Dissertations / Theses on the topic 'French lieutenant's woman'

Includes abstract.
Includes bibliographical references.
The following thesis investigates the role of hindsight and sexuality in The French Lieutenant’s Woman by John Fowles. In this instance I look closely at the two main characters of the novel, namely Charles Smithson and Sarah Woodruff, and I show the varying levels of freedom that each character displays in a Victorian world.

Undersöker hur den berättartekniska strukturen i John Fowles roman The French Lieutenant's Woman skapar en interaktion mellan läsare och text. Syftet är att diskutera hur detta bidrar till det didaktiska budskap som romanen tycks formulera. Uppsatsen använder Shoshana Felmans teorier om överföring mellan läsare och text och Wolfgang Isers begrepp "den implicita läsaren" som verktyg för analysen.

This study analyzes the development of the major characters in Fowles's novel - Charles, Sarah, and Sam - in terms of the heroic quest motif. Using the basic pattern of the heroic quest, the monomyth, that Joseph Campbell sets forth in his The Hero with a Thousand Faces, I attempt to show that Fowles's novel may best be understood as the story of three separate heroic quests whose paths cross rather than as the story of a single hero or heroine. This reading seems to account best for all elements of the novel and to explain best the final positions of the characters in question as well as providing a rich appreciation of the novel's wealth of imagery.

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This dissertation proposes a comparative analysis of metafiction in the novel The French lieutenant's woman, by John Fowles and in the film with the same name, directed by Karel Reisz, with screenplay by Harold Pinter. Our theoretical frame highlights some of the main studies published in the field of metafiction. We supplement the investigation of metafiction in the literary and filmic narrative in interface with other theoretical contributions, among them: narratology, filmic adaptation and some theoreticians of postmodernism. We adopt as a methodological principle the comparative investigation of some aesthetic devices and procedures associated with metafiction (self-reflexivity, self-consciousness, intertextuality, mise-en-abyme, among others) as long as they have been emphasized in the appreciation of some selected narrative categories (narrator, epigraph, character, reader/spectator) in the literary and filmic contexts. As a whole, our results consider metafiction as being a privileged, mediatory, logic, processual and theoretical-critical tool for the in-depth comprehension of the filmic and literary narratives.
Esta dissertação propõe uma análise comparativa da metaficção no romance The French lieutenant's woman, de John Fowles e no filme homônimo, dirigido por Karel Reisz, com roteiro de Harold Pinter. Nosso aporte teórico focaliza, sobretudo, os principais estudos publicados na área da metaficção. Suplementamos a investigação da metaficção na narrativa literária e fílmica com a interface de outros subsídios teóricos, dentre eles: a narratologia, a adaptação fílmica e alguns teóricos do pós-modernismo. Adotamos como princípio metodológico, o exame comparado de alguns recursos e procedimentos estéticos filiados à metaficção (tais como, autorreflexividade, autoconsciência, intertextualidade, mise-en-abyme, entre outros), conforme foram sendo enfatizados ao longo da apreciação de algumas categorias narrativas selecionadas (narrador, epígrafe, personagem, leitor/espectador) nos contextos literários e fílmicos. Em síntese, nossos resultados recaem sobre a metaficção enquanto uma ferramenta teórico-crítica, processual, lógica, mediadora e privilegiada para a compreensão aprofundada das narrativas literária e fílmica em pauta.

Les romans de John Fowles s'inscrivent dans une démarche d'expérimentation avec la forme en même temps qu'ils affirment un attachement à la tradition réaliste, et nous disent quelque chose de la déchirure au cœur du vingtième siècle. Un mouvement contradictoire se dessine où le sujet moderne, divisé et incomplet, tend vers une complétude illusoire, perdue et irrécupérable, et en même temps anticipe la manière de faire consoner la faille de sa propre structure avec le vide indicible et informe dont les signifiants tracent le bord et qui ne devient perceptible que lorsque le sens se délite sous l'effet du travail de la lettre. L'incomplétude est de structure et Fowles s'interroge pour savoir comment l'écrire dans un texte qui, par définition, est complet. La fiction lui fournit le cadrage narratif de son désir de retrouver ce qui le meut. Quête impossible car le signifiant premier recouvre le manque qui est sa raison d'être. Une écriture qui se soutient d'une position symbolique masculine qui vise la maîtrise par l'imposition d'un sens qui voile le réel se trouve en échec. Une nouvelle écriture se fait jour sur les décombres da la première, fondée sur la position symbolique féminine qui, n'étant pas toute dans le langage, permet de faire percevoir le manque sur lequel la langage se fonde. Ce qui ne peut se dire relève de ce que nous nommons le réel et se différencie de la réalité qui est constituée du discours. Comment la réalité s'articule-t-elle au réel par le discours spécifique de la fiction ? Les romans de Fowles mettent en jeu deux discours inséparables mais antinomiques, l'un basé sur le désir qui est métonymique et linéaire, relevant du vouloir-dire de l'auteur, et l'autre qui travaille à défaire le premier en laissant parler dans les interstices qu'il ouvre quelque chose d'une jouissance perdue. Afin de laisser transpercer ce deuxième discours basé sur le vouloir-jouir inconscient, sous-jacent dans toute écriture, Fowles élabore une esthétique de l'inachevé
John Fowles's novels develop formal experimentation while attaching great value to the realistic tradition and express to some extent the rift at the heart of the century. There is a contradictory movement in his novels where the divided and therefore incomplete subject strives to achieve fulfilment in a unity that has been lost and cannot be recovered, simultaneously anticipating how to harmonize the fracture inherent in his position as subject with the unspeakable void outlined by the signifier and which is only perceptible when meaning crumbles through the work the letter. Lack of fulfilment is structural and Fowles is searching a means to write this into a text which is necessarily whole. Fiction provides the narrative framework for his desire to find what sets it in motion. He embarks on an impossible quest as the first signifier covers the original lack on which language is constituted. Writing from a symbolic masculine position whose aim is to control and impose a meaning in order to conceal “the real” is doomed to fail. A new form of writing must emerge on the ruins of the former based on a symbolic feminine position which cannot be totally framed in language and is thus able to reveal the lack on which language is founded. What cannot be said is what we call “the real” and differs from reality which is constructed by discourse. How can we articulate reality and the real through the specific discourse of fiction? Fowles's novels bring into play two forms of discourse that are both unseparable yet antinomical; one is based on desire whose nature is metonymical and linear, depending on the author's intention whereas the other endeavours to undo the first and create an opening through which the voice of the lost “jouissance” may be heard. In order to make way for the operation of this other discourse in which the unconscious desire for the form of jouissance which language permits is inherent, Fowles has elaborated an ethical response which we call his aesthetics of the impossible ending

