“‘I am infinitely strange to myself’: Existentialism, the Bildungsroman, and John Fowles’s The French Lieutenant’s Woman’”

Over the years, several commentators, including Jeff Rackham, William J. Palmer, Dwight Eddins, Elizabeth D. Rankin, and, more recently, Richard P. Lynch, have noted the influence of existentialism on John Fowles. Most of these commentators agree that this author premises his fiction on “abandonment,” Jean-Paul Sartre’s Heideggerian argument “that God does not exist, and that we must bear the full consequences of that assertion” (Existentialism 27). One such consequence is the absence of a universal ‘human nature,’ or a defining “concept of that which is human” of which each individual is a particular instance (21). The corollary of this absence is, in Sartre’s famous phrase, that “existence precedes essence,” by which he means “that man first exists: he materializes in the world, encounters himself, and only afterward defines himself” (21–22). “[T]o begin with,” Sartre elaborates, “man is nothing” (22). Even when he later “makes of himself” something as a subject, he is radically incomplete because the ‘something’ that he becomes is sustained only through a constantly remade decision which is open to reconstruction (22).

My purpose in this article is not to rehearse Sartre’s argument on abandonment, but to consider the impact of his understanding of the human subject—that is, of a being that “projects itself into a future” (23)—on Fowles’s depiction of Charles Smithson and Sarah Woodruff in The French Lieutenant’s Woman. Both characters undergo a Bildung that involves a radical break with, even forfeiture of, their former selves. Because incomplete, they make themselves; because they make themselves, the meaning of their being is the sum of their actions; yet because they construct their identities through those actions, they become estranged from themselves and thus strangers to themselves. Fowles, in presenting his characters in this way, suggests that the individual’s destiny, in the absence of a prior essence, lacks not only predetermination, but also predictability. Precisely because the individual controls her existence, she cannot map her destiny out in advance; her future, as Sartre maintains in Being and Nothingness, is open and therefore unknowable (55–56). The individual may invest her life with meaning through her choices, but she makes those choices without any certitude as to their outcome. To choose, and so create, and thereafter recreate herself, necessarily means that she risks becoming other than she is—in other words, a stranger to herself.

In tracing the existential Bildung of the principal characters in The French Lieutenant’s Woman, I show how this novel departs from the classic Bildungsroman, which charts the development of a character from immaturity to maturity, from ignorance to knowledge, and hence to mastery, of self. In Fowles’s novel, in contrast, self-mastery is never final, but rather always tenuous, because the self, in its incompletion, is constantly becoming otherwise than it is and was. In fact, self-mastery, being grounded in the breakdown of essence, is accompanied by bewilderment, a bewilderment premised on the characters’ sense of the inadequacy of the cultural forms of understanding through which they seek to comprehend themselves and others. Fowles’s self-reflexive engagement with the classic Bildungsroman ultimately evinces an overriding concern with the manner in which this genre inscribes, and in consequence perpetuates, conventional conceptions of the human subject. At issue here is the content of this literary form, and the extent to which its assumptions about ‘human nature’ encourage readers to read in ‘bad faith,’ that is, in ways endorsing the stability of identity, thereby concealing the individual’s existential freedom. Fowles attempts to overcome this problem by securing in the readers of the novel the same existential Bildung that his characters undergo—raising the question of where the responsibility lies for the bad faith with which they read it. The text’s skepticism about essentialist modes of knowledge has implications for the epistemological claims of its own representation of reality. As Frank Kermode observes of Sartre’s Nausea, the treatment of the ultimate indifference of things-in-themselves to human systems of order inscribes dissonance...