John Fowles: Visionary and Voyeur (Costerus New Series)

John Fowles Visionary and Voyeur Costerus New Series 175 Series Editors: C.C. Barfoot, Theo D’haen and Erik Kooper J...

Author: Brooke Lenz

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John Fowles Visionary and Voyeur

Costerus New Series 175 Series Editors: C.C. Barfoot, Theo D’haen and Erik Kooper

John Fowles Visionary and Voyeur

Brooke Lenz

Amsterdam-New York, NY 2008

©Photographer: Socrates | Agency: Dreamstime.com Cover design: Aart Jan Bergshoeff The paper on which this book is printed meets the requirements of “ISO 9706:1994, Information and documentation - Paper for documents - Requirements for permanence”. ISBN: 978-90-420-2388-8 ©Editions Rodopi B.V., Amsterdam - New York, NY 2008 Printed in the Netherlands

CONTENTS

Preface On Fowles and Feminism

1

Introduction Voyeurism and Other Visual Pleasures

15

Chapter One Objectification and Exploitation: Victimized Perspectives in The Collector

49

Chapter Two A Conflict of Gendered Perspectives: Voyeurism, Violence, and Seduction in The Magus

75

Chapter Three A Crisis of Authority: Fantasy and Feminism in The French Lieutenant’s Woman

101

Chapter Four Women in the Wasteland: Alternative Perspectives in The Ebony Tower

133

Chapter Five Whole Sight; and Desolation: Situated Knowledges in Daniel Martin

161

Chapter Six Interlude: Mantissa

187

Chapter Seven Seductive and Situated Dissent: A Maggot as Winged Creature

201

Conclusion On Authority and Authenticity

223

Bibliography

237

Index

247

PREFACE ON FOWLES AND FEMINISM

As the author of both critically acclaimed and commercially successful fiction, John Fowles has attracted significant attention from literary critics employing a wide range of theoretical and ideological constructs in their analyses of his work. One of the most contentious of these frameworks is feminist criticism. Critics attempting to evaluate the extent to which Fowles personally advocated feminism and/or demonstrates a feminist consciousness in his oeuvre – especially in novels like The French Lieutenant’s Woman or Mantissa – have often been confounded by a number of inherent complications and contradictions in Fowles’ attitude towards women. The results have been a muddled debate over Fowles’ status as a feminist writer and a general lack of direction for feminist critics, teachers, and readers attempting to find personal or ideological value in his work. Although feminist advocacy never appeared to be Fowles’ top priority, he specifically professed his feminist sympathies a number of times in the course of his career. An early comment in his 1964 essay “I Write Therefore I Am” illustrated a rather odd formulation of feminist advocacy: “I am a feminist – that is, I like women and enjoy their company, and not only for sexual reasons.” 1 Such comments hardly inspired great rejoicing from contemporary feminists. Fowles provided some important context for this rather odd formulation, however, in his 1985 interview with Jan Relf: This business of feminism … you see, liking women, quite apart from sexual things – liking the womanly way of seeing life, came to me when I was still at Oxford, long before modern feminism came into 1

John Fowles, “I Write Therefore I Am”, in Wormholes, ed. Jan Relf, New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1998, 8.

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John Fowles: Visionary and Voyeur being …. But now [feminists] have swept on really past where I am. I know some women writers don’t like me very much. I have been called the greatest block to intelligent feminism in the British novel. All I can say is that I don’t agree. 2

Despite the consistent oddity of Fowles’ definition of feminism, his feminist advocacy makes more sense in its historical context. Formulating his ideas as an individual without affiliation to the feminist movement, Fowles recognized that he was successively remarkably progressive and rather regressive in his advocacy. 3 And although contemporary feminists may object to Fowles’ demonstrated lack of understanding for the political and evolutionary importance of radical positions in the history of feminist movement, Fowles’ convictions at this time did approximate a somewhat conservative but relatively common feminist position. In a 1988 interview with Katherine Tarbox, Fowles reflected more carefully on his relationship with feminism: In historical or social terms I’ve always had great sympathy for, I won’t quite say feminism in the modern sense, but for a female principle in life. It doesn’t always tie in with modern feminism. My wife would deny point blank that I’m a proper feminist. But I do, more for obscure personal reasons, hate the macho viewpoint. 4

Fowles expanded on this articulation of his Jungian-influenced feminist perspective in his 1988 interview with Susana Jaén Onega:

2

Jan Relf, “An Interview with John Fowles” (1985), in Conversations with John Fowles, ed. Dianne L. Vipond, Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 1999, 123. 3 In her excellent biography, John Fowles: A Life in Two Worlds (New York: Viking, 2004), Eileen Warburton offers an example of Fowles’ most regressive response to “the conflicts of women’s emancipation” in her discussion of The Scythe (1966), a “positively reactionary” play that advocates a “D.H. Lawrentian or Victorian view of feminine nature” by encouraging women to return to their traditional domestic devotion to husband, hearth, and home (292). Fowles reluctantly suppressed the play at his wife’s insistence. 4 Katherine Tarbox, “Interview with John Fowles”, in Conversations with John Fowles, ed. Vipond, 165.

On Fowles and Feminism

3

I am not a “feminist” in the fiercely active political sense it is usually used in England and America nowadays, but I have sympathy for the general “anima”, the feminine spirit, the feminine intelligence, and I think that all male judgments of the way women go about life are so biased that they are virtually worthless. Man is really being a very prejudiced judge of his own case and of course when judging against women. It is counted very bad taste in England now to talk favorably of women’s intuition. The real feminists in England do not like this sentimental talk of female intuition. I am afraid I still have some faith in that. Women cannot, I think, sometimes think as logically or rationally as men can, but thinking logically or rationally often leads you into error. It is by no means certain that the result is any worse in a woman, if you like, muddling her way through to a decision, or feeling her emotional way to a decision, than that of a highly rational man. 5

These comments demonstrate a shift in alignment for Fowles, a transition from professed advocacy to sympathy. From this shift, it appears that Fowles became increasingly conscious of the differences between his personal convictions and those of contemporary feminism. The most glaring difference, as Fowles indicated, is his reverence for “the feminine intelligence”, which he associated exclusively with emotion and intuition. There are three immediate problems that a contemporary feminist might identify in this adulation. The first is Fowles’ absolute characterization of men as rational and women as emotional; the second, a problem intimately interwoven with the first, is Fowles’ tendency to use the terms “women”, “female”, and “feminine” interchangeably, suggesting that his convictions stem from a rather simple and traditional essentialism that confines women (and men, for that matter, as he uses “men”, “male”, and “masculine” in the same way) within rigid gender prescriptions; and the third is his obliviousness to the possibility that his own convictions might fit his description of male judgments of women: “all male judgments of the way women go about life are so biased that they are virtually worthless.” Totally lacking a selfconscious examination of his archetypal idealization of women, 5

Susana Jaén Onega, “Fowles on Fowles”, in Conversations with John Fowles, ed. Vipond, 180-81.

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John Fowles: Visionary and Voyeur

Fowles clearly espoused a curiously apolitical and problematically essential kind of feminism. Indeed, after reading such comments, a contemporary feminist may be tempted to concur with Elizabeth Fowles’ verdict: Fowles was by no means a “proper feminist”. Fowles’ growing awareness of this state of affairs became more explicit in his 1989 conversation with James R. Baker, in which Fowles admitted: I am certainly not a feminist in the militant sense, and I’m sure many such contemporary feminists would disown me. I have great sympathy for the general feminine principle in life. I find very little “heroic” about most men, and think that quality is far more likely to appear among women in ordinary, non-literary life. 6

Clearly, Fowles’ feminism was characterized not by political activism but chiefly by admiration for and allegiance to women (at least for those women who demonstrate what Fowles called the “feminine principle”), especially in marked opposition to society’s general admiration of men. He expanded on this formulation of his feminist sympathies in a 1995 interview with Dianne L. Vipond: I hope I am a feminist in most ordinary terms, but I certainly wouldn’t call myself one compared with many excellent women writers. Part of me must remain male. Masculinity is like the old pea-soup fog, a weather condition I remember from youth. It takes you a long time to realize not only where you are but where you ought to be. True humanism must be feminist. 7

In these comments, Fowles demonstrated an awareness of the important distinction between carefully theorized feminist ideology (as expressed by “excellent women writers”, whom we may assume could be authors, theorists, or critics) and feminism in “ordinary terms”, or as it is generally perceived by society at large. Fowles’ convictions do seem to fit the latter category, particularly in terms of his admiration for women, his explicit association of feminism with 6

James R. Baker, “John Fowles: The Art of Fiction CIX”, in Conversations with John Fowles, ed. Vipond, 194. 7 Dianne L. Vipond, “An Unholy Inquisition”, in Wormholes, ed. Relf, 381.


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women (“part of me must remain male”, that is, never strictly feminist), and his acute dissatisfaction with masculinity. This dissatisfaction proceeded from a profound sense of guilt, as Fowles explained in 1997 in “The John Fowles Symposium”: we men, our whole gender, must come clean and confess that our macho attitude to [women] has been grossly and barbarously wrong for at least three millennia …. A sensitive and thinking male can’t have felt innocent since the time of the Hittites. 8

This historical sensibility informed Fowles’ 1999 formulation of his feminist advocacy: “I am very much a feminist and … yes, I think the world would be a happier place if women had more power and consideration.” 9 Perhaps more significant for literary critics than Fowles’ personal convictions, however, are his literary efforts in the interest of feminism. His professed admiration for women writers is especially clear in his translations of Marie de France and Claire de Duras, as well as in his argument that the Odyssey was written by a woman – an argument he makes playfully in Mantissa (in which Erato claims to have authored the Odyssey, with the original title of Men, Will They Ever Grow Up? or Men, for short) and more seriously in Islands. 10 Regardless of its scholarly merit, this argument illustrates Fowles’ admiration for women’s writing, particularly when it concentrates on 8

John Fowles, “The John Fowles Symposium, Lyme Regis, July 1996”, in Wormholes, ed. Relf, 74. 9 Dianne L. Vipond, “A Dialogue with John Fowles”, in Conversations with John Fowles, ed. Vipond, 235. 10 In Islands (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1978), Fowles notes: “It is very instructive to read the Odyssey and Marie de France’s stories side by side: it is not just the central similarity of attitude to the quest theme, but the little touches of humour, the psychological accuracy underlying the delight in the fabulous (the ability to make fabulous beings behave humanly), the obsession with domestic behaviour and domestic objects, the preponderant role played by the relationships between men and women … a shared set of sensibilities and preoccupations that we know, in the latter case, did not belong to a man. Even if one must take the orthodox scholarly view, and make Homer the male bard that tradition has always maintained, it seems to me certain that he was composing quite as much for a feminine audience as a masculine one, and from an essentially feminist point of view: that is, a civilizing one” (58).

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issues of special relevance to women’s lives, as well as his assertion that feminism is a requisite part of civilized society. This insistence on feminism as a fundamentally civilizing force, and on women as the instruments of that force, stems from Fowles’ essentialist gender ideology as explained in his 1969 essay “Notes on an Unfinished Novel”: “I see man as a kind of artifice, and woman as a kind of reality. The one is cold idea, the other is warm fact.” 11 This characterization of men as “cold idea” reflects a traditional association of masculinity (inherently male, for Fowles) with detachment and rationality, just as the characterization of women as “warm fact” reflects a traditional association of femininity (inherently female, for Fowles) with attachment, intuition, and what Fowles called “right feeling”, though Fowles recognized that men and women can and do appropriate both ontological and epistemological characteristics from the other sex. Indeed, Fowles valued epistemological and ontological tension between men and women. Gender difference, especially in terms of masculine and feminine ways of knowing, was particularly important to Fowles, and he advocated an increased respect for “the womanly way of seeing life” in the interests of promoting a more balanced social perspective. 12 Therefore it was deeply disturbing to Fowles for feminists to continue this trend, as he explained to Raman K. Singh: I think the female principle links women, while the male one separates men. There are certain aspects of women’s liberation that seem to me rather silly. It always worries me when I see the feminine principle itself being attacked by women. I think there are aspects, for example, the aggressive advocation of lesbianism, that seem to me to deny it ….

11

John Fowles, “Notes on an Unfinished Novel”, in Wormholes, ed. Relf, 23. In his 1976 interview with James Campbell (“An Interview with John Fowles”, in Conversations with John Fowles, ed. Vipond, 42), for example, Fowles explained, “I feel that the universe is female in some deep way. I think one of the things that is lacking in our society is equality of male and female ways of looking at life.” See also Fowles’ comments to this effect in Tony Graham, Hilary Arnold, Sappho Durrell, and John Thackara, “John Fowles: An Exclusive Interview”, in Conversations with John Fowles, ed. Vipond, 59-64. 12


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this is denying the extraordinary half-maternal, half-mysterious aspect of women. I think they’re very foolish to destroy all that. 13

That is, women’s greatest strengths, according to Fowles, are precisely those that distinguish them from and make them attractive to men – their intuition, their relationships, their maternity, their mystery. These are precisely the qualities Fowles emphasized in his fictional characterizations of women; his heroines all embody what Fowles identified alternatively as the “female principle” or “feminine principle”. At their best, Fowles’ female characters represent progression, vitality, creativity, independence, and authenticity, and they generally perform the task of altering both their fellow characters’ and readers’ perspectives through their unconventional and mysterious actions. These characterizations, it would seem, have been largely successful, as evidenced by Fowles’ enormous popularity as a best-selling novelist. Particularly noteworthy in this respect is The French Lieutenant’s Woman, which has earned praise not only from the reading public but also from feminist critic Deborah Byrd, who calls the novel “an almost ideal feminist fictional work”. 14 Although his other novels are less explicit about advocating feminism, in “ordinary terms” it seems that Fowles has made useful contributions as a feminist writer. Most feminist critics, however, have not been satisfied with this “ordinary” formulation of feminist advocacy, and even a number of critics not specifically endorsing feminism have noted problems with Fowles’ attitude towards women. His enthusiasm for the work of Marie de France and Claire de Duras, for example, is complicated by the way he dismisses their authority and uses them to explore masculine concerns. 15 Furthermore, Fowles’ nearly exclusive attention 13

Raman K. Singh, “An Encounter with John Fowles”, in Conversations with John Fowles, ed. Vipond, 90. 14 Deborah Byrd, “The Evolution and Emancipation of Sarah Woodruff: The French Lieutenant’s Woman as a Feminist Novel”, International Journal of Women’s Studies, VII/4 (September/October 1984), 306. 15 See Doris Y. Kadish, “Rewriting Women’s Stories: Ourika and The French Lieutenant’s Woman”, South Atlantic Review, LXII/2 (Spring 1997), 74-87 and Constance B. Hieatt, “Eliduc Revisited: John Fowles and Marie de France”, English Studies in Canada, III/3 (1977), 351-58.

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to male problems has been made especially clear in critical analyses of his novels. A number of critics, for example, have focused on the quest motif that provides the general framework for Fowles’ works, arguing that as the male hero pursues the mysterious, inspirational, and ultimately unattainable female, he occupies the centre of attention while she is relegated to a marginal existence as catalyst for the hero’s quest. 16 Fowles’ female characters thus appear, as Margaret Bozenna Goscilo has commented, as dehumanized archetypes, idealized symbols of femininity. 17 The quest motif as Fowles employs it does require a remarkable woman to motivate and define it; furthermore, what is most clear in Fowles’ fiction is the repeated failure, or at least difficulty, of the male hero to evolve as an individual and as a member of society, a failure that is in marked contrast to the enlightenment and authenticity of the female catalyst. Nevertheless, the pattern of his novels ultimately reflects a problematic gender ideology. Despite Fowles’ practice of including strong and apparently powerful female characters in his novels, critics have argued, their ultimate relegation to the role of helpmeet to the male hero diminishes their importance and undermines their authority. 18 Ultimately consigned to the role of muse, Fowles’ heroines, along with their needs, desires, and concerns, fade into the background of the male quest for enlightenment, suggesting what Bruce Woodcock identifies as a contradiction in Fowles’ thinking “between a progressive recognition that men must 16

See especially Carol Barnum, The Fiction of John Fowles: A Myth for Our Time, Greenwood: FL, Penkevill Publishing, 1988; Peter Conradi, John Fowles, New York: Methuen, 1982; John Haegert, “Memoirs of a Deconstructive Angel: The Heroine as Mantissa in the Fiction of John Fowles”, Contemporary Literature, XXVII/2 (Summer 1986), 160-81; Simon Loveday, The Romances of John Fowles, New York: St Martin’s Press, 1985; Ishrat Lindblad, “‘La bonne vaux,’ ‘la princesses lointaine’ – Two Motifs in the Novels of John Fowles”, in Studies in English Philology, Linguistics and Literature Presented to Alarik Rynell, eds Mats Rydén and Lennart A. Björk, Stockholm: Almquist and Wiksell International, 1978, 87-101; and Bruce Woodcock, Male Mythologies: John Fowles and Masculinity, Totowa, NJ: Barnes and Noble Books, 1984. 17 Margaret Bozenna Goscilo, “John Fowles’s Pre-Raphaelite Woman: Interart Strategies and Gender Politics”, Mosaic, XXVI/2 (1993), 68. 18 See especially Pam Cooper, The Fictions of John Fowles, Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, 1991 and Haegert, “Memoirs”, 160-81.


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change, and a nostalgic desire that women should do the job for them”. 19 Not surprisingly, feminists have objected to the implication in Fowles’ fiction that what is most valuable about women is their ability to improve men. Despite his professed admiration for a feminine ontology and epistemology, Fowles evidently valued women for their sexually alluring mystery and “the womanly way of seeing” for its potential to expand the inauthentic but nevertheless powerful male subject’s consciousness and quality of life. In short, as Peter Conradi notes, “the sexual idealization of women [in Fowles’ fiction] has acted as the destructive condition under which their repression could continue unabated”. 20 As Conradi and other critics have noted, Fowles remained caught within a conventional gender framework despite his attempts to recognize and confront the problems of patriarchal ideology. Fowles explicitly professed, both in interviews and in his writing, his enthusiasm for feminist movement; he admired and promoted women writers who have often been neglected; he offered explicit and pointed criticisms of masculinity, especially in comparison to femininity; and he deliberately created impressive and compelling women characters who provide the impetus for his novels. At the same time, his enthusiasm for feminism was in fact an enthusiasm for a very old and very conventional idealization of women; his advocacy of women writers ultimately served his larger purpose of exploring problems typically associated with men; his attack on masculinity was undermined by his persistent essentialism; and the women in his novels generally fail to achieve the kind of narrative centrality and dynamic growth granted to the men. In short, feminist approaches to Fowles have demonstrated a rather significant discrepancy between Fowles’ professed feminism and his actual approach to women and women’s issues. Indeed, Fowles’ convictions as enacted in both his comments and his writing are not merely lacking in sensitivity – they are rife with complications and contradictions. These contradictions make it 19 20

Woodcock, Male Mythologies, 15. Conradi, John Fowles, 91.

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impossible to approach Fowles’ feminism without serious reservations. Nevertheless, feminist critics have been and continue to be provoked by the problems inherent in Fowles’ articulation of feminism. There is something compelling about a man claiming feminist advocacy, something both politically and intellectually alluring about his attempts to exhibit his convictions, something that motivates the feminist scholar to investigate that advocacy in all its detail and complication in an attempt to determine the extent of its authenticity. This endeavour to verify whether, or the extent to which, Fowles was a feminist has largely defined feminist approaches to his fiction. Further efforts to determine Fowles’ definitive status as a feminist author, however, would be both unproductive and overly invested in pigeonholing Fowles and his work. Furthermore, to continue playing this classification game seems to me to be a surrender to one of Fowles’ most powerful manipulations: the endless tease of shrouded and unattainable truth. Just as the reader of one of Fowles’ novels is drawn into the mystery of his fragmented and mythic fictional landscapes, so too is the feminist reader lured into an ultimately fruitless quest to fully understand, to fully know, Fowles’ standing as a feminist author. While this classification may be marginally useful in attracting (or discouraging) new feminist readers, whether we can call Fowles a feminist author or not is beside the point, and reflects an attitude Fowles himself objected to most vehemently – a scientific desire to identify rather than to understand. More to the point would be an exploration of what Fowles’ claims to feminism mean in context to women readers and feminist scholars. Although to a contemporary feminist his conception of feminism is not exactly ideal, Fowles’ attempt to advocate the improvement of women’s condition challenges the feminist critic to determine what his novels can contribute to contemporary feminism, raising a number of pertinent questions. What can we learn from the contradictions in his feminist advocacy, especially as that advocacy determines his subject matter, characterization, and narrative technique? How can a contemporary feminist interpret his attempt to advocate feminism (or, to be more precise, his “feminine principle”) in the context of the different social and political situations of men and women? Fowles offers a promising case study of the relationship between feminism and men, a relationship that feminists need to consider more earnestly.


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Rather than continuing to reprimand Fowles for the masculine prejudice ingrained in his attitude towards women, feminist approaches must find new lenses to apply to Fowles’ work, new avenues of inquiry that can negotiate both the problematic myths and the extraordinary talents on display in Fowles’ fiction. An imperative task of the feminist critic exploring Fowles’ feminist advocacy is an attempt to value that affiliation while preventing it from appropriating women’s positions. The importance of this task suggests that the feminist scholar approaching Fowles adopt a resistant reading practice that would defy Fowles’ manipulations and seductions, seeking instead to expose the production of that dominant discourse and to encourage alternative reading pleasures. One approach a feminist critic might embrace is Laura Mulvey’s concept of feminist curiosity. Throughout her career, Mulvey has investigated the possibilities for a feminist aesthetic, beginning in women’s experiences and perspectives and proceeding through a politically and intellectually conscious exploration grounded in a curious, feminine and feminist gaze. As Mulvey explains in “Pandora’s Box: Topographies of Curiosity”, the Pandora myth provides a perfect analogy for the kind of reading practice Mulvey promotes. Pandora is, Mulvey suggests, the ultimate idealized spectacle of womanhood; her box contains all that is unspeakable and anxiety-provoking in femininity, all that her image conceals. 21 Her compulsion to look inside her box despite the danger of doing so encapsulates a drive for self-knowledge; Pandora, in employing her feminine curiosity, her epistemophilia, seeks to know about herself that which is forbidden and dangerous, that which is veiled by her own beauty. In looking, Pandora explodes her own image, becoming both the site of enigma and the source of the enigma’s decipherment. Mulvey’s summary of the transformation of the Pandora myth from misogynist representation to feminist curiosity is worth quoting at length:

21

Laura Mulvey, Fetishism and Curiosity, Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1996, 59.

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John Fowles: Visionary and Voyeur To sum up, there are three ‘cliché’ motifs, elements of myth, that are central to Pandora’s iconography: (a) femininity as enigma; (b) female curiosity as transgressive and dangerous; (c) the spatial or topographical figuration of the female body as inside and outside. And I would like to try to reformulate them, to illuminate the tautology, as follows: (a) Pandora’s curiosity acts out a transgressive desire to see inside her own surface or exterior, into the insides of the female body metaphorically represented by the box and its attendant horrors; (b) feminist curiosity transforms the topography of Pandora and her box into a new pattern or configuration, which can then be deciphered to reveal symptoms of the erotic economy of patriarchy; (c) feminist curiosity can constitute a political, critical, and creative drive. 22

Feminist curiosity, Mulvey suggests, can recognize the idealization of women and actively investigate the interior space suggested and concealed by that surface image. As a potentially active, creative methodology, feminist curiosity moves beyond articulating an oppositional perspective by investigating and resisting the process of representation through new paradigms, new pleasures. This approach seems particularly promising in respect to Fowles’ fiction, which offers a traditionally archetypal idealization of women fraught with sexualized tension. Furthermore, the procession of remarkable women in Fowles’ fiction provides an ideal site of investigation for the curious feminist critic. Characters like Sarah in The French Lieutenant’s Woman and Erato in Mantissa, for example, represent both the idealization of woman as surface image and a self-conscious desire to explore the depths of being beneath and obscured by that surface image. Likewise, characters like Diana in The Ebony Tower and Jenny and Jane in Daniel Martin expose their male counterparts’ tendency to objectify and categorize them, and resist such objectification by representing themselves through specific and oppositional discourses. Finally, characters like Isobel and Catherine in The Ebony Tower and Rebecca in A Maggot attempt to subvert traditional narrative patterns by authoring alternative narratives through which they can understand their experiences, cope with oppressive dominant discourses, and envision more authentic and just communities. The playfully 22

Ibid., 61-62.


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postmodern, unconventional characterization of such women characters, coupled with a curious feminist analysis, could potentially explode their Fowlesian femininity and elucidate the potential of Fowles’ feminist endeavours. More productive, refreshing readings of Fowles’ work thus require a shift in perspective, a move from familiar, fundamental configurations to insights that radiate from more marginal positions.

INTRODUCTION VOYEURISM AND OTHER VISUAL PLEASURES

While feminist critics have vividly demonstrated the limitations of Fowles’ feminist advocacy through pointed critiques of his concern with problems typical of men and his treatment of women writers and characters, a more attentive approach might confront Fowles’ complicated feminist efforts with both an acknowledgement of the seductive pleasures embodied in each text and a demonstration of alternative pleasures. This shift cannot be achieved without some difficulty. Although feminism and feminist criticism are by no means homogeneous ideological practices, any feminist approach must acknowledge the problems in Fowles’ attitude to women, and even the most accommodating, most curious feminist critic must feel some vexation at this attitude. Pamela Cooper summarizes this exasperation perfectly: She (for such a critic is most likely to be a woman) must negotiate both the implied admiration which Fowles (like many readers) evidently feels for his heroines, and those strategies that restrict these heroines within male-defined bounds – bounds that seem at times not only to condition but to create the attractiveness of these women, and thus to encode them as masculine fantasies. In other words, the feminist critic may sometimes feel that Fowles’ fictions were not really written for the female reader.

The feminist critic, Cooper continues, must negotiate considerable ambivalence while considering the contradictions within Fowles’ practice of authority. 1 While Fowles’ fiction revolves around 1

Cooper, The Fictions of John Fowles, 221 (italics in the original).

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remarkable women characters, and the political and social ideals embodied in those women proceed from some clearly feminist values, those characters and those ideals also bear the mark of a wellestablished idealization of women that circumscribes and diffuses their power. Furthermore, Fowles’ characters and their motivations often fail to reflect the reality of women’s lived experience. Jan Relf and Carol Barnum, for example, have both accused Fowles of falseness in the women characters in Daniel Martin, and Barry N. Olshen notes of the protagonist in The Magus, “Surely the main deficiency in the characterization of Nicholas lies in his attraction for the females of the novel when he seems to have none whatsoever for the reader”. 2 Beyond negotiating Fowles’ troubling ideology about womanhood and about feminism, feminist scholars approaching his work confront some fictional women and men whose characterization appears to be motivated primarily by either symbolic or idealistic design. Because of these complications, feminist scholars (who, as Cooper notes, are most likely to be women) must manage their ambivalence to Fowles’ attitude toward women both as readers and as scholars, as women and as feminists. The many perspectives that arise from these identities, while related, are not necessarily identical, and indeed are in many cases divergent. While feminists have criticized Fowles for his attitude toward women, for example, many women readers seem to have appreciated his apparently genuine fascination with and archetypal characterization of women. 3 Indeed, such contradictory responses may reside within the same individual. The feminist critic may very well identify with a Fowles’ heroine or aspire to be like her, be flattered by the veneration he expresses for that heroine, and simultaneously object to the limited and unrealistic definitions of womanhood embodied by that heroine. The simultaneous presence of such divergent responses 2

Barry N. Olshen, John Fowles, New York: F. Ungar, 1978, 53. See also Relf, “An Interview with John Fowles”, and Carol Barnum, “An Interview with John Fowles”, both in Conversations with John Fowles, ed. Vipond, 129 and 114, for further discussion of Fowles’ women characters as flat or unconvincing. 3 See David Streitfeld, “A Writer Blocked”, in Conversations with John Fowles, ed. Vipond, 216, and Warburton, John Fowles: A Life in Two Worlds, 373.

Voyeurism and Other Visual Pleasures

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creates a difficult analytical situation for the feminist critic – a situation that may encompass pleasure, guilt, irritation, admiration, rage, inspiration, and a host of other emotional and intellectual reactions that are not easily disentangled. A resistant, curious, feminist approach to Fowles’ work must embrace such ambivalence, complexity and puzzlement as fertile sites of investigation. The first step in such an approach is to acknowledge that divergent responses to a text or body of texts arise from divergent perspectives, from various points of view. A number of feminist theorists including Nancy Hartsock, Donna Haraway, Evelyn Fox Keller, Sandra Harding, Dorothy Smith, and Patricia Hill Collins have developed this fundamental investigation of divergent perspectives, producing a body of theoretical formulations collectively recognized as feminist standpoint theory. At the core of standpoint theory is an understanding of knowledge as situated – that is, people in various social positions will have different perspectives and political consciousnesses. Furthermore, each person will simultaneously inhabit a number of different positions that, independently and in combination, produce a number of perspectives. For these theorists, “standpoint” refers not simply to perspective or experience but to an understanding of perspective and experience as part of a larger social and political context – that is, a standpoint is an intellectual achievement that reflects political consciousness. Despite its more colloquial usage, the term “standpoint” refers not to a rigid or permanent stabilization of perspective, but rather to a fluid and dynamic negotiation of experience and point of view that can be temporarily stabilized in order to interrogate dominant ideologies. Because of its dedication to alternative points-of-view, standpoint theory encourages neither an omniscient view from nowhere, nor a single, enforced dominant view, but rather multiple and complicated visions from a variety of situations. 4 Standpoint theorists anchor their methodology in “outsider within” positions – positions inhabited by groups who are included in dominant discourses but are nevertheless, and for various reasons, unable to fully participate in them. The 4

Donna Haraway, “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective”, Feminist Studies, XIV/3 (1988), 589.

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identification and exploration of such marginalized positions as places from which a less false standpoint on social, political, and historical power relationships originates characterize and motivate standpoint approaches. 5 Such positions are neither absolute nor homogeneous; standpoint theory posits that individuals who are similarly situated share “the organization of social relations that has accomplished [their] exclusion”, 6 but does not posit identical individual understanding, nor does it imply that marginalized standpoints produce absolute truth. Marginalized positions, as Donna Haraway explains, “are not exempt from critical reexamination, decoding, deconstruction, and interpretation …. [and] are not ‘innocent’ positions. On the contrary, they are preferred because in principle they are least likely to allow denial of the critical and interpretive core of all knowledge.” 7 Such situations, that is, exhibit their difference from standard, dominant, and unmarked positions, clearly displaying their own political investment in the production of knowledge and simultaneously critiquing those dominant ideologies that mask their equal investment. Standpoint theory offers a useful methodology to the curious feminist critic who analyzes Fowles’ fiction. Negotiating her own perspectives as a woman and as a feminist, the feminist critic can, using standpoint theory, interrogate both the dominant Fowles’ ideological framework and the larger social and political context in which that framework operates as reader encounters text. Locating herself as an embodied subject within “a world directly experienced from oneself as center (in the body) on the one hand and a world organized in the abstracted conceptual mode, external to the local and particular places of one’s bodily existence” on the other, 8 the feminist critic can draw on her own lived experience as well as the theoretical formulations that structure her standpoint or standpoints. Situating her 5

See Sandra Harding, Whose Science? Whose Knowledge?, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991 for further discussion of marginalized standpoints as locations from which “less false” knowledge proceeds. 6 Dorothy Smith, The Everyday World as Problematic, Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1987, 78. 7 Haraway, “Situated Knowledges”, 584. 8 Smith, The Everyday World as Problematic, 84.


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knowledge in both the material and the abstract in this way, the feminist critic of Fowles can recognize those instances where, despite her identity as a reader for whom Fowles the popular novelist presumably writes, the text, as Cooper notes, does not seem to be written for her, and thus can begin from an outsider within position that embraces complex and even contradictory responses. Furthermore, by recognizing the complexity of her location, the feminist critic embracing standpoint methodology can recognize the complexity of other situations. As Haraway argues: “The knowing self is partial in all its guises, never finished, whole, simply there and original; it is always constructed and stitched together imperfectly, and therefore able to join with another, to see together without claiming to be another.” 9 Using a standpoint approach, the feminist critic can interrogate not only her own various perspectives but also Fowles’ various perspectives as they inhabit and emerge from his texts. Through the use of standpoint methodology, the relationship between critic and text (and critic and author) can become less oppositional and categorical, and more collaborative. One of the most consistent tenets of standpoint theory among its various practitioners is an insistence on self-consciousness and connection between researcher and researched. As Haraway explains: “Situated knowledges require that the object of knowledge be pictured as an actor and agent, not as a screen or a ground or a resource, never finally as slave to the master that closes off the dialectic in his unique agency and his authorship of ‘objective’ knowledge.” 10 Seeking to transform the concept of objectivity by interrogating the biases and assumptions of the researcher, standpoint theorists value information exchange, allowing the situated subject of research to participate, to interact with the researcher, rather than displaying itself as passive object to be pronounced upon. Using this approach, the curious feminist critic of Fowles’ work can engage in critical practice as though in a 9

Haraway, “Situated Knowledges”, 586 (italics in the original). Ibid., 592. See also Sandra Harding, Whose Science? Whose Knowledge?, and Evelyn Fox Keller, Reflections on Gender and Science, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1985, for an intriguing example of this practice in the work of Barbara McClintock. 10

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conversational exchange with Fowles’ writings, each expressing particular points of view, each contributing to a collaborative project incorporating fresh insights. This method, because it is dedicated to collaboration and to multiple interpretations, might negotiate certain critical challenges more productively than other approaches. The skepticism with which feminist scholars have considered Fowles’ feminist advocacy, for example, demonstrates some of the most problematic assumptions through which feminist analyses of men’s claims to feminism work. Feminist claims, as Bruce Woodcock notes, “have a quite different function and meaning when women make them on their own behalf than they do when men make them”. 11 There is a provocative ambivalence in such claims that Woodcock explains rather well: When women assert values as “feminist” or “female”, even those which have been traditionally ascribed to them within patriarchal ideology, their activity declares a conception of themselves as part of a process of self-definition. When a man adopts the same arguments, their political function changes quite simply because of the relationship between those arguments, whose aim is to challenge male power, and male power itself. One must inevitably suspect a conscious or unconscious attempt to contain their impact, or somehow subvert or appropriate the cutting edge of feminism by containing it within maledefined limits. 12

Woodcock’s comments continue to be pertinent nearly twenty years after his argument first appeared, since men’s claims to feminist advocacy still elicit suspicion for precisely the reasons he mentions. In fact, one might reasonably be as suspicious of Woodcock for these reasons as of Fowles. Although in comparison to Fowles, Woodcock does confront masculine prejudice more self-consciously and with more deliberate scrutiny, this suspicion may account for the hostility his study has provoked among Fowles scholars. 13 11

Woodcock, Male Mythologies, 17. Ibid., 17-18. 13 See, for example, Robert J. Begiebing, Toward a New Synthesis: John Fowles, John Gardner, Norman Mailer, Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1989. Begiebing concurs with William Palmer (“John Fowles and the Crickets”, Modern Fiction Studies, 12


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It is crucial to note, however, that a woman is not necessarily more qualified to assess Fowles’ masculine prejudice than a man simply by virtue of being a woman. As Magali Cornier Michael argues, both men and women “are socialized within a patriarchal world” that relies on masculine perspectives. 14 Indeed, Michael criticizes Deborah Byrd’s celebration of Fowles’ feminism as naïve precisely because it accepts his ordinary feminist efforts too complacently. 15 However, neither should Fowles’ feminist efforts be rejected completely on account of his admittedly masculine bias. Feminist critics, for example, have objected to Fowles’ tendency to structure his novels around problems typical of men, but professed feminist sympathy does not necessarily dictate concern only with the problems of women. In fact, Fowles’ attention to men’s problems (which in his universe invariably implicate women), coupled with his complicated feminist advocacy, provides a rather intriguing textual territory that deserves more careful attention than feminist critics have granted. Because standpoint methodology, rather than reifying dominant ideology (even dominant feminist ideology), seeks to interrogate its production and to explore from a number of perspectives the ways in which it is inscribed within the lives of people in various social locations, the curious feminist critic using a standpoint approach accepts neither the dominant ideologies of Fowles’ fiction nor her own point of view as absolute. Rather, she works toward a reading practice that acknowledges a variety of attitudes and that weaves together the

XXXI/1 (1985), 3-13), complaining that Male Mythologies advances a shallow and distorted interpretation, and then goes on to attack Woodcock’s perspective as a man advocating feminism with a tasteless dismissal: “One wonders then how Woodcock (a name from the realm of allegory? a witty feminist’s pseudonym?) as a male – his penile legacy intact – can maintain pretensions to a correct feminist deconstruction of Fowles’ ‘sexist’ texts” (140). Although Woodcock’s name and biological sex admittedly invite such teasing, one also wonders why exactly Begiebing and others are so thoroughly bothered by Woodcock’s analysis that they find it necessary to respond with such juvenile indiscretion. 14 Magali Cornier Michael, “‘Who is Sarah?’ A Critique of The French Lieutenant’s Woman’s Feminism”, Critique, XXVIII/4 (Summer 1987), 226. 15 Ibid., 228.

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values and interpretive strategies practiced by both author and various readers. This curious, collaborative approach seems particularly appropriate as a methodology for critiquing Fowles’ work, as it reflects rather strikingly Fowles’ own scholastic attitudes. Ruth Morse notes, for example, the self-consciousness and “sense of his situation” that permeates Fowles’ writing. 16 Indeed, Fowles commented rather eloquently on the variety of perspectives he negotiated in “The J.R. Fowles Club”, a self-reflection in which he conceived of his multiple identities as a writer in terms of a kind of men’s club: Quite a lot of my fellow members will hardly exchange a civil word; others do nothing but whine and whinge. Yet others (talk about egos!) are self-important beyond belief, especially one fathead who fancies himself a novelist. Another pretends to be a feminist. I’d like to see him just once with a duster or an iron in his hand. Another pair both think they know everything about natural history – one a sort of scientist, the other a sort of poet. You can imagine …. We are truly an unspeakably futile shambles. I honestly shall resign if they don’t watch out. I’ve always hated men’s clubs, anyway. 17

Emphasizing both a multiplicity of perspectives and a poignant sense of inadequacy in these comments, Fowles illustrates the difficulty with which the writer attempts to unify a cacophony of diverse voices and to reconcile his sense of accomplishment with an inevitable sense of failure or guilt when these multiple selves offer conflicting points of view. Intensely aware of his development as a writer and as a man, Fowles demonstrated through both his fiction and his non-fiction this acute sense of inner conflict, of personal and ideological evolution, as well as remorse for earlier attitudes, still lingering in his awareness of earlier selves. 18 This acute sense of multiplicity manifests itself within Fowles’ fiction as a dedication to ambiguity and indeterminacy. Particularly 16

Ruth Morse, “John Fowles, Marie de France, and the Man with Two Wives”, Philological Quarterly, LXIII/1 (Winter 1984), 20. 17 John Fowles, “The J.R. Fowles Club”, in Wormholes, ed. Relf, 67. 18 See, for example, The Tree, New York: The Ecco Press, 1979, in which this kind of self-reflection is particularly poignant.


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conscious of the various responses different readers may have to the same text, and even to the different responses a single reader may have to a text at various times, Fowles devoted himself to a “mobility or fluidity of image, in terms of how readers ‘see’ the text”. 19 Rather than attempting to present an objective or otherwise absolute account, either in his fiction or non-fiction, Fowles recognized that perspective and point of view, as they are experienced both immediately and over time, are neither rigid nor fixed, but fluid and subject to change. As he explained, “my taste in fiction is towards a fair degree of realism in style and my taste in non-fiction (say in what scientists and academics write) is towards those who can exhibit qualities like tolerance of hypothesis, dislike of the rigid interpretation, a general fluidity of attitude and a basic sympathy towards a subject … a touch of ordinary humanity, in a phrase”. 20 This preference for “a touch of ordinary humanity” became increasingly important to Fowles over the course of his career, and is explained most fully in his discussions of nature, in which he insists that to know nature one must recognize both a mutual relationship with it and an aesthetic appreciation of it that moves beyond a scientific desire to categorize and collect. 21 He locates the beginnings of this attitude in his encounter with Zen in the 1950s, during which he discovered “that there was less conflict than I had imagined between nature as external assembly of names and facts and nature as internal feeling; that the two modes of seeing or knowing could in fact marry and take place almost simultaneously, and enrich each other”. 22 Aware of science-as-usual’s tenets of objectivity and detachment, Fowles insisted instead that “there is a price for forgetting that a scientist is also a human being” 23 and lamented the emptiness of the collector’s detached and self-serving understanding of nature. 19 Barnum, “An Interview with John Fowles”, in Conversations with John Fowles, ed. Vipond, 105. 20 Baker, “John Fowles: The Art of Fiction CIX”, in Conversations with John Fowles, ed. Vipond, 186. 21 See especially John Fowles, “The Nature of Nature”, in Wormholes, ed. Relf, 34361, and The Tree. 22 Fowles, The Tree, 39. 23 John Fowles, “John Aubrey and the Genesis of the Monumenta Britannica”, in Wormholes, ed. Relf, 195.

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Reflecting an attitude remarkably similar to that of feminist standpoint theorists, he explained, “One is not supposed to feel and to know at the same time, though of course one may (if less commonly) feel what one knows and (much more frequently) know what one feels. The problem lies in trying to get the two systems of information exchange, each ruled by a fundamentally different ethos, to marry and bear fruit.” 24 Like Evelyn Fox Keller’s professed admiration for the collaborative, involved work of Barbara McClintock, Fowles’ admiration for seventeenth-century historiographer John Aubrey proceeded from an appreciation of Aubrey’s intensely inquisitive, varied, and connected methodology; in “John Aubrey and the Genesis of the Monumenta Britannica”, Fowles explains, “[Aubrey’s] view is holistic; he thinks far less of different subjects, all neatly frontiered and separated, than of different angles of approach to the central problem: what was the past, what was it like?”. 25 This admiration for Aubrey epitomizes Fowles’ interest in multiple realities and interpretations of the same material, all expressing different factual and imaginative contexts. Like many feminist standpoint theorists, Fowles valued difference of interpretation and collaborative efforts that display multiple points of view; his contributions to a number of books of photography, for example, highlight both his own unique understanding of the material and a disparate vision offered by the photographer. 26 Of Fay Godwin’s photographs of the Scillies, for example, Fowles commented, “It was not how I see (or then saw) the islands; but it was of quite sufficient force to make me think again, and respect her very different vision of them”. 27 Choosing to collaborate with Godwin and with the other photographers whose work he includes in his various non-fictional

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Fowles, “The Nature of Nature”, 345. Fowles, “John Aubrey”, 181. 26 See The Enigma of Stonehenge, New York: Summit Books, 1980; Islands, Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1978; Lyme Regis Camera, Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1990; Shipwreck, Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1975; A Short History of Lyme Regis, Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1982; and Thomas Hardy’s England, Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1984. 27 John Fowles, “Land”, in Wormholes, ed. Relf, 326. 25


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writings, Fowles demonstrated his reverence for openness, ambiguity, and multiple points of view. This respect for difference of vision reflects Fowles’ understanding of lived experience. His professed preference for “a fair degree of realism in style” in both the fiction he wrote and the fiction he read, for example, reflects a conscious decision to reject the conventional closure of the novel in favor of indeterminate endings more representative of lived experience. It is for this reason that his novels end without the traditional sense of completion, but rather with, for example, the three separate endings of The French Lieutenant’s Woman or the frozen scene and ambiguous quotation at the close of The Magus. 28 Aware of both the implied continuation of a plot representative of lived experience, despite the misleading snipping of the narrative thread at the conventional ending of a novel, and of the different responses various readers may have to any story, Fowles offers instead indeterminate endings that require the reader to supply his or her own analysis, forcing the reader into a kind of interpretive freedom that denies the conventional pleasure of closure and offers instead an alternative pleasure of nearly limitless possibility. Furthermore, Dianne Vipond suggests, Fowles’ indeterminacy opens a space in which the reader, confronted with an unconventional narrative strategy, might become aware of his or her assumptions not only about the reading experience but about the subject matter of the text as well. 29 Instead of assuming a natural progression of plot, the reader of a Fowles’ novel is forced to note the very construction of the illusion of natural textual progression. Thus he creates a reading experience dependent upon an ambitious, curious, open-minded reader willing to contribute more than is usually required within the authorreader relationship. This arduous reading experience allows for, and indeed encourages, varied and fluid readings. 28

This quotation reads: “cras amet qui numquam amavit / quique amavit cras amet”, translated as “Tomorrow let him love, who has never loved; he who has loved, let him love tomorrow”, or alternatively, “Let those love now who've never loved; let those who've loved, love yet again”. See Bob Goosmann, “Translating the Last Lines of The Magus”, John Fowles: The Website, http://www.fowlesbooks.com/ourjohn.htm, for more on this quotation. 29 Vipond, Introduction, in Conversations with John Fowles, ed. Vipond, xiii.

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In fact, Fowles seemed to prefer unusual readings, or at least readings that radiate from unusual locations, and made a conscious effort to inscribe both traditional and alternative perspectives in his writings. “I suppose I have a liking for people who are outside society”, Fowles explained, and this identification with marginalized individuals illustrates his paradoxical sense of simultaneous privilege as a white, male, educated Englishman and his isolation as a writer and thinker whose aesthetic and ideological preferences reflect a more continental attitude. 30 As a kind of outsider within himself, Fowles inscribed in his writings a particularly complex negotiation of perspective that thrives on the tension between dominant and resistant epistemological and ontological practices. This tension is especially apparent in his translation of Ourika, a nineteenth-century French novel written by Claire de Duras. The story of a rescued slave girl educated and raised within eighteenth-century French society life, Ourika offers a unique case study of the intersection of privileged and marginalized perspectives. The story proceeds from Ourika who, as a dying woman, recites her tale to a doctor attempting to cure her apparently psychosomatic deterioration. As Margaret Waller notes in her introduction to Fowles’ translation, Ourika’s status as an outsider within provides a poignantly ambivalent perspective on French society life. 31 Unaware as a child of any significance attached to her racial difference, Ourika is shocked to discover that her race marks her as inferior and marginal to her social circle. This discovery prompts Ourika to develop a heightened consciousness of her surroundings and of the ideological practices that define her situation; she comments, “From the time I felt ostracized, I became more exacting. I analyzed and criticized almost all that had previously satisfied me.” 32 No longer able to identify with her kind 30 Quoted in Daniel Halpern, “A Sort of Exile in Lyme Regis”, in Conversations with John Fowles, ed. Vipond, 18. For more on Fowles’ identification with outsiders, see also Melissa Denes, “Fowles on a Fair Day”, in Conversations with John Fowles, ed. Vipond, 223-30. Fowles comments throughout his non-fictional writings collected in Wormholes and the interviews collected in Conversations with John Fowles on his non-conformist political, social, and aesthetic preferences. 31 Margaret Waller, Introduction, in Ourika, by Claire de Duras, trans. John Fowles, New York: MLA, 1994, xix. 32 Claire de Duras, Ourika, trans. Fowles, 17.


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and well-intentioned – but nevertheless society-conscious – caretakers, Ourika attempts to redefine herself by identifying with her African heritage, but is disillusioned by an eruption of violence incited and perpetrated by African slaves. Isolated from both her French contemporaries and her African heritage, Ourika despairs of ever developing her considerable talents, of ever achieving contentment within a society that dismisses her abilities because of her marked difference. Trapped within a situation defined by both pleasurable, familiar activities and appalling, limitless isolation, Ourika is, as Waller notes, “the outsider whose difference makes her critical of French society”, but she “also serves as its spokesperson, a mirroring the heroine identifies as both pleasurable and demeaning”. 33 These complications, inherent to Ourika’s point of view, force the reader to recognize both the piercing insights and the painful ambivalence of the outsider within. Furthermore, the reader, encountering Ourika’s tale through the framing and editing narrative of the doctor who records Ourika’s story, can also recognize that the main character is not, as Waller notes, “the eighteenth-century African woman whose story originally inspired the work but a fiction created by the duchess of Duras in the 1820s”. This realization generates the interpretive necessity of evaluating the intersections of not only this fictional Ourika’s competing perspectives, but also the intersections of the other perspectives that inform Fowles’ translation of the text: that of the French doctor who actually narrates Ourika’s story as he records it for diagnosis and attempted treatment; that of the educated society woman living in nineteenth-century France whose authorial efforts have created the text; and that of Fowles, whose translation introduces a contemporary Englishman’s perspective as the text shifts from French to English. Fowles’ Ourika, then, is no simple rendering of a French outsider’s experiences, but rather a complicated convergence of attitudes and opinions orbiting a tale inherently complicated by the interaction of divergent worldviews. Waller argues that Claire de Duras’ narrative choices in Ourika provide a counter-narrative to dominant discourse, using the 33

Waller, Introduction, xix.

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perspectives of the outsider within to expose and dispute the oppression of the marginalized. 34 Writing from a situation not her own, Duras necessarily complicates her text with experiences and interpretations that are at least partially surmised, giving rise to, as Waller notes, an inevitable characterization of Ourika as “Other”. This characterization is complicated by the framing narrative of the doctor, whose comments both detach the story from Ourika herself and, through the sanctioning effect of his retelling, lend authority to her insights. The tension created by Duras’ and her fictional doctor’s simultaneous sympathy and conjecture, Waller suggests, generates a number of complications, not the least of which involve privilege and authority. In writing Ourika, Duras assumes the right to speak for a woman whose situation, while perhaps sharing certain social and political realities with her own, nevertheless is largely foreign. However, the act of writing Ourika also provides a forum for the insights that proceed from that marginalized perspective, insights that, while perhaps skewed by Duras’ assumptions, nevertheless include important examinations of prevalent oppressive attitudes that might not surface through other, more direct channels. 35 By extension, Fowles’ choice to translate Ourika, making it available to a contemporary English-speaking audience, suggests a similar interest in exposing lingering gender and racial prejudice as well as a specific concern for promoting both the work of a neglected woman writer and the insights of outsiders within. By choosing to translate this text, Fowles demonstrated an implied affiliation with its analysis of prejudice. Focusing on the social construction of difference and the injustice that proceeds from such constructions, Ourika demonstrates Fowles’ interest in spotlighting perspectives that challenge dominant ideology. Indeed, in the Foreword to his translation of Ourika, Fowles observes that this “strange little novel” clearly influenced his writing of The French Lieutenant’s Woman, 34

Ibid., xx. Speaking for others is always a complicated endeavor; as Doris Y. Kadish summarizes, “we must conclude that there is no clear or uncontaminated access to the other’s voice” (“Rewriting Women’s Stories”, 86). For further discussion of this issue, see Linda Alcoff, “The Problem of Speaking for Others”, Cultural Critique, (Winter 1991-1992), 5-32. 35


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especially in his desire “to write about a woman who had been unfairly exiled from society”. His creation of the English Sarah, he further admits, implies his own racial prejudice, or the racial prejudice of the earlier self who could “have been so stupid as not to see who that woman really was”. Fowles’ subsequent translation of Ourika attempts to ameliorate that prejudice and reflects his admiration for Duras’ attempt to understand a situation not her own – an effort he calls “this first serious attempt by a white novelist to enter a black mind”. 36 Yet ultimately his admiration for Ourika stems not from the specificities of Ourika’s experiences and insights, nor from a thorough desire to explore unfamiliar social locations, but rather from Ourika’s contribution to a rather general understanding of oppression; he praises Ourika because “it universalizes the particular racial context, goes just as well for any intelligent member of a despised minority in a jealous and blind majority culture …. This is the case history of an outsider, of the eternal étranger in human society.” 37 This focus on the universality of Ourika’s situation, while pertinent and genuinely appreciative, nevertheless suggests that for Fowles, the specificities of a black woman’s situation are not really important. Rather, the insights that arise from such a location are significant only insofar as they illuminate the more general problems of more comfortable and familiar marginalizations. So we return to the feminist critique of Fowles’ novels that suggests that even in his desire to offer alternative perspectives, he ultimately employed resistant epistemological and ontological practices in order to expand the self-awareness of traditionally centralized, though perhaps somewhat isolated, individuals. Because of his genuine feminist sympathies and his sincere interest in multiplicity and alternative perspectives, Fowles attempted, not only in Ourika and The French Lieutenant’s Woman, but in all of his fictional works, to explore women’s sensibilities and to advocate women’s ways of knowing and being. However, the central characters of his novels are invariably men who benefit from the alternative 36 37

John Fowles, Foreword, in Duras, Ourika, xxix-xxx. Ibid., xxxi.

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perspectives embodied in the mysterious, but useful, women they meet. Despite his professed fascination with women, Fowles consistently organized his texts through men’s perspectives, and made no claim to understand women or his women characters. Like the protagonists of his novels, Fowles insisted on and was seduced by women’s ultimate unknowability. Thomas C. Foster offers a speculative explanation of Fowles’ reticent depiction of women, suggesting, “It may be that Fowles recognizes the falseness of a male novelist claiming such complete understanding of the feminine”. 38 This recognition may be interpreted in a number of ways, but Fowles’ refusal to definitively explain his heroines suggests a modest admission of insufficient knowledge, a self-effacing retreat from pretended expertise. Such an attitude might account for his response to interrogation regarding his professed inability to understand his heroines: What I really meant is that they are not to be understood by traditional male standards. Like most male artists, I have a strong female component in my character, just as most women artists have a strong male one. This may help us in creating characters of the opposite sex, but of course we’re always, finally, no more than sympathetic visitors in a foreign country … not natives. If my women characters seem short on motivation and analysis – I suppose most notoriously in The French Lieutenant’s Woman – it is because I am writing from the standpoint of this male “visitor”. 39

Acutely aware of his situation as a man and as a writer, Fowles conceived a distance from women, likening his attempts to portray women to a distinct sense of difference as an outsider within a much 38

Thomas C. Foster, Understanding John Fowles, Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 1994, 49. Interestingly, and despite general critical opinion, Fowles has referred to Alison as “the central character of The Magus” (Vipond, “An Unholy Inquisition”, 371). This odd statement demonstrates the infatuation Fowles felt for his heroines – especially since, as Eileen Warburton reveals, those heroines are based recognizably on his first wife, Elizabeth (John Fowles: A Life in Two Worlds, 234) – and provides a revealing instance of his own understanding of his texts conflicting with critical (and especially feminist) readings. 39 Tony Graham, Hilary Arnold, Sappho Durrell, and John Thackara, “John Fowles: An Exclusive Interview”, 61.


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loved but nonetheless exotic landscape. Despite attempts to acculturate oneself to this foreign space, Fowles suggested, a man can never fully approximate a woman’s standpoint (and vice versa), since any such attempt is doomed to failure, or at least to inadequacy. This attitude reflects his apparently sincere desire to avoid appropriation or violation of women’s space through the employment of an admiring but distant touch. At the same time, the puzzling and oft-criticized characterization of women in his work might be interpreted not as modest admiration but as titillating fantasy, as an attitude of rapt fancy through which Fowles portrayed women not with detached observation but with intimate idealization, as embodiments of men’s infatuations. Indeed, Fowles confessed to nympholepsy, defined as “that perverse but persistent condition of desire for the unattainable”, 40 and asserted that this condition infects most of the contemporary Western world, which has become, in his own words, “girl-besotted, girl-drunk, girl-distorted”. For this state of affairs Fowles firmly blamed men: I am very far from being a misogynist, and I immediately acquit the girls themselves of any intention to subvert the progress of the human republic. They are not consciously befuddling us, or at any rate no more than Eve first befuddled that egregious dimwit Adam; it is we, the men, who are befuddling ourselves with girls. 41

In short, Fowles understood our current social and intellectual climate to be polluted with an unhealthy, but nevertheless quite compelling, fixation on inexplicable and unattainable women. Convinced of the near impossibility of escaping this condition, Fowles instead explored it in all its complexity and perversion, and almost exclusively through men’s perspectives. Apparently more concerned with the general affliction of “the eternal étranger in human society” than with the specificities of oppressed individuals’ lived experience, and certainly more concerned with the difficulties men confront in their relationships and in their struggles to define their own identities than with similar difficulties faced by women, 40 41

Jan Relf, Introduction, in Wormholes, ed. Relf, xxii. John Fowles, “Gather Ye Starlets”, in Wormholes, ed. Relf, 94.

