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“Eyes a man could drown in”: Phallic Myth and Femininity in John Fowles's The French
Lieutenant's Woman
Author(s): Mahitosh Mandal
Source:
Interdisciplinary Literary Studies
, 2017, Vol. 19, No. 3 (2017), pp. 274-298
Published by: Penn State University Press
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5325/intelitestud.19.3.0274
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, Vol . , N. ,
Copyright © e Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA
•
“Eyes a man could drown in”: Phallic Myth
and Femininity in John Fowles’s The French
Lieutenant’s Woman
abstract
is paper is a psychoanalytic study of “gender myths” as presented in John
Fowles’s famous novel e French Lieutenant’s Woman (). It begins
by describing Fowles’s interest in Freudian psychoanalysis and his use of
psychoanalytic ideas in constructing ctional characters. e paper sub-
sequently explains how the concept of “postmodern indeterminacy” as
found in Fowles’s text needs to be read in connection with the “enigma” as
embodied by Sarah Woodru, the female protagonist. An attempt is then
made to make sense of the “enigma of femininity,” a critical concern among
the psychoanalysts. Elaborating on Lacanian developments and critique of
Freudian ideas, this paper uses the psychoanalytic notions related to the
truth of the feminine, ctionality of the masculine, jouissance, and sexual
non-rapport to oer an analysis of the enigma of Sarah Woodru, the fail-
ures of Charles Smithson the male protagonist, and the inconclusiveness
of Fowles’s narrative. e discussion highlights the link between feminism
and Lacanian psychoanalysis on the question of construction of gender
identities.
keywords: sexual non-rapport, jouissance, phallic myth, femininity,
postmodernism, Lacanian psychoanalysis
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phallic myth and femininity in the french lieutenant’s woman
275
Do not ask me to explain what I have done. I cannot explain it. It is
not to be explained. . . . I am not to be understood even by myself.
And I can’t tell you why, but I believe my happiness depends on my
not understanding.
— , ,
’ , ,
ere is a jouissance . . . “beyond the phallus.” ere is a jouissance
that is hers, that belongs to that “she” that doesn’t exist and doesn’t
signify anything. ere is a jouissance that is hers about which she
herself perhaps knows nothing if not that she experiences it—that
much she knows. She knows it, of course, when it comes. It does not
happen to all of them.
—
():
,
, –,
introduction
As a thinker and literary writer, John Fowles was quite substantially inter-
ested in the working of the unconscious mind, and in the psychological
and psychoanalytic theories pertaining to the same. Eileen Warburton,
Fowles’s biographer, notes that Fowles was so fascinated with psychoanal-
ysis that he was inspired to analyze his and his wife’s minds by interpreting
their dreams. His basic techniques of understanding the unconscious were
Freudian, though he took recourse to Jungian, Alderian, and Hornerian
methodologies as and when necessary. In John Fowles: A Life in Two Worlds,
Warburton writes:
Fowles completed an intense period of analysis of his dreams and
those of his wife. In his “method” he made the basic interpreta-
tion Freudian—that is, he wrote, “treat all imagery as illustration of
pre-conscious traumas that have to do with (a) withdrawal of the
breast-corruption of the pure mother-baby relationship, (b) feelings
about parents or the parent substitutes; Oedipus complex and the rest.”
Imagery, however, was to be interpreted using Jungian, Alderian, and
Hornerian methodologies.
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276
mahitosh mandal
Fowles’s fascination with psychoanalysis (Freudian) and analytical
psychology (Jungian) is reected in his literary writings, especially in
his novels. A close study reveals that, to a great extent, Fowles’s texts are
psychoanalytically informed. His protagonists are subjected to “psycho-
logical tests,” conducted by gures supposed to function as psychoanalysts
and psychiatrists. His characters speak the vocabulary of psychoanalysis,
frequently using in their conversations terms like “Oedipus complex,” “repe-
tition compulsion,” “case histories,” “sado-masochism,” “hysteria,” “father/
mother-substitute,” “gaze,” and so forth. Real or ctional “case histories” (in
the Freudian fashion) constitute, or are incorporated in, his narratives to
the extent that his novels have been called “psychoanalytic trial narratives.”
at is not to say that Fowles mechanically imitates Freudian case histories
which he found extremely fascinating and which he, in real life, made use of
to understand himself and others. With postmodernist inclination, Fowles
maintains an ironic, parodic, even interrogatory distance vis-à-vis the larger
discourse of psychoanalysis (predominantly Freudian), as sometimes his
ctional psychiatrists and psychoanalysts are shown to have ended up with
false interpretation of the protagonists’ minds. It has been rightly pointed
out that in his novels Fowles does not merely represent psychical structures
but also “interpret psychoanalytical meanings.” Such “interpretations” and
“interrogations” do not however indicate a gesture of rejection of psycho-
analysis, provided Fowles’s own preoccupations with the human mind.
roughout his career Fowles maintained a sustained interest in psychoa-
nalysis. For example, later on, when Gilbert Rose wrote a Freudian reading
of e French Lieutenant’s Woman, presenting the unconscious signicance
of the novel to its author, Fowles was highly impressed and was immedi-
ately inspired to write an essay called “Hardy and the Hag,” a psychoanalytic
study of omas Hardy’s novel e Well Beloved. Fowles’s reinterpretation
of psychoanalysis could also be considered as part of the larger climate of
opinions and diversity of followers/schools that Freudian psychoanalysis
(both in theory and practice) had eventually generated in Europe. With the
rise of Jacques Lacan on the international psychoanalytic scene, his historic
elimination from the International Psychoanalytical Association, accompa-
nied by his widely inuential weekly lectures/seminars on psychoanalysis
in Paris for about twenty-seven years (–), most of these schools of
Freudian psychoanalysis would gradually recede to the background.
It is hardly possible that Fowles had read Lacan. Fowles (–)
was younger than Lacan (–); however, even though Fowles was
psychoanalytically informed there is a curious absence of any reference to
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phallic myth and femininity in the french lieutenant’s woman
277
Lacan in his works. ere are direct references to Lacan’s contemporaries
like Roland Barthes (-) and Jacques Derrida (–) in his
novels. In fact, a text like e French Lieutenant’s Woman shows that Fowles
is writing as a critically conscious post-structuralist. e rst French pub-
lication of Lacan’s major written work Écrits was in while the rst
English translation of the same was published in . Similarly, the rst
published transcription of Lacan’s lectures (Seminar Book XI) in French
came out in while the rst English translation of his seminars (Seminar
Book XI) was available in . In the English-speaking world Lacan was
fairly unknown around the time Fowles was writing his masterpieces. is
was mainly due to the fact that he spoke more than he wrote. Could we
then conclude that the absence of Lacan in Fowles was due to the relative
inaccessibility of his lectures and writings outside France? It remains a fact
that Lacan was somehow less known to Fowles, who studied in Oxford and
lived in Dorset, United Kingdom, than Derrida and Barthes whom Fowles
fondly and playfully refers to in his novels.
