Academic Journal of Humanities & Social Sciences, 2025, 8(11); doi: 10.25236/AJHSS.2025.081104.
Min Lu
Foreign Languages College, Inner Mongolia University, Hohhot, Inner Mongolia, 010021, China
John Fowles’ The French Lieutenant’s Woman is a postmodern metafiction. Set in Victorian England, the novel centers on Charles Smithson, torn between his fiancée Ernestina and Sarah Woodruff stigmatized as “The French Lieutenant’s Woman”. This paper uses Mikhail Bakhtin’s polyphonic theory, including four core tenets: independent consciousness, incomplete dialogue, simultaneous chronotope and carnivalization, to analyze the metafiction. The novel embodies Bakhtinian polyphony through autonomous character voices which reflects Victorian complexities, three open endings that leave ideological tensions unresolved, concentrated scenes amplifying clashes of consciousness, and carnivalization which subverts norms via hierarchy disruption and an intrusive, carnival-like narrator. Therefore, Fowles integrates Bakhtin’s tenets into a dialogic, non-monologic narrative, solidifying his status as a bridge between modernism and postmodernism.
John Fowles; The French Lieutenant’s Woman; Bakhtin’s Polyphonic Theory
Min Lu. Bakhtinian Polyphony in The French Lieutenant’s Woman. Academic Journal of Humanities & Social Sciences (2025), Vol. 8, Issue 11: 17-22. https://doi.org/10.25236/AJHSS.2025.081104.
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