The French Lieutenant's Woman - Essay Example

The Struggle for Freedom in The French Lieutenants Woman, Cal, and Selected Poems The French Lieutenants Woman, Cal and Emily Dickinsons Selected Poems are, superficially, three substantially different texts. The first two were written by privileged twentieth-century men, both of whom became famous for their work during their lifetime; Selected Poems is the work of a nineteenth-century woman dissatisfied with the world around her and, for the most part, unpublished. However, all three pieces of literature deal with universal themes; one of these is the desire for personal freedom hindered by social customs. Although their settings vary hugely – The French Lieutenants Woman and Selected Poems are set midway through the Victorian period, respectively in Lyme, England and Amherst, America, whereas Cal takes place in 1960s Northern Ireland, featuring the IRA – the characters in each text struggle against social, religious, class and internalized constraints in an attempt to gain freedom. This essay will discuss the dichotomy of freedom and restriction in these three texts. John Fowles The French Lieutenants Woman (1963) is set about a century before its publication, allowing the author to use contemporary Victorian morals to portray struggle for freedom. Almost every character in the story can be said to battle against the norm in order to fulfil their desires, and in the Victorian age many laws, conventions and ideologies happened to prevent people from being truly free. This is true also of Emily Dickinson, and her Selected Poems (1890), which were written in roughly the same period that The French Lieutenants Woman is set, but on the other side of the Atlanctic. Dickinson was born in Amherst, America in 1830, a very old-fashioned and religiously orthodox place. Despite her familys wealth and connections, Dickinson suffered from agoraphobia. Her dislike of human interaction was compounded by her anachronistic beliefs about religion and marriage, of which her contemporaries would no doubt have disapproved; this could explain why so many of her poems were hidden away unpublished until after her death in 1886. Like Fowles, Dickinson wrote much on the topic of freedom and restrictions thereto. Cal (1983), conversely, is a more modern work, written by Bernard McClaverty and set less than fifty years ago. However, it is stunning that the constraints relevant in the worlds of Selected Poems and The French Lieutenants Woman were not as distantly historical as they seem: Cal shares many hindrances to personal freedom with those presented in the other works. Long after Queen Victoria died, the barriers to individual desires remained in Britain. One of the major setbacks to personal freedoms was the restrictive class hierarchy of Britain, as shown in Fowles The French Lieutenants Woman. In the nineteenth century, ones class was a defining aspect of life: wealth, usually in conjunction with high-class parents, automatically sent someone to the top of the social ladder, creating a society in which it was, on the whole, universally accepted that the rich were superior to the poor in every way. Unbridgeable chasms existed across society. Although the richer classes undeniably had far easier lifestyles, this ease of living came with the constant evaluation of oneself by peers. Social expectations restricted ones ability to pursue individual desires. This is particularly true of Charles in The French Lieutenants Woman. Charles upper-class status would lead a reader to believe that he has the freedom to do as he likes; however, his relationship with the lower-class Sarah has risky repercussions for his place in the social hierarchy. Beyond threatening his planned marriage to Ernestina, which could be blamed solely on romantic infidelity rather than class infidelity, Charles interaction with Sarah jeopardizes his relationship with Ernestinas powerful father and even his own reputation as a gentleman. That said, it cannot be ignored that people in the lower classes would experience far more impediments to self-realization and unconventional happiness. Fowles shows this through Sarahs character. In spite of her moderately rich background and proper education, Sarah remains merely a governess, and as such is only good enough to educate the youthful upper classes, rather than joining this social stratum herself. This is shown on page 166-169. Upon leaving her position, no other option opens itself to Sarah – the prejudices of society close off many choices to a woman who is rumored to be fallen. In an attempt to regain her own dignity and forbid society from rejecting her, she rejects them by isolating herself. She “sets [herself] beyond the pale”. It is only by removing herself from the game of class hierarchy that Sarah can win. The constraints that the higher classes put upon each other are an integral part of being in society; Sarahs freedom is “beyond the pale of Victorian narrowness”. Unlike Mrs Poultney and the other pillars of the Lyme Regis society, Sarah demonstrates that her lower-class status allows her more freedom than a woman of wealth would perhaps be able to achieve. Her freedom, which “they cannot understand”, is not even an option for women who were coddled from birth with money and prejudice. This same class attitude can be seen in Dickinsons Selected Poems, even though the New World originally championed itself as a place in which any person, regardless of background, could succeed. Dickinson herself rejected social hierarchies, by distancing herself from them in the same way that Sarah does in The French Lieutenants Woman. Although her poems rarely talk about class specifically, she does consider the effects of class on women, and how all levels of society tried to stifle womens voices. Knowing no other existence, and being brought up to believe that to be a member of the lower classes is to be inferior, it was near-impossible for rich women to break free of the constraints and expectations society placed on them. The risk was too great. The subjugation of the poor under the rich is also evident in Bernard McClavertys Cal. Just like Charles in The French Lieutenants Woman, Cal is born into a world of