T.C.

İSTANBUL ÜNİVERSİTESİ
SOSYAL BİLİMLER ENSTİTÜSÜ
BATI DİLLERİ VE EDEBİYATLARI ANABİLİM DALI
İNGİLİZ DİLİ VE EDEBİYATI BİLİM DALI

YÜKSEK LİSANS TEZİ

EXISTENTIALISM IN JOHN FOWLES’S NOVELS

AND THEIR FILM ADAPTATIONS: THE MAGUS
(1965) AND THE FRENCH LIEUTENANT’S
WOMAN (1969)

ZEHRA AYDIN
2501141537

TEZ DANIŞMANI
DOÇ. DR. YILDIZ KILIÇ

İSTANBUL, 2017
ii
 ÖZ

JOHN FOWLES’UN SEÇİLİ ROMANLARINDA VE FİLM

UYARLAMALARINDA VAROLUŞÇULUK:
BÜYÜCÜ (1965) VE FRANSIZ TEĞMENİN KADINI (1969)

ZEHRA AYDIN

Bu çalışma, John Fowles’un Büyücü (1965) ve Fransız Teğmenin Kadını

(1969) romanları ve onların film adaptasyonlarında Jean-Paul Sartre’ın varoluşçuluk
felsefesini nasıl ele aldığını incelemeyi amaçlamaktadır. Tezin bakış açısı
varoluşçuluk felsefesi üzerinden olup, yazılı ve görsel yaratım sürecinde yazarın ve
yönetmenin varoluşçuluğu nasıl yansıttığı, birbirlerine neler kattıkları, varoluşçu
elementlere ne kadar odaklandıkları ve neleri yansıtmakta eksik kaldıkları üzerinden
bir tartışma yapılmaktadır. Tezde incelenecek romanların kısa bir anlatımının
devamında roman ile film adaptasyonu arasındaki bağlantılar, benzerlikler ve
farklılıklar edebi bir eleştiri süzgecinden geçirilmektedir. “Özgürlük, sorumluluk ve
seçme özgürlüğü” gibi kavramlar eşliğinde bireyin yabancılaşması ve bu
yabancılaşmanın ne tür süreçlerden geçerek nasıl bir sona ulaştığı ele alınmaktadır.
Romanlardaki bu bağlantıların adaptasyonlarda var olup olmadığı veya ne tür
teknikler kullanılarak yansıtıldığı üzerinde tartışılmaktadır. Aynı yazarın iki farklı
eserindeki varoluşçuluk felsefesinin film adaptasyonlarına katkı mı sağladığından
yoksa film adaptasyonlarının mı romanlara katkı sağladığından bahsedilmiştir. John
Fowles romanlarında ana kahramanlarının varoluşçuluk felsefesini teorik düzeyden
gerçek hayata taşıyarak ne derecede başarılı olup olmadıklarını ve bulundukları
toplumun gözetlemesi altında bu bireylerin varlıklarını sürdürüp sürdüremediklerine
değinmektedir.

Anahtar Kelimeler: Varoluşçuluk, Roman, Film Adaptasyonu, John Fowles,

Özgünlük.

iii
 ABSTRACT

EXISTENTIALISM IN JOHN FOWLES’S NOVELS AND

THEIR FILM ADAPTATIONS:
THE MAGUS (1965) AND THE FRENCH LIEUTENANT’S
WOMAN (1969)

ZEHRA AYDIN

This study analyses how John Fowles uses some aspects of Jean-Paul Sartre’s
existentialism in his novels, The Magus (1965) and The French Lieutenant’s
Woman (1969), and how existentialism is reflected in their film adaptations. This
thesis discusses how written and visual narratives reflect Fowles’ perception of
existentialism; how one narrative contributes to the other; what the deficiencies and
strengths of each narrative’s representation to the reader or the audience are.
Following the analysis of the novels; the connection, similarities and differences
between each novel and its respective adaptation are examined into a detailed critique.
In the novels, the process of the individual’s alienation, the stages of this process and
where it leads the individual’s life are taken into account in terms of “freedom,
responsibility, liberty of choice, and authenticity”. Within the context of the film
adaptations are discussed to what extent existential elements in the novels are taken
into consideration, and, which techniques are used to reflect similarities or differences
in terms of the protagonists’ struggle to becoming an existential self. An issue
prominent to this discussion is whether the written narratives contribute to the visual
narratives in the scope of Fowles’ focus upon freedom and authenticity. This study
looks into whether John Fowles’ protagonists and their representations in the film
adaptations are able to transfer the existential self from a theoretical base to animated
life by placing characters under the gaze of society.

Keywords: Existentialism, Novel, Film Adaptation, John Fowles, and Authenticity.

iv
 FOREWORD

This study includes a study of two novels of John Fowles and their film
adaptations in terms of the question of free will, freedom of choice, and the possibility
of authenticity of an individual in a society. The writer tries to apply different
approaches to his novels to find the answers for his questions. On the other hand, their
film adaptations reflect other perspectives that are either from the viewpoint of
society or from that of the individual.
This dissertation falls into three chapters. In the Introduction; the theory of
existentialism, Sartre’s existentialism, and to which point Fowles focuses upon
Sartre’s existential theory is mentioned. In Chapter 1, I move to the analysis of John
Fowles’ splendid novel that he revised over twelve years, The Magus and its film
adaptation in the scope of existentialism. In Chapter 2, The French Lieutenant’s
Woman and its film adaptation are studied from the perspective of the same theory.
Chapter 3 is dedicated to the comparison of the two novels and their film adaptations.
In the conclusion, I try to find specific answers to Fowles’ questions about the
practicability of the existential theory in real life.
Before starting to write the dissertation, the greatest difficulty that I
encountered was deciding the writer, the novels, and the possibility of including
another area of study, film. The question of freedom, free will, and how much an
individual is allowed to lead one’s own life have been occupying my mind for a very
long time, so that I take pleasure in having come to realize what I have been missing
before I started to search for them during this dissertation. My experience has been
that to study is the most prominent method of enjoying life and I wish to continue
along this in this path for the rest of my life.
It is an honour to meet, to know, to be a colleague, and most importantly to be
a student of the English Language and Literature Department, where I have received
support and kindness. I would like to thank Associate Professor Canan Şavkay for
introducing me to John Fowles’ works, Professor Esra Melikoğlu, and Assistant
Professor Özlem Karadağ for their sincere interest and support in our academic
studies.

v
 I want to express my gratitude to my supervisor Associate Professor Yıldız
Kılıç with whom I have witnessed the sustainability of academic love in every lecture
she gives. I also feel so privileged to be a colleague, to be her student, and most
luckily to have had a chance to write my thesis under her supervision. Without her, I
would not have realized my interest in visual studies.
I would love to thank my family; my brother Mehmet Aydın who has never
lost his faith in me; my childhood friends Sümeyye and Kübra; and especially Zöhre
Baş who is more than a friend, a colleague and a sister to me for their great support,
patience, and love during my last two years. I dedicate this thesis to everyone who has
courage and love for their passion in their lives.

İSTANBUL, 2017
ZEHRA AYDIN

vi
 CONTENTS

ÖZ………….…………………………………………………...………iii
ABSTRACT……………………………………………………………iv
FOREWORD……….……………………………………………….v-vi
ABBREVIATION LIST………………………………………………ix
FIGURES LIST………………………………………………………...x
INTRODUCTION…….………………………………………………..1

CHAPTER 1
THE MAGUS

1.1. Analysis of the Text………………………….……………………………..……9

1.1.1. Fiction and Realism in Fowles……………………………..…………9
1.1.2. The Background of the Novel……………………………………….10
1.1.3. The Modern World as a Panopticon Prison…………………………12
1.1.4. The Function of Art in Nicholas’s Perception………………………14
1.1.5. John Fowles and Nicholas’s Way of Seeing………………………...15
1.1.6. Aspects of Existentialist in The Magus…………………………….15
1.2. Analysis of the Film Adaptation: The Magus…………………………………..22
1.2.1. Interaction of Novels and Film Adaptations………………………….22
1.2.2. Perception of Film as a Reality or Fiction……………………………24
1.2.3. Psychoanalytic Analysis of Films…………………………………….25
1.2.4. The Narrative Techniques…………………………………………….27
1.2.5. Audience’s Reception of The Magus…………………………………27

vii
 CHAPTER 2
THE FRENCH LIEUTENANT’S WOMAN
2.1. Analysis of the Text…………………………………………………...………..35
2.1.1. Victorianism through the Postmodern Novel…………………...........35
2.1.2. The Function of Victorian Writers……………………………………36
2.1.3. A Consequence of Family Presence: Sarah and Charles……………..37
2.1.4. Under the Gaze: Sarah and Charles…………………………………..39
2.1.5. A Social Outcast in the Panopticon Prison…………………………...42
2.2. Analysis of the Film Adaptation: The French Lieutenant’s Woman……...……44
2.2.1. Double Roles………………………………………………………….44
2.2.2. The Film Posters…………………………………………...…………45
2.2.3. Pinter’s Twin-Plot Structure……………………...…………………..47

CHAPTER 3
THE COMPARISON OF JOHN FOWLES’ NOVELS AND
FILM ADAPTATIONS

3.1. Existential Aspects in John Fowles’ Novels: The Magus and The French
Lieutenant’s Woman………………………………………………………….50
3.2. Existential Aspects in the Film Adaptations: The Magus and The French
Lieutenant’s Woman……………………………………………………………52

CONCLUSION………………………………………………………..55
BIBLIOGRAPHY………………………………………………….…57

viii
 ABBREVIATION LIST
Ed. by. : Editör
Ibid : Aynı eser
p. : Sayfa
pp. : Sayfalar
Trans. by. : Çeviren
Qtd. in. : Alıntı
W. date : Basım tarihi yok

ix
 FIGURES LIST

Figure 1.1. : “Panopticon, Isla de Pinos” by Stan Douglass (p.13)

Figure 1.2. : The ship Nicholas travels to Greece (p.28)
Figure 1.3. : Anne’s begging looks while waiting for Nicholas to tell her not to
go (p.29)
Figure 1.4. : T.S. Eliot’s book left on the shore (p.30)
Figure 1.5. : Nicholas with the smiling statue (p.34)
Figure 2.1. : “Lorenzo and Isabella” by John Everet Millais (p.40)
Figure 2.2. : Poster 1 (p.45)
Figure 2.3. : Poster 2 (p.45)
Figure 2.4. : Poster 3 (p.45)
Figure 2.5. : Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Ecce Ancilla Domini (1850) (p.46)
Figure 2.6. : Dante Gabriel Rossetti, My Lady Greensleeve (1863) (p.46)
Figure 2.7. : Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Proserpine (1874) (p.46)
Figure 2.8. : Sarah on the Cobb (p.48)
Figure 2.9. : Charles receives a telegraph (p.48)
Figure 2.10. : Sarah before the mirror (p.48)
Figure 3.1. : Sarah before the mirror (p.53)
Figure 3.2. : Sarah’s drawing (p.53)
Figure 3.3. : Anne before the mirror (p.53)

x
 INTRODUCTION

Throughout history, existentialism is a philosophy arising as a response to

international catastrophes, starting first in Germany after the First World War, then
continuing in similar conditions.1 As a result of the Second World War, the nations
are formed and their contemporary attitudes start to be shaped. The societies have
strict norms and rules according to their way of valuing, judging, and deciding what is
appropriate and what is not. Social opinions and norms have a great deal of impact
upon individuals who feel forced to behave in an artificial manner as opposed to their
own wishes and desires for their own lives.
Globalization came about in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth
century. Due to the onset of globalization, not only are the national boundaries lifted
but cultural and economic boundaries lifted as well. It causes the classification among
societies to collapse and confusion to be created in the minds of individuals. As a
result of globalization, a psychological catalyst also emerges; individuals become
confused by the borders in social spheres. From an existentialist perception, the
international catastrophe of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries is the unending
psychological problems of individuals. With the collapse of certainties after
globalization, individuals live as a stranger in other societies or even in their own
society. With the appearance of ‘the Other’ or ‘Cultural Other’, they start to
differentiate the self and otherness. In the end, they experience alienation,
nothingness, and self-realization step by step.
To mention about existentialism in Kierkegaard, Heidegger, and Sartre; after
the Second World War, Jean-Paul Sartre is responsible for formulating existentialist
thought. Kierkegaard was the founding father of existential philosophy. However, the
perspectives of Kierkegaard (1813-1855), Heidegger (1889-1976) and Sartre (1905-
1980) to existentialism differ from each other mainly due to belonging to different
centuries. In addition, the difference among these three philosophers depends also
upon their relationship with the dominant figures or institutions in their lives.

1
F.H. Heinemann, Existentialism and the Modern Predicament, New York, Harper Torchbooks,
1965, p.177.

1
 Shaping his ideas in the Mid-Nineteenth-Century by referencing Victorianism,
Søren Kierkegaard had a strong father figure who generates a firmly Lutheran
household; so that he was oppressed by his family through religious sphere. He
suggests a radical revision of the popular idea of the self, and focuses attention on
decision.2 His conceptualisation of existentialism possibly comes out as a reaction to
oppressive factors in his life.
Being a prominent existential philosopher in the Twentieth Century, Martin
Heidegger experiences the First World War in his youth and Second World War in his
50s. His father is an employee Catholic Church and responsible for the care and
upkeep of the village church. As a vital point, Heidegger participates in the Nazi Party
but he does not attend the meetings a year later. His philosophy is stated in
Existentialism As Philosopy (1962): “defined freedom in terms of the Person’s
choice of the possibilities which he is to realize”.3 The ambiguity about Heidegger’s
being a Nazi supporter may suggest that Heidegger as an individual is still searching
for his point of view towards life, philosophy, education, and his sense of self.
Jean-Paul Sartre witnesses two World Wars throughout the Twentieth-
Century. He loses his father in his infancy; therefore, his lack of a significant male
Other in his formative years means a much more unrestricted sphere of philosophic
activity. He becomes an activist during his life; he participates in the French
resistance after being a prisoner of war. Living his life according to his own desire
and wishes, Sartre suggests in his philosophy: “choose yourself in such a way as to be
authentic, responsible, and thus existentially free in your self-awareness.” 4 The
importance of the individual’s authenticity, responsibility, and existence is stated in
Sartre’s lecture “Existentialism is a Humanism”,

[…] existence is prior to essence, man is responsible for what he is. Thus, the first
effect of existentialism is that it puts every man in possession of himself as he is, and
places the entire responsibility for his existence squarely upon his own shoulders.
[…] man chooses himself, but by that we also mean that in choosing for himself he
chooses for all men.5

2
Walter Kaufmann, Existentialism from Dostoevsky to Sartre, Cleveland, Meridian Books, p.17.
3
Fernando R. Molina, Existentialism As Philosopy, New Jersey, Prentice Hall, 1962, p. 107.
4
Maurice Natanson, “Jean-Paul Sartre’s Philosophy of Freedom”, Social Research, Vol. 19, No: 3,
1952, pp.364-80, (Online) http://www.jstor.org/stable/40969303, Jstor, 10 November 2016.
5
Jean-Paul Sartre, “Existentialism is a Humanism”, qtd in Existentialism, Ed. by Robert C. Solomon,
New York, The Modern Library, 1974, p.198.

