The French Lieutenant’s Woman

The French Lieutenant’s Woman (John Fowles, 1969)

The French Lieutenant’s Woman (Dir. Karl Reisz, 1981)

That frame above is one of the first images, preceding even the main title, in Karl Reisz’s film adaptation of The French Lieutenant’s Woman. For readers of Fowles’ novel, the gesture will register as clever and perhaps a little too early. The fourth wall that Fowles crushes in his novel at the  95 page mark isn’t even bothered with here. The film never gives the illusion that we are inside a story, never tries to trick us into thinking that we are transported to Lyme Regis, 1868, never even allowing us a moment to think that this might be about Victorian people in their own age. We know from the moment it begins that this movie is about Victorian people in our age, or in 1981. It works from the outside in, which pushes the viewer to see everything on screen as a construction meant to be juxtaposed against today. Or, perhaps, it is the other way around, and we are supposed to see everything we are today as set against the Victorians. The strategy is done in the spirit of Fowles’ novel, no doubt, but this new, more abrupt attack on the fourth wall pushes the limits of the novel’s original trick: there’s no apparent ringmaster this time, because Fowles, having finished the novel about 12 years before the movie was made and moved on to other things, is no longer here to guide us. Even the film’s screenwriter, Harold Pinter, never allows himself to be seen. What we are watching is actors in their “real lives” alongside the roles that they are made to play in the film version The French Lieutenant’s Woman. Instead of being on a sort of guided tour of his own story by Fowles, the concerns he delineates through commentary have now been narrativized for us.  This is not how we would expect a high romantic film of the Victorians to open. If the novel reads as nearly impossible to adapt for film, that’s because it is, at least as it is written. But Reisz and Pinter do exactly what a good adaption should do: they bring all the literary tricks over into the film form without seeming to miss a beat, adjusting them to fit the new medium.

Let’s go back again to that initial shot, where we see Meryl Streep as she readies herself to stand on the Cobb and look mysterious. That is where the novel started, with The French Lieutenant’s Woman, real name Sarah Woodruff, transfixed transfixed her gaze on the ocean as she was approached by the rather oblivious naturalist Charles Smithson. The film starts before that scene in a place that we might call “re-creation”. The sense that we are on a film set, though immediate, doesn’t last very long, and the shot readers of the novel would’ve been expecting comes into quick focus, not as a thing unto itself, but as an extension of the image above. Reisz hints at the mystery of Sarah Woodruff – an actor in a dual, or even triple role – so that he can smash it to bits right away. Here is the real title image:

Parallel Narratives in Contrast

In structuring the film version of The French Lieutenant’s Woman, Pinter chose to invent something that was not in the novel at all as a way to invoke the direct voice of John Fowles, who is not only the author of the novel but a rather prominent character in it. Meryl Streep and Jeremy Irons, who play Sarah Woodruff and Charles Smithson respectively, are given parallel roles as the actors Anna and Mike, who, like the film roles they play, are embroiled in an affair. Meeting them for the first time is slightly jarring. They are where, in Fowles’ Victorian world, no married man or woman would be caught dead. Or if they were caught, they might be dead.

And, again, later in the film as Mike and Anna part ways for a time, we see that Reisz has situated the right side of the frame in empty space so that the force of the visual seems to be pushing Anna into a corner via Mike. She’s playing the game and not entirely unhappy to, but her gestures suggest a woman trapped, not by the social mores surrounding her but by her own boredom and fickleness.

The Social Norms of Love

Being in bed, however bad it might be, isn’t as shocking as how they view themselves. When a phone rings in Anna’s room, Mike picks it up to learn that Anna is wanted down in make up. Anna’s first concern when she is woken up by her lover is that the person on the other end of the line now knows that Mike must have spent the night in her bed, but Streep’s delivery suggests annoyance rather than mortification. Mike, without worry, wants them to know. For him, their love is real and thus it is appropriate to announce it to the world. No amount of social shame seems to phase Mike. Intimacy in 1981, according to Mike, should be a public thing. Looking at the shot above, we can see the way that Mike and Anna will interact throughout almost the entire movie, with him piqued and ready to make their love known officially while she is casually detached and almost disinterested, knowing that this fling is temporary and that the fewer people know the better, to save the annoyance. Contrast this to the first time in the film that Charles meets Ernestina (we’ll call her Tina from here out, as characters in both the book and the movie do). His purpose is to propose marriage. The film offers little in the sense of courtship, but tells us everything that the book does with one simple device. Here is a shot of the engagement scene. Charles, a naturalist as we recall, is sealing his fate in the distinctly controlled nature of a conservatory. He and his new fiancee do not kiss to celebrate their forthcoming marriage, but rather they hug passionately. Though Charles, like Mike, is the one to propose a social recognition of their love, he doesn’t share Tina’s sense of blind romance. He is nervous, if we may read back into the book for a second, because he is a comfortable gentleman bachelor throwing himself off a cliff.