It does not matter whether or not Fowles himself directly used Lacan
in his writing; what matters is that both of them had shared interests in
psychoanalysis. Apart from his critical interest in Freudian psychoanalytic
ideas (as was the case with Lacan, albeit in a more rigorous and clinical
way), Fowles, almost in all of his novels, was preoccupied with the working
of the human mind and engaged with the issues of male desire and fan-
tasy, the “enigma” of femininity, and the (im-)possibility of man–woman
relationship. ese ideas were the key concerns of Lacan—concerns that
evolved into some original and immensely signicant concepts including
feminine jouissance, phallic myth, sexual non-rapport, and the limits of
love and knowledge, found most notably in his Seminar Book XX and else-
where. In a more critical sense, the problems with psychiatry that Fowles
theoretically encountered (reected through his attempt to disprove the
diagnosis made by his ctional psychiatrists), can be rightly addressed
using Lacanian ideas. It seems Fowles was eager to present some complex
psychic situations that could not be easily fathomed, unlike some psychia-
trists who thought they could do so. rough his clinical engagement with
psychoanalysis, Lacan too had repeatedly addressed the ungraspable and
not-easily-graspable domains of human psyche and criticized a class of
practitioners who lacked the necessary critical edge in their theoretical and
clinical engagements with psychoanalysis.
Indeed, the major postmodernist preoccupations of Fowles—his
strategies of rewriting, parody and playfulness, his repeated keeping of
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278
mahitosh mandal
the endings of his stories unresolved, his use of metactional moments
and the moments of ontological frame-breaking as the author intrudes
the narrative, and so on—could best be understood in poststructuralist
terms in so far as Lacanian ideas have signicant structuralist and post-
structuralist implications. As Eli Zaretsky in his essay “Postmodernism
and Psychoanalysis” points out, Freud’s theories originating as they did in
the modernist period cannot explain all that a postmodern “subject” might
experience. If, as Derrida says, inconclusiveness is one of the hallmarks
of postmodernism and indeterminacy marks postmodern subjectivity,
then Lacan, concludes Zaretsky, has given us the rst postmodernist-
poststructuralist conception of psychoanalysis “that truly broke with
modernist assumptions concerning subjectivity and sexual dierence.”
Hence, he adds, a meaningful history of postmodernism should assign
relatively more importance to Lacan. Zaretsky’s point might seem to be
rather simplistic here, especially his understanding of Freud as a “modern-
ist.” However, he has, as it were, hit the nail on the head, and has echoed
a point that Slavoj Žižek makes in his studies on postmodernism. Žižek,
while talking about the later lms of Alfred Hitchcock, states that a post-
structuralist reading of a postmodern text and another reading of the same
text not informed by the poststructuralist ideas would be fundamentally
dierent from each other, the former alone disentangling the true signi-
cance of the postmodern narrative.
truth of the feminine and fictionality of the masculine
One of the ways to introduce the concept of truth/ction, a major concern
in Lacanian psychoanalysis, would be to say a few words about the Japanese
lm Rashomon (), which won the Golden Lion Award () and
established Akira Kurosawa as an international lm-maker. Famously, in
this lm, a murder incident and a related rape incident are presented in
four dierent and somewhat contradictory versions presented from four
dierent subject positions, each of which is initially, equally convincing.
rough this lm, Kurosawa gives us a number of critical insights on the
question of truth. e original incident (murder or rape) or the primal
scene is always already lost. But the loss is only too unbearable which is
why a re- presentation of the primal scene becomes an imperative. It is only
through the subjective re-presentation (with all the unconscious nuances
of the word “subjective”) of the traumatic moment that the truth of that
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phallic myth and femininity in the french lieutenant’s woman
279
moment can be constructed. In other words, truth cannot be accessed in its
own abode, in an unmediated way. Truth exists only through the narration
of it, that is, through the mediation of discourses/visuals. What is more
important, the discursive representation of truth is precisely what creates
the truth, which would otherwise be non-existent. Truth is devoid of any
singularity and authenticity; it exists as “truths,” in the plural, in multiple
versions and variations, deriving from the dierent subject positions at
stake. Here, Kurosawa seems to have evoked a major Lacanian insight, as
proposed by Lacan in “Seminar on ‘e Purloined Letter’”: truth is struc-
tured like ction or truth reveals a “ctional ordering” where truth has
proximity toward the Real as well as the Symbolic, in the Lacanian sense.
Here, if ction is considered to be (or based on, as in the case of John
Fowles’s narrative to be explained shortly) deception or lie, even then such
falsity may be said to be inscribed in the very text of truth. Insofar as ction
is understood broadly as the domain of language or the Symbolic, truth can
only be half-said or half-articulated, for there is always something in truth
that escapes symbolization or remains unsayable. It is this domain of the
unsayable in truth that makes truth similar to the Real understood as that
which escapes signierization.
For Lacan, the proliferation of ction or discourses is directly linked
to an attempt to avoid the void, to avoid an encounter with the Real or
with a traumatic truth. A literary example here could be the case of the
Arabian Nights, a sequence of interconnected stories which, as planned by
Scheherazade, the storyteller-queen, have their roots in a traumatic event,
that is, the betrayal by the rst Queen, her murder by her Sultan-husband,
and his consequent desperation to avenge the betrayal by marrying and
murdering one virgin aer another. e proliferation of the stories, meant
to approximate stories, is an attempt to defer another traumatic
moment, the death of the queen Scheherazade in the hands of her Sultan-
husband, and the succession of marriages and murders that would have
followed. Here, murder/death would be the domain of the Real or the trau-
matic domain of beyond-the-language while the constantly increasing sto-
ries would constitute the ctional/Symbolic universe which helps one in
avoiding/hiding the Real. For Lacan, the domain of language is predomi-
nantly the domain of the Symbolic which is precisely what creates and cat-
egorizes what is known as “reality.” e entry of the human subject into the
domain of the Symbolic, or vice versa is necessarily related to the exclusion
of the Real from reality. However, the domain of the reality/Symbolic, for
Lacan, is not just an exclusion of the Real/truth. e Symbolic is also that
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which bears a truth, the truth about its origins in the Real. e Real does
not “exist” in the Symbolic as such, but it “ex-sists” (exists outside but insists
on) the Symbolic, and like the umbilical cord’s relation to the body, always
functions as a remainder/reminder setting the Symbolic in motion. e
Symbolic or the domain of discourse and representation has its origins in
the Real/the unrepresentable/truth, and carries within itself the remainder,
or traces, of the Real.