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Fowles ultimately considered the “Other” (read “woman”) an embodiment of the inexplicable and alienated elements of the Self (read “man”), sympathizing with the marginalized without fully confronting the complexities of unfamiliar situations. Fowles’ portrayal of women may stem from genuine admiration and a desire to venerate women’s unique discernments, but because of his use of these sensibilities as tools to increase the pleasure and existential authenticity of the men in his novels, these efforts have varying degrees of success. In short, Fowles was, as a number of feminist critics have suggested, better at exploring the epistemological and ontological complexities of men’s experiences than at elucidating the insights proceeding from women’s perspectives. Yet Fowles’ consistent interest in multiplicity deserves further interrogation. He celebrated Duras’ attempt to explore a situation not her own, and supported that attempt with similar efforts in his texts. In fact, despite his confessed obsession with the unknowable and unattainable woman, he asserts in Islands precisely the effort to incorporate women’s perspectives as the organizing principle behind his fiction. As Katherine Tarbox notes: Fowles begins his reading of The Odyssey with an insistence that Homer was a woman and ends with the conviction that The Odyssey is the template for all his own novels …. As a culturally engendered male, who identifies strongly with and is an apologist for the bumbling Odysseus, his repeated writings of the Homer-woman’s text are a gesture toward a lost androgyny, an attempt to recover the faculties and sensibilities he names female. 42

Paradoxically committed to exploring perspectives that he associated with women and to inscribing men’s nympholepsy, Fowles’ texts are fraught with tension between men’s competing desires to understand women and to idealize women. So Fowles excelled in the exploration of men’s problems and faltered when he attempted to inscribe women’s experiences and 42

Katherine Tarbox, “John Fowles’s Islands: Landscape and Narrative’s Negative Space”, in John Fowles and Nature: Fourteen Perspectives on Landscape, ed. James R. Aubrey, Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1999, 54.


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perceptions – but he was, after all, a man, and more significant than his understandable difficulty at inscribing a woman’s standpoint is the attempt itself, an attempt that has engaged feminist and women readers alike. Fowles’ texts continuously require the reader to consider the limitations of even the most dominant textual tones. His texts are eminently interrogative, perhaps questioning the world from a fixed masculine subjectivity, but determined to explore women’s unique situations and to interface with women’s ways of knowing and being. Although Fowles was limited in his feminist capabilities and enveloped in men’s concerns, his work, through its sincere attempts to inscribe women’s experiences and insights, offers a unique opportunity for the feminist critic to explore the intersections of men’s fantasies and women’s prospects, of authorial control and resistant readings. These intersections become vividly clear in a close reading of Fowles’ management of his authority. He complicates his feminist advocacy by offering inexplicable women characters. Likewise, he undermines his professed devotion to indeterminacy and interpretive freedom by exercising unmistakable authorial control. Such control is most apparent, in fact, in his adamant refusal to explain his heroines’ motivations, most obviously in The Magus, in which Nicholas, despite his detective work, never fully explains to readers (or, indeed, understands himself) Alison’s reasons for faking suicide or Julie’s reasons for seducing and discarding him, and in The French Lieutenant’s Woman, in which readers encounter in detail the tortured (if amusing) machinations of Charles’s thoughts but never enter Sarah’s consciousness. Such selective omniscience forces readers to develop a curious epistemological craving that is fulfilled or frustrated at Fowles’ leisure. In other cases, as in The Collector, A Maggot, and especially The Magus, characters reveal information selectively, forcing readers (and often other characters) to proceed with a deliberately fragmented vision of the situation – often a vision skewed toward a particular perspective. These manipulations depend upon fragmentation, on privileged points of view, and – most importantly – on a narrative style steeped in cinematic conventions. In each of his texts, Fowles uses his protagonist’s perspective to frame and organize the narrative. This framing technique is remarkably similar to point of view shooting,

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which, as Terry Lovell explains, “show[s] us what the camera, placed in the position of the character, would reveal, which is not necessarily the same thing as what the character sees, or wants us to believe she/he sees”. 43 An eminently metafictional author, Fowles blatantly displays the unreliability of his narrators, and indeed of all of his characters, who are either deliberately mysterious or noticeably inauthentic. His use of a cinematic sensibility to emphasize such unreliability, however, further illustrates both the intense pleasure and the misleading totality of the visual. In “I Write Therefore I Am”, Fowles attributes his fascination with visual practice to a generational fixation: “All of us [in my generation] write cinematically; our imaginations, constantly fed on films, ‘shoot’ scenes, and we write descriptions of what has been shot. So for us a lot of novel writing is, or seems like, the tedious translating of an unmade and never-to-be-made film into words.” 44 This obsession with a visual conception of narrative complicates the authorial process, Fowles suggests, incorporating an almost inescapable contemporary reliance on visual stimulation. In fact, his inspiration for writing often began with a visual image; both The French Lieutenant’s Woman and A Maggot, for example, were inspired by a persistent vision of one or more main characters captured within a specific landscape as if by an imaginary camera’s lens. 45 Nevertheless, Fowles struggled with his, and his readers’, reliance on the visual, precisely because of the tyranny of perspective employed by cinema: The cinematic visual image is virtually the same for all who see it; it stamps out personal imagination, the response from individual visual memory. A sentence or paragraph in a novel will evoke a different 43

Terry Lovell, “Feminism and Form in the Literary Adaptation: The French Lieutenant’s Woman”, in Criticism and Critical Theory, ed. Jeremy Hawthorn, London: Arnold, 1984, 124. 44 Fowles, “I Write Therefore I Am”, 7. Interestingly, several of Fowles’ novels have been made into films, requiring an equally tedious (and considerably less rewarding) translation of words back into images. Fowles was generally disappointed in these efforts, reflecting in part his ambivalent attitude to the combination of narrative and visual practices. 45 See Fowles, “Notes on an Unfinished Novel”, 13, and A Maggot, Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1985, Prologue.


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image in each reader. This necessary cooperation between writer and reader – the one to suggest, the other to make concrete – is a privilege of verbal form; and the cinema can never usurp it. 46

This privileging of novelistic freedom obviously reflects Fowles’ preference for the written text. However, it also foregrounds his ambivalent attitude toward the visual, which he perceives as both oppressive and undeniable. This ambivalent attitude creates a distinct tension in Fowles’ work, in which he tempers his suspicion of cinematic conventions with an apparent compulsion to play with visual practices. Most of his novels are not thematically bound to cinematic discourse (Daniel Martin excepted), but both his fiction and non-fiction reveal a deep fascination with and incorporation of the visual into the written text – that is, both characters and the reader are made to watch in a unique way. Within the fiction, characters (usually men – Clegg, Nicholas, Charles, David, Daniel, Miles, Ayscough) do a great deal of watching, particularly as they try to understand the inexplicable motivations of other characters (usually women – Miranda, Alison, Lily/Julie, Sarah, Diana, Jane, Erato, Rebecca). Through such viewing, Fowles’ men characters become preoccupied with visual practices that hinge on the desire and/or ability to infiltrate the private world of women others and, in so doing, exercise power over them. Such power becomes intoxicating, and generates a perverse pleasure that dramatically increases in proportion to the difficulty through which it is attained. Likewise, readers must watch the action from a particular vantage point – sometimes through the framing lens of a narrator, but more often through the perspective of the main character (a man). While this watching often serves to illustrate situations within the texts, it is more significantly a means by which readers come to identify with a particular character, to perceive the world as he perceives it. For readers, pleasure results from the tension between mystery and increasing fullness of vision, and intensifies with the difficulty in attaining either the full picture possessed by Fowles, or, more

46

Fowles, “Notes on an Unfinished Novel”, 21 (italics in the original).

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manageably, the picture equivalent to that possessed by the character with whom readers are encouraged to identify. These visual manipulations combine intense pleasure with transgression and coercion, since Fowles’ fiction is enraptured with mystery and a kind of narrative striptease, rife with eroticized power games between characters and between the author and reader. 47 Fowles summarized, “I suppose I am … haunted – both ravished and tormented – by the erotic; yet happiest when it is left three-quarters hidden, in secret”, 48 and it is this fascination with the erotic and with the seduction of the tease that determines the viewing practices of his texts. These practices are not always, or even primarily, sexual. However, they are quite often characterized by unequal power relations, as in Fowles’ use of selective omniscience (most notably in The French Lieutenant’s Woman); with forced or coerced viewing, as in his framing of the action through his protagonists’ point of view (as in The Magus, Mantissa, Daniel Martin, and The Ebony Tower); and sometimes even with the pornographic (as in, for example, Clegg’s photographing Miranda naked in The Collector, the disintoxication scene in The Magus, and the climactic lovemaking in Mantissa). In each of these cases, both characters and readers are bound to an eroticized visual practice controlled by authorial manipulation and characterized by coercion. In short, Fowles’ fiction is inherently voyeuristic – that is, obsessed with transgressive, eroticized visual practices, motivated by the desire to penetrate private spaces, and most pleasurable when intimate knowledge results from unequal power relations. Just as the cinema is organized by a spectator/spectacle interaction, his fiction is dependent 47 Fowles admits as much, telling Katherine Tarbox, “All art must be a kind of striptease” (Tarbox, “Interview”, 153). Furthermore, as Jan Relf summarizes Fowles’ comments on writing: “Writing, it seems, is a sexy business. Fiction making, the creating of another world, is a ‘haunting, isolating, and guilt-ridden experience’; his characters need ‘constant caressing’; he falls in love with his heroines and is, if only imaginatively, unfaithful to his wife with every novel he writes. His relationship with the novel, for the duration of its writing, is like an affair, full of guilts, anxieties, secret delights” (Relf, Introduction, ix). The inscription of the erotic in a Fowles’ text thus encourages the reader to experience pleasures similar to those of the author himself. 48 Baker, “John Fowles”, 191.


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upon the gaze of protagonist and reader, seeking to penetrate the shroud of mystery surrounding the women in the novels and the revelations in the texts. In her landmark essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema”, Mulvey examines the process by which narrative encourages this kind of spectator identification aligned with an active, voyeuristic, masculine gaze. In narrative cinema, Mulvey argues, the woman on the screen becomes a spectacle, the site on which this gaze fixes. Mulvey comments: In a world ordered by sexual imbalance, pleasure in looking has been split between active/male and passive/female. The determining male gaze projects its fantasy onto the female figure, which is styled accordingly …. Traditionally, the woman displayed has functioned on two levels: as erotic object for the characters within the screen story, and as erotic object for the spectator within the auditorium, with a shifting tension between the looks on either side of the screen. 49

These two looks of protagonist and spectator, while in tension, are also in cohesion: “As the spectator identifies with the main male protagonist, he projects his look onto that of his like, his screen surrogate, so that the power of the male protagonist as he controls events coincides with the active power of the erotic look, both giving a satisfying sense of omnipotence.” 50 Through this process of identification, the woman on the screen becomes merely a fetish, a spectacle of sexuality viewed both through the eyes of the spectator (regardless of that spectator’s sex) and through the eyes of the man with whom the spectator identifies. This viewing practice hinges on inequality, on the passivity of the idealized and mysterious feminine object as well as the viewer, in comparison to the active and directing power of the masculine subject with whom the viewer identifies. Often this process is eroticized explicitly through sexual innuendo, but it is always implicitly seductive in terms of power. These initial formulations of the gaze have been modified and extended by a number of theorists, generating a far more varied 49

Laura Mulvey, Visual and Other Pleasures, Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1989, 19. 50 Ibid., 20.

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account of voyeurism and spectatorship, both within the cinema and without. 51 Of these forms of voyeurism, all are a direct result of public concern about controlling the unknown – that which is mysterious, hidden, clandestine – and most are explicitly concerned with intentional surveillance. Though not all explicitly sexual in their intent or in their focus, these various forms of watching all are inherently saturated by an overwhelming desire to know and to control, as well as a thorough belief in observation as the premier means of producing knowledge. It is this desire to know, and to acquire knowledge through direct observation, that Fowles uses in order to both construct and control voyeuristic pleasure in his texts. From both his characters and his readers, Fowles conceals important elements of traditional narrative – character motivation, linear progression of events, ideological cohesion. Such concealment to some extent emphasizes his postmodern concerns. However, his apparent desire to control the vision of both characters and readers suggests a kind of authorial pleasure in having ultimate control over revelations within the text. Furthermore, some blatantly didactic instances of authorial domination in Fowles’ texts, as Simon Loveday rightly observes, compromise his attempts to encourage interpretive freedom. These moments are especially noticeable in the earlier fiction – The Collector, The Magus, and The French Lieutenant’s Woman – in which Fowles and his well-known political and aesthetic values rather transparently enter the text through characters’ reflections and didactic narrative interruptions. These ponderous authorial interventions, as Loveday explains, “show a failure of trust in the reader’s judgment, good sense, and ability to come to the ‘right’ decision unaided (his apparent assumption that such a decision exists at all is itself a loaded one)”. 52 Despite his interest in the fluid, varied interpretation, Fowles, particularly in his early works, resists such multiplicity of perspective.

51

See The Cinematic Society, London: Sage Publications, 1995, in which Norman K. Denzin summarizes gaze theorizing admirably, including the work of Laura Mulvey, Jean-Paul Sartre, Jacques Lacan, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Michel Foucault, Patricia Erens and Mary Anne Doane. 52 Loveday, The Romances of John Fowles, 134.


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This resistance is, of course, about authority, or, to be more precise, about power. Fowles’ postmodern efforts, while stunning and somewhat revolutionary in their depiction of indeterminacy and interpretive freedom, are less radical than they may at first appear. Despite his undermining of traditional narrative, Fowles’ fiction nonetheless makes use of inescapable narrative conventions through which the author ultimately controls readers’ vision of the text while cultivating an illusion of interpretive freedom. 53 Indeed, illusion is one of Fowles’ fascinations: his work is eminently focused on the interrogation of the narrative illusions of coherence, completion, and control, advocating instead self-reflexive and paradoxical acceptance of the illusions of freedom, indeterminacy, and multiplicity. The pleasure Fowles evidently obtained from creating an illusion of interpretive freedom, and from drawing attention to the construction of that illusion (as he did both within his fiction and in his interviews), 54 ultimately emphasizes the primacy of authorial vision as the only complete and satisfying perspective, and encourages the search for an equivalent vision. For both characters and readers implicated in his voyeuristic games, such a search is complicated by the impossibility of satiating the compelling desire, since the observation is never complete. Conflicting desires characterize the relationship between the viewer and viewed: in Fowles’ novels, the voyeur enjoys the power that viewing (of women within the text and of the development of the text itself) implies, but simultaneously wishes for intimacy and comprehension, which cannot be achieved as long as there is an imbalance of power between characters and between readers and author. Circumscribed by Fowles’ coercive narrative teasing and manipulated by the illusion of interpretive freedom, both characters and readers are denied the satisfaction of a complete understanding of either his heroines or of the sequence of events in the texts. Instead, characters and readers are granted the

53

Mahmoud Salami, John Fowles’s Fiction and the Poetics of Postmodernism, London: Associated University Presses, 1992, 41. 54 See, for example, Chapter 13 of The French Lieutenant’s Woman, Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1969, 95-99, and James Campbell, “An Interview with John Fowles”, 33.

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limited but nonetheless titillating pleasures of spectatorship, pleasures that result from a voyeuristic gaze. Fowles’ employment of the gaze, however, is neither static nor simple, but varies in accordance with his development as a writer and with his ideological concerns in each piece of fiction. In his earlier texts, including The Collector, The Magus, The French Lieutenant’s Woman, and The Ebony Tower, Fowles seems particularly focused on keeping both characters and readers in a state of perpetual longing, seeking fuller vision when only fragments are available. In The Collector, for example, Fowles offers a fairly straightforward piece of psychological detective fiction, making use of two distinct forms of the gaze, one of which is “conducted under full interactional awareness, where two parties exchange mutual glances”, the other of which is “covert and secret, where one party has no idea that they are being spied upon by another”. 55 Split between Clegg’s framing narrative and Miranda’s journals, The Collector seems on the surface to be split fairly equally between two opposing perspectives. However, within the text itself, both Clegg and Miranda engage in voyeuristic practices ultimately aimed at penetrating the privacy of the other in order to gain either a physical or a psychological advantage. For readers, both Clegg’s and Miranda’s narratives are ultimately self-serving fragments of the truth. Clegg’s narrative reveals him to be an unreliable narrator whose explanations are intended to obscure and to justify his clearly perverted and criminal actions. Miranda’s narrative, while more honest, reflects not a genuine woman’s perspective, but the barely concealed values of Fowles and his fictional surrogate, G.P., and involves readers in a rather traditional form of peeping – that of reading another person’s diary. Forced to view the most intimate revelations and thoughts of both Clegg and Miranda, readers of The Collector are overloaded with private reflections and perversions and ascertain no alternative vision to the troubling pornographic objectification and fragmented disjunction of its characters’ socially conditioned interactions. In his next published work, Fowles encodes visual practices with endless complication and manipulation. The practice of spectatorship 55

Denzin, The Cinematic Society, 48.


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is, of course, fraught with complexity. As Denzin summarizes the variability of the gaze: A gaze may be a gaze of power and domination …. It may be investigative, medical, or psychiatric. It may be erotic or non-erotic, or both …. A gaze may be suspected, and a person takes measures to secure privacy …. And, a person may pretend to gaze, or to look, when they in fact are not giving their attention to another …. A person may also be positioned to be deliberately gazed upon. 56

The Magus makes use of all of these gazes, creating a narrative rife with tension and suspense. Narrated by Nicholas Urfe, The Magus illustrates from an unspecified future time Nicholas’ complicated and mysterious experience on a Greek island, as he perceived it at the time. Thoroughly English and reflective of his generation’s concerns, Nicholas interprets his experiences through a very masculine, very conventional lens. Marginalized, however, by Conchis and his accomplices, Nicholas responds to uncertainty by incessant observation and analysis of the other characters, especially the women with whom he is romantically involved. In order to make sense of his experiences, Nicholas attempts to fuse various fragments of knowledge to form a coherent vision that fits his current outlook on life and society. For readers, these fragments are disjointed, reflective of partial knowledge and partial understanding. Forced to accept the narrative from Nicholas’ point-of-view, readers are encouraged to identify with Nicholas’ analyses and quests for knowledge. The women characters, who Fowles suggests operate through a more humane, feminine ethic, remain mysterious and threatening objects of Nicholas’ gaze, their motivations never explained and their reactions never explored through their own perspectives. The Magus thus fails to explore the standpoint of any of its women characters, relying instead on Nicholas’ limited, voyeuristic, and suspicious point of view and Fowles’ projected fantasy of a feminine philosophy. The French Lieutenant’s Woman, Fowles’ next novel, again makes use of a variety of gazing practices – scientific, erotic, aesthetic – and 56

Ibid., 48.

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again encourages readers to seek fullness of vision while simultaneously frustrating that desire. The French Lieutenant’s Woman incorporates a unique authorial perspective through footnotes and an intrusive modern narrator whose twentieth-century knowledge frames and comments on the Victorian story. At the center of the novel, however, is the mysterious Sarah Woodruff, whose dubious reputation perfectly positions her as an “outsider within”, both marginalized from her society and at the center of its attention. Despite his occasional omniscience, the narrator is as intrigued with Sarah as his Victorian protagonist, Charles, never able (or even willing) to penetrate her consciousness. Instead, both the narrator and the Victorian characters satisfy themselves with constant surveillance over Sarah’s activities, watching and categorizing her according to their own standards. Readers of The French Lieutenant’s Woman negotiate competing visions: that of Charles as a developing existentialist, and that of the modern narrator/author as a controlling influence. More significantly, however, readers must consider competing visions of Sarah, one in which, like the women in The Magus, she remains a mysterious threat, admirable and able to inspire men’s activity, but never coherently motivated or explored; the other in which she advances a situated perspective and articulates piercing analyses of the injustices inherent in her society. Apparently reluctant to appropriate his heroine’s perspective, Fowles constructs Sarah not merely as a seductively mysterious woman, but as a woman who recognizes the limitations of conventional ways of seeing and enacts a more intuitive and authentic way of knowing and being. Through such authorial ambivalence, The French Lieutenant’s Woman initiates a transition in his work from fragmentation to multiplicity, from manipulation to provocation, and from voyeurism to whole sight. His only collection of short stories, Fowles’ next work, The Ebony Tower, consists of an eclectic assortment of tales linked by a kind of authorial surrender to ambiguity. In the title novella, readers occupy David’s perspective, seeing experiences in terms of famous works of art and understanding complicated women in terms of broad portraits. In each of the other tales, one of which is a translation of a Breton lay, the characters carefully watch one another, searching for clues that might explain odd behavior or that might help to categorize others into


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recognizable stereotypes. In each of these tales, however, the characters must eventually surrender to the unknown and the inexplicable, focusing only on practical solutions to unanswerable questions. Likewise, readers of The Ebony Tower must contend with a fairly random collection of tales, seeking a coherent understanding of theme and content in some very different stories. Most striking in this collection, however, is Fowles’ apparent attempt to push the fragmentary to its limits and to emphasize uncertainty, ambiguity, and impossibility in terms of ever achieving a full and coherent understanding of others or of a text. Therefore, The Ebony Tower marks a transition in Fowles’ work from a model of authorial control and manipulation to a model that accepts uncertainty and multiple perspectives. Particularly significant in this shift is his experimentation with women’s perspectives, which he employs in order to suggest unconventional and sometimes inspirational alternatives for a contemporary wasteland seemingly obsessed with abstraction, resignation, and complacency. The Ebony Tower illustrates his growing desires to interrogate both narrative and social conventions that deny women’s assertions of creativity and community, and to seek fictional spaces in which such perspectives might emerge with the potential to renew a bewildered and alienated contemporary community. In each of his later novels – Daniel Martin, Mantissa, and A Maggot – Fowles experiments with more focused visual practices that are less invasive of others and more self-reflective, more interested in displaying a complicated and varied vision of experience. In Daniel Martin, for example, he offers his most explicitly cinematic treatment of experience. As a dissatisfied but successful Hollywood screenwriter, Daniel Martin reflects on his life through a series of scenes, depicting important moments and memories from his past as well as significant developments in his current situation and relationships. While characters do attempt to understand one another through direct observation, that observation is non-intrusive and focused on developing working relationships rather than on exercising power over others. Dan’s reflections, in particular, are oriented toward self-knowledge and a more responsible, healthy self-image. Particularly interesting for readers is the remove at which several of the scenes of Dan’s life are illustrated. Rather than narrating events

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as he remembers them, often Dan describes his memories as though they are part of a screenplay, or as though the people involved are characters in a novel – which, indeed, they are, as Dan records his memories as part of his attempt to write his life-story into a novel. In his attempt to understand his experiences, Dan projects them outward, recording them as an outside observer might see them – that is, through an imagined but nevertheless alternative perspective. This double-writing endeavor (Fowles writing Daniel Martin and Daniel Martin writing his novel) emphasizes the development of vision as an ongoing, complicated process. Focused as it is on what Fowles called “whole sight”, Daniel Martin offers Fowles’ first attempt at deliberately connecting fragments in the interests of a comprehensive revisioning and revising of a lifetime of experience. Recognizing that any comprehensive study of Dan’s personal history must account for both his own individual experiences and his socially and historically determined attitudes, both character and author interrogate the forces that have shaped Dan’s perspective and generated his current anxiety. For both Dan and Fowles, the process of writing the novel that becomes Daniel Martin thus requires an unaccustomed commitment to a conception of knowledge as situated, and to a concomitant acknowledgement that any individual’s perspective is therefore partial, merely a fragment of the more complete vision that is whole sight. In direct contrast to the outward-focused narrative of Daniel Martin, Mantissa turns inward to probe the eroticized and often theoretically complicated inner workings of Miles Green and his muse, Erato. Their intellectual and sexual sparring illustrates constant manipulation of one another, presumably with the goal of creating better, more thoughtful and creative fiction. Through this imagined relationship, Miles explores his insecurities and talents, displaying a kind of imaginative surveillance of the self. Because the story takes place entirely within Miles’ head, its characters enjoy a peculiar status as both real and imagined, as both controlled by Miles as author and as spontaneous actors allowed to surprise him. Readers thus encounter a somewhat wild ride through the consciousness of a particularly selfreflexive author (who is both Miles and, to a certain extent, Fowles), whose interactions with his muse appear to be an effort to confront and understand his problematic views of women and of fiction. So


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Mantissa enacts Fowles’ most direct and experimental confrontation with his competing interests in freedom and authorial control, in masculine ways of knowing and feminism, in fragmentary vision and whole sight. Combining elements of all of his earlier works, A Maggot explores the mysterious disappearance of an eighteenth-century gentleman through the sensibility of a modern narrator fixated on the cinema. The characters involved in this mystery attempt to narrate the events leading to the young man’s disappearance to the investigating lawyer, Henry Ayscough, offering varied perspectives that illustrate the dynamics of their rigidly hierarchical society. Like Fowles’ earlier fiction, A Maggot emphasizes the extent to which members of a society watch one another in order to effectively categorize one another. While Fowles stresses each character’s partial understanding of the situation, each of their accounts clearly contributes to both Ayscough’s interpretation of the mystery and to readers’ expanding vision of the clouded events. The most significant of these multiple visions, however, comes in the stunning deposition of Rebecca Lee, who employs intuitive, alternative ways of knowing and being, offering both the most incredible and the most compelling perspective within the text. Through her spiritual transformation and vibrant, creative narrative, Rebecca performs a radical critique of Ayscough’s drive for answers, suggesting that such an obsession denies the power of situated knowledges and prevents the connection between individuals and communities that facilitates social reform. Thus A Maggot offers Fowles’ most progressive text in terms of its alternative and multiple visions of reality. Through these various uses of the visual, Fowles illustrates Denzin’s summary of the gaze: A gaze is not simply voyeuristic. It is regulated, has a trajectory, and evokes emotions and conduct which are differentially reciprocated, and erotic. A gaze may be active, or passive, direct, or indirect and indifferent …. Finally, every gaze is regulated, structured by underlying systems of power and gender. 57 57

Ibid., 48.

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Neither unproblematically feminist nor entirely traditional in his depictions of women and in his explorations of multiple perspectives, Fowles offers in his fiction a complex narrative experience that intensifies as a number of ideological systems compete and intersect. Furthermore, his work depends upon the tension created by these intersections for its force and seductive intensity. What is particularly provocative for the feminist reader of Fowles is this tension between authorial control and interpretive freedom, between hegemonic discourse and multiple marginalized points of view. His earlier fiction seems to be characterized much more clearly by fragmentation and voyeuristic vision, while his later novels appear to be more concerned with whole sight and alternative visions and views. While authorial control seems to be a primary concern in the early work, questioning the legitimacy of such control becomes more central in the later novels. Over time, Fowles becomes more genuinely committed to exploring multiple perspectives, and less inclined to force readers into particular identifications or into the search for a singular vision. In other words, as he and his work mature, Fowles seems to develop a more complex standpoint, less dominated solely by men’s concerns. A curious, feminist, resistant reading of Fowles’ fiction, then, must interrogate instances of coercion and authorial manipulation, especially as those practices circumscribe women readers and characters, but must also explore those occasions of authorial selfreflexivity and genuine multiplicity that enable women characters and readers to examine their own perspectives and assert their own standpoints. To interpret Fowles’ fiction through this resistant feminist reading practice, to gaze upon his body of work from a woman’s and a feminist’s standpoint, is to recognize that, as Haraway eloquently comments, “Vision is always a question of the power to see – and perhaps of the violence implicit in our visualizing practices”. 58 If the feminist critic notes that Fowles’ visual inscriptions are often violently invasive (or evasive, as the case may be), her interrogating gaze must also acknowledge its own potential for violence. Rather than violently dissecting Fowles’ fiction in an effort to diffuse its seductive 58

Haraway, “Situated Knowledges”, 585.


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circumscription of women, the feminist critic, if committed to a curious collaborative exploration, might uncover the explosive potential of his innovative employment of the visual, and might discover that in looking through the lenses he offers in his latest fiction, women, like Pandora, can become both the site of enigma and the source of its decipherment.

CHAPTER ONE OBJECTIFICATION AND EXPLOITATION: VICTIMIZED PERSPECTIVES IN THE COLLECTOR

Focused on the criminal actions of a voyeur, The Collector provides a perfect opportunity for a feminist interrogation of Fowles’ early coercive and manipulative use of the visual in his fiction. As his most conventional novel, The Collector exploits the familiar trope of a beautiful, idealized woman (art student Miranda Grey) held captive by a powerful but troubled madman (clerk and pools winner Frederick Clegg) through a detailed account of Miranda’s kidnapping, captivity, and eventual death. As a psychological thriller, The Collector uses the suspenseful, disjunctive, and fragmented observations made by both the captor and the captive; as a more conscientious social analysis, it explores the tyranny of class consciousness and exposes the total estrangement of people from different social locations. Both horrified by and sympathetic to his disturbed antihero, Fowles suggests in The Collector that the violence and ignorance embodied in Clegg are endemic to a society fractured by rigid stratifications, and illustrates the impossibility of communication across social, economic, and cultural boundaries. This respectable agenda, however, operates problematically through extensive manipulation of readers and through the troubling treatment (both by Clegg and by Fowles) of Miranda. Although the novel presents two opposing viewpoints by including both Clegg’s journals and Miranda’s diary, which suggests an effort to balance multiple perspectives, Miranda’s imprisonment within Clegg’s domain and the confinement of her narrative between Clegg’s accounts instead emphasize her status as a victim and an object. Even as Fowles ensures that readers prefer Miranda’s aesthetic sensibilities and attempts at self-reflection to Clegg’s rationalizations, his obvious use of her as a mouthpiece for both his own philosophical musings and the convictions of his fictional surrogate, G.P., undermines the

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legitimacy of her commentary and the force of her insights as a woman. Although Miranda argues that she grows as an individual and begins to achieve an authentic standpoint during her imprisonment, the problematic imposition of these men’s views instead restricts Miranda within a pervasive pornographic ideology as her perspective becomes lifeless and she becomes a site for voyeuristic objectification. Imprisoned by Clegg and invalidated by Fowles, Miranda becomes most compelling as a woman not through her standpoint, but through her status as a victim. While The Collector artfully examines the limitations of rigid points of view and attempts to incorporate the insights of a woman character, it exploits rather than explores a woman’s standpoint, and offers no alternative vision to the troubling pornographic objectification and fragmented disjunction of its characters’ socially conditioned interactions. The Collector opens with surreptitious observation, as Clegg records his initial sightings of Miranda – leaving her home, in a queue at the library, reading on the train – for both his and the reader’s vicarious enjoyment. As Katherine Tarbox has noted, Clegg has “camera eyes; he sees everything from a distance, voyeuristically”, and his opening observations, as they are presented to the reader, resemble “an Alfred Hitchcock film where a long lens sweeps high over a city and gradually lowers to pick the victim’s face out of a crowd”. 1 These initial observations instantly establish the cinematic quality of the novel and invite readers to participate in transgressive visual practices. Simultaneously penetrating both Miranda’s assumed anonymity in a crowd (and, as Tarbox suggests, identifying her as a victim) and presenting Clegg’s introspections in his private journal, the first few pages of The Collector implicate readers in two traditional forms of voyeurism: spying on a pretty girl, and reading someone else’s diary. 2 In fact, the entire novel is based upon these two voyeuristic activities. Readers apprehend the world of the novel only through the mediating and private visions of Clegg, who watches 1

Katherine Tarbox, The Art of John Fowles, Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1988, 48-49. 2 Though most commentators of the novel note only the invasion of privacy perpetrated in reading Miranda’s diary, Robert Huffaker (John Fowles, Boston, MA: Twayne Publishers, 1980) notes that like Miranda’s diary, Clegg’s journals “seem a personal process not intended for a third party” (89).

Victimized Perspectives in The Collector

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Miranda, and later Miranda, who occasionally watches Clegg but more often reflects on herself. Through the first person narrative used in both Clegg’s journals and Miranda’s diary, readers perceive the events of the novel as Clegg and Miranda want to present them – a circumstance that encourages reader identification and sympathy. 3 Such sympathy facilitates the social agenda that Fowles advances in The Collector, which relies largely on readers recognizing the conditions that create Clegg and allow him to act on his violent and criminal fantasies without remorse. By imprisoning them within Clegg’s perspectives, Fowles coerces readers into viewing Clegg’s abhorrent actions through his own perceptions. However, he simultaneously encourages readers to reject Clegg’s justification of his violent, criminal actions and recognize the skewed nature of his presentation. This tension is increased, rather than eased, by the inclusion of Miranda’s point of view. A refreshing change from Clegg’s attempts to rationalize and justify his behavior, Miranda’s diary provides a radically different view of the novel’s events, as well as some compelling aesthetic, political, and philosophical reflections. Unlike Clegg, Miranda is neither criminal nor repulsive, and her infinitely more sane contemplations, aimed at self-exploration rather than selfjustification, encourage readers to give more credence to Miranda’s version of events. Though more impressionistic than Clegg’s account, Miranda’s diary contributes significantly to readers’ comprehension of the novel’s events by offering a thoughtful analysis of the situation and the motives of both captor and captive. 4 However, the inclusion of Miranda’s account ultimately emphasizes the fragmentary nature of the novel and the total disjunction of the characters’ competing perspectives. As Perry Nodelman explains, both Clegg’s and Miranda’s accounts are incredibly claustrophobic and self-involved. 5 Though the two accounts do occasionally overlap, providing multiple interpretations of the same incidents, they are motivated by such radically divergent objectives that it is difficult to reconcile their perceptions into a 3

Charles Garard, Point of View in Fiction and Film: Focus on John Fowles, New York: Peter Lang, 1991, 28. 4 Olshen, John Fowles, 21. 5 Perry Nodelman, “John Fowles’s Variations in The Collector”, Contemporary Literature, XXVIII/3 (Fall 1987), 335.

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cohesive whole. Instead, The Collector demonstrates an almost complete disconnection between a man’s progress reports and a woman’s journey into self-awareness. Indeed, a majority of Miranda’s diary is neither an analysis of her current imprisonment nor an attempt to understand Clegg, but rather a reinterpretation of her previous experiences as an art student, and in particular her experiences with her suitor/mentor, G.P. Because so much of Miranda’s diary concerns events and characters unknown to Clegg, its contents are unverifiable except for the psychological importance their recording has for Miranda. In this sense, readers of The Collector have no reason to approach Miranda’s diary with any less suspicion than they approach Clegg’s journals – both records are patently designed to persuade an imagined outside reader (and of course, the authors themselves) of their authors’ logic, virtue, and vulnerability. Essentially, Clegg’s journals and Miranda’s diary are both self-serving, self-justifying documents designed specifically to demonstrate how little the author is understood by others, and the sequence of these documents demonstrates unequivocally that neither character has any meaningful comprehension of the other’s motives, values, or point of view. Indeed, one of the most noticeable characteristics of the novel is the extent to which its main characters fail to understand each other – a failure that results as much from the characters’ similarities as it does from their differences. The characters’ conformity to the values, prejudices, and ontologies of their respective social locations determines both their initial interpretations of each other and their inability to evaluate thoughtfully the accuracy of those interpretations. Lacking in self-awareness and imprisoned by the values and assumptions they have merely absorbed from family, friends, colleagues, and experiences, 6 Clegg and Miranda both elicit readers’ sympathy, if not for their response to their socioeconomic circumstances, then at least for the frustrations and anxieties inherent to those situations. While Clegg’s journals suggest little interest in comprehending Miranda and even less interest in confronting his own neuroses, however, Miranda’s diary appears to reflect a genuine desire both to increase her self-awareness and to examine her preconceived notions 6

Ibid., 339.


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about Clegg. This desire to interrogate her previously unquestioned attitudes contributes to the authenticity and believability of Miranda’s version of events. Despite his voyeuristic practices, Clegg is a less precise observer than Miranda. As Thomas C. Foster notes: “The best he can do, often, is to describe the disgust he thinks he perceives in others”, while “Miranda can describe his movements, his gestures, his tone of voice, and his conversational gambits better than he can”. 7 Nevertheless, Miranda never achieves a coherent or thorough understanding of her captor or of her imprisonment, largely because of her almost exclusive focus on herself. Even in conjunction with Clegg’s account, Miranda’s diary offers only unreliable, self-indulgent impressions – as her admission to cheating when recording a conversation with Clegg emphasizes 8 – and fragmentary insights into Clegg’s motivations and their mutual alienation. As Miranda summarizes, “It’s all bits and pieces” (126). The disconnection, fragmentation, and utter impossibility of communication between Miranda and Clegg, as Foster argues, result from the many oppositions in the circumstances they inhabit. 9 These dichotomies create an insurmountable divide between Miranda and Clegg, neither of whom is able or willing to appreciate the alternate ontology of their respective Other. Miranda asserts, “He is absolutely inferior to me in all ways. His one superiority is his ability to keep me here. That’s the only power he has” (238). This unique situation of dominance defines the status of Miranda and Clegg as mutual outsiders within. Outside of Clegg’s domain, Miranda has access to dominant ideology, while Clegg does not; inside his domain, Clegg’s ideology is the only ideology, and Miranda finds herself at a disadvantage, struggling to understand the values and rules of this new social milieu. Confined together in the prison Clegg has created for his “guest” Miranda, both characters are exposed to the ontological realities of the other, yet they remain totally isolated from and totally inaccessible to each other as they view one another across a chasm of social categories. The most pervasive distinction between Miranda and Clegg is that of class, which determines, at least to some degree, nearly every interaction between the two characters, especially as Clegg struggles 7

Foster, Understanding John Fowles, 30. John Fowles, The Collector, Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1963, 141. 9 Foster, Understanding John Fowles, 33. 8

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to explain his perceptions and Miranda attempts to improve him. Throughout the novel, both characters rely on socially conditioned class consciousness, viewing each other as manifestations of their prejudices and ideals and consequently failing to develop any meaningful interaction. Both characters are acutely aware of Miranda’s higher socio-economic status and attendant privileges, and both characters assume Miranda’s general superiority. Yet despite her advanced education, her sympathetic disposition, and her certainty that Clegg can shake off the disadvantages of his past, Miranda firmly and repeatedly categorizes Clegg as inferior, demeaning his interest in butterfly collecting and dismissing the significance of his background. Instead, Miranda suggests, Clegg should become an art collector and benefactor for struggling artists, insisting, “you could become whatever you liked …. You’ve got to be a new human being’.” Clegg is incredulous at this suggestion, commenting, “She sort of pushed out her face at me, as if it was something easy I could do, but wouldn’t”. Almost immediately after this moment, after Clegg rather mildly expresses his inability to comprehend this fantasy, Miranda snaps at him in a typical reversion to her categorical understanding of their relationship: “Then she said”, Clegg reports, “I always seem to end up by talking down to you. I hate it. It’s you. You always squirm one step lower than I can go” (79-80). Miranda’s insistence on referring to Clegg as Caliban (rather than Ferdinand, the alias he gives her) further emphasizes not only her more sophisticated education and appreciation of irony, but also her subconscious belief, despite her efforts to improve him, that he is fundamentally substandard. Just as Clegg idolizes Miranda because of her social location, Miranda denigrates Clegg for his, and neither character is ultimately able to consider the other as an individual distinct from rigid social categories. This rigid class divide is so stark that Clegg considers it the source of all that goes wrong with Miranda, even after she has died from his neglect: as he considers his next victim, an “ordinary common shop-girl” named Marian, he explains, “that was my mistake before, aiming too high, I ought to have seen that I could never get what I wanted from someone like Miranda, with all her la-di-da ideas and clever tricks” (304). Even after her death, Clegg fails to see Miranda as an individual and his interactions with her as anything except a conflict of class consciousness.


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This problem of consciousness is largely a problem of communication – Clegg and Miranda are quite unable to speak the same language. Both characters have distinctive linguistic patterns reflective of their class and education. Acutely aware of his lack of sophistication, Clegg employs a fragmentary and eclectic use of language, 10 relying heavily on euphemism and an almost paranoid attempt at grammatical propriety, which disrupts narrative flow and to Miranda sounds alternatively silly and disturbing. This unusual fixation with linguistic propriety reflects Clegg’s larger obsessions with neatness, politeness, and prim social rituals that are totally incongruous with his criminal actions. Miranda has terrible difficulty reconciling this incongruity: “Why do you keep on using these stupid words – nasty, nice, proper, right? Why are you so worried about what’s proper? You’re like a little old maid who thinks marriage is dirty and everything except weak cups of tea in a stuffy old room is dirty. Why do you take all the life out of life? Why do you kill all the beauty? .... And what have you done? You’ve had a little dream, the sort of dream I suppose little boys have and masturbate about, and you fall all over yourself being nice to me so that you won’t have to admit to yourself that the whole business of my being here is nasty, nasty nasty – ” (78-79)

One of her more perceptive moments, this incident demonstrates Miranda’s occasional ability to comprehend Clegg’s psychology. However, the exchange that immediately follows this outburst indicates that despite Miranda’s insight, these two characters suffer from an almost complete inability to communicate: “This is no good,” she said. “I might be talking Greek.” I understand, I said. I’m not educated. She almost shouted. “You’re so stupid. Perverse.” (79)

Here, as throughout the novel, Clegg and Miranda speak at crosspurposes. For Clegg, everything radiates from his socio-economic status: he is not educated, he has not had Miranda’s advantages or privileges. These realities absolutely define his way of being, and his absurd fixation with propriety, both behavioral and linguistic, follows 10

Salami, John Fowles’s Fiction and the Poetics of Postmodernism, 54.

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directly from his belief that such propriety establishes his respectability, regardless of his actions. Miranda, on the other hand, having had few opportunities to reflect on the lived reality of lower classes, lives conceptually and aesthetically, and repeatedly dismisses the factors that determine Clegg’s thoughts and consequent behavior. In short, neither character uses a means of expression at all suitable for communication with the other, and both assume that their failure to communicate results from the other’s problematic use and/or comprehension of language. Although both Clegg and Miranda reflect on this problem, neither character accepts any responsibility for their frustrating interactions. Miranda, for example, records a conversation in which Clegg rehearses his oft-stated perception that Miranda does not understand him (“She could never see that” [80], “What she never understood” [101], “It was almost like she was stupid, plain stupid” [109]). To Clegg’s insistent “You don’t understand me at all”, she counters, “Oh, yes I do” (141), assuming that her perception is superior to his, despite the fact that she never adequately understands Clegg or his motivations. This failure to communicate linguistically creates other failures in the novel – failure to escape, failure to please, failure to sustain a relationship. More than any of Fowles’ other works of fiction, The Collector emphasizes the characters’ multiple failures without implying significant, if mysterious, successes. As Evelyn Fox Keller argues: “Sharing a language means more than knowing the ‘right’ names by which to call things; it means knowing the ‘right’ syntax in which to pose claims and questions, and even more importantly it means sharing a more or less agreed-upon understanding of what constitute legitimate questions and meaningful answers.” 11 Lacking not only shared linguistic paradigms but, more importantly, shared conceptions of meaningful communication in general, Clegg and Miranda completely fail to achieve the progressive consultation that Fox Keller and other standpoint theorists associate with the exchange of outsider within perspectives. Unlike the hero/heroine pairs of Fowles’ later novels, all of whom struggle to understand and communicate with the opposite sex, Clegg and Miranda respond to their experiences together not with insight or expanded consciousness 11

Keller, Reflections on Gender and Science, 130.


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but with defensiveness and frustration. For Clegg, these feelings inspire an exhibition of the “selfish, rapacious, suspicious, obsessed with control, sexually driven” characteristics that Foster identifies as the worst aspects of rampant masculinity. 12 Miranda likewise demonstrates a number of unattractive qualities typically associated with femininity: vanity, naiveté, hypocrisy, immaturity, inconsistency. These stereotypical and confrontational responses ultimately determine the violent, criminal, and static nature of their relationship. The incredible extent to which these two people, confined in a relatively small space and isolated from all outside influence, totally fail to reach any mutual comprehension of one another frustrates not only Clegg and Miranda but also readers of the novel, who because of the self-serving and fiercely subjective nature of the novel’s diary format cannot assume that their interpretations of the characters are not subject to constant authorial manipulation. Clegg clearly wishes to justify his behavior, and because of the nature of that behavior, readers might assume reasonably that his actions toward Miranda are worse than he reports. Likewise, Miranda’s admission to cheating in her recording of conversations with Clegg and her constant denigration of his class-conscious primness emphasize both her idealism and her vanity, suggesting that her reflections are at best naïve. Above all, The Collector is an exceptionally claustrophobic novel, creating a disturbing sense of confinement for readers who cannot escape the completely alienated and ultimately imperceptive views of these two distressed characters. For all parties involved, seeing clearly is simply impossible. For both the characters and readers of the novel, this haziness of vision results from a systematic process of objectification. Clegg and Miranda never see one another as real, complex individuals, but objectify one another as representatives of rigid economic and gender categories. Clegg’s early descriptions of Miranda immediately establish her objectification, not only as a social superior but as a thing of beauty, “reducing her free and vital nature in his mind’s eye to the status of an object, a ‘specimen’ in a collection”. 13 Recording his sightings of her in the observations diary in which he records butterfly sightings, Clegg describes Miranda as “a rarity”, a “Pale Clouded Yellow, for instance”, “not like the other ones, even the 12 13

Foster, Understanding John Fowles, 32. Olshen, John Fowles, 17.

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pretty ones. More for the real connoisseur” (3). These sightings provide Clegg with immense pleasure, and convince him not only of Miranda’s physical beauty but of her general perfection. 14 Once he has kidnapped her, he basks in this projected image despite her objections: I could sit there all night watching her, just the shape of her head and the way the hair fell from it with a special curve, so graceful it was, like the shape of a swallowtail. It was like a veil or a cloud, it would lie like silk strands all untidy and loose but lovely over her shoulders …. She had a way of throwing it back when it had fallen too much forward, it was just a simple natural movement. Sometimes I wanted to say to her, please do it again, please let your hair fall forward and toss it back. (65)

Clegg’s fetishization of Miranda’s hair is particularly noticeable in this passage; her hair, with its fine, pale, golden, flowing strands reminiscent of clouds and veils, represents the angelic image he has created of her. Yet clearly, he is not looking at her, noticing, for example, her fear, anguish, or desperation, or even her ordinariness – he even idealizes the beauty of her yawning and stretching (66). This uncompromising idealism and fetishism prevent Clegg from coming to understand Miranda as a complete and complex individual whom John Campbell rightly describes as a “frequently inconsistent, sometimes irritable, impossibly idealistic, rather snobbish fair-weather socialist”. 15 Committed to his unrealistic fantasy of Miranda, Clegg cannot see her for who she is. As she realizes, Miranda is an exquisite item in Clegg’s collection: “The sheer joy of having me under his power, of being able to spend all and every day staring at me. He doesn’t care what I say or how I feel – my feelings are meaningless to him – it’s the fact that he’s got me” (171). Clegg’s desire to possess Miranda as he would a valuable specimen clearly establishes his madness, characterized by a perverse attachment to and idealization of the visual image. Acutely aware of how Miranda looks, both up close and at a distance, and especially 14 John Campbell, “Moral Sense and The Collector: The Novels of John Fowles”, Critical Quarterly, XXV/1 (Spring 1983), 49. 15 Ibid., 49.


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cognizant of viewing opportunities, Clegg is also conscious of himself as a visual object. In fact, this awareness becomes paranoia, preventing him from getting Miranda necessary medical attention. Afraid that his madness is inscribed on his body, Clegg flees a doctor’s waiting room: I must have looked daft in the room, with all the people looking at me .... Well, they all seemed to be looking at me, I hadn’t the nerve to go straight through to the doctor so I stood by the wall. If only I could have gone straight in I’d have done it, everything would have been all right, it was having to be with all those other people in that room. I hadn’t been in a room with other people for a long time, only in and out of shops, it felt strange, as I say, they all seemed to look at me, one old woman especially wouldn’t take her eyes off me, I thought I must look peculiar in some way. (289)

Later, reflecting on this experience both literally and figuratively, Clegg examines himself in a mirror: I thought I was going mad, I kept on looking in the mirror and trying to see it in my face. I had this horrible idea, I was mad, everyone else could see it, only I couldn’t. I kept remembering how people in Lewes seemed to look at me sometimes, like the people in that doctor’s waiting-room. They all knew I was mad. (297)

Therefore it is not only Clegg’s inability to see Miranda as a complete individual, but also his inability to see himself as such, that creates the fragmentary, disconnected interactions between them. 16 Constrained by his background and socio-economic situation, seeing himself only as an object for ridicule and abuse, Clegg becomes obsessed with an object of beauty. He can present both Miranda and himself only as such objects, and his narrative completely lacks descriptions that might allow readers to see either character more completely. Miranda, however, appears to produce some compelling personal insights, which seduce readers into accepting her claim to have significantly grown as an individual during her imprisonment. Yet just as Miranda cheats in recording her conversations with Clegg, Fowles cheats in his presentation of Miranda, who turns out to be little more

16


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than a mouthpiece for his philosophical and political ideals. 17 Miranda spouts her recitation of Fowles’ values most clearly as she comes to identify with and fully subscribe to the aesthetic and political leanings of her suitor/mentor, G.P. Throughout her narrative, Miranda criticizes Clegg by reciting G.P.’s values, analyses, and complaints. Although Miranda remembers disagreements with G.P., as her imprisonment lengthens she increasingly accepts his point of view, eventually coming to trust his insight and denigrate her own: I keep on thinking of him: of things he said and I said, and how we neither of us really understood what the other meant. No, he understood, I think. He counts possibilities so much faster than I can. (165)

Miranda’s willingness to assume that G.P. understood her despite her inability to understand him strikingly contrasts her attitude toward Clegg, about whom she makes an opposite assumption: she believes she understands him, but that he could never understand her. These assumptions proceed from Miranda’s hierarchical understanding of the world, of a division between the Few and the Many. The distinction between these two categories occupies a central place in Fowles’ philosophy, as outlined in detail in The Aristos, the philosophical treatise Fowles originally published just a year after the publication of The Collector. In Miranda’s understanding, G.P. clearly falls into the former category despite his predatory sexual exploitation of women and his total self-absorption, and Clegg, who embodies similar vices but lacks G.P.’s artistic aesthetic, falls into the latter category. Because she identifies with and strives to be one of the Few, Miranda assumes that role in her interactions with Clegg. This philosophy further cements her sense of superiority and readers’ preference for Miranda’s point of view. In this way Fowles ensures that readers will sympathize not only with Miranda’s imprisonment, but also with her social, political, philosophical, and aesthetic opinions, all of which conform rather strikingly to Fowles’ own ideals. 18 The commandments stated in The Aristos range from elitist artistic commitments to Socialist politics, and Miranda’s opinions 17 18

Olshen, John Fowles, 24-25. Salami, John Fowles’s Fiction and the Poetics of Postmodernism, 50.


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most obviously reflect dictates both to accept one’s Englishness and to “cauterize” one’s background. 19 Such opinions privilege Miranda’s perspective, infusing it with a layered consciousness that compares favorably with Clegg’s highly subjective account. 20 However, Miranda’s layered perspective is not always obvious, and often her recitations of G.P.’s (and Fowles’) views are initially offered to readers as though they are Miranda’s own thoughts. In these instances, she acknowledges the source of these ideas offhandedly, in parentheses, with phrases like, “G.P.’s words”, and “these are all G.P.’s words and ideas” (172). These offhand citations are so casual that readers predisposed to trust Miranda’s account and to watch her overcome her circumstances through self-improvement could easily interpret her acceptance of G.P.’s ideas as merely part of a process of self-definition. Particularly for those readers who are unfamiliar with The Aristos, Miranda’s emerging point of view may seem bold, idealistic, and authentic. However, Miranda’s subjectivity never escapes or evolves beyond G.P.’s influence; the perspective she embodies is essentially not her own, but his. The lack of an authentic woman’s standpoint in Miranda’s diary is perhaps most obvious when she finally decides that G.P.’s unapologetic promiscuity (something she refers to earlier as “His Fault” (223)) is in fact a virtue: His promiscuity is creative. Vital. Even though it hurts. He creates love and life and excitement around him; he lives, the people he loves remember him. (265)

Feminist readers in particular must balk at this blatant self-sacrificing adulation for rampant male virility, representative of Miranda’s more general internalization of patriarchal norms. Indeed, careful readers, feminist or not, might note that this is a complete reversal of attitude on Miranda’s part. Earlier, she records a conversation with G.P. in which he attempts both to justify his promiscuity and to chastise Miranda for her refusal to go to bed with him. During the course of this conversation, Miranda recalls, she recognized G.P.’s apparent disregard for the possibility that she might identify with other women, noting that he spoke “as if I was another man” (186). 19 20

John Fowles, The Aristos, Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1964, 152-53. Garard, Point of View in Fiction and Film: Focus on John Fowles, 33.

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In this episode, Miranda realizes that G.P. is attempting to circumscribe her actions: “I was thinking”, she reports, “I shouldn’t let him talk like this, he’s drawing a net round me. I didn’t think it, I felt it” (187). This comment reveals a remarkable insight proceeding directly from a woman’s standpoint: applying G.P.’s abstract considerations, which she identifies as typical of male attitudes toward sex, to her own situation in considering a sexual relationship with G.P., Miranda recognizes the double bind in which this masculine logic places her. If she does sleep with him, she relinquishes any claim to his fidelity; if she doesn’t sleep with him, she places herself into the category of what G.P. calls “people like your bloody aunt” who will never understand his genius, his passion, his uncompromising frankness. In short, here Miranda recognizes that G.P. forces an uncompromising choice: she can be an open-minded, aesthetically correct whore or a narrow-minded, aesthetically incorrect prude. Miranda refuses to give in to this logic, trusting her own instincts and analyses. These ways of knowing are confirmed when Miranda discovers G.P. in bed with her friend Toinette, a fellow student whose promiscuity reflects exactly the internalization of masculine logic G.P. appreciates. Feeling betrayed, Miranda comments that after this event, her relationship with G.P. “was never the same” (191). Yet Miranda seems to forget her outrage as her imprisonment lengthens. Secluded from all except Clegg and engaged in a process of self-exploration, Miranda concludes not that she was right to reject G.P.’s sexual advances, but that G.P.’s philosophy is beautiful. Certainly, she comes to this decision chiefly by comparing G.P. to Clegg, and considering her experiences, G.P. can hardly lose in this comparison. Although G.P. attempts to indoctrinate Miranda, he also respects her resistance to his philosophy as a display of individual authenticity. Clegg, on the other hand, sees Miranda only as an ideal object of adoration and cannot acknowledge that she may have complex motivations and attitudes about men or sex. Nor can he acknowledge that his attraction to her may reflect a problematic attitude toward women in general. Foster argues that Clegg’s sexual problems are rooted in misogyny, citing his marked dislike for his female family members, most notably


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his mother, whom he has been told was a whore. 21 If these women represent the worst of women, Miranda represents the best, 22 at least until Clegg actually captures her. Once he interacts with Miranda, he begins to see faults he considers typical of women, considering her a “young student, nun, whore, harpy, or princess, by turns”. 23 Initially, he places her on a pedestal, and enforces a strict personal regimen under which he must treat her with absolute gentility. He praises himself for this behavior, repeatedly noting his virtuous self-restraint: I know what some would think, they would think my behaviour peculiar. I know most men would only have thought of taking an unfair advantage and there were plenty of opportunities. I could have … [d]one what I liked, but I am not that sort, definitely not that sort at all. (100)

While Miranda notes this restraint with some relief, Clegg’s apparent lack of sexual desire for her both confuses and frightens her: if he doesn’t want her for sex, she wonders, what does he want her for? Confused by Clegg’s treatment and unable to identify his desires, Miranda attempts to seduce him. Hoping that sex will foster better communication and ultimately her freedom, Miranda steels herself for a sexual encounter with Clegg. This is an extreme personal compromise for Miranda, and as an escape strategy it backfires completely. Never understanding the force of Clegg’s extremely polarized sexual idealism, Miranda does not anticipate the shame, and then anger, with which Clegg greets her seduction. It is after this scene that Clegg comments on Miranda’s plain stupidity; relenting slightly, he continues: Of course she wasn’t really [stupid], it was just that she didn’t see how to love me in the right way. There were a lot of ways she could have pleased me. She was like all women, she had a one-track mind. I never respected her again. (109)

Rather than drawing them closer, this failed seduction further alienates Miranda and Clegg. More importantly, once Miranda has displayed open and unashamed sexuality, she loses Clegg’s obsessively proper 21

Foster, Understanding John Fowles, 24. Conradi, John Fowles, 37. 23 Foster, Understanding John Fowles, 24. 22

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respect, plummeting from “being a princesse lointaine to being one of what Clegg terms ‘the other sort’, from Virgin Mary to Eve, from hygienic female icon to incarnate seductress and whore”. 24 This constraining masculine logic, which situates all women as either virgins or whores, parallels G.P.’s similar philosophy. In this case, however, Miranda has betrayed her principles and her instincts. The next morning, she reacts to Clegg’s change in behavior toward her with some anger of her own: It makes me furious. Nobody could ever understand how much I put into yesterday. The effort of giving, of risking, of understanding. Of pushing back every natural instinct. It’s him. And it’s this weird male thing. Now I’m no longer nice. They sulk if you don’t give, and hate you when you do. Intelligent men must despise themselves for being like that. (262)

Indeed, G.P.’s acknowledgement of this failing is largely responsible for Miranda’s generous attitude toward him: he is, if nothing else, honest. Even G.P.’s affair with Toinette becomes tolerable after the failed seduction attempt, when Miranda decides, “love is beautiful, any love. Even just sex. The only thing that is ugly is this frozen lifeless utter lack-love between Caliban and me” (265). Yet Miranda is coerced into accepting G.P.’s uncompromising promiscuity, condoning such behavior not because it truly embodies her own attitudes and ideals, but because it is more tolerable than Clegg’s abusive and destructive sexual idealism. Miranda’s reconsideration of G.P.’s sexual ideals also reflects some of her troubling conceptions of romantic relationships, which are particularly striking as she fantasizes about G.P.: I’ve been daydreaming (not for the first time) about living with G.P. He deceives me, he leaves me, he is brutal and cynical with me, I am in despair. In these daydreams there isn’t much sex, it’s just our living together. In rather romantic surroundings …. We are together, very close in spirit. All silly magazine stuff, really, in the details. But there is the closeness of spirit. That is something real. And the situations I imagine (where he forsakes me) are real. I mean, it kills me to think of them. (253) 24

Conradi, John Fowles, 39.


