The French Lieutenant's Woman

“She secretly pleased Mrs. Poulteney from the start, by seeming so cast-down, so annihilated by circumstance.”

Mrs. Poulteney does not want to help Sarah for Sarah’s benefit. Her charity is self-serving, a means of ensuring that she goes to heaven. Sarah performs the role of the charitable case as part of her tragic persona. If Sarah were only suffering inwardly, she would not appeal to Mrs. Poulteney’s narcissism.

“His statement to himself should have been, ‘I possess this now, therefore I am happy’, instead of what it so Victorianly was: ‘I cannot possess this for ever, and therefore am sad.’”

When outlining the contrast between Charles’s Victorian views and the modern views the narrator holds, the narrator presents a modern value judgement. He criticizes Charles by suggesting that he “should” conceive of the world in a more modern manner. The subjectivity of the narrator foreshadows the eventual introduction of the narrator as a physical character in the story. The adverb “Victorianly” humorously marks Charles as someone who cannot break free from his socially conditioned views.

“Soon she would have to stop playing at mistress, and be one in real earnest.”

Victorian society demands a performance of manners, class, and etiquette, so Ernestina’s expectation that she will someday have to perform a role in earnest is a genuine fear. Ernestina’s insecurity about her middle-class roots makes this prospect both tempting and terrifying: On one hand, she wants to enter Charles’s level of society, and on another, she fears being judged by the upper class.

“Perhaps Charles is myself disguised. Perhaps it is only a game.”

The narrator uses the novel as a chance to delve into self-reflection by recreating himself as a Victorian man. Criticism of Charles becomes self-criticism of the narrator, turning the novel into a therapeutic exercise through contrasting the cultures of the present and past.

“Until the little disagreement she had perhaps been more in love with marriage than with her husband to-be.”

The minor disagreement between Charles and Ernestina about the proper treatment of servants is the first contentious moment in their relationship. This tension has a clarifying effect on Ernestina; for the first time, she realizes that she is about to marry an actual person.

“He knew he was about to engage in the forbidden, or rather the forbidden was about to engage in him.”

Here, the narrator reframes Charles as a passive figure in a controversial situation. Despite Charles’s agency and his ability to abandon Sarah at any moment, the prose reflects Charles’s sense of fatalism, foreshadowing the conflict that haunts him throughout the novel.

“Perhaps that was it—that she had not divined that a gentleman could never reveal the anger she ascribed to him.”

Charles’s realization is a reminder of the gulf in social class between himself and Ernestina. He takes his own knowledge of etiquette and decorum as a given, something that has been taught to him from so young an age that it is second nature. Ernestina and her family lack his many generations of learned behaviors, even if they are materially richer than most aristocrats. In Victorian society, wealth is not the sole determiner of social class.

“Why had he allowed Grogan to judge her for him?”

Grogan believes that Sarah’s behavior is deliberate, a manifestation of her desire to have herself judged and punished. Increasingly, Charles exhibits this same behavior. Charles’s desire to seek punish is an extension of his alienation from late Victorian society while Grogan’s ability to diagnose this in Sarah but not Charles demonstrates the innate sexism of the culture.

“I am sure Mrs. Fairley will be pleased to help you use it upon all those wretched enough to come under your power.”

When Sarah confronts Mrs. Poulteney, the tone of her rebuttal is more important than the content. While Mrs. Poulteney is insulted by Sarah’s words, she is just as horrified that a servant would speak to their employer in such a fashion. Sarah’s insult to Mrs. Poulteney is an insult to the entire social structure of England and an indication of the social structure’s fragile foundations.

“It is no more than a formality. But such formalities matter.”

Here, Charles shows that he is caught between the present and the past. He acknowledges that formalities represent the old values he wants to leave behind, but he cannot quite bring himself to abandon tradition. Charles is both dismissive of and beholden to the past, and his journey as a character is a struggle to resolve this tension.

“Exeter was, in all this, no exception—all the larger provincial towns of the time had to find room for this unfortunate army of female wounded in the battle for universal masculine purity.”

Victorian society is patently anti-sex, yet at the same time, it must find space for all the women whose reputations have been tarnished through sexual associations. This need is so great that even provincial towns like Exeter must dedicate whole neighborhoods to this issue. The presence of such neighborhoods suggests that sex is a far more common part of Victorian society than the Victorians would care to admit.