e proliferation of signiers to avoid the void can be illustrated by the
metaphor of an onion. e onion has multiple layers, which when peeled
o, one aer another, reveals that at its center, there is void. e layers could
be compared with the discursive layers of the Symbolic reality which dis-
guise a lack, precisely by containing it. One can uncover the layers of the
onion to discover or “unconceal” the truth; however, in the place of truth
one can nd only a lack of it, a void, horror, the unsigniable Real that
must be hidden, or disguised, through discourse. It is understandable why
Lacan has stated that every discourse is a semblance. Every discourse pre-
sents the semblance of truth while in reality in the place of truth there is
only a lack. In his analysis of courtly love, Lacan has pointed out that the
discourse of courtly love in the medieval times was not a mimetic exer-
cise, it didn’t represent what was there in the feudal reality; rather, it rep-
resented what was not there. Courtly love, for Lacan, was based on a lack
of sexual advances or on maintaining proper physical distance from the
lady on part of the knight. e discourse of love and romance represented
an inevitable truth, that is, no such ideal love-relation could take place in
actuality, that the lord/lady-knight relationships had an underlying tension
that would lead to the eventual de-structuration of feudalism which Johan
Huizinga has termed “waning of the middle ages.” Courtly romance could
be considered to be a kind of wish-fullment on the part of the upholders
of feudalism, a wish that was far from being fullled in the domain of social
reality; hence, the need for literary discourse.
It may be noted that the French word for truth is vérité which is a fem-
inine noun. By and large, Lacan brings out the link between truth and fem-
ininity. It can be argued that femininity in the purest sense is a domain
outside the phallocentric language. Masculinity for Lacan is a ction which
is structured in law, logic, and language; whereas femininity is the domain
of truth, the domain beyond language and representation, the domain that
challenges the concepts of law and logic. e “myth of masculinity” or the
“phallic myth” derives from the notion of the phallus. Lacan explains that
phallus does not just refer to the biological organ; rather, it is predominantly
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phallic myth and femininity in the french lieutenant’s woman
281
a Symbolic entity comprising a set of traditionally inherited concepts like
virility, power, and superiority, supposed to construct the identity of the
masculine subject. Phallus is an overcoat that the male subject is made to
put on by the society, in order to achieve “manhood.” In this sense, one can
say, slightly modifying Simone de Beauvoir’s o-quoted statement, that one
is not born a man; one becomes a man, that is, one has to internalize the
existing notions of masculinity in order to have his subjectivity constructed.
Following Lacan, one can state that woman’s (understood not as a bio-
logical but a psychoanalytic category) existence qua woman, or as “purely
feminine,” is the Other to language, and that woman cannot exist entirely
as woman, or entirely as feminine, since that would make her completely
incomprehensible and unrepresentable to others as well as to herself. For
Lacan, woman is not entirely cut by language, and insofar as she is not cut
by language, in so far as she verges on the Real, she is a potential threat
to the ction called masculinity and patriarchy. Patriarchy can at all exist
and sustain itself so long as it can avoid encountering the purely feminine.
Women themselves as subjects are trained from the beginning of their life
to uphold and authenticate the patriarchal institution, at the cost of keep-
ing aside, or sacricing, the purely feminine or that which is fatal to the
phallic. One can say that women function as the gatekeepers of patriarchy.
Gatekeepers exist, ironically, at the margins of an institution but are instru-
mental in protecting the institution.
ere are two ways in which women authenticate the phallic myth by
apparently sacricing “pure femininity” and tting into the domain of lan-
guage and understanding. ese are what could be called “woman as mas-
querade” and “woman as symptom.” As masquerade, a woman upholds and
authenticates the phallic myth, the ction about the virility, heroism, supe-
riority, and power of the masculine subject. In other words, as masquerade,
woman masks, or does not trigger, the disturbing questions regarding mas-
culine subject’s sense of being superior to women, or his right to exert power
over women, for example. As masquerade woman protects man from expe-
riencing existential crisis by making him sense a kind of psychic unity about
his being. Woman, in the Lacanian sense, is also the symptom of man. Here,
symptom would refer to woman as a site for the disguised fullment of man’s
repressed sexual desire. Sexual desire is repressed in the classical Freudian
sense because the rst sexual impulse was directed toward the mother, an
impulse which had to be repressed because of paternal prohibition. For
the masculine subject, woman is not an original object of desire but rather
always a substitute for the rst object of desire, that is, mother. If symptom is
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mahitosh mandal
understood as a return-of-the-repressed in a disguised form, then for man,
woman qua man’s substitute-object-of-desire stages man’s repressed sexual
desire. Because the original object is always already lost, woman is less an
object than an object cause of man’s desire and fantasy. Woman as substitute
object cannot full man’s desire but brings back his repressed desires with the
caveat that fullment of desire is impossible. Desire thus caused may not be
fullled or may not aim at fullment but it does contribute to the articulation
and recognition of the masculine subject as a desiring subject.
Both as masquerade and as symptom a woman contributes to a rather
ironical sense of self-importance and security of the masculine subject. As
masquerade, woman enhances the false sense of superiority and power of
the masculine subject and as symptom woman oers sustenance of the
masculine subject as a desiring subject with no possible promise to ful-
l his desire ever. Further, both as masquerade and symptom a woman is
understandable and explainable since she thereby ts into the coordinates
of desire and fantasy of man and is hence graspable in language. However,
woman qua woman is the Other to language and in so far as she is, she
remains a perpetual threat to the entire Symbolic domain and phallic myth.
As would be seen shortly in the discussion of John Fowles’s woman protag-
onist, the encounter with this Other side of woman can lead to an absolute
dissolution of the masculine subject. It is obvious that these three aspects
of femininity correspond to the three Lacanian registers: the Imaginary
(woman as object of fantasy or as man’s symptom), the Symbolic (woman
as masquerade), and the Real (woman ek-sisting the phallic domain).
Because masculinity is a ction and for a woman to be related to man
is to participate in the authenticating of this ction, sexual “relationships”
are by implication based on a kind of emptiness and falsehood. It is in this
context that Lacan stated that there cannot be any “sexual rapport” between
man and woman. e hyphen in the expression “man-woman” (as in “man-
woman relationship”) is crucial. e hyphen is like the bar between signier
and signied in Ferdinand de Saussure’s formulation of the linguistic sign:
. Ferdinand de Saussure’s diagram
for the linguistic sign.