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Miranda’s conception of life with G.P. mirrors Clegg’s fantasy of life with Miranda, which includes mutual love, both for each other and for Clegg’s butterfly collection, a modern home, and social gatherings in which Clegg and Miranda are popular hosts. Both characters daydream about living with their partner, physically and emotionally but not sexually close, romantically situated within “silly magazine” settings. The similarity of Miranda’s fantasy to Clegg’s suggests a disturbing parallel between their general understandings of romantic relationships. The major difference between Clegg’s fantasy and Miranda’s is their conception of the effects of their romantic arrangements; while Clegg imagines “other men all green round the gills” (4), Miranda imagines herself abused and betrayed. This image of herself as the forsaken woman, brutalized, deceived, and abandoned by G.P., is particularly disturbing because it is not the result of practical analysis of G.P.’s potential as a mate, but the result of fantasies in which “real closeness of spirit” is intimately connected with psychological abuse. Feminist readers in particular must note this problematic conception of women’s role in romantic relationships, which historically has led to abuse in the forms of rape, incest, and domestic violence. Indeed, feminists have argued for some time that it is precisely because women have been socialized to believe in the patriarchal ideology that suggests that women deserve or are ennobled by abuse that they accept such abuse from their partners. Even beyond romantic relationships, Miranda’s ideal of women’s endurance seems to reflect a masculine ideology. After again fantasizing about being “hurt, lost, battered and buffeted” by G.P. (266), Miranda exalts: The power of women! I’ve never felt so full of mysterious power. Men are a joke. We’re so weak physically, so helpless with things. Still, even today. But we’re stronger than they are. We can stand their cruelty. They can’t stand ours. (267)

Certainly the endurance to withstand men’s cruelty is a less than ideal virtue for women, and it is hard to imagine women readers, and especially feminist readers, being convinced that Miranda speaks from an authentic, politically and intellectually informed woman’s standpoint here. Instead, this perspective seems to reflect a masculine ideology that relies on women’s simultaneous weakness and

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endurance, their reliance on men and their ability to tolerate men’s abusive behavior. After basking in women’s ability to endure abuse, Miranda decides, “I will give myself to G.P. He can have me. And whatever he does to me I shall still have my woman-me he can never touch” (267). This statement parallels Miranda’s earlier admission that her attempted seduction of Clegg was exciting in “a nasty perverted way” because it represented “A woman-in-me reaching to a man-in-him” (259). Perhaps more than any of Miranda’s disquieting conceptions of sexuality and gender, this essentialism communicates most clearly Fowles’ own ideology. Miranda’s assertion that women possess something essentially mysterious, inexplicable, and untouchable summarizes precisely Fowles’ fascination with them. In fact, it is this mysteriousness that Fowles values above all other aspects of womanhood; it determines the eroticism through which all of his men characters perceive his women characters, as well as the details of their sexual encounters. In his fiction, these encounters are described physically and psychologically, nearly always from a man’s perspective, retaining the veil of secrecy around women’s essential mystery. In contrast, Fowles admits to having written a pornographic novel, but feeling that he had made “an error of bad taste”, not because of the subject matter of the text but rather because, “It broke that secret, bared the hidden part”, Fowles burnt this novel out of “a feeling of blasphemy”. 25 It is through Miranda’s fantasies and eventual acceptance of G.P.’s (and Fowles’) ideologies that Fowles exploits what appears on the surface to be a woman’s perspective. Miranda offers not an authentic woman’s standpoint, but a point of view reflective of internalized masculine ideologies. Within her diary, this male discourse functions abstractly, ideologically; within the novel as a whole, Fowles imposes masculine ideologies literally, as Miranda’s diary is confined within Clegg’s narrative, which “begins before Miranda’s and resumes after it, surrounding and containing her narrative as a counterpart to her captivity”. 26 Unable to communicate with Clegg, even to the extent that she cannot convince him to get her medical attention, Miranda 25

James R. Baker, “John Fowles: The Art of Fiction CIX”, in Conversations with John Fowles, ed. Vipond, 191. 26 James Acheson, John Fowles, New York: St Martin’s Press, 1998, 10.


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dies a prisoner. Likewise, her diary ultimately ends up in Clegg’s hands, and Fowles presents it to the reader as only a part of Clegg’s larger story. Through this editorial decision, Miranda is denied even the opportunity to present her perspective without defensive, responsive commentary from Clegg, who complains, “I found her diary which shows she never loved me, she only thought of herself and the other man all the time” (303). Even Miranda’s most private, intensive, and final thoughts are subject to Clegg’s censoring, judgmental comments, and in this final complaint Clegg silences Miranda forever. By manipulating her perspective in these ways, Fowles invalidates Miranda’s insights as a woman. In this interpretation, Miranda is far less compelling a character than critics have generally assumed. Although her narrative challenges Clegg’s account and enacts a dramatic process of consciousness-raising, Miranda asserts a philosophy appropriated from G.P.’s and Fowles’ experiences instead of the kind of situated politics and knowledge that “marginalized groups develop … explicitly from their own socially devalued lives instead of from ‘nowhere’ or from somebody else’s life”. 27 In fact, denied an authentic woman’s standpoint, Miranda becomes compelling for readers chiefly through her suffering. Indeed, The Collector is constructed explicitly for readers to witness her victimization. Beyond encouraging readers to enjoy penetrating the private space of Miranda’s diary, Fowles showcases Miranda’s humiliation and violation on a number of occasions. Fowles describes, for example, Miranda’s failed seduction of Clegg in both characters’ accounts, requiring readers to observe Miranda’s humiliation in detail not once, but twice. More disquieting, however, is Fowles’ pornographic presentation of Miranda. This representation relies on Clegg’s descriptions of and violations of Miranda, as he reduces her to a collection of dehumanized fragments. From his initial observations of Miranda, to his descriptions of her activities in captivity, and finally to the pornographic photographs he takes of her, Clegg fetishizes Miranda’s body parts and exercises control over her by refusing to see her as a whole individual. Part of this fragmentation results from Clegg’s stereotypical gender ideology, in which women (good women, that is, 27

Harding, Whose Science? Whose Knowledge?, 273.

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not “the other sort”) are weak and pure, requiring protection and strength from men. This ideology informs Clegg’s initial fantasy of kidnapping Miranda: It began where she was being attacked by a man and I ran up and rescued her. Then somehow I was the man that attacked her, only I didn’t hurt her; I captured her and drove her off in the van to a remote house and there I kept her captive in a nice way. Gradually she came to know me and like me and the dream grew into the one about our living in a nice modern house, married, with kids and everything. (14) 28

Clegg’s dominance is key to this fantasy, as he either functions as her protector or her abuser. In both cases, he functions as a dominant man exercising power over a submissive woman. This ideology extends to sexuality. Before his kidnap of Miranda, Clegg achieves erotic stimulation only in situations where he is completely dominant, as in masturbating while looking at “books of stark women and all that” (10). When confronted with a real woman, however, he is “no good”, as when he attempts to prove his virility and normality with a prostitute (9). His impotence with the prostitute, and later, with Miranda, is directly connected to both his extremely polarized sexual idealism and his sense of control – the completeness of which determines his ability to fulfill his ideal of masculinity. Acceptable sexuality for Clegg requires masculine dominance and feminine submission; if those roles are reversed, he is both unwilling and unable to engage in sexual acts. Although Clegg’s madness and criminal behavior implicitly suggest that his psychology is disturbed and his ideology is problematic, Fowles reinforces Clegg’s conception of sexual relations through Miranda’s own fantasies. Miranda’s association of romance and abuse is compounded by her full expectation of abusive treatment from Clegg. Confused about his motives for kidnapping her, Miranda repeatedly questions Clegg about his sexual interest in her. Despite Clegg’s protestations, Miranda assumes that having sex with Clegg 28 Such admissions reveal Fowles’ sympathy with his antihero; this fantasy in particular mirrors almost exactly Fowles’ early sexual fantasies (Warburton, John Fowles, 219).


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will facilitate her escape, and attempts to give herself to him, thereby fulfilling not only what she believes is Clegg’s sexual fantasy but fulfilling her own expectations of sexual relationships as well. However, Clegg reads this sexual invitation not as submissive, but as threateningly aggressive. Miranda’s attempted seduction of Clegg is exactly the wrong strategy for escape, since it shatters Clegg’s ideal of Miranda’s purity; affiliates Miranda disturbingly with Clegg’s absent, negligent, and supposedly promiscuous mother; and, most importantly, threatens his total control of the situation. In fact, even before the attempted seduction, Miranda has already proven herself a legitimate threat to Clegg’s dominance, compelling him to mistreat her. After a particularly close escape attempt, Clegg chloroforms Miranda and, despite his earlier protestations that he is “not that sort at all”, does what he likes with her. He details the scene at length with a cinematic eye: She looked a sight, the dress all off one shoulder. I don’t know what it was, it got me excited, it gave me ideas, seeing her lying there right out. It was like I’d showed who was really the master. The dress was right off her shoulder, I could see the top of one stocking. I don’t know what reminded me of it, I remembered an American film I saw once (or was it a magazine) about a man who took a drunk girl home and undressed her and put her to bed, nothing nasty, he just did that and no more and she woke up in his pyjamas. So I did that. I took off her dress and her stockings and left on certain articles, just the brassièrre and the other so as not to go the whole hog. She looked a real picture lying there with only what Aunt Annie called strips of nothing on …. It was my chance I had been waiting for. I got the old camera and took some photos, I would have taken more, only she started to move a bit, so I had to pack up and get out quick. (91)

Stating explicitly that his act of physical violence (restraining and chloroforming Miranda) was exciting specifically because it demonstrated his dominance, Clegg links his gender ideology with his sexuality – dominant men are virile. In viewing Miranda’s undergarments, Clegg practices a traditional form of voyeurism, which he links to a previous viewing of a sexually suggestive, if not certainly pornographic, film. His uncertainty about the source of the scenario of which his situation reminds him suggests that his familiarity with such materials is extensive. Furthermore, Jacqueline Costello notes, pornography inspires Clegg in violating Miranda:

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“Recalling the film establishes a precedent, thus permitting him to undress Miranda.” 29 In his repeated emphasis on how Miranda looks while unconscious and undressed, Clegg distances himself from her as an individual, commenting on how she “looked a real picture”. No longer seeing her as a complete person, Clegg visualizes and photographs Miranda as a pornographic object. For Clegg, photography and pornography are virtually interchangeable. Although he claims that he had always been interested in photography and that his motivation for buying a camera was to photograph butterflies, these claims are immediately preceded by his admission to an interest in pornographic books and immediately followed by his admission to a desire to photograph couples having sex – an interest he actively pursues (10, 18). Clegg’s photography serves an important voyeuristic function, stimulating him through the exercise of control over others, whose private spaces he penetrates and whose intimacy he violates. He justifies his photography by emphasizing its innocence (“Nothing nasty. Just couples” (18)) and relative lack of physical violence. About his photographing Miranda unconscious, he says, “About what I did, undressing her, when I thought after, I saw it wasn’t so bad; not many would have kept control of themselves, just taken photos, it was almost a point in my favour”. Nevertheless, Clegg does not tell Miranda about this photo session, despite the fact that he composes a letter apologizing for using force to subdue her, and incredibly, he does not address this letter because “Dear Miranda seemed familiar” (92). Having violated her privacy and dignity, Clegg still acknowledges no intimacy with Miranda, still perceiving her as merely an object and an image. The more threatening Miranda becomes, the more she asserts herself, the more ruthless Clegg becomes in his objectification and abuse of her. Already getting pleasure from the photos he had taken while Miranda was unconscious, Clegg notes the advantage of such images: “I could take my time with them. They didn’t talk back at me” (109). Disturbed and motivated by the failed seduction scene, Clegg unsuccessfully attempts to coerce Miranda into posing for pornographic pictures, reasoning, “You took your clothes off, you 29

Jacqueline Costello, “The Prison-House of Culture: John Fowles’s The Collector”, Recovering Literature, XVII (1989-1990), 23.


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asked for it. Now you got it”. Miranda’s disgusted refusal to pose for such pictures reinforces Clegg’s sense of reclaiming the upper hand in their relationship, and he decides to punish her, commenting, “I felt happy, I can’t explain, I saw I was weak before, now I was paying her back for all the things she said and thought about me …. she was the one who was going to stay below in all senses and even if it wasn’t what she deserved in the beginning she had made it so that she did now” (114). That is, by challenging his control, and by extension his masculinity, and especially by doing so sexually, Miranda has convinced Clegg that she deserves any abuse he chooses to commit. Intoxicated by his returning sense of power, Clegg misinterprets Miranda’s first signs of illness as acting, a misunderstanding made worse by Miranda’s earlier attempt to escape by faking illness. No longer trusting or respecting her, Clegg chastises the truly ill Miranda for her behavior, prompting her to complain, “Oh, God you’re not a man, if only you were a man”. This assertion destroys Clegg’s tenuous sense of control, pushing him beyond his endurance of her antagonism. No longer willing or able to see Miranda as a decent woman, and desperate to prove his manhood, Clegg makes an object of her: I said, all right, I’m going to teach you a lesson. I had the cords in my pocket and after a bit of a struggle I got them on her and then the gag, it was her own fault if they were tight, I got her on a short rope tied to the bed and then I went and fetched the camera and flash equipment …. I got her garments off and at first she wouldn’t do as I said but in the end she lay and stood like I ordered (I refused to take if she did not co-operate). So I got my pictures. I took her till I had no more bulbs left. (117-18)

Although not physically penetrated, Miranda clearly becomes the victim of a rape in this scene as she is deprived of any agency, brutally violated, bound, gagged, and abused until Clegg climaxes. “With Clegg’s personal ineffectuality obliterated by the mechanical potency of his camera”, Pamela Cooper argues, “the imagery of photography identifies this movement from dubious veneration to violation as essentially one of exposure – not, as Clegg thinks, of Miranda’s true nature as a whore, but of his own sexual reverence as a matter of raw

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power and the need to compel feminine submission to it”. 30 Through this rape, which he repeatedly characterizes as something Miranda deserves, Clegg regains his sense of control, and with it restores his manhood. Once again secure in both his gender and sexual ideologies, Clegg finds further pleasure in viewing and reviewing his images of Miranda, describing the most pleasing of these photos as those “with her face cut off … when she stood in high heels, from the back. The tied hands to the bed made what they call an interesting motif. I can say I was quite pleased with what I got” (118). No longer idealizing Miranda, Clegg finds special pleasure in those pictures that do not show her hair, the fetishized symbol of his earlier veneration, and by removing her face, Clegg further turns Miranda into a dehumanized, fragmented object. Through pornography, Clegg restores his security in men’s power and women’s weakness, men’s virile dominance and women’s inert submission. Although these pornographic activities occur against Miranda’s will, they fulfill, if in some exaggeration, both Clegg’s and her own expectations of gender roles and sexual intimacy, expectations that mirror both characters’ conventional attitudes. Even in this extreme instance of sexualized violence, Clegg and Miranda retain their original opinions and prejudices. As Nodelman keenly argues: [Miranda] is right to fear rape and violence, right to see the relationships of men and women as a struggle for power. In a final irony, Clegg’s brutish treatment of her illness forces her to pervert the new ideas she thinks she has espoused into her old prejudices; and meanwhile, her attempt to act on her newfound freedom and seduce Clegg is exactly what leads him to become the brute he had resisted being before …. Doomed from the start by their shared ideas about sex and class, neither Miranda nor Clegg can grow because they can do nothing but confirm for each other what they believe to be true already. 31

Ultimately, Clegg and Miranda learn very little from their potentially consciousness-raising relationship. Because of the attitudes they share, 30 31

Cooper, The Fictions of John Fowles, 27. Nodelman, “John Fowles’s Variations in The Collector”, 343-44.


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which posit them as opposites in nearly all social categories, their experience as outsiders within has left them perpetually outside one another’s ontological realities. For readers, this relationship demonstrates the total impossibility of anything except disconnection, fragmentation, and misunderstanding between members of antagonistic social groups. Trapped within their socially conditioned attitudes, Clegg and Miranda fail to achieve any real depth as characters or as individuals. By refusing to offer readers the consolation of meaningful communication or an exchange of truly multiple perspectives between Clegg and Miranda, Fowles requires readers to engage in transgressive visual practices that expose both characters as one-dimensional, powerless creatures. This logic suggests that like Miranda, Clegg “is fundamentally not responsible for his actions. The possessor is himself possessed; he is as much the victim as the victimizer.” 32 Through this presentation of mutual victimization, Fowles suggests that individuals are largely unable to transcend the limitations of their social conditioning, and are ultimately at the mercy of the attitudes and opportunities of their social locations. This genuinely sympathetic social analysis, however, operates through the spectacle of a woman’s imprisonment, violation, and death. Forced to occupy Clegg’s perspective during much of Miranda’s imprisonment and rape, readers can either accept the vicarious enjoyment encouraged by Clegg’s enthusiastic and detailed descriptions, or reject that enjoyment, choosing instead to register disgust. Critics have noted Fowles’ awareness of the tension in The Collector between indulgence and exorcism of a masculine fantasy of physical, psychological, and sexual domination. 33 For women readers and feminist critics, however, this acknowledgement is inadequate, particularly since a curious, resistant feminist reading of The Collector demonstrates Miranda’s complicit indulgence in this same fantasy. Although in Fowles’ work pornography generally “functions as a symbolic motif representing the antiexistential, dehumanizing impulse that lurks just beneath the surface of modern life and against which all

32

Olshen, John Fowles, 22. See Woodcock, Male Mythologies: John Fowles and Masculinity, 41, and Conradi, John Fowles, 41.

33

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moral men must rebel”, 34 in this first novel Fowles offers no alternative perspective that advocates this rebellion. In fact, by aligning Miranda’s ideals and expectations with the masculine ideology that engenders her exploitation and victimization, he invalidates Miranda’s perspective, making her interesting only as a victim of objectification and sexualized violence. Although his inclusion of Miranda’s perspective suggests a sincere interest in exploring a woman’s standpoint, and his careful descriptions of Clegg’s egregious behavior suggest a genuine disgust with a philosophy of masculine dominance, in The Collector Fowles ultimately fails to explore his potential as what Angela Carter calls the “moral pornographer”, who “might use pornography as a critique of current relations between the sexes” and “begin to penetrate to the heart of the contempt for women that distorts our culture”. 35 Instead, too intent on his social agenda, Fowles manipulates both Miranda and readers into accepting his own political and philosophical ideals, constraining them within an essentially exploitative masculine perspective.

34

William J Palmer, The Fiction of John Fowles: Tradition, Art, and the Loneliness of Selfhood, Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 1974, 40. 35 Angela Carter, The Sadeian Woman, New York: Penguin, 1979, 19-20. Of course, Carter’s concept of the moral pornographer may be impossible to achieve. Indeed, Woodcock argues that the moral pornographer cannot exist in the current Western social and political context: “The ‘moral pornographer’ may be identical with the vicarious pornographer except in the pretence of exposing the very thing he indulges. Both are notably dependent upon the response of their consumer for the final measure of their function and this is delineated in a social context within which women are in general subject to the manipulations of male power, a context impossible to step outside” (Male Mythologies: John Fowles and Masculinity, 151).

CHAPTER TWO A CONFLICT OF GENDERED PERSPECTIVES: VOYEURISM, VIOLENCE, AND SEDUCTION IN THE MAGUS

Rather than advancing specific social and political ideals, Fowles’ second novel, The Magus, immerses readers in a tale so convoluted and complex that they have employed an incredibly diverse range of perspectives in response. 1 Narrated by Nicholas Urfe from an unspecified present location, The Magus illustrates the narrator’s complicated and mysterious experience on a Greek island as he perceived it at the time. As Nicholas re-enacts his experience of what he comes to know as “the godgame”, he subjects readers to a radically disorienting, exciting, and disturbing psychodrama that calls his (and the readers’) values, prejudices, and ideals into question. Fowles has suggested that Nicholas learns from these experiences, or at least comes to some critical understanding of his ideological shortcomings. 2 However, the continuing debate over Nicholas’ growth suggests significant critical disagreement about the moral, social,

1

The first of Fowles’ novels to be conceived and initially written, The Magus was first published after The Collector. However, a revised and now standard version was published after Daniel Martin. This chapter examines this standard revised version, but I have placed my discussion of The Magus in the original publication sequence because of its decidedly fragmented nature and obsession with authorial control, both more clearly associated with Fowles’ early works than with his later fiction. The revisions of the 1978 version emphasize Fowles’ growing interest in whole sight, but they do not significantly alter the visual practices encouraged by the original version. 2 In defending Nicholas, Fowles also reveals his notorious irritation with literary critics, who have, in his estimation, focused too zealously on Nicholas’ deficiencies: “One thing about him – he is writing his own story – and no critic has ever taken that into account. All these terrible things they say about him – that he’s a typical, totally selfish, modern man – they’ve never noticed that he’s saying these things about himself. He’s talking about ‘as he was’ from a present (of which you know nothing) to a past” (Relf, “An Interview with John Fowles”, 120).

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political, and philosophical schemes of both the godgame and the novel. 3 Like The Collector, The Magus integrates two distinct perspectives, one represented by Nicholas, the other by Maurice Conchis, the “magus” of the title, and his accomplices in the godgame. Thoroughly English and reflective of his generation’s concerns, Nicholas interprets his experiences through a stereotypically masculine, conventional lens. Conchis and his accomplices, on the other hand, operate through an unconventional and interpersonal perspective that Conchis specifically identifies with women’s ways of knowing and being. Consequently uncertain about his position as an outsider within the masque, Nicholas responds to this ambiguity with incessant observation and analysis of the other characters, especially the women with whom he is romantically involved. In order to make sense of his experiences, Nicholas attempts to fuse various fragments of knowledge to form a coherent vision that fits his current outlook on life and society. For readers, these fragments are disjointed, reflective of partial knowledge and partial understanding. By forcing them to apprehend the events of the novel through Nicholas’ point-of-view, Fowles never allows readers to sustain an identification with any other perspective, and encourages them to identify with Nicholas’ analyses and quests for knowledge. Although the novel implies that Conchis and his accomplices subscribe to a more humanistic and authentic ideology than any that Nicholas accepts, Fowles ultimately undermines his advocacy of this philosophy by emphasizing its inherent mystery and failing to explore the motivations, convictions, and personalities of its practitioners in any depth. Even at the novel’s conclusion, the women 3

Delma E. Presley (“The Quest of the Bourgeois Hero: An Approach to Fowles’ The Magus”, Journal of Popular Culture, VI (1972), 396) argues that Nicholas successfully learns from the godgame, becoming a magus in his own right through the experience. But Michael H. Begnal (“A View of John Fowles’ The Magus”, Modern British Literature, III (1978), 67-72), Frank G. Novak (“The Dialectics of Debasement in The Magus”, Modern Fiction Studies, XXXI/1 (Spring 1985), 71-82), and Ellen McDaniel (“Games and Godgames in The Magus and The French Lieutenant’s Woman”, Modern Fiction Studies, XXXI/1 (Spring 1985), 31-42) argue that Nicholas participates in the godgame merely because it emphasizes his own importance, and Novak further argues that Nicholas never moves beyond this attitude and fails with the lessons Conchis attempts to teach him.

Voyeurism, Violence, and Seduction in The Magus

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characters, whom Fowles suggests possess a more comprehensive understanding of human relationships and experiences, remain the mysterious and threatening objects of Nicholas’ gaze, their motivations never explained and their reactions never explored. Despite its explicit promotion of women’s ways of knowing and being, The Magus fails to explore the standpoint of any of its women characters, relying instead on Nicholas’ limited, voyeuristic, and suspicious point of view and Fowles’ projected fantasy of a feminine philosophy. As the narrator of the novel’s extraordinary events, Nicholas occupies a position of exceptional power. In recording his experience of the godgame, Nicholas appropriates Conchis’ position as magus, forcing readers to adopt his original position as the elect individual who must negotiate endless confusion and ambiguous suggestion while attempting to understand the godgame and its consequences. Through this framework, Fowles promotes an ironic reader identification with the novel’s protagonist and encourages readers to acquire the insight that Nicholas, from his future location, implies he has acquired. Not especially problematic in design, this autobiographical framework causes anxiety for readers because Nicholas, like Conchis, is both unreliable as a narrator and deliberately reticent about his current perspective. As Simon Loveday notes, readers of fictional autobiography accept certain conventions of the genre, such as a need to suspend disbelief over the narrator’s memory, while readers of firstperson narratives also appreciate and often expect the narrator to offer both honesty and clear values with which readers can judge the development of the story and the protagonist. 4 Although Nicholas often does explain his thoughts and motives as a younger man, these explanations are suspect: like Clegg’s journal and Miranda’s diary, Nicholas’ story, because it is so self-reflexive, includes a healthy amount of self-justification and egocentric righteousness, even from the older, more insightful Nicholas who reports both his thoughts during the events he describes and his subsequent analyses of his earlier consciousness. Furthermore, Nicholas reinforces the mysteriousness of his experience by emphasizing his own relative lack of knowledge in comparison to Conchis and Lily de Seitas, both of 4

Loveday, The Romances of John Fowles, 38-39.

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whom Nicholas believes to be nearly omniscient, at least as far as he is concerned, and by implication placing readers in a doubly limited epistemological position, denied access not only to the knowledge possessed by Conchis and Lily de Seitas but also to that of Nicholas. By offering so little insight into his current perspective, Nicholas taunts readers with his concealed knowledge of the tantalizing details of his development and relationships as they unfolded between the final events described in the novel and the future situation from which the older Nicholas narrates. 5 This faintly mocking tone has caused readers some discomfort in occupying Nicholas’ point of view. Women readers in particular must cringe at his use of women’s bodies and abuse of their affections; men readers have catalogued a variety of character flaws and even questioned whether his edification is worth the effort Conchis (and Fowles) expends on him. 6 Despite the fact that Nicholas suggests a number of these flaws himself, readers experience the bulk of the novel only through the perspective of the young, objectionable Nicholas, and only rarely through the perspective of the older, presumably improved version. Yet Nicholas’ perspective causes discomfort not only because of his disreputable characteristics, but also because of his unsettling behavior and point of view. As he begins his experience of the godgame, Nicholas behaves disturbingly like Clegg, taking careful mental notes of all that he hears, sees, and even smells at Bourani. He deliberately places himself in positions from which he can spy or be spied upon, and, most strikingly, he conceives of his participation in the godgame in terms of various fantasies. Like Clegg, Nicholas pursues those activities that separate him from others and that allow him to nurse a vague desire for vengeance on a world that has denied him authority, certainty, and stability. Nicholas’ attitude toward Conchis and the masque, and indeed toward life in general, is initially one of aesthetic amusement. He is determined, if he cannot understand the behavior of other people or the strange events of the godgame, to appreciate their aesthetic elements – that is, to employ the critical persona he developed as a 5

Ibid., 38-39. Foster, Understanding John Fowles, 43; Salami, John Fowles’s Fiction and the Poetics of Postmodernism, 94; and Woodcock, Male Mythologies: John Fowles and Masculinity, 47.

6


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student at Oxford, and to place himself at a distance removed enough to feel securely in command. Rather than thoughtfully interpreting his experiences and his relationships with others, Nicholas focuses on spectacle, summarizing the significance of people and events by describing his sensory impressions. Nicholas employs this attitude throughout the godgame as he attempts to dismiss his uncertainty, confusion, and fear. From his initial encounter with Conchis’ elaborately staged illustrations during his first weekend visit to Bourani, Nicholas focuses on the extraordinary mechanics of the spectacle rather than the significance of its performance. Upon hearing the sound of men singing “Tipperary” in the distance, for example, Nicholas considers the location of the record player and the placing of speakers, documents the swelling and fading of the music, and then concludes that this odd event must be “an elaborate joke of Conchis’, mounted for [his] exclusive benefit”. 7 He does not consider the incongruence of “an elaborate joke” with the story cataloguing the atrocities of the First World War that Conchis had related earlier in the evening. Even after smelling the “atrocious stench” recalling Conchis’ description of the odor of a corpse in a shell-hole, Nicholas approaches Conchis facetiously, mentioning only the voices in the night and attempting to thank Conchis for “‘organizing a unique experience for [him]’” (140). Nicholas continues in this approach even as the events of the godgame become more surreal. Upon viewing Lily/Julie for the first time, he describes in astonishing detail every rustle he hears and every element of her costume, presenting it in terms of “some genre picture” (158-59). His description of the mythic scene in which a satyr chases a nymph is likewise filled with fastidious attention to costume and staging, as well as to the physical characteristics of both the men and women actors (185-187). Refusing to consider the implications of these staged events as complements to Conchis’ storytelling, Nicholas instead evaluates the theatrical effectiveness of each spectacle, marvels at the lengths to which Conchis will go to entertain him, and frets at the possibility that he might have stumbled upon a bizarre sexual cult. Believing himself to be the center of attention, Nicholas is both flattered by these elaborate spectacles and perturbed by “these other people who had appeared from nowhere to poach in [his] 7

John Fowles, The Magus, New York: Dell Publishing, 1978, 137.

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territory, who were in some way in conspiracy against [him], who knew more” (188). It is this jealousy of Conchis’ accomplices that motivates Nicholas to shift his participation in the godgame from aesthetic critique to active performance. Cognizant of his tendency to aestheticize even the most momentous events, Nicholas is also aware of his propensity to act performatively rather than authentically; indeed, it is this very awareness that prevents him from committing suicide (64). As he later realizes, he has constructed his entire life around performance: … all my life I had tried to turn life into fiction, to hold reality away; always I had acted as if a third person was watching and listening and giving me marks for good or bad behaviour – a god like a novelist, to whom I turned, like a character with the power to please, the sensitivity to feel slighted, the ability to adapt himself to whatever he believed the novelist-god wanted. (549)

In terms of the existential theme of the novel, this mind-set prevents Nicholas from acting authentically and from accepting responsibility for his actions, and in admitting this construction, Nicholas begins to accept a more authentically free existence. His participation, and especially his performances, in the godgame prompt this realization. Nicholas’ desire to fictionalize reality and perform for an omniscient authority facilitates the process whereby he adopts various roles throughout the masque, all of which he performs conceiving of Conchis as novelist-god. This transition occurs particularly easily because of Nicholas’ constant and immediate sense of being watched whenever he is in Conchis’ domain. Even before he meets Conchis, Nicholas discovers a book of poetry at the beach near Bourani, apparently left deliberately in his path. Having read the marked passages, he assumes that he is being watched, and replaces the book “Not out of kindness, but to justify my curiosity to the hidden eyes” (72). This awareness of being watched increases once Conchis and Nicholas meet. Nicholas explains, “Outwardly he seemed to have very little interest in me, yet he watched me; even when he was looking away he watched me; and he waited. Right from the beginning I had this: he was indifferent to me, yet he watched and he waited” (88). Rather provocative in demeanor, Conchis adheres perfectly to Nicholas’ conception of the novelist-god. Through his “watching and waiting”, the true extent of


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which is probably a combination of Conchis’ legitimate interest in the godgame and a projection of Nicholas’ obsession with evaluation, Conchis assumes for Nicholas a role of authority and attendant assessment, and inspires Nicholas to perform appropriately, particularly because he objects to the indifference with which Conchis treats him. This indifference reflects, as Nicholas rightly identifies, Conchis’ interest in him as a type of individual, representative of particular social constructions (94). Determined to prove himself more interesting as an individual than as a type, Nicholas eagerly plays along whenever Conchis requests particular behavior, but occasionally pursues activities he assumes to be outside of Conchis’ prescriptions, such as when he descends the stairs to meet Lily/Julie for the first time, though he believes he is “probably meant to listen, not go down” (158). In accepting Conchis’ prescribed roles of houseguest, aspiring psychologist, and knight errant, among others, Nicholas attempts to live up to the expectations of those around him. In occasionally acting outside of those roles, he seeks to please and surprise – that is, to prove himself other than (and in his mind, superior to) the type Conchis assumes him to be. Thus Nicholas simultaneously resents and enjoys the role-playing in which he engages, grounding himself in the social conventions attendant upon his class, education, and background – his aesthetic detachment, his cynicism, his self-absorption, his somewhat insincere politeness. During the godgame itself, however, Nicholas never conceives of those ideas or behaviors as constituting a role in themselves. Relying on logic and irony, Nicholas eventually puts his faith in Lily/Julie, in whom he identifies similar social and intellectual standards. Lily/Julie encourages this attachment, cementing their bond by describing a similar reaction to Conchis’ voyeurism in her “confession” to being an aspiring actress lured to Bourani under false pretences (342, 348). Playing to Nicholas’ prejudices, Lily/Julie describes her encounters with Joe, Conchis’ spy and the twins’ “watchdog”, emphasizing his physical prowess and inarticulateness, two characteristics Nicholas despises as markers of inferior social status. This description mirrors perfectly Nicholas’ own assessment of the African American man, whom he confronts, insults, and provokes after reflecting on his physicality, animality, and apparent lack of humor and sanity (326-

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27). Frequently associated with a dog (or jackal, or watchdog), Joe represents for Nicholas both Conchis’ loyal servant and a kind of dumb animal, the latter association increased by Joe’s refusal to speak for most of the godgame. Despite his assertion that “I possessed a lot of faults, but racialism wasn’t one of them … or at least I liked to think racialism wasn’t one of them” (328), Nicholas both dislikes and fears Joe because of his racial identity. However, Joe’s presence increases Nicholas’ pleasure in performance by constantly, and often gallingly, reminding Nicholas of Conchis’ vigilance and of his own directive to perform in ways that will please Conchis as novelist-god. Committed to pursuing the contradictory desires of following what he believes to be the rules of the godgame and breaking those rules in order to pursue Lily/Julie, Nicholas takes special pleasure in being watched. Joe’s presence and scripted role as bodyguard/keeper of the twins reinforces Nicholas’ vision of himself as aspiring player, always under surveillance. Simultaneously, his distance allows Nicholas to construct an illusion of confidence and collusion between himself and the twins, an “erotic” collusion that the “eternal deception-relishing child” side of himself enjoys (351). Of course, Nicholas is especially tormented by his enforced viewing of Lily/Julie and Joe making love just after the trial scene and blue film, as their intercourse suggests that their collusion in deceiving Nicholas has included its own erotic element. However, Nicholas’ viewing of Lily/Julie and Joe reveals more serious defects in his worldview. The most obvious of these flaws is his racism, which he reveals to Lily de Seitas in his threat to reveal to her young son “how his sister performs – I think that’s the euphemism – one week with me, the next with a Negro” (613), emphasizing not only his revulsion at this interracial relationship but a more poignant devastation that he has, in his view, been supplanted by an inferior being. More generally, however, Nicholas’ response to watching Joe and Lily/Julie make love illustrates his compulsive voyeurism and his obsessive objectification of others, especially women. Although he notes, “There was no perversion, no attempt to suggest that I was watching anything else but two people who were in love making love …. They behaved as if to show that the reality was the very antithesis of the absurd nastiness of the film”, Nicholas continues to participate in such “absurd nastiness” simply by watching their intercourse – an


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element he fails to realize is probably not present in “the reality” of their everyday lovemaking. He reports: For long moments I shut my eyes, refusing to watch. But then always I seemed forced, a voyeur in hell, to raise my head and look again. (538)

Baffled by their exhibitionism, Nicholas blames them (and Conchis) for compelling him to “look again” rather than examining his own compulsively voyeuristic tendencies. Naturally, this exhibition is so disturbing to Nicholas precisely because it implies his own complicity and further indicts the hypocritical and masturbatory attitude he has enacted both throughout the godgame and in his previous relationships. Just as he distances himself from meaningful encounters by aestheticizing them as spectacle, Nicholas removes himself from others through incessant observation and objectification. This approach is particularly noticeable before Nicholas goes to Greece in his relationship with Alison. Generally baffled by her manic depressive, changeable moods and both attracted and ashamed by her Australian mannerisms, Nicholas is careful to describe Alison’s appearance, nearly always providing readers with a very clear picture of how she looks and of how men respond to her physical appearance. This constant attention to Alison’s physical state indicates a certain detachment in Nicholas’ response to her, and substitutes Alison-asspectacle for Alison-as-individual. When Alison leaves the London apartment before Nicholas departs for Greece, for example, Nicholas describes in fastidious detail exactly how she looked as she left: Her camel-hair coat disappeared down the stairs. She didn’t look back. I went to the window, and saw her walking fast across the street, the pale coat, the straw-coloured hair almost the same colour as the coat, a movement of her hand to her handbag, her blowing her nose; not once did she look back. She broke into a run. I opened the window and leant out and watched until she disappeared round the corner at the end of the street into Marylebone Road. And not even then, at the very end, did she look back. (49)

Considering the emotional significance of this event, particularly for Alison, Nicholas’ description seems rather cold. Focusing on

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irrelevant details such as the color of Alison’s coat and matter-offactly reporting her use of a tissue, Nicholas denies any emotional connection to Alison and emphasizes his lack of empathy for her. Apparently stunned by her refusal to look back while he shamelessly gawks out the window, Nicholas forces Alison to make an exhibit of her exit, to put her love on display, as she later points out in a letter: Remember I walked all the way down the street and never once looked back. I knew you were watching. Remember I did all this and I love you. (55)

Reporting only the spectacle of Alison’s leaving, Nicholas conveys no sense of loss at this parting, but instead reports a feeling of “emotional triumph” at having loved her less than she loved him and a sense that he has “in some indefinable way won” (50). Carrying this sense of triumph with him to Greece, Nicholas is able to transfer his obsession with Alison’s appearance to Greece itself. Upon his arrival, he explains: When that ultimate Mediterranean light fell on the world around me, I could see it was supremely beautiful; but when it touched me, I felt it was hostile …. It was partly the terror, the stripping-to-essentials, of love; because I fell totally and forever in love with the Greek landscape from the moment I arrived. But with the love came a contradictory, almost irritating, feeling of impotence and inferiority, as if Greece were a woman so sensually provocative that I must fall physically and desperately in love with her, and at the same time so calmly aristocratic that I should never be able to approach her. (51)

The immediacy of this commentary is revealing: at merely the sight of Greece, Nicholas identifies his relationship with the land as one of passion. Having just left Alison, whom he had nearly always considered in terms of appearances, here Nicholas transfers that obsession with appearances to Greece-as-spectacle. Furthermore, he notes both an immediate sense of inferiority and his irritation at this sensation, and associates these uncomfortable feelings specifically with a woman. Such associations determine Nicholas’ interactions with both Alison and Lily/Julie, both of whom he passionately desires as objects but denounces when they exhibit subjectivity and independence. Just


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as he had accepted the posting in Greece “like a medieval king” who “had fallen in love with the picture long before [seeing] the reality” (41), Nicholas envisions Alison and Lily/Julie as artifacts, objects onto which he can project his own self-involved fantasies. Just as fastidious in describing every detail of Lily/Julie’s numerous costumes as he is in describing Alison’s physical appearance, Nicholas repeatedly notes the picturesque placement of Lily/Julie within vignettes and landscapes, transforming her into a work of art – he even compliments her by exclaiming, “You look so ravishing. Like a Renoir” (198). Charmed by this spectacular vision of her, Nicholas finds the more realistic Alison unbearable in Athens, and so transports her to the especially aesthetic Parnassus where, not surprisingly, he envisions her within an artistic vignette: She had woven a rough crown out of the oxeyes and wild pinks that grew in the grass around us. It sat lopsidedly on her uncombed hair; and she wore a smile of touching innocence. She did not know it, but it was at first for me an intensely literary moment. I could place it exactly: England’s Helicon …. Suddenly she was like such a poem and I felt a passionate wave of desire for her. (274)

Contrary to the irritation and distaste he has felt for Alison during their sojourn in Greece, Nicholas’ response to Alison experiences a radical revision through this moment. “By assimilating Alison into art”, Cooper argues, Nicholas transforms her “into the sort of iconographic female whom he finds he can love …. He tries to change Alison into the kind of woman that Julie is, or that she appears to be: a living work of art possessed of the convenient ability to function as a sexual tease.” 8 Nicholas’ attraction to women as artistic objects hinges on this notion of the sexual tease. He is attracted not by sexuality, but by the suggestion of reserved sexuality, and especially by sexuality he can access only by enduring numerous trials and surmounting daunting obstacles. The Magus contains what Tarbox describes as “a most masterful sex tease”, 9 and Nicholas certainly encounters his share of reluctance, encouragement, and mixed messages as he waits for Lily/Julie to surrender to his sexual advances. Yet these obstacles 8 9

Cooper, The Fictions of John Fowles, 86. Tarbox, The Art of John Fowles, 23.

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increase both Nicholas’ anticipation and experience of his sexual interactions with Lily/Julie, allowing him to project his own desires onto her and to imagine her as the perfect combination of English reserve and Mediterranean passion. In fantasizing about her, recalling her all-too-brief kiss and visualizing her twin sister’s stunning figure, he creates a scenario in which his desire for her can be completely fulfilled: “I imagined Julie coming to me there, in the bedroom; or in the pine-forest, darkness, a wildness, a willing rape” (238). Although Nicholas never fulfills this fantasy, he does experience some sexual pleasure with Lily/Julie that incorporates his desires for hidden passion, submission, and brutality. Telling Nicholas that she is menstruating, Lily/Julie proceeds to excite and then masturbate Nicholas in the sea, a gesture he appreciates precisely for its quality of surrender: “I would have had it go on all night, this being seduced that was also a seduction, this sudden conversion of the aloof, the fastidious, the voice that quoted Sophocles, into an obedient geisha, an adorable mermaid” (375). In this description, Nicholas conceives of Lily/Julie not as an individual with her own desires, but as a collection of qualities she employs to distance herself from him – aloof, fastidious, intellectual – and in various roles he projects onto her as she pleases him – a geisha, a mermaid. Furthermore, he claims: I had an intuition it had meant more for her … it was a kind of discovery, or rediscovery, of her own latent sexuality, through the satisfaction of mine – and through the night, the warmth, the old magic of wild Greece. Her face seemed softer, simpler, maskless now …. All was transparent between us. (376)

Assuming that his sexual release has satisfied her and freed her from her sexual repression, Nicholas imagines Lily/Julie as both soft and simple – transparently connected to him through their shared English values – and wild, warm, and passionate. As Foster rightly comments, “His astonishing arrogance exceeds all known bounds”; oblivious to either Lily/Julie’s motivation or response to this activity, Nicholas still claims “to have done her a favor”. 10 Even more satisfying, Nicholas’ subsequent single experience of intercourse with Lily/Julie allows him to conceive of her as simultaneously “virginal”, innocent, and childlike, and untamed, 10

Foster, Understanding John Fowles, 51.


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perverse, and “slavelike”. He describes his favorite moments of the encounter in intimate detail: It was a little as I had imagined it in the beginning, the Lily Montgomery phase: this delicate, elusive creature half-swooning, succumbed to the animal part of herself; and not quite adult yet – beneath the airs and graces, something of the innocent perversity of a little girl playing at sex with little boys …. There was something virginal about her; yet wanting to be corrupted, led further …. I began to drive. Her arms bent back behind her head, as if she was defenceless, doubly naked, completely at my mercy; that lovely slavelike limpness in everything but the loins …. She seemed so small, fragile, asking for the brutality she had said she had felt in the chapel at Moutsa. Her hands clenched, as if I was really hurting her. I came, it was too soon, but irresistible. (492-94)

Especially exciting for Nicholas is the combination Lily/Julie embodies of innocence and corruptibility, reserve and passion. He perceives her as his sex toy, “at [his] mercy”, inviting his possession and violence. Initially inaccessible to Nicholas, Lily/Julie perfectly personifies those qualities he seeks in women – qualities that allow him to project his essentially autoerotic desires onto an object whose most striking characteristic is teasing compliance. While Lily/Julie personifies this kind of initial inaccessibility and eventual compliance, Alison initially strikes Nicholas as totally accessible, and therefore unworthy of anything but sexual fervor. Appreciative of her skill as a mistress, Nicholas simultaneously despises Alison for the lack of reserve her skill implies. Like Lily/Julie, Alison invites Nicholas’ violent impulses. However, completely in control sexually, Alison bears the brunt of Nicholas’ violence as he attempts to dominate her in other ways. Toying with her emotions when she visits him in Greece, Nicholas lies to Alison about having syphilis. Despite this lie, Alison propositions Nicholas, who reacts to this offer with detached criticism: As she caressed me, I thought, it’s like being with a prostitute, hands as adept as a prostitute’s, nothing but a matter of pleasure … and I gave way to the pleasure she gave me …. I imagined lying in the same position with Julie, and I thought I knew it would be infinitely disturbing and infinitely more passionate; not familiar, not aching with

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John Fowles: Visionary and Voyeur fatigue, hot, a bit sweaty … some cheapened word like randy; but white-hot, mysterious, overwhelming passion. (269)

Completely willing to express her sexuality and fulfill her own desires, Alison resists the kind of projection that Nicholas practices in response to Lily/Julie’s seductions, threatening his sense of control and domination. Responding to this independence, Nicholas compares Alison to a prostitute both in bed and, more poignantly, when she reveals herself to him in Athens after supposedly committing suicide (572). Threatened and betrayed, Nicholas rejects Alison as an individual with her own desires and agenda. It is only when Alison unwittingly summons a literary pastoral image, allowing Nicholas to objectify her as a work of art associated with innocence, that he sincerely makes love to her without comparing her to a prostitute. Feeling cleansed by this intercourse, Nicholas confesses his interest in the godgame, prompting Alison to accuse him, quite rightly, of using her and of desiring another woman. While Nicholas denies these charges, Alison neatly summarizes Nicholas’ attitude towards her: “For you I’ll always be Alison who slept around. That Australian girl who had an abortion. The human boomerang. Throw her away and she’ll always come back for another week-end of cheap knock.”

Although Nicholas replies, “That’s a long way below the belt” (280), he does not deny the truth of Alison’s analysis. Instead, disconcerted by her insight, unwilling to freely admit to his callous attitude, and determined to be free of the commitment she requests, Nicholas resorts to brutality, forcing her to the bed, holding her down, and slapping her (281). This particular weekend with Alison epitomizes Nicholas’ reliance on objectification and violence. Moreover, it exhibits his egocentric, autoerotic attitude, linking his treatment of women with a pornographic perspective. Initially critical of the absurd blue film he must watch after the trial, Nicholas is shocked by the footage of Alison and himself on Parnassus, horrified that their lovemaking may have been filmed. This footage emphasizes Nicholas’ abusive attitude toward women in general, and Alison in particular, by comparing his relationship with her to pornography. By forcing him to consider the


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implications of this included footage, Conchis encourages Nicholas to acknowledge that his perspective enacts a pornographic ethic. In fact, Conchis has been encouraging such ideological recognition throughout the godgame. Repeatedly bombarding Nicholas with pornographic images, Conchis elicits strong but not self-reflexive reactions from Nicholas. These reactions vary from his description of the priapus as evoking a “primitive terror” (87) to the painting on the kylix he describes as “very obscene indeed” (106). Complaining that the pornographic books Conchis provides are too obsessive, Nicholas nevertheless peruses them many times, reflecting on his negative reaction to “the facet of Conchis’ polyhedral character that obviously enjoyed ‘curious’ objects and literature” (168). Never considering that Conchis may have meant these curiosities to reflect not his own perversions but those of his guest, Nicholas considers the placement of a photograph of Lily among these objects as reflecting particularly bad taste on the part of his host (106). Yet his own relationship with Lily/Julie enacts precisely a pornographic attitude. Indeed, in encouraging Nicholas’ attachment to Lily/Julie, and especially by constructing their involvement through a series of role-plays, Conchis elicits Nicholas’ most self-involved emotional and sexual fantasies. Unable and unwilling to see the women with whom he is romantically involved as subjects, Nicholas instead considers them only within his own autoerotic, pornographic fantasies. Yet even after the conclusion of the godgame, Nicholas has difficulty confronting this aspect of his personality. Still unable to comprehend Conchis’ (and his accomplices’) motivations and values, Nicholas chooses to consider their behavior immediately after the trial as a pornographic pleasure: “While it happened it had seemed like a vicious twisting of the dagger in an already more than sufficient wound; but now I saw it might also be a kind of revenge given me for their spying, their voyeurism, on Alison and myself” (542-43). Sufficiently “disintoxicated” of Lily/Julie, Nicholas fails to understand the deeper significance of the godgame, trial, and disintoxication that Conchis has offered him. Instead he chooses to relish his role as victim. In adopting this role, Nicholas again alters his participation in the godgame, obsessively sleuthing for explanations to his confusion and determinedly behaving in ways he believes Conchis and his accomplices will appreciate.

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In undertaking this behavior, Nicholas firmly clings to an almost paranoid assumption of constant surveillance. In contrast to the kind of firmly situated and reciprocal exploration of various perspectives that standpoint theorists envision, Nicholas enacts what Evelyn Fox Keller defines as a kind of vigilant, paranoid defensiveness that initially prevents him from accepting “those affective and cognitive experiences that require receptivity, reciprocity, or simply a relaxed state of mind” 11 – the kind of experiences that comprise the godgame. Instead, he devotes himself to an exhaustive search for ultimately meaningless facts. Still obsessed with observation and performance, Nicholas cannot imagine that Conchis has absconded as novelist-god, that the practitioners of the godgame are not continually evaluating his activity. More importantly, Nicholas cannot imagine a context for his experiences that transcends his paranoia. Antagonistically determined to show them that he can live without affairs, Nicholas avoids women he finds sexually stimulating (644), attaching himself instead to the dumpy and, he thinks, asexual Jojo, out of what he calls “kindness to dumb animals” (646) and a sense that if Alison, Conchis, and the others are watching, “it might even help to precipitate matters” (647). Still focused on his status as a victim, Nicholas uses Jojo as both a distraction and a ruse to attract Alison, once again structuring his relationships with women primarily around his own needs and projections. Nicholas’ dependence on performance, objectification, and brutality becomes critical in the novel’s final scene – his long-awaited reunion with Alison. Shocked at her unexpected appearance, Nicholas looks at her, as she notes with characteristic accuracy, “as if I’m a prostitute or something”. Recognizing Nicholas’ gaze as the selfinvolved, objectifying device he has used to isolate himself and to justify his mistreatment of her, Alison summarizes her status in her relationship with Nicholas, explaining: “Whenever I’m with you it’s like going to someone and saying, ‘Torture me, abuse me. Give me hell’.” (663)

Refusing to accept this summary of his brutality, instead Nicholas focuses on Alison’s appearance and behavior, noting especially what he believes to be unnatural, choreographed movements that convince 11



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him that their meeting is on display for Conchis and his accomplices (664). Energized by this opportunity for performance, Nicholas attempts to bully Alison into a commitment that actively rejects the standards and potentiality of the godgame, accusing her of “playing to their script” even as he engages in a performance specifically intended to antagonize Conchis and his accomplices. Furious at Alison’s frustration with this performative response to her, Nicholas resorts to violence, slapping Alison across the face in what he describes as “a necessary act” (666). Suddenly enlightened through “this trivial little bit of masculine brutality” (667), Nicholas realizes that Conchis is not watching, that the novelist-god has absconded. Through the slap, Nicholas begins to understand authentic action, to reject observation and performance as the standards by which he constructs his actions, and to accept the complications inherent to a relationship not between objects but between individuals. However, this “trivial little bit of masculine brutality” reveals Nicholas’ extremely limited understanding of the perspective Conchis and his accomplices have advocated in the staging of the godgame. Perhaps, as David H. Walker has argued, the slap is necessary for Nicholas – a “settling of accounts”, a declaration of his own selfworth, a comprehension “that accusation and punishment evince the mutual ties between people”. 12 Nevertheless, by physically abusing Alison, Nicholas hardly recommends himself as an enlightened, changed man, as someone no longer willing to objectify, evaluate, and brutalize his lover. By freezing the narrative without revealing the couple’s future, in his position as narrator the older Nicholas suggests that readers must learn to surrender their own voyeurism and pursue their own authentic perspectives, but his emphasis on violence as a catalyst for authentic living indicates a continuing reliance on objectification and brutality. In contrast to the abusive, pornographic, and self-centered masculine perspective that Nicholas embodies, Conchis, Lily/Julie, Alison, and Lily de Seitas embody a feminine perspective committed to self-actualization and connection. Fowles associates these values explicitly with women: The Magus is, as Loveday summarizes, “a work which celebrates women and women’s influence …. entirely 12

David H. Walker, “Remorse, Responsibility, and Moral Dilemmas in Fowles’s Fiction”, in Critical Essays on John Fowles, ed. Ellen Pifer, Boston, MA: G.K. Hall, 1986, 62.

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open and unashamed in its proclamation of the superiority of women over men”. 13 Even the narrative structure of the novel, Haegert argues, “remains distinctly ‘feminine,’ both in the sense of being presided over by women (Conchis is offstage for extended periods) and in the sense of proceeding in a regular wavelike pattern – of emotional contraction followed by revelatory expansion – that resembles parturition”. 14 Through this structure, Haegert suggests, Fowles dramatizes the birth of a feminine ethic, a non-violent, communityoriented perspective grounded in human relationships. An extension of Fowles’ essentialist ideology, The Magus specifically advocates, through the practitioners of the godgame, epistemological and ontological standards that reflect traditionally feminine values. While Nicholas’ standpoint relies on spectacle, objectification, performance, and violence, the standpoint of the godgame’s practitioners embraces whole sight, relationships, authenticity, and complexity. Rejecting whenever possible conventional moral and social standards, the “necessary fictions” by which people define themselves and their relationships (638), the practitioners of the godgame strive to live authentically, morally, intellectually, and socially responsible lives. For most of the novel, Nicholas fails to appreciate or even understand this vision. A significant reason for Nicholas’ perplexity is his inability to integrate multiple perspectives and paradoxical realities. Possessing a singularity of vision that allows him to acknowledge only his own desires and to project those desires onto others, Nicholas can comprehend neither the complexity of Conchis’ narratives nor the balance of what he perceives as oppositional forces. In relating Conchis’ narratives, Nicholas creates an ambience around the narration that includes the food and drink, the weather, and the physical response of each listener, projecting an atmosphere of artistic creation around Conchis’ storytelling. In turn, sensing that Nicholas views him as an authority figure, Conchis adopts a dominant role, positioning himself as artist/mentor and Nicholas as character/apprentice. In establishing this hierarchy, Conchis adopts a narrative strategy and ritual that Nicholas recognizes and in which he can perform appropriately. Conchis begins within a context that Nicholas finds relatively comfortable, allowing him to suggest 13

Loveday, The Romances of John Fowles, 42, 43. Haegert, “Memoirs of a Deconstructive Angel: The Heroine as Mantissa in the Fiction of John Fowles”, 165.