A presente dissertação comparatista visa problematizar as manifestações metanarrativas que questionam a tradição historiográfica e a legitimidade da verdade histórica. Mário de Carvalho e John Fowles são dois nomes incontornáveis da literatura pós-modernista, em particular na propagação das linhas definidoras da metaficção historiográfica. Os dois romances que intitulam esta investigação académica surgem-nos como vozes desafiadoras dos convencionalismos normativos que regularam a historiografia durante séculos. Neste sentido, apresentamos, nas páginas anteriores, um quadro de investigação que procura reflectir a respeito da índole ambígua da reescrita historiográfica. Importa-nos compreender se, na representação do passado, o romancista transporta os leitores para uma época histórica que, não sendo real, é verosímil ou se, em alternativa, edifica, com recurso a efeitos anacrónicos, uma representação contemporânea desse passado. Em suma, questionamos se é o leitor quem viaja até ao passado ou se é o passado que, reconstituído no presente, viaja até ao leitor; ABSTRACT:The main purpose of this thesis will be to examine the metanarrative manifestations which call into question the legitimacy of traditional historiography and, subsequently, historical truth. Mario de Carvalho and John Fowles are two significant postmodern authors, who emphasized the historiographic metafiction outlines. The two novels which entitle the dissertation emerge to us as defiant voices that challenge the conventions which had regulated historiography for centuries. Hence, the previous pages present an investigation framework that reflects on the ambiguous nature of historiographical rewriting. We aim to understand whether, in representing the past, the novelist transports the readers to an historical age or, as an alternative, he rebuilds a contemporary representation of that past, by means of anachronistic effects. In other words, we question whether it is the reader who travels to the past or it is the past that, being reconstructed in the present, travels to the reader’s era.

The present work explicates the concept of "the messianic" as it figures in the work of Jacques Derrida and Walter Benjamin in order to establish the foundation of a useful (and, one hopes, potentially innovative) critical approach to the works of Mary Shelley, Joseph Conrad, John Fowles, as well as to novelistic fiction generally. This foundation rests on a common quality of the messianic as it figures in Derrida and Benjamin's respective corpora. In their conception the messianic refers not to some individual of divine, semi-divine, or even mortal origin who is charged with functioning as the world-historical agent by whose deeds history itself comes to an end, and a new holy, paradisiacal order is thereby founded, but to the aspirational tenor to humankind's orientation to futurity. The messianic finds expression in the myriad instantiations of human beings' future-oriented activity. As such, it achieves a sort of spectrality--or, to borrow the term Marx applies to the commodity, a phantom-like objectivity--having a somewhat intuitive apprehensibility, if in fact not form or substance.Novelistic fiction, which exploits its own spectrality in a bid for arranging impossible arrangements, realizing impossible realities, ordering impossible orders, attempts to occupy an impossible-to-occupy space between on one hand, the catastrophic present and the messianic future, and on the other hand, the future to come and the future as it is wished to be. Wracked by the tension created by its allegiance to chance, the contingent, and the aleatory on one side, and to the deterministic, the necessary, and the climactic or teleological on the other side, novelistic fiction achieves its particular character precisely through pursuit of its abortive program, just as humanity achieves its character, to the extent that such a notion is legitimate, precisely through its abortive program, which is nothing more no less than survival, than living on.