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phallic myth and femininity in the french lieutenant’s woman
283
Lacan draws attention to the bar in Saussure’s diagram. He argues that
because of the bar, the signier and signied will be eternally alienated
from one another; hence, the arrows (signifying an interaction between
signier and signied) that de Saussure puts across the signier and sig-
nied make no sense. In this way, the hyphen would keep “man” and
“woman” forever apart. e hyphen and the bar could also be considered
as the phallus where the phallus stands for ction of masculinity and for
woman’s participation in the same as masquerade and symptom. To quote
Garry Leonard, “For Lacan, the sexual relation consists of two interrelated
gender myths: the myth of psychic unity and coherence that is the mas-
culine subject and corresponding myth of the feminine subject as the site
of the otherness and absence that guarantees the supposedly self-evident
unity of man. e irony of this is that by believing in the phallus, and in the
law and order that it represents, a man is symbolically castrated because
his penis is, subsequently, just an easy rem(a)inder of his insatiable desire
that must, henceforth, be completed and authenticated by something out-
side of himself.”
In this context, Lacan also talks about jouissance. A French term that
has been kept untranslated for its uniqueness, jouissance can be under-
stood as orgasmic bliss, that is, a kind of pleasant pain or painful pleas-
ure, a paradoxical notion that derives partly from Freud’s “Beyond the
Pleasure Principle” and that clearly distinguishes itself from the idea of
“pure” pain or “pure” pleasure. Evans puts it succinctly: “e term jouis-
sance thus nicely expresses the paradoxical satisfaction that the subject
derives from his symptom, or, to put it another way, the suering that he
derives from his own satisfaction.” Jouissance in this sense is related to
a kind of transgression, for example, the desire to transgress the pleasure
principle xed by societal norms and conventions. Lacan talks about two
kinds of jouissance, that is, phallic jouissance and the Other (feminine/
supplementary) jouissance, and points out the crucial dierence between
“experiencing” them and “articulating” them. e phallic jouissance
can be experienced and articulated. However, the feminine jouissance
is an experience of transgressive pleasure that is on the other side of
language and that can only be experienced but cannot be articulated or
represented through language. is Other jouissance can be understood
side by side with the notion of “pure femininity,” truth, the Real, and
the domain of “beyond the phallus.” In his writings on the Baroque art,
especially in his analysis of the Baroque sculpture “e Ecstasy of St.
Teresa” in Seminar Book XX, Lacan draws attention to a certain ecstatic
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mahitosh mandal
experience similar to the Other jouissance which is inarticulable in
phallocentric language. It is not for nothing that this Lacanian idea of
an inarticulable feminine experience beyond the phallic would have an
impact on the contemporary French feminists who would explore the
possibility of an alternative language for the woman through, for exam-
ple, the conceptualizing of “écriture feminine” or feminine writing. e
problem with feminine jouissance is that since it is ineable and resists
phallicization, it unsettles the masculine subject who happens to con-
front it. is jouissance may expose the phallic pretensions and threaten
the dissolution and fragmentation of the false sense of unied masculine
selood.
phallic myth and femininity in fowles
John Fowles’s novel e French Lieutenant’s Woman (), set in the
nineteenth-century Victorian England, tells the story of a village-girl Sarah
Woodru—who is initially found as an outcast (a “fallen woman” since
she supposedly had a liaison with a certain French lieutenant). She then
apparently falls in love with the male protagonist Charles Smithson, who
leaves his ancée Ernestina for her, yet whom Sarah eventually betrays to
ultimately make her way right into the heart of London, into the famous
Victorian artistic household of the Rossettis. However, later on, Charles
discovers Sarah a virgin, and that she has fooled everybody by circulating
the story that she was the French lieutenant’s “woman.” Why did Sarah do
this? We are le to ponder. Aer the intercourse scene, as Charles leaves her
temporarily, promising to return to her shortly, Sarah suddenly disappears.
Charles would desperately look for her for years. Why does she disappear?
We are le to reect upon the event. While through Sarah, Fowles success-
fully constructs one of the strongest and most complex women characters
in literary history, he adds an unprecedented twist at the end of the narra-
tive by assigning the story three dierent endings. e three endings are
as follows: rst ending is apparently a day-dream in which Ernestina and
Charles get married, and Sarah no more comes on the scene except being
casually spoken of once by Charles. In the second ending, Sarah appears to
be a manipulator of Charles’s feelings. But then, to Charles’s and the readers’
astonishment, she reveals their child to Charles. ere is a sort of union at
last: Sarah’s “head against his breast shakes with a mute vehemence” (F LW ,
). What does it imply? Reconciliation? What will they do? Get married?
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phallic myth and femininity in the french lieutenant’s woman
285
Would Sarah take him as an extension of her happiness? Any such resolution
is kept suspended. e third ending takes o from the middle of the second
ending just when Lalage, their child, is about to enter. Althoughthe narra-
tor has his excuses to suspend the earlier endings as inappropriate,the third
ending is as inconclusive as the earlier two.
e multiple endings of the novel and the enigma called Sarah
Woodru (somewhat like the heroine in Luis Buñuel’s movie at
Obscure Object of Desire) have, for their obvious signicance, repeatedly
received critical attention. While Linda Hutcheon, among others, has
attempted to analyze the formal structure of the novel, special attention
has been paid to the psychic universe of Sarah and Charles by Robert
Huaker, Bruce Woodcock, Gilbert Rose, and Olga Kirillova, among oth-
ers. e theories of Jung and Freud have been central to the majority of
writings of this kind, except one article written by Olga Kirillova from
a Lacanian standpoint. Also, all these scholars in dierent ways indi-
cate the kind of impact Sarah’s character has on Charles the male pro-
tagonist. Huaker, for example, tries to understand Sarah in conjunction
with Jung’s insights through analytical psychology into the female mind.
