Conclusion: Fictions of the Garden

Abstract

In an essay written only a few years before The French Lieutenant’s Woman, John Fowles singles out withdrawal from the public arena as the defining trait of the English (as opposed to the British) character. Like the novels with which the previous chapter ended, Fowles shows a degree of sympathy with the desire for retrenchment into the private domain, but again like them he disputes its ultimate goal, reflecting that while ‘withdrawal is a kind of movement’ or, in other words, an act significant in a historical context, it is ‘not necessarily a kind of morality’ (1964: 85). The statement in many ways sums up the concern with the relationship between the individual and the historical process that pervades the 13 novels discussed in this study. They outline not only the predicament of characters caught up in situations over which they can exercise limited control and torn between active if uncertain intervention in history and the passive rewards of private fulfilment, but also the comparable quandary of the historical novelist (and, vicariously, his or her proxy in the novels, the quester after the past), who must navigate between truthfulness of representation, with its corollary partiality of vision, and historical comprehensiveness, which can only be achieved by resorting to invention.