La question des formes narratives, de la représentation et de la lecture dans le roman anglais postmoderne s'inscrit dans une perspective qui vise à relier la pratique littéraire et artistique au contexte historique et culturel postmoderne de la fin du vingtième siècle. Ce contexte est caractérisé par un sentiment d'incertitude et de doute. En rapport avec ceci, l'étude est centrée sur les stratégies de déstabilisation de la représentation réaliste et des modes la construction du sens. En effet, le roman anglais postmoderne remet en question le sens commun qui constitue le fondement de l'écriture réaliste qu'elle soit histoire, biographie ou fiction. La principale stratégie consiste en l'introduction, parallèlement au récit réaliste, d'une version du principe d'incertitude et d'un discours interrogatif qui vise à désintégrer les notions communes et insoupçonnées du langage comme véhicule neutre, de la réalité et de la subjectivité comme étant saisissables et (re)présentables. La subversion des habitudes de lecture (et d'écriture) qui en résulte implique une problématisation des principes téléologiques qui déterminent nos rapports au texte et au monde
This thesis is concerned with questions of form, representation and the reading process in the English postmodern novel. The idea is to relate the postmodern novel of the last decades of the twentieth-century to a historical and cultural (post-industrial, postmodern and post-humanist) context characterized by a general feeling of uncertainty and doubt. Related to this is the study of the destabilizing strategies of realist representation and of the common modes of meaning-construction. In fact, postmodern English fiction calls into question the common sense basis of realistic writing be it historical, biographical or fictional. The principal strategy consist in introducing, parallel to a realistic narrative, a version of the uncertainty principle and an outward interrogative discourse that seeks to subvert familiar notions of language, reality and subjectivity. The resulting subversion of the reading (and writing) habits implies a problematizing of the teleological principles that determine our relationships with text and world

Cette these examine les representations de l'ere victorienne proposees par le roman des iles britanniques du dernier tiers du xxeme siecle. Les romans sont etudies en regard de la double specificite de l'ere victorienne : son ecriture et son image. Une double re-ecriture est a l'oeuvre dans ces romans qui participent d'un contexte litteraire postmoderne. D'une part, ils se positionnent par rapport au projet realiste qu'ils revelent comme une illusion : par le biais d'un jeu autour de documents dits factuels et/ou l'emploi de personnages "reels" ("the last testament 0f oscar wilde" de peter ackroyd, "clare" de john mackenna et "poor things" d'alasdair gray) ; par la presence d'intertextes victoriens apparents dans le mode narratif, l'intrigue et les conclusions qui lui sont apportees ("thefrench lieutenants woman" de john fowles, "possession" d'a. S. Byatt et "nice work" de david lodge). D'autre part, ils proposent une re-evaluation de l'ere victorienne qui s'appuie sur une perception de l'histoire selon laquelle celle-ci est une construction elaboree a partir de textes. L'etude de l'heroine victorienne vue par le xxeme siecle montre que celle-ci est une representation detournee deses comparses litteraires du siecle precedent. La presence de personnages atypiques remet en question les stereotypes sur la sexualite des victoriens. Tandis que certains romans offrent une representation interne du passe, d'autres affichent la distance temporelle et presentent ce faisant une approche critique du xxeme siecle et du postmodernisme.

New, old novels, contemporary fictions that parody the forms, conventions, and devices of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century novels, form a significant and increasingly popular subclass of postmodernist fiction. Paradoxically combining realistic and metafictional conventions, these works establish an ironic dialogue with the past, employing yet simultaneously subverting traditional fictional techniques.
In this dissertation, I subject five new, old novels--John Barth's The Sot-Weed Factor and LETTERS, Erica Jong's Fanny, T. Coraghessan Boyle's Water Music, and John Fowles's The French Lieutenant's Woman--to a detailed analysis, which compares the parodic role of archaic devices in each contemporary novel to the serious use made of such devices in the past. I argue that new, old novels, by juxtaposing old and new world views, foreground the ontological concerns of fiction and suggest that literary representation is constitutive rather than imitative of reality. Their examination of the relationship between fiction and reality places them at the centre of contemporary concern.

This essay examines the adaptation of The French Lieutenant’s Woman; proclaiming that it is based on the same core of meaning as the novel. This core, or interiority, of the art work, is the freedom which Sarah Woodruff presents. The interiority is immanent within the novel as well as the film. The freedom that Sarah presents creates gaps in time and is mainly freedom from time. From an exterior perspective though, these art works look different. The exteriority is visualized and described by being denominated as different narrative levels. In the film Mike falls in love with Sarah as an escape from his own time, one that is characterized by more lenient moral views than those prevalent in the Victorian Age. This present-day character is not, of course, in the novel but is invented by Harold Pinter as part of a metaphor for Fowles’ metafictional stance. In the novel, freedom is partly represented by an extradiegetic narrative level and suggested in various comments made by the apparent author of the work: John Fowles. This essay highlights the contrasts between the fictive world (on a hypodiegetic level), and the real world (on a diegetic level). By doing this, this essay suggests a motive for Pinter’s “narrative innovation” as a “brilliant metaphor” for Fowles´ novel. With these contrasts we find that the restraints of a seemingly open society (the 1980s in which Pinter was writing the screenplay) are able to contain an inner, rather implicit, restraint for the individual of the 1980s. The longing for freedom is triggered as soon as man is deprived of freedom, irrespective of how and when. Sarah is an escape from Victorian Age for Charles, at the same time as she is an escape from the 1980s for Mike. On the whole, Sarah is an escape from the linearity of all time. Freedom is immanent with both of the artworks, yet they are completely different, seen from outside.