Which leads us to Charles’ first intimate encounter with Sarah Woodruff, or as they call her in town, The French Lieutenant’s Woman. The male gaze, from Charles’ perspective, sees Sarah as embedded in nature itself rather than controlled by social rituals and structures. She looks away at the sea, sitting at the edge of a cliff. This encounter has no social observance at all. It is private and meant, at least by one participant, to stay that way.

Charles and Tina, however, have a love that is social. Even in their most intimate moment, as they decide their future together, they are being observed, unaware, by their respective servants, Mary and Sam. They are behind windows, peeking over a curtain; being observed may not be the point of Charles and Tina’s intimacy, but it is an unavoidable consequence.

When Mike and Anna are in public, they allow themselves be seen together in public. Their public show, though, has a naturalness not just in their affair but in their professionalism. As the two leads of the film The French Lieutenant’s Woman, other cast and crew members can tacitly excuse their public friendship as the necessary off camera work of two leads. They may need to be discreet about their romance, but they do not need to hide their association. Whatever communication they wish to have with one another, be it business or personal, can be done, unlike Charles and Sarah, in the broad light of day. See Sarah in a social setting with Charles as she makes an attempt to communicate:

Though others are in the room holding court, Reisz lights Sarah so that while she serves Charles we very subtly take his perspective. The frame, arranged at an angle to put Charles’ back to us, allows us to see the room as he sees it, with Sarah in light and the other two players, his fiancee included, in shadow. Sarah cannot simply turn to Charles or take him aside and have a few words of polite conversation with him. Instead she must communicate by slight of hand.

On Anna/Sarah

Though the film presents Anna and Mike in public often, we rarely see them interact in  social situations, but in one scene they are eating a meal with other cast and crew members. Though visible to everyone else, they are sequestered from the rest of the group at their own table. What conversation they are having, which consists mainly of Mike pressuring Anna to see him again soon, is recognized publicly and apparently not distrusted.

The parallels also find some expression in Reisz’s use of Meryl Streep in close-up. In the first frame we see Streep as Sarah in a scene lifted from the opening chapter of Fowles’ novel. Out on the Cobb, Charles approaches Sarah who stands looking out to sea amidst lashing winds and crashing waves. When he tries to call her back from the weather, she only looks back at him without words. Her gaze is mysterious and alluring, but also distant. And, in contrast to the placid charms of Tina, Sarah here is backdropped by a storm.

Here Charles and Tina walk along the Cobb only a few moments before the above shot.

Later in the film we see Streep, as Anna, sitting on the beach with Mike. There’s no storm behind Anna. She, unlike her movie counterpart, is calm even if she is no less distant. When Mike wants to know what is bothering her, she gives a standard issue white lie of, “Oh, nothing.” and then turns away from him. She does nothing to draw Mike in and never seems to manipulate his weakness for her own mad pleasure.

Sarah also looks away from Charles as she lies (at least in part), but the goal of her distancing and her lying seems to be to ensnare Charles. This isn’t a mere act, it’s a total theatre in which Sarah keeps her distance until crucial parts in her narrative are relayed, at which point she gets up, walks around Charles, and even brazenly lets her hair down before proclaiming herself a whore.

Though we are never left to doubt much about Anna’s state of mind – she’s a modern woman having her fling – the film, right along with the novel allows us to doubt Sarah mental health. She often sketches. Here are a couple of examples:

As she watches her former employer die and her coffin carried away, Sarah draws a picture of what looks like death or torture.

Then later, after she has finally revealed her shame openly to Mrs. Pouteney, Sarah sits in her room and sketches this harrowing picture of herself.

Her artistry comes into a new light at the end of the film when she meets Charles again after a long absence at the end of the film. Finally liberated from the tyranny of her own sexual repression/mania, Sarah’s sketching takes on a much brighter, pleasant quality. Even Charles recognizes this when he says, “You have found your gift.”

It is easy then to see the Anna/Sarah characters as not just parallels but as continuums. Like the Sarah we see at the end of the film, Anna too is a “liberated” woman. She wants sex and pleasure, and because she lives in a society that will allow her those desires without any shame, she can take what she wants. Anna’s distance, then, can be read as boredom. Her relationship with Charles isn’t erotic, because she doesn’t have to do anything for it. She must trick no one and is never required to seduce. She is only required to be there.

On Mike/Charles

Mike and Charles don’t diverge or act in continuum quite the way that Anna/Sarah do, but it is still worth making a few observations about how they play off of each other.