He contends that Sarah, by maintaining a passive attitude, aids Charles
in his self-realization. Lauren Barral presents a somewhat similar insight
by keeping a sustained focus on Charles: “Within the enigmatic narra-
tive, the protagonist Charles Smithson rst initiates a quest for Sarah’s
mystery. Progressively, the quest for Sarah turns into a quest for his own
self-knowledge.” Woodcock makes the point that Charles is forced to
a realization of self and autonomy through his ironical or contradictory
idealization of, and attempts to, appropriate Sarah. Bonnie Zare, in her
powerful reading of Sarah Woodru in “Reclaiming Masculinist Texts
for Feminist Readers,” talks about the richness of Sarah’s character which
motivates feminist readings. She refers to the author’s ambiguous take on
the changing roles of women in Victorian England and concludes: “the
text is nally ambiguous enough to allow Sarah to transcend the bounds
of the words which try to circumscribe her.” While such a conclusion is
indeed of great importance for the present article, Bonnie Zare’s article
does not consider the signicant Lacanian intervention in the understand-
ing of femininity. Rose’s article is probably the rst proper attempt to read
Fowles psychoanalytically in conjunction with Freud with an emphasis on
the theme of loss in creative process. Olga Kirillova’s article in Lacanian
terms considers the French lieutenant a phallic signier for Sarah and the
relations between the characters as one of “transference.” Some of these
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articles provide new perspectives, no doubt, but they have their limitations.
Sarah to both Huaker and Woodcock apparently aids in the formation of
Charles’s self but their discussion seems to present Sarah as a mere part of
Charles’s consciousness, without a strong individuality. Rose’s Freudian
reading, even though it appealed a lot to readers including Fowles him-
self, does not seem entirely convincing because of its psycho-biographical
inferences, given the limitations a piece of psycho-biographical criticism
might have (problems with psychoanalyzing an author through one of his
published books). Kirillova’s clinically inspired reading (solely focusing on
the concept of “transference”) is undeniably a novel Lacanian engagement
with Fowles; but in no way does it exhaust Lacan in the literary universe
of the text.
Critically diering from all these existing readings and specically
focusing on Lacanian ideas, in this paper I claim that it would be insu-
cient to say that the novel with its multiple endings is an experiment with
the narrative form. ere is something more in it, an impasse that resists
any straight forward resolution to the story. With specic focus on the
female protagonist, I claim that this impasse is Sarah Woodru herself, the
content of whose character produces multiple and contradictory eects
and possibilities both for the narrative as well as for the male protagonist.
Fowles’s biographical details suggest that the author was actually unde-
cided as to how to conclude the story, given the kind of character he had
constructed. Eileen Warburton, Fowles’s biographer, writes that the ending
of the novel, as was initially composed by Fowles, was like the following
(including a twist even in this initial dra): “Aer a twenty-month search
Charles nds Sarah living in Clapham, presumably married. Denying she
ever loved him, she sends him away. Leaving with bruised pride, Charles
cynically sends owers of farewell and learns from the seller that Mrs.
Smithson [Sarah] lives alone, supporting her baby son by modelling at the
Royal Academy of Art. Joyfully, Charles rushes to a tender reconciliation
to the promise of marriage and another child.” Fowels’s wife, Elizabeth
Fowles, rejected this ending by calling it “too pat”: “Sarah,” Elizabeth
wrote, “was the one person who should come through strong as part of
the twentieth-century conditions of complicated male/female female [sic]
intellect . . . should stand as the tragic gure in some way. Your inconclu-
sive modern human being. . . . erefore I do not think you can end with
the ending you have.” Warburton adds: “In July Fowles wrote both
a stronger version of the conventional happy ending and a new “tragic”
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phallic myth and femininity in the french lieutenant’s woman
287
ending in which the couple part and Sarah continues mysteriously, as
“your inconclusive modern human being.” e expression “inconclusive
modern human being” (with all the rich connotations of the word “mod-
ern” here) is key to my understanding of Sarah as a psychologically rich
and complex woman character who baes anybody (male protagonist/
other characters/narrator/reader) who attempts to draw some simple and
straightforward conclusions about her. My attempt in this paper would be
to show that for some substantial psychoanalytic reasons, Sarah embodies
what Lacan would have called an instance of “dédoublement,” whereby
she attracts the attention of others only to frustrate a conclusive under-
standing about her; whereby she participates in the construction of phal-
lic myth only to “unconceal” the nothingness of it; whereby she becomes
the agent of ction and truth at the same time. My argument is that the
incomprehensibility of Sarah derives from her embodying the truth or
the Real of femininity, in the Lacanian sense, which puts the Symbolic/
discursive/phallic/ctional universe at a loss, alongside her functioning
as “masquerade” and “symptom” or as creator and upholder of the phallic
myth and male fantasy/desire.
sarah as masquerade and symptom
In the narrative, Sarah creates and upholds the ction of selood and the
phallic myth in many ways. e idea of the “French lieutenant’s woman” is
based on a lie. Sarah invents and circulates a false story about her liaison/
sexual intercourse with a certain French lieutenant, whom as the story goes,
she nursed when he was rescued from a shipwreck. Sarah disguises herself
as a fallen woman, as a socially outcast. It is this falsehood and disguise that
actually creates her identity or selood. She seems to imply that her “I” is
a “lie.” Of course, in this case, Sarah deliberately takes recourse to a falsity
to project herself as an outcast. However, by way of this ction she can fool
the Victorian mindset, turn the conventions upside down, and assert her
agenc y.
Sarah’s participation in the creation of the ction of masculinity hap-
pens on a more subtle, unconscious level. Arguably, the key to the narrative
is the enigmatic gaze of Sarah Woodru, described in the very rst chap-
ter. is chapter, beginning with an epigraph from omas Hardy’s poem
“Riddle” (thus enhancing the sense of enigma about the female protagonist),
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mahitosh mandal
describes Charles and Ernestina at quite a length and concludes with a
description of Sarah standing by the sea:
But where the telescopist would have been at sea himself was with
the other gure on that somber, curving mole. It stood right at the
seawardmost end, apparently leaning against an old cannon barrel
upended as a bollard. Its clothes were black. e wind moved them,
but the gure stood motionless, staring, staring out to sea, more like a
living memorial to the drowned, a gure from myth, than any proper
fragment of the petty provincial day. (FLW, )
In the lm adaptation of the novel, this moment is captured tellingly.
Sarah, whom Charles doesn’t yet know, is found dressed in black, standing
by the seaside of Lyme Regis and staring at the sea. As she stands there
amidst violent storm and rains, she is seen by Charles, who has eventually
arrived at that place with his ancée Ernestina. Like a chivalric hero, he
. Sarah (Meryl Streep) staring at the stormy sea and
chivalric Charles (Jeremy Irons) standing at a distance
. Sarah’s gaze (performed by Meryl Streep)
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phallic myth and femininity in the french lieutenant’s woman
289
approaches to rescue her from the impending disaster—rains and storm—
when she looks back at this stranger coldly, indierently for a few seconds,
aer which she once again turns toward the sea. Charles in a way is forced
to leave her alone.
