2. Postmodern Treatment of The French Lieutenant’s woman.
The French Lieutenant 's Woman is a 1969 postmodern historical fiction novel by John Fowles. It was his third published novel, after The Collector (1963) and The Magus (1965). The novel presents a Victorian tale and setting with the elements of Postmodernism and the characters that are ahead of their time. Thus, it resembles a Victorian novel in structure and detail, while pushing the traditional boundaries of narrative in a very modern manner. It explores the fraught relationship of gentleman and amateur naturalist Charles Smithson and Sarah Woodruff, the former governess and independent woman with whom he falls in love. Fowles has represented Sarah Woodruff and Charles in a very contrasting manner, one being so independent and other like more stereotypical male characters, that also receives attention for its tn reatment of gender issues. The novel builds on Fowles ' authority in Victorian literature, both following and critiquing many of the conventions of period novels.
2.1 METAFICTION
The story remains beautiful and believable, regardless the claim that it has nothing to do with reality. In Chapter 13, Fowles breaks away from the conventional method of storytelling and creates the “feeling of release”. He ends up intertextuating in almost four pages, advising the reader that “the characters are not real but that they are alive”:
“This story I am telling is all imagination. These characters I create never existed