John Fowles Visionary and Voyeur

John Fowles
Visionary and Voyeur
Costerus New Series 175

Series Editors:
C.C. Barfoot, Theo Dhaen
and Erik Kooper
John Fowles
Visionary and Voyeur
Brooke Lenz
Amsterdam-New York, NY 2008

Photographer: Socrates | Agency: Dreamstime.com
Cover design: Aart Jan Bergshoeff
The paper on which this book is printed meets the requirements of

ISO 9706:1994, Information and documentation - Paper for
documents - Requirements for permanence.
ISBN: 978-90-420-2388-8
Editions Rodopi B.V., Amsterdam - New York, NY 2008
Printed in the Netherlands
CONTENTS
Preface 1
On Fowles and Feminism
Introduction 15
Voyeurism and Other Visual Pleasures
Chapter One 49
Objectification and Exploitation: Victimized Perspectives
in The Collector
Chapter Two 75
A Conflict of Gendered Perspectives: Voyeurism, Violence,
and Seduction in The Magus
Chapter Three 101

A Crisis of Authority: Fantasy and Feminism
in The French Lieutenants Woman
Chapter Four 133

Women in the Wasteland: Alternative Perspectives
in The Ebony Tower
Chapter Five 161

Whole Sight; and Desolation: Situated Knowledges
in Daniel Martin
Chapter Six 187

Interlude: Mantissa
Chapter Seven 201
Seductive and Situated Dissent: A Maggot
as Winged Creature
Conclusion 223
On Authority and Authenticity
Bibliography 237
Index 247
PREFACE
ON FOWLES AND FEMINISM
As the author of both critically acclaimed and commercially

successful fiction, John Fowles has attracted significant attention from
literary critics employing a wide range of theoretical and ideological
constructs in their analyses of his work. One of the most contentious
of these frameworks is feminist criticism. Critics attempting to
evaluate the extent to which Fowles personally advocated feminism
and/or demonstrates a feminist consciousness in his oeuvre
especially in novels like The French Lieutenants Woman or Mantissa
have often been confounded by a number of inherent complications
and contradictions in Fowles attitude towards women. The results
have been a muddled debate over Fowles status as a feminist writer
and a general lack of direction for feminist critics, teachers, and
readers attempting to find personal or ideological value in his work.
Although feminist advocacy never appeared to be Fowles top
priority, he specifically professed his feminist sympathies a number of
times in the course of his career. An early comment in his 1964 essay
I Write Therefore I Am illustrated a rather odd formulation of
feminist advocacy: I am a feminist that is, I like women and enjoy
their company, and not only for sexual reasons. 1 Such comments
hardly inspired great rejoicing from contemporary feminists. Fowles
provided some important context for this rather odd formulation,
however, in his 1985 interview with Jan Relf:
This business of feminism you see, liking women, quite apart from
sexual things liking the womanly way of seeing life, came to me
when I was still at Oxford, long before modern feminism came into
1
John Fowles, I Write Therefore I Am, in Wormholes, ed. Jan Relf, New York:
Henry Holt and Company, 1998, 8.
2 John Fowles: Visionary and Voyeur
being . But now [feminists] have swept on really past where I am. I
know some women writers dont like me very much. I have been
called the greatest block to intelligent feminism in the British novel.
All I can say is that I dont agree. 2
Despite the consistent oddity of Fowles definition of feminism, his

feminist advocacy makes more sense in its historical context.
Formulating his ideas as an individual without affiliation to the
feminist movement, Fowles recognized that he was successively
remarkably progressive and rather regressive in his advocacy. 3 And
although contemporary feminists may object to Fowles demonstrated
lack of understanding for the political and evolutionary importance of
radical positions in the history of feminist movement, Fowles
convictions at this time did approximate a somewhat conservative but
relatively common feminist position.
In a 1988 interview with Katherine Tarbox, Fowles reflected more
carefully on his relationship with feminism:
In historical or social terms Ive always had great sympathy for, I

wont quite say feminism in the modern sense, but for a female
principle in life. It doesnt always tie in with modern feminism. My
wife would deny point blank that Im a proper feminist. But I do,
more for obscure personal reasons, hate the macho viewpoint. 4
Fowles expanded on this articulation of his Jungian-influenced

feminist perspective in his 1988 interview with Susana Jan Onega:
2
Jan Relf, An Interview with John Fowles (1985), in Conversations with John
Fowles, ed. Dianne L. Vipond, Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 1999,
123.
3
In her excellent biography, John Fowles: A Life in Two Worlds (New York: Viking,
2004), Eileen Warburton offers an example of Fowles most regressive response to
the conflicts of womens emancipation in her discussion of The Scythe (1966), a
positively reactionary play that advocates a D.H. Lawrentian or Victorian view of
feminine nature by encouraging women to return to their traditional domestic
devotion to husband, hearth, and home (292). Fowles reluctantly suppressed the play
at his wifes insistence.
4
Katherine Tarbox, Interview with John Fowles, in Conversations with John
Fowles, ed. Vipond, 165.
On Fowles and Feminism 3
I am not a feminist in the fiercely active political sense it is usually

used in England and America nowadays, but I have sympathy for the
general anima, the feminine spirit, the feminine intelligence, and I
think that all male judgments of the way women go about life are so
biased that they are virtually worthless. Man is really being a very
prejudiced judge of his own case and of course when judging against
women. It is counted very bad taste in England now to talk favorably
of womens intuition. The real feminists in England do not like this
sentimental talk of female intuition. I am afraid I still have some faith
in that. Women cannot, I think, sometimes think as logically or
rationally as men can, but thinking logically or rationally often leads
you into error. It is by no means certain that the result is any worse in
a woman, if you like, muddling her way through to a decision, or
feeling her emotional way to a decision, than that of a highly rational
man. 5
These comments demonstrate a shift in alignment for Fowles, a

transition from professed advocacy to sympathy. From this shift, it
appears that Fowles became increasingly conscious of the differences
between his personal convictions and those of contemporary
feminism. The most glaring difference, as Fowles indicated, is his
reverence for the feminine intelligence, which he associated
exclusively with emotion and intuition. There are three immediate
problems that a contemporary feminist might identify in this
adulation. The first is Fowles absolute characterization of men as
rational and women as emotional; the second, a problem intimately
interwoven with the first, is Fowles tendency to use the terms
women, female, and feminine interchangeably, suggesting that
his convictions stem from a rather simple and traditional essentialism
that confines women (and men, for that matter, as he uses men,
male, and masculine in the same way) within rigid gender
prescriptions; and the third is his obliviousness to the possibility that
his own convictions might fit his description of male judgments of
women: all male judgments of the way women go about life are so
biased that they are virtually worthless. Totally lacking a self-
conscious examination of his archetypal idealization of women,
5
Susana Jan Onega, Fowles on Fowles, in Conversations with John Fowles, ed.
Vipond, 180-81.
Fowles clearly espoused a curiously apolitical and problematically

essential kind of feminism. Indeed, after reading such comments, a
contemporary feminist may be tempted to concur with Elizabeth
Fowles verdict: Fowles was by no means a proper feminist.
Fowles growing awareness of this state of affairs became more
explicit in his 1989 conversation with James R. Baker, in which
Fowles admitted:
I am certainly not a feminist in the militant sense, and Im sure many

such contemporary feminists would disown me. I have great sympathy
for the general feminine principle in life. I find very little heroic
about most men, and think that quality is far more likely to appear
among women in ordinary, non-literary life. 6
Clearly, Fowles feminism was characterized not by political activism

but chiefly by admiration for and allegiance to women (at least for
those women who demonstrate what Fowles called the feminine
principle), especially in marked opposition to societys general
admiration of men. He expanded on this formulation of his feminist
sympathies in a 1995 interview with Dianne L. Vipond:
I hope I am a feminist in most ordinary terms, but I certainly wouldnt

call myself one compared with many excellent women writers. Part of
me must remain male. Masculinity is like the old pea-soup fog, a
weather condition I remember from youth. It takes you a long time to
realize not only where you are but where you ought to be. True
humanism must be feminist. 7
In these comments, Fowles demonstrated an awareness of the

important distinction between carefully theorized feminist ideology
(as expressed by excellent women writers, whom we may assume
could be authors, theorists, or critics) and feminism in ordinary
terms, or as it is generally perceived by society at large. Fowles
convictions do seem to fit the latter category, particularly in terms of
his admiration for women, his explicit association of feminism with
6
James R. Baker, John Fowles: The Art of Fiction CIX, in Conversations with John
7
Dianne L. Vipond, An Unholy Inquisition, in Wormholes, ed. Relf, 381.
women (part of me must remain male, that is, never strictly

feminist), and his acute dissatisfaction with masculinity. This
dissatisfaction proceeded from a profound sense of guilt, as Fowles
explained in 1997 in The John Fowles Symposium:
we men, our whole gender, must come clean and confess that our
macho attitude to [women] has been grossly and barbarously wrong
for at least three millennia . A sensitive and thinking male cant
have felt innocent since the time of the Hittites. 8
This historical sensibility informed Fowles 1999 formulation of his

feminist advocacy: I am very much a feminist and yes, I think the
world would be a happier place if women had more power and
consideration. 9
Perhaps more significant for literary critics than Fowles personal
convictions, however, are his literary efforts in the interest of
feminism. His professed admiration for women writers is especially
clear in his translations of Marie de France and Claire de Duras, as
well as in his argument that the Odyssey was written by a woman an
argument he makes playfully in Mantissa (in which Erato claims to
have authored the Odyssey, with the original title of Men, Will They
Ever Grow Up? or Men, for short) and more seriously in Islands. 10
Regardless of its scholarly merit, this argument illustrates Fowles
admiration for womens writing, particularly when it concentrates on
8
John Fowles, The John Fowles Symposium, Lyme Regis, July 1996, in
Wormholes, ed. Relf, 74.
9
Dianne L. Vipond, A Dialogue with John Fowles, in Conversations with John
10
In Islands (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1978), Fowles notes: It is very
instructive to read the Odyssey and Marie de Frances stories side by side: it is not just
the central similarity of attitude to the quest theme, but the little touches of humour,
the psychological accuracy underlying the delight in the fabulous (the ability to make
fabulous beings behave humanly), the obsession with domestic behaviour and
domestic objects, the preponderant role played by the relationships between men and
women a shared set of sensibilities and preoccupations that we know, in the latter
case, did not belong to a man. Even if one must take the orthodox scholarly view, and
make Homer the male bard that tradition has always maintained, it seems to me
certain that he was composing quite as much for a feminine audience as a masculine
one, and from an essentially feminist point of view: that is, a civilizing one (58).
issues of special relevance to womens lives, as well as his assertion

that feminism is a requisite part of civilized society.
This insistence on feminism as a fundamentally civilizing force,
and on women as the instruments of that force, stems from Fowles
essentialist gender ideology as explained in his 1969 essay Notes on
an Unfinished Novel: I see man as a kind of artifice, and woman as
a kind of reality. The one is cold idea, the other is warm fact. 11 This
characterization of men as cold idea reflects a traditional association
of masculinity (inherently male, for Fowles) with detachment and
rationality, just as the characterization of women as warm fact
reflects a traditional association of femininity (inherently female, for
Fowles) with attachment, intuition, and what Fowles called right
feeling, though Fowles recognized that men and women can and do
appropriate both ontological and epistemological characteristics from
the other sex.
Indeed, Fowles valued epistemological and ontological tension
between men and women. Gender difference, especially in terms of
masculine and feminine ways of knowing, was particularly important
to Fowles, and he advocated an increased respect for the womanly
way of seeing life in the interests of promoting a more balanced
social perspective. 12 Therefore it was deeply disturbing to Fowles for
feminists to continue this trend, as he explained to Raman K. Singh:
I think the female principle links women, while the male one separates
men. There are certain aspects of womens liberation that seem to me
rather silly. It always worries me when I see the feminine principle
itself being attacked by women. I think there are aspects, for example,
the aggressive advocation of lesbianism, that seem to me to deny it .
11
John Fowles, Notes on an Unfinished Novel, in Wormholes, ed. Relf, 23.
12
In his 1976 interview with James Campbell (An Interview with John Fowles, in
Conversations with John Fowles, ed. Vipond, 42), for example, Fowles explained, I
feel that the universe is female in some deep way. I think one of the things that is
lacking in our society is equality of male and female ways of looking at life. See also
Fowles comments to this effect in Tony Graham, Hilary Arnold, Sappho Durrell, and
John Thackara, John Fowles: An Exclusive Interview, in Conversations with John
Fowles, ed. Vipond, 59-64.
this is denying the extraordinary half-maternal, half-mysterious aspect

of women. I think theyre very foolish to destroy all that. 13
That is, womens greatest strengths, according to Fowles, are precisely

those that distinguish them from and make them attractive to men
their intuition, their relationships, their maternity, their mystery.
These are precisely the qualities Fowles emphasized in his fictional
characterizations of women; his heroines all embody what Fowles
identified alternatively as the female principle or feminine
principle. At their best, Fowles female characters represent
progression, vitality, creativity, independence, and authenticity, and
they generally perform the task of altering both their fellow
characters and readers perspectives through their unconventional and
mysterious actions. These characterizations, it would seem, have been
largely successful, as evidenced by Fowles enormous popularity as a
best-selling novelist. Particularly noteworthy in this respect is The
French Lieutenants Woman, which has earned praise not only from
the reading public but also from feminist critic Deborah Byrd, who
calls the novel an almost ideal feminist fictional work. 14 Although
his other novels are less explicit about advocating feminism, in
ordinary terms it seems that Fowles has made useful contributions
as a feminist writer.
Most feminist critics, however, have not been satisfied with this
ordinary formulation of feminist advocacy, and even a number of
critics not specifically endorsing feminism have noted problems with
Fowles attitude towards women. His enthusiasm for the work of
Marie de France and Claire de Duras, for example, is complicated by
the way he dismisses their authority and uses them to explore
masculine concerns. 15 Furthermore, Fowles nearly exclusive attention
13
Raman K. Singh, An Encounter with John Fowles, in Conversations with John
14
Deborah Byrd, The Evolution and Emancipation of Sarah Woodruff: The French
Lieutenants Woman as a Feminist Novel, International Journal of Womens Studies,
VII/4 (September/October 1984), 306.
15
See Doris Y. Kadish, Rewriting Womens Stories: Ourika and The French
Lieutenants Woman, South Atlantic Review, LXII/2 (Spring 1997), 74-87 and
Constance B. Hieatt, Eliduc Revisited: John Fowles and Marie de France, English
Studies in Canada, III/3 (1977), 351-58.
to male problems has been made especially clear in critical analyses of

his novels. A number of critics, for example, have focused on the
quest motif that provides the general framework for Fowles works,
arguing that as the male hero pursues the mysterious, inspirational,
and ultimately unattainable female, he occupies the centre of attention
while she is relegated to a marginal existence as catalyst for the heros
quest. 16 Fowles female characters thus appear, as Margaret Bozenna
Goscilo has commented, as dehumanized archetypes, idealized
symbols of femininity. 17
The quest motif as Fowles employs it does require a remarkable
woman to motivate and define it; furthermore, what is most clear in
Fowles fiction is the repeated failure, or at least difficulty, of the male
hero to evolve as an individual and as a member of society, a failure
that is in marked contrast to the enlightenment and authenticity of the
female catalyst. Nevertheless, the pattern of his novels ultimately
reflects a problematic gender ideology. Despite Fowles practice of
including strong and apparently powerful female characters in his
novels, critics have argued, their ultimate relegation to the role of
helpmeet to the male hero diminishes their importance and
undermines their authority. 18 Ultimately consigned to the role of
muse, Fowles heroines, along with their needs, desires, and concerns,
fade into the background of the male quest for enlightenment,
suggesting what Bruce Woodcock identifies as a contradiction in
Fowles thinking between a progressive recognition that men must
16
See especially Carol Barnum, The Fiction of John Fowles: A Myth for Our Time,
Greenwood: FL, Penkevill Publishing, 1988; Peter Conradi, John Fowles, New York:
Methuen, 1982; John Haegert, Memoirs of a Deconstructive Angel: The Heroine as
Mantissa in the Fiction of John Fowles, Contemporary Literature, XXVII/2
(Summer 1986), 160-81; Simon Loveday, The Romances of John Fowles, New York:
St Martins Press, 1985; Ishrat Lindblad, La bonne vaux, la princesses lointaine
Two Motifs in the Novels of John Fowles, in Studies in English Philology,
Linguistics and Literature Presented to Alarik Rynell, eds Mats Rydn and Lennart A.
Bjrk, Stockholm: Almquist and Wiksell International, 1978, 87-101; and Bruce
Woodcock, Male Mythologies: John Fowles and Masculinity, Totowa, NJ: Barnes and
Noble Books, 1984.
17
Margaret Bozenna Goscilo, John Fowless Pre-Raphaelite Woman: Interart
Strategies and Gender Politics, Mosaic, XXVI/2 (1993), 68.
18
See especially Pam Cooper, The Fictions of John Fowles, Ottawa: University of
Ottawa Press, 1991 and Haegert, Memoirs, 160-81.
change, and a nostalgic desire that women should do the job for
them. 19
Not surprisingly, feminists have objected to the implication in
Fowles fiction that what is most valuable about women is their ability
to improve men. Despite his professed admiration for a feminine
ontology and epistemology, Fowles evidently valued women for their
sexually alluring mystery and the womanly way of seeing for its
potential to expand the inauthentic but nevertheless powerful male
subjects consciousness and quality of life. In short, as Peter Conradi
notes, the sexual idealization of women [in Fowles fiction] has acted
as the destructive condition under which their repression could
continue unabated. 20 As Conradi and other critics have noted, Fowles
remained caught within a conventional gender framework despite his
attempts to recognize and confront the problems of patriarchal
ideology.
Fowles explicitly professed, both in interviews and in his writing,
his enthusiasm for feminist movement; he admired and promoted
women writers who have often been neglected; he offered explicit and
pointed criticisms of masculinity, especially in comparison to
femininity; and he deliberately created impressive and compelling
women characters who provide the impetus for his novels. At the
same time, his enthusiasm for feminism was in fact an enthusiasm for
a very old and very conventional idealization of women; his advocacy
of women writers ultimately served his larger purpose of exploring
problems typically associated with men; his attack on masculinity was
undermined by his persistent essentialism; and the women in his
novels generally fail to achieve the kind of narrative centrality and
dynamic growth granted to the men. In short, feminist approaches to
Fowles have demonstrated a rather significant discrepancy between
Fowles professed feminism and his actual approach to women and
womens issues.
Indeed, Fowles convictions as enacted in both his comments and
his writing are not merely lacking in sensitivity they are rife with
complications and contradictions. These contradictions make it
19
Woodcock, Male Mythologies, 15.
20
Conradi, John Fowles, 91.
impossible to approach Fowles feminism without serious

reservations. Nevertheless, feminist critics have been and continue to
be provoked by the problems inherent in Fowles articulation of
feminism. There is something compelling about a man claiming
feminist advocacy, something both politically and intellectually
alluring about his attempts to exhibit his convictions, something that
motivates the feminist scholar to investigate that advocacy in all its
detail and complication in an attempt to determine the extent of its
authenticity.
This endeavour to verify whether, or the extent to which, Fowles
was a feminist has largely defined feminist approaches to his fiction.
Further efforts to determine Fowles definitive status as a feminist
author, however, would be both unproductive and overly invested in
pigeonholing Fowles and his work. Furthermore, to continue playing
this classification game seems to me to be a surrender to one of
Fowles most powerful manipulations: the endless tease of shrouded
and unattainable truth. Just as the reader of one of Fowles novels is
drawn into the mystery of his fragmented and mythic fictional
landscapes, so too is the feminist reader lured into an ultimately
fruitless quest to fully understand, to fully know, Fowles standing as
a feminist author. While this classification may be marginally useful
in attracting (or discouraging) new feminist readers, whether we can
call Fowles a feminist author or not is beside the point, and reflects an
attitude Fowles himself objected to most vehemently a scientific
desire to identify rather than to understand.
More to the point would be an exploration of what Fowles claims
to feminism mean in context to women readers and feminist scholars.
Although to a contemporary feminist his conception of feminism is
not exactly ideal, Fowles attempt to advocate the improvement of
womens condition challenges the feminist critic to determine what
his novels can contribute to contemporary feminism, raising a number
of pertinent questions. What can we learn from the contradictions in
his feminist advocacy, especially as that advocacy determines his
subject matter, characterization, and narrative technique? How can a
contemporary feminist interpret his attempt to advocate feminism (or,
to be more precise, his feminine principle) in the context of the
different social and political situations of men and women? Fowles
offers a promising case study of the relationship between feminism
and men, a relationship that feminists need to consider more earnestly.
Rather than continuing to reprimand Fowles for the masculine

prejudice ingrained in his attitude towards women, feminist
approaches must find new lenses to apply to Fowles work, new
avenues of inquiry that can negotiate both the problematic myths and
the extraordinary talents on display in Fowles fiction.
An imperative task of the feminist critic exploring Fowles
feminist advocacy is an attempt to value that affiliation while
preventing it from appropriating womens positions. The importance
of this task suggests that the feminist scholar approaching Fowles
adopt a resistant reading practice that would defy Fowles
manipulations and seductions, seeking instead to expose the
production of that dominant discourse and to encourage alternative
reading pleasures. One approach a feminist critic might embrace is
Laura Mulveys concept of feminist curiosity. Throughout her career,
Mulvey has investigated the possibilities for a feminist aesthetic,
beginning in womens experiences and perspectives and proceeding
through a politically and intellectually conscious exploration grounded
in a curious, feminine and feminist gaze. As Mulvey explains in
Pandoras Box: Topographies of Curiosity, the Pandora myth
provides a perfect analogy for the kind of reading practice Mulvey
promotes. Pandora is, Mulvey suggests, the ultimate idealized
spectacle of womanhood; her box contains all that is unspeakable and
anxiety-provoking in femininity, all that her image conceals. 21 Her
compulsion to look inside her box despite the danger of doing so
encapsulates a drive for self-knowledge; Pandora, in employing her
feminine curiosity, her epistemophilia, seeks to know about herself
that which is forbidden and dangerous, that which is veiled by her
own beauty. In looking, Pandora explodes her own image, becoming
both the site of enigma and the source of the enigmas decipherment.
Mulveys summary of the transformation of the Pandora myth from
misogynist representation to feminist curiosity is worth quoting at
length:
21
Laura Mulvey, Fetishism and Curiosity, Bloomington, IN: Indiana University
Press, 1996, 59.
To sum up, there are three clich motifs, elements of myth, that are
central to Pandoras iconography: (a) femininity as enigma; (b) female
curiosity as transgressive and dangerous; (c) the spatial or
topographical figuration of the female body as inside and outside. And
I would like to try to reformulate them, to illuminate the tautology, as
follows: (a) Pandoras curiosity acts out a transgressive desire to see
inside her own surface or exterior, into the insides of the female body
metaphorically represented by the box and its attendant horrors; (b)
feminist curiosity transforms the topography of Pandora and her box
into a new pattern or configuration, which can then be deciphered to
reveal symptoms of the erotic economy of patriarchy; (c) feminist
curiosity can constitute a political, critical, and creative drive. 22
Feminist curiosity, Mulvey suggests, can recognize the idealization of

women and actively investigate the interior space suggested and
concealed by that surface image.
As a potentially active, creative methodology, feminist curiosity
moves beyond articulating an oppositional perspective by
investigating and resisting the process of representation through new
paradigms, new pleasures. This approach seems particularly
promising in respect to Fowles fiction, which offers a traditionally
archetypal idealization of women fraught with sexualized tension.
Furthermore, the procession of remarkable women in Fowles fiction
provides an ideal site of investigation for the curious feminist critic.
Characters like Sarah in The French Lieutenants Woman and Erato in
Mantissa, for example, represent both the idealization of woman as
surface image and a self-conscious desire to explore the depths of
being beneath and obscured by that surface image. Likewise,
characters like Diana in The Ebony Tower and Jenny and Jane in
Daniel Martin expose their male counterparts tendency to objectify
and categorize them, and resist such objectification by representing
themselves through specific and oppositional discourses. Finally,
characters like Isobel and Catherine in The Ebony Tower and Rebecca
in A Maggot attempt to subvert traditional narrative patterns by
authoring alternative narratives through which they can understand
their experiences, cope with oppressive dominant discourses, and
envision more authentic and just communities. The playfully
22
Ibid., 61-62.
postmodern, unconventional characterization of such women

characters, coupled with a curious feminist analysis, could potentially
explode their Fowlesian femininity and elucidate the potential of
Fowles feminist endeavours. More productive, refreshing readings of
Fowles work thus require a shift in perspective, a move from
familiar, fundamental configurations to insights that radiate from more
marginal positions.
INTRODUCTION
VOYEURISM AND OTHER VISUAL PLEASURES
While feminist critics have vividly demonstrated the limitations of

Fowles feminist advocacy through pointed critiques of his concern
with problems typical of men and his treatment of women writers and
characters, a more attentive approach might confront Fowles
complicated feminist efforts with both an acknowledgement of the
seductive pleasures embodied in each text and a demonstration of
alternative pleasures.
This shift cannot be achieved without some difficulty. Although
feminism and feminist criticism are by no means homogeneous
ideological practices, any feminist approach must acknowledge the
problems in Fowles attitude to women, and even the most
accommodating, most curious feminist critic must feel some vexation
at this attitude. Pamela Cooper summarizes this exasperation
perfectly:
She (for such a critic is most likely to be a woman) must negotiate

both the implied admiration which Fowles (like many readers)
evidently feels for his heroines, and those strategies that restrict these
heroines within male-defined bounds bounds that seem at times not
only to condition but to create the attractiveness of these women, and
thus to encode them as masculine fantasies. In other words, the
feminist critic may sometimes feel that Fowles fictions were not
really written for the female reader.
The feminist critic, Cooper continues, must negotiate considerable

ambivalence while considering the contradictions within Fowles
practice of authority. 1 While Fowles fiction revolves around
1
Cooper, The Fictions of John Fowles, 221 (italics in the original).
remarkable women characters, and the political and social ideals

embodied in those women proceed from some clearly feminist values,
those characters and those ideals also bear the mark of a well-
established idealization of women that circumscribes and diffuses
their power.
Furthermore, Fowles characters and their motivations often fail to
reflect the reality of womens lived experience. Jan Relf and Carol
Barnum, for example, have both accused Fowles of falseness in the
women characters in Daniel Martin, and Barry N. Olshen notes of the
protagonist in The Magus, Surely the main deficiency in the
characterization of Nicholas lies in his attraction for the females of the
novel when he seems to have none whatsoever for the reader. 2
Beyond negotiating Fowles troubling ideology about womanhood
and about feminism, feminist scholars approaching his work confront
some fictional women and men whose characterization appears to be
motivated primarily by either symbolic or idealistic design. Because
of these complications, feminist scholars (who, as Cooper notes, are
most likely to be women) must manage their ambivalence to Fowles
attitude toward women both as readers and as scholars, as women and
as feminists.
The many perspectives that arise from these identities, while
related, are not necessarily identical, and indeed are in many cases
divergent. While feminists have criticized Fowles for his attitude
toward women, for example, many women readers seem to have
appreciated his apparently genuine fascination with and archetypal
characterization of women. 3 Indeed, such contradictory responses may
reside within the same individual. The feminist critic may very well
identify with a Fowles heroine or aspire to be like her, be flattered by
the veneration he expresses for that heroine, and simultaneously object
to the limited and unrealistic definitions of womanhood embodied by
that heroine. The simultaneous presence of such divergent responses
2
Barry N. Olshen, John Fowles, New York: F. Ungar, 1978, 53. See also Relf, An
Interview with John Fowles, and Carol Barnum, An Interview with John Fowles,
both in Conversations with John Fowles, ed. Vipond, 129 and 114, for further
discussion of Fowles women characters as flat or unconvincing.
3
See David Streitfeld, A Writer Blocked, in Conversations with John Fowles, ed.
Vipond, 216, and Warburton, John Fowles: A Life in Two Worlds, 373.
Voyeurism and Other Visual Pleasures 17
creates a difficult analytical situation for the feminist critic a

situation that may encompass pleasure, guilt, irritation, admiration,
rage, inspiration, and a host of other emotional and intellectual
reactions that are not easily disentangled.
A resistant, curious, feminist approach to Fowles work must
embrace such ambivalence, complexity and puzzlement as fertile sites
of investigation. The first step in such an approach is to acknowledge
that divergent responses to a text or body of texts arise from divergent
perspectives, from various points of view. A number of feminist
theorists including Nancy Hartsock, Donna Haraway, Evelyn Fox
Keller, Sandra Harding, Dorothy Smith, and Patricia Hill Collins have
developed this fundamental investigation of divergent perspectives,
producing a body of theoretical formulations collectively recognized
as feminist standpoint theory. At the core of standpoint theory is an
understanding of knowledge as situated that is, people in various
social positions will have different perspectives and political
consciousnesses. Furthermore, each person will simultaneously
inhabit a number of different positions that, independently and in
combination, produce a number of perspectives. For these theorists,
standpoint refers not simply to perspective or experience but to an
understanding of perspective and experience as part of a larger social
and political context that is, a standpoint is an intellectual
achievement that reflects political consciousness. Despite its more
colloquial usage, the term standpoint refers not to a rigid or
permanent stabilization of perspective, but rather to a fluid and
dynamic negotiation of experience and point of view that can be
temporarily stabilized in order to interrogate dominant ideologies.
Because of its dedication to alternative points-of-view, standpoint
theory encourages neither an omniscient view from nowhere, nor a
single, enforced dominant view, but rather multiple and complicated
visions from a variety of situations. 4 Standpoint theorists anchor their
methodology in outsider within positions positions inhabited by
groups who are included in dominant discourses but are nevertheless,
and for various reasons, unable to fully participate in them. The
4
Donna Haraway, Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the
Privilege of Partial Perspective, Feminist Studies, XIV/3 (1988), 589.
identification and exploration of such marginalized positions as places

from which a less false standpoint on social, political, and historical
power relationships originates characterize and motivate standpoint
approaches. 5 Such positions are neither absolute nor homogeneous;
standpoint theory posits that individuals who are similarly situated
share the organization of social relations that has accomplished
[their] exclusion, 6 but does not posit identical individual
understanding, nor does it imply that marginalized standpoints
produce absolute truth. Marginalized positions, as Donna Haraway
explains, are not exempt from critical reexamination, decoding,
deconstruction, and interpretation . [and] are not innocent
positions. On the contrary, they are preferred because in principle they
are least likely to allow denial of the critical and interpretive core of
all knowledge. 7 Such situations, that is, exhibit their difference from
standard, dominant, and unmarked positions, clearly displaying their
own political investment in the production of knowledge and
simultaneously critiquing those dominant ideologies that mask their
equal investment.
Standpoint theory offers a useful methodology to the curious
feminist critic who analyzes Fowles fiction. Negotiating her own
perspectives as a woman and as a feminist, the feminist critic can,
using standpoint theory, interrogate both the dominant Fowles
ideological framework and the larger social and political context in
which that framework operates as reader encounters text. Locating
herself as an embodied subject within a world directly experienced
from oneself as center (in the body) on the one hand and a world
organized in the abstracted conceptual mode, external to the local and
particular places of ones bodily existence on the other, 8 the feminist
critic can draw on her own lived experience as well as the theoretical
formulations that structure her standpoint or standpoints. Situating her
5
See Sandra Harding, Whose Science? Whose Knowledge?, Ithaca, NY: Cornell
University Press, 1991 for further discussion of marginalized standpoints as locations
from which less false knowledge proceeds.
6
Dorothy Smith, The Everyday World as Problematic, Boston: Northeastern
University Press, 1987, 78.
7
Haraway, Situated Knowledges, 584.
8
Smith, The Everyday World as Problematic, 84.
knowledge in both the material and the abstract in this way, the
feminist critic of Fowles can recognize those instances where, despite
her identity as a reader for whom Fowles the popular novelist
presumably writes, the text, as Cooper notes, does not seem to be
written for her, and thus can begin from an outsider within position
that embraces complex and even contradictory responses.
Furthermore, by recognizing the complexity of her location, the
feminist critic embracing standpoint methodology can recognize the
complexity of other situations. As Haraway argues: The knowing self
is partial in all its guises, never finished, whole, simply there and
original; it is always constructed and stitched together imperfectly,
and therefore able to join with another, to see together without
claiming to be another. 9 Using a standpoint approach, the feminist
critic can interrogate not only her own various perspectives but also
Fowles various perspectives as they inhabit and emerge from his
texts.
Through the use of standpoint methodology, the relationship
between critic and text (and critic and author) can become less
oppositional and categorical, and more collaborative. One of the most
consistent tenets of standpoint theory among its various practitioners
is an insistence on self-consciousness and connection between
researcher and researched. As Haraway explains: Situated
knowledges require that the object of knowledge be pictured as an
actor and agent, not as a screen or a ground or a resource, never finally
as slave to the master that closes off the dialectic in his unique agency
and his authorship of objective knowledge. 10 Seeking to transform
the concept of objectivity by interrogating the biases and assumptions
of the researcher, standpoint theorists value information exchange,
allowing the situated subject of research to participate, to interact with
the researcher, rather than displaying itself as passive object to be
pronounced upon. Using this approach, the curious feminist critic of
Fowles work can engage in critical practice as though in a
9
Haraway, Situated Knowledges, 586 (italics in the original).
10
Ibid., 592. See also Sandra Harding, Whose Science? Whose Knowledge?, and
Evelyn Fox Keller, Reflections on Gender and Science, New Haven, CT: Yale
University Press, 1985, for an intriguing example of this practice in the work of
Barbara McClintock.
conversational exchange with Fowles writings, each expressing

particular points of view, each contributing to a collaborative project
incorporating fresh insights.
This method, because it is dedicated to collaboration and to
multiple interpretations, might negotiate certain critical challenges
more productively than other approaches. The skepticism with which
feminist scholars have considered Fowles feminist advocacy, for
example, demonstrates some of the most problematic assumptions
through which feminist analyses of mens claims to feminism work.
Feminist claims, as Bruce Woodcock notes, have a quite different
function and meaning when women make them on their own behalf
than they do when men make them. 11 There is a provocative
ambivalence in such claims that Woodcock explains rather well:
When women assert values as feminist or female, even those

which have been traditionally ascribed to them within patriarchal
ideology, their activity declares a conception of themselves as part of
a process of self-definition. When a man adopts the same arguments,
their political function changes quite simply because of the
relationship between those arguments, whose aim is to challenge male
power, and male power itself. One must inevitably suspect a conscious
or unconscious attempt to contain their impact, or somehow subvert or
appropriate the cutting edge of feminism by containing it within male-
defined limits. 12
Woodcocks comments continue to be pertinent nearly twenty

years after his argument first appeared, since mens claims to feminist
advocacy still elicit suspicion for precisely the reasons he mentions. In
fact, one might reasonably be as suspicious of Woodcock for these
reasons as of Fowles. Although in comparison to Fowles, Woodcock
does confront masculine prejudice more self-consciously and with
more deliberate scrutiny, this suspicion may account for the hostility
his study has provoked among Fowles scholars. 13
11
12
Ibid., 17-18.
13
See, for example, Robert J. Begiebing, Toward a New Synthesis: John Fowles, John
Gardner, Norman Mailer, Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1989. Begiebing concurs
with William Palmer (John Fowles and the Crickets, Modern Fiction Studies,
It is crucial to note, however, that a woman is not necessarily more

qualified to assess Fowles masculine prejudice than a man simply by
virtue of being a woman. As Magali Cornier Michael argues, both
men and women are socialized within a patriarchal world that relies
on masculine perspectives. 14 Indeed, Michael criticizes Deborah
Byrds celebration of Fowles feminism as nave precisely because it
accepts his ordinary feminist efforts too complacently. 15 However,
neither should Fowles feminist efforts be rejected completely on
account of his admittedly masculine bias. Feminist critics, for
example, have objected to Fowles tendency to structure his novels
around problems typical of men, but professed feminist sympathy
does not necessarily dictate concern only with the problems of
women. In fact, Fowles attention to mens problems (which in his
universe invariably implicate women), coupled with his complicated
feminist advocacy, provides a rather intriguing textual territory that
deserves more careful attention than feminist critics have granted.
Because standpoint methodology, rather than reifying dominant
ideology (even dominant feminist ideology), seeks to interrogate its
production and to explore from a number of perspectives the ways in
which it is inscribed within the lives of people in various social
locations, the curious feminist critic using a standpoint approach
accepts neither the dominant ideologies of Fowles fiction nor her own
point of view as absolute. Rather, she works toward a reading practice
that acknowledges a variety of attitudes and that weaves together the
XXXI/1 (1985), 3-13), complaining that Male Mythologies advances a shallow and
distorted interpretation, and then goes on to attack Woodcocks perspective as a man
advocating feminism with a tasteless dismissal: One wonders then how Woodcock (a
name from the realm of allegory? a witty feminists pseudonym?) as a male his
penile legacy intact can maintain pretensions to a correct feminist deconstruction of
Fowles sexist texts (140). Although Woodcocks name and biological sex
admittedly invite such teasing, one also wonders why exactly Begiebing and others
are so thoroughly bothered by Woodcocks analysis that they find it necessary to
respond with such juvenile indiscretion.
14
Magali Cornier Michael, Who is Sarah? A Critique of The French Lieutenants
Womans Feminism, Critique, XXVIII/4 (Summer 1987), 226.
15
Ibid., 228.
values and interpretive strategies practiced by both author and various

readers.
This curious, collaborative approach seems particularly appropriate
as a methodology for critiquing Fowles work, as it reflects rather
strikingly Fowles own scholastic attitudes. Ruth Morse notes, for
example, the self-consciousness and sense of his situation that
permeates Fowles writing. 16 Indeed, Fowles commented rather
eloquently on the variety of perspectives he negotiated in The J.R.
Fowles Club, a self-reflection in which he conceived of his multiple
identities as a writer in terms of a kind of mens club:
Quite a lot of my fellow members will hardly exchange a civil word;

others do nothing but whine and whinge. Yet others (talk about egos!)
are self-important beyond belief, especially one fathead who fancies
himself a novelist. Another pretends to be a feminist. Id like to see
him just once with a duster or an iron in his hand. Another pair both
think they know everything about natural history one a sort of
scientist, the other a sort of poet. You can imagine . We are truly an
unspeakably futile shambles. I honestly shall resign if they dont
watch out. Ive always hated mens clubs, anyway. 17
Emphasizing both a multiplicity of perspectives and a poignant

sense of inadequacy in these comments, Fowles illustrates the
difficulty with which the writer attempts to unify a cacophony of
diverse voices and to reconcile his sense of accomplishment with an
inevitable sense of failure or guilt when these multiple selves offer
conflicting points of view. Intensely aware of his development as a
writer and as a man, Fowles demonstrated through both his fiction and
his non-fiction this acute sense of inner conflict, of personal and
ideological evolution, as well as remorse for earlier attitudes, still
lingering in his awareness of earlier selves. 18
This acute sense of multiplicity manifests itself within Fowles
fiction as a dedication to ambiguity and indeterminacy. Particularly
16
Ruth Morse, John Fowles, Marie de France, and the Man with Two Wives,
Philological Quarterly, LXIII/1 (Winter 1984), 20.
17
John Fowles, The J.R. Fowles Club, in Wormholes, ed. Relf, 67.
18
See, for example, The Tree, New York: The Ecco Press, 1979, in which this kind of
self-reflection is particularly poignant.
conscious of the various responses different readers may have to the

same text, and even to the different responses a single reader may
have to a text at various times, Fowles devoted himself to a mobility
or fluidity of image, in terms of how readers see the text. 19 Rather
than attempting to present an objective or otherwise absolute account,
either in his fiction or non-fiction, Fowles recognized that perspective
and point of view, as they are experienced both immediately and over
time, are neither rigid nor fixed, but fluid and subject to change. As he
explained, my taste in fiction is towards a fair degree of realism in
style and my taste in non-fiction (say in what scientists and academics
write) is towards those who can exhibit qualities like tolerance of
hypothesis, dislike of the rigid interpretation, a general fluidity of
attitude and a basic sympathy towards a subject a touch of ordinary
humanity, in a phrase. 20
This preference for a touch of ordinary humanity became
increasingly important to Fowles over the course of his career, and is
explained most fully in his discussions of nature, in which he insists
that to know nature one must recognize both a mutual relationship
with it and an aesthetic appreciation of it that moves beyond a
scientific desire to categorize and collect. 21 He locates the beginnings
of this attitude in his encounter with Zen in the 1950s, during which
he discovered that there was less conflict than I had imagined
between nature as external assembly of names and facts and nature as
internal feeling; that the two modes of seeing or knowing could in fact
marry and take place almost simultaneously, and enrich each other. 22
Aware of science-as-usuals tenets of objectivity and detachment,
Fowles insisted instead that there is a price for forgetting that a
scientist is also a human being 23 and lamented the emptiness of the
collectors detached and self-serving understanding of nature.
19
Barnum, An Interview with John Fowles, in Conversations with John Fowles, ed.
Vipond, 105.
20
Baker, John Fowles: The Art of Fiction CIX, in Conversations with John Fowles,
ed. Vipond, 186.
21
See especially John Fowles, The Nature of Nature, in Wormholes, ed. Relf, 343-
61, and The Tree.
22
Fowles, The Tree, 39.
23
John Fowles, John Aubrey and the Genesis of the Monumenta Britannica, in
Wormholes, ed. Relf, 195.
Reflecting an attitude remarkably similar to that of feminist standpoint

theorists, he explained, One is not supposed to feel and to know at
the same time, though of course one may (if less commonly) feel what
one knows and (much more frequently) know what one feels. The
problem lies in trying to get the two systems of information exchange,
each ruled by a fundamentally different ethos, to marry and bear
fruit. 24 Like Evelyn Fox Kellers professed admiration for the
collaborative, involved work of Barbara McClintock, Fowles
admiration for seventeenth-century historiographer John Aubrey
proceeded from an appreciation of Aubreys intensely inquisitive,
varied, and connected methodology; in John Aubrey and the Genesis
of the Monumenta Britannica, Fowles explains, [Aubreys] view is
holistic; he thinks far less of different subjects, all neatly frontiered
and separated, than of different angles of approach to the central
problem: what was the past, what was it like?. 25
This admiration for Aubrey epitomizes Fowles interest in multiple
realities and interpretations of the same material, all expressing
different factual and imaginative contexts. Like many feminist
standpoint theorists, Fowles valued difference of interpretation and
collaborative efforts that display multiple points of view; his
contributions to a number of books of photography, for example,
highlight both his own unique understanding of the material and a
disparate vision offered by the photographer. 26 Of Fay Godwins
photographs of the Scillies, for example, Fowles commented, It was
not how I see (or then saw) the islands; but it was of quite sufficient
force to make me think again, and respect her very different vision of
them. 27 Choosing to collaborate with Godwin and with the other
photographers whose work he includes in his various non-fictional
24
Fowles, The Nature of Nature, 345.
25
Fowles, John Aubrey, 181.
26
See The Enigma of Stonehenge, New York: Summit Books, 1980; Islands, Boston:
Little, Brown and Company, 1978; Lyme Regis Camera, Boston: Little, Brown and
Company, 1990; Shipwreck, Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1975; A Short
History of Lyme Regis, Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1982; and Thomas
Hardys England, Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1984.
27
John Fowles, Land, in Wormholes, ed. Relf, 326.
writings, Fowles demonstrated his reverence for openness, ambiguity,

and multiple points of view.
This respect for difference of vision reflects Fowles understanding
of lived experience. His professed preference for a fair degree of
realism in style in both the fiction he wrote and the fiction he read,
for example, reflects a conscious decision to reject the conventional
closure of the novel in favor of indeterminate endings more
representative of lived experience. It is for this reason that his novels
end without the traditional sense of completion, but rather with, for
example, the three separate endings of The French Lieutenants
Woman or the frozen scene and ambiguous quotation at the close of
The Magus. 28 Aware of both the implied continuation of a plot
representative of lived experience, despite the misleading snipping of
the narrative thread at the conventional ending of a novel, and of the
different responses various readers may have to any story, Fowles
offers instead indeterminate endings that require the reader to supply
his or her own analysis, forcing the reader into a kind of interpretive
freedom that denies the conventional pleasure of closure and offers
instead an alternative pleasure of nearly limitless possibility.
Furthermore, Dianne Vipond suggests, Fowles indeterminacy opens a
space in which the reader, confronted with an unconventional
narrative strategy, might become aware of his or her assumptions not
only about the reading experience but about the subject matter of the
text as well. 29 Instead of assuming a natural progression of plot, the
reader of a Fowles novel is forced to note the very construction of the
illusion of natural textual progression. Thus he creates a reading
experience dependent upon an ambitious, curious, open-minded reader
willing to contribute more than is usually required within the author-
reader relationship. This arduous reading experience allows for, and
indeed encourages, varied and fluid readings.
28
This quotation reads: cras amet qui numquam amavit / quique amavit cras amet,
translated as Tomorrow let him love, who has never loved; he who has loved, let him
love tomorrow, or alternatively, Let those love now who've never loved; let those
who've loved, love yet again. See Bob Goosmann, Translating the Last Lines of The
Magus, John Fowles: The Website, http://www.fowlesbooks.com/ourjohn.htm, for
more on this quotation.
29
Vipond, Introduction, in Conversations with John Fowles, ed. Vipond, xiii.
In fact, Fowles seemed to prefer unusual readings, or at least

readings that radiate from unusual locations, and made a conscious
effort to inscribe both traditional and alternative perspectives in his
writings. I suppose I have a liking for people who are outside
society, Fowles explained, and this identification with marginalized
individuals illustrates his paradoxical sense of simultaneous privilege
as a white, male, educated Englishman and his isolation as a writer
and thinker whose aesthetic and ideological preferences reflect a more
continental attitude. 30 As a kind of outsider within himself, Fowles
inscribed in his writings a particularly complex negotiation of
perspective that thrives on the tension between dominant and resistant
epistemological and ontological practices.
This tension is especially apparent in his translation of Ourika, a
nineteenth-century French novel written by Claire de Duras. The story
of a rescued slave girl educated and raised within eighteenth-century
French society life, Ourika offers a unique case study of the
intersection of privileged and marginalized perspectives. The story
proceeds from Ourika who, as a dying woman, recites her tale to a
doctor attempting to cure her apparently psychosomatic deterioration.
As Margaret Waller notes in her introduction to Fowles translation,
Ourikas status as an outsider within provides a poignantly ambivalent
perspective on French society life. 31 Unaware as a child of any
significance attached to her racial difference, Ourika is shocked to
discover that her race marks her as inferior and marginal to her social
circle. This discovery prompts Ourika to develop a heightened
consciousness of her surroundings and of the ideological practices that
define her situation; she comments, From the time I felt ostracized, I
became more exacting. I analyzed and criticized almost all that had
previously satisfied me. 32 No longer able to identify with her kind
30
Quoted in Daniel Halpern, A Sort of Exile in Lyme Regis, in Conversations with
John Fowles, ed. Vipond, 18. For more on Fowles identification with outsiders, see
also Melissa Denes, Fowles on a Fair Day, in Conversations with John Fowles, ed.
Vipond, 223-30. Fowles comments throughout his non-fictional writings collected in
Wormholes and the interviews collected in Conversations with John Fowles on his
non-conformist political, social, and aesthetic preferences.
31
Margaret Waller, Introduction, in Ourika, by Claire de Duras, trans. John Fowles,
New York: MLA, 1994, xix.
32
Claire de Duras, Ourika, trans. Fowles, 17.
and well-intentioned but nevertheless society-conscious

caretakers, Ourika attempts to redefine herself by identifying with her
African heritage, but is disillusioned by an eruption of violence incited
and perpetrated by African slaves. Isolated from both her French
contemporaries and her African heritage, Ourika despairs of ever
developing her considerable talents, of ever achieving contentment
within a society that dismisses her abilities because of her marked
difference. Trapped within a situation defined by both pleasurable,
familiar activities and appalling, limitless isolation, Ourika is, as
Waller notes, the outsider whose difference makes her critical of
French society, but she also serves as its spokesperson, a mirroring
the heroine identifies as both pleasurable and demeaning. 33 These
complications, inherent to Ourikas point of view, force the reader to
recognize both the piercing insights and the painful ambivalence of
the outsider within.
Furthermore, the reader, encountering Ourikas tale through the
framing and editing narrative of the doctor who records Ourikas
story, can also recognize that the main character is not, as Waller
notes, the eighteenth-century African woman whose story originally
inspired the work but a fiction created by the duchess of Duras in the
1820s. This realization generates the interpretive necessity of
evaluating the intersections of not only this fictional Ourikas
competing perspectives, but also the intersections of the other
perspectives that inform Fowles translation of the text: that of the
French doctor who actually narrates Ourikas story as he records it for
diagnosis and attempted treatment; that of the educated society
woman living in nineteenth-century France whose authorial efforts
have created the text; and that of Fowles, whose translation introduces
a contemporary Englishmans perspective as the text shifts from
French to English. Fowles Ourika, then, is no simple rendering of a
French outsiders experiences, but rather a complicated convergence
of attitudes and opinions orbiting a tale inherently complicated by the
interaction of divergent worldviews.
Waller argues that Claire de Duras narrative choices in Ourika
provide a counter-narrative to dominant discourse, using the
33
Waller, Introduction, xix.
perspectives of the outsider within to expose and dispute the

oppression of the marginalized. 34 Writing from a situation not her
own, Duras necessarily complicates her text with experiences and
interpretations that are at least partially surmised, giving rise to, as
Waller notes, an inevitable characterization of Ourika as Other. This
characterization is complicated by the framing narrative of the doctor,
whose comments both detach the story from Ourika herself and,
through the sanctioning effect of his retelling, lend authority to her
insights. The tension created by Duras and her fictional doctors
simultaneous sympathy and conjecture, Waller suggests, generates a
number of complications, not the least of which involve privilege and
authority. In writing Ourika, Duras assumes the right to speak for a
woman whose situation, while perhaps sharing certain social and
political realities with her own, nevertheless is largely foreign.
However, the act of writing Ourika also provides a forum for the
insights that proceed from that marginalized perspective, insights that,
while perhaps skewed by Duras assumptions, nevertheless include
important examinations of prevalent oppressive attitudes that might
not surface through other, more direct channels. 35
By extension, Fowles choice to translate Ourika, making it
available to a contemporary English-speaking audience, suggests a
similar interest in exposing lingering gender and racial prejudice as
well as a specific concern for promoting both the work of a neglected
woman writer and the insights of outsiders within. By choosing to
translate this text, Fowles demonstrated an implied affiliation with its
analysis of prejudice. Focusing on the social construction of difference
and the injustice that proceeds from such constructions, Ourika
demonstrates Fowles interest in spotlighting perspectives that
challenge dominant ideology. Indeed, in the Foreword to his
translation of Ourika, Fowles observes that this strange little novel
clearly influenced his writing of The French Lieutenants Woman,
34
Ibid., xx.
35
Speaking for others is always a complicated endeavor; as Doris Y. Kadish
summarizes, we must conclude that there is no clear or uncontaminated access to the
others voice (Rewriting Womens Stories, 86). For further discussion of this
issue, see Linda Alcoff, The Problem of Speaking for Others, Cultural Critique,
(Winter 1991-1992), 5-32.
especially in his desire to write about a woman who had been

unfairly exiled from society. His creation of the English Sarah, he
further admits, implies his own racial prejudice, or the racial prejudice
of the earlier self who could have been so stupid as not to see who
that woman really was. Fowles subsequent translation of Ourika
attempts to ameliorate that prejudice and reflects his admiration for
Duras attempt to understand a situation not her own an effort he
calls this first serious attempt by a white novelist to enter a black
mind. 36
Yet ultimately his admiration for Ourika stems not from the
specificities of Ourikas experiences and insights, nor from a thorough
desire to explore unfamiliar social locations, but rather from Ourikas
contribution to a rather general understanding of oppression; he
praises Ourika because it universalizes the particular racial context,
goes just as well for any intelligent member of a despised minority in
a jealous and blind majority culture . This is the case history of an
outsider, of the eternal tranger in human society. 37 This focus on
the universality of Ourikas situation, while pertinent and genuinely
appreciative, nevertheless suggests that for Fowles, the specificities of
a black womans situation are not really important. Rather, the
insights that arise from such a location are significant only insofar as
they illuminate the more general problems of more comfortable and
familiar marginalizations.
So we return to the feminist critique of Fowles novels that
suggests that even in his desire to offer alternative perspectives, he
ultimately employed resistant epistemological and ontological
practices in order to expand the self-awareness of traditionally
centralized, though perhaps somewhat isolated, individuals. Because
of his genuine feminist sympathies and his sincere interest in
multiplicity and alternative perspectives, Fowles attempted, not only
in Ourika and The French Lieutenants Woman, but in all of his
fictional works, to explore womens sensibilities and to advocate
womens ways of knowing and being. However, the central characters
of his novels are invariably men who benefit from the alternative
36
John Fowles, Foreword, in Duras, Ourika, xxix-xxx.
37
Ibid., xxxi.
perspectives embodied in the mysterious, but useful, women they

meet. Despite his professed fascination with women, Fowles
consistently organized his texts through mens perspectives, and made
no claim to understand women or his women characters.
Like the protagonists of his novels, Fowles insisted on and was
seduced by womens ultimate unknowability. Thomas C. Foster offers
a speculative explanation of Fowles reticent depiction of women,
suggesting, It may be that Fowles recognizes the falseness of a male
novelist claiming such complete understanding of the feminine. 38
This recognition may be interpreted in a number of ways, but Fowles
refusal to definitively explain his heroines suggests a modest
admission of insufficient knowledge, a self-effacing retreat from
pretended expertise. Such an attitude might account for his response to
interrogation regarding his professed inability to understand his
heroines:
What I really meant is that they are not to be understood by traditional

male standards. Like most male artists, I have a strong female
component in my character, just as most women artists have a strong
male one. This may help us in creating characters of the opposite sex,
but of course were always, finally, no more than sympathetic visitors
in a foreign country not natives. If my women characters seem
short on motivation and analysis I suppose most notoriously in The
French Lieutenants Woman it is because I am writing from the
standpoint of this male visitor. 39
Acutely aware of his situation as a man and as a writer, Fowles

conceived a distance from women, likening his attempts to portray
women to a distinct sense of difference as an outsider within a much
38
Thomas C. Foster, Understanding John Fowles, Columbia, SC: University of South
Carolina Press, 1994, 49. Interestingly, and despite general critical opinion, Fowles
has referred to Alison as the central character of The Magus (Vipond, An Unholy
Inquisition, 371). This odd statement demonstrates the infatuation Fowles felt for his
heroines especially since, as Eileen Warburton reveals, those heroines are based
recognizably on his first wife, Elizabeth (John Fowles: A Life in Two Worlds, 234)
and provides a revealing instance of his own understanding of his texts conflicting
with critical (and especially feminist) readings.
39
Tony Graham, Hilary Arnold, Sappho Durrell, and John Thackara, John Fowles:
An Exclusive Interview, 61.
loved but nonetheless exotic landscape. Despite attempts to

acculturate oneself to this foreign space, Fowles suggested, a man can
never fully approximate a womans standpoint (and vice versa), since
any such attempt is doomed to failure, or at least to inadequacy. This
attitude reflects his apparently sincere desire to avoid appropriation or
violation of womens space through the employment of an admiring
but distant touch.
At the same time, the puzzling and oft-criticized characterization of
women in his work might be interpreted not as modest admiration but
as titillating fantasy, as an attitude of rapt fancy through which Fowles
portrayed women not with detached observation but with intimate
idealization, as embodiments of mens infatuations. Indeed, Fowles
confessed to nympholepsy, defined as that perverse but persistent
condition of desire for the unattainable, 40 and asserted that this
condition infects most of the contemporary Western world, which has
become, in his own words, girl-besotted, girl-drunk, girl-distorted.
For this state of affairs Fowles firmly blamed men:
I am very far from being a misogynist, and I immediately acquit the

girls themselves of any intention to subvert the progress of the human
republic. They are not consciously befuddling us, or at any rate no
more than Eve first befuddled that egregious dimwit Adam; it is we,
the men, who are befuddling ourselves with girls. 41
In short, Fowles understood our current social and intellectual climate

to be polluted with an unhealthy, but nevertheless quite compelling,
fixation on inexplicable and unattainable women.
Convinced of the near impossibility of escaping this condition,
Fowles instead explored it in all its complexity and perversion, and
almost exclusively through mens perspectives. Apparently more
concerned with the general affliction of the eternal tranger in
human society than with the specificities of oppressed individuals
lived experience, and certainly more concerned with the difficulties
men confront in their relationships and in their struggles to define
their own identities than with similar difficulties faced by women,
40
Jan Relf, Introduction, in Wormholes, ed. Relf, xxii.
41
John Fowles, Gather Ye Starlets, in Wormholes, ed. Relf, 94.
Fowles ultimately considered the Other (read woman) an

embodiment of the inexplicable and alienated elements of the Self
(read man), sympathizing with the marginalized without fully
confronting the complexities of unfamiliar situations. Fowles
portrayal of women may stem from genuine admiration and a desire to
venerate womens unique discernments, but because of his use of
these sensibilities as tools to increase the pleasure and existential
authenticity of the men in his novels, these efforts have varying
degrees of success. In short, Fowles was, as a number of feminist
critics have suggested, better at exploring the epistemological and
ontological complexities of mens experiences than at elucidating the
insights proceeding from womens perspectives.
Yet Fowles consistent interest in multiplicity deserves further
interrogation. He celebrated Duras attempt to explore a situation not
her own, and supported that attempt with similar efforts in his texts. In
fact, despite his confessed obsession with the unknowable and
unattainable woman, he asserts in Islands precisely the effort to
incorporate womens perspectives as the organizing principle behind
his fiction. As Katherine Tarbox notes:
Fowles begins his reading of The Odyssey with an insistence that