Sarah’s enigmatic gaze is what attracts Charles and sets his desire in
motion. e crucial quest for Charles has the form of questions: “Who is
Sarah? From what shadows does she come?” (FLW, ). In a sense the entire
Symbolic order of the narrative is built around this gaze, which functions
both as an objet petit a, as well as the unsigniable trace of the Real. e title
of the paper, especially the expression, “eyes a man could drown in” is very
apt, and refers to these dual possibilities of Sarah’s gaze, eyes that attract and
then literally destroy the masculine subject. Lacan says that the Other as a
whole does not cause desire; something in the Other, the voice or the look,
for example, causes desire. It is the blank look that Sarah gives Charles,
a look which for Charles turns into a gaze full of mystery and in need of
exploration, that sets in motion the desire and fantasy of Charles. At a great
length in the narrative, Sarah adds fuel to Charles’s desire, and ction about
himself, by convincingly stating that Charles is the only person in the world
who can take care of her, that Charles is kind of omniscient, omnipotent,
and potentially heroic a gure, and so on. Charles gradually starts believing
in this ction to the point that he starts sexually fantasizing about Sarah,
leaves his ancée for Sarah, and aerward decides to spend the whole life
looking for Sarah who had by then disappeared.
As masquerade in relation to the phallic myth, Sarah seems to deliber-
ately arm the sense of mastery, heroism, virility, and protective power of
the male subject. For example, by paying attention to Charles she enhances
his condence: “As he talked, and was listened to with a grave interest, his
disapproval evaporated” (FLW, ). Again, when Sarah says, “I have no
one to turn to. . . . I am weak. . . . I have sinned” (FLW, ), she gives him
the impression that Charles is the only person for her to turn to, the only
person to save and protect her. She makes Charles believe that while he is
strong she is weak. is authentication of Charles as a superior being is
remarkably intensied by the following conversation:
Charles: I am most sorry for you. But I must confess I don’t
understand why you should seek to . . . make me your
condant. . .
Sarah: Because you have travelled. Because you are educated.
Because you are a gentleman. Because . . .
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Charles: It is beyond my powers—the powers of far wiser men than
myself—to help you here.
Sarah: I do not—I will not believe that. (FLW, 139)
Sarah at these points enhances Charles’s superiority as a masculine sub-
ject. And how does Charles react to this? Charles felt “obscurely attered.”
Charles gains an inated image of himself which ts into the masculine
position he desires. Her giving of sea urchins (“they are all I have, to give”)
to Charles is also symbolic of her total surrender to this masculine subject.
Same is the case with her completing of Charles’s unnished sentences, thus
bringing completion to his selood:
Sarah: I have no one to turn to.
Charles: I hoped I had made it clear that Mrs. Tranter—
Sarah: Has the kindest heart. But I do not need kindness.
Charles: If I can speak on your behalf to Mrs. Tranter, I shall be
most happy . . . but it would be most improper of me to . . .
Sarah: Interest yourself further in my circumstances. (FLW, 138)
As far as Sarah plays the masquerade vis-à-vis Charles, Charles seems to
play the father with Sarah and we are told “he had a desire to protect her.”
On his rst encounter with Sarah, Charles, was “overcome by an equally
strange feeling—not sexual, but fraternal, perhaps paternal . . .” (F LW , 74,
italics mine). A similar description is found in the following: “for a moment
she was like a child, both reluctant and yet willing to be cozened—or
homilized—out of tears” (FLW, 178). Charles here senses a paternal author-
ity over Sarah, which also includes a taming of her “wildness,” which gives
him a sense of superiority. He may well replace Sarah’s father. Her father’s
sending her to the boarding school (to be discussed shortly) is similar to
Charles sending her to Exeter (for psychological treatment). In both cases
the upholding of the masculine myth is involved. In both cases Sarah obe-
diently listens to the demand of the masculine subject and thus authorizes
the masculine position. Like other masculine subjects in the novel, Charles
too takes pride in being charitable toward her, in oering to send her to a
respectable asylum and also in proudly bearing the expenses for the same.
Sarah’s acceptance of these oers authenticates his superiority.
Apart from performing the masquerade in various ways, Sarah is also
“symptom” of Charles’s masculine position. As the signier of Charles’s
repressed sexual desire, Sarah signies the source of his pleasure. WhenSarah
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phallic myth and femininity in the french lieutenant’s woman
291
tells Charles about her aair with the French lieutenant, Charles’s fantasy is
tellingly at work: “He saw the scene she had not detailed: her giving herself.
He was at one and the same time Varguennes [the French lieutenant] enjoy-
ing her and the man who sprang forward and struck him down” (F LW ,
). Charles-striking-down-Varguennes is the myth of Charles’s heroism
authorized by Sarah’s “masquerade” that is ironically derivative of a c-
tion, the lie that she had a liaison with Varguennes. Sarah here becomes
the “symptom,” that is, the means for fulllment of Charles’s fantasy and
his sexual desire. us Sarah functions as masquerade while authorizing
Charles’s phallic myth and as symptom as she arouses desire in him.
sarah and the real of femininity
If Sarah initially upholds the phallic myth, she gradually, sometimes simulta-
neously, becomes instrumental in its dissolution. If Sarah’s gaze at the outset of
the narrative has set Charles’s desire in motion, it has also revealed to Charles
his emptiness as a subject, and has gradually led him to destruction. Aer
his rst meeting with her, we are told, Charles experiences emptiness about
his life so far: Sarah “made him aware of a deprivation. His future had always
seemed to him of vast potential; and now [now that, among other things,
he was betrothed to Ernestina] suddenly it was a xed voyage to a known
place” (FLW , ). Gradually when he falls desperately in love with Sarah who
eventually stops reciprocating his love, he states: “But you [Sarah] must say
that [you never loved me]! You must say, ‘I was totally evil, I never saw in
him other than an instrument I could use, a destruction I could encompass’”
(FLW, ). He adds: “is is my reward. To succour you . . . and now to know
I was no more than the dupe of your imaginings” (FLW , ).
In fact, the novel ends with Charles confronting the harsh truth about
the vanity of masculinity as exposed by his apparent separation from Sarah.
“And at the gate, the future made present, he found he did not know where
to go. . . . [I]t meant thirty-four years of struggling upwards—all in vain,
in vain, in vain, all height lost . . .” (F LW , ). Metaphorically, Charles’s
realization of the nothingness of his high-sounding masculinity is repre-
sented by the corpse in the nal description: “along that other deserted
embankment Charles now begins to pace, a man behind the invisible gun
carriage on which rests his own corpse” (F LW , ). Charles has “at last...
begun, though he would still bitterly deny it . . . to realize that life . . . is
to be, however inadequately, emptily, hopelessly . . . endured” (FLW, ).
