Chapter II
Woman

     If we read the novel by the surface suggestion of the title, The French Lieutenant's Woman, and see only a relationship between men and women, or a patriarchal frame enframing Sarah, we should be deceived.  That is not the whole story.  We find along the revelation of Sarah's story that, the lieutenant is designed to submit to Sarah's narrative manipulations in order to fulfill her wish to emancipate her old suppressed self.  From the fact that Fowles does borrow a certain image of woman, that is the Pre-Raphaelite woman, in portraying Sarah, no matter how much Sarah is faithful to the original or deviating from it, I find it is effective to apply Francoise Meltzer's method of analyzing the author's ideas on fiction writing in terms of his or her own way of representing the portraits in their own works.  These portraits could be historically present or imagined.  A novelist is like a painter, in the sense that he or she sketches his or her characters, though in words.  Thus, as a painter, in "painting" his characters, an author should be aware of the limits of the canvas, that is the very concept of the frame.

Title as index of framing/de-framing

     The title of The French Lieutenant's Woman, before we examine the different kinds of frames from the contents of the novel, has already indicated the epistemological frame delimiting Sarah and Sarah's story as a frame story.  Through fabricating a non-existing personal history, Sarah employs the role of a fallen woman, a fictional identity, and creates a liaison with a French lieutenant.  As the villagers believe in this fiction without sympathy and comprehension, the title directly points out their limited vision in taking Sarah as a fallen woman.  The title, revealing the "false" relationship between Sarah and the French lieutenant, announces Sarah's story of her sexuality as the frame story which precedes the narrator's revelation of his textuality as an on-going process of writing.  We shall find that through the false story she tells, Sarah frees herself from the restriction of the society and thus ruptures the epistemological frame.

     French, in the title, as a foreign language and a foreign state, indicates something unreal for Sarah.  She has mentioned the unreality she feels of that language to Charles in Chapter Twenty.  Moreover, as French existentialism signifies an important intellectual development in human liberation, and the historical sentiment of freedom disseminated from the French Revolution, French thus is appropriate for Sarah to cast her imagination upon her emancipation.  Or, as M. Keith Booker suggests, French thinkers in the last few decades have been reminding us of the "intimate and inextricable links that exist between sexuality and language" (178), French, therefore, serves more significant for Sarah to intertwine her story on the subject of sexuality.  Furthermore, as the French lieutenant's name "Varguennes" looks almost the same as "Vagueness" in its spelling, I suspect that a feeling of vagueness about oneself seems to be suggested in Sarah when she brings out this French man and makes up all the stories (certainly it is Fowles who manages all these in the background).  Nevertheless, the vagueness in this fiction permits her a space of imagination.  By imagining a false identity as the French lieutenant's woman, she alienates herself not only from her people, but also from her womankind.  Unlike her former hostess Mrs. Talbot, Sarah does not satisfy herself with husband and children; unlike Ernestina, Sarah does not have gentleman chasers nor social life but faces her solitude, as well as sexual imagination, honestly.  This alienation occasions her to become an outcast and this state promises her freedom and subjectivity.  Therefore, we see Sarah actively wielding her will power, rather than passively succumbing to any others.  In appropriating the French lieutenant, Sarah changes the title into The French Lieutenant of the Woman .  What reflected from the alternative title, however, is not only in its literal meaning, a reverse power relationship between woman and man, but metaphorically the demonstration of a woman's freedom of imagination, and further a test to the reader's reading capacity and attitude offered by the author.

Title as index of ekphrasis

     Besides the free play of story-telling on Sarah's side, Fowles's choosing this title makes the novel a verbal portrait of Sarah.  Fowles once reveals that FLW originates from a visual image coming into his mind one morning when he is still in bed half asleep: a "woman stands at the end of a deserted quay and stares out to sea" ("Notes" 136).  Sarah's image at its first stage, therefore, is a static image like a painted portrait.  The several descriptions of Sarah unravel picture after picture with Sarah as the model.  Giving Sarah flesh and blood, Fowles applies the images of the Pre-Raphaelite Women.

     The French Lieutenant's Woman thus functions as a picture title.  A picture title can be said the most ostensible and general verbal representation of the picture (Heffernan 303).  It serves as a guide to the interpretation of the picture (Fisher 288).  If one has the experience of looking from a picture to its title and looking back, one would find that title and picture become "signifier to the signified" for each other (Heffernan Note 26, 315).  That is, a picture title is to interpret, to signify, and to represent a picture.  The title The French Lieutenant's Woman seems to suggest a Pre-Raphaelite fallen woman, mysterious and erotic, with rich rippled hair and full lips, but this title, containing a falsehood hidden and needed to be explored, goads rather than guides us to re-consider the superficial information of the representational title.

     To analyze the title itself, we have already obtained the suggestive value ekphrasis contains: to question the adequacy of any representation.  James. A. W. Heffernan declares that what ekphrasis "represents in words must itself be representational" (300).  The Pre-Raphaelite Women which Sarah's image is based upon demonstrate the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood's representation of women through paintings.  Representation, according to Francoise Meltzer, means to present the "idealized" object under the idea of imitation which is only "a means" but not "an end" (8).  Fowles's representation of Sarah as a means shall index further Fowles's attitude towards novel-writing, and lead us to ponder upon the relationship between fiction and history, except the more direct question of writing and iconization (Meltzer 44).