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alternative epistemological and ontological standards subtly and gradually. Within this framework, Conchis initially advocates a feminine ethic by suggesting women’s role as facilitator of men’s selfactualization. Conchis’ early descriptions of Lily as his adolescent love epitomize this conceptualization of women: Lily prompts the young Conchis to examine his motivations and values, leading him, through her condemnation of his defection from the war effort, to denounce the artificial constrictions of duty and pursue a more authentic existence. By linking Lily with his ontological conversion, Conchis suggests that through women men can shed inhibiting social constructions and learn to act in accordance with their true selves, thereby pursuing existential authenticity. This approach appeals to Nicholas, who is already comfortable considering women in terms of their usefulness to him, and allows Conchis to establish a relatively comfortable situation in which he can gradually challenge the masculine ideology he initially exploits. Slowly, Conchis begins to suggest that women’s ways of knowing and being are superior to men’s epistemological and ontological systems, advocating especially their ability to perceive connections. In contrast to Nicholas’ critical attitude to spectacle, Conchis integrates sensory impressions and metaphysical illumination in his narration of events, presenting each of his stories not as isolated incidents but as moments on a continuum of experience. Rather than projecting his resentments and desires onto the circumstances in which he finds himself, Conchis reconstructs the events of his life through a perspective that honors complexity, ambiguity, and balance between the individual and that which is outside the individual – a perspective that Fowles will later term, in Daniel Martin, a novel that parallels The Magus, “whole sight”. Situating his conversion to this way of thinking in his experience of the First World War, Conchis first introduces Nicholas to the ideology he associates with the feminine: “I experienced the very opposite of what the German and French metaphysicians of our century have assured us is the truth: that all that is other is hostile to the individual. To me all that is other seemed exquisite. Even that corpse, even the squealing rats. To be able to experience, never mind that it was cold and hunger and nausea, was a miracle. Try to imagine that one day you discover you have a sixth, a

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John Fowles: Visionary and Voyeur till then unimagined new sense – something not comprehended in feeling, seeing, the conventional five. But a far profounder sense, the source from which all others spring. The word ‘being’ no longer passive and descriptive, but active … almost imperative.” (133)

This ontological transformation arises from Conchis’ extraordinary perception of all things as connected, as in balance, in direct contrast to his previous understanding of the universe as hostile to the individual – an understanding that Nicholas not only shares, but nurtures in constructing himself as “the solitary heart” (23). Especially vivid in his descriptions of this and other events, Conchis encourages listener identification, inviting Nicholas to share in both his sensory and his philosophical perceptions. Through this approach, Conchis encourages Nicholas to move beyond his extremely isolated, divided, egocentric, and masculine world view and accept instead an ideology of interconnection and wholeness that Conchis associates with the feminine. In further narrative encounters Conchis continues to challenge Nicholas to reject the socially determined attitudes and values he cherishes, attacking Nicholas’ conception of the universe as inherently antagonistic to the individual. Particularly in his relation of the events on Phraxos during the Second World War, Conchis illustrates the disastrous effects of that masculine ideology: “I should like you also to reflect that its events could have taken place only in a world where man considers himself superior to woman …. That is, a world governed by brute force, humourless arrogance, illusory prestige and primeval stupidity …. Men love war because it allows them to look serious. Because they imagine it is the one thing that stops women laughing at them. In it they can reduce women to the status of objects. That is the great distinction between the sexes. Men see objects, women see the relationship between objects. Whether the objects need each other, love each other, match each other. It is an extra dimension of feeling we men are without and one that makes war abhorrent to all real women – and absurd. I will tell you what war is. War is a psychosis caused by an inability to see relationships.” (420)

In this most direct statement of the feminine ideology that Conchis and his accomplices embody, Conchis both aligns himself with Nicholas as a man whose masculine understanding of the universe is


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limited and suggests that in his acceptance of a woman’s standpoint he possesses a more comprehensive, and ultimately, more humanistic understanding of the universe than Nicholas does. Noting especially men’s tendency to objectify others, especially women, Conchis suggests that the atrocities of war result directly from men’s inability to see connections – an inability he specifically aligns with both himself and Nicholas as men. In (re)constructing this and other narratives, he attempts to initiate Nicholas into a feminine relational ethic. However, apparently resigned to his own limitations as a man, Conchis leaves more direct initiations to Lily/Julie and Lily de Seitas. In their interactions with Nicholas, these women lead Nicholas through a process by which his disconnection from and objectification of women can be gradually replaced with respectful, authentic relationships. In a relationship with Lily/Julie that is both highly scripted and thoughtfully improvised, Nicholas engages in the godgame’s “pattern of participatory observation” that reflects a Jungian methodology in its refusal to separate “the thinking subject (the scientist, etc.) from the observed object (the focus of the experiment)”, and that acknowledges “that we see things less as they are in themselves than as we the observers are”. 15 Through what Nicholas perceives as her betrayal, Lily/Julie forces Nicholas to acknowledge that he knows her only as an object of his own fantasy. Therefore the final disintoxication prepares Nicholas to acknowledge not only that his desire for Lily/Julie was inauthentic, but that his general approach to women is selfish and autoerotic. Less performative, Lily de Seitas offers Nicholas a more straightforward explanation of the godgame and its goals, telling him explicitly that despite his denigration of Lily/Julie and Rose/June, “my daughters were nothing but a personification of your own selfishness” (612) and identifying him as “an unscrupulous collector [who] falls in love with a painting he wants. And will do anything to get” (613). Initially resistant to and threatened by this analysis, and understandably confused and resentful because of his recent experience of the godgame, Nicholas responds to Lily de Seitas with a kind of intimidated terror:

15 Julius Rowan Raper, “John Fowles: The Psychological Complexity of The Magus”, American Imago, XLV/1 (Spring 1988), 68.

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John Fowles: Visionary and Voyeur I was still full of spleen; and in some obscure way frightened to think of Alison in this woman’s hands, as one hears of a countryside one has loved being sold to building developers. And I also felt left behind, abandoned again. I did not belong to this other-planet world. (615)

Profoundly threatened by Lily de Seitas, Nicholas fears not for Alison, but for himself – he fears that Alison-as-object, once exposed to the practitioners of the godgame, will no longer offer him the pleasure he has found in her. Moreover, Nicholas fears that Alison-as-subject, like Lily/Julie, will abandon him precisely because of his inability to accept the unconventional values and ideals that Lily de Seitas describes. At the same time, Alison’s participation in the godgame attracts Nicholas. Despite his frustration and fear, Nicholas begins to appreciate Alison’s complexity and ambiguity as a result of his exposure to the feminine ethic Conchis and Lily de Seitas advocate. Before the godgame, Nicholas is unwilling to acknowledge Alison’s complexity, initially considering her a mere sex object. Constrained by his pornographic and egocentric perspective, Nicholas abandons Alison for his appointment on Phraxos precisely because of his growing awareness of her complexity. 16 After the godgame, however, and especially after his conversations with Lily de Seitas and the unenlightened Mitford, whose brief participation in the godgame was hurriedly aborted because of his total lack of potential, Nicholas begins to reconsider not only his view of Alison, whom he can now understand as refreshingly real, without artifice, but also his view of himself: “I thought of Lily de Seitas; how to her I must seem as Mitford did to myself. A barbarian” (627). This admission suggests that Nicholas, although not yet committed to Conchis’ feminine vision of wholeness, authenticity, and reciprocal trust in relationships, has at least learned to entertain alternative points of view. Considering the rigidity and antagonism inherent to Nicholas’ original perspective, this conversion, limited though it may be, is rather extraordinary. Despite Nicholas’ behavior in the final scene, his growing awareness of himself as limited by his selfishness and objectification of women suggests that the godgame succeeds in altering his perspective and allows him to pursue a more authentic existence in respectful connection with others. By re-inscribing 16

Ibid., 62.


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himself within the narrative of his experience, Nicholas appears to engage in a self-reflexive examination of his attitudes that simultaneously invites readers to evaluate his progress. By establishing his narrative dominance throughout the text, and by further emphasizing Conchis’ dominance as magus within his domain, Nicholas challenges readers to judge all the characters and evaluate their values and behavior. This activity requires readers to practice vigilant resistance to the narrative scheme of the novel and to read against their own passivity. In this way, Fowles uses Nicholas’ self-reflexive narrative to promote a plurality of interpretations of the godgame, of Nicholas’ success as an initiate of a feminine ideology, and of the novel as a whole. By dramatizing the confrontation between a masculine perspective characterized by performance and violence and a feminine perspective embodying authenticity and complexity, Fowles encourages readers to evaluate Nicholas’ experience and to consider the dominant ideologies that structure their own points of view. The Magus thus enacts an approach similar to feminist standpoint epistemology, requiring readers to consider how their own biases and values affect their response to Conchis, to Nicholas, and to the indeterminacy of the novel's ending. Fowles’ deliberate snipping of the narrative thread in this ending makes this requirement explicit. In ending the novel this way, Fowles offers readers a choice, simultaneously suggesting that in order to understand their choices, readers must engage in a process of self-examination similar to Nicholas’ in recording his experience of the godgame. Therefore the novel’s meaning is necessarily multiple, complex, and dependent on an active dialogue between reader and text. Fowles advocates a feminist standpoint approach not only through Conchis’ construction of the godgame, but also in his own structuring of The Magus. However, this scheme functions problematically precisely because of Fowles’ simultaneous devotion to mystery and seduction. So reliant on active, self-reflexive reading, and so devoted to complexity and ambiguity, The Magus is also notoriously vague in terms of the philosophy it purports to advocate. As a more compelling perspective than Nicholas’, this feminine outlook clearly motivates Conchis and his accomplices to undermine social constructions and encourage individuals to pursue self-actualization. However, because readers encounter this perspective only through Nicholas’ confused,

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masculine point of view, and because his point of view reflects Fowles’ own limitations as a male writer, 17 this feminine ideology materializes in fragments only. Indeed, readers suffer from a perplexity Nicholas verbalizes after he watches Lily/Julie and Joe make love: “Everything I had ever thought to understand about woman receded, interwove, flowed into mystery, into distorting shadows and currents, like objects sinking away, away, down through shafted depths of water” (539). This perplexity results partly from the fact that Nicholas’ and Conchis’ various narratives always defer meaning. Perhaps the most tantalizing tease of this novel full of suspense and provocation is the always present yet never fulfilled promise of penetrating the perspectives of the women characters. Indeed, in a novel purporting to advocate a feminine ideology, it is singularly odd that Fowles never explores the motivations and superior insights of the women characters through their own perspectives. Instead, Fowles relies on his essentialist ideology in defining the feminine ethic he advocates through Conchis, Lily de Seitas, and Alison. Like Nicholas, Fowles projects his own fantasies of women's virtues onto his women characters and into the philosophy he advocates. Central to Conchis’ teachings, for example, is the tenet that real women abhor war because of their ability to see relationships – a belief that engages an essentialist gender ideology by rigidly situating femininity within a specific social and political point of view that suggests women who do not subscribe to this attitude deny their own inherent being. Similarly defined by traditional gender associations, Lily de Seitas’ most fundamental characteristic appears to be mysteriousness. Although she offers Nicholas the most straightforward explanation of the godgame of any of the characters, ultimately she relies on euphemistic references to “certain … leaps” taken and “certain gaps bridged” in her explanation of the godgame’s design to reproduce “something of the mysterious purposes that govern existence” (638-39). In these two most impressive magi, Fowles valorizes characteristics traditionally associated with the feminine – commitment to relationships, objection to violence and 17 Fowles has commented, “I did toy for many years with the idea of making Conchis a woman too, but I realised some of his acts were male (because the writer’s male) and so I couldn’t do that” (Relf, “Interview”, 125).


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war, mysteriousness, vagueness, intuitiveness – rather than qualities arising out of the specific situations of either individual or group experiences. More problematic than this archetypal characterization of his magi is Fowles’ construction of Alison, on whom Conchis and his accomplices confer their enthusiastic praise. Although the godgame seeks to encourage Nicholas to adopt alternative attitudes, its simultaneous imperative is to convince him of Alison’s excellence. Alison is exceptionally honest, without pretence, and resistant to social convention. However, the principal virtue that Conchis, and especially Lily de Seitas, associate with her is “a very rare capacity for attachment and devotion” that is “very precious”. She is, Lily de Seitas insists, “a little piece of pure womankind”. Commenting that Alison possesses a special talent for giving herself and identifying that talent as “the one great quality our sex has to contribute to life” (612), Lily de Seitas further suggests that Alison in some ways surpasses even her as a woman. This singular celebration of women’s ability to devote themselves to others associates Alison’s personal authenticity with femininity at large, suggesting that for women at least, authentic existence requires devotion to others – an argument that slides precariously towards advocating women’s selflessness. Moreover, the “complexity” that Conchis and the others encourage Nicholas to appreciate in Alison breaks down into what is for him a paradox: Alison is both sexually available and emotionally, if not intellectually, sophisticated. In other words, Alison is rather like the traditional “whore with a heart of gold”. Sexually talented, emotionally sophisticated, and exceptionally capable of attachment, Alison represents the pinnacle of the problematic feminine ideology Conchis and his accomplices advocate. Moreover, this representation remains simply that – a summary, an illustration. Both Fowles and his magi dismiss significant aspects of Alison’s situation that contribute to her complexity – her Australian identity, her emotional instability, her decision to have an abortion – suggesting that such aspects of her personality are of no consequence in comparison to her essential femininity. Far more thorough in his construction of Nicholas’ flawed perspective than in describing the ideology he purports to advocate, Fowles reveals in The Magus both a genuine interest in women’s ways of knowing and being and a problematic insistence on understanding

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those epistemological and ontological systems only through his own projected fantasies. Still committed in this early novel to a kind of authorial tease through which readers experience endless stimulation but can never achieve more than tantalizing fragments of his own implied larger vision, Fowles both challenges readers to explore the feminine ideology he advocates and contains them within a masculine attitude Nicholas epitomizes. Associating Conchis’ progressive outlook explicitly with women, Fowles simultaneously shrouds that perspective in mystery, encouraging readers to adopt Nicholas’ desire for penetrating women’s intimate and private worlds: “What had always attracted me in the opposite sex was what they tried to hide, what provoked all the metaphorical equivalents of seducing them out of their clothes into nakedness” (393). Relying on the seductive power of his mysterious women characters and his mystifying feminine ethic, Fowles therefore explores in The Magus not an authentic woman’s standpoint, but a projected masculine fantasy.

CHAPTER THREE A CRISIS OF AUTHORITY: FANTASY AND FEMINISM IN THE FRENCH LIEUTENANT’S WOMAN

In its exploration of both the pleasures and the pitfalls of masculine fantasy, Fowles’ third novel, The French Lieutenant’s Woman, revolves around Fowles’ most provocative heroine, the mysterious Sarah Woodruff. Incorporating a unique authorial perspective through footnotes and an intrusive modern narrator whose twentieth-century knowledge frames and comments on the Victorian story, The French Lieutenant’s Woman perfectly positions Sarah as an “outsider within”. Within her Victorian society, Sarah performs the role of social outcast, marginalized from society and simultaneously at the center of its attention. Within the larger narrative of the text, Sarah occupies a similar position, since the narrator, despite his occasional omniscience, is as intrigued with Sarah as his Victorian characters are, though he is never able (or willing) to penetrate her consciousness. Characterized most clearly by mysteriousness, Sarah challenges her fellow characters and readers alike to contemplate her consciousness, particularly in order to comprehend her generally incomprehensible actions. Within the story, both the narrator and the Victorian characters satisfy themselves with constant surveillance over Sarah’s activities, watching and categorizing her according to their own standards. Through such surveillance, readers negotiate competing masculine visions: that of the villagers of Lyme, whose understanding of Sarah reflects the patriarchal prejudices of the time; that of Charles, whose fascination with Sarah ranges from philanthropic to erotic; and that of the modern narrator/author as a controlling influence, whose refusal to explain his heroine determines her inaccessibility. Through these perspectives, Sarah remains, like the women in The Magus, a mysterious threat, admirable and able to inspire male activity, but never coherently motivated or explored. These perspectives force readers to contend with fragmented

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masculine visions always focused on Sarah as an object of analysis, and because of their fragmentary nature, these visions are frustrating, ultimately falling short of the complete picture presumably accessible only to Fowles. At the same time, Sarah represents a prototype for the “New Woman” whose unconventional attitudes and actions expose the oppressive machinations of both social and narrative authority. Despite his determination not to explain Sarah, Fowles provides readers with useful details about her circumstances and, more importantly, allows her to articulate piercing analyses of the injustices inherent in her society. Contextualizing Sarah’s behavior through this exploration of her situation, Fowles validates a feminist standpoint approach by presenting a woman character who pursues and enacts a politically engaged and practically grounded standpoint. Reluctant to appropriate his heroine’s perspective, Fowles constructs Sarah not merely as a seductively mysterious woman, but as a woman who recognizes the limitations of epistemological and ontological systems available to her – structures through which twentieth-century readers continue to operate – and who rejects those systems in favor of more intuitive and authentic ways of knowing and being. These contrary readings indicate the complexity of this most critically acclaimed of Fowles’ works. Yet these readings also indicate a profound ambivalence in Fowles’ ambitions and attitudes toward his authority. Determined to pursue his advocacy of a feminine ethic, cognizant of his problematic fascination with women’s inexplicability, and increasingly resistant to dominating his characters and readers, Fowles offers in The French Lieutenant’s Woman a text fraught with tension and complicated by competing authorial desires. Through this novel, Fowles acknowledges that inscribing his masculine fantasies of domination and seduction in his fiction is incompatible with his artistic attraction to narrative freedom, his philosophical interest in authentic and alternative epistemological and ontological systems, and his political commitment to feminist advocacy. Exploring his contradictory ambitions in The French Lieutenant’s Woman, Fowles represents in narrative form a crisis of authority that initiates a transition in his work from fragmentation to multiplicity, from manipulation to provocation, and from voyeurism to whole sight. These tensions are immediately accentuated through the narrator’s introduction, in which critical surveillance of the characters and the

Fantasy and Feminism in The French Lieutenant’s Woman 103 narrative establishes The French Lieutenant’s Woman as a novel constructed on a voyeuristic model. Beginning his tale with a telescopic vision of Lyme, gradually narrowing his focus on Charles and Ernestina in their promenade along the Cobb, and finally onto Sarah, a “figure from myth” gazing enigmatically out to sea, 1 the narrator as “local spy” uses what Olshen identifies as a “modern, cinematic panorama” to introduce the novel’s main characters. 2 Blending the conventions of a Victorian novel with a cinematic point of view, the narrator immediately situates readers within a voyeuristic context, a location from which they will visually penetrate the Victorian world of the narrative. Indeed, Kadish reads these opening pages as evidence of the narrator’s interest in more transgressive visual practices, comparing his description of Lyme to “a voyeur or a pornographer fetishistically isolating parts of feminine bodies”. 3 This association of landscape/seascape with women’s bodies is justified, for later in the novel, another local spy, Grogan, will focus his own telescope rather similarly – and consciously “wickedly” – on the Lyme beachfront to view the “nereids” bathing there (150). Furthermore, this voyeuristic surveillance of Lyme, and especially of Lyme-as-woman, anticipates the principal pleasures of the narrative, defining Victorian society generally, and Sarah specifically, as objects of speculation. Despite the fact that the narrator couches his story in the conventions of the Victorian novel, The French Lieutenant’s Woman is fundamentally a contemporary postmodern work that interrogates various ways of constructing experience. Accordingly, the narrative relies on the visual image, reflecting both Fowles’ understanding of the cinema as fundamental to contemporary narrative attitudes 4 and his assertion that the novel was inspired by a persistent and provocative image of Sarah staring out to sea. 5 However, not exactly a dispassionate observer, the narrator achieves his visual presentation of the story through intrusive cinematic devices that rely on traditional forms of voyeurism, such as watching a young 1

John Fowles, The French Lieutenant’s Woman, Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1969, 5. 2 Olshen, John Fowles, 67. 3 Doris Y. Kadish, “Rewriting Women’s Stories”, 78. 4 Fowles, “I Write Therefore I Am”, in Wormholes, ed. Relf, 7. 5 Fowles, “Notes on an Unfinished Novel”, in Wormholes, ed. Relf, 13.

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woman undress before her mirror or staring at a silhouetted woman through her window. 6 Intruding not only into readers’ consciousness through his historical musings but also through such spying on his women characters, the narrator projects himself into the narrative as a kind of interactive critic, both commenting on the action and simultaneously emphasizing his characters’ sexuality/textuality. This emphasis is particularly significant for Sarah, whose mysteriousness entices both characters and readers into acts of interpretation. Thoroughly convinced of surveillance as an organizing life-principle, the Victorian characters are particularly conscious of ways of seeing and of being seen. Mrs Poulteney, for example, frets about the eventual destination of her immortal soul, unsettled by the vicar’s pronouncement that, “The Creator is all-seeing and all-wise” (22). Ernestina likewise accepts both divine and secular surveillance as factors in her intimate reflections. As the narrator reports, Ernestina thinks specifically of Charles’ values, and abstractly of more spiritual directives, as she writes in her diary: “She wrote partly for his eyes – as, like every other Victorian woman, she wrote partly for His eyes” (253). Such awareness of external observation is not limited to the novel’s women; Charles is equally conscious of how he and his actions must appear, repeatedly imagining “what anyone who was secretly watching might think” (143). The “anyone” Charles fears is not exactly divine – Charles’ faith is quite ambivalent compared to his reverence for Darwin – but more immediately present, since he fears surveillance both by contemporary embodied folk and by ancestors whose standards he hopes to meet. Particularly conscious of the observation and implicit judgment of both their earthly community and its heavenly counterpart, the Victorian characters feel both justified and obligated to monitor one another with special vigilance. Because of her apparently deliberate anti-social behavior, Sarah inspires the members of her community into especially relentless and constant acts of surveillance and interpretation, all of which attempt to locate Sarah within well-established narrative conventions. 7 The most stereotypically Victorian interpretation of Sarah comes from Ernestina, whose physical and intellectual demeanor corresponds exactly to her society’s expectations, despite her occasional 6

Tarbox, The Art of John Fowles, 82. Katherine Tarbox, “The French Lieutenant’s Woman and the Evolution of Narrative”, Twentieth Century Literature, XLII/1 (Spring 1996), 89-91. 7

Fantasy and Feminism in The French Lieutenant’s Woman 105 misdemeanors in what Charles considers vulgarity. Thoroughly conditioned by and comfortable within her social location, Ernestina’s only analytical attention to her community reflects her father’s low opinion of the upper classes, which she acknowledges only after Charles has jilted her, and her discomfort with servants, as evidenced by her relationship with Mary. To Ernestina, Sarah’s deliberate flaunting of Victorian convention, and the social critique it implies, is profoundly unsettling, particularly because of Sarah’s assumed sexual misconduct. So frightened of sexuality that a mere glimpse of her bed while admiring herself in the mirror causes her to hastily cover herself (28), Ernestina cannot even bring herself to use the local term for Sarah, who allows the town to believe that in making herself sexually available to the French lieutenant she has become his “Hoer” (86). In contrast to Sarah’s direct admission of her infamous title (“there walks the French Lieutenant’s Whore – oh yes, let the word be said” [17576]), Ernestina resorts first to romanticism in informing Charles of her reputation, referring initially to Sarah as “poor Tragedy” (8), and when pressed by Charles, to euphemism, calling her “the French Lieutenant’s ... Woman” (9). Thus Ernestina provides both Sarah and the narrative with a title reflecting external definition and implicit anxiety. To the pervasive sense of anxiety permeating Sarah’s interactions with her community, Mrs Poulteney and Mrs Fairley add pious judgment. Eager to secure both her own salvation and the envy of her rival in Christian charity, Lady Cotton, through her dedication to helping a poor, mad sinner achieve repentance, Mrs Poulteney insists on defining Sarah in terms of “her only too visible sorrow, which showed she was a sinner” (36) and her inconvenient ability to reproach and unsettle company before whom Mrs Poulteney would like to exhibit her pious benevolence (60). Resistant to seeing Sarah in more complex ways as well as obliged to monitor her unstable charge’s activities, Mrs Poulteney relies on another local spy, her servant Mrs Fairley, whose talent for surveillance rivals only the narrator’s. Among the sharpest eyes in Lyme – “a town of sharp eyes” (291), as Charles will later reflect in London – are those of Mrs Fairley, whose enthusiasm for spying on Sarah is motivated by “a hatred that slowly grew almost vitriolic in its intensity”. With “excellent opportunities to do her spying” on her frequent journeys

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into town and “a wide network of relations and acquaintances at her command”, Mrs Fairley, more than any other individual in the novel, collects detailed accounts of Sarah’s “every movement and expression – darkly exaggerated and abundantly glossed” (61). Resentful of Sarah’s assumption of various attentions to Mrs Poulteney as well as Sarah’s popularity with the other servants, Mrs Fairley deliberately portrays her rival as promiscuous and exhibitionist, particularly in her propensity to walk in the wildly natural Ware Commons – an offense roughly equivalent, in Mrs Poulteney’s eyes, to prostitution. Willing herself not to see Sarah in terms of her sexuality as long as she exhibits proper repentance, Mrs Poulteney is particularly affronted by Sarah’s deliberate journeys to Lyme’s “de facto Lover’s Lane” (90), a place she associates, the narrator conjectures, with “satanic orgies” and “French abominations” (92). Appalled by Sarah’s refusal to renounce her desires and conform to convention, Mrs Poulteney and Mrs Fairley together define Sarah as “a public scandal” and a “wicked Jezebel” (244, 245), both traditional labels for women who challenge patriarchal religious and sexual norms. More thoughtful but no less patriarchal, Dr Grogan views Sarah in terms of melancholy and hysteria narratives. Situating her case firmly within a scientific context in which women’s behavior is analyzed and judged, Grogan attributes Sarah’s behavior not to willfulness but to illness, describing her apparent desire to remain perpetually miserable as a kind of addiction. He tells Charles, “Her sadness becomes her happiness. She wants to be a sacrificial victim, Smithson. Where you and I flinch back, she leaps forward. She is possessed, you see” (156). An “advanced man for his time and place” (59), Grogan views Sarah from a perspective grounded in the scientific method and reliant on logic, and offers a plausible, if incorrect, assessment of Sarah’s deliberate suffering. 8 Increasingly convinced of Sarah’s commitment to her misery, Grogan ultimately defines Sarah in terms of a stereotypically feminine reliance on emotion and incapacity for logic, explaining to Charles, “You must not think she is like us men, able to reason clearly, examine her motives, understand why she behaves as she does. One must see her as being in a mist” (156). Despite his genuine concern for Sarah, Grogan imposes patriarchal standards onto

8

Tarbox, The Art of John Fowles, 69.

Fantasy and Feminism in The French Lieutenant’s Woman 107 her situation, and encourages Charles, a fellow Darwinian, to likewise consider her an object to analyze and categorize. Occasionally sharing in each of these interpretations of Sarah while struggling with such views, Charles simultaneously embodies the standards of his era and the subversion of those standards. Both a representative Victorian and an individual struggling with existential angst, Charles negotiates complicated and often contradictory perspectives as he attempts to understand the mysteriously alluring Sarah. Cognizant that the familiar categories in which he tries to place Sarah fail to explain her behavior adequately, Charles occupies an interpretive position that mirrors readers’ bewildered fascination with the novel’s heroine. Unlike the inhabitants of Lyme, who willingly focus on only particular aspects of Sarah’s personality in order to ascribe meaning to her behavior, Charles acknowledges more complexity in her character, and contributes to that complexity by projecting his own uncertainties and desires onto her. This difference between Charles’ perspective and the views embraced by Mrs Poulteney, Dr Grogan, and the other inhabitants of Lyme results largely from Charles’ unusual opportunities to observe and interact with Sarah. Although Charles’ initial contact with Sarah challenges him to hone his skills of analysis and perception, his unconventional and secluded interactions with her encourage his voyeurism and imagination. Coming upon her unexpectedly as she sleeps on a ledge in the Undercliff, Charles experiences an irresistible urge to surreptitiously observe and reflect on her as an object on display. Although initially hesitant to engage in a subversive visual act, Charles eventually succumbs to his curiosity, noticing Sarah lying “in the complete abandonment of deep sleep, on her back” (70). Believing that he can observe her without her knowledge, Charles proceeds to examine the supine Sarah from every angle the landscape will allow, considering her in terms of his sexual history: There was something intensely tender and yet sexual in the way she lay; it awakened a dim echo of Charles of a moment from his time in Paris. Another girl, whose name now he could not even remember, perhaps had never known, seen sleeping so, one dawn, in a bedroom overlooking the Seine. He moved round the curving lip of the plateau, to where he could see the sleeper’s face better, and it was only then that he realized whom he had intruded upon …. It irked him strangely

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John Fowles: Visionary and Voyeur that he had to see her upside down, since the land would not allow him to pass round for the proper angle. He stood unable to do anything but stare down, tranced by this unexpected encounter …. He came at last to the very edge of the rampart above her, directly over her face …. It was precisely then, as he craned sideways down, that she awoke. (70-71)

Initially stimulated by the opportunity to gaze on an erotically suggestive woman’s body, Charles is even more excited once he realizes whom he has been watching. This realization prompts not horror, as it might in a more conventional gentleman, but irritation that his location does not provide a better vantage point. Unable, and apparently unwilling, to discontinue his probing gaze, Charles becomes transfixed in a state of voyeuristic absorption. Jolted out of his reverie by Sarah’s awakening, however, Charles reverts to the alienating and passive trappings of convention, apologizing for his presence and walking away. Nevertheless, this voyeuristic encounter establishes an unmistakably active erotic element in Charles’ evolving connection to Sarah. Inspired by this unexpected private viewing, Charles reflects on Sarah as image, frequently noting her appearance and acknowledging the complicated desires her appearance stimulates. Intrigued by Sarah’s unusual combination of severity, evidenced by her conservative and dark clothing, and wildness, suggested especially by her untidily restrained hair, Charles recognizes both the extent to which his fiancée Ernestina reflects the tastes of his society and the extent to which Sarah does not. While Ernestina, pale, fair, and grayeyed, has “exactly the right face for her age; that is, small-chinned, oval, delicate as a violet” (25), Sarah’s appearance suggests more exotic characteristics, as Charles notices: Part of her hair had become loose and half covered her cheek. On the Cobb it had seemed to him a dark brown; now he saw that it had red tints, a rich warmth, and without the then indispensable gloss of feminine hair oil. The skin below seemed very brown, almost ruddy, in that light, as if the girl cared more for health than a fashionably pale and languid-cheeked complexion. A strong nose, heavy eyebrows …. Delicate, fragile, arched eyebrows were then the fashion, but Sarah’s were strong, or at least unusually dark, almost the color of her hair, which made them seem strong, and gave her a faintly tomboyish air on occasion …. Her face was well modeled, and completely feminine;

Fantasy and Feminism in The French Lieutenant’s Woman 109 and the suppressed intensity of her eyes was matched by the suppressed sensuality of her mouth, which was wide – and once again did not correspond with current taste. (71, 119)

Fascinated by this unconventional and darkly alluring appearance, Charles becomes particularly haunted by Sarah’s remarkable face, which takes on a kind of spectacular significance: “It was as if after each sight of it, he could not believe its effect, and had to see it again. It seemed to both envelop and reject him; as if she was a figure in a dream, both standing still and yet always receding” (86). This fascination with Sarah’s face, and less obsessively, her hair, recalls Clegg’s fascination with Miranda’s hair in The Collector. It also reflects a process of fetishization most commonly associated with the cinema, and especially with female stars. In describing the development of and the process through which the star close-up creates a disjuncture between image and narrative, Laura Mulvey argues that such spectacles of idealized women, simultaneously displayed and unavailable, function by associating “both the image and femininity with secrets, with something that lies ‘darkly’ behind the mask”. Seeing Sarah as both inviting and resisting his possession of her, Charles wishes to penetrate the veil of mystery surrounding her, especially in terms of her sexuality, which because of her reputation is constantly on display and yet surrounded by mystery. For Charles, then, “the spectacle of female sexuality becomes one of ‘typography,’ one of surface and secret”. 9 This typography is particularly significant as Charles’ vision of Sarah oscillates between philanthropic concern and erotic desire. Consciously exhibiting her misery and isolation, Sarah inspires both sympathy and pity from her community. Unlike Mrs Poulteney, who considers Sarah’s performative misery an asset in convincing others of her benevolence, Charles initially speaks for the truly compassionate interests of kind-hearted people like Aunt Tranter who sincerely wish to help Sarah. This attitude manifests itself as Charles observes Sarah sleeping in the Undercliff, after he has compared her to his memory of a French prostitute:

9

Laura Mulvey, Fetishism and Curiosity, 41, 46.

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John Fowles: Visionary and Voyeur He stood unable to do anything but stare down, tranced by this unexpected encounter, and overcome by an equally strange feeling – not sexual, but fraternal, perhaps paternal, a certainty of the innocence of this creature, of her being unfairly outcast, and which was in turn a factor of his intuition of her appalling loneliness. He could not imagine what, besides despair, could drive her, in an age where women were semistatic, timid, incapable of sustained physical effort, to this wild place. (71)

While engaged in this kind of compassionate reflection, Charles focuses not on Sarah’s sexual allure, but on her innocence and vulnerability, considering her in terms of conventional womanhood. In this view, Sarah is small, fragile, in need of assistance and protection not only because she is a woman but because her meekness is so convincingly touching. However, in a later encounter at Mrs Poulteney’s, Charles begins to notice that Sarah’s obvious meekness is in fact “contrary to her nature” and that she is “playing a part” that surreptitiously communicates “complete disassociation from, and disapprobation of, her mistress” (103). Furthermore, Charles notes, in the presence of her employer, Sarah appears to be “laboring under a sense of injustice – and, very interestingly to a shrewd observer, doing singularly little to conceal it” (104). In Mulvey’s terms, Sarah, like Marilyn Monroe and other stars, invests a great deal in a spectacular surface image that simultaneously invites the fascinated gazer to consider “both its constructedness and its vulnerability and instability”. 10 As Charles dimly perceives, Sarah masquerades as innocent, humble, meek, and mild in her role as repentant, miserable sinner, simultaneously inviting Charles as “shrewd observer” to deconstruct her surface image and consider the alluring mysteries concealed by her mask of innocence. And especially because she subverts the repentant sinner context in which Mrs Poulteney displays her, Sarah implies a defiantly passionate and erotic nature underlying her performative appearance. Because of his interest in Sarah as secretive and erotically suggestive, Charles has difficulty sustaining his fraternal/paternal attitude and instead concentrates on Sarah as dark, mysterious, and exotic. These associations recall Ourika, the eponymous heroine of Claire de Duras’ novel, that Fowles translated into English. Like 10

Ibid., 48.

Fantasy and Feminism in The French Lieutenant’s Woman 111 Sarah, Ourika is the dark, exotic, sexually mature, and yet romantically spurned alternative to an innocent, socially acceptable, and consummately white woman involved with the man she loves, also named Charles. Similarly melancholic in response to her circumstances, Ourika appears ravished, with the exception of “her extraordinarily large and luminous eyes”. 11 Charles notes a similar composition in Sarah’s face: “All in it had been sacrificed, he now realized, to the eyes” (119). Apparently unaware of these parallels while writing The French Lieutenant’s Woman, Fowles later cited Ourika, or at least its heroine, as “very active in [his] unconscious” during the writing of the novel, even chastising himself for fantasizing about Sarah while being “so stupid as not to see who that woman really was”. Noting “a remnant of color prejudice” in his characterization of Sarah, Fowles asserts, “something in my unconscious cheated on the essential clue. The woman in my mind … had black clothes but a white face”. 12 This admission explains in part Charles’ dual perception of Sarah. While considering Sarah in terms of her oppression, isolation, and vulnerability – that is, in terms of her need for protection and assistance – Charles focuses on the mask, the white face, the spectacular image. While considering Sarah in terms of her eroticism, her mystery, or her passion, however, he associates her with darkness. Such associations are re-inforced by Grogan, who describes Sarah’s mysteriously obsessive displays of passionate emotion as “Dark indeed. Very dark” (156). This portrayal of Sarah identifies her as “the almost white, black woman” popularly characterized as “tragically sexual” in European films. 13 Because of her reputation as the French lieutenant’s whore, Sarah cannot occupy a position Charles ascribes to virginal white women like Ernestina. Instead, she occupies the marginal, exotic, and dangerous space of the scarlet woman. Although Fowles claimed to have been haunted by Sarah’s white face, in terms 11

Duras, Ourika, trans. John Fowles, 4. Kadish argues that this description of Ourika's eyes reflects Fowles’ desire to enhance “male medical discourse”, since his translation varies from a more straightforward rendering like “her large and shiny eyes” (Kadish, “Rewriting Women's Stories”, 76). 12 Fowles, Foreword, in Duras, Ourika, xxix-xxx. 13 bell hooks, “Selling Hot Pussy: Representations of Black Female Sexuality in the Cultural Marketplace”, in Black Looks: Race and Representation, Boston: South End Press, 1992, 74.

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of her sexuality, she occupies a space associated in contemporary culture with black women: “Undesirable in the conventional sense, which defines beauty and sexuality as desirable only to the extent that it is idealized and unattainable, the black female body gains attention only when it is synonymous with accessibility, availability, when it is sexually deviant”. 14 Charles’ interpretation of Sarah as the sexually deviant, dark other is most clearly displayed as she “confesses” her experience with the French lieutenant, Varguennes. Begging him to listen as she relates this erotically charged narrative, Sarah both repels and attracts Charles, who again notices her eyes and uses their appearance to define his view of her: “Only the eyes were more intense: eyes without sun, bathed in an eternal moonlight” (143). Once he has heard this tale, Charles intuits, his ability to consider her a conventional woman, to focus on her mask of innocence, will dissolve. Instead, she will become fixed in the “eternal” darkness of the erotic other. Playing to this possibility, Sarah portrays herself as an object of erotic fantasy in her “confession”. Describing the encounter in sensual detail, Sarah situates Charles (and readers) within her narrative, finally climactically declaring, “I gave myself to him” (174). Stimulated by this performance, Charles completes her suggestive tale within his imagination: He saw the scene she had not detailed: her giving herself. He was at one and the same time Varguennes enjoying her and the man who sprang forward and struck him down; just as Sarah was to him both an innocent victim and a wild, abandoned woman. Deep in himself he forgave her her unchastity; and glimpsed the dark shadows where he might have enjoyed it himself. (176)

Sarah’s seduction functions by suggestion, prompting Charles to engage in a voyeuristic fantasy similar to those that Clegg reports in The Collector. Like Clegg fantasizing about striking down a man attacking Miranda and then attacking her himself, Charles imagines himself in both the position of sexual partner and the position of voyeur, making love to Sarah and “striking down” the man to whom 14

Ibid., 65-66. For a similar argument, see Patricia Hill Collins’ chapter entitled, “The Sexual Politics of Black Womanhood”, in Black Feminist Thought, 2nd edn, New York: Routledge, 2000, 123-48.

Fantasy and Feminism in The French Lieutenant’s Woman 113 he watches her give herself. In this respect Charles functions as a stand-in for readers, who voyeuristically experience Sarah’s narrative along with him and later observe as he makes love to Sarah himself. This single act of sexual penetration convinces Charles that in at least some respects he understands Sarah “profoundly”. Yet he also recognizes that even after their sexual encounter, in other respects his understanding of her is “ignorant” (370). Readers share this sense, as they too know Sarah in terms of her sexuality – indeed, readers know more about Sarah’s sexual mores at this point than Charles, having observed Sarah planning to seduce him – but remain mystified about her motivations. Like Charles and the inhabitants of Lyme, readers have little alternative but to consider Sarah through voyeuristic interpretations and fragmented accounts of her behavior, particularly because the narrator refuses to enter her consciousness. Examining the thoughts of each of the other main characters, the narrator explicitly queries, “Who is Sarah? Out of what shadows does she come?” (94), but declines his authority to explore Sarah’s perspective, sanctimoniously declaring, “Possibility is not permissibility” (96). This refusal both reveals the narrator’s conception of Sarah as the dark Other and indicates his deliberate decision to keep her in shadow. Providing readers with a private viewing of Sarah at her window that none of the characters (except him) share, the narrator engages in just enough peeping to tantalize readers with a little textual voyeurism, and then makes Sarah responsible for this narrative teasing. Contemplating his authority to explain his heroine, the narrator claims: But I find myself suddenly like a man in the sharp spring night, watching from the lawn beneath that dim upper window in Marlborough House; I know in the context of my book’s reality that Sarah would never have brushed away her tears and leaned down and delivered a chapter of revelation. She would instantly have turned, had she seen me there just as the old moon rose, and disappeared into the interior shadows. (96)

Rather than admitting that he finds such surreptitious surveillance stimulating, the narrator instead argues that Sarah herself establishes boundaries that he cannot penetrate. Later in the novel, just after he describes Sarah arranging various objects in her room in Exeter, the

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narrator claims to respect such parameters, and again associates Sarah with darkness: She seemed waiting in the quiet light and crackle, the firethrown shadows …. And I no more intend to find out what was going on in her mind as she firegazed than I did on that other occasion when her eyes welled tears in the silent night of Marlborough House. (279)

Enjoying the voyeuristic pleasures of spying on Sarah in dark atmospheres suggestively lit by the rising moon or a flickering fire, the narrator offers readers semi-private viewing experiences that evoke intimacy while simultaneously preventing the satisfaction of penetrating Sarah’s consciousness. In this way the narrator represents the reader-as-voyeur, determining readers’ fragmented and incomplete understanding of Sarah as an erotic enigma. Feminist readers have criticized this method, arguing that such reverence for Sarah-as-enigma defines Sarah as an object of voyeuristic analysis and constrains her subjectivity within dominant ideologies. 15 Unlike Ernestina, Charles, or even Mrs Poulteney, all of whose thoughts the narrator examines, Sarah remains enigmatically and suggestively impenetrable, seducing characters, the narrator, and readers into interpretive acts that attempt to define her through fragmented masculine gazes. However, Fowles also has good reasons for retaining Sarah’s mystery, not the least of which concern her status as existential catalyst. Like Conchis and his accomplices in The Magus, Sarah performs an educational function in The French Lieutenant’s Woman, prompting Charles, and readers along with him, to evaluate the hypocrisies and injustices inherent in his worldview and to pursue a more existentially authentic existence. Early in the novel, Sarah’s mysteriousness and sexually explicit reputation provide essential seductive mechanisms through which Charles and readers can initially explore unconventional attitudes. As the novel progresses, Sarah’s continued impenetrability facilitates this existential transformation, since it forces Charles and readers to question radically the rigid narratives they use to define marginalized individuals. Because Sarah’s behavior is unconventional and generally incomprehensible, 15 Michael, “‘Who is Sarah?’ A Critique of The French Lieutenant’s Woman’s Feminism”, 228-231; Kadish, “Rewriting Women's Stories”, 79.

Fantasy and Feminism in The French Lieutenant’s Woman 115 and because it suggests vital and relational qualities absent in Charles’ epistemological and ontological realities, Charles is willing to make choices that facilitate existential authenticity, even though his motivation for making those choices is to capture, possess, and comprehend Sarah. Despite this problematic motivation, Fowles suggests that Charles’ pursuit of Sarah is ultimately admirable and worthwhile, particularly in his statement in the last ending that Charles, despite his failure to possess Sarah, “has at last found an atom of faith in himself, a true uniqueness, on which to build” (467). In terms of Charles’ development, Fowles validates Sarah’s role as enigmatic muse, inspiring her male admirer to acts of creativity and authenticity. However, Fowles’ deliberate refusal to explain his heroine also reflects an intense desire to surrender authorial control and to dramatize the restrictive, limited roles society allows women to occupy. As he explains: I could have analysed Sarah Woodruff more than I did. But not to do so was a conscious decision. One strong reason was that I think women are far less amenable to analysis than men – for a number of historical and biological reasons, but primarily because the ill wind of their past exploitation has brought one good: a kind of common exile that permits them to stand outside the ritual games and role-mania of the average male. Sarah Woodruff was deliberately created to suggest this ‘beneficial’ side of the historical exile.16

Specifically locating Sarah as an outsider to dominant ideologies, and associating that outsider status with a historical situation that has “exiled” women from such ideologies, Fowles suggests that his characterization of Sarah, rather than oppressively confining her within masculine structures, instead liberates her from such “ritual games and role-mania”. Rebecca Lin interprets this authorial decision as indicative of both Fowles’ inability to understand women and his refusal to appropriate women’s perspectives. 17 Beyond her freedom 16 Graham et al., “John Fowles: An Exclusive Interview”, in Conversations with John Fowles, ed. Vipond, 61. 17 Rebecca Lin, “Medusa, Siren or Sphinx: Retrieving the Female Gaze and Voice in The French Lieutenant’s Woman”, Studies in Language and Literature, VIII (December 1998), 200.

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from narrative omniscience, Sarah’s deliberately obscure characterization separates her from Fowles’ earlier heroines, allowing her to embody a more emancipated status independent from authorial impositions and representative of feminist ambitions. Even Michael, Fowles’ most vehement critic on this point, acknowledges that “although Fowles to a certain degree romanticizes Sarah’s quest for a feminist consciousness by depicting her as an enigmatic and tragic figure, the novel does assert this theme of emancipation …. I distinctly hear an authorial voice, Fowles’ voice, within these profeminist discourses.” 18 Although readers cannot access Sarah’s consciousness directly, Fowles provides careful descriptions of Sarah’s penetrating, resistant gaze and allows her to articulate piercing analyses of her situation, both of which establish Sarah’s remarkable status as an outsider within. In keeping with the novel’s emphasis on surveillance and on the motif of watching eyes, Fowles repeatedly emphasizes Sarah’s ability to see her society through unique interpretive lenses. In contrast with Ernestina, who can “cast down her eyes very prettily, as if she might faint should any gentleman dare to address her” (25), Sarah employs her gaze as both a weapon and a mirror, forcing the recipients of her looks to reevaluate their assumptions. When Charles first sees Sarah on the Cobb, for example, he immediately notices “how her stare was aimed like a rifle at the farthest horizon” (9); after addressing her with transparently trite pleasantries, he receives a typical look from Sarah, one which looks not at him but through him: Again and again, afterwards, Charles thought of that look as a lance; and to think so is of course not merely to describe an object but the effect it has. He felt himself in that brief instant an unjust enemy; both pierced and deservedly diminished. (10)

Seeing himself in the reflection of Sarah’s gaze, Charles feels uncomfortably penetrated and comprehended, especially because Sarah manages to use her gaze to subvert Charles’ imposition of patronizing conventions. In their subsequent meetings, Sarah continues to use her gaze to expose the injustices she suffers both at society’s hands and through 18 Michael, “‘Who is Sarah?’ A Critique of The French Lieutenant’s Woman’s Feminism”, 227.

Fantasy and Feminism in The French Lieutenant’s Woman 117 Charles’ refusal to acknowledge her suffering. Repeatedly resisting Sarah’s intense pleas for assistance, Charles focuses on his reputation, always at the mercy of potential secret watchers, and attempts to withdraw from her presence. Sarah’s response is to fix Charles with ever more revealing looks. As the narrator reports in one case: Her eyes were anguished ... and anguishing; an outrage in them, a weakness abominably raped. They did not accuse Charles of the outrage, but of not seeing that it had taken place. (139)

Especially aware of the inauthentic roles the members of her community play, Sarah uses her gaze to expose Charles’ posturing, which obscures the injustice endemic to a society arranged by rigid categories. This dynamic is especially poignant when Charles assumes the role of “Alarmed Propriety” (144), to which Sarah responds with a look of typically understated reproach: Though direct, it was a timid look. Yet behind it lay a very modern phrase: Come clean, Charles, come clean. It took the recipient off balance. (145)

Although Charles never fully comprehends Sarah’s social analyses, her piercing gaze convinces him that his own role-playing is inauthentic. Indeed, it is this very perception that catalyzes Charles’ unusual pursuit of Sarah and establishes his potential for becoming existentially authentic. Yet Sarah’s piercing gaze exposes more than merely Charles’ existential shortcomings. The narrator describes Sarah’s interpretive vision as nearly flawless in its ability to disregard irrelevancies and social conditioning: She could sense the pretensions of a hollow argument, a false scholarship, a biased logic when she came across them; but she also saw through people in subtler ways. Without being able to say how, any more than a computer can explain its own processes, she saw them as they were and not as they tried to seem. It would not be enough to say she was a fine moral judge of people. Her comprehension was broader than that. (52)

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Both intelligent and discerning, and apparently innately so, Sarah possesses a penetrating and socially conscious gaze that uncovers the essential qualities of both individuals and institutions. This ability is both a blessing and a curse, as it allows Sarah to analyze social situations with great insight and accuracy, but also reveals to her the disappointing wholeness of individuals and institutions more easily accepted when only partially understood. In fact, it is precisely this ability that dooms her to imminent spinsterhood, a condition that precipitates her radical behavior with the French lieutenant: she is unable to accept any suitors because her “innate curse” reveals too clearly her suitors’ “meannesses, their condescensions, their charities, their stupidities” (54). Through these carefully noted instances of Sarah’s superior insight, Fowles establishes Sarah’s penetrating gaze as a precondition for her developing standpoint, which evolves as she enlarges her vision through analysis of the social, economic, and political conditions in which she finds herself. Although Sarah’s initial social analysis relies on fiction and poetry “as a substitute for experience”, her incompatible education and social status soon disabuse her of her purely poetic understanding of the world, forcing her to choose between equally unattractive options. As the narrator reports: But alas, what she had thus taught herself had been very largely vitiated by what she had been taught. Given the veneer of a lady, she was made the perfect victim of a caste society. Her father had forced her out of her own class, but could not raise her to the next. To the young men of the one she had left she had become too select to marry; to those of the one she aspired to, she remained too banal. (53)

Unable to marry, both because of her awkward social status and because of her ability to see through her potential suitors, and saddled with an increasingly delusional father whose class pretensions eventually drive him both into the poorhouse and into the madhouse, Sarah finds herself in need of employment, choosing to become a governess. Although this lifestyle at least allows Sarah to employ her education, it taunts her with a state of domestic contentment she can never possess. Tormented by her sense of injustice that such pleasure will apparently never be hers even though it is the privilege of her employer, Mrs Talbot, who is “[her] own age exactly” (169), Sarah

Fantasy and Feminism in The French Lieutenant’s Woman 119 decides to pursue Varguennes. Although Charles claims to understand this decision, or at least uses a mask of understanding to encourage Sarah to continue her confession, Sarah is quick to correct him and to establish her lived experiences as the basis of her wider social analysis: “You cannot, Mr. Smithson. Because you are not a woman. Because you are not a woman who was born to be a farmer’s wife but educated to be something ... better …. You were not born a woman with a natural respect, a love of intelligence, beauty, learning …. And you were not ever a governess, Mr. Smithson, a young woman without children paid to look after children. You cannot know that the sweeter they are the more intolerable the pain is. You must not think I speak of mere envy. I loved little Paul and Virginia, I feel for Mrs. Talbot nothing but gratitude and affection – I would die for her or her children. But to live each day in scenes of domestic happiness, the closest spectator of a happy marriage, home, adorable children …. It came to seem to me as if I were allowed to live in paradise, but forbidden to enjoy it.” (169)

Specifically noting her status as a spectator, an outsider within this blissful home, Sarah subverts the pleasures of surveillance, instead emphasizing the alienation and frustration that such a position engenders. Misunderstanding her point, Charles insists that “social privilege does not necessarily bring happiness”, and presses Sarah to admit to exaggerating her alienation, commenting, “But surely you can’t pretend that all governesses are unhappy – or remain unmarried?”. To this query Sarah replies, “All like myself” (170), connecting her feelings of alienation and frustration both to her personal experience and to a wider acknowledgment of the shared oppression of women who are similarly situated. Through such analyses, Sarah illustrates the epistemological vigor of an outsider within position that affords a social location from which particular experiences and critical analysis may combine to “bring into focus questions and issues that were not visible, ‘important,’ or legitimate within the dominant institutions, their conceptual frameworks, cultures, and practices”. 19 19

Sandra Harding, Is Science Multicultural? Postcolonialisms, Feminisms, and Epistemologies, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998, 17.

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Indeed, Sarah further argues, her situation reflects larger issues of class conflict, exhibited within her experience in her fixation on material goods. Just as Sarah observes domestic happiness without fully participating in it in the Talbots’ home, she feels further tormented by their economic security and material comforts, which Sarah understands to be beyond her reach. As she tells Charles: “Four years ago my father was declared bankrupt. All our possessions were sold,” she tells Charles. “Ever since then,” she explains, “I have suffered from the illusion that even things – mere chairs, tables, mirrors – conspire to increase my solitude. You will never own us, they say, we shall never be yours. But always someone else’s.” (171)

Feeling herself tormented within her employer’s comfortable home, Sarah emphasizes her constant awareness of her poverty and her spinsterhood, two conditions imposed upon her by her father’s misplaced aspirations. Connecting her frustration with wider working class struggles, Sarah confesses to Charles: “I know this is madness, I know in the manufacturing cities poverties and solitude exist in comparison to which I live in comfort and luxury. But when I read of the Unionists’ wild acts of revenge, part of me understands. Almost envies them, for they know where and how to wreak their revenge. And I am powerless.” (171)

Unable to resign herself to what Charles perceptively understands to be “the slow, tantalizing agonies of her life as a governess” (175), Sarah acknowledges her own relative privilege, but nevertheless seethes with anger and resentment that she should have so few alternatives, so few opportunities, to pursue her personal, intellectual, and economic interests. However, she is not powerless. Although she does not “wreak her revenge” through violent or even aggressive tactics, Sarah does enact various strategies that destabilize Victorian conventions and draw attention to her suffering. The most significant of these strategies, obviously, is her decision to associate herself with Varguennes, thereby establishing her reputation as the French Lieutenant’s Woman. To Charles, she justifies this decision as an act of desperation:

Fantasy and Feminism in The French Lieutenant’s Woman 121 “I did it so that I should never be the same again. I did it so that people should point at me, should say, there walks the French Lieutenant’s Whore – oh yes, let the word be said. So that they should know I have suffered, and suffer, as others suffer in every town and village in this land …. It was a kind of suicide. An act of despair, Mr. Smithson. I know it was wicked . . . blasphemous, but I knew no other way to break out of what I was.”

Deliberately sacrificing her respectability and her acceptable but restrictive social identity, Sarah embraces this role with a specific aim of provocation; she wants her community to contemplate the conditions that could prompt a woman in her position to take such a radical step. In fact, she does not actually engage in intercourse with Varguennes – a decision in keeping with her self-protective and insightful character – but allows her community to believe that she has. In so doing, Sarah liberates herself from conventional narratives through which her society defines and constrains women: “Sometimes I almost pity [other women] …. I think I have a freedom they cannot understand. No insult, no blame, can touch me. Because I have set myself beyond the pale. I am nothing, I am hardly human any more. I am the French Lieutenant’s Whore.” (175)

However, this role, while certainly calling attention to Sarah’s suffering, initially functions by merely displacing Sarah from one set of narrative conventions to another, as the interpretations imposed upon her by Ernestina, Mrs Poulteney, and Dr Grogan indicate. She therefore continues to subvert her community’s expectations, continuously seeking a social space in which she might reject all limiting categorizations. The behaviors associated with this objective – her staring out to sea, her acceptance of the post at Marlborough House, her refusal to accept assistance from Mrs Talbot or Aunt Tranter – all work to baffle the residents of Lyme, whose limited imagination allows Sarah very little room to carve out an authentic identity. In Charles, however, Sarah finds an individual who is intrigued by her unconventional resistance to social norms. Sensing his attraction, Sarah appeals to Charles for assistance, specifically noting his difference from the inhabitants of Lyme and suggesting that

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his travels and studies must have endowed him with a more generous and varied perspective than she generally encounters. She explains: “I live among people the world tells me are kind, pious, Christian people. And they seem to me crueler than the cruelest heathens, stupider than the stupidest animals. I cannot believe that the truth is so. That life is without understanding or compassion. That there are not spirits generous enough to understand what I have suffered and why I suffer … and that, whatever sins I have committed, it is not right that I should suffer so much.”

Stunned by “this articulate account of her feelings, this proof, already suspected but not faced, of an intelligence beyond convention” (141), Charles succumbs to Sarah’s seductions, enabling Sarah to appropriate in his life the role Varguennes has played in hers. Implicating Charles in her situation, luring him out of Lyme to her hotel in Exeter, deceiving him into an intimate meeting with her in her fire lit bedroom, seducing him into an act of brief but world-shattering intercourse, and finally abandoning him, Sarah uses Charles to transcend her role as the French Lieutenant’s Whore. That a woman in her position should pursue such a course of action is totally incomprehensible to Charles, who has trouble associating this typically masculine narrative with any woman, even one as unconventional as Sarah. Still attempting to fit Sarah into familiar representations of women, Charles finds his understanding of Sarah split between competing visions: “he became increasingly unsure of the frontier between the real Sarah and the Sarah he had created in so many such dreams: the one Eve personified, all mystery and love and profundity, and the other a half-scheming, half-crazed governess from an obscure seaside town” (429). Although aspects of her behavior fit these interpretations, Sarah conforms to neither of these visions, especially since, contrary to Charles’ perception of the “real” Sarah versus the “dream” Sarah, these opposing constructions are equally infused with his own projected needs and desires. On her own terms, Sarah’s resistance to categorization, to comprehensive visions that define and explain her, is necessary for her to establish and maintain a satisfactory situation. Although Sarah professes affection for Charles, she abandons him precisely because he is unable to see her except in terms of categorical assumptions, despite the thoughtful analyses of her situation she has shared with

Fantasy and Feminism in The French Lieutenant’s Woman 123 him. Indeed, the process through which Charles begins to interpret Sarah on her own terms does not begin until after he has finally located her in London, after the enigmatic, mysterious seductress image that Charles cherishes has become largely untenable. In her altered circumstances, Sarah subverts all of Charles’ masculine fantasies, and displays a self-assurance that Charles finds bewildering. Indeed, Sarah’s self-possession is evident in both of the novel’s final endings. Although these two endings convey very different resolutions to Charles’ and Sarah’s relationship, both include Sarah’s articulate summary of her contentment and sense of belonging in Rossetti’s circle. 20 Responding to Charles’ desire to marry her, Sarah explains: “I do not wish to marry. I do not wish to marry because ... first, because of my past, which habituated me to loneliness. I had always thought that I hated it. I now live in a world where loneliness is most easy to avoid. And I have found that I treasure it. 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.” (450)

Objecting not to Charles but to the institution of marriage, Sarah reports a commitment to self-determination that forbids any assumption of familiar roles for women. She has come, she argues, to value her independence and to nurture her loneliness, both characteristics that signify her uniqueness. Furthermore, she explains: “I never expected to be happy in life. Yet I find myself happy where I am situated now. I have varied and congenial work – work so pleasant that I no longer think of it as such. I am admitted to the daily conversation of genius …. The persons I have met here have let me see a community of honorable endeavor, of noble purpose, I had not till now known existed in this world …. Mr. Smithson, I am happy, I am at last arrived, or so it seems to me, where I belong …. You may think what you will of me, but I cannot wish my life other than it is at the moment. And not even when I am besought by a man I esteem, who touches me more than I show, from whom I do not deserve such 20 Because the “coin toss” that rewinds the clock and restarts the action in the second ending occurs after Sarah’s articulation, her explanation must be assumed to have occurred in both endings, although the text only reports it in the first ending.

