Rewriting Marx: Emancipation and Restoration in The French Lieutenant’s Woman

1. Rewriting Marx: Emancipation and Restoration in The French Lieutenant’s Woman By David L. Landrum Twentieth Century Literature 42.1 (1996): 103-114. Presented by Anne Chen

2. Marxism • Marxism is a prescriptive and determining ideology pursuing rescue and human revolution. • Economic advancement: economics is the only dynamic operative in experience and liberation may come from an economic restructuring alone.

3. Marxism • Class struggle: Marxism is an interpretation of history, one that attempts to project an ethic upon historical processes and so systemize them. All history in Marxism is realized in terms of class struggle. It is so prescribe, so delimit that hampers the possibilities of human freedom.

4. Marxist elements in The French Lieutenant’s Woman • Main idea: Every emancipation is restoration of the human world and of human relationships to man himself. • Emancipation appears as dissolution: Charles and Ernestina vs. Sam and Mary • This essay subverts that Marxist substance and nature of the emancipations are required to truly restore human relationships.

5. Class Struggle • Charles Smithson: is from a landed family and looks to inherit the title of baronet– a leisured class • Ernestina Freeman: a daughter of industrialist– a entrepreneurial class • Their marriage is the alliance of old money and new industrial England at that time. • Masters connected with servants rising tensions from social stratification in sex, socially inferior, language, money and education

6. Economic and social status:Sam vs. Charles • Marx’s Capital, “The extraordinary productiveness of modern industry … allows of the unproductive employment of a larger and larger part of the working class, and the consequent reproduction, on a constantly extending scale, of the ancient domestic slaves under the name of a servant class, including men-servants, women-servants, lackeys, etc.” (FLW 43) • Charles: his superior education to bully his servant • Sam: detests his job with allusions of class struggle and violent revolution • Sam Weller and Sam Farrow

7. Sam’s economic advancement • The path of liberation to Sam • The rise of bourgeoisie: government reforms and economic prosperity • He desires to go into business for himself as a haberdasher– his determination to break free from Charles and create the space necessary for personal fulfillment, for emancipation.

8. Economic and social status:Mary vs. Ernestina • Ernestina: 1. superior economic and social power to Mary– tyrannize, bully her 2. sexual repression • Mary: 1. senses oppression from Ernestina but is envious of Ernestina’s economic superiority in pursuing fashion 2. sexually free • Since both individuals are deeply embedded each in his own social stratum, exterior forces must bring this emancipation about.

9. Sexual dynamic: physical expression and communication • Charles & Ernestina: follow upper-class conventions and get married by the consideration of money. They hide and conceal their inner selves without communication. The quality of their communication is symbolic of the lack of genuineness in their relationship. • Sam & Mary: can be direct, honest, open with one another. There is communication that grows into a love based on respect and that is innocent and sincere.

10. Rewriting Marx in The French Lieutenant’s Woman • This novel tends to violate any attempt at delimiting and circumscribing life and challenges all meta-narrative Marxism that would prescribe, and so delimit, the possibilities of human freedom. • Fowels upholds that restoration of human relationships is the nature of true emancipation. • The indeterminacy of history: human emancipation is accomplished by the uncovering of possibility and by a dissolution of certainties that permits genuine liberation to come about.