Homer was a woman and ends with the conviction that The Odyssey is
the template for all his own novels . As a culturally engendered
male, who identifies strongly with and is an apologist for the
bumbling Odysseus, his repeated writings of the Homer-womans text
are a gesture toward a lost androgyny, an attempt to recover the
faculties and sensibilities he names female. 42
Paradoxically committed to exploring perspectives that he associated

with women and to inscribing mens nympholepsy, Fowles texts are
fraught with tension between mens competing desires to understand
women and to idealize women.
So Fowles excelled in the exploration of mens problems and
faltered when he attempted to inscribe womens experiences and
42
Katherine Tarbox, John Fowless Islands: Landscape and Narratives Negative
Space, in John Fowles and Nature: Fourteen Perspectives on Landscape, ed. James
R. Aubrey, Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1999, 54.
perceptions but he was, after all, a man, and more significant than
his understandable difficulty at inscribing a womans standpoint is the
attempt itself, an attempt that has engaged feminist and women
readers alike. Fowles texts continuously require the reader to consider
the limitations of even the most dominant textual tones. His texts are
eminently interrogative, perhaps questioning the world from a fixed
masculine subjectivity, but determined to explore womens unique
situations and to interface with womens ways of knowing and being.
Although Fowles was limited in his feminist capabilities and
enveloped in mens concerns, his work, through its sincere attempts to
inscribe womens experiences and insights, offers a unique
opportunity for the feminist critic to explore the intersections of mens
fantasies and womens prospects, of authorial control and resistant
readings.
These intersections become vividly clear in a close reading of
Fowles management of his authority. He complicates his feminist
advocacy by offering inexplicable women characters. Likewise, he
undermines his professed devotion to indeterminacy and interpretive
freedom by exercising unmistakable authorial control. Such control is
most apparent, in fact, in his adamant refusal to explain his heroines
motivations, most obviously in The Magus, in which Nicholas, despite
his detective work, never fully explains to readers (or, indeed,
understands himself) Alisons reasons for faking suicide or Julies
reasons for seducing and discarding him, and in The French
Lieutenants Woman, in which readers encounter in detail the tortured
(if amusing) machinations of Charless thoughts but never enter
Sarahs consciousness. Such selective omniscience forces readers to
develop a curious epistemological craving that is fulfilled or frustrated
at Fowles leisure. In other cases, as in The Collector, A Maggot, and
especially The Magus, characters reveal information selectively,
forcing readers (and often other characters) to proceed with a
deliberately fragmented vision of the situation often a vision skewed
toward a particular perspective.
These manipulations depend upon fragmentation, on privileged
points of view, and most importantly on a narrative style steeped
in cinematic conventions. In each of his texts, Fowles uses his
protagonists perspective to frame and organize the narrative. This
framing technique is remarkably similar to point of view shooting,
which, as Terry Lovell explains, show[s] us what the camera, placed

in the position of the character, would reveal, which is not necessarily
the same thing as what the character sees, or wants us to believe
she/he sees. 43 An eminently metafictional author, Fowles blatantly
displays the unreliability of his narrators, and indeed of all of his
characters, who are either deliberately mysterious or noticeably
inauthentic. His use of a cinematic sensibility to emphasize such
unreliability, however, further illustrates both the intense pleasure and
the misleading totality of the visual.
In I Write Therefore I Am, Fowles attributes his fascination with
visual practice to a generational fixation: All of us [in my generation]
write cinematically; our imaginations, constantly fed on films, shoot
scenes, and we write descriptions of what has been shot. So for us a
lot of novel writing is, or seems like, the tedious translating of an
unmade and never-to-be-made film into words. 44 This obsession with
a visual conception of narrative complicates the authorial process,
Fowles suggests, incorporating an almost inescapable contemporary
reliance on visual stimulation. In fact, his inspiration for writing often
began with a visual image; both The French Lieutenants Woman and
A Maggot, for example, were inspired by a persistent vision of one or
more main characters captured within a specific landscape as if by an
imaginary cameras lens. 45 Nevertheless, Fowles struggled with his,
and his readers, reliance on the visual, precisely because of the
tyranny of perspective employed by cinema:
The cinematic visual image is virtually the same for all who see it; it
stamps out personal imagination, the response from individual visual
memory. A sentence or paragraph in a novel will evoke a different
43
Terry Lovell, Feminism and Form in the Literary Adaptation: The French
Lieutenants Woman, in Criticism and Critical Theory, ed. Jeremy Hawthorn,
London: Arnold, 1984, 124.
44
Fowles, I Write Therefore I Am, 7. Interestingly, several of Fowles novels have
been made into films, requiring an equally tedious (and considerably less rewarding)
translation of words back into images. Fowles was generally disappointed in these
efforts, reflecting in part his ambivalent attitude to the combination of narrative and
visual practices.
45
See Fowles, Notes on an Unfinished Novel, 13, and A Maggot, Boston: Little,
Brown and Company, 1985, Prologue.
image in each reader. This necessary cooperation between writer and

reader the one to suggest, the other to make concrete is a privilege
of verbal form; and the cinema can never usurp it. 46
This privileging of novelistic freedom obviously reflects Fowles

preference for the written text. However, it also foregrounds his
ambivalent attitude toward the visual, which he perceives as both
oppressive and undeniable.
This ambivalent attitude creates a distinct tension in Fowles work,
in which he tempers his suspicion of cinematic conventions with an
apparent compulsion to play with visual practices. Most of his novels
are not thematically bound to cinematic discourse (Daniel Martin
excepted), but both his fiction and non-fiction reveal a deep
fascination with and incorporation of the visual into the written text
that is, both characters and the reader are made to watch in a unique
way. Within the fiction, characters (usually men Clegg, Nicholas,
Charles, David, Daniel, Miles, Ayscough) do a great deal of watching,
particularly as they try to understand the inexplicable motivations of
other characters (usually women Miranda, Alison, Lily/Julie, Sarah,
Diana, Jane, Erato, Rebecca). Through such viewing, Fowles men
characters become preoccupied with visual practices that hinge on the
desire and/or ability to infiltrate the private world of women others
and, in so doing, exercise power over them. Such power becomes
intoxicating, and generates a perverse pleasure that dramatically
increases in proportion to the difficulty through which it is attained.
Likewise, readers must watch the action from a particular vantage
point sometimes through the framing lens of a narrator, but more
often through the perspective of the main character (a man). While
this watching often serves to illustrate situations within the texts, it is
more significantly a means by which readers come to identify with a
particular character, to perceive the world as he perceives it. For
readers, pleasure results from the tension between mystery and
increasing fullness of vision, and intensifies with the difficulty in
attaining either the full picture possessed by Fowles, or, more
46
Fowles, Notes on an Unfinished Novel, 21 (italics in the original).
manageably, the picture equivalent to that possessed by the character

with whom readers are encouraged to identify.
These visual manipulations combine intense pleasure with
transgression and coercion, since Fowles fiction is enraptured with
mystery and a kind of narrative striptease, rife with eroticized power
games between characters and between the author and reader. 47
Fowles summarized, I suppose I am haunted both ravished and
tormented by the erotic; yet happiest when it is left three-quarters
hidden, in secret, 48 and it is this fascination with the erotic and with
the seduction of the tease that determines the viewing practices of his
texts. These practices are not always, or even primarily, sexual.
However, they are quite often characterized by unequal power
relations, as in Fowles use of selective omniscience (most notably in
The French Lieutenants Woman); with forced or coerced viewing, as
in his framing of the action through his protagonists point of view (as
in The Magus, Mantissa, Daniel Martin, and The Ebony Tower); and
sometimes even with the pornographic (as in, for example, Cleggs
photographing Miranda naked in The Collector, the disintoxication
scene in The Magus, and the climactic lovemaking in Mantissa). In
each of these cases, both characters and readers are bound to an
eroticized visual practice controlled by authorial manipulation and
characterized by coercion.
In short, Fowles fiction is inherently voyeuristic that is, obsessed
with transgressive, eroticized visual practices, motivated by the desire
to penetrate private spaces, and most pleasurable when intimate
knowledge results from unequal power relations. Just as the cinema is
organized by a spectator/spectacle interaction, his fiction is dependent
47
Fowles admits as much, telling Katherine Tarbox, All art must be a kind of
striptease (Tarbox, Interview, 153). Furthermore, as Jan Relf summarizes Fowles
comments on writing: Writing, it seems, is a sexy business. Fiction making, the
creating of another world, is a haunting, isolating, and guilt-ridden experience; his
characters need constant caressing; he falls in love with his heroines and is, if only
imaginatively, unfaithful to his wife with every novel he writes. His relationship with
the novel, for the duration of its writing, is like an affair, full of guilts, anxieties,
secret delights (Relf, Introduction, ix). The inscription of the erotic in a Fowles text
thus encourages the reader to experience pleasures similar to those of the author
himself.
48
Baker, John Fowles, 191.
upon the gaze of protagonist and reader, seeking to penetrate the

shroud of mystery surrounding the women in the novels and the
revelations in the texts. In her landmark essay Visual Pleasure and
Narrative Cinema, Mulvey examines the process by which narrative
encourages this kind of spectator identification aligned with an active,
voyeuristic, masculine gaze. In narrative cinema, Mulvey argues, the
woman on the screen becomes a spectacle, the site on which this gaze
fixes. Mulvey comments:
In a world ordered by sexual imbalance, pleasure in looking has been

split between active/male and passive/female. The determining male
gaze projects its fantasy onto the female figure, which is styled
accordingly . Traditionally, the woman displayed has functioned on
two levels: as erotic object for the characters within the screen story,
and as erotic object for the spectator within the auditorium, with a
shifting tension between the looks on either side of the screen. 49
These two looks of protagonist and spectator, while in tension, are

also in cohesion: As the spectator identifies with the main male
protagonist, he projects his look onto that of his like, his screen
surrogate, so that the power of the male protagonist as he controls
events coincides with the active power of the erotic look, both giving
a satisfying sense of omnipotence. 50 Through this process of
identification, the woman on the screen becomes merely a fetish, a
spectacle of sexuality viewed both through the eyes of the spectator
(regardless of that spectators sex) and through the eyes of the man
with whom the spectator identifies. This viewing practice hinges on
inequality, on the passivity of the idealized and mysterious feminine
object as well as the viewer, in comparison to the active and directing
power of the masculine subject with whom the viewer identifies.
Often this process is eroticized explicitly through sexual innuendo, but
it is always implicitly seductive in terms of power.
These initial formulations of the gaze have been modified and
extended by a number of theorists, generating a far more varied
49
Laura Mulvey, Visual and Other Pleasures, Bloomington, IN: Indiana University
Press, 1989, 19.
50
Ibid., 20.
account of voyeurism and spectatorship, both within the cinema and

without. 51 Of these forms of voyeurism, all are a direct result of public
concern about controlling the unknown that which is mysterious,
hidden, clandestine and most are explicitly concerned with
intentional surveillance. Though not all explicitly sexual in their intent
or in their focus, these various forms of watching all are inherently
saturated by an overwhelming desire to know and to control, as well
as a thorough belief in observation as the premier means of producing
knowledge.
It is this desire to know, and to acquire knowledge through direct
observation, that Fowles uses in order to both construct and control
voyeuristic pleasure in his texts. From both his characters and his
readers, Fowles conceals important elements of traditional narrative
character motivation, linear progression of events, ideological
cohesion. Such concealment to some extent emphasizes his
postmodern concerns. However, his apparent desire to control the
vision of both characters and readers suggests a kind of authorial
pleasure in having ultimate control over revelations within the text.
Furthermore, some blatantly didactic instances of authorial
domination in Fowles texts, as Simon Loveday rightly observes,
compromise his attempts to encourage interpretive freedom. These
moments are especially noticeable in the earlier fiction The
Collector, The Magus, and The French Lieutenants Woman in
which Fowles and his well-known political and aesthetic values rather
transparently enter the text through characters reflections and didactic
narrative interruptions. These ponderous authorial interventions, as
Loveday explains, show a failure of trust in the readers judgment,
good sense, and ability to come to the right decision unaided (his
apparent assumption that such a decision exists at all is itself a loaded
one). 52 Despite his interest in the fluid, varied interpretation, Fowles,
particularly in his early works, resists such multiplicity of perspective.
51
See The Cinematic Society, London: Sage Publications, 1995, in which Norman K.
Denzin summarizes gaze theorizing admirably, including the work of Laura Mulvey,
Jean-Paul Sartre, Jacques Lacan, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Michel Foucault, Patricia
Erens and Mary Anne Doane.
52
Loveday, The Romances of John Fowles, 134.
This resistance is, of course, about authority, or, to be more

precise, about power. Fowles postmodern efforts, while stunning and
somewhat revolutionary in their depiction of indeterminacy and
interpretive freedom, are less radical than they may at first appear.
Despite his undermining of traditional narrative, Fowles fiction
nonetheless makes use of inescapable narrative conventions through
which the author ultimately controls readers vision of the text while
cultivating an illusion of interpretive freedom. 53 Indeed, illusion is one
of Fowles fascinations: his work is eminently focused on the
interrogation of the narrative illusions of coherence, completion, and
control, advocating instead self-reflexive and paradoxical acceptance
of the illusions of freedom, indeterminacy, and multiplicity.
The pleasure Fowles evidently obtained from creating an illusion
of interpretive freedom, and from drawing attention to the
construction of that illusion (as he did both within his fiction and in
his interviews), 54 ultimately emphasizes the primacy of authorial
vision as the only complete and satisfying perspective, and encourages
the search for an equivalent vision. For both characters and readers
implicated in his voyeuristic games, such a search is complicated by
the impossibility of satiating the compelling desire, since the
observation is never complete. Conflicting desires characterize the
relationship between the viewer and viewed: in Fowles novels, the
voyeur enjoys the power that viewing (of women within the text and
of the development of the text itself) implies, but simultaneously
wishes for intimacy and comprehension, which cannot be achieved as
long as there is an imbalance of power between characters and
between readers and author. Circumscribed by Fowles coercive
narrative teasing and manipulated by the illusion of interpretive
freedom, both characters and readers are denied the satisfaction of a
complete understanding of either his heroines or of the sequence of
events in the texts. Instead, characters and readers are granted the
53
Mahmoud Salami, John Fowless Fiction and the Poetics of Postmodernism,
London: Associated University Presses, 1992, 41.
54
See, for example, Chapter 13 of The French Lieutenants Woman, Boston: Little,
Brown and Company, 1969, 95-99, and James Campbell, An Interview with John
Fowles, 33.
limited but nonetheless titillating pleasures of spectatorship, pleasures

that result from a voyeuristic gaze.
Fowles employment of the gaze, however, is neither static nor
simple, but varies in accordance with his development as a writer and
with his ideological concerns in each piece of fiction. In his earlier
texts, including The Collector, The Magus, The French Lieutenants
Woman, and The Ebony Tower, Fowles seems particularly focused on
keeping both characters and readers in a state of perpetual longing,
seeking fuller vision when only fragments are available. In The
Collector, for example, Fowles offers a fairly straightforward piece of
psychological detective fiction, making use of two distinct forms of
the gaze, one of which is conducted under full interactional
awareness, where two parties exchange mutual glances, the other of
which is covert and secret, where one party has no idea that they are
being spied upon by another. 55 Split between Cleggs framing
narrative and Mirandas journals, The Collector seems on the surface
to be split fairly equally between two opposing perspectives.
However, within the text itself, both Clegg and Miranda engage in
voyeuristic practices ultimately aimed at penetrating the privacy of the
other in order to gain either a physical or a psychological advantage.
For readers, both Cleggs and Mirandas narratives are ultimately
self-serving fragments of the truth. Cleggs narrative reveals him to be
an unreliable narrator whose explanations are intended to obscure and
to justify his clearly perverted and criminal actions. Mirandas
narrative, while more honest, reflects not a genuine womans
perspective, but the barely concealed values of Fowles and his
fictional surrogate, G.P., and involves readers in a rather traditional
form of peeping that of reading another persons diary. Forced to
view the most intimate revelations and thoughts of both Clegg and
Miranda, readers of The Collector are overloaded with private
reflections and perversions and ascertain no alternative vision to the
troubling pornographic objectification and fragmented disjunction of
its characters socially conditioned interactions.
In his next published work, Fowles encodes visual practices with
endless complication and manipulation. The practice of spectatorship
55
Denzin, The Cinematic Society, 48.
is, of course, fraught with complexity. As Denzin summarizes the

variability of the gaze:
A gaze may be a gaze of power and domination . It may be

investigative, medical, or psychiatric. It may be erotic or non-erotic, or
both . A gaze may be suspected, and a person takes measures to
secure privacy . And, a person may pretend to gaze, or to look,
when they in fact are not giving their attention to another . A person
may also be positioned to be deliberately gazed upon. 56
The Magus makes use of all of these gazes, creating a narrative rife
with tension and suspense. Narrated by Nicholas Urfe, The Magus
illustrates from an unspecified future time Nicholas complicated and
mysterious experience on a Greek island, as he perceived it at the
time. Thoroughly English and reflective of his generations concerns,
Nicholas interprets his experiences through a very masculine, very
conventional lens. Marginalized, however, by Conchis and his
accomplices, Nicholas responds to uncertainty by incessant
observation and analysis of the other characters, especially the women
with whom he is romantically involved. In order to make sense of his
experiences, Nicholas attempts to fuse various fragments of
knowledge to form a coherent vision that fits his current outlook on
life and society.
For readers, these fragments are disjointed, reflective of partial
knowledge and partial understanding. Forced to accept the narrative
from Nicholas point-of-view, readers are encouraged to identify with
Nicholas analyses and quests for knowledge. The women characters,
who Fowles suggests operate through a more humane, feminine ethic,
remain mysterious and threatening objects of Nicholas gaze, their
motivations never explained and their reactions never explored
through their own perspectives. The Magus thus fails to explore the
standpoint of any of its women characters, relying instead on
Nicholas limited, voyeuristic, and suspicious point of view and
Fowles projected fantasy of a feminine philosophy.
The French Lieutenants Woman, Fowles next novel, again makes
use of a variety of gazing practices scientific, erotic, aesthetic and
56
Ibid., 48.
again encourages readers to seek fullness of vision while

simultaneously frustrating that desire. The French Lieutenants
Woman incorporates a unique authorial perspective through footnotes
and an intrusive modern narrator whose twentieth-century knowledge
frames and comments on the Victorian story. At the center of the
novel, however, is the mysterious Sarah Woodruff, whose dubious
reputation perfectly positions her as an outsider within, both
marginalized from her society and at the center of its attention.
Despite his occasional omniscience, the narrator is as intrigued with
Sarah as his Victorian protagonist, Charles, never able (or even
willing) to penetrate her consciousness. Instead, both the narrator and
the Victorian characters satisfy themselves with constant surveillance
over Sarahs activities, watching and categorizing her according to
their own standards.
Readers of The French Lieutenants Woman negotiate competing
visions: that of Charles as a developing existentialist, and that of the
modern narrator/author as a controlling influence. More significantly,
however, readers must consider competing visions of Sarah, one in
which, like the women in The Magus, she remains a mysterious threat,
admirable and able to inspire mens activity, but never coherently
motivated or explored; the other in which she advances a situated
perspective and articulates piercing analyses of the injustices inherent
in her society. Apparently reluctant to appropriate his heroines
perspective, Fowles constructs Sarah not merely as a seductively
mysterious woman, but as a woman who recognizes the limitations of
conventional ways of seeing and enacts a more intuitive and authentic
way of knowing and being. Through such authorial ambivalence, The
French Lieutenants Woman initiates a transition in his work from
fragmentation to multiplicity, from manipulation to provocation, and
from voyeurism to whole sight.
His only collection of short stories, Fowles next work, The Ebony
Tower, consists of an eclectic assortment of tales linked by a kind of
authorial surrender to ambiguity. In the title novella, readers occupy
Davids perspective, seeing experiences in terms of famous works of
art and understanding complicated women in terms of broad portraits.
In each of the other tales, one of which is a translation of a Breton lay,
the characters carefully watch one another, searching for clues that
might explain odd behavior or that might help to categorize others into
recognizable stereotypes. In each of these tales, however, the

characters must eventually surrender to the unknown and the
inexplicable, focusing only on practical solutions to unanswerable
questions. Likewise, readers of The Ebony Tower must contend with a
fairly random collection of tales, seeking a coherent understanding of
theme and content in some very different stories. Most striking in this
collection, however, is Fowles apparent attempt to push the
fragmentary to its limits and to emphasize uncertainty, ambiguity, and
impossibility in terms of ever achieving a full and coherent
understanding of others or of a text.
Therefore, The Ebony Tower marks a transition in Fowles work
from a model of authorial control and manipulation to a model that
accepts uncertainty and multiple perspectives. Particularly significant
in this shift is his experimentation with womens perspectives, which
he employs in order to suggest unconventional and sometimes
inspirational alternatives for a contemporary wasteland seemingly
obsessed with abstraction, resignation, and complacency. The Ebony
Tower illustrates his growing desires to interrogate both narrative and
social conventions that deny womens assertions of creativity and
community, and to seek fictional spaces in which such perspectives
might emerge with the potential to renew a bewildered and alienated
contemporary community.
In each of his later novels Daniel Martin, Mantissa, and A
Maggot Fowles experiments with more focused visual practices that
are less invasive of others and more self-reflective, more interested in
displaying a complicated and varied vision of experience. In Daniel
Martin, for example, he offers his most explicitly cinematic treatment
of experience. As a dissatisfied but successful Hollywood
screenwriter, Daniel Martin reflects on his life through a series of
scenes, depicting important moments and memories from his past as
well as significant developments in his current situation and
relationships. While characters do attempt to understand one another
through direct observation, that observation is non-intrusive and
focused on developing working relationships rather than on exercising
power over others. Dans reflections, in particular, are oriented toward
self-knowledge and a more responsible, healthy self-image.
Particularly interesting for readers is the remove at which several
of the scenes of Dans life are illustrated. Rather than narrating events
as he remembers them, often Dan describes his memories as though

they are part of a screenplay, or as though the people involved are
characters in a novel which, indeed, they are, as Dan records his
memories as part of his attempt to write his life-story into a novel. In
his attempt to understand his experiences, Dan projects them outward,
recording them as an outside observer might see them that is,
through an imagined but nevertheless alternative perspective. This
double-writing endeavor (Fowles writing Daniel Martin and Daniel
Martin writing his novel) emphasizes the development of vision as an
ongoing, complicated process. Focused as it is on what Fowles called
whole sight, Daniel Martin offers Fowles first attempt at
deliberately connecting fragments in the interests of a comprehensive
revisioning and revising of a lifetime of experience. Recognizing that
any comprehensive study of Dans personal history must account for
both his own individual experiences and his socially and historically
determined attitudes, both character and author interrogate the forces
that have shaped Dans perspective and generated his current anxiety.
For both Dan and Fowles, the process of writing the novel that
becomes Daniel Martin thus requires an unaccustomed commitment
to a conception of knowledge as situated, and to a concomitant
acknowledgement that any individuals perspective is therefore
partial, merely a fragment of the more complete vision that is whole
sight.
In direct contrast to the outward-focused narrative of Daniel
Martin, Mantissa turns inward to probe the eroticized and often
theoretically complicated inner workings of Miles Green and his
muse, Erato. Their intellectual and sexual sparring illustrates constant
manipulation of one another, presumably with the goal of creating
better, more thoughtful and creative fiction. Through this imagined
relationship, Miles explores his insecurities and talents, displaying a
kind of imaginative surveillance of the self. Because the story takes
place entirely within Miles head, its characters enjoy a peculiar status
as both real and imagined, as both controlled by Miles as author and
as spontaneous actors allowed to surprise him. Readers thus encounter
a somewhat wild ride through the consciousness of a particularly self-
reflexive author (who is both Miles and, to a certain extent, Fowles),
whose interactions with his muse appear to be an effort to confront
and understand his problematic views of women and of fiction. So
Mantissa enacts Fowles most direct and experimental confrontation

with his competing interests in freedom and authorial control, in
masculine ways of knowing and feminism, in fragmentary vision and
whole sight.
Combining elements of all of his earlier works, A Maggot explores
the mysterious disappearance of an eighteenth-century gentleman
through the sensibility of a modern narrator fixated on the cinema.
The characters involved in this mystery attempt to narrate the events
leading to the young mans disappearance to the investigating lawyer,
Henry Ayscough, offering varied perspectives that illustrate the
dynamics of their rigidly hierarchical society. Like Fowles earlier
fiction, A Maggot emphasizes the extent to which members of a
society watch one another in order to effectively categorize one
another.
While Fowles stresses each characters partial understanding of the
situation, each of their accounts clearly contributes to both
Ayscoughs interpretation of the mystery and to readers expanding
vision of the clouded events. The most significant of these multiple
visions, however, comes in the stunning deposition of Rebecca Lee,
who employs intuitive, alternative ways of knowing and being,
offering both the most incredible and the most compelling perspective
within the text. Through her spiritual transformation and vibrant,
creative narrative, Rebecca performs a radical critique of Ayscoughs
drive for answers, suggesting that such an obsession denies the power
of situated knowledges and prevents the connection between
individuals and communities that facilitates social reform. Thus A
Maggot offers Fowles most progressive text in terms of its alternative
and multiple visions of reality.
Through these various uses of the visual, Fowles illustrates
Denzins summary of the gaze:
A gaze is not simply voyeuristic. It is regulated, has a trajectory, and

evokes emotions and conduct which are differentially reciprocated,
and erotic. A gaze may be active, or passive, direct, or indirect and
indifferent . Finally, every gaze is regulated, structured by
underlying systems of power and gender. 57
57
Ibid., 48.
Neither unproblematically feminist nor entirely traditional in his

depictions of women and in his explorations of multiple perspectives,
Fowles offers in his fiction a complex narrative experience that
intensifies as a number of ideological systems compete and intersect.
Furthermore, his work depends upon the tension created by these
intersections for its force and seductive intensity.
What is particularly provocative for the feminist reader of Fowles
is this tension between authorial control and interpretive freedom,
between hegemonic discourse and multiple marginalized points of
view. His earlier fiction seems to be characterized much more clearly
by fragmentation and voyeuristic vision, while his later novels appear
to be more concerned with whole sight and alternative visions and
views. While authorial control seems to be a primary concern in the
early work, questioning the legitimacy of such control becomes more
central in the later novels. Over time, Fowles becomes more genuinely
committed to exploring multiple perspectives, and less inclined to
force readers into particular identifications or into the search for a
singular vision. In other words, as he and his work mature, Fowles
seems to develop a more complex standpoint, less dominated solely
by mens concerns.
A curious, feminist, resistant reading of Fowles fiction, then, must
interrogate instances of coercion and authorial manipulation,
especially as those practices circumscribe women readers and
characters, but must also explore those occasions of authorial self-
reflexivity and genuine multiplicity that enable women characters and
readers to examine their own perspectives and assert their own
standpoints. To interpret Fowles fiction through this resistant feminist
reading practice, to gaze upon his body of work from a womans and a
feminists standpoint, is to recognize that, as Haraway eloquently
comments, Vision is always a question of the power to see and
perhaps of the violence implicit in our visualizing practices. 58 If the
feminist critic notes that Fowles visual inscriptions are often violently
invasive (or evasive, as the case may be), her interrogating gaze must
also acknowledge its own potential for violence. Rather than violently
dissecting Fowles fiction in an effort to diffuse its seductive
58
circumscription of women, the feminist critic, if committed to a

curious collaborative exploration, might uncover the explosive
potential of his innovative employment of the visual, and might
discover that in looking through the lenses he offers in his latest
fiction, women, like Pandora, can become both the site of enigma and
the source of its decipherment.
CHAPTER ONE
OBJECTIFICATION AND EXPLOITATION:

VICTIMIZED PERSPECTIVES IN THE COLLECTOR
Focused on the criminal actions of a voyeur, The Collector provides a

perfect opportunity for a feminist interrogation of Fowles early
coercive and manipulative use of the visual in his fiction. As his most
conventional novel, The Collector exploits the familiar trope of a
beautiful, idealized woman (art student Miranda Grey) held captive by
a powerful but troubled madman (clerk and pools winner Frederick
Clegg) through a detailed account of Mirandas kidnapping, captivity,
and eventual death. As a psychological thriller, The Collector uses the
suspenseful, disjunctive, and fragmented observations made by both
the captor and the captive; as a more conscientious social analysis, it
explores the tyranny of class consciousness and exposes the total
estrangement of people from different social locations. Both horrified
by and sympathetic to his disturbed antihero, Fowles suggests in The
Collector that the violence and ignorance embodied in Clegg are
endemic to a society fractured by rigid stratifications, and illustrates
the impossibility of communication across social, economic, and
cultural boundaries.
This respectable agenda, however, operates problematically
through extensive manipulation of readers and through the troubling
treatment (both by Clegg and by Fowles) of Miranda. Although the
novel presents two opposing viewpoints by including both Cleggs
journals and Mirandas diary, which suggests an effort to balance
multiple perspectives, Mirandas imprisonment within Cleggs
domain and the confinement of her narrative between Cleggs
accounts instead emphasize her status as a victim and an object. Even
as Fowles ensures that readers prefer Mirandas aesthetic sensibilities
and attempts at self-reflection to Cleggs rationalizations, his obvious
use of her as a mouthpiece for both his own philosophical musings
and the convictions of his fictional surrogate, G.P., undermines the
legitimacy of her commentary and the force of her insights as a

woman. Although Miranda argues that she grows as an individual and
begins to achieve an authentic standpoint during her imprisonment,
the problematic imposition of these mens views instead restricts
Miranda within a pervasive pornographic ideology as her perspective
becomes lifeless and she becomes a site for voyeuristic objectification.
Imprisoned by Clegg and invalidated by Fowles, Miranda becomes
most compelling as a woman not through her standpoint, but through
her status as a victim. While The Collector artfully examines the
limitations of rigid points of view and attempts to incorporate the
insights of a woman character, it exploits rather than explores a
womans standpoint, and offers no alternative vision to the troubling
pornographic objectification and fragmented disjunction of its
characters socially conditioned interactions.
The Collector opens with surreptitious observation, as Clegg
records his initial sightings of Miranda leaving her home, in a queue
at the library, reading on the train for both his and the readers
vicarious enjoyment. As Katherine Tarbox has noted, Clegg has
camera eyes; he sees everything from a distance, voyeuristically,
and his opening observations, as they are presented to the reader,
resemble an Alfred Hitchcock film where a long lens sweeps high
over a city and gradually lowers to pick the victims face out of a
crowd. 1 These initial observations instantly establish the cinematic
quality of the novel and invite readers to participate in transgressive
visual practices. Simultaneously penetrating both Mirandas assumed
anonymity in a crowd (and, as Tarbox suggests, identifying her as a
victim) and presenting Cleggs introspections in his private journal,
the first few pages of The Collector implicate readers in two
traditional forms of voyeurism: spying on a pretty girl, and reading
someone elses diary. 2 In fact, the entire novel is based upon these two
voyeuristic activities. Readers apprehend the world of the novel only
through the mediating and private visions of Clegg, who watches
1
Katherine Tarbox, The Art of John Fowles, Athens, GA: University of Georgia
Press, 1988, 48-49.
2
Though most commentators of the novel note only the invasion of privacy
perpetrated in reading Mirandas diary, Robert Huffaker (John Fowles, Boston, MA:
Twayne Publishers, 1980) notes that like Mirandas diary, Cleggs journals seem a
personal process not intended for a third party (89).
Victimized Perspectives in The Collector 51
Miranda, and later Miranda, who occasionally watches Clegg but

more often reflects on herself.
Through the first person narrative used in both Cleggs journals
and Mirandas diary, readers perceive the events of the novel as Clegg
and Miranda want to present them a circumstance that encourages
reader identification and sympathy. 3 Such sympathy facilitates the
social agenda that Fowles advances in The Collector, which relies
largely on readers recognizing the conditions that create Clegg and
allow him to act on his violent and criminal fantasies without remorse.
By imprisoning them within Cleggs perspectives, Fowles coerces
readers into viewing Cleggs abhorrent actions through his own
perceptions. However, he simultaneously encourages readers to reject
Cleggs justification of his violent, criminal actions and recognize the
skewed nature of his presentation.
This tension is increased, rather than eased, by the inclusion of
Mirandas point of view. A refreshing change from Cleggs attempts
to rationalize and justify his behavior, Mirandas diary provides a
radically different view of the novels events, as well as some
compelling aesthetic, political, and philosophical reflections. Unlike
Clegg, Miranda is neither criminal nor repulsive, and her infinitely
more sane contemplations, aimed at self-exploration rather than self-
justification, encourage readers to give more credence to Mirandas
version of events. Though more impressionistic than Cleggs account,
Mirandas diary contributes significantly to readers comprehension of
the novels events by offering a thoughtful analysis of the situation
and the motives of both captor and captive. 4
However, the inclusion of Mirandas account ultimately
emphasizes the fragmentary nature of the novel and the total
disjunction of the characters competing perspectives. As Perry
Nodelman explains, both Cleggs and Mirandas accounts are
incredibly claustrophobic and self-involved. 5 Though the two
accounts do occasionally overlap, providing multiple interpretations of
the same incidents, they are motivated by such radically divergent
objectives that it is difficult to reconcile their perceptions into a
3
Charles Garard, Point of View in Fiction and Film: Focus on John Fowles, New
York: Peter Lang, 1991, 28.
4
Olshen, John Fowles, 21.
5
Perry Nodelman, John Fowless Variations in The Collector, Contemporary
Literature, XXVIII/3 (Fall 1987), 335.
cohesive whole. Instead, The Collector demonstrates an almost

complete disconnection between a mans progress reports and a
womans journey into self-awareness. Indeed, a majority of Mirandas
diary is neither an analysis of her current imprisonment nor an attempt
to understand Clegg, but rather a reinterpretation of her previous
experiences as an art student, and in particular her experiences with
her suitor/mentor, G.P. Because so much of Mirandas diary concerns
events and characters unknown to Clegg, its contents are unverifiable
except for the psychological importance their recording has for
Miranda. In this sense, readers of The Collector have no reason to
approach Mirandas diary with any less suspicion than they approach
Cleggs journals both records are patently designed to persuade an
imagined outside reader (and of course, the authors themselves) of
their authors logic, virtue, and vulnerability. Essentially, Cleggs
journals and Mirandas diary are both self-serving, self-justifying
documents designed specifically to demonstrate how little the author
is understood by others, and the sequence of these documents
demonstrates unequivocally that neither character has any meaningful
comprehension of the others motives, values, or point of view.
Indeed, one of the most noticeable characteristics of the novel is
the extent to which its main characters fail to understand each other
a failure that results as much from the characters similarities as it
does from their differences. The characters conformity to the values,
prejudices, and ontologies of their respective social locations
determines both their initial interpretations of each other and their
inability to evaluate thoughtfully the accuracy of those interpretations.
Lacking in self-awareness and imprisoned by the values and
assumptions they have merely absorbed from family, friends,
colleagues, and experiences, 6 Clegg and Miranda both elicit readers
sympathy, if not for their response to their socioeconomic
circumstances, then at least for the frustrations and anxieties inherent
to those situations.
While Cleggs journals suggest little interest in comprehending
Miranda and even less interest in confronting his own neuroses,
however, Mirandas diary appears to reflect a genuine desire both to
increase her self-awareness and to examine her preconceived notions
6
Ibid., 339.
about Clegg. This desire to interrogate her previously unquestioned

attitudes contributes to the authenticity and believability of Mirandas
version of events. Despite his voyeuristic practices, Clegg is a less
precise observer than Miranda. As Thomas C. Foster notes: The best
he can do, often, is to describe the disgust he thinks he perceives in
others, while Miranda can describe his movements, his gestures, his
tone of voice, and his conversational gambits better than he can. 7
Nevertheless, Miranda never achieves a coherent or thorough
understanding of her captor or of her imprisonment, largely because of
her almost exclusive focus on herself. Even in conjunction with
Cleggs account, Mirandas diary offers only unreliable, self-indulgent
impressions as her admission to cheating when recording a
conversation with Clegg emphasizes 8 and fragmentary insights into
Cleggs motivations and their mutual alienation. As Miranda
summarizes, Its all bits and pieces (126).
The disconnection, fragmentation, and utter impossibility of
communication between Miranda and Clegg, as Foster argues, result
from the many oppositions in the circumstances they inhabit. 9 These
dichotomies create an insurmountable divide between Miranda and
Clegg, neither of whom is able or willing to appreciate the alternate
ontology of their respective Other. Miranda asserts, He is absolutely
inferior to me in all ways. His one superiority is his ability to keep me
here. Thats the only power he has (238). This unique situation of
dominance defines the status of Miranda and Clegg as mutual
outsiders within. Outside of Cleggs domain, Miranda has access to
dominant ideology, while Clegg does not; inside his domain, Cleggs
ideology is the only ideology, and Miranda finds herself at a
disadvantage, struggling to understand the values and rules of this new
social milieu. Confined together in the prison Clegg has created for his
guest Miranda, both characters are exposed to the ontological
realities of the other, yet they remain totally isolated from and totally
inaccessible to each other as they view one another across a chasm of
social categories.
The most pervasive distinction between Miranda and Clegg is that
of class, which determines, at least to some degree, nearly every
interaction between the two characters, especially as Clegg struggles
7
Foster, Understanding John Fowles, 30.
8
John Fowles, The Collector, Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1963, 141.
9
to explain his perceptions and Miranda attempts to improve him.

Throughout the novel, both characters rely on socially conditioned
class consciousness, viewing each other as manifestations of their
prejudices and ideals and consequently failing to develop any
meaningful interaction. Both characters are acutely aware of
Mirandas higher socio-economic status and attendant privileges, and
both characters assume Mirandas general superiority. Yet despite her
advanced education, her sympathetic disposition, and her certainty
that Clegg can shake off the disadvantages of his past, Miranda firmly
and repeatedly categorizes Clegg as inferior, demeaning his interest in
butterfly collecting and dismissing the significance of his background.
Instead, Miranda suggests, Clegg should become an art collector and
benefactor for struggling artists, insisting, you could become
whatever you liked . Youve got to be a new human being. Clegg
is incredulous at this suggestion, commenting, She sort of pushed out
her face at me, as if it was something easy I could do, but wouldnt.
Almost immediately after this moment, after Clegg rather mildly
expresses his inability to comprehend this fantasy, Miranda snaps at
him in a typical reversion to her categorical understanding of their
relationship: Then she said, Clegg reports, I always seem to end up
by talking down to you. I hate it. Its you. You always squirm one step
lower than I can go (79-80). Mirandas insistence on referring to
Clegg as Caliban (rather than Ferdinand, the alias he gives her) further
emphasizes not only her more sophisticated education and
appreciation of irony, but also her subconscious belief, despite her
efforts to improve him, that he is fundamentally substandard. Just as
Clegg idolizes Miranda because of her social location, Miranda
denigrates Clegg for his, and neither character is ultimately able to
consider the other as an individual distinct from rigid social
categories. This rigid class divide is so stark that Clegg considers it
the source of all that goes wrong with Miranda, even after she has died
from his neglect: as he considers his next victim, an ordinary
common shop-girl named Marian, he explains, that was my mistake
before, aiming too high, I ought to have seen that I could never get
what I wanted from someone like Miranda, with all her la-di-da ideas
and clever tricks (304). Even after her death, Clegg fails to see
Miranda as an individual and his interactions with her as anything
except a conflict of class consciousness.
This problem of consciousness is largely a problem of

communication Clegg and Miranda are quite unable to speak the
same language. Both characters have distinctive linguistic patterns
reflective of their class and education. Acutely aware of his lack of
sophistication, Clegg employs a fragmentary and eclectic use of
language, 10 relying heavily on euphemism and an almost paranoid
attempt at grammatical propriety, which disrupts narrative flow and to
Miranda sounds alternatively silly and disturbing. This unusual
fixation with linguistic propriety reflects Cleggs larger obsessions
with neatness, politeness, and prim social rituals that are totally
incongruous with his criminal actions. Miranda has terrible difficulty
reconciling this incongruity:
Why do you keep on using these stupid words nasty, nice, proper,
right? Why are you so worried about whats proper? Youre like a
little old maid who thinks marriage is dirty and everything except
weak cups of tea in a stuffy old room is dirty. Why do you take all the
life out of life? Why do you kill all the beauty? .... And what have you
done? Youve had a little dream, the sort of dream I suppose little
boys have and masturbate about, and you fall all over yourself being
nice to me so that you wont have to admit to yourself that the whole
business of my being here is nasty, nasty nasty (78-79)
One of her more perceptive moments, this incident demonstrates

Mirandas occasional ability to comprehend Cleggs psychology.
However, the exchange that immediately follows this outburst
indicates that despite Mirandas insight, these two characters suffer
from an almost complete inability to communicate:
This is no good, she said. I might be talking Greek.

I understand, I said. Im not educated.
She almost shouted. Youre so stupid. Perverse. (79)
Here, as throughout the novel, Clegg and Miranda speak at cross-

purposes. For Clegg, everything radiates from his socio-economic
status: he is not educated, he has not had Mirandas advantages or
privileges. These realities absolutely define his way of being, and his
absurd fixation with propriety, both behavioral and linguistic, follows
10
Salami, John Fowless Fiction and the Poetics of Postmodernism, 54.
directly from his belief that such propriety establishes his

respectability, regardless of his actions. Miranda, on the other hand,
having had few opportunities to reflect on the lived reality of lower
classes, lives conceptually and aesthetically, and repeatedly dismisses
the factors that determine Cleggs thoughts and consequent behavior.
In short, neither character uses a means of expression at all suitable
for communication with the other, and both assume that their failure to
communicate results from the others problematic use and/or
comprehension of language. Although both Clegg and Miranda reflect
on this problem, neither character accepts any responsibility for their
frustrating interactions. Miranda, for example, records a conversation
in which Clegg rehearses his oft-stated perception that Miranda does
not understand him (She could never see that [80], What she never
understood [101], It was almost like she was stupid, plain stupid
[109]). To Cleggs insistent You dont understand me at all, she
counters, Oh, yes I do (141), assuming that her perception is
superior to his, despite the fact that she never adequately understands
Clegg or his motivations.
This failure to communicate linguistically creates other failures in
the novel failure to escape, failure to please, failure to sustain a
relationship. More than any of Fowles other works of fiction, The
Collector emphasizes the characters multiple failures without
implying significant, if mysterious, successes. As Evelyn Fox Keller
argues: Sharing a language means more than knowing the right
names by which to call things; it means knowing the right syntax in
which to pose claims and questions, and even more importantly it
means sharing a more or less agreed-upon understanding of what
constitute legitimate questions and meaningful answers. 11 Lacking
not only shared linguistic paradigms but, more importantly, shared
conceptions of meaningful communication in general, Clegg and
Miranda completely fail to achieve the progressive consultation that
Fox Keller and other standpoint theorists associate with the exchange
of outsider within perspectives. Unlike the hero/heroine pairs of
Fowles later novels, all of whom struggle to understand and
communicate with the opposite sex, Clegg and Miranda respond to
their experiences together not with insight or expanded consciousness
11
Keller, Reflections on Gender and Science, 130.
but with defensiveness and frustration. For Clegg, these feelings

inspire an exhibition of the selfish, rapacious, suspicious, obsessed
with control, sexually driven characteristics that Foster identifies as
the worst aspects of rampant masculinity. 12 Miranda likewise
demonstrates a number of unattractive qualities typically associated
with femininity: vanity, naivet, hypocrisy, immaturity, inconsistency.
These stereotypical and confrontational responses ultimately
determine the violent, criminal, and static nature of their relationship.
The incredible extent to which these two people, confined in a
relatively small space and isolated from all outside influence, totally
fail to reach any mutual comprehension of one another frustrates not
only Clegg and Miranda but also readers of the novel, who because of
the self-serving and fiercely subjective nature of the novels diary
format cannot assume that their interpretations of the characters are
not subject to constant authorial manipulation. Clegg clearly wishes to
justify his behavior, and because of the nature of that behavior,
readers might assume reasonably that his actions toward Miranda are
worse than he reports. Likewise, Mirandas admission to cheating in
her recording of conversations with Clegg and her constant
denigration of his class-conscious primness emphasize both her
idealism and her vanity, suggesting that her reflections are at best
nave. Above all, The Collector is an exceptionally claustrophobic
novel, creating a disturbing sense of confinement for readers who
cannot escape the completely alienated and ultimately imperceptive
views of these two distressed characters. For all parties involved,
seeing clearly is simply impossible.
For both the characters and readers of the novel, this haziness of
vision results from a systematic process of objectification. Clegg and
Miranda never see one another as real, complex individuals, but
objectify one another as representatives of rigid economic and gender
categories. Cleggs early descriptions of Miranda immediately
establish her objectification, not only as a social superior but as a
thing of beauty, reducing her free and vital nature in his minds eye
to the status of an object, a specimen in a collection. 13 Recording
his sightings of her in the observations diary in which he records
butterfly sightings, Clegg describes Miranda as a rarity, a Pale
Clouded Yellow, for instance, not like the other ones, even the
12
13
pretty ones. More for the real connoisseur (3). These sightings
provide Clegg with immense pleasure, and convince him not only of
Mirandas physical beauty but of her general perfection. 14 Once he
has kidnapped her, he basks in this projected image despite her
objections:
I could sit there all night watching her, just the shape of her head and
the way the hair fell from it with a special curve, so graceful it was,
like the shape of a swallowtail. It was like a veil or a cloud, it would
lie like silk strands all untidy and loose but lovely over her shoulders
. She had a way of throwing it back when it had fallen too much
forward, it was just a simple natural movement. Sometimes I wanted
to say to her, please do it again, please let your hair fall forward and
toss it back. (65)
Cleggs fetishization of Mirandas hair is particularly noticeable in

this passage; her hair, with its fine, pale, golden, flowing strands
reminiscent of clouds and veils, represents the angelic image he has
created of her. Yet clearly, he is not looking at her, noticing, for
example, her fear, anguish, or desperation, or even her ordinariness
he even idealizes the beauty of her yawning and stretching (66). This
uncompromising idealism and fetishism prevent Clegg from coming
to understand Miranda as a complete and complex individual whom
John Campbell rightly describes as a frequently inconsistent,
sometimes irritable, impossibly idealistic, rather snobbish fair-weather
socialist. 15 Committed to his unrealistic fantasy of Miranda, Clegg
cannot see her for who she is. As she realizes, Miranda is an exquisite
item in Cleggs collection: The sheer joy of having me under his
power, of being able to spend all and every day staring at me. He
doesnt care what I say or how I feel my feelings are meaningless to
him its the fact that hes got me (171).
Cleggs desire to possess Miranda as he would a valuable specimen
clearly establishes his madness, characterized by a perverse
attachment to and idealization of the visual image. Acutely aware of
how Miranda looks, both up close and at a distance, and especially
14
John Campbell, Moral Sense and The Collector: The Novels of John Fowles,
Critical Quarterly, XXV/1 (Spring 1983), 49.
15
Ibid., 49.
cognizant of viewing opportunities, Clegg is also conscious of himself

as a visual object. In fact, this awareness becomes paranoia,
preventing him from getting Miranda necessary medical attention.
Afraid that his madness is inscribed on his body, Clegg flees a
doctors waiting room:
I must have looked daft in the room, with all the people looking at me
.... Well, they all seemed to be looking at me, I hadnt the nerve to go
straight through to the doctor so I stood by the wall. If only I could
have gone straight in Id have done it, everything would have been all
right, it was having to be with all those other people in that room. I
hadnt been in a room with other people for a long time, only in and
out of shops, it felt strange, as I say, they all seemed to look at me, one
old woman especially wouldnt take her eyes off me, I thought I must
look peculiar in some way. (289)
Later, reflecting on this experience both literally and figuratively,

Clegg examines himself in a mirror:
I thought I was going mad, I kept on looking in the mirror and trying
to see it in my face. I had this horrible idea, I was mad, everyone else
could see it, only I couldnt. I kept remembering how people in Lewes
seemed to look at me sometimes, like the people in that doctors
waiting-room. They all knew I was mad. (297)
Therefore it is not only Cleggs inability to see Miranda as a complete

individual, but also his inability to see himself as such, that creates the
fragmentary, disconnected interactions between them. 16 Constrained
by his background and socio-economic situation, seeing himself only
as an object for ridicule and abuse, Clegg becomes obsessed with an
object of beauty. He can present both Miranda and himself only as
such objects, and his narrative completely lacks descriptions that
might allow readers to see either character more completely.
Miranda, however, appears to produce some compelling personal
insights, which seduce readers into accepting her claim to have
significantly grown as an individual during her imprisonment. Yet just
as Miranda cheats in recording her conversations with Clegg, Fowles
cheats in his presentation of Miranda, who turns out to be little more
16
than a mouthpiece for his philosophical and political ideals. 17 Miranda

spouts her recitation of Fowles values most clearly as she comes to
identify with and fully subscribe to the aesthetic and political leanings
of her suitor/mentor, G.P. Throughout her narrative, Miranda criticizes
Clegg by reciting G.P.s values, analyses, and complaints. Although
Miranda remembers disagreements with G.P., as her imprisonment
lengthens she increasingly accepts his point of view, eventually
coming to trust his insight and denigrate her own:
I keep on thinking of him: of things he said and I said, and how we

neither of us really understood what the other meant. No, he
understood, I think. He counts possibilities so much faster than I can.
(165)
Mirandas willingness to assume that G.P. understood her despite her

inability to understand him strikingly contrasts her attitude toward
Clegg, about whom she makes an opposite assumption: she believes
she understands him, but that he could never understand her.
These assumptions proceed from Mirandas hierarchical
understanding of the world, of a division between the Few and the
Many. The distinction between these two categories occupies a central
place in Fowles philosophy, as outlined in detail in The Aristos, the
philosophical treatise Fowles originally published just a year after the
publication of The Collector. In Mirandas understanding, G.P. clearly
falls into the former category despite his predatory sexual exploitation
of women and his total self-absorption, and Clegg, who embodies
similar vices but lacks G.P.s artistic aesthetic, falls into the latter
category. Because she identifies with and strives to be one of the Few,
Miranda assumes that role in her interactions with Clegg. This
philosophy further cements her sense of superiority and readers
preference for Mirandas point of view. In this way Fowles ensures
that readers will sympathize not only with Mirandas imprisonment,
but also with her social, political, philosophical, and aesthetic
opinions, all of which conform rather strikingly to Fowles own
ideals. 18 The commandments stated in The Aristos range from elitist
artistic commitments to Socialist politics, and Mirandas opinions
17
Olshen, John Fowles, 24-25.
18
most obviously reflect dictates both to accept ones Englishness and to

cauterize ones background. 19 Such opinions privilege Mirandas
perspective, infusing it with a layered consciousness that compares
favorably with Cleggs highly subjective account. 20
However, Mirandas layered perspective is not always obvious,
and often her recitations of G.P.s (and Fowles) views are initially
offered to readers as though they are Mirandas own thoughts. In these
instances, she acknowledges the source of these ideas offhandedly, in
parentheses, with phrases like, G.P.s words, and these are all
G.P.s words and ideas (172). These offhand citations are so casual
that readers predisposed to trust Mirandas account and to watch her
overcome her circumstances through self-improvement could easily
interpret her acceptance of G.P.s ideas as merely part of a process of
self-definition. Particularly for those readers who are unfamiliar with
The Aristos, Mirandas emerging point of view may seem bold,
idealistic, and authentic. However, Mirandas subjectivity never
escapes or evolves beyond G.P.s influence; the perspective she
embodies is essentially not her own, but his.
The lack of an authentic womans standpoint in Mirandas diary is
perhaps most obvious when she finally decides that G.P.s
unapologetic promiscuity (something she refers to earlier as His
Fault (223)) is in fact a virtue:
His promiscuity is creative. Vital. Even though it hurts. He creates

love and life and excitement around him; he lives, the people he loves
remember him. (265)
Feminist readers in particular must balk at this blatant self-sacrificing

adulation for rampant male virility, representative of Mirandas more
general internalization of patriarchal norms. Indeed, careful readers,
feminist or not, might note that this is a complete reversal of attitude
on Mirandas part. Earlier, she records a conversation with G.P. in
which he attempts both to justify his promiscuity and to chastise
Miranda for her refusal to go to bed with him. During the course of
this conversation, Miranda recalls, she recognized G.P.s apparent
disregard for the possibility that she might identify with other women,
noting that he spoke as if I was another man (186).
19
John Fowles, The Aristos, Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1964, 152-53.
20
Garard, Point of View in Fiction and Film: Focus on John Fowles, 33.
In this episode, Miranda realizes that G.P. is attempting to

circumscribe her actions: I was thinking, she reports, I shouldnt let
him talk like this, hes drawing a net round me. I didnt think it, I felt
it (187). This comment reveals a remarkable insight proceeding
directly from a womans standpoint: applying G.P.s abstract
considerations, which she identifies as typical of male attitudes toward
sex, to her own situation in considering a sexual relationship with
G.P., Miranda recognizes the double bind in which this masculine
logic places her. If she does sleep with him, she relinquishes any claim
to his fidelity; if she doesnt sleep with him, she places herself into the
category of what G.P. calls people like your bloody aunt who will
never understand his genius, his passion, his uncompromising
frankness. In short, here Miranda recognizes that G.P. forces an
uncompromising choice: she can be an open-minded, aesthetically
correct whore or a narrow-minded, aesthetically incorrect prude.
Miranda refuses to give in to this logic, trusting her own instincts and
analyses. These ways of knowing are confirmed when Miranda
discovers G.P. in bed with her friend Toinette, a fellow student whose
promiscuity reflects exactly the internalization of masculine logic G.P.
appreciates. Feeling betrayed, Miranda comments that after this event,
her relationship with G.P. was never the same (191).
Yet Miranda seems to forget her outrage as her imprisonment
lengthens. Secluded from all except Clegg and engaged in a process of
self-exploration, Miranda concludes not that she was right to reject
G.P.s sexual advances, but that G.P.s philosophy is beautiful.
Certainly, she comes to this decision chiefly by comparing G.P. to
Clegg, and considering her experiences, G.P. can hardly lose in this
comparison. Although G.P. attempts to indoctrinate Miranda, he also
respects her resistance to his philosophy as a display of individual
authenticity. Clegg, on the other hand, sees Miranda only as an ideal
object of adoration and cannot acknowledge that she may have
complex motivations and attitudes about men or sex. Nor can he
acknowledge that his attraction to her may reflect a problematic
attitude toward women in general.
Foster argues that Cleggs sexual problems are rooted in misogyny,
citing his marked dislike for his female family members, most notably
his mother, whom he has been told was a whore. 21 If these women
represent the worst of women, Miranda represents the best, 22 at least
until Clegg actually captures her. Once he interacts with Miranda, he
begins to see faults he considers typical of women, considering her a
young student, nun, whore, harpy, or princess, by turns. 23 Initially,
he places her on a pedestal, and enforces a strict personal regimen
under which he must treat her with absolute gentility. He praises
himself for this behavior, repeatedly noting his virtuous self-restraint:
I know what some would think, they would think my behaviour

peculiar. I know most men would only have thought of taking an
unfair advantage and there were plenty of opportunities. I could have
[d]one what I liked, but I am not that sort, definitely not that sort at
all. (100)
While Miranda notes this restraint with some relief, Cleggs apparent
lack of sexual desire for her both confuses and frightens her: if he
doesnt want her for sex, she wonders, what does he want her for?
Confused by Cleggs treatment and unable to identify his desires,
Miranda attempts to seduce him. Hoping that sex will foster better
communication and ultimately her freedom, Miranda steels herself for
a sexual encounter with Clegg. This is an extreme personal
compromise for Miranda, and as an escape strategy it backfires
completely. Never understanding the force of Cleggs extremely
polarized sexual idealism, Miranda does not anticipate the shame, and
then anger, with which Clegg greets her seduction. It is after this scene
that Clegg comments on Mirandas plain stupidity; relenting slightly,
he continues:
Of course she wasnt really [stupid], it was just that she didnt see how
to love me in the right way. There were a lot of ways she could have
pleased me. She was like all women, she had a one-track mind. I never
respected her again. (109)
Rather than drawing them closer, this failed seduction further alienates
Miranda and Clegg. More importantly, once Miranda has displayed
open and unashamed sexuality, she loses Cleggs obsessively proper
21
22
23
respect, plummeting from being a princesse lointaine to being one of

what Clegg terms the other sort, from Virgin Mary to Eve, from
hygienic female icon to incarnate seductress and whore. 24
This constraining masculine logic, which situates all women as
either virgins or whores, parallels G.P.s similar philosophy. In this
case, however, Miranda has betrayed her principles and her instincts.
The next morning, she reacts to Cleggs change in behavior toward
her with some anger of her own:
It makes me furious. Nobody could ever understand how much I put

into yesterday. The effort of giving, of risking, of understanding. Of
pushing back every natural instinct. Its him. And its this weird male
thing. Now Im no longer nice. They sulk if you dont give, and hate
you when you do. Intelligent men must despise themselves for being
like that. (262)
Indeed, G.P.s acknowledgement of this failing is largely responsible

for Mirandas generous attitude toward him: he is, if nothing else,
honest. Even G.P.s affair with Toinette becomes tolerable after the
failed seduction attempt, when Miranda decides, love is beautiful,
any love. Even just sex. The only thing that is ugly is this frozen
lifeless utter lack-love between Caliban and me (265). Yet Miranda
is coerced into accepting G.P.s uncompromising promiscuity,
condoning such behavior not because it truly embodies her own
attitudes and ideals, but because it is more tolerable than Cleggs
abusive and destructive sexual idealism.
Mirandas reconsideration of G.P.s sexual ideals also reflects
some of her troubling conceptions of romantic relationships, which are
particularly striking as she fantasizes about G.P.:
Ive been daydreaming (not for the first time) about living with G.P.
He deceives me, he leaves me, he is brutal and cynical with me, I am
in despair. In these daydreams there isnt much sex, its just our living
together. In rather romantic surroundings . We are together, very
close in spirit. All silly magazine stuff, really, in the details. But there
is the closeness of spirit. That is something real. And the situations I
imagine (where he forsakes me) are real. I mean, it kills me to think of
them. (253)
24
Mirandas conception of life with G.P. mirrors Cleggs fantasy of life

with Miranda, which includes mutual love, both for each other and for
Cleggs butterfly collection, a modern home, and social gatherings in
which Clegg and Miranda are popular hosts. Both characters
daydream about living with their partner, physically and emotionally
but not sexually close, romantically situated within silly magazine
settings. The similarity of Mirandas fantasy to Cleggs suggests a
disturbing parallel between their general understandings of romantic
relationships. The major difference between Cleggs fantasy and
Mirandas is their conception of the effects of their romantic
arrangements; while Clegg imagines other men all green round the
gills (4), Miranda imagines herself abused and betrayed. This image
of herself as the forsaken woman, brutalized, deceived, and abandoned
by G.P., is particularly disturbing because it is not the result of
practical analysis of G.P.s potential as a mate, but the result of
fantasies in which real closeness of spirit is intimately connected
with psychological abuse.
Feminist readers in particular must note this problematic
conception of womens role in romantic relationships, which
historically has led to abuse in the forms of rape, incest, and domestic
violence. Indeed, feminists have argued for some time that it is
precisely because women have been socialized to believe in the
patriarchal ideology that suggests that women deserve or are ennobled
by abuse that they accept such abuse from their partners. Even beyond
romantic relationships, Mirandas ideal of womens endurance seems
to reflect a masculine ideology. After again fantasizing about being
hurt, lost, battered and buffeted by G.P. (266), Miranda exalts:
The power of women! Ive never felt so full of mysterious power.