Thesis

     The descriptions of Sarah's elaboration of her sexual identity occupy a large portion in the novel.  In addition, the reports related to the nineteenth-century men's or women's attitudes towards sexuality can often be found too, especially in Chapter Thirty-five.  According to my observation, this large quantity of discussions on sexuality is by no means Fowles's faithful copy of the nineteenth-century idea of woman's sexuality.  In this chapter, I will focus on the Pre-Raphaelite origin in Sarah and examine Fowles's verbal representation and revision of this visual image.  We shall see in Fowles's descriptions of Sarah's hair a gradual process of revelation of the Pre-Raphaelite Women which Sarah's image is based upon.  Associating Sarah with the images of four Pre-Raphaelite Women, Elizabeth Siddall, Jane Morris, Christina Rossetti, and Fanny Cornforth, I shall show that Fowles revises further the Pre-Raphaelite Women in Sarah and thus challenges "the art [he] ostensibly salutes" (Heffernan 309).  In another word, Fowles epitomizes in the dichotomous heritage between the Pre-Raphaelite Women and Sarah a revisionist investigation of history.

Concepts of sexuality in FLW

     The references and quotations Fowles takes from the nineteenth-century discourses on sexuality reveal his comments and criticism.  Women's situation in the nineteenth century, the alleged "golden age of repression", was in its most conflicting state (qtd. in Conradi 60).  It is not saying that women then were too much different from women now, but that women's attitudes and the ways they were treated in the "great Feminine Century in History" were much different (Cunnington v).  The intertexts in FLW indicate that the upper- or upper-middle-class women were expected as merely domestic creatures, serving husbands and taking care of the household.  Working-class women were helping husbands do physical labour out in the mines, factories, with still the domestic duties to care for.  The extreme difference in the living situations between women of higher and lower classes engenders two obvious social phenomena.  Except the incessant balls and concerts, the higher-class ladies would often visit orphanages, hospitals, or penitentiaries to show their charity.  The lower-class women, envying the fashion and leisure, though actually boredom, of the ladies, would use their "most precious possession" in exchange for these luxuries: they developed the enterprise of prostitution (FLW 142).  Therefore, in the delineation of women in the nineteenth-century literature and painting, among the portraits of women from different walks of life, we can always see the dichotomy of virgins and whores; that is, a woman is either described as a Madonna or a femme fatale.  The very difference between them is their conception of sexuality.  No lady would admit that women have sexual pleasure; and those who demonstrate or enjoy it would be deemed as fallen.  Sexuality then was taken as the touchstone of women's supreme virtue--virginity.  Keeping her virginity carefully, a woman was secured with matrimonial happiness; violating it, she was doomed to prostitution and solitude.

     Though with a nineteenth-century body and mind, Sarah is liberated by Fowles with a soul ahead of her time.  Sarah has a foresight or a transcendental vision by which she can see through the follies of the people in her age; when the women around her still follow the nineteenth-century prudery about sex, she faces her sexuality with awareness and honesty.  She endorses her imagination in fictionalizing her sexual identity, and even materializes the false identity of a fallen woman by giving her virginity to Charles.  Sexuality, obviously, is applied in her quest for subjectivity.  Sarah uses sexuality as the subject matter of her story in order to achieve a liberation from the restraining society.  By liberating the perception about sex in herself, Sarah is able to see the hope of equalization between man and woman, and is able to see herself in the broad daylight, and to achieve the status of a New Woman--an independent woman with her "self-knowledge and self-possession" (FLW 353).

Hair as preliminary symbol of freedom
and foreshadowing of Sarah's Pre-Raphalite Origin

     Freeing Sarah from the suppression of the conventional ideology on sex, Fowles applies the images of the Pre-Raphaelite Women.  To usher in the topic about sexuality, Fowles endows Sarah with the talents to "weave" both her experience and imagination into her story-telling.  In the delineation of Sarah's stories, her hair plays a crucial role because it leads us step by step to perceive Sarah's Pre-Raphaelite origin.  The hair motif is significant, first, because it is also the recurring motif in the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood's portrayals of women.  The Brotherhood's elaboration of women's hair in their art follow the Victorian tradition of taking hair as the metonymy of weaving threads which thus signify the net of fate as in William Holman Hunt's The Lady of Shallot (fig. 1), or as the symbol of female sexuality as in the portraits of femme fatale, or in many of Rossetti's portraits of fallen women or "sex goddesses" (Marsh 28).

     Elizabeth G. Gitter in her study on the power of the Victorian women's hair also offers us substantial information which we can apply to examine Fowles's elaboration of Sarah's hair.  From her study of mythology and ballads, Gitter mentions that the strands of hair of a woman and the threads she weaves are "analogous to the narrative thread, the story line, the strands of the plot" (938).  So we perceive the rape of Philomela from the tapestry she looms; or in the fairy tale "The Goose-Girl," we recognize her princessly state by the rich and radiant golden hair she finally reveals.  The weaving of the hair itself plays the "prosthetic tongue" for these heroines to expose their experience or identity (939).  In contrast to hair as expression of violation and purity, Medusa's hair expresses her anger and revenge.  Since the dichotomous image of women exposed by the different effects of hair shown in the above instances, the hair motif fascinates the Victorian painters and writers so much that they all do their very best to explore the significance and elaborate the complexities of it.  Therefore, in Victorian fiction, such as Middlemarch, David Copperfield, or Vanity Fair, etc., we can always find a woman's hair described in considerable detail (941).  Women's hair carries multiple meanings in Victorian literature, and the meanings alter in relation to women's identities.  Nevertheless, the significance of hair is still summed up into two extremes: precious blessedness and innocence vs. fusion of the sexual lust and the lust for power as we often see in the contrast between Madonna and Medusa (943).

     Tracing the hair motif in Fowles's textual portrait of Sarah, we shall find that, succeeding the Victorian, or specifically the Pre-Raphaelite, tradition in elaborating Sarah's hair, Fowles does not delimit hair as only Sarah's instrument of expression or merely as a symbol of her sexuality.  Fowles in effect utilizes hair as a subject which exposes Sarah as the original weaver of her story and an extraordinary individualist.  Therefore, subverting the hair's superficial state as a symbol femininity, Fowles endorses it with the other suggestive values in his representation of Sarah: an accompaniment of Sarah's psychological development, an irrepressible call for her subjectivity, and an ostensible emblem of her extraordinary personality.