2
By authenticity he means ‘to be true to one’s self’: Although the external impacts
such as social norms are existent, it is essential for an individual to be true to his own
self and to take responsibility for his actions, that he himself has decided by his free
will. Sartre’s description of authenticity is stated as, “Authenticity, it is almost
needless to say, consists in having a true and lucid consciousness of the situation, in
assuming the responsibilities and risks it involves, in accepting it […] sometimes in
horror and hate.”6 Inauthentic existence for Sartre is a way to avoid the paradoxical
problem of appearing to provide prescriptions for a mode of living that rejects
external dictation. 7 If being inauthentic means a life living for others’ values and
judgements, this leads the individual towards a paradoxical situation. Charles Taylor
differentiates the end of this paradox as “inwardness” or “internal space” and the
result is a distinction between one's private individuality and one's public self.8
The perception of the individual as a subject or an object is described in
Modern French Philosophy From Existentialism to Postmodernism (2003),

Sartre’s analysis of human interaction, we are either looking at others or we are being
looked at [...] we are either dominating them with our look and thereby taking away
their freedom by objectifying them, or we are submitting ourselves to their look and
allowing our own freedom to be taken away by being objectified. Either we turn
other people into objects under our look, or we allow them to turn us into objects
under their look […] ’to look, is to fight. […] [But] the Other looks at me and as such
he holds the secret of my being, he knows what I am. Thus the profound meaning of
my being is outside of me, imprisoned in an absence. The other had the advantage
over me.9

The look of the other has power upon the determination of an individual’s position.
This situation may also take place while a novel is being read; the characters are
evaluated according to the reader’s point of view –namely their looks or perceptions.
While the reader feels himself as being one of the characters, the interaction between
the Other and the self begins. He starts to dominate the others by his judgements or
vice versa. In the analysis of the novels, the reasons of self-alienation and the
consequences of the process will be analysed in detail mainly regarding Sartre’s

6
<http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/authenticity/>
7
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Authenticity_>
8
<http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/authenticity/>
9 Robert Wicks, Modern French Philosophy From Existentialism to Postmodernism, Oxford,
Oneworld, 2003, pp. 48-50.

3
existentialism in terms of authenticity, responsibility, and the effect of the look upon
the individual.
To understand John Fowles’ Fiction and Existentialism, Jowles’ relationship
with his family would be helpful. Losing his mother at the age of six, John Fowles is
brought up by his father. Having only one parent does not mean Fowles shares a close
relationship with his father; perhaps due largely to the father’s stern character and his
old-fashioned middle-class Englishman. It is stated in Obsession and Culture: A
Study of Sexual Obsession in Modern Fiction (1996) that,

Fowles realizes that not only was his father psychologically damaged by being in the
trenches during World War I, but also he belonged to a generation of middle-class
Englishmen who could not communicate with their sons in a direct and open way –in
fact, Fowles’s father (never named) seems to have been chillier than most. 10

Fowles’s uncle dies while fighting in the First World War. The death of his brother
places a heavy burden on the father’s shoulders when he is forced to take on
responsibility for his brother’s family; probably placing a strain on his own
relationship with his son and causing a rift. As a choice of career, Fowles starts
military training; however, he decides to quit after completing his military service two
years later. He decides to start his intellectual life by attending Oxford University. It
contributes a great deal to not only Fowles’s decision for a literary career but also his
first meeting with French Existentialism – mainly Sartre and Camus: “Fowles’s
interest in French Existentialism dates from his undergraduate years at Oxford. He
was particularly attracted to the existentialists’ views on authenticity and personal
freedom […] authentic selves – the people they really are.”11 In a way, Fowles revolts
against his family’s wish for his being in the army and chooses his own path.
Fowles believes that society has determining effects upon the individual. It is
stated: “[…] Fowles’s fiction concerns the relation of the individual to his cultural and
historical situation and to his society; for these determining forces are what most
threaten freedom and corrupt authenticity.”12 He draws attention to the interference of
the society upon the individual. The oppression of individuals removes them from

10
Andrew Brink, Obsession and Culture: A Study of Sexual Obsession in Modern Fiction,
Massachusetts, Associated University Presses, 1996, pp. 163-164.
11
James M. Acheson, Modern Novelists: John Fowles, London, Palgrave Macmillan, 1998, p.6.
12
Kerry McSweeney, Four Contemporary Novelists, Canada, McGill-Queen’s University Press,
1983, p.107.

4
their own beings and it leads them into an inauthentic individualism –an inability to
be true to one’s self. Fowles grasps existentialism as a way to escape from some
situations stating, ‘Existentialism is “the revolt of the individual against all those
systems of thought, theories of psychology, and social and political pressures that
attempt to rob him of his individuality.”13 Additionally, Fowles emphasizes society’s
negative impacts upon freedom as, “The ordinary man and woman live in an
asphyxiating smog of opinions foisted on them by society. They lose all independence
of judgement and all freedom of action.”14
In terms of existential philosophy, Fowles adopts the “authenticity and
inauthenticity” concepts from Sartre’s Existentialism. Fowles describes to what extent
he touches upon this philosophy in Four Contemporary Novelists (1983),

I am interested in the side of existentialism which deals with freedom: the business of
whether we do have freedom, whether we do have free will, to what extent you can
change your life, choose yourself, and all the rest of it. Most of my major characters
have been involved in this Sartrean concept of authenticity and inauthenticity.
[…] How you achieve freedom. That obsesses me. All my books are about that. The
question is, is there really free will? Can we choose freely? Can we act freely? Can
we choose? How do we do it?15

He starts to ask those questions to himself during his life and consequently this way of
thinking is naturally reflected upon his writing. He describes a good novel as a human
document and he wants the reader to grasp it “like an interesting meeting with a
stranger; it is not a machine, a thing you don’t understand till you have taken it to bits
[…].”16 The quotation emphasizes the writerly aspect of his texts –he wants the reader
to strive towards significance, to decipher the text and arrive at a meaning. Fowles
addresses his obsession about the meaning of freedom, creates an atmosphere that is
conductive to his reader’s questioning, and his novels lead his readers to find
themselves as one of the characters or in a similar social or cultural position
throughout the process of reading his novels.
In The Magus (1965), Fowles creates his own reflection with Nicholas Urfe –
the protagonist and the narrator of the novel. According to Fowles, the determining
forces such as society cause the individual not to be able to comprehend the self. To
13
John Fowles, The Aristos, Chicago, New American Library, 1964, p. 122.
14
McSweeney, Four Contemporary Novelists, p.107.
15
Ibid., p.105.
16
Alain Fournier, The Wanderer;: or, the End of Youth, trs. by Lowell Bair, New York, New
American Library, 1971, p.223.

5
cast him out from his society, Fowles first distances Nicholas from his own cultural
ties. Fowles also disallows integration with the new society in Greece by inviting
Nicholas to Conchis’s enclosed estate in Phraxos. Theatre, as a high form of art,
creates a background for Nicholas to find the selfhood of the modern man. The
individual’s defence against social manipulation is through self-alienation; this
psychological situation is explained in Psychotherapy and Existentialism (1968) as:

Through his freedom a human being is not only able to detach himself from the
world, but he is also capable of self-detachment. In other words, man can take a stand
toward himself; as a spiritual person he can choose an attitude toward his own
psychological character.17

Through the function of literature, Nicholas creates both a physical and psychological
distance with himself as an individual, causing him to experience a self-detachment.
What this study will focus on is how Nicholas comes to this point and how he
overcomes and faces what he initially escapes from. Nicholas’s journey for the search
of self will be analysed in terms of his alienation, social constructs, the realization of
his own self, and the gaze of other people around him. The problem concerning
Nicholas is that he wants to behave as he wishes but he neither accepts being made
external to the social construct nor does he want to be on his own for the rest of his
life by disregarding all the individuals in society. Fowles focuses upon Nicholas’s
inability of being authentic in England and how Nicholas keeps this inability
insistently in most of the situations in Greece; therefore, Nicholas is reflected to the
readers as an unreliable individual by presenting his inner voice.
The Magus (1968) is filmed three years after the novel’s first publication. It is
essential to note that while comparing the novel with the film adaptation that the
screenplay is also by John Fowles. The visual narrative and the written narrative
provide its audience and reader with different tools of analysis. As stated in The Art
of Adaptation: Turning Fact and Fiction into Film (1992), “Novels and films
express themselves in different mediums. Narrative fiction uses words to tell a story,
it describes characters, and builds ideas. Films use image and actions. They are

17
Viktor E. Frankl, Psychotherapy and existentialism: selected paper on logotheraphy, New York,
Simon and Schuster, 1968, p.28.

6
essentially different mediums that resist each other as they cooperate.”18 In the novel,
existential aspects focus upon the freedom of choice, alienation, authenticity and
responsibility from the perspective of either Conchis or Nicholas. In the film,
Nicholas is put under the gaze of the society and his inner voice is silenced; therefore
the audience is given more licence to analyse the narrative. This study will question
how the novel and the film present existential aspects in terms of their own mediums.
In The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1969), Sarah Woodruff is a woman
who seems to be trapped in the norms and values of the Victorian society. Perceived
as the Tragedy from the gaze of others, she is using the title to distance herself from
society and its morality. In the novel, the Victorian society, its morality, and its rules
towards a woman who is assumed to have sinned are broadly expressed. Sarah is
represented in such a way that she uses the condemnation of the Victorian society in
the favour of her own purposes. Nonetheless, she is trying to deceive the reader as if
she were publicly declaring her freedom in some cases. The novel allows the readers
to witness a psychological combat between individuals who wish to have freedom and
society’s strict rules. In a way, Fowles represents Sarah as a woman who is trying to
challenge society with her truths. The problem lies in the question: Is existentialism a
public or private practice?
In the film adaptation, The French Lieutenant’s Woman changes the focus
point of the social gaze to Sarah’s own gaze upon her situation. The screenwriter
Harold Pinter creates a double role-playing by showing two aspects of the film: a
modern life behind the camera with the actors, Mike and Anna; and a Victorian life
before the camera with Sarah and Charles. The film portrays Sarah pretending to be a
victim. The audience is given the perspective of the Victorian society and sometimes
the perspective of Sarah, though that is quite rare. While in the novel, it is Sarah’s
perspective of society that is dominant; while in the film it is society’s perspective of
Sarah that is dominant. This study will question how the film adaptation presents the
protagonist as an existential self that is different from the novel.
Both written and visual narratives reflect society, its individuals, their inner
worlds, wishes, desires, passions, and disappointments. In this study, the individuals
and their experiences and the concept of alienation in order to achieve self-realization
will be discussed. Firstly, The Magus and secondly, The French Lieutenant’s

18
Linda Seger, The Art of Adaptation: Turning Fact and Fiction into Film, New York, Henry Holt
and Company, 1992, p.27.

7
Woman will be analysed in conjunction with their respective film adaptations; they
will be discussed and compared to impart differences and impact of the visual and
textual narrative upon the reader and audiences in terms of existential elements.

8
 CHAPTER 1
THE MAGUS

1.1. The Analysis of the Text

1.1.1. Fiction and Realism in Fowles

John Fowles combines extraordinary stories and situations with characters,

their way of thinking, behaving, and values that are mundanely realistic. His fiction
enriches the readers’ mind, and his realism helps the readers to be able to put
themselves into the characters’ shoes. Fowles has a specific purpose in his writings, to
show that the human condition needs to be analysed in terms of the moments of
struggle, the possible solutions for escape, and coming face to face with the
consequences of those actions.
Another vital theme in Fowles’ fiction is the question of freedom. Are the
individuals free in their choices? Is “absolute freedom” a fallacy or does it exist in the
lives of individuals? Is freedom about one individual or is it a part of human
interactions, namely the issue of society? Fowles puts his opinion about freedom
saying, “ […] what I meant at the heart of my story: that true freedom lies between
each two, never in one alone, and therefore it can never be absolute freedom […]”1.
Fowles emphasizes the need of the Other, to have freedom so that one person’s being
free comes into existence with the comparison of another who has a lesser sphere of
freedom. Echoing Sartre, the question of freedom may lead us to the issue of
responsibility such as, “[…] absolute responsibility is […] the logical requirement of
the consequences of our freedom”2. Freedom lets us decide what we want to do and
also puts the burden of carrying the responsibility of our actions.
Fowles has had similar experiences to his protagonist, Nicholas. Fowles also
went to Greece and taught English from 1951 to 1952 at a private boarding school.
There are other real connections between the novel and Fowles’ life. While teaching
in Greece Fowles came to know a Greek millonaire called Niarchos, who actually

1
John Fowles, Foreword, The Magus, New York, Dell Publishing, 1985, pp.10-11.
2
Jean-Paul Sartre, Existentialism and Human Emotions, New York, The Wisdom Library, 1957,
p.53.

