The French Lieutenant's Woman - John Fowles Read Online Free PDF Page B

a thing she knew to be vaguely
sinful, yet necessary, like a hot bath or a warm bed on a winter's night.
She imagined herself for a truly sinful moment as someone wicked--a dancer,
an actress. And then, if you had been watching, you would have seen something
very curious. For she suddenly stopped turning and admiring herself in
profile; gave an abrupt look up at the ceiling. Her lips moved. And she
hastily opened one of the wardrobes and drew on a peignoir.
    For what had crossed her
mind--a corner of her bed having chanced, as she pirouetted, to catch her
eye in the mirror--was a sexual thought: an imagining, a kind of dimly
glimpsed Laocoon embrace of naked limbs. It was not only her profound ignorance
of the reality of copulation that frightened her; it was the aura of pain
and brutality that the act seemed to require, and which seemed to deny
all that gentleness of gesture and discreetness of permitted caress that
so attracted her in Charles. She had once or twice seen animals couple;
the violence haunted her mind.
    Thus she had evolved a kind
of private commandment-- those inaudible words were simply "I must not"--whenever
the physical female implications of her body, sexual, menstrual, parturitional,
tried to force an entry into her consciousness. But though one may keep
the wolves from one's door, they still howl out there in the darkness.
Ernestina wanted a husband, wanted Charles to be that husband, wanted children;
but the payment she vaguely divined she would have to make for them seemed
excessive. She sometimes wondered why God had permitted such a bestial
version of Duty to spoil such an innocent longing. Most women of her period
felt the same; so did most men; and it is no wonder that duty has become
such a key concept in our understanding of the Victorian age--or for that
matter, such a wet blanket in our own.*
[* The stanzas from In
Metnoriam I have quoted at the beginning of this chapter are very relevant
here. Surely the oddest of all the odd arguments in that celebrated anthology
of after-life anxiety is stated in this poem (xxxv). To claim that love
can only be satyr-shaped if there is no immortality of the soul is clearly
a panic flight from Freud. Heaven for the Victorians was very largely heaven
because the body was left behind--along with the Id.]
    Having quelled the wolves
Ernestina went to her dressing table, unlocked a drawer and there pulled
out her diary, in black morocco with a gold clasp. From another drawer
she took a hidden key and unlocked the book. She turned immediately to
the back page. There she had written out, on the day of her betrothal to
Charles, the dates of all the months and days that lay between it and her
marriage. Neat lines were drawn already through two months; some ninety
numbers remained; and now Ernestina took the ivory-topped pencil from the
top of the diary and struck through March 26th. It still had nine hours
to run, but she habitually allowed herself this little cheat. Then she
turned to the front of the book, or nearly to the front, because the book
had been a Christmas present. Some fifteen pages in, pages of close handwriting,
there came a blank, upon which she had pressed a sprig of jasmine. She
stared at it a moment, then bent to smell it. Her loosened hair fell over
the page, and she closed her eyes to see if once again she could summon
up the most delicious, the day she had thought she would die of joy, had
cried endlessly, the ineffable . ..
    But she heard Aunt Tranter's
feet on the stairs, hastily put the book away, and began to comb her lithe
brown hair.
 
 
    6
Ah Maud, you milk-white
fawn, you are all unmeet
for a wife.
-- Tennyson, Maud (1855)
----
    Mrs. Poulteney's face,
that afternoon when the vicar made his return and announcement, expressed
a notable ignorance. And with ladies of her kind, an unsuccessful appeal
to knowledge is more often than not a successful appeal to disapproval.
Her face was admirably suited to the latter sentiment; it had