Existentialism In Charles To London

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2.3 SARAH WOODRUFF: ROLE MODEL TO “EXISTENTIALISM” AND FREEDOM
I could not marry that man (the French sailor). So I married shame… What has kept me alive is my shame, my knowing that I am truly not like other women. This has something to do with her desire of freedom and to be different from other women. She functions as a model of ‘Existentialism’ philosophy, which advocates individual’s free will and lifestyle more than the societal beliefs and values.
Sarah Woodruff is not the conventional Victorian woman who toes the line. She herself creates the fictional story of her shameful engagement with a French sailor, who never returned back to her, and thus labeled her as a “fallen immoral woman”. It seems that she almost praises this shame, for it lets her have a freedom that is denied to other women of her age. And she is totally aware of it. Being …show more content…

It again destroys the illusion of reality and is one form of ‘Self-Reflexivity’. While Charles is looking for solitude in train and thinks that he has finally attained it, then at last minute ‘a bearded man’ with cold stare comes to his compartment. ‘He is some forty years old, whom Charles thinks to be extremely unpleasant’. Soon the train starts and Charles is lulled into a day dream. At first the bearded man does not notice Charles, but then he begins to stare him more and more. The narrator says that ‘his stare is like an omnipotent God’, if there is such a thing. But suddenly, he then makes it clear that the “bearded man is he himself, the author of the novel, the narrator”. So as the narrator stares at Charles, he asks himself a question that what he is going to do with him, his character. Here, he almost resolves to end the story but says that ‘what Charles wants is clear, but what Sarah wants is not so clear’, for he does not even know where she is at the

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