boundaries, even though he and Charles are of different classes and different eras. Cal is depressed, and his inability to hold down a job contributes to his self-hatred; his fathers lone wage is not enough for the two of them to maintain a safe and healthy lifestyle. The similarities between Cal and Charles continue when one considers that Cal is a victim of prejudices regarding love that crosses class boundaries: the object of his interests, widowed Marcella Morton, is older and wealthier than Cal, which makes it difficult for the couple to publicly be together. Despite their mutual wish to pursue a relationship, social prejudices (as well as, of course, Cals own guilt over killing her husband) demand that they do not. Another form of constraint is that of sexual judgment. In The French Lieutenants Woman, Ernestina represents a perfect Victorian virgin, “correct”, proper and far removed from Sarah, who is rumored to have had an extramarital relationship with a French soldier (hence the title). Through necessity, Sarah affects not to care that the other women in Lyme Regis refer to her as “the French Lieutenant’s whore”. The entire book, like Tess of the dURbervilles on which it was based, takes for its premise the absurd idea that a woman who has had sex before marriage is unclean and worthy of nothing except being shunned. As Dickinson lived at the time recorded in The French Lieutenants Wife, this gender judgment affected her in life. Part of the reason that so few of her poetry was published during her lifetime (fewer than a dozen of her several thousand poems) was that misogynistic views disapproved of women working. Dickinson herself admitted that people might “judge” her for earning money through writing. Like Fowles Ernestina, Dickinson was born into a wealthy family, and hence into the unnavigable web of prejudice and expectation that hindered women from fulfilling their potential. In poem 401, Dickinson mocks the stereotypical womans role in society by deeming her gender “Soft-Cherubic Creatures”. These three, soft, weak words juxtaposed against the hard capital letters creates a tone of sarcasm. Continuing by describing attacks on women thus, “One would as soon assault a Plush/Or violate a Star”, Dickinson intimates that the traiditonal view of women as fragile and beautiful is ultimately disrespectful. She manages to simultaneously express her awe at womens beauty, and ridicule men who use that beauty as an excuse to treat women as trivial and superficial. Poem 446 makes a similar point: the first line, “I showed her heights she never saw”, suggests a male speaker, and through the satire of Dickinson writing from a mans perspective she makes the point that women were not afforded the respect they deserved. Taken as an analysis of society, this poem explains that men can reach a degree of freedom in social life that is unavailable to women; the speakers solemn tone gives way to arrogance, reflecting the contemporary attitude to womens freedoms. The idea of women needing greater freedoms is at first a reasonable one, but as it becomes a reality, the oppressors remember their position as oppressors and turn against their prisoners once more. This is shown through Dickinsons italicization of “‘With me-‘ I said – With me?”, conveying the idea that this woman has no place among the heights of contemporary society. As mentioned above, both Dickinson and Sarah rejected the constraints placed upon them by society. In poem 288, the speaker declares “Im Nobody!” before continuing “How dreary/to be/Somebody!/How public/like a Frog”. The silliness of the wordchoice underscores the silliness of modern society, and the capitalization of Nobody emphasizes her reclamation of her isolation as a true self-identity. Like Sarah, Dickinson refuses to play the game. This had repercussions on both womens social life, but granted them a peace of mind unattainable otherwise. In Cal, Marcella Morton subverts these expectations – she owns property, and works as a librarian. Her male counterpart, Cal, does not even have a job. This simple fact seems to prove that feminism had made grounds in misogyny over the previous century, although a more complex look at Marcellas worklife – and at twenty-first century women who pursue careers – would no doubt reveal sexist details which differ little from Sarahs and Dickinsons experiences. Relatedly, constraints on relationships and sex were a huge boundary in nineteenth as well as twentieth-century societies. In The French Lieutenants Woman, Charles and Sarahs clandestine relationship severely hampers the freedoms afforded to Charles by his lucky birth into a higher social class. His developing interest in the “French lieutenants whore” exposes Charles to the disapproval which characterizes Sarahs dealings with other people – her suffering becomes his, and threatens his entire livelihood. The unbridgeable chasms of the social hierarchy, discussed above, stop Charles from finding happiness with Sarah. Individuals in Victorian society were often severely sexually repressed, even though nineteenth-century Britain was, in its own euphemistic way, as open about sex as modern society is. In The French Lieutenants Woman, a scene in which Ernestina momentarily succumbs to perfectly natural sexual desire – not even that, but consideration of her own sexuality – is punctuated by her own command that “I must not”. Although we cannot take one character to be reflective of an entire society, Ernestinas instinctive self-censorship shows that women were expected to hide their real feelings for the sake of propriety. The footnotes for this chapter expand on the topic, showing that the Victorian era harbored an innate quandary over the relationship between bodily functions and spiritual worries. In The French Lieutenants Woman, Sarah strives to find love outside conventional marriage; Dickinson felt similarly, thinking of marriage as a trap for women, in an unusual way for her era. In poem 199, the narrator – a wife – reminisces about her childhood and compares it, unfavorably, to her life as a married woman. The first stanza, like the honeymood period of a marriage, revels in the pride of the womans new status: “Im wife”. The abrupt exclamation, conveying surprise and happiness, is contrasted later in the poem with a much more sorrowful “How odd the Girl’s life looks/Behind this soft Eclipse”, revealing the narrators feeling of being distanced from her own past self. Her adult role has eclipsed her youthful pain. Yet still the speaker laments her marriage, refusing to compare her childhood to her married adulthood even though it makes her marriage look good in comparison: “But why compare?