The essence of both Mike and Charles is that they cannot have what they naturally wants; Mike is prevented by Anna herself while Charles has to fight the mystery of his temptress and all of his age’s trappings. Charles’ desires have been stemmed by the constraints of his class and engagement to Tina. He spends nearly the entirety of the film keeping his acquaintance with Sarah a secret, even to the point of bribing lowly servants for their discretion. And when his shame is known by those around him, it is manifested in Reisz’s visual choices.

Charles, disinterested, consumed with his own grief, as Sam tries to discuss his own future, is turned away from his long time friend and servant. Sam’s internal straggly and perhaps sadness at seeing his employer laid low, is lit in blue here:

Though he tries to drown his sorrows in drink and old friends, Charles’ companions are merry while looks glumly away. Charles remains in shadow:

And when he tells his lawyer to give Sarah fifty pounds, Charles cannot even look the man in the face. His lawyer, we see, is lit almost straight on, full faced, while Charles is half in shadow:

Mike and Charles, even with their different levels of shame, are the same in that they are both willing to cast aside aspects of their current life for the passion that consumes him; Charles risks his social honor when he is stripped of his gentleman status, and Mike in his willing to risk the wife and young daughter that he has.

Some Thoughts on What the Film Leaves Out

All screen adaptations are acts of exclusion. Fowles’ novel comes in at about 500 pages long, which means that Pinter and Reisz are obligated to leave a number of elements of the book out of the film. Since we’ve looked briefly at how the film transposes and narrativizes Fowles’ commentary, let’s turn our attention to missing aspects of the Victorian story line.

Charles’ Uncle

There are a number of minor characters missing in the film, but perhaps none bigger than Charles’ uncle, Sir Robert. We have already hinted at him above, but we did not explore how he relates to Charles. We learn from Fowles that Sir Robert is a wealthy man who has never married and therefore has no children. Charles, being the only son by his own parents, is set to receive his uncle’s estate and wealth upon his death. In the course of the novel, Sir Robert blindsides Charles by choosing to be married, which negates a good deal of his inheritance. This thread happens concurrently with Charles’ association with Sarah and his eventual betrayal of Tina. When he does break his engagement with Tina in the book’s chosen side of a forking narrative, Charles isn’t just choosing to subjugate himself to the shame of his new union with Sarah, but he is also choosing to reject the wealth that would come through Tina and her father. In the novel Tina’s father suggests the notion that Charles might go into business with him one day. Charles, being a gentlemen, is appalled. But by losing his uncle to a new woman and rejecting Tina, Charles is forcing himself to a future in which he will one day, if the money runs out, be forced to work.

The film never even alludes to Charles’ uncle, though it does suggest in an early scene that Charles would be loathe to enter into commerce. It would be below his social standing.

John Fowles

We have already looked at the clever way in which Reisz and Pinter avoided heavy commentary through voice-over, but what the story of Anna and Mike does not always adequately convey is that the Victorian story is a construction, seeming to be made up as Fowles goes along. There are a couple of scenes in the film that do suggest this. First, we have a scene in which Anna and Mike practice a scene in which Sarah is to look at Charles, approach him, and then fall. They are, of course, making decisions on how their characters will act and be, which makes them authorial. Later in the film, while the cast is visiting Mike’s house for a lunch, Mike and Anna’s (husband? boyfriend?) discuss what will be done with the ending of the film, will they go with the happy ending or the sad one? Though the scene oversimplifies the multiple endings in the novel, it does openly recognize that whatever the audience is treated to is a choice made by people – Reisz, Pinter, producers – who want the story to play a certain way for their audience. Of course Anna, Mike, and the entire “cast” of the film are also constructs created by people we never see, much like John Fowles is both a real author and a character that he has created for the purpose of suggesting a person behind the curtain.

Multiple Endings

Not a character, per se, but a major element Fowles’ novel needs to be addressed. The book contains at least a few different possible endings.

Chapter 44: After a night of boozing and an encounter with a London prostitute, Charles heads back to Lyme. He knows Sarah is in Exeter, but chooses not to visit her, but go straight back to Tina. Arriving in Lyme, he meets with Tina, tells her about Sarah, and all is made well. They marry and live their lives. This is the “traditional” ending, imagined not by Fowles, but by Charles as he rides the train from London to Exeter. The truth, as we eventually see, is that Charles does stay at Exeter, visiting Endicott’s Hotel, where Sarah now resides. The film has no similar scene for this, though it could have been presented in a dream sequence.