碩士
靜宜大學
英國語文學系
87
Abstract: In The French Lieutenant’s Woman, John Fowles explores the complex relationships between men and men, women and women, and men and women. The male character, Charles Smithson, represents a man trying to adapt the Victorian definitions of masculinity in order to maintain his hegemony. In the meantime, the novel also displays the processes that Charles discerns the illusion of omnipotent paternal power, and then, he gradually comes to great awareness of his real self. Suffering from life, the hero is able to reconstruct his self-identity, as well as his masculinity again and again. This thesis, through psychoanalysis, attempts to examine Charles’s manhood from various aspects and to study how he reconstructs his masculinity. In the first chapter, the interaction and mutual influences between the rise of feminism and the changes of masculinity are represented. The current of male study makes men begin to ponder on some important problems like “who they are” and “what they are.” In the second and the third chapters, Charles’s Oedipus complex is examined by his relationships with the symbolic mother and father figures. After experiencing and overcoming this psychological obstacle, the Oedipus complex, Charles establishes his potential character as a man and obtains strength to construct his own manhood. Despite of conventional psychoanalysis of the Oedipus complex, Charles’s rationality and emotion would be investigated as well. The mechanism of rationality and emotion makes Charles have different decisions in the triple endings. The open ending thus symbolizes the multiple possibilities of a man’s masculinity. Finally, the thesis is concluded some problems and vista of modern masculinity. Most critiques on The French Lieutenant’s Woman focus on women’s liberation or the subversion of male power. Fowles, as a male writer, must attempt to demonstrate some serious and crucial problems with men themselves by showing women’s self-awareness, autonomy, and individuality, which truly mirror male predicaments in both the Victorian Age and the modern times.

碩士
國立高雄師範大學
英語學系
87
John Fowles is an out-and-out magus. His novels arouse the interest of countless readers, but the juxtaposition of pairs of counterpoints usually confuse them a great deal. The concept of poles and counterpoles is central to Fowles’s novels as well as to his philosophical book, The Aristos. Among Fowles’s novels, The French Lieutenant’s Woman is particularly richer in the presentation of pairs of counterpoints and therefore is cited as a revealing example for the study of counterpoints. Instead of using an arbitrary perspective of binary opposition, the purpose of this thesis is to justify Fowles’s golden means in dealing with polar opposites. This thesis will be divided into six chapters. Chapter one deals with the purpose of the study, and gives a definition of and a brief introduction to the concept of the pole and the counterpole in Fowles’s The Aristos. The polar opposites usually play an important part in Fowles’s novels. This thesis will present four pairs of counterpoints: the Victorian period versus the postmodern period, reality versus fiction, freedom versus duty, and the upper class versus the lower class. Chapter two analyzes the contrasts between the Victorian period and the postmodern period. Fowles parodies the social values, mores, attitudes and sexuality of the two historical periods as well as the narrative modes of Victorian styles and postmodern styles. The purpose of this juxtaposition is to prompt readers to learn lessons from the past, reflect on the present and look forward to the future. Chapter three treats the polarity of reality and fiction. In this novel, Fowles makes the pair of polarity indistinguishable, the outcome of which is to blur the demarcation of reality and fiction. Readers are initiated to learn that life is full of many “realities” and “fictions” and that reality and fiction are indispensable to and coexistent in our lives. Chapter four is devoted to scrutinizing the contrast of freedom and duty. Fowles is convinced that freedom is the highest human good. But humans in the pursuit of freedom are blocked by their obligatory duties. Only when they get rid of such restraints and regard the pursuit of freedom as their duty can they achieve the highest human good. Chapter five focuses on the contrasts among different social classes. The fall of the upper class and the rise of the lower class demonstrate that social hierarchy has declined and the middle class becomes the mainstream of this society. Furthermore, though women’s social position is much inferior to men’s in the Victorian period, Fowles, through his characterization of Sarah, suggests that there will be a hope for the equality of both sexes. Chapter six comes to a conclusion. The pole and the counterpole are interdependent on each other, and their coexistence is the law of nature. Fowles’s attitude toward polar opposites reveals a heart for wholeness and balance. Therefore, confronted with the conflicts of the positive and negative forces, hopefully, we can manage to find a way to balance or reconciliation so as to evolve harmoniously.

碩士
國立高雄師範大學
英語學系
92
The French Lieutenant's Woman is by all means an attractive piece of metafiction. The aim of this study is to demonstrate Fowles's metafictional skills in this novel. Based on this viewpoint, my thesis contains six chapters. The first chapter is a brief introduction to Fowles's life, works and literary theories. It also describes the background of the writing and summarizes the touching but controvertible plot in The French Lieutenant's Woman. The second chapter deals with an analysis of metafiction. In metafication, the fictional world is the refraction of the real world-- a twisting mirror image, instead of an image of facts. The third chapter demonstrates the metafictional language in the novel. The indeterminacy of language makes it difficult to distinguish between truth and fiction. The fourth chapter is concentrated on metafictional structures in The French Lieutenant's Woman; there are obvious framing devices containing "stories within stories," narrative device, and the device of parody. The fifth chapter discusses the role of the reader as well as the interrelationship between author, reader and text. For a convenient illustration, the three reciprocal relationships are also diagrammed. The last chapter is the conclusion, which summarizes the above-mentioned metafictional techniques. At the same time, the reason why The French Lieutenant's Woman is widely read is underscored.