9
lived at villa Bourani. Subsequently in the novel a similar figure is re-named Conchis,
while his estate retains the title of Bourani. By giving these details in the preface of
the novel, Fowles presents his readers with these connections that lead their way of
thinking from a fiction to a work related to real events and real experiences. In
addition, the reader is motivated to associate with Nicholas as the first person narrator
that may help the readers to picture the event in their mind’s eye.
In terms of the need for escape, Fowles and his protagonist Nicholas have a
common desire. Fowles mentions his own exile, “I already knew I was a permanent
exile from many aspects of English society, but a novelist has to enter deeper exiles
still.”3 Nicholas has a longing for an exile as well, and he is tired of being in England
and of its people. Fowles uses the need for escape by providing his readers with
various sorts of art. Fowles creates a theatrical environment for his protagonist by
placing Nicholas in an unknown environment and a private estate. Art allows an
individual to enter deeper exiles by allowing him to create another parallel world for
his own. It opens a sphere for him to put himself into another body and life. It all
shows the eternal effect of art upon the individual and the nature of this unending
circle between life and art.

1.1.2. The Background of the Novel

The opening of the novel gives details about Nicholas and his parents. Being
the only child in a middle-class family, he states that he wishes he did not have his
parents and ancestors. Nicholas’s first criticism of authority comes with the
description “monstrous dwarf Queen Victoria” and continues by describing the
relationship between his father, mother, and himself. As a brigadier, his father is the
totalitarian in the family and is described by Nicholas with three key words: “[…]
Discipline and Tradition and Responsibility […]” 4 . Even when his father is away
from home, his despotic influence is so internalised by his mother that she behaves as
if the father were in the next room listening to them.
The identity struggle for Nicholas is given with his words, “I led two lives.”5
He is, first of all, Brigadier “Blazer” Urfe’s son in the Army and in public life; on the

3
Fowles, Foreword, The Magus, p.9.
4
John Fowles, The Magus, New York, Dell Publishing, 1985, p.7.
5
Ibid., p.18.

10
other hand, he is reading Penguin New Writing and poetry pamphlets in private. At
the age of twenty-one, he goes to Oxford and he realizes “I was not the person I
wanted to be.” 6 The realization is stated in the first paragraph of the novel
communicating the fact that Nicholas as the protagonist wants the reader to be aware
of his sense of separation, dissatisfaction, and his expected search for whatever may
be the meaning of his life. What he wants to escape from is his father’s three key
words: discipline, tradition, and responsibility. In his second year at Oxford, his
parents die in an air crash. He says, “After the first shock I felt almost an immediate
sense of relief, of freedom.”7 The loss of an authority in his life disappears as the
world experiences a similar loss on a worldwide scale. Nicholas refers to the
potentiality of a world without Hitler and he mentions Hitler is dead before he is
eighteen. Therefore, Fowles creates a parallel between Nicholas and the world by
eliminating the authoritative figures –successively Nicholas’s father upon his life and
Hitler upon the historical events.
As a result of his search for an escape route, he states, “ […] I knew what I
needed. I needed a new land, a new race, a new language; and, although I couldn’t put
it into words then, I needed a new mystery.”8 These words and the decision Nicholas
arrives at takes us to the beginning of a new adventure in Greece. It becomes a new
land in which Fowles creates an irony inherent to seeking the new in a country that
harbours the ancient roots of Western civilisation, a new race and even a new mystery
for him. He is able to break all his ties with his love affairs and with his family whom
he describes as being “[…] parents […] born in the grotesquely elongated shadow,
which they never rose sufficiently above history to leave […] of Queen Victoria.”9
namely his whole past. In Greece, he may come across something he is pursuing as
the meaning of his life, his existence and most strikingly his essence10 that he can find
out after the experiences and adventures in a new land.

6
Ibid., p.17.
7
Ibid., p.19.
8
Ibid., p.21.
9
Ibid., p.17.
10
In general, essence is a predetermined pattern in human life that the essence of an individual exists as
inborn. However, Sartre’s existentialism explains that essence comes after existence. The essence of
individuals is gained after they exist and after they have experiences in life. Essence is man-made with
the choices humans make and with the responsibility as a result of their choices.

11
 1.1.3. The Modern World as a Panopticon Prison

In Zygmunt Bauman’s Özgürlük (Freedom) (2016), two people are

necessary in order to achieve freedom: one watching the other. Therefore, one
acquires freedom whereas the other is imprisoned under his gaze. In the prison model
of Jeremy Bentham –Panopticon, the main focus is between freedom and captivity
that refers to the contrast of autonomous act and controlled act. Meaning “all-seeing”,
Panopticon is a distinctive architectural model due to the fact that all prisoners have
their own cells and the sunlight from the window projects their shadows onto the
wall.11 Foucault interprets Bentham’s Panopticon model with its relation to theatre on
the basis of each prisoner’s cell:

Bentham’s Panopticon is the architectural figure […] We know the principal on

which it was based: at the periphery, an annual building; at the centre, a tower; this
tower is pierced with wide windows that open onto the inner side of the ring; the
peripheric building is divided into cells, each of which extends the whole width of
the building; they have two windows, one on the inside, corresponding to the
windows of the tower; the other, on the outside, allows the light to cross the cell from
one end to the other. All that is needed, then, is to place a supervisor in the central
tower and to shut up in each cell a madman, a patient, a condemned man, a worker or
a schoolboy. By the effect of backlighting, one can observe from the tower, standing
out precisely against the light, the small captive shadows in the cells of the periphery.
They are like so many cages, so many small theatres, in which each actor is alone,
perfectly individualized and constantly visible […] Visibility is a trap.12

In this model, the observation tower, the interior of which could not be seen by the
prisoners, is situated just in the centre of this circular construction as illustrated
below:

11
Zygmunt Bauman, Özgürlük, İstanbul, Ayrıntı Yayınları, 2016, pp. 17-20.
12
Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. by Alan Sheridan,
London, Penguin Books, 1991, p.200.

12
 Fg. 1.1. "Panopticon, Isla de Pinos" by Stan Douglass.13
National Gallery of Canada, 10 Oct. 2016, (Online)
<http://www.thepolisblog.org/2013/07/reversing-panopticon-designing-for.html>

One of the most significant roles of this model is to emphasize the fact that the
expected behaviours of the prisoners could initially be provided by the control and the
power of others. The free will of the prisoners is deliberately “silenced” or
suppressed. In Bentham’s own words, the essence of Panopticon depends upon the
centeredness of the observer and the impressive function of seeing without being seen.
Prisoners’ free wills will disappear day by day. The ideal is that over time the external
control would be internalised by the prisoners who would then self-control or self-
police. The Panopticon presents us with the proof that one’s loss of freedom brings
out the other’s acquisition of freedom.14
If we adapt this prison model into social life, then panopticism may be
comprehended as one person who gazes upon another like a guardian not in the way
he can control but in the way that his judgement might exist with the gaze. As
Foucault states in Discipline and Punish (1991): “The gaze is alert everywhere […]
”15 That could be in different ways: one explanation can be that a person is alienated
from his own self with his own othered gaze; and another explanation can be that a
person is estranged to his self by the gaze of the other. One way or another, the gaze
has an unending power upon the individual living in society. To make the connection
of the prison model and its adaptation into social life, the main doctrine of Panopticon
prison is getting used to behaving as if one of the guardians is watching the prisoner
though he never knows when or even whether someone is watching over him. The

13
“Panopticon, Isla de Pinos” by Stan Douglass, National Gallery of Canada, 10 Oct. 2016, (Online)
<http://www.thepolisblog.org/2013/07/reversing-panopticon-designing-for.html>.
14
Zygmunt Bauman, Özgürlük, pp.18-30.
15
Foucault, Discipline and Punish, p.195.

13
gaze of an authoritative figure and the situation of an individual who is on his own
will be taken into account in the novel’s analysis.

1.1.4. The Function of Art in Nicholas’s Perception

Ali Shariati, a significant intellectual of the twentieth century, considers the

need for art and the meaning of human essence. He considers the past and the present
in terms of an individual’s shaping the society or being shaped by the society.
Today’s individual is completely alone. He needs what he thinks and believes that he
is lacking. Today’s human being is becoming alienated to everything around him. He
wants to create something that is familiar to him and that he wants to create a
relationship between the world, objects, perceptions of the outside world and his own
world. Art provides a feeling of what he lacks. The existing physical world does not
understand him. He is totally alone among it all. Art gives him a chance to redress the
lack.
Creative human beings, the artists, detach themselves from everything in the
world, and enter into their imaginary worlds. When they create their art through
singing, playing, and carving, they actually define, build, and enhance themselves.
While creating something, a human actually creates himself. Art contains the sense of
the artist’s existence and his humanity. 16 John Fowles uses this function of art in
Nicholas’s desires, and in so doing the readers witness Fowles’ longings. What
Fowles discovers in his life as a lack, as described in Shariati’s book, is attributed to
Nicholas –the wish to eliminate a complete authority like a prisoner in Panopticon
prison. The main difference between Fowles and his creation, Nicholas is that the
former is aware of himself, his existence, and his sense of lack, while the latter has a
long way to reach this awareness.

16
Ali Shariati, Sanat, Ankara, Fecr Yayınları, 2015, pp.27-37.

14
 1.1.5. John Fowles and Nicholas’s Way of Seeing

In Fowles’ autobiographical book The Tree (1992), he starts with a portrayal

of his father and calls attention to a clear difference between his father and himself.
Fowles describes how he gets excited about one of his cousins’ life whereas his father
does not, “I envied him enormously his freedom to go on walking tours, his endless
photography of exotic places […] it puzzled me that my father regarded this
fascinating human being as half-mad.”17 While Fowles gives freedom an enormous
value, his father describes a person who is following his desires as insane. Fowles
cannot get rid of hegemonic powers upon his own life and he decides to give his
character, actually his alter ego, much more opportunities and free will. He even
states in the foreword to The Magus that what he needed was “a deeper exile”;
something he achieved with the creation of a fictional persona and a fictional world.
Like himself, Fowles gives Nicholas a very disciplined father figure and family
bonds. Nevertheless, he breaks all of Nicholas’ ties with his family, his relationship,
his job and his sense of comfort in England. Fowles first declares Nicholas’s father
and mother death, his weariness of girls, his need for a new adventure, and more.
What Fowles allows Nicholas is the possibility of creating a new life by stepping into
a new land, a new culture, a new school, and a new environment.

1.1.6. Aspects of Existentialism in The Magus

Fowles is concerned with the situation of a postmodern man’s restrictions and

conflicts with his society and with his own self in terms of the consciousness of self.
Therefore, he presents a character for us to see and analyse the processes, and
difficulties that we may come across during our search for the self. Fowles may have
intended to create several mirrors that can help the reader to see his self with the
protagonist of a novel and that can help Nicholas to realize what he lacks with another
character, Conchis. In addition, Fowles may have also intended to give his readers
messages with Conchis’s words and warnings to Nicholas.

17
John Fowles, The Tree, St. Albans, The Sumach Press, 1992, p.10.

15
 To analyse the events and turning points step by step from an existential
perspective, it would be useful to look at the novel by concentrating on Nicholas,
from England until the end of god-game. Throughout the novel, three basic points will
be taken into account: the individual’s need to escape; his imprisonment in a
theoretical Panopticon prison; and his facing up to the consequences of what or who
he is.
Nicholas’s need to escape occurs in various parts of the novel. He chooses to
escape due to his wish for denying his responsibilities. Nicholas is initially introduced
to the reader through his behaviour towards women. He perceives them as sexual
objects, and then he preys on them. After Nicholas decides to accept the job in
Greece, he leaves an envelope including a note and some amount of money for
Alison. He writes: “Oh God, if only I was worth waiting for […]. ”18 He later admits
to himself that he experiences “ […] both grief and a revoltingly unclouded desire to
celebrate my release […] .”19 He says one thing but he acts in a totally different way.
He does not want to carry the burden of his choices. Instead of searching for what he
lacks, he chooses to escape.
Entering into a new society offers Nicholas two options as stated in the text;
“One kind of person is engaged in society without realizing it; another kind engages
in society by controlling it.”20 The first kind becomes Nicholas who is not aware of
what is going around him in Greece. On the other hand, the latter is Conchis
controlling the small society he creates at the estate of Bourani. Conchis functions as
unconsciousness for Nicholas; therefore, Conchis constantly reminds Nicholas of his
past by flashbacks and by their similar memories. For instance, Nicholas comes to
Greece to escape from Alison, and Conchis tells Nicholas about his fiancée and how
he leaves her behind just like Nicholas.
In addition, Conchis defines the existential condition of Nicholas by saying,
“You’re still becoming. Not being.” 21 However, Conchis does not directly explain
what he means by “being”. Sartre describes being in the scope of consciousness:

18
Fowles, The Magus, p.50.
19
Ibid., p.50.
20
Ibid., p.60.
21
Ibid., p.112.

16
 Consciousness is a being, the nature of which is to be conscious of the nothingness of
its being.” […] My consciousness […] constitutes itself in its own flesh as the
nihilation of a possibility which another human reality projects as its possibility. For
that reason it must arise in the world as a Not; it is as a Not that the slave first
apprehends the master, or that the prisoner who is trying to escape sees the guard
who is watching him.22

What Nicholas lacks is consciousness –an awareness that would show his situation in
the world much more different than how he perceives himself. Sartre continues his
explanation with a question: “What are we to say is the being of man who has the
possibility of denying himself?” 23 Conchis functions as a response to Sartre’s
question, and Conchis tries to make Nicholas question his behaviour and its
consequences not only upon Nicholas but especially upon others around him. In
existentialism, absolute freedom requires carrying the burden of responsibility for all
humanity. Conchis starts to mention his past, how he has to decide in complicated
situations, and how he ends up with all those in order to change Nicholas’s focus from
only his own life to another direction so that he can see himself from the gaze of the
Other.
How does Conchis affect Nicholas to the degree that Nicholas finds himself
imprisoned by his words? How do words create a space to escape from reality and
also offer an alternative path in his escape route? The novel states: “[…] To write
poetry and to commit suicide […] the same, attempts at escape.”24 Both of them are
bringing reality and life to an end in different ways. Killing oneself is a decision and
an end to one’s physical life. From another perspective, poetry is also a way to end
real life by opening a passage to metaphorical life. The words create images in the
readers’ minds and another world comes into existence in the scope of art. Conchis
emphasizes the significance of words,

[Conchis] Why should I struggle through hundreds of pages of fabrication to reach

half a dozen very little truths?
[Nicholas] For fun?
[Conchis] Words are for truth. For facts. Not fiction. 25

22
Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, trans. By Hazel E. Barnes, New York, Philosophical
Library, 1956, p.47.
23
Ibid., p.47.
24
Fowles, The Magus, p.65.
25
Ibid., p.101.

