French Lieutenants Woman And Disgrace: A Literary Analysis

In The French Lieutenants woman and Disgrace, both Fowles and Coetzee explore the issue of societal divisions in varying ways. Primarily, they do this through their presentation of character, femininity and hierarchical societies. The issue of social classes in The French Lieutenants woman is key in understanding the main problems that occur in the comic world of The French Lieutenants Woman. Additionally, the different relationships that Fowles has created in the novel are a biproduct of the divided society in which they live however, this is also an interesting point of comparison with the character of Petrus in Disgrace. Through Petrus and …., Fowles and Coetzee have created novels which exist around these male characters however, whose

This is mirrored in the French Lieutenants Woman as there is a significant difference in how women and men view sex and how they are expected to engage or refrain from engaging in it. In light of this, it is difficult for a modern day reader to imagine certain aspects of this gendered attitude towards sex.

The norms and conventions of the society in which the novels are set is also very interesting when considering the societal divisions between novels. The fact that in The French Lieutenants Woman, Fowles questions key Victorian principles and social conformities leads the reader to believe that the novel is mostly postmodernist however, the novel also encounters a Victorian farm girl who disregards social convention and the Victorian notion of womanhood and this affirms that the novel is also historical. The subject of the novel is fundamentally rather similar to that of his other works: the relations between maker and their creation highlighting a persons personal struggle for selfhood alongside the belief that one should abide by convention being questioned through the sheer hypocrisy of the principal characters. This notion of

Interestingly, all three of the societies of these novels recently underwent some kind of political or governmental reform, which accentuates the notion that all of these novels were based on societies with large inequalities, and, in the case of An Inspector calls, The Boer war brought about mass disease on home soil especially for the working classes simply due to the uneven amounts of money used to fund the war.

Similarly, class structures and social mobility are also important themes to my primary texts when baring in mind the social divisions as there is a stringent demarcation between classes in both Victorian England and post apartheid south Africa. Every character is also shown to be aware of the rigid class distinctions by the authors and the narrative utilises this theme to accentuate the meaninglessness of these social barriers. In addition to this, in chapter 8 of The French Lieutenants woman, when Fowles says “Societal freedom is the freedom you get from others”. In saying this, Fowles is inviting the reader to think about his characters, namely Sarah and Charles, in the context of the society in which