Outside perspectives on our lives are pivotal to understand their significance (as demonstrated in The French Lieutenant’s Woman and Arcadia)
Many characters in The French Lieutenant’s Woman and Arcadia are perceived by those around them in various ways but these perceptions are highly biased and inaccurate. External perspectives of characters’ lives (and our own) are required to truly understand their significance. This is because they provide an overall depiction of the nature of a person’s behaviours and are not based on limited information. Charles (in The French Lieutenant’s Woman) is seen to be a loving and caring man from Ernestina’s perspective whereas from an external perspective, he can be judged as quite the opposite. Similarly, Thomasina Coverly (in Arcadia), is seen as an innocent child as she describes her ‘understanding’ of carnal embrace to Lady Croom. Both of these characters are seen as completely innocent from the perspective of those around them (Ernestina and Lady Croom, respectively) whereas, from an external perspective (that of the reader or an omniscient observer) it is known that they are much less innocent than they may seem. This has implications on the ability of characters (Lady Croom and Ernestina, for example) to understand their lives without gaining an external perspective: in short, they cannot. With outside perspectives, we become able to understand our lives more clearly as we have the ability to ensure that we are not viewing situations in ways that are biased by our own experiences.
In The French Lieutenant’s Woman, Fowles shows the reader that the way in which a person behaves with you does not accurately depict the kind of person they are. This is very clear in Charles’ relationship with Ernestina in that Ernestina sees Charles as loving and caring partner whereas Charles, in reality, does not care enough about this relationship to try and protect it. “Charles, as you will have noticed, had more than one vocabulary. With Sam in the morning, with Ernestina across a gay lunch, and here in the role of Alarmed Propriety… he was almost three different men….”. How Charles seemed to Ernestina would have changed drastically had Ernestina learnt about what was going on in his head and the things he was hiding. “I too have been looking for the right girl. And I have not found her” is what Charles says to his uncle when they are in conversation. Charles is engaged to Ernestina and yet is not sure that she is the “right girl”. On the contrary, Ernestina is heavily invested in this relationship and these varying levels of interest only cause both Ernestina and Charles harm later in the novel. Had Ernestina known about the conversation that Charles had with his uncle, her outlook on her engagement would have adapted accordingly. If Ernestina was able to have an external viewpoint on certain situations, such as the aforementioned conversation and the comparative amount of devotion she had to Charles, she would have been able to assess the significance of the relationship that she and Charles had. By understanding this significance, she could gain a better understanding of whether she was wrong to be so passionate about Charles and hence realise that what she was dedicating her life to was not significant at all.
Similarly, in Arcadia, Mr Chater requires an outside viewpoint on his life to clearly understand how foolish he is. This is particularly true in the situation that occurs with regards to his wife and Septimus Hodge. At first, he reacts in a realistic manner when he calls out Septimus for being a “damned lecher” and “blackguard”. This is an appropriate reaction if your wife has cheated on you (something to obviously be mad about). This being said, he is “flattered out of [his] course” when Septimus starts praising him as a “[poet] of the first rank” and successfully manipulates him into thinking that “there is nothing that [his wife] would not do for [him]”. Mr Chater, who has been buttered up into thinking that his wife has not only been faithful to him but has actually gone to the length of persuading Septimus through sexual means of Mr Chater’s poetic prowess, is a fool. It is apparent to the reader that Mr Chater is an idiot who cannot tell apart a compliment from bait that lures him down a rabbit hole of misperceived adultery. The reason that the reader knows better than to believe what Septimus is saying is because he himself does not think Chater a great poet which makes it clear that his entire colloquy with Chater was nonsense. Stoppard has done well to portray a scenario of absolute absurdity on the part of Mr Chater, and a masterclass in manipulation by Septimus which makes plain the fact that with just interactions to base ourselves off, we are doomed to a lack of understanding of relationships in our lives.
