The French Lieutenant's Woman

Sarah is the titular French Lieutenant’s Woman though the actual nickname given to her by the people of Lyme Regis replaces “woman” with something far more disparaging. She first appears standing on the quay, staring out at the water. As Charles learns, she is supposedly staring out to sea to wait for her lover to return to her from France. According to the local people, she is a dishonored woman. She has had premarital sex and lost her status in society. She has been judged for her actions, and she functions as a victim of the chaste moral standards of Victorian society. Rather than suffer under this burden, Sarah embraces her identity as a dishonored woman. She welcomes the judgement of the local community as a manifestation of her own self-loathing. Sarah wants to be judged, punished, and ostracized; she wants to perform the Victorian literary stereotype of the tragically forlorn woman in black because, even if she is suffering, she at least has a place in the world. Sarah would prefer to embody a tragic stereotype than be lost amid her self-loathing. She takes on the identity of the French Lieutenant’s Woman because she would rather have this than no identity at all.

Like so much of the Victorian behavior portrayed in the novel, however, Sarah’s identity is a performance. As Charles discovers in a seedy hotel room in Exeter, Sarah is not a dishonored woman. She did not have sex with the French Lieutenant and, until the moment when she went to bed with Charles, she was a virgin. The irony of Charles trying to help a dishonored woman is that he becomes the man who dishonors her. In this moment, Charles sees Sarah as her real self. He sees the melancholia which is hinted at by Dr. Grogan and he sees why Sarah’s deep self-loathing would manifest in the form of a public performance of a shameful identity. He sees himself as complicit in Sarah’s scheme, someone who has been manipulated by her as she manipulated the world around her. Charles resents his knowledge of the true Sarah because it disabuses him of the notion that he understood her on some profound level. Instead, at the moment of his shame, he realizes that Sarah has maintained an emotional distance from him, just as she has done from everything else. Her performance of the tragically dishonored woman affords her control in a patriarchal society that denies her agency.

When Charles finally finds Sarah, she is living in the home of an artist. The bohemian surroundings recontextualize Sarah and show her real self. Much like Charles, she feels out of place in Victorian society. She is a modern woman and struggles to find an identity in the Victorian age until she associates herself with controversial artists who actively reject social expectations. In both the novel’s endings, Sarah asserts her agency. Rather than live her previous melancholia, she has found happiness. She refuses to give up this happiness or allow it to be conditioned by Charles, an aristocratic man who is used to getting his own way. Sarah rejects the Victorian patriarchal demand that women subject themselves to men in a demure, modest manner. After many years of suffering, she is tired of living according to the terms set by other people. Sarah may end the story with Charles or without him. More importantly, she ends the story with a renewed sense of herself and a newfound sense of her own strength.

Ernestina Freeman does everything that society expects of her. She follows the acceptable path of social mobility in Victorian society. As the daughter of a middle-class man who has made a fortune, she is marrying a man above her social class and rising through the ranks of society. At each step, she is sure to adhere to social expectations. Her behavior is governed by Victorian ideals; she is mannered, polite, chaste, and demure, exactly as her society expects women to be. Her rigid adherence to the Victorian system of etiquette turns Ernestina into the embodiment of the status quo. To Charles, she is perfectly performing the role of a Victorian woman, and this places her—in a social sense—beyond reproach. Ernestina plays by the rules of society, yet she is rejected by Charles. Rejecting her symbolizes Charles’s rejection of the status quo. Though Ernestina has worked hard to do everything expected of a Victorian woman, this same social zealotry becomes her undoing.

Ernestina provides a point of contrast to Sarah. Whereas Ernestina does everything society deems correct, Sarah embodies everything society deems to be illicit. The stark contrast between the women is reflected in their relationship with Charles. Ernestina follows the rules. She courts Charles for some time and then allows him to arrange a marriage with her father. She may be naïve, but nothing she does breaks any rule of etiquette. Ernestina welcomes society’s gaze as a validation of her behavior, whereas Sarah shuns society and the judgement it brings. Charles wordlessly resents being tied to Ernestina, as she ties him to the past. When he becomes disinherited and she may potentially be the only source of their wealth, he resents her further. Throughout her relationship with Charles, Ernestina does nothing wrong. Ernestina is doomed by her compliance with social etiquette, ironically made miserable by the same rules that once gave her so much purpose.