17
How words function in our minds is explained in Cahit Zarifoğlu’s book by giving the
example of doing a special gymnastic move perfectly by first imagining it in the mind
prior to doing it physically. First of all, a person needs to think and imagine the
moment he is about to perform, with all the facial expressions, bodily gestures, and
most significantly, in his imagination. Then, the more this image is perfected in the
mind, the better this move can be performed.26 For the readers of The Magus, the
novel-within-a-novel situation would help them to proceed in the same way with
Nicholas. Fowles uses Conchis to tell his reader how to communicate with words and
how to use them in their lives.
In the analysis of the novel, the second basic point is related to the
imprisonment of an individual in Bentham’s Panopticon prison. In Greece, what
Nicholas needs is to experience nothingness, and then to find his long-lost self. The
Panopticon prison model may possibly remind us of Conchis and his society at
Bourani. Conchis is the head of a theoretical Panopticon, in charge of all the other
guardians as actors in theatrical sphere.
In England, Nicholas is not aware of the dangers of his sought after absolute
freedom. Before Nicholas leaves England, he is in the position of a guardian and is
not under the control of anyone; while Alison is a prisoner under the captivity of his
love. His absolute freedom causes the restriction of the Other. Only when Nicholas
finds himself detached from his home, his country, every person he knows, and every
object he owns, he becomes an individual whose position is changed from a guardian
into a prisoner. At Conchis’s estate, Nicholas is positioned as a prisoner under
Conchis’s absolute freedom. Conchis and his actors successfully trick Nicholas’s
perception of reality that he expresses: “ […] my sense of reality was like gravity. For
a while I was like a man in space, whirling through madness.”27 The stories he is told,
nearly all the names he learns are not real, and the memories he listens to are moving
his mind to the point where he cannot differentiate what is real and what is fiction.
Absolute freedom brings one a total control; on the other hand it causes limitation and
corruption of the Other.
How Greece functions as a prison is expressed by Conchis: “Greece is like a
mirror. It makes you suffer. Then you learn […] To live with what you are.” 28 The

26
Cahit Zarifoğlu, Bir Değirmendir Dünya, Istanbul, Beyan Yayınları, 2015, p.30.
27
Fowles, The Magus, p.246.
28
Ibid., p.101.

18
reflection can be provided by parallels between Conchis’s and Nicholas’s lives.
Greece sets the ground for both of them to stay in the same place but Conchis needs to
find more grounds to share with Nicholas to capture his psychological world in order
to start his god-game.
The God-game provides Nicholas with the psychological background of a
prison where he will be trapped and where he is expected to find out his ignorance29.
The more the game continues, the more Nicholas loses his absolute freedom and
proceeds to recognize his loneliness and his alienation: “ […] between existence and
nothingness […] I felt myself filled with nothingness […] social loneliness […] ”30
During the game, Nicholas is very confused that he cannot differentiate when he is
watched and when not by admitting, “Now listen, Alison. I know who is watching us,
I know where he’s watching, I know why we are here. So first. I’m nearly broke
[...]”31. When he says those words nearly at the end of god-game, there is no one
except Nicholas and Alison.
It can be said that it is the gaze that makes the person aware of the others’
selves and of his self. The god-game directs Nicholas to the point where the
Panopticon prison leads its prisoners to the point where they can no longer
differentiate when they are under control and under gaze and when they are not. At
the end of god-game, Nicholas comes to a turning point realizing what is going on
around him and what he understands about the experiment,

I was being taught some obscure metaphysical lesson about the place of man in
existence, about the limitations of the egocentric view […] For weeks I had had a
sense of being taken apart, disconnected from a previous self –or the linked
structures of ideas and conscious feeling that constitute self […] 32

The theoretical Panopticon prison in The Magus can be taken as being a sociological
experiment and oppression of the individual. Nicholas is expected to understand to go
back in time and remember the old Nicholas in England by gaining the awareness of
his self-centredness, selfishness, and egoism. He is expected to be a gaze to his own
life.

29
Ibid., p.157.
30
Ibid., p.60.
31
Ibid., p.664.
32
Ibid., p.393.

19
 The third and the last point in the analysis of the novel is when Nicholas faces
the consequences of what he is. Shortly after Conchis’s society disappears, Nicholas
expresses his sense of intimidation:

I was tired, tired, tired of deception; tired of being deceived; tired of deceiving
others; and most tired of all of being self-tricked, of being endlessly at the mercy of
my own loins; the craving for the best, that made the very worst of me. 33

Nicholas understands that the experiment, actually starting for him in the scope of
facing with his self through the gaze of others, is over and Conchis declares to him,
“We are all actors here […] You have much to learn. You are as far from your true
self […]”34
Nicholas becomes aware that he is deceiving himself and the moment
becomes an answer of Sartre’s question: “What are we to say is the being of man who
has the possibility of denying himself?”35 Nicholas is led to face himself many times.
However, the problem is that his mind always turns the situation into one point that he
finds excuses to make himself innocent or he blames other people or conditions. It
continues as an unending circulation until the trial takes place.

During the trial, all the actors at Bourani declare that they are an international
group of psychologists. Doctor Maxwell makes one of the most striking footnotes
about Nicholas,

[…] subject selfishness and social inadequacy […] his personality deficiencies are
due to circumstances outside his command […] he was […] born short-sighted by
nature and has been further blinded by his environment. It is small wonder that he
cannot find his way […]36

After the evaluations of the psychologists, Nicholas watches some scenes from the
gaze of the camera that Nicholas is made the Other to his own experiences on the
island and he has a chance to be a “gaze” towards his own life. In the next film, he
experiences a shock because it is the moment when he understands Alison, whose

33
Ibid., p.406.
34
Ibid., p.411.
35
Sartre, Being and Nothingness, p.47.
36
Fowles, The Magus, p.521.

20
death is the only reality for him until that moment, is also included in the god-game.37
He feels nothingness when he realises that the only thing he thought was real is also a
part of the experiment. And he is at the point of truly judging himself:

What was I after all? […] but all my life I had tried to turn life into fiction, to hold
reality away; always I had acted as if a third person was watching and listening and
giving me marks for good and bad behaviour –a god like novelist, to whom I turned,
like a character with the power to please, the sensitivity to feel slighted, the ability to
adapt himself to whatever he believed the novelist-god wanted. This leechlike
variation of the superego I had created myself fostered myself, and because of it I
had always been incapable of acting freely. It was not my defence, but my despot.
And now I saw it, I saw it a death too late.38

The experiment for Nicholas directs him to the point of questioning the condition of
his previous and current selves with all the consequences of each of them.
Towards the end of the novel, the narrator changes from Nicholas to a third-
person from starting to talk about Nicholas to leading the readers to think more
broadly upon each individual:

The smallest hope, a bare continuing to exist, is enough for the antihero’s future; to
leave him, says our age, leave him where mankind is in its history, at a crossroads, in
dilemma, with all to lose and only more of the same to win; let him survive, but give
him no direction, no reward; because we too are waiting, in our solitary rooms where
the telephone never rings, waiting for this girl, this truth, this crystal of humanity,
this reality lost through imagination, to return; and to say she returns is a lie. 39

Our modern world is the metaphor of the waiting-room in The Magus. We all are
waiting in this world, searching for a meaning, playing a role in the process of giving
meaning to things, to events, and sometimes to ourselves. In Sartrean existentialism,
the final destination has no importance during the process of the individual’s search
for an identity but the cycle of asking questions does. The process before the end is
significant in that the last quote also mentions the fact that human beings are getting
stuck in life choices, having no certain ways to go, no prize in the end, and highly
significant having no universal truth. What matters for an existentialist is the process
of asking questions, finding new ones while dealing with the previous ones, not

37
Ibid., p.536.
38
Ibid., pp.548-9.
39
Ibid., p.657.

21
aiming to reach a certain conclusion, accepting the possibility of being completely
lost through the process, and always creating an unending circulation of the search for
the self. Conchis underlines what is important for an individual: “The human race is
unimportant. It is the self that must not be betrayed.”40
Fowles as the creator of the novel, Conchis as a creator of the theatrical
environment for Nicholas, and the reader as the last creator of all, occupy an
imaginary world, possibly more real than reality itself. The more the novel continues
the more we can grasp the process of knowing oneself, not betraying oneself, and
taking responsibility for one’s freedom –one’s choices in existential terms. Literature
opens a sphere for the readers to create separation from real lives and to experience
alienation through the eyes of other shadows –the characters in the novels, plays, and
poems.

1.2. The Analysis of the Film: The Magus

1.2.1. Interaction of Novels and Film Adaptations

Limited time means that a film adaptation has to eliminate a good number of
scenes from a novel. Echoing Shakespeare, film is, in general, restricted to “the short
two hours’ traffic of our stage.”41 Film adaptations can be performed either by being
faithful to the novel or by using the novel just as a starting point and creating a work
quite different to the novel. In terms of narrative form, novels and films have their
own way of expression including similarities and differences:

Literary language, for example, is the set of messages whose matter of expression is
writing; cinematic language is the set of messages whose matter of expression
consists of five tracks or channels: moving photographic image, recorded phonetic
sound, recorded noises, recorded musical sound, and writing (credits, intertitles,
written materials in the shot). Cinema is a language, in sum, not only in a broadly
metaphorical sense but also as a set of messages grounded in a given matter of
expression, and as an artistic language, a discourse or signifying practice
characterized by specific codifications and ordering procedures.42

40
Ibid., p.135.
41
Qtd. in. James Monaco, How to Read a Film: The World of Movies, Media, and Multimedia:
Art, Technology, Language, History, Theory, New York, Oxford University Press, 2000, p.45.
42
Robert Stam, Film Theory, Australia, Blackwell Publishing, 2007, p.112.

22
 In addition, novels and films can be compared, from the creator’s perspective,
in terms of their ability to influence, “ […] whatever the novelist describes is filtered
through his language, his prejudices, and his point of view. With film we have a
certain amount of freedom to choose, to select one detail rather than another.”43 What
makes films different from novels in terms of the variety of their interpretation? In
terms of the readers, they cannot control exposure by reading the printed script. The
reader can only create significance and reaction.
Questioning the intention of spectators by applying Freud’s psychology and
Lacan’s mirror theory, Christian Metz looks for answers to some questions, “Why do
spectators go to the cinema […] What pleasure are they seeking? And how do they
become part of an institutional machine that both delights and deludes them?”44 To
solve this dilemma it is useful to focus upon the psychological aspect of the human
mind:

[…] the spectator is aware of the illusory nature of the cinematic image and yet
believes in that image nevertheless. This belief, furthermore, is premised on the
spectacle being placed at a safe distance, and in this sense depends on voyeurism
(with sadistic overtones). The cinema was clearly founded on the pleasure of looking,
conceived since its origins as a place from which one could “spy on” others. What
Freud called scopophilia, the impulse to return the other into the object of a curious
gaze, is one of the primordial elements in cinematic seduction.45

Believing what we are reading or watching is beyond the reality of our own lives and
gives a certain amount of safety to the receivers of novels and films. On the other
hand, each individual has curiosity about the life of the Other. This curiosity can also
work upon non-existent others for the individuals to be able to distance themselves
from the responsibilities and burdens of their lives. In terms of psychological
perspective, the readers of novels and the audience of films resemble one another in
terms of recreating their reality from what they originally receive and building up a
curiosity about the Other to stay away from their problems. Owing to different
mediums, cinema uses a cinematographic language and images for the receivers –
leading them to transform from a given visual, an imagined interpretation by the
audience whereas the readers of the text has words reflected from the mind of a

43 James Monaco, How to Read a Film: The World of Movies, Media, and Multimedia: Art,
Technology, Language, History, Theory, p.46.
44
Qtd. in. Stam, Film Theory, p.168.
45
Ibid., p.168.

23
creator/ a narrator –directing them to use their power of imagination without any
visual material.

1.2.2. Perception of Film as a Reality or Fiction

Robert Stam questions the social function of the cinema and leads his readers
to think about its relation to reality, “Is cinema an art or merely a mechanical recorder
of visual phenomena? […] What distinguishes reality in the world, as it were, from
reality as presented in the cinema? […]” 46 . If we consider what we hear of other
people’s lives to be real, then what makes the films different from this situation? In
the cinema, a person also witnesses another individual’s life from the perspective of a
camera. On the one side, a person sees with his own eyes, on the other he sees from a
vehicle that reflects also a person’s eyes. How can we distinguish the degree of reality
between two? Thinking about the function of the camera in the scope of a fictional
journey for the audience, Dziga Vertov gives the camera a human voice to explain
what it really does and he emphasizes the fact that films have a certain and limited
aspect of perceiving the world,

I am kino-eye. I am a mechanical machine. I, a machine, show you the world as only

I can see it.
Now and forever, I free myself from human immobility. I am in constant motion. I
draw near, then away, from objects. I crawl under, I climb onto them. I move apace
with the muzzle of a galloping horse. I plunge full speed into a crown. (Vertov, 1984,
p.17)47

Brecht and Metz take the question to a different ground instead of explaining
whether films reflect reality or not,

[…] Brecht’s dictum that “Realism doesn’t consist in reproducing reality, but in
showing how things really are.” […] Christian Metz later elaborated this concept,
making an important differentiation between the reality of the substance of a film and
the reality of the discourse in which that substance is expressed. “On the other hand.”
He wrote, “there is the impression of reality; on the other the perception of
reality….”48

46
Ibid., p.27.
47
Qtd. in Ibid., p.44.
48
James Monaco, How to Read a Film: The World of Movies, Media, and Multimedia: Art,
Technology, Language, History, Theory, p.415.

24
In other words, the essence of a film is grasped with the conscious mind. Each
individual gains an impression of what he watches and he can be aware of the obvious
essence or the intended message. In this sense, the reality of films may possibly be
understood as quite close to the reality of our world. From another perspective, the
reality of the discourse is related with the unconsciousness of the mind. Regarding
human psychology’s relation to the unconscious, the perception of a film’s reality is
relatively changeable. Each individual, each mind, each experience, and each
unconscious are apart from one another.