Men are a joke. Were so weak physically, so helpless with things.
Still, even today. But were stronger than they are. We can stand their
cruelty. They cant stand ours. (267)
Certainly the endurance to withstand mens cruelty is a less than ideal

virtue for women, and it is hard to imagine women readers, and
especially feminist readers, being convinced that Miranda speaks from
an authentic, politically and intellectually informed womans
standpoint here. Instead, this perspective seems to reflect a masculine
ideology that relies on womens simultaneous weakness and
endurance, their reliance on men and their ability to tolerate mens

abusive behavior.
After basking in womens ability to endure abuse, Miranda
decides, I will give myself to G.P. He can have me. And whatever he
does to me I shall still have my woman-me he can never touch (267).
This statement parallels Mirandas earlier admission that her
attempted seduction of Clegg was exciting in a nasty perverted way
because it represented A woman-in-me reaching to a man-in-him
(259). Perhaps more than any of Mirandas disquieting conceptions of
sexuality and gender, this essentialism communicates most clearly
Fowles own ideology. Mirandas assertion that women possess
something essentially mysterious, inexplicable, and untouchable
summarizes precisely Fowles fascination with them. In fact, it is this
mysteriousness that Fowles values above all other aspects of
womanhood; it determines the eroticism through which all of his men
characters perceive his women characters, as well as the details of
their sexual encounters. In his fiction, these encounters are described
physically and psychologically, nearly always from a mans
perspective, retaining the veil of secrecy around womens essential
mystery. In contrast, Fowles admits to having written a pornographic
novel, but feeling that he had made an error of bad taste, not
because of the subject matter of the text but rather because, It broke
that secret, bared the hidden part, Fowles burnt this novel out of a
feeling of blasphemy. 25
It is through Mirandas fantasies and eventual acceptance of G.P.s
(and Fowles) ideologies that Fowles exploits what appears on the
surface to be a womans perspective. Miranda offers not an authentic
womans standpoint, but a point of view reflective of internalized
masculine ideologies. Within her diary, this male discourse functions
abstractly, ideologically; within the novel as a whole, Fowles imposes
masculine ideologies literally, as Mirandas diary is confined within
Cleggs narrative, which begins before Mirandas and resumes after
it, surrounding and containing her narrative as a counterpart to her
captivity. 26 Unable to communicate with Clegg, even to the extent
that she cannot convince him to get her medical attention, Miranda
25
James R. Baker, John Fowles: The Art of Fiction CIX, in Conversations with
John Fowles, ed. Vipond, 191.
26
James Acheson, John Fowles, New York: St Martins Press, 1998, 10.
dies a prisoner. Likewise, her diary ultimately ends up in Cleggs

hands, and Fowles presents it to the reader as only a part of Cleggs
larger story. Through this editorial decision, Miranda is denied even
the opportunity to present her perspective without defensive,
responsive commentary from Clegg, who complains, I found her
diary which shows she never loved me, she only thought of herself
and the other man all the time (303). Even Mirandas most private,
intensive, and final thoughts are subject to Cleggs censoring,
judgmental comments, and in this final complaint Clegg silences
Miranda forever.
By manipulating her perspective in these ways, Fowles invalidates
Mirandas insights as a woman. In this interpretation, Miranda is far
less compelling a character than critics have generally assumed.
Although her narrative challenges Cleggs account and enacts a
dramatic process of consciousness-raising, Miranda asserts a
philosophy appropriated from G.P.s and Fowles experiences instead
of the kind of situated politics and knowledge that marginalized
groups develop explicitly from their own socially devalued lives
instead of from nowhere or from somebody elses life. 27 In fact,
denied an authentic womans standpoint, Miranda becomes
compelling for readers chiefly through her suffering. Indeed, The
Collector is constructed explicitly for readers to witness her
victimization. Beyond encouraging readers to enjoy penetrating the
private space of Mirandas diary, Fowles showcases Mirandas
humiliation and violation on a number of occasions. Fowles describes,
for example, Mirandas failed seduction of Clegg in both characters
accounts, requiring readers to observe Mirandas humiliation in detail
not once, but twice.
More disquieting, however, is Fowles pornographic presentation
of Miranda. This representation relies on Cleggs descriptions of and
violations of Miranda, as he reduces her to a collection of
dehumanized fragments. From his initial observations of Miranda, to
his descriptions of her activities in captivity, and finally to the
pornographic photographs he takes of her, Clegg fetishizes Mirandas
body parts and exercises control over her by refusing to see her as a
whole individual. Part of this fragmentation results from Cleggs
stereotypical gender ideology, in which women (good women, that is,
27
Harding, Whose Science? Whose Knowledge?, 273.
not the other sort) are weak and pure, requiring protection and
strength from men. This ideology informs Cleggs initial fantasy of
kidnapping Miranda:
It began where she was being attacked by a man and I ran up and
rescued her. Then somehow I was the man that attacked her, only I
didnt hurt her; I captured her and drove her off in the van to a remote
house and there I kept her captive in a nice way. Gradually she came
to know me and like me and the dream grew into the one about our
living in a nice modern house, married, with kids and everything.
(14) 28
Cleggs dominance is key to this fantasy, as he either functions as her

protector or her abuser. In both cases, he functions as a dominant man
exercising power over a submissive woman. This ideology extends to
sexuality. Before his kidnap of Miranda, Clegg achieves erotic
stimulation only in situations where he is completely dominant, as in
masturbating while looking at books of stark women and all that
(10). When confronted with a real woman, however, he is no good,
as when he attempts to prove his virility and normality with a
prostitute (9). His impotence with the prostitute, and later, with
Miranda, is directly connected to both his extremely polarized sexual
idealism and his sense of control the completeness of which
determines his ability to fulfill his ideal of masculinity. Acceptable
sexuality for Clegg requires masculine dominance and feminine
submission; if those roles are reversed, he is both unwilling and
unable to engage in sexual acts.
Although Cleggs madness and criminal behavior implicitly
suggest that his psychology is disturbed and his ideology is
problematic, Fowles reinforces Cleggs conception of sexual relations
through Mirandas own fantasies. Mirandas association of romance
and abuse is compounded by her full expectation of abusive treatment
from Clegg. Confused about his motives for kidnapping her, Miranda
repeatedly questions Clegg about his sexual interest in her. Despite
Cleggs protestations, Miranda assumes that having sex with Clegg
28
Such admissions reveal Fowles sympathy with his antihero; this fantasy in
particular mirrors almost exactly Fowles early sexual fantasies (Warburton, John
Fowles, 219).
will facilitate her escape, and attempts to give herself to him, thereby
fulfilling not only what she believes is Cleggs sexual fantasy but
fulfilling her own expectations of sexual relationships as well.
However, Clegg reads this sexual invitation not as submissive, but as
threateningly aggressive. Mirandas attempted seduction of Clegg is
exactly the wrong strategy for escape, since it shatters Cleggs ideal of
Mirandas purity; affiliates Miranda disturbingly with Cleggs absent,
negligent, and supposedly promiscuous mother; and, most
importantly, threatens his total control of the situation.
In fact, even before the attempted seduction, Miranda has already
proven herself a legitimate threat to Cleggs dominance, compelling
him to mistreat her. After a particularly close escape attempt, Clegg
chloroforms Miranda and, despite his earlier protestations that he is
not that sort at all, does what he likes with her. He details the scene
at length with a cinematic eye:
She looked a sight, the dress all off one shoulder. I dont know what it
was, it got me excited, it gave me ideas, seeing her lying there right
out. It was like Id showed who was really the master. The dress was
right off her shoulder, I could see the top of one stocking. I dont
know what reminded me of it, I remembered an American film I saw
once (or was it a magazine) about a man who took a drunk girl home
and undressed her and put her to bed, nothing nasty, he just did that
and no more and she woke up in his pyjamas. So I did that. I took off
her dress and her stockings and left on certain articles, just the
brassirre and the other so as not to go the whole hog. She looked a
real picture lying there with only what Aunt Annie called strips of
nothing on . It was my chance I had been waiting for. I got the old
camera and took some photos, I would have taken more, only she
started to move a bit, so I had to pack up and get out quick. (91)
Stating explicitly that his act of physical violence (restraining and

chloroforming Miranda) was exciting specifically because it
demonstrated his dominance, Clegg links his gender ideology with his
sexuality dominant men are virile. In viewing Mirandas
undergarments, Clegg practices a traditional form of voyeurism,
which he links to a previous viewing of a sexually suggestive, if not
certainly pornographic, film. His uncertainty about the source of the
scenario of which his situation reminds him suggests that his
familiarity with such materials is extensive. Furthermore, Jacqueline
Costello notes, pornography inspires Clegg in violating Miranda:
Recalling the film establishes a precedent, thus permitting him to

undress Miranda. 29 In his repeated emphasis on how Miranda looks
while unconscious and undressed, Clegg distances himself from her as
an individual, commenting on how she looked a real picture. No
longer seeing her as a complete person, Clegg visualizes and
photographs Miranda as a pornographic object.
For Clegg, photography and pornography are virtually
interchangeable. Although he claims that he had always been
interested in photography and that his motivation for buying a camera
was to photograph butterflies, these claims are immediately preceded
by his admission to an interest in pornographic books and immediately
followed by his admission to a desire to photograph couples having
sex an interest he actively pursues (10, 18). Cleggs photography
serves an important voyeuristic function, stimulating him through the
exercise of control over others, whose private spaces he penetrates and
whose intimacy he violates. He justifies his photography by
emphasizing its innocence (Nothing nasty. Just couples (18)) and
relative lack of physical violence. About his photographing Miranda
unconscious, he says, About what I did, undressing her, when I
thought after, I saw it wasnt so bad; not many would have kept
control of themselves, just taken photos, it was almost a point in my
favour. Nevertheless, Clegg does not tell Miranda about this photo
session, despite the fact that he composes a letter apologizing for
using force to subdue her, and incredibly, he does not address this
letter because Dear Miranda seemed familiar (92). Having violated
her privacy and dignity, Clegg still acknowledges no intimacy with
Miranda, still perceiving her as merely an object and an image.
The more threatening Miranda becomes, the more she asserts
herself, the more ruthless Clegg becomes in his objectification and
abuse of her. Already getting pleasure from the photos he had taken
while Miranda was unconscious, Clegg notes the advantage of such
images: I could take my time with them. They didnt talk back at me
(109). Disturbed and motivated by the failed seduction scene, Clegg
unsuccessfully attempts to coerce Miranda into posing for
pornographic pictures, reasoning, You took your clothes off, you
29
Jacqueline Costello, The Prison-House of Culture: John Fowless The Collector,
Recovering Literature, XVII (1989-1990), 23.
asked for it. Now you got it. Mirandas disgusted refusal to pose for
such pictures reinforces Cleggs sense of reclaiming the upper hand in
their relationship, and he decides to punish her, commenting, I felt
happy, I cant explain, I saw I was weak before, now I was paying her
back for all the things she said and thought about me . she was the
one who was going to stay below in all senses and even if it wasnt
what she deserved in the beginning she had made it so that she did
now (114). That is, by challenging his control, and by extension his
masculinity, and especially by doing so sexually, Miranda has
convinced Clegg that she deserves any abuse he chooses to commit.
Intoxicated by his returning sense of power, Clegg misinterprets
Mirandas first signs of illness as acting, a misunderstanding made
worse by Mirandas earlier attempt to escape by faking illness. No
longer trusting or respecting her, Clegg chastises the truly ill Miranda
for her behavior, prompting her to complain, Oh, God youre not a
man, if only you were a man. This assertion destroys Cleggs tenuous
sense of control, pushing him beyond his endurance of her
antagonism. No longer willing or able to see Miranda as a decent
woman, and desperate to prove his manhood, Clegg makes an object
of her:
I said, all right, Im going to teach you a lesson. I had the cords in my
pocket and after a bit of a struggle I got them on her and then the gag,
it was her own fault if they were tight, I got her on a short rope tied to
the bed and then I went and fetched the camera and flash equipment
. I got her garments off and at first she wouldnt do as I said but in
the end she lay and stood like I ordered (I refused to take if she did not
co-operate). So I got my pictures. I took her till I had no more bulbs
left. (117-18)
Although not physically penetrated, Miranda clearly becomes the

victim of a rape in this scene as she is deprived of any agency, brutally
violated, bound, gagged, and abused until Clegg climaxes. With
Cleggs personal ineffectuality obliterated by the mechanical potency
of his camera, Pamela Cooper argues, the imagery of photography
identifies this movement from dubious veneration to violation as
essentially one of exposure not, as Clegg thinks, of Mirandas true
nature as a whore, but of his own sexual reverence as a matter of raw
power and the need to compel feminine submission to it. 30 Through

this rape, which he repeatedly characterizes as something Miranda
deserves, Clegg regains his sense of control, and with it restores his
manhood.
Once again secure in both his gender and sexual ideologies, Clegg
finds further pleasure in viewing and reviewing his images of
Miranda, describing the most pleasing of these photos as those with
her face cut off when she stood in high heels, from the back. The
tied hands to the bed made what they call an interesting motif. I can
say I was quite pleased with what I got (118). No longer idealizing
Miranda, Clegg finds special pleasure in those pictures that do not
show her hair, the fetishized symbol of his earlier veneration, and by
removing her face, Clegg further turns Miranda into a dehumanized,
fragmented object. Through pornography, Clegg restores his security
in mens power and womens weakness, mens virile dominance and
womens inert submission.
Although these pornographic activities occur against Mirandas
will, they fulfill, if in some exaggeration, both Cleggs and her own
expectations of gender roles and sexual intimacy, expectations that
mirror both characters conventional attitudes. Even in this extreme
instance of sexualized violence, Clegg and Miranda retain their
original opinions and prejudices. As Nodelman keenly argues:
[Miranda] is right to fear rape and violence, right to see the

relationships of men and women as a struggle for power. In a final
irony, Cleggs brutish treatment of her illness forces her to pervert the
new ideas she thinks she has espoused into her old prejudices; and
meanwhile, her attempt to act on her newfound freedom and seduce
Clegg is exactly what leads him to become the brute he had resisted
being before . Doomed from the start by their shared ideas about
sex and class, neither Miranda nor Clegg can grow because they can
do nothing but confirm for each other what they believe to be true
already. 31
Ultimately, Clegg and Miranda learn very little from their potentially
consciousness-raising relationship. Because of the attitudes they share,
30
Cooper, The Fictions of John Fowles, 27.
31
Nodelman, John Fowless Variations in The Collector, 343-44.
which posit them as opposites in nearly all social categories, their

experience as outsiders within has left them perpetually outside one
anothers ontological realities.
For readers, this relationship demonstrates the total impossibility of
anything except disconnection, fragmentation, and misunderstanding
between members of antagonistic social groups. Trapped within their
socially conditioned attitudes, Clegg and Miranda fail to achieve any
real depth as characters or as individuals. By refusing to offer readers
the consolation of meaningful communication or an exchange of truly
multiple perspectives between Clegg and Miranda, Fowles requires
readers to engage in transgressive visual practices that expose both
characters as one-dimensional, powerless creatures. This logic
suggests that like Miranda, Clegg is fundamentally not responsible
for his actions. The possessor is himself possessed; he is as much the
victim as the victimizer. 32 Through this presentation of mutual
victimization, Fowles suggests that individuals are largely unable to
transcend the limitations of their social conditioning, and are
ultimately at the mercy of the attitudes and opportunities of their
social locations.
This genuinely sympathetic social analysis, however, operates
through the spectacle of a womans imprisonment, violation, and
death. Forced to occupy Cleggs perspective during much of
Mirandas imprisonment and rape, readers can either accept the
vicarious enjoyment encouraged by Cleggs enthusiastic and detailed
descriptions, or reject that enjoyment, choosing instead to register
disgust. Critics have noted Fowles awareness of the tension in The
Collector between indulgence and exorcism of a masculine fantasy of
physical, psychological, and sexual domination. 33 For women readers
and feminist critics, however, this acknowledgement is inadequate,
particularly since a curious, resistant feminist reading of The Collector
demonstrates Mirandas complicit indulgence in this same fantasy.
Although in Fowles work pornography generally functions as a
symbolic motif representing the antiexistential, dehumanizing impulse
that lurks just beneath the surface of modern life and against which all
32
33
See Woodcock, Male Mythologies: John Fowles and Masculinity, 41, and Conradi,
John Fowles, 41.
moral men must rebel, 34 in this first novel Fowles offers no

alternative perspective that advocates this rebellion. In fact, by
aligning Mirandas ideals and expectations with the masculine
ideology that engenders her exploitation and victimization, he
invalidates Mirandas perspective, making her interesting only as a
victim of objectification and sexualized violence. Although his
inclusion of Mirandas perspective suggests a sincere interest in
exploring a womans standpoint, and his careful descriptions of
Cleggs egregious behavior suggest a genuine disgust with a
philosophy of masculine dominance, in The Collector Fowles
ultimately fails to explore his potential as what Angela Carter calls the
moral pornographer, who might use pornography as a critique of
current relations between the sexes and begin to penetrate to the
heart of the contempt for women that distorts our culture. 35 Instead,
too intent on his social agenda, Fowles manipulates both Miranda and
readers into accepting his own political and philosophical ideals,
constraining them within an essentially exploitative masculine
perspective.
34
William J Palmer, The Fiction of John Fowles: Tradition, Art, and the Loneliness of
Selfhood, Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 1974, 40.
35
Angela Carter, The Sadeian Woman, New York: Penguin, 1979, 19-20. Of course,
Carters concept of the moral pornographer may be impossible to achieve. Indeed,
Woodcock argues that the moral pornographer cannot exist in the current Western
social and political context: The moral pornographer may be identical with the
vicarious pornographer except in the pretence of exposing the very thing he indulges.
Both are notably dependent upon the response of their consumer for the final measure
of their function and this is delineated in a social context within which women are in
general subject to the manipulations of male power, a context impossible to step
outside (Male Mythologies: John Fowles and Masculinity, 151).
CHAPTER TWO
A CONFLICT OF GENDERED PERSPECTIVES:

VOYEURISM, VIOLENCE, AND SEDUCTION IN THE MAGUS
Rather than advancing specific social and political ideals, Fowles

second novel, The Magus, immerses readers in a tale so convoluted
and complex that they have employed an incredibly diverse range of
perspectives in response. 1 Narrated by Nicholas Urfe from an
unspecified present location, The Magus illustrates the narrators
complicated and mysterious experience on a Greek island as he
perceived it at the time. As Nicholas re-enacts his experience of what
he comes to know as the godgame, he subjects readers to a radically
disorienting, exciting, and disturbing psychodrama that calls his (and
the readers) values, prejudices, and ideals into question. Fowles has
suggested that Nicholas learns from these experiences, or at least
comes to some critical understanding of his ideological
shortcomings. 2 However, the continuing debate over Nicholas growth
suggests significant critical disagreement about the moral, social,
1
The first of Fowles novels to be conceived and initially written, The Magus was
first published after The Collector. However, a revised and now standard version was
published after Daniel Martin. This chapter examines this standard revised version,
but I have placed my discussion of The Magus in the original publication sequence
because of its decidedly fragmented nature and obsession with authorial control, both
more clearly associated with Fowles early works than with his later fiction. The
revisions of the 1978 version emphasize Fowles growing interest in whole sight, but
they do not significantly alter the visual practices encouraged by the original version.
2
In defending Nicholas, Fowles also reveals his notorious irritation with literary
critics, who have, in his estimation, focused too zealously on Nicholas deficiencies:
One thing about him he is writing his own story and no critic has ever taken that
into account. All these terrible things they say about him that hes a typical, totally
selfish, modern man theyve never noticed that hes saying these things about
himself. Hes talking about as he was from a present (of which you know nothing)
to a past (Relf, An Interview with John Fowles, 120).
political, and philosophical schemes of both the godgame and the

novel. 3
Like The Collector, The Magus integrates two distinct
perspectives, one represented by Nicholas, the other by Maurice
Conchis, the magus of the title, and his accomplices in the godgame.
Thoroughly English and reflective of his generations concerns,
Nicholas interprets his experiences through a stereotypically
masculine, conventional lens. Conchis and his accomplices, on the
other hand, operate through an unconventional and interpersonal
perspective that Conchis specifically identifies with womens ways of
knowing and being. Consequently uncertain about his position as an
outsider within the masque, Nicholas responds to this ambiguity with
incessant observation and analysis of the other characters, especially
the women with whom he is romantically involved. In order to make
sense of his experiences, Nicholas attempts to fuse various fragments
of knowledge to form a coherent vision that fits his current outlook on
life and society.
For readers, these fragments are disjointed, reflective of partial
knowledge and partial understanding. By forcing them to apprehend
the events of the novel through Nicholas point-of-view, Fowles never
allows readers to sustain an identification with any other perspective,
and encourages them to identify with Nicholas analyses and quests
for knowledge. Although the novel implies that Conchis and his
accomplices subscribe to a more humanistic and authentic ideology
than any that Nicholas accepts, Fowles ultimately undermines his
advocacy of this philosophy by emphasizing its inherent mystery and
failing to explore the motivations, convictions, and personalities of its
practitioners in any depth. Even at the novels conclusion, the women
3
Delma E. Presley (The Quest of the Bourgeois Hero: An Approach to Fowles The
Magus, Journal of Popular Culture, VI (1972), 396) argues that Nicholas
successfully learns from the godgame, becoming a magus in his own right through the
experience. But Michael H. Begnal (A View of John Fowles The Magus, Modern
British Literature, III (1978), 67-72), Frank G. Novak (The Dialectics of
Debasement in The Magus, Modern Fiction Studies, XXXI/1 (Spring 1985), 71-82),
and Ellen McDaniel (Games and Godgames in The Magus and The French
Lieutenants Woman, Modern Fiction Studies, XXXI/1 (Spring 1985), 31-42) argue
that Nicholas participates in the godgame merely because it emphasizes his own
importance, and Novak further argues that Nicholas never moves beyond this attitude
and fails with the lessons Conchis attempts to teach him.
Voyeurism, Violence, and Seduction in The Magus 77
characters, whom Fowles suggests possess a more comprehensive

understanding of human relationships and experiences, remain the
mysterious and threatening objects of Nicholas gaze, their
motivations never explained and their reactions never explored.
Despite its explicit promotion of womens ways of knowing and
being, The Magus fails to explore the standpoint of any of its women
characters, relying instead on Nicholas limited, voyeuristic, and
suspicious point of view and Fowles projected fantasy of a feminine
philosophy.
As the narrator of the novels extraordinary events, Nicholas
occupies a position of exceptional power. In recording his experience
of the godgame, Nicholas appropriates Conchis position as magus,
forcing readers to adopt his original position as the elect individual
who must negotiate endless confusion and ambiguous suggestion
while attempting to understand the godgame and its consequences.
Through this framework, Fowles promotes an ironic reader
identification with the novels protagonist and encourages readers to
acquire the insight that Nicholas, from his future location, implies he
has acquired.
Not especially problematic in design, this autobiographical
framework causes anxiety for readers because Nicholas, like Conchis,
is both unreliable as a narrator and deliberately reticent about his
current perspective. As Simon Loveday notes, readers of fictional
autobiography accept certain conventions of the genre, such as a need
to suspend disbelief over the narrators memory, while readers of first-
person narratives also appreciate and often expect the narrator to offer
both honesty and clear values with which readers can judge the
development of the story and the protagonist. 4 Although Nicholas
often does explain his thoughts and motives as a younger man, these
explanations are suspect: like Cleggs journal and Mirandas diary,
Nicholas story, because it is so self-reflexive, includes a healthy
amount of self-justification and egocentric righteousness, even from
the older, more insightful Nicholas who reports both his thoughts
during the events he describes and his subsequent analyses of his
earlier consciousness. Furthermore, Nicholas reinforces the
mysteriousness of his experience by emphasizing his own relative lack
of knowledge in comparison to Conchis and Lily de Seitas, both of
4
Loveday, The Romances of John Fowles, 38-39.
whom Nicholas believes to be nearly omniscient, at least as far as he

is concerned, and by implication placing readers in a doubly limited
epistemological position, denied access not only to the knowledge
possessed by Conchis and Lily de Seitas but also to that of Nicholas.
By offering so little insight into his current perspective, Nicholas
taunts readers with his concealed knowledge of the tantalizing details
of his development and relationships as they unfolded between the
final events described in the novel and the future situation from which
the older Nicholas narrates. 5
This faintly mocking tone has caused readers some discomfort in
occupying Nicholas point of view. Women readers in particular must
cringe at his use of womens bodies and abuse of their affections; men
readers have catalogued a variety of character flaws and even
questioned whether his edification is worth the effort Conchis (and
Fowles) expends on him. 6 Despite the fact that Nicholas suggests a
number of these flaws himself, readers experience the bulk of the
novel only through the perspective of the young, objectionable
Nicholas, and only rarely through the perspective of the older,
presumably improved version.
Yet Nicholas perspective causes discomfort not only because of
his disreputable characteristics, but also because of his unsettling
behavior and point of view. As he begins his experience of the
godgame, Nicholas behaves disturbingly like Clegg, taking careful
mental notes of all that he hears, sees, and even smells at Bourani. He
deliberately places himself in positions from which he can spy or be
spied upon, and, most strikingly, he conceives of his participation in
the godgame in terms of various fantasies. Like Clegg, Nicholas
pursues those activities that separate him from others and that allow
him to nurse a vague desire for vengeance on a world that has denied
him authority, certainty, and stability.
Nicholas attitude toward Conchis and the masque, and indeed
toward life in general, is initially one of aesthetic amusement. He is
determined, if he cannot understand the behavior of other people or
the strange events of the godgame, to appreciate their aesthetic
elements that is, to employ the critical persona he developed as a
5
Ibid., 38-39.
6
Foster, Understanding John Fowles, 43; Salami, John Fowless Fiction and the
Poetics of Postmodernism, 94; and Woodcock, Male Mythologies: John Fowles and
Masculinity, 47.
student at Oxford, and to place himself at a distance removed enough

to feel securely in command. Rather than thoughtfully interpreting his
experiences and his relationships with others, Nicholas focuses on
spectacle, summarizing the significance of people and events by
describing his sensory impressions. Nicholas employs this attitude
throughout the godgame as he attempts to dismiss his uncertainty,
confusion, and fear. From his initial encounter with Conchis
elaborately staged illustrations during his first weekend visit to
Bourani, Nicholas focuses on the extraordinary mechanics of the
spectacle rather than the significance of its performance. Upon hearing
the sound of men singing Tipperary in the distance, for example,
Nicholas considers the location of the record player and the placing of
speakers, documents the swelling and fading of the music, and then
concludes that this odd event must be an elaborate joke of Conchis,
mounted for [his] exclusive benefit. 7 He does not consider the
incongruence of an elaborate joke with the story cataloguing the
atrocities of the First World War that Conchis had related earlier in the
evening. Even after smelling the atrocious stench recalling Conchis
description of the odor of a corpse in a shell-hole, Nicholas
approaches Conchis facetiously, mentioning only the voices in the
night and attempting to thank Conchis for organizing a unique
experience for [him] (140).
Nicholas continues in this approach even as the events of the
godgame become more surreal. Upon viewing Lily/Julie for the first
time, he describes in astonishing detail every rustle he hears and every
element of her costume, presenting it in terms of some genre picture
(158-59). His description of the mythic scene in which a satyr chases a
nymph is likewise filled with fastidious attention to costume and
staging, as well as to the physical characteristics of both the men and
women actors (185-187). Refusing to consider the implications of
these staged events as complements to Conchis storytelling, Nicholas
instead evaluates the theatrical effectiveness of each spectacle,
marvels at the lengths to which Conchis will go to entertain him, and
frets at the possibility that he might have stumbled upon a bizarre
sexual cult. Believing himself to be the center of attention, Nicholas is
both flattered by these elaborate spectacles and perturbed by these
other people who had appeared from nowhere to poach in [his]
7
John Fowles, The Magus, New York: Dell Publishing, 1978, 137.
territory, who were in some way in conspiracy against [him], who

knew more (188).
It is this jealousy of Conchis accomplices that motivates Nicholas
to shift his participation in the godgame from aesthetic critique to
active performance. Cognizant of his tendency to aestheticize even the
most momentous events, Nicholas is also aware of his propensity to
act performatively rather than authentically; indeed, it is this very
awareness that prevents him from committing suicide (64). As he later
realizes, he has constructed his entire life around performance:
all my life I had tried to turn life into fiction, to hold reality away;
always I had acted as if a third person was watching and listening and
giving me marks for good or bad behaviour a god like a novelist, to
whom I turned, like a character with the power to please, the
sensitivity to feel slighted, the ability to adapt himself to whatever he
believed the novelist-god wanted. (549)
In terms of the existential theme of the novel, this mind-set prevents

Nicholas from acting authentically and from accepting responsibility
for his actions, and in admitting this construction, Nicholas begins to
accept a more authentically free existence. His participation, and
especially his performances, in the godgame prompt this realization.
Nicholas desire to fictionalize reality and perform for an omniscient
authority facilitates the process whereby he adopts various roles
throughout the masque, all of which he performs conceiving of
Conchis as novelist-god.
This transition occurs particularly easily because of Nicholas
constant and immediate sense of being watched whenever he is in
Conchis domain. Even before he meets Conchis, Nicholas discovers a
book of poetry at the beach near Bourani, apparently left deliberately
in his path. Having read the marked passages, he assumes that he is
being watched, and replaces the book Not out of kindness, but to
justify my curiosity to the hidden eyes (72). This awareness of being
watched increases once Conchis and Nicholas meet. Nicholas
explains, Outwardly he seemed to have very little interest in me, yet
he watched me; even when he was looking away he watched me; and
he waited. Right from the beginning I had this: he was indifferent to
me, yet he watched and he waited (88). Rather provocative in
demeanor, Conchis adheres perfectly to Nicholas conception of the
novelist-god. Through his watching and waiting, the true extent of
which is probably a combination of Conchis legitimate interest in the

godgame and a projection of Nicholas obsession with evaluation,
Conchis assumes for Nicholas a role of authority and attendant
assessment, and inspires Nicholas to perform appropriately,
particularly because he objects to the indifference with which Conchis
treats him.
This indifference reflects, as Nicholas rightly identifies, Conchis
interest in him as a type of individual, representative of particular
social constructions (94). Determined to prove himself more
interesting as an individual than as a type, Nicholas eagerly plays
along whenever Conchis requests particular behavior, but occasionally
pursues activities he assumes to be outside of Conchis prescriptions,
such as when he descends the stairs to meet Lily/Julie for the first
time, though he believes he is probably meant to listen, not go down
(158). In accepting Conchis prescribed roles of houseguest, aspiring
psychologist, and knight errant, among others, Nicholas attempts to
live up to the expectations of those around him. In occasionally acting
outside of those roles, he seeks to please and surprise that is, to
prove himself other than (and in his mind, superior to) the type
Conchis assumes him to be.
Thus Nicholas simultaneously resents and enjoys the role-playing
in which he engages, grounding himself in the social conventions
attendant upon his class, education, and background his aesthetic
detachment, his cynicism, his self-absorption, his somewhat insincere
politeness. During the godgame itself, however, Nicholas never
conceives of those ideas or behaviors as constituting a role in
themselves. Relying on logic and irony, Nicholas eventually puts his
faith in Lily/Julie, in whom he identifies similar social and intellectual
standards. Lily/Julie encourages this attachment, cementing their bond
by describing a similar reaction to Conchis voyeurism in her
confession to being an aspiring actress lured to Bourani under false
pretences (342, 348).
Playing to Nicholas prejudices, Lily/Julie describes her encounters
with Joe, Conchis spy and the twins watchdog, emphasizing his
physical prowess and inarticulateness, two characteristics Nicholas
despises as markers of inferior social status. This description mirrors
perfectly Nicholas own assessment of the African American man,
whom he confronts, insults, and provokes after reflecting on his
physicality, animality, and apparent lack of humor and sanity (326-
27). Frequently associated with a dog (or jackal, or watchdog), Joe

represents for Nicholas both Conchis loyal servant and a kind of
dumb animal, the latter association increased by Joes refusal to speak
for most of the godgame. Despite his assertion that I possessed a lot
of faults, but racialism wasnt one of them or at least I liked to
think racialism wasnt one of them (328), Nicholas both dislikes and
fears Joe because of his racial identity. However, Joes presence
increases Nicholas pleasure in performance by constantly, and often
gallingly, reminding Nicholas of Conchis vigilance and of his own
directive to perform in ways that will please Conchis as novelist-god.
Committed to pursuing the contradictory desires of following what he
believes to be the rules of the godgame and breaking those rules in
order to pursue Lily/Julie, Nicholas takes special pleasure in being
watched. Joes presence and scripted role as bodyguard/keeper of the
twins reinforces Nicholas vision of himself as aspiring player, always
under surveillance. Simultaneously, his distance allows Nicholas to
construct an illusion of confidence and collusion between himself and
the twins, an erotic collusion that the eternal deception-relishing
child side of himself enjoys (351).
Of course, Nicholas is especially tormented by his enforced
viewing of Lily/Julie and Joe making love just after the trial scene and
blue film, as their intercourse suggests that their collusion in deceiving
Nicholas has included its own erotic element. However, Nicholas
viewing of Lily/Julie and Joe reveals more serious defects in his
worldview. The most obvious of these flaws is his racism, which he
reveals to Lily de Seitas in his threat to reveal to her young son how
his sister performs I think thats the euphemism one week with
me, the next with a Negro (613), emphasizing not only his revulsion
at this interracial relationship but a more poignant devastation that he
has, in his view, been supplanted by an inferior being.
More generally, however, Nicholas response to watching Joe and
Lily/Julie make love illustrates his compulsive voyeurism and his
obsessive objectification of others, especially women. Although he
notes, There was no perversion, no attempt to suggest that I was
watching anything else but two people who were in love making love
. They behaved as if to show that the reality was the very antithesis
of the absurd nastiness of the film, Nicholas continues to participate
in such absurd nastiness simply by watching their intercourse an
element he fails to realize is probably not present in the reality of

their everyday lovemaking. He reports:
For long moments I shut my eyes, refusing to watch. But then always
I seemed forced, a voyeur in hell, to raise my head and look again.
(538)
Baffled by their exhibitionism, Nicholas blames them (and Conchis)

for compelling him to look again rather than examining his own
compulsively voyeuristic tendencies. Naturally, this exhibition is so
disturbing to Nicholas precisely because it implies his own complicity
and further indicts the hypocritical and masturbatory attitude he has
enacted both throughout the godgame and in his previous
relationships.
Just as he distances himself from meaningful encounters by
aestheticizing them as spectacle, Nicholas removes himself from
others through incessant observation and objectification. This
approach is particularly noticeable before Nicholas goes to Greece in
his relationship with Alison. Generally baffled by her manic
depressive, changeable moods and both attracted and ashamed by her
Australian mannerisms, Nicholas is careful to describe Alisons
appearance, nearly always providing readers with a very clear picture
of how she looks and of how men respond to her physical appearance.
This constant attention to Alisons physical state indicates a certain
detachment in Nicholas response to her, and substitutes Alison-as-
spectacle for Alison-as-individual. When Alison leaves the London
apartment before Nicholas departs for Greece, for example, Nicholas
describes in fastidious detail exactly how she looked as she left:
Her camel-hair coat disappeared down the stairs. She didnt look back.
I went to the window, and saw her walking fast across the street, the
pale coat, the straw-coloured hair almost the same colour as the coat, a
movement of her hand to her handbag, her blowing her nose; not once
did she look back. She broke into a run. I opened the window and
leant out and watched until she disappeared round the corner at the
end of the street into Marylebone Road. And not even then, at the very
end, did she look back. (49)
Considering the emotional significance of this event, particularly for

Alison, Nicholas description seems rather cold. Focusing on
irrelevant details such as the color of Alisons coat and matter-of-

factly reporting her use of a tissue, Nicholas denies any emotional
connection to Alison and emphasizes his lack of empathy for her.
Apparently stunned by her refusal to look back while he shamelessly
gawks out the window, Nicholas forces Alison to make an exhibit of
her exit, to put her love on display, as she later points out in a letter:
Remember I walked all the way down the street and never once
looked back. I knew you were watching. Remember I did all this and I
love you. (55)
Reporting only the spectacle of Alisons leaving, Nicholas conveys no

sense of loss at this parting, but instead reports a feeling of emotional
triumph at having loved her less than she loved him and a sense that
he has in some indefinable way won (50).
Carrying this sense of triumph with him to Greece, Nicholas is able
to transfer his obsession with Alisons appearance to Greece itself.
Upon his arrival, he explains:
When that ultimate Mediterranean light fell on the world around me, I
could see it was supremely beautiful; but when it touched me, I felt it
was hostile . It was partly the terror, the stripping-to-essentials, of
love; because I fell totally and forever in love with the Greek
landscape from the moment I arrived. But with the love came a
contradictory, almost irritating, feeling of impotence and inferiority,
as if Greece were a woman so sensually provocative that I must fall
physically and desperately in love with her, and at the same time so
calmly aristocratic that I should never be able to approach her. (51)
The immediacy of this commentary is revealing: at merely the sight of

Greece, Nicholas identifies his relationship with the land as one of
passion. Having just left Alison, whom he had nearly always
considered in terms of appearances, here Nicholas transfers that
obsession with appearances to Greece-as-spectacle. Furthermore, he
notes both an immediate sense of inferiority and his irritation at this
sensation, and associates these uncomfortable feelings specifically
with a woman.
Such associations determine Nicholas interactions with both
Alison and Lily/Julie, both of whom he passionately desires as objects
but denounces when they exhibit subjectivity and independence. Just
as he had accepted the posting in Greece like a medieval king who

had fallen in love with the picture long before [seeing] the reality
(41), Nicholas envisions Alison and Lily/Julie as artifacts, objects
onto which he can project his own self-involved fantasies. Just as
fastidious in describing every detail of Lily/Julies numerous costumes
as he is in describing Alisons physical appearance, Nicholas
repeatedly notes the picturesque placement of Lily/Julie within
vignettes and landscapes, transforming her into a work of art he
even compliments her by exclaiming, You look so ravishing. Like a
Renoir (198). Charmed by this spectacular vision of her, Nicholas
finds the more realistic Alison unbearable in Athens, and so transports
her to the especially aesthetic Parnassus where, not surprisingly, he
envisions her within an artistic vignette:
She had woven a rough crown out of the oxeyes and wild pinks that
grew in the grass around us. It sat lopsidedly on her uncombed hair;
and she wore a smile of touching innocence. She did not know it, but
it was at first for me an intensely literary moment. I could place it
exactly: Englands Helicon . Suddenly she was like such a poem
and I felt a passionate wave of desire for her. (274)
Contrary to the irritation and distaste he has felt for Alison during
their sojourn in Greece, Nicholas response to Alison experiences a
radical revision through this moment. By assimilating Alison into
art, Cooper argues, Nicholas transforms her into the sort of
iconographic female whom he finds he can love . He tries to change
Alison into the kind of woman that Julie is, or that she appears to be: a
living work of art possessed of the convenient ability to function as a
sexual tease. 8
Nicholas attraction to women as artistic objects hinges on this
notion of the sexual tease. He is attracted not by sexuality, but by the
suggestion of reserved sexuality, and especially by sexuality he can
access only by enduring numerous trials and surmounting daunting
obstacles. The Magus contains what Tarbox describes as a most
masterful sex tease, 9 and Nicholas certainly encounters his share of
reluctance, encouragement, and mixed messages as he waits for
Lily/Julie to surrender to his sexual advances. Yet these obstacles
8
9
Tarbox, The Art of John Fowles, 23.
increase both Nicholas anticipation and experience of his sexual

interactions with Lily/Julie, allowing him to project his own desires
onto her and to imagine her as the perfect combination of English
reserve and Mediterranean passion. In fantasizing about her, recalling
her all-too-brief kiss and visualizing her twin sisters stunning figure,
he creates a scenario in which his desire for her can be completely
fulfilled: I imagined Julie coming to me there, in the bedroom; or in
the pine-forest, darkness, a wildness, a willing rape (238).
Although Nicholas never fulfills this fantasy, he does experience
some sexual pleasure with Lily/Julie that incorporates his desires for
hidden passion, submission, and brutality. Telling Nicholas that she is
menstruating, Lily/Julie proceeds to excite and then masturbate
Nicholas in the sea, a gesture he appreciates precisely for its quality of
surrender: I would have had it go on all night, this being seduced that
was also a seduction, this sudden conversion of the aloof, the
fastidious, the voice that quoted Sophocles, into an obedient geisha, an
adorable mermaid (375). In this description, Nicholas conceives of
Lily/Julie not as an individual with her own desires, but as a collection
of qualities she employs to distance herself from him aloof,
fastidious, intellectual and in various roles he projects onto her as
she pleases him a geisha, a mermaid. Furthermore, he claims:
I had an intuition it had meant more for her it was a kind of

discovery, or rediscovery, of her own latent sexuality, through the
satisfaction of mine and through the night, the warmth, the old
magic of wild Greece. Her face seemed softer, simpler, maskless now
. All was transparent between us. (376)
Assuming that his sexual release has satisfied her and freed her from
her sexual repression, Nicholas imagines Lily/Julie as both soft and
simple transparently connected to him through their shared English
values and wild, warm, and passionate. As Foster rightly comments,
His astonishing arrogance exceeds all known bounds; oblivious to
either Lily/Julies motivation or response to this activity, Nicholas still
claims to have done her a favor. 10
Even more satisfying, Nicholas subsequent single experience of
intercourse with Lily/Julie allows him to conceive of her as
simultaneously virginal, innocent, and childlike, and untamed,
10
perverse, and slavelike. He describes his favorite moments of the

encounter in intimate detail:
It was a little as I had imagined it in the beginning, the Lily

Montgomery phase: this delicate, elusive creature half-swooning,
succumbed to the animal part of herself; and not quite adult yet
beneath the airs and graces, something of the innocent perversity of a
little girl playing at sex with little boys . There was something
virginal about her; yet wanting to be corrupted, led further . I began
to drive. Her arms bent back behind her head, as if she was
defenceless, doubly naked, completely at my mercy; that lovely
slavelike limpness in everything but the loins . She seemed so
small, fragile, asking for the brutality she had said she had felt in the
chapel at Moutsa. Her hands clenched, as if I was really hurting her. I
came, it was too soon, but irresistible. (492-94)
Especially exciting for Nicholas is the combination Lily/Julie

embodies of innocence and corruptibility, reserve and passion. He
perceives her as his sex toy, at [his] mercy, inviting his possession
and violence. Initially inaccessible to Nicholas, Lily/Julie perfectly
personifies those qualities he seeks in women qualities that allow
him to project his essentially autoerotic desires onto an object whose
most striking characteristic is teasing compliance.
While Lily/Julie personifies this kind of initial inaccessibility and
eventual compliance, Alison initially strikes Nicholas as totally
accessible, and therefore unworthy of anything but sexual fervor.
Appreciative of her skill as a mistress, Nicholas simultaneously
despises Alison for the lack of reserve her skill implies. Like
Lily/Julie, Alison invites Nicholas violent impulses. However,
completely in control sexually, Alison bears the brunt of Nicholas
violence as he attempts to dominate her in other ways. Toying with
her emotions when she visits him in Greece, Nicholas lies to Alison
about having syphilis. Despite this lie, Alison propositions Nicholas,
who reacts to this offer with detached criticism:
As she caressed me, I thought, its like being with a prostitute, hands
as adept as a prostitutes, nothing but a matter of pleasure and I
gave way to the pleasure she gave me . I imagined lying in the same
position with Julie, and I thought I knew it would be infinitely
disturbing and infinitely more passionate; not familiar, not aching with
fatigue, hot, a bit sweaty some cheapened word like randy; but
white-hot, mysterious, overwhelming passion. (269)
Completely willing to express her sexuality and fulfill her own

desires, Alison resists the kind of projection that Nicholas practices in
response to Lily/Julies seductions, threatening his sense of control
and domination. Responding to this independence, Nicholas compares
Alison to a prostitute both in bed and, more poignantly, when she
reveals herself to him in Athens after supposedly committing suicide
(572). Threatened and betrayed, Nicholas rejects Alison as an
individual with her own desires and agenda.
It is only when Alison unwittingly summons a literary pastoral
image, allowing Nicholas to objectify her as a work of art associated
with innocence, that he sincerely makes love to her without comparing
her to a prostitute. Feeling cleansed by this intercourse, Nicholas
confesses his interest in the godgame, prompting Alison to accuse
him, quite rightly, of using her and of desiring another woman. While
Nicholas denies these charges, Alison neatly summarizes Nicholas
attitude towards her:
For you Ill always be Alison who slept around. That Australian girl
who had an abortion. The human boomerang. Throw her away and
shell always come back for another week-end of cheap knock.
Although Nicholas replies, Thats a long way below the belt (280),
he does not deny the truth of Alisons analysis. Instead, disconcerted
by her insight, unwilling to freely admit to his callous attitude, and
determined to be free of the commitment she requests, Nicholas
resorts to brutality, forcing her to the bed, holding her down, and
slapping her (281).
This particular weekend with Alison epitomizes Nicholas reliance
on objectification and violence. Moreover, it exhibits his egocentric,
autoerotic attitude, linking his treatment of women with a
pornographic perspective. Initially critical of the absurd blue film he
must watch after the trial, Nicholas is shocked by the footage of
Alison and himself on Parnassus, horrified that their lovemaking may
have been filmed. This footage emphasizes Nicholas abusive attitude
toward women in general, and Alison in particular, by comparing his
relationship with her to pornography. By forcing him to consider the
implications of this included footage, Conchis encourages Nicholas to

acknowledge that his perspective enacts a pornographic ethic.
In fact, Conchis has been encouraging such ideological recognition
throughout the godgame. Repeatedly bombarding Nicholas with
pornographic images, Conchis elicits strong but not self-reflexive
reactions from Nicholas. These reactions vary from his description of
the priapus as evoking a primitive terror (87) to the painting on the
kylix he describes as very obscene indeed (106). Complaining that
the pornographic books Conchis provides are too obsessive, Nicholas
nevertheless peruses them many times, reflecting on his negative
reaction to the facet of Conchis polyhedral character that obviously
enjoyed curious objects and literature (168). Never considering that
Conchis may have meant these curiosities to reflect not his own
perversions but those of his guest, Nicholas considers the placement
of a photograph of Lily among these objects as reflecting particularly
bad taste on the part of his host (106). Yet his own relationship with
Lily/Julie enacts precisely a pornographic attitude. Indeed, in
encouraging Nicholas attachment to Lily/Julie, and especially by
constructing their involvement through a series of role-plays, Conchis
elicits Nicholas most self-involved emotional and sexual fantasies.
Unable and unwilling to see the women with whom he is romantically
involved as subjects, Nicholas instead considers them only within his
own autoerotic, pornographic fantasies.
Yet even after the conclusion of the godgame, Nicholas has
difficulty confronting this aspect of his personality. Still unable to
comprehend Conchis (and his accomplices) motivations and values,
Nicholas chooses to consider their behavior immediately after the trial
as a pornographic pleasure: While it happened it had seemed like a
vicious twisting of the dagger in an already more than sufficient
wound; but now I saw it might also be a kind of revenge given me for
their spying, their voyeurism, on Alison and myself (542-43).
Sufficiently disintoxicated of Lily/Julie, Nicholas fails to understand
the deeper significance of the godgame, trial, and disintoxication that
Conchis has offered him. Instead he chooses to relish his role as
victim. In adopting this role, Nicholas again alters his participation in
the godgame, obsessively sleuthing for explanations to his confusion
and determinedly behaving in ways he believes Conchis and his
accomplices will appreciate.
In undertaking this behavior, Nicholas firmly clings to an almost

paranoid assumption of constant surveillance. In contrast to the kind
of firmly situated and reciprocal exploration of various perspectives
that standpoint theorists envision, Nicholas enacts what Evelyn Fox
Keller defines as a kind of vigilant, paranoid defensiveness that
initially prevents him from accepting those affective and cognitive
experiences that require receptivity, reciprocity, or simply a relaxed
state of mind 11 the kind of experiences that comprise the godgame.
Instead, he devotes himself to an exhaustive search for ultimately
meaningless facts. Still obsessed with observation and performance,
Nicholas cannot imagine that Conchis has absconded as novelist-god,
that the practitioners of the godgame are not continually evaluating his
activity. More importantly, Nicholas cannot imagine a context for his
experiences that transcends his paranoia. Antagonistically determined
to show them that he can live without affairs, Nicholas avoids women
he finds sexually stimulating (644), attaching himself instead to the
dumpy and, he thinks, asexual Jojo, out of what he calls kindness to
dumb animals (646) and a sense that if Alison, Conchis, and the
others are watching, it might even help to precipitate matters (647).
Still focused on his status as a victim, Nicholas uses Jojo as both a
distraction and a ruse to attract Alison, once again structuring his
relationships with women primarily around his own needs and
projections.
Nicholas dependence on performance, objectification, and
brutality becomes critical in the novels final scene his long-awaited
reunion with Alison. Shocked at her unexpected appearance, Nicholas
looks at her, as she notes with characteristic accuracy, as if Im a
prostitute or something. Recognizing Nicholas gaze as the self-
involved, objectifying device he has used to isolate himself and to
justify his mistreatment of her, Alison summarizes her status in her
relationship with Nicholas, explaining:
Whenever Im with you its like going to someone and saying,

Torture me, abuse me. Give me hell. (663)
Refusing to accept this summary of his brutality, instead Nicholas

focuses on Alisons appearance and behavior, noting especially what
he believes to be unnatural, choreographed movements that convince
11
him that their meeting is on display for Conchis and his accomplices
(664). Energized by this opportunity for performance, Nicholas
attempts to bully Alison into a commitment that actively rejects the
standards and potentiality of the godgame, accusing her of playing to
their script even as he engages in a performance specifically intended
to antagonize Conchis and his accomplices. Furious at Alisons
frustration with this performative response to her, Nicholas resorts to
violence, slapping Alison across the face in what he describes as a
necessary act (666). Suddenly enlightened through this trivial little
bit of masculine brutality (667), Nicholas realizes that Conchis is not
watching, that the novelist-god has absconded. Through the slap,
Nicholas begins to understand authentic action, to reject observation
and performance as the standards by which he constructs his actions,
and to accept the complications inherent to a relationship not between
objects but between individuals.
However, this trivial little bit of masculine brutality reveals
Nicholas extremely limited understanding of the perspective Conchis
and his accomplices have advocated in the staging of the godgame.
Perhaps, as David H. Walker has argued, the slap is necessary for
Nicholas a settling of accounts, a declaration of his own self-
worth, a comprehension that accusation and punishment evince the
mutual ties between people. 12 Nevertheless, by physically abusing
Alison, Nicholas hardly recommends himself as an enlightened,
changed man, as someone no longer willing to objectify, evaluate, and
brutalize his lover. By freezing the narrative without revealing the
couples future, in his position as narrator the older Nicholas suggests
that readers must learn to surrender their own voyeurism and pursue
their own authentic perspectives, but his emphasis on violence as a
catalyst for authentic living indicates a continuing reliance on
objectification and brutality.
In contrast to the abusive, pornographic, and self-centered
masculine perspective that Nicholas embodies, Conchis, Lily/Julie,
Alison, and Lily de Seitas embody a feminine perspective committed
to self-actualization and connection. Fowles associates these values
explicitly with women: The Magus is, as Loveday summarizes, a
work which celebrates women and womens influence . entirely
12
David H. Walker, Remorse, Responsibility, and Moral Dilemmas in Fowless
Fiction, in Critical Essays on John Fowles, ed. Ellen Pifer, Boston, MA: G.K. Hall,
1986, 62.
open and unashamed in its proclamation of the superiority of women

over men. 13 Even the narrative structure of the novel, Haegert argues,
remains distinctly feminine, both in the sense of being presided
over by women (Conchis is offstage for extended periods) and in the
sense of proceeding in a regular wavelike pattern of emotional
contraction followed by revelatory expansion that resembles
parturition. 14 Through this structure, Haegert suggests, Fowles
dramatizes the birth of a feminine ethic, a non-violent, community-
oriented perspective grounded in human relationships. An extension
of Fowles essentialist ideology, The Magus specifically advocates,
through the practitioners of the godgame, epistemological and
ontological standards that reflect traditionally feminine values. While
Nicholas standpoint relies on spectacle, objectification, performance,
and violence, the standpoint of the godgames practitioners embraces
whole sight, relationships, authenticity, and complexity. Rejecting
whenever possible conventional moral and social standards, the
necessary fictions by which people define themselves and their
relationships (638), the practitioners of the godgame strive to live
authentically, morally, intellectually, and socially responsible lives.
For most of the novel, Nicholas fails to appreciate or even
understand this vision. A significant reason for Nicholas perplexity is
his inability to integrate multiple perspectives and paradoxical
realities. Possessing a singularity of vision that allows him to
acknowledge only his own desires and to project those desires onto
others, Nicholas can comprehend neither the complexity of Conchis
narratives nor the balance of what he perceives as oppositional forces.
In relating Conchis narratives, Nicholas creates an ambience around
the narration that includes the food and drink, the weather, and the
physical response of each listener, projecting an atmosphere of artistic
creation around Conchis storytelling. In turn, sensing that Nicholas
views him as an authority figure, Conchis adopts a dominant role,
positioning himself as artist/mentor and Nicholas as
character/apprentice. In establishing this hierarchy, Conchis adopts a
narrative strategy and ritual that Nicholas recognizes and in which he
can perform appropriately. Conchis begins within a context that
Nicholas finds relatively comfortable, allowing him to suggest
13
Loveday, The Romances of John Fowles, 42, 43.
14
Haegert, Memoirs of a Deconstructive Angel: The Heroine as Mantissa in the
Fiction of John Fowles, 165.
alternative epistemological and ontological standards subtly and

gradually.
Within this framework, Conchis initially advocates a feminine
ethic by suggesting womens role as facilitator of mens self-
actualization. Conchis early descriptions of Lily as his adolescent
love epitomize this conceptualization of women: Lily prompts the
young Conchis to examine his motivations and values, leading him,
through her condemnation of his defection from the war effort, to
denounce the artificial constrictions of duty and pursue a more
authentic existence. By linking Lily with his ontological conversion,
Conchis suggests that through women men can shed inhibiting social
constructions and learn to act in accordance with their true selves,
thereby pursuing existential authenticity. This approach appeals to
Nicholas, who is already comfortable considering women in terms of
their usefulness to him, and allows Conchis to establish a relatively
comfortable situation in which he can gradually challenge the
masculine ideology he initially exploits.
Slowly, Conchis begins to suggest that womens ways of knowing
and being are superior to mens epistemological and ontological
systems, advocating especially their ability to perceive connections. In
contrast to Nicholas critical attitude to spectacle, Conchis integrates
sensory impressions and metaphysical illumination in his narration of
events, presenting each of his stories not as isolated incidents but as
moments on a continuum of experience. Rather than projecting his
resentments and desires onto the circumstances in which he finds
himself, Conchis reconstructs the events of his life through a
perspective that honors complexity, ambiguity, and balance between
the individual and that which is outside the individual a perspective
that Fowles will later term, in Daniel Martin, a novel that parallels
The Magus, whole sight.
Situating his conversion to this way of thinking in his experience
of the First World War, Conchis first introduces Nicholas to the
ideology he associates with the feminine:
I experienced the very opposite of what the German and French

metaphysicians of our century have assured us is the truth: that all that
is other is hostile to the individual. To me all that is other seemed
exquisite. Even that corpse, even the squealing rats. To be able to
experience, never mind that it was cold and hunger and nausea, was a
miracle. Try to imagine that one day you discover you have a sixth, a
till then unimagined new sense something not comprehended in

feeling, seeing, the conventional five. But a far profounder sense, the
source from which all others spring. The word being no longer
passive and descriptive, but active almost imperative. (133)
This ontological transformation arises from Conchis extraordinary

perception of all things as connected, as in balance, in direct contrast
to his previous understanding of the universe as hostile to the
individual an understanding that Nicholas not only shares, but
nurtures in constructing himself as the solitary heart (23). Especially
vivid in his descriptions of this and other events, Conchis encourages
listener identification, inviting Nicholas to share in both his sensory
and his philosophical perceptions. Through this approach, Conchis
encourages Nicholas to move beyond his extremely isolated, divided,
egocentric, and masculine world view and accept instead an ideology
of interconnection and wholeness that Conchis associates with the
feminine.
In further narrative encounters Conchis continues to challenge
Nicholas to reject the socially determined attitudes and values he
cherishes, attacking Nicholas conception of the universe as inherently
antagonistic to the individual. Particularly in his relation of the events
on Phraxos during the Second World War, Conchis illustrates the
disastrous effects of that masculine ideology:
I should like you also to reflect that its events could have taken place
only in a world where man considers himself superior to woman .
That is, a world governed by brute force, humourless arrogance,
illusory prestige and primeval stupidity . Men love war because it
allows them to look serious. Because they imagine it is the one thing
that stops women laughing at them. In it they can reduce women to the
status of objects. That is the great distinction between the sexes. Men
see objects, women see the relationship between objects. Whether the
objects need each other, love each other, match each other. It is an
extra dimension of feeling we men are without and one that makes
war abhorrent to all real women and absurd. I will tell you what war
is. War is a psychosis caused by an inability to see relationships.
(420)
In this most direct statement of the feminine ideology that Conchis

and his accomplices embody, Conchis both aligns himself with
Nicholas as a man whose masculine understanding of the universe is
limited and suggests that in his acceptance of a womans standpoint he

possesses a more comprehensive, and ultimately, more humanistic
understanding of the universe than Nicholas does. Noting especially
mens tendency to objectify others, especially women, Conchis
suggests that the atrocities of war result directly from mens inability
to see connections an inability he specifically aligns with both
himself and Nicholas as men.
In (re)constructing this and other narratives, he attempts to initiate
Nicholas into a feminine relational ethic. However, apparently
resigned to his own limitations as a man, Conchis leaves more direct
initiations to Lily/Julie and Lily de Seitas. In their interactions with
Nicholas, these women lead Nicholas through a process by which his
disconnection from and objectification of women can be gradually
replaced with respectful, authentic relationships. In a relationship with
Lily/Julie that is both highly scripted and thoughtfully improvised,
Nicholas engages in the godgames pattern of participatory
observation that reflects a Jungian methodology in its refusal to
separate the thinking subject (the scientist, etc.) from the observed
object (the focus of the experiment), and that acknowledges that we
see things less as they are in themselves than as we the observers
are. 15 Through what Nicholas perceives as her betrayal, Lily/Julie
forces Nicholas to acknowledge that he knows her only as an object of
his own fantasy. Therefore the final disintoxication prepares Nicholas
to acknowledge not only that his desire for Lily/Julie was inauthentic,
but that his general approach to women is selfish and autoerotic. Less
performative, Lily de Seitas offers Nicholas a more straightforward
explanation of the godgame and its goals, telling him explicitly that
despite his denigration of Lily/Julie and Rose/June, my daughters
were nothing but a personification of your own selfishness (612) and
identifying him as an unscrupulous collector [who] falls in love with
a painting he wants. And will do anything to get (613). Initially
resistant to and threatened by this analysis, and understandably
confused and resentful because of his recent experience of the
godgame, Nicholas responds to Lily de Seitas with a kind of
intimidated terror:
15
Julius Rowan Raper, John Fowles: The Psychological Complexity of The Magus,
American Imago, XLV/1 (Spring 1988), 68.
I was still full of spleen; and in some obscure way frightened to think
of Alison in this womans hands, as one hears of a countryside one has
loved being sold to building developers. And I also felt left behind,
abandoned again. I did not belong to this other-planet world. (615)
Profoundly threatened by Lily de Seitas, Nicholas fears not for Alison,

but for himself he fears that Alison-as-object, once exposed to the
practitioners of the godgame, will no longer offer him the pleasure he
has found in her. Moreover, Nicholas fears that Alison-as-subject, like
Lily/Julie, will abandon him precisely because of his inability to
accept the unconventional values and ideals that Lily de Seitas
describes.
At the same time, Alisons participation in the godgame attracts
Nicholas. Despite his frustration and fear, Nicholas begins to
appreciate Alisons complexity and ambiguity as a result of his
exposure to the feminine ethic Conchis and Lily de Seitas advocate.
Before the godgame, Nicholas is unwilling to acknowledge Alisons
complexity, initially considering her a mere sex object. Constrained
by his pornographic and egocentric perspective, Nicholas abandons
Alison for his appointment on Phraxos precisely because of his
growing awareness of her complexity. 16 After the godgame, however,
and especially after his conversations with Lily de Seitas and the
unenlightened Mitford, whose brief participation in the godgame was
hurriedly aborted because of his total lack of potential, Nicholas
begins to reconsider not only his view of Alison, whom he can now
understand as refreshingly real, without artifice, but also his view of
himself: I thought of Lily de Seitas; how to her I must seem as
Mitford did to myself. A barbarian (627). This admission suggests
that Nicholas, although not yet committed to Conchis feminine vision
of wholeness, authenticity, and reciprocal trust in relationships, has at
least learned to entertain alternative points of view.
Considering the rigidity and antagonism inherent to Nicholas
original perspective, this conversion, limited though it may be, is
rather extraordinary. Despite Nicholas behavior in the final scene, his
growing awareness of himself as limited by his selfishness and
objectification of women suggests that the godgame succeeds in
altering his perspective and allows him to pursue a more authentic
existence in respectful connection with others. By re-inscribing
16
Ibid., 62.
himself within the narrative of his experience, Nicholas appears to

engage in a self-reflexive examination of his attitudes that
simultaneously invites readers to evaluate his progress. By
establishing his narrative dominance throughout the text, and by
further emphasizing Conchis dominance as magus within his domain,
Nicholas challenges readers to judge all the characters and evaluate
their values and behavior. This activity requires readers to practice
vigilant resistance to the narrative scheme of the novel and to read
against their own passivity.
In this way, Fowles uses Nicholas self-reflexive narrative to
promote a plurality of interpretations of the godgame, of Nicholas
success as an initiate of a feminine ideology, and of the novel as a
whole. By dramatizing the confrontation between a masculine
perspective characterized by performance and violence and a feminine
perspective embodying authenticity and complexity, Fowles
encourages readers to evaluate Nicholas experience and to consider
the dominant ideologies that structure their own points of view. The
Magus thus enacts an approach similar to feminist standpoint
epistemology, requiring readers to consider how their own biases and
values affect their response to Conchis, to Nicholas, and to the
indeterminacy of the novel's ending. Fowles deliberate snipping of
the narrative thread in this ending makes this requirement explicit. In
ending the novel this way, Fowles offers readers a choice,
simultaneously suggesting that in order to understand their choices,
readers must engage in a process of self-examination similar to
Nicholas in recording his experience of the godgame. Therefore the
novels meaning is necessarily multiple, complex, and dependent on
an active dialogue between reader and text.
Fowles advocates a feminist standpoint approach not only through
Conchis construction of the godgame, but also in his own structuring
of The Magus. However, this scheme functions problematically
precisely because of Fowles simultaneous devotion to mystery and
seduction. So reliant on active, self-reflexive reading, and so devoted
to complexity and ambiguity, The Magus is also notoriously vague in
terms of the philosophy it purports to advocate. As a more compelling
perspective than Nicholas, this feminine outlook clearly motivates
Conchis and his accomplices to undermine social constructions and
encourage individuals to pursue self-actualization. However, because
readers encounter this perspective only through Nicholas confused,
masculine point of view, and because his point of view reflects