     An expertise in needle-work, Sarah weaves an "antimacassar" to please Mrs. Poultney, and does public penance to warm others, but interlaces the stories with her imagination to comfort herself (FLW 52).  Sarah's hair is tightened back inside the collar of her black coat when Charles first sees her at The Cobb from a distance.  The hair's color is not appealing to Charles's eyes yet; what catches his eyes is her uncommon stare "aimed like a rifle"(14).  Her manly look and her unfashionable, "bizarre", seemingly "man's riding coat" cover up her feminine sexuality (14).  Her tightened hair, echoing her hidden sexuality, shows a reserve of her personality in silence to avoid Charles's concern.

     In Charles's first encounter with Sarah vis-a-vis at the Undercliff, her hair is partly loose and half covers her cheek; its color seems a dark brown with red tints.  This new found "red tints" gives Charles a feel of "rich warmth" (62) and indicates Sarah's covered femininity.  Moreover, although Charles does not obtain any response from Sarah, he felt more attracted by her mystery.  From this time on, we will often see Sarah appear with her hair loose, often partly.

     When Charles goes for the second time on his fossil-searching trip, he meets Sarah again.  This time Sarah's hair is lightly loose because of being blown by the wind.  Her stumbling on the muddy ground gives her a look of "wild shyness" and a "faint touch of a boy caught stealing apples from an orchard" (98).  The mixture of her "tomboyish air" and "completely feminine" face (99), though repelling Charles first, gradually attracts his attention.  Not different from his fellow men, Charles pays his attention to Sarah's sexuality, though unconsciously.  On this occasion, Sarah keeps silence as her lines in their "dialogue" again.  Her later revelation of the fake truth that the lieutenant is married serves as her further answer to Charles's kindness to help with two-fold meaning: to reject Charles's concern, while inducing his further interest in her story.

     Sarah's hair is most revealing in the descriptions of nature.  The narrator has a fuller description of her hair in terms of Charles's feeling in Chapter Twenty:
 

At this meeting, the high collar and cut of Sarah's coat still give Charles the sense of "the air of a girl coachman, a female soldier" (136), to which the hair contradicts with an implication of extreme femininity.  With this fuller description of the hair in the background, Sarah gives a harangue on her experience, not keeping silence this time.  It is predictable that at this moment Charles is fully involved in Sarah's story because of her active invitation and scheming.  Her hair now, though not fully loose, yet imagined so by Charles, seems to suggest her increasingly revealing sexuality.  The red sheen here, with the unraveling of Sarah's sexuality and the mixture of masculinity/ femininity, seems to relate more directly to Rossetti's Venetian paintings, with Fanny Cornforth  as the principle model (Marsh 84); in those paintings the images of women express more the "voluptuous nature" with "richness of ornamental trappings and decoration" (Faxon 150; See Fig. 2).

     In the scene of the wood hut where Sarah falls asleep, her hair is described as loosened, like one great jewel, "resting on a dark-green Paisley scarf" (196).  This image arouses our association of it with several of Rossetti's famous paintings in which his female figures wear a green robe.  In The Blessed Damozel (fig. 3), we can see the damozel's red hair resting loosely on the green of her clothes and the richness of the red or auburn hair, decorated by a ring of stars.  The passionate embracing and kissing of the lovers behind her interestingly echoes Charles's action here; Charles at this time breaks the rule by embracing and kissing Sarah.

     The result of this transgression is Sarah's leaving for Exeter.  In Endicott's Family Hotel, Sarah "t[ears] off her bonnet and sh[akes] her hair loose in her characteristic way" (220).  From then on, Sarah keeps her hair loose fully even when Charles turns up in her hotel room.  Her hair is seen loose and falling over her green shoulders (due to the green marino shawl) and then, the hair,
 

The loose hair exposes Sarah's sexuality to its extreme of seduction; Charles, on this occasion, achieves a sexual consummation with Sarah.  Up to this moment, Sarah's search for subjectivity seems to be achieved through her sexuality.  Mistaken by his imagination of the mystery exposed, Charles's discovery of Sarah's virginity causes him only shock and more mystery.

     In the final scene in which Charles visits Sarah in Rossetti's house, her hair is "bound loosely back by a red ribbon" and "seen in all its richness, reaching almost down to her waist" (347, 349).  A New Woman now in a liberated household, Sarah does not need to hide her beauty and sexuality by binding her hair.  Her choosing to bind it, yet loosely, with a bright-color decoration, displays her easiness in coping with herself and her newly found emancipation.  Fowles's previous description of Sarah revealing fully her sexuality, echoing the mysterious femininity and unreachable goddesshood demonstrated in Rossetti's paintings modeled by Jane Morris, plays a tricky twist in Charles's self-claimed understanding of Sarah.  On the surface, Sarah seems ungenerous because by reserving her own integrity, she is not willing to give Charles a chance to grow with her (Huffaker 114).  The betrayal of Charles by his servant, Sam, prevents Sarah from reading Charles's confession letter expressing his love to her, in which his change is promising.  Yet the effort of gaining freedom and confidence may be the very reason for Sarah to be selfish and protective in her present happiness and peace.  Nevertheless, Charles's inability to read Sarah's smile at their reunion may be another cause for their separation.  Sarah's image with a smile does not relate to any specific Pre-Raphaelite Women, who either tend to have serious look and indifferent demeanor or have loose, luxuriant hair expressing female sexuality, and seems to suggest Fowles's revisionist presentation of the image beyond the PRB's representation of women.