/I’m ‘Wife!’ Stop there!”. The underlying beliefs about marriage are disturbing. Whereas Ernestina desired to be married above all else, Dickinson withdrew from the entire institution, feeling that it would “weaken her already inferior status”. This view of hers was fairly anachronistic, more suited to our time than Dickinsons – and it was possibly taken as inspiration for Fowles character of Sarah. In poem 732, Dickinson states “She rose to His Requirement, dropped/The Playthings of Her Life/To take the honorable Work/Of Woman, and of Wife”. In a few short words she captures the essence of her discomfort with the idea of marriage: that women are innately inferior to men, and that to fulfil a womans true duty she must lose her own identity, to subsume her selfhood in his expectations. Dickinson expresses revulsion at the concept of giving up ones freedom and independence to be an “honorable” wife – by just using this adjective, she mocks it, and the entire institution. She also describes wifehood as “work”, which was then and is now something to be avoided if at all possible! Relationships and sex in Cal also provide a suitable vehicle for McClavertys exploration of freedom and constraint, in particular the relationship between Cal and Marcella Morton. After her Protestant husbands death – committed, unknown to her, by Cal – Marcella, like Dickinson and Sarah before her, isolates herself from society. Her interaction with Cal, which evolves from her giving him a job on her farm, leads to reciprocal sexual desires, but both are hampered by internal conflicts. Marcella is portrayed as genuinely selfless, as well as riddled with guilt over her widowhood: she announces to Cal, soon after their first kiss, that “I’m a widow. With problems. You’re a boy without. Somebody might get hurt and regret it.” Her complex fears regarding a potential relationship with a younger, poorer man intersect with social prejudices to hold her back from achieving happiness. Religion and religious limits on behavior also play a large role in each of these three pieces of literature. Dickinson, and Charles from The French Lieutenants Woman, were both born into religious families but found themselves questioning these externally-imposed beliefs. Both lived in the 1860s, a time of significant change in terms of religion, helped along by Darwins publication of On the Origin of Species (1859) on the eve of the decade. Like many people now, Dickinson strived to follow the religious beliefs of her peers but was unable to – similarly, in fact, to Charles. In Fowles novel, Charles is a Darwinist, interested scientifically in the story of evolution as opposed to the story of creation. In one scene, he attends church and finds himself desperately searching for an untenable belief in the Christian God; this pivotal moment is the catalyst for Charles realization that he can never marry Ernestina. Religion has become a burden to Charles when it should be a relief. The concept of wanting to believe, but being unable to, resurfaces in Dickinsons poem 1551. The ending of the poem concludes “Better an ignis fatuus/Than no illume at all”. Her suggestion is that the attempt to believe, regardless of whether it succeeds, is important; to give up entirely is a step too far even for the radical Dickinson. Like Charles she makes an effort to believe, but decides that her effort counts for enough. Dickinsons poem 501 expands on her existentialist views. She introduces the poem with the line “The world is not conclusion” - this appears, at first glance, to adhere to the usual Christian view, but the poem goes on to discuss afterlife in further, more complex detail. The use of words such as “baffle” suggests that truth may not be compatible with the existence of an afterlife; when read in conjunction with poem 1551, the reference to people who speak “Strong Hallelujahs” comes across as sarcastic, implying that those who cannot accept their own reasonable doubt about religion are those who proclaim their faith the loudest. The poems conclusion is skeptical, affirming her own choice to doubt Christianity and condemning those who accept the churchs teachings blindly. Religion plays a huge part in Cal, which is set in an Ireland torn apart by religion and colonialism. Cal McCluskey is a member of a Catholic family living in a Protestant community – a fact which instantly isolates him from his neighbours. As the Protestant community develops and becomes closer, “the more excluded and isolated the McCluskeys felt”. The family is constantly “on watch” for inter-religious conflict, a burden which sadly becomes part of their everyday life. This is shown by Cals reflection, as he looks out od his bedroom window, that the rain “meant there would be no aggro tonight. Rain kept the Protestants at home”. His surroundings, and the religious battles within him, oppress Cal, forcing him to commit violent acts against his will – the antithesis of freedom. Like Dickinson and Sarah, Cal finds freedom in isolating himself from others; at the end of the book, he finds the ultimate freedom in allowing himself to be beaten, isolating himself from kindness, humanity, and security to find fulfilment. The French Lieutenants Woman, Selected Poems and Cal are similar in that they address individual quests to find freedom in the face of discrimination on the basis of class, gender, and religion. It is both astounding and disappointing that the different temporal and spatial settings of the three works matter little in terms of the bigotry contained within them; it makes one wonder whether the twenty-first century is so different. Works Cited Dickinson, Emily. Selected Poems. 1890. Fowles, John. The French Lieutenants Woman. 1963. McClaverty, Bernard. Cal. 1983. Read More