A comparative study of formal and thematic responses to the representation of marriage in victorian literature in john fowles's postmodern novel the french lieutenant's woman and jeffery eugenides's metamodern novel the marriage plot

Abstract

This thesis is a comparative study of literary responses to the representation of marriage in Victorian literature in John Fowles’s Postmodern novel The French Lieutenant’s Woman and Jeffery Eugenides’s Metamodern novel The Marriage Plot. It aims specifically to examine the different ways in which Fowles and Eugenides respond to the form and content of the Victorian novel in treating marriage in relation to the respective philosophical understanding of truth. In essence, both authors seek a literary tradition that is more fully responsive to the cultural and material impulses of their new worlds. To demonstrate Fowles’s deconstruction and Eugenides’s reconstruction of truth, this thesis draws its methodological foundations on form and content from Bakhtinian, Marxist, Feminist and Metamodern concepts. These theories are pertinent to this research because, despite using various methodologies, they all elicit the Postmodern and Metamodern textual implications that Fowles and Eugenides use to find a valid contemporary voice among the overpowering influence of the classic Victorian marriage plot. The results of this study show how the Postmodern and Metamodern texts reveal a deep crack in the traditional marriage in the Victorian novel. These texts create a rich and valid source from which to examine the development of form. This study simultaneously discusses content, and how its narratives connect to larger cultural narratives of class and gender. The multidisciplinary aspect of this research emphasizes the interconnection between nineteenth, twentieth and twenty-first century literary works and cultural history. Fowles turns to the Victorian novel to deconstruct the nineteenth-century fiction and marriage, rejecting its objective truth. Eugenides, however, oscillates towards both the Victorian and Postmodern fiction in an attempt to restore truth.