contemporary rewriting, in his novel the female character is composed as willingly exposing herself as wicked. Rather than portraying the ‘wicked’ women as victims of a male-dominated society, he prefers to grant wickedness to Sarah as a power position that would grant her freedom from the conventional codes of the Victorian society. In this chapter, it is intended to show how Fowles changes the rewriting strategies that aim to give voice to the marginal women in literature and by doing so how he creates a new version of a feminist rewriting. © Inter-Disciplinary Press 2014.