碩士
淡江大學
西洋語文研究所
81
This thesis attempts to cast some light on Fowles's huamnism by discussing Charles's collector mentality in The French Lieutenant's Woman. Based on the idea of collecting in The Collector, Fowles's first novel, this study examines Charles's classifying impulse, explores the historical realities that brought it about, and shows the damage it does to Charles himself. In the story, Charles tends to categorize and to define the people in his life, denying their living realities. His collecting is meant to reduce them to the status of objects, since only dead things have fixed natures and can be neatly categorized. This dehumanizing act is what Fowles loathes. Being an aristocratic male in the Victorian patriarchal and hierarchal society, Charles enjoys enviable privileges. Yet women's liberation and the rising of lower classes spoil his superior position. He feels inferior and powerless. His collecting is driven by the need to disguise this feeling and to sustain a sense of power by turning others into objects under his control. The tragedy is that the sense of power is false. Man is not a self-sufficient being; his growth is impossible without the stimulus of other people. Treating human as objects, he can only confine himself in a closed circle of false superiority. Without growth, his self is in danger of being withered. He is himself the victim of the act of collecting.

碩士
國立彰化師範大學
英語學系
99
The thesis adopts the deep ecological discourse to explore nature in The French Lieutenant’s Woman. Based on the deep ecological framework, I intend to offer a new vision to interpret the human-nature relationship as shown in this work. Through natural inspiration on humans, I explore that people can achieve the ecological self in the process of self-reconstruction. The study is divided into five chapters. Chapter One begins with a brief introduction of John Fowles. With the exploration of John Fowles’s concepts of nature, nature is shown as the main element in his works. The following part offers the critical reviews on The French Lieutenant’s Woman spanning from different perspectives. The last part is the chapter descriptions as an overview of the whole thesis. The second chapter introduces the deep ecological thinking, which serves as a main methodology in this thesis. In terms of the based claims by deep ecologists, this chapter consists of four aspects: the Western anthropocentric thought on nature, natural egalitarianism, deep ecological spirituality, and the ecological self. According to deep ecology, the human-centered conviction is the source of devaluation on nature, and it creates the Up/Down mode between humans since traditional Western anthropocentrism legitimates the hierarchical ranking in different groups. Against the centrism promoted by humans, deep ecology calls for the notions of natural egalitarianism to emphasize human and nature are equal. Besides, the deep ecologists present that nature is the organic system with spirits and ensure the interconnected relationship between human and nature. Chapter Three analyzes the value-hierarchical thinking in The French Lieutenant’s Woman. This chapter includes three sections. The first section examines the influence of science on nature in the Victorian society. The following sections illuminate how anthropocentrism functions to victimize nature and cause the dualistic modes in human’s society as shown in the text. In the fourth chapter of the thesis, it portrays natural equality and deep ecological spirituality in The French Lieutenant’s Woman. And in the last section, I focus on the male protagonist, Charles, who accomplishes the transformation from the social self to the ecological self with the natural inspiration. Finally, the study concludes that the deep ecological discourse has association with John Fowles’s concepts of nature. Both of them assert there is the flourishing coexistence between human and natural world. Moreover, agreeing with the position of nature in the world, they indicate nature is presented as the main factor to help an individual growth.

碩士
國立中興大學
外國語文學系
89
Since the British Empire started to paint the map red in the 1860s, Africa, the Dark Continent, has borne the brunt of its invasion. Back home, at the same time that John Stuart Mill was campaigning for women’s rights, some of his compatriots went to great length of exploring the biological Dark Continent of the female mind and body. The female was accordingly misrepresented, wrongly accused, or even manhandled. In John Fowles’s The French Lieutenant’s Woman, he describes the relationship between the sexes, a lop-sidedness in favor of the male. Predicated on the feminist approach, this thesis is meant to address such a problematic relationship in terms of a Victorian woman Sarah’s exploitation and victimization by the patriarchal society and dissect the rationale behind its self-righteous and condescending treatment of her, which ineluctably relegates her to the Other. Divided into three parts, this thesis cuts across an introduction, a main body of two chapters, and a conclusion. I bring into play as my theoretical background the theories of Rebecca Stott, Elaine Showalter, and Sandra Gilbert as well as Susan Gubar. These theories I harness to elaborate on the male domination and female subordination and how women can break the tyranny of their prescribed destiny in the Victorian era, when the Law of the Father reigns in full swing. In Chapter One, I appropriate Stott’s perspectives on femme fatales to demonstrate sustained paternal attempts at penetrating and dispersing the mist of mystery around the so-called “fatal woman” and why she is feared like the plague. At bottom, fatal woman as such is nothing but a man-constructed denomination created to facilitate men’s exercise of scientific groping about her. Meanwhile, another focus of the chapter will be on demystifying the myth of “the female malady” theory, brought forward by Showalter, by claiming that nurture reinforces or retards nature, rather than vice versa. The earlier part of the second chapter treats of men’s and women’s functions in Victorian society, likening men’s to the function of a speculum meant to shed light on women’s inner self, and women’s to that of a mirror which forcedly glasses back men’s desired image. This chapter is concerned chiefly with female creativity and identity. Under patriarchy and conventional mores, women’s creative space is much compressed, still more their self-identity to which artistic creation subserves amply. Through creation of art, they are able to claim their authorship and further to define and forge their own identity. In Sarah’s case, by virtue of “a fiction of her own” and some kind of playacting, she achieves self-actualization, clinching her sense of identity eventually.

