In my first journal on The French Lieutenant’s Woman I wrote that I hadn’t yet decided whether the interjections from the narrator enhanced or detracted from the novel. Throughout the novel I found that the interjections allowed Fowles to simultaneously weave the story and provide occasional tidbits of narrative commentary. Now, social commentary is nothing new to the Victoria novel, and at first I thought that such obvious interjections were a weak and dumbed down strategy to voice commentary. I was a bit offended that Fowles thought I would miss less obvious expressions of his opinions, and I wondered why he hadn’t tried a more sly approach.
I realized that the commentary in The French Lieutenant’s Woman is indeed very unique because it comes from the perspective of a 20th century mind. I do not think a Victorian novel has ever been narrated in such a manner before—obviously it would have been impossible for Hardy to do so. At first I disproved of the interjections because they felt like speed bumps in the flow of the story. An example of one such speed bump is in the last paragraph of chapter 9 when the narrator says, “Such an anticlimax!.” When I read that I was actually offended. It made me feel that the narrator was stooping to my level inferior intellect. I didn’t think he needed to announce an anticlimax. If I felt that something was anticlimactic, I could recognize that for myself.
I quickly began to understand that the interjections were necessary to remind the reader of the presence of the narrator and to understand that his commentary is from the 20th century—something that, due to the novel’s setting, is very easy to forget. One of these obvious reminder happened when the narrator said: “I have pretended to slip back into 1867; but of course that year is in reality a century past.” (55) This statement reminds me of the narrator’s hindsight, and it prefaces his quips about the differences between the Victorian era and the “less reserved context of our own century.” (55)
One of the truly unique aspects of this novel is the narrator’s futuristic perspective. Without those short sections of commentary, this novel wouldn’t be more than another rehashing of the classic Victorian sob story. With the narrator’s perspective though, Fowles helps further the evolution of the Victorian novel and succeeds in modernizing its classic style.