Fowles own limitations as a male writer, 17 this feminine ideology
materializes in fragments only. Indeed, readers suffer from a
perplexity Nicholas verbalizes after he watches Lily/Julie and Joe
make love: Everything I had ever thought to understand about
woman receded, interwove, flowed into mystery, into distorting
shadows and currents, like objects sinking away, away, down through
shafted depths of water (539).
This perplexity results partly from the fact that Nicholas and
Conchis various narratives always defer meaning. Perhaps the most
tantalizing tease of this novel full of suspense and provocation is the
always present yet never fulfilled promise of penetrating the
perspectives of the women characters. Indeed, in a novel purporting to
advocate a feminine ideology, it is singularly odd that Fowles never
explores the motivations and superior insights of the women
characters through their own perspectives.
Instead, Fowles relies on his essentialist ideology in defining the
feminine ethic he advocates through Conchis, Lily de Seitas, and
Alison. Like Nicholas, Fowles projects his own fantasies of women's
virtues onto his women characters and into the philosophy he
advocates. Central to Conchis teachings, for example, is the tenet that
real women abhor war because of their ability to see relationships a
belief that engages an essentialist gender ideology by rigidly situating
femininity within a specific social and political point of view that
suggests women who do not subscribe to this attitude deny their own
inherent being. Similarly defined by traditional gender associations,
Lily de Seitas most fundamental characteristic appears to be
mysteriousness. Although she offers Nicholas the most
straightforward explanation of the godgame of any of the characters,
ultimately she relies on euphemistic references to certain leaps
taken and certain gaps bridged in her explanation of the godgames
design to reproduce something of the mysterious purposes that
govern existence (638-39). In these two most impressive magi,
Fowles valorizes characteristics traditionally associated with the
feminine commitment to relationships, objection to violence and
17
Fowles has commented, I did toy for many years with the idea of making Conchis
a woman too, but I realised some of his acts were male (because the writers male)
and so I couldnt do that (Relf, Interview, 125).
war, mysteriousness, vagueness, intuitiveness rather than qualities

arising out of the specific situations of either individual or group
experiences.
More problematic than this archetypal characterization of his magi
is Fowles construction of Alison, on whom Conchis and his
accomplices confer their enthusiastic praise. Although the godgame
seeks to encourage Nicholas to adopt alternative attitudes, its
simultaneous imperative is to convince him of Alisons excellence.
Alison is exceptionally honest, without pretence, and resistant to
social convention. However, the principal virtue that Conchis, and
especially Lily de Seitas, associate with her is a very rare capacity for
attachment and devotion that is very precious. She is, Lily de
Seitas insists, a little piece of pure womankind. Commenting that
Alison possesses a special talent for giving herself and identifying that
talent as the one great quality our sex has to contribute to life (612),
Lily de Seitas further suggests that Alison in some ways surpasses
even her as a woman. This singular celebration of womens ability to
devote themselves to others associates Alisons personal authenticity
with femininity at large, suggesting that for women at least, authentic
existence requires devotion to others an argument that slides
precariously towards advocating womens selflessness. Moreover, the
complexity that Conchis and the others encourage Nicholas to
appreciate in Alison breaks down into what is for him a paradox:
Alison is both sexually available and emotionally, if not intellectually,
sophisticated. In other words, Alison is rather like the traditional
whore with a heart of gold. Sexually talented, emotionally
sophisticated, and exceptionally capable of attachment, Alison
represents the pinnacle of the problematic feminine ideology Conchis
and his accomplices advocate. Moreover, this representation remains
simply that a summary, an illustration. Both Fowles and his magi
dismiss significant aspects of Alisons situation that contribute to her
complexity her Australian identity, her emotional instability, her
decision to have an abortion suggesting that such aspects of her
personality are of no consequence in comparison to her essential
femininity.
Far more thorough in his construction of Nicholas flawed
perspective than in describing the ideology he purports to advocate,
Fowles reveals in The Magus both a genuine interest in womens ways
of knowing and being and a problematic insistence on understanding
those epistemological and ontological systems only through his own

projected fantasies. Still committed in this early novel to a kind of
authorial tease through which readers experience endless stimulation
but can never achieve more than tantalizing fragments of his own
implied larger vision, Fowles both challenges readers to explore the
feminine ideology he advocates and contains them within a masculine
attitude Nicholas epitomizes. Associating Conchis progressive
outlook explicitly with women, Fowles simultaneously shrouds that
perspective in mystery, encouraging readers to adopt Nicholas desire
for penetrating womens intimate and private worlds: What had
always attracted me in the opposite sex was what they tried to hide,
what provoked all the metaphorical equivalents of seducing them out
of their clothes into nakedness (393). Relying on the seductive power
of his mysterious women characters and his mystifying feminine ethic,
Fowles therefore explores in The Magus not an authentic womans
standpoint, but a projected masculine fantasy.
CHAPTER THREE
A CRISIS OF AUTHORITY: FANTASY AND FEMINISM

IN THE FRENCH LIEUTENANTS WOMAN
In its exploration of both the pleasures and the pitfalls of masculine

fantasy, Fowles third novel, The French Lieutenants Woman,
revolves around Fowles most provocative heroine, the mysterious
Sarah Woodruff. Incorporating a unique authorial perspective through
footnotes and an intrusive modern narrator whose twentieth-century
knowledge frames and comments on the Victorian story, The French
Lieutenants Woman perfectly positions Sarah as an outsider within.
Within her Victorian society, Sarah performs the role of social outcast,
marginalized from society and simultaneously at the center of its
attention. Within the larger narrative of the text, Sarah occupies a
similar position, since the narrator, despite his occasional
omniscience, is as intrigued with Sarah as his Victorian characters are,
though he is never able (or willing) to penetrate her consciousness.
Characterized most clearly by mysteriousness, Sarah challenges
her fellow characters and readers alike to contemplate her
consciousness, particularly in order to comprehend her generally
incomprehensible actions. Within the story, both the narrator and the
Victorian characters satisfy themselves with constant surveillance
over Sarahs activities, watching and categorizing her according to
their own standards. Through such surveillance, readers negotiate
competing masculine visions: that of the villagers of Lyme, whose
understanding of Sarah reflects the patriarchal prejudices of the time;
that of Charles, whose fascination with Sarah ranges from
philanthropic to erotic; and that of the modern narrator/author as a
controlling influence, whose refusal to explain his heroine determines
her inaccessibility. Through these perspectives, Sarah remains, like
the women in The Magus, a mysterious threat, admirable and able to
inspire male activity, but never coherently motivated or explored.
These perspectives force readers to contend with fragmented
masculine visions always focused on Sarah as an object of analysis,

and because of their fragmentary nature, these visions are frustrating,
ultimately falling short of the complete picture presumably accessible
only to Fowles.
At the same time, Sarah represents a prototype for the New
Woman whose unconventional attitudes and actions expose the
oppressive machinations of both social and narrative authority.
Despite his determination not to explain Sarah, Fowles provides
readers with useful details about her circumstances and, more
importantly, allows her to articulate piercing analyses of the injustices
inherent in her society. Contextualizing Sarahs behavior through this
exploration of her situation, Fowles validates a feminist standpoint
approach by presenting a woman character who pursues and enacts a
politically engaged and practically grounded standpoint. Reluctant to
appropriate his heroines perspective, Fowles constructs Sarah not
merely as a seductively mysterious woman, but as a woman who
recognizes the limitations of epistemological and ontological systems
available to her structures through which twentieth-century readers
continue to operate and who rejects those systems in favor of more
intuitive and authentic ways of knowing and being.
These contrary readings indicate the complexity of this most
critically acclaimed of Fowles works. Yet these readings also indicate
a profound ambivalence in Fowles ambitions and attitudes toward his
authority. Determined to pursue his advocacy of a feminine ethic,
cognizant of his problematic fascination with womens inexplicability,
and increasingly resistant to dominating his characters and readers,
Fowles offers in The French Lieutenants Woman a text fraught with
tension and complicated by competing authorial desires. Through this
novel, Fowles acknowledges that inscribing his masculine fantasies of
domination and seduction in his fiction is incompatible with his
artistic attraction to narrative freedom, his philosophical interest in
authentic and alternative epistemological and ontological systems, and
his political commitment to feminist advocacy. Exploring his
contradictory ambitions in The French Lieutenants Woman, Fowles
represents in narrative form a crisis of authority that initiates a
transition in his work from fragmentation to multiplicity, from
manipulation to provocation, and from voyeurism to whole sight.
These tensions are immediately accentuated through the narrators
introduction, in which critical surveillance of the characters and the
Fantasy and Feminism in The French Lieutenants Woman 103
narrative establishes The French Lieutenants Woman as a novel

constructed on a voyeuristic model. Beginning his tale with a
telescopic vision of Lyme, gradually narrowing his focus on Charles
and Ernestina in their promenade along the Cobb, and finally onto
Sarah, a figure from myth gazing enigmatically out to sea, 1 the
narrator as local spy uses what Olshen identifies as a modern,
cinematic panorama to introduce the novels main characters. 2
Blending the conventions of a Victorian novel with a cinematic point
of view, the narrator immediately situates readers within a voyeuristic
context, a location from which they will visually penetrate the
Victorian world of the narrative. Indeed, Kadish reads these opening
pages as evidence of the narrators interest in more transgressive
visual practices, comparing his description of Lyme to a voyeur or a
pornographer fetishistically isolating parts of feminine bodies. 3 This
association of landscape/seascape with womens bodies is justified,
for later in the novel, another local spy, Grogan, will focus his own
telescope rather similarly and consciously wickedly on the
Lyme beachfront to view the nereids bathing there (150).
Furthermore, this voyeuristic surveillance of Lyme, and especially
of Lyme-as-woman, anticipates the principal pleasures of the
narrative, defining Victorian society generally, and Sarah specifically,
as objects of speculation. Despite the fact that the narrator couches his
story in the conventions of the Victorian novel, The French
Lieutenants Woman is fundamentally a contemporary postmodern
work that interrogates various ways of constructing experience.
Accordingly, the narrative relies on the visual image, reflecting both
Fowles understanding of the cinema as fundamental to contemporary
narrative attitudes 4 and his assertion that the novel was inspired by a
persistent and provocative image of Sarah staring out to sea. 5
However, not exactly a dispassionate observer, the narrator achieves
his visual presentation of the story through intrusive cinematic devices
that rely on traditional forms of voyeurism, such as watching a young
1
John Fowles, The French Lieutenants Woman, Boston: Little, Brown and Company,
1969, 5.
2
3
Doris Y. Kadish, Rewriting Womens Stories, 78.
4
Fowles, I Write Therefore I Am, in Wormholes, ed. Relf, 7.
5
Fowles, Notes on an Unfinished Novel, in Wormholes, ed. Relf, 13.
woman undress before her mirror or staring at a silhouetted woman

through her window. 6 Intruding not only into readers consciousness
through his historical musings but also through such spying on his
women characters, the narrator projects himself into the narrative as a
kind of interactive critic, both commenting on the action and
simultaneously emphasizing his characters sexuality/textuality.
This emphasis is particularly significant for Sarah, whose
mysteriousness entices both characters and readers into acts of
interpretation. Thoroughly convinced of surveillance as an organizing
life-principle, the Victorian characters are particularly conscious of
ways of seeing and of being seen. Mrs Poulteney, for example, frets
about the eventual destination of her immortal soul, unsettled by the
vicars pronouncement that, The Creator is all-seeing and all-wise
(22). Ernestina likewise accepts both divine and secular surveillance
as factors in her intimate reflections. As the narrator reports, Ernestina
thinks specifically of Charles values, and abstractly of more spiritual
directives, as she writes in her diary: She wrote partly for his eyes
as, like every other Victorian woman, she wrote partly for His eyes
(253). Such awareness of external observation is not limited to the
novels women; Charles is equally conscious of how he and his
actions must appear, repeatedly imagining what anyone who was
secretly watching might think (143). The anyone Charles fears is
not exactly divine Charles faith is quite ambivalent compared to his
reverence for Darwin but more immediately present, since he fears
surveillance both by contemporary embodied folk and by ancestors
whose standards he hopes to meet. Particularly conscious of the
observation and implicit judgment of both their earthly community
and its heavenly counterpart, the Victorian characters feel both
justified and obligated to monitor one another with special vigilance.
Because of her apparently deliberate anti-social behavior, Sarah
inspires the members of her community into especially relentless and
constant acts of surveillance and interpretation, all of which attempt to
locate Sarah within well-established narrative conventions. 7 The most
stereotypically Victorian interpretation of Sarah comes from
Ernestina, whose physical and intellectual demeanor corresponds
exactly to her societys expectations, despite her occasional
6
7
Katherine Tarbox, The French Lieutenants Woman and the Evolution of
Narrative, Twentieth Century Literature, XLII/1 (Spring 1996), 89-91.
misdemeanors in what Charles considers vulgarity. Thoroughly

conditioned by and comfortable within her social location, Ernestinas
only analytical attention to her community reflects her fathers low
opinion of the upper classes, which she acknowledges only after
Charles has jilted her, and her discomfort with servants, as evidenced
by her relationship with Mary. To Ernestina, Sarahs deliberate
flaunting of Victorian convention, and the social critique it implies, is
profoundly unsettling, particularly because of Sarahs assumed sexual
misconduct. So frightened of sexuality that a mere glimpse of her bed
while admiring herself in the mirror causes her to hastily cover herself
(28), Ernestina cannot even bring herself to use the local term for
Sarah, who allows the town to believe that in making herself sexually
available to the French lieutenant she has become his Hoer (86). In
contrast to Sarahs direct admission of her infamous title (there walks
the French Lieutenants Whore oh yes, let the word be said [175-
76]), Ernestina resorts first to romanticism in informing Charles of her
reputation, referring initially to Sarah as poor Tragedy (8), and
when pressed by Charles, to euphemism, calling her the French
Lieutenants ... Woman (9). Thus Ernestina provides both Sarah and
the narrative with a title reflecting external definition and implicit
anxiety.
To the pervasive sense of anxiety permeating Sarahs interactions
with her community, Mrs Poulteney and Mrs Fairley add pious
judgment. Eager to secure both her own salvation and the envy of her
rival in Christian charity, Lady Cotton, through her dedication to
helping a poor, mad sinner achieve repentance, Mrs Poulteney insists
on defining Sarah in terms of her only too visible sorrow, which
showed she was a sinner (36) and her inconvenient ability to
reproach and unsettle company before whom Mrs Poulteney would
like to exhibit her pious benevolence (60). Resistant to seeing Sarah in
more complex ways as well as obliged to monitor her unstable
charges activities, Mrs Poulteney relies on another local spy, her
servant Mrs Fairley, whose talent for surveillance rivals only the
narrators. Among the sharpest eyes in Lyme a town of sharp eyes
(291), as Charles will later reflect in London are those of Mrs
Fairley, whose enthusiasm for spying on Sarah is motivated by a
hatred that slowly grew almost vitriolic in its intensity. With
excellent opportunities to do her spying on her frequent journeys
into town and a wide network of relations and acquaintances at her

command, Mrs Fairley, more than any other individual in the novel,
collects detailed accounts of Sarahs every movement and expression
darkly exaggerated and abundantly glossed (61). Resentful of
Sarahs assumption of various attentions to Mrs Poulteney as well as
Sarahs popularity with the other servants, Mrs Fairley deliberately
portrays her rival as promiscuous and exhibitionist, particularly in her
propensity to walk in the wildly natural Ware Commons an offense
roughly equivalent, in Mrs Poulteneys eyes, to prostitution. Willing
herself not to see Sarah in terms of her sexuality as long as she
exhibits proper repentance, Mrs Poulteney is particularly affronted by
Sarahs deliberate journeys to Lymes de facto Lovers Lane (90), a
place she associates, the narrator conjectures, with satanic orgies
and French abominations (92). Appalled by Sarahs refusal to
renounce her desires and conform to convention, Mrs Poulteney and
Mrs Fairley together define Sarah as a public scandal and a wicked
Jezebel (244, 245), both traditional labels for women who challenge
patriarchal religious and sexual norms.
More thoughtful but no less patriarchal, Dr Grogan views Sarah in
terms of melancholy and hysteria narratives. Situating her case firmly
within a scientific context in which womens behavior is analyzed and
judged, Grogan attributes Sarahs behavior not to willfulness but to
illness, describing her apparent desire to remain perpetually miserable
as a kind of addiction. He tells Charles, Her sadness becomes her
happiness. She wants to be a sacrificial victim, Smithson. Where you
and I flinch back, she leaps forward. She is possessed, you see (156).
An advanced man for his time and place (59), Grogan views Sarah
from a perspective grounded in the scientific method and reliant on
logic, and offers a plausible, if incorrect, assessment of Sarahs
deliberate suffering. 8 Increasingly convinced of Sarahs commitment
to her misery, Grogan ultimately defines Sarah in terms of a
stereotypically feminine reliance on emotion and incapacity for logic,
explaining to Charles, You must not think she is like us men, able to
reason clearly, examine her motives, understand why she behaves as
she does. One must see her as being in a mist (156). Despite his
genuine concern for Sarah, Grogan imposes patriarchal standards onto
8
her situation, and encourages Charles, a fellow Darwinian, to likewise

consider her an object to analyze and categorize.
Occasionally sharing in each of these interpretations of Sarah while
struggling with such views, Charles simultaneously embodies the
standards of his era and the subversion of those standards. Both a
representative Victorian and an individual struggling with existential
angst, Charles negotiates complicated and often contradictory
perspectives as he attempts to understand the mysteriously alluring
Sarah. Cognizant that the familiar categories in which he tries to place
Sarah fail to explain her behavior adequately, Charles occupies an
interpretive position that mirrors readers bewildered fascination with
the novels heroine. Unlike the inhabitants of Lyme, who willingly
focus on only particular aspects of Sarahs personality in order to
ascribe meaning to her behavior, Charles acknowledges more
complexity in her character, and contributes to that complexity by
projecting his own uncertainties and desires onto her.
This difference between Charles perspective and the views
embraced by Mrs Poulteney, Dr Grogan, and the other inhabitants of
Lyme results largely from Charles unusual opportunities to observe
and interact with Sarah. Although Charles initial contact with Sarah
challenges him to hone his skills of analysis and perception, his
unconventional and secluded interactions with her encourage his
voyeurism and imagination. Coming upon her unexpectedly as she
sleeps on a ledge in the Undercliff, Charles experiences an irresistible
urge to surreptitiously observe and reflect on her as an object on
display. Although initially hesitant to engage in a subversive visual
act, Charles eventually succumbs to his curiosity, noticing Sarah lying
in the complete abandonment of deep sleep, on her back (70).
Believing that he can observe her without her knowledge, Charles
proceeds to examine the supine Sarah from every angle the landscape
will allow, considering her in terms of his sexual history:
There was something intensely tender and yet sexual in the way she
lay; it awakened a dim echo of Charles of a moment from his time in
Paris. Another girl, whose name now he could not even remember,
perhaps had never known, seen sleeping so, one dawn, in a bedroom
overlooking the Seine. He moved round the curving lip of the plateau,
to where he could see the sleepers face better, and it was only then
that he realized whom he had intruded upon . It irked him strangely
that he had to see her upside down, since the land would not allow
him to pass round for the proper angle. He stood unable to do anything
but stare down, tranced by this unexpected encounter . He came at
last to the very edge of the rampart above her, directly over her face
. It was precisely then, as he craned sideways down, that she awoke.
(70-71)
Initially stimulated by the opportunity to gaze on an erotically

suggestive womans body, Charles is even more excited once he
realizes whom he has been watching. This realization prompts not
horror, as it might in a more conventional gentleman, but irritation
that his location does not provide a better vantage point. Unable, and
apparently unwilling, to discontinue his probing gaze, Charles
becomes transfixed in a state of voyeuristic absorption. Jolted out of
his reverie by Sarahs awakening, however, Charles reverts to the
alienating and passive trappings of convention, apologizing for his
presence and walking away. Nevertheless, this voyeuristic encounter
establishes an unmistakably active erotic element in Charles evolving
connection to Sarah.
Inspired by this unexpected private viewing, Charles reflects on
Sarah as image, frequently noting her appearance and acknowledging
the complicated desires her appearance stimulates. Intrigued by
Sarahs unusual combination of severity, evidenced by her
conservative and dark clothing, and wildness, suggested especially by
her untidily restrained hair, Charles recognizes both the extent to
which his fiance Ernestina reflects the tastes of his society and the
extent to which Sarah does not. While Ernestina, pale, fair, and gray-
eyed, has exactly the right face for her age; that is, small-chinned,
oval, delicate as a violet (25), Sarahs appearance suggests more
exotic characteristics, as Charles notices:
Part of her hair had become loose and half covered her cheek. On the
Cobb it had seemed to him a dark brown; now he saw that it had red
tints, a rich warmth, and without the then indispensable gloss of
feminine hair oil. The skin below seemed very brown, almost ruddy,
in that light, as if the girl cared more for health than a fashionably pale
and languid-cheeked complexion. A strong nose, heavy eyebrows .
Delicate, fragile, arched eyebrows were then the fashion, but Sarahs
were strong, or at least unusually dark, almost the color of her hair,
which made them seem strong, and gave her a faintly tomboyish air
on occasion . Her face was well modeled, and completely feminine;
and the suppressed intensity of her eyes was matched by the

suppressed sensuality of her mouth, which was wide and once again
did not correspond with current taste. (71, 119)
Fascinated by this unconventional and darkly alluring appearance,

Charles becomes particularly haunted by Sarahs remarkable face,
which takes on a kind of spectacular significance: It was as if after
each sight of it, he could not believe its effect, and had to see it again.
It seemed to both envelop and reject him; as if she was a figure in a
dream, both standing still and yet always receding (86).
This fascination with Sarahs face, and less obsessively, her hair,
recalls Cleggs fascination with Mirandas hair in The Collector. It
also reflects a process of fetishization most commonly associated with
the cinema, and especially with female stars. In describing the
development of and the process through which the star close-up
creates a disjuncture between image and narrative, Laura Mulvey
argues that such spectacles of idealized women, simultaneously
displayed and unavailable, function by associating both the image
and femininity with secrets, with something that lies darkly behind
the mask. Seeing Sarah as both inviting and resisting his possession
of her, Charles wishes to penetrate the veil of mystery surrounding
her, especially in terms of her sexuality, which because of her
reputation is constantly on display and yet surrounded by mystery. For
Charles, then, the spectacle of female sexuality becomes one of
typography, one of surface and secret. 9
This typography is particularly significant as Charles vision of
Sarah oscillates between philanthropic concern and erotic desire.
Consciously exhibiting her misery and isolation, Sarah inspires both
sympathy and pity from her community. Unlike Mrs Poulteney, who
considers Sarahs performative misery an asset in convincing others of
her benevolence, Charles initially speaks for the truly compassionate
interests of kind-hearted people like Aunt Tranter who sincerely wish
to help Sarah. This attitude manifests itself as Charles observes Sarah
sleeping in the Undercliff, after he has compared her to his memory of
a French prostitute:
9
Laura Mulvey, Fetishism and Curiosity, 41, 46.
He stood unable to do anything but stare down, tranced by this

unexpected encounter, and overcome by an equally strange feeling
not sexual, but fraternal, perhaps paternal, a certainty of the innocence
of this creature, of her being unfairly outcast, and which was in turn a
factor of his intuition of her appalling loneliness. He could not
imagine what, besides despair, could drive her, in an age where
women were semistatic, timid, incapable of sustained physical effort,
to this wild place. (71)
While engaged in this kind of compassionate reflection, Charles

focuses not on Sarahs sexual allure, but on her innocence and
vulnerability, considering her in terms of conventional womanhood. In
this view, Sarah is small, fragile, in need of assistance and protection
not only because she is a woman but because her meekness is so
convincingly touching.
However, in a later encounter at Mrs Poulteneys, Charles begins
to notice that Sarahs obvious meekness is in fact contrary to her
nature and that she is playing a part that surreptitiously
communicates complete disassociation from, and disapprobation of,
her mistress (103). Furthermore, Charles notes, in the presence of her
employer, Sarah appears to be laboring under a sense of injustice
and, very interestingly to a shrewd observer, doing singularly little to
conceal it (104). In Mulveys terms, Sarah, like Marilyn Monroe and
other stars, invests a great deal in a spectacular surface image that
simultaneously invites the fascinated gazer to consider both its
constructedness and its vulnerability and instability. 10 As Charles
dimly perceives, Sarah masquerades as innocent, humble, meek, and
mild in her role as repentant, miserable sinner, simultaneously inviting
Charles as shrewd observer to deconstruct her surface image and
consider the alluring mysteries concealed by her mask of innocence.
And especially because she subverts the repentant sinner context in
which Mrs Poulteney displays her, Sarah implies a defiantly
passionate and erotic nature underlying her performative appearance.
Because of his interest in Sarah as secretive and erotically
suggestive, Charles has difficulty sustaining his fraternal/paternal
attitude and instead concentrates on Sarah as dark, mysterious, and
exotic. These associations recall Ourika, the eponymous heroine of
Claire de Duras novel, that Fowles translated into English. Like
10
Ibid., 48.
Sarah, Ourika is the dark, exotic, sexually mature, and yet

romantically spurned alternative to an innocent, socially acceptable,
and consummately white woman involved with the man she loves,
also named Charles. Similarly melancholic in response to her
circumstances, Ourika appears ravished, with the exception of her
extraordinarily large and luminous eyes. 11 Charles notes a similar
composition in Sarahs face: All in it had been sacrificed, he now
realized, to the eyes (119). Apparently unaware of these parallels
while writing The French Lieutenants Woman, Fowles later cited
Ourika, or at least its heroine, as very active in [his] unconscious
during the writing of the novel, even chastising himself for fantasizing
about Sarah while being so stupid as not to see who that woman
really was. Noting a remnant of color prejudice in his
characterization of Sarah, Fowles asserts, something in my
unconscious cheated on the essential clue. The woman in my mind
had black clothes but a white face. 12
This admission explains in part Charles dual perception of Sarah.
While considering Sarah in terms of her oppression, isolation, and
vulnerability that is, in terms of her need for protection and
assistance Charles focuses on the mask, the white face, the
spectacular image. While considering Sarah in terms of her eroticism,
her mystery, or her passion, however, he associates her with darkness.
Such associations are re-inforced by Grogan, who describes Sarahs
mysteriously obsessive displays of passionate emotion as Dark
indeed. Very dark (156). This portrayal of Sarah identifies her as the
almost white, black woman popularly characterized as tragically
sexual in European films. 13 Because of her reputation as the French
lieutenants whore, Sarah cannot occupy a position Charles ascribes to
virginal white women like Ernestina. Instead, she occupies the
marginal, exotic, and dangerous space of the scarlet woman. Although
Fowles claimed to have been haunted by Sarahs white face, in terms
11
Duras, Ourika, trans. John Fowles, 4. Kadish argues that this description of Ourika's
eyes reflects Fowles desire to enhance male medical discourse, since his translation
varies from a more straightforward rendering like her large and shiny eyes (Kadish,
Rewriting Women's Stories, 76).
12
Fowles, Foreword, in Duras, Ourika, xxix-xxx.
13
bell hooks, Selling Hot Pussy: Representations of Black Female Sexuality in the
Cultural Marketplace, in Black Looks: Race and Representation, Boston: South End
Press, 1992, 74.
of her sexuality, she occupies a space associated in contemporary

culture with black women: Undesirable in the conventional sense,
which defines beauty and sexuality as desirable only to the extent that
it is idealized and unattainable, the black female body gains attention
only when it is synonymous with accessibility, availability, when it is
sexually deviant. 14
Charles interpretation of Sarah as the sexually deviant, dark other
is most clearly displayed as she confesses her experience with the
French lieutenant, Varguennes. Begging him to listen as she relates
this erotically charged narrative, Sarah both repels and attracts
Charles, who again notices her eyes and uses their appearance to
define his view of her: Only the eyes were more intense: eyes
without sun, bathed in an eternal moonlight (143). Once he has heard
this tale, Charles intuits, his ability to consider her a conventional
woman, to focus on her mask of innocence, will dissolve. Instead, she
will become fixed in the eternal darkness of the erotic other.
Playing to this possibility, Sarah portrays herself as an object of
erotic fantasy in her confession. Describing the encounter in sensual
detail, Sarah situates Charles (and readers) within her narrative, finally
climactically declaring, I gave myself to him (174). Stimulated by
this performance, Charles completes her suggestive tale within his
imagination:
He saw the scene she had not detailed: her giving herself. He was at
one and the same time Varguennes enjoying her and the man who
sprang forward and struck him down; just as Sarah was to him both an
innocent victim and a wild, abandoned woman. Deep in himself he
forgave her her unchastity; and glimpsed the dark shadows where he
might have enjoyed it himself. (176)
Sarahs seduction functions by suggestion, prompting Charles to

engage in a voyeuristic fantasy similar to those that Clegg reports in
The Collector. Like Clegg fantasizing about striking down a man
attacking Miranda and then attacking her himself, Charles imagines
himself in both the position of sexual partner and the position of
voyeur, making love to Sarah and striking down the man to whom
14
Ibid., 65-66. For a similar argument, see Patricia Hill Collins chapter entitled, The
Sexual Politics of Black Womanhood, in Black Feminist Thought, 2nd edn, New
York: Routledge, 2000, 123-48.
he watches her give herself. In this respect Charles functions as a

stand-in for readers, who voyeuristically experience Sarahs narrative
along with him and later observe as he makes love to Sarah himself.
This single act of sexual penetration convinces Charles that in at
least some respects he understands Sarah profoundly. Yet he also
recognizes that even after their sexual encounter, in other respects his
understanding of her is ignorant (370). Readers share this sense, as
they too know Sarah in terms of her sexuality indeed, readers know
more about Sarahs sexual mores at this point than Charles, having
observed Sarah planning to seduce him but remain mystified about
her motivations. Like Charles and the inhabitants of Lyme, readers
have little alternative but to consider Sarah through voyeuristic
interpretations and fragmented accounts of her behavior, particularly
because the narrator refuses to enter her consciousness. Examining the
thoughts of each of the other main characters, the narrator explicitly
queries, Who is Sarah? Out of what shadows does she come? (94),
but declines his authority to explore Sarahs perspective,
sanctimoniously declaring, Possibility is not permissibility (96).
This refusal both reveals the narrators conception of Sarah as the
dark Other and indicates his deliberate decision to keep her in shadow.
Providing readers with a private viewing of Sarah at her window that
none of the characters (except him) share, the narrator engages in just
enough peeping to tantalize readers with a little textual voyeurism,
and then makes Sarah responsible for this narrative teasing.
Contemplating his authority to explain his heroine, the narrator
claims:
But I find myself suddenly like a man in the sharp spring night,
watching from the lawn beneath that dim upper window in
Marlborough House; I know in the context of my books reality that
Sarah would never have brushed away her tears and leaned down and
delivered a chapter of revelation. She would instantly have turned, had
she seen me there just as the old moon rose, and disappeared into the
interior shadows. (96)
Rather than admitting that he finds such surreptitious surveillance

stimulating, the narrator instead argues that Sarah herself establishes
boundaries that he cannot penetrate. Later in the novel, just after he
describes Sarah arranging various objects in her room in Exeter, the
narrator claims to respect such parameters, and again associates Sarah

with darkness:
She seemed waiting in the quiet light and crackle, the firethrown
shadows . And I no more intend to find out what was going on in
her mind as she firegazed than I did on that other occasion when her
eyes welled tears in the silent night of Marlborough House. (279)
Enjoying the voyeuristic pleasures of spying on Sarah in dark

atmospheres suggestively lit by the rising moon or a flickering fire,
the narrator offers readers semi-private viewing experiences that
evoke intimacy while simultaneously preventing the satisfaction of
penetrating Sarahs consciousness.
In this way the narrator represents the reader-as-voyeur,
determining readers fragmented and incomplete understanding of
Sarah as an erotic enigma. Feminist readers have criticized this
method, arguing that such reverence for Sarah-as-enigma defines
Sarah as an object of voyeuristic analysis and constrains her
subjectivity within dominant ideologies. 15 Unlike Ernestina, Charles,
or even Mrs Poulteney, all of whose thoughts the narrator examines,
Sarah remains enigmatically and suggestively impenetrable, seducing
characters, the narrator, and readers into interpretive acts that attempt
to define her through fragmented masculine gazes.
However, Fowles also has good reasons for retaining Sarahs
mystery, not the least of which concern her status as existential
catalyst. Like Conchis and his accomplices in The Magus, Sarah
performs an educational function in The French Lieutenants Woman,
prompting Charles, and readers along with him, to evaluate the
hypocrisies and injustices inherent in his worldview and to pursue a
more existentially authentic existence. Early in the novel, Sarahs
mysteriousness and sexually explicit reputation provide essential
seductive mechanisms through which Charles and readers can initially
explore unconventional attitudes. As the novel progresses, Sarahs
continued impenetrability facilitates this existential transformation,
since it forces Charles and readers to question radically the rigid
narratives they use to define marginalized individuals. Because
Sarahs behavior is unconventional and generally incomprehensible,
15
Michael, Who is Sarah? A Critique of The French Lieutenants Womans
Feminism, 228-231; Kadish, Rewriting Women's Stories, 79.
and because it suggests vital and relational qualities absent in Charles

epistemological and ontological realities, Charles is willing to make
choices that facilitate existential authenticity, even though his
motivation for making those choices is to capture, possess, and
comprehend Sarah.
Despite this problematic motivation, Fowles suggests that Charles
pursuit of Sarah is ultimately admirable and worthwhile, particularly
in his statement in the last ending that Charles, despite his failure to
possess Sarah, has at last found an atom of faith in himself, a true
uniqueness, on which to build (467). In terms of Charles
development, Fowles validates Sarahs role as enigmatic muse,
inspiring her male admirer to acts of creativity and authenticity.
However, Fowles deliberate refusal to explain his heroine also
reflects an intense desire to surrender authorial control and to
dramatize the restrictive, limited roles society allows women to
occupy. As he explains:
I could have analysed Sarah Woodruff more than I did. But not to do
so was a conscious decision. One strong reason was that I think
women are far less amenable to analysis than men for a number of
historical and biological reasons, but primarily because the ill wind of
their past exploitation has brought one good: a kind of common exile
that permits them to stand outside the ritual games and role-mania of
the average male. Sarah Woodruff was deliberately created to suggest
this beneficial side of the historical exile.16
Specifically locating Sarah as an outsider to dominant ideologies, and

associating that outsider status with a historical situation that has
exiled women from such ideologies, Fowles suggests that his
characterization of Sarah, rather than oppressively confining her
within masculine structures, instead liberates her from such ritual
games and role-mania. Rebecca Lin interprets this authorial decision
as indicative of both Fowles inability to understand women and his
refusal to appropriate womens perspectives. 17 Beyond her freedom
16
Graham et al., John Fowles: An Exclusive Interview, in Conversations with John
17
Rebecca Lin, Medusa, Siren or Sphinx: Retrieving the Female Gaze and Voice in
The French Lieutenants Woman, Studies in Language and Literature, VIII
(December 1998), 200.
from narrative omniscience, Sarahs deliberately obscure

characterization separates her from Fowles earlier heroines, allowing
her to embody a more emancipated status independent from authorial
impositions and representative of feminist ambitions. Even Michael,
Fowles most vehement critic on this point, acknowledges that
although Fowles to a certain degree romanticizes Sarahs quest for a
feminist consciousness by depicting her as an enigmatic and tragic
figure, the novel does assert this theme of emancipation . I
distinctly hear an authorial voice, Fowles voice, within these pro-
feminist discourses. 18
Although readers cannot access Sarahs consciousness directly,
Fowles provides careful descriptions of Sarahs penetrating, resistant
gaze and allows her to articulate piercing analyses of her situation,
both of which establish Sarahs remarkable status as an outsider
within. In keeping with the novels emphasis on surveillance and on
the motif of watching eyes, Fowles repeatedly emphasizes Sarahs
ability to see her society through unique interpretive lenses. In
contrast with Ernestina, who can cast down her eyes very prettily, as
if she might faint should any gentleman dare to address her (25),
Sarah employs her gaze as both a weapon and a mirror, forcing the
recipients of her looks to reevaluate their assumptions. When Charles
first sees Sarah on the Cobb, for example, he immediately notices
how her stare was aimed like a rifle at the farthest horizon (9); after
addressing her with transparently trite pleasantries, he receives a
typical look from Sarah, one which looks not at him but through him:
Again and again, afterwards, Charles thought of that look as a lance;

and to think so is of course not merely to describe an object but the
effect it has. He felt himself in that brief instant an unjust enemy; both
pierced and deservedly diminished. (10)
Seeing himself in the reflection of Sarahs gaze, Charles feels

uncomfortably penetrated and comprehended, especially because
Sarah manages to use her gaze to subvert Charles imposition of
patronizing conventions.
In their subsequent meetings, Sarah continues to use her gaze to
expose the injustices she suffers both at societys hands and through
18
Michael, Who is Sarah? A Critique of The French Lieutenants Womans
Feminism, 227.
Charles refusal to acknowledge her suffering. Repeatedly resisting

Sarahs intense pleas for assistance, Charles focuses on his reputation,
always at the mercy of potential secret watchers, and attempts to
withdraw from her presence. Sarahs response is to fix Charles with
ever more revealing looks. As the narrator reports in one case:
Her eyes were anguished ... and anguishing; an outrage in them, a

weakness abominably raped. They did not accuse Charles of the
outrage, but of not seeing that it had taken place. (139)
Especially aware of the inauthentic roles the members of her

community play, Sarah uses her gaze to expose Charles posturing,
which obscures the injustice endemic to a society arranged by rigid
categories. This dynamic is especially poignant when Charles assumes
the role of Alarmed Propriety (144), to which Sarah responds with a
look of typically understated reproach:
Though direct, it was a timid look. Yet behind it lay a very modern
phrase: Come clean, Charles, come clean. It took the recipient off
balance. (145)
Although Charles never fully comprehends Sarahs social analyses,

her piercing gaze convinces him that his own role-playing is
inauthentic. Indeed, it is this very perception that catalyzes Charles
unusual pursuit of Sarah and establishes his potential for becoming
existentially authentic.
Yet Sarahs piercing gaze exposes more than merely Charles
existential shortcomings. The narrator describes Sarahs interpretive
vision as nearly flawless in its ability to disregard irrelevancies and
social conditioning:
She could sense the pretensions of a hollow argument, a false

scholarship, a biased logic when she came across them; but she also
saw through people in subtler ways. Without being able to say how,
any more than a computer can explain its own processes, she saw
them as they were and not as they tried to seem. It would not be
enough to say she was a fine moral judge of people. Her
comprehension was broader than that. (52)
Both intelligent and discerning, and apparently innately so, Sarah

possesses a penetrating and socially conscious gaze that uncovers the
essential qualities of both individuals and institutions. This ability is
both a blessing and a curse, as it allows Sarah to analyze social
situations with great insight and accuracy, but also reveals to her the
disappointing wholeness of individuals and institutions more easily
accepted when only partially understood. In fact, it is precisely this
ability that dooms her to imminent spinsterhood, a condition that
precipitates her radical behavior with the French lieutenant: she is
unable to accept any suitors because her innate curse reveals too
clearly her suitors meannesses, their condescensions, their charities,
their stupidities (54).
Through these carefully noted instances of Sarahs superior insight,
Fowles establishes Sarahs penetrating gaze as a precondition for her
developing standpoint, which evolves as she enlarges her vision
through analysis of the social, economic, and political conditions in
which she finds herself. Although Sarahs initial social analysis relies
on fiction and poetry as a substitute for experience, her
incompatible education and social status soon disabuse her of her
purely poetic understanding of the world, forcing her to choose
between equally unattractive options. As the narrator reports:
But alas, what she had thus taught herself had been very largely
vitiated by what she had been taught. Given the veneer of a lady, she
was made the perfect victim of a caste society. Her father had forced
her out of her own class, but could not raise her to the next. To the
young men of the one she had left she had become too select to marry;
to those of the one she aspired to, she remained too banal. (53)
Unable to marry, both because of her awkward social status and

because of her ability to see through her potential suitors, and saddled
with an increasingly delusional father whose class pretensions
eventually drive him both into the poorhouse and into the madhouse,
Sarah finds herself in need of employment, choosing to become a
governess.
Although this lifestyle at least allows Sarah to employ her
education, it taunts her with a state of domestic contentment she can
never possess. Tormented by her sense of injustice that such pleasure
will apparently never be hers even though it is the privilege of her
employer, Mrs Talbot, who is [her] own age exactly (169), Sarah
decides to pursue Varguennes. Although Charles claims to understand

this decision, or at least uses a mask of understanding to encourage
Sarah to continue her confession, Sarah is quick to correct him and to
establish her lived experiences as the basis of her wider social
analysis:
You cannot, Mr. Smithson. Because you are not a woman. Because
you are not a woman who was born to be a farmers wife but educated
to be something ... better . You were not born a woman with a
natural respect, a love of intelligence, beauty, learning . And you
were not ever a governess, Mr. Smithson, a young woman without
children paid to look after children. You cannot know that the sweeter
they are the more intolerable the pain is. You must not think I speak of
mere envy. I loved little Paul and Virginia, I feel for Mrs. Talbot
nothing but gratitude and affection I would die for her or her
children. But to live each day in scenes of domestic happiness, the
closest spectator of a happy marriage, home, adorable children . It
came to seem to me as if I were allowed to live in paradise, but
forbidden to enjoy it. (169)
Specifically noting her status as a spectator, an outsider within this

blissful home, Sarah subverts the pleasures of surveillance, instead
emphasizing the alienation and frustration that such a position
engenders. Misunderstanding her point, Charles insists that social
privilege does not necessarily bring happiness, and presses Sarah to
admit to exaggerating her alienation, commenting, But surely you
cant pretend that all governesses are unhappy or remain
unmarried?. To this query Sarah replies, All like myself (170),
connecting her feelings of alienation and frustration both to her
personal experience and to a wider acknowledgment of the shared
oppression of women who are similarly situated. Through such
analyses, Sarah illustrates the epistemological vigor of an outsider
within position that affords a social location from which particular
experiences and critical analysis may combine to bring into focus
questions and issues that were not visible, important, or legitimate
within the dominant institutions, their conceptual frameworks,
cultures, and practices. 19
19
Sandra Harding, Is Science Multicultural? Postcolonialisms, Feminisms, and
Epistemologies, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998, 17.
Indeed, Sarah further argues, her situation reflects larger issues of

class conflict, exhibited within her experience in her fixation on
material goods. Just as Sarah observes domestic happiness without
fully participating in it in the Talbots home, she feels further
tormented by their economic security and material comforts, which
Sarah understands to be beyond her reach. As she tells Charles:
Four years ago my father was declared bankrupt. All our possessions
were sold, she tells Charles. Ever since then, she explains, I have
suffered from the illusion that even things mere chairs, tables,
mirrors conspire to increase my solitude. You will never own us,
they say, we shall never be yours. But always someone elses. (171)
Feeling herself tormented within her employers comfortable home,

Sarah emphasizes her constant awareness of her poverty and her
spinsterhood, two conditions imposed upon her by her fathers
misplaced aspirations. Connecting her frustration with wider working
class struggles, Sarah confesses to Charles:
I know this is madness, I know in the manufacturing cities poverties

and solitude exist in comparison to which I live in comfort and luxury.
But when I read of the Unionists wild acts of revenge, part of me
understands. Almost envies them, for they know where and how to
wreak their revenge. And I am powerless. (171)
Unable to resign herself to what Charles perceptively understands to

be the slow, tantalizing agonies of her life as a governess (175),
Sarah acknowledges her own relative privilege, but nevertheless
seethes with anger and resentment that she should have so few
alternatives, so few opportunities, to pursue her personal, intellectual,
and economic interests.
However, she is not powerless. Although she does not wreak her
revenge through violent or even aggressive tactics, Sarah does enact
various strategies that destabilize Victorian conventions and draw
attention to her suffering. The most significant of these strategies,
obviously, is her decision to associate herself with Varguennes,
thereby establishing her reputation as the French Lieutenants
Woman. To Charles, she justifies this decision as an act of
desperation:
I did it so that I should never be the same again. I did it so that people
should point at me, should say, there walks the French Lieutenants
Whore oh yes, let the word be said. So that they should know I have
suffered, and suffer, as others suffer in every town and village in this
land . It was a kind of suicide. An act of despair, Mr. Smithson. I
know it was wicked . . . blasphemous, but I knew no other way to
break out of what I was.
Deliberately sacrificing her respectability and her acceptable but

restrictive social identity, Sarah embraces this role with a specific aim
of provocation; she wants her community to contemplate the
conditions that could prompt a woman in her position to take such a
radical step. In fact, she does not actually engage in intercourse with
Varguennes a decision in keeping with her self-protective and
insightful character but allows her community to believe that she
has. In so doing, Sarah liberates herself from conventional narratives
through which her society defines and constrains women:
Sometimes I almost pity [other women] . I think I have a freedom

they cannot understand. No insult, no blame, can touch me. Because I
have set myself beyond the pale. I am nothing, I am hardly human any
more. I am the French Lieutenants Whore. (175)
However, this role, while certainly calling attention to Sarahs

suffering, initially functions by merely displacing Sarah from one set
of narrative conventions to another, as the interpretations imposed
upon her by Ernestina, Mrs Poulteney, and Dr Grogan indicate. She
therefore continues to subvert her communitys expectations,
continuously seeking a social space in which she might reject all
limiting categorizations. The behaviors associated with this objective
her staring out to sea, her acceptance of the post at Marlborough
House, her refusal to accept assistance from Mrs Talbot or Aunt
Tranter all work to baffle the residents of Lyme, whose limited
imagination allows Sarah very little room to carve out an authentic
identity. In Charles, however, Sarah finds an individual who is
intrigued by her unconventional resistance to social norms. Sensing
his attraction, Sarah appeals to Charles for assistance, specifically
noting his difference from the inhabitants of Lyme and suggesting that
his travels and studies must have endowed him with a more generous
and varied perspective than she generally encounters. She explains:
I live among people the world tells me are kind, pious, Christian
people. And they seem to me crueler than the cruelest heathens,
stupider than the stupidest animals. I cannot believe that the truth is
so. That life is without understanding or compassion. That there are
not spirits generous enough to understand what I have suffered and
why I suffer and that, whatever sins I have committed, it is not
right that I should suffer so much.
Stunned by this articulate account of her feelings, this proof, already

suspected but not faced, of an intelligence beyond convention (141),
Charles succumbs to Sarahs seductions, enabling Sarah to appropriate
in his life the role Varguennes has played in hers. Implicating Charles
in her situation, luring him out of Lyme to her hotel in Exeter,
deceiving him into an intimate meeting with her in her fire lit
bedroom, seducing him into an act of brief but world-shattering
intercourse, and finally abandoning him, Sarah uses Charles to
transcend her role as the French Lieutenants Whore.
That a woman in her position should pursue such a course of action
is totally incomprehensible to Charles, who has trouble associating
this typically masculine narrative with any woman, even one as
unconventional as Sarah. Still attempting to fit Sarah into familiar
representations of women, Charles finds his understanding of Sarah
split between competing visions: he became increasingly unsure of
the frontier between the real Sarah and the Sarah he had created in so
many such dreams: the one Eve personified, all mystery and love and
profundity, and the other a half-scheming, half-crazed governess from
an obscure seaside town (429). Although aspects of her behavior fit
these interpretations, Sarah conforms to neither of these visions,
especially since, contrary to Charles perception of the real Sarah
versus the dream Sarah, these opposing constructions are equally
infused with his own projected needs and desires.
On her own terms, Sarahs resistance to categorization, to
comprehensive visions that define and explain her, is necessary for her
to establish and maintain a satisfactory situation. Although Sarah
professes affection for Charles, she abandons him precisely because
he is unable to see her except in terms of categorical assumptions,
despite the thoughtful analyses of her situation she has shared with
him. Indeed, the process through which Charles begins to interpret

