The Dialogicality Of Contemporary Novels Reflected In The French Lieutenant’s Woman

The French Lieutenant’s Woman (hereafter abbreviated as FLW) is the best-known among all the works by John Fowles, and it is believed to be able to represent the postmodernist novels in Britain. Since it publication, it has engaged much critical interest for its diverse themes and postmodernist narrative techniques while enjoying great popularity for its high readability. The dialogicality of a novel is viewed by Mikhail Bakhtin as its distinguishing property from other literary genres. He reveals the dialogic nature at the various dimensions of a novel through his study on Dostoevsky’s novels. Based on a close reading of the text, the present study begins by examining the dialogic relationships between the author, the text and the reader of FLW from the perspective of Bakhtin’s dialogism, and it goes on to include historical and literary contexts in its discussion about the novel’s diaolgicality, aiming to gain a more profound insight into the implication of FLW, as well as the dialogicality possessed by modern novels.The paper is composed of five parts. The introduction gives a short description of the theses. It also reviews the criticisms to his novels (FLW in particular) and the Bakhtinian dialogism before stating the objectives of the present study. Chapter one discusses the dialogic relationships between the various elements inside FLW and argues that the dialogues between the main characters as well as the internal dialogues of the main characters play a prominent role in the construction of their subjectivity, and meanwhile the dialogue between the plots helps to develop its theme of freedom. Chapter two probes into the dialogic relationships between the author, the text and the reader. It shows that the author’s abandoning of the traditional all-knowing, all-powerful perspective leads to the freedom of the characters and the indeterminacy of the text, which in turn enable the readers to participate actively in the process of the meaning construction in FLW. Chapter three focuses on the grand dialogue between the novel and its historical and literary contexts. It demonstrates how the authority of historical texts is deconstructed by the anarchism and meta-narrative employed in FLW and how the Victorian history is reconstructed by the intertextuality between the novel and its epigraphs of diverse genres. In addition, it maintains that FLW itself is a part of a grand dialogue between different literary views, due to its publication at a time when there existed a fierce debate about whether the novel as a literary genre was dead. The conclusion attempts to sum up the discussions in the previous chapters. It further argues that the development of contemporary novels enriches its dialogicality and at the same time promotes the criticism from a dialogic perspective. Thus the dialogue between the novel and the criticism generate the power for their respective progress.