碩士
輔仁大學
英國語文學研究所
84
This thesis is a study of John Fowles's cultural critique of the nineteenth-century art and life in _The French Lieutenant's Woman_. Fowles demonstrates his critique of the past primarily on his characterization of his heroine, Sarah, by endowing her with subjectivity. Most of the earlier critics tend to see Serah both functional as a symbol and ontological as a human being with subjectivity. Later critics, especially feminist critics, however, tend to see Sarah as still a catalyst of Charles's transformation, or an object of the narrator's narrative voice without being given a subjecthood. Since I see Sarah as the mover of all actions in the novel and a creator of her new self through her own choice, I attempt justify Sarah's subjectivity in my thesis. As Sarah achieves her independence in the household of Rossetti, I assume the importance of this artist at my first stage of writing and start to read the paintings of the Pre- Raphaelite Brotherhood. Exaiming closely Fowles's descriptions of Sarah, however, I discover that Sarah's image is based on the image of the Pre-Raphaelite Women. Fowles's presentation of Sarah does not only depict her by means of the image of the Pre-Raphaelite Women, but refill the image with life, action, and even release the narrative impulse of the painted portrait by giving Sarah the power of story-telling. To study Fowles's textual portrait of Sarah, I find that ekphrasis is the most suitable and refreshing way to proceed my thesis. Ekphrasis, briefly speaking, is the verbal representation of the visual representation and functions to bring the art objects alive before the mind's eye. This representation of vision in words is not just a verbal replica of the visual art but reflects the "translator' s," that is, the poet's or the novelist's critique and challenge of the visual representation. Therefore, ekphrasis, stressing on the transition between the verbal and visual representation and the question of representation itself, helps me diagnose Fowles's revision of the woman's image and even the tradition of fiction-writing. Fowles's textual portrait of Sarah, here his ekphrastic revision of her, arouses the question of frame. Fowles's critique of the Pre- Raphaelite art can be first seen in his revision of the artist- designed frames of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. Fowles's frames of epigraphs and footnotes he arranges in each chapter echoes the Pre- Raphaelite ornate and intricate frames to set off the framed portraits. More than setting off the painted portrait, Rossetti's frames, with its simplicity and symbolism, seem to extend the painted portraits onto them and the frames seem to be dissolved. Nevertheless, the broadness, flatness, and gold color in the frames are so strong that they isolate the inner portrait from the external world rather than connect them. While setting up the frames of the epigraphs and footnotes to enhance the illusionism of the nineteenth-century romance, Fowles ushers the intrusion of the narrator to break them in turn. Fowles's characters, therefore, confron the confusion of the external world rather than being secured within the frames. Fowles's breaking up the frames thus disturbs the convention of reading frames and reading fiction. In the first chapter of my thesis, I study the concepts of framing in the Pre-Raphaelite art and in Fowles's novel. Reading Fowles's representation of Pre-Raphaelitism from the concept of framing, I attempt to set up a theoretical approach of the thesis to examine the interart dimension of the novel. The verbal frame around Sarah is made up of the different texts reinforcing the nineteen-century atmosphere especially from the epigraphs and footnotes, Within these nineteenth- century documents, Sarah's story suspends the larger story of the narrator as a frame story. The frame of epigraphs and footnotes Fowles designs in the novel is to set off the nineteenth- century ethos; whereas breaking the frame by the anachronism of the narrator's intrusion all the time, or with some significant images or metaphors suggesting rupture of frame, Fowles takes the frame as a narrative device and boundary itself with layers of significance. In Chapter II, I analyze the title of the novel and the central enigama, Sarah. The focus of my discussion is on the Pre-Raphaelite origin of Sarah and Fowles's revision of that image in portraying her. From the study of Sarah's Pre-Raphaelite origin, we shall find a dichotomy prevailing in the novel. The dichotomy adhering to Sarah's image is actually Fowles's strategy to reflect his attitude towards dualism and, moreover, his idea on writing. To study Sarah's image with the mask of the Pre-Raphaelite Women, we shall see how Fowles's position evolves from the gesture of gazing to the action of writing. Fowles's revision of the Pre-Raphaelite frame and image of women is to fulfill his pleasure of free play with different texts in his writing in process. In Chapter III, I stress on the inter-relationship between sexuality and textuality as theme and technique in _The French Lieutenant' s Woman_, a text of bliss. The novel as "a text of bliss" is to respond Barthes's theory of the text and the idea of jouissance which signifies the ultimate intensity of sexual experience and reading experience and stands further as a "rhetoric to resist closure and extend play" (Stanley Fish). I shall demonstrate that while Sarah is wielding her power of fictionalization and dramatization to free her sexuality, we shall at eh same time experience the emancipation of the text through the narrator's principle and practice of freedom. Showing the romance- fiction relationship in _The French Lieutenant's Woman_, the interart criticism (my application of the ekphrastic theory here) helps turn over the multiplicious dimensions of portraits. The study of Sarah's Pre-Raphaelite origin, therefore, leads us to the question of how a fiction can deal with its graphic representation and offer revisionist thinkings. From Fowles's ekphrastic revision of the Pre-Raphaelite Women, therefore, we see not only his critique of the two- mindedness of the Victorians towards women and sexuality, but also his attitude towards fiction-writing: to be both sounding true and coming clean, to present the fiction as an on-going process, and to achieve the pleasure of writing.