1.2.3. Psychoanalytic Analysis of Films

Cinema not only offers the audience a chance to analyse the unconscious level
of other individuals but also presents them with an opportunity to be an alienated
subject to the real world they are struggling in. Cinema uses language as a medium to
create a connection with the individual’s unconscious that may be explained by
referencing to Lacan’s theory of psychoanalysis,

[…] Jacques Lacan, the major influence in psychoanalytic film theory, had placed
language at the very center of psychoanalysis. […] for Lacan, the Unconscious was
an effect of the subject’s entry into linguistic (symbolic) order. Language was the
very condition of the Unconscious. 49

Language is used to reach the unconsciousness of an individual and the

process continues with the relation of the Other in terms of interrelatedness among
language, psychoanalysis, Lacanian perspective, the individual, and the cinema;

[…] Lacan’s notion that desire is not a matter of desiring the other but of “desiring
the desire of the other” seemed a marvelously apt description of the processes of
identification in the cinema. […] initial loss of an originary plenitude linked to a dual
relation with the mother, human beings were seen as constitutively alienated, split
from themselves, with psychic “identity” […] Lacan describes how the infant ego is
constituted by the child’s identification with and misrecognition of the lure of the
mirror image, which offers an imaginary picture of his own autonomous self-
presence. Both Metz and Baudry compared the spectator’s situation to the mirror
stage, with Metz pointing out that the mirror analogy was only partially accurate; the
cinema, unlike the mirror, does not reflect back the spectator’s own image.50

49
Stam, Film Theory, p.161.
50
Ibid., pp.163-4.

25
During the mirror stage, an individual goes through the levels of alienation, being lost
and finally recognition of the self. In cinema, another medium is situated between
Lacan’s mirror and the individual, that is, the gaze of a device –the camera. This gaze
creates a series of processes for its receivers from the realization of unconsciousness
towards the separation of one’s self and the outer world:

The cinema, for Baudry, constitutes the approximate material realization of an

unconscious goal perhaps inherent in the human psyche: the regressive desire to
return to an earlier state of psychic development, a state of relative narcissism in
which desire could be satisfied through a stimulated, enveloping reality where the
separation between one’s body and the exterior world, between ego and non-ego, is
not clearly defined. In apparatus theory the cinema becomes a very powerful machine
which transforms the embodied, socially situated individual into a spectatorial
subject. […] The film as window-on-the-world became barred, like a prison.51

As a result, cinema creates an intermediary task to analyse and to film other

individuals. It publicly brings their desires, wishes, and secrets into the screen. It
provides spectators with the visual materials, covers the awareness of the division
between one’s self and the outer world, and presents a reflection of other individuals.
It becomes the duty of the spectator that one should absorb what is presented and to
figure out where to position one’s own image in one’s psychological world.
To exemplify psychoanalytic aspects in the film The Magus, Conchis
functions as Nicholas’s subconscious. According to Lacan’s theory, the language is
the path to enter the symbolic order; therefore, Conchis plays also the function of the
language by telling stories that mirror Nicholas’s life as his youth. In addition,
Nicholas, at the end of the film, becomes the Other that he is brought into the screen
so that he can realize how the others’ gaze comprehends him. To some extent, the
camera turns into a gaze of a society that watches his acts and records them in its own
memory. He becomes closer to a point where an existential self can differentiate the
other and the self so that one may be aware of the burdens for his freedom of choice.

51
Ibid., p.163.

26
 1.2.4. The Narrative Techniques

Directed by Guy Green, The Magus 52 is a British novel adaptation whose

screenplay was written by John Fowles in 1968. In terms of cinema techniques, the
narrative perspective can be either diegetic or mimetic. Diegetic narration means the
narrator uses his own voice by telling the story, and in so doing highly affects the
audience and their perception of the narration. On the other hand, mimetic narration
means there is no direct narrator. 53 The Magus contains both of the narrative
perspectives. Nicholas’s travel to Greece and what he experiences in this country are
illustrated according to mimetic narrative technique. Conchis’s past about German
occupation and Nicholas’s experiences in England are given to the screen as a
diegetic narrative technique. In addition, the film is mostly diegetic due to the reason
that the audience mostly hears the narration from the perspective of other characters,
mainly Conchis. The focus upon diegetic narration may possibly refer to postmodern
elements that try to give multiple viewpoints within the narration instead of focusing
on one person. Nicholas’s inner voice in the film is silenced so that the other
characters have an effective gaze upon Nicholas who is situated in an oppressed
position unlike Fowles’ Nicholas. Not hearing what Nicholas thinks and how he
processes his mind through the god-game lead the audience to rely upon how the
others’ gaze perceives Nicholas.

1.2.5. Audience’s Reception of The Magus

The scene opens with a view from a hill over the sea where a shepherd takes
care of a lot of sheep. Nearly all of them are black except a single white one. It gives
the impression that what happens between a shepherd and his sheep could be a
representation of what will happen on the island; suggesting the relationship between
Conchis and Nicholas. Right after this scene, the camera moves from the land towards
the sea (Figure 2.1); a ship in the middle of the sea could lead the audience to the
sense of isolation that an individual may experience in his own community. In the
scope of existentialism, “Sartre modified his notion of “the look” by arguing that only

52
The stars are Michael Caine as Nicholas Urfe, Anthony Quinn as Maurice Conchis, Candice Bergen
as Lily (later as Julie), Anna Karina as Anne.
53
Mustafa Sözen, “Anlatı Mesafesi-Anlatı Perspektifi Kavramları, Sinematografik Anlatı ve Örnek
Çözümlemeler”, ZKU Sosyal Bilimler Dergisi, Cilt 4, Sayı 8, 2008, p.124.

27
some, not all, interpersonal relations result in alienation and loss of freedom.”54 The
first two shots may refer to existential philosophy in terms of being aware of the
Other –the black sheep, and alienation as a result of Nicholas’s loss of control upon
his life in Greece.

Fg. 1.2. The ship Nicholas travels to Greece.

The close association between escaping from responsibilities and travelling is

expressed as:

Escape from the responsibilities of the past was clearly granted a necessary role in
the development of personal identity in four of ten groups. The way in which travel
enables this process would suggest that the decision to leave one’s home
environment to journey through foreign lands is sometimes an attempt to find that
part of oneself that is denied expression by one’s responsibilities to others. 55

In the novel, Nicholas’s intention for going to Greece is expressed quite clearly by his
words, “ […] I knew what I needed. I needed a new land, a new race, a new language;
and, although I couldn’t put it into words then, I needed a new mystery.”56 In the film,
Nicholas’s only words about his travel are: “I wanted to get out of England.” Fowles
situates Nicholas in a condition that Nicholas may attempt to find a part of himself
whereas the film focuses upon what Nicholas is doing in Greece. The audience is
exposed to questions about what will happen rather than questioning the reasons
behind. What an existential self is expected to perform is that to return and look at

54
http://www.iep.utm.edu/sartre-p/

55
Kevin Murray, “The Construction of Identity in the Narratives of Romance and Comedy”, Ed. by
John Shotter and Kenneth J. Gergen, Texts of Identity, Sage Publications, London, 1989, p.193.

56
Fowles, The Magus, p.21.

28
the reasons of the situation to understand and accept the responsibility of his actions
in the end.
While wandering around the forest trying to discover new parts of Phraxos, he
hears Anne’s voice and probably her last words addressed to him before he leaves
England: “I don’t love you… Deep down… There is somebody totally different. That
is who I love.” The audience is made suspicious about the character of Nicholas, his
questionable honesty, and his implicated identity problem.

Fg. 1.3. Anne’s begging looks while waiting

for Nicholas to tell her not to go.

In terms of the gaze of the society upon an individual’s identity, travelling to a new
land as a foreigner, Nicholas will face the perception of other people, the impact of
whose gaze he will not be aware of at the very beginning. Identity, being a concept
related with not only the individual himself but also the whole group of people with
whom that individual should interact, is defined as:

[…] something that must be negotiated. In the process, as noted by Eugene

Weinstein and Paul Deutschberger (1964), the individual must strike two bargains:
one with the world and one with herself/himself. It is in this key dynamic of identity
negotiation, then, that reciprocity –not merely as mirroring but in the deeper sense of
mutual shaping– is to be found between self and society. 57

Right after Nicholas steps on the land on Phraxos, some native people focus their gaze
upon Nicholas such as children playing on the street, women working in laundry, and
a man sitting on a bar. The natives stare at Nicholas as if they knew what Nicholas’s
problem is as an individual; his inability to be true to himself. In terms of authenticity,

57
George J. McCall, “The Structure, Content, and Dynamics of Self: Continuities in the Study of Role-
Identities”, Ed. by Krysia Yardley and Terry Honess, Self and Identity - Psychosocial Perspectives,
John Wiley & Sons, Chichester and New York, 1987, p.135.

29
the audience is made to feel suspicious and uncomfortable about Nicholas with the
gaze of the society.
His wandering around Phraxos takes Nicholas to the sea shore where he
swims, and he sees an airplane in the sky above him, the sight of which takes him
back to England to the scene when Nicholas and Anne first meet. After swimming,
Nicholas finds T. S. Eliot’s Collected Poems (1990) with a passage marked with a
lock of blonde hair. (Figure 1.4)

Fg. 1.4. T.S. Eliot’s book left on the shore.

We shall not cease from exploration

And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time. 58

This extract of poetry gives the feeling that Nicholas is starting his journey in his
newly discovered part of Phraxos. The lines lead the reader to think that physically
Nicholas will not go anywhere else and that it will be a journey to his subconscious. It
is also emphasized that the result will not lead Nicholas to an answer. Nonetheless,
his perception will have changed so that he will have a new way of comprehending
the self. In existential terms, Sartre explains the term ‘the reflective consciousness’:

[…] the reflective consciousness has the self directly for an object. The unreflective
consciousness does not apprehend the person directly or as its object; the person is
presented to consciousness in so far as the person is an object for the other. This
means that all of a sudden I am conscious of myself as escaping myself, not in that I
am the foundation of my own nothingness but in that I have my foundation outside
myself. I am for myself only as I am a pure reference to the other. 59

58
T.S. Eliot. Collected Poems 1909-1962, London, Faber and Faber,1990, p.222.
59
Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, trans. by Hazel E. Barnes, New York, Philosophical
Library, 1956, p.260.

30
Sartre’s reference to self and being aware of existence in the Other may be adapted to
what Nicholas experiences while he comes across with the Other outside his existence
that can lead him into the awareness of his subconscious. As Eliot’s poem refers that
the individual’s final destination will be to knowledge –Nicholas’s subconscious.
In addition to the function of the gaze, Bentham’s theoretical Panopticon
prison provides the place for Nicholas to be watched over by Conchis’s people. When
Conchis meets Nicholas, he shows him around the estate and asks, “I chose well?” It
gives the impression of an isolated area of the island that could remind the audience
of a sort of isolated prison, Panopticon prison,

L. B. Jeffries, at the beginning of Rear Window, …subjecting his neighbors to a

controlled gaze, …as it were, in a private panopticon… Foucault’s description of the
cells of the panopticon – “so many cages, so many small theatres, in which each actor
is alone, perfectly individualized and constantly visible” – in some ways describes
the scene exposed to Jeffries’s gaze.60

Conchis’s estate is also a Panopticon prison where his society projects a gaze towards
every move Nicholas makes. More broadly, every part of Greece is another version of
Panopticon prison for Nicholas. While walking on the streets, he is under the
observation of the native people. Even at the school, Nicholas has an illusion that he
feels there are soldiers with their guns at the corridors as if he went back to the
Second World War when the German soldiers used the school as their official
building during the occupation. As the young version of Conchis and in the role of the
traitor, Nicholas is the one who is under the effects of a psychological meta-theatre,
that is how Conchis describes what happens in Phraxos for Nicholas in the end. The
purpose of being watched over is to make Nicholas aware of those others he has
previously failed to care for, in terms of thinking about the responsibilities of his
actions. With Conchis’s game, Nicholas is first trying to solve the game and its
purpose, then he gains an awareness of the others’ existence.
Towards the end of the film, the trial scene is manifested through a machine’s
analysis of Nicholas performed by Conchis’s society. The machine, having Julie’s
(previously Lily’s) voice, delivers its account of Nicholas after expressing that
nothing interesting is found about the subject except:

60
Stam, Film Theory, p.316.

31
 […] there is a familiar type of male parasite. His only law is his own pleasure. His
only morality is his own good. He is a machine of self-gratification, not a human
being […] He is egocentric. He is a liar. There is no hope for him. 61

Nicholas in the film is put under observation not by other people’s judgements, ideas,
and evaluations but by their choice of words. They have heard those words, which
express his problematic identity about social issues and value judgements, from
Nicholas during the god-game. As the audience, we do not hear how Nicholas judges
his own situation. On the contrary, the reader of the novel witnesses various aspects
of Nicholas’s self-criticism and self-judgements. That difference leads the audience to
judge Nicholas without giving him a voice to express his development for his
awareness towards the end.
The process of Nicholas’s encounter with Alison62 in the novel and with Anne
in the film takes place differently in terms of losing and regaining someone. In
Fowles’ novel, Nicholas becomes furious at Alison’s joining both Conchis’s group
and his. However, Nicholas has to wait three and a half months to see Alison again
and have a chance to face her. The novelist offers his character a good amount of time
to think about the past, his approach to Alison and also to decide how she deserves to
be treated. Right after Alison leaves in their first encounter, Nicholas expresses his
feelings: “I was the man in the dark, the excluded, the eternal butt. Not a Hamlet
mourning for Ophelia. But Malvolio.”63 To compare Hamlet’s love with Malvolio, it
is helpful to look at Hamlet’s words for expressing his love for Ophelia:

‘Swounds, show me what thou’lt do.