Furthermore, Thomasina (in Arcadia) is far less ‘innocent’ that Lady Croom knows. When there is a discussion going on between her mother, Mr Noakes and her tutor, she asks Septimus if the discussion is centred around carnal embrace when her mother asks “what [she knows] of carnal embrace”. Thomasina, so as to keep listening to the conversation, passes off her mention of carnal embrace as hugging the side of beef which does the job of keeping her mother in the dark about her knowledge of sex and her place in the conversation secured. Lady Croom judges Thomasina as the person she sees her to be rather than who she is. Although Thomasina is not a bad person in reality, she is quite less innocent, so to speak, as her mother believes her to be. Once again, it is evident that Lady Croom needs an outside perspective on Thomasina’s life to truly understand it and, in turn, understand how she fits into her life through gaining a more accurate portrayal of their relationship. At the end of the day, our experiences shape our beliefs and outside perspectives, by nature, do not come to us often. With them, however, the fourth wall of life can be broken and we can understand our relationships with others on a deeper level and gain a better understanding of how significant certain aspects of our life, and our lives themselves, are.
Although it is axiomatic that the presence of outside perspectives in one’s judgement only enhances their understanding of everything, this point could also be argued against (but not quite). Outside perspectives do have the potential to increase knowledge about certain situations, for example, Ernestina’s knowledge about her relationship with Charles or Lady Croom’s relationship with her daughter. Despite that fact, they (external viewpoints) are not, in and of themselves, accurate, necessarily. This is one of the differences between The French Lieutenant’s Woman and Arcadia: in the latter, there are no characters that cannot be understood accurately from an external/omniscient perspective in that all the characters in Arcadia can be understood by the reader. There is not the element of unpredictability that Fowles talks about in The French Lieutenant’s Woman. In Arcadia, the characters do not “disobey [their creator]” as they do in Fowles’ novel. The prostitute that Charles meets (in The French Lieutenant’s Woman) is not a bad person, per se, but from an outside perspective she is just a prostitute and nothing that would conventionally be regarded as respectable. This explanation could be used to suggest that she is a better person than she may appear and her only shortcoming is that “[she doesn’t] know [any other way]”. Conversely, it could be argued that, from a direct interaction with her, Sarah the prostitute seems to be a good person in a bad situation. With this as the foundation of a perception and the addition of outside perspectives (the fact that she is a prostitute), one is able to convey a very different viewpoint (not unreasonably) that Sarah is not as good a person as she may seem to be. This is an excellent example of how perceptions, without outside perspectives, can, very clearly, differ greatly from reality (this is especially true in The French Lieutenant’s Woman).
All in all, whether it is Ernestina understanding her relationship with Charles, Lady Croom’ with her daughter or readers trying to understand and evaluate the kind of person that the prostitute that Charles meets is (in The French Lieutenant’s Woman), the significance of our lives cannot be understood maximally unless outside perspectives are gained. The way we understand our own lives is influenced heavily by our relationships with other people and our relationships are affected by how people interact with us. Our interactions with people give us an image of them in our minds, but this image could be wildly inaccurate as the way people interact with us may not be the actual representation of who they are. With outside perspectives, as Fowles and Stoppard demonstrate in The French Lieutenant’s Woman and Arcadia, respectively, we can see how people behave as a whole (not just with us) and this allows for a clearer understanding of the people in our lives and hence our lives themselves.
Bibliography:
- Fowles, J. (1969). The French lieutenant’s woman. Vintage.
- Graham, W. (2016). Arcadia at A Noise Within — The Santa Barbara Independent. The Santa Barbara Independent. Retrieved 21 November 2021, from https://www.independent.com/2016/11/15/arcadia-noise-within/.
- Stoppard, T. (1993). Arcadia. Faber and Faber Limited.
- Taylor, J. (2019). Perception Is Not Reality. Psychology Today. Retrieved 21 November 2021, from https://www.psychologytoday.com/au/blog/the-power-prime/201908/perception-is-not-reality#:~:text=Perception%20acts%20as%20a%20lens,of%20what%20reality%20truly%20is.
- The French Lieutenant’s Woman. Mondo-digital.com. (2015). Retrieved 21 November 2021, from https://www.mondo-digital.com/frenchlieu.html.
- Voss, P. (2020). De-scription versus Pre-scription — and other Ethical Confusions. Medium. Retrieved 21 November 2021, from https://medium.com/@petervoss/de-scription-versus-pre-scription-and-other-ethical-confusions-b506f2377d42.