碩士
國立清華大學
外國語文學系
96
本論文探討在歷史學後設小說(historiographic metafiction)的敘事結構，約翰．傅敖斯透過互文性(intertextuality)與維多利亞時代作歷史對話，並運用後設寫作策略，將莎拉(Sarah Woodruff)描寫成一位反抗性約束，被社會排斥的邊緣人，來批判父權社會對女性性自主的壓迫。本文引用維多利亞時期的女性研究作為理論依據，分析當時女性在自我發展與性附屬的困境。 第一章援用琳達．哈琴(Linda Hutcheon)對歷史學後設小說的理論分析小說結構，以闡釋傅敖斯在與歷史對話發掘的女性相關性議題。第二章透過女性歇斯底里症醫學觀點的探討，剖析父權體制對女性性慾的妖魔化(demonization)，以及性道德影響維多利亞時期的醫療體系。第三章檢視父權體制建構的女性身體與性意識。莎拉運用反抗與虛構(fabrication)策略，掙脫父權社會的女性二分法(virgin /whore dichotomy)，婚姻束縛與女性家庭天性的意識形態，達成自我認同，成為當時代的新女性(New Woman)。 傅敖斯運用維多利亞史料文本，揭露女性性慾與性意識在性道德的監控下，被扭曲再現與誤解。非傳統女主角的描繪，呈現後現代所強調的差異與多元性，以及女性性意識的覺醒。透過虛構自身歷史的藝術創作過程，莎拉獲得自我與自主性。

碩士
國立高雄師範大學
英語學系
94
Abstract John Fowles is a great contemporary novelist. His works are extensive and penetrating, showing profound insights into humanity. Above all, The French Lieutenant’s Woman is on everybody’s lips. He experimentally arranges open endings in this novel. This thesis focuses on these open endings, examining what the traditional Victorian novels lack. Chapter One introduces John Fowles and the values of open endings. Chapter Two explores the Victorian values of religion, society, morality, and other aspects. Chapter Three investigates the first ending—the Victorian ending. Chapter Four reviews the second ending, which is not, but very much like, a Victorian ending. Chapter Five looks into the third open ending, which is the most reasonable and acceptable ending for the novel because it is what the protagonist strives for. Chapter Six, the conclusion, evaluates the consciousness and nature of the elite in society. Their inner strength is the source of social improvement. The author, the reader and the characters in the novel are coexistent. Life will never be limited to a fixed ending. In the case of life, the hand of God is never easily understood. What an individual can do is to make the most of his/her life. Life itself may be a tragedy, not a comedy. Nevertheless, one thing is sure—a comedy is for entertainment, but only a tragedy keeps humans awake and awakened.

by Yu Cheuk Keung.
Thesis (M.Phil.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 1999.
Includes bibliographical references (leaves 110-116).
Abstracts in English and Chinese.
Introduction Two Notions of (In)decision and Their Relevance to the Underlying Concepts of Subjectivity --- p.1
Chapter Chapter One --- The Formation of a Narcissistic Hero: Lord Jim --- p.24
Chapter Chapter Two --- Sexual Impotence and Psychological Indecision: Half of Man is Woman --- p.46
Chapter Chapter Three --- "From a Self of ""Being"" to a Self of ""Nothingness"": The French Lieutenant 's Woman" --- p.73
Conclusion Toward a Better Understanding of the Psyche --- p.99
Notes --- p.107
Works Cited --- p.108
Bibliography --- p.110

博士
國立高雄師範大學
英語學系
103
ABSTRACT This dissertation aims to deal with John Fowles’s early fiction, using mainly the perspectives and concepts proposed in his philosophical work, The Aristos, with a focus on how Fowles practices the Taoist concept of wu-wei (無為) in rounding up his early novels. Clearly an existentialist, Fowles believes not so much in the existence of God as manifested in his works, but in man’s probability of growing into the aristos, which is exemplified in the characterization of all early Fowlesian protagonists, and ironically so with the aid of god-like figures. Fowles’s philosophical reasonings in The Aristos, of how the world is governed by Law and Chaos, two conflicting forces of the universe, of what hazard means in terms of human expectation, of why Godgames are designed, and finally of how and why God has to withdraw Himself from his manipulative stance in the games, play a pivotal role in our understanding of this Fowlesian world, where as we witness God does not exist, yet His agents intrude in and then withdraw from the novelistic world. The dissertation begins with the discussion of the Fowlesian existential journey towards aristos, in hopes of initiating readers into the terms and ideas offered in Fowles’s The Aristos. Bakhtin’s concept of ‘novelization’ is also employed to articulate Fowles’s own career as an innovative novelist whose life-long job is to novelize the genre of story-telling. Chapter One traces back the Fowlesian disappearance of God to the classical literature where the gradual withdrawals of God or gods are described either as the way to peace, as seen in Greek literature, or as a trial for questers to face in the acquisition of free will and knowledge, as illustrated in the story of Adam and Eve in The Bible. Chapter Two focuses on how godgames in Fowles’s The Magus serve as a life-saving initiation for the protagonist to grow from a manipulative ‘Many’ to one of the ‘Few,’ with the help of his gaming experiences with god-like figures in the work. Chapter Three deals with Fowles’s innovative narrative skills in The French Lieutenant’s Woman, where reading itself becomes a gaming interaction between the narrator and the reader, a theme to be thoroughly dealt with in the work, which also adds to our understanding of hazard as indeterminacies in early Fowlesian novels. Chapter Four addresses the issue of wu-wei (無為) in Fowles’s The Magus and The French Lieutenant’s Woman, the two major works in Fowles’s early fiction. The emphasis of this chapter proves to be on the progress of Fowlesian protagonists from you-wei (有為) to wu-wei (無為), from manipulation to freedom. The last chapter, the conclusion, summarizes the present dissertation by offering a pattern in Fowles’s depiction of the characters and the world they are in, namely the pattern of first building illusions and then disillusioning them. It is by this construction and then deconstruction that we witness a world closer to what we see in our down-to-earth reality, a world where we are somewhat forcedly engaged in the gaming experiences with the otherness, a world where we have to locate ourselves in this changing hazardous society, during our life-long journey towards the aristos, which means ‘the best situation,’ in a definitely spiritual sense of the word.