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is emptiness is the truth of the phallic myth; this emptiness, Charles
realizes, is what characterizes his selood. As is obvious, the dissolution
of Charles’s masculine position is an eect of Sarah’s refusal to function as
masquerade and symptom.
Sarah has earlier shown her dependence on the masculine subject by
projecting herself as a weak being in need of assistance from Charles; she
later tells Charles: “It is as I told you before. I am far stronger than any man
may easily imagine” (FLW, ). Sarah reiterates her feminine position: “I
do not want to share my life. I wish to be what I am, not what a husband,
however kind, however indulgent, must expect me to become in marriage”
(FLW, ). Here she is a dierent woman, not what Charles or the reader
imagined her to be (i.e., a woman in need of protection and security from
a male subject like Charles). She shows here the other side of her character
which tries to do away with the masculine position. She claries that she
had actually loved Charles as she says, “ere is one thing in which I have
not deceived you. I loved you . . . I think from the moment I saw you. In
that, you were never deceived.” But she hastily adds, “What duped you was
my loneliness. A resentment, an envy, I don’t know. I don’t k now . . . . Do
not ask me to explain what I have done. I cannot explain it. It is not to be
explained” (FLW , ). I claim that Sarah here is being very honest about
her state of mind. She is certainly trying to express herself but language
fails her. It is in the gaps of the signiers, it is in the ellipses that the femi-
nine as the Real exists. Sarah’s subject position becomes the unexplainable
“other” to language. is otherness makes her an enigma, even to herself.
Here Sarah functions not as masquerade or symptom but rather the Real as
the feminine reveals itself through her in an unsettling way.
is particular aspect of Sarah’s femininity gures at another place in
the narrative in a remarkable way, as we discover Sarah’s relation to her
father (this point has not unfortunately received any critical attention). e
narrator tells us that Sarah had an uncanny ability to “see through” peo-
ple, to “classify other people’s worth” (F LW , ). e vanity and worthless-
ness pertaining to her father is devastatingly brought to light by Sarah. Her
father was a vicar, not of a much respectable social status. But he believed
in his ancestry, especially in its past status as gentry. He was boastful of this,
in spite of his own diminished social condition. His past was a source of his
pride and condence. Due to this pride he sent Sarah, his only child (and
also the only woman in his life since his wife was dead) for education to a
boarding school (meant for people of higher social status). Although she
went to the boarding school, thus partially authenticating her father’s false
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phallic myth and femininity in the french lieutenant’s woman
293
sense of superior social status, in the main Sarah could not take her father’s
boastful attitude sympathetically. Aer she came back from the boarding
school, she “sat across the elm table from him and watched him when he
boasted, watching with a quiet reserve that goaded him, goaded him like
a piece of useless machinery (for he was born a Devon man and money
means all to Devon men), goaded him nally into madness” (F LW , ). To
prove his masculinity, to prove his worthiness to his daughter as it were, he
then bought a farm of his own. “But it was cheap and bad. . . . For several
years he struggled to keep up both the mortgage and a ridiculous facade
of gentility” (FLW , ). Metaphorically, her father’s struggle here is a des-
perate attempt to veil the harsh truth about his weakness as a male subject,
a weakness which he is afraid to confront. e “mortgage” and “gentility”
correspond to the two contradictory parts of his selood, and on “keep-
ing up both” depends the unity of his selood which actually is a falsity.
However, he did not get authorization or support from any female subject
(Sarah vehemently resisted it). So, he went mad quite literally and was sent
to the Dorchester Asylum where he died a year later.
As is obvious, both in the case of her father and Charles, Sarah’s look,
her “seeing through,” her “gaze” which pervades the narrative (she “saw
through” the vanities of her suitors and made all possibilities of man-woman
relationship impossible), has a disconcerting character about it which is
devastating for a man to the extent that it can strip o the façade of mascu-
linity and can leave a man with the bare minimum, which can easily lead to
his madness. It would be a mistake to state that Sarah as an individual delib-
erately engages in the acts of authentication and dissolution of masculinity.
Whatever Sarah does is strongly informed by the position she occupies, the
feminine subject position which is not entirely cut by language and which
resists understanding even to the woman herself. Sarah herself indicates
this “beyond” of understanding and articulation, by referring to the fact
that she cannot help her contradictory attitudes, that she does not know
why she does certain things though she cannot help doing those things. For
example, as noted in the epigraph of this paper, she says, “Do not ask me
to explain what I have done. I cannot explain it. It is not to be explained”
(FLW, ). At another point she states, “I am not to be understood even
by myself. And I can’t tell you why, but I believe my happiness depends
on my not understanding” (FLW, , italics mine). e key words here
are “happiness” and “not understanding.” I claim that at this point Sarah
is not expressing her vanity, as Charles would like to think; rather she is
illustrating an important psychoanalytic nding of Lacan about the Other
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jouissance. e Other jouissance is what women can experience but can-
not understand, know, or articulate, since these involve the intervention of
language which is predominantly phallic. It is important how Lacan under-
stands the relation between jouissance and knowledge. Knowledge, accord-
ing to Lacan, is motivated by some failure of pleasure, some insuciency
of pleasure: in a word, dissatisfaction. Displeasure relates to knowledge;
pleasure relates to the lack of knowledge. In the Lacanian R-S-I schema,
pleasure or jouissance verges more on the Real (the unrepresentable) and
knowledge verges more on the Symbolic (the linguistic). Sarah seems to
make a striking point here by linking “enjoyment” with “I do not know
why” or linking the feminine jouissance with the Real.
conclusion
At the heart of the narrative of e French Lieutenant’s Woman is the Real
of femininity which manifests itself through Sarah Woodru, and which
is in dire need to be avoided, represented and supplemented. In so far as
Sarah is known as the French lieutenant’s woman, she can be categorized and
thereby understood as a “fallen woman.” In so far as Sarah performs the role
of masquerade and symptom, in so far as she upholds the myth of masculin-
ity (Charles’s, her father’s, and reader’s) and remains the object of male desire
and fantasy (Charles’s, her suitors’, and reader’s), she can be represented.