Sarah on her own terms does not begin until after he has finally
located her in London, after the enigmatic, mysterious seductress
image that Charles cherishes has become largely untenable. In her
altered circumstances, Sarah subverts all of Charles masculine
fantasies, and displays a self-assurance that Charles finds bewildering.
Indeed, Sarahs self-possession is evident in both of the novels final
endings. Although these two endings convey very different resolutions
to Charles and Sarahs relationship, both include Sarahs articulate
summary of her contentment and sense of belonging in Rossettis
circle. 20 Responding to Charles desire to marry her, Sarah explains:
I do not wish to marry. I do not wish to marry because ... first,

because of my past, which habituated me to loneliness. I had always
thought that I hated it. I now live in a world where loneliness is most
easy to avoid. And I have found that I treasure it. I do not want to
share my life. I wish to be what I am, not what a husband, however
kind, however indulgent, must expect me to become in marriage.
(450)
Objecting not to Charles but to the institution of marriage, Sarah

reports a commitment to self-determination that forbids any
assumption of familiar roles for women. She has come, she argues, to
value her independence and to nurture her loneliness, both
characteristics that signify her uniqueness. Furthermore, she explains:
I never expected to be happy in life. Yet I find myself happy where I

am situated now. I have varied and congenial work work so pleasant
that I no longer think of it as such. I am admitted to the daily
conversation of genius . The persons I have met here have let me
see a community of honorable endeavor, of noble purpose, I had not
till now known existed in this world . Mr. Smithson, I am happy, I
am at last arrived, or so it seems to me, where I belong . You may
think what you will of me, but I cannot wish my life other than it is at
the moment. And not even when I am besought by a man I esteem,
who touches me more than I show, from whom I do not deserve such
20
Because the coin toss that rewinds the clock and restarts the action in the second
ending occurs after Sarahs articulation, her explanation must be assumed to have
occurred in both endings, although the text only reports it in the first ending.
a faithful generosity of affection . And whom I beg to comprehend

me. (450-51)
Having finally located herself within a situation that values her

intellect and imagination and that allows her to pursue her ambitions,
Sarah resists Charles attempts to alter her circumstances.
Recognition of this conventional social identity is especially
significant for both Charles and readers of the novel, since it indicates
Sarahs exclusive concern for her own happiness and well-being
rather than a larger goal of either philosophical or political
emancipation. Although numerous critics have chronicled the process
whereby Sarah prompts Charles to pursue existential authenticity, and
a few critics have argued that Sarah embodies a feminist
consciousness, Sarahs behavior and explanations suggest a far more
individual objective. Refusing to justify her behavior through the
modes of perception that have previously constrained her, Sarah
instead relies on more intuitive and alternative ways of knowing and
being in constructing her situation. Most significantly, Sarah
specifically rejects rationality as a means of defining or explaining her
actions. Citing this decision as a major factor in her dismissal of
Charles, and of another suitors, marriage proposal, Sarah indicates
her fundamental rejection of logical analysis:
You do not understand. It is not your fault. You are very kind. But I
am not to be understood.
You forget you have said that to me before. I think you make it a
matter of pride.
I meant that I am not to be understood even by myself. And I cant
tell you why, but I believe my happiness depends on my not
understanding.
Charles smiled, in spite of himself. This is absurdity. You refuse to
entertain my proposal because I might bring you to understand
yourself.
I refuse, as I refused the other gentleman, because you cannot
understand that to me it is not an absurdity. (452)
Even after this exchange, Charles fails to appreciate the importance

of this directive for Sarah. Critics have likewise missed the point of
this exchange. Ignoring the social conditions that have marginalized
Sarah and prompted her radical behavior social conditions that she
catalogues in some detail and claiming instead that her refusal to
understand herself results not from any lessons learned from her
experiences but rather from an innate inability to engage in rationality,
Tony E. Jackson, for example, argues that Sarah cannot work out the
meaning of her experiences in a wider context. 21 In fact, Sarah is
perfectly able to analyze the meanings of her experiences, and can
connect those experiences to larger systemic oppressions affecting
other members of her class, sex, and status, and does so repeatedly
and in a remarkably articulate fashion that even Charles acknowledges
(141).
In fact, Sarahs radical determination not to understand herself
reflects an insightful comprehension of the marginalizing and
debilitating effects of logical analysis. Perhaps the most fundamental
force of patriarchal society, rationality or more accurately, excessive
reverence for rationality has historically limited the social, political,
professional, and intellectual roles that women may assume.
Furthermore, mans reliance on rationality has enabled his alienation
from alternative epistemological systems, especially those
traditionally associated with threatening others intuition, for
example, traditionally associated with women, or instinct, traditionally
associated with nature. In the world of the novel, rationality has
worked to define Sarah as deviant, disturbed, even perverse, with
undesirable effects, as with Grogans scientific and logical diagnosis,
for example, which defines Sarah as mentally unstable and best suited
to an asylum.
In refusing to understand herself, Sarah both resists such
machinations and enacts a kind of authenticity essential to Fowles
understanding of existential freedom. In his reflections on the mystery
of Stonehenge, for example, Fowles argues, Choosing not to know,
in an increasingly known, structured, ordained, predictable world,
becomes almost a freedom, a last refuge of the self. 22 Indeed, Sarah
suggests that her motives must not be comprehended through any
philosophy available to her. As Ernestinas, Mrs Poulteneys,
Charles, and the narrators interpretations of Sarah show, the variety
of epistemological systems operating within the novel, both within the
21
Tony E. Jackson, Charles and the Hopeful Monster: Postmodern Evolutionary
Theory in The French Lieutenants Woman, Twentieth Century Literature, XLIII/2
(Summer 1997), 230-31.
22
Fowles, The Enigma of Stonehenge, 125.
Victorian scene and within the contemporary situation of the narrator,

are all problematic in terms of their comprehension of Sarah.
Although in some respects Sarah is the wild, passionate outcast
Ernestina assumes her to be; the suffering sinner Mrs Poulteney
considers her; the alluring seductress Charles envisions; and the erotic
enigma on whom the narrator spies, Sarah is never any of these things
completely, nor is she merely a combination of them. Likewise, she is
not merely an overly educated farmers daughter, or even the half-
scheming, half-crazed governess from an obscure seaside town (429)
Charles assumes her to be in his more skeptical moments. Instead,
Sarah is a complex individual whose interaction with all of these
narratives, all commonly accepted representations of women,
convinces her of their limiting and controlling function.
Determined not to understand herself either in terms of rationality
or in terms of these various representations, Sarah instead embraces
more intuitive and personally relevant ontological and epistemological
systems. Her relationship with Millie, for instance, functions not
through any clearly defined social dynamic, but instead through a
wordless connection. As the narrator reports:
This tender relationship was almost mute. They rarely if ever talked,
and if they did, of only the most trivial domestic things. They knew it
was that warm, silent co-presence in the darkness that mattered. (159)
Loveday emphasizes the significance of this tender and mute

relationship, comparing it to scenes of intellectual brotherhood
between Charles and Grogan. In contrast to the intellectual affinity
between the two men, the wordless, and at the time indeed mindless,
communion between Sarah and Millie illustrates alternative modes of
behavior and relation. As Loveday explains, It is physical; it is
female; its members are of the oppressed; in short, it is in the modern
sense a kind of sisterhood. 23 Bonding through Sarahs intuitive
understanding of Millies afflictions and a physical relationship that
communicates empathy, Sarah and Millie enact an alternative
relational system that creates ambiguities, disrupts intrusive
23
ideologies, and demands the dissolution of substantial controlling

beliefs. 24
Likewise, Sarah destabilizes accepted representations of
womanhood by associating herself with the natural world. Although
both Ernestina and Mrs Poulteney interpret this connection as
evidence of her wantonness, Sarah uses it, especially in her
interactions with Charles, as a location, a point of departure for the
construction of new and liberatory meanings. 25 Representing
freedom from the narrowly defined and rigidly enforced expectations
of her community, the wild, natural setting of the Undercliff enables
Sarah to reconstruct her experience with Varguennes not merely as a
confession but as a provocation, a directive to Charles to acknowledge
the constraints of her previous situation, the tyrannies of her present
circumstances, and the possibilities for her future if he assists her.
Strategically locating herself within these natural surroundings, Sarah
creates an alternative space in which she can proactively pursue a
more intuitive and personally authentic way of being.
In both her relationship with Millie and her association with nature,
Sarah experiences a kind of liberation from restrictive social
expectations that enables her to act authentically. Although she is able
to apply logical analysis and her sociopolitical consciousness to her
situation, Sarahs assertion that her happiness depends on not
understanding herself both reflects her faith in an intuitive, instinctual
way of being that deliberately subverts oppressive and controlling
categorizations and establishes her primary objective of individual,
rather than political, emancipation. Of course, Sarahs rejection of
masculine narratives and pursuit of alternative connections also
reflects Fowles belief that women think intuitively and emotionally
rather than intellectually, and that they are in touch with a deeper and
warmer level of thought and feeling than men ever penetrate to.
Indeed, as the creation of a male author, Sarah necessarily has depths
24
David W. Landrum, Sarah and Sappho: Lesbian Reference in The French
Lieutenants Woman, Mosaic, XXXIII/1 (March 2000), 75.
25
Suzanne Ross, Water out of a Woodland Spring: Sarah Woodruff and Nature in
The French Lieutenants Woman, in John Fowles and Nature: Fourteen Perspectives
on Landscape, ed. James R. Aubrey, Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University
Press, 1999, 190.
[Fowles] himself cannot plumb. 26 Fowles famous or notorious

refusal to enter Sarahs consciousness and tell us what she is
thinking, Loveday considers an ingenious solution to this problem.
Instead of entering her consciousness and illustrating her thought
processes, Fowles merely implies that Sarah enacts an authentic
womans standpoint, and thus avoids describing in any detail the
process through which she considers her lived experience, her
observations of social relations, her interactions with others, and her
ideological convictions as interrelated aspects of a larger social and
political situation.
Although Fowles does demonstrate Sarahs insight into her own
experience and her ability to connect that experience with wider
systems of privilege and oppression, his inability and/or unwillingness
to delineate Sarahs motivations and ideological convictions
strategically positions Sarah between two opposing forces: that of
connection between men and women and that of mutual alienation.
The mystery surrounding Sarahs motivations, deliberately maintained
by both character and author, provides the key to this tension. In fact,
her impenetrability on this matter facilitates both Charles journey
toward existential authenticity and her own search for a situation in
which she may pursue her intellectual and personal freedom.
The question confronting Fowles as he approached the novels
ending was whether or not these two quests could mingle
harmoniously. In refusing to explain Sarahs motivations behind her
treatment of Charles, Fowles maintains the plausibility of both
endings to the novel one that employs Sarahs alternative ethic as a
force of connection for Charles and Sarah, and the other that
constructs this ethic as necessarily committed to self-determination
and self-preservation in opposition to convention. In the first of these
endings, Fowles presents Sarahs refusal to marry Charles and her
insistence on independence as a kind of test for Charles and as a
surrender to hazard: the reunion of the lovers ultimately rests, Charles
thinks, in Gods hands, in His forgiveness of their sins (459).
Because he persists in locating Sarah and remains sufficiently open to
her unconventional attitudes, Charles succeeds in re-uniting with
Sarah and meeting his daughter Lalage, fusing these distinct
individuals into a loving family and fulfilling the narrative
26
conventions of romance. Whispering to his lover in a passionate

embrace, Charles acknowledges, in this ending, Sarahs deliberate
mysteriousness as a crucial part of their relationship: Shall I ever
understand your parables? he whispers, to which she responds
physically, her head against his breast shak[ing] with a mute
vehemence (460). Facilitating their final embrace, Sarahs alternative
ethic creates a space within which this unconventional family might
find happiness.
In the final ending, however, Sarah employs her insistence on
independence and mystery not as a force of connection but as a force
of emancipation, both from Charles and from conventional resolutions
to the romantic mystery plot. Realizing that Sarah seriously refuses to
marry him, Charles examines her for some explanation: He sought
her eyes, the narrator explains, for some evidence of her real
intentions, and found only a spirit prepared to sacrifice everything but
itself ready to surrender truth, feeling, perhaps even all womanly
modesty in order to save its own integrity. This realization prompts
Charles to see Sarah in an entirely new way, as a hidden cancer
revealed in all of its loathsome reality (464-65). Believing that
Sarahs mission is simply mean-spirited manipulation, Charles storms
out of the house, past his unknown daughter, and out into a world he
now hardly comprehends. Suggesting that Sarahs battle for territory
was a legitimate uprising of the invaded against the perennial invader
(466), the narrator insists that this ending is equally plausible, that
even though it rejects the traditional closure of the romantic plot, it
nevertheless reflects reality, the truth that life, however
advantageously Sarah may in some ways seem to fit the role of
Sphinx, is not a symbol, is not one riddle and one failure to guess it
but is to be, however inadequately, emptily, hopelessly endured
(467).
In other words, Fowles deliberate refusal to explain his heroine
allows him to entertain two opposing but, for Fowles, equally
tempting visions: in the first, the confused hero possesses his
mysterious muse, becoming more authentic in the process; in the
second, the superior woman rejects convention and asserts her own
authenticity. The former encompasses all of Fowles masculine
fantasies of narrative control, seduction and domination; the latter
embodies his competing interests in indeterminacy, provocation, and
feminist advocacy. Although these endings represent but two of an

infinity of possible outcomes, these two particular endings dramatize
what Conradi rightly identifies as a central tension in Fowles work
[that] springs from the way an ostentatiously liberal politics tries to
negotiate the force of play of coercive and repressive fantasy. 27
This negotiation reaches a critical tension in The French
Lieutenants Woman, a novel that both constrains its heroine through
the imposition of restrictive masculine visions and surrenders some
authorial control in a genuine attempt to allow that heroine to develop
outside of masculine fantasies. Struggling to reconcile his reverence
for the mysterious feminine with his growing awareness of the ways
in which his authorial practices exploit women for mens pleasure,
Fowles offers endings that fulfill both of his competing desires as a
philosophically and politically conscious man and author. However,
the ordering of those endings suggests a move on Fowles part, albeit
reluctant, toward genuine indeterminacy and multiplicity of
perspective. 28 Interestingly, Ruth Christiani Brown links The French
Lieutenants Woman to Hardys The Well-Beloved and Melvilles
Pierre, both novels that seethe with self-hatred and that show a
scornful anger at the audience for its rampant sentimentality. 29
Although perhaps not as vitriolic a novel as these, The French
Lieutenants Woman does indict both readers and Fowles himself for
desiring the sentimental, conventional reunion of the lovers in the first
ending, and does initiate a radical shift in the authors work, though
not nearly as disastrous a shift as Hardy or Melville experienced after
their transitional novels. Instead, The French Lieutenants Woman,
particularly in its final ending, suggests a new direction for Fowles,
one that surrenders authorial omniscience in order to embrace not
fragmentation, but a multiplicity of perspective that enables whole
sight. Having established his talent for narrative seduction and
manipulation in The Collector and The Magus, Fowles begins to
interrogate the responsible use of that talent in The French
27
Peter Conradi, The French Lieutenants Woman: Novel, Screenplay, Film,
Critical Quarterly, XXIV/1 (Spring 1982), 41.
28
Indeed, as Warburton explains, Fowles acceptance of multiple perspectives began
with accepting the views of his original and most discerning editor, his wife Elizabeth,
whose critique of the sentimental ending Fowles favored determined the published
order of the endings (John Fowles, 295).
29
Ruth Christiani Brown, The French Lieutenants Woman and Pierre: Echo and
Answer, Modern Fiction Studies, XXXI/1 (Spring 1985), 117.
Lieutenants Woman, particularly in his construction and use of the

perspective of a woman situated as an outsider within who:
ha[s] been devalued, neglected, excluded from the center of the social
order; who generate[s] less interest in ignorance about how the social
order works who enable[s] a different perspective, one from
everyday life who mediate[s] relations between nature and culture
. And whose activities provide particularly illuminating
understandings at this moment in history. 30
Indeed, through this situated perspective, Fowles questions not only

the surveillance culture of his Victorian characters, but the voyeuristic
spectatorship of contemporary culture as well. This interest in
interrogating both his own authority and dominant modes of seeing
led to some difficult but necessary confrontations for Fowles in The
Ebony Tower, as he learned to surrender authorial control and to
explore new connections between women and narrative.
30
Harding, Whose Science? Whose Knowledge?, 211-12.
CHAPTER FOUR
WOMEN IN THE WASTELAND:

ALTERNATIVE PERSPECTIVES IN THE EBONY TOWER
After dramatizing the tension between his own masculine fantasies

and his interest in womens authentic perspectives in The French
Lieutenants Woman, Fowles offered a strange collection of short
stories in his next published work, The Ebony Tower. Despite his
forays into poetry, philosophy, and non-fiction writing, Fowles had
established a reputation as a fine novelist by this time; that he should
publish a collection of short stories has proved somewhat
disconcerting to critics, especially because of the eclectic nature of the
stories included in The Ebony Tower, apparently linked only by a kind
of authorial surrender to ambiguity. In each of these tales, both readers
and characters must ultimately surrender to the problematic and the
inexplicable. The most striking feature of this collection, however, is
the parallel directive apparently embraced by Fowles himself, who
attempts in The Ebony Tower to push the fragmentary to its limits, to
accept that even a controlling author might have to allow uncertainty.
Reflecting Fowles changing concerns as an author, The Ebony Tower
emphasizes ambiguity and impossibility in terms of ever achieving a
full and coherent understanding of others or of a text.
The Ebony Tower therefore indicates a transition in Fowles work
from a model of authorial control and manipulation to a model that
accepts uncertainty and multiple realities. Particularly significant in
this transition is Fowles experimentation with womens perspectives,
which he employs in order to suggest unconventional and sometimes
inspirational alternatives to the problematic assumptions of traditional
narratives. Instead of the fragmentation, disillusionment, and
alienation that result from the characters attempts to fit themselves
and others into prefabricated roles, the narrative inventions of The
Ebony Towers women inspire connection and communication.
Through this effort, Fowles emphasizes his faith in womens ways of
knowing and being and attempts to develop the feminine ethic he first
advanced in The Magus. However, in The Ebony Tower Fowles also
acknowledges the obstacles individuals who wish to pursue such an
ethic might encounter in a contemporary wasteland seemingly
obsessed with abstraction, resignation, and complacency. A kind of
abdication of his talent for authorial seduction and manipulation, The
Ebony Tower illustrates Fowles growing desires to interrogate both
narrative and social conventions that deny womens assertions of
creativity and community, and to seek fictional spaces in which such
perspectives might emerge with the potential to renew a bewildered
and alienated contemporary community.
Given this focus on such contemporary dilemmas, Fowles
inclusion of a Breton lay in The Ebony Tower seems somewhat odd.
However, his translation of Marie de Frances Eliduc serves as the
imaginative point of reference for the entire collection, establishing
Maries medieval concerns with relationships and womens
perspectives as a comparative standard for his contemporary stories.
Comparing Marie de France to Jane Austen, Fowles admires the
transmutation that took place when Marie grafted her own knowledge
of the world on the old [Celtic] material, applauding her sexual
honesty; her very feminine awareness of how people really
behaved; her passionate excess, which he compares to Austens
use of sense and sensibility; and her humor. 1 His translation of her
tale is a genuine effort to honor both the Celtic romance as the source
of the very essence of what we have meant ever since by the
fictional (118) and Marie as an intelligent, ironic, and eminently
incisive artist.
Although Fowles suggests in his translation that his affinities lie
with Eliduc, using what Marie asserts is the original title of the lay, he
includes Maries use of a revised title, Guildelec and Guilliadun
because, as Marie herself explains, its really about the two
women (123), suggesting an attempt to balance his interest in mens
problems with a commitment to explore womens narratives. The
story of a loyal husband and soldier who falls in love with a young
princess while fighting in a foreign land, Eliduc considers a most
compelling dilemma for Fowles, who alters Maries concept of
fidelity by subtly privileging Eliducs relationship with Guilliadun
over his marriage. 2 Through this altered focus, Fowles inserts a
1
John Fowles, The Ebony Tower, Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1974, 120-21.
2
Morse, John Fowles, Marie de France, and the Man with Two Wives, 24-25.
Alternative Perspectives in The Ebony Tower 135
contemporary existential element into Eliducs situation, establishing

Eliducs marriage to Guildelec as a satisfying but static relationship,
and characterizing his affair with Guilliadun as an alternative, kinetic
relationship that more appropriately suits Eliducs changing
circumstances and identity. Concerned not with fidelity and
commitment as principle virtues but rather with personal authenticity
and evolution, Fowles acknowledges Eliducs affection for his wife,
but contrasts it with his passionate desire for his mistress. Through
this contrast, Fowles uses Eliduc to represent a contemporary conflict
between limiting conventions and liberating alternatives.
However, Fowles generally retains Maries characterization of the
two women, whose perspectives effect a positive resolution to the
problem Eliduc has created in taking Guilliadun as his mistress.
Unable to envision a solution to his dilemma, Eliduc mopes after
Guilliadun loses consciousness at discovering that he is married,
assuming she is dead. Neither able to revive her nor willing to devote
himself with renewed fervor to his marriage, Eliduc leaves Guilliadun
in a chapel in the forest, vowing to come here every day and weep in
all my desolation on your tomb, and returns to his wife but gives her
not a single smile or a kind word. Puzzled by the fact that
Guilliadun remains pink and white, only very faintly pale (139) in
apparent death, Eliduc nevertheless makes no effort to investigate her
condition, but instead wallows in his anguish.
Guildelec, however, takes a more proactive approach, sending a
servant to spy on her husband to discover the source of his miserable
behavior and finally journeying to the chapel herself. Insightful and
compassionate, Guildelec understands the situation immediately,
explaining to her servant:
Do you see this girl? Shes as lovely as a jewel. Shes my husbands

mistress. Thats why hes so miserable. Somehow it doesnt shock me.
So pretty ... to have died so young. I feel only pity for her. And I still
love him. Its a tragedy for us all. (140)
This response reflects both Guildelecs wisdom and her ability to see
herself in connection rather than competition with others. Although,
like Eliduc, Guildelec weeps for Guilliadun, she remains sufficiently
alert to watch her servant kill a weasel, whose mate revives it with a
magical red flower. A quick-thinking and resourceful woman,
Guildelec uses the flower to revive her rival, who firmly blames
Eliduc for her despair and fear:
I fell hopelessly in love with a knight, a brave mercenary called

Eliduc. He eloped with me. But he was wicked, he deceived me. He
had a wife all the time. He never told me, never gave me the least hint.
When I heard the truth, I fainted with the agony of it. Now hes
brutally left me helpless here in a foreign country. He tricked me, I
dont know what will become of me. Women are mad to trust in
men. (140-41)
A most justified complaint considering Guilliaduns circumstances,

this analysis crystallizes perhaps the most significant moral of this tale
in Fowles terms: women are indeed mad to trust in men, especially
men like Eliduc, whose pursuit of a kinetic and authentic situation a
worthwhile goal nevertheless problematically objectifies all that is
outside the self as potentially hostile and fails to include a responsible
and compassionate commitment to others.
In contrast to Eliducs self-serving actions reminiscent of Nicholas
perspective in The Magus, Guildelec enacts an alternative ethic,
reminiscent of the perspective advocated by Conchis. This ethic
values compassion, connection, and a kind of common sense that
parallels Evelyn Fox Kellers concept of dynamic objectivity, which
she defines as the pursuit of a maximally authentic, and hence
maximally reliable, understanding of the world around oneself
[that] actively draws on the commonality between mind and nature as
a resource for understanding. 3 Through her curiosity and
determination to discover the source of her husbands misery, her
compassion for her rival, and her willingness to value elements of the
natural world, Guildelec uses an empathetic strategy that facilitates
her husbands desire for authenticity, his continued care for
Guilliadun, and her own autonomy. Reporting her husbands grief,
Guildelec dissolves Guilliaduns anger and resolves to reunite her
with Eliduc a plan to which Guilliadun submits, despite her
reservations about her lover. Unlike Eliduc, who relies on deceit and a
hope that his wife and mistress will never know of one another,
Guildelec and Guilliadun actively seek a resolution to this
complicated state of affairs that will foster respect and contentment
among the three of them. After sending for Eliduc, Guildelec
graciously reunites her husband with his mistress, shrewdly assesses
his response, and outlines a practical solution to their problem:
3
That same night he was home, and found Guilliadun restored to life
. They cant hide their joy at being reunited. When Eliducs wife
saw how things stood, she told her husband her plans. She asked his
formal permission for a separation, she wished to become a nun and
serve God. He must give her some of his land and she would found an
abbey on it. And then he must marry the girl he loved so much, since
it was neither decent nor proper, besides being against the law, to live
with two wives. (141)
A reliable and responsible solution that provides legal, moral, and

economic stability to all three parties, Guildelecs plan allows Eliduc
to marry, protect, and provide for Guilliadun, an otherwise defenseless
foreigner in Eliducs country. Simultaneously, it allows Guildelec to
assume a new social role and way of being that integrates convention
and self-determination.
In Maries version, Hieatt argues, this plan does not so much
advocate Guildelecs self-sacrifice as it illustrates her wisdom,
practicality, and prudence, especially compared to her husband. 4
Despite the altered emphasis in his translation, however, Fowles
similarly advocates Guildelecs sensible resolution, not only
emphasizing her noble sacrifice but implying that that sacrifice entails
an admirable commitment to community shamefully absent in her
husbands behavior. Through her empathetic actions, Fowles implies,
Guildelec demonstrates an ability to facilitate authenticity and
autonomy in her actions and her relationships, both critical elements
of the standpoint approach that Fox Keller advocates. 5
Fowles interest in such approaches becomes evident in the rest of
the stories that comprise The Ebony Tower, both through the
innovative narrative visions of women characters and through the
absence or rejection of such perspectives. As the least resolved story
of the collection, Poor Koko demonstrates the impossibility of
communication across conventional social categories without the
mediation of womens relational perspectives. The only piece of
Fowles fiction that does not include a major woman character, Poor
Koko tells the story of an aged scholars experience with a young
burglar who breaks into the country retreat where the scholar has
come to finish a book on Thomas Love Peacock, argues politics and
linguistics with him, and eventually ties him up and burns his beloved
4
Hieatt, Eliduc Revisited: John Fowles and Marie de France, 356.
5
manuscript. Narrated from the scholars point of view, the story serves
as an attempt to report and analyze this experience and come to grips
with its ultimate meaning. Although he admits to some possible
exaggerations and misreadings of the burglars behavior, the scholar
dismisses these minor misinterpretations or inaccuracies of memory,
focusing instead on his continuing inability to make sense of what
happened and his principal desire to come to some sort of positive
conclusion. Indeed, he admits to being haunted by the experience,
explaining:
What haunts me most can be put as two questions. Why did it happen?
Why did it happen to me? In essence: what was it in me that drove
that young demon to behave as he did?
Genuinely perplexed about the burglars motivations for burning

the manuscript, the scholar makes a sincere effort to consider himself
as the burglar might have seen him. For his part, the scholar explains:
I have tried to list what he might have hated in me, both reasonably
and unreasonably: my age, my physical puniness, my myopia, my
accent, my education, my lack of guts, my everything else. I must
certainly have seemed precious, old-fashioned, square, and all the rest
of it, but surely all that could not have added up to much more than
the figure of a vaguely contemptible elderly man.
Clearly aware of his faults, the scholar cannot be completely surprised

that there should have been some antagonism in his interaction with
the burglar. But he is unconvinced that these faults should have
motivated the burglar to burn his Peacock manuscript, especially
because, he reflects, this unforgivable act was preceded by a
surprisingly mild, almost kind, course of behavior. Although he
originally ascribes the burglars kindness to cold calculation from
the start he was kind only to deceive, the scholar finally admits:
But now I simply do not know. I would give a very great deal I think
even an absolution, if that were a condition of putting the question to
know when he truly decided to do it. (180-81)
This admission indicates a transition in the scholars response to

the burglary from an inward-looking indignation to an outward-
looking confusion. Accordingly, the scholar turns to an investigation
of the young burglars gestures and linguistic ticks, looking for
meanings that he may not have grasped at the time of the burglary.
Taking a nearly unprecedented course of action in his experience, the
introverted and academically encapsulated scholar begins to observe
the social conventions of the young working class, looking to
demolition workers and football fans to explain the burglars parting
gesture, an aggressively cocked thumb the scholar finally understands
to indicate a warning: a grim match was about to start, and the
opposing team he represented was determined to win (183).
The source of this opposition, the scholar speculates, is language.
Focusing especially on the burglars repetitive usage of the word
man and the interrogative right, the scholar advances a tentative
conclusion for which he admits he has very little evidence,
speculating:
I wont be so absurd as to maintain that if I had interspersed my own

remarks with a few reciprocal mans and rights the night would then
have taken a different path. But I am convinced that the fatal clash
between us was of one who trusts and reveres language and one who
suspects and resents it. (184-85)
Representative of closely guarded privilege, the scholars skill with

and reverence for language, he thinks, marginalizes and enrages the
young burglar, whose militant and minimalist use of language reflects
the resentment of a generation systematically deprived of thorough
education and genuine opportunities for intellectual, political, and
economic advancement. His fatal error, the scholar then concludes,
was his dismissive refusal to write about the burglar:
My fate was most probably sealed from the moment I rejected his
suggestion that I write about him myself . In a sense he placed his
own need in the scales against what I had called a long-dead novelist;
and what he must have resented most was the application of this
precious and denied gift of word-magic to no more than another
obscure word-magician. I presented a closed shop, a secret club, an
introverted secret society; and that is what he felt he had to destroy.
(185-86)
In refusing to write about him during their encounter, the scholar

realizes, he antagonizes the burglar by explicitly denying him even
imaginative access to the privileged society of which the scholar is a
member. The burglars response, the scholar believes, is a symbolic
attempt to punish him through the same mechanism, by denying him

access to and even destroying his own word-magic.
Explicitly concerned with fragmentation and the inability to see
whole, Poor Koko demonstrates Fowles growing interest in
connecting the perspectives of individuals in radically different social,
political, and economic locations. Significantly, the scholars
reflections are not without effect; as Robert Huffaker argues, these
reflections transcend the scholars original conception of the event as
a story to dine out on (159), becoming a genuine attempt to connect
with his antagonist that facilitates his growth in social consciousness. 6
Nevertheless, his reflections are both speculative and highly
subjective, reading very much like Cleggs journals and Mirandas
diaries in The Collector. Unable to locate the burglar and confirm his
interpretation of events, the scholar assumes very limited personal
responsibility for the destruction of his manuscript and for the
burglars alienation, which he attributes to the true villains of the
piece [who] are well beyond individual control: the triumph of the
visual, of television, the establishment of universal miseducation, the
social and political history of our unmanageable century and
heaven knows how many other factors (186). Submitting to this
macrocosmic interpretation, the scholar resists the very personal
nature of his encounter. Rather than acknowledge the creative,
symbolically rich, and highly individualized actions of the burglar, the
scholar ultimately dismisses him as a mere representative of a
historically deprived community. Even in his deliberately obscure
title and incomprehensible epigraph, which carefully indict both the
burglar and the scholar for their antagonism, the scholar reinforces
their ultimate disconnection, situating them within general
prescriptions for the appropriate practice of filial behavior and the
proper commitment to language.
Lacking the perspective of a woman character, Poor Koko
exhibits the inability of a manipulative author to move beyond
fragmentation into whole sight. Similarly constructed around a
protagonist with limited vision, the title novella of the collection, The
Ebony Tower, demonstrates the alienation and failure of an artist and
critic who is unable to evolve beyond his abstract, rational,
complacent acceptance of convention and embrace a symbolic,
intuitive, and alternative way of being. A variation on The Magus,
The Ebony Tower chronicles David Williams visit to Cotminais,
6
Robert Huffaker, John Fowles, 125.
the domain of an inarticulate but generally right feeling magus, artist

Henry Breasley. 7 There David encounters two young women who
interpret Breasleys beliefs for David and initiate him into their
unconventional world Diana, whom Breasley calls the Mouse, and
Anne, whom he calls the Freak and although David does not
encounter the metatheatrical structures of the godgame, he does
experience in this isolated, medieval forest domain a parallel
challenge to reevaluate his worldview and to embrace authenticity and
a passion for existence.
More grounded in the conventions of realism than The Magus,
The Ebony Tower presents both an initiate and a magus who are far
more limited in their potential than either Nicholas or Conchis.
Financially established and comfortable in his marriage and
profession, David embodies far less energy and self-protective
arrogance than the much younger Nicholas. Prone to drunken ravings
and off-color innuendos, Breasley occasionally seems little more than
a cheap knock-off of the sleek and sophisticated Conchis. Similarly,
both Davids and Breasleys outlooks are more moderate than their
counterparts perspectives. While Nicholas relies on objectification
and violence, David relies on abstraction and complacency, and while
Conchis epitomizes psychological complexity, Breasley embodies
sensual immediacy. Through these variations, Fowles inevitably
surrenders a great deal of the seduction and explosive tension of the
earlier situation. However, these constructions simultaneously use
readers familiarity with such people and points of view to suggest
that radical challenges to accepted ways of knowing and being can
spring from relatively ordinary conditions. Such grounding is
immediately apparent as David contemplates his trip to Breasleys
home. Unlike Nicholas, whose impulsive journey to Greece represents
his need for a new land, a new race, a new language a new
mystery, 8 David journeys to Cotminais on an errand that is not
strictly necessary and that he undertakes mostly for the opportunity
of meeting a man one had spent time on and whose work one did, with
reservations, genuinely admire ... the fun of it, to say one had met
him (10-11). Despite this rather unremarkable errand, however,
7
This is not the only variation at work in The Ebony Tower, and numerous critics
have admirably catalogued the extent to which this collection justifies Fowles
working title, Variations, in terms of characterization, narrative structure, and theme,
both within the collection itself and in reference to Fowles earlier works.
8
Fowles, The Magus, 21.
Davids experience in Breasleys domain profoundly unsettles his

understanding of himself, his work, and his relationships.
An abstract painter and art critic, David initially enacts an
exceptionally rational, conventional, and generally unruffled way of
being. Commercially successful and mildly ambitious, David accepts
his moderate success in the art world and cultivates in his critical work
a kind of fair-minded geniality enhanced by his knowledge of art
history and his linguistic skill. As a painter, he is a technically
sophisticated color painter whose work is tending toward nature,
he thinks, but is composed of a technical precision, a sound
architectonic quality inherited from his parents [architectural]
predilections, and a marked subtlety of tone. Because he is dubious
about transatlantic monumentality, he paints to a relatively small
scale, producing works that went well on walls that had to be lived
with . in flats and homes, enjoyed privately, on his own chosen
scale. In his personal life, David enjoys a similarly unexceptional and
comfortable status in his marriage to Beth, a childrens book
illustrator, whose artistic work mitigates the one brief bad period in
an otherwise very successful marriage, when Beth had rebelled
against constant motherhood and flown the banner of Womens
Liberation. An admirer of his parents marriage, David is pleased to
observe that His own had begun to assume that same easy
camaraderie and cooperation (15-16). He is, in short, a generally
content individual, comfortable in his modest ambitions and proud of
his conventional successes.
In Breasley, however, David discovers an artist who is profoundly
connected to both his work and his surroundings, and who seamlessly
integrates his intense sensual, intellectual, and emotional impressions
into his artistic vision. Almost entirely (and deliberately) inarticulate,
Breasley cultivates in his small community a reverence for
physicality, sensuality, and immediacy. Davids first inkling of this
devotion comes in an early conversation with Diana, as he attempts to
discover the nature of her relationship with Breasley. Diana admits
that both she and Anne are sexually intimate with Breasley, and
justifies this arrangement by citing Breasleys need for sensuality:
Hes not verbal at all. As you must have realized . He has to see
and to feel. Quite literally. The shadow of young girls in flower isnt
enough (34).
Compelled to immerse himself in sensuality, Breasley rejects

abstraction and linguistic precision, focusing instead on the
immediacy of experience. Particularly enraged by the kind of
linguistic urbanity and abstract art that David generates, Breasley
viciously attacks both Davids work and his general worldview:
Pair of tits and a cunt. All that goes with them. Thats reality. Not
your piddling little theorems and pansy colors. (42)
More than just a theory on the appropriate concerns of art, this

drunken rant illustrates Breasleys rejection of the ebony tower itself,
a concept, Diana explains, that he uses to define the contemporary
retreat into abstraction that denies the common impulses and intuitions
of humanity.
Unable to communicate these values to David through language,
Breasley relies on Diana as translator. Much more like David in both
artistic and national temperament than Breasley, Diana initiates David
into the Cotminais domain through both her articulate summaries of
Breasleys opinions and her seductive sexual and emotional
vulnerability. Unlike Breasley, Diana demonstrates significant
linguistic prowess, translating Breasleys violently minimalist
language into precise summaries with which David can engage.
Explaining Breasleys tits and cunt comment, for example, Diana
declares:
Henry feels that full abstraction represents a flight from human and
social responsibility . Youre afraid of the human body (41-42).
Such explanations facilitate Davids negotiation of his ordeal

with Breasley, allowing him to identify and (courteously) respond to
Breasleys attack. Admiring Dianas incisive management of this
ordeal and trusting in her ability to articulately summarize Breasleys
perspective, David accepts Dianas explanations, which provide the
necessary context in which David can interpret Breasleys
fundamental talents:
More and more he realized the truth of what [Diana] had said: the old
mans problem was an almost total inadequacy with words. If he
didnt always cheapen, he certainly misrepresented everything he
talked about. One had to keep remembering the way he could express
himself in paint; and the gap was enormous. The art predicated a
sensitive and complex man; and almost everything outward in him

denied it. (55)
An exceptionally rational man, David relies on this kind of detached

analysis to make sense of his experiences with the enigmatic Breasley.
In contrast, Diana is both articulate and poised. Considering her a kind
of kindred spirit and ally, David is able to identify with her intellect
and become receptive to her perspective.
Continually puzzled by the apparent disjunction between
Breasleys intuitive and sensual sophistication and his logical and
linguistic immaturity, David is especially impressed with Dianas
ability to maintain a commitment to artistic abstraction while
simultaneously integrating a kind of emotional rawness and sensual
immediacy into her work. In contrast to Beth, whose work, David
thinks, fails to enact a similarity of stylistic purpose in comparison
to his own, Diana exhibits fixations that David recognizes:
He understood both critically and intuitively what this girl was trying
to do. It did bear an analogy with his own development; in a more
feminine, decorative kind of way more concerned with textures and
correspondences than form she was abstracting from natural rather
than artificial color ranges. (86)
Perceiving a kind of complementarity in Dianas more feminine

perspective particularly in comparison to Beths less compelling
attitude flattered by his own influence on Dianas work, and stirred
by Dianas modesty and uncertainty in her abilities, David begins to
question his complacency in both his work and his marriage.
Davids unusual experiences at Cotminais further enchant him,
especially as Breasleys devotion to the sensual repeatedly grants
David access to Diana as physically and emotionally vulnerable. Upon
arriving at Breasleys home, David glimpses both Diana and Anne
lounging naked in the sun. This incidental opportunity for voyeurism,
he soon realizes, is nothing extraordinary, since both women remain in
a perpetual state of either total or partial undress throughout his visit.
For Diana, David realizes, this perpetual lack of conventional dress is
both a conscious embrace of Breasleys values and a signifier of
ambivalence. When Diana explains her sexual relationship with
Breasley, for example, David notes:
There was a defensiveness behind the frankness, some kind of

warning. They both looked down; David momentarily at the line of
the bare breasts beneath the blouse, then away. She seemed devoid of
coquetry, of any trace of the flagrant sexiness of her friend. Her self-
possession was so strong that it denied her good looks, that repeated
undertone of nakedness, any significance; and yet it secretly drew
attention to them. (34)
Clearly displaying her sexuality, Diana simultaneously denies its

importance. Justifying her intimacy with Breasley by referring to his
integrated interpretation of life and art, she also suggests to David that
such values are foreign to her nature. These intriguing contradictions
are seductively appealing to David, whose comfortable marriage no
longer provides, or perhaps never provided, the sort of mystery that
Diana embodies.
Both aloof and sensitive, self-possessed and self-conscious, and
apparently nothing like his wife, Diana becomes for David an
especially evocative art object representative of an aesthetic and
sexual ideal. A result of her constantly displayed or suggested nudity,
which David initially considers in terms of works of art, like those by
Gauguin and Manet, that exhibit womens, but not mens, nakedness
(59), this objectification occurs as David begins to evaluate and
analyze Diana as an object of his gaze. Exploiting the artistically
justified nudity that Breasleys devotion to the sensual creates, David
indulges his voyeuristic fantasies by closely examining both Diana
and Anne. Somewhat repelled by Anne, whom he describes as faintly
negroid, aboriginal, androgynous, and comparing this repulsive body
with Dianas pale and feminine body, David violates Breasleys
open and honest acknowledgement of human sexuality by
surreptitiously observing a self-consciously naked Diana at the precise
moment when she will not notice his gaze:
He watched her body when she turned to pass something, when he

knew the direction of his eyes would not be caught. They talked
banally enough; and the ghost of infidelity stalked through Davids
mind not any consideration of its actuality, but if he hadnt been
married, if Beth ... that is to say, if Beth didnt sometimes have certain
faults, an occasional brisk lack of understanding of him, an
overmundane practicality, which this attractively cool and honest
young mistress of a situation would be too intelligent (for he saw in
her something that he aimed at in his own painting, a detachment and
at the same time a matter-of-factness) to show or at any rate to abuse.
Idealizing Dianas intelligence and tact in comparison to Beths

practicality, David creates radically divergent pictures of the two
women, one of which denigrates Beth as disappointingly real, the
other of which envisions Diana as flawlessly ideal. Such a
dichotomous vision is particularly easy for David to generate, since
his rational and complacent worldview considers such imaginings to
be merely conceptual. Indeed, he admits:
It wasnt that one didnt still find Beth desirable, that the idea of a
spell together in France without the kids after Cot (hovering in it
Beths tacit reacceptance of motherhood, a third child, the son they
both wanted) ... just that one was tempted. One might, if one wasnt
what one was; and if it were offered that is, it was a safe
impossibility and a very remote probability away. (59-60)
Complacently resigned to his relationship with Beth, which offers

the conventional pleasures of a stable, cooperative marriage and the
potential to father a son, David dismisses his growing attraction to
Diana, noting, He felt a little bewitched, possessed, but deciding, it
must be mainly the effect of being without Beth. Comfortably
accepting this rational explanation, David continues to gaze on the
intriguing Diana as he would gaze on an especially evocative work of
art:
The more he learned her, the more he watched her, the more he liked
her; as temperament, as system of tastes and feelings, as female
object. He knew it, and concealed it ... not only to her, partly also to
himself; that is, he analyzed what he had so rapidly begun to find
attractive about her why that precise blend of the physical and the
psychological, the reserved and the open, the controlled and the .
uncertain, called so strongly to something in his own nature. (72-73)
Considering her as a series of characteristics rather than an integrated

subject, David enjoys a fragmented vision of Diana reminiscent of
pornography. Indeed, such contemplation of Dianas emotional and
physical vulnerability stimulates a knowledge of a brutality totally
alien to his nature: how men could rape, and causes him to recognize,
Something both tender and provocative in that defenselessness stirred
him deeply. Nevertheless, David persists in his detached, reserved
response to Diana, deciding to report these unusual sensations to Beth,
because sooner or later he told her everything; but not till they had
made love again (74).
This caveat, however, indicates a tension in Davids consciousness,

the result of new confrontations to his worldview. Sexually,
artistically, and psychologically stimulated by Diana, David
simultaneously recognizes the vitality of the perspective she embodies
Breasleys perspective, devoted to the immediate, the sensual, and
the real, but further infused with her own intuition and acuity. In
contrast to his rational and resigned complacency, David realizes,
Diana integrates a reverence for the vitality and physicality of human
experience into her artistic and theoretical concerns with abstraction.
Initiated into this worldview by Dianas exhibitions of vulnerability,
David becomes a recipient of her confidences and subsequent
invitations to physical intimacy. Dianas subtle seductiveness, far
more than a merely physical invitation, thus confronts Davids entire
way of being by offering a challenge to accept reality over abstraction.
As in The Magus, this challenge has a moral component, since
Davids acceptance of Dianas invitation would indicate a
commitment to personal authenticity and emotional honesty that could
facilitate creativity, communication, and respect in his relationships.
Too thoroughly constrained by convention, however, David fails to
rise to the challenge, losing his chance to pursue an authentic and vital
connection with Diana in a crucial moment of indecision. He
recognizes the significance of this failure almost immediately:
Even as he stood there he knew it was a far more than sexual

experience, but a fragment of one that reversed all logic, process, that
struck new suns, new evolutions, new universes out of nothingness. It
was metaphysical: something far beyond the girl; an anguish, a being
bereft of a freedom whose true nature he had only just seen. For the
first time in his life he knew more than the fact of being; but the
passion to exist. (102)
Beyond this immediate metaphysical anguish, David recognizes that

his failure with Diana indicates his own inability to evolve beyond his
rationality, his complacency, and his general withdrawal from vitality
into abstraction. Eventually, he knows, the missed opportunity would
become the finally sensible decision, the decent thing; the flame of a
deep fire that had singed him a dream, a moments illusion; her reality
just one more unpursued idea kept among old sketchbooks at the back
of a studio cupboard (112).
Connecting this result with Fowles concern with existentialism,
critics have interpreted Davids failure with Diana as an indication of
his continued lack of individual authenticity, and certainly the

construction of the narrative suggests that his residence in the ebony
tower is a shameful withdrawal not only from reality, but from
humanity more generally. However, these interpretations only
partially acknowledge the parallel experiences of Nicholas in The
Magus, whose maturation results not primarily from his coupling with
Julie, but from his disintoxication from her. Because of the
disintoxication, Nicholas learns to disassociate his attraction to
mystery and vitality from Lily/Julie, and eventually to see those
qualities in Alison, whom he previously associated with the mundane,
the oppressively real. Through this change in perspective, Nicholas
begins the process of integrating Conchiss feminine ethic
committed to whole sight, relationships, authenticity, and complexity
into his everyday reality. Although David is a more mature,
respectful, and perceptive individual than Nicholas, his conception of
Diana, even after her confidences, is idealized and highly aesthetic,
much like Nicholas vision of Lily/Julie. Unlike Nicholas, David at
least glimpses his potential lovers alternative ethic; however, he
similarly associates the mystery and vitality he senses exclusively
with a specific woman. In terms of his own development, Davids real
failure is not his missed opportunity to be sexually intimate with
Diana, but his resultant inability to disassociate the fundamentally
human perspective she embodies from Diana herself. Such a
disassociation might have allowed David to infuse his work with the
kind of emotional rawness and sensual immediacy he perceives in
Breasleys work, and even in Dianas abstract work.
Furthermore, in choosing not to evolve beyond his rationality and
conventionality, David fails to connect with others in meaningful
ways. This detachment is particularly detrimental for Diana, whose
relationship with David might have convinced her to pursue a healthy,
authentic existence away from her stimulating but problematic
association with Breasley, which presses her into behavior that she
admits is against her nature (88-94). Yet Davids retreat into
conventionality also condemns him to an extremely resigned view of
Beth, the mother of his children and artist in her own right, in whom
he can see nothing but the relentless face of the present tense (114),
not the mystery and vitality he might have seen in her had he
embraced not Diana, but the alternative way of being she embodies.
Far more than a personal existential failure, Davids indecision leads
to an inability to translate any of his experiences at Cotminais into
his everyday existence and thus to infuse authenticity, immediacy, and

connection into his relationships. Instead, he succumbs, like the
scholar in Poor Koko, to a macrocosmic lament about the injustice
of his inborn inadequacies and the failures of his generation (111).
In both Poor Koko and The Ebony Tower, Fowles illustrates
how the absence of or the inability to embrace womens alternative
perspectives condemns modern man to the contemporary wasteland
defined by abstraction, self-absorption, and disconnection. In The
Enigma, however, Fowles offers a much more hopeful situation, as
Sergeant Mike Jennings, a detective investigating the mysterious
disappearance of conventionally respectable and successful Member
of Parliament John Marcus Fielding, entertains the inventive and
inspirational perspective of an aspiring novelist, Isobel Dodgson. An
unconventional detective fiction, The Enigma enacts an almost
playful metafictional approach to the mystery of Fieldings
disappearance, suggesting that alternative feminine narratives based
on intuition can inspire connection and communion between men and
women similarly situated in, but not condemned to, the wasteland of
contemporary existence.
As far as traditional sleuthing goes, Fieldings disappearance is
indeed an enigma. Assigned to the case merely to keep up
appearances, Jennings realizes immediately that He was not really
expected to discover anything, only to suggest that avenues were still
being busily explored (202). As a conscientious and politically adept
third-generation (and public-school educated) policeman, however,
Jennings makes a sincere effort to investigate the case, experimenting
with new investigative approaches. Having exhausted all conventional
leads, Jennings approaches Isobel, the girlfriend of Fieldings son, less
out of any hope that she might shed light on the investigation than out
of the belief that a pretty girl makes a change, even if she knows
nothing (223). In fact, Isobels conventional perspective on the case
offers very little new information, beyond the slightest implication
that Fielding may have felt stifled by his conformist existence and
even in advancing these insights, Isobel admits:
Im talking about tiny, very faint impressions. And retrospective

ones. They may not mean anything. (233)
Nevertheless, Jennings is intrigued by his immediate impression of

Isobel as someone alive someone who lived in the present, not the
past (224), and decides to entertain what she calls her private
theory about Fieldings disappearance, even though she describes it

as very wild . Very literary (235).
In the interval between agreeing to hear this theory and actually
hearing it, however, Jennings begins to connect with Isobel beyond his
initial attraction, discovering similar frustrations and doubts in their
work and their identities:
She was trying to write a novel, it was so slow, you had to destroy so
much and start again; so hard to discover whether one was really a
writer or just a victim of a literary home environment. He felt a little
bit the same about his own work; and its frustrations and endless
weeks of getting nowhere. They rather surprisingly found, behind the
different cultural backgrounds, a certain kind of unspoken identity of
situation. (235)
Much more concretely based in everyday reality than in the mythic

fantasy Fowles uses to define his earlier relationships between men
and women, this connection, based on an unspoken identity of
situation, reflects the extent to which the contemporary wasteland
constructs both Jennings and Isobel; despite the professional and
conceptual differences between them, Isobel and Jennings begin to
value one anothers perceptions primarily through their shared
anxieties. This mutual identification does not ignore their differences,
as Isobels question about police brutality indicates (226), but it does
allow Isobel and Jennings to transcend the conventional interrogation
format and interact in more meaningful ways.
This interaction takes the form of a hypothetical discussion of the
case from the premise that, as Isobel puts it, Nothing is real. All is
fiction. Setting up her theory of Fieldings disappearance, she
explains to Jennings:
Lateral thinking. Lets pretend everything to do with the Fieldings,

even you and me sitting here now, is in a novel. A detective story.
Yes? Somewhere theres someone writing us, were not real. (236)
An obvious metafictional ploy for Fowles, especially after the

narrators antics in The French Lieutenants Woman, this development
indicates a transition in narrative form as well as a transition in the
texts overall approach to conventional perspectives. Countering
Jennings bafflement over Fieldings case, Fowles advances an
alternative ideology through Isobel, who builds on her earlier
impressions of Fieldings anxiety over his conformist lifestyle and

uses her very wild theory to imply that fiction may very well be
true to life and help us to understand reality, perhaps even more so
than other forms of discourse, by its capacity for lateral thinking. 9
Lacking solid evidence, Isobel instead focuses on her own intuitions,
and analyzes those impressions through an alternative logic based on
literary conventions. Conscious of certain inconsistencies in Fieldings
behavior that suggested discomfort in what he had become, Isobel
argues:
There was an author in his life. In a way. Not a man. A system, a

view of things? Something that had written him. Had really made him
just a character in a book. (240)
Engaging in cooperative authorship with Jennings, Isobel not only

explains this personal theory, but invites Jennings to participate in its
elucidation. After Jennings complains that the author of their
hypothetical narrative ought never to have started it in the first place
. [Because he] [f]orgot to plant any decent leads, Isobel concludes:
the writer would have to face up to that. His main character has
walked out on him. So all hes left with is the characters
determination to have it that way. High and dry. Without a decent
ending. (239)
Thoughtful and creative, Isobel finally provides the suggestion that

Fielding may have committed suicide, without leaving any evidence,
as both an escape from stagnation and as one truly authentic act that
would forever frustrate explanation and set him apart from his
inauthentic social role.
Playful, intelligent, and grounded in her own lived experience and
her understanding of literary conventions, Isobels hypothetical
fictionalizing of even her own existence forces both Jennings and
readers as audience to discard their expectations for the investigation
of Fieldings disappearance and embrace intuition and indeterminacy.
Although Isobels explanation of Fieldings motivations is plausible,
conforming to the facts Jennings has already collected as well as to his
9
Ulrich Broich, John Fowles, The Enigma and the Contemporary British Short
Story, in Modes of Narrative: Approaches to American, Canadian, and British
Fiction, eds Reingard M. Nischik and Barbara Korte, Wrzburg, Germany:
Knigshausen & Neumann, 1990, 186.
own instincts, it is, as his superiors note when he later informally

advances it, highly circumstantial and based on half-baked
psychology (247). More importantly for the potential relationship
between Isobel and Jennings, however, Isobels theory highlights the
extent to which Jenningss accepted investigative method relies on
narrative conventions of its own, especially since Isobel deliberately
plants a gap in her story that mirrors her own unexplained
whereabouts for two hours on the day of Fieldings disappearance. If
he is to follow the static conventions of the standard detective plot,
Jennings realizes, he must press Isobel into a confession of her
activities during those missing hours. If, on the other hand, he is
willing to accept her kinetic alternative perspective, he must also trust
his instincts about Isobel and accept indeterminacy. Rising to the
challenge, Jennings realizes:
It was bantering, yet he knew he was being put to the test; that this
was precisely what was to be learned. And in some strange way the
case had died during that last half hour; it was not so much that he
accepted her theory, but that he now saw it didnt really matter.
Much more important than the process of tying ends up, Jennings
understands, is Isobels living face with brown eyes, half challenging
and half teasing (245). Having connected with her, Jennings is
willing to abandon his conventional investigative perspective, which
has created only frustration and anxiety, and pursue an alternative way
of seeing that facilitates connection and growth.
In The Enigma, then, Fowles offers a womans inventive
authorship as a means of transcending the wasteland of contemporary
experience. Through Isobels literary imaginings, Jennings and Isobel
come to identify their similar situations and to explore an intuitive and
kinetic bond that mitigates their anxieties and alienation. Of all the
conclusions to Fowles contemporary tales, this result resembles most
closely the resolution of Eliduc, which Fowles advocates as a model
of womens inspirational and visionary potential, suggesting that such
vision can indeed transform contemporary experience. However, in
the final tale of the collection, The Cloud, Fowles offers a much
more obscure exploration of womens perspectives, ultimately leaving
it to readers to decide whether the pain and alienation of contemporary
experience can ever be transcended.
An unusual and difficult story, The Cloud employs a narrative
approach that flows in and out of the consciousness of the protagonist,
Catherine, an extremely sensitive young woman whose husband or

lover has recently committed suicide. The often shifting, sometimes
indeterminate point of view in The Cloud is particularly challenging
for readers, since it relies extensively upon the indefinite one and
shifts between past and present tenses . The effect is a narrative
which destroys the readers distinction between what has happened,
what is happening, and what continually happens. 10 This indistinct
situating of time emphasizes the storys visual and cinematic qualities.
Rather than building primarily through a linear sequence of events, the
psychological impact of the story relies instead on a fluid drifting
through memory, perception, and imagination, often focusing on
disconnected images and vignettes.
The limitations of language are especially apparent in The
Cloud, as Fowles attempts to explore the perspective of a traumatized
woman protagonist who has difficulty understanding her experience
through any recognizable narrative patterns. Feeling herself in a
confused state of being all the futures, all the pasts; being yesterday
and tomorrow; which left today like a fragile grain between two
implacable and immense millstones (298), Catherine cannot conceive
of her experience through any sense of continuity. Instead, Catherines
experience takes on a detached, fragmented, and disconnected quality,
through which she identifies various narrative islands that will not
cohere into a meaningful pattern:
So now everything became little islands, without communication,

without farther islands to which this that one was on was a stepping-
stone, a point with point, a necessary stage. Little islands set in their
own limitless sea, one crossed them in a minute, in five at most, then
it was a different island but the same: the same voices, the same
masks, the same emptiness behind the words . And the fear was
both of being left behind and of going on: of the islands past and the
islands ahead. (261)
Both paralyzed and comforted by this sense of incoherence, Catherine

expresses anxiety at the thought of narrative progression, at
considering her current state a necessary stage, a point with point
on a continuum of experience that might lead to her personal
evolution.
10
Huffaker, John Fowles, 128.
Profoundly alienated by the trauma of her lovers suicide,

Catherine becomes extremely critical of the clichs by which her
sister Bel, Bels husband Paul, and their friends Peter and Sally
structure their lives: family contentment, professional ambition, sexual
predation, even philosophical abstraction. However, she
simultaneously fears stagnation, being left behind as others progress
along such clearly defined, if clichd, continuums while she lingers in
her state of incoherent grief. Wondering if these contradictory
impulses really constitute a challenge to others Surprise me, prove
Im wrong, string the islands together again? Catherine resists
relationships, deciding, It would never do to have ones misery taken
advantage of (261). Because Catherine is morbidly conscious of the
baselessness of all the fictions which structure life, 11 she is unable to
trust others and becomes transfixed within the wasteland of
contemporary existence, unable to establish meaningful relationships,
and similarly unable to transcend her self-absorbed agony and
hopelessness.
This profound alienation is somewhat relieved, however, in
Catherines interactions with her niece, Emma, particularly when
Emma asks Catherine to tell her a story. 12 Hesitant to participate so
flagrantly in the process of constructing what she believes can only be
a false and misleading narrative through which to understand human
experience, Catherine nevertheless observes the appropriate rituals,
beginning quite conventionally, Once upon a time there was a
princess. Relieving some of Catherines anxiety, Emma provides a
number of questions, the answers to which situate this princess firmly
within the narrative conventions of the fairy tale: she is very pretty,
Catherine agrees: very clever . Much cleverer than me, she
insists, and also very sad because she has no family, Nobody.
Unlike Catherine, whose introduction of such total isolation into the
tale reflects her own sense of perpetual grief, Emma interprets the
princesss sadness as merely a necessary element of the fairy tale, a
problem requiring resolution, asking Catherine:
11
Frederick M. Holmes, Fictional Self-Consciousness in John Fowless The Ebony
Tower, Ariel, XVI/3 (July 1985), 35.
12
Eileen Warburton notes that Fowles occasional inclusion of a little girl named
Emma in his fiction references one of the daughters of a college housemate to Fowles
stepdaughter Anna Christy. This Emma shared a close relationship with Fowles
during her childhood, and Warburton argues that she appears in Fowles work as the
mythical girl in a garden, a hidden guarantor of some right value, or the active
messenger of such values (John Fowles, 324).
Will it end happily?

