The French Lieutenant’s Woman by John Fowles

The French Lieutenant’s Woman by John Fowles Background

Victorian Issues: Evolution • 1859 Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species • unsound; contradict a literal interpretation of the Bible. • Doubt in God e.g. Carlyle “Characteristics “

Victorian Issues: Industrialism • Textiles • Railways and steel • Electricity and chemicals • Digital information technologies, miniaturization • Great Exhibition of 1851

Victorian Issues: Women • Purity and selflessness, protected and enshrined within the home, create a place of peace where man could take refuge from the difficulties of modern life. • Boredom, feminine idleness as a status symbol for upper- and middle-class. • “Woman Question”, concerned issues of sexaul inequality in politics, economic life, education and social intercourse. • suffrage, married women to own their own property, enlarge educational opportunities, improved employment opportunities

Alfred, Lord Tennyson(1) • Maud (1855) 6, 13, 16, 25, 43, 45, 49, 56 --an experimental monologue --portrayal of the speaker’s hope for a redeeming love and his despair and bitterness over the social ills surrounding him. --reflects Tennyson’s preoccupation with the relationship of the role of women to modern civilization

Alfred, Lord Tennyson(2) • Mariana (1835) --the state of feeling was intensely drawn into melancholy isolation. --portrayed through the consciousness of an abandoned woman. • In Memoriam (1850) 12, 15, 20, 36, 38, 41, 48 --a long elegy written over a period of seventeen years embodying the poet’s reflections on our relation to God and to nature. --reflects the religious uncertainties he experienced.

Matthew Arnold • His poetry bears testimony to the refusal to compromise with the spirit of his era. • Mycerinus, the Forsaken Merman, the Scholar-Gipsy, Empedocles, display lonely and isolated protagonists, alien to their environment, projection of their creator's own essential homelessness in the Victorian world. • Meeting, Parting 21, 40, and A Farewell 9, 22, reveal the individual has to postulate some mysterious and superhuman power in order to account for the limitations of his faculties, especially as a social being, but the relationship is predestined to failure.

Pre-Raphaelites • Christina Rossetti (1830-94) --unmarried --battled against a solid idea that women were not to interpret scripture. -- used women as subjects of her poems. • Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828-82) --beauty of women’s face --dreamy stares, breathless from visions of heaven 1, 2, 3, 4, 5

Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood • Founded in 1848 by a small and influential group of people. • Hope to recapture the spiritual vividness they saw in the medieval painting before Raphael (1483-1520). • Both painting and poetry are different ways to express the same idea.

Ecce Ancilla Domini (The Annunciation)1850 by Dante Gabriel Rossetti www.ibiblio.org/wm/paint/ auth/rossetti/

Beatrice, a Portrait of Jane Morris by Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828-1882) http://www.victorianweb.org/painting/dgr/paintings/1.html

'The Blessed Damozel'by Dante Gabriel Rossetti http://www.nouveaunet.com/prbpassion/various2.cfm

Beata Beatrix (186[3-4?]-70) Painted in memory of Rossetti's wife, Lizzie Siddal, who died from an overdose of laudanum in February 1862 . The theme is taken from Dante's "La Vita Nuova", in which Rossetti's favourite poet describes his unrequited love and mourning for Beatrice Portinari. http://www.caroltipping.com/ beatabeatrix.htm

Siren

The French Lieutenant’s Woman by John Fowles