Like many other postmodern novels, Fowles uses multiple different stylistic and structural techniques to highlight his thematic interests in The French Lieutenant's Woman. When discussing these stylistic concerns, many literary critics comment on the importance of the narrator and the narration, the intertextual references to other literary works, and the multiple endings.
Narration
Throughout the novel, the omniscient narrative voice, alongside a series of footnotes, reflect with an objective tone on a number of plot devices: the author's difficulty controlling the characters; the conventions that are expected of a "Victorian novel"; and analyses of differences in 19th-century customs and class. The narrator often returns to topics of interest to literature and scholarship from the period, like the theories of Charles Darwin and Charles Lyell, the radical politics of Karl Marx, and the works of Matthew Arnold, Alfred Tennyson and Thomas Hardy.[18]
Through a metafictional and metahistorical voice, the contemporary, postmodern narrator questions the role of the author and the historian in thinking about the past.[19][20] In her article discussing the use of paratext, or the contextualizing text printed in the book such as the footnotes and epigraphs, Deborah Bowen argues that the novel's paratext forces the reader, as in other postmodern works, to rethink the importance of such peripheral material that in other contexts will get overlooked in light of preference for the main text.[21] Instead of nicely complementing the main plot and adding meaning, these paratextual elements can distract from the effectiveness of the novel and challenge the authority of the narrative voice.[20]
Intertextuality
Beyond the narrator intervening and emphasizing particular interpretations of the text, the book's metafictional approach often relies on intertextual references to provide further commentary. In the epigraphs for each chapter, the book gestures towards a number of important 19th-century texts and ideas. Partially, references to other texts act in "ironic play", parodied by how the novel emulates other Victorian conventions throughout the text.[22] Linda Hutcheon describes the works of William Thackery, George Eliot, Charles Dickens, Froude, and Thomas Hardy as direct inspirations for this parody.[22]
In his discussion of science and religion in the novel, John Glendening notes that both character commentary on Darwin's publications along with the epigraphs mentioning those works as direct contributors to the novel's emphasis on science superseding religion.[23] Similarly, by quoting Marx with the first epigraph, along with multiple subsequent epigraphs, the novel directs thematic attention towards the socio-economics issues within the novel.[17] Deborah Bowen describes literary critics struggling to find readings of the epigraphs that explore the themes of the novel, and argues that the poor relationship between the epigraphs and the text "disperses the authority of the narrative voice, thus destroying his power to speak as a moralist."[20] For Bowen, the epigraphs support the satire of Victorian fiction conventions in the novel.
Multiple endings
Often critics will comment on the novel's multiple endings. Each offers a possible ending for Charles's pursuit of Sarah: the first ends with Charles married to Ernestina, the second with a successful reestablishment of a relationship with Sarah, and the third with Charles cast back into the world without a partner. Michelle Phillips Buchberger discusses these endings as a demonstration of "Fowles's rejection of a narrow mimesis" of reality; rather Fowles presents this multiplicity of endings to highlight the role of the author in plot choices.[24]
It is not enough to suggest that the novel with its multiple endings is a mere experiment with the narrative form. "There is something more in it," as Mandal puts it, "an impasse that resists any straight forward resolution to the story." After all, the form of a narrative is determined by its content. It is Sarah Woodruff "the content of whose character produces multiple and contradictory possibilities" for the narrative.[25]