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John Fowles: Visionary and Voyeur a faithful generosity of affection …. And whom I beg to comprehend me.” (450-51)

Having finally located herself within a situation that values her intellect and imagination and that allows her to pursue her ambitions, Sarah resists Charles’ attempts to alter her circumstances. Recognition of this conventional social identity is especially significant for both Charles and readers of the novel, since it indicates Sarah’s exclusive concern for her own happiness and well-being rather than a larger goal of either philosophical or political emancipation. Although numerous critics have chronicled the process whereby Sarah prompts Charles to pursue existential authenticity, and a few critics have argued that Sarah embodies a feminist consciousness, Sarah’s behavior and explanations suggest a far more individual objective. Refusing to justify her behavior through the modes of perception that have previously constrained her, Sarah instead relies on more intuitive and alternative ways of knowing and being in constructing her situation. Most significantly, Sarah specifically rejects rationality as a means of defining or explaining her actions. Citing this decision as a major factor in her dismissal of Charles’, and of another suitor’s, marriage proposal, Sarah indicates her fundamental rejection of logical analysis: “You do not understand. It is not your fault. You are very kind. But I am not to be understood.” “You forget you have said that to me before. I think you make it a matter of pride.” “I meant that 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.” Charles smiled, in spite of himself. “This is absurdity. You refuse to entertain my proposal because I might bring you to understand yourself.” “I refuse, as I refused the other gentleman, because you cannot understand that to me it is not an absurdity.” (452)

Even after this exchange, Charles fails to appreciate the importance of this directive for Sarah. Critics have likewise missed the point of this exchange. Ignoring the social conditions that have marginalized Sarah and prompted her radical behavior – social conditions that she catalogues in some detail – and claiming instead that her refusal to

Fantasy and Feminism in The French Lieutenant’s Woman 125 understand herself results not from any lessons learned from her experiences but rather from an innate inability to engage in rationality, Tony E. Jackson, for example, argues that Sarah cannot work out the meaning of her experiences in a wider context. 21 In fact, Sarah is perfectly able to analyze the meanings of her experiences, and can connect those experiences to larger systemic oppressions affecting other members of her class, sex, and status, and does so repeatedly and in a remarkably articulate fashion that even Charles acknowledges (141). In fact, Sarah’s radical determination not to understand herself reflects an insightful comprehension of the marginalizing and debilitating effects of logical analysis. Perhaps the most fundamental force of patriarchal society, rationality – or more accurately, excessive reverence for rationality – has historically limited the social, political, professional, and intellectual roles that women may assume. Furthermore, man’s reliance on rationality has enabled his alienation from alternative epistemological systems, especially those traditionally associated with threatening others – intuition, for example, traditionally associated with women, or instinct, traditionally associated with nature. In the world of the novel, rationality has worked to define Sarah as deviant, disturbed, even perverse, with undesirable effects, as with Grogan’s scientific and logical diagnosis, for example, which defines Sarah as mentally unstable and best suited to an asylum. In refusing to understand herself, Sarah both resists such machinations and enacts a kind of authenticity essential to Fowles’ understanding of existential freedom. In his reflections on the mystery of Stonehenge, for example, Fowles argues, “Choosing not to know, in an increasingly ‘known’, structured, ordained, predictable world, becomes almost a freedom, a last refuge of the self”. 22 Indeed, Sarah suggests that her motives must not be comprehended through any philosophy available to her. As Ernestina’s, Mrs Poulteney’s, Charles’, and the narrator’s interpretations of Sarah show, the variety of epistemological systems operating within the novel, both within the 21

Tony E. Jackson, “Charles and the Hopeful Monster: Postmodern Evolutionary Theory in The French Lieutenant’s Woman”, Twentieth Century Literature, XLIII/2 (Summer 1997), 230-31. 22 Fowles, The Enigma of Stonehenge, 125.

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Victorian scene and within the contemporary situation of the narrator, are all problematic in terms of their comprehension of Sarah. Although in some respects Sarah is the wild, passionate outcast Ernestina assumes her to be; the suffering sinner Mrs Poulteney considers her; the alluring seductress Charles envisions; and the erotic enigma on whom the narrator spies, Sarah is never any of these things completely, nor is she merely a combination of them. Likewise, she is not merely an overly educated farmer’s daughter, or even the “halfscheming, half-crazed governess from an obscure seaside town” (429) Charles assumes her to be in his more skeptical moments. Instead, Sarah is a complex individual whose interaction with all of these narratives, all commonly accepted representations of women, convinces her of their limiting and controlling function. Determined not to understand herself either in terms of rationality or in terms of these various representations, Sarah instead embraces more intuitive and personally relevant ontological and epistemological systems. Her relationship with Millie, for instance, functions not through any clearly defined social dynamic, but instead through a wordless connection. As the narrator reports: This tender relationship was almost mute. They rarely if ever talked, and if they did, of only the most trivial domestic things. They knew it was that warm, silent co-presence in the darkness that mattered. (159)

Loveday emphasizes the significance of this tender and mute relationship, comparing it to “scenes of intellectual brotherhood” between Charles and Grogan. In contrast to “the intellectual affinity between the two men,” the “wordless, and at the time indeed mindless, communion” between Sarah and Millie illustrates alternative modes of behavior and relation. As Loveday explains, “It is physical; it is female; its members are of the oppressed; in short, it is in the modern sense a kind of sisterhood”. 23 Bonding through Sarah’s intuitive understanding of Millie’s afflictions and a physical relationship that communicates empathy, Sarah and Millie enact an alternative relational system that “creates ambiguities, disrupts intrusive

23

Loveday, The Romances of John Fowles, 73.

Fantasy and Feminism in The French Lieutenant’s Woman 127 ideologies, and demands the dissolution of substantial controlling beliefs”. 24 Likewise, Sarah destabilizes accepted representations of womanhood by associating herself with the natural world. Although both Ernestina and Mrs Poulteney interpret this connection as evidence of her wantonness, Sarah uses it, especially in her interactions with Charles, “as a location, a point of departure for the construction of new and liberatory meanings”. 25 Representing freedom from the narrowly defined and rigidly enforced expectations of her community, the wild, natural setting of the Undercliff enables Sarah to reconstruct her experience with Varguennes not merely as a confession but as a provocation, a directive to Charles to acknowledge the constraints of her previous situation, the tyrannies of her present circumstances, and the possibilities for her future if he assists her. Strategically locating herself within these natural surroundings, Sarah creates an alternative space in which she can proactively pursue a more intuitive and personally authentic way of being. In both her relationship with Millie and her association with nature, Sarah experiences a kind of liberation from restrictive social expectations that enables her to act authentically. Although she is able to apply logical analysis and her sociopolitical consciousness to her situation, Sarah’s assertion that her happiness depends on not understanding herself both reflects her faith in an intuitive, instinctual way of being that deliberately subverts oppressive and controlling categorizations and establishes her primary objective of individual, rather than political, emancipation. Of course, Sarah’s rejection of masculine narratives and pursuit of alternative connections also reflects Fowles’ belief “that women think intuitively and emotionally rather than intellectually, and that they are in touch with a deeper and warmer level of thought and feeling than men ever penetrate to”. Indeed, as the creation of a male author, Sarah necessarily has “depths 24

David W. Landrum, “Sarah and Sappho: Lesbian Reference in The French Lieutenant’s Woman”, Mosaic, XXXIII/1 (March 2000), 75. 25 Suzanne Ross, “‘Water out of a Woodland Spring’: Sarah Woodruff and Nature in The French Lieutenant’s Woman”, in John Fowles and Nature: Fourteen Perspectives on Landscape, ed. James R. Aubrey, Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1999, 190.

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[Fowles] himself cannot plumb”. 26 Fowles’ “famous or notorious refusal to enter Sarah’s consciousness and tell us what she is thinking”, Loveday considers “an ingenious solution to this problem”. Instead of entering her consciousness and illustrating her thought processes, Fowles merely implies that Sarah enacts an authentic woman’s standpoint, and thus avoids describing in any detail the process through which she considers her lived experience, her observations of social relations, her interactions with others, and her ideological convictions as interrelated aspects of a larger social and political situation. Although Fowles does demonstrate Sarah’s insight into her own experience and her ability to connect that experience with wider systems of privilege and oppression, his inability and/or unwillingness to delineate Sarah’s motivations and ideological convictions strategically positions Sarah between two opposing forces: that of connection between men and women and that of mutual alienation. The mystery surrounding Sarah’s motivations, deliberately maintained by both character and author, provides the key to this tension. In fact, her impenetrability on this matter facilitates both Charles’ journey toward existential authenticity and her own search for a situation in which she may pursue her intellectual and personal freedom. The question confronting Fowles as he approached the novel’s ending was whether or not these two quests could mingle harmoniously. In refusing to explain Sarah’s motivations behind her treatment of Charles, Fowles maintains the plausibility of both endings to the novel – one that employs Sarah’s alternative ethic as a force of connection for Charles and Sarah, and the other that constructs this ethic as necessarily committed to self-determination and self-preservation in opposition to convention. In the first of these endings, Fowles presents Sarah’s refusal to marry Charles and her insistence on independence as a kind of test for Charles and as a surrender to hazard: the reunion of the lovers ultimately rests, Charles thinks, “in God’s hands, in His forgiveness of their sins” (459). Because he persists in locating Sarah and remains sufficiently open to her unconventional attitudes, Charles succeeds in re-uniting with Sarah and meeting his daughter Lalage, fusing these distinct individuals into a loving family and fulfilling the narrative 26

Loveday, The Romances of John Fowles, 60.

Fantasy and Feminism in The French Lieutenant’s Woman 129 conventions of romance. Whispering to his lover in a passionate embrace, Charles acknowledges, in this ending, Sarah’s deliberate mysteriousness as a crucial part of their relationship: “Shall I ever understand your parables?” he whispers, to which she responds physically, her “head against his breast shak[ing] with a mute vehemence” (460). Facilitating their final embrace, Sarah’s alternative ethic creates a space within which this unconventional family might find happiness. In the final ending, however, Sarah employs her insistence on independence and mystery not as a force of connection but as a force of emancipation, both from Charles and from conventional resolutions to the romantic mystery plot. Realizing that Sarah seriously refuses to marry him, Charles examines her for some explanation: “He sought her eyes”, the narrator explains, “for some evidence of her real intentions, and found only a spirit prepared to sacrifice everything but itself – ready to surrender truth, feeling, perhaps even all womanly modesty in order to save its own integrity”. This realization prompts Charles to see Sarah in an entirely new way, as a “hidden cancer … revealed in all of its loathsome reality” (464-65). Believing that Sarah’s mission is simply mean-spirited manipulation, Charles storms out of the house, past his unknown daughter, and out into a world he now hardly comprehends. Suggesting that Sarah’s “battle for territory was a legitimate uprising of the invaded against the perennial invader” (466), the narrator insists that this ending is equally plausible, that even though it rejects the traditional closure of the romantic plot, it nevertheless reflects reality, the truth that “life, however advantageously Sarah may in some ways seem to fit the role of Sphinx, is not a symbol, is not one riddle and one failure to guess it … but is to be, however inadequately, emptily, hopelessly … endured” (467). In other words, Fowles’ deliberate refusal to explain his heroine allows him to entertain two opposing but, for Fowles, equally tempting visions: in the first, the confused hero possesses his mysterious muse, becoming more authentic in the process; in the second, the superior woman rejects convention and asserts her own authenticity. The former encompasses all of Fowles’ masculine fantasies of narrative control, seduction and domination; the latter embodies his competing interests in indeterminacy, provocation, and

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feminist advocacy. Although these endings represent but two of an infinity of possible outcomes, these two particular endings dramatize what Conradi rightly identifies as a “central tension in Fowles’ work [that] springs from the way an ostentatiously liberal politics tries to negotiate the force of play of coercive and repressive fantasy”. 27 This negotiation reaches a critical tension in The French Lieutenant’s Woman, a novel that both constrains its heroine through the imposition of restrictive masculine visions and surrenders some authorial control in a genuine attempt to allow that heroine to develop outside of masculine fantasies. Struggling to reconcile his reverence for the mysterious feminine with his growing awareness of the ways in which his authorial practices exploit women for men’s pleasure, Fowles offers endings that fulfill both of his competing desires as a philosophically and politically conscious man and author. However, the ordering of those endings suggests a move on Fowles’ part, albeit reluctant, toward genuine indeterminacy and multiplicity of perspective. 28 Interestingly, Ruth Christiani Brown links The French Lieutenant’s Woman to Hardy’s The Well-Beloved and Melville’s Pierre, both novels that “seethe with self-hatred” and that “show a scornful anger at the audience” for its “rampant sentimentality”. 29 Although perhaps not as vitriolic a novel as these, The French Lieutenant’s Woman does indict both readers and Fowles himself for desiring the sentimental, conventional reunion of the lovers in the first ending, and does initiate a radical shift in the author’s work, though not nearly as disastrous a shift as Hardy or Melville experienced after their transitional novels. Instead, The French Lieutenant’s Woman, particularly in its final ending, suggests a new direction for Fowles, one that surrenders authorial omniscience in order to embrace not fragmentation, but a multiplicity of perspective that enables whole sight. Having established his talent for narrative seduction and manipulation in The Collector and The Magus, Fowles begins to interrogate the responsible use of that talent in The French 27

Peter Conradi, “The French Lieutenant’s Woman: Novel, Screenplay, Film”, Critical Quarterly, XXIV/1 (Spring 1982), 41. 28 Indeed, as Warburton explains, Fowles’ acceptance of multiple perspectives began with accepting the views of his original and most discerning editor, his wife Elizabeth, whose critique of the sentimental ending Fowles favored determined the published order of the endings (John Fowles, 295). 29 Ruth Christiani Brown, “The French Lieutenant’s Woman and Pierre: Echo and Answer”, Modern Fiction Studies, XXXI/1 (Spring 1985), 117.

Fantasy and Feminism in The French Lieutenant’s Woman 131 Lieutenant’s Woman, particularly in his construction and use of the perspective of a woman situated as an outsider within who: ha[s] been devalued, neglected, excluded from the center of the social order; who generate[s] less interest in ignorance about how the social order works … who enable[s] a different perspective, one from everyday life … who mediate[s] relations between nature and culture …. And whose activities provide particularly illuminating understandings at this moment in history. 30

Indeed, through this situated perspective, Fowles questions not only the surveillance culture of his Victorian characters, but the voyeuristic spectatorship of contemporary culture as well. This interest in interrogating both his own authority and dominant modes of seeing led to some difficult but necessary confrontations for Fowles in The Ebony Tower, as he learned to surrender authorial control and to explore new connections between women and narrative.

30

Harding, Whose Science? Whose Knowledge?, 211-12.

CHAPTER FOUR WOMEN IN THE WASTELAND: ALTERNATIVE PERSPECTIVES IN THE EBONY TOWER

After dramatizing the tension between his own masculine fantasies and his interest in women’s authentic perspectives in The French Lieutenant’s Woman, Fowles offered a strange collection of short stories in his next published work, The Ebony Tower. Despite his forays into poetry, philosophy, and non-fiction writing, Fowles had established a reputation as a fine novelist by this time; that he should publish a collection of short stories has proved somewhat disconcerting to critics, especially because of the eclectic nature of the stories included in The Ebony Tower, apparently linked only by a kind of authorial surrender to ambiguity. In each of these tales, both readers and characters must ultimately surrender to the problematic and the inexplicable. The most striking feature of this collection, however, is the parallel directive apparently embraced by Fowles himself, who attempts in The Ebony Tower to push the fragmentary to its limits, to accept that even a controlling author might have to allow uncertainty. Reflecting Fowles’ changing concerns as an author, The Ebony Tower emphasizes ambiguity and impossibility in terms of ever achieving a full and coherent understanding of others or of a text. The Ebony Tower therefore indicates a transition in Fowles’ work from a model of authorial control and manipulation to a model that accepts uncertainty and multiple realities. Particularly significant in this transition is Fowles’ experimentation with women’s perspectives, which he employs in order to suggest unconventional and sometimes inspirational alternatives to the problematic assumptions of traditional narratives. Instead of the fragmentation, disillusionment, and alienation that result from the characters’ attempts to fit themselves and others into prefabricated roles, the narrative inventions of The Ebony Tower’s women inspire connection and communication. Through this effort, Fowles emphasizes his faith in women’s ways of

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knowing and being and attempts to develop the feminine ethic he first advanced in The Magus. However, in The Ebony Tower Fowles also acknowledges the obstacles individuals who wish to pursue such an ethic might encounter in a contemporary wasteland seemingly obsessed with abstraction, resignation, and complacency. A kind of abdication of his talent for authorial seduction and manipulation, The Ebony Tower illustrates Fowles’ growing desires to interrogate both narrative and social conventions that deny women’s assertions of creativity and community, and to seek fictional spaces in which such perspectives might emerge with the potential to renew a bewildered and alienated contemporary community. Given this focus on such contemporary dilemmas, Fowles’ inclusion of a Breton lay in The Ebony Tower seems somewhat odd. However, his translation of Marie de France’s Eliduc serves as the imaginative point of reference for the entire collection, establishing Marie’s medieval concerns with relationships and women’s perspectives as a comparative standard for his contemporary stories. Comparing Marie de France to Jane Austen, Fowles admires “the transmutation that took place when Marie grafted her own knowledge of the world on the old [Celtic] material”, applauding her “sexual honesty”; her “very feminine awareness of how people really behaved”; her “passionate excess”, which he compares to Austen’s use of “sense and sensibility”; and her humor. 1 His translation of her tale is a genuine effort to honor both the Celtic romance as the source of “the very essence of what we have meant ever since by the fictional” (118) and Marie as an intelligent, ironic, and eminently incisive artist. Although Fowles suggests in his translation that his affinities lie with Eliduc, using what Marie asserts is the original title of the lay, he includes Marie’s use of a revised title, “Guildelüec and Guilliadun” “because”, as Marie herself explains, “it’s really about the two women” (123), suggesting an attempt to balance his interest in men’s problems with a commitment to explore women’s narratives. The story of a loyal husband and soldier who falls in love with a young princess while fighting in a foreign land, “Eliduc” considers a most compelling dilemma for Fowles, who alters Marie’s concept of fidelity by subtly privileging Eliduc’s relationship with Guilliadun over his marriage. 2 Through this altered focus, Fowles inserts a 1 2

John Fowles, The Ebony Tower, Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1974, 120-21. Morse, “John Fowles, Marie de France, and the Man with Two Wives”, 24-25.

Alternative Perspectives in The Ebony Tower

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contemporary existential element into Eliduc’s situation, establishing Eliduc’s marriage to Guildelüec as a satisfying but static relationship, and characterizing his affair with Guilliadun as an alternative, kinetic relationship that more appropriately suits Eliduc’s changing circumstances and identity. Concerned not with fidelity and commitment as principle virtues but rather with personal authenticity and evolution, Fowles acknowledges Eliduc’s affection for his wife, but contrasts it with his passionate desire for his mistress. Through this contrast, Fowles uses Eliduc to represent a contemporary conflict between limiting conventions and liberating alternatives. However, Fowles generally retains Marie’s characterization of the two women, whose perspectives effect a positive resolution to the problem Eliduc has created in taking Guilliadun as his mistress. Unable to envision a solution to his dilemma, Eliduc mopes after Guilliadun loses consciousness at discovering that he is married, assuming she is dead. Neither able to revive her nor willing to devote himself with renewed fervor to his marriage, Eliduc leaves Guilliadun in a chapel in the forest, vowing to “come here every day and weep in all my desolation on your tomb”, and returns to his wife but gives her “not a single smile or a kind word”. Puzzled by the fact that Guilliadun remains “pink and white, only very faintly pale” (139) in apparent death, Eliduc nevertheless makes no effort to investigate her condition, but instead wallows in his anguish. Guildelüec, however, takes a more proactive approach, sending a servant to spy on her husband to discover the source of his miserable behavior and finally journeying to the chapel herself. Insightful and compassionate, Guildelüec understands the situation immediately, explaining to her servant: “Do you see this girl? She’s as lovely as a jewel. She’s my husband’s mistress. That’s why he’s so miserable. Somehow it doesn’t shock me. So pretty ... to have died so young. I feel only pity for her. And I still love him. It’s a tragedy for us all.” (140)

This response reflects both Guildelüec’s wisdom and her ability to see herself in connection rather than competition with others. Although, like Eliduc, Guildelüec weeps for Guilliadun, she remains sufficiently alert to watch her servant kill a weasel, whose mate revives it with a magical red flower. A quick-thinking and resourceful woman, Guildelüec uses the flower to revive her rival, who firmly blames Eliduc for her despair and fear:

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John Fowles: Visionary and Voyeur “I fell hopelessly in love with a knight, a brave mercenary called Eliduc. He eloped with me. But he was wicked, he deceived me. He had a wife all the time. He never told me, never gave me the least hint. When I heard the truth, I fainted with the agony of it. Now he’s brutally left me helpless here in a foreign country. He tricked me, I don’t know what will become of me. Women are mad to trust in men.” (140-41)

A most justified complaint considering Guilliadun’s circumstances, this analysis crystallizes perhaps the most significant moral of this tale in Fowles’ terms: women are indeed mad to trust in men, especially men like Eliduc, whose pursuit of a kinetic and authentic situation – a worthwhile goal – nevertheless problematically objectifies all that is outside the self as potentially hostile and fails to include a responsible and compassionate commitment to others. In contrast to Eliduc’s self-serving actions reminiscent of Nicholas’ perspective in The Magus, Guildelüec enacts an alternative ethic, reminiscent of the perspective advocated by Conchis. This ethic values compassion, connection, and a kind of common sense that parallels Evelyn Fox Keller’s concept of dynamic objectivity, which she defines as “the pursuit of a maximally authentic, and hence maximally reliable, understanding of the world around oneself … [that] actively draws on the commonality between mind and nature as a resource for understanding”. 3 Through her curiosity and determination to discover the source of her husband’s misery, her compassion for her rival, and her willingness to value elements of the natural world, Guildelüec uses an empathetic strategy that facilitates her husband’s desire for authenticity, his continued care for Guilliadun, and her own autonomy. Reporting her husband’s grief, Guildelüec dissolves Guilliadun’s anger and resolves to reunite her with Eliduc – a plan to which Guilliadun submits, despite her reservations about her lover. Unlike Eliduc, who relies on deceit and a hope that his wife and mistress will never know of one another, Guildelüec and Guilliadun actively seek a resolution to this complicated state of affairs that will foster respect and contentment among the three of them. After sending for Eliduc, Guildelüec graciously reunites her husband with his mistress, shrewdly assesses his response, and outlines a practical solution to their problem:

3



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That same night he was home, and found Guilliadun restored to life …. They can’t hide their joy at being reunited. When Eliduc’s wife saw how things stood, she told her husband her plans. She asked his formal permission for a separation, she wished to become a nun and serve God. He must give her some of his land and she would found an abbey on it. And then he must marry the girl he loved so much, since it was neither decent nor proper, besides being against the law, to live with two wives. (141)

A reliable and responsible solution that provides legal, moral, and economic stability to all three parties, Guildelüec’s plan allows Eliduc to marry, protect, and provide for Guilliadun, an otherwise defenseless foreigner in Eliduc’s country. Simultaneously, it allows Guildelüec to assume a new social role and way of being that integrates convention and self-determination. In Marie’s version, Hieatt argues, this plan does not so much advocate Guildelüec’s self-sacrifice as it illustrates her wisdom, practicality, and prudence, especially compared to her husband. 4 Despite the altered emphasis in his translation, however, Fowles similarly advocates Guildelüec’s sensible resolution, not only emphasizing her noble sacrifice but implying that that sacrifice entails an admirable commitment to community shamefully absent in her husband’s behavior. Through her empathetic actions, Fowles implies, Guildelüec demonstrates an ability to facilitate authenticity and autonomy in her actions and her relationships, both critical elements of the standpoint approach that Fox Keller advocates. 5 Fowles’ interest in such approaches becomes evident in the rest of the stories that comprise The Ebony Tower, both through the innovative narrative visions of women characters and through the absence or rejection of such perspectives. As the least resolved story of the collection, “Poor Koko” demonstrates the impossibility of communication across conventional social categories without the mediation of women’s relational perspectives. The only piece of Fowles’ fiction that does not include a major woman character, “Poor Koko” tells the story of an aged scholar’s experience with a young burglar who breaks into the country retreat where the scholar has come to finish a book on Thomas Love Peacock, argues politics and linguistics with him, and eventually ties him up and burns his beloved 4 5

Hieatt, “Eliduc Revisited: John Fowles and Marie de France”, 356. Keller, Reflections on Gender and Science, 118.

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manuscript. Narrated from the scholar’s point of view, the story serves as an attempt to report and analyze this experience and come to grips with its ultimate meaning. Although he admits to some possible exaggerations and misreadings of the burglar’s behavior, the scholar dismisses these “minor misinterpretations or inaccuracies of memory”, focusing instead on his “continuing inability to make sense of what happened” and his principal desire to “come to some sort of positive conclusion”. Indeed, he admits to being haunted by the experience, explaining: What haunts me most can be put as two questions. Why did it happen? Why did it happen to me? In essence: what was it in me that drove that young demon to behave as he did?

Genuinely perplexed about the burglar’s motivations for burning the manuscript, the scholar makes a sincere effort to consider himself as the burglar might have seen him. For his part, the scholar explains: I have tried to list what he might have hated in me, both reasonably and unreasonably: my age, my physical puniness, my myopia, my accent, my education, my lack of guts, my everything else. I must certainly have seemed precious, old-fashioned, square, and all the rest of it, but surely all that could not have added up to much more than the figure of a vaguely contemptible elderly man.

Clearly aware of his faults, the scholar cannot be completely surprised that there should have been some antagonism in his interaction with the burglar. But he is unconvinced that these faults should have motivated the burglar to burn his Peacock manuscript, especially because, he reflects, “this unforgivable act was preceded by a surprisingly mild, almost kind, course of behavior”. Although he originally ascribes the burglar’s kindness to “cold calculation … from the start he was kind only to deceive”, the scholar finally admits: But now I simply do not know. I would give a very great deal – I think even an absolution, if that were a condition of putting the question – to know when he truly decided to do it. (180-81)

This admission indicates a transition in the scholar’s response to the burglary from an inward-looking indignation to an outwardlooking confusion. Accordingly, the scholar turns to an investigation of the young burglar’s gestures and linguistic ticks, looking for


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meanings that he may not have grasped at the time of the burglary. Taking a nearly unprecedented course of action in his experience, the introverted and academically encapsulated scholar begins to observe the social conventions of the young working class, looking to demolition workers and football fans to explain the burglar’s parting gesture, an aggressively cocked thumb the scholar finally understands to indicate “a warning: a grim match was about to start, and the opposing team he represented was determined to win” (183). The source of this opposition, the scholar speculates, is language. Focusing especially on the burglar’s repetitive usage of the word “man” and the interrogative “right”, the scholar advances “a tentative conclusion” for which he admits he has “very little evidence”, speculating: I won’t be so absurd as to maintain that if I had interspersed my own remarks with a few reciprocal mans and rights the night would then have taken a different path. But I am convinced that the fatal clash between us was of one who trusts and reveres language and one who suspects and resents it. (184-85)

Representative of closely guarded privilege, the scholar’s skill with and reverence for language, he thinks, marginalizes and enrages the young burglar, whose militant and minimalist use of language reflects the resentment of a generation systematically deprived of thorough education and genuine opportunities for intellectual, political, and economic advancement. His fatal error, the scholar then concludes, was his dismissive refusal to write about the burglar: My fate was most probably sealed from the moment I rejected his suggestion that I write about him myself …. In a sense he placed his own need in the scales against what I had called a long-dead novelist; and what he must have resented most was the application of this precious and denied gift of word-magic to no more than another obscure word-magician. I presented a closed shop, a secret club, an introverted secret society; and that is what he felt he had to destroy. (185-86)

In refusing to write about him during their encounter, the scholar realizes, he antagonizes the burglar by explicitly denying him even imaginative access to the privileged society of which the scholar is a member. The burglar’s response, the scholar believes, is a symbolic

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attempt to punish him through the same mechanism, by denying him access to — and even destroying — his own “word-magic”. Explicitly concerned with fragmentation and the inability to see whole, “Poor Koko” demonstrates Fowles’ growing interest in connecting the perspectives of individuals in radically different social, political, and economic locations. Significantly, the scholar’s reflections are not without effect; as Robert Huffaker argues, these reflections transcend the scholar’s original conception of the event as “a story to dine out on” (159), becoming a genuine attempt to connect with his antagonist that facilitates his growth in social consciousness. 6 Nevertheless, his reflections are both speculative and highly subjective, reading very much like Clegg’s journals and Miranda’s diaries in The Collector. Unable to locate the burglar and confirm his interpretation of events, the scholar assumes very limited personal responsibility for the destruction of his manuscript and for the burglar’s alienation, which he attributes to “the true villains of the piece [who] are well beyond individual control: the triumph of the visual, of television, the establishment of universal miseducation, the social and political … history of our unmanageable century and heaven knows how many other factors” (186). Submitting to this macrocosmic interpretation, the scholar resists the very personal nature of his encounter. Rather than acknowledge the creative, symbolically rich, and highly individualized actions of the burglar, the scholar ultimately dismisses him as a mere representative of a historically deprived community. Even in his “deliberately obscure” title and “incomprehensible” epigraph, which carefully indict both the burglar and the scholar for their antagonism, the scholar reinforces their ultimate disconnection, situating them within general prescriptions for the appropriate practice of filial behavior and the proper commitment to language. Lacking the perspective of a woman character, “Poor Koko” exhibits the inability of a manipulative author to move beyond fragmentation into whole sight. Similarly constructed around a protagonist with limited vision, the title novella of the collection, “The Ebony Tower”, demonstrates the alienation and failure of an artist and critic who is unable to evolve beyond his abstract, rational, complacent acceptance of convention and embrace a symbolic, intuitive, and alternative way of being. A variation on The Magus, “The Ebony Tower” chronicles David Williams’ visit to Coëtminais, 6

Robert Huffaker, John Fowles, 125.


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the domain of an inarticulate but generally right feeling magus, artist Henry Breasley. 7 There David encounters two young women who interpret Breasley’s beliefs for David and initiate him into their unconventional world – Diana, whom Breasley calls the Mouse, and Anne, whom he calls the Freak – and although David does not encounter the metatheatrical structures of the godgame, he does experience in this isolated, medieval forest domain a parallel challenge to reevaluate his worldview and to embrace authenticity and a passion for existence. More grounded in the conventions of realism than The Magus, “The Ebony Tower” presents both an initiate and a magus who are far more limited in their potential than either Nicholas or Conchis. Financially established and comfortable in his marriage and profession, David embodies far less energy and self-protective arrogance than the much younger Nicholas. Prone to drunken ravings and off-color innuendos, Breasley occasionally seems little more than a cheap knock-off of the sleek and sophisticated Conchis. Similarly, both David’s and Breasley’s outlooks are more moderate than their counterparts’ perspectives. While Nicholas relies on objectification and violence, David relies on abstraction and complacency, and while Conchis epitomizes psychological complexity, Breasley embodies sensual immediacy. Through these variations, Fowles inevitably surrenders a great deal of the seduction and explosive tension of the earlier situation. However, these constructions simultaneously use readers’ familiarity with such people and points of view to suggest that radical challenges to accepted ways of knowing and being can spring from relatively ordinary conditions. Such grounding is immediately apparent as David contemplates his trip to Breasley’s home. Unlike Nicholas, whose impulsive journey to Greece represents his need for “a new land, a new race, a new language … a new mystery”, 8 David journeys to Coëtminais on an errand that is “not strictly necessary” and that he undertakes mostly for “the opportunity of meeting a man one had spent time on and whose work one did, with reservations, genuinely admire ... the fun of it, to say one had met him” (10-11). Despite this rather unremarkable errand, however, 7

This is not the only variation at work in The Ebony Tower, and numerous critics have admirably catalogued the extent to which this collection justifies Fowles’ working title, Variations, in terms of characterization, narrative structure, and theme, both within the collection itself and in reference to Fowles’ earlier works. 8 Fowles, The Magus, 21.

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David’s experience in Breasley’s domain profoundly unsettles his understanding of himself, his work, and his relationships. An abstract painter and art critic, David initially enacts an exceptionally rational, conventional, and generally unruffled way of being. Commercially successful and mildly ambitious, David accepts his moderate success in the art world and cultivates in his critical work a kind of fair-minded geniality enhanced by his knowledge of art history and his linguistic skill. As a painter, he is a technically sophisticated “color painter” whose work is “tending toward nature”, he thinks, but is composed of “a technical precision, a sound architectonic quality inherited from his parents’ [architectural] predilections, and a marked subtlety of tone”. Because he is “dubious about transatlantic monumentality”, he paints to a relatively small scale, producing works that “went well on walls that had to be lived with …. in flats and homes, enjoyed privately, on his own chosen scale”. In his personal life, David enjoys a similarly unexceptional and comfortable status in his marriage to Beth, a children’s book illustrator, whose artistic work mitigates the “one brief bad period” in an otherwise “very successful” marriage, when Beth “had rebelled against ‘constant motherhood’ and flown the banner of Women’s Liberation”. An admirer of his parents’ marriage, David is pleased to observe that “His own had begun to assume that same easy camaraderie and cooperation” (15-16). He is, in short, a generally content individual, comfortable in his modest ambitions and proud of his conventional successes. In Breasley, however, David discovers an artist who is profoundly connected to both his work and his surroundings, and who seamlessly integrates his intense sensual, intellectual, and emotional impressions into his artistic vision. Almost entirely (and deliberately) inarticulate, Breasley cultivates in his small community a reverence for physicality, sensuality, and immediacy. David’s first inkling of this devotion comes in an early conversation with Diana, as he attempts to discover the nature of her relationship with Breasley. Diana admits that both she and Anne are sexually intimate with Breasley, and justifies this arrangement by citing Breasley’s need for sensuality: “He’s not verbal at all. As you must have realized …. He has to see and to feel. Quite literally. The shadow of young girls in flower isn’t enough” (34).


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Compelled to immerse himself in sensuality, Breasley rejects abstraction and linguistic precision, focusing instead on the immediacy of experience. Particularly enraged by the kind of linguistic urbanity and abstract art that David generates, Breasley viciously attacks both David’s work and his general worldview: “Pair of tits and a cunt. All that goes with them. That’s reality. Not your piddling little theorems and pansy colors.” (42)

More than just a theory on the appropriate concerns of art, this drunken rant illustrates Breasley’s rejection of the ebony tower itself, a concept, Diana explains, that he uses to define the contemporary retreat into abstraction that denies the common impulses and intuitions of humanity. Unable to communicate these values to David through language, Breasley relies on Diana as translator. Much more like David in both artistic and national temperament than Breasley, Diana initiates David into the Coëtminais domain through both her articulate summaries of Breasley’s opinions and her seductive sexual and emotional vulnerability. Unlike Breasley, Diana demonstrates significant linguistic prowess, translating Breasley’s violently minimalist language into precise summaries with which David can engage. Explaining Breasley’s “tits and cunt” comment, for example, Diana declares: “Henry feels that full abstraction represents a flight from human and social responsibility …. You’re afraid of the human body” (41-42).

Such explanations facilitate David’s negotiation of his “ordeal” with Breasley, allowing him to identify and (courteously) respond to Breasley’s attack. Admiring Diana’s incisive management of this ordeal and trusting in her ability to articulately summarize Breasley’s perspective, David accepts Diana’s explanations, which provide the necessary context in which David can interpret Breasley’s fundamental talents: More and more he realized the truth of what [Diana] had said: the old man’s problem was an almost total inadequacy with words. If he didn’t always cheapen, he certainly misrepresented everything he talked about. One had to keep remembering the way he could express himself in paint; and the gap was enormous. The art predicated a

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John Fowles: Visionary and Voyeur sensitive and complex man; and almost everything outward in him denied it. (55)

An exceptionally rational man, David relies on this kind of detached analysis to make sense of his experiences with the enigmatic Breasley. In contrast, Diana is both articulate and poised. Considering her a kind of kindred spirit and ally, David is able to identify with her intellect and become receptive to her perspective. Continually puzzled by the apparent disjunction between Breasley’s intuitive and sensual sophistication and his logical and linguistic immaturity, David is especially impressed with Diana’s ability to maintain a commitment to artistic abstraction while simultaneously integrating a kind of emotional rawness and sensual immediacy into her work. In contrast to Beth, whose work, David thinks, fails to enact “a similarity of stylistic purpose” in comparison to his own, Diana exhibits fixations that David recognizes: He understood both critically and intuitively what this girl was trying to do. It did bear an analogy with his own development; in a more feminine, decorative kind of way – more concerned with textures and correspondences than form – she was abstracting from natural rather than artificial color ranges. (86)

Perceiving a kind of complementarity in Diana’s more feminine perspective – particularly in comparison to Beth’s less compelling attitude – flattered by his own influence on Diana’s work, and stirred by Diana’s modesty and uncertainty in her abilities, David begins to question his complacency in both his work and his marriage. David’s unusual experiences at Coëtminais further enchant him, especially as Breasley’s devotion to the sensual repeatedly grants David access to Diana as physically and emotionally vulnerable. Upon arriving at Breasley’s home, David glimpses both Diana and Anne lounging naked in the sun. This incidental opportunity for voyeurism, he soon realizes, is nothing extraordinary, since both women remain in a perpetual state of either total or partial undress throughout his visit. For Diana, David realizes, this perpetual lack of conventional dress is both a conscious embrace of Breasley’s values and a signifier of ambivalence. When Diana explains her sexual relationship with Breasley, for example, David notes:


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There was a defensiveness behind the frankness, some kind of warning. They both looked down; David momentarily at the line of the bare breasts beneath the blouse, then away. She seemed devoid of coquetry, of any trace of the flagrant sexiness of her friend. Her selfpossession was so strong that it denied her good looks, that repeated undertone of nakedness, any significance; and yet it secretly drew attention to them. (34)

Clearly displaying her sexuality, Diana simultaneously denies its importance. Justifying her intimacy with Breasley by referring to his integrated interpretation of life and art, she also suggests to David that such values are foreign to her nature. These intriguing contradictions are seductively appealing to David, whose comfortable marriage no longer provides, or perhaps never provided, the sort of mystery that Diana embodies. Both aloof and sensitive, self-possessed and self-conscious, and apparently nothing like his wife, Diana becomes for David an especially evocative art object representative of an aesthetic and sexual ideal. A result of her constantly displayed or suggested nudity, which David initially considers in terms of works of art, like those by Gauguin and Manet, that exhibit women’s, but not men’s, nakedness (59), this objectification occurs as David begins to evaluate and analyze Diana as an object of his gaze. Exploiting the artistically justified nudity that Breasley’s devotion to the sensual creates, David indulges his voyeuristic fantasies by closely examining both Diana and Anne. Somewhat repelled by Anne, whom he describes as “faintly negroid, aboriginal, androgynous”, and comparing this repulsive body with Diana’s pale and “feminine” body, David violates Breasley’s open and honest acknowledgement of human sexuality by surreptitiously observing a self-consciously naked Diana at the precise moment when she will not notice his gaze: He watched her body when she turned to pass something, when he knew the direction of his eyes would not be caught. They talked banally enough; and … the ghost of infidelity stalked through David’s mind – not any consideration of its actuality, but if he hadn’t been married, if Beth ... that is to say, if Beth didn’t sometimes have certain faults, an occasional brisk lack of understanding of him, an overmundane practicality, which this attractively cool and honest young mistress of a situation would be too intelligent (for he saw in her something that he aimed at in his own painting, a detachment and at the same time a matter-of-factness) to show or at any rate to abuse.

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Idealizing Diana’s intelligence and tact in comparison to Beth’s practicality, David creates radically divergent pictures of the two women, one of which denigrates Beth as disappointingly real, the other of which envisions Diana as flawlessly ideal. Such a dichotomous vision is particularly easy for David to generate, since his rational and complacent worldview considers such imaginings to be merely conceptual. Indeed, he admits: It wasn’t that one didn’t still find Beth desirable, that the idea of a spell together in France without the kids after Coët (hovering in it Beth’s tacit reacceptance of motherhood, a third child, the son they both wanted) ... just that one was tempted. One might, if one wasn’t what one was; and if it were offered – that is, it was a safe impossibility and a very remote probability away. (59-60)

Complacently resigned to his relationship with Beth, which offers the conventional pleasures of a stable, cooperative marriage and the potential to father a son, David dismisses his growing attraction to Diana, noting, “He felt a little bewitched, possessed”, but deciding, “it must be mainly the effect of being without Beth”. Comfortably accepting this rational explanation, David continues to gaze on the intriguing Diana as he would gaze on an especially evocative work of art: The more he learned her, the more he watched her, the more he liked her; as temperament, as system of tastes and feelings, as female object. He knew it, and concealed it ... not only to her, partly also to himself; that is, he analyzed what he had so rapidly begun to find attractive about her – why that precise blend of the physical and the psychological, the reserved and the open, the controlled and the .… uncertain, called so strongly to something in his own nature. (72-73)

Considering her as a series of characteristics rather than an integrated subject, David enjoys a fragmented vision of Diana reminiscent of pornography. Indeed, such contemplation of Diana’s emotional and physical vulnerability stimulates “a knowledge of a brutality totally alien to his nature: how men could rape”, and causes him to recognize, “Something both tender and provocative in that defenselessness stirred him deeply”. Nevertheless, David persists in his detached, reserved response to Diana, deciding to report these unusual sensations to Beth, “because sooner or later he told her everything; but not till they had made love again” (74).


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This caveat, however, indicates a tension in David’s consciousness, the result of new confrontations to his worldview. Sexually, artistically, and psychologically stimulated by Diana, David simultaneously recognizes the vitality of the perspective she embodies – Breasley’s perspective, devoted to the immediate, the sensual, and the real, but further infused with her own intuition and acuity. In contrast to his rational and resigned complacency, David realizes, Diana integrates a reverence for the vitality and physicality of human experience into her artistic and theoretical concerns with abstraction. Initiated into this worldview by Diana’s exhibitions of vulnerability, David becomes a recipient of her confidences and subsequent invitations to physical intimacy. Diana’s subtle seductiveness, far more than a merely physical invitation, thus confronts David’s entire way of being by offering a challenge to accept reality over abstraction. As in The Magus, this challenge has a moral component, since David’s acceptance of Diana’s invitation would indicate a commitment to personal authenticity and emotional honesty that could facilitate creativity, communication, and respect in his relationships. Too thoroughly constrained by convention, however, David fails to rise to the challenge, losing his chance to pursue an authentic and vital connection with Diana in a crucial moment of indecision. He recognizes the significance of this failure almost immediately: Even as he stood there he knew it was a far more than sexual experience, but a fragment of one that reversed all logic, process, that struck new suns, new evolutions, new universes out of nothingness. It was metaphysical: something far beyond the girl; an anguish, a being bereft of a freedom whose true nature he had only just seen. For the first time in his life he knew more than the fact of being; but the passion to exist. (102)

Beyond this immediate metaphysical anguish, David recognizes that his failure with Diana indicates his own inability to evolve beyond his rationality, his complacency, and his general withdrawal from vitality into abstraction. Eventually, he knows, “the missed opportunity would become the finally sensible decision, the decent thing; the flame of a deep fire that had singed him a dream, a moment’s illusion; her reality just one more unpursued idea kept among old sketchbooks at the back of a studio cupboard” (112). Connecting this result with Fowles’ concern with existentialism, critics have interpreted David’s failure with Diana as an indication of

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his continued lack of individual authenticity, and certainly the construction of the narrative suggests that his residence in the ebony tower is a shameful withdrawal not only from reality, but from humanity more generally. However, these interpretations only partially acknowledge the parallel experiences of Nicholas in The Magus, whose maturation results not primarily from his coupling with Julie, but from his disintoxication from her. Because of the disintoxication, Nicholas learns to disassociate his attraction to mystery and vitality from Lily/Julie, and eventually to see those qualities in Alison, whom he previously associated with the mundane, the oppressively real. Through this change in perspective, Nicholas begins the process of integrating Conchis’s feminine ethic – committed to whole sight, relationships, authenticity, and complexity – into his everyday reality. Although David is a more mature, respectful, and perceptive individual than Nicholas, his conception of Diana, even after her confidences, is idealized and highly aesthetic, much like Nicholas’ vision of Lily/Julie. Unlike Nicholas, David at least glimpses his potential lover’s alternative ethic; however, he similarly associates the mystery and vitality he senses exclusively with a specific woman. In terms of his own development, David’s real failure is not his missed opportunity to be sexually intimate with Diana, but his resultant inability to disassociate the fundamentally human perspective she embodies from Diana herself. Such a disassociation might have allowed David to infuse his work with the kind of emotional rawness and sensual immediacy he perceives in Breasley’s work, and even in Diana’s abstract work. Furthermore, in choosing not to evolve beyond his rationality and conventionality, David fails to connect with others in meaningful ways. This detachment is particularly detrimental for Diana, whose relationship with David might have convinced her to pursue a healthy, authentic existence away from her stimulating but problematic association with Breasley, which presses her into behavior that she admits is against her nature (88-94). Yet David’s retreat into conventionality also condemns him to an extremely resigned view of Beth, the mother of his children and artist in her own right, in whom he can see nothing but “the relentless face of the present tense” (114), not the mystery and vitality he might have seen in her had he embraced not Diana, but the alternative way of being she embodies. Far more than a personal existential failure, David’s indecision leads to an inability to translate any of his experiences at Coëtminais into


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his everyday existence and thus to infuse authenticity, immediacy, and connection into his relationships. Instead, he succumbs, like the scholar in “Poor Koko”, to a macrocosmic lament about the injustice of his inborn inadequacies and the failures of his generation (111). In both “Poor Koko” and “The Ebony Tower”, Fowles illustrates how the absence of or the inability to embrace women’s alternative perspectives condemns modern man to the contemporary wasteland defined by abstraction, self-absorption, and disconnection. In “The Enigma”, however, Fowles offers a much more hopeful situation, as Sergeant Mike Jennings, a detective investigating the mysterious disappearance of conventionally respectable and successful Member of Parliament John Marcus Fielding, entertains the inventive and inspirational perspective of an aspiring novelist, Isobel Dodgson. An unconventional detective fiction, “The Enigma” enacts an almost playful metafictional approach to the mystery of Fielding’s disappearance, suggesting that alternative feminine narratives based on intuition can inspire connection and communion between men and women similarly situated in, but not condemned to, the wasteland of contemporary existence. As far as traditional sleuthing goes, Fielding’s disappearance is indeed an enigma. Assigned to the case merely to keep up appearances, Jennings realizes immediately that “He was not really expected to discover anything, only to suggest that avenues were still being busily explored” (202). As a conscientious and politically adept third-generation (and public-school educated) policeman, however, Jennings makes a sincere effort to investigate the case, experimenting with new investigative approaches. Having exhausted all conventional leads, Jennings approaches Isobel, the girlfriend of Fielding’s son, less out of any hope that she might shed light on the investigation than out of the belief that “a pretty girl makes a change, even if she knows nothing” (223). In fact, Isobel’s conventional perspective on the case offers very little new information, beyond the slightest implication that Fielding may have felt stifled by his conformist existence – and even in advancing these insights, Isobel admits: “I’m talking about tiny, very faint impressions. And retrospective ones. They may not mean anything.” (233)

Nevertheless, Jennings is intrigued by his “immediate impression” of Isobel as “someone alive … someone who lived in the present, not the past” (224), and decides to entertain what she calls her “private

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theory” about Fielding’s disappearance, even though she describes it as “very wild …. Very literary” (235). In the interval between agreeing to hear this theory and actually hearing it, however, Jennings begins to connect with Isobel beyond his initial attraction, discovering similar frustrations and doubts in their work and their identities: She was trying to write a novel, it was so slow, you had to destroy so much and start again; so hard to discover whether one was really a writer or just a victim of a literary home environment. He felt a little bit the same about his own work; and its frustrations and endless weeks of getting nowhere. They rather surprisingly found, behind the different cultural backgrounds, a certain kind of unspoken identity of situation. (235)

Much more concretely based in everyday reality than in the mythic fantasy Fowles uses to define his earlier relationships between men and women, this connection, based on an “unspoken identity of situation”, reflects the extent to which the contemporary wasteland constructs both Jennings and Isobel; despite the professional and conceptual differences between them, Isobel and Jennings begin to value one another’s perceptions primarily through their shared anxieties. This mutual identification does not ignore their differences, as Isobel’s question about police brutality indicates (226), but it does allow Isobel and Jennings to transcend the conventional interrogation format and interact in more meaningful ways. This interaction takes the form of a hypothetical discussion of the case from the premise that, as Isobel puts it, “Nothing is real. All is fiction”. Setting up her theory of Fielding’s disappearance, she explains to Jennings: “Lateral thinking. Let’s pretend everything to do with the Fieldings, even you and me sitting here now, is in a novel. A detective story. Yes? Somewhere there’s someone writing us, we’re not real.” (236)

An obvious metafictional ploy for Fowles, especially after the narrator’s antics in The French Lieutenant’s Woman, this development indicates a transition in narrative form as well as a transition in the text’s overall approach to conventional perspectives. Countering Jennings’ bafflement over Fielding’s case, Fowles advances an alternative ideology through Isobel, who builds on her earlier


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impressions of Fielding’s anxiety over his conformist lifestyle and uses her “very wild” theory to imply “that fiction may very well be true to life and help us to understand reality, perhaps even more so than other forms of discourse, by its capacity for ‘lateral thinking”. 9 Lacking solid evidence, Isobel instead focuses on her own intuitions, and analyzes those impressions through an alternative logic based on literary conventions. Conscious of certain inconsistencies in Fielding’s behavior that suggested discomfort in what he had become, Isobel argues: “There was an author in his life. In a way. Not a man. A system, a view of things? Something that had written him. Had really made him just a character in a book.” (240)

Engaging in cooperative authorship with Jennings, Isobel not only explains this personal theory, but invites Jennings to participate in its elucidation. After Jennings complains that the author of their hypothetical narrative “ought never to have started it in the first place …. [Because he] [f]orgot to plant any decent leads”, Isobel concludes: “… the writer would have to face up to that. His main character has walked out on him. So all he’s left with is the character’s determination to have it that way. High and dry. Without a decent ending.” (239)

Thoughtful and creative, Isobel finally provides the suggestion that Fielding may have committed suicide, without leaving any evidence, as both an escape from stagnation and as one truly authentic act that would forever frustrate explanation and set him apart from his inauthentic social role. Playful, intelligent, and grounded in her own lived experience and her understanding of literary conventions, Isobel’s hypothetical fictionalizing of even her own existence forces both Jennings and readers as audience to discard their expectations for the investigation of Fielding’s disappearance and embrace intuition and indeterminacy. Although Isobel’s explanation of Fielding’s motivations is plausible, conforming to the facts Jennings has already collected as well as to his 9

Ulrich Broich, “John Fowles, ‘The Enigma’ and the Contemporary British Short Story”, in Modes of Narrative: Approaches to American, Canadian, and British Fiction, eds Reingard M. Nischik and Barbara Korte, Würzburg, Germany: Königshausen & Neumann, 1990, 186.

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own instincts, it is, as his superiors note when he later “informally” advances it, “highly circumstantial” and based on “half-baked psychology” (247). More importantly for the potential relationship between Isobel and Jennings, however, Isobel’s theory highlights the extent to which Jennings’s accepted investigative method relies on narrative conventions of its own, especially since Isobel deliberately plants a gap in her story that mirrors her own unexplained whereabouts for two hours on the day of Fielding’s disappearance. If he is to follow the static conventions of the standard detective plot, Jennings realizes, he must press Isobel into a confession of her activities during those missing hours. If, on the other hand, he is willing to accept her kinetic alternative perspective, he must also trust his instincts about Isobel and accept indeterminacy. Rising to the challenge, Jennings realizes: It was bantering, yet he knew he was being put to the test; that this was precisely what was to be learned. And in some strange way the case had died during that last half hour; it was not so much that he accepted her theory, but that … he now saw it didn’t really matter.

Much more important than the process of “tying ends up”, Jennings understands, is Isobel’s “living face with brown eyes, half challenging and half teasing” (245). Having connected with her, Jennings is willing to abandon his conventional investigative perspective, which has created only frustration and anxiety, and pursue an alternative way of seeing that facilitates connection and growth. In “The Enigma”, then, Fowles offers a woman’s inventive authorship as a means of transcending the wasteland of contemporary experience. Through Isobel’s literary imaginings, Jennings and Isobel come to identify their similar situations and to explore an intuitive and kinetic bond that mitigates their anxieties and alienation. Of all the conclusions to Fowles’ contemporary tales, this result resembles most closely the resolution of “Eliduc”, which Fowles advocates as a model of women’s inspirational and visionary potential, suggesting that such vision can indeed transform contemporary experience. However, in the final tale of the collection, “The Cloud”, Fowles offers a much more obscure exploration of women’s perspectives, ultimately leaving it to readers to decide whether the pain and alienation of contemporary experience can ever be transcended. An unusual and difficult story, “The Cloud” employs a narrative approach that flows in and out of the consciousness of the protagonist,


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Catherine, an extremely sensitive young woman whose husband or lover has recently committed suicide. The often shifting, sometimes indeterminate point of view in “The Cloud” is particularly challenging for readers, since it “relies extensively upon the indefinite ‘one’ and shifts between past and present tenses …. The effect is a narrative which destroys the reader’s distinction between what has happened, what is happening, and what continually happens.” 10 This indistinct situating of time emphasizes the story’s visual and cinematic qualities. Rather than building primarily through a linear sequence of events, the psychological impact of the story relies instead on a fluid drifting through memory, perception, and imagination, often focusing on disconnected images and vignettes. The limitations of language are especially apparent in “The Cloud”, as Fowles attempts to explore the perspective of a traumatized woman protagonist who has difficulty understanding her experience through any recognizable narrative patterns. Feeling herself in a confused state of “being all the futures, all the pasts; being yesterday and tomorrow; which left today like a fragile grain between two implacable and immense millstones” (298), Catherine cannot conceive of her experience through any sense of continuity. Instead, Catherine’s experience takes on a detached, fragmented, and disconnected quality, through which she identifies various narrative islands that will not cohere into a meaningful pattern: So now everything became little islands, without communication, without farther islands to which this that one was on was a steppingstone, a point with point, a necessary stage. Little islands set in their own limitless sea, one crossed them in a minute, in five at most, then it was a different island but the same: the same voices, the same masks, the same emptiness behind the words …. And the fear was both of being left behind and of going on: of the islands past and the islands ahead. (261)

Both paralyzed and comforted by this sense of incoherence, Catherine expresses anxiety at the thought of narrative progression, at considering her current state “a necessary stage”, a “point with point” on a continuum of experience that might lead to her personal evolution.

10

Huffaker, John Fowles, 128.

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Profoundly alienated by the trauma of her lover’s suicide, Catherine becomes extremely critical of the “clichés” by which her sister Bel, Bel’s husband Paul, and their friends Peter and Sally structure their lives: family contentment, professional ambition, sexual predation, even philosophical abstraction. However, she simultaneously fears stagnation, being left behind as others progress along such clearly defined, if clichéd, continuums while she lingers in her state of incoherent grief. Wondering if these contradictory impulses really constitute a challenge to others – “Surprise me, prove I’m wrong, string the islands together again?” – Catherine resists relationships, deciding, “It would never do to have one’s misery taken advantage of” (261). Because Catherine is “morbidly conscious of the baselessness of all the fictions which structure life”, 11 she is unable to trust others and becomes transfixed within the wasteland of contemporary existence, unable to establish meaningful relationships, and similarly unable to transcend her self-absorbed agony and hopelessness. This profound alienation is somewhat relieved, however, in Catherine’s interactions with her niece, Emma, particularly when Emma asks Catherine to tell her a story. 12 Hesitant to participate so flagrantly in the process of constructing what she believes can only be a false and misleading narrative through which to understand human experience, Catherine nevertheless observes the “appropriate rituals”, beginning quite conventionally, “Once upon a time there was a princess”. Relieving some of Catherine’s anxiety, Emma provides a number of questions, the answers to which situate this princess firmly within the narrative conventions of the fairy tale: she is “very pretty”, Catherine agrees: “very clever …. Much cleverer than me”, she insists, and “also very sad” because she has no family, “Nobody”. Unlike Catherine, whose introduction of such total isolation into the tale reflects her own sense of perpetual grief, Emma interprets the princess’s sadness as merely a necessary element of the fairy tale, a problem requiring resolution, asking Catherine: 11 Frederick M. Holmes, “Fictional Self-Consciousness in John Fowles’s The Ebony Tower”, Ariel, XVI/3 (July 1985), 35. 12 Eileen Warburton notes that Fowles’ occasional inclusion of a little girl named Emma in his fiction references one of the daughters of a college housemate to Fowles’ stepdaughter Anna Christy. This Emma shared a close relationship with Fowles during her childhood, and Warburton argues that she appears in Fowles’ work as “the mythical girl in a garden, a hidden guarantor of some ‘right’ value, or the active messenger of such values” (John Fowles, 324).


