Its been a while since I’ve thought about
Thomas Hardy, but as I began reading the first several chapters of The
French Lieutenant’s Woman I was immediately reminded of Jude and Tess of
the d’Urbervilles. Even before I made it to the first paragraph of the
book I noticed the epigraph was a bit of a poem by Thomas Hardy. Past the
epigraph, I found the flowing tone and style in the first paragraph to be very
similar to Hardy’s. The paragraph is a single long sentence of
descriptions. The way that Fowles describes Lyme Regis, a “small but
ancient eponym of the inbite,” and the weather, “incisively sharp and
blustery,” both remind me of the Hardy’s style of precise yet flowing
writing style. In the first paragraph we also learn that the book is set
in England in the Victorian era—a similar time and place to Jude and
Tess.
As I kept reading, I was struck by Fowles’ particularly un-Hardyesque technique of interjecting with bits of first person commentary from the author’s modern perspective. I first noticed this in chapter 3 when Fowles states that “One of the commonest symptoms of wealthy today is destructive neurosis.” In Chapter 7 Fowles seems to be including the reader in his worries and difficulties in characterization when he suddenly cuts to first person and says, “I risk making Sarah sound like a bigot.”
These quick interjections crescendo into Chapter 13, which Fowles’ writes completely from his own perspective. His prose abruptly stops flowing like Hardy, and becomes more short, abrupt and modern feeling. The first sentence of the chapter is only four words long and each has only one syllable: “I do not know.” It is followed by yet another short and succinct sentence: “This story I am telling is all imagination.” Fowles’ switch to consistent first person perspective is also a departure from Hardy. He uses the word “I” fifteen times in the first two paragraphs.
Fowles’ broad commentary in chapter 13 is quite witty, but I had trouble deciding if I thought it added or detracted from the novel. I decided that I thought the abrupt change in prose ripped my mind out of the story and detracted from the story. Later in the chapter, Fowles’ addresses my opinion and asks “I have disgracefully broken the illusion? No.” Fowles’ defends his break in the story with the claim that his character, what he calls “creatures in [his] mind,” “still exist, and in a reality no less, or no more real than one [he] has just broken.”
I agree with Fowles that his characters exist in a reality, but they do so as creatures in the reality of my mind. Although real, the reality in which his characters live is fragile. Because of the fragile state that his characters live in, I feel that his interjections do indeed break the illusion—each time they crash into the story his characters die a little bit in my head.
I am open to the possibility that this novel has a broader purpose than just storytelling. If the commentary adds more to the novel in wit and insight than it detracts from it in characterization then I suppose I could then see the interjections as a success. For now though, it seems that they hurt more than they enhance the book.