Browsing by Author "Ulusoy, Emel"

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History, his story, and story conceptions of reality and freedom in The French Lieutenant's woman
(2005) Ulusoy, Emel
John Fowles is one of the famous novelists of the twentieth century. The French Lieutenanfs Woman is considered to be his best work in which he demonstrates the interacting natures of fiction and life, culture and ideology, and man and freedom. He sees the novel as an evolving genre, and draws a parallel between the evolution of fiction and the evolution of man. Fowles rejects the traditional understanding of novel writing. He gives a new shape to the genre by asserting a metafictional style. He compares and contrasts his style with those of the Victorian novelists. To do this, he assumes a pseudo-Victorian tone which enables him to act both in and out of the Victorian tradition. While constructing the work, he makes use of documentary, history, sociology, and psychology. The novel becomes an amalgam, and with this amalgam, Fowles is able to draw a three-dimensional picture of his society in which man is destined to evolve horizontally. Hence, different from the nineteenth century novelists, Fowles IV depicts an alternative, horizontal evolution model contrary to the vertical one of the Victorians. The female character Fowles creates is the prototype of the horizontally evolving "modem" woman. However, Fowles does not limit modernity with twentieth century only. The gist of modernism (or postmodernism) for him lies in the idea of evolution itself, and it is timeless. Through the relation between Charles and Sarah, he shows that change is inevitable, and at the same time he expects his readers to evolve through the reading process of the novel. Finally, Fowles comes to reveal that there is a parallelism between life and fiction because man has always created fictitious pasts and presents, and an image of a fictitious future.