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“Will it end happily?” “We’ll have to see.” “I ’spect it will, don’t you?” (285)

While Catherine’s response indicates her resignation to observing the conventions of storytelling as well as her inability to envision anything beyond her own immediate sense of alienation, Emma’s faith in narrative conventions projects a hopeful future for the princess. With Emma’s encouragement, Catherine begins to construct a creative and original tale despite her initial reservations, using her own isolation as a point of departure for the similarly situated princess. Still unable to project certainty, however, Catherine structures an indeterminate ending for the tale, concluding with the suggestion that the princess and her prince may be reunited, “Any day now. Very soon”, and that once together, they will be happy and have “Lots of babies” (293). Satisfied, Emma accepts this suggestion with a smile and kisses, but Catherine later considers the concept of reunion in terms of her dead lover, and contemplates suicide. Both tempted by and incapable of this course of action, Catherine enacts an imaginative suicide, lying “composing and decomposed, writing and written, here and tomorrow …. Young dark-haired corpse with a bitter mouth; her hands by her sides, she does by thinking of doing; in her unmatched underclothes, black-shuttered eyes” (298). Totally absorbed by this psychological surrender to death, Catherine lies exposed, “not as she would wish to be seen” (300), to Peter’s voyeuristic gaze. Aroused by her obvious instability, Peter invades Catherine’s islanded existence physically and psychologically, pressing her into a sexual encounter she both invites and resists. As Clark Closser notes, this encounter is narrated exclusively from Peter’s point of view, establishing his vulgarity and self-absorption while obscuring Catherine’s motivations for submitting to sexual violation. 13 Yet even the imperceptive Peter recognizes, especially when Catherine suddenly “turns her head and opens her eyes and stares up into [his] face”, that her submission signifies something more profound than the “sick game of a screwed-

13

Clark Closser, “In the Sea of Life Enisled’: Narrative Landscape and Catharine’s Fate in John Fowles’s ‘The Cloud”, in John Fowles and Nature: Fourteen Perspectives on Landscape, ed. James R. Aubrey, Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1999, 66.

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up little neurotic in heat” that he initially takes it to be. As the narrator explains: It is strange, as if she can’t really see him, as if she is looking through his knowing, faintly mocking smile. He has, will always have, the idea that it was something beyond him. (304)

Having interrupted Catherine as she attempts to author a resolution to her trauma through suicide, Peter presents an opportunity to vary that resolution. Because Peter represents everything that Catherine despises about existence – arrogance, self-absorption, exploitation, blind ambition, alienation – her surrender to his violation becomes a symbolic surrender to all that is dead, empty, and meaningless: a surrender to nothingness, a symbolic suicide. But because that surrender is sexual, it also implies a hope of rebirth and renewal, recalling her suggestion to Emma that the isolated and grief-stricken princess will soon reunite with her prince and create a new existence and new life. Catherine’s submission to both sex and death in this encounter is, as John B. Humma suggests, ultimately liberating. 14 After this encounter, however, Catherine disappears from the story, as Peter reunites with the others and, upon seeing a “feral and ominous” cloud (309), the group returns home. Because the group refuses to look for Catherine, assuming that she has either gone on ahead or will come at her leisure, her narrative remains frozen, indeterminate, the only certainty her isolation, as the final line of the story emphasizes: “The princess calls, but there is no one, now, to hear her” (312). While many critics have interpreted this final line as an indication of Catherine’s suicide, this reference to her original fairy tale suggests a more hopeful interpretation. In describing the situation of the fairy tale to Emma, Catherine emphasizes the princess’s isolation, explaining, “She was all alone”; however, this explanation also restores Catherine’s belief in narrative. Although the princess is initially frozen, transfixed like Catherine in her grief, her situation as she is separated from others and isolated within nature becomes a “point with point” on a continuum of experience, creating the potential for growth and change, as Catherine suddenly realizes: “And from nowhere, storied; granted a future, peripeteia” (286). Like the princess, Catherine has been “naughty” and has hidden in the forest, 14

John B. Humma, “John Fowles’ The Ebony Tower: In the Celtic Mood”, Southern Humanities Review, XVII/1 (Winter 1983), 45.


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and presumably remains there, like the princess, without her clothes. Removed from the others, whose clichéd narrative identifications provide only fragmented and disconnected islands of experience, Catherine situates herself exactly as her fictional princess is situated at the moment of peripeteia when she is unexpectedly “granted a future”. Although Catherine does disappear from the main narrative, that narrative is fundamentally fragmented and barren, defined by the inauthentic fictions by which inhabitants of the contemporary wasteland structure their lives. Her disappearance is a liberation from such inauthentic fictions and a suggestion of a new, more natural, fertile, and authentic narrative in which she might situate herself. Therefore, though unusual and somewhat unsettling, Catherine’s progression throughout “The Cloud” enacts her insight while storytelling: “One does not have to believe stories; only that they can be told” (289). Having rejected the conventional and stifling narratives by which the others live, Catherine enacts an unconventional perspective committed to the act of authorship as fundamentally authentic and creative. Fowles mirrors this perspective in his deliberately indeterminate ending, refusing to author a narrative in which to fit Catherine, facing up to the fact, as Isobel suggests the author of Fielding’s story must, that his main character insists on mystery and personal authenticity outside of conventional narratives. This alternative perspective, Fowles further suggests, has the potential to renew and revitalize the wasteland; as Raymond J. Wilson, III, notes, Fowles’ repeated allusions to T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land support this interpretation, since “The Waste Land’s thundercloud, we recall, brought the promise, at least the hope, of soothing rain”. 15 In calling attention to “the positive in Eliot’s thundercloud by naming the entire story ‘The Cloud”, Wilson concludes, Fowles suggests that the resolution of Catherine’s individual and emerging narrative represents “a similar hopeful possibility”. 16 Furthermore, by focusing so carefully on a woman’s alternative perspective, Fowles suggests that a more widespread acceptance of such perspectives, particularly in their identification of nature as an important part of the larger community in which the individual is situated, could relieve the alienation, fragmentation, and disconnection of the contemporary wasteland. However, Fowles’ surrender of 15 Raymond J. Wilson, III, “Allusion and Implication in John Fowles’s ‘The Cloud”, Studies in Short Fiction, XX/1 (1983), 21. 16 Ibid., 22.

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authority over Catherine’s narrative, while significant in its investment in women’s authorship, simultaneously obscures the positive implications of the final story in The Ebony Tower, leaving readers with an ambivalent impression of Fowles’ attitude toward women and narrative. Throughout the collection, Fowles suggests that women’s alternative perspectives encourage authenticity, respect, connection, and communication within the individual’s relationships to others and to nature. However, the complications of each of these stories also imply significant uncertainty about the revitalizing potential of women’s perspectives. Unlike the heroines of Fowles’ earlier fictions, the heroines of The Ebony Tower are more specifically situated in the real than in the symbolic, with more investment in their careers, more mundane relationships with their families, and more theoretical sophistication than Miranda, Alison, Lily/Julie, or even Sarah project, and their mysteriousness generally reflects the ordinary limitations of human relationships rather than a mythic gender ideology. More significantly, however, Diana, Isobel, and Catherine are all at least occasional victims of sexual exploitation, some instances of which Fowles constructs so as to invite reader participation. The most flagrant example of such exploitation is of course Catherine’s encounter with Peter, a sexual violation described in detail for readers. But Diana is similarly exploited, both in her relationship with Breasley and in Fowles’ descriptions of her from David’s point of view. Profoundly unsure of her talent and her identity, Diana clings to her role at Coëtminais with a kind of desperation, frightened of being normal and of enlarging her sexual experience beyond her failed relationship with a fellow art student and her intimacy with Breasley. As Anne insightfully points out to David, this intimacy is not terribly problematic in itself: “… it’s not the physical thing. He can hardly do it anymore …. [and] I’ve seen it all. Much sicker scenes than this …. But it’s not the same with Di. She’s just had that one twit at Leeds …. She thinks it’s either like it is with Henry or the way I used to go on. She just doesn’t know what it’s about. What it can be about.” (83)

As Anne suggests, Diana’s relationship with Breasley reflects a kind of perversion because, as David realizes, “The physical side of her life with Henry must be deeply against the grain of her ‘innocent’ self …. Yet the real repression must be of a normal sexuality” (91). However,


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even after this recognition, David fails to assist Diana in transcending her perverted sexual behavior, hesitating at the crucial moment when an authentic sexual communication might have convinced her to terminate her complicity in Breasley’s exploitation of her. This hesitation constitutes another form of sexual exploitation, as David becomes aroused by Diana’s sexual and emotional vulnerability but fails to provide the intimacy she needs, offering instead only a detached and delayed resignation to her invitation. Like his protagonist, Fowles indulges in a similar detachment from his heroine, frequently offering her up for a voyeuristic masculine gaze despite his interest in her situated perspective. Indeed, Diana’s perpetual nakedness is exhibited to readers for their own aesthetic (or pornographic) pleasure, in contrast to David’s occasional nakedness, which Fowles never describes. 17 Even as he constructs a narrative that indicts David’s tendency to objectify both people and situations into aesthetically interesting images, Fowles engages in a similar activity, repeatedly exploiting his heroine’s sexual vulnerability for the occasional voyeuristic thrill. Similarly, in “The Enigma” Fowles includes some jolting fantasies that Jennings entertains while Isobel advances her inventive theory of Fielding’s disappearance. Feeling out of his depth and intellectually inferior to Isobel, Jennings imagines Isobel as sexually vulnerable: He felt obscurely humiliated, to have to sit here and listen to all this; and at the same time saw her naked, deliciously naked on his bed. Her bed. Any bed or no bed. (240)

As she continues in her psychologically complex and theoretically inventive explanation, Jennings enhances his imaginatively voyeuristic fantasy, wondering “if she was wearing anything at all beneath the dress. He saw her sitting astride his knees, her arms enlacing his neck, tormenting him; and brutality” (242). Even as he begins to understand the significance of Isobel’s attempts at authorship, Jennings authors his own pornographic narrative that Fowles invites readers to share, undermining Isobel’s authority by framing her as sexually, rather than intellectually or emotionally, compelling. This fixation on women’s sexual vulnerability, especially as exhibited for men’s pleasure, suggests that despite his ambitions 17

Cooper, The Fictions of John Fowles, 159.

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toward surrendering his manipulative and seductive authorial power, Fowles continues in this transitional collection to indulge in some of his masculine fantasies. However, Fowles’ clear indictment of David and Peter, and to a lesser extent Jennings and Breasley, implies that men’s desire to exploit women’s sexual vulnerability plays a significant role in their inability to transcend disillusionment and alienation. Furthermore, each heroine’s sexual exploitation simultaneously suggests the extent to which specifically situated contemporary women might employ sexuality as an instrument of personal agency. Indeed, Catherine, Diana, and Isobel are all complicit in their own exploitation, since they invite or at least accept the sexual advances of Peter, Breasley, David, and Jennings. Like Sarah in The French Lieutenant’s Woman, these women all invite sexual encounters that might create new narrative possibilities as they attempt to author their futures. Constrained by a historical and cultural context that privileges fragmentation and disconnection, these women use sexuality as an avenue through which they might develop personal authenticity and challenge their partners to envision more complete and fulfilling relationships. These efforts are risky, their outcomes uncertain; in The Ebony Tower, Fowles has not yet convinced himself that women characters specifically situated in the real can transcend the wasteland of contemporary experience or assist men in doing so. Nevertheless, Fowles’ experimental constructions of women’s perspectives in this collection suggest his growing commitment to multiplicity and whole sight – concepts he interrogates obsessively in his next novel, Daniel Martin.

CHAPTER FIVE WHOLE SIGHT; AND DESOLATION: SITUATED KNOWLEDGES IN DANIEL MARTIN

Daniel Martin, a novel written simultaneously by Fowles and by its title character, begins rather insistently with the capitalized directive, “WHOLE SIGHT; OR ALL THE REST IS DESOLATION”. 1 As an organizing principle and ethical goal, Daniel Martin’s commitment to whole sight signifies Fowles’ first attempt to compose partial and multiple perceptions, memories, and fantasies into a cohesive whole, just as Dan attempts to integrate alternative perspectives while constructing a novelistic revising and revisualization of a lifetime of experience. For both author and character – Fowles in his earlier works, especially The Ebony Tower, and Dan in his career as a Hollywood screenwriter – fragmented and singular visions have defined individuals as hopelessly self-absorbed, frustrated, and alienated, and society as irredeemably materialistic and unjust, a desolate wasteland that makes communication and community virtually impossible. In their joint pursuit of whole sight, Fowles and Dan seek to transcend the wasteland of contemporary experience and restore fertility and vitality to their worldviews by experimenting with unconventional perspectives. For both writers, the attempt to construct a realistic novel that transcends the performative element of the spectacle is particularly challenging. Disgusted with the partial truths and unearned privileges that have divided his public persona from his private being, Dan attributes that disjunction to his career as a screenwriter and insists on the novel as a more honest medium for an English writer: The film cannot be the medium of a culture all of whose surface appearances mislead, and which has made such a psychological art of escaping present, or camera, reality. For us English the camera, a 1

John Fowles, Daniel Martin, Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1977, 3.

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John Fowles: Visionary and Voyeur public eye, invites performance, lying. We make abundant use of these appearances in our comedy, in our humor; socially and politically; but for our private reality we go elsewhere, and above all to words. Since we are so careful only to reveal our true selves in private, the ‘private’ form of the read text must serve us better than the publicity of the seen spectacle. (273)

Precisely because of his compulsion to examine his “true self”, located not in any singular “camera reality” but in the complex, nonlinear interplay of memory, consciousness, and imagination, Dan approaches the novel for its potential to reveal a more honest, private reality instead of a public performance. Likewise, Fowles experiments in Daniel Martin with alternative uses of the novel, both denigrating and exploiting cinematic conventions, and resisting the mythic and psychologically compelling tone of his earlier fiction in order to infuse this novel with a more specific social consciousness. In experimenting with form and attempting to review the real conditions in which the writer perceives and projects himself and his ideals, both Dan and Fowles pursue a complex, multiple approach to perception. As Ina Ferris and Simon Loveday both note, Daniel Martin is obsessed with the individual’s relationship to society and to history, including extensive theoretical meditations on Lukacs and Gramsci and an unprecedented number of minor characters, all of whom help to situate the protagonist (and, incidentally, the author) within a specific generational and cultural condition. 2 Recognizing that any comprehensive study of Dan’s personal history must account for both his own individual experiences and his socially- and historically-determined attitudes, both character and author interrogate the cultural, historical, political, professional, and psychological forces that have shaped Dan’s perspective and generated his current anxiety. 3 For both Dan and Fowles, the process of writing the novel that becomes Daniel Martin therefore requires an unaccustomed 2 Ina Ferris, “Realist Intention and Mythic Impulse in Daniel Martin”, Journal of Narrative Technique, XII/1 (Spring 1982), 146; Loveday, The Romances of John Fowles, 112. 3 Critics have undertaken similar approaches to Daniel Martin; see, for example, Jacqueline Costello, “When Worlds Collide: Freedom, Freud, and Jung in John Fowles’ Daniel Martin”, University of Hartford Studies in Literature, XXII/1 (1990), 31-44; Mahmoud Salami, “The Archaeological Representation of the Orient in John Fowles’ Daniel Martin”, Ariel, XXIX/3 (July 1998), 143-68; and Carol Ward, “Movie as Metaphor: Focus on Daniel Martin”, Literature Film Quarterly, XV/1 (1987), 814.

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commitment to a conception of knowledge as situated, and to a concomitant acknowledgement that any individual’s perspective is therefore partial, merely a fragment of the more complete vision that is whole sight. In defining the Devil as “not seeing whole” (181), Anthony provides the impetus for Dan’s self-evaluation, particularly as his imminent death inspires him to consider his own personal history as honestly and completely as possible. An obvious Oedipal figure whose insightful consideration of his own failures as a husband, a philosopher, and a friend precedes his evocative suicide, Anthony encourages Dan to reconsider not only his past experiences, but his present attitudes and future relationships, and to acknowledge especially the critical factors that connect past, present, and future. This directive toward self-scrutiny convinces Dan to pursue the autobiographical novel he has already contemplated. Unsettled by Anthony’s somewhat excessive emphasis on his own failings, however, Dan seeks to balance his own subjective self-disgust with a more objective consideration of his failures and successes. By ingeniously alternating first- and third-person narration in his novel, Dan fuses the subjective and the objective, simultaneously occupying the positions of narrator and character and presenting a multi-faceted, fluid self-image for scrutiny. As an extension of his inveterate obsession with mirrors, this narrative fluidity allows Dan to “see oneself as others see one – to escape the first person, and become one’s own third” (62). Just as his Oxford room had contained walls full of mirrors, the novel that Dan constructs functions through repeating reflections that display him from multiple angles. Through his analytical integration of such manifold images, Dan enacts an approach to authorship that parallels Donna Haraway’s directive for a visionary feminist standpoint epistemology. “The imaginary and the rational – the visionary and objective vision – hover close together,” Haraway argues; furthermore, she adds, “The fantastic element of hope for transformative knowledge and the severe check and stimulus of sustained critical inquiry are jointly the ground of any believable claim to objectivity or rationality not riddled with breathtaking denials and repressions”. Already conscious of the extent to which his “breathtaking denials and repressions” have created his empty and unsatisfying situation, and further compelled by Anthony’s suicide to pursue a serious investigation of his personal history that might

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liberate both himself and Jane from their inauthentic roles, Dan uses the novel to consider himself as a “split and contradictory self”; to engage in a reflective “practice of objectivity that privileges contestation, deconstruction, passionate construction, webbed connections, and hope for transformation of systems of knowledge and ways of seeing”; 4 and finally, to envision a more authentic existence. For Dan, however, these innovative, postmodern reflections are problematically narcissistic, simultaneously requiring both exhibitionism and voyeurism of his talents and ideals, as his propensity to insert cinematic jargon or to emphasize the visual spectacle early in the novel indicates. Especially because of his expertise in cinematic ways of seeing, Dan often slips into the role Norman K. Denzin identifies as that of the male voyeur in contemporary cinema, becoming “a prisoner in a house of visual and ocular mirrors, a victim of his own power and deception”. 5 As Dan progressively embraces the conventions of the novel and rejects the conventions of the cinema, his investigations seem increasingly epistemologically and ontologically limited. Because Dan occupies a privileged social, economic, and professional position, his masculine gaze, as he realizes, lacks a necessary critical edge. Even in his extensive considerations of the historical and political events that have defined his generation, the religious and social circumstances that have prompted his personal indulgences, and the psychological deprivations that have influenced his relationships, Dan has difficulty accepting responsibility for his behavior and interrogating his choices, too often implying that those larger forces have determined his actions. Like Denzin’s postmodern voyeur, he cannot “produce a depth and form of understanding that goes beyond detailed glimpses of the pathetic masculine subject reflected in the flat historical mirror”. Gradually coming to an awareness of these limitations as the novel develops, Dan begins to look outside himself – beyond even his projected self – for more varied critical perspectives. For these alternative visions Dan turns to the women in his life, especially his mistress Jenny and his ex-sister-in-law, former friend and lover, and Anthony’s widow, Jane. Experts in their own realms of intimacy, Jenny and Jane cannot access the entirety of Dan’s complex situation, 4 5

Haraway, “Situated Knowledges”, 585-86. Denzin, The Cinematic Society, 167.


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a combination of historical, cultural, and professional worlds that only Dan can fully inhabit. Both central to Dan’s consciousness and peripheral to certain aspects of his situation, these women function as outsiders within Dan’s dominant discourse, able to offer penetrating insights from their positions that contribute significantly to the whole sight Dan envisions. If Dan occupies a position similar to Denzin’s postmodern male voyeur, the women in Dan’s life (and novel) occupy the position of the female counterpart to the voyeur, who, Denzin argues, can “plumb the depths of another’s soul and discover and understand the rage, the fire, the emotionality, and the meaning that move another to action”. 6 Each of these women allows Dan to see himself in new ways and to further understand his own ideals and motivations, and his inclusion of their perspectives in his novel attests to his resolution to integrate such alternative visions into his way of seeing. For Fowles, the inclusion of such perspectives indicates a growing commitment to a feminine ethic grounded not in masculine fantasy but in the real conditions of women’s lived experience. Unlike his earlier heroines, Jenny and especially Jane are mundanely realistic, firmly situated in the everyday by repeated references to their cultural identities, professions, respective ages, past relationships, family members, and, in Jane’s case, even varicose veins. Neither philosophically experimental nor categorically unique, Jenny and Jane struggle with the circumstances of their lives, projecting an air of genuine, even excessive, uncertainty about their appropriate places in the world. In this respect, Jenny and Jane epitomize for Dan “two things he fears, emotion and unreason” (44). Yet the significance Dan grants to Jenny’s and Jane’s perspectives also indicates Fowles’ interest in bridging a gap between men’s and women’s ways of knowing and being, in crossing a “zone of unspoken distance between male and female intelligences” (290) such as the one Dan perceives in Anthony’s failed relationship with Jane. Especially because of Anthony’s request that Dan might resurrect Jane’s authentic self, Dan’s novel fundamentally seeks an authentic, specifically situated woman’s perspective that might complement the authentic, critically considered and credibly owned man’s perspective that Dan pursues. For both Dan and Fowles, then, the novel that is Daniel Martin enacts

6

Ibid., 187.

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a visionary approach to personal authenticity that seeks to transcend the singularity and dominance of masculine authority. This interest in the perspectives of women who are more situated in the real than in the archetypal is challenging for both Fowles and his protagonist, both of whom have more experience considering women as psychologically or erotically functional. Indeed, even in his reflective, progressive novel, Dan generally uses the women in his life as occasions for his own self-analysis, noting how the most obvious aspects of their circumstances affect their behavior, but considering them mostly as emblems of particular stages in his psychological or sexual development. Focused on a careful contemplation of his own situation, Dan dismisses such complexity in his considerations of his Aunt Millie; his ex-wife and Jane’s sister, Nell; his mistresses; and even his daughter, Caro. Instead of presenting these women as specifically situated, complex people, Dan introduces them into his novel as examples of various tropes of womanhood against which he defines his masculinity and self-image. At the heart of his unsatisfying relationships with women, Dan suggests, is the death of his mother in his early childhood. Indeed, Dan repeatedly offers a Freudian analysis of his general inability to accept women as they are rather than as he needs them to be. 7 Connecting Dan’s pursuit of a maternal ideal with his experience of discovering a dead woman in the reeds of a river during his Oxford days – an experience that precipitates his first sexual liaison with Jane – Eileen Warburton argues that Dan’s sexual and psychological realities are closely connected. Indeed, Warburton suggests, Dan’s systematic pursuit of ever younger women as mistresses illustrates his utterly fragmented perspective. Unable to face the reality of his mother’s absence, Dan pursues transitory, inconsequential relationships with women that prevent him from confronting his fundamental feelings of loss and from achieving whole sight. 8 Even in 7

This interest in Freudian analysis is one of the most clearly autobiographical elements of the extremely autobiographical Daniel Martin. In her biography of Fowles, Eileen Warburton outlines in some detail Fowles’ continual pursuit of an imaginative reunion with the mother in his writing, a theory that he first formulated independently in 1964 and that he subsequently developed in both his fictional and non-fictional writing after reading Gilbert Rose’s “The French Lieutenant’s Woman: The Unconscious Significance of a Novel to its Author”, American Imago, XXIX (1972), 165-76 (John Fowles, 270, 341-43). 8 Eileen Warburton, “The Corpse in the Combe: The Vision of the Dead Woman in the Landscapes of John Fowles”, John Fowles and Nature: Fourteen Perspectives on


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his relationship with his Aunt Millie, whose place in Dan’s childhood household situates her as his mother-substitute, Dan fails to create a meaningful, enduring relationship that fully considers the complicated role Millie must have had to fulfill for him. Instead, he reports, he “harried her abominably” as a teenager, denigrated her optimism and lack of intellect, and, he explains, realized belatedly that “She was much nearer sainthood than anyone else in my life – the kind of sanctity Flaubert defined for all time in Un Coeur Simple. I didn’t read that masterpiece until she was dead; and recognized her, and my own past arrogance, at once” (86). Emblematic of Dan’s tendency to come to consciousness of others’ qualities or sacrifices far too late to make amends, Aunt Millie serves an almost completely literary function in Dan’s novel. Just as he recognizes her “sanctity” only in a literary text, Dan similarly uses his Aunt Millie in his own novel not to honor her situated perspective, but to establish the roots of the arrogance and egotism that have defined his masculinity. Similarly, Dan situates his daughter Caro as a member of a particular social class, with a disappointing academic background and the complicated emotions of a child caught in the middle of her divorced parents’ battles. However, like Millie, Caro’s presence in Dan’s novel merely fills a number of textual gaps. Though she does provoke Dan into conversations that force him to reevaluate his opinions, Caro functions much more significantly in Dan’s novel as a symbol of his intermittent fatherhood, his failed marriage, and his hypocrisy as a man both involved with a much younger mistress and critical of his daughter’s affair with a middle-aged man. Although Dan and Caro gradually begin to transcend the Electra complex that seems to define their relationship, Dan never reports Caro’s insights into his situation as anything beyond the talent her middle-aged lover, Barney, perceives in her: a “gift for handling people. Getting their number” (257). Able to penetrate only those aspects of Dan’s consciousness that correspond to his generally inadequate behavior as a father, Caro contributes only marginally to Dan’s pursuit of whole sight through what he characterizes as her somewhat surprising and conveniently timed challenges to his authority. Caro’s mother and Dan’s ex-wife, Nell, offers even fewer insightful interpretations of Dan’s personal history, primarily because

Landscape, ed. James R. Aubrey, Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1999, 125-26.

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Dan includes her in his novel in only the most defensive and coldly factual terms. Intimately connected with Dan’s past and presumably especially familiar with the events and choices that have contributed to his current situation, Nell appears in Dan’s novel merely as a representative of all that he resists about his past and about his potential – she is wealthy but embodies none of the resigned dignity of her husband, Andrew; she is educated but refuses to discuss meaningful issues with anything but self-important pronouncement; she is as exasperated with Caro as Dan, but resents Jane’s attempts to direct her confused and conflicted niece. Despite his commitment to whole sight, Dan repeatedly implies that Nell’s perspective can offer nothing significant to his novel. Indeed, he presents the failure of their marriage entirely without her point of view, assuming that the occasional self-criticism he includes in this report will account for any contribution she might make, finally even denying Nell the specificity of her own experience by proclaiming, “I suspect our growing incompatibility [at the time of my first affair] was at least as much a matter of history as of personal psychologies” (158). Presenting Nell as a mere type of well-bred, insensitive, and demanding woman, Dan defines both his past behavior and his current contemplations in opposition to his ex-wife, denying her the opportunity to comment on his reflections or even occupy her own specific situation. Indeed, Dan’s reports of nearly all his erotic relationships proceed from his singular point of view, as he considers each mistress only in terms of her contribution to his psychological or sexual development. His first romantic interest, Nancy, for example, appears as a rather stereotypical, plump country maid, initiating the young Dan into his blossoming sexuality with the standard tantalizing combination of modesty and curiosity that Dan (and Fowles) records in lingering, exploring, suckling, bursting, and finally simultaneously orgasmic detail (371-72). Extremely significant to Dan’s development as a lover, Nancy functions in Dan’s novel as a symbol of lost innocence, and later embodies the lost enchantment of a realistically aged woman, as her conventional, indifferent chatter demonstrates when she visits her childhood home, the farm Dan now owns. Likewise, Dan’s first infidelities represent the consequences of his professional success. Mere bodies with which Dan happens to engage sexually, these mistresses appear as the famously promiscuous “British Open” (136) and an aspiring American actress with whom Dan felt he was having “an affair with America itself” (159). Granting these women


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only the briefest of cameos in his novel, Dan considers them in only the most straightforward journalistic terms, merely reporting their appearance in his life and using them as characters to establish his self-indulgence and sexual predation. Dan modifies this dismissive attitude in his reports of two more significant affairs, one with his coworker, Andrea, and the other with Miriam and Marjory, Cockney sisters and aspiring actresses. More specifically situated than his other mistresses, Andrea and the sisters represent more complicated psychological realities for Dan, especially since both affairs end with a certain sense of poignant loss. The profoundly abused wife of a violent, alcoholic Polish expatriate, Andrea embodies not only Dan’s endless pursuit of his lost mother – there was “something vaguely maternal about her body”, Dan recalls – but also his compulsion to escape commitments and responsibilities he considers fundamentally stifling. Noting that Andrea “felt trapped in some hopeless way,” Dan explains his relationship with her as a complicated process of projection and identification: “In effect she was both Nell and Dan: Nell, in leading a life that did not satisfy her full self; and Dan, in feeling she had been tricked into a wrong marriage” (148). An enduring relationship that ends amicably out of “mutual refusal to disrupt our ways of life” but poignantly with her eventual suicide, Dan’s affair with Andrea functions metaphorically as an affair with his own marriage, allowing him to sympathize with the frustrations of a woman trapped in unsatisfying, even abusive circumstances while simultaneously nursing his own resentments. Illustrating his pattern of abandoning the realities that are too difficult for him to face, Dan’s report of his relationship with Andrea establishes a significant source of fragmentation in his perspective: rather than sympathizing with Nell’s marital dissatisfaction, Dan transfers his insights and sympathy to a similarly situated but ultimately dissociated partner, mitigating his guilt over his mistreatment of Nell and allowing him to develop a less coherent, but also less challenging, perspective. Indeed, in reflecting on this relationship, Dan identifies the source of his depression at Andrea’s suicide not as the dissolution of their affair but as his “feeling that she had had the last word about all our private lives, all our profession, all our age” (149). In retrospect, he suggests, Andrea’s suicide implicates precisely his historically, professionally, and personally fragmented perspective, his refusal to see beyond his immediate desires and to see whole.

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In contrast to this fragmentation, Dan presents his affair with Miriam and Marjory as a fantastic vision of relational contentment. This report is a “fable”, he insists, and as the chapter title suggests, an “Interlude” from the tiresome obligations of his other affairs. Admitting, “There were always, inevitably, elements of callousness, selfishness, self-secrecy” in his relationships, Dan laments at the beginning of this fable, “One cannot tell another human being: I’ve examined you, experienced you, learned from you, and it’s been amusing and interesting, but now I’d like to move on, without some infliction of pain” (239). In his affair with Miriam and Marjory, however, Dan claims to have achieved exactly that fulfilling liberation, and he uses his reflections on this affair in his novel to justify his pursuit of inconsequential commitments. A supposedly mutually beneficial affair that provides the down-and-out, working class Miriam and Marjory with a temporary home and Dan with sexual access to a pair of young, attractive women, Dan’s affair with these two sisters, he raves, functioned through “a blend of reciprocal curiosity, affection and physical pleasure that was totally free of love”, although he admits, “the physical pleasure was mostly mine” (250). Praising Miriam’s contentment, and later her sister’s, with his treating her like “a pet animal – someone I was prepared to feed and dress and make love to, and teach a little, but not someone I could ever give my heart or full attention to” (244), Dan praises the sisters as “the two most civilized feminine creatures I have ever known” because of their “stunning honesty”, “tact”, and “intelligence”. Indeed, Dan is so totally fulfilled by this unconventional affair that he presents it without apparent irony as “a glimpse of an ideal world, perhaps even of a future: not in some odious male chauvinist sense, the access to two bodies, the indulging in the old harem fantasy, but because it was so free of all the encumbrance, the suppuration, the vile selfishness of romantic love” (251-52). Careful to contextualize this affair within the unique professional and social circumstances in which it developed, Dan offers important information about Miriam’s and Marjory’s situation in this fable. Like Andrea, Miriam and Marjory have been victimized by a violent alcoholic. However, they have also been sexually abused by this alcoholic father, and repeatedly exploited in their long history in show business (245). Indeed, when Dan’s affair with Miriam begins during the filming of one of his scripts, Marjory seems “permanently attached to the producer’s side”, a situation Dan assumes is “the usual fee” for


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aspiring actresses’ minor roles (241), and Miriam initially assumes that Dan’s offer of similar roles for the sisters in his next screenplay involves a similar fee. Despite Dan’s assurances that he expects nothing in return for his generosity in housing and entertaining the sisters, Miriam and Marjory apparently assume otherwise – hence Miriam’s offer of her sister for Dan’s sexual enjoyment. Although Dan initially rejects this offer, he requires very little persuasion, explaining, “I knew she was trying … to say something generous – and however implausible, obscene, what you will, her proposition must sound” (247). Indulging in precisely the “old harem fantasy” he purports to dismiss, Dan raves about the sisters’ “generosity” rather than considering their behavior a conditioned response to their repeated exploitation. Rather than convincing readers that this affair is indeed “a glimpse of an ideal world”, Dan’s obliviousness to the ways in which his easy acceptance of Miriam’s and Marjory’s sexual “generosity” simply reinforces their understanding of their sexuality as the necessary exchange for social and professional advancement, Dan demonstrates in this fable his inability to thoughtfully consider the specific situations of his mistresses and his resultant tendency to use women as emblematic of stages in his own development. With Jenny, however, Dan attempts to transcend this tendency, especially since Jenny actively resists the kind of emblematic representation he practices with his other mistresses. She explains: “I know your game. We’re all so much easier to live with when we’re just notions in your past. I think you’re the original male chauvinist pig.” (619)

In making such claims, Jenny challenges Dan’s fragmented masculine authority, insisting: “I just won’t be only something in your script. In any of your scripts. Ever again.” (443)

Refusing to accept Dan’s repeated attempts to define her, like his other mistresses, as a type, an example of a certain kind of young, beautiful, impressionable actress whom he can instruct – an approach that closely resembles the relationship between G. P. and Miranda in

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The Collector 9 – Jenny forces Dan to consider both his own complex situation and her own situated perspective, encouraging him to write the novel that becomes Daniel Martin and contributing three chapters to that novel herself. Like Clegg in The Collector, Dan incorporates Jenny’s writing into his novel on his own terms and in his preferred order. Unlike Clegg, however, who claims that Miranda’s diary demonstrates how she “only thought of herself”, 10 Dan uses Jenny’s contributions in a sincere attempt to consider an alternative perspective that might help him to see whole. Initially attracted to Jenny because of her status as a fellow British exile in Hollywood, Dan values Jenny’s perspective for its slightly altered rehearsal of his own experiences. Lamenting his sense of personal failure and ontological fragmentation early in the novel, Dan compliments Jenny, insisting, “You’re one of the very few fragments that make sense” (15). Indeed, from Dan’s perspective, Jenny embodies a temperament, professional ambition, and cultural predicament similar to his own, and these similarities in situation establish an almost immediate connection between them. However, Jenny also embodies significant variations on Dan’s experiences. Although she lives in London and values many of the characteristics of Englishness Dan uses to define his identity, Jenny is in fact not English, but Scottish, and lacks the sociopolitical history of Dan’s traumatized generation. Although she shares many of Dan’s cynical dismissals of Hollywood society, she is not a sell-out veteran screenwriter, but an established stage actress embarking upon her first Hollywood production. And although her current romantic entanglement involves a significant age difference between partners, she occupies the role of the young daughter to Dan’s mature father, or so Dan realizes when he confronts his own daughter Caro’s affair with Barney. Because Jenny and Dan are similarly situated, Dan can examine responses and attitudes that mirror his own by observing and interacting with Jenny. In this respect Jenny fulfills Dan’s compulsion to seek relationships in which he can consider his mistresses as “surfaces before which he could … see himself reflected” (239). However, the specificities of Jenny’s situation distinguish her from Dan’s other mistresses and establish her significance as a real, rather 9 Kerry McSweeney, “Withering into the Truth: John Fowles and Daniel Martin”, Critical Quarterly, XX/4 (1978), 33. 10 Fowles, The Collector, 303.


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than emblematic, presence in Dan’s consciousness. In particular, the contrasts Jenny embodies allow her to offer alternative interpretations of their current professional situation, their relationship, and their individual identities that challenge Dan to reevaluate his attitudes and assumptions and that become crucial to both his novel and his pursuit of whole sight. 11 The most significant of these contrasts proves to be Jenny’s association with American film. Living, working, and writing in and about America until the very end of Dan’s novel, Jenny ultimately represents the inauthentic, impossible ideals Dan associates with his flight into film – a decision he considers a betrayal of his true self. Despite the similarities between Jenny’s and Dan’s experiences, the extent to which Dan associates Jenny with the cinema disassociates her from the aspects of his situation that truly matter to him. As a result, Jenny occupies a position profoundly outside Dan’s situation, since she is an insider only within the world he wishes to abandon. Indeed, Dan finally rejects Jenny precisely because of this outsider status, considering their relationship a function of his previous inauthentic, fragmented perspective. However, Jenny’s outsider within status inspires her to pursue a kind of confrontational authorship that contributes significantly to Dan’s pursuit of whole sight. Infusing her authorship with a consciousness Patricia Hill Collins refers to as “oppositional knowledge” – “a type of knowledge developed by, for, and/or in defense of an oppressed group’s interests [that ideally] fosters the group’s self-definition and self-determination” 12 – Jenny employs her sense of outrage at Dan’s objectification and/or abstraction of his mistresses to expose those elements of his perspective and behavior that he either cannot or will not acknowledge, forcing him to recognize that his knowledge is indeed situated and therefore partial. Indeed, Jenny’s first contribution, a report of her first impressions of Dan in Hollywood and at his most inauthentic, comes as a shock to Dan, “less at the side of it that was critical of him,” he insists, “but at its distancing; a certain sharp, too sharp objectivity, the ‘you-and-me’ made ‘them” (286). What Dan perceives as “too sharp objectivity”, Jenny considers a necessary element of Dan’s self-examination. As she explains to him, “You get so uptight when I have my own ways of 11

Susan Strehl Klemtner, “The Counterpoles of John Fowles’s Daniel Martin”, Critique, XXI/2 (1979), 64. 12 Collins, Black Feminist Thought, 299.

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seeing things” (329). The distance she employs in her contributions, carefully violated in occasional direct references, deliberately jolts Dan out of his egotistic subjectivity. Having destabilized Dan’s perspective through this first contribution, Jenny’s other contributions concentrate on Dan’s attitude toward women. The least significant – but most memorable – of these efforts, Jenny’s third contribution indicts Dan’s voyeuristic, objectifying tendencies. Conscious of Dan’s increasing withdrawal, Jenny constructs this missive as a pornographic fantasy in which she stars, along with the lead actor in her current film – a man Dan and Jenny refer to, rather appropriately, as “the Prick” – and the Prick’s girlfriend Kate, whom Jenny describes in detail, she tells Dan, “for your benefit. You’d fancy her” (432). A dramatization of Jenny’s desire to be unfaithful to Dan in order to get his attention, this contribution foregrounds “the issues of veracity and fictionality [that] make interpretation difficult”, Thomas C. Foster argues, particularly as it functions entirely through the question, “Is she telling the truth or not, or, rather, what sort of truth is she telling?” While Foster notes how this contribution represents a cinematic “change in perspective (one can almost see the script direction NEW POV)” that attempts to “emulate objectivity by overcoming the camera’s inevitably limiting, subjective focus”, 13 it also deconstructs the process of representation. In deliberately assuming the role of sex object in a pornographic text, Jenny startles Dan into recognizing his tendency to represent his mistresses not as specifically situated but as elements of dominant masculine fantasies. Written paradoxically both for Dan’s vicarious enjoyment and for her own self-determination, Jenny’s third contribution, while perhaps not factual, thus presents a “less false”, oppositional perspective that demonstrates the extent to which Dan really conceives of their relationship as a series of interactions involving, as he puts it, “the ravings of the male menopause and a naked film-star”. Just as Jenny initially reacts to Dan’s comment with a vehement insistence on personal rather than categorical identity, exclaiming, “I’m not a film-star. I’m your Jenny” (16), she similarly focuses her second contribution, a meditation on her experiences in America without Dan, not primarily on the general differences between England and America – as Dan focuses several of his musings 13

Foster, Understanding John Fowles, 128.


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throughout Daniel Martin – but on the effects those differences have on individuals and on relationships. Outraged at Dan’s assumption “that he must know what was best for both of us” (233), Jenny identifies the source of Dan’s apparent arrogance as a particularly English obsession with loss, arguing: He has a mistress. Her name is Loss …. I have to imagine a secret Dan who actually likes loss – both all he’s lost in the past and all he has still to lose. In some way to him loss is a beautiful, fertile thing.

Noting the satisfaction with which Dan anticipates the dissolution of their relationship, Jenny characterizes his “awful English attachment to defeat and loss and self-negation” as a kind of perversion: The more I think of it, the more creepy it becomes. Like some strangler caressing a girl’s neck and quietly weeping because he’s going to kill her in a few minutes. (234)

Dan initially dismisses this analysis, claiming that Jenny’s interpretation of his repeatedly failed relationships is “slightly wrong: his mistress was not loss so much as that he expected the loss of all his mistresses, and in more or less direct proportion to his discovery of them” (239). However, later in the novel, Dan acknowledges the kind of violence he perpetrates on his mistresses in dismissing them once he believes he has come to understand them categorically. This acknowledgement springs from Jenny’s reflections on their visit to Tsankawi, which make their way into the novel not within Jenny’s formal contributions but at the end of Dan’s chapter relating the same events. A profoundly significant event in their relationship, this visit to Tsankawi represents opposing potentialities for their affair: the potential for serious commitment, which Dan considers tempting but ultimately impossible, and the potential for eventual disconnection, toward which Dan subtly directs their relationship through characteristic withdrawal. Conscious of these tensions not only in retrospect but during this trip, Jenny uses her reflections on Tsankawi to challenge Dan’s problematic rejection of women’s perspectives, explaining to him: You understand so many outer things about women, but I sometimes think none of the inner ones at all. Or perhaps it’s even worse, you know them and pretend you don’t. (333)

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Indeed, Dan’s rejection of Jenny proceeds directly from her ability to challenge his perspective with her own way of seeing, to bring him to consciousness of issues he would prefer not to notice. Not yet willing or able to integrate her insights into his perspective and alienated by the significant differences in their situations, Dan abandons Jenny and the world she inhabits. However, Dan ultimately validates Jenny’s oppositional perspective by allowing her not only the final word on Tsankawi, characterizing her comment on that trip as a “bullseye. Where it was aimed” (618), but also an authorial voice in what is otherwise a novel exclusively composed from Dan’s dominant perspective. This retrospective acceptance of Jenny’s insights provides one of the most sincere illustrations of Dan’s commitment to whole sight in the novel, since integrating Jenny’s contributions into his text requires Dan to grant her character an authority that challenges his own. Moreover, Jenny’s contributions transform Dan, if only for three chapters and a few occasional comments, into a reader forced to confront his own representation in someone else’s text. 14 By including her contributions in his novel, Dan implies that although he cannot be bothered to reconsider his already-formed images of his previous mistresses, he does empathize with Jenny’s insistence on self-definition. Though she remains to some extent a representation of elements of Dan’s situation, Jenny transcends, through the oppositional perspective embodied in her authorship, the process of objectification Dan uses to employ his mistresses as “something in [his] scripts.” Nevertheless, Dan learns to incorporate women’s ways of knowing and being into his pursuit of whole sight not primarily through Jenny, but through Jane. Like Jenny, Jane is for Dan an outsider within. While their alienation has kept Jane totally removed from Dan’s professional life and only tenuously connected to his personal life for a significant period, Jane nevertheless understands both intuitively and experientially the attitudes and events that fundamentally structure Dan’s ontological and epistemological systems. Whereas Jenny’s insider knowledge covers the aspects of Dan’s situation that he wishes to abandon, Jane’s insider knowledge encompasses those aspects he most fervently desires to revive. Furthermore, Jane’s predicament is extraordinarily similar to Dan’s dissatisfaction and despair. Repeatedly noting her alienation from her true self, Jane defines her 14

Susana Jaén Onega, Form and Meaning in the Novels of John Fowles, Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press, 1989, 107.


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situation in terms of the struggle to transcend her unfulfilling and inauthentic existence. Both a mirror for and a contributor to Dan’s pursuit of whole sight, Jane successfully resists emblematic interpretation through her situated perspective and convinces Dan to embrace an alternative personal ethic infused with right feeling. Although Dan considers Jane’s potential as an emblem of his psychological development, these considerations ultimately persuade him to abandon the formulaic representations of women and relationships he has used both professionally and personally and pursue more complex modes of inquiry. Just after defending his failure to sustain meaningful relationships to his daughter, arguing that writers “can always imagine better ones. With much less effort” (267), Dan admits to “thinking less of Jane in the flesh than of her uses, when reduced to certain moral attitudes, artistically; as an emblem of his own guilty conscience, perhaps precisely because of the feminine and characteristically English cast of her nature”. However, after further considering Jane’s thematic and emblematic potential, Dan rejects the relative simplicity and safety of film and embarks upon his novel by “assembling a few notes on why he should leave the sanctuary of a medium he knew for the mysteries and complexities of one he didn’t” (268-69). Although Jenny playfully taunts Dan into considering an autobiographical novel, Jane makes that medium necessary. Too complex an emblem for simple representation, she requires more elaborate consideration. Indeed, as Dan begins to explore Jane’s situation, he revises his initial assumptions about her significance as a character in his lifetext. Instead of upholding the petrified social moral values Dan has associated with Jane and Anthony, for example, Jane denigrates such mores as profoundly sickening, particularly since she associates them with the stifling dogmas of Anthony’s Catholicism and the stylized irrelevancies of Oxford society. In place of the feminine magnetism he remembers of the young Jane, Dan encounters a dry Oxford intellectualism and detachment characteristic of Anthony’s masculine society. 15 “That permanent faint smile I had always associated with her”, Dan mourns, “seemed to have disappeared; and so had all her ancient vitality – that mute electricity, disturbance, poetry with which she had always charged even the most trivial meeting …. What I began to feel was a deep reserve, and I didn’t know what it hid” (152). 15

Paul H. Lorenz, “Epiphany among the Ruins: Etruscan Places in John Fowles’s Daniel Martin”, The Texas Review, XI/1-2 (Spring-Summer 1990), 83.

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Perhaps most shockingly for Dan, Jane has directed her “characteristically English” nature toward a political flirtation with Communism, an impractical and radical initiative Dan attributes to “Oxford eccentricity” and to “middle-aged women’s liberation, a need to shock both herself and those around her, a reaction against premature widowhood and all its threatened emptinesses” (192). Although she acknowledges these factors, Jane insists on her behavior as a more specific response to her situation. A prematurely widowed mother of three children – the youngest of whom causes constant frustration and anxiety – Jane lacks a satisfying narrative through which to structure her life. Her marriage to Anthony has been profoundly destructive; her conversion to Catholicism has proved insincere; her affair with a younger man, a former student of Anthony’s, has ended with predictable speed; her career potential has fizzled after long years in the role of wife and mother. Confronting Dan’s incredulity over her changed demeanor and left-wing sympathies, Jane contends that Dan has “failed to realize the complexity of her case and her predicament” (387), insisting: “But you do have an interesting career, Dan. It really is rather different for us. My kind of woman. At my age.” (388)

Identifying her dilemmas as a function of, among other factors, her age, her gender, her marital status, her sexuality, her lack of career, her motherhood, her class, her political affiliations, and her education, Jane asserts a specifically situated perspective that largely invalidates Dan’s abstract concept of her. Even more unsettling to Dan’s perspective is Anthony’s insistence that his marriage to Jane has prevented her from living authentically, particularly as it denied the love Dan and Jane once shared. Shocked by the revelation that Anthony knew of his sexual intimacy with Jane, Dan is even more stunned, he reports, by the “possibility that an event I had always believed had disturbed my own life far more deeply than hers … had finally – if Anthony was to be believed – affected her more deeply” (184). Recalling that his infidelities to Nell resulted in large part from “the fatal memory of that afternoon with Jane, which by then had become a proof that wild selfishness can be got away with . . . and echo tenderly, poetically, secretly” (137) and admitting that in response to Jane’s subsequent disgust he “nursed the grotesque unfairness of her blaming me for a sin she had first taught me to commit” (162), Dan assimilates this revelation with some difficulty,


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slowly acknowledging the supreme injustice of representing Jane as a mere emblem of his “guilty conscience” when she has apparently suffered more profoundly from similar guilt. Indeed, the more Dan learns about Jane, the more he perceives in her “a potency of self-disappointment, self-slander, self-distrust, that he might in the past have aped … but had never really felt”. Hypothesizing that Jane’s anxiety may be the result of “something in femininity, in femaleness”, Dan marvels at Jane’s simultaneous selfpossession and self-disgust, noting, “she was both her own, in a way he had never quite managed, and not her own, where he only too lazily and complacently was” (404). Indeed, as an individual Jane is a mass of contradictions, not unlike Fowles’ other heroines. Like Sarah in The French Lieutenant’s Woman, Diana in “The Ebony Tower”, or Catherine in “The Cloud”, Jane has an acute awareness of her situation and desperately seeks self-determination, but suffers from an inability to accept conventional ways of knowing and being. As she struggles to discover acceptable outlets for her ideals and ambitions, she appears inscrutable, implausible, and inconsistent to the more rational Dan, who notes with some confusion “the silences, the pretense that she had no conventional faces left (a claim her behavior denied all the time), the constant to-and-fro between the woman who argued every step and the woman who declared herself unreasonable; who asserted, then backed down; who had no hope for herself, but would not accept hopelessness in anyone else” (395). Beyond mere confusion, these contradictions in Jane’s attitudes and behavior provoke Dan’s anger, resentment, and indignation, particularly during their trip to Palmyra, a side trip from their cruise down the Nile, during which the couple reunite sexually. An awkward and complicated act for Jane, who sleeps with Dan in an effort to demonstrate how little a sexual union can contribute to a complete and genuine connection between similarly stymied individuals, this encounter provokes a climactic clash of perspective between Dan and Jane. Even more bewildered by this second liaison than by the first, Dan’s exasperation with Jane’s emotional withdrawal and resignation to despair prompts him to revert to a conception of Jane as object, exclaiming, “He felt outraged … outraged like a man before a machine that will not function, although he has followed to the letter all the instructions for starting it” (604). For Jane, however, authenticity and contentment cannot be achieved so simply and methodically through this narrative and experiential return to the

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formative experience of their lives. Conscious of the extent to which she fulfills Dan’s need for “recurrent structure in both real and imagined events” (396) and deeply distrustful of such conventional narrative patterns that attempt to fuse the real and the fictional, Jane views their sexual reunion not as a process of healing, but as a process of final dissociation. Totally incomprehensible to Dan, whose perspective reflects the admittedly privileged position that he occupies and that allows him to structure his attitudes through dominant discourses, this reasoning reflects what Collins considers “subjugated knowledge”, or “the secret knowledges generated by oppressed groups”. 16 Prevented from pursuing authenticity and opportunity because of her marriage, motherhood, religion, class, and social position, Jane has cultivated a contradictory and split identity that allows her to maintain social conventions while simultaneously criticizing and withdrawing from them. Indeed, as Dan notes: She was not the sort of woman ever to be understood empirically, logically – indeed that was part of the problem, that she could discuss herself lucidly and frankly, and yet still live in darkness ... not merely inscrutable, but almost calculatedly two-faced; although that suggests hypocrisy, and this was perhaps simply a matter of self-preservation, of knowing the feelings of the ‘dark’ self would destroy too much if allowed to show. (300)

By turns unable and unwilling to communicate her reasoning to Dan, Jane clings to this “dark” self, to the ideologies and strategies that have helped her to cope with her existence within systems she finds alienating. As Collins explains, “Such knowledge typically remains hidden because revealing it weakens its purpose in assisting [the oppressed] in dealing with oppression”. 17 This split consciousness has become such a fundamental characteristic of Jane’s ontological system, however, that she is unable to transcend it without Dan’s assistance. Despite her attraction to Dan, Jane rather resignedly explains to him that she can no longer access the feelings she had for him in their youth, when she “had a whole being” (604). Moreover, Jane is so thoroughly downtrodden by the disappointments of her experiences that she simply cannot conceive of 16 17

Collins, Black Feminist Thought, 301. Ibid., 301.


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any conventional narrative (such as renewed romance, for example) as anything but oppressive; in this respect, her resistance to a relationship with Dan constitutes oppositional knowledge. However, Dan interprets Jane’s resistance differently, and functions as an outsider within in his own right to transform Jane’s consciousness through his perspective. Understanding that Jane has “built up a life so firmly founded on original mistakes and wrong decisions that their removal must seem a threat” (415), Dan finally confronts Jane’s reliance on ontological schizophrenia and alienation by characterizing the source of her anxiety as “Eternal marriage to yourself. Undying love for your own mistakes” (605). Destabilized by this comment and by the unbearable wasteland atmosphere of Palmyra, Jane finally acknowledges that her coping strategies, while necessary within most conventional encounters, are so reliant on alienation and opposition that they deny her opportunities for genuine connection and healing. Although conventional in its faith in the romance narrative, Dan’s perspective nevertheless functions in critical opposition to Jane’s selfprotective, subjugated perspective. Indeed, his intervention rescues her from permanent alienation by restoring balance to her consciousness and allowing her to transcend her resignation and despair. Like Nicholas in The Magus, Dan takes his cue from the Orpheus myth and rescues his Eurydice from symbolic death. Conscious of Orpheus’s failure, however, and deeply frustrated by the extent to which Jane has obsessed over decisions and events long past, Dan resolves to stop dwelling on his past and to concentrate on the present and the future. Just as Jane’s self-renewal requires the integration of Dan’s oppositional perspective, this initiative requires, Dan realizes, a similar confrontation with alternative ways of knowing and being. Although Jenny’s contributions have primed him for such confrontations, Dan’s first awareness of such alternative systems occurs in Egypt, during a musical interlude that powerfully reminds Dan of “other languages, meaning-systems, besides that of words” and that convinces him that he and Jane share “an identity, a syncretism, a same key, a thousand things beyond verbalization” (561). The most significant meaning-system in Dan’s transformation, however, is Jane’s capacity for right feeling, “a profound, and profoundly unintellectual, sense of natural orientation” that she retains despite “all her faults, her wrong dogmas, her self-obsessions, her evasions”. Although Dan admits that he had always imagined this intuitive sophistication “as something static and unchanging – and

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conscious, even if hidden”, his immersion in Jane’s situated perspective changes his understanding of her capacity for right feeling, finally convincing him that “it had always really been living, mobile, shifting and quivering, even veering wildly, like a magnetic needle ... so easily distorted, shaken out of true by mind, emotion, circumstance, environment”. Furthermore, Dan realizes, this kind of intuition “must be a thing that limited and confused rational vision, that would provoke countless errors of actual choice. Followed, it would always run her against nature, the easy courses of society; disobeyed, it would create anxiety, schizophrenia” (609). It is this revelation that finally transforms Dan’s frustration with Jane’s irrationality into compassion for her struggle to balance her considerable intellectual, rational, and verbal talents with her emotional, intuitive, and nonverbal capacity for right feeling. More significantly for his own development, this realization also convinces Dan that his own investigative perspective has lacked precisely this intuitive orientation. Integrating Jane’s right feeling into his own ways of knowing and being, Dan finally learns to appreciate disorder and complexity in relationships, to choose the real over the archetypal. 18 Through the communication and connection of their differently oriented but similarly situated perspectives, Jane and Dan achieve whole sight, envisioning a renewed existence as committed lovers, liberal activists, and experimental narrative artists – and Dan’s “impossible” novel finally begins with the line he imagines as its last sentence. Like Nicholas in The Magus, Dan implies in this narrative account of his transformative experiences, especially through the occasionally self-congratulatory self-disgust that infuses the text, 19 that he has evolved beyond the failures of vision that constrained his previous existence and has achieved a more cohesive, authentic perspective. More convincing than Nicholas, however, Dan successfully integrates women’s ways of knowing and being into his evolving text, creating a prismatic rather than fragmented narrative that integrates multiple modes of perception. 20 Furthermore, Dan’s novel so thoroughly establishes the factors that have endowed him with a dominant discursive position and so self-consciously deconstructs those reifying factors that it transcends the tone of didactic omniscience on which 18

Foster, Understanding John Fowles, 136-37. Nicholas Delbanco, “On Daniel Martin”, Brick, LXVIII (Fall 2001), 97. 20 Ibid., 95. 19


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Nicholas relies. Just as he considers himself “an inefficient god who sees a lapse in his creation repaired by what he had forgotten to institute” (230) when he witnesses an unexpectedly compassionate exchange between a policeman and a tramp, Dan renounces the “god trick of seeing everything from nowhere” 21 by introducing subjugated and oppositional knowledges into his autobiographical narrative. Likewise, in creating a text committed both thematically and structurally to whole sight, Fowles transcends his manipulative impulses 22 and enacts some genuine consciousness-raising about “the obsessive mythologising of the male novelist, his own condition”. 23 In this regard, Daniel Martin serves as a significant fictional contribution to feminist standpoint theory. Painstakingly concerned with exploring the intersections of the various social, historical, political, philosophical, epistemological, and ontological systems that specifically situate an individual man, this novel makes a stunning case for standpoint theorists’ claim that all knowledge is indeed situated and partial. Moreover, by dramatizing the interaction of several situated perspectives, Daniel Martin models a feminist standpoint epistemology that “challenge[s] all certified knowledge and open[s] up the question of whether what has been taken to be true can stand the test of alternative ways of validating truth”. 24 However, in comparison to Fowles’ early novels, Daniel Martin lacks spontaneity and suspense, somewhat ponderously plodding along through the wasteland of the real without sufficiently engaging the playful seductions of the archetypal so masterfully exploited in The Magus and The French Lieutenant’s Woman. Aside from his one indulgence in creating Dan’s rather implausible little fantasy affair with Miriam and Marjory, Fowles avoids almost entirely his characteristic fascination with the archetypal in Daniel Martin, focusing instead on the real conditions in which the novelist and his specifically situated muse must struggle for authenticity and authority. Indeed, as a number of critics have noted, the excessively serious, even monotonous tone of Daniel Martin proceeds principally from the characterization of its heroine. Unlike Fowles’ earlier heroines, Jane generally traffics not in ideas but in lived experience, not in abstract

21

Haraway. “Situated Knowledges”, 581. Salami, John Fowles 161. 23 Woodcock, Male Mythologies, 117. 24 Collins, Black Feminist Thought, 270-71. 22

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concepts of freedom and justice but in concrete illustrations of oppression and alienation. Lacking the erotic vitality of Lily/Julie in The Magus or Sarah in The French Lieutenant’s Woman, Jane has provoked ambivalent, even unfavorable readings from critics, many of whom consider her flat, inanimate, and unappealing, especially in comparison to the more vibrant Jenny. 25 To such criticisms of Jane, Fowles has admitted: “She was meant to be – I wouldn’t exactly say flat, but difficult. Not very attractive sexually. An awkward woman.” 26

Though perhaps disappointing to his readership, Fowles’ characterization of Jane as so unremittingly real, with such similar dilemmas to those of the novel’s hero and without the provocative capacities of his earlier heroines, signifies a critical development in his approach to authority. As Loveday explains, “This concern with the development of a female protagonist marks a substantial shift of interest for Fowles .... For the first time he has written a book which can truly – if discreetly – be said to be about a woman’s quest for identity”. Indeed, in contrast to some critics’ conviction that Jane merely facilitates Dan’s quest for whole sight without offering more than a symbolic challenge, 27 Loveday insists that Dan’s pursuit of whole sight “cannot be achieved without the success of a similar process of self-discovery in Jane”. 28 Indeed, it is the mutual exchange of outsider within perspectives between Dan and Jane that ultimately secures their personal and romantic renewal. Despite her awkwardness, Jane thus occupies a unique position among Fowles’ heroines as a protagonist who not only provokes the hero’s existential development, but also confronts specific oppressions in her own situation and achieves genuine connection with the hero. Even feminist readers fascinated by Fowles’ standpoint approach in Daniel Martin, however, must acknowledge the drudgery of the novel in comparison to his far more provocative, if problematic, earlier novels. Indeed, even the most enthusiastic feminist reader of 25

Ferris, “Realist Intention and Mythic Impulse in Daniel Martin”, 151; McSweeney, “Withering into the Truth: John Fowles and Daniel Martin”, 33; Delbanco, “On Daniel Martin”, 97; Huffaker, John Fowles, 136. 26 Barnum, “Interview”, in Conversations with John Fowles, ed. Vipond, 114. 27 Salami, John Fowles 190; Robert Arlett, “Daniel Martin and the Contemporary Epic Novel”, Modern Fiction Studies, XXXI/1 (Spring 1985), 184. 28 Loveday, The Romances of John Fowles, 126.