Woo’t weep? Woo’t fight? Woo’t fast? Woo’t tear thyself?
Woo’t drink up eisel, eat a crocodile?
I’ll do ’t. Dost thou come here to whine,
To outface me with leaping in her grave?
Be buried quick with her?—and so will I.64

61
This dialogue is taken from one of the scenes in the film, The Magus.
62
When Alison’s name is given, the novel is mentioned. While the name Anne is stated, it is referred to
the film.
63
Ibid., p.574.
64
William Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act5, Scene 1. (The simplified English version of the scene states:
“Damn it, show me what you’re going to do for her. Will you cry? Fight? Stop eating? Cut yourself?
Drink vinegar? Eat a crocodile? I’ll do all that. Did you come here to whine? To outdo me by jumping
into her grave so theatrically? To be buried alive with her? So will I.”
<https://hamletstoryboard.wordpress.com/2013/12/16/diary-entry-14-act-5-scene-1/>

32
Hamlet’s love is explained with his degree of sacrifice and devotion. However,
Malvolio 65 is the steward who is deceived by a fake love letter. His ambition for
revenge reveals Malvolio’s arrogance and the love of self. Considering Nicholas’s
love for Alison, Fowles’ protagonist becomes aware of the fact that his love is not
true love as Hamlet’s and that he is running after his ambitions in addition to his self-
centredness. After three months, Nicholas comes to the realization of the
consequences of his absolute freedom and explains: “She was mysterious, almost a
new woman; one had to go back several steps, and starts again: and know the place
for the first time.”66 Finally Nicholas confesses to Alison what she means to him and
that he would be a half man without her.67 Starting from this point until the moment
of his realization of Alison’s importance in his life, Nicholas spends time on his own
to gain an awareness of what he is doing to others. In terms of his love to Alison, he
steps through a path from being Malvolio to being Hamlet. What is lack in the film is
the possibility of Nicholas’s ability to love someone truly because Anne leaves him in
the end and Julie is lost with the rest of the meta-theatre actors. Accounting for his
deception of Anne and his disregard of her even after he sees her in Greece, Nicholas
is portrayed as a reflection of Shakespeare’s Malvolio. Considering whether or not
Nicholas is an existential self, the film presents to the audience how he is received
through the gaze of the Others –the natives and Conchis’s people, and he is portrayed
as an individual unable to be true to himself.
As a final existential point of comparison, both the novel and the film come to
an end with poetry. Fowles’ novel presents a statement of hope for the future of
Nicholas:

Cras amet qui numguam amavit Tomorrow let him love, who has never loved;
quique amavit cra amet68 he who has loved, let him love tomorrow. 69

65
He is a character in William Shakespeare’s play Twelfth Night.
66
Fowles, The Magus, p.662.
67
Ibid., p.667.
68
Ibid., p.668.
69
“Translating the Last Lines of The Magus,” Fowles Books, n.d., 10 Dec. 2016, (Online)
<https://www.fowlesbooks.com/ourjohn.htm>.

33
The first two lines mention a man who has never loved anyone and who is given an
opportunity to love tomorrow. The last two lines are talking about a man who has
already loved someone that the emphasis in the last line changes from tomorrow into
letting him love. So that the primary subject of the whole novel –Nicholas comes to
the mind as the man who is permitted to love tomorrow. In the film, T. S. Eliot’s
poem is given in the last moments: “We shall not cease from exploration […] And
know the place for the first time.”70 Eliot’s poem also suggests that there is hope for
Nicholas in addition to the smile on Nicholas’s face (Figure 1.5) on his face after
reading the poem; however, the machine that the theatrical

Fg. 1.5. Nicholas with the smiling statue.

society uses states: “There is no hope for him.” The contradiction presented through
the film detracts the audience from believing what is implied. On the other hand,
Nicholas’s situation about his evaluation of his actions, his inability to find answers
that have been posed on him by Conchis’s society shows that he is silenced through
the gaze of others. The film does not provide Nicholas with a moment to question his
acts as the novel does: “What was I after all? […] I had acted as if a third person was
watching and listening and giving me marks for good or bad behaviour […]” 71
Therefore, the film chooses not to enlighten the existential aspects of being aware of
nothingness and of getting closer to the consciousness of Sartre’s philosophy: “[…]
man chooses himself, but by that we also mean that in choosing for himself he
chooses for all men.”72

70
T.S. Eliot, Collected Poems 1909-1962, p.222.
71
Fowles, The Magus, p.549.
72
Jean-Paul Sartre, “Existentialism is a Humanism”, qtd in Existentialism, Ed. by Robert C. Solomon,
New York, The Modern Library, 1974, p.198.

34
 CHAPTER II
The French Lieutenant’s Woman

2.1. Analysis of the Text

2.1.1. Victorianism through the Postmodern Novel
“Every emancipation is a restoration of the human world and of human relations
to man himself.” Marx, Zur Judenfrage (1844)
1
*

John Fowles’ novel The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1969) questions the
freedom of a man and a woman from the perspective of Victorian society. Charles
Smithson is a Victorian man in possession of characteristics that make him quite
untypical. On the other hand, Sarah Woodruff initially seems trapped and repressed
by Victorian society that names her the French Lieutenant’s whore or tragedy.
In existential terms, every individual has a choice of being authentic, to be
what one is. The question is why Fowles chooses Victorian society as the basis to
address his postmodern readers from the 1960s. Fowles creates a background to his
characters to present the difference in their behaviour while they are exposed to the
Victorian social gaze and while they are in solitude. This duality of character, brought
about by the necessity of social conformity, is of course counter to existential
definition. The Victorian age is full of hypocrisy between the individuals’ stipulated
perfect morality and the realities of prostitution and child labour; hence not only is the
individual pushed towards duality but society exists in a hypocritical state of duality.
In the novel, Victorian society is criticized in terms of its mind-set:

[…] the very fact that every Victorian had two minds […] It is a schizophrenia seen
at its clearest, its most notorious, in the poets I have quoted from so often –in
Tennyson, Clough, Arnold, Hardy […] I think, makes the best guidebook to the age
very possibly Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.2

1
John Fowles, French Lieutenant’s Woman, Boston, Little, Brown & Company, 1969, p.7.
*
The novel starts with this quote that may possibly be understood as the core meaning throughout the
novel.
2
Ibid., pp.288-9.

35
Individuals who live under the demanding gaze of society would be pressured into
duplicity, which would in turn be detrimental to integrity. The protagonists of the
novel, Sarah and Charles, react differently to one another to escape this situation.
Echoing R.L. Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886)
illustrates the duality innate to an individual’s character in the Victorian age.
Existential individualism is destroyed by society forcing the individual to be one sort
of person in public and another sort in private. Therefore, Fowles shows Sarah
capable of existential autonomy, but because she caters to social expectations, he also
shows that she is an imperfect example of the existential individual. Sarah plays the
role of an outsider due to a past affair and accepts the condemnation to passively
create solitude for herself. However, she cannot become an authentic person by telling
lies to people around her. The analysis of Sarah in terms of her behaviours will be
discussed in one of the following chapters.

2.1.2. The Function of Victorian Writers

“For the word, which tears the writer of prose away from himself and throws him
into the world, sends back to the poet his own image, like a mirror.” 3
Jean-Paul Sartre

Fowles starts each chapter with a quotation that is either a factual description
about Victorian society or an extract from a literary text taken from writers like
Thomas Hardy, Karl Marx, and Alfred Lord Tennyson. To explain the reason why he
takes extracts from these poets and writers, Fowles mentions Hardy’s life and what
distinguishes him from the other names of his century:

I have now come under the shadow, the very relevant shadow, of the great novelist
who towers over this part of England of which I write. When we remember that
Hardy was the first to try to break the Victorian middle-class seal over the supposed
Pandora’s box of sex, not the least interesting (and certainly the most paradoxical)
thing about him is his financial protection of the seal of his own and his immediate
ancestors’ sex life.4

3
Jean Paul Sartre, What is Literature?, trans. by Bernard Frechtman, London, Routledge, 1993, p.8.
4
Fowles, French Lieutenant’s Woman, p.215.

36
Fowles continues to mention Hardy’s love for his sixteen-year-old cousin Tryphena
who is actually his illegitimate half-sister’s illegitimate daughter. Their terrible family
secret forces them to separate. Fowles guesses that these cases lead Hardy to create
some characters like Sue Bridehead and Tess “who are pure Tryphena in spirit”5.
Fowles is using Hardy to exemplify a point that refers to this great poet’s fallible
human side. Fowles shows his reader that even a leading writer of the Victorian age
deals with unacceptable situations in their real lives. Like so many Victorian writers
Thomas Hardy may have been articulate as an intellectual, yet as an individual he was
as anxious to follow social rules of behaviour as everyone else; his life was as
necessarily two-faced as others. Fowles may possibly draw attention to the difference
between a human’s authenticity in theory and its practicality in real life. In the
questioning of Sarah’s authenticity, this difference will be taken into account in this
study.

2.1.3. A Consequence of Family Presence: Sarah and

Charles

In the scope of family ties, Sarah’s mother is never mentioned while her
father’s destiny is told in only a few pages. Firstly, his job and his principles are
enlightened and later his being put into an asylum is stated:

The girl’s father […] A farmer merely, but a man of excellent principles and highly
respected in that neighbourhood. He most wisely provided the girl with a better
education than one would expect.6

Sarah’s father provides his daughter with an education that is equal to that of a lady.
He is called “a man of excellent principles”7 but he has “an obsession with his own
ancestors”8 in the scope of having money and land. His obsession with money leads
him into a terrible situation:

5
Ibid., p.216.
6
Ibid., p.31.
7
Ibid., p.48.
8
Ibid., p.48.

37
 […] goaded him like a piece of useless machinery (for he was born a Devon man and
money means all to Devon man), goaded him finally into madness. […] For several
years he struggled to both keep up both the mortgage and a ridiculous façade of
gentility; then he went quite literally mad and was sent to Dorchester Asylum. He
died there a year later.9

Her father is perceived by the Victorian society as a perfect man. Nonetheless,

he is an inauthentic person due to the fact that his purpose of life is different than how
it seems. Though conversely an imperfect man, the parallel with John Durbeyfield,
Thomas Hardy’s ‘nobility obsessed’ father to the ill-fated Tess from the novel Tess of
the d’Urbervilles (1892) is a suggestive association. It is the idea of these self-
destructive men behind the subsequent actions of their socially subversive daughters.
The other prominent figure in the novel, Charles Smithson is a thirty-two-
year-old middle-class gentleman, with an interest in paleontology. At the very
beginning of the novel, Charles and his family’s background are given before Sarah’s:

[…] Charles’s father, was left well provided for, both in land and money. […] His
had been a life with only one tragedy –the simultaneous death of his young wife and
the stillborn child who would have been a sister to the one-year-old Charles. But he
swallowed his grief. He lavished […] a series of tutors and drill sergeants on his son,
whom on the whole he liked only slightly less than himself. […] gambling-tables
[…] lived very largely for pleasure . . . and died very largely of it […] Charles was
[…] his only heir.”10

Fowles implies that Charles’s father performs familial duties but his heart is
unattached to his family. That may be taken as an indication of the painful disunity
between a person’s personal and public self.

Both fathers are living a lie, but their motivation is very different. Sarah’s
father is urged by avarice, it seems, not something one can sympathise with; however,
Charles’s father appears to be heartbroken following the death of his wife, and
notably it is stated that he may not have felt love for Charles, but he felt even less for
himself. The first father is driven mad by his own hypocrisy; the second is destroyed
by his inability to work through his grief. Considering their respective children in
terms of the conception of their models –the fathers, Sarah witnesses her father
tricking society and perhaps as a direct consequence she performs in a similar way by

9
Ibid., pp.48-49.
10
Ibid., p.17.

38
enacting a social pretence. Charles also acts like his father in a way by showing two
selves: one is performing a perfect gentleman before the eyes of the society and the
other is the private self that he starts to discover with Sarah.

2.1.4. Under the Gaze: Sarah and Charles

“I am responsible for my being-for the Other in so far as I realize him freely

in authenticity or in unauthenticity. It is in complete freedom…
I realize my being-with in the anonymous form of “they.”
… through the world I make myself what I am.”
Sartre, Being and Nothingness11

Sarah Woodruff and Charles Smithson are introduced to the reader through the
gaze of their society. Sarah tricks Victorian society about her virginity and creates a
sphere for her assumed freedom. Fowles teases his readers to think that she is an
immoral person according to the dictates of her period. Until the moment Charles
becomes aware of her virginity, Fowles never mentions the possibility that Sarah is
lying about her past. Freedom for Sarah means remaining detached from and so
avoiding the pressure of Victorian society’s gaze by telling lies about her
condemnation. However, Charles feels his freedom as having his own words
approved by the society’s gaze.
The very abrupt realisation by the reader that Sarah is a virgin is rendered
even more startling because it coincides with Charles’ moment of realisation. A
similar moment of shocking awakening can be seen in the comparison of Keats’s
poem “Isabella, or the Pot of Basil” (1818) with Millais’s painting (1849) as
illustrated,

11
Jean Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, trans. by Hazel E. Barnes, New York, Philosophical
Library, 1956, p.246.

39
 Fg. 2.1. John Everett Millais,
Lorenzo and Isabella (1849)12

Keats’s poem is describing Isabella’s pre- and post-character revelation while

Millais’s painting gives only the character’s previous situation before she loses her
lover. The painting situates Isabella under the gaze of Victorian society; however, it is
hard to imagine her in a manic episode while digging her lover’s grave. Isabella loses
everything she has and this probably reveals her potentiality of acting for what she
desires. As for Sarah, she camouflages her private self by hiding her intentions behind
the titles of the French lieutenant’s whore or tragedy. Sarah is a complete and whole
character who significantly does not change –unlike Charles who experiences
epiphany and does. Sarah is first depicted as she wishes to appear to society and later
as the woman she actually and secretly is. Sarah can be depicted as Millais’s Isabella
from the gaze of the society in terms of her expected bending in the encounter with
the society. When Sarah finds a sphere for her solitude and desires, she declares her
choice to be alone in one of the possible endings Fowles offers to his readers.
Fowles presents Sarah under the society’s gaze when she is in public sphere
and also gives how Sarah describes herself as if she were declaring her words to the
rest of the society. However, she does not confront with the society and does not
declare her desire for freedom publicly. In addition to emphasising Sarah’s existential
dysfunction, Fowles also implicitly declares Sarah’s inauthenticity about her
behaviours by stating the differences between Sarah as an existential woman and

12
“Lorenzo and Isabella” by John Everet Millais, Walker Art Gallery, 5 March 2017, (Online)
<http://www.tate.org.uk/research/publications/tate-papers/18/sugar-salt-and-curdled-milk-millais-and-
the-synthetic-subject>.