However, such easy and smooth understanding and representation of Sarah
is repeatedly disrupted throughout the narrative, disruptions which lead to
subjective dissolution (her father’s, Charles’s) and discursive indeterminacy
(multiple endings of the narrative). ere are moments in the narrative that
should not just be explained away as an enigma of femininity. ese are the
moments when there takes place a signicant interface between the Real and
the Symbolic, moments when the entire domain of language and discourse is
challenged and is almost on the verge of dissolution. Why does Sarah circu-
late a false story about her liaison with a certain French lieutenant? Why does
Sarah “ego-massage” her father and Charles, creating and upholding falsity
about them, only to eventually destroy the same? Why does she at dierent
points in the three endings tell dierent kinds of lie about her present status?
Questions of this kind refer to the impasse that the Real of femininity puts
forward in the phallic domain of the Symbolic. e ctional domain of the
narrative and the ction of selood are time and again punctuated by the
intrusion of the Real. e Symbolic has to rush in to come to terms with
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phallic myth and femininity in the french lieutenant’s woman
295
the unbearable truth of the Real. In a sense, it is the Real which triggers
the Symbolic, or, it is the Real of Sarah’s femininity that demands Symbolic
representation. Fowles’s narrative becomes a prime instance of what happens
to a discourse that is constantly punctured by a truth (embodied via the
“dédoublement” of Sarah Woodru) that has an existence outside, and that
resists representation through, the phallocentric language.
is Assistant Professor of English, Presidency University,
Kolkata, India. His research interests include psychoanalytic literary criticism,
Bengal Renaissance, and Dalit Studies.
notes
. Eileen Warburton, John Fowles: A Life in Two Worlds (London: Viking,
),.
. Olga Kirillova, “If the French Lieutenant Never Existed, He Should Have Been
Invented,” e Symptom, no. (Spring ), accessed April, , http://
www.lacan.com/olgak.htm.
. Rose actually talks about a number of literary issues. See Gilbert J. Rose,
Trauma and Mastery in Life and Art (New Haven: Yale University Press, ).
. eorists concerned here would include Carl Gustav Jung, Alfred Adler,
Karen Horney, Melanie Klein, Anna Freud, and others and schools concerned
would include ego psychology, object relations school, analytical psychology,
and so on.
. Eli Zaretsky, “Psychoanalysis and Postmodernism,” American Literary
History , no. (Spring ): , accessed May , , http://www.jstor.org/
stable/.
. Slavoj Žižek ed., Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Lacan (But
Were Afraid to Ask Hitchcock) (London: Verso, ), –.
. Jacques Lacan, “Seminar on ‘e Purloined Letter’” in Écrits: e First Complete
Edition in English, trans. Bruce Fink (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., ), .
. Dylan Evans, An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis (London
and New York: Routledge, ), .
. I rst heard about this metaphor from my teacher Professor Santanu Biswas of
Jadavpur University, who introduced me to Lacan.
. Lacan delivered a series of lectures constituting his Seminar of the year
(unpublished untill now), which he signicantly entitled “A Discourse that
Might Not Be a Semblance.” See Jacques Lacan, “e Seminar of Jacques Lacan
Book XVIII: On a Discourse that Might Not Be a Semblance, -,” unof-
cially translated by Cormac Gallagher from unedited French typescripts,
accessed February , , http://www.lacaninireland.com/web/wp-content/
uploads///Book--On-a-discourse-that-might-not-be-a-semblance.pdf.
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mahitosh mandal
. Jacques Lacan, “Courtly Love as Anamorphosis,” in e Seminar of Jacques
Lacan Book VII: Ethics of Psychoanalysis –, trans. Dennis Porter
(London and New York: Routledge, ), -.
. e title of Huizinga’s book is apt. See Johan Huizinga, e Waning of the
Middle Ages, trans. F. Hopman (London: Penguin Books, ).
. I am indebted to Professor Santanu Biswas again for his discussion of the
notion of women as gatekeepers of patriarchy.
. Garry Leonard, “Spilling the Whisky on the Corpus,” in Reading Dubliners
Again: A Lacanian Perspective (New York: Syracuse University Press,
),–.
. Freud talks about the rst childhood “stirrings of sexuality” in his reading of
Oedipus Rex on the basis of which he formulates the concept of Oedipus com-
plex. See Sigmund Freud, e Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological
Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. , e Interpretation of Dreams Part I, ed. and
trans. James Strachey (London: Vintage Books, ), .
. e concept is elaborated in Lacan’s Seminar Book XX. See Jacques Lacan,
Seminar Book XX (Encore): On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and
Knowledge, trans. Bruce Fink (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., ).
. I am indebted to Professor Biswas again for pointing this out to me.
. Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, trans. Wade Baskin (New
York: Columbia University Press, ), .
. Leonard, “Spilling the Whisky on the Corpus,” .
. Evans, Dictionary, .
. e details of Huaker’s, Hutcheon’s, and Woodcock’s books are as follows.
Robert Huaker, John Fowles (Boston: Twayne, ); Linda Hutcheon,
Narcissistic Narrative: e Metactional Paradox (London and New York:
Methuen, ); and Bruce Woodcock, Male Mythologies: John Fowles and
Masculinity (New York: Barnes and Noble, ).
. Lauren Barral, “Mystery, Knowledge, and Freedom in e French Lieutenant’s
Woman” (Master’s thesis, Université Stendhal, ), , accessed April , ,
https://dumas.ccsd.cnrs.fr/dumas-/document.
. Bonnie Zare, “Reclaiming Masculinist Texts for Feminist Readers: Sarah
Woodru ’s ‘e French Lieutenant’s Woman,’” Modern Language Studies ,
no. / (Autumn–Winter ): , accessed May , , http://www.jstor.org/
stable/.
. Warburton, John Fowles: A Life in Two Worlds, .
. Ibid.
. Lacan talks about a kind of splitting (“dédoublement”) vis-à-vis the female
subject. See Geneviève Morel, “Feminine Conditions of Jouissance,” in Reading
Seminar XX: Lacan’s Major Work on Love, Knowledge, and Feminine Sexuality,
eds. Suzanne Barnard and Bruce Fink (Albany: State University of New York
Press, ), .
. e lm script was written by Harold Pinter and the lm retaining Fowles’s title
was directed by Karel Reisz and released in . e two screenshots of the lm
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phallic myth and femininity in the french lieutenant’s woman
297
are taken by me. See e French Lieutenant’s Woman, DVD, directed by Karel
Reisz (; Century City, Los Angeles: Twentieth Century Fox, ).
. I have consulted Bruce Fink, “Knowledge and Jouissance,” in Reading Seminar XX:
Lacan’s Major Work on Love, Knowledge, and Feminine Sexuality, eds. Suzanne
Barnard and Bruce Fink (Albany: State University of New York Press, ),
–.
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