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Daniel Martin is bound to notice that despite his efforts in this novel, “social realism is essentially alien to [Fowles’] imagination” and despite its overt commitment to wider social analysis, Daniel Martin is obsessed with the individual and with the process through which historical and social phenomena affect the development of individual points of view. 29 Despite his apparent determination to explore and integrate women’s alternative perspectives into his own authorial pursuit of whole sight, Fowles fails in two regards in Daniel Martin: first, by focusing so exclusively on the mundanely and desolately real that he sacrifices the vitality of his specifically situated heroine and of his narrative endeavors; and second, by focusing so exclusively on the individual that he overlooks the fundamental potential of situated knowledges, which Haraway argues, “are about communities, not about isolated individuals”. 30 The first of these failures he addresses both playfully and confrontationally in his next novel, Mantissa; the second he overcomes in his final published novel, A Maggot.

29 30

Ferris, “Realist Intention and Mythic Impulse in Daniel Martin”, 146-47. Haraway. “Situated Knowledges”, 590.

CHAPTER SIX INTERLUDE: MANTISSA

If Daniel Martin enacts an exploration of the unremittingly real conditions affecting situated men and women, Mantissa represents a flight into fantasy – or, more accurately, a retreat into the archetypal forces of masculinity and femininity. While The French Lieutenant’s Woman, The Ebony Tower, and Daniel Martin demonstrate a progressive process through which Fowles attempts to investigate the alternative perspectives that arise from the specific situations of his women characters, Mantissa represents an interlude in that progression, performing an abstract investigation of the authorial process entirely within the mind of its protagonist, an author named Miles Green. Examining the imaginative relations between Miles and his muse, Erato, Mantissa indulges in a great deal of irreverent, playful, academic, and even pornographic masculine fantasy, portraying the authorial process as both erotically charged and essentially confrontational. Less a novel than a confessional and theoretical exercise, 1 however, Mantissa proceeds from a profound sense of authorial anxiety. 2 Both a snub and a taunt to academic critics, Mantissa seems obsessed with exposing the absurdity of critical theories that emphasize deconstruction and the death of the author. However, Mantissa also reflects significant authorial anxiety over woman as muse, as other, as character, and as function. As John Haegert convincingly argues, despite the oddities of the women in The Ebony Tower and Daniel Martin, Fowles’ heroines had become predictable, almost entirely functional elements of his novels by the time he wrote Mantissa. 3 As “a way of revitalizing the role of woman, or restoring 1

Loveday, The Romances of John Fowles, 6. Ian Gotts, “Fowles’ Mantissa: Funfair in Another Village”, Critique, XXVI/2 (Winter 1985), 93. 3 Haegert, “Memoirs of a Deconstructive Angel”, 168. 2

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and enlarging her subversive influence in the text itself”, Haegert argues, Mantissa demonstrates Fowles’ desire to redesign both his women characters and his own authorial practices. 4 As a response to the imaginative failures of Daniel Martin, however, Mantissa not only confronts Fowles’ archetypal conceptions of masculine authority and feminine creativity, but ridicules his compulsion to retreat into the god trick and establishes situated knowledges as essential for the vitality and spontaneity of his future authorial efforts. Keenly aware of the critical response his work inspires, Fowles admits to some mischievous intentions in the writing of Mantissa: “I’ve always had this, I suppose, half-unconscious feeling that when you’re writing there’s a tease element: that something is always teasing you and making you have pratfalls. There’s some mysterious enemy who one knows also helps, but who can cause all kinds of problems and give you all kinds of misinformation. Mantissa came partly from that sense; partly, I suppose, from the sense that I think modern literary criticism has altogether got too serious and pious …. And also, I suppose, I wrote the book because I knew it was a book most people would disapprove of. Really, I wanted to give people an opportunity to kick me – which they duly did.” 5

As Fowles notes, Mantissa asserts a number of unpopular notions: his unfashionable belief in inspiration as the generative force behind his (and all) fiction, his notorious disdain for academic criticism, and his determination to write and publish despite the dictates of either the popular or the academic market. Perhaps most unsettling to Fowles’ readers, however, is the exhibitionism that defines Mantissa. A remarkably self-reflexive text, the novel exposes Fowles’ most intimate authorial processes through its portrayal of the combative, collaborative, and inherently erotic writing process in which Miles and Erato, the “mysterious enemy who one knows also helps”, engage. Despite the occasional theoretical debate, Mantissa consists almost entirely of sexual acts. The novel’s opening scene, for example, depicts a coldly clinical Erato in the guise of a neurologist named Dr Delfie, who arouses the amnesiac Miles and assists him in creating the “lovely little story” that is Mantissa’s opening chapter. 6 Subsequently, Erato narrates her first sexual encounter in sensual detail, spars with 4

Ibid., 170. Tarbox, “Interview”, in Conversations with John Fowles, ed. Vipond, 167. 6 John Fowles, Mantissa, Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1982, 44. 5

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Miles in a number of narrative brainstorming sessions that involve various levels of sexual congress, and then merges with him in the couple’s climactic lovemaking. Finally, the novel ends with a dramatic reversal in which Erato embodies Miles’ ultimate sexual fantasies while simultaneously transforming him into a satyr. In fact, the sexual variations in which Miles and Erato engage both create and constitute the novel, 7 revealing Fowles’ conception of authorship as an autoerotic process “intimately and mysteriously bound up with the writer’s libido”. 8 In exhibiting his inherently sexual authorial process, Fowles simultaneously situates readers as voyeurs, inviting them to participate in the fantasies that constitute his authority. Indeed, throughout the novel, Fowles implicates readers as voyeurs to his exhibitionism, dissolving the boundaries between the pleasures of the written text and the titillations of the writing process. Just as the hospital inhabitants observe Miles’ and Erato’s climactic lovemaking when the walls of Miles’ cell dissolve, readers of Mantissa witness their interactions without directly engaging in the sexual/textual pleasures of literary conception. However, unless they are authors themselves, readers of the novel may identify not with the “sad and silent concupiscence” (155) of the hospital inhabitants who stare longingly at the harmonious union of author and muse for which they yearn, but rather with the more critically exasperated appraisal of Miles’ authorial process that Erato advances in her role as psychoanalyst: “To me you are simply someone obliged to act out a primal scene trauma. As usual it has left you with a marked feeling of destructive revenge. As usual you’ve tried to sublimate that by an equally marked tendency to voyeurism and exhibitionism. I’ve seen it ten thousand times. You also obey the usual pathology in attempting to master the unresolved trauma by repetitive indulgence in the quasi-regressive activities of writing and being published. I can tell you you’d be a much healthier person if you regressed fully and openly to the two underlying activities concerned.”

Despite Miles’ sarcastic response that he should become “a peeping Tom and a flasher”, Erato identifies Miles’ underlying needs as inherently performative, and suggests that he should go into acting or 7 8

Cooper, The Fictions of John Fowles, 205. Tarbox, The Art of John Fowles, 128.

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directing (143). Although he later complains that this analysis is “over the top … and a wee bit below the belt” (166), Miles admits that the structure of his encounter with his muse complicates that complaint, since Erato’s ontological status is inherently problematic. As both characters repeatedly argue, Erato is not “real” except as a figment of Miles’ imagination, a psychic reality, or, as Fowles would undoubtedly have argued, as an embodiment of his anima. 9 Any analysis of Miles’ authorship that Erato advances must therefore come from Miles himself. Similarly, as a product of Fowles’ imagination, Mantissa exhibits Fowles’ sometimes rather sordid writing process as a kind of performative confrontation, inviting readers not only to enjoy but also to evaluate the archetypal forces and pornographic processes that define his authority. Emblematic of the masculine authority through which Fowles defines his protagonists, Miles shares certain elements of his creator’s situation while simultaneously possessing characteristics Fowles notoriously despises. Likewise, Erato represents the feminine creativity that defines Fowles’ heroines, all of whom, their creator admits, comprise “just one woman, basically”. 10 Indeed, the events within Mantissa mirror significant elements of all of Fowles’ other novels, 11 primarily because Miles and Erato embody the characteristics and impulses of their fictional predecessors without the encumbrance of specific circumstances to which their interactions must adhere. As one of Fowles’ typical antiheroes, Miles shares particular aspects of his creator’s situation: he is, for example, a successful English novelist, and he experiences authorship as the teasing, frustrating, often infuriating, and ultimately pleasurable process that Fowles described when discussing his own creative practice. However, like Fowles’ other protagonists, Miles also embodies attitudes and behaviors that Fowles repudiates. The most obvious of these attitudes is Miles’ absurdly deconstructionist view of authorship, but his pornographic and abstract approach to relationships places him most clearly within the ranks of Fowles’ protagonists. Like Clegg in The Collector, Miles is a collector with a penchant for pornography, imagining, numbering, and evaluating the vivid sexual encounters with his ideal woman that occur entirely within the confines of a space 9

Tarbox, “Interview”, in Conversations with John Fowles, ed. Vipond, 167. Onega, “Fowles on Fowles”, in Conversations with John Fowles, ed. Vipond, 177. 11 Onega, Form and Meaning in the Novels of John Fowles, 134. 10

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he controls. Like Nicholas in his attitude to Lily/Julie in The Magus, Miles submits to the spectacular machinations of a mysterious woman who combines Mediterranean passion and the English reserve and intelligence indicative “of well-bred, even upper-class, background” (12), while simultaneously appreciating Erato’s erotic skills and denigrating her considerable sexual experience in a manner similar to Nicholas’ treatment of Alison. Moreover, Miles demonstrates a marked appreciation for the exotic reminiscent of Charles’ attraction to the dark and alluring Sarah in The French Lieutenant’s Woman, repeatedly complimenting Erato in her role as the West Indian Nurse Cory and fantasizing in fragmentary detail about Erato’s potential for exotic embodiment: Polynesian, Irish, Venezuelan, Lebanese, Balinese, Indian, Italian, Russian and various points between; shy, passionate, pert, cool; dressed and undressed, tamed and wild, chased and chasing; teasing, in tears, toying, tempestuous ... a whole United Nations of female eyes, mouths, breasts, legs, arms, loins, bottoms prettily slink and kaleidoscopically tumble through, or past, the windows of his mind; but alas, like the images in the fluttered pages of some magazine; or like snowflakes, frozen because unrealizable. (184-85)

Such fantasies fail to materialize for Miles, he thinks, simply because of Erato’s refusal to accommodate him in his practice of “degradin’ women by turnin’ us into one-dimensional sex-objects” (56). However, Erato suggests that Miles’ imaginative failures result from his general lack of self-awareness (169), a characteristic he shares with Charles along with his inherent belief in his social superiority. This belief proceeds not only from Miles’ self-importance – a characteristic he demonstrates while apparently suffering from amnesia, assuming himself to be a member of a “suitably senior and respected profession” certainly not associated with “the frivolity of the arts” (33) – but also from his affinity for the abstract. Like David in “The Ebony Tower”, Miles is unable to integrate the sensual and the theoretical. Instead, he defends his pornographic imaginings as purely metaphorical and denigrates Erato for her “astounding ignorance of what contemporary literature is about” (115) and her desire for “story, character, suspense, description, all that antiquated nonsense from premodernist times” (119). Indeed, in his approach to Erato, Miles resembles nothing so much as the sell-out screenwriter Daniel Martin, who views the women in his life as significant only in terms of his

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own development. Considering her no more than a fairly amusing mistress, Miles effectively dismisses Erato with Dan’s characteristic attitude – “I’ve examined you, experienced you, learned from you, and it’s been amusing and interesting, but now I’d like to move on” 12 – explaining, “You must learn to accept that for me, for all of us who are truly serious, you can never again be more than an occasional editorial adviser in one or two very secondary areas” (121). Totally convinced of his authority, Miles exhibits arrogance, self-absorption, excessive reliance on logic and abstraction, and unquestioned identification with dominant discourses – all characteristics that define Fowles’ antiheroes. Similarly, Erato embodies the mystery, creativity, eroticism, and unpredictability of Fowles’ heroines. Like Miranda in The Collector, Erato struggles for self-determination in opposition to the fantasies of her jailer. Indeed, she complains to Miles of the inauthentic roles she must play as the “programmed slave of whatever stupid mood you’ve created. Whatever clumsy set of supposed female emotions you’ve bodged up for me” (87-88) and actively resists Miles’ attempts to control her. Like Lily/Julie in The Magus, Erato employs her epistemological and ontological advantages to expose her suitor’s shortcomings and advance piercing criticisms of his psychological hang-ups. Such analyses provoke a sarcasm in Miles’ response to her that mirrors Nicholas’ initial response to the godgame: “I realize that destroying every belief a man has in himself, in effectively castrating him for the rest of his life, is a highly amusing situation. That you’re being enormously self-restrained in not rolling on the floor at the sheer fun of it.” (127)

Yet Erato also exhibits Alison’s paradoxical promiscuity and devotion, continuing to respond to Miles’ wishes despite his characterization of her as “a totally immoral and persistent old tart [who has] been a hot night out for every pen-pushing Tom, Dick and Harry, a pair of ever-open legs, for four thousand years” (91). Of course, Miles tolerates Erato’s promiscuity primarily because it benefits him, especially when Erato, like Sarah in The French Lieutenant’s Woman, seduces her suitor with suggestive tales that emphasize her vulnerability. Indeed, Erato repeatedly encourages

12

Fowles, Daniel Martin, 239.

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Miles to consider her violation. As Dr Delfie, for example, she explains: “I should like you to see and feel my defenselessness. How small and weak I am, compared to you – how rapable, as it were.” (38)

Later, as “herself”, she narrates in explicit detail her rape by a satyr (79-80) and includes her own rape in the outline of the novel she constructs for Miles’ enlightenment (106). Like Sarah’s “confession” to Charles of her affair with the French lieutenant, Erato’s rape narratives stimulate Miles, inviting him to imagine himself both as a participant in and as a voyeur to a sexual violation she welcomes. Yet Erato represents Fowles’ heroines most clearly in her creative power, resisting restrictive roles and operating through alternative epistemological and ontological systems. Like Diana in “The Ebony Tower”, Erato is artistically gifted, a peerless assistant to Miles as author, but also an original artist who successfully integrates the sensual and the abstract – she claims, for example, to be the true author of the Odyssey (171-72). Such an accomplishment is especially insulting to Miles, who strictly separates the cerebral from the sensual and objects, “You can’t have a male brain and intellect as well as a mania for being the universal girlfriend” (122). Indeed, what Miles identifies as Erato’s “asinine female logic” (89) bears a remarkable resemblance to Jane’s “right feeling”. Arguing that logic is “the mental equivalent of the chastity belt” (149), Erato repeatedly refutes Miles’ objections to her ideas, insisting, “Feeling right is terribly important to me” (109). Just as Fowles’ other heroines operate through alternative intellectual and intuitive ways of knowing and being, Erato breaks all the rules of Miles’ dominant discourse by employing oppositional knowledges to subvert his authoritarian efforts. Through such flagrant comparisons to his other characters, Fowles defines Miles and Erato as archetypes, extreme versions of the masculine authority and feminine creativity that dominate his authorial consciousness. Unlike his other characters, however, Miles and Erato possess a hyperawareness of their own representation that leads to considerable ambivalence about the roles they play together. Lacking specific situations that might determine their interactions, Miles and Erato explore a wide range of extreme behavior, with Miles often assuming a savagely misogynistic attitude and Erato enacting a radically feminist agenda in between periods of mutual attraction.

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During such antagonistic episodes, Miles rails against Erato, deciding finally on a Japanese geisha as the most attractive of his potential exotic mistresses, primarily because she is his “infinitely compliant woman, true wax at last, dutiful and respectful, uncomplaining, admiring, and above all peerlessly dumb” (190), and Erato complains about her sexual and ontological exploitation, defining Miles as “a modern satyr … who invents a woman on paper so that he can force her to say and do things no real woman in her right mind ever would” (85). Despite these efforts to control one another through definitive situations, Miles and Erato actively resist associations with specific social categories, each preferring an unrestricted ontological status allowing for nearly boundless freedom from signification. For Miles, amnesia represents exactly the kind of godlike limbo through which he prefers to operate. It is in this amnesiac state that Miles enters the novel, conceiving of himself totally without categorical identity, an “it” who is blissfully “bereft of pronoun, all that distinguishes person from person; and bereft of time, all that distinguishes present from past and future” (3). Relishing the impression of supreme authority that accompanies this boundless state, Miles considers his entry into consciousness with a detached pleasure: “It was conscious of a luminous and infinite haze, as if it were floating, godlike, alpha and omega, over a sea of vapor and looking down … [with] a pleasing intimation of superiority, of having somehow got to the top of the heap, still attached to this sense of impersonality” (3-4). This blissfully impersonal state dissolves, however, when Miles becomes aware “of murmured sounds and peripheral shadows, which reduced the impression of boundless space and empire to something much more contracted and unaccommodating” (3). Resenting this imposition of “the relentless demon of reality”, particularly because it threatens his sense of absolute authority, Miles objects especially to the humiliating signification of gender: With another painfully swift and reducing intuition it realized it was not just an I, but a male I. That must be where the inrushing sense of belowness, impotence, foolishness came from. (4)

This impression is strengthened by the circumstances in which Miles finds himself, since he is apparently at the mercy of two women, one a wife who is “too anxious to establish an ownership of him” (9) and the other a doctor whose inquiries suggest that he should recall a situation

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he cannot grasp. Yet despite his initial terror, Miles persistently rejects the imposition of a specific situation on his consciousness. Even as his wife recites names and places he should remember, Miles reports, “He had perhaps heard them before, as words; but he had no idea what relevance they were supposed to have, nor why they should increasingly sound like evidence of crimes he had committed” (5). Offended by “his alleged wife”, Miles particularly resists the memory of marriage and fatherhood, justifying his “desire to be inviolable” by noting that his wife’s wheedling tone makes his children “sound more like overdue bills, past follies of spending, than children”. Determined to escape this distasteful imposition of situation, Miles attempts to “regain the nothingness, the limbo, the grey, ticking silence” (9), but is prevented by Erato in the guise of Dr Delfie. Much more willing to trust this impersonal doctor than his wife, Miles notes approvingly that Dr Delfie’s eyes “held the muted irony of an old friend of the opposite sex – completely detached now, yet still harboring the ghost of a more affectionate interest” (8). This affectionate detachment serves Miles perfectly in his desire to remain “godlike, alpha and omega”. In contrast to his wife’s insistence of a limiting, personal situation including marriage and children, Dr Delfie offers completely impersonal radical sex therapy designed to satisfy Miles’ “unconscious desire to fondle unknown female bodies” (21). Considering nothing but his maleness relevant to this treatment, Dr Delfie rather easily convinces Miles to submit to her ministrations while he indulges in fantasies about his authority and influence and enjoys the seductions of both Dr Delfie and Nurse Cory. Yet even in this most gendered situation, Miles subverts the signification of gender, ending this pornographic tale with the birth of the tale itself, “a lovely little story” that he apparently creates “all by [him]self” (44). Enraged by this sexual exploitation and appropriation of women’s creative powers, Erato interrupts Miles’ masculine fantasy with a violent eruption of radical feminist rage. Yet despite her feminist consciousness, Erato does little to insist that Miles own a situated perspective. Instead, she repeatedly berates him for exhibiting stereotypically masculine shortcomings, especially of a Freudian variety. Similarly, Erato relishes her status as “a female archetype with an archetypally good sense” (140), continuously changing her appearance and attitudes in order to subvert Miles’ controlling authority. In the course of the novel, Erato appears in numerous incarnations, sometimes simultaneously occupying several female

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bodies, as in the opening sequence where she appears as both Dr Delfie and Nurse Cory. In her most traditional garb, Erato is classically stunning. Without her clothes, she is “both demure and provocative, classical and modern, individual and Eve-like, tender and unforgiving, present and past, real and dreamed” (71). Transcending all signifiers of social location, Erato claims to have been mistress to the likes of Shakespeare, Milton, Shelley, Keats, H.G. Wells, and T.S. Eliot (148). Yet she objects to the process by which such authors constrain her to a particular representation. Indeed, she resists Miles’ repeated suggestions that she appear in their next variation only as the enthusiastic and exotic Nurse Cory and insists: “I will not be turned into a brainless female body at your beck and call and every perverted whim. What you forget is that I am not something in a book. I am supremely real …. As well as being a goddess.” (59)

This resistance to limiting representation, however, emphasizes Erato’s ontologically problematic status. Although she objects to Miles’ preference for Nurse Cory because, she complains, “it does hurt me the tiniest bit that I’m not enough for you as I am” (183), Erato inherently lacks a specific situation that might preclude such variations in representation. Indeed, she summarizes the conditions of her existence – what she refers to as the “whole historical situation” of the non-existent muse Erato (92) – as though she is both real and imagined, insisting that she possesses an essential identity but appears to others only as they construct her: “I suppose it’s never occurred to you what a horror it would be … to have to occupy a role and function that escapes all normal biological laws. All on her own. No outside help, never a day off. Constantly having to dress up as this, dress up as that. The impossible boredom of it. The monotony. The schizophrenia. Day after day of being mauled about in people’s minds, misunderstood, travestied, degraded. And never a word of thanks for it …. Never a thought for her as a person, only for what can be got out of her. Never a moment’s consideration for her emotions. Never enough imagination to realize that she may be secretly dying for a little tenderness and sympathy ….” (93)

Particularly exasperated by authors like Miles who consider only her physical appearance and sexual charms in their representations, Erato emphasizes her subjection to Miles’ misogynistic whims, noting that if she “has the effrontery to object to being treated as a mere sex-

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object” he will simply “Toss her back to nothingness, like an old boot”. Oppressed by her abstract existence, Erato explains to Miles: “I have absolutely no rights. The sexual exploitation’s nothing beside the ontological one. You can kill me off in five lines if you want to. Throw me in the wastepaper basket, never think of me again.” (94)

Confined to an existence that depends in all its particularities on the whims of the authors who invoke her presence but determined to enact an alternative way of being, Erato rails at her inability to secure a satisfactory situation and dissolves into tears at her frustration and confusion, admitting to Miles: “I suddenly felt, what am I doing here letting this total stranger humiliate and insult me like this – distort what I really am. I mean I know I’m technically nothing. But what I began to feel I would be if I wasn’t. My true, serious nature.” (97)

However, Erato manipulates Miles through such nonsensical objections. Although she may indeed experience as oppressive the machinations of such misogynistic authors as Miles, her lack of situation simultaneously allows her the freedom to control the creative process. Eliciting Miles’ sympathy by “personifying every hurt and helpless female face, caught between reproach and appeal for sympathy, since time began” (96), Erato proceeds to abuse Miles physically with repeated blows to the head and ribs; to disappear, leaving Miles in a panic; and finally to become Miles’ fantasy geisha while turning him into a satyr. Through these events, Erato asserts her divinity, reproaching Miles by explaining: “I was trying to get it through your thick skull that I have not just become invisible to you, I have always been invisible to you. All you’ve ever seen in me is what you choose to see.” (149)

As she demonstrates her authority through such manipulative machinations, Erato employs her changeability as an instrument of power, and ultimately seizes control of both Miles and the text precisely because she cannot be constrained by a specific situation. Although Miles objects to his mistreatment by threatening to “write it down. Every damned word” (192), it is unclear whether

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Miles or Erato can ultimately claim authorship over the text, 13 since Erato responds by reciting the Greek alphabet, alpha to omega, a gesture that recalls Miles’ amnesiac fantasies of godlike authority (193). Indeed, despite Miles’ status as author, Erato occupies an oddly authoritative position in the novel’s opening sequence, at one point gazing down at Miles with a look that “seemed for a moment to be curiously speculative, as if she had not yet fully made up her mind what his treatment should be; as if she saw him as less a person than a problem” (15-16). This gaze recalls the narrator’s look upon Charles in The French Lieutenant’s Woman: Now could I use you? Now what could I do with you? It is precisely … the look an omnipotent god – if there were such an absurd thing – should be shown to have. Not at all what we think of as a divine look; but one of a distinctly mean and dubious (as the theoreticians of the nouveau roman have pointed out) moral quality. 14

Clearly exhibiting “a distinctly mean and dubious moral quality” in their abuse of one another, Erato and Miles exercise a nearly equivalent authority, not only at the end of Mantissa but throughout the text. While these abusive interactions advance Fowles’ most scathing analyses of his worst impulses as an author, the equally frequent sexual liaisons between Miles and Erato undermine his efforts at selfcriticism. As Jan Relf notes, there seems to be a “dual author-persona here in Mantissa – one who is being ironic at his own expense (the writer plagued with the tormenting muse, the feminist plagued with chauvinistic fantasies), and the one who floats ‘godlike, alpha and omega,’ detached above it all”. 15 In fact, critics have noted considerable ambivalence in Fowles’ self-critique, which is both brutally masochistic and theoretically suspect. 16 Despite his selfreflexive and even self-abusive confessions, Fowles incorporates so many layers of irony and parody in Mantissa that it is difficult for readers to take his self-criticisms seriously. 17 Indeed, Fowles claimed: 13

Haegert, “Memoirs of a Deconstructive Angel”, 174. Fowles, The French Lieutenant’s Woman, 405. 15 Relf, “An Interview with John Fowles”, in Conversations with John Fowles, ed. Vipond, 131. 16 Woodcock, Male Mythologies, 153; Salami, John Fowles’s Fiction and the Poetics of Postmodernism, 200; Cooper, The Fictions of John Fowles, 211. 17 Onega, Form and Meaning in the Novels of John Fowles, 133-34. 14

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“Mantissa was meant to be a joke …. Mantissa was really meant to be a comment, no more, on the problems of being a writer.” 18

This claim, in conjunction with the direct disparagement of the critical enterprise that Mantissa enacts, defines Mantissa as a public joke, a deliberately disorienting and difficult text ultimately written primarily for its author’s pleasure and as an affirmation of his creative impulses. Yet Mantissa also enacts a very personal confrontation between Fowles’ aesthetic affinity for absolute authority and his political commitment to multiple, situated knowledges. In this respect, Mantissa offers its author both pleasure and instruction in accordance with his early philosophical reflections on art: All artifacts please and teach the artist first, and other people later. The pleasing and teaching come from the explanation of self by the expression of self; by seeing the self, and all the selves of the whole self, in the mirror of what the self has created. 19

If Daniel Martin is a socially responsible but uninspiring novel, Mantissa is precisely the opposite: a fantastically absorbing but socially irresponsible investigation of archetypal forces rather than situated realities. Yet this irresponsible novel serves the important function of allowing Fowles to examine, as in a mirror, the most significant “selves” of his whole self – the author, the muse/anima, the chauvinist, the feminist – in their purest and broadest forms. Indeed, by ensuring that these selves lack specific situations, Fowles discovers the limitations of his archetypal conceptions. As completely non-situated author-gods, both Erato and Miles demonstrate the tyranny of the god trick, the “view from nowhere” that seeks to impose its authority indiscriminately and oppressively. Feminist critics have argued that Mantissa, while ostensibly criticizing Miles as “a writer satisfied with the onanistic display of his male fantasies and incapable of devising a faithful mirror of nature that would convey a morally edifying and sociologically useful message”, simultaneously affirms Miles’ pornographic chauvinism – especially because of “the too crude and heavy lampooning to which the amnesic writer is subjected” and Erato’s “waywardness and latent eroticism, 18

Onega, “Fowles on Fowles”, in Conversations with John Fowles, ed. Vipond, 175, 176. 19 Fowles, The Aristos, 207.

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her unreliability and inconsistency, her militant feminism and flagrant stupidity as described by the resentful Miles Green”. 20 However, the novel equally affirms and repudiates Erato’s archetypal authority. Lacking the conditions that inspire reflective, responsible, and socially conscious standpoints, Miles and Erato repeat their antagonistic interactions endlessly – as the novel’s ending, a mirror of the novel’s beginning, indicates – never experiencing the personal development or interpersonal connection that result from an exchange of outsider within perspectives. Instead, they experience the perennial frustrations of the “battle of the sexes”, each eventually groaning with “an endurance stretched beyond endurance, an agony beyond agony” (152) in a “spine-chilling cry of frustrated rage” (193). Mantissa thus establishes situated knowledges as an essential grounding point for Fowles’ archetypal creations. As Haegert argues, Mantissa does indeed reconfigure the heroine figure for Fowles, “reestablish[ing] her as the first principle and matrix of his art” rather than a mere catalyst for the antihero’s existential development. 21 More importantly, however, Mantissa demonstrates that Fowles’ archetypal formulations, while provocative, satisfy only his creative impulses and do little to develop his genuine political and philosophical commitment to alternative ways of knowing and being. Indeed, the fantastically entertaining Mantissa illustrates Fowles’ immense talent for infusing his characters with archetypal energy. For him to exercise that talent without exploring the insights that arise from diverse and specific situations, however, “would be like playing in a game especially designed to suit [his] capacities and [his] alone; a game in which it was impossible to lose”. Insisting, as he so eloquently does in The Aristos, that “It is impossible to win a game that one can never lose”, 22 Fowles chose instead in his final published novel, A Maggot, to privilege a narrative form characterized not by godlike authority, but by a firmly situated, self-reflexive, and manifold uncertainty. Creative, mysterious, hypnotic, and prophetic, A Maggot justifies Fowles’ decision to pursue his feminist advocacy of situated knowledges, offering a woman protagonist whose situated perspective explodes the dominant discourses of both her own past age and our own present era.

20

Onega, Form and Meaning in the Novels of John Fowles, 133-34. Haegert, “Memoirs of a Deconstructive Angel”, 181. 22 Fowles, The Aristos, 56. 21

CHAPTER SEVEN SEDUCTIVE AND SITUATED DISSENT: A MAGGOT AS WINGED CREATURE

After the fantastic confrontations of Mantissa, A Maggot demonstrates Fowles’ return to socially responsible fiction, although the novel retains a certain postmodern self-reflexivity. Combining elements of all of his earlier works, this last of Fowles’ novels explores the mysterious disappearance of an eighteenth-century gentleman through the sensibility of a modern narrator, whose camera eyes provide readers with a detached perspective through which to approach the text’s central mystery. Unlike the narrator of The French Lieutenant’s Woman, this narrator hardly embodies godlike authority, contributing little more than a modern sensibility to the investigation that largely comprises the novel, merely adding his voice to the chorus of individuals who speculate on the disappearance of “his Lordship”, the young nobleman whom readers know by his alias, Mr Bartholomew, until his disappearance. Lacking evidence to support their speculations, the characters involved in this mystery attempt to narrate the events leading to his Lordship’s disappearance to the investigating lawyer, Henry Ayscough, “the man of affairs” for his Lordship’s father, a duke. 1 The perspectives these diverse characters offer illustrate not only different perceptions of the events in question, but also various levels of awareness of authority, class, religion, and reputation. Like Fowles’ earlier fiction, A Maggot emphasizes the extent to which members of a society observe and categorize one another, using group identities to understand interactions between individuals differently located in traditional social hierarchies. However, readers of A Maggot experience a more egalitarian vision of the events within the story and of the credibility of each of the characters. While Fowles suggests that each character possesses only a partial understanding of the situation, each of his various characters’ accounts clearly contributes to both 1

John Fowles, A Maggot, Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1985, 229.

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Ayscough’s interpretation of the mystery and to readers’ expanding vision of the clouded events. Through these various perspectives, A Maggot offers Fowles’ most comprehensive exploration of multiple, situated knowledges. The most significant of these multiple visions, however, comes in the stunning deposition of Rebecca Lee, a prostitute reborn to Christian dissent through her experience with his Lordship. The sole eye-witness to the events immediately preceding his Lordship’s disappearance, Rebecca occupies a uniquely authoritative position in her interactions with Ayscough, whose thorough commitment to rationalism and the status quo causes him to treat Rebecca’s narrative with suspicion, incredulity, and hostility. In direct contrast to Ayscough’s logical, authoritarian approach, Rebecca employs intuitive, alternative ways of knowing and being, offering both the most incredible and the most compelling perspective within the text. Through her spiritual transformation and vibrant, creative narrative, Rebecca performs a radical interrogation of Ayscough’s drive for answers, suggesting that such an obsession denies the power of situated knowledges and prevents the connection between individuals and communities that facilitates social reform. A culmination of all of Fowles’ most cherished conceptions of femininity and feminism, Rebecca combines eroticism, mystery, and seduction with a firmly situated and socially conscious perspective, engaging in a practice of innovative authorship that challenges the manipulative tyrannies of abstraction and fragmentation through its alternative vision of fertility, equality, and wholeness. Like Fowles’ earlier novels, A Maggot is a highly cinematic text constructed on a voyeuristic model that operates through a mosaic pattern of fragmented memories, flashbacks, and images. The most striking of such fragments begins the novel, and like the opening sequence of The French Lieutenant’s Woman, A Maggot’s initial pages describe the haunting image that inspired the novel. In the Prologue to A Maggot, Fowles describes this image: For some years before [the novel’s] writing a small group of travellers, faceless, without apparent motive, went in my mind towards an event. Evidently in some past, since they rode horses, and in a deserted landscape; but beyond this very primitive image, nothing …. The riders never progressed to any destination, but simply rode

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along a skyline, like a sequence of looped film in a movie projector. (1)

Apprehending this image as a spectator might experience a film, Fowles emphasizes his lack of narrative context to accompany this persistent vision, until, characteristically, he associates its power with the image of an erotically mysterious woman: “One day one of the mysterious riders gained a face; that is, by chance I acquired a pencil and water-colour drawing of a young woman …. something in the long dead face, in the eyes, an inexplicable presentness, a refusal to die, came slowly to haunt me” (450). As in his explanation of the obsessive vision of Sarah that inspired The French Lieutenant’s Woman, in this confession of his fascination with a drawing of an Italian prostitute (or so he suspects), Fowles establishes Rebecca as the catalyst for the novel. Just as the heroines of both The French Lieutenant’s Woman and A Maggot generate the conditions that define their respective fictional worlds, the narrators of both novels employ cinematic conventions that emphasize the characters’ observations of one another – and especially of these mysterious women – and facilitate modern readers’ analyses of characters situated in a historical past. The historical distance in A Maggot provides readers with a sense of superior comprehension, particularly since the events that the eighteenthcentury characters somewhat naively describe suggest an explanation of his Lordship’s disappearance that contemporary readers are likely to associate with science fiction, a genre of which the characters have no knowledge. 2 However, despite the suggestion of extraterrestrial encounters in A Maggot, neither the contemporary narrator nor readers of the novel can assert such an explanation of the text’s central mystery with any certainty, particularly because this narrator, unlike his counterpart in The French Lieutenant’s Woman, lacks the omniscience to penetrate and interpret the thoughts of the characters. Like Fowles in his obsession with an image without context, the narrator of A Maggot has no special knowledge of the events the novel investigates, merely recording his observations through his rather ordinary contemporary point of view. Indeed, the novel proceeds almost entirely through scenes employing a detached perspective preoccupied with the cinematic 2

Cooper, The Fictions of John Fowles, 216.

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conventions that Fowles believes define contemporary experience. In the opening sequence, the narrator describes the “forlorn little group of travellers” and the surrounding landscape in a style reminiscent of a screenplay, noting “the uniform grey of the overcast sky”, broken only by “a thin wash of yellow light” in “the extreme west”, and the “peaty track [that] traverses a waste of dead heather and ling” above a “steepsided valley” studded with “unbroken dark woodlands, still more in bud than in leaf”. Similarly, the narrator suggests appropriate costume design, noting that “the traveller’s clothes are by chance similarly without accent” and then proceeding to describe in detail the clothing of each of the characters, from his Lordship’s “dark bistre greatcoat, boots and a tricorn hat, its upturned edges trimmed discreetly in silver braid” (3) to his servant Dick’s “long-sleeved blouse, heavy drugget jerkin and leather breeches” (4). As this sequence proceeds, the narrator preserves this attitude of spectatorship, describing the movements of the group as though watching not only from a physical and historical distance, but from a conceptual remove that situates the characters as objects displayed for readers’ visualization. As though writing for a film director’s edification, the narrator describes landscapes, clothing, props, and the movement of the characters in meticulous detail, but does not offer an explanation of the events or penetrate the consciousness of any of the characters. This detached, cinematic presentation continues through the remainder of the novel, as Ayscough interrogates each character and the narrator reports these interviews through recorded depositions, written in a question and answer format that is “devoid of point of view”. 3 Even in the rare instances when the narrator describes a character or interaction in more detail – such as when members of Rebecca’s religious community arrive to protest her interrogation – he presents such information without significant insight into the matter under investigation, as though merely describing the characters for the benefit of the actors cast to portray them. In preserving this detached perspective, Fowles emphasizes the novel’s similarity to a detective film, focusing readers’ attention on the investigation of his Lordship’s disappearance. Furthermore, by limiting his narrator’s omniscience and presenting the narrative through the conventions of cinematic spectatorship, Fowles 3



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encourages readers to share Ayscough’s perspective as he relentlessly pursues the “truth” of his Lordship’s disappearance – to thrill at the discovery of a fresh clue, to rail at the obvious fabrications of the witnesses, and to despair of ever finding a satisfactory explanation of events that surpass ordinary understanding. Yet Fowles presents Ayscough as an impossibly arrogant, fossilized individual threatened by the prospect of social reform and scathingly dismissive of the situated perspectives the witnesses offer. Furthermore, Fowles suggests, Ayscough derives considerable pleasure from penetrating the private reflections of the witnesses, particularly when he employs his position of power to achieve intimate knowledge of others’ sexual practices. Indeed, Ayscough’s attitude mirrors the obsessive voyeurism that Norman K. Denzin identifies in the modernist and late modernist detective films of the 1950s and 1960s, in which the male protagonist controls and justifies the pursuit of personal desires through investigation. 4 Like these modernist voyeurs, Ayscough pursues the investigation of his Lordship’s disappearance with unusual zeal and an odd personal interest in his Lordship’s sexual preferences. Displaying “an ancient dislike” (411) for the young nobleman that proceeds, at least in part, from his disapproval of the unconventional young man’s filial misbehavior, Ayscough repeatedly interrogates witnesses about a possible homosexual affair between his Lordship and his servant, Dick – an affair that the witnesses deny with uniform incredulity. Thomas C. Foster argues that Ayscough considers “what he perceives as deviant sexuality, coupled with a desire to wound a noble parent … the most likely explanation” for his Lordship’s disappearance, and therefore “pursues a line of questioning regarding untoward familiarity between master and servant, particularly (and this seems to horrify the class-conscious lawyer even more) whether the servant may have been the sexual master”, 5 with each witness, despite the general lack of evidence for such a relationship. However, Ayscough’s obsession with other people’s sexual practices extends beyond this assumption of his Lordship’s homosexuality. Indeed, Ayscough repeatedly questions both the madam Claiborne about the practices within her brothel and the former prostitute Rebecca about her experiences in that profession, and at one point even demands that 4 5

Denzin, The Cinematic Society, 115. Foster, Understanding John Fowles, 149.

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Rebecca reveal the extent of her sexual intimacy with her husband, a matter with no apparent relevance to the investigation and which Rebecca insists “is no business of thine, nor any other man” (299). Yet even during these inappropriate and irrelevant lines of questioning, Ayscough claims an incontestable authority grounded in his and his employer’s social position that effectively quashes witnesses’ objections. In so doing, Ayscough codes his voyeurism as a necessary activity in the pursuit of an official and noble objective. Furthermore, Ayscough considers his verbal abuse and intimidation of the witnesses necessary exercises in maintaining traditional social hierarchies. Repeatedly exhibiting a desire to obliterate the dissent or deviance he associates with “the mob”, Ayscough bullies those witnesses he sees as threatening to the status quo, and even fantasizes momentarily about “interrogation aided by rack and thumbscrew”, by which method, “at least one had got to the bottom” (425). This assumption of the inherent inferiority, duplicity, and insubordination of the common man causes Ayscough to approach the investigation with preconceived conclusions “fashioned out of projection, prejudice, and innuendo”. 6 Indeed, Ayscough pursues the investigation with single-minded conviction, reasoning that there must be one, and only one, explanation for what really happened to his Lordship. When testimony surprises or challenges Ayscough’s assumptions, his characteristic response is to accuse the witnesses of fabrication, likening such “subterfuge and deceit” to heresy (97). Even when he credits a witness with honest intentions, Ayscough dismisses interpretations and explanations he finds unconvincing as the result of superstition or irrationality. As he explains to Rebecca: “There are two truths, mistress. One that a person believes is truth; and one that is truth incontestible. We will credit you the first, but the second is what we seek.” (345)

Through this commitment to a single, determinable truth, Ayscough demonstrates a reliance on rationality and a belief in objectivity that fail to acknowledge the limitations of his own perspective. As the narrator explains, “All ancient and established professions must be founded on tacit prejudices as strong as their written statutes and 6



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codes; and by those Ayscough is imprisoned as much as any debtor in the Fleet by law” (231). However, Ayscough himself displays little consciousness of such ingrained attitudes beyond an occasional awareness of his behavior as part of a routine of “tricks or practices before difficult witnesses” that he has “long acquired, like his bursts of bullying contempt, to compensate for his puny stature” (314). Confident in his authority, assured in his manner, and convinced that genuine knowledge proceeds only from logical method, Ayscough employs a manipulative and fragmented approach to the text’s central mystery, resisting the socially significant and personally meaningful interpretations that the various witnesses propose. Proceeding from his own privately drawn conclusions about his Lordship’s disappearance, Ayscough directs the witnesses’ testimony with questions they often find surprising or distracting. Employing an imperious and punitive attitude toward witnesses like Claiborne and the actor Lacy, whom he distrusts because of their professions, and like Jones, whom he reviles because of his Welsh nationality, Ayscough also inspires considerable anxiety in his witnesses, who in turn adopt an excessively conciliatory manner that undermines their credibility. Anxious to confess everything to this intimidating investigator, all of the witnesses include a great deal of conjecture and second-hand information in their testimony, producing accounts that are “scattered, fragmentary, redundant, often contradictory, and [that contain] both factual and imaginary evidence”. 7 Such speculations emphasize the highly subjective nature of the investigative enterprise, and illustrate the characters’ discomfort with the ambiguity surrounding his Lordship’s disappearance. In order to cope with their uncertainty, many of the witnesses offer explanations of his Lordship’s disappearance that reflect their lived experiences and social conditioning. The least convincing of such explanations involve witchcraft or cult activity whose practice, Ayscough determines, “remains very far from the bounds of possibility” (411). Such explanations, however, conform to the superstitions of the country folk whom Ayscough considers “ignorant, fearful people, more apt … for the most part to see the Devil’s hand in all than to weigh with reason” (100). A slightly more persuasive explanation suggests that his Lordship was robbed and murdered, 7

Onega, Form and Meaning in the Novels of John Fowles, 145.

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either by highwaymen, foreigners, or his own servants. While Ayscough dismisses this explanation as similarly illogical, he treats this account with more respect, particularly because it conforms to his own social prejudices about the mobile lower classes. Such prejudices largely dictate Ayscough’s interrogative manner, and especially the offensive and “crudely chauvinistic contempt for his witness” that Ayscough exhibits while interrogating Jones – an approach that, the narrator explains, “is stock, and really has little to do with poor Jones’ Welshness” (227). Although Ayscough repeatedly ridicules Jones as “worthy thy nation” (226), the narrator suggests that Ayscough more profoundly fears Jones’ physical and social mobility, both of which threaten the rigid, materialistic social hierarchies that generate Ayscough’s power (231). Predisposed by this anxiety to doubt Jones’ testimony, Ayscough barely notes the individual circumstances of Jones’ participation in his Lordship’s disappearance, merely assuming him to be a type of drunken, poor, lying Welshman. Although Jones reasonably insists, “You must believe me, sir. If I told some tale, I should make it more pleasing to your worship’s will” (214), Ayscough ultimately believes that Jones is a liar and rogue, and that his testimony, even if meant sincerely, inherently lacks credibility because of his categorical inability to reason. Indeed, Ayscough considers all of the witnesses in terms of their categorical identities, complimenting his more educated or socially acceptable witnesses for their honesty and threatening the less respectable witnesses – such as Claiborne, Jones, and Rebecca – with hanging for their perjury. For Fowles, however, including these diverse perspectives enacts the standpoint directive that Sandra Harding insists “requires starting from multiple lives that are in many ways in conflict with one another and each of which has its own multiple and contradictory commitments”. 8 From Puddicombe, the landlord of the inn where his Lordship was last seen, who assures Ayscough of his respectability by pledging, “King and true church, I am no fanatick nor meeting man. Ask any here” (70); to Dorcas, the country maid whose memory of his Lordship is clouded by her pleasant interactions with Rebecca and her harassment from the lecherous Jones; to Beckford, the curate of the parish in which his Lordship disappears, who would, Ayscough comments, “turn 8

Harding, Whose Science? Whose Knowledge?, 285.


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Mahometan tomorrow, to gain a better living” (101); to Wardley, whose religious fanaticism provides outlets for his “cantankerousness and love of argument” and opportunities “to mock his enemies’ illogic … and also – how sweet is bile – then to dispatch them to future damnation”(384, 385); to Lacy, Claiborne, Jones, and Rebecca, whose participation in his Lordship’s disappearance places them in considerable jeopardy, all the witnesses involved in Ayscough’s investigation negotiate complicated situations that contextualize their memories and condition their responses to Ayscough’s inquiries. By including such multiple points of view, Fowles interrogates the concept of objectivity, suggesting that all perspectives reflect group identity, individual subjectivity, and a consciousness of hierarchical power relations, even in the absence of self-awareness. However, in Rebecca, Fowles offers a protagonist who challenges categorical dismissal and asserts a situated perspective that emerges from both individual experience and the categorizations that organize society. In contrast to the other characters, who have “little power of seeing people other than they are in outward; which applies even to how they see themselves, labelled and categorised by circumstance and fate” (49), Rebecca is keenly aware of the uniqueness of her situation and insists upon a discourse that acknowledges the significance of her individual experience. Although Fowles reports some feminist objections to Rebecca, particularly in terms of her extraordinary conversion from prostitute to radical Christian dissenter, 9 her “multiple and even contradictory” identities position her as a remarkable “agent of [the] less partial and distorted descriptions and explanations” that constitute situated knowledge. 10 Even before the mysterious events that effect her transformation, Rebecca asserts “an unmistakable sense of personal identity set in a world to some degree, however small, manipulable or controllable by that identity” (385) that sets her apart from the other characters. When his Lordship forces her to debase herself before him, for example, Rebecca practices a certain passive resistance, initially responding to his Lordship’s insistence that she repeat, “I am issued of Eve, with all her sins” by stating only, “I am issued of Eve” (43).

9

Carlin Romano, “A Conversation with John Fowles”, in Conversations with John Fowles, ed. Vipond, 143. 10 Harding, Whose Science? Whose Knowledge?, 284.

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When his Lordship then interrogates her about her profession, Rebecca explains the circumstances that led her into prostitution, describing how the son of her first employer seduced her; how her second master similarly required her sexual favors; how her beauty precluded her from obtaining further posts, since married women generally hire domestics; and how, finally, she chose prostitution over begging, claiming, “I was carried to it by need, sir. ’Tis so with most of us” (46). Although she admits, at his Lordship’s prompting, that not all women in need turn to prostitution, Rebecca nevertheless stands by her analysis of her own individual history and its resemblance to the histories of similarly situated women. In her conversations with Ayscough, Rebecca continues to ground her answers in a standpoint that proceeds directly from her individual experiences. Despite Ayscough’s insincere apologies that he must ask about her life as a prostitute, Rebecca insists, “Ask. I would not forget I sinned” (408). When his questions extend to her personal life with her husband, however, Rebecca refuses to answer: “Of what I was thee may enquire, ’tis as whipping to that abomination I was, that she deserves. What I am since is no business of thine, nor any other man.” (299)

Rebecca further refuses to respond to Ayscough’s questions when her answers would disrupt the narrative sequence she wishes to construct. Even when Ayscough commands, “I will be put off no more”, Rebecca insists: “Yes thee will, Master Ayscough. For if I told thee now … thee would mock me, and not believe.” (326)

Certain of her knowledge and determined to present it on her own terms, Rebecca challenges Ayscough’s method, she explains, because Ayscough continually attempts to frame her answers in terms of categorical responses, rather than acknowledging her insights as specifically situated. Indeed, Rebecca objects: “Thee’d make me mirror of thy sex. Dost know what a harlot is, master Ayscough? What all men would have all women be, that they may the easier think the worst of them.” (356-57)


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Such comments allow Rebecca to employ her considerable knowledge of men’s behavior – including their confessions to her in her bed – to indict Ayscough’s fragmented and manipulative approach as both sexist and inadequate to his supposed purpose of discovering the truth about his Lordship’s disappearance. Despairing over this narrowminded attitude, Rebecca finally argues: “I tell thee truth, which thee will not have. In this thee’s great proof theeself I must lie to be believed.” (381)

In fact, Rebecca is most convincing when she lies, as she realizes. Aware of both the strangeness of her experience with his Lordship and the real danger in which her participation in his disappearance might put her, Rebecca initially lies about that experience to the spying Jones, constructing an elaborate tale of Satanic ritual that she knows he would be a fool to repeat. As Rebecca expects, Jones believes this tale, confessing it only under Ayscough’s aggressive interrogation, and repeatedly apologizing for what he imagines to be the devastating truth of his Lordship’s demise. Predictably, Ayscough dismisses this irrational tale outright and accuses Rebecca of deliberately deceiving Jones, to which she simply replies, “I told him what he might believe” (300). Although Ayscough scoffs at this casual admission, arguing, “Who lies once will ever lie twice” (325), Rebecca insists that she lied to Jones to prevent him from “meddling further” (300) in affairs of great personal significance to her, since, she claims, he “made it plain that he would use me still, and I would not be used” (381). As critics have noted, this attitude parallels Sarah’s behavior in The French Lieutenant’s Woman. 11 Like Sarah, Rebecca weaves a creative, seductive narrative for each of her listeners, often obscuring the facts in order to emphasize a more significant personal or social truth to which her situation affords special access. Moreover, like Sarah, Rebecca employs a direct and penetrating gaze that “disrupts the social order, erasing the boundaries between male and female, law and order, investigator, criminal and victim” and that asserts a subversive power similar to the female voyeurism Denzin identifies in contemporary films. 12 Unlike the other witnesses, Rebecca maintains 11

Foster, Understanding John Fowles, 161; Salami, John Fowles’s Fiction and the Poetics of Postmodernism, 228. 12 Denzin, The Cinematic Society, 140.

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an “undeviating directness of look” throughout her testimony that, the narrator explains, is “so direct indeed that [Ayscough] knew he could not, and would never, believe it” (319). Instead of feeling the “sneaking admiration for such directness” that the narrator suspects a modern lawyer might experience, Ayscough responds to Rebecca’s gaze with renewed belief in his “long-held opinion … that the world grows worse, and especially in the insolence of its lower orders” (315). Yet Rebecca’s gaze is rarely insolent or angry. Instead, the narrator notes, Rebecca looks on others, particularly men, “merely as one who sees [them] whole” (290). Indeed, Rebecca’s direct and penetrating gaze corresponds to her similarly perceptive analyses of the conditions that structure her society. Throughout her testimony, Rebecca advances insights that proceed directly from her experiences of prostitution. Through these analyses, Rebecca demonstrates a sophisticated understanding of dominant ways of knowing and being that establishes her standpoint as the result of thoughtful reflection on both her interactions with members of various social classes and the conditions that have structured those experiences. Unlike Lacy and Jones, both of whom acknowledge the dubious reputation of their professions and admit to a certain personal fallibility in their participation in his Lordship’s disappearance, Rebecca justifies her professional activities and her role in his Lordship’s disappearance in terms of social conditioning, explaining to Ayscough: “And I pray thee remember we women are brought up to do men’s will in this world. I know men will say ’tis Eve who tempts them into the stews. But ’tis Adam who keeps them there.”

Indeed, Rebecca even convinces Ayscough of her expertise in such matters. After making this claim, for example, she observes, “I take heart thee won’t look me in my eyes, ’tis sign thee knows I speak truth” (305). Rebecca’s insights also reflect the commitment to social justice embraced by her religious community, a dissenting sect associated with the French Prophets. Particularly concerned about the vast inequalities they observe in their society, the members of Rebecca’s religious sect proclaim a socialist doctrine, insisting on shared resources and simple living and actively resisting ostentation. More outrageously to the conventional Ayscough, this sect also professes a


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kind of pre-feminist commitment to women’s equality, believing that at the second coming Christ will be reborn as a woman. Like others in her religious community, Rebecca expresses contempt for those who would safeguard their own material and social privileges when destitution and suffering abound, even accusing Ayscough of such behavior during a prophetic fit that strikes in the middle of her testimony: “I tell thee a new world comes, no sin shall be, no strife more between man and man, between man and woman, nor parent and child, nor master and servant. No, nor wicked will, nor washing of hands, nor shrugging of shoulders, nor blindness like thine to all that breaks thy comfort and thy selfish ways.” (427)

Shocked and offended by her propensity to introduce such visions into her testimony, Ayscough accuses Rebecca of trying to subvert all masculine authority in revenge for her exploitation as a prostitute: “Religion is thy mask, no more. ’Tis all the better to have thy unwomanly revenge.”