40
Sarah as the outcast. By giving various viewpoints on his characters, Fowles wants to
take the readers’ attention to one of his points:

You* will no doubt have guessed the truth: that she was far less mad than she seemed
. . . or at least not mad in the way that was generally supposed. Her exhibition of her
shame had a kind of purpose; and people with purposes know when they have been
sufficiently attained and can be allowed to rest in abeyance for a while. 13

Fowles wants his readers to distinguish and think about the possibilities before letting
them categorize one of his characters into the borders of certain patterns in the scope
of society’s judgements and gaze. Fowles gives a lesson to his readers before he
presents Sarah’s true self, implying that the truth does not lie behind the majority’s
judgement but behind the individual’s self, that cannot be comprehended by the gaze
of society. The point is that Sarah is a depicted by Fowles as being a passively
existential character, or partially dysfunctional as an existential entity.
In terms of Charles Smithson, Fowles presents him in varying stages
according to the society’s gaze. Charles is a highly appreciated gentleman in the
society. After he signs “a statement of guilt”14, he is not pleased with the results in
terms of the society’s reactions:

Lyme was a town of sharp eyes; and this was a city of the blind. No one turned and
looked at him. He was almost invisible, he did not exist, and this gave him a sense of
freedom, but a terrible sense, for he had in reality lost it […] All in his life was lost;
and all reminded him that it was lost. […].15

Charles experiences his first shock when he faces the power of Victorian society’s
gaze upon an individual. However, he has money and power to escape and to take a
trip around the world compared to Sarah’s lack of opportunities. In terms of
existentialism, Charles is not existential due to the fact that he patently falls under the
control of both society at large and of Sarah. His function in the novel is more as the
other individual under Victorian society’s gaze for the readers rather than being an
existential character.

13
John Fowles, French Lieutenant’s Woman, pp.56-57.
*Fowles addresses his reader as “you”.
14
Ibid., p.321.
15
Ibid., p.231.

41
 In terms of Fowles’ perception of existentialism, his characters are
experiencing the road of being in two minds due to society’s gaze –private and public
self. As the novel’s point of focus, Sarah is presented with an imperfect existential
experience; though Fowles does not clearly give the reason, it may possibly be about
the correlation between an individual and the society. What causes an individual to
create a public persona is society; however, without a society an individual cannot
have a chance to come across the Other that is the primary step for an existential self.
Society is not an organization that must be eliminated from the individual’s life, and
that is unrealistic. An individual grows up in a society and both of the sides build up
one another; they are not separate from each other. Existentialism is a singular,
undaunted and idealistic theory – its practice in the realms of everyday human life,
however, is anything but perfect, strong and idealistic. Sarah, as the penniless,
unprotected, Victorian woman typifies the ‘ordinary’ imperfections and unresilient
humanity of real life. When perfect theory and imperfect humanity come together one
gets a believable, understandably imperfect existentialism, plus pathos.

2.1.5. A Social Outcast in the Panopticon Prison

“Who is Sarah?
Out of what shadows does she come?”16

Considering Victorian society as a theoretical panopticon prison, Charles with

patriarchal status is part of the panopticon prison: he has social autonomy and power.
However, Sarah does not have it as a woman and she is very much the objectivised
prisoner. When Sarah goes to nature –the woods, the Cobb, she finds total solitude
that she does not need to pretend as if someone is watching over. Both of the
protagonists of the novel are perceived as pleased while they are in the borders of
their prisons despite the fact that they are totally aware of the gaze of Victorian
society. Whenever Sarah is under the gaze, she is playing several roles: an obedient
servant for Mrs. Poulteney, a naïve lover for Charles, an outcast for the Victorian
society. On the other hand, when Charles becomes an outcast in his prison, he feels
as:

16
Ibid., p.80.

42
 When he had had his great vision of himself freed from his age, his ancestry and
class and country, he had not realized how much the freedom was embodied in
Sarah, in the assumption of a shared exile. […] there was something in his isolation
that he could cling to; he was the outcast, the not like the other men, the result of a
decision few could have taken, no matter whether it was ultimately foolish or wise. 17

Thinking about the chance of running away from that prison, Sarah and Charles do
not have equal chances financially. The vital struggle for them will be the courage and
strength to face with the judgements of the society and to declare their own self-
control upon their lives. In addition, Fowles’ irony upon Charles is admirable; what
seems a reference to existential separation from society is that his autonomy is reliant
on Sarah; hence, it is not autonomy.
Regarding the second ending, Sarah gives a wonderful speech about what she
desires for the moment. Then, Charles gains a different insight into Sarah: “[…] he
began to perceive […] her new self-knowledge and self-possession; she no longer
needed an outward uniform.”18 Fowles provides Sarah’s declaration of her freedom as
one of the possible endings of the novel. However, the reader should be aware of the
fact that Sarah is not standing on her own feet. On the contrary, she is living under the
roof of a Pre-Raphaelite painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti. She continues to act her role
in different circumstances rather than her situation in Mrs. Poulteney’s house.
Throughout the novel, Fowles creates contradicting states of mind to prove
deep-rooted societal norms embedded within his characters. During each of these
moments, Charles gains an insight into the realization for the true identity of Sarah,
comes across the Other, and reaches the final point of a beginning for setting off on
an unending journey of searching for the self. Fowles dramatically comments on
Sarah’s lack of authenticity, and gives a duty both to Charles and his readers about
not only solving a case but also heading them to the direction towards the path of
asking questions about one’s self, searching for it, and trying to understand if a
person has authenticity both in his actions and for his responsibility of those.

17
Ibid., p.335.
18
Ibid., p.353.

43
 2.2. Analysis of the Film Adaptation of The French
Lieutenant’s Woman
2.2.1. Double Roles

Adapted by the playwright Harold Pinter and Karel Reisz, The French
Lieutenant’s Woman (1981) is an adaptation of John Fowles’ novel (1969). The
double role-playing and parallelism take place between actors and characters that
provides the audience to witness both the Victorian society and the modern society as
well as the comparison of their values, morality, and individuals’ freedom of choice
for their own age that reflects Fowles’ comparison of two societies very effectively.
Within the parallel narrative, the stars19 play double roles: the one in the Victorian
society as Sarah or Charles and the other as the actor playing Anne and Mike.
Considering Pinter’s life, he witnesses the “bombings of his city by the
Germans”20 during the Second World War that may lead him to question the power of
the authority upon the individual. In addition to being a playwright, Pinter focuses
generally upon his characters’ duality as a result of social oppression; the one
oppressed by the society and the other oppressing another individual. To exemplify,
Sarah is reflected as the oppressed individual by Victorian society; however, when
she acquires a chance to oppress another individual, she also uses her power upon the
one –Charles. Pinter presents Sarah both as a victim and a victimizer. From the
perspective of Sarah’s role behind the camera, Anne reveals the duality in Mike; the
family father figure and the adulterer. Therefore, Pinter’s screenplay functions in
duality as the result of the power of an authority; either the society or a group of
individuals. In existential terms, the film adaptation does not question an individual’s
authenticity, being what he is, but represents the individual’s position of being stuck.

19
The stars are Meryl Streep as Sarah and Anna, Jeremy Irons as Charles and Mike.
20
<https://www.biography.com/people/harold-pinter-9441163>

44
 2.2.2. The Film Posters

Pinter/Reisz’s screenplay has references to Victorian art from a different

perspective to Fowles. In the novel, Sarah lives in Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s house as
his assistant. In the film, she lives in the house of an architect named Elliott and is
tutoring his children as well as doing her own work. Whereas in the novel Sarah’s
primary function is to be an assistant to an artist, the film turns her situation as worker
in the house and reflects her artistic aspect as only a hobby. The adaptation focuses
more upon the status of the characters in the society rather than how they situate
themselves.
In terms of physical appearance, Sarah is meant to resemble Rossetti’s wife
Elisabeth Siddal as an iconic model that may indicate to the generic Pre-Raphaelite
‘stunner’. Rossetti portrays his women as having lush hair that refers to women’s
sexuality and having a sort of resisting look. The physical representation of
‘Victorian’ Sarah in the film is instilled with the same subversiveness as the textual
example. An existential individual disregards every external authority and also
declares one’s self no matter what the society imposes upon one. Victorian Sarah is
put under the power of her society; however, she uses the same power upon Charles.
Pinter refers to the consequences of the power as the corruption of both the individual
and the society.
The different posters of the film may possibly give vital clues about Sarah
Woodruff –the Victorian outcast:

Fg. 2.2. Poster 121 Fg. 2.3. Poster 222 Fg. 2.4. Poster 323

21
< http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0082416/>
22
< https://itunes.apple.com/us/movie/the-french-lieutenants-woman/id401419848>
23
< http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0082416/mediaviewer/rm1798807040>

45
Each one differs from the way Sarah sees the world as either being exposed to the
power of Victorian society or acting under the power of Charles or imposing the
power on Charles. The posters are presented in order a naïve Sarah (Figure 2.2); a
subversive Sarah (Figure 2.3); and an imprisoned Sarah (Figure 2.4). In “Poster 1”,
the sentence “She was lost from the moment she saw him.”24* is quite the opposite of
the existential Sarah in Fowles’ novel because Sarah in the novel does not fall under
Charles’s spell or his control in addition to not falling madly in love with him. The
woman in the poster reflects the Sarah perceived from the gaze of the Victorian
society that has clearly an authority and power on its individuals. In “Poster 2”
(Figure 2.3), Sarah has persistent looks as if she is declaring her existence by her
straight adamant gaze. This poster reminds us of Fowles’ existential Sarah and
Pinter’s Anna character in the film due to the fact that both characters are strong and
forceful representations of women. Lastly, “Poster 3” (Figure 2.4) shows Sarah with
her hands around her throat as if she were strangling herself and Charles with the pose
of a perfect Victorian gentleman pose. Sarah’s face is partially lit that may refer to the
situation about the model’s known and unknown sides.
Each poster reminds us of specific paintings by Rossetti as illustrated below
according to the order of references to the posters:

Fg. 2.5. Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Fg. 2.6. Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Fg. 2.7. Dante Gabriel
Ecce Ancilla Domini (1850)25 My Lady Greensleeve (1863)26 Rossetti, Proserpine
(1874)27

24
This sentence is both stated in Poster 1 and Poster 2. Poster 3 reflects Sarah’s despair with her hands
on her neck.
25
< http://www.rossettiarchive.org/docs/s44.rap.html>
26
< http://www.rossettiarchive.org/docs/s161.rap.html>
27
< http://www.rossettiarchive.org/docs/s233.r-2.rap.html>

46
The first poster (Figure 2.2) and the first painting (Figure 2.5) mirror Sarah’s inner
feelings as being scared due to interference to her sphere and her desire to keep a
distance. The second poster and parallel painting (Figures 2.3 and 2.6) function to
reflect her rebellious and subversive stance against her threatened individuality, and
the last comparison (Figures 2.4 and 2.7) may refer to Sarah’s restricted sexual
freedom, Sarah’s strangling her neck tightly or Proserpine’s attempt to stop herself by
twisting her wrist with her other hand. The sequence of the parallel posters and the
paintings seems like the steps of the individual’s encounter with the power of the
society; first society recognizes an individual, then the individual attempts to declare
her resistance, and finally the encounter comes to an end to oppress the individual –
Victorian Sarah. Due to Victorian Sarah’s gender, poverty, and friendless state, she
must behave in a certain way in order to survive in the society. Albert Camus’s
character Meursault 28 performs his existential role that ends up with becoming a
martyr whereas Fowles’ Sarah, incentive as a character, is to survive. How Pinter
reflects Fowles’ Sarah from her intention to survive in the society turns into Victorian
Sarah’s suffering under the power and authority of the society.

2.2.3. Pinter’s Twin-Plot Structure

Harold Pinter chooses to split the characters into parallel historical periods and
sets of characters. Pinter concentrates upon the duality of the characters; Sarah as the
Victorian woman, Anne as the actor playing the role of Sarah in modern age, Charles
as the Victorian gentleman who has money and respect from Victorian society’s gaze,
and Mike as the actor playing the role of Charles. The film focuses on the threat that
stems from the society’s power upon the integrity of individuals. To perceive Sarah’s
existential self, the audience needs to look at Sarah’s modern reflection in the mirror,
Anna. Nonetheless, the audience have a disadvantage that they become only aware of
the reflection method at the end of the film when Mike wants to address Anna but
calls her Sarah. At that point –quite late, the audience is obviously warned about the
fact that Anna and Sarah are the reflections of one another in different circumstances
due to living in different ages. The two-plot structure works in terms of revealing the
duality in the characters as the private and the public selves; however, this split is

28
Camus’s protagonist in his novel, The Stranger is an absurd novel in existential literature.

47
represented as different individuals in different ages. Therefore, the audience cannot
evaluate the progress and connection between the selves. Fowles’ existential
viewpoint is turned into how an individual survives in one’s double roles among the
society.
In the comparison of Sarah and Charles, the scenes are illustrated below in
terms of their waiting for the return of their lost lovers: one is precarious and in
danger, in a symbolic environment of passion (Figure 2.8); the other is secure,
superior, safe, and staid (Figure 2.9).

Fg. 2.8. Sarah on the Cobb Fg. 2.9. Charles receives a telegraph 29

At the end of the waiting period, Charles’s social status is emphasized whereas
Sarah’s fearless nature and her resistance in her waiting are reflected to the audience.
Sarah seems as the one who wants to keep her rebellious nature to herself rather than
showing it off. She declares herself with the words, “No insult, no blame can touch
me. I have set myself beyond the pale. […] I am nothing. […] I am the French
lieutenant’s whore.”30 She also states, “I have a freedom they cannot understand.” In
order to free herself from the restriction of being a ‘virgin’, Sarah uses Charles to
achieve this by having sex with him. She is trying to convince the gaze of society to
create a sphere of freedom for herself. In the scene (Fig. 2.10), she tests her
perception from the gaze of the others by using the mirror:

Fig. 2.10. Sarah before the mirror

29
The moment when Charles receives the telegraph about Sarah’s presence after three years.
30
She spells the word “whore” with excessive stress.