Chapter 51: Charles’ imagination, given full treatment in ch. 44, is also recognized in later on in chapter 51. By this time Charles has consummated with Sarah, learned that she is a liar, decided to marry her anyway, returned home to break his engagement with Tina, induced his former fiancee into a possibly fake fainting spell, and lost the services of Sam, who in the book isn’t just Charles’ servant, but also his closest friend of ten years. In this state, “For a wild moment he almost rushed out of the White Lion – he would throw himself at Ernestina’s feet, he would plead insanity, inner torment, a testing of her love…he kept striking his fist in his open palm.” He does not allow his imagination and the brutality of his new circumstances in which, “…even his servants despised and rejected him!” to over come him. He decides to go back to Exeter to fetch his lover with dreams of living on the Continent with her.

Chapter 55: When he goes back to Exeter, Sarah is gone, leaving no word of herself. Mrs. Endicott knows that she has gone to London, but nothing more. Seeing that he has been betrayed by Sam, who was supposed to leave a note to Sarah that the engagement was going to be nullified, Charles rides back to London in search of his new lover. He does not, as he wishes to, ride alone. He is accompanied by Fowles himself, who suggests not only that there are different narrative possibilities, but that they are the result of the novelists designed fight between characters. The film only hints that there are “happy” and “unhappy” endings. Fowles, however, proposes the completely unacceptable by Victorian standards option of an ambiguous ending that simply sees Charles on the train to London. Since neither Charles or Fowles knows what Sarah wants or where she is, the novel is impossible to end. But since such and ending would be unthinkable for the people whose story is being told, it cannot be accepted here.

Here the novel becomes far trickier than the film could ever dream to be. Knowing that the novel is a fight between characters and the ending determines a sort of victor, Fowles chooses to present to the reader two different endings. Knowing further that the reader will trust the second and final ending as the “true” one, Fowles pretends to flip a coin to see whose ending he will relate first.

Again, there’s nothing in the film to approximate this forking narrative other than the Mike/Charles-Anna/Sarah idea. Shoehorning this into the film would’ve required some overworked elements such as voice over or even the goofy presence of Fowles himself. In the book those elements have literary value, but in a film they would likely come off as hokey.

Chapter 60: The first ending appears to belong to Charles. After going abroad for many months, Sarah’s whereabouts are discovered by Sam and Mary (in the film Sarah makes herself known), who are now living in London. Sam reveals her location as a way of making atonement for his earlier sin of betrayal. When Charles sees Sarah, she says that she does not want to be married and that they cannot be together. But before Charles can leave, Sarah reveals that she has had a baby by Charles and they appear to reconcile to one another in love. Here Charles has everything: his sufferings ended, his friendship with Sam can resume, Sarah back in his arms, and the vision of family bequeathed to him in the form of a child he did not know existed.

Chapter 61: The second ending is Sarah’s, and true to Fowles’ words in ch. 55 the reader sees it as the right ending, the true ending. In it Sarah temps Charles into a Platonic relationship that he refuses. The scene ends with Sarah looking out the window, we not knowing exactly what she thinks, for she is too far away for us to tell. This calls back to the 13th chapter of the book, in which Fowles smashes the fourth wall by revealing to the reader that he does not know what is in Sarah’s mind as she looks out the window at Mrs. Pouteney’s.

Multiple Endings – Film

Using the previously explored parallel characters, the film tries to replicate Fowles’ splintering endings. Neither one is ambiguous in the way that the novel’s final ending is, but they suggest the same sort of opposing destinies for Charles.

In the first ending, the Victorian ending that is supposed to conclude the film that Anna and Mike are making, Sarah meets with Charles after months of separation. As in the book’s first ending, they fight and make up, ending with an idyllic shot of them in a rowboat together.

The second ending sees Anna and Mike at the same house, but this time it is clearly outfitted for a film shoot. While attending a wrap party, Mike beckons Anna up to the same room overlooking the lake and when he arrives he finds it is empty. Anna has not agreed to go along with his plan for a true affair, which will lead to the destruction of his family life at the very least. Mike, like Charles in the book’s ending, is left alone.

There in the room we hear the sound of a car leaving the drive. Charles goes to the window, knowing that it is Anna departing, and calls out the name of Sarah. The Platonic relationship has won out because Anna, the woman who never had the passion to match Mike, has forced his hand.

Some Conclusions

If Fowles predominate aim in writing The French Lieutenant’s Woman was to explore two contrasting eras (Victorian and 1960s), force the reader to think about how narrative is defined by eras, and then finally to engross the reader in a Victorian mystery full of erotic possibility and psychological intrigue, then Reisz and Pinter seem to have captured the essence well. Both versions of The French Lieutenant’s Woman are about how a sexually piqued woman will make her way in the world. On the one end repression leads to madness. On the other, freedom leads to boredom and oppression.