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This essay examines the ambiguity that attends to lesbian sexuality in John Fowles's The French Lieutenant's Woman. While the narrator of the novel struggles to deny the lesbianism of Sarah Woodruff-the unbounded sexuality that links Sarah to Sappho of Lesbos-the novel's postmodern textual and visual elements undercut the narrator's ideological stance.
The postmodern novel is both iconoclastic and appreciative, a work of literature that embeds itself in a given fictive style or genre, then exploits the very genre it inhabits for the purposes of parody. This technique of parody and critique recognizes that the novel is not truth in the modernist sense of the term but discourse that exceeds any intended message or established center and that explores language, opening the way for the free association of ideas through the disruption of the core meta-texts upon which fictional discourse usually depends. This freeing of language often gives a text a dynamism that takes it beyond ideological limits, even the limits that its own genre-postmodern novel-would seem to assign it. Figurations of gender and of sexuality, for example, may come in for critique by a contemporary writer inhabiting a genre from past days, but the complex interchange between conventions, language, and philosophical disposition that so often characterizes historiographic metafiction frequently opens up a text to such a degree that the very concept of critique is itself called into question. The postmodern novel, if it is successful, cannot establish its own assumptions as a center but must engage in a critique even of those assumptions and a parody of the very notions it might seem to advance. Linda Hutcheon has pointed out that "parody is a perfect postmodern form," because it interrogates even its own idea of originality (11).
John Fowles's The French Lieutenant's Woman exploits this device of genre-as-a-means-of-parody by at once using the conventions of Victorian fiction and critiquing Victorian assumptions, even subverting modernist assumptions and assumptions upon which 20th-century thought and culture depend. As the novel progresses, established centers for critique are dissolved one after another. This is especially true in the portions of the text dealing with sexual orientation, representations of lesbianism in particular. Considerable ambiguity attends to references to lesbianism in The French Lieutenant's Woman. The narrator of the novel seems...