     Sarah's smile indicates a mystery and freedom in her.  In the earlier scene of her confession, Charles and Sarah overhear a "sound of a stifled peal of laughter" (148) coming from below the slope.  As Charles finds that the sound is from Sam and Mary, "his blood froze" (149).  Sarah, however, responds to this intrusive laughter of young lovers, with a smile.  Though Charles seems to see her humor, an understanding excuse for Sam and Mary, or even an irony, in the smile, his immediate reaction to it is "as if she had thrown off her clothes" since it is timed as the lovers are "exploring" each other in a notorious place (150).  Later when he visits Sarah at Rossetti's house, he sees a sketch of a female nude in the studio "in the corner of his eye", he directly associates it with Sarah (FLW 348).  Finally, explaining the smile in Sarah's eyes at their last meeting as her last temptation, or as Medusa's laugh of revenge, Charles recalls the earlier scene of hearing the laughter of Sam and Mary and feels a nakedness in Sarah again.  Charles's interpretation of Sarah as a tempter while wishing to be connected with her reflects a dichotomous male fantasy about women and sexuality in the Victorian era.  John Ruskin's idea about Rossetti's nudes is an interesting anecdote to the Victorian sexual prudery.  According to Alicia Craig Faxon, when Rossetti was painting one of his nudes, Venus Verticordia (fig. 4), Ruskin looked in and was "upset by so much sensuality", and later complained to Rossetti about the "coarseness" of the flowers (137).  One of Rossetti's patrons wrote to a friend that: "'What does that extraordinary Ruskin mean when he speaks of the 'coarseness' of the flowers? . . . I suppose he is reflecting upon their morals, but I never heard a word breathed against the perfect respectability of a honey suckle.  Of course roses have got themselves talked about from time to time, but really if one were to listen to scandal about flowers, gardening would become impossible'" (italics mine; qtd. in Faxon 137).

     Charles's reaction to Sarah's last smile certainly fails himself to perceive it as her last test; a test through which to see whether Charles understands her nature, which could be of sensuality, irregularity and emotion, and her wish for integrity and comprehension.  Charles may win our sympathy since he seems to see through the fossil-like life he leads and manages to have a change.  Sarah's renouncing of Charles's proposal, however, does not result in a selfishness but rather an act of self-protection and understanding that Charles does not know her enough to start a new life with her.

     Choosing the hair as Sarah's instrument of expression, Fowles does not paralyze her tongue in telling her story, but lets her wield her instrument as she feels appropriate.  Through the elaboration of Sarah's hair, we shall discover Sarah's psychological development and recognize her call for subjectivity.  The delineation of Sarah's hair accompanies the development of her subjectivity; hair itself, with its characteristic way of falling loosely, suggests Sarah's irresistible call for freedom.  In those scenes when her hair is tightened up, we see Sarah more reserved; yet in the scenes when her hair is loose, she looks more active and certain.  Nevertheless, whenever we recall Sarah, we can envisage her with her hair "bound loosely back by a red ribbon" as a New Woman in Rossetti's house trying to live her life through her own choice (FLW 347).  This always present or looming image of Sarah with loosened hair seems to me more a demonstration of her strong personality different from the conventional image of her contemporary women.  As I have mentioned earlier, Fowles's treatment of the shape and color of Sarah's hair shows a process of revelation in her image.  The readers realize by and by that Sarah is modeled on the images of the Pre-Raphaelite Women.

Pre-Raphaelite Women as direct origin of Sarah's image

     Fowles's representation of Sarah with a revisionist spirit is particularly significant in his application of Rossetti's models.  The image of the Pre-Raphaelite Women, in general, is now well recognized as a synonym of a particular female appearance which has loose or rippled hair, large eyes, elongated neck and soulful expression (Altick 290, Marsh 10); this image is typically the portrayal of Rossetti's women.  Of the Pre-Raphaelite art Rossetti's portrayals of women are most discussed.  In David Sonstroem's study of Rossetti's "fair lady," he sums up Rossetti's women into four categories: the first as the women saviors, constituting of his Beatirces, Virgin Marys, Madonnas and the Blessed Damozels; the second as the femme fatales, such as Lilith, Helen of Troy, etc.; the third as sinful women in need of help from men, like the fallen women figures, Jenny, or the heroine of Found; the fourth as women victims damaged by men, like Ophelia ("Preface" 3-4).  Interestingly, a mixture of these four images seems to be demonstrated in the depiction of Sarah as we examine the four famous models of Rossetti--Elizabeth Siddall, Jane Morris, Christina Rossetti, and Fanny Cornforth.  Sonstroem states further that Rossetti's different fantasies lead him to concentrate only on one kind of woman figure at one time; but after mid-1860, Rossetti's oeuvre contains a combination of Madonna and femme fatale (3-4) .  Sarah's hair of the color of dark brown or "red tints" suggests both virginity and sensuality, reminding us of Elizabeth Siddall, who models for Rossetti as the heroine of romance, Virgin Mary, or particularly his Beatrice, in Paolo and Francesca, Ecce Ancilla Domini! (The Annunciation), Beatrice Meeting Dante at a Marriage Feast, and Beata Beatrix (figs. 5, 6, 7 & 8).  The mixture of masculinity and femininity in Sarah's demeanor and feature reminds us of another typical Rossetti's portrayal of women with manly look (indicating strong facial features), yet full and round feminine figure, modeled by Jane Morris in the subjects of mysterious goddesses and eternal beauty in Proserpina, Astarte Syriaca, and La Pia de’ Tolomei, to name only a few (figs. 9, 10, & 11).  According to Sonstroem, we may say that Rossetti's life and work was closely related with women; the subject matters of his famous poetry or paintings were women around him ("Preface" 4).  He sees in the relation of Rossetti's life and work with women a demonstration of his fantasy life ("Preface" 6).  Recalling the time span from 1860's to Rossetti's death, we know that it is also the time that his frames transmit more modern sense of simplicity to reinforce the painted images.  That is, the simplicity of the frame sets off strikingly the dichotomous complexity of the image of women in his works.  Alicia Craig Faxon, examining Rossetti's life and work chronologically, concludes that the woman in Rossetti's later works is "no longer an object for viewing but, unequivocally, a subject" (200).  In other words, women can be subjects, though as "projections of the artist's anima and as sacred icons of a new religion that worships beauty, uniting sacred and profane love" (200).  Rossetti's female portraits are objects of art, whereas the strong materiality and revealing sensuality disclosed from them enrich their objecthood with subjectivity.  Applying Rossetti's portraits of women, Fowles subverts the conventional Victorian images of women.  Moreover, as Rossetti presents his women in dichotomy in his fantasy, in Sonstroem's terms, or to use Christina Rossetti's words, in his "dream" ("Studio" Norton 1505), Fowles destabilizes the frame of this dichotomy further by delineating Sarah's character as an endless difference (Neary 171).