48
Pinter successfully presents Sarah’s doubleness with the reflective function of the
mirror. By reason of her acting, Sarah genuinely succeeds in surviving under the
power and authority of the society. What the screenwriter implies is that it is the
society that corrupts the individuals and forces them into forces by virtue of their
power. What is left to an individual in order to survive is to create a reflection of
social expectations and to keep her intentions hidden not to be a martyr but to
continue living.

49
 Chapter III
The Comparison of John Fowles’ Novels and Film Adaptations

3.1. Existential Aspects in John Fowles’ Novels: The Magus

and The French Lieutenant’s Woman

In postmodern texts, patriarchal authority as an extension of institutional

authorities has been rejected to give a voice to the individuals in the society.
Therefore, the relationships in the families decline and the lack of nurture extends all
the way to the greater disunity of individuals in a community. In addition, the father
figure becomes ineffectual in a postmodern mind-set, so it reminds the equation of the
masculine principle with wars, violence, and other ways of physical and
psychological destructions. Reminding Fowles’ reference to the world wars by
Conchis’s stories in The Magus, and the loss of Hitler in The French Lieutenant’s
Woman, his characters experience the catastrophes, the lack of nurture from their
father figures, and the decline of the father figure in the postmodern texts.
In both novels, Fowles detracts the father figures from the lives of the
protagonists –Nicholas and Sarah. The loss of authority in their lives leads them into a
much more independent life to make their own choices. Therefore, both the loss and
its consequence may lead the postmodern individuals to autonomy. Fowles questions
how an individual can cope with autonomy, whether one is allowed to experience an
existential self in the society, and also whether the individual attains authenticity or
not under surveillance in his both novels.
Nicholas’s understanding of life depends upon his selfish attitudes, his
ignorance, and his unawareness about restricting the freedom of other people around
him. The reader incessantly hears Nicholas’s point of view, rather than how his
society regards his attitudes. The problem is Nicholas’s recklessness about other
people’s freedom because of his self-centredness. This deliberate focus on the self
seems to be a textual implication of existential detachment to the detriment of
communal life. In terms of the self, Sarah is also fixating everything intensely upon
herself. The readers witness how society regards her and how Sarah expresses her

50
existential self under their gaze. The problem is that the camouflage of her existential
self does not support the thesis that she has the courage and confidence to declare her
authenticity against the norms of her society. Fowles refers to the issue that the
postmodern/existential theory has been unworkable in practice. The issue that
consumes the 1950s and 60s’ English novel is that the postmodern ideal of absolute
autonomy for the individual is dangerous. It creates a cult of personality and
totalitarianism; therefore, the unlimited power that is allowed to one individual is a
danger of selfishly curbing the freedom of others. Absolute freedom is corrupting the
individuals absolutely. To exemplify the danger of absolute freedom, Sarah and
Nicholas are the characters who believe to have an absolute freedom in their private
sphere; however, they pose a threat to the others around them like Charles and Alison.
In terms of the degree of knowledge, in The Magus, Fowles clearly states the
qualities Nicholas lacks and the truth is kept hidden both from Nicholas and the
reader. In The French Lieutenant’s Woman, total knowingness is dedicated to
neither the characters nor the reader. Fowles eliminates the authoritative point of
view that forces his reader to reach a certain conclusion in his postmodern/existential
texts. Instead, the lack of an authoritative narrative leads the reader to situate oneself
into one of the characters –probably into the position of Nicholas and Sarah and
allows one to observe to what extent an individual has opportunities in a society to be
an existential self.
From the perspective of existentialism, Nicholas as an inauthentic person is
led to a path and forced to evaluate himself in order to realize the qualities he lacks
and to question himself, his decisions, and his regrets. However, the readers do not
know the final outcome whether Nicholas achieves existential individualism. He is
trapped within an organized society, in a meta-theatre whereas Sarah is trapped within
a society. They are ironically being trapped while they are trying to escape external
authority and control that refers to the inescapability of the power of authority in life.
Sarah exists within a falsehood and is lacking integrity while she is seeming to be
existential. Nicholas is telling lies in any situation he deems necessary; while Sarah is
telling everyone lies about her identity: hence both are contradicting the basic
principle of existential and postmodern individualism because it insinuates a state of
collaboration with values/entities external to the self. Fowles shows the reader that
being authentic does not depend either on the societal conditions or the individual in
terms of his/her struggle with the others. He refers to the fact that an individual

51
cannot exist out of the borders of society; however, the existential philosophy requires
an individual to stand against the authoritative norms and rules of the society that is
not practicable in real life.

3.2. Existential Aspects in the Film Adaptations: The Magus

and The French Lieutenant’s Woman

The two film adaptations focus on a different aspect that the existence and the
gaze of society are more emphasized compared to Fowles’ novels. For instance,
Fowles focuses on Nicholas’s inner voice in The Magus but in the film how other
individuals perceive Nicholas is mainly presented not only by their words but by their
way of looking and behaviours towards him. This difference does not contradict the
novel; however, it refers to an aspect that is not addressed in the novel. It shows how
the society regards an inauthentic individual and also how much Nicholas acts under
the gaze of others. Additionally, Nicholas’s intention in going to Greece is expressed
quite clearly by his words, “ […] I knew what I needed. I needed a new land, a new
race, a new language; and, although I couldn’t put it into words then, I needed a new
mystery.”1 Nonetheless, in the film adaptation the audience is not made aware of this
reason. The film adaptation of The Magus does not aim to justify Nicholas’s
behaviours; therefore, it does not allow Nicholas to express his intentions on his own
words. On the contrary, the film silences him and gives voice to the majority. From
the first moments of Nicholas’s arrival to Greece, the camera focuses on local
people’s gaze upon him; a few children playing on the street start to laugh at him, a
man sitting on a bar stares at Nicholas carefully, a group of women working as a
laundry service turn and look at him. During those moments, the camera focalizes
upon these people’s strange facial expressions that make clear to the audience that
Nicholas is “the individual under the gaze”. In existential terms, the individual is
expected to stand against the authority/ society’s strict rules. Nonetheless, theatrical
society in the film is able to oppress his freedom of choice by deciding how to lead
Nicholas whereas the theatrical society in the novel creates grounds for him to
evaluate, decide and choose, namely to learn how to be an authentic individual.

1
Fowles, The Magus, p.21.

52
 In The French Lieutenant’s Woman, Fowles focuses on how society
perceives Sarah. Nevertheless, Pinter’s adaptation presents both Sarah as a fragile,
naïve, desperate, mysterious woman with the close shots on Sarah’s facial expressions
and Anne’s clear intention of using Mike according to her desires. Pinter reveals
Sarah’s duality by presenting her other instead of Fowles’ presentation of Sarah from
the gaze of society. In terms of clothes, Sarah is dressed first in dark colours then in
the light colours of her new environment. Sarah is like a chameleon adapting the
colours of her environment: when she is in the midst of conservative, controlling
middle-class society her clothes reflect their dark soberness; when she is in the more
enlightened, artistic environment she takes on its colours. It gives the conclusion that
Sarah as an individual behaves according to how much her surrounding allows her to
be. In terms of existentialism, her acting as a result of calculations of the possibilities
cannot be a representation of an existential self who is expected to express one’s self
as what he is regardless of taking into account the power or the gaze of an authority.
The film often and repeatedly shows how Sarah is seen, approached and evaluated by
Victorian society. Pinter refers to Sarah’s choice to be the person she is: the private
and public Sarah who are two different and contradictory people in the novel; Pinter
is literally showing these two people with Sarah as her looking into the mirror:

Fig. 3.1. Sarah before the mirror Fig. 3.2. Sarah’s drawing Fig. 3.3. Anne before the mirror

Sarah, in the novel, is a woman who sometimes defends herself against the norms and
rules of the Victorian society and who declares her own reasons for her lies. However,
she makes her confessions generally to Charles, not the other individuals of the
society. Fowles portrays Sarah as the woman who wishes to stand against the
society’s gaze while she talks to Charles. Sarah is represented as the Pandora’s box,
which refers to Sarah’s unforeseen and unpleasant intentions, to the reader due to her
not being a reliable individual with her words. To return to the film adaptation, Pinter

53
takes the attention from how Sarah is reflected in her world against the society to
what Sarah is experiencing in solitude and to how much she experiences self-
reckoning. As illustrated above (on the left), Sarah is looking at the mirror and she
seems to be evaluating the success of her acting. The drawing of herself (in the
middle) reveals her sense of evil because she is lying to people and who are even
deceiving her self. Sarah’s reflection in modern life, Anna, (on the right) also stands
in front of a mirror to evaluate and question her actions. Anna seems to be asking,
“Who am I?” while Sarah seems to ask “How am I acting?” in the mirror scenes.
In existential terms, different aspects about the protagonists are emphasized in
the film adaptations. Nicholas is portrayed in terms of his and does not develop in the
film except for a second of intuition when he smiles in the end. In the film, his
incapability of being active directs the audience to evaluate Nicholas whereas
Nicholas’s level of progress mostly depends upon his words rather than his actions in
the novel. Sarah’s inwardness leads the audience to re-evaluate her in terms of her
inability to be an existential self. As for the comparison of the film adaptations,
Nicholas’s feelings and bodily gestures are withdrawn and seem mechanical. On the
other hand, Sarah’s feelings are excessively presented as if she is a hysteric woman
rather than an existential self. Fowles’ novels express how an individual experiences
one’s existential self or how a group of people lead an individual to the realization of
one’s existential self; however, he refers to the incapability of the reality that the
theory of existentialism cannot be adapted to the real life where the power and
authority of the society or other institutions exist. Throughout the films, nearly no
inner dialects of Nicholas and Sarah take place because it is difficult to present them
in the film. The audience does not hear what they think, how they evaluate the
situation that they face with even in solitude. The camera creates a gaze to the
Fowles’ characters that represent how the others understand them. This lack on the
representation of the novels results in an inability to show the characters’ thoughts,
their inner struggles with the self. While the words present the inner world of the
individuals, the camera shows the perception of the gaze.

54
 CONCLUSION

In his novels, John Fowles is questioning the possibility of free will and how it
may be achieved; he aims to pose these questions through his various protagonists in
terms of both the individual and society. Fowles illustrates the process of being an
existential individual in two ways: he creates a fabricated society and through
Conchis’s game leads Nicholas towards an existential selfhood; and he motivates
Sarah into pursuing existential selfhood by situating her into a control-addicted
society that watches over its individuals, besides judging them according to their own
concept of morality. In the film adaptation of The Magus, the presentation of
Nicholas’s selfhood is given through the gaze of the Other in the society. Rather than
how Nicholas proceeds through the awareness of his selfhood as stated in the novel,
the film concentrates upon how he is situated, puppet-like, in a game. It is hard to
witness Nicholas’s choices, his inner struggles, and his self-evaluation in realizing his
mistakes. The adaptation focuses on Nicholas’s perception as an individual who needs
to be directed through a certain path. Therefore, the film does not generally present
the audience with existential aspects of Nicholas’s selfhood. In the other film
adaptation, Sarah’s selfhood is presented to the audience through the mirror scene,
which also refers to the parallel narratives of the film and illustrates the notion of the
duality of characterisation. Harold Pinter, the playwright, defines Sarah’s duality of
public and private self that can refer to the manner in which social jurisdiction
manipulates and obscures the individual’s selfhood.
The focus of this study is to question whether an individual can have freedom
of choice within the confines of society. Existentialism in Fowles’ novels is put into
practice to present the process an individual may encounter. As a theory,
existentialism is an intellectual premise in Fowles’ two novels; however, beyond this
initial premise in both texts existential theory, when faced with the demands of ‘real
life’, is demonstrated to be an unworkable ideal. When an individual, like Nicholas,
disregards the confines of society, he is evaluated as being self-centred and as abusing
the rights of freedom of the Other, which postmodernism emphasizes that having
freedom of choice means to choose for all men, not just for one’s self. Equally with a
representation like Sarah: when one stays within the rules of society and decides to
keep one’s selfhood in the private sphere, then the condemnation is that the individual
is playing double roles. In existential theory, being what you are not is perceived as

55
inauthenticity; however, Sarah chooses to perform this to survive in society. Fowles
prefers to create a warmly imperfect Sarah and Nicholas to prove the situation that the
power and authority of the society corrupt the individuals’ perception of selfhood.
The existence of the Other puts a burden on individuals and an awareness that they
are being watched; therefore, individuals choose to perform their roles in order to
continue their existence within a society. Even when an individual wants to create her
existential being, the interference of the Others is inevitable. Fowles’ intentional
choice of imperfect characters also shows the humane aspect of individuals who may
lie, abuse the rights of the others, and even deceive themselves. The condition of
human weakness is not taken into account as a fault for Fowles but a part of the rich
fabric of humanity. Fowles focuses on the impossibility of perfection of an individual
within a society. He creates non-Meursault1like characters on purpose to show how
his readers may also come across characters like Sarah and Nicholas in their
surrounding, to create a sense of empathy. Unlike Albert Camus, Fowles is referring
to the issue of existential individualism within existing social confines. As a final
point, Fowles is motivated by the reality of the ‘human condition’ and he also sees the
imperfect functioning of the existential ideal as being a natural extension of it. Fowles
supports the idea that humanity must have freedom of choice; however, humanity also
needs to be a part of society, also must be linked to the Other, even if this is
detrimental to the existential/freedom of choice argument.

1
He is the protagonist in Albert Camus’s The Stranger / L’Etranger (1942).

56
 BIBLIOGRAPHY
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Fowles, John: French Lieutenant’s Woman, Boston, Little, Brown &

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Fowles, John: The Magus, New York, Dell Publishing, 1985.

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Green, Guy (Dir.): Candice Bergen, and Anna Karina. 20th Century Fox,
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Reizs, Karel (Dir.): The French Lieutenant’s Woman. Perf. Meryl Streep
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 The Wanderer;: or, the End of Youth, trs. by
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Zygmunt Bauman

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