Well have to see.
I spect it will, dont you? (285)
While Catherines response indicates her resignation to observing the

conventions of storytelling as well as her inability to envision
anything beyond her own immediate sense of alienation, Emmas faith
in narrative conventions projects a hopeful future for the princess.
With Emmas encouragement, Catherine begins to construct a creative
and original tale despite her initial reservations, using her own
isolation as a point of departure for the similarly situated princess.
Still unable to project certainty, however, Catherine structures an
indeterminate ending for the tale, concluding with the suggestion that
the princess and her prince may be reunited, Any day now. Very
soon, and that once together, they will be happy and have Lots of
babies (293). Satisfied, Emma accepts this suggestion with a smile
and kisses, but Catherine later considers the concept of reunion in
terms of her dead lover, and contemplates suicide. Both tempted by
and incapable of this course of action, Catherine enacts an imaginative
suicide, lying composing and decomposed, writing and written, here
and tomorrow . Young dark-haired corpse with a bitter mouth; her
hands by her sides, she does by thinking of doing; in her unmatched
underclothes, black-shuttered eyes (298).
Totally absorbed by this psychological surrender to death,
Catherine lies exposed, not as she would wish to be seen (300), to
Peters voyeuristic gaze. Aroused by her obvious instability, Peter
invades Catherines islanded existence physically and
psychologically, pressing her into a sexual encounter she both invites
and resists. As Clark Closser notes, this encounter is narrated
exclusively from Peters point of view, establishing his vulgarity and
self-absorption while obscuring Catherines motivations for
submitting to sexual violation. 13 Yet even the imperceptive Peter
recognizes, especially when Catherine suddenly turns her head and
opens her eyes and stares up into [his] face, that her submission
signifies something more profound than the sick game of a screwed-
13
Clark Closser, In the Sea of Life Enisled: Narrative Landscape and Catharines
Fate in John Fowless The Cloud, in John Fowles and Nature: Fourteen
Perspectives on Landscape, ed. James R. Aubrey, Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson
University Press, 1999, 66.
up little neurotic in heat that he initially takes it to be. As the narrator

explains:
It is strange, as if she cant really see him, as if she is looking through

his knowing, faintly mocking smile. He has, will always have, the idea
that it was something beyond him. (304)
Having interrupted Catherine as she attempts to author a resolution

to her trauma through suicide, Peter presents an opportunity to vary
that resolution. Because Peter represents everything that Catherine
despises about existence arrogance, self-absorption, exploitation,
blind ambition, alienation her surrender to his violation becomes a
symbolic surrender to all that is dead, empty, and meaningless: a
surrender to nothingness, a symbolic suicide. But because that
surrender is sexual, it also implies a hope of rebirth and renewal,
recalling her suggestion to Emma that the isolated and grief-stricken
princess will soon reunite with her prince and create a new existence
and new life. Catherines submission to both sex and death in this
encounter is, as John B. Humma suggests, ultimately liberating. 14
After this encounter, however, Catherine disappears from the story,
as Peter reunites with the others and, upon seeing a feral and
ominous cloud (309), the group returns home. Because the group
refuses to look for Catherine, assuming that she has either gone on
ahead or will come at her leisure, her narrative remains frozen,
indeterminate, the only certainty her isolation, as the final line of the
story emphasizes: The princess calls, but there is no one, now, to
hear her (312). While many critics have interpreted this final line as
an indication of Catherines suicide, this reference to her original fairy
tale suggests a more hopeful interpretation. In describing the situation
of the fairy tale to Emma, Catherine emphasizes the princesss
isolation, explaining, She was all alone; however, this explanation
also restores Catherines belief in narrative. Although the princess is
initially frozen, transfixed like Catherine in her grief, her situation as
she is separated from others and isolated within nature becomes a
point with point on a continuum of experience, creating the
potential for growth and change, as Catherine suddenly realizes: And
from nowhere, storied; granted a future, peripeteia (286). Like the
princess, Catherine has been naughty and has hidden in the forest,
14
John B. Humma, John Fowles The Ebony Tower: In the Celtic Mood, Southern
Humanities Review, XVII/1 (Winter 1983), 45.
and presumably remains there, like the princess, without her clothes.
Removed from the others, whose clichd narrative identifications
provide only fragmented and disconnected islands of experience,
Catherine situates herself exactly as her fictional princess is situated at
the moment of peripeteia when she is unexpectedly granted a future.
Although Catherine does disappear from the main narrative, that
narrative is fundamentally fragmented and barren, defined by the
inauthentic fictions by which inhabitants of the contemporary
wasteland structure their lives. Her disappearance is a liberation from
such inauthentic fictions and a suggestion of a new, more natural,
fertile, and authentic narrative in which she might situate herself.
Therefore, though unusual and somewhat unsettling, Catherines
progression throughout The Cloud enacts her insight while
storytelling: One does not have to believe stories; only that they can
be told (289). Having rejected the conventional and stifling narratives
by which the others live, Catherine enacts an unconventional
perspective committed to the act of authorship as fundamentally
authentic and creative. Fowles mirrors this perspective in his
deliberately indeterminate ending, refusing to author a narrative in
which to fit Catherine, facing up to the fact, as Isobel suggests the
author of Fieldings story must, that his main character insists on
mystery and personal authenticity outside of conventional narratives.
This alternative perspective, Fowles further suggests, has the potential
to renew and revitalize the wasteland; as Raymond J. Wilson, III,
notes, Fowles repeated allusions to T. S. Eliots The Waste Land
support this interpretation, since The Waste Lands thundercloud, we
recall, brought the promise, at least the hope, of soothing rain. 15 In
calling attention to the positive in Eliots thundercloud by naming the
entire story The Cloud, Wilson concludes, Fowles suggests that the
resolution of Catherines individual and emerging narrative represents
a similar hopeful possibility. 16
Furthermore, by focusing so carefully on a womans alternative
perspective, Fowles suggests that a more widespread acceptance of
such perspectives, particularly in their identification of nature as an
important part of the larger community in which the individual is
situated, could relieve the alienation, fragmentation, and disconnection
of the contemporary wasteland. However, Fowles surrender of
15
Raymond J. Wilson, III, Allusion and Implication in John Fowless The Cloud,
Studies in Short Fiction, XX/1 (1983), 21.
16
Ibid., 22.
authority over Catherines narrative, while significant in its

investment in womens authorship, simultaneously obscures the
positive implications of the final story in The Ebony Tower, leaving
readers with an ambivalent impression of Fowles attitude toward
women and narrative. Throughout the collection, Fowles suggests that
womens alternative perspectives encourage authenticity, respect,
connection, and communication within the individuals relationships
to others and to nature. However, the complications of each of these
stories also imply significant uncertainty about the revitalizing
potential of womens perspectives. Unlike the heroines of Fowles
earlier fictions, the heroines of The Ebony Tower are more specifically
situated in the real than in the symbolic, with more investment in their
careers, more mundane relationships with their families, and more
theoretical sophistication than Miranda, Alison, Lily/Julie, or even
Sarah project, and their mysteriousness generally reflects the ordinary
limitations of human relationships rather than a mythic gender
ideology. More significantly, however, Diana, Isobel, and Catherine
are all at least occasional victims of sexual exploitation, some
instances of which Fowles constructs so as to invite reader
participation.
The most flagrant example of such exploitation is of course
Catherines encounter with Peter, a sexual violation described in detail
for readers. But Diana is similarly exploited, both in her relationship
with Breasley and in Fowles descriptions of her from Davids point
of view. Profoundly unsure of her talent and her identity, Diana clings
to her role at Cotminais with a kind of desperation, frightened of
being normal and of enlarging her sexual experience beyond her failed
relationship with a fellow art student and her intimacy with Breasley.
As Anne insightfully points out to David, this intimacy is not terribly
problematic in itself:
its not the physical thing. He can hardly do it anymore . [and]

Ive seen it all. Much sicker scenes than this . But its not the same
with Di. Shes just had that one twit at Leeds . She thinks its either
like it is with Henry or the way I used to go on. She just doesnt know
what its about. What it can be about. (83)
As Anne suggests, Dianas relationship with Breasley reflects a kind

of perversion because, as David realizes, The physical side of her life
with Henry must be deeply against the grain of her innocent self .
Yet the real repression must be of a normal sexuality (91). However,
even after this recognition, David fails to assist Diana in transcending

her perverted sexual behavior, hesitating at the crucial moment when
an authentic sexual communication might have convinced her to
terminate her complicity in Breasleys exploitation of her.
This hesitation constitutes another form of sexual exploitation, as
David becomes aroused by Dianas sexual and emotional vulnerability
but fails to provide the intimacy she needs, offering instead only a
detached and delayed resignation to her invitation. Like his
protagonist, Fowles indulges in a similar detachment from his heroine,
frequently offering her up for a voyeuristic masculine gaze despite his
interest in her situated perspective. Indeed, Dianas perpetual
nakedness is exhibited to readers for their own aesthetic (or
pornographic) pleasure, in contrast to Davids occasional nakedness,
which Fowles never describes. 17 Even as he constructs a narrative that
indicts Davids tendency to objectify both people and situations into
aesthetically interesting images, Fowles engages in a similar activity,
repeatedly exploiting his heroines sexual vulnerability for the
occasional voyeuristic thrill.
Similarly, in The Enigma Fowles includes some jolting fantasies
that Jennings entertains while Isobel advances her inventive theory of
Fieldings disappearance. Feeling out of his depth and intellectually
inferior to Isobel, Jennings imagines Isobel as sexually vulnerable:
He felt obscurely humiliated, to have to sit here and listen to all this;
and at the same time saw her naked, deliciously naked on his bed. Her
bed. Any bed or no bed. (240)
As she continues in her psychologically complex and theoretically

inventive explanation, Jennings enhances his imaginatively
voyeuristic fantasy, wondering if she was wearing anything at all
beneath the dress. He saw her sitting astride his knees, her arms
enlacing his neck, tormenting him; and brutality (242). Even as he
begins to understand the significance of Isobels attempts at
authorship, Jennings authors his own pornographic narrative that
Fowles invites readers to share, undermining Isobels authority by
framing her as sexually, rather than intellectually or emotionally,
compelling.
This fixation on womens sexual vulnerability, especially as
exhibited for mens pleasure, suggests that despite his ambitions
17
toward surrendering his manipulative and seductive authorial power,

Fowles continues in this transitional collection to indulge in some of
his masculine fantasies. However, Fowles clear indictment of David
and Peter, and to a lesser extent Jennings and Breasley, implies that
mens desire to exploit womens sexual vulnerability plays a
significant role in their inability to transcend disillusionment and
alienation. Furthermore, each heroines sexual exploitation
simultaneously suggests the extent to which specifically situated
contemporary women might employ sexuality as an instrument of
personal agency. Indeed, Catherine, Diana, and Isobel are all complicit
in their own exploitation, since they invite or at least accept the sexual
advances of Peter, Breasley, David, and Jennings. Like Sarah in The
French Lieutenants Woman, these women all invite sexual
encounters that might create new narrative possibilities as they
attempt to author their futures. Constrained by a historical and cultural
context that privileges fragmentation and disconnection, these women
use sexuality as an avenue through which they might develop personal
authenticity and challenge their partners to envision more complete
and fulfilling relationships. These efforts are risky, their outcomes
uncertain; in The Ebony Tower, Fowles has not yet convinced himself
that women characters specifically situated in the real can transcend
the wasteland of contemporary experience or assist men in doing so.
Nevertheless, Fowles experimental constructions of womens
perspectives in this collection suggest his growing commitment to
multiplicity and whole sight concepts he interrogates obsessively in
his next novel, Daniel Martin.
CHAPTER FIVE
WHOLE SIGHT; AND DESOLATION:

SITUATED KNOWLEDGES IN DANIEL MARTIN
Daniel Martin, a novel written simultaneously by Fowles and by its

title character, begins rather insistently with the capitalized directive,
WHOLE SIGHT; OR ALL THE REST IS DESOLATION. 1 As an organizing
principle and ethical goal, Daniel Martins commitment to whole sight
signifies Fowles first attempt to compose partial and multiple
perceptions, memories, and fantasies into a cohesive whole, just as
Dan attempts to integrate alternative perspectives while constructing a
novelistic revising and revisualization of a lifetime of experience. For
both author and character Fowles in his earlier works, especially The
Ebony Tower, and Dan in his career as a Hollywood screenwriter
fragmented and singular visions have defined individuals as
hopelessly self-absorbed, frustrated, and alienated, and society as
irredeemably materialistic and unjust, a desolate wasteland that makes
communication and community virtually impossible. In their joint
pursuit of whole sight, Fowles and Dan seek to transcend the
wasteland of contemporary experience and restore fertility and vitality
to their worldviews by experimenting with unconventional
perspectives.
For both writers, the attempt to construct a realistic novel that
transcends the performative element of the spectacle is particularly
challenging. Disgusted with the partial truths and unearned privileges
that have divided his public persona from his private being, Dan
attributes that disjunction to his career as a screenwriter and insists on
the novel as a more honest medium for an English writer:
The film cannot be the medium of a culture all of whose surface

appearances mislead, and which has made such a psychological art of
escaping present, or camera, reality. For us English the camera, a
1
John Fowles, Daniel Martin, Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1977, 3.
public eye, invites performance, lying. We make abundant use of

these appearances in our comedy, in our humor; socially and
politically; but for our private reality we go elsewhere, and above all
to words. Since we are so careful only to reveal our true selves in
private, the private form of the read text must serve us better than the
publicity of the seen spectacle. (273)
Precisely because of his compulsion to examine his true self,

located not in any singular camera reality but in the complex, non-
linear interplay of memory, consciousness, and imagination, Dan
approaches the novel for its potential to reveal a more honest, private
reality instead of a public performance. Likewise, Fowles experiments
in Daniel Martin with alternative uses of the novel, both denigrating
and exploiting cinematic conventions, and resisting the mythic and
psychologically compelling tone of his earlier fiction in order to infuse
this novel with a more specific social consciousness.
In experimenting with form and attempting to review the real
conditions in which the writer perceives and projects himself and his
ideals, both Dan and Fowles pursue a complex, multiple approach to
perception. As Ina Ferris and Simon Loveday both note, Daniel
Martin is obsessed with the individuals relationship to society and to
history, including extensive theoretical meditations on Lukacs and
Gramsci and an unprecedented number of minor characters, all of
whom help to situate the protagonist (and, incidentally, the author)
within a specific generational and cultural condition. 2 Recognizing
that any comprehensive study of Dans personal history must account
for both his own individual experiences and his socially- and
historically-determined attitudes, both character and author interrogate
the cultural, historical, political, professional, and psychological
forces that have shaped Dans perspective and generated his current
anxiety. 3 For both Dan and Fowles, the process of writing the novel
that becomes Daniel Martin therefore requires an unaccustomed
2
Ina Ferris, Realist Intention and Mythic Impulse in Daniel Martin, Journal of
Narrative Technique, XII/1 (Spring 1982), 146; Loveday, The Romances of John
Fowles, 112.
3
Critics have undertaken similar approaches to Daniel Martin; see, for example,
Jacqueline Costello, When Worlds Collide: Freedom, Freud, and Jung in John
Fowles Daniel Martin, University of Hartford Studies in Literature, XXII/1 (1990),
31-44; Mahmoud Salami, The Archaeological Representation of the Orient in John
Fowles Daniel Martin, Ariel, XXIX/3 (July 1998), 143-68; and Carol Ward, Movie
as Metaphor: Focus on Daniel Martin, Literature Film Quarterly, XV/1 (1987), 8-
14.
Situated Knowledges in Daniel Martin 163
commitment to a conception of knowledge as situated, and to a

concomitant acknowledgement that any individuals perspective is
therefore partial, merely a fragment of the more complete vision that
is whole sight.
In defining the Devil as not seeing whole (181), Anthony
provides the impetus for Dans self-evaluation, particularly as his
imminent death inspires him to consider his own personal history as
honestly and completely as possible. An obvious Oedipal figure
whose insightful consideration of his own failures as a husband, a
philosopher, and a friend precedes his evocative suicide, Anthony
encourages Dan to reconsider not only his past experiences, but his
present attitudes and future relationships, and to acknowledge
especially the critical factors that connect past, present, and future.
This directive toward self-scrutiny convinces Dan to pursue the
autobiographical novel he has already contemplated. Unsettled by
Anthonys somewhat excessive emphasis on his own failings,
however, Dan seeks to balance his own subjective self-disgust with a
more objective consideration of his failures and successes. By
ingeniously alternating first- and third-person narration in his novel,
Dan fuses the subjective and the objective, simultaneously occupying
the positions of narrator and character and presenting a multi-faceted,
fluid self-image for scrutiny.
As an extension of his inveterate obsession with mirrors, this
narrative fluidity allows Dan to see oneself as others see one to
escape the first person, and become ones own third (62). Just as his
Oxford room had contained walls full of mirrors, the novel that Dan
constructs functions through repeating reflections that display him
from multiple angles. Through his analytical integration of such
manifold images, Dan enacts an approach to authorship that parallels
Donna Haraways directive for a visionary feminist standpoint
epistemology. The imaginary and the rational the visionary and
objective vision hover close together, Haraway argues;
furthermore, she adds, The fantastic element of hope for
transformative knowledge and the severe check and stimulus of
sustained critical inquiry are jointly the ground of any believable
claim to objectivity or rationality not riddled with breathtaking denials
and repressions. Already conscious of the extent to which his
breathtaking denials and repressions have created his empty and
unsatisfying situation, and further compelled by Anthonys suicide to
pursue a serious investigation of his personal history that might
liberate both himself and Jane from their inauthentic roles, Dan uses
the novel to consider himself as a split and contradictory self; to
engage in a reflective practice of objectivity that privileges
contestation, deconstruction, passionate construction, webbed
connections, and hope for transformation of systems of knowledge
and ways of seeing; 4 and finally, to envision a more authentic
existence.
For Dan, however, these innovative, postmodern reflections are
problematically narcissistic, simultaneously requiring both
exhibitionism and voyeurism of his talents and ideals, as his
propensity to insert cinematic jargon or to emphasize the visual
spectacle early in the novel indicates. Especially because of his
expertise in cinematic ways of seeing, Dan often slips into the role
Norman K. Denzin identifies as that of the male voyeur in
contemporary cinema, becoming a prisoner in a house of visual and
ocular mirrors, a victim of his own power and deception. 5 As Dan
progressively embraces the conventions of the novel and rejects the
conventions of the cinema, his investigations seem increasingly
epistemologically and ontologically limited. Because Dan occupies a
privileged social, economic, and professional position, his masculine
gaze, as he realizes, lacks a necessary critical edge. Even in his
extensive considerations of the historical and political events that have
defined his generation, the religious and social circumstances that
have prompted his personal indulgences, and the psychological
deprivations that have influenced his relationships, Dan has difficulty
accepting responsibility for his behavior and interrogating his choices,
too often implying that those larger forces have determined his
actions. Like Denzins postmodern voyeur, he cannot produce a
depth and form of understanding that goes beyond detailed glimpses
of the pathetic masculine subject reflected in the flat historical
mirror.
Gradually coming to an awareness of these limitations as the novel
develops, Dan begins to look outside himself beyond even his
projected self for more varied critical perspectives. For these
alternative visions Dan turns to the women in his life, especially his
mistress Jenny and his ex-sister-in-law, former friend and lover, and
Anthonys widow, Jane. Experts in their own realms of intimacy,
Jenny and Jane cannot access the entirety of Dans complex situation,
4
Haraway, Situated Knowledges, 585-86.
5
a combination of historical, cultural, and professional worlds that only

Dan can fully inhabit. Both central to Dans consciousness and
peripheral to certain aspects of his situation, these women function as
outsiders within Dans dominant discourse, able to offer penetrating
insights from their positions that contribute significantly to the whole
sight Dan envisions. If Dan occupies a position similar to Denzins
postmodern male voyeur, the women in Dans life (and novel) occupy
the position of the female counterpart to the voyeur, who, Denzin
argues, can plumb the depths of anothers soul and discover and
understand the rage, the fire, the emotionality, and the meaning that
move another to action. 6 Each of these women allows Dan to see
himself in new ways and to further understand his own ideals and
motivations, and his inclusion of their perspectives in his novel attests
to his resolution to integrate such alternative visions into his way of
seeing.
For Fowles, the inclusion of such perspectives indicates a growing
commitment to a feminine ethic grounded not in masculine fantasy but
in the real conditions of womens lived experience. Unlike his earlier
heroines, Jenny and especially Jane are mundanely realistic, firmly
situated in the everyday by repeated references to their cultural
identities, professions, respective ages, past relationships, family
members, and, in Janes case, even varicose veins. Neither
philosophically experimental nor categorically unique, Jenny and Jane
struggle with the circumstances of their lives, projecting an air of
genuine, even excessive, uncertainty about their appropriate places in
the world. In this respect, Jenny and Jane epitomize for Dan two
things he fears, emotion and unreason (44). Yet the significance Dan
grants to Jennys and Janes perspectives also indicates Fowles
interest in bridging a gap between mens and womens ways of
knowing and being, in crossing a zone of unspoken distance between
male and female intelligences (290) such as the one Dan perceives in
Anthonys failed relationship with Jane. Especially because of
Anthonys request that Dan might resurrect Janes authentic self,
Dans novel fundamentally seeks an authentic, specifically situated
womans perspective that might complement the authentic, critically
considered and credibly owned mans perspective that Dan pursues.
For both Dan and Fowles, then, the novel that is Daniel Martin enacts
6
Ibid., 187.
a visionary approach to personal authenticity that seeks to transcend

the singularity and dominance of masculine authority.
This interest in the perspectives of women who are more situated
in the real than in the archetypal is challenging for both Fowles and
his protagonist, both of whom have more experience considering
women as psychologically or erotically functional. Indeed, even in his
reflective, progressive novel, Dan generally uses the women in his life
as occasions for his own self-analysis, noting how the most obvious
aspects of their circumstances affect their behavior, but considering
them mostly as emblems of particular stages in his psychological or
sexual development. Focused on a careful contemplation of his own
situation, Dan dismisses such complexity in his considerations of his
Aunt Millie; his ex-wife and Janes sister, Nell; his mistresses; and
even his daughter, Caro. Instead of presenting these women as
specifically situated, complex people, Dan introduces them into his
novel as examples of various tropes of womanhood against which he
defines his masculinity and self-image.
At the heart of his unsatisfying relationships with women, Dan
suggests, is the death of his mother in his early childhood. Indeed,
Dan repeatedly offers a Freudian analysis of his general inability to
accept women as they are rather than as he needs them to be. 7
Connecting Dans pursuit of a maternal ideal with his experience of
discovering a dead woman in the reeds of a river during his Oxford
days an experience that precipitates his first sexual liaison with Jane
Eileen Warburton argues that Dans sexual and psychological
realities are closely connected. Indeed, Warburton suggests, Dans
systematic pursuit of ever younger women as mistresses illustrates his
utterly fragmented perspective. Unable to face the reality of his
mothers absence, Dan pursues transitory, inconsequential
relationships with women that prevent him from confronting his
fundamental feelings of loss and from achieving whole sight. 8 Even in
7
This interest in Freudian analysis is one of the most clearly autobiographical
elements of the extremely autobiographical Daniel Martin. In her biography of
Fowles, Eileen Warburton outlines in some detail Fowles continual pursuit of an
imaginative reunion with the mother in his writing, a theory that he first formulated
independently in 1964 and that he subsequently developed in both his fictional and
non-fictional writing after reading Gilbert Roses The French Lieutenants Woman:
The Unconscious Significance of a Novel to its Author, American Imago, XXIX
(1972), 165-76 (John Fowles, 270, 341-43).
8
Eileen Warburton, The Corpse in the Combe: The Vision of the Dead Woman in
the Landscapes of John Fowles, John Fowles and Nature: Fourteen Perspectives on
his relationship with his Aunt Millie, whose place in Dans childhood
household situates her as his mother-substitute, Dan fails to create a
meaningful, enduring relationship that fully considers the complicated
role Millie must have had to fulfill for him. Instead, he reports, he
harried her abominably as a teenager, denigrated her optimism and
lack of intellect, and, he explains, realized belatedly that She was
much nearer sainthood than anyone else in my life the kind of
sanctity Flaubert defined for all time in Un Coeur Simple. I didnt read
that masterpiece until she was dead; and recognized her, and my own
past arrogance, at once (86). Emblematic of Dans tendency to come
to consciousness of others qualities or sacrifices far too late to make
amends, Aunt Millie serves an almost completely literary function in
Dans novel. Just as he recognizes her sanctity only in a literary
text, Dan similarly uses his Aunt Millie in his own novel not to honor
her situated perspective, but to establish the roots of the arrogance and
egotism that have defined his masculinity.
Similarly, Dan situates his daughter Caro as a member of a
particular social class, with a disappointing academic background and
the complicated emotions of a child caught in the middle of her
divorced parents battles. However, like Millie, Caros presence in
Dans novel merely fills a number of textual gaps. Though she does
provoke Dan into conversations that force him to reevaluate his
opinions, Caro functions much more significantly in Dans novel as a
symbol of his intermittent fatherhood, his failed marriage, and his
hypocrisy as a man both involved with a much younger mistress and
critical of his daughters affair with a middle-aged man. Although Dan
and Caro gradually begin to transcend the Electra complex that seems
to define their relationship, Dan never reports Caros insights into his
situation as anything beyond the talent her middle-aged lover, Barney,
perceives in her: a gift for handling people. Getting their number
(257). Able to penetrate only those aspects of Dans consciousness
that correspond to his generally inadequate behavior as a father, Caro
contributes only marginally to Dans pursuit of whole sight through
what he characterizes as her somewhat surprising and conveniently
timed challenges to his authority.
Caros mother and Dans ex-wife, Nell, offers even fewer
insightful interpretations of Dans personal history, primarily because
Landscape, ed. James R. Aubrey, Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press,
1999, 125-26.
Dan includes her in his novel in only the most defensive and coldly
factual terms. Intimately connected with Dans past and presumably
especially familiar with the events and choices that have contributed
to his current situation, Nell appears in Dans novel merely as a
representative of all that he resists about his past and about his
potential she is wealthy but embodies none of the resigned dignity of
her husband, Andrew; she is educated but refuses to discuss
meaningful issues with anything but self-important pronouncement;
she is as exasperated with Caro as Dan, but resents Janes attempts to
direct her confused and conflicted niece. Despite his commitment to
whole sight, Dan repeatedly implies that Nells perspective can offer
nothing significant to his novel. Indeed, he presents the failure of their
marriage entirely without her point of view, assuming that the
occasional self-criticism he includes in this report will account for any
contribution she might make, finally even denying Nell the specificity
of her own experience by proclaiming, I suspect our growing
incompatibility [at the time of my first affair] was at least as much a
matter of history as of personal psychologies (158). Presenting Nell
as a mere type of well-bred, insensitive, and demanding woman, Dan
defines both his past behavior and his current contemplations in
opposition to his ex-wife, denying her the opportunity to comment on
his reflections or even occupy her own specific situation.
Indeed, Dans reports of nearly all his erotic relationships proceed
from his singular point of view, as he considers each mistress only in
terms of her contribution to his psychological or sexual development.
His first romantic interest, Nancy, for example, appears as a rather
stereotypical, plump country maid, initiating the young Dan into his
blossoming sexuality with the standard tantalizing combination of
modesty and curiosity that Dan (and Fowles) records in lingering,
exploring, suckling, bursting, and finally simultaneously orgasmic
detail (371-72). Extremely significant to Dans development as a
lover, Nancy functions in Dans novel as a symbol of lost innocence,
and later embodies the lost enchantment of a realistically aged
woman, as her conventional, indifferent chatter demonstrates when
she visits her childhood home, the farm Dan now owns. Likewise,
Dans first infidelities represent the consequences of his professional
success. Mere bodies with which Dan happens to engage sexually,
these mistresses appear as the famously promiscuous British Open
(136) and an aspiring American actress with whom Dan felt he was
having an affair with America itself (159). Granting these women
only the briefest of cameos in his novel, Dan considers them in only
the most straightforward journalistic terms, merely reporting their
appearance in his life and using them as characters to establish his
self-indulgence and sexual predation.
Dan modifies this dismissive attitude in his reports of two more
significant affairs, one with his coworker, Andrea, and the other with
Miriam and Marjory, Cockney sisters and aspiring actresses. More
specifically situated than his other mistresses, Andrea and the sisters
represent more complicated psychological realities for Dan, especially
since both affairs end with a certain sense of poignant loss. The
profoundly abused wife of a violent, alcoholic Polish expatriate,
Andrea embodies not only Dans endless pursuit of his lost mother
there was something vaguely maternal about her body, Dan recalls
but also his compulsion to escape commitments and responsibilities he
considers fundamentally stifling. Noting that Andrea felt trapped in
some hopeless way, Dan explains his relationship with her as a
complicated process of projection and identification: In effect she
was both Nell and Dan: Nell, in leading a life that did not satisfy her
full self; and Dan, in feeling she had been tricked into a wrong
marriage (148). An enduring relationship that ends amicably out of
mutual refusal to disrupt our ways of life but poignantly with her
eventual suicide, Dans affair with Andrea functions metaphorically as
an affair with his own marriage, allowing him to sympathize with the
frustrations of a woman trapped in unsatisfying, even abusive
circumstances while simultaneously nursing his own resentments.
Illustrating his pattern of abandoning the realities that are too difficult
for him to face, Dans report of his relationship with Andrea
establishes a significant source of fragmentation in his perspective:
rather than sympathizing with Nells marital dissatisfaction, Dan
transfers his insights and sympathy to a similarly situated but
ultimately dissociated partner, mitigating his guilt over his
mistreatment of Nell and allowing him to develop a less coherent, but
also less challenging, perspective. Indeed, in reflecting on this
relationship, Dan identifies the source of his depression at Andreas
suicide not as the dissolution of their affair but as his feeling that she
had had the last word about all our private lives, all our profession, all
our age (149). In retrospect, he suggests, Andreas suicide implicates
precisely his historically, professionally, and personally fragmented
perspective, his refusal to see beyond his immediate desires and to see
whole.
In contrast to this fragmentation, Dan presents his affair with

Miriam and Marjory as a fantastic vision of relational contentment.
This report is a fable, he insists, and as the chapter title suggests, an
Interlude from the tiresome obligations of his other affairs.
Admitting, There were always, inevitably, elements of callousness,
selfishness, self-secrecy in his relationships, Dan laments at the
beginning of this fable, One cannot tell another human being: Ive
examined you, experienced you, learned from you, and its been
amusing and interesting, but now Id like to move on, without some
infliction of pain (239). In his affair with Miriam and Marjory,
however, Dan claims to have achieved exactly that fulfilling
liberation, and he uses his reflections on this affair in his novel to
justify his pursuit of inconsequential commitments. A supposedly
mutually beneficial affair that provides the down-and-out, working
class Miriam and Marjory with a temporary home and Dan with
sexual access to a pair of young, attractive women, Dans affair with
these two sisters, he raves, functioned through a blend of reciprocal
curiosity, affection and physical pleasure that was totally free of love,
although he admits, the physical pleasure was mostly mine (250).
Praising Miriams contentment, and later her sisters, with his treating
her like a pet animal someone I was prepared to feed and dress and
make love to, and teach a little, but not someone I could ever give my
heart or full attention to (244), Dan praises the sisters as the two
most civilized feminine creatures I have ever known because of their
stunning honesty, tact, and intelligence. Indeed, Dan is so
totally fulfilled by this unconventional affair that he presents it
without apparent irony as a glimpse of an ideal world, perhaps even
of a future: not in some odious male chauvinist sense, the access to
two bodies, the indulging in the old harem fantasy, but because it was
so free of all the encumbrance, the suppuration, the vile selfishness of
romantic love (251-52).
Careful to contextualize this affair within the unique professional
and social circumstances in which it developed, Dan offers important
information about Miriams and Marjorys situation in this fable. Like
Andrea, Miriam and Marjory have been victimized by a violent
alcoholic. However, they have also been sexually abused by this
alcoholic father, and repeatedly exploited in their long history in show
business (245). Indeed, when Dans affair with Miriam begins during
the filming of one of his scripts, Marjory seems permanently attached
to the producers side, a situation Dan assumes is the usual fee for
aspiring actresses minor roles (241), and Miriam initially assumes

that Dans offer of similar roles for the sisters in his next screenplay
involves a similar fee. Despite Dans assurances that he expects
nothing in return for his generosity in housing and entertaining the
sisters, Miriam and Marjory apparently assume otherwise hence
Miriams offer of her sister for Dans sexual enjoyment. Although
Dan initially rejects this offer, he requires very little persuasion,
explaining, I knew she was trying to say something generous
and however implausible, obscene, what you will, her proposition
must sound (247). Indulging in precisely the old harem fantasy he
purports to dismiss, Dan raves about the sisters generosity rather
than considering their behavior a conditioned response to their
repeated exploitation. Rather than convincing readers that this affair is
indeed a glimpse of an ideal world, Dans obliviousness to the ways
in which his easy acceptance of Miriams and Marjorys sexual
generosity simply reinforces their understanding of their sexuality
as the necessary exchange for social and professional advancement,
Dan demonstrates in this fable his inability to thoughtfully consider
the specific situations of his mistresses and his resultant tendency to
use women as emblematic of stages in his own development.
With Jenny, however, Dan attempts to transcend this tendency,
especially since Jenny actively resists the kind of emblematic
representation he practices with his other mistresses. She explains:
I know your game. Were all so much easier to live with when were
just notions in your past. I think youre the original male chauvinist
pig. (619)
In making such claims, Jenny challenges Dans fragmented masculine

authority, insisting:
I just wont be only something in your script. In any of your scripts.

Ever again. (443)
Refusing to accept Dans repeated attempts to define her, like his

other mistresses, as a type, an example of a certain kind of young,
beautiful, impressionable actress whom he can instruct an approach
that closely resembles the relationship between G. P. and Miranda in
The Collector 9 Jenny forces Dan to consider both his own complex
situation and her own situated perspective, encouraging him to write
the novel that becomes Daniel Martin and contributing three chapters
to that novel herself. Like Clegg in The Collector, Dan incorporates
Jennys writing into his novel on his own terms and in his preferred
order. Unlike Clegg, however, who claims that Mirandas diary
demonstrates how she only thought of herself, 10 Dan uses Jennys
contributions in a sincere attempt to consider an alternative
perspective that might help him to see whole.
Initially attracted to Jenny because of her status as a fellow British
exile in Hollywood, Dan values Jennys perspective for its slightly
altered rehearsal of his own experiences. Lamenting his sense of
personal failure and ontological fragmentation early in the novel, Dan
compliments Jenny, insisting, Youre one of the very few fragments
that make sense (15). Indeed, from Dans perspective, Jenny
embodies a temperament, professional ambition, and cultural
predicament similar to his own, and these similarities in situation
establish an almost immediate connection between them. However,
Jenny also embodies significant variations on Dans experiences.
Although she lives in London and values many of the characteristics
of Englishness Dan uses to define his identity, Jenny is in fact not
English, but Scottish, and lacks the sociopolitical history of Dans
traumatized generation. Although she shares many of Dans cynical
dismissals of Hollywood society, she is not a sell-out veteran
screenwriter, but an established stage actress embarking upon her first
Hollywood production. And although her current romantic
entanglement involves a significant age difference between partners,
she occupies the role of the young daughter to Dans mature father, or
so Dan realizes when he confronts his own daughter Caros affair with
Barney.
Because Jenny and Dan are similarly situated, Dan can examine
responses and attitudes that mirror his own by observing and
interacting with Jenny. In this respect Jenny fulfills Dans compulsion
to seek relationships in which he can consider his mistresses as
surfaces before which he could see himself reflected (239).
However, the specificities of Jennys situation distinguish her from
Dans other mistresses and establish her significance as a real, rather
9
Kerry McSweeney, Withering into the Truth: John Fowles and Daniel Martin,
Critical Quarterly, XX/4 (1978), 33.
10
Fowles, The Collector, 303.
than emblematic, presence in Dans consciousness. In particular, the

contrasts Jenny embodies allow her to offer alternative interpretations
of their current professional situation, their relationship, and their
individual identities that challenge Dan to reevaluate his attitudes and
assumptions and that become crucial to both his novel and his pursuit
of whole sight. 11
The most significant of these contrasts proves to be Jennys
association with American film. Living, working, and writing in and
about America until the very end of Dans novel, Jenny ultimately
represents the inauthentic, impossible ideals Dan associates with his
flight into film a decision he considers a betrayal of his true self.
Despite the similarities between Jennys and Dans experiences, the
extent to which Dan associates Jenny with the cinema disassociates
her from the aspects of his situation that truly matter to him. As a
result, Jenny occupies a position profoundly outside Dans situation,
since she is an insider only within the world he wishes to abandon.
Indeed, Dan finally rejects Jenny precisely because of this outsider
status, considering their relationship a function of his previous
inauthentic, fragmented perspective.
However, Jennys outsider within status inspires her to pursue a
kind of confrontational authorship that contributes significantly to
Dans pursuit of whole sight. Infusing her authorship with a
consciousness Patricia Hill Collins refers to as oppositional
knowledge a type of knowledge developed by, for, and/or in
defense of an oppressed groups interests [that ideally] fosters the
groups self-definition and self-determination 12 Jenny employs her
sense of outrage at Dans objectification and/or abstraction of his
mistresses to expose those elements of his perspective and behavior
that he either cannot or will not acknowledge, forcing him to
recognize that his knowledge is indeed situated and therefore partial.
Indeed, Jennys first contribution, a report of her first impressions of
Dan in Hollywood and at his most inauthentic, comes as a shock to
Dan, less at the side of it that was critical of him, he insists, but at
its distancing; a certain sharp, too sharp objectivity, the you-and-me
made them (286). What Dan perceives as too sharp objectivity,
Jenny considers a necessary element of Dans self-examination. As
she explains to him, You get so uptight when I have my own ways of
11
Susan Strehl Klemtner, The Counterpoles of John Fowless Daniel Martin,
Critique, XXI/2 (1979), 64.
12
Collins, Black Feminist Thought, 299.
seeing things (329). The distance she employs in her contributions,

carefully violated in occasional direct references, deliberately jolts
Dan out of his egotistic subjectivity.
Having destabilized Dans perspective through this first
contribution, Jennys other contributions concentrate on Dans attitude
toward women. The least significant but most memorable of these
efforts, Jennys third contribution indicts Dans voyeuristic,
objectifying tendencies. Conscious of Dans increasing withdrawal,
Jenny constructs this missive as a pornographic fantasy in which she
stars, along with the lead actor in her current film a man Dan and
Jenny refer to, rather appropriately, as the Prick and the Pricks
girlfriend Kate, whom Jenny describes in detail, she tells Dan, for
your benefit. Youd fancy her (432). A dramatization of Jennys
desire to be unfaithful to Dan in order to get his attention, this
contribution foregrounds the issues of veracity and fictionality [that]
make interpretation difficult, Thomas C. Foster argues, particularly
as it functions entirely through the question, Is she telling the truth or
not, or, rather, what sort of truth is she telling? While Foster notes
how this contribution represents a cinematic change in perspective
(one can almost see the script direction NEW POV) that attempts to
emulate objectivity by overcoming the cameras inevitably limiting,
subjective focus, 13 it also deconstructs the process of representation.
In deliberately assuming the role of sex object in a pornographic text,
Jenny startles Dan into recognizing his tendency to represent his
mistresses not as specifically situated but as elements of dominant
masculine fantasies. Written paradoxically both for Dans vicarious
enjoyment and for her own self-determination, Jennys third
contribution, while perhaps not factual, thus presents a less false,
oppositional perspective that demonstrates the extent to which Dan
really conceives of their relationship as a series of interactions
involving, as he puts it, the ravings of the male menopause and a
naked film-star.
Just as Jenny initially reacts to Dans comment with a vehement
insistence on personal rather than categorical identity, exclaiming,
Im not a film-star. Im your Jenny (16), she similarly focuses her
second contribution, a meditation on her experiences in America
without Dan, not primarily on the general differences between
England and America as Dan focuses several of his musings
13
throughout Daniel Martin but on the effects those differences have

on individuals and on relationships. Outraged at Dans assumption
that he must know what was best for both of us (233), Jenny
identifies the source of Dans apparent arrogance as a particularly
English obsession with loss, arguing:
He has a mistress. Her name is Loss . I have to imagine a secret

Dan who actually likes loss both all hes lost in the past and all he
has still to lose. In some way to him loss is a beautiful, fertile thing.
Noting the satisfaction with which Dan anticipates the dissolution of

their relationship, Jenny characterizes his awful English attachment
to defeat and loss and self-negation as a kind of perversion:
The more I think of it, the more creepy it becomes. Like some
strangler caressing a girls neck and quietly weeping because hes
going to kill her in a few minutes. (234)
Dan initially dismisses this analysis, claiming that Jennys

interpretation of his repeatedly failed relationships is slightly wrong:
his mistress was not loss so much as that he expected the loss of all his
mistresses, and in more or less direct proportion to his discovery of
them (239). However, later in the novel, Dan acknowledges the kind
of violence he perpetrates on his mistresses in dismissing them once
he believes he has come to understand them categorically. This
acknowledgement springs from Jennys reflections on their visit to
Tsankawi, which make their way into the novel not within Jennys
formal contributions but at the end of Dans chapter relating the same
events. A profoundly significant event in their relationship, this visit
to Tsankawi represents opposing potentialities for their affair: the
potential for serious commitment, which Dan considers tempting but
ultimately impossible, and the potential for eventual disconnection,
toward which Dan subtly directs their relationship through
characteristic withdrawal. Conscious of these tensions not only in
retrospect but during this trip, Jenny uses her reflections on Tsankawi
to challenge Dans problematic rejection of womens perspectives,
explaining to him:
You understand so many outer things about women, but I sometimes

think none of the inner ones at all. Or perhaps its even worse, you
know them and pretend you dont. (333)
Indeed, Dans rejection of Jenny proceeds directly from her ability to

challenge his perspective with her own way of seeing, to bring him to
consciousness of issues he would prefer not to notice. Not yet willing
or able to integrate her insights into his perspective and alienated by
the significant differences in their situations, Dan abandons Jenny and
the world she inhabits.
However, Dan ultimately validates Jennys oppositional
perspective by allowing her not only the final word on Tsankawi,
characterizing her comment on that trip as a bullseye. Where it was
aimed (618), but also an authorial voice in what is otherwise a novel
exclusively composed from Dans dominant perspective. This
retrospective acceptance of Jennys insights provides one of the most
sincere illustrations of Dans commitment to whole sight in the novel,
since integrating Jennys contributions into his text requires Dan to
grant her character an authority that challenges his own. Moreover,
Jennys contributions transform Dan, if only for three chapters and a
few occasional comments, into a reader forced to confront his own
representation in someone elses text. 14 By including her contributions
in his novel, Dan implies that although he cannot be bothered to
reconsider his already-formed images of his previous mistresses, he
does empathize with Jennys insistence on self-definition. Though she
remains to some extent a representation of elements of Dans
situation, Jenny transcends, through the oppositional perspective
embodied in her authorship, the process of objectification Dan uses to
employ his mistresses as something in [his] scripts.
Nevertheless, Dan learns to incorporate womens ways of knowing
and being into his pursuit of whole sight not primarily through Jenny,
but through Jane. Like Jenny, Jane is for Dan an outsider within.
While their alienation has kept Jane totally removed from Dans
professional life and only tenuously connected to his personal life for
a significant period, Jane nevertheless understands both intuitively and
experientially the attitudes and events that fundamentally structure
Dans ontological and epistemological systems. Whereas Jennys
insider knowledge covers the aspects of Dans situation that he wishes
to abandon, Janes insider knowledge encompasses those aspects he
most fervently desires to revive. Furthermore, Janes predicament is
extraordinarily similar to Dans dissatisfaction and despair.
Repeatedly noting her alienation from her true self, Jane defines her
14
Susana Jan Onega, Form and Meaning in the Novels of John Fowles, Ann Arbor,
MI: UMI Research Press, 1989, 107.
situation in terms of the struggle to transcend her unfulfilling and

inauthentic existence. Both a mirror for and a contributor to Dans
pursuit of whole sight, Jane successfully resists emblematic
interpretation through her situated perspective and convinces Dan to
embrace an alternative personal ethic infused with right feeling.
Although Dan considers Janes potential as an emblem of his
psychological development, these considerations ultimately persuade
him to abandon the formulaic representations of women and
relationships he has used both professionally and personally and
pursue more complex modes of inquiry. Just after defending his
failure to sustain meaningful relationships to his daughter, arguing that
writers can always imagine better ones. With much less effort (267),
Dan admits to thinking less of Jane in the flesh than of her uses,
when reduced to certain moral attitudes, artistically; as an emblem of
his own guilty conscience, perhaps precisely because of the feminine
and characteristically English cast of her nature. However, after
further considering Janes thematic and emblematic potential, Dan
rejects the relative simplicity and safety of film and embarks upon his
novel by assembling a few notes on why he should leave the
sanctuary of a medium he knew for the mysteries and complexities of
one he didnt (268-69). Although Jenny playfully taunts Dan into
considering an autobiographical novel, Jane makes that medium
necessary. Too complex an emblem for simple representation, she
requires more elaborate consideration.
Indeed, as Dan begins to explore Janes situation, he revises his
initial assumptions about her significance as a character in his life-
text. Instead of upholding the petrified social moral values Dan has
associated with Jane and Anthony, for example, Jane denigrates such
mores as profoundly sickening, particularly since she associates them
with the stifling dogmas of Anthonys Catholicism and the stylized
irrelevancies of Oxford society. In place of the feminine magnetism he
remembers of the young Jane, Dan encounters a dry Oxford
intellectualism and detachment characteristic of Anthonys masculine
society. 15 That permanent faint smile I had always associated with
her, Dan mourns, seemed to have disappeared; and so had all her
ancient vitality that mute electricity, disturbance, poetry with which
she had always charged even the most trivial meeting . What I
began to feel was a deep reserve, and I didnt know what it hid (152).
15
Paul H. Lorenz, Epiphany among the Ruins: Etruscan Places in John Fowless
Daniel Martin, The Texas Review, XI/1-2 (Spring-Summer 1990), 83.
Perhaps most shockingly for Dan, Jane has directed her

characteristically English nature toward a political flirtation with
Communism, an impractical and radical initiative Dan attributes to
Oxford eccentricity and to middle-aged womens liberation, a need
to shock both herself and those around her, a reaction against
premature widowhood and all its threatened emptinesses (192).
Although she acknowledges these factors, Jane insists on her
behavior as a more specific response to her situation. A prematurely
widowed mother of three children the youngest of whom causes
constant frustration and anxiety Jane lacks a satisfying narrative
through which to structure her life. Her marriage to Anthony has been
profoundly destructive; her conversion to Catholicism has proved
insincere; her affair with a younger man, a former student of
Anthonys, has ended with predictable speed; her career potential has
fizzled after long years in the role of wife and mother. Confronting
Dans incredulity over her changed demeanor and left-wing
sympathies, Jane contends that Dan has failed to realize the
complexity of her case and her predicament (387), insisting:
But you do have an interesting career, Dan. It really is rather

different for us. My kind of woman. At my age. (388)
Identifying her dilemmas as a function of, among other factors, her

age, her gender, her marital status, her sexuality, her lack of career,
her motherhood, her class, her political affiliations, and her education,
Jane asserts a specifically situated perspective that largely invalidates
Dans abstract concept of her.
Even more unsettling to Dans perspective is Anthonys insistence
that his marriage to Jane has prevented her from living authentically,
particularly as it denied the love Dan and Jane once shared. Shocked
by the revelation that Anthony knew of his sexual intimacy with Jane,
Dan is even more stunned, he reports, by the possibility that an event
I had always believed had disturbed my own life far more deeply than
hers had finally if Anthony was to be believed affected her
more deeply (184). Recalling that his infidelities to Nell resulted in
large part from the fatal memory of that afternoon with Jane, which
by then had become a proof that wild selfishness can be got away with
. . . and echo tenderly, poetically, secretly (137) and admitting that in
response to Janes subsequent disgust he nursed the grotesque
unfairness of her blaming me for a sin she had first taught me to
commit (162), Dan assimilates this revelation with some difficulty,
slowly acknowledging the supreme injustice of representing Jane as a

mere emblem of his guilty conscience when she has apparently
suffered more profoundly from similar guilt.
Indeed, the more Dan learns about Jane, the more he perceives in
her a potency of self-disappointment, self-slander, self-distrust, that
he might in the past have aped but had never really felt.
Hypothesizing that Janes anxiety may be the result of something in
femininity, in femaleness, Dan marvels at Janes simultaneous self-
possession and self-disgust, noting, she was both her own, in a way
he had never quite managed, and not her own, where he only too
lazily and complacently was (404). Indeed, as an individual Jane is a
mass of contradictions, not unlike Fowles other heroines. Like Sarah
in The French Lieutenants Woman, Diana in The Ebony Tower, or
Catherine in The Cloud, Jane has an acute awareness of her
situation and desperately seeks self-determination, but suffers from an
inability to accept conventional ways of knowing and being. As she
struggles to discover acceptable outlets for her ideals and ambitions,
she appears inscrutable, implausible, and inconsistent to the more
rational Dan, who notes with some confusion the silences, the
pretense that she had no conventional faces left (a claim her behavior
denied all the time), the constant to-and-fro between the woman who
argued every step and the woman who declared herself unreasonable;
who asserted, then backed down; who had no hope for herself, but
would not accept hopelessness in anyone else (395).
Beyond mere confusion, these contradictions in Janes attitudes
and behavior provoke Dans anger, resentment, and indignation,
particularly during their trip to Palmyra, a side trip from their cruise
down the Nile, during which the couple reunite sexually. An awkward
and complicated act for Jane, who sleeps with Dan in an effort to
demonstrate how little a sexual union can contribute to a complete and
genuine connection between similarly stymied individuals, this
encounter provokes a climactic clash of perspective between Dan and
Jane. Even more bewildered by this second liaison than by the first,
Dans exasperation with Janes emotional withdrawal and resignation
to despair prompts him to revert to a conception of Jane as object,
exclaiming, He felt outraged outraged like a man before a
machine that will not function, although he has followed to the letter
all the instructions for starting it (604). For Jane, however,
authenticity and contentment cannot be achieved so simply and
methodically through this narrative and experiential return to the
formative experience of their lives. Conscious of the extent to which

she fulfills Dans need for recurrent structure in both real and
imagined events (396) and deeply distrustful of such conventional
narrative patterns that attempt to fuse the real and the fictional, Jane
views their sexual reunion not as a process of healing, but as a process
of final dissociation.
Totally incomprehensible to Dan, whose perspective reflects the
admittedly privileged position that he occupies and that allows him to
structure his attitudes through dominant discourses, this reasoning
reflects what Collins considers subjugated knowledge, or the secret
knowledges generated by oppressed groups. 16 Prevented from
pursuing authenticity and opportunity because of her marriage,
motherhood, religion, class, and social position, Jane has cultivated a
contradictory and split identity that allows her to maintain social
conventions while simultaneously criticizing and withdrawing from
them. Indeed, as Dan notes:
She was not the sort of woman ever to be understood empirically,

logically indeed that was part of the problem, that she could discuss
herself lucidly and frankly, and yet still live in darkness ... not merely
inscrutable, but almost calculatedly two-faced; although that suggests
hypocrisy, and this was perhaps simply a matter of self-preservation,
of knowing the feelings of the dark self would destroy too much if
allowed to show. (300)
By turns unable and unwilling to communicate her reasoning to Dan,

Jane clings to this dark self, to the ideologies and strategies that
have helped her to cope with her existence within systems she finds
alienating. As Collins explains, Such knowledge typically remains
hidden because revealing it weakens its purpose in assisting [the
oppressed] in dealing with oppression. 17
This split consciousness has become such a fundamental
characteristic of Janes ontological system, however, that she is unable
to transcend it without Dans assistance. Despite her attraction to Dan,
Jane rather resignedly explains to him that she can no longer access
the feelings she had for him in their youth, when she had a whole
being (604). Moreover, Jane is so thoroughly downtrodden by the
disappointments of her experiences that she simply cannot conceive of
16
Collins, Black Feminist Thought, 301.
17
Ibid., 301.
any conventional narrative (such as renewed romance, for example) as

anything but oppressive; in this respect, her resistance to a relationship
with Dan constitutes oppositional knowledge. However, Dan
interprets Janes resistance differently, and functions as an outsider
within in his own right to transform Janes consciousness through his
perspective. Understanding that Jane has built up a life so firmly
founded on original mistakes and wrong decisions that their removal
must seem a threat (415), Dan finally confronts Janes reliance on
ontological schizophrenia and alienation by characterizing the source
of her anxiety as Eternal marriage to yourself. Undying love for your
own mistakes (605). Destabilized by this comment and by the
unbearable wasteland atmosphere of Palmyra, Jane finally
acknowledges that her coping strategies, while necessary within most
conventional encounters, are so reliant on alienation and opposition
that they deny her opportunities for genuine connection and healing.
Although conventional in its faith in the romance narrative, Dans
perspective nevertheless functions in critical opposition to Janes self-
protective, subjugated perspective. Indeed, his intervention rescues her
from permanent alienation by restoring balance to her consciousness
and allowing her to transcend her resignation and despair.
Like Nicholas in The Magus, Dan takes his cue from the Orpheus
myth and rescues his Eurydice from symbolic death. Conscious of
Orpheuss failure, however, and deeply frustrated by the extent to
which Jane has obsessed over decisions and events long past, Dan
resolves to stop dwelling on his past and to concentrate on the present
and the future. Just as Janes self-renewal requires the integration of
Dans oppositional perspective, this initiative requires, Dan realizes, a
similar confrontation with alternative ways of knowing and being.
Although Jennys contributions have primed him for such
confrontations, Dans first awareness of such alternative systems
occurs in Egypt, during a musical interlude that powerfully reminds
Dan of other languages, meaning-systems, besides that of words and
that convinces him that he and Jane share an identity, a syncretism, a
same key, a thousand things beyond verbalization (561).
The most significant meaning-system in Dans transformation,
however, is Janes capacity for right feeling, a profound, and
profoundly unintellectual, sense of natural orientation that she retains
despite all her faults, her wrong dogmas, her self-obsessions, her
evasions. Although Dan admits that he had always imagined this
intuitive sophistication as something static and unchanging and
conscious, even if hidden, his immersion in Janes situated

perspective changes his understanding of her capacity for right
feeling, finally convincing him that it had always really been living,
mobile, shifting and quivering, even veering wildly, like a magnetic
needle ... so easily distorted, shaken out of true by mind, emotion,
circumstance, environment. Furthermore, Dan realizes, this kind of
intuition must be a thing that limited and confused rational vision,
that would provoke countless errors of actual choice. Followed, it
would always run her against nature, the easy courses of society;
disobeyed, it would create anxiety, schizophrenia (609). It is this
revelation that finally transforms Dans frustration with Janes
irrationality into compassion for her struggle to balance her
considerable intellectual, rational, and verbal talents with her
emotional, intuitive, and nonverbal capacity for right feeling. More
significantly for his own development, this realization also convinces
Dan that his own investigative perspective has lacked precisely this
intuitive orientation. Integrating Janes right feeling into his own ways
of knowing and being, Dan finally learns to appreciate disorder and
complexity in relationships, to choose the real over the archetypal. 18
Through the communication and connection of their differently
oriented but similarly situated perspectives, Jane and Dan achieve
whole sight, envisioning a renewed existence as committed lovers,
liberal activists, and experimental narrative artists and Dans
impossible novel finally begins with the line he imagines as its last
sentence.
Like Nicholas in The Magus, Dan implies in this narrative account
of his transformative experiences, especially through the occasionally
self-congratulatory self-disgust that infuses the text, 19 that he has
evolved beyond the failures of vision that constrained his previous
existence and has achieved a more cohesive, authentic perspective.
More convincing than Nicholas, however, Dan successfully integrates
womens ways of knowing and being into his evolving text, creating a
prismatic rather than fragmented narrative that integrates multiple
modes of perception. 20 Furthermore, Dans novel so thoroughly
establishes the factors that have endowed him with a dominant
discursive position and so self-consciously deconstructs those reifying
factors that it transcends the tone of didactic omniscience on which
18
Foster, Understanding John Fowles, 136-37.
19
Nicholas Delbanco, On Daniel Martin, Brick, LXVIII (Fall 2001), 97.
20
Ibid., 95.
Nicholas relies. Just as he considers himself an inefficient god who

sees a lapse in his creation repaired by what he had forgotten to
institute (230) when he witnesses an unexpectedly compassionate
exchange between a policeman and a tramp, Dan renounces the god
trick of seeing everything from nowhere 21 by introducing subjugated
and oppositional knowledges into his autobiographical narrative.
Likewise, in creating a text committed both thematically and
structurally to whole sight, Fowles transcends his manipulative
impulses 22 and enacts some genuine consciousness-raising about the
obsessive mythologising of the male novelist, his own condition. 23 In
this regard, Daniel Martin serves as a significant fictional contribution
to feminist standpoint theory. Painstakingly concerned with exploring
the intersections of the various social, historical, political,
philosophical, epistemological, and ontological systems that
specifically situate an individual man, this novel makes a stunning
case for standpoint theorists claim that all knowledge is indeed
situated and partial. Moreover, by dramatizing the interaction of
several situated perspectives, Daniel Martin models a feminist
standpoint epistemology that challenge[s] all certified knowledge and
open[s] up the question of whether what has been taken to be true can
stand the test of alternative ways of validating truth. 24
However, in comparison to Fowles early novels, Daniel Martin
lacks spontaneity and suspense, somewhat ponderously plodding
along through the wasteland of the real without sufficiently engaging
the playful seductions of the archetypal so masterfully exploited in
The Magus and The French Lieutenants Woman. Aside from his one
indulgence in creating Dans rather implausible little fantasy affair
with Miriam and Marjory, Fowles avoids almost entirely his
characteristic fascination with the archetypal in Daniel Martin,
focusing instead on the real conditions in which the novelist and his
specifically situated muse must struggle for authenticity and authority.
Indeed, as a number of critics have noted, the excessively serious,
even monotonous tone of Daniel Martin proceeds principally from the
characterization of its heroine. Unlike Fowles earlier heroines, Jane
generally traffics not in ideas but in lived experience, not in abstract
21
Haraway. Situated Knowledges, 581.
22
Salami, John Fowles 161.
23
24
Collins, Black Feminist Thought, 270-71.
concepts of freedom and justice but in concrete illustrations of

oppression and alienation.
Lacking the erotic vitality of Lily/Julie in The Magus or Sarah in
The French Lieutenants Woman, Jane has provoked ambivalent, even
unfavorable readings from critics, many of whom consider her flat,
inanimate, and unappealing, especially in comparison to the more
vibrant Jenny. 25 To such criticisms of Jane, Fowles has admitted:
She was meant to be I wouldnt exactly say flat, but difficult. Not
very attractive sexually. An awkward woman. 26
Though perhaps disappointing to his readership, Fowles

characterization of Jane as so unremittingly real, with such similar
dilemmas to those of the novels hero and without the provocative
capacities of his earlier heroines, signifies a critical development in
his approach to authority. As Loveday explains, This concern with
the development of a female protagonist marks a substantial shift of
interest for Fowles .... For the first time he has written a book which
can truly if discreetly be said to be about a womans quest for
identity. Indeed, in contrast to some critics conviction that Jane
merely facilitates Dans quest for whole sight without offering more
than a symbolic challenge, 27 Loveday insists that Dans pursuit of
whole sight cannot be achieved without the success of a similar
process of self-discovery in Jane. 28 Indeed, it is the mutual exchange
of outsider within perspectives between Dan and Jane that ultimately
secures their personal and romantic renewal. Despite her
awkwardness, Jane thus occupies a unique position among Fowles
heroines as a protagonist who not only provokes the heros existential
development, but also confronts specific oppressions in her own
situation and achieves genuine connection with the hero.
Even feminist readers fascinated by Fowles standpoint approach
in Daniel Martin, however, must acknowledge the drudgery of the
novel in comparison to his far more provocative, if problematic,
earlier novels. Indeed, even the most enthusiastic feminist reader of
25
Ferris, Realist Intention and Mythic Impulse in Daniel Martin, 151; McSweeney,
Withering into the Truth: John Fowles and Daniel Martin, 33; Delbanco, On
Daniel Martin, 97; Huffaker, John Fowles, 136.
26
Barnum, Interview, in Conversations with John Fowles, ed. Vipond, 114.
27
Salami, John Fowles 190; Robert Arlett, Daniel Martin and the Contemporary
Epic Novel, Modern Fiction Studies, XXXI/1 (Spring 1985), 184.
28
Daniel Martin is bound to notice that despite his efforts in this novel,
social realism is essentially alien to [Fowles] imagination and
despite its overt commitment to wider social analysis, Daniel Martin
is obsessed with the individual and with the process through which
historical and social phenomena affect the development of individual
points of view. 29 Despite his apparent determination to explore and
integrate womens alternative perspectives into his own authorial
pursuit of whole sight, Fowles fails in two regards in Daniel Martin:
first, by focusing so exclusively on the mundanely and desolately real
that he sacrifices the vitality of his specifically situated heroine and of
his narrative endeavors; and second, by focusing so exclusively on the
individual that he overlooks the fundamental potential of situated
knowledges, which Haraway argues, are about communities, not
about isolated individuals. 30 The first of these failures he addresses
both playfully and confrontationally in his next novel, Mantissa; the
second he overcomes in his final published novel, A Maggot.
29
Ferris, Realist Intention and Mythic Impulse in Daniel Martin, 146-47.
30
Haraway. Situated Knowledges, 590.
CHAPTER SIX
INTERLUDE: MANTISSA
If Daniel Martin enacts an exploration of the unremittingly real

conditions affecting situated men and women, Mantissa represents a
flight into fantasy or, more accurately, a retreat into the archetypal
forces of masculinity and femininity. While The French Lieutenants
Woman, The Ebony Tower, and Daniel Martin demonstrate a
progressive process through which Fowles attempts to investigate the
alternative perspectives that arise from the specific situations of his
women characters, Mantissa represents an interlude in that
progression, performing an abstract investigation of the authorial
process entirely within the mind of its protagonist, an author named
Miles Green. Examining the imaginative relations between Miles and
his muse, Erato, Mantissa indulges in a great deal of irreverent,
playful, academic, and even pornographic masculine fantasy,
portraying the authorial process as both erotically charged and
essentially confrontational.
Less a novel than a confessional and theoretical exercise, 1
however, Mantissa proceeds from a profound sense of authorial
anxiety. 2 Both a snub and a taunt to academic critics, Mantissa seems
obsessed with exposing the absurdity of critical theories that
emphasize deconstruction and the death of the author. However,
Mantissa also reflects significant authorial anxiety over woman as
muse, as other, as character, and as function. As John Haegert
convincingly argues, despite the oddities of the women in The Ebony
Tower and Daniel Martin, Fowles heroines had become predictable,
almost entirely functional elements of his novels by the time he wrote
Mantissa. 3 As a way of revitalizing the role of woman, or restoring
1
2
Ian Gotts, Fowles Mantissa: Funfair in Another Village, Critique, XXVI/2
(Winter 1985), 93.
3
Haegert, Memoirs of a Deconstructive Angel, 168.
and enlarging her subversive influence in the text itself, Haegert

argues, Mantissa demonstrates Fowles desire to redesign both his
women characters and his own authorial practices. 4 As a response to
the imaginative failures of Daniel Martin, however, Mantissa not only
confronts Fowles archetypal conceptions of masculine authority and
feminine creativity, but ridicules his compulsion to retreat into the god
trick and establishes situated knowledges as essential for the vitality
and spontaneity of his future authorial efforts.
Keenly aware of the critical response his work inspires, Fowles
admits to some mischievous intentions in the writing of Mantissa:
Ive always had this, I suppose, half-unconscious feeling that when

youre writing theres a tease element: that something is always
teasing you and making you have pratfalls. Theres some mysterious
enemy who one knows also helps, but who can cause all kinds of
problems and give you all kinds of misinformation. Mantissa came
partly from that sense; partly, I suppose, from the sense that I think
modern literary criticism has altogether got too serious and pious .
And also, I suppose, I wrote the book because I knew it was a book
most people would disapprove of. Really, I wanted to give people an
opportunity to kick me which they duly did. 5
As Fowles notes, Mantissa asserts a number of unpopular notions: his

unfashionable belief in inspiration as the generative force behind his
(and all) fiction, his notorious disdain for academic criticism, and his
determination to write and publish despite the dictates of either the
popular or the academic market. Perhaps most unsettling to Fowles
readers, however, is the exhibitionism that defines Mantissa. A
remarkably self-reflexive text, the novel exposes Fowles most
intimate authorial processes through its portrayal of the combative,
collaborative, and inherently erotic writing process in which Miles and
Erato, the mysterious enemy who one knows also helps, engage.
Despite the occasional theoretical debate, Mantissa consists almost
entirely of sexual acts. The novels opening scene, for example,
depicts a coldly clinical Erato in the guise of a neurologist named Dr
Delfie, who arouses the amnesiac Miles and assists him in creating the
lovely little story that is Mantissas opening chapter. 6 Subsequently,
Erato narrates her first sexual encounter in sensual detail, spars with
4
Ibid., 170.
5
Tarbox, Interview, in Conversations with John Fowles, ed. Vipond, 167.
6
John Fowles, Mantissa, Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1982, 44.
Interlude: Mantissa 189
Miles in a number of narrative brainstorming sessions that involve

various levels of sexual congress, and then merges with him in the
couples climactic lovemaking. Finally, the novel ends with a
dramatic reversal in which Erato embodies Miles ultimate sexual
fantasies while simultaneously transforming him into a satyr. In fact,
the sexual variations in which Miles and Erato engage both create and
constitute the novel, 7 revealing Fowles conception of authorship as
an autoerotic process intimately and mysteriously bound up with the
writers libido. 8
In exhibiting his inherently sexual authorial process, Fowles
simultaneously situates readers as voyeurs, inviting them to participate
in the fantasies that constitute his authority. Indeed, throughout the
novel, Fowles implicates readers as voyeurs to his exhibitionism,
dissolving the boundaries between the pleasures of the written text and
the titillations of the writing process. Just as the hospital inhabitants
observe Miles and Eratos climactic lovemaking when the walls of
Miles cell dissolve, readers of Mantissa witness their interactions
without directly engaging in the sexual/textual pleasures of literary
conception.
However, unless they are authors themselves, readers of the novel
may identify not with the sad and silent concupiscence (155) of the
hospital inhabitants who stare longingly at the harmonious union of
author and muse for which they yearn, but rather with the more
critically exasperated appraisal of Miles authorial process that Erato
advances in her role as psychoanalyst:
To me you are simply someone obliged to act out a primal scene

trauma. As usual it has left you with a marked feeling of destructive
revenge. As usual youve tried to sublimate that by an equally marked
tendency to voyeurism and exhibitionism. Ive seen it ten thousand
times. You also obey the usual pathology in attempting to master the
unresolved trauma by repetitive indulgence in the quasi-regressive
activities of writing and being published. I can tell you youd be a
much healthier person if you regressed fully and openly to the two
underlying activities concerned.
Despite Miles sarcastic response that he should become a peeping