     Fowles first touches upon the "faintly masculinized Victorian female" (Huffaker 91) in his introduction of a reprint of Sabine Baring-Gould's Mehalah on its eponymous heroine.  He is obviously attracted by her
 

In this sense, Robert Huffaker concludes that Fowles leaves his heroine Sarah "living with . . . the Pre-Raphaelites in the summer of 1869" (92).  Barry N. Olshen informs us that in a letter to him, Fowles has mentioned that Sarah "was intended physically to recall Elizabeth Siddal[l], the favorite model of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood" (126).

     Obviously for Fowles, the "distinctly masculine cast" of the Pre-Raphaelite Women stands for the symbol of a breakthrough against the conventional ideology about women.  Applying the image in depicting Sarah then, Fowles is affirming the revolutionary force of the image.  Sarah's image, with its Pre-Raphaelite origin, is thus deliberately designed as a mixture of femininity and masculinity in Fowles's mind; nevertheless, these two qualities are coexistent with rather than opposite to each other.  This coexistence of oppositions is what Fowles believes necessary and beneficial to any human being in his philosophical pensées, The Aristos.  Fowles does not present Sarah as a feminist in general terms; instead, by endowing Sarah with a composite image of masculinity and femininity without clarification, Fowles claims a freedom for Sarah beyond any categorization.

     Sarah's image can be particularly seen as a mixture of the four famous models of Rossetti: Elizabeth Siddall, Jane Morris, Christina Rossetti, and Fanny Cornforth.  From Fowles's descriptions of Sarah, we can first infer in the image a composite of Rossetti's two best-known models: Elizabeth Siddall and Jane Morris.  William, Rossetti's brother, records his impressions of the two women respectively as follows.  First, about Elizabeth Siddall:
 

 And then, on Jane Morris:
 

Sarah's "exophthalmic dark-brown eyes with their clear whites" (98), her dark-brown hair with red tints, her solitary exoticism, all remind us of her likeness to both Elizabeth Siddall and Jane Morris.  As Margaret Bozenna Goscilo observes, however, if we read a fuller description of Sarah, we will find almost a translation of Jane Morris into words (FLW 70):
 

The association is most obvious when we recall Sarah's dark-brown hair with red tints laying on her green marino shawl or her wandering in the scenes of nature, and then relate these pictures with Rossetti's "preferred mise-en-scene: a red-tressed, green-clad and/or green-embowered beauty" (Goscilo 70-71) looming languidly in a canvas containing Jane Morris, as in Proserpine, La Pia de’ Tolomei, and The Day Dream (see Figs. 9, 11 & 12).

     The air of mystery revealed from Jane Morris's fused image of "the voluptuousness combined with the dreamy, the intense with the languid" (Hutcheon 130), according to Jan Marsh, serves as the essence of the third type of Pre-Raphaelite "stunner" (26): "the Eternal Feminine" in the fin de siècle (28).  Rossetti's portrayal modeling on Jane Morris apparently and emotionally expresses a worshipping "fervour of a devotee" (Marsh 128; see figs. 9 & 10) to this goddess Jane.  Rossetti's affection to Jane Morris fails him to see her real self as "sensible, practical and intelligent, with a witty and sensitive outlook on life" but takes her as an icon to worship throughout his life (Marsh 130).  While depicting Sarah as mysterious and melancholy, however, Fowles deems the mystery of Sarah as the signifier of her self-knowledge and self-possession, and thus ridicules men's perception of her.

     When consulted by Harold Pinter upon the film adaptation of FLW, Fowles said to Pinter: "Go off and do what you like . . .just don't explain Sarah" (qtd. in Johnstone 69).  Fowles's rejection to explain Sarah, (when demonstrated in the novel, he uses all kinds of rumors to describe her), to keep Sarah as an enigma, is his characterization of Sarah.  The significance behind it is to subvert the convention of characterization, in which a character is always delineated with a "sum of certain superficial traits" (Tarbox 81).  Moreover, Sarah's mystery guards her from a certain explanation, which echoes the essence of reality the text (FLW) ingeniously sees: always changing, unplanned, and full of hazards.  Sarah's reality, in the context of the novel, is mystery; her nature is incomprehensible, escaping from any rational and fixed explication, and thus discloses a possibility of endless difference (Neary 171).

