“Passionate Reciprocity”: Love, Existentialism, and Bodily Knowledge in The French Lieutenant’s Woman

John Fowles’s novel presents romantic love as a force that strips away cant and propriety, revealing a self unmasked. If heeded, this unmasking can function as a catalyst for existential investigation, for it reveals the self to be not a stable pre-formed entity but, rather, a continually evolving creative project. At the same time, the novel tests the limits of conscious intervention in the governance of this project. While its narrator celebrates the advantages of having “existentialist philosophy at our disposal,” analysis of the novel suggests that Fowles finds philosophy inadequately equipped to tackle either the primary impetus of love or its impact. Instead, the novel articulates an understanding that anticipates very recent findings in cognitive science and neuropsychology. Current developments in the sciences provide retroactive support for Fowles’s intuitive claims and shed further light upon the novel’s implications regarding choice and decision-making in love.