M.A.
This dissertation conducts a semiotic analysis of the transposition of The French Lieutenant's Woman from novel to film. Special attention is paid to the concept of narrative point of view. The study is introduced by a chapter outlining the theoretical approach followed in this dissertation, after which a careful analysis of The French Lieutenant's Woman as written narrative and as film is attempted. The success of this adaptation is illustrated by showing how Karl Reisz uses the same principles of subversion, violation and manipulation which give Fowles's narrative style its distinctive character. It is also shown that an adaptation can be successful as long as the particular characteristics of the specific medium are taken into account.

碩士
國立成功大學
外國語文學系碩博士班
95
Inspired by Fowles’s statement that the key to his fiction lies in his relationship with nature, my thesis aims to re-examine the postmodernist criticism of his The French Lieutenant’s Woman and to re-interpret the novel from the point of view of nature. In postmodernist criticism of FLW, Fowle’s deviant, experimental narrative is regarded as an endorsement of the postmodernist dogma that everything is socially, culturally, and linguistically constructed. And his self-reflexive, metafictional writing style is regarded as a sort of self-deconstructive aesthetics in which there is nothing outside the text. However, by digging into Fowles’s attitude toward nature and his relationship with it, one can find that his association with postmodernism is in fact not as strong as the postmodernist critics think. By putting his novel in the broader context of nature, one can see that his writing aims to show the process by which he connects his writing to wild nature, not to a certain ideology or discourse. Roughly speaking, for Fowles, nature is not the equivalent of the Wordsworthian or Emersonian Nature, which as John Alcorn says,“is located still within the epistemological world of John Locke” (3). Rather, it refers to a world full of “proliferation” and“varieties”(Alcorn 6) that the human mind can never fabricate or fully understand. What Fowles tries to show in The French Lieutenant’s Woman is another dimension of nature—a dimension that is beyond human construction and that thus refuses to stay fixed or fossilized. However, this dimension of nature is not limited merely to external, physical landscapes but exists in internal nature as well— in the wild, mysterious, unpredictable human nature. In FLW, nature has two facets— external nature (the Undercliff) and internal nature (Fowles’s writing and Charles’s transformation). These two facets of nature are not shaped separately in the novel but closely connected to each other. The external nature functions to inspire and determine the internal nature and even directs the whole narrative to the novel’s ultimate aim—to reconnect internal nature to external nature. At the end of the FLW, not only the character but also the author himself achieves a “true uniqueness”—a uniqueness that is beyond social, cultural, and linguistic construction.

碩士
淡江大學
英文學系碩士班
101
In the Victorian Age, there are many large changes to transform our lives and widen the gap among people. Advances of Science, Industrial Revolution and indifferent interrelationship really influence the mode of society and the way of living. Therefore, the Revolution brings out the “cold” relationship among people, even though advances of technology indeed improve the quality of life and bring more conveniences to people. However, the interrelationship of people seems getting worse than before. Those changes would continue to affect the modern society. In my thesis, my focus is on the possibility of finding out the solution to confront this cold and indifferent society. “Modern consciousness, however, is inextricably rooted in nineteenth-century culture. The idea of modernity was already a source of public debate and widespread anxiety as the Industrial Revolution transformed social, economic, and political life faster, it seemed, than such changes could peacefully be absorbed.” This quotation from Norton Anthology briefly offers us a thought that the Industrial Revolution brings enormous effects to us. The Revolution also brings out a disputed issue that has been argued for a long time. The changing conditions of women''s work created by the Industrial Revolution posed an equally strong challenge to traditional views of women''s roles. In this novel, female is still an object belongs to the male. The French philosopher, Emmanuel Levinas, is chosen to examine and explore this possibility in the novel, written by John Fowles, The French Lieutenant’s Woman. By employing his theory of face, we could realize there is a wide gap existed for a long time and it continues to widen. His theory presents the caring of people and ethics of society. His theory leads out problem for us to realize the seriousness of people’s relation and provides plausible solutions to engage in those problems. My contribution is to find out the solutions by exploring Levinas’s theory of face. We still have the ability to change our lives from coldness to warmness in order to increase “temperature” in the society. As mentioned in Norton Anthology, that is to say, ‘"Modernism" is central to any discussion of twentieth-century art and literature. It has been called the "tradition of the new," or an attempt to reject old habits of thought while expressing contemporary history in all its chaos, anxiety, technological development, and rapid change. It has also been called the "dehumanization of art," an overly self-conscious style that prizes technical brilliance while ignoring traditional humanistic values.’ Due to the format of novel, it is metafiction, a kind of postmodern writing. Through this writing, readers could engage in the development of characters, however, the characters would be dehumized. Therefore, Fowles employs this writing technique to have a conversation between author and readers.