     While the image of Jane Morris indicates strength of selfhood with mystery, the image of Siddall connotes power of change with tenderness.  According to my observation, Siddall's image seems to represent the first and earliest type of the Pre-Raphaelite "stunner": "the fair, demure, modest maiden with her innocent attractions"(Marsh 22; see fig. 13).  She very often models for Rossetti on the topics of romance, medieval legends, and pale ladies of death, which we can see from the pictures modeled by her as earlier mentioned.  Siddall's modeling as Beatrice in a series of Rossetti's paintings is significant.  Beatrice, in the real life of the historical Dante, the writer of The Divine Comedy, is his inspiration for work; while in The Divine Comedy, she plays an angelic spirit, asking Virgil to guide Dante the poet back from his wanderings.  Beatrice to Dante is the inspiration and the muse of his works, and therefore, Siddall to Rossetti.  Siddall's genius in "conception and color", however, does not limit her as only a muse but make her self-taught in painting as an artist (qtd. in Faxon 141).  If we compare her self-portrait with Rossetti's portrait of her, we shall find that she presents herself more as an "anxious and self-critical young woman" than merely a "beautiful but decidedly glamorous" portrayal of Rossetti's (Marsh 22; See fig. 14).

     Sarah's physical likeness to Siddall is seen in her sometimes smallness, fragility, tenderness, and innocence.  Sarah's association with Siddall, moreover, can be seen from her guiding Charles towards his self transformation, just as the Beatrice Siddall models in guiding Dante Rossetti.  Another meaningful connection between them is the act of changing names.  Siddall changed the spelling of her original surname "Siddal" to "Siddall" after she abandoned her profession of modeling and started her artist career (Marsh 21).  Sarah does not only change her surname, but also her identity, from "Miss Woodruff" to "Mrs. Roughwood" when she moves to Rossetti's house and works as his secretary and model occasionally.  Woodruff, records The American Heritage Dictionary, is a kind of plant "having small white flowers and narrow, fragrant leaves used as flavoring and in sachets" (1389) .  Roughwood, literally, means wood with uneven surface or coarse touch; or it could also mean the thing in its natural state.  Therefore, the change of the name suggests a decision to abstain any decorative or auxiliary quality, and to assert a tougher and natural new identity.

     Sarah, instead of presenting herself as a painter, expresses her creativity and autonomy as a story-teller and a performer.  Fowles tells us that Sarah has intelligence, insight, and especially talents in telling stories.  She has "an aesthetic sense," we are told, but it is perhaps more an emotional sense (220).  While Siddall demonstrates her imagination and originality in painting, Sarah displays her emotional sense, her intuition, and intelligence in her story-telling accompanied with acting.  Sarah's job at Rossetti's house as his amanuensis or sometimes his model can be seen as her temporary position at the beginning of her independent life.  Her determinate rejection of Charles's proposal, and her contentment with her present state, though as an assistant, both suggest a new understanding about herself and a choice out of her own free will.  She might develop her narrative skills as to be a writer of literature or art criticism; we seem to see the contour of these two possibilities from the introduction of Christina Rossetti and Sarah's quoting Ruskin's theory of "an inconsistency of conception" to Charles (351).

     Christina Rossetti, often modeled for her brother Dante Rossetti as Virgin Mary, holds her "aesthetics of renunciation" in contrast to Sarah's aesthetics of emotion (Gilbert and Gubar 539).  The two famous paintings she models on Virgin Mary are Ecce Ancilla Domini (fig. 6) and The Girlhood of Mary Virgin (Faxon 52).  In the first painting, she models on a Mary with a shrinking pose which, according to Faxon, has a literary source in Luke 1:29 suggesting that "she was troubled" or a visual source from an Italian painting of the same topic (55).  In the second painting, we see a Mary with a demure attitude towards her education of embroidery.  These two images of Mary seem to echo Christina's personal experience in her life and work.  According to Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, Christina Rossetti very often expresses the concept of self-effacement of women and reveals an "aesthetics of renunciation" in her poems (554).  She discloses the idea that, in Gilbert's and Gubar's words, only renunciation and anguish can be suitable source for woman, and "young woman poets should not loiter in the glen of imagination" which is the haunt of the men writers (572-3).  Nevertheless, before Christina Rossetti "learns the lesson of renunciation" (Gilbert and Gubar 573), her conflicting self is referred to by her father as "that angelic little demon of a Christina" or by her brother William Rossetti as having "an inherent tendency to rebel" and being "hardly less passionate than Gabriel" (qtd. in Miller 70).  Perhaps it is this potential and strong impulse which once constitute her consciousness of gender that lead her to "criticize the conventional representation of women in Pre-Raphaelite art" while her "stern religious vision controls the sensuous impulses typical of Pre-Raphaelite poetry and painting" (Norton 1502).  According to Nan Miller, Christina Rossetti was once "troubled" by her brother Dante's reaction to the sensuousness she expressed in her poetry.  Miller says, Rossetti, like Charles, or we might say, like most men of his time, could not admit that "spirit or passion may also be a woman's 'primary impulse'" (72).  Therefore, Christina's submitting to "an existence of self-conscious repression" might be the result of Dante Rossetti's discouraging her expression of passion in her works.

     Christina Rossetti's conflicting self reflects the spirit of the time just too vividly: the two-mindedness of the Victorians.  Her conflicting spirit is seen by Fowles and introduced at the end of the novel:
 

His further comment or report that Christina Rossetti has once been called in Punch, a famous newspaper of the time, "the sobbing abbess, the hysterical spinster of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood" (357), might remind the reader of Sarah's condition; but imaging Sarah as "sobbing" or "hysterical" is either obsolete or false.  When Christina Rossetti renunciates her passion to religion in her art and life, Sarah is designated as an artist fulfilling herself with imagination and emotion in life.  Wading across the mud, Sarah has reached a territory under her control.  Perhaps, not being given the role of a specific artist is Sarah's enactment of Ruskin's theory of "an inconsistency of conception" and also Fowles's revision of Sarah's image to transcend the "idealized" image of the Pre-Raphaelite Women, who were composed by the PRB under a wish "to be one-minded about art and life" (FLW 289), yet in an "inward" and "involute" age.

     The image of Sarah is most prominently alluded to an outcast.  This burgeoning image of Sarah, described by Fowles in his "Notes on an Unfinished Novel,"
 

To present Sarah as an outcast in the prudish mid-Victorian society is to give her the identity of a fallen woman.