Tom and a flasher, Erato identifies Miles underlying needs as
inherently performative, and suggests that he should go into acting or
7
8
directing (143). Although he later complains that this analysis is over

the top and a wee bit below the belt (166), Miles admits that the
structure of his encounter with his muse complicates that complaint,
since Eratos ontological status is inherently problematic. As both
characters repeatedly argue, Erato is not real except as a figment of
Miles imagination, a psychic reality, or, as Fowles would
undoubtedly have argued, as an embodiment of his anima. 9 Any
analysis of Miles authorship that Erato advances must therefore come
from Miles himself.
Similarly, as a product of Fowles imagination, Mantissa exhibits
Fowles sometimes rather sordid writing process as a kind of
performative confrontation, inviting readers not only to enjoy but also
to evaluate the archetypal forces and pornographic processes that
define his authority. Emblematic of the masculine authority through
which Fowles defines his protagonists, Miles shares certain elements
of his creators situation while simultaneously possessing
characteristics Fowles notoriously despises. Likewise, Erato
represents the feminine creativity that defines Fowles heroines, all of
whom, their creator admits, comprise just one woman, basically. 10
Indeed, the events within Mantissa mirror significant elements of all
of Fowles other novels, 11 primarily because Miles and Erato embody
the characteristics and impulses of their fictional predecessors without
the encumbrance of specific circumstances to which their interactions
must adhere.
As one of Fowles typical antiheroes, Miles shares particular
aspects of his creators situation: he is, for example, a successful
English novelist, and he experiences authorship as the teasing,
frustrating, often infuriating, and ultimately pleasurable process that
Fowles described when discussing his own creative practice.
However, like Fowles other protagonists, Miles also embodies
attitudes and behaviors that Fowles repudiates. The most obvious of
these attitudes is Miles absurdly deconstructionist view of authorship,
but his pornographic and abstract approach to relationships places him
most clearly within the ranks of Fowles protagonists. Like Clegg in
The Collector, Miles is a collector with a penchant for pornography,
imagining, numbering, and evaluating the vivid sexual encounters
with his ideal woman that occur entirely within the confines of a space
9
Tarbox, Interview, in Conversations with John Fowles, ed. Vipond, 167.
10
Onega, Fowles on Fowles, in Conversations with John Fowles, ed. Vipond, 177.
11
Onega, Form and Meaning in the Novels of John Fowles, 134.
he controls. Like Nicholas in his attitude to Lily/Julie in The Magus,

Miles submits to the spectacular machinations of a mysterious woman
who combines Mediterranean passion and the English reserve and
intelligence indicative of well-bred, even upper-class, background
(12), while simultaneously appreciating Eratos erotic skills and
denigrating her considerable sexual experience in a manner similar to
Nicholas treatment of Alison. Moreover, Miles demonstrates a
marked appreciation for the exotic reminiscent of Charles attraction
to the dark and alluring Sarah in The French Lieutenants Woman,
repeatedly complimenting Erato in her role as the West Indian Nurse
Cory and fantasizing in fragmentary detail about Eratos potential for
exotic embodiment:
Polynesian, Irish, Venezuelan, Lebanese, Balinese, Indian, Italian,

Russian and various points between; shy, passionate, pert, cool;
dressed and undressed, tamed and wild, chased and chasing; teasing,
in tears, toying, tempestuous ... a whole United Nations of female
eyes, mouths, breasts, legs, arms, loins, bottoms prettily slink and
kaleidoscopically tumble through, or past, the windows of his mind;
but alas, like the images in the fluttered pages of some magazine; or
like snowflakes, frozen because unrealizable. (184-85)
Such fantasies fail to materialize for Miles, he thinks, simply because

of Eratos refusal to accommodate him in his practice of degradin
women by turnin us into one-dimensional sex-objects (56).
However, Erato suggests that Miles imaginative failures result from
his general lack of self-awareness (169), a characteristic he shares
with Charles along with his inherent belief in his social superiority.
This belief proceeds not only from Miles self-importance a
characteristic he demonstrates while apparently suffering from
amnesia, assuming himself to be a member of a suitably senior and
respected profession certainly not associated with the frivolity of the
arts (33) but also from his affinity for the abstract. Like David in
The Ebony Tower, Miles is unable to integrate the sensual and the
theoretical. Instead, he defends his pornographic imaginings as purely
metaphorical and denigrates Erato for her astounding ignorance of
what contemporary literature is about (115) and her desire for story,
character, suspense, description, all that antiquated nonsense from pre-
modernist times (119). Indeed, in his approach to Erato, Miles
resembles nothing so much as the sell-out screenwriter Daniel Martin,
who views the women in his life as significant only in terms of his
own development. Considering her no more than a fairly amusing

mistress, Miles effectively dismisses Erato with Dans characteristic
attitude Ive examined you, experienced you, learned from you,
and its been amusing and interesting, but now Id like to move on 12
explaining, You must learn to accept that for me, for all of us who
are truly serious, you can never again be more than an occasional
editorial adviser in one or two very secondary areas (121). Totally
convinced of his authority, Miles exhibits arrogance, self-absorption,
excessive reliance on logic and abstraction, and unquestioned
identification with dominant discourses all characteristics that define
Fowles antiheroes.
Similarly, Erato embodies the mystery, creativity, eroticism, and
unpredictability of Fowles heroines. Like Miranda in The Collector,
Erato struggles for self-determination in opposition to the fantasies of
her jailer. Indeed, she complains to Miles of the inauthentic roles she
must play as the programmed slave of whatever stupid mood youve
created. Whatever clumsy set of supposed female emotions youve
bodged up for me (87-88) and actively resists Miles attempts to
control her. Like Lily/Julie in The Magus, Erato employs her
epistemological and ontological advantages to expose her suitors
shortcomings and advance piercing criticisms of his psychological
hang-ups. Such analyses provoke a sarcasm in Miles response to her
that mirrors Nicholas initial response to the godgame:
I realize that destroying every belief a man has in himself, in

effectively castrating him for the rest of his life, is a highly amusing
situation. That youre being enormously self-restrained in not rolling
on the floor at the sheer fun of it. (127)
Yet Erato also exhibits Alisons paradoxical promiscuity and

devotion, continuing to respond to Miles wishes despite his
characterization of her as a totally immoral and persistent old tart
[who has] been a hot night out for every pen-pushing Tom, Dick and
Harry, a pair of ever-open legs, for four thousand years (91).
Of course, Miles tolerates Eratos promiscuity primarily because it
benefits him, especially when Erato, like Sarah in The French
Lieutenants Woman, seduces her suitor with suggestive tales that
emphasize her vulnerability. Indeed, Erato repeatedly encourages
12
Fowles, Daniel Martin, 239.
Miles to consider her violation. As Dr Delfie, for example, she

explains:
I should like you to see and feel my defenselessness. How small and
weak I am, compared to you how rapable, as it were. (38)
Later, as herself, she narrates in explicit detail her rape by a satyr

(79-80) and includes her own rape in the outline of the novel she
constructs for Miles enlightenment (106). Like Sarahs confession
to Charles of her affair with the French lieutenant, Eratos rape
narratives stimulate Miles, inviting him to imagine himself both as a
participant in and as a voyeur to a sexual violation she welcomes.
Yet Erato represents Fowles heroines most clearly in her creative
power, resisting restrictive roles and operating through alternative
epistemological and ontological systems. Like Diana in The Ebony
Tower, Erato is artistically gifted, a peerless assistant to Miles as
author, but also an original artist who successfully integrates the
sensual and the abstract she claims, for example, to be the true
author of the Odyssey (171-72). Such an accomplishment is especially
insulting to Miles, who strictly separates the cerebral from the sensual
and objects, You cant have a male brain and intellect as well as a
mania for being the universal girlfriend (122). Indeed, what Miles
identifies as Eratos asinine female logic (89) bears a remarkable
resemblance to Janes right feeling. Arguing that logic is the
mental equivalent of the chastity belt (149), Erato repeatedly refutes
Miles objections to her ideas, insisting, Feeling right is terribly
important to me (109). Just as Fowles other heroines operate
through alternative intellectual and intuitive ways of knowing and
being, Erato breaks all the rules of Miles dominant discourse by
employing oppositional knowledges to subvert his authoritarian
efforts.
Through such flagrant comparisons to his other characters, Fowles
defines Miles and Erato as archetypes, extreme versions of the
masculine authority and feminine creativity that dominate his
authorial consciousness. Unlike his other characters, however, Miles
and Erato possess a hyperawareness of their own representation that
leads to considerable ambivalence about the roles they play together.
Lacking specific situations that might determine their interactions,
Miles and Erato explore a wide range of extreme behavior, with Miles
often assuming a savagely misogynistic attitude and Erato enacting a
radically feminist agenda in between periods of mutual attraction.
During such antagonistic episodes, Miles rails against Erato, deciding

finally on a Japanese geisha as the most attractive of his potential
exotic mistresses, primarily because she is his infinitely compliant
woman, true wax at last, dutiful and respectful, uncomplaining,
admiring, and above all peerlessly dumb (190), and Erato complains
about her sexual and ontological exploitation, defining Miles as a
modern satyr who invents a woman on paper so that he can force
her to say and do things no real woman in her right mind ever would
(85).
Despite these efforts to control one another through definitive
situations, Miles and Erato actively resist associations with specific
social categories, each preferring an unrestricted ontological status
allowing for nearly boundless freedom from signification. For Miles,
amnesia represents exactly the kind of godlike limbo through which
he prefers to operate. It is in this amnesiac state that Miles enters the
novel, conceiving of himself totally without categorical identity, an
it who is blissfully bereft of pronoun, all that distinguishes person
from person; and bereft of time, all that distinguishes present from
past and future (3). Relishing the impression of supreme authority
that accompanies this boundless state, Miles considers his entry into
consciousness with a detached pleasure: It was conscious of a
luminous and infinite haze, as if it were floating, godlike, alpha and
omega, over a sea of vapor and looking down [with] a pleasing
intimation of superiority, of having somehow got to the top of the
heap, still attached to this sense of impersonality (3-4).
This blissfully impersonal state dissolves, however, when Miles
becomes aware of murmured sounds and peripheral shadows, which
reduced the impression of boundless space and empire to something
much more contracted and unaccommodating (3). Resenting this
imposition of the relentless demon of reality, particularly because it
threatens his sense of absolute authority, Miles objects especially to
the humiliating signification of gender:
With another painfully swift and reducing intuition it realized it was

not just an I, but a male I. That must be where the inrushing sense of
belowness, impotence, foolishness came from. (4)
This impression is strengthened by the circumstances in which Miles

finds himself, since he is apparently at the mercy of two women, one a
wife who is too anxious to establish an ownership of him (9) and the
other a doctor whose inquiries suggest that he should recall a situation
he cannot grasp. Yet despite his initial terror, Miles persistently rejects
the imposition of a specific situation on his consciousness. Even as his
wife recites names and places he should remember, Miles reports, He
had perhaps heard them before, as words; but he had no idea what
relevance they were supposed to have, nor why they should
increasingly sound like evidence of crimes he had committed (5).
Offended by his alleged wife, Miles particularly resists the memory
of marriage and fatherhood, justifying his desire to be inviolable by
noting that his wifes wheedling tone makes his children sound more
like overdue bills, past follies of spending, than children.
Determined to escape this distasteful imposition of situation, Miles
attempts to regain the nothingness, the limbo, the grey, ticking
silence (9), but is prevented by Erato in the guise of Dr Delfie. Much
more willing to trust this impersonal doctor than his wife, Miles notes
approvingly that Dr Delfies eyes held the muted irony of an old
friend of the opposite sex completely detached now, yet still
harboring the ghost of a more affectionate interest (8). This
affectionate detachment serves Miles perfectly in his desire to remain
godlike, alpha and omega. In contrast to his wifes insistence of a
limiting, personal situation including marriage and children, Dr Delfie
offers completely impersonal radical sex therapy designed to satisfy
Miles unconscious desire to fondle unknown female bodies (21).
Considering nothing but his maleness relevant to this treatment, Dr
Delfie rather easily convinces Miles to submit to her ministrations
while he indulges in fantasies about his authority and influence and
enjoys the seductions of both Dr Delfie and Nurse Cory. Yet even in
this most gendered situation, Miles subverts the signification of
gender, ending this pornographic tale with the birth of the tale itself,
a lovely little story that he apparently creates all by [him]self (44).
Enraged by this sexual exploitation and appropriation of womens
creative powers, Erato interrupts Miles masculine fantasy with a
violent eruption of radical feminist rage. Yet despite her feminist
consciousness, Erato does little to insist that Miles own a situated
perspective. Instead, she repeatedly berates him for exhibiting
stereotypically masculine shortcomings, especially of a Freudian
variety. Similarly, Erato relishes her status as a female archetype
with an archetypally good sense (140), continuously changing her
appearance and attitudes in order to subvert Miles controlling
authority. In the course of the novel, Erato appears in numerous
incarnations, sometimes simultaneously occupying several female
bodies, as in the opening sequence where she appears as both Dr

Delfie and Nurse Cory. In her most traditional garb, Erato is
classically stunning. Without her clothes, she is both demure and
provocative, classical and modern, individual and Eve-like, tender and
unforgiving, present and past, real and dreamed (71). Transcending
all signifiers of social location, Erato claims to have been mistress to
the likes of Shakespeare, Milton, Shelley, Keats, H.G. Wells, and T.S.
Eliot (148). Yet she objects to the process by which such authors
constrain her to a particular representation. Indeed, she resists Miles
repeated suggestions that she appear in their next variation only as the
enthusiastic and exotic Nurse Cory and insists:
I will not be turned into a brainless female body at your beck and call
and every perverted whim. What you forget is that I am not something
in a book. I am supremely real . As well as being a goddess. (59)
This resistance to limiting representation, however, emphasizes

Eratos ontologically problematic status. Although she objects to
Miles preference for Nurse Cory because, she complains, it does
hurt me the tiniest bit that Im not enough for you as I am (183),
Erato inherently lacks a specific situation that might preclude such
variations in representation. Indeed, she summarizes the conditions of
her existence what she refers to as the whole historical situation of
the non-existent muse Erato (92) as though she is both real and
imagined, insisting that she possesses an essential identity but appears
to others only as they construct her:
I suppose its never occurred to you what a horror it would be to

have to occupy a role and function that escapes all normal biological
laws. All on her own. No outside help, never a day off. Constantly
having to dress up as this, dress up as that. The impossible boredom of
it. The monotony. The schizophrenia. Day after day of being mauled
about in peoples minds, misunderstood, travestied, degraded. And
never a word of thanks for it . Never a thought for her as a person,
only for what can be got out of her. Never a moments consideration
for her emotions. Never enough imagination to realize that she may be
secretly dying for a little tenderness and sympathy . (93)
Particularly exasperated by authors like Miles who consider only

her physical appearance and sexual charms in their representations,
Erato emphasizes her subjection to Miles misogynistic whims, noting
that if she has the effrontery to object to being treated as a mere sex-
object he will simply Toss her back to nothingness, like an old

boot. Oppressed by her abstract existence, Erato explains to Miles:
I have absolutely no rights. The sexual exploitations nothing beside

the ontological one. You can kill me off in five lines if you want to.
Throw me in the wastepaper basket, never think of me again. (94)
Confined to an existence that depends in all its particularities on the

whims of the authors who invoke her presence but determined to enact
an alternative way of being, Erato rails at her inability to secure a
satisfactory situation and dissolves into tears at her frustration and
confusion, admitting to Miles:
I suddenly felt, what am I doing here letting this total stranger

humiliate and insult me like this distort what I really am. I mean I
know Im technically nothing. But what I began to feel I would be if I
wasnt. My true, serious nature. (97)
However, Erato manipulates Miles through such nonsensical

objections. Although she may indeed experience as oppressive the
machinations of such misogynistic authors as Miles, her lack of
situation simultaneously allows her the freedom to control the creative
process. Eliciting Miles sympathy by personifying every hurt and
helpless female face, caught between reproach and appeal for
sympathy, since time began (96), Erato proceeds to abuse Miles
physically with repeated blows to the head and ribs; to disappear,
leaving Miles in a panic; and finally to become Miles fantasy geisha
while turning him into a satyr. Through these events, Erato asserts her
divinity, reproaching Miles by explaining:
I was trying to get it through your thick skull that I have not just
become invisible to you, I have always been invisible to you. All
youve ever seen in me is what you choose to see. (149)
As she demonstrates her authority through such manipulative

machinations, Erato employs her changeability as an instrument of
power, and ultimately seizes control of both Miles and the text
precisely because she cannot be constrained by a specific situation.
Although Miles objects to his mistreatment by threatening to
write it down. Every damned word (192), it is unclear whether
Miles or Erato can ultimately claim authorship over the text, 13 since
Erato responds by reciting the Greek alphabet, alpha to omega, a
gesture that recalls Miles amnesiac fantasies of godlike authority
(193). Indeed, despite Miles status as author, Erato occupies an oddly
authoritative position in the novels opening sequence, at one point
gazing down at Miles with a look that seemed for a moment to be
curiously speculative, as if she had not yet fully made up her mind
what his treatment should be; as if she saw him as less a person than a
problem (15-16). This gaze recalls the narrators look upon Charles
in The French Lieutenants Woman:
Now could I use you? Now what could I do with you? It is precisely
the look an omnipotent god if there were such an absurd thing
should be shown to have. Not at all what we think of as a divine look;
but one of a distinctly mean and dubious (as the theoreticians of the
nouveau roman have pointed out) moral quality. 14
Clearly exhibiting a distinctly mean and dubious moral quality in

their abuse of one another, Erato and Miles exercise a nearly
equivalent authority, not only at the end of Mantissa but throughout
the text.
While these abusive interactions advance Fowles most scathing
analyses of his worst impulses as an author, the equally frequent
sexual liaisons between Miles and Erato undermine his efforts at self-
criticism. As Jan Relf notes, there seems to be a dual author-persona
here in Mantissa one who is being ironic at his own expense (the
writer plagued with the tormenting muse, the feminist plagued with
chauvinistic fantasies), and the one who floats godlike, alpha and
omega, detached above it all. 15 In fact, critics have noted
considerable ambivalence in Fowles self-critique, which is both
brutally masochistic and theoretically suspect. 16 Despite his self-
reflexive and even self-abusive confessions, Fowles incorporates so
many layers of irony and parody in Mantissa that it is difficult for
readers to take his self-criticisms seriously. 17 Indeed, Fowles claimed:
13
14
Fowles, The French Lieutenants Woman, 405.
15
Relf, An Interview with John Fowles, in Conversations with John Fowles, ed.
Vipond, 131.
16
Woodcock, Male Mythologies, 153; Salami, John Fowless Fiction and the Poetics
of Postmodernism, 200; Cooper, The Fictions of John Fowles, 211.
17
Onega, Form and Meaning in the Novels of John Fowles, 133-34.
Mantissa was meant to be a joke . Mantissa was really meant to be

a comment, no more, on the problems of being a writer. 18
This claim, in conjunction with the direct disparagement of the critical

enterprise that Mantissa enacts, defines Mantissa as a public joke, a
deliberately disorienting and difficult text ultimately written primarily
for its authors pleasure and as an affirmation of his creative impulses.
Yet Mantissa also enacts a very personal confrontation between
Fowles aesthetic affinity for absolute authority and his political
commitment to multiple, situated knowledges. In this respect,
Mantissa offers its author both pleasure and instruction in accordance
with his early philosophical reflections on art:
All artifacts please and teach the artist first, and other people later.
The pleasing and teaching come from the explanation of self by the
expression of self; by seeing the self, and all the selves of the whole
self, in the mirror of what the self has created. 19
If Daniel Martin is a socially responsible but uninspiring novel,

Mantissa is precisely the opposite: a fantastically absorbing but
socially irresponsible investigation of archetypal forces rather than
situated realities. Yet this irresponsible novel serves the important
function of allowing Fowles to examine, as in a mirror, the most
significant selves of his whole self the author, the muse/anima, the
chauvinist, the feminist in their purest and broadest forms.
Indeed, by ensuring that these selves lack specific situations,
Fowles discovers the limitations of his archetypal conceptions. As
completely non-situated author-gods, both Erato and Miles
demonstrate the tyranny of the god trick, the view from nowhere
that seeks to impose its authority indiscriminately and oppressively.
Feminist critics have argued that Mantissa, while ostensibly criticizing
Miles as a writer satisfied with the onanistic display of his male
fantasies and incapable of devising a faithful mirror of nature that
would convey a morally edifying and sociologically useful message,
simultaneously affirms Miles pornographic chauvinism especially
because of the too crude and heavy lampooning to which the amnesic
writer is subjected and Eratos waywardness and latent eroticism,
18
Onega, Fowles on Fowles, in Conversations with John Fowles, ed. Vipond, 175,
176.
19
Fowles, The Aristos, 207.
her unreliability and inconsistency, her militant feminism and flagrant

stupidity as described by the resentful Miles Green. 20 However, the
novel equally affirms and repudiates Eratos archetypal authority.
Lacking the conditions that inspire reflective, responsible, and socially
conscious standpoints, Miles and Erato repeat their antagonistic
interactions endlessly as the novels ending, a mirror of the novels
beginning, indicates never experiencing the personal development or
interpersonal connection that result from an exchange of outsider
within perspectives. Instead, they experience the perennial frustrations
of the battle of the sexes, each eventually groaning with an
endurance stretched beyond endurance, an agony beyond agony
(152) in a spine-chilling cry of frustrated rage (193).
Mantissa thus establishes situated knowledges as an essential
grounding point for Fowles archetypal creations. As Haegert argues,
Mantissa does indeed reconfigure the heroine figure for Fowles,
reestablish[ing] her as the first principle and matrix of his art rather
than a mere catalyst for the antiheros existential development. 21 More
importantly, however, Mantissa demonstrates that Fowles archetypal
formulations, while provocative, satisfy only his creative impulses and
do little to develop his genuine political and philosophical
commitment to alternative ways of knowing and being. Indeed, the
fantastically entertaining Mantissa illustrates Fowles immense talent
for infusing his characters with archetypal energy. For him to exercise
that talent without exploring the insights that arise from diverse and
specific situations, however, would be like playing in a game
especially designed to suit [his] capacities and [his] alone; a game in
which it was impossible to lose. Insisting, as he so eloquently does in
The Aristos, that It is impossible to win a game that one can never
lose, 22 Fowles chose instead in his final published novel, A Maggot,
to privilege a narrative form characterized not by godlike authority,
but by a firmly situated, self-reflexive, and manifold uncertainty.
Creative, mysterious, hypnotic, and prophetic, A Maggot justifies
Fowles decision to pursue his feminist advocacy of situated
knowledges, offering a woman protagonist whose situated perspective
explodes the dominant discourses of both her own past age and our
own present era.
20
Onega, Form and Meaning in the Novels of John Fowles, 133-34.
21
22
Fowles, The Aristos, 56.
CHAPTER SEVEN
SEDUCTIVE AND SITUATED DISSENT:

A MAGGOT AS WINGED CREATURE
After the fantastic confrontations of Mantissa, A Maggot demonstrates

Fowles return to socially responsible fiction, although the novel
retains a certain postmodern self-reflexivity. Combining elements of
all of his earlier works, this last of Fowles novels explores the
mysterious disappearance of an eighteenth-century gentleman through
the sensibility of a modern narrator, whose camera eyes provide
readers with a detached perspective through which to approach the
texts central mystery. Unlike the narrator of The French Lieutenants
Woman, this narrator hardly embodies godlike authority, contributing
little more than a modern sensibility to the investigation that largely
comprises the novel, merely adding his voice to the chorus of
individuals who speculate on the disappearance of his Lordship, the
young nobleman whom readers know by his alias, Mr Bartholomew,
until his disappearance.
Lacking evidence to support their speculations, the characters
involved in this mystery attempt to narrate the events leading to his
Lordships disappearance to the investigating lawyer, Henry
Ayscough, the man of affairs for his Lordships father, a duke. 1 The
perspectives these diverse characters offer illustrate not only different
perceptions of the events in question, but also various levels of
awareness of authority, class, religion, and reputation. Like Fowles
earlier fiction, A Maggot emphasizes the extent to which members of a
society observe and categorize one another, using group identities to
understand interactions between individuals differently located in
traditional social hierarchies. However, readers of A Maggot
experience a more egalitarian vision of the events within the story and
of the credibility of each of the characters. While Fowles suggests that
each character possesses only a partial understanding of the situation,
each of his various characters accounts clearly contributes to both
1
John Fowles, A Maggot, Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1985, 229.
Ayscoughs interpretation of the mystery and to readers expanding

vision of the clouded events. Through these various perspectives, A
Maggot offers Fowles most comprehensive exploration of multiple,
situated knowledges.
The most significant of these multiple visions, however, comes in
the stunning deposition of Rebecca Lee, a prostitute reborn to
Christian dissent through her experience with his Lordship. The sole
eye-witness to the events immediately preceding his Lordships
disappearance, Rebecca occupies a uniquely authoritative position in
her interactions with Ayscough, whose thorough commitment to
rationalism and the status quo causes him to treat Rebeccas narrative
with suspicion, incredulity, and hostility. In direct contrast to
Ayscoughs logical, authoritarian approach, Rebecca employs
intuitive, alternative ways of knowing and being, offering both the
most incredible and the most compelling perspective within the text.
Through her spiritual transformation and vibrant, creative narrative,
Rebecca performs a radical interrogation of Ayscoughs drive for
answers, suggesting that such an obsession denies the power of
situated knowledges and prevents the connection between individuals
and communities that facilitates social reform. A culmination of all of
Fowles most cherished conceptions of femininity and feminism,
Rebecca combines eroticism, mystery, and seduction with a firmly
situated and socially conscious perspective, engaging in a practice of
innovative authorship that challenges the manipulative tyrannies of
abstraction and fragmentation through its alternative vision of fertility,
equality, and wholeness.
Like Fowles earlier novels, A Maggot is a highly cinematic text
constructed on a voyeuristic model that operates through a mosaic
pattern of fragmented memories, flashbacks, and images. The most
striking of such fragments begins the novel, and like the opening
sequence of The French Lieutenants Woman, A Maggots initial
pages describe the haunting image that inspired the novel. In the
Prologue to A Maggot, Fowles describes this image:
For some years before [the novels] writing a small group of

travellers, faceless, without apparent motive, went in my mind
towards an event. Evidently in some past, since they rode horses, and
in a deserted landscape; but beyond this very primitive image, nothing
. The riders never progressed to any destination, but simply rode
A Maggot as Winged Creature 203
along a skyline, like a sequence of looped film in a movie projector.

(1)
Apprehending this image as a spectator might experience a film,

Fowles emphasizes his lack of narrative context to accompany this
persistent vision, until, characteristically, he associates its power with
the image of an erotically mysterious woman: One day one of the
mysterious riders gained a face; that is, by chance I acquired a pencil
and water-colour drawing of a young woman . something in the
long dead face, in the eyes, an inexplicable presentness, a refusal to
die, came slowly to haunt me (450). As in his explanation of the
obsessive vision of Sarah that inspired The French Lieutenants
Woman, in this confession of his fascination with a drawing of an
Italian prostitute (or so he suspects), Fowles establishes Rebecca as
the catalyst for the novel.
Just as the heroines of both The French Lieutenants Woman and A
Maggot generate the conditions that define their respective fictional
worlds, the narrators of both novels employ cinematic conventions
that emphasize the characters observations of one another and
especially of these mysterious women and facilitate modern readers
analyses of characters situated in a historical past. The historical
distance in A Maggot provides readers with a sense of superior
comprehension, particularly since the events that the eighteenth-
century characters somewhat naively describe suggest an explanation
of his Lordships disappearance that contemporary readers are likely
to associate with science fiction, a genre of which the characters have
no knowledge. 2 However, despite the suggestion of extraterrestrial
encounters in A Maggot, neither the contemporary narrator nor readers
of the novel can assert such an explanation of the texts central
mystery with any certainty, particularly because this narrator, unlike
his counterpart in The French Lieutenants Woman, lacks the
omniscience to penetrate and interpret the thoughts of the characters.
Like Fowles in his obsession with an image without context, the
narrator of A Maggot has no special knowledge of the events the novel
investigates, merely recording his observations through his rather
ordinary contemporary point of view.
Indeed, the novel proceeds almost entirely through scenes
employing a detached perspective preoccupied with the cinematic
2
conventions that Fowles believes define contemporary experience. In

the opening sequence, the narrator describes the forlorn little group
of travellers and the surrounding landscape in a style reminiscent of a
screenplay, noting the uniform grey of the overcast sky, broken only
by a thin wash of yellow light in the extreme west, and the peaty
track [that] traverses a waste of dead heather and ling above a steep-
sided valley studded with unbroken dark woodlands, still more in
bud than in leaf. Similarly, the narrator suggests appropriate costume
design, noting that the travellers clothes are by chance similarly
without accent and then proceeding to describe in detail the clothing
of each of the characters, from his Lordships dark bistre greatcoat,
boots and a tricorn hat, its upturned edges trimmed discreetly in silver
braid (3) to his servant Dicks long-sleeved blouse, heavy drugget
jerkin and leather breeches (4). As this sequence proceeds, the
narrator preserves this attitude of spectatorship, describing the
movements of the group as though watching not only from a physical
and historical distance, but from a conceptual remove that situates the
characters as objects displayed for readers visualization. As though
writing for a film directors edification, the narrator describes
landscapes, clothing, props, and the movement of the characters in
meticulous detail, but does not offer an explanation of the events or
penetrate the consciousness of any of the characters.
This detached, cinematic presentation continues through the
remainder of the novel, as Ayscough interrogates each character and
the narrator reports these interviews through recorded depositions,
written in a question and answer format that is devoid of point of
view. 3 Even in the rare instances when the narrator describes a
character or interaction in more detail such as when members of
Rebeccas religious community arrive to protest her interrogation he
presents such information without significant insight into the matter
under investigation, as though merely describing the characters for the
benefit of the actors cast to portray them.
In preserving this detached perspective, Fowles emphasizes the
novels similarity to a detective film, focusing readers attention on
the investigation of his Lordships disappearance. Furthermore, by
limiting his narrators omniscience and presenting the narrative
through the conventions of cinematic spectatorship, Fowles
3
encourages readers to share Ayscoughs perspective as he relentlessly

pursues the truth of his Lordships disappearance to thrill at the
discovery of a fresh clue, to rail at the obvious fabrications of the
witnesses, and to despair of ever finding a satisfactory explanation of
events that surpass ordinary understanding. Yet Fowles presents
Ayscough as an impossibly arrogant, fossilized individual threatened
by the prospect of social reform and scathingly dismissive of the
situated perspectives the witnesses offer. Furthermore, Fowles
suggests, Ayscough derives considerable pleasure from penetrating
the private reflections of the witnesses, particularly when he employs
his position of power to achieve intimate knowledge of others sexual
practices. Indeed, Ayscoughs attitude mirrors the obsessive
voyeurism that Norman K. Denzin identifies in the modernist and late
modernist detective films of the 1950s and 1960s, in which the male
protagonist controls and justifies the pursuit of personal desires
through investigation. 4
Like these modernist voyeurs, Ayscough pursues the investigation
of his Lordships disappearance with unusual zeal and an odd personal
interest in his Lordships sexual preferences. Displaying an ancient
dislike (411) for the young nobleman that proceeds, at least in part,
from his disapproval of the unconventional young mans filial
misbehavior, Ayscough repeatedly interrogates witnesses about a
possible homosexual affair between his Lordship and his servant, Dick
an affair that the witnesses deny with uniform incredulity. Thomas
C. Foster argues that Ayscough considers what he perceives as
deviant sexuality, coupled with a desire to wound a noble parent
the most likely explanation for his Lordships disappearance, and
therefore pursues a line of questioning regarding untoward
familiarity between master and servant, particularly (and this seems to
horrify the class-conscious lawyer even more) whether the servant
may have been the sexual master, 5 with each witness, despite the
general lack of evidence for such a relationship. However,
Ayscoughs obsession with other peoples sexual practices extends
beyond this assumption of his Lordships homosexuality. Indeed,
Ayscough repeatedly questions both the madam Claiborne about the
practices within her brothel and the former prostitute Rebecca about
her experiences in that profession, and at one point even demands that
4
5
Rebecca reveal the extent of her sexual intimacy with her husband, a
matter with no apparent relevance to the investigation and which
Rebecca insists is no business of thine, nor any other man (299).
Yet even during these inappropriate and irrelevant lines of
questioning, Ayscough claims an incontestable authority grounded in
his and his employers social position that effectively quashes
witnesses objections. In so doing, Ayscough codes his voyeurism as a
necessary activity in the pursuit of an official and noble objective.
Furthermore, Ayscough considers his verbal abuse and intimidation of
the witnesses necessary exercises in maintaining traditional social
hierarchies. Repeatedly exhibiting a desire to obliterate the dissent or
deviance he associates with the mob, Ayscough bullies those
witnesses he sees as threatening to the status quo, and even fantasizes
momentarily about interrogation aided by rack and thumbscrew, by
which method, at least one had got to the bottom (425). This
assumption of the inherent inferiority, duplicity, and insubordination
of the common man causes Ayscough to approach the investigation
with preconceived conclusions fashioned out of projection, prejudice,
and innuendo. 6
Indeed, Ayscough pursues the investigation with single-minded
conviction, reasoning that there must be one, and only one,
explanation for what really happened to his Lordship. When testimony
surprises or challenges Ayscoughs assumptions, his characteristic
response is to accuse the witnesses of fabrication, likening such
subterfuge and deceit to heresy (97). Even when he credits a witness
with honest intentions, Ayscough dismisses interpretations and
explanations he finds unconvincing as the result of superstition or
irrationality. As he explains to Rebecca:
There are two truths, mistress. One that a person believes is truth;
and one that is truth incontestible. We will credit you the first, but the
second is what we seek. (345)
Through this commitment to a single, determinable truth, Ayscough

demonstrates a reliance on rationality and a belief in objectivity that
fail to acknowledge the limitations of his own perspective. As the
narrator explains, All ancient and established professions must be
founded on tacit prejudices as strong as their written statutes and
6
codes; and by those Ayscough is imprisoned as much as any debtor in

the Fleet by law (231). However, Ayscough himself displays little
consciousness of such ingrained attitudes beyond an occasional
awareness of his behavior as part of a routine of tricks or practices
before difficult witnesses that he has long acquired, like his bursts
of bullying contempt, to compensate for his puny stature (314).
Confident in his authority, assured in his manner, and convinced
that genuine knowledge proceeds only from logical method,
Ayscough employs a manipulative and fragmented approach to the
texts central mystery, resisting the socially significant and personally
meaningful interpretations that the various witnesses propose.
Proceeding from his own privately drawn conclusions about his
Lordships disappearance, Ayscough directs the witnesses testimony
with questions they often find surprising or distracting. Employing an
imperious and punitive attitude toward witnesses like Claiborne and
the actor Lacy, whom he distrusts because of their professions, and
like Jones, whom he reviles because of his Welsh nationality,
Ayscough also inspires considerable anxiety in his witnesses, who in
turn adopt an excessively conciliatory manner that undermines their
credibility. Anxious to confess everything to this intimidating
investigator, all of the witnesses include a great deal of conjecture and
second-hand information in their testimony, producing accounts that
are scattered, fragmentary, redundant, often contradictory, and [that
contain] both factual and imaginary evidence. 7 Such speculations
emphasize the highly subjective nature of the investigative enterprise,
and illustrate the characters discomfort with the ambiguity
surrounding his Lordships disappearance.
In order to cope with their uncertainty, many of the witnesses offer
explanations of his Lordships disappearance that reflect their lived
experiences and social conditioning. The least convincing of such
explanations involve witchcraft or cult activity whose practice,
Ayscough determines, remains very far from the bounds of
possibility (411). Such explanations, however, conform to the
superstitions of the country folk whom Ayscough considers ignorant,
fearful people, more apt for the most part to see the Devils hand in
all than to weigh with reason (100). A slightly more persuasive
explanation suggests that his Lordship was robbed and murdered,
7
Onega, Form and Meaning in the Novels of John Fowles, 145.
either by highwaymen, foreigners, or his own servants. While

Ayscough dismisses this explanation as similarly illogical, he treats
this account with more respect, particularly because it conforms to his
own social prejudices about the mobile lower classes.
Such prejudices largely dictate Ayscoughs interrogative manner,
and especially the offensive and crudely chauvinistic contempt for
his witness that Ayscough exhibits while interrogating Jones an
approach that, the narrator explains, is stock, and really has little to
do with poor Jones Welshness (227). Although Ayscough repeatedly
ridicules Jones as worthy thy nation (226), the narrator suggests that
Ayscough more profoundly fears Jones physical and social mobility,
both of which threaten the rigid, materialistic social hierarchies that
generate Ayscoughs power (231). Predisposed by this anxiety to
doubt Jones testimony, Ayscough barely notes the individual
circumstances of Jones participation in his Lordships disappearance,
merely assuming him to be a type of drunken, poor, lying Welshman.
Although Jones reasonably insists, You must believe me, sir. If I told
some tale, I should make it more pleasing to your worships will
(214), Ayscough ultimately believes that Jones is a liar and rogue, and
that his testimony, even if meant sincerely, inherently lacks credibility
because of his categorical inability to reason.
Indeed, Ayscough considers all of the witnesses in terms of their
categorical identities, complimenting his more educated or socially
acceptable witnesses for their honesty and threatening the less
respectable witnesses such as Claiborne, Jones, and Rebecca with
hanging for their perjury. For Fowles, however, including these
diverse perspectives enacts the standpoint directive that Sandra
Harding insists requires starting from multiple lives that are in many
ways in conflict with one another and each of which has its own
multiple and contradictory commitments. 8 From Puddicombe, the
landlord of the inn where his Lordship was last seen, who assures
Ayscough of his respectability by pledging, King and true church, I
am no fanatick nor meeting man. Ask any here (70); to Dorcas, the
country maid whose memory of his Lordship is clouded by her
pleasant interactions with Rebecca and her harassment from the
lecherous Jones; to Beckford, the curate of the parish in which his
Lordship disappears, who would, Ayscough comments, turn
8
Mahometan tomorrow, to gain a better living (101); to Wardley,

whose religious fanaticism provides outlets for his cantankerousness
and love of argument and opportunities to mock his enemies illogic
and also how sweet is bile then to dispatch them to future
damnation(384, 385); to Lacy, Claiborne, Jones, and Rebecca, whose
participation in his Lordships disappearance places them in
considerable jeopardy, all the witnesses involved in Ayscoughs
investigation negotiate complicated situations that contextualize their
memories and condition their responses to Ayscoughs inquiries. By
including such multiple points of view, Fowles interrogates the
concept of objectivity, suggesting that all perspectives reflect group
identity, individual subjectivity, and a consciousness of hierarchical
power relations, even in the absence of self-awareness.
However, in Rebecca, Fowles offers a protagonist who challenges
categorical dismissal and asserts a situated perspective that emerges
from both individual experience and the categorizations that organize
society. In contrast to the other characters, who have little power of
seeing people other than they are in outward; which applies even to
how they see themselves, labelled and categorised by circumstance
and fate (49), Rebecca is keenly aware of the uniqueness of her
situation and insists upon a discourse that acknowledges the
significance of her individual experience. Although Fowles reports
some feminist objections to Rebecca, particularly in terms of her
extraordinary conversion from prostitute to radical Christian
dissenter, 9 her multiple and even contradictory identities position
her as a remarkable agent of [the] less partial and distorted
descriptions and explanations that constitute situated knowledge. 10
Even before the mysterious events that effect her transformation,
Rebecca asserts an unmistakable sense of personal identity set in a
world to some degree, however small, manipulable or controllable by
that identity (385) that sets her apart from the other characters. When
his Lordship forces her to debase herself before him, for example,
Rebecca practices a certain passive resistance, initially responding to
his Lordships insistence that she repeat, I am issued of Eve, with all
her sins by stating only, I am issued of Eve (43).
9
Carlin Romano, A Conversation with John Fowles, in Conversations with John
10
When his Lordship then interrogates her about her profession,

Rebecca explains the circumstances that led her into prostitution,
describing how the son of her first employer seduced her; how her
second master similarly required her sexual favors; how her beauty
precluded her from obtaining further posts, since married women
generally hire domestics; and how, finally, she chose prostitution over
begging, claiming, I was carried to it by need, sir. Tis so with most
of us (46). Although she admits, at his Lordships prompting, that not
all women in need turn to prostitution, Rebecca nevertheless stands by
her analysis of her own individual history and its resemblance to the
histories of similarly situated women.
In her conversations with Ayscough, Rebecca continues to ground
her answers in a standpoint that proceeds directly from her individual
experiences. Despite Ayscoughs insincere apologies that he must ask
about her life as a prostitute, Rebecca insists, Ask. I would not forget
I sinned (408). When his questions extend to her personal life with
her husband, however, Rebecca refuses to answer:
Of what I was thee may enquire, tis as whipping to that abomination

I was, that she deserves. What I am since is no business of thine, nor
any other man. (299)
Rebecca further refuses to respond to Ayscoughs questions when her

answers would disrupt the narrative sequence she wishes to construct.
Even when Ayscough commands, I will be put off no more,
Rebecca insists:
Yes thee will, Master Ayscough. For if I told thee now thee would
mock me, and not believe. (326)
Certain of her knowledge and determined to present it on her own

terms, Rebecca challenges Ayscoughs method, she explains, because
Ayscough continually attempts to frame her answers in terms of
categorical responses, rather than acknowledging her insights as
specifically situated. Indeed, Rebecca objects:
Theed make me mirror of thy sex. Dost know what a harlot is,
master Ayscough? What all men would have all women be, that they
may the easier think the worst of them. (356-57)
Such comments allow Rebecca to employ her considerable knowledge

of mens behavior including their confessions to her in her bed to
indict Ayscoughs fragmented and manipulative approach as both
sexist and inadequate to his supposed purpose of discovering the truth
about his Lordships disappearance. Despairing over this narrow-
minded attitude, Rebecca finally argues:
I tell thee truth, which thee will not have. In this thees great proof
theeself I must lie to be believed. (381)
In fact, Rebecca is most convincing when she lies, as she realizes.

