Abstract
When the film adaptation of John Fowles’sThe French Lieutenant’s Woman was screened in 1981, many critics were quick to dismiss Pinter’s screenplay as a failed representation of the “diachronic dilemma” that made the novel so successful. Pinter’s introduction of a new dimension to the work, which juxtaposes the Victorian world of Charles Smithson and Sarah Woodruff and the modern world of Mike and Anna, does not render the adaptation inferior, especially if we take into account the underlying thesis of the novel. In having the Victorian characters act out their anxieties in their pursuit of an existential freedom alongside their modern counterparts, Pinter’s screenplay brings the unending need and desire to achieve this freedom, as an Absurd but necessary pursuit, to the foreground.
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Notes
In Mel Gussow’s Conversations with Pinter (53, 100).
All quotations from Pinter’s adaptation of Fowles’s novel are taken from The Screenplay of the French Lieutenant’s Woman (1981), hereafter abbreviated as SFLW.
For negative reviews, see Tony Whall’s “Karel Reisz’s The French Lieutenant’s Woman: Only the Name Remains the Same,” and Vincent Canby’s review of the film in the New York Times. Positive reviews include Enoch Brater’s “The French Lieutenant’s Woman: Screenplay and Adaptation,” and Joanne Klein’s Making Pictures: The Pinter Screenplays.
All quotations from John Fowles’s The French Lieutenant’s Woman are taken from the 1969 Jonathan Cape edition, hereafter abbreviated as FLW.
The details of this theme is discussed at length in my essay, “Remembrance of Things Past and Present: Chronological Time and Cognitive Sensibilities in Harold Pinter’s Silence and The Proust Screenplay.” Many of Pinter’s original plays, like Landscape (1967), Silence (1968), Old Times (1970), and No Man’s Land (1974), are preoccupied with the notions of subjective memory and the mind’s curious perceptions of time. These works are normally referred to as the Pinter’s memory plays. His interest in these themes is reflected in the choice of novels that he has adapted into screenplays, most notably, L. P. Hartley’s The Go-Between and Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu. Pinter may well be refining his technique of presenting multiple views of time after The Proust Screenplay, which was written shortly before the screenplay of The French Lieutenant’s Woman; the structure in both works is similar (also see his comments on this in Gussow, 52 and 53). Peter Conradi points out the Proustian echoes in The French Lieutenant’s Woman: “Proust is an early twentieth-century seeker after a late nineteenth-century past, used here as a symbol of the sensual plentitude of memory in the nineteenth century but within a text which reminds us that it is produced from the mid-twentieth,” and that “the effect is a startling mixture of prospect and retrospect, each framed within our own retrospect so that the scene is contemporal with its own tranquil imagined future (to itself), past (to us) re-enactment” (John Fowles 74–75).
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© 2013 Jane Wong Yeang Chui
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Wong, J.Y.C. (2013). Conceptualizing Freedom and Desire in the Film Adaptation of The French Lieutenant’s Woman. In: Affirming the Absurd in Harold Pinter. Palgrave Pivot, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137343079_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137343079_5
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