68 pages • 2-hour read
The French Lieutenant's Woman
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Themes
The Expectations of Victorian Social Class
The characters in The French Lieutenant’s Woman are keenly aware of their social class. In broad terms, they belong to one of three classes: Charles and Sir Robert are members of the aristocratic upper class; Ernestina and her father are upwardly mobile members of the newly moneyed middle class; and Sam and Mary are working class. Victorian society demands that these characters adhere to the expectations of their social class. Sam and Mary must know their place, for example, and act demurely and respectfully to the members of the middle and upper classes. On more than one occasion, Charles rebukes Sam for taking a presumptive tone that is not suitable for a working-class man. Similarly, Charles recognizes Ernestina’s attempts to act in a manner befitting an upper-class woman though he notes that she cannot quite escape her middle-class heritage. Ideas and manners that are second nature to him seem new and unnecessary to her. His attempts to refine her manners and correct her infringements of Victorian etiquette are part of his training her to marry into a social class above her station. Ernestina recognizes this, deferring to Charles’s more refined and polished understanding of how an upper-class person should act. This awareness of class expectations shapes all the characters’ behavior, compelling them to act in the way society deems appropriate.
Social class is also separate from material wealth. Mr. Freeman is one of the richest characters in the novel. By the time Charles is disinherited, Mr. Freeman is wealthier than everyone except Sir Robert. Nevertheless, he recognizes Charles’s elevated class position as entitling him to a higher ranking in society. Charles views money as an ugly and unnecessary distraction, as he has never needed money and always expected to have it. Mr. Freeman has worked hard to build his fortune, but his money cannot buy him social status. He adheres to the Victorian society’s expectations for upwardly mobile middle-class men, but he loathes the etiquette system. For all his hard work, men like Charles maintain a higher status while having achieved nothing. After the breakup of Ernestina and Charles’s engagement, Mr. Freeman’s desire to punish Charles takes on a valence of class war. Despite his wealth, he can only inflict this punishment because Charles has broken social convention. Social convention and adherence to class-based expectations are infinitely more important than material wealth during this era.
As the narrator notes, however, the class system in Victorian society is not immutable. As the narrator speaks to the audience from the 1960s, he frequently references Karl Marx, whose influence on the emergence of collective class consciousness shaped the course of the 20th century. He describes the hypocrisy and the vapidity of a class system that elevates people due to their heritage rather than their moral worth. Similarly, Sarah is the title character and someone who seems removed from the Victorian class system. Frequently, the narrator notes how her ideas or her appearance are more suited for the 20th century than the Victorian age. She is a modern figure, a woman out of time whose pain draws attention to the absurdity of the Victorian class-based society.
The Connection Between Past and Present
The French Lieutenant’s Woman is divided into two historical periods. The main plot takes place in Victorian England, but the narrator is narrating from the 1960s, reflecting back on the past as a way to better understand his present. The narrator draws attention to this chronological gulf: At various points, he pulls the narrative forward as much as a century, describing the characters’ descendants—such as Mary’s great-great-great-granddaughter, who is “one of the more celebrated younger English film actresses” (75)—or the fate of certain buildings, which have burned down or been repurposed. These narrative devices establish the novel as a self-conscious period piece. The French Lieutenant’s Woman is not a Victorian novel, though it mimics many of its stylistic and narrative trends. Instead, it is a novel about Victorian novels, self-consciously playing on the audience’s expectations by pointedly diverting from traditions and tropes as a way to compel reflection on the differences between the Victoria era and the 20th century.
This tension between past and present is also evident in Charles’s problems. Charles is an English gentleman. His family history and his social status mean that he materially benefits from the centuries of tradition regarding class and wealth in England. Despite this material benefit, he is not satisfied. He feels alienated from the society which benefits him so much and he develops an amateur interest in the cutting edge science of the day to provide him with answers to questions that he does not know how to ask. His fascination with paleontology and Darwin’s theory of evolution (both relatively new during Charles’s time) suggest that the man who benefits so much from the past is looking to the future for answers about his social alienation. The inherent irony of Charles’s life is that he rebels against a social structure which benefits him a great deal. Like Sarah deliberately welcoming negative judgement as a way to express her psychological melancholy, Charles invites the judgement of the future to ameliorate his discomfort about the past.
The narrator reveals that the direction of history is not always certain. At several points, the narrator comes to a moment in the story that could function as an ending. When Charles decides to leave Exeter and when he confronts Sarah, the narrator notes that the traditional ending of the Victorian novel should not be expected. By exposing the frayed ends of history, the narrator introduces a postmodern doubt regarding the objectivity of the past. The audience’s role becomes to construct meaning from the intersection of these competing subjective narratives.
Victorian Etiquette and Hypocrisy
The Victorian society portrayed in The French Lieutenant’s Woman is obsessed with etiquette. With such a clear sense of class identity, the characters are very careful in how they behave to ensure that they are never considered to be breaching the codified system of manners that governs Victorian Britain. Charles, an aristocratic member of the upper class, must be talked to with a certain level of reverence and respect by a working-class man like Sam even if they have known each other for years. Likewise, a man must not be seen alone with a woman, otherwise the woman’s reputation will be ruined. Ernestina’s engagement to Charles is a proposed marriage between a member of the upper class and a recently moneyed and upwardly mobile middle-class person. By the time this marriage breaks up, Charles has already been horrified by the prospect that he may actually have to work for a living, and Mr. Freeman calls in his legal team to ensure that his daughter’s reputation is maintained in accordance with social etiquette. Lives are governed and dictated by this common understanding of social etiquette, but the manners do not necessarily reflect the reality of the society. Much of social interaction is an elaborate performance, in which characters play the roles expected of them by society. Sam, by order of etiquette, should not know his employer’s private business. When Charles confesses his interest in Sarah, however, Sam must theatrically feign surprise to maintain Charles’s belief that his servant is disinterested in his affairs. Similarly, Mr. Freeman has risen up in the world from a much lower rank and he detests the vapidity and insincerity of social etiquette, yet he performs his role regardless. The prospect of breaching social etiquette is ostracization and exile from the community; characters are willing to perform so that they are permitted to remain in society.
This theatrical system of social etiquette masks an immoral foundation in Victorian society. As the narrator notes, sex work is rampant in the society and pornography is produced in vast quantities. When Charles meets with his old college friends, these supposedly respectable young gentlemen spend their evening drinking heavily and soliciting sex workers. Even though they are not adhering to the social etiquette, they do so in a private and privileged manner. Their wealth and status give them access to private immoral indulgences that are not permitted to working class men like Sam. Victorian society permits their immoral behavior, so long as they inflict their vices on working-class people in private.
The hypocrisy of Victorian etiquette is that it demands moral behavior and then ignores infractions on the basis of one’s money and status. The upper classes are not moral bastions, even though they are frequently told that they embody the positive moral ethos of Victorian society. Men like Charles are supposedly the most respectable pillars of society, yet he and his friends break the rules more often than anyone. The entire structure of the etiquette system, the narrator takes care to point out, is an elaborate means of indulging the moral hypocrisy of Victorian society. Victorians enjoy sex as much as anyone else, they just hide their inclinations and then publicly tell one another that they are chaste and virtuous. Their hypocrisy is blatant and self-serving, yet hidden behind a carefully constructed and maintained edifice of manners.
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