Yet Rebecca replies with a comment that any member of her sect might make: “I’ll tell thee my evil purpose. Most in this world is unjust by act of man, not of Our Lord Jesus Christ. Change that is my purpose.” (424)

However, Rebecca’s unusual knowledge, achieved both during her life as a prostitute and, more significantly, during her transformative experience with his Lordship, distinguishes her perspective from that offered by her father, her husband, and Wardley, the leader of her religious sect. Although these men protest Ayscough’s interrogation of Rebecca and particularly his insistence that she stay overnight at the inn where he conducts his interview with her, Rebecca considers her interview with Ayscough an opportunity to advocate her political and spiritual vision. Employing techniques learned in her profession, Rebecca convinces her protectors to leave, demonstrating an odd mix of obsequiousness and decisiveness that flusters her carpenter father, who, the narrator reports, “does not look appeased, and searches for something in her steady eyes, the faint smile, perhaps a simple answer

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to the question of why she knows him, but he does not know her”. The answer to this question, the narrator further suggests, lies in Rebecca’s experiential knowledge of men and in strategies she has developed in order to conform to their expectations. Indeed, he reports, Rebecca’s father responds to her attentions “like a man shown, at this late stage of his life, a glimpse of something he has never recognised before: a lightness, affection, a last echo of her former life; a thousand miles from solid timber and moral judgements by setsquare, and so unplaceable by him” (391). This ability to manipulate dominant modes of discourse and behavior for her own purposes extends to Rebecca’s method of responding to Ayscough’s inquiries. In direct contrast to her husband, who has merely “picked up the language of prophetic visions and yet is sure his utterances come by divine inspiration: that is, he is selfgulled, or innocently self-believing” (385), Rebecca employs a language and narrative approach that are self-aware and visionary. To Ayscough’s repeated confusion and disbelief, Rebecca argues, “Thee has thy alphabet, and I mine, that is all. And I must speak mine” (313), forcing Ayscough to acknowledge the alternative epistemological processes by which she has come to understand her experience with his Lordship. Ayscough’s rational objections and sometimes arbitrary questions distract and confuse Rebecca, who often responds only after “a strange pause, as if she must have Ayscough’s words first translated from a foreign language before she can frame a reply” (410). The narrator attributes Rebecca’s and Ayscough’s different ways of knowing to their being “set apart from each other not only by countless barriers of age, sex, class, education, native province and the rest, but by something far deeper still: by belonging to two very different halves of the human spirit, perhaps at root those, left and right, of the two hemispheres of the brain”. Ayscough, the narrator speculates, is left-brain dominant, and therefore “rational, mathematical, ordered, glib with words, usually careful and conventional” (425). Rebecca, on the other hand, appears to be rightbrain dominant, and therefore “poor at reason, often confused in thought and argument” with a “sense of time (and politic timing) [that] is often defective” (426). While insightful in its modern and scientific sensibility, this appeal to biological determinism fails to recognize the explosive potential of Rebecca’s situated perspective and to acknowledge the sociopolitical


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tension between Ayscough and Rebecca – a tension of which both characters are acutely aware. Rebecca destabilizes Ayscough’s dominant discourse throughout her testimony, temporarily supplanting it with an alternative discourse that privileges her subjectivity 13 and challenging Ayscough’s supposed objectivity by offering a situated perspective that generates oppositional knowledge. However, Rebecca also exercises a subversive authority less focused on shaking Ayscough’s dominant masculine authority than on offering an inspirational and visionary alternative to his obsessive quest for determinate truth. Through her creative authorship, Rebecca produces a progressive, cooperative, and ethical vision that exploits what Donna Haraway identifies as the fundamental potential of situated knowledges, which “are about communities, not about isolated individuals”. 14 Incorporating her individual history, her interactions with others, the beliefs of her religious community, and the social analyses that proceed from these multiple and contradictory situations, Rebecca offers Ayscough a mystical and woman-centered explanation of his Lordship’s disappearance. In place of the Satanic orgy she describes to Jones, Rebecca tells Ayscough of a strange journey through space and time within “the maggot”, a futuristic vessel whose dimensions could not possibly have fit within the cave in which Rebecca claims to have encountered it. Within this maggot, Rebecca claims, she and his Lordship, along with Dick, were transported to a heavenly community she refers to as “June Eternal”. However, she claims, after this journey she alone experienced horrific visions of battles, torture, and suffering, including the burning of an innocent girl she understood to be her younger self. After these visions, she claims, she fell asleep, and woke naked and alone in the cave, knowing that his Lordship had left in the maggot and “returned” to June Eternal. Considering herself cleansed of her former sinful life and transformed by his Lordship’s spiritual intervention, Rebecca concludes, she encountered Jones, constructed a disturbing tale to prevent him from discussing his Lordship’s disappearance further, then sought her parents’ forgiveness, and finally pursued a life of repentance and religious devotion assisted by her husband, who married her to provide a home for her unborn child,

13 14

Salami, John Fowles’s Fiction and the Poetics of Postmodernism, 245. Haraway, “Situated Knowledges”, 590.

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the result of her compassionate relationship with the physically impressive but intellectually incapable Dick. Except for her insistence on identifying heaven with the name June Eternal, the vision Rebecca describes to Ayscough largely corresponds to the beliefs of her religious sect, which in addition to its commitment to a socialist ideal of shared resources practices a strict celibacy. Rebecca describes June Eternal as a joyous socialist community in which there is no poverty or disease, no unsought labor, and no children. Instead, she claims, she saw men and women living separate but equally pleasant lives under the direction of a young and old man that Rebecca later understood to be representations of God and Jesus Christ, whom she claims also to have seen during an earlier night journey to Stonehenge with his Lordship and Dick. Her explanation of his Lordship’s disappearance and Dick’s apparent suicide likewise conform to the prophetic sensibility of her religious community. Resisting Ayscough’s rational objections to her version of events, Rebecca answers his logical question, “Can you deny that [his Lordship] may have left some otherwise than in your engine?” by asserting her right to conceive of this transformative experience in spiritual terms, arguing, “I cannot, in your alphabet; in mine I can, and do” (380). Although she claims not to have known about Dick’s suicide, Rebecca explains it in similarly religious terms: “I spake this yesterday of his Lordship and his man, how in much they seemed as one. And now do I see they were as one in truth, Dick of the carnal and imperfect body, his Lordship of the spirit …. And as Jesus Christ’s body must die upon the Cross, so must the latter day earthly self, poor unregenerate Dick, die so the other half be saved.”

By identifying his Lordship not as Christ reborn but “of His spirit” (417), Rebecca advocates a mystical version of his Lordship’s disappearance that reflects her community’s spiritual sensibilities. However, Rebecca’s vision also includes significant deviations from her sect’s beliefs that will provide the basis for the Shaker spirituality she initiates. Aside from Wardley’s insistence that “Heaven hath no special season, ’tis no more June than any other month”, Rebecca’s visionary narrative deviates from her sect’s doctrine in its advocacy of a female deity. Indeed, the facilitator of her transformative experience in the maggot, Rebecca claims, was a woman she calls Holy Mother Wisdom, a personage of whom


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Wardley claims never to have heard (397). Upon entering the cave, Rebecca claims, she encountered three women, whom she describes as a maiden, carrying flowers “of purest white”; a mother, carrying flowers “of red, like blood”; and a crone, carrying flowers “of darkest purple, near to black”. These three traditional representations of a goddess figure, Rebecca notes, “seemed one woman in her three ages, so like were their features despite their different years” (361). Indeed, these three women merged into one, she insists, creating a single woman Rebecca identifies as Holy Mother Wisdom: “the bearing spirit of God’s will, and one with Him from the beginning, that takes up all that Christ the Saviour promised. That is both His mother and His widow, and His daughter beside; wherein lies the truth of those three women grown one I saw first appear. She is that which liveth always, and shall be my mistress always.” (375)

Predictably, Ayscough objects to this advocacy of a female deity, arguing a conventional Christian stance grounded in patriarchal authority. Such beliefs Rebecca attributes to Ayscough’s position of privilege. Her own knowledge, she insists, proceeds from a subjugated position that generates an alternative view: “Thee would snare me. Thee knows not what it is to be woman …. As I was used when whore, so I may be used still. And all women beside …. We may not say what we believe, nor say what we think, for fear we be mocked because we are woman. If men think a thing be so, so it must be, we must obey. I speak not of thee alone, it is so with all men, and everywhere. Holy Mother Wisdom is not heard nor seen, nor what she might bring if she were let.” (416-17)

Suggesting that conventional conceptions of a male god support an oppressive patriarchal system of perpetual inequality, 15 Rebecca further argues that the Bible is a limited spiritual guide precisely because of its masculine bias – that is, not false witness so much as, she says, “Witness from one side alone. Which fault lies in man, not in God nor His son” (424). Supporting this analysis with specific references to Biblical passages, Rebecca presents a firmly situated and socially conscious challenge to Ayscough’s authority in particular and 15


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to masculine authority more generally, offering an alternative vision that advocates equality and cooperation between men and women inspired by the union of male and female godheads. Through this revelation, Rebecca employs the insights generated by her situation to offer a creative, holistic vision that invigorates her personal spirituality and provides a template for social justice within the wider community. Threatened by any social change, but especially by such a politically conscious and philosophically subversive doctrine as the one Rebecca advocates, Ayscough continues to define Rebecca as a seditious prostitute, even offering her money (from his employer, and, he claims, against his advice [434]) to assist with her impending child-birth – an offering Rebecca rejects because of its implication of payment for services rendered. Dismissing Rebecca’s version of his Lordship’s disappearance as eccentric, immodest, blasphemous, and irrational, Ayscough employs his dominant discourse to code her vision “in obsessive, neurotic terms”, not unlike contemporary films’ portrayals of the female gaze, which, Denzin argues, is “inevitably anchored back in sexuality and sexual desire”. 16 Unable to transcend his prejudice, Ayscough enacts a regressive political practice grounded in false universals. Rebecca, however, has moved beyond such categorizations, and in place of her sexual seductions – practices that had left her barren – she enacts intuitive and creative ways of knowing and being. Conscious of the uniqueness of her transformative experience with his Lordship, Rebecca considers herself a link between a material world defined by oppression and a spiritual realm that promises authenticity and equality. She appears to “wander in a hugely extended now, treating both past and future as present, instead of keeping them in control and order, firmly separated” (426), and to consult sources beyond her intellect in responding to Ayscough’s logical inquiries. As the narrator explains, “on occasion it is almost as if she answers not for herself, but waits until some mysterious adviser puts one in her mind” (410), and at one point she even claims to see his Lordship in the room and to answer through his guidance (430). Indeed, despite Wardley’s disappointment that she “hath not prophesied” (400), Rebecca experiences several prophetic moments in the course of her conversations with Ayscough, from an intuition that “the child inside 16

Denzin, The Cinematic Society, 140.


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her will be a girl” (391) to the prophetic fit in which she accuses Ayscough of refusing to acknowledge the ways in which his investigative practices secure his privilege and thwart social justice. In these oppositional responses, Rebecca operates through what Susan Hekman identifies as a standpoint paradigm, defining her politics “as a local and situated activity undertaken by discursively constituted subjects” and practicing political resistance by both “challenging the hegemonic discourse that writes a particular script for a certain category of subjects” and “by employing other discursive formations to oppose that script, not by appealing to universal subjectivity or absolute principles”. 17 In conjunction with her impending motherhood – the result of which, Fowles suggests in the Epilogue, will be the historical Shaker leader Mother Ann Lee – such alternative discursive formations establish Rebecca as the ultimate representative of Fowles’ visionary feminist ethic. Like Conchis and Lily de Seitas in The Magus, Rebecca advocates whole sight, meaningful relationships, personal authenticity, and complexity. Like Sarah in The French Lieutenant’s Woman, Rebecca seduces her listeners through creative tales that, while not factual, include significant personal and social truths that inspire the pursuit of authenticity and genuine connection between men and women. Like Isobel in “The Enigma”, Rebecca demonstrates that the obsession for determinable, factual truth merely reinforces the “received historical patterns, prefabricated identities, and iniquitous class distinctions” that create oppression and alienation. 18 Like Jane in Daniel Martin, Rebecca challenges her interlocutor to recognize the insights that proceed from her oppositional, situated perspective as genuine and potentially transformative knowledge. And like Erato in Mantissa, Rebecca embodies a mysterious and seductive selfawareness that resists sterile intellectualism with a vibrant and inspirational sensuality and fertility. In finally creating a heroine who is both seductively mysterious and specifically situated, Fowles achieves a genuine feminist advocacy, offering a woman protagonist whose situated perspective 17

Susan Hekman, “Truth and Method: Feminist Standpoint Theory Revisited”, in Provoking Feminisms, eds Carolyn Allen and Judith A. Howard, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2000, 25. 18 Frederick M. Holmes, “History, Fiction, and the Dialogic Imagination: John Fowles’s A Maggot”, Contemporary Literature, XXXII/2 (Summer 1991), 231.

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explodes the dominant discourses of both her eighteenth-century England and of readers’ contemporary Western culture, which Fowles considered equally blind to alternative visions of reality. In this novel, his Lordship constructs a godgame – similar in design to that described in The Magus – that challenges each character to determine the meaning of his unusual behavior, his unconventional attitudes, and his mysterious disappearance. 19 Rebecca contributes significantly to readers’ initiation into this godgame by advancing her own perspective, assuming a role similar to Nicholas’ in The Magus. Unlike Nicholas, however, Rebecca demonstrates an authenticity, a willingness to own her standpoint with all its attendant insights and limitations, and an understanding of the conditions that generate multiple and contradictory points of view that establish her perspective as truly transformed and transformative. Indeed, like Conchis’ parables in The Magus, Rebecca’s narrative challenges its audience to entertain multiple interpretations of reality and to accept a certain indeterminacy that encourages authentic choices. Confronted with multiple versions of his Lordship’s disappearance as well as the “religious polemics, historical chronicles, journalistic texts, puritanical texts, fantastic texts, political and juridicial testimonies, and literary allusions to the drama of the age” 20 that Fowles incorporates into the novel, readers of A Maggot must negotiate a conventional drive for determinate truth and a competing compulsion to “question the motives and values supporting that very drive for closure”. 21 However, as a more aggressive examination of dominant modes of investigation and discourse than “The Enigma”, A Maggot indicts the reader who, like Ayscough in his final letter to the duke, paranoically seeks to reconstruct the events of the novel “to fit a master narrative telling of what really happened on this date, in this place, to this person”. 22 Like the socially sanctioned voyeurs who enact such projects in contemporary conspiracy films, such readers, Fowles suggests, perpetuate the tyrannical or manipulative practices

19

Tarbox, The Art of John Fowles, 154. Salami, John Fowles’s Fiction and the Poetics of Postmodernism, 225. 21 Jeffrey Roessner, “Unsolved Mysteries: Agents of Historical Change in John Fowles’s A Maggot”, Papers on Language and Literature, XXXVI/3 (Summer 2000), 308. 22 Denzin, The Cinematic Society, 186. 20


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that “command and oblige us” to “believe what those in power would have us believe”. However, through Rebecca, who not only advocates a creative visionary ethic but through her daughter establishes a radical community effort to create “a more humane society” (453), Fowles offers an alternative model of dissent that, he concludes, is “an eternal biological or evolutionary mechanism … needed always, and in our own age more than ever before” (454). In direct resistance to the detached and fragmented contemporary obsession with the spectacle, Rebecca embodies alternative epistemological and ontological methods that are “multi-perspectival” and that go “beyond pure vision and specularity” 23 to advocate a vision of wholeness, creativity, authenticity, and community. Although Rebecca’s radical vision of social justice and equality reflects a historical and spiritual specificity, Fowles’ contemporary exploration of her situated perspective exceeds such limitations. He insists in the Prologue to A Maggot: What follows may seem like a historical novel; but it is not. It is maggot.”

The final published effort in his career as a novelist, A Maggot justifies its creator’s insistence that it is not merely a “whim or quirk” but “the larval stage of a winged creature … at least in the writer’s hope” (1). In advocating Rebecca’s practice of multi-perspectival dissent, A Maggot demonstrates Fowles’ truly feminist commitment to the transformative potential of situated knowledges.

23

Ibid., 141.

CONCLUSION ON AUTHORITY AND AUTHENTICITY

Although many of his ideas changed over the course of his career as a novelist, John Fowles maintained a number of abiding interests in his fiction, including his advocacy of a more balanced society that values women’s ways of knowing and being. This advocacy developed from his manipulative exploitation and obfuscation of women’s perspectives in The Collector and The Magus, through his experimental explorations of women’s creative authorship in The French Lieutenant’s Woman, The Ebony Tower, and Mantissa, and finally to his reverence for the evocative insights that proceed from the specific situations of the women in Daniel Martin and A Maggot. As this respect for women’s alternative approaches to self-awareness, interpersonal relationships, and social reform developed, Fowles became more self-reflexive, more willing to surrender complete authorial control, and more interested in entertaining multiple perspectives in his work. Simultaneously, his fiction became less alienating and at times even inspiring for feminist readers. Why, then, has his later work received comparatively little attention, especially from feminist critics? One explanation for this oversight might be Fowles’ unfortunate quarrel with his first wife, Elizabeth, whose rejection of his ultimately unpublished thriller The Device – the copyright of which Fowles had assigned to Elizabeth as a gift that would provide her with an independent income – caused a rift that destroyed Elizabeth’s role as first reader and editor of Fowles’ novels. 1 Without Elizabeth’s insightful cuts and alterations, Fowles’ fiction after The French Lieutenant’s Woman generally lacks the force and seductive intensity of the earlier work, relying too heavily on lengthy explication of the novelist’s theoretical and sexual fixations, values, and analyses. Simply put, The Ebony Tower, Daniel Martin, Mantissa, and A 1

Eileen Warburton, John Fowles, 328-30.

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Maggot are less richly provocative than The Magus and The French Lieutenant’s Woman, Fowles’ most popular and acclaimed novels. Feminist readers in particular also may have overlooked Fowles’ later work because of his often domineering treatment of the women in his own life. A fierce individualist committed above all else to his writing, Fowles often ignored, alienated, or tormented Elizabeth, even as he depended on her for nearly every other aspect of his life, and even as she clearly suffered from the circumstances in which her relationship with him placed her. 2 His scandalous affair with a woman in her early twenties six months after Elizabeth’s death, his constant psychological fixations on idealized women, his tendency to surround himself with women assistants and admirers, his contempt for his mother, and his eventual marriage to Sarah Smith – daughter of Elizabeth’s friend Leo Smith – also comprise a catalogue of relationships toward which feminist readers may feel considerable antipathy and, as a result, intense suspicion of Fowles’ self-defined feminism. Perhaps most significantly for feminist readers, however, Fowles maintained a persistently essentialist view of gender, even as his work explored women’s situations more specifically. Just as he insists in The Aristos that the distinction between the Few and the Many is a matter of biological hazard, Fowles always believed in categorically gendered characteristics as biologically determined. 3 Throughout his fiction, women appear as the representatives of a humanizing force in opposition to men’s aggressive, confrontational, and fiercely individualist impulses. In this role, his heroines always advocate relationships, social justice, and a more comprehensive and intuitive

2

Eileen Warburton chronicles this relationship in thoughtful detail in her biography, John Fowles: A Life in Two Worlds, from Elizabeth’s affair with Fowles in Greece; through the tortuous period in which she lost her daughter Anna to her first husband, Roy Christy, because of her determination to stay with Fowles; through the years of poverty and distress until Fowles achieved literary fame; through his long career during which Elizabeth acquiesced to his insistence on living in Lyme Regis and devoting his time and energy to both his writing and the museum there; and finally to her death from cancer. In Warburton’s portrayal of this marriage, John and Elizabeth are always devoted friends and lovers. However, as Fowles himself admits throughout Warburton’s biography and his own journals (John Fowles, The Journals, ed. Charles Drazin, London: Vintage, I, 2003, and II, 2006), Elizabeth provided the conditions and inspiration that made his career as a writer possible, and suffered for her husband’s authorship. 3 Warburton, John Fowles, 457.

On Authority and Authenticity

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understanding of the individual’s role in wider communities – all characteristics Fowles considered inherently feminine. However, despite his belief in this kind of biological determinism, Fowles attempted to employ his essentialism strategically, and in his later novels offered women’s insights not merely as “perspectives or views that flow from their authors unwittingly because of their biology or location in geographical or other such social relations” but as the “critically and theoretically constructed discursive positions” that Sandra Harding identifies as genuine standpoints. 4 Even as early as The Magus, Fowles illustrated the destructive potential of what he considered to be men’s inherent inability to see the relationships between individuals and among communities. The alternative visions that his heroines offer, obliquely in early novels like The Magus but explicitly in later novels like Daniel Martin and A Maggot, challenge such configurations through precise analyses of the oppressive conditions they create in the lived experiences of specifically situated women and men. In Fowles’ novels, the intuitive, creative, and collaborative standpoints that the heroines advance deconstruct the process through which the heroes’ (or antiheroes’) excessive rationality, abstraction, and fragmentation condemn both individuals and whole societies to the oppressive and inauthentic conditions of a contemporary wasteland. These visions are projected, and they proceed from problematic claims to essentialism that function descriptively in ways that Alison Stone, in her summary of strategic essentialism, correctly describes as “false and oppressive”. 5 However, they also offer politically conscious and personally relevant epistemological and ontological alternatives that facilitate individual authenticity and genuine connection, and that move toward the kind of coalitional feminist politics that arise when differently situated individuals or groups “decide to act together to achieve some determinate objective, while yet acknowledging the irreducible differences between them and the often highly divergent concerns that motivate them to pursue this objective”. Such politics, Stone argues, can achieve positive – if somewhat indirect – ends for diverse groups of women, even when coalitions are comprised of “deeply asymmetrical power relationship[s]”. 6 4

Harding, Is Science Multicultural?, 17. Alison Stone, “Essentialism and Anti-Essentialism in Feminist Philosophy”, Journal of Moral Philosophy, I/2 (2004), 144. 6 Ibid., 152. 5

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This kind of coalitional feminist political practice offers a useful paradigm for men’s feminist advocacy as well, particularly when conceived of as profeminism, which Harry Brod defines as “the developing feminist politics of, by, and for men”. Profeminism, Brod suggests, “insists that men must recognize their own stake in the transformations advanced by feminism, not because men should put their own needs ahead of others, but because this recognition is part and parcel of being able to fully commit oneself to the liberation of others”. 7 Indeed, as a humanist Fowles was always interested in the ways both men and women might achieve their full human potential, and advocated feminism precisely for that reason. More specifically, Fowles offered poignant illustrations in his novels of men not as “incapable of change, beings who must be simply opposed or written off”, but as “beings who must be challenged to change and whose change must be facilitated”. 8 Rather than condoning the fixations he believed to be inherently masculine or offering completely negative portrayals of men, in his novels Fowles illustrated “that men could still be distinctively men, but different from how they now are”. 9 These positive visions of men’s capacity for and invested interest in different practices of masculinity provide what Brod identifies as a necessary condition for men’s feminist advocacy. Moreover, as Sandra Harding argues, feminist standpoint theory “at least [implies] that there are contributions to feminist thought that are more easily (in some cases uniquely) made by men”, so that “feminist thought is disadvantaged by a lack of contributions from men’s subjectivities”. 10 Fowles struggled for the credibly owned man’s standpoint he advanced, and the vision of individual authenticity and social justice he advocated in his texts proceeded from ideals he consistently interrogated and refined throughout his life, as evidenced in his journals and in his largely autobiographical novels, which take their themes and events both from his intellectual interests and from his lived experiences. As a young man in the 1950s, for example, Fowles filled his journals with obsessive attempts of selfdefinition. Reminiscent of Nicholas’ attitudes in The Magus, such 7

Harry Brod, “To Be a Man, or Not to Be a Man – That Is the Feminist Question”, in Men Doing Feminism, ed. Tom Digby, New York: Routledge, 1998, 208. 8 Ibid., 201. 9 Larry May, “A Progressive Male Standpoint”, in Men Doing Feminism, ed. Digby, 350. 10 Sandra Harding, “Can Men Be Subjects of Feminist Thought?”, in Men Doing Feminism, ed. Digby, 174.


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reflections often operate through a kind of detached self-satisfaction, especially as Fowles considered his life in terms of narrative conventions. In recording an argument with his girlfriend Ginette Marcailloux in June 1951, for example, Fowles admits: Psychologically I play her like a tired ball, experimenting, risking, showing off. Because now I am beginning to plan and formulate a nouvelle about her, or around her, I treat her more as the character in the novel than as her real self. The novel necessitates a “sad” end – an end of separation, that is, which presents no sadness to me (sadness is a romantic hypocrisy) – and so I prepare and indulge in melancholy for our departure. I feel myself a monster, because now, when we are together, we are no longer (for me) real, but characters in an unwritten novel. 11

Despite “feeling a monster” in this affair, Fowles’ journal entry demonstrates exaltation in this experience both for its seductive interest and for its contribution to his emerging identity as the controlling character in a determined narrative pattern and simultaneously as the author of that still indeterminate narrative. Like Nicholas in the godgame, at this time Fowles valued his “solitary heart”, claiming, “The strongest part of me is the part I never divulge; a mixture of the ego of my ambitions and my best capability, ruthlessly determined to achieve its own fulfillment” (I, 110), and considered his detachment from lived experience – or, more precisely, his willingness to consider lived experience in narrative terms – “the exalted privilege of the poet-artist” (I, 111). This tone of selfcongratulatory isolation dominates the early journals and coincides with frequent descriptions of the physical characteristics of the women Fowles encountered, particularly when those encounters provided opportunities for voyeurism. 12 However, the focus of the journals gradually shifts from selfsatisfied efforts to define the self in opposition to and through surveillance of others to genuine self-reflection. Particularly significant in initiating this shift was Fowles’ affair with and subsequent marriage to Elizabeth, which forced him to consider the consequences of his attitudes and behavior on the lived experiences of others. This necessity was uncomfortable for Fowles, who had difficulty reconciling what he felt to be moral obligations to others 11 12

John Fowles, The Journals, I, 111. See, for example, ibid., 16, 77, 118, 122, 213, and 216.

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with his self-centered desires. As his affair with Elizabeth became particularly messy in December 1953, for example, he explained: Poor E. She has all the trouble of Anna, the expense …. She accused me of being bored by the whole situation. It is true; I am tired of it. At the same time, I am conscious of being altogether self-centered in my actions. I ought to be paying E something. She has barely enough for the necessities of life. Seems not to eat. But she is tough, resilient, resourceful in the miserable circumstances of London. Worse than that, I am guilty about Anna. I watched her today, and she stared back in a strange hostile way; yet I could not find the least pity for the child. She was a fact, an abstract something, within the normal bounds of human obligations, to be pushed aside. I cannot disregard her; yet I cannot consider her. (I, 306)

No longer removing himself from relationships by considering only their narrative interest, Fowles noticed at this point the effects of his affair with Elizabeth on her everyday experience, yet excused his refusal to help her by alternately complimenting her resilience and denigrating her “fundamental instability” (I, 307), her vulgarity, and her inability to resolve her floundering relationship with either him or with her husband Roy Christy. Still unable to confront such lived realities, Fowles removed himself from this unbearable situation through affairs with students at Ashridge, which allowed him to indulge in masculine fantasies of “the unobtainable” woman as an escape from “the mundane mess” represented by his relationship with Elizabeth (I, 333), a move that recalls (or foreshadows, as the case may be) David’s behavior in The Ebony Tower and Dan’s early affairs in Daniel Martin. Once this relationship became more stable, however, Fowles began to reflect on his attitudes more carefully, to consider others with an interest “much closer to ornithology than voyeurism” (I, 557), and to understand himself and his relationships to others within a broad personal and cultural context. As a diarist Fowles was ruthlessly honest and critical, and frequently deconstructed the cultural, historical, political, professional, and psychological forces that shaped the attitudes and behavior he observed in himself and others. In September 1975, for example, he offered this explanation for the tension in his relationship with his mother: In three seconds she will return the remotest subject to her world at Great Ayton, just as she did with Leigh-on-Sea. I suppose it is all


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derived from the terrible spoiling she evidently got from [her father]; all the rest of her life has been a clamour for that sort of attention – with the inevitable result that the more she has egotized the less attention she has received. Eliz and I speculate as to how my father stood it all those years without going mad; I think it accounts for his retreat into philosophy and German lyric verse and the rest – anything for a world she could not touch. I behave badly towards her, showing my disapproval through silence; but largely without guilt. I stem from her emotionally and in my intense relationship with my own ego, of course; that is, I am genetically her child; his by acquired circumstance. (II, 192)

This pattern of reflection emerges repeatedly in the journals, as Fowles noted the behavior of others, described his response to such behavior, considered Elizabeth’s responses, and then attempted to account for the causes and complicating factors that determined such complex social interactions. Another common pattern in the journals emerged from Fowles’ reading, as he attempted to synthesize current events, cultural commentary, critical analysis, philosophical idealism, and aesthetic pleasure into new ways of seeing. In October 1988, for example, Fowles responded to reading poetry by Eliot and Larkin and “the faintly ridiculous, but painstaking Robert Critchfield’s account of modern Britain”, 13 commenting: Difficult not to feel what I have felt all my rather wiser life, that we are historioculturally done for; hopelessly moribund, compared to the USA. Their faith in progress, advance; our deep ‘faith’ in failure, or seeing some virtue in it. They see themselves always transcending history, ‘breaking’ it both as one breaks a code and breaks a horse; we are always its ‘victims’, the mere effects of what it was, caused not causing …. Critchfield mentions somewhere that our train services are terrible: true, but we like it that way; that arrival on time is always slightly a matter of chance, that the service is not as fast as it might be. It allows us to opt out of progress, an inclination which really does suit our zeitgeist. We adore being able to retreat into the past, as into a comfortable sofa.

By using such texts as a springboard, Fowles struggled to understand cultural differences, especially between England and the 13

Fowles is referring to Robert Critchfield, “The Best of Times, The Worst of Times”, The Economist, CCCII/7486 (21 February 1987), 54.

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United States, and to identify the underlying, historically evolving attitudes that determined the everyday experiences of differently situated groups. Characteristically, Fowles continued in this reflection to apply these concepts to himself: This tells me much of my own interest in the past and concern for nature. Nature now becomes the past, in the sense of the what-is-going rather than what-is-gone. In that sense it is my church, where I retreat, a very cyclical church (like all churches). This is why so much in modern life (and modern London) alienates me, why I have such doubts about the political left; that is, my token ‘socialism’ of the last twenty or thirty years is abraded by the endless pressure of common ‘taste’ and the common ‘thinking’ (themselves largely formed by Eliot and Larkin) that socialism is in itself bad, greed and avarice ‘naturally’ good. Like so many others I retreat to the cyclical, not least because it is more comfortable; that is, to the consolations of history in all its forms. (II, 375-76)

Such efforts to consider himself (and others) as situated within divergent social, cultural, philosophical, and personal circumstances, and to examine how different individuals and groups addressed those shared circumstances, fill Fowles’ later journals, in explorations that eventually crystallize in the character of Daniel Martin, whom Fowles called “my exteriorized imagination – imagination as a substitute for biological realization” (II, 201). By infusing his fiction with his own fixations and personal history – as Daniel Martin demonstrates – Fowles developed the kind of understanding of his situation and of the forces that shaped his perspective that characterizes an authentic standpoint. Furthermore, as the published order of his novels obscures but his journals illustrate, Fowles did not come to this standpoint through a linear progression of abstract thought, but through continuous reflection grounded in both present circumstances and past events, in both large social movements and personal relationships, much as Daniel Martin comes to his own standpoint through a fluid negotiation of memory, analysis, and experience. Furthermore, the journals reflect Fowles’ growing uncertainty in the absoluteness of his ideas as he matured, as well as a concomitant willingness to admit that his vision might be partial. Particularly provocative in this respect is his inclusion of Elizabeth’s perspective in the journals. Initially, Fowles merely reported Elizabeth’s concerns as he understood them (admittedly imperfectly). Such concerns included her “loss of identity”, a complaint that Fowles compared to


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the work of Betty Friedan and ultimately resisted because he believed Elizabeth to be “looking at herself in the distorting mirror of me”, which produced a “twisted reflection” he perceived Elizabeth to be using “for whipping up her anger and despair” (I, 641-42). Later reflections on Elizabeth’s frustrations, and the frustrations she identified in women’s lives more generally, show Fowles’ genuine inability to fully comprehend Elizabeth’s ontological difficulties and a poignant despair at the resulting tension in his marriage, which featured more frequent arguments that he found “profoundly disturbing and debilitating” (II, 169). Many arguments apparently revolved precisely around Fowles’ myopia in both everyday life and in his writing. In June 1975, Fowles even reported Elizabeth’s irritation with his diary, “how I traduce everything, never speak well of her in it, give only my point of view” (II, 184). Eventually, Elizabeth actually wrote in the journal herself, specifically refuting interpretations of shared experiences that Fowles had advanced. The first of these interventions occurred in September 1987, when Fowles recorded Elizabeth’s response to the death of her mother. Angered by her husband’s report, Elizabeth wrote: You see nothing. You feel nothing. All you see is how you see. (II, 320)

Further comments by Elizabeth criticize Fowles’ inability to understand “the living reality of children” (II, 419), his collecting of “meaningless objects” (II, 423), his tendency toward presumption and rejection of her ideas (II, 424), and his incompetence at handling the practical necessities of life (II, 425-27). In December 1989, he commented in the journal on Elizabeth’s resentments – most of which resulted from decisions made to facilitate his writing – which “erupted in all she has scrawled here; so much for which I am not forgiven” (II, 429). Despite his inability to concur fully with such criticisms, Fowles decided to retain these interventions – a decision that demonstrates a unique acknowledgement of his own fragmented understanding and emphasizes his dependence on Elizabeth’s perspective for his pursuit of whole sight. Like Jenny in Daniel Martin, Elizabeth practiced a kind of confrontational authorship in her husband’s journals, using her oppositional knowledge to force her husband to recognize that his knowledge was partial, even biased, and to confront the fact that his desires had created problems in her everyday experiences. Like Dan in

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the same novel, Fowles granted Elizabeth an authority in his journals that challenged his own, allowing her standpoint to compete with and complement his, even in his most intimate writing. Elizabeth’s interventions accompanied a poignant sense of dissolution for Fowles, who, as he aged, increasingly questioned his identity, his authenticity, and his authority. Alienated by his fame, he struggled to define himself in relation to “the abominable ‘John Fowles” (II, 267). In December 1985, he wrote, “My sense of personal identity has completely disintegrated, I feel like an actor in a play he despises, or several actors, in a series of roles that are largely meaningless” (II, 281). These comments mirror the reflections of the much earlier essay “The J. R. Fowles Club”, in which Fowles communicated his sense of failure in reconciling what he perceived as his many divergent masculine selves. Here, such comments take on an added dimension of forced alienation from authentic ways of being, as Fowles felt himself mistakenly equated with his public persona. This feeling of disintegration functioned as an ironic consequence of his writing. While earlier in life he had deliberately fostered a narrative understanding of experience, in these difficult years Fowles felt himself trapped both within and without a narrative pattern beyond his control. In April 1988, for example, Fowles complained: Not feeling who you really, actually are: like being a spectator at your own demise. Of course what happens is intensely personal, but it seems not, as in a dream happening to someone else, as in fiction. I suppose this is in a sense a sort of consolation: that one can see one’s own life, however miserable, as a novel; as not truly real, even when it is happening. (II, 352)

Such reflections exude Fowles’ real despair at his inability to cope with either his professional successes or his personal failures. Finally seeing his devotion to narrative as both a comfort and an abdication of responsibility, Fowles hypothesized in July 1989: Perhaps I – and many others – have been novelists because we could not stand saying the truth. We always needed to escape from what is, the world as it appears to us; to invent other worlds. The world that is is too cold and cruel to bear; and above all we ourselves (I myself) that are are also a lot too cold and cruel. We create the surfaces of the mirrors we see ourselves in, or how we hope others will see us; that is, distorting surfaces. (II, 410)


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In these times of depression after he had written all his published novels, Fowles apparently understood his ontology as escapist, egocentric, evasive. Yet such admissions demonstrate his genuine willingness to honestly assess his contributions both to the world at large (through his writing) and to his relationships with the people he lived and worked with. As he matured, Fowles moved from a kind of aloof arrogance to a very specifically situated understanding of himself in the world. Accordingly, Fowles’ fiction gradually reflected his broadening understanding of the ways in which dominant discourses affect the perspectives of individuals who are differently situated; moved from a model of fragmentation and voyeuristic vision to a commitment to whole sight and alternative visions and views; and surrendered certain aspects of authorial control, instead questioning the legitimacy of such control, especially in its tendency to manipulate others. Through these efforts, and despite his self-described “cruelty” to the women in his life – behavior that he considered a necessary condition of his authorship 14 – in some ways Fowles appears to have adopted in his writing what Harding identifies as a “traitorous identity”, a critical position occupied by “people [who] would rather learn difficult truths about themselves and their world than suspect that they are thinking and behaving disreputably” and who “act not out of the ‘spontaneous consciousness’ of the social locations that history has bestowed on [them] but out of the traitorous ones [they] choose with the assistance of critical social theories generated by the emancipatory movements”. 15 Yet in the context of profeminism and Harding’s later work on men’s feminist subjectivities, the standpoint Fowles owned in his nonfiction and illustrated in his fiction functions provocatively precisely because it proceeds from his specific situation as a man. Larry May has offered a useful description of this kind of progressive male standpoint, which he defines as “an egalitarian theoretical and practical position from which men can critically assess male experience and traditional male roles”: First, there is a striving for knowledge or understanding based on experience, especially personal experience of traditional male roles and activities. Second, there is a critical reflection on that experience 14 15

Warburton, John Fowles, 457. Harding, Whose Science? Whose Knowledge?, 293 and 295.

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John Fowles: Visionary and Voyeur in light of the possible harms to women, as well as men, of assuming traditional male roles and engaging in traditional male activities. Third, there is a moral motivation to change at least some aspects of traditional male roles and activities. And finally, there are practical proposals for changes in traditional male roles that are regarded as believable by other men. 16

As the journals amply demonstrate, Fowles clearly strove to understand his personal experiences of traditional male roles and activities, and his novels offer compelling illustrations of and critical reflections on the effects of those roles and activities in the lives of both men and women. Fowles was deeply interested in changing the structures and traditions that create such conditions, and specifically advocated such change in his later novels, especially Daniel Martin and A Maggot. Whether these proposals for change in traditional male roles fulfill May’s criteria for believability is a more complicated matter, considering the fictional nature of Fowles’ feminist efforts. However, the popularity and continued critical success of Fowles’ novels suggest that readers and critics, both male and female, continue to appreciate Fowles’ examinations of the problems of men, feminist objections notwithstanding. Such continued relevance, I think, demonstrates that Fowles examines such problems authentically and sympathetically, offering a “male affirmative … validation of men’s experiences as they experience them”. 17 While this kind of validation clearly cannot function as the ultimate achievement of profeminism, it does provide a necessary condition for men’s sustained feminist advocacy. As Brod argues, “before people can listen to whatever new words or ideas one may have to tell them, they must first feel that they themselves have been listened to”. 18 Indeed, May notes the “regrettable fact that men generally take other men more seriously than they take women” and identifies this fact as a potential advantage for men offering progressive standpoints “if the male voice of authority is used as an effective critical tool”. 19 Although he consistently demonstrated a problematic understanding of feminism, and although his authorial efforts were always directed primarily by 16 17

Larry May, “A Progressive Male Standpoint”, 337. Brod, “To Be a Man, or Not to Be a Man – That Is the Feminist Question”, 202.

18

Ibid., 203.

19

May, “A Progressive Male Standpoint”, 349.


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philosophical and heuristic concerns and only secondarily by concrete social analyses, Fowles nevertheless demonstrated an intriguing standpoint as a man who advocated feminism. Moreover, in his later fiction, Fowles offered avenues for curious feminist and profeminist critics to anchor their investigations in authentic and situated perspectives that generate feminist knowledge. In providing these avenues of investigation, Fowles’ work encourages such readers in their efforts to envision a more balanced society that values women’s ways of knowing and being and that suggests new ways of practicing masculinity – and to find visual and other pleasures in his practice of authority.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

WORKS BY JOHN FOWLES Fiction John Fowles, The Collector, Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1963. —— Daniel Martin, Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1977. —— The Ebony Tower, Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1974. —— The French Lieutenant’s Woman, Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1969. —— A Maggot, Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1985. —— The Magus, New York: Dell Publishing, 1978. —— Mantissa, Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1982. Nonfiction John Fowles, The Aristos, Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1964. —— The Enigma of Stonehenge, New York: Summit Books, 1980. —— Foreword, in Ourika, by Claire de Duras, trans. John Fowles, New York: MLA, 1994, xxix-xxx. —— Islands, Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1978. —— Lyme Regis Camera, Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1990. —— Shipwreck, Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1975. —— A Short History of Lyme Regis, Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1982. —— Thomas Hardy’s England, Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1984. —— The Tree, New York: The Ecco Press, 1979. Translations Claire de Duras, Ourika, trans. John Fowles, New York: MLA, 1994.

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Essays John Fowles, “Gather Ye Starlets”, in Wormholes, ed. Jan Relf, New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1998, 89-99. —— “I Write Therefore I Am”, in Wormholes, ed. Jan Relf, New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1998, 5-12. —— “The J.R. Fowles Club”, in Wormholes, ed. Jan Relf, New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1998, 67. —— “John Aubrey and the Genesis of the Monumenta Britannica”, in Wormholes, ed. Jan Relf, New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1998, 175-96. —— “The John Fowles Symposium, Lyme Regis, July 1996”, in Wormholes, ed. Jan Relf, New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1998, 73-76. —— “Land”, in Wormholes, ed. Jan Relf, New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1998, 321-39. —— “The Nature of Nature”, in Wormholes, ed. Jan Relf, New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1998, 343-61. —— “Notes on an Unfinished Novel” in Wormholes, ed. Jan Relf, New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1998, 13-26. —— Wormholes, ed. Jan Relf, New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1998. Journals John Fowles, The Journals, ed. Charles Drazin, London: Vintage, I, 2003. —— The Journals, ed. Charles Drazin, London: Vintage, II, 2006. Interviews James R. Baker, “John Fowles: The Art of Fiction CIX”, in Conversations with John Fowles, ed. Dianne L. Vipond, Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 1999, 182-97. Carol Barnum, “An Interview with John Fowles”, in Conversations with John Fowles, ed. Dianne L. Vipond, Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 1999, 102-18. Melissa Denes, “Fowles on a Fair Day”, in Conversations with John Fowles, ed. Dianne L. Vipond, Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 1999, 223-30.

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John Fowles, Conversations with John Fowles, ed. Dianne L. Vipond, Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 1999. Tony Graham, Hilary Arnold, Sappho Durrell, and John Thackara, “John Fowles: An Exclusive Interview”, in Conversations with John Fowles, ed. Dianne L. Vipond, Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 1999, 59-64. Daniel Halpern, “A Sort of Exile in Lyme Regis”, in Conversations with John Fowles, ed. Dianne L. Vipond, Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 1999, 14-25. Susana Jaén Onega, “Fowles on Fowles”, in Conversations with John Fowles, ed. Dianne L. Vipond, Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 1999, 168-81. Jan Relf, “An Interview with John Fowles”, in Conversations with John Fowles, ed. Dianne L. Vipond, Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 1999, 119-33. Carlin Romano, “A Conversation with John Fowles”, in Conversations with John Fowles, ed. Dianne L. Vipond, Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 1999, 134-48. Raman K. Singh, “An Encounter with John Fowles”, in Conversations with John Fowles, ed. Dianne L. Vipond, Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 1999, 82-101. David Streitfeld, “A Writer Blocked”, in Conversations with John Fowles, ed. Dianne L. Vipond, Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 1999, 214-20. Katherine Tarbox, “Interview with John Fowles”, in Conversations with John Fowles, ed. Dianne L. Vipond, Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 1999, 149-67. Dianne L. Vipond, “A Dialogue with John Fowles”, in Conversations with John Fowles, ed. Dianne L. Vipond, Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 1999, 231-38. —— “An Unholy Inquisition”, in Wormholes, ed. Jan Relf, New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1998, 365-84. WORKS BY OTHER AUTHORS James Acheson, John Fowles, New York: St Martin’s Press, 1998. Linda Alcoff, “The Problem of Speaking for Others”, Cultural Critique, (Winter 1991-1992), 5-32.

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Robert Arlett, “Daniel Martin and the Contemporary Epic Novel”, Modern Fiction Studies, XXXI/1 (Spring 1985), 173-85. Carol Barnum, The Fiction of John Fowles: A Myth for Our Time, Greenwood: FL, Penkevill Publishing, 1988. Robert J. Begiebing, Toward a New Synthesis: John Fowles, John Gardner, Norman Mailer, Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1989. Michael H. Begnal, “A View of John Fowles’ The Magus”, Modern British Literature, III (1978), 67-72. Harry Brod, “To Be a Man, or Not to Be a Man – That Is the Feminist Question”, in Men Doing Feminism, ed. Tom Digby, New York: Routledge, 1998, 197-212. Ulrich Broich, “John Fowles, ‘The Enigma’ and the Contemporary British Short Story”, in Modes of Narrative: Approaches to American, Canadian, and British Fiction, eds Reingard M. Nischik and Barbara Korte, Würzburg, Germany: Königshausen & Neumann, 1990, 179-89. Ruth Christiani Brown, “The French Lieutenant’s Woman and Pierre: Echo and Answer”, Modern Fiction Studies, XXXI/1 (Spring 1985), 115-32. Deborah Byrd, “The Evolution and Emancipation of Sarah Woodruff: The French Lieutenant’s Woman as a Feminist Novel”, International Journal of Women’s Studies, VII/4 (September/October 1984), 306-21. James Campbell, “An Interview with John Fowles”, in Conversations with John Fowles, ed. Dianne L. Vipond, Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 1999, 33-45. John Campbell, “Moral Sense and The Collector: The Novels of John Fowles”, Critical Quarterly, XXV/1 (Spring 1983), 45-53. Angela Carter, The Sadeian Woman, New York: Penguin, 1979. Clark Closser, “‘In the Sea of Life Enisled’: Narrative Landscape and Catharine’s Fate in John Fowles’s ‘The Cloud’”, in John Fowles and Nature: Fourteen Perspectives on Landscape, ed. James R. Aubrey, Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1999, 60-68. Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought, Second Edition, New York: Routledge, 2000. Peter Conradi, “The French Lieutenant’s Woman: Novel, Screenplay, Film”, Critical Quarterly, XXIV/1 (Spring 1982), 41-57. —— John Fowles, New York: Methuen, 1982.

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INDEX

Alcoff, Linda, 28 Aubrey, John, 24 Austen, Jane, 134 Baker, James R., 4 Barnum, Carol, 16 Begiebing, Robert J., 20 Begnal, Michael H., 76 Brod, Harry, 226, 234 Brown, Ruth Christiani, 130 Byrd, Deborah, 7, 21 Campbell, James, 6 Campbell, John, 58 Carter, Angela, 74 Christy, Roy, 228 Claire de Duras, 5, 7, 32; Ourika, 26-29, 110-11 Closser, Clark, 155 Collins, Patricia Hill, 17, 173, 179-80 Conradi, Peter, 9, 130 Cooper, Pamela, 15, 16, 19, 71, 85 Costello, Jacqueline, 69 Critchfield, Robert, 229-30 Denzin, Norman K., 38, 40, 45, 164-65, 205, 211, 218 Doane, Mary Anne, 38 Eliot, T. S., 157, 229

Erens, Patricia, 38 Ferris, Ina, 162 feminism, and criticism of Fowles’ work, 1, 8-11, 1519, 21, 29, 32-33, 46, 61, 65, 73, 209, 223-24, 234; Fowles’ comments on, 1-5, 7, 226, 231; in Fowles’ oeuvre, 219-21, 234-35; in The French Lieutenant’s Woman, 102, 116, 124; in A Maggot, 200, 202, 219-21; in Mantissa, 44-45, 193200; and profeminism, 226, 233-35 Foucault, Michel, 38 Foster, Thomas C., 30, 53, 62, 86, 174, 205 Fowles, Elizabeth, 4, 223, 224, 227-28, 229, 230-32 Fowles, John, authenticity, 4950, 61-67, 76, 80-82, 9197, 99, 102, 114-17, 12130, 133, 135-37, 141, 14748, 151, 157-60, 163, 165, 173, 176, 178-79, 182-83, 192, 218, 220, 225, 227, 230-32, 234; authority, 15, 33, 38-40, 42, 43, 44, 46, 75, 80, 92, 100, 101-103, 113, 115-16, 129-30, 133-

248


34, 152, 157-60, 163, 165, 171, 173, 175-76, 183-84, 187-90, 192-200, 201-202, 207, 215, 217, 223, 231-35; characterization of men, 16, 41, 78, 190-95, 205-207; characterization of women, 16, 30-33, 41, 42, 76-77, 98-99, 101-102, 110, 11416, 128, 166, 183-84, 18788, 192-93, 195-97, 200, 202, 209; essentialism, 3-4, 6-7, 9, 66, 92, 98-99, 22425; existentialism, 42, 73, 80, 93, 107, 114-17, 12425, 128, 135-37, 147-48, 184, 200; and the “feminine principle”, 3-4, 7, 9, 10; fragmentation, 33, 40-42, 44, 45, 46, 51-53, 59, 67, 72-73, 75-76, 98, 100, 101, 113-14, 130, 133, 140, 146, 153, 157, 160, 161, 166-73, 182, 191, 202, 207, 211, 221, 225, 231-33; humanism, 4, 76, 226; indeterminacy, 22, 25, 33, 39, 43-44, 46, 97, 129-30, 151-53, 155-57, 220; masculine bias of, 20-21, 30-31, 46, 64-67, 74, 9798, 101-102, 182-83; metafiction, 34, 42, 80, 149-51; narrative choices, 25, 33-36, 38-40, 42, 43, 45, 46, 51, 55, 57, 59, 66, 77, 92-94, 97-98, 101-104, 113-14, 129-30, 133-34, 150-59, 163, 171, 175-76,

187-9, 200, 201, 203-205, 220; pornography, 40, 50, 66, 67-73, 82, 88-89, 96, 146, 159, 173, 187-91, 195, 199; postmodernism, 3839, 103, 201; race, 29, 8182, 111-12, 164; standpoint of, 30-31, 226-35; use of cinematic conventions, 3335, 43-44, 45, 50, 69, 103, 109, 153, 162, 164, 174, 201-205; and “whole sight”, 42, 44, 45, 46, 75, 92, 93, 130, 140, 160, 161, 163, 165, 166-73, 176, 182, 184, 212, 219, 221, 231-32 Works: The Aristos, 60, 61, 200, 224; The Collector, 33, 36, 38, 40, 49-74, 75, 76, 109, 112, 130, 140, 171, 190, 192, 223; fragmentation, 51-53, 59, 67, 72-73; Miranda’s perspective, 49-50, 61-67; narrative form, 51, 55, 57, 59, 66; pornography, 50, 66, 67-73; standpoint, 50, 53, 56, 61-62, 65-67, 7274; voyeurism, 49-50, 53, 57-58, 67-73; Daniel Martin, 12, 16, 35, 36, 4344, 75, 93, 160, 161-85, 187, 188, 191-92, 199, 219, 223, 225, 228, 230, 231-32, 234; characters’ pursuit of authenticity, 163, 165, 173, 176, 178-79, 182-83; Dan’s authorship, 161-63, 165, 171, 173, 175-76; and

Index Fowles’ practice of authority, 161-63, 165, 183-84; fragmentation, 161, 166-73, 182; Jane’s perspective, 176-82; Jenny’s perspective, 17176; narrative form, 163, 171, 175-76; standpoint, 44, 163, 165, 173-85; voyeurism, 164, 173; whole sight, 161, 163, 165, 16673, 176, 182, 184; women’s authorship, 171-76; The Ebony Tower, 12, 36, 40, 42-43, 131, 133-60, 179, 187, 191, 193, 219, 220, 223, 228; characters’ pursuit of authenticity, 133, 135-37, 141, 147-48, 151, 157-60; existentialism, 135-37, 147-48; and Fowles’ practice of authority, 133-34, 152, 157-60; fragmentation, 133, 140, 146, 153, 157, 160; indeterminacy, 151-53, 155-57; narrative form, 133-34, 150-59; pornography, 146, 159; standpoint, 137, 150; voyeurism, 144-46, 155, 158-59; women’s authorship, 150-52, 153-58, 160; essays, 1, 5-6, 22, 24, 34; The French Lieutenant’s Woman, 1, 7, 12, 25, 28-29, 30, 33, 34, 36, 38, 40, 41-42, 101-31, 133, 150, 160, 179, 183,

249 187, 191, 192, 198, 201203, 211, 219, 223, 224; characters’ authenticity, 102, 114-17, 121-30; existentialism, 107, 114-17, 124-25, 128; feminism, 102, 116, 124; and Fowles’ practice of authority, 100, 101-103, 113, 115-16, 12930; fragmentation, 100, 101, 113-14, 130; narrative form, 101-104, 113-14, 129-30; standpoint, 42, 101-102, 115-31; voyeurism, 101-18, 122, 130-31; Islands, 5, 32; A Maggot, 12, 33, 34, 43, 45, 185, 200, 201-21, 223, 224, 225, 234; feminism, 200, 202, 219-21; and Fowles’ practice of authority, 201202, 221; fragmentation, 202, 207, 211, 221; narrative form, 201, 203205, 220; Rebecca’s authorship, 215-20; standpoint, 45, 202, 20821; voyeurism, 202, 205206, 211; whole sight, 212, 219, 221; The Magus, 16, 25, 33, 36, 38, 40, 41, 42, 75-100, 130, 134, 136, 140, 141, 147-48, 181, 182, 183, 191, 192, 219, 220, 223, 224, 225, 226; characters’ authenticity, 76, 80-82, 9197, 99; Conchis’ authority, 80, 92; fragmentation, 7576, 98, 100; narrative form,

250


77, 92-94, 97-98; pornography, 82, 88-89, 96; standpoint, 41, 76-78, 90, 92, 94-95, 97-100; voyeurism, 76-85, 89-92; Mantissa, 1, 5, 12, 36, 43, 44-45, 185, 187-200, 201, 219, 223; Erato’s authorship, 197-98; feminism, 44-45, 193-200; and Fowles’ practice of authority, 187-90, 198-200; Miles’ authorship, 192-98; narrative form, 187-89, 200; pornography, 187-91, 195, 199; standpoint, 199200; voyeurism, 188-90, 193 Friedan, Betty, 231 Godwin, Fay, 24 Goscilo, Margaret Bozenna, 8 Gramsci, Antonio, 162 Haegert, John, 92, 187-88 Haraway, Donna, 17, 18, 19, 46, 163, 185, 215 Harding, Sandra, 17, 208, 225, 226, 233 Hartsock, Nancy, 17 Hekman, Susan, 219 Hiett, Constance B., 137 Hitchcock, Alfred, 50 Homer, The Odyssey, 5, 32, 193 Huffaker, Robert, 50, 140

Humma, John B., 156 Jackson, Tony E., 125 Kadish, Doris Y., 28 Keller, Evelyn Fox, 17, 24, 56, 90, 136, 137 Lacan, Jacques, 38 Larkin, Philip, 229 Lee, Ann, 219 Loveday, Simon, 38, 77, 91, 126, 162, 184 Lovell, Terry, 33 Lukacs,Georg, 162 Marcailloux, Ginette, 227 Marie de France, 5, 7, 134; Eliduc, 134-37 May, Larry, 233-34 McClintock, Barbara, 24 McDaniel, Ellen, 76 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 38 Michael, Magali Cornier, 21 Morse, Ruth, 22 Mulvey, Laura, 11-13, 37-38, 109-10 Nodelman, Perry, 51, 72 Novak, Frank G., 76 Olshen, Barry, 16, 103 Onega, Susana Jaén, 2 Palmer, William, 20 Presley, Delma E., 76

Index Relf, Jan, 1, 16, 36, 198 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 38 Singh, Raman K., 6 Smith, Dorothy, 17 Smith, Leo, 224 Smith, Sarah, 224 standpoint, in The Collector, 50, 53, 56, 61-62, 65-67, 72-74; definition of, 17, 21; in Daniel Martin, 44, 163, 165, 173-85; in The Ebony Tower, 137, 150; in Fowles’ oeuvre, 24, 26, 28, 46, 225-26, 235; in The French Lieutenant’s Woman, 42, 101-102, 11531; in A Maggot, 45, 202, 208-21; in The Magus, 41, 76-78, 90, 92, 94-95, 97100; in Mantissa, 199-200; and objectivity, 19; and the “outsider within”, 17, 18, 19, 27-28; and situated knowledge, 17, 18-19 Stone, Alison, 225

251 Tarbox, Katherine, 2, 32, 36, 50, 85 Vipond, Dianne L., 4, 25 voyeurism, in The Collector, 49-50, 53, 57-58, 67-73; in Daniel Martin, 164, 173; definition of, 37-38, 41, 45; in The Ebony Tower, 14446, 155, 158-59; in Fowles’ oeuvre, 35-45, 46, 227, 228, 233; in The French Lieutenant’s Woman, 10118, 122, 130-31; in A Maggot, 202, 205-206, 211; in The Magus, 76-85, 8992; in Mantissa, 188-90, 193

Walker, David H., 91 Waller, Margaret, 26, 27, 28 Warburton, Eileen, 2, 30, 166, 224 Wilson, Raymond J., III, 157 Woodcock, Bruce, 8, 20, 74

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