     The fallen woman is a recurring motif in the portraits of the Pre-Raphaelite Women.  Rossetti's sympathy with fallen women was noted in his group.  He was quite aware that, according to Faxon, for every fallen woman there must be a fallen man.  In a letter to Ford Madox Brown, he made an analogy further between an artist and a prostitute: "I have often said that to be an artist is just the same thing as to be a whore, as far as dependence on the whims and fancies of individuals is concerned" (qtd. in Faxon 67).  Fowles, in a latest interview with Dianne Vipond, compares writers to prostitutes as well: "they know they have to sell by physical appearance, though underneath they may have far more serious intentions and meanings" (19).  Rossetti's assertion projects his own financial dependence on his patrons; Fowles's comparison, however, affirms the intention and self-motivation of any individual.

     The theme of the fallen woman is one of the principal female conditions in the Victorian age, which reflects one side of the Victorian two-mindedness toward female sexuality.  Trying to free from this prudery towards sex and demonstrate their social consciousness, the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood have contributed their genius in portraying the fallen women.  In Rossetti's famous painting Found with Fanny Cornforth as the model (see fig. 15), the fallen heroine is depicted with an expression of shame and regret--a typical expression a fallen woman is expected to have.  On the contrary, the fallen prostitute in Rossetti's poem "Jenny," arousing his understanding that behind every fallen woman there is a fallen man, "immodestly" shows a "[l]azy laughing languid" posture, unashamed (Lang 11).  The former description of the fallen woman in paint is Rossetti's representation of a social phenomenon and the latter in words is his complaint of the injustice imposed on prostitutes or a self-reflection of his own situation as an artist depending on the fancy of his patrons.

     The expression of shame and regret is frequently seen in Sarah in public while in the encounters with Charles, the "laughing languid" posture is likewise hinted from Charles's viewpoint, particularly in their first private encounter.  Fowles describes it as follows:
 

The "[a]nother girl", appearing in Charles's memory, along with the female images in other passages in the novel, suggests a prostitute or a fallen woman (99,115,126).  The sleeping pose of Sarah or the girl may remind the reader of the prostitute in Rossetti's "Jenny."  In the poem, Jenny, with "wealth of loosened hair," fair, soft and tired, likewise sleeps "hard and fast," upon the knee of a young poet (Rossetti, D. G. 12, 15).  Sarah's "complete abandonment of deep sleep" seems to parody Jenny's "hard and fast" sleep; her hair "half covered her cheek," Jenny's "chin nestled" in the hair; the sexuality apart from her childlike quality, Jenny's "lifted silken skirt/Advertise dainties through the dirt" (14); and most strikingly, the "scattered handful of anemones lay on the grass" around Sarah, the "golden coins" the poet "lay among" Jenny's "golden hair" (19).  This interesting intertexuality instantly suggests Sarah's association with the Pre-Raphaelite fallen women.

     In using the image of the fallen women, Fowles on the surface follows Rossetti and presents Sarah in the dichotomy of femme fatale/Madonna, yet his purpose is to search out the originator(s) of this problematic dichotomy, to expose the Victorian ma(e)n's hypocrisy, and condemn him/them.  When Charles listens to Sarah's confession, the narrator says, he sees what she does not detail: her giving herself to Varguennes, the French lieutenant.  In this vision, Charles is both Varguennes enjoying Sarah and another man striking himself down.  At the time when Charles encounters with Sarah's two sleeping scenes, he naturally recalls his debauchery in his younger days with prostitutes.  That is, he associates Sarah with the fallen woman almost too instantly.  This association happens also in his experience with Ernestina.  When we see her offering Charles a chance to claim her hand, the narrator says: "in its way, as those made by the women who in the London of the time haunted the doorways round the Haymarket" (69).  In most of these scenes, we see this association naturally occurs to Charles, but what we understand from this naturalness is the narrator's vivid portrait of the men in the time: their conflicting and hypocritical feelings towards women by seeing them as virgins and fancying them as whores at the same time.  Marsh has pointed in her Pre-Raphaelite Women that in the Victorian age "women were both elevated and constrained, worshipped and restricted to specific roles" (10).  Fowles states, "Every Victorian had two minds" (FLW 288, 289); though as the most revolutionary voice of their time, the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood did not fully overthrow the influence of the social spirit.  Diagnosing the Victorian two-mindedness, Fowles applies the virgin/whore dual qualities suggested in Sarah's image as a strategy to subvert the dichotomy.  Fowles thus challenges the reader who wishes ideally to defeat the dichotomous nature of reality without being able to reckon it as part of our daily life.  Therefore, the constant association of women with prostitutes in the minds of Charles and the narrator is Fowles's reproach upon the age: an age in which the men see themselves as the victims of the fallen women while they are the victimizers of their falls.  As the fallen woman is always taken as the symbol of shame on women, Fowles, through Sarah's fabricated identity of a fallen woman, intends to search the fallen men out, and pinpoints their mistakes.  Subverting the corollary of the story of a fallen woman, Fowles tells us that the fallen woman does not fall, but the men do.

     Fowles's representation of Sarah's fallen state, moreover, is not a record of a social fact, like in Found, nor simply a poet's reflection of the injustice imposed on the prostitute or his own fate, as in "Jenny," but a parody and further a questioning of the myth of the fall.  Sarah's being recognized as a fallen woman does not only happen due to her deliberate fabrication of her story, but is enhanced by her incessant solitary walking.  The very place she walks to and where triggers the series of her falls and Charles's is the Undercliff, an "English Garden of Eden" in the days of the novel (59).  The alias of the Undercliff certainly associates Sarah and Charles with Eve and Adam; whereas in the scenes where we always see the falling flints, the slopes of cliffs, the fallen ivy, the eroding earth, and all other geographical downfalls, the implication of the fall myth prevails (Huffaker 110).  The "fallen" scenes serve as metonymy to intensify Sarah's and Charles's falls by the superficial meaning of the word, while implicitly piling up promising futures for both.  We should find that Sarah's fall is her approach to rise; in engendering Charles's fall, she actually leads him out of the cave of ignorance to climb up to a high land of self-knowledge.  By using the fall of natural features as metonymy, Fowles actually questions the conventional meaning of "rise" and "fall", and practices his philosophical thinking on the myth of fall into his fictional work.