“Consciously he believed he was a perfect gentleman; and perhaps it was only in his obsessive determination to appear one that we can detect a certain inner doubt.”

Like so many other characters, Mr. Freeman is performing a role in accordance with the expectations placed on him by his peers. He believes that he is a “perfect gentleman,” but this self-belief is not essential. More important is that he appears to be the perfect gentleman to those around him. Thus, he must perform his role above and beyond what he believes to be true. The truth about him is less important than how he is perceived by others.

“But in fact his façade was sobriety, while theirs was drunkenness, exactly the reverse of the true comparative state.”

Like so many characters, the gentlemen at Charles’s club are keenly aware of the expectations placed on them by society. They are performing the role of uninhibited young men, as this will allow them to break the strict moral codes of their society as pertaining to sex. Even in their debauchery, they cannot abandon their need to adopt a social “façade.”

“Sam’s surprise makes one suspect that his real ambition should have been in the theatre.”

As a working-class man, Sam is presumed to be unintelligent and disinterested in the lives of his social betters. On the contrary, he is keenly aware of Charles’s relationship with Sarah. He must feign surprise to indulge Charles’s perception of working-class men and keep his true intentions secret.

“A few moments later he lay still. Precisely ninety seconds had passed since he had left her to look into the bedroom.”

The course of Sarah’s life is dictated by two sexual encounters, one which never happened (with the French Lieutenant) and one which lasted all of 90 seconds with Charles. Her life pivots on these two private moments because people’s impression of her actions is more important than the actions themselves. Whether Sarah had sex on either occasion is immaterial, as all that really matters is whether people believe that she had extramarital sex.

“I am infinitely strange to myself.”

Charles’s relationship with Sarah is more about himself than about them as a couple. He is torn between Sarah and Ernestina because of what they represent, rather than who they are. When he is talking to Sarah, he justifies his actions by claiming ignorance of his own intentions. Rather than considering how his actions might affect Sarah, he has thought only about how his actions relate to himself.

“He stared a moment down at that collapsed figure, and recognized the catatonia of convention.”

Ernestina theatrically collapses when Charles breaks off their engagement. The irony of her description as a “collapsed figure” is that she is performatively playing on the imagery of the fallen woman. When she is rejected, Ernestina appeals for sympathy by falling to the ground, literally becoming a fallen woman. Her performative actions fail to elicit Charles’s sympathy.

“He did something that night he had not done for many years. He knelt by his bed and prayed.”

Charles is an agnostic, and his uncertainty about God’s existence becomes all the more apparent in this desperate act. Rather than faith, all he has is the desire to believe someone or something can remove his accountability and fix the damage he has caused.

“My problem is simple—what Charles wants is clear? It is indeed. But what the protagonist wants is not so clear.”

As part of the novel’s postmodern aesthetic, the narrator is unable to control his characters. They defy convention, just as the novel itself defies the conventions of Victorian literature. The narrator’s battle against his characters foreshadows that the novel will ultimately reject the cathartic climax and happy denouement of Victorian literary tradition.

“I am defiled to the end of my life.”

The irony of Charles’s complaint here is that he is suffering a fraction of the harm to his reputation that was inflicted on Sarah. Furthermore, he chose to have sex with Sarah and break his engagement while Sarah never had sex with the French Lieutenant.

“He became as dependent on travelling as an addict on his opium.”

Charles uses travel to distract himself from his emotional pain. Travel—like opium—does not address the root cause of his problem but provides a momentary reprieve. Only when he confronts Sarah is he able to find some resolution.

“He began to see the often risible provinciality of his hosts as a condition of their lack of hypocrisy.”

Only when Charles leaves England is he able to examine the hypocrisy of Victorian society. Inside the society, he is under too much pressure to perform the role of an English gentleman. Outside of these expectations, he is free to witness their absurdity. Though his hosts lack sophistication, they also lack the hypocrisy that defines English society.

“History reduced to a living stop, a photograph in flesh.”

Here, the narrator merges several creative genres in an attempt to capture the essence of human experience. The metaphor of a photograph that is at once a living person and also part of a series of such photographs, i.e., a film, shows both the continuous and interrupted nature of life, which the narrator seeks to capture in his novel.