Aware of both the strangeness of her experience with his Lordship and
the real danger in which her participation in his disappearance might
put her, Rebecca initially lies about that experience to the spying
Jones, constructing an elaborate tale of Satanic ritual that she knows
he would be a fool to repeat. As Rebecca expects, Jones believes this
tale, confessing it only under Ayscoughs aggressive interrogation,
and repeatedly apologizing for what he imagines to be the devastating
truth of his Lordships demise. Predictably, Ayscough dismisses this
irrational tale outright and accuses Rebecca of deliberately deceiving
Jones, to which she simply replies, I told him what he might believe
(300). Although Ayscough scoffs at this casual admission, arguing,
Who lies once will ever lie twice (325), Rebecca insists that she lied
to Jones to prevent him from meddling further (300) in affairs of
great personal significance to her, since, she claims, he made it plain
that he would use me still, and I would not be used (381).
As critics have noted, this attitude parallels Sarahs behavior in The
French Lieutenants Woman. 11 Like Sarah, Rebecca weaves a
creative, seductive narrative for each of her listeners, often obscuring
the facts in order to emphasize a more significant personal or social
truth to which her situation affords special access. Moreover, like
Sarah, Rebecca employs a direct and penetrating gaze that disrupts
the social order, erasing the boundaries between male and female, law
and order, investigator, criminal and victim and that asserts a
subversive power similar to the female voyeurism Denzin identifies in
contemporary films. 12 Unlike the other witnesses, Rebecca maintains
11
Foster, Understanding John Fowles, 161; Salami, John Fowless Fiction and the
Poetics of Postmodernism, 228.
12
an undeviating directness of look throughout her testimony that, the

narrator explains, is so direct indeed that [Ayscough] knew he could
not, and would never, believe it (319). Instead of feeling the
sneaking admiration for such directness that the narrator suspects a
modern lawyer might experience, Ayscough responds to Rebeccas
gaze with renewed belief in his long-held opinion that the world
grows worse, and especially in the insolence of its lower orders
(315). Yet Rebeccas gaze is rarely insolent or angry. Instead, the
narrator notes, Rebecca looks on others, particularly men, merely as
one who sees [them] whole (290).
Indeed, Rebeccas direct and penetrating gaze corresponds to her
similarly perceptive analyses of the conditions that structure her
society. Throughout her testimony, Rebecca advances insights that
proceed directly from her experiences of prostitution. Through these
analyses, Rebecca demonstrates a sophisticated understanding of
dominant ways of knowing and being that establishes her standpoint
as the result of thoughtful reflection on both her interactions with
members of various social classes and the conditions that have
structured those experiences. Unlike Lacy and Jones, both of whom
acknowledge the dubious reputation of their professions and admit to
a certain personal fallibility in their participation in his Lordships
disappearance, Rebecca justifies her professional activities and her
role in his Lordships disappearance in terms of social conditioning,
explaining to Ayscough:
And I pray thee remember we women are brought up to do mens

will in this world. I know men will say tis Eve who tempts them into
the stews. But tis Adam who keeps them there.
Indeed, Rebecca even convinces Ayscough of her expertise in such

matters. After making this claim, for example, she observes, I take
heart thee wont look me in my eyes, tis sign thee knows I speak
truth (305).
Rebeccas insights also reflect the commitment to social justice
embraced by her religious community, a dissenting sect associated
with the French Prophets. Particularly concerned about the vast
inequalities they observe in their society, the members of Rebeccas
religious sect proclaim a socialist doctrine, insisting on shared
resources and simple living and actively resisting ostentation. More
outrageously to the conventional Ayscough, this sect also professes a
kind of pre-feminist commitment to womens equality, believing that

at the second coming Christ will be reborn as a woman. Like others in
her religious community, Rebecca expresses contempt for those who
would safeguard their own material and social privileges when
destitution and suffering abound, even accusing Ayscough of such
behavior during a prophetic fit that strikes in the middle of her
testimony:
I tell thee a new world comes, no sin shall be, no strife more between
man and man, between man and woman, nor parent and child, nor
master and servant. No, nor wicked will, nor washing of hands, nor
shrugging of shoulders, nor blindness like thine to all that breaks thy
comfort and thy selfish ways. (427)
Shocked and offended by her propensity to introduce such visions into

her testimony, Ayscough accuses Rebecca of trying to subvert all
masculine authority in revenge for her exploitation as a prostitute:
Religion is thy mask, no more. Tis all the better to have thy
unwomanly revenge.
Yet Rebecca replies with a comment that any member of her sect
might make:
Ill tell thee my evil purpose. Most in this world is unjust by act of
man, not of Our Lord Jesus Christ. Change that is my purpose. (424)
However, Rebeccas unusual knowledge, achieved both during her

life as a prostitute and, more significantly, during her transformative
experience with his Lordship, distinguishes her perspective from that
offered by her father, her husband, and Wardley, the leader of her
religious sect. Although these men protest Ayscoughs interrogation
of Rebecca and particularly his insistence that she stay overnight at
the inn where he conducts his interview with her, Rebecca considers
her interview with Ayscough an opportunity to advocate her political
and spiritual vision. Employing techniques learned in her profession,
Rebecca convinces her protectors to leave, demonstrating an odd mix
of obsequiousness and decisiveness that flusters her carpenter father,
who, the narrator reports, does not look appeased, and searches for
something in her steady eyes, the faint smile, perhaps a simple answer
to the question of why she knows him, but he does not know her. The
answer to this question, the narrator further suggests, lies in Rebeccas
experiential knowledge of men and in strategies she has developed in
order to conform to their expectations. Indeed, he reports, Rebeccas
father responds to her attentions like a man shown, at this late stage
of his life, a glimpse of something he has never recognised before: a
lightness, affection, a last echo of her former life; a thousand miles
from solid timber and moral judgements by setsquare, and so
unplaceable by him (391).
This ability to manipulate dominant modes of discourse and
behavior for her own purposes extends to Rebeccas method of
responding to Ayscoughs inquiries. In direct contrast to her husband,
who has merely picked up the language of prophetic visions and yet
is sure his utterances come by divine inspiration: that is, he is self-
gulled, or innocently self-believing (385), Rebecca employs a
language and narrative approach that are self-aware and visionary. To
Ayscoughs repeated confusion and disbelief, Rebecca argues, Thee
has thy alphabet, and I mine, that is all. And I must speak mine (313),
forcing Ayscough to acknowledge the alternative epistemological
processes by which she has come to understand her experience with
his Lordship. Ayscoughs rational objections and sometimes arbitrary
questions distract and confuse Rebecca, who often responds only after
a strange pause, as if she must have Ayscoughs words first
translated from a foreign language before she can frame a reply
(410). The narrator attributes Rebeccas and Ayscoughs different
ways of knowing to their being set apart from each other not only by
countless barriers of age, sex, class, education, native province and the
rest, but by something far deeper still: by belonging to two very
different halves of the human spirit, perhaps at root those, left and
right, of the two hemispheres of the brain. Ayscough, the narrator
speculates, is left-brain dominant, and therefore rational,
mathematical, ordered, glib with words, usually careful and
conventional (425). Rebecca, on the other hand, appears to be right-
brain dominant, and therefore poor at reason, often confused in
thought and argument with a sense of time (and politic timing)
[that] is often defective (426).
While insightful in its modern and scientific sensibility, this appeal
to biological determinism fails to recognize the explosive potential of
Rebeccas situated perspective and to acknowledge the sociopolitical
tension between Ayscough and Rebecca a tension of which both

characters are acutely aware. Rebecca destabilizes Ayscoughs
dominant discourse throughout her testimony, temporarily supplanting
it with an alternative discourse that privileges her subjectivity 13 and
challenging Ayscoughs supposed objectivity by offering a situated
perspective that generates oppositional knowledge. However, Rebecca
also exercises a subversive authority less focused on shaking
Ayscoughs dominant masculine authority than on offering an
inspirational and visionary alternative to his obsessive quest for
determinate truth. Through her creative authorship, Rebecca produces
a progressive, cooperative, and ethical vision that exploits what Donna
Haraway identifies as the fundamental potential of situated
knowledges, which are about communities, not about isolated
individuals. 14
Incorporating her individual history, her interactions with others,
the beliefs of her religious community, and the social analyses that
proceed from these multiple and contradictory situations, Rebecca
offers Ayscough a mystical and woman-centered explanation of his
Lordships disappearance. In place of the Satanic orgy she describes
to Jones, Rebecca tells Ayscough of a strange journey through space
and time within the maggot, a futuristic vessel whose dimensions
could not possibly have fit within the cave in which Rebecca claims to
have encountered it. Within this maggot, Rebecca claims, she and his
Lordship, along with Dick, were transported to a heavenly community
she refers to as June Eternal. However, she claims, after this journey
she alone experienced horrific visions of battles, torture, and suffering,
including the burning of an innocent girl she understood to be her
younger self. After these visions, she claims, she fell asleep, and woke
naked and alone in the cave, knowing that his Lordship had left in the
maggot and returned to June Eternal. Considering herself cleansed
of her former sinful life and transformed by his Lordships spiritual
intervention, Rebecca concludes, she encountered Jones, constructed a
disturbing tale to prevent him from discussing his Lordships
disappearance further, then sought her parents forgiveness, and
finally pursued a life of repentance and religious devotion assisted by
her husband, who married her to provide a home for her unborn child,
13
14
the result of her compassionate relationship with the physically

impressive but intellectually incapable Dick.
Except for her insistence on identifying heaven with the name June
Eternal, the vision Rebecca describes to Ayscough largely
corresponds to the beliefs of her religious sect, which in addition to its
commitment to a socialist ideal of shared resources practices a strict
celibacy. Rebecca describes June Eternal as a joyous socialist
community in which there is no poverty or disease, no unsought labor,
and no children. Instead, she claims, she saw men and women living
separate but equally pleasant lives under the direction of a young and
old man that Rebecca later understood to be representations of God
and Jesus Christ, whom she claims also to have seen during an earlier
night journey to Stonehenge with his Lordship and Dick. Her
explanation of his Lordships disappearance and Dicks apparent
suicide likewise conform to the prophetic sensibility of her religious
community. Resisting Ayscoughs rational objections to her version of
events, Rebecca answers his logical question, Can you deny that [his
Lordship] may have left some otherwise than in your engine? by
asserting her right to conceive of this transformative experience in
spiritual terms, arguing, I cannot, in your alphabet; in mine I can, and
do (380). Although she claims not to have known about Dicks
suicide, Rebecca explains it in similarly religious terms:
I spake this yesterday of his Lordship and his man, how in much they
seemed as one. And now do I see they were as one in truth, Dick of
the carnal and imperfect body, his Lordship of the spirit . And as
Jesus Christs body must die upon the Cross, so must the latter day
earthly self, poor unregenerate Dick, die so the other half be saved.
By identifying his Lordship not as Christ reborn but of His spirit

(417), Rebecca advocates a mystical version of his Lordships
disappearance that reflects her communitys spiritual sensibilities.
However, Rebeccas vision also includes significant deviations
from her sects beliefs that will provide the basis for the Shaker
spirituality she initiates. Aside from Wardleys insistence that
Heaven hath no special season, tis no more June than any other
month, Rebeccas visionary narrative deviates from her sects
doctrine in its advocacy of a female deity. Indeed, the facilitator of her
transformative experience in the maggot, Rebecca claims, was a
woman she calls Holy Mother Wisdom, a personage of whom
Wardley claims never to have heard (397). Upon entering the cave,
Rebecca claims, she encountered three women, whom she describes as
a maiden, carrying flowers of purest white; a mother, carrying
flowers of red, like blood; and a crone, carrying flowers of darkest
purple, near to black. These three traditional representations of a
goddess figure, Rebecca notes, seemed one woman in her three ages,
so like were their features despite their different years (361). Indeed,
these three women merged into one, she insists, creating a single
woman Rebecca identifies as Holy Mother Wisdom:
the bearing spirit of Gods will, and one with Him from the
beginning, that takes up all that Christ the Saviour promised. That is
both His mother and His widow, and His daughter beside; wherein lies
the truth of those three women grown one I saw first appear. She is
that which liveth always, and shall be my mistress always. (375)
Predictably, Ayscough objects to this advocacy of a female deity,

arguing a conventional Christian stance grounded in patriarchal
authority. Such beliefs Rebecca attributes to Ayscoughs position of
privilege. Her own knowledge, she insists, proceeds from a subjugated
position that generates an alternative view:
Thee would snare me. Thee knows not what it is to be woman . As

I was used when whore, so I may be used still. And all women beside
. We may not say what we believe, nor say what we think, for fear
we be mocked because we are woman. If men think a thing be so, so it
must be, we must obey. I speak not of thee alone, it is so with all men,
and everywhere. Holy Mother Wisdom is not heard nor seen, nor what
she might bring if she were let. (416-17)
Suggesting that conventional conceptions of a male god support an

oppressive patriarchal system of perpetual inequality, 15 Rebecca
further argues that the Bible is a limited spiritual guide precisely
because of its masculine bias that is, not false witness so much as,
she says, Witness from one side alone. Which fault lies in man, not in
God nor His son (424). Supporting this analysis with specific
references to Biblical passages, Rebecca presents a firmly situated and
socially conscious challenge to Ayscoughs authority in particular and
15
to masculine authority more generally, offering an alternative vision

that advocates equality and cooperation between men and women
inspired by the union of male and female godheads.
Through this revelation, Rebecca employs the insights generated
by her situation to offer a creative, holistic vision that invigorates her
personal spirituality and provides a template for social justice within
the wider community. Threatened by any social change, but especially
by such a politically conscious and philosophically subversive
doctrine as the one Rebecca advocates, Ayscough continues to define
Rebecca as a seditious prostitute, even offering her money (from his
employer, and, he claims, against his advice [434]) to assist with her
impending child-birth an offering Rebecca rejects because of its
implication of payment for services rendered. Dismissing Rebeccas
version of his Lordships disappearance as eccentric, immodest,
blasphemous, and irrational, Ayscough employs his dominant
discourse to code her vision in obsessive, neurotic terms, not unlike
contemporary films portrayals of the female gaze, which, Denzin
argues, is inevitably anchored back in sexuality and sexual desire. 16
Unable to transcend his prejudice, Ayscough enacts a regressive
political practice grounded in false universals.
Rebecca, however, has moved beyond such categorizations, and in
place of her sexual seductions practices that had left her barren she
enacts intuitive and creative ways of knowing and being. Conscious of
the uniqueness of her transformative experience with his Lordship,
Rebecca considers herself a link between a material world defined by
oppression and a spiritual realm that promises authenticity and
equality. She appears to wander in a hugely extended now, treating
both past and future as present, instead of keeping them in control and
order, firmly separated (426), and to consult sources beyond her
intellect in responding to Ayscoughs logical inquiries. As the narrator
explains, on occasion it is almost as if she answers not for herself,
but waits until some mysterious adviser puts one in her mind (410),
and at one point she even claims to see his Lordship in the room and
to answer through his guidance (430). Indeed, despite Wardleys
disappointment that she hath not prophesied (400), Rebecca
experiences several prophetic moments in the course of her
conversations with Ayscough, from an intuition that the child inside
16
her will be a girl (391) to the prophetic fit in which she accuses
Ayscough of refusing to acknowledge the ways in which his
investigative practices secure his privilege and thwart social justice. In
these oppositional responses, Rebecca operates through what Susan
Hekman identifies as a standpoint paradigm, defining her politics as
a local and situated activity undertaken by discursively constituted
subjects and practicing political resistance by both challenging the
hegemonic discourse that writes a particular script for a certain
category of subjects and by employing other discursive formations
to oppose that script, not by appealing to universal subjectivity or
absolute principles. 17
In conjunction with her impending motherhood the result of
which, Fowles suggests in the Epilogue, will be the historical Shaker
leader Mother Ann Lee such alternative discursive formations
establish Rebecca as the ultimate representative of Fowles visionary
feminist ethic. Like Conchis and Lily de Seitas in The Magus,
Rebecca advocates whole sight, meaningful relationships, personal
authenticity, and complexity. Like Sarah in The French Lieutenants
Woman, Rebecca seduces her listeners through creative tales that,
while not factual, include significant personal and social truths that
inspire the pursuit of authenticity and genuine connection between
men and women. Like Isobel in The Enigma, Rebecca demonstrates
that the obsession for determinable, factual truth merely reinforces the
received historical patterns, prefabricated identities, and iniquitous
class distinctions that create oppression and alienation. 18 Like Jane in
Daniel Martin, Rebecca challenges her interlocutor to recognize the
insights that proceed from her oppositional, situated perspective as
genuine and potentially transformative knowledge. And like Erato in
Mantissa, Rebecca embodies a mysterious and seductive self-
awareness that resists sterile intellectualism with a vibrant and
inspirational sensuality and fertility.
In finally creating a heroine who is both seductively mysterious
and specifically situated, Fowles achieves a genuine feminist
advocacy, offering a woman protagonist whose situated perspective
17
Susan Hekman, Truth and Method: Feminist Standpoint Theory Revisited, in
Provoking Feminisms, eds Carolyn Allen and Judith A. Howard, Chicago: The
University of Chicago Press, 2000, 25.
18
Frederick M. Holmes, History, Fiction, and the Dialogic Imagination: John
Fowless A Maggot, Contemporary Literature, XXXII/2 (Summer 1991), 231.
explodes the dominant discourses of both her eighteenth-century

England and of readers contemporary Western culture, which Fowles
considered equally blind to alternative visions of reality. In this novel,
his Lordship constructs a godgame similar in design to that
described in The Magus that challenges each character to determine
the meaning of his unusual behavior, his unconventional attitudes, and
his mysterious disappearance. 19 Rebecca contributes significantly to
readers initiation into this godgame by advancing her own
perspective, assuming a role similar to Nicholas in The Magus.
Unlike Nicholas, however, Rebecca demonstrates an authenticity, a
willingness to own her standpoint with all its attendant insights and
limitations, and an understanding of the conditions that generate
multiple and contradictory points of view that establish her
perspective as truly transformed and transformative.
Indeed, like Conchis parables in The Magus, Rebeccas narrative
challenges its audience to entertain multiple interpretations of reality
and to accept a certain indeterminacy that encourages authentic
choices. Confronted with multiple versions of his Lordships
disappearance as well as the religious polemics, historical chronicles,
journalistic texts, puritanical texts, fantastic texts, political and
juridicial testimonies, and literary allusions to the drama of the age 20
that Fowles incorporates into the novel, readers of A Maggot must
negotiate a conventional drive for determinate truth and a competing
compulsion to question the motives and values supporting that very
drive for closure. 21 However, as a more aggressive examination of
dominant modes of investigation and discourse than The Enigma, A
Maggot indicts the reader who, like Ayscough in his final letter to the
duke, paranoically seeks to reconstruct the events of the novel to fit a
master narrative telling of what really happened on this date, in this
place, to this person. 22 Like the socially sanctioned voyeurs who
enact such projects in contemporary conspiracy films, such readers,
Fowles suggests, perpetuate the tyrannical or manipulative practices
19
20
21
Jeffrey Roessner, Unsolved Mysteries: Agents of Historical Change in John
Fowless A Maggot, Papers on Language and Literature, XXXVI/3 (Summer 2000),
308.
22
that command and oblige us to believe what those in power would

have us believe.
However, through Rebecca, who not only advocates a creative
visionary ethic but through her daughter establishes a radical
community effort to create a more humane society (453), Fowles
offers an alternative model of dissent that, he concludes, is an eternal
biological or evolutionary mechanism needed always, and in our
own age more than ever before (454). In direct resistance to the
detached and fragmented contemporary obsession with the spectacle,
Rebecca embodies alternative epistemological and ontological
methods that are multi-perspectival and that go beyond pure vision
and specularity 23 to advocate a vision of wholeness, creativity,
authenticity, and community. Although Rebeccas radical vision of
social justice and equality reflects a historical and spiritual specificity,
Fowles contemporary exploration of her situated perspective exceeds
such limitations. He insists in the Prologue to A Maggot:
What follows may seem like a historical novel; but it is not. It is

maggot.
The final published effort in his career as a novelist, A Maggot

justifies its creators insistence that it is not merely a whim or quirk
but the larval stage of a winged creature at least in the writers
hope (1). In advocating Rebeccas practice of multi-perspectival
dissent, A Maggot demonstrates Fowles truly feminist commitment to
the transformative potential of situated knowledges.
23
Ibid., 141.
CONCLUSION
ON AUTHORITY AND AUTHENTICITY
Although many of his ideas changed over the course of his career as a
novelist, John Fowles maintained a number of abiding interests in his
fiction, including his advocacy of a more balanced society that values
womens ways of knowing and being. This advocacy developed from
his manipulative exploitation and obfuscation of womens
perspectives in The Collector and The Magus, through his
experimental explorations of womens creative authorship in The
French Lieutenants Woman, The Ebony Tower, and Mantissa, and
finally to his reverence for the evocative insights that proceed from
the specific situations of the women in Daniel Martin and A Maggot.
As this respect for womens alternative approaches to self-awareness,
interpersonal relationships, and social reform developed, Fowles
became more self-reflexive, more willing to surrender complete
authorial control, and more interested in entertaining multiple
perspectives in his work. Simultaneously, his fiction became less
alienating and at times even inspiring for feminist readers. Why, then,
has his later work received comparatively little attention, especially
from feminist critics?
One explanation for this oversight might be Fowles unfortunate
quarrel with his first wife, Elizabeth, whose rejection of his ultimately
unpublished thriller The Device the copyright of which Fowles had
assigned to Elizabeth as a gift that would provide her with an
independent income caused a rift that destroyed Elizabeths role as
first reader and editor of Fowles novels. 1 Without Elizabeths
insightful cuts and alterations, Fowles fiction after The French
Lieutenants Woman generally lacks the force and seductive intensity
of the earlier work, relying too heavily on lengthy explication of the
novelists theoretical and sexual fixations, values, and analyses.
Simply put, The Ebony Tower, Daniel Martin, Mantissa, and A
1
Eileen Warburton, John Fowles, 328-30.
Maggot are less richly provocative than The Magus and The French
Lieutenants Woman, Fowles most popular and acclaimed novels.
Feminist readers in particular also may have overlooked Fowles
later work because of his often domineering treatment of the women
in his own life. A fierce individualist committed above all else to his
writing, Fowles often ignored, alienated, or tormented Elizabeth, even
as he depended on her for nearly every other aspect of his life, and
even as she clearly suffered from the circumstances in which her
relationship with him placed her. 2 His scandalous affair with a woman
in her early twenties six months after Elizabeths death, his constant
psychological fixations on idealized women, his tendency to surround
himself with women assistants and admirers, his contempt for his
mother, and his eventual marriage to Sarah Smith daughter of
Elizabeths friend Leo Smith also comprise a catalogue of
relationships toward which feminist readers may feel considerable
antipathy and, as a result, intense suspicion of Fowles self-defined
feminism.
Perhaps most significantly for feminist readers, however, Fowles
maintained a persistently essentialist view of gender, even as his work
explored womens situations more specifically. Just as he insists in
The Aristos that the distinction between the Few and the Many is a
matter of biological hazard, Fowles always believed in categorically
gendered characteristics as biologically determined. 3 Throughout his
fiction, women appear as the representatives of a humanizing force in
opposition to mens aggressive, confrontational, and fiercely
individualist impulses. In this role, his heroines always advocate
relationships, social justice, and a more comprehensive and intuitive
2
Eileen Warburton chronicles this relationship in thoughtful detail in her biography,
John Fowles: A Life in Two Worlds, from Elizabeths affair with Fowles in Greece;
through the tortuous period in which she lost her daughter Anna to her first husband,
Roy Christy, because of her determination to stay with Fowles; through the years of
poverty and distress until Fowles achieved literary fame; through his long career
during which Elizabeth acquiesced to his insistence on living in Lyme Regis and
devoting his time and energy to both his writing and the museum there; and finally to
her death from cancer. In Warburtons portrayal of this marriage, John and Elizabeth
are always devoted friends and lovers. However, as Fowles himself admits throughout
Warburtons biography and his own journals (John Fowles, The Journals, ed. Charles
Drazin, London: Vintage, I, 2003, and II, 2006), Elizabeth provided the conditions
and inspiration that made his career as a writer possible, and suffered for her
husbands authorship.
3
Warburton, John Fowles, 457.
On Authority and Authenticity 225
understanding of the individuals role in wider communities all

characteristics Fowles considered inherently feminine.
However, despite his belief in this kind of biological determinism,
Fowles attempted to employ his essentialism strategically, and in his
later novels offered womens insights not merely as perspectives or
views that flow from their authors unwittingly because of their
biology or location in geographical or other such social relations but
as the critically and theoretically constructed discursive positions
that Sandra Harding identifies as genuine standpoints. 4 Even as early
as The Magus, Fowles illustrated the destructive potential of what he
considered to be mens inherent inability to see the relationships
between individuals and among communities. The alternative visions
that his heroines offer, obliquely in early novels like The Magus but
explicitly in later novels like Daniel Martin and A Maggot, challenge
such configurations through precise analyses of the oppressive
conditions they create in the lived experiences of specifically situated
women and men. In Fowles novels, the intuitive, creative, and
collaborative standpoints that the heroines advance deconstruct the
process through which the heroes (or antiheroes) excessive
rationality, abstraction, and fragmentation condemn both individuals
and whole societies to the oppressive and inauthentic conditions of a
contemporary wasteland.
These visions are projected, and they proceed from problematic
claims to essentialism that function descriptively in ways that Alison
Stone, in her summary of strategic essentialism, correctly describes as
false and oppressive. 5 However, they also offer politically conscious
and personally relevant epistemological and ontological alternatives
that facilitate individual authenticity and genuine connection, and that
move toward the kind of coalitional feminist politics that arise when
differently situated individuals or groups decide to act together to
achieve some determinate objective, while yet acknowledging the
irreducible differences between them and the often highly divergent
concerns that motivate them to pursue this objective. Such politics,
Stone argues, can achieve positive if somewhat indirect ends for
diverse groups of women, even when coalitions are comprised of
deeply asymmetrical power relationship[s]. 6
4
Harding, Is Science Multicultural?, 17.
5
Alison Stone, Essentialism and Anti-Essentialism in Feminist Philosophy, Journal
of Moral Philosophy, I/2 (2004), 144.
6
Ibid., 152.
This kind of coalitional feminist political practice offers a useful

paradigm for mens feminist advocacy as well, particularly when
conceived of as profeminism, which Harry Brod defines as the
developing feminist politics of, by, and for men. Profeminism, Brod
suggests, insists that men must recognize their own stake in the
transformations advanced by feminism, not because men should put
their own needs ahead of others, but because this recognition is part
and parcel of being able to fully commit oneself to the liberation of
others. 7 Indeed, as a humanist Fowles was always interested in the
ways both men and women might achieve their full human potential,
and advocated feminism precisely for that reason. More specifically,
Fowles offered poignant illustrations in his novels of men not as
incapable of change, beings who must be simply opposed or written
off, but as beings who must be challenged to change and whose
change must be facilitated. 8 Rather than condoning the fixations he
believed to be inherently masculine or offering completely negative
portrayals of men, in his novels Fowles illustrated that men could
still be distinctively men, but different from how they now are. 9
These positive visions of mens capacity for and invested interest in
different practices of masculinity provide what Brod identifies as a
necessary condition for mens feminist advocacy.
Moreover, as Sandra Harding argues, feminist standpoint theory
at least [implies] that there are contributions to feminist thought that
are more easily (in some cases uniquely) made by men, so that
feminist thought is disadvantaged by a lack of contributions from
mens subjectivities. 10 Fowles struggled for the credibly owned
mans standpoint he advanced, and the vision of individual
authenticity and social justice he advocated in his texts proceeded
from ideals he consistently interrogated and refined throughout his
life, as evidenced in his journals and in his largely autobiographical
novels, which take their themes and events both from his intellectual
interests and from his lived experiences. As a young man in the 1950s,
for example, Fowles filled his journals with obsessive attempts of self-
definition. Reminiscent of Nicholas attitudes in The Magus, such
7
Harry Brod, To Be a Man, or Not to Be a Man That Is the Feminist Question, in
Men Doing Feminism, ed. Tom Digby, New York: Routledge, 1998, 208.
8
Ibid., 201.
9
Larry May, A Progressive Male Standpoint, in Men Doing Feminism, ed. Digby,
350.
10
Sandra Harding, Can Men Be Subjects of Feminist Thought?, in Men Doing
Feminism, ed. Digby, 174.
reflections often operate through a kind of detached self-satisfaction,

especially as Fowles considered his life in terms of narrative
conventions. In recording an argument with his girlfriend Ginette
Marcailloux in June 1951, for example, Fowles admits:
Psychologically I play her like a tired ball, experimenting, risking,

showing off. Because now I am beginning to plan and formulate a
nouvelle about her, or around her, I treat her more as the character in
the novel than as her real self. The novel necessitates a sad end an
end of separation, that is, which presents no sadness to me (sadness is
a romantic hypocrisy) and so I prepare and indulge in melancholy
for our departure. I feel myself a monster, because now, when we are
together, we are no longer (for me) real, but characters in an unwritten
novel. 11
Despite feeling a monster in this affair, Fowles journal entry

demonstrates exaltation in this experience both for its seductive
interest and for its contribution to his emerging identity as the
controlling character in a determined narrative pattern and
simultaneously as the author of that still indeterminate narrative. Like
Nicholas in the godgame, at this time Fowles valued his solitary
heart, claiming, The strongest part of me is the part I never divulge;
a mixture of the ego of my ambitions and my best capability,
ruthlessly determined to achieve its own fulfillment (I, 110), and
considered his detachment from lived experience or, more precisely,
his willingness to consider lived experience in narrative terms the
exalted privilege of the poet-artist (I, 111). This tone of self-
congratulatory isolation dominates the early journals and coincides
with frequent descriptions of the physical characteristics of the women
Fowles encountered, particularly when those encounters provided
opportunities for voyeurism. 12
However, the focus of the journals gradually shifts from self-
satisfied efforts to define the self in opposition to and through
surveillance of others to genuine self-reflection. Particularly
significant in initiating this shift was Fowles affair with and
subsequent marriage to Elizabeth, which forced him to consider the
consequences of his attitudes and behavior on the lived experiences of
others. This necessity was uncomfortable for Fowles, who had
difficulty reconciling what he felt to be moral obligations to others
11
John Fowles, The Journals, I, 111.
12
See, for example, ibid., 16, 77, 118, 122, 213, and 216.
with his self-centered desires. As his affair with Elizabeth became

particularly messy in December 1953, for example, he explained:
Poor E. She has all the trouble of Anna, the expense . She accused
me of being bored by the whole situation. It is true; I am tired of it. At
the same time, I am conscious of being altogether self-centered in my
actions. I ought to be paying E something. She has barely enough for
the necessities of life. Seems not to eat. But she is tough, resilient,
resourceful in the miserable circumstances of London. Worse than
that, I am guilty about Anna. I watched her today, and she stared back
in a strange hostile way; yet I could not find the least pity for the
child. She was a fact, an abstract something, within the normal bounds
of human obligations, to be pushed aside. I cannot disregard her; yet I
cannot consider her. (I, 306)
No longer removing himself from relationships by considering

only their narrative interest, Fowles noticed at this point the effects of
his affair with Elizabeth on her everyday experience, yet excused his
refusal to help her by alternately complimenting her resilience and
denigrating her fundamental instability (I, 307), her vulgarity, and
her inability to resolve her floundering relationship with either him or
with her husband Roy Christy. Still unable to confront such lived
realities, Fowles removed himself from this unbearable situation
through affairs with students at Ashridge, which allowed him to
indulge in masculine fantasies of the unobtainable woman as an
escape from the mundane mess represented by his relationship with
Elizabeth (I, 333), a move that recalls (or foreshadows, as the case
may be) Davids behavior in The Ebony Tower and Dans early affairs
in Daniel Martin.
Once this relationship became more stable, however, Fowles began
to reflect on his attitudes more carefully, to consider others with an
interest much closer to ornithology than voyeurism (I, 557), and to
understand himself and his relationships to others within a broad
personal and cultural context. As a diarist Fowles was ruthlessly
honest and critical, and frequently deconstructed the cultural,
historical, political, professional, and psychological forces that shaped
the attitudes and behavior he observed in himself and others. In
September 1975, for example, he offered this explanation for the
tension in his relationship with his mother:
In three seconds she will return the remotest subject to her world at
Great Ayton, just as she did with Leigh-on-Sea. I suppose it is all
derived from the terrible spoiling she evidently got from [her father];
all the rest of her life has been a clamour for that sort of attention
with the inevitable result that the more she has egotized the less
attention she has received. Eliz and I speculate as to how my father
stood it all those years without going mad; I think it accounts for his
retreat into philosophy and German lyric verse and the rest anything
for a world she could not touch. I behave badly towards her, showing
my disapproval through silence; but largely without guilt. I stem from
her emotionally and in my intense relationship with my own ego, of
course; that is, I am genetically her child; his by acquired
circumstance. (II, 192)
This pattern of reflection emerges repeatedly in the journals, as

Fowles noted the behavior of others, described his response to such
behavior, considered Elizabeths responses, and then attempted to
account for the causes and complicating factors that determined such
complex social interactions.
Another common pattern in the journals emerged from Fowles
reading, as he attempted to synthesize current events, cultural
commentary, critical analysis, philosophical idealism, and aesthetic
pleasure into new ways of seeing. In October 1988, for example,
Fowles responded to reading poetry by Eliot and Larkin and the
faintly ridiculous, but painstaking Robert Critchfields account of
modern Britain, 13 commenting:
Difficult not to feel what I have felt all my rather wiser life, that we
are historioculturally done for; hopelessly moribund, compared to the
USA. Their faith in progress, advance; our deep faith in failure, or
seeing some virtue in it. They see themselves always transcending
history, breaking it both as one breaks a code and breaks a horse; we
are always its victims, the mere effects of what it was, caused not
causing . Critchfield mentions somewhere that our train services are
terrible: true, but we like it that way; that arrival on time is always
slightly a matter of chance, that the service is not as fast as it might be.
It allows us to opt out of progress, an inclination which really does
suit our zeitgeist. We adore being able to retreat into the past, as into a
comfortable sofa.
By using such texts as a springboard, Fowles struggled to

understand cultural differences, especially between England and the
13
Fowles is referring to Robert Critchfield, The Best of Times, The Worst of
Times, The Economist, CCCII/7486 (21 February 1987), 54.
United States, and to identify the underlying, historically evolving

attitudes that determined the everyday experiences of differently
situated groups. Characteristically, Fowles continued in this reflection
to apply these concepts to himself:
This tells me much of my own interest in the past and concern for
nature. Nature now becomes the past, in the sense of the what-is-going
rather than what-is-gone. In that sense it is my church, where I retreat,
a very cyclical church (like all churches). This is why so much in
modern life (and modern London) alienates me, why I have such
doubts about the political left; that is, my token socialism of the last
twenty or thirty years is abraded by the endless pressure of common
taste and the common thinking (themselves largely formed by Eliot
and Larkin) that socialism is in itself bad, greed and avarice
naturally good. Like so many others I retreat to the cyclical, not least
because it is more comfortable; that is, to the consolations of history
in all its forms. (II, 375-76)
Such efforts to consider himself (and others) as situated within

divergent social, cultural, philosophical, and personal circumstances,
and to examine how different individuals and groups addressed those
shared circumstances, fill Fowles later journals, in explorations that
eventually crystallize in the character of Daniel Martin, whom Fowles
called my exteriorized imagination imagination as a substitute for
biological realization (II, 201). By infusing his fiction with his own
fixations and personal history as Daniel Martin demonstrates
Fowles developed the kind of understanding of his situation and of the
forces that shaped his perspective that characterizes an authentic
standpoint. Furthermore, as the published order of his novels obscures
but his journals illustrate, Fowles did not come to this standpoint
through a linear progression of abstract thought, but through
continuous reflection grounded in both present circumstances and past
events, in both large social movements and personal relationships,
much as Daniel Martin comes to his own standpoint through a fluid
negotiation of memory, analysis, and experience.
Furthermore, the journals reflect Fowles growing uncertainty in
the absoluteness of his ideas as he matured, as well as a concomitant
willingness to admit that his vision might be partial. Particularly
provocative in this respect is his inclusion of Elizabeths perspective
in the journals. Initially, Fowles merely reported Elizabeths concerns
as he understood them (admittedly imperfectly). Such concerns
included her loss of identity, a complaint that Fowles compared to
the work of Betty Friedan and ultimately resisted because he believed

Elizabeth to be looking at herself in the distorting mirror of me,
which produced a twisted reflection he perceived Elizabeth to be
using for whipping up her anger and despair (I, 641-42). Later
reflections on Elizabeths frustrations, and the frustrations she
identified in womens lives more generally, show Fowles genuine
inability to fully comprehend Elizabeths ontological difficulties and a
poignant despair at the resulting tension in his marriage, which
featured more frequent arguments that he found profoundly
disturbing and debilitating (II, 169). Many arguments apparently
revolved precisely around Fowles myopia in both everyday life and
in his writing. In June 1975, Fowles even reported Elizabeths
irritation with his diary, how I traduce everything, never speak well
of her in it, give only my point of view (II, 184).
Eventually, Elizabeth actually wrote in the journal herself,
specifically refuting interpretations of shared experiences that Fowles
had advanced. The first of these interventions occurred in September
1987, when Fowles recorded Elizabeths response to the death of her
mother. Angered by her husbands report, Elizabeth wrote:
You see nothing. You feel nothing. All you see is how you see. (II,
320)
Further comments by Elizabeth criticize Fowles inability to

understand the living reality of children (II, 419), his collecting of
meaningless objects (II, 423), his tendency toward presumption and
rejection of her ideas (II, 424), and his incompetence at handling the
practical necessities of life (II, 425-27). In December 1989, he
commented in the journal on Elizabeths resentments most of which
resulted from decisions made to facilitate his writing which erupted
in all she has scrawled here; so much for which I am not forgiven (II,
429).
Despite his inability to concur fully with such criticisms, Fowles
decided to retain these interventions a decision that demonstrates a
unique acknowledgement of his own fragmented understanding and
emphasizes his dependence on Elizabeths perspective for his pursuit
of whole sight. Like Jenny in Daniel Martin, Elizabeth practiced a
kind of confrontational authorship in her husbands journals, using her
oppositional knowledge to force her husband to recognize that his
knowledge was partial, even biased, and to confront the fact that his
desires had created problems in her everyday experiences. Like Dan in
the same novel, Fowles granted Elizabeth an authority in his journals

that challenged his own, allowing her standpoint to compete with and
complement his, even in his most intimate writing.
Elizabeths interventions accompanied a poignant sense of
dissolution for Fowles, who, as he aged, increasingly questioned his
identity, his authenticity, and his authority. Alienated by his fame, he
struggled to define himself in relation to the abominable John
Fowles (II, 267). In December 1985, he wrote, My sense of personal
identity has completely disintegrated, I feel like an actor in a play he
despises, or several actors, in a series of roles that are largely
meaningless (II, 281). These comments mirror the reflections of the
much earlier essay The J. R. Fowles Club, in which Fowles
communicated his sense of failure in reconciling what he perceived as
his many divergent masculine selves. Here, such comments take on an
added dimension of forced alienation from authentic ways of being, as
Fowles felt himself mistakenly equated with his public persona.
This feeling of disintegration functioned as an ironic consequence
of his writing. While earlier in life he had deliberately fostered a
narrative understanding of experience, in these difficult years Fowles
felt himself trapped both within and without a narrative pattern
beyond his control. In April 1988, for example, Fowles complained:
Not feeling who you really, actually are: like being a spectator at your
own demise. Of course what happens is intensely personal, but it
seems not, as in a dream happening to someone else, as in fiction. I
suppose this is in a sense a sort of consolation: that one can see ones
own life, however miserable, as a novel; as not truly real, even when it
is happening. (II, 352)
Such reflections exude Fowles real despair at his inability to cope

with either his professional successes or his personal failures. Finally
seeing his devotion to narrative as both a comfort and an abdication of
responsibility, Fowles hypothesized in July 1989:
Perhaps I and many others have been novelists because we could

not stand saying the truth. We always needed to escape from what is,
the world as it appears to us; to invent other worlds. The world that is
is too cold and cruel to bear; and above all we ourselves (I myself)
that are are also a lot too cold and cruel. We create the surfaces of the
mirrors we see ourselves in, or how we hope others will see us; that is,
distorting surfaces. (II, 410)
In these times of depression after he had written all his published

novels, Fowles apparently understood his ontology as escapist,
egocentric, evasive. Yet such admissions demonstrate his genuine
willingness to honestly assess his contributions both to the world at
large (through his writing) and to his relationships with the people he
lived and worked with. As he matured, Fowles moved from a kind of
aloof arrogance to a very specifically situated understanding of
himself in the world. Accordingly, Fowles fiction gradually reflected
his broadening understanding of the ways in which dominant
discourses affect the perspectives of individuals who are differently
situated; moved from a model of fragmentation and voyeuristic vision
to a commitment to whole sight and alternative visions and views; and
surrendered certain aspects of authorial control, instead questioning
the legitimacy of such control, especially in its tendency to manipulate
others.
Through these efforts, and despite his self-described cruelty to
the women in his life behavior that he considered a necessary
condition of his authorship 14 in some ways Fowles appears to have
adopted in his writing what Harding identifies as a traitorous
identity, a critical position occupied by people [who] would rather
learn difficult truths about themselves and their world than suspect
that they are thinking and behaving disreputably and who act not
out of the spontaneous consciousness of the social locations that
history has bestowed on [them] but out of the traitorous ones [they]
choose with the assistance of critical social theories generated by the
emancipatory movements. 15 Yet in the context of profeminism and
Hardings later work on mens feminist subjectivities, the standpoint
Fowles owned in his nonfiction and illustrated in his fiction functions
provocatively precisely because it proceeds from his specific situation
as a man.
Larry May has offered a useful description of this kind of
progressive male standpoint, which he defines as an egalitarian
theoretical and practical position from which men can critically assess
male experience and traditional male roles:
First, there is a striving for knowledge or understanding based on

experience, especially personal experience of traditional male roles
and activities. Second, there is a critical reflection on that experience
14
Warburton, John Fowles, 457.
15
Harding, Whose Science? Whose Knowledge?, 293 and 295.
in light of the possible harms to women, as well as men, of assuming

traditional male roles and engaging in traditional male activities.
Third, there is a moral motivation to change at least some aspects of
traditional male roles and activities. And finally, there are practical
proposals for changes in traditional male roles that are regarded as
believable by other men. 16
As the journals amply demonstrate, Fowles clearly strove to

understand his personal experiences of traditional male roles and
activities, and his novels offer compelling illustrations of and critical
reflections on the effects of those roles and activities in the lives of
both men and women. Fowles was deeply interested in changing the
structures and traditions that create such conditions, and specifically
advocated such change in his later novels, especially Daniel Martin
and A Maggot.
Whether these proposals for change in traditional male roles fulfill
Mays criteria for believability is a more complicated matter,
considering the fictional nature of Fowles feminist efforts. However,
the popularity and continued critical success of Fowles novels
suggest that readers and critics, both male and female, continue to
appreciate Fowles examinations of the problems of men, feminist
objections notwithstanding. Such continued relevance, I think,
demonstrates that Fowles examines such problems authentically and
sympathetically, offering a male affirmative validation of mens
experiences as they experience them. 17 While this kind of validation
clearly cannot function as the ultimate achievement of profeminism, it
does provide a necessary condition for mens sustained feminist
advocacy.
As Brod argues, before people can listen to whatever new words
or ideas one may have to tell them, they must first feel that they
themselves have been listened to. 18 Indeed, May notes the
regrettable fact that men generally take other men more seriously
than they take women and identifies this fact as a potential advantage
for men offering progressive standpoints if the male voice of
authority is used as an effective critical tool. 19 Although he
consistently demonstrated a problematic understanding of feminism,
and although his authorial efforts were always directed primarily by
16
Larry May, A Progressive Male Standpoint, 337.
17
Brod, To Be a Man, or Not to Be a Man That Is the Feminist Question, 202.
18
Ibid., 203.
19
May, A Progressive Male Standpoint, 349.
philosophical and heuristic concerns and only secondarily by concrete

social analyses, Fowles nevertheless demonstrated an intriguing
standpoint as a man who advocated feminism. Moreover, in his later
fiction, Fowles offered avenues for curious feminist and profeminist
critics to anchor their investigations in authentic and situated
perspectives that generate feminist knowledge. In providing these
avenues of investigation, Fowles work encourages such readers in
their efforts to envision a more balanced society that values womens
ways of knowing and being and that suggests new ways of practicing
masculinity and to find visual and other pleasures in his practice of
authority.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
WORKS BY JOHN FOWLES
Fiction
John Fowles, The Collector, Boston: Little, Brown and Company,
1963.
Daniel Martin, Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1977.
The Ebony Tower, Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1974.
The French Lieutenants Woman, Boston: Little, Brown and
Company, 1969.
A Maggot, Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1985.
The Magus, New York: Dell Publishing, 1978.
Mantissa, Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1982.
Nonfiction
John Fowles, The Aristos, Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1964.
The Enigma of Stonehenge, New York: Summit Books, 1980.
Foreword, in Ourika, by Claire de Duras, trans. John Fowles,
New York: MLA, 1994, xxix-xxx.
Islands, Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1978.
Lyme Regis Camera, Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1990.
Shipwreck, Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1975.
A Short History of Lyme Regis, Boston: Little, Brown and
Company, 1982.
Thomas Hardys England, Boston: Little, Brown and Company,
1984.
The Tree, New York: The Ecco Press, 1979.
Translations
Claire de Duras, Ourika, trans. John Fowles, New York: MLA, 1994.
Essays
John Fowles, Gather Ye Starlets, in Wormholes, ed. Jan Relf, New
York: Henry Holt and Company, 1998, 89-99.
I Write Therefore I Am, in Wormholes, ed. Jan Relf, New
The J.R. Fowles Club, in Wormholes, ed. Jan Relf, New York:
Henry Holt and Company, 1998, 67.
John Aubrey and the Genesis of the Monumenta Britannica, in
Wormholes, ed. Jan Relf, New York: Henry Holt and Company,
1998, 175-96.
The John Fowles Symposium, Lyme Regis, July 1996, in
1998, 73-76.
Land, in Wormholes, ed. Jan Relf, New York: Henry Holt and
Company, 1998, 321-39.
The Nature of Nature, in Wormholes, ed. Jan Relf, New York:
Henry Holt and Company, 1998, 343-61.
Notes on an Unfinished Novel in Wormholes, ed. Jan Relf,
New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1998, 13-26.
1998.
Journals
John Fowles, The Journals, ed. Charles Drazin, London: Vintage, I,
2003.
The Journals, ed. Charles Drazin, London: Vintage, II, 2006.
Interviews
James R. Baker, John Fowles: The Art of Fiction CIX, in
Conversations with John Fowles, ed. Dianne L. Vipond, Jackson,
MS: University Press of Mississippi, 1999, 182-97.
Carol Barnum, An Interview with John Fowles, in Conversations
with John Fowles, ed. Dianne L. Vipond, Jackson, MS: University
Press of Mississippi, 1999, 102-18.
Melissa Denes, Fowles on a Fair Day, in Conversations with John
Fowles, ed. Dianne L. Vipond, Jackson, MS: University Press of
Mississippi, 1999, 223-30.
Bibliography 239
John Fowles, Conversations with John Fowles, ed. Dianne L. Vipond,

Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 1999.
Tony Graham, Hilary Arnold, Sappho Durrell, and John Thackara,
John Fowles: An Exclusive Interview, in Conversations with
John Fowles, ed. Dianne L. Vipond, Jackson, MS: University
Daniel Halpern, A Sort of Exile in Lyme Regis, in Conversations
Susana Jan Onega, Fowles on Fowles, in Conversations with John
Jan Relf, An Interview with John Fowles, in Conversations with
John Fowles, ed. Dianne L. Vipond, Jackson, MS: University Press
of Mississippi, 1999, 119-33.
Carlin Romano, A Conversation with John Fowles, in
Conversations with John Fowles, ed. Dianne L. Vipond, Jackson,
MS: University Press of Mississippi, 1999, 134-48.
Raman K. Singh, An Encounter with John Fowles, in Conversations
David Streitfeld, A Writer Blocked, in Conversations with John
Katherine Tarbox, Interview with John Fowles, in Conversations
Dianne L. Vipond, A Dialogue with John Fowles, in Conversations
An Unholy Inquisition, in Wormholes, ed. Jan Relf, New
WORKS BY OTHER AUTHORS
James Acheson, John Fowles, New York: St Martins Press, 1998.

Linda Alcoff, The Problem of Speaking for Others, Cultural
Critique, (Winter 1991-1992), 5-32.
Robert Arlett, Daniel Martin and the Contemporary Epic Novel,

Modern Fiction Studies, XXXI/1 (Spring 1985), 173-85.
Carol Barnum, The Fiction of John Fowles: A Myth for Our Time,
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Robert J. Begiebing, Toward a New Synthesis: John Fowles, John
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Michael H. Begnal, A View of John Fowles The Magus, Modern
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Harry Brod, To Be a Man, or Not to Be a Man That Is the Feminist
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Ulrich Broich, John Fowles, The Enigma and the Contemporary
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American, Canadian, and British Fiction, eds Reingard M. Nischik
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Ruth Christiani Brown, The French Lieutenants Woman and Pierre:
Echo and Answer, Modern Fiction Studies, XXXI/1 (Spring
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Deborah Byrd, The Evolution and Emancipation of Sarah Woodruff:
The French Lieutenants Woman as a Feminist Novel,
International Journal of Womens Studies, VII/4
(September/October 1984), 306-21.
James Campbell, An Interview with John Fowles, in Conversations
John Campbell, Moral Sense and The Collector: The Novels of John
Fowles, Critical Quarterly, XXV/1 (Spring 1983), 45-53.
Angela Carter, The Sadeian Woman, New York: Penguin, 1979.
Clark Closser, In the Sea of Life Enisled: Narrative Landscape and
Catharines Fate in John Fowless The Cloud, in John Fowles
and Nature: Fourteen Perspectives on Landscape, ed. James R.
Aubrey, Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1999,
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Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought, Second Edition, New
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Peter Conradi, The French Lieutenants Woman: Novel, Screenplay,
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XXVI/2 (Winter 1985), 81-95.
John Haegert, Memoirs of a Deconstructive Angel: The Heroine as
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Donna Haraway, Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in
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Frederick M. Holmes, Fictional Self-Consciousness in John Fowless
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229-43.
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John B. Humma, John Fowles The Ebony Tower: In the Celtic
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Susan Strehl Klemtner, The Counterpoles of John Fowless Daniel
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David W. Landrum, Sarah and Sappho: Lesbian Reference in The
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Rebecca Lin, Medusa, Siren or Sphinx: Retrieving the Female Gaze
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Fowless Daniel Martin, The Texas Review, XI/1-2 (Spring-
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Martins Press, 1985.
Terry Lovell, Feminism and Form in the Literary Adaptation: The
French Lieutenants Woman, in Criticism and Critical Theory, ed.
Jeremy Hawthorn, London: Arnold, 1984, 112-26.
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Ellen McDaniel, Games and Godgames in The Magus and The
French Lieutenants Woman, Modern Fiction Studies, XXXI/1
(Spring 1985), 31-42.
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Daniel Martin, Critical Quarterly, XX/4 (1978), 31-38.
Magali Cornier Michael, Who Is Sarah? A Critique of The French
Lieutenants Womans Feminism, Critique, XXVIII/4 (Summer
1987), 225-36.
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Wives, Philological Quarterly, LXIII/1 (Winter 1984), 17-30.
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the Loneliness of Selfhood, Columbia, MO: University of Missouri
Press, 1974.
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XXXVI/3 (Summer 2000), 302-23.
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Northeastern University Press, 1987.
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88-102.
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John Fowles, New York: MLA, 1994, xiii-xxi.
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Literature Film Quarterly, XV/1 (1987), 8-14.
Raymond J. Wilson, III, Allusion and Implication in John Fowless
The Cloud, Studies in Short Fiction, XX/1 (1983), 17-22.
Bruce Woodcock, Male Mythologies: John Fowles and Masculinity,
Totowa, NJ: Barnes and Noble Books, 1984.
INDEX
Alcoff, Linda, 28 Erens, Patricia, 38

Aubrey, John, 24
Austen, Jane, 134 Ferris, Ina, 162
feminism, and criticism of
Baker, James R., 4 Fowles work, 1, 8-11, 15-
Barnum, Carol, 16 19, 21, 29, 32-33, 46, 61,
Begiebing, Robert J., 20 65, 73, 209, 223-24, 234;
Begnal, Michael H., 76 Fowles comments on, 1-5,
Brod, Harry, 226, 234 7, 226, 231; in Fowles
Brown, Ruth Christiani, 130 oeuvre, 219-21, 234-35; in
Byrd, Deborah, 7, 21 The French Lieutenants
Woman, 102, 116, 124; in A
Campbell, James, 6 Maggot, 200, 202, 219-21;
Campbell, John, 58 in Mantissa, 44-45, 193-
Carter, Angela, 74 200; and profeminism, 226,
Christy, Roy, 228 233-35
Claire de Duras, 5, 7, 32; Foucault, Michel, 38
Ourika, 26-29, 110-11 Foster, Thomas C., 30, 53, 62,
Closser, Clark, 155 86, 174, 205
Collins, Patricia Hill, 17, 173, Fowles, Elizabeth, 4, 223, 224,
179-80 227-28, 229, 230-32
Conradi, Peter, 9, 130 Fowles, John, authenticity, 49-
Cooper, Pamela, 15, 16, 19, 50, 61-67, 76, 80-82, 91-
71, 85 97, 99, 102, 114-17, 121-
Costello, Jacqueline, 69 30, 133, 135-37, 141, 147-
Critchfield, Robert, 229-30 48, 151, 157-60, 163, 165,
173, 176, 178-79, 182-83,
Denzin, Norman K., 38, 40, 192, 218, 220, 225, 227,
45, 164-65, 205, 211, 218 230-32, 234; authority, 15,
Doane, Mary Anne, 38 33, 38-40, 42, 43, 44, 46,
75, 80, 92, 100, 101-103,
Eliot, T. S., 157, 229 113, 115-16, 129-30, 133-
34, 152, 157-60, 163, 165, 187-9, 200, 201, 203-205,

171, 173, 175-76, 183-84, 220; pornography, 40, 50,
187-90, 192-200, 201-202, 66, 67-73, 82, 88-89, 96,
207, 215, 217, 223, 231-35; 146, 159, 173, 187-91, 195,
characterization of men, 16, 199; postmodernism, 38-
41, 78, 190-95, 205-207; 39, 103, 201; race, 29, 81-
characterization of women, 82, 111-12, 164; standpoint
16, 30-33, 41, 42, 76-77, of, 30-31, 226-35; use of
98-99, 101-102, 110, 114- cinematic conventions, 33-
16, 128, 166, 183-84, 187- 35, 43-44, 45, 50, 69, 103,
88, 192-93, 195-97, 200, 109, 153, 162, 164, 174,
202, 209; essentialism, 3-4, 201-205; and whole
6-7, 9, 66, 92, 98-99, 224- sight, 42, 44, 45, 46, 75,
25; existentialism, 42, 73, 92, 93, 130, 140, 160, 161,
80, 93, 107, 114-17, 124- 163, 165, 166-73, 176, 182,
25, 128, 135-37, 147-48, 184, 212, 219, 221, 231-32
184, 200; and the feminine Works: The Aristos, 60,
principle, 3-4, 7, 9, 10; 61, 200, 224; The
fragmentation, 33, 40-42, Collector, 33, 36, 38, 40,
44, 45, 46, 51-53, 59, 67, 49-74, 75, 76, 109, 112,
72-73, 75-76, 98, 100, 101, 130, 140, 171, 190, 192,
113-14, 130, 133, 140, 146, 223; fragmentation, 51-53,
153, 157, 160, 161, 166-73, 59, 67, 72-73; Mirandas
182, 191, 202, 207, 211, perspective, 49-50, 61-67;
221, 225, 231-33; narrative form, 51, 55, 57,
humanism, 4, 76, 226; 59, 66; pornography, 50,
indeterminacy, 22, 25, 33, 66, 67-73; standpoint, 50,
39, 43-44, 46, 97, 129-30, 53, 56, 61-62, 65-67, 72-
151-53, 155-57, 220; 74; voyeurism, 49-50, 53,
masculine bias of, 20-21, 57-58, 67-73; Daniel
30-31, 46, 64-67, 74, 97- Martin, 12, 16, 35, 36, 43-
98, 101-102, 182-83; 44, 75, 93, 160, 161-85,
metafiction, 34, 42, 80, 187, 188, 191-92, 199, 219,
149-51; narrative choices, 223, 225, 228, 230, 231-32,
25, 33-36, 38-40, 42, 43, 234; characters pursuit of
45, 46, 51, 55, 57, 59, 66, authenticity, 163, 165, 173,
77, 92-94, 97-98, 101-104, 176, 178-79, 182-83; Dans
113-14, 129-30, 133-34, authorship, 161-63, 165,
150-59, 163, 171, 175-76, 171, 173, 175-76; and
Index 249
Fowles practice of 187, 191, 192, 198, 201-

authority, 161-63, 165, 203, 211, 219, 223, 224;
183-84; fragmentation, 161, characters authenticity,
166-73, 182; Janes 102, 114-17, 121-30;
perspective, 176-82; existentialism, 107, 114-17,
Jennys perspective, 171- 124-25, 128; feminism,
76; narrative form, 163, 102, 116, 124; and Fowles
171, 175-76; standpoint, practice of authority, 100,
44, 163, 165, 173-85; 101-103, 113, 115-16, 129-
voyeurism, 164, 173; whole 30; fragmentation, 100,
sight, 161, 163, 165, 166- 101, 113-14, 130; narrative
73, 176, 182, 184; womens form, 101-104, 113-14,
authorship, 171-76; The 129-30; standpoint, 42,
Ebony Tower, 12, 36, 40, 101-102, 115-31;
42-43, 131, 133-60, 179, voyeurism, 101-18, 122,
187, 191, 193, 219, 220, 130-31; Islands, 5, 32; A
223, 228; characters Maggot, 12, 33, 34, 43, 45,
pursuit of authenticity, 133, 185, 200, 201-21, 223, 224,
135-37, 141, 147-48, 151, 225, 234; feminism, 200,
157-60; existentialism, 202, 219-21; and Fowles
135-37, 147-48; and practice of authority, 201-
Fowles practice of 202, 221; fragmentation,
authority, 133-34, 152, 202, 207, 211, 221;
157-60; fragmentation, 133, narrative form, 201, 203-
140, 146, 153, 157, 160; 205, 220; Rebeccas
indeterminacy, 151-53, authorship, 215-20;
155-57; narrative form, standpoint, 45, 202, 208-
133-34, 150-59; 21; voyeurism, 202, 205-
pornography, 146, 159; 206, 211; whole sight, 212,
standpoint, 137, 150; 219, 221; The Magus, 16,
voyeurism, 144-46, 155, 25, 33, 36, 38, 40, 41, 42,
158-59; womens 75-100, 130, 134, 136, 140,
authorship, 150-52, 153-58, 141, 147-48, 181, 182, 183,
160; essays, 1, 5-6, 22, 24, 191, 192, 219, 220, 223,
34; The French 224, 225, 226; characters
Lieutenants Woman, 1, 7, authenticity, 76, 80-82, 91-
12, 25, 28-29, 30, 33, 34, 97, 99; Conchis authority,
36, 38, 40, 41-42, 101-31, 80, 92; fragmentation, 75-
133, 150, 160, 179, 183, 76, 98, 100; narrative form,
77, 92-94, 97-98; Humma, John B., 156

pornography, 82, 88-89, 96;
standpoint, 41, 76-78, 90, Jackson, Tony E., 125
92, 94-95, 97-100;
voyeurism, 76-85, 89-92; Kadish, Doris Y., 28
Mantissa, 1, 5, 12, 36, 43, Keller, Evelyn Fox, 17, 24, 56,
44-45, 185, 187-200, 201, 90, 136, 137
219, 223; Eratos
authorship, 197-98; Lacan, Jacques, 38
feminism, 44-45, 193-200; Larkin, Philip, 229
and Fowles practice of Lee, Ann, 219
authority, 187-90, 198-200; Loveday, Simon, 38, 77, 91,
Miles authorship, 192-98; 126, 162, 184
narrative form, 187-89, Lovell, Terry, 33
200; pornography, 187-91, Lukacs,Georg, 162
195, 199; standpoint, 199-
200; voyeurism, 188-90, Marcailloux, Ginette, 227
193 Marie de France, 5, 7, 134;
Eliduc, 134-37
Friedan, Betty, 231 May, Larry, 233-34
McClintock, Barbara, 24
Godwin, Fay, 24 McDaniel, Ellen, 76
Goscilo, Margaret Bozenna, 8
Gramsci, Antonio, 162 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 38
Michael, Magali Cornier, 21
Haegert, John, 92, 187-88 Morse, Ruth, 22
Haraway, Donna, 17, 18, 19, Mulvey, Laura, 11-13, 37-38,
46, 163, 185, 215 109-10
Harding, Sandra, 17, 208, 225,
226, 233 Nodelman, Perry, 51, 72
Hartsock, Nancy, 17 Novak, Frank G., 76
Hekman, Susan, 219
Hiett, Constance B., 137 Olshen, Barry, 16, 103
Hitchcock, Alfred, 50 Onega, Susana Jan, 2
Homer, The Odyssey, 5, 32,
193 Palmer, William, 20
Huffaker, Robert, 50, 140 Presley, Delma E., 76
Index 251
Relf, Jan, 1, 16, 36, 198 Tarbox, Katherine, 2, 32, 36,

50, 85
Sartre, Jean-Paul, 38
Singh, Raman K., 6 Vipond, Dianne L., 4, 25
Smith, Dorothy, 17 voyeurism, in The Collector,
Smith, Leo, 224 49-50, 53, 57-58, 67-73; in
Smith, Sarah, 224 Daniel Martin, 164, 173;
standpoint, in The Collector, definition of, 37-38, 41, 45;
50, 53, 56, 61-62, 65-67, in The Ebony Tower, 144-
72-74; definition of, 17, 21; 46, 155, 158-59; in Fowles
in Daniel Martin, 44, 163, oeuvre, 35-45, 46, 227,
165, 173-85; in The Ebony 228, 233; in The French
Tower, 137, 150; in Lieutenants Woman, 101-
Fowles oeuvre, 24, 26, 28, 18, 122, 130-31; in A
46, 225-26, 235; in The Maggot, 202, 205-206, 211;
French Lieutenants in The Magus, 76-85, 89-
Woman, 42, 101-102, 115- 92; in Mantissa, 188-90,
31; in A Maggot, 45, 202, 193
208-21; in The Magus, 41,
76-78, 90, 92, 94-95, 97-
100; in Mantissa, 199-200; Walker, David H., 91
and objectivity, 19; and the Waller, Margaret, 26, 27, 28
outsider within, 17, 18, Warburton, Eileen, 2, 30, 166,
19, 27-28; and situated 224
knowledge, 17, 18-19 Wilson, Raymond J., III, 157
Stone, Alison, 225 Woodcock, Bruce, 8, 20, 74

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John Fowles

Visionary and Voyeur

Costerus New Series 175

Amsterdam-New York, NY 2008

Cover design: Aart Jan Bergshoeff

The paper on which this book is printed meets the requirements of

Chapter Three 101

Chapter Four 133

Chapter Five 161

Chapter Six 187

ON FOWLES AND FEMINISM

As the author of both critically acclaimed and commercially

Despite the consistent oddity of Fowles definition of feminism, his

In historical or social terms Ive always had great sympathy for, I

Fowles expanded on this articulation of his Jungian-influenced

I am not a feminist in the fiercely active political sense it is usually

These comments demonstrate a shift in alignment for Fowles, a

Fowles clearly espoused a curiously apolitical and problematically

I am certainly not a feminist in the militant sense, and Im sure many

Clearly, Fowles feminism was characterized not by political activism

I hope I am a feminist in most ordinary terms, but I certainly wouldnt

In these comments, Fowles demonstrated an awareness of the

women (part of me must remain male, that is, never strictly

This historical sensibility informed Fowles 1999 formulation of his

issues of special relevance to womens lives, as well as his assertion

this is denying the extraordinary half-maternal, half-mysterious aspect

That is, womens greatest strengths, according to Fowles, are precisely

to male problems has been made especially clear in critical analyses of

impossible to approach Fowles feminism without serious

Rather than continuing to reprimand Fowles for the masculine

Feminist curiosity, Mulvey suggests, can recognize the idealization of

postmodern, unconventional characterization of such women

VOYEURISM AND OTHER VISUAL PLEASURES

While feminist critics have vividly demonstrated the limitations of

She (for such a critic is most likely to be a woman) must negotiate

The feminist critic, Cooper continues, must negotiate considerable

remarkable women characters, and the political and social ideals

creates a difficult analytical situation for the feminist critic a

identification and exploration of such marginalized positions as places

conversational exchange with Fowles writings, each expressing

When women assert values as feminist or female, even those

Woodcocks comments continue to be pertinent nearly twenty

It is crucial to note, however, that a woman is not necessarily more

values and interpretive strategies practiced by both author and various

Quite a lot of my fellow members will hardly exchange a civil word;

Emphasizing both a multiplicity of perspectives and a poignant

conscious of the various responses different readers may have to the

Reflecting an attitude remarkably similar to that of feminist standpoint

writings, Fowles demonstrated his reverence for openness, ambiguity,

In fact, Fowles seemed to prefer unusual readings, or at least

and well-intentioned but nevertheless society-conscious

perspectives of the outsider within to expose and dispute the

especially in his desire to write about a woman who had been

perspectives embodied in the mysterious, but useful, women they

What I really meant is that they are not to be understood by traditional

Acutely aware of his situation as a man and as a writer, Fowles

loved but nonetheless exotic landscape. Despite attempts to

I am very far from being a misogynist, and I immediately acquit the

In short, Fowles understood our current social and intellectual climate

Fowles ultimately considered the Other (read woman) an

Fowles begins his reading of The Odyssey with an insistence that

Paradoxically committed to exploring perspectives that he associated

which, as Terry Lovell explains, show[s] us what the camera, placed

image in each reader. This necessary cooperation between writer and