     The Undercliff, noted for "its mysteries, its shadows, its dangers" (59), attracts Sarah for its solitude and Charles for its value of a national nature reserve.  It is the very place Charles meets Sarah alone in his fossil-searching trip by intruding into her temporary seclusion and thus stimulates the "chemistry" of Sarah.  At the end of Chapter Thirteen, the narrator tells us that Sarah's shock caused by Charles's down-staring face in the intrusion mentioned above accelerates "the speed of her fall" which may just exercise itself in her mind without this meeting (83).  The coming "fortunate fall" of Charles, though still beyond his imagination, is at hand (Cohen 155).

     Charles's first conscious fall appears in Chapter Eighteen.  At this stage, after some other meetings with Sarah, her image has already haunted him, especially when he visits the wilderness.  In this collection trip for fossils, we see the dense ivy "hanging in great ragged curtains" (112) like a tunnel over Charles's head, the fallen flints, and hear with Charles "a sound as of a falling stone" (113), and then Sarah appears again.  She admits that she follows him, which strikes him with fright while associating this experience with her rumored madness.  Yet, before he identifies her, Charles, from a certain angle, sees Sarah in light.  Here the narrator describes Sarah's very "attractiveness" in her "peculiar female face" which is "in accordance with some subtle chemistry of angle, light, mood" (113).  This description strengthens our association of Sarah with a painted portrait.  The narrator describes Sarah further: "an oblique shaft of wan sunlight . . . lit her face, her figure standing before the entombing greenery behind her; and her face was suddenly very beautiful" (113).  As Katherine Tarbox has noted (66), Sarah's image as such reminds us of Rossetti's Proserpina (fig. 9) in which the goddess stands in front of the "momentary light" in her dark green robe with "the ivy spray" setting in the background (Faxon 191).  On this occasion, Charles recalls a peasant's visual experience claiming to have seen the Virgin Mary surrounded by merciful "light" (113).  This combination of femme fatale and Madonna keeps sticking to Sarah.  She, at that moment, presents Charles two Micraster tests as gifts.  Sarah's offering of the tests later turns out to be a condition of exchange for Charles's help.  In the process of listening to Sarah's "petition," Charles feels dismayed and seems "about to be engulfed by a landslide" (116).  Fearing that a scandal might be caused by his involvement, Charles again feels as if he walks on somewhere like a "brink over an abyss" (119).  To help Sarah for Charles is an engagement in "the forbidden" rather than a chance for his change (120).

     Sarah's offering Charles with two tests reminds us instantly of Eve's offering Adam the fruit of knowledge in the Bible.  Fowles's application of the Biblical Fall, however, is to re-explain it with paradoxical illumination.  In his meditation of Adam and Eve in the Aristos, Fowles seems to foretell us his attitude toward Sarah and Charles.  He says,
 

Fowles considers Adam as a symbol of stasis or conservatism, while Eve kinesis or progress (Aristos 165-66).  The Fall is essential for progress, for self-fulfillment, and for evolution.  Identifying Sarah with Eve in this sense, I take their pre-knowledge of their "fall," the chance for their evolution, as the meeting point.  Eve, therefore, before offering Adam the forbidden fruit, has first tasted it and gained knowledge, that is, acceptance of her sexuality; Sarah could be compared to her in this way.  Before Charles is aware of his "fall" at the time of Sarah's direct petition, Sarah has sensed hers at the intrusion scene; she feels that "the speed of her fall accelerate[s]" (83).  While Sarah is offering the tests, she is offering Charles the chance for evolution.  She herself takes the chance first, and in the process of achieving it, she tempts Charles by invitation to head for a deeper understanding of himself.  She is urged by a longing for freedom and subjectivity; helping Charles for his existential growth, she is fulfilling her self-transformation.  Her offering of herself, her virginity, should not be taken as her gifts, but medium, through which she offers an invaluable gift: the choice of freedom.
 Huffaker also parallels the Undercliff with Eden and Sarah with Eve from his observation of the test-offering scenes in the fall myth.  He says:
 

The purpose of Sarah's test, for Huffaker, is to fulfill her own freedom while giving Charles his.  Huffaker applies Jungian psychology of the female mind to analyze Sarah as an anima, a seductress, a single woman envying the wives, and a new woman who cherishes her self-awareness more than love, though not with any mean thought to ruin Charles.  Nevertheless, he sees Sarah's final self-fulfillment still selfish and intolerant.  He takes it as the twentieth century's barrier to love.  Huffaker's conclusion as such seems to echo another of Fowles's ideas of Adam and Eve in the Aristos:
 

Fowles's wish of this motherhood-tolerance of woman is obviously demonstrated in the reunion scene between Sarah and Charles in the happy ending.  In the happy reunion between Sarah and Charles, we see a secular version of the Holy Family scene.  Charles is reunited with Sarah and his little daughter, Lalage--the motherhood of Sarah here may suggest the tolerance performed in their relationship.  But the irony is there: when Sarah's tears of happiness are seen, the father's cheek banged by the little girl's doll, and the whole family immersed in the perfect harmony like "a thousand violins cloy very rapidly without percussion", there is too much sweetness to be true to the reader, and certainly to Fowles himself (360).  With the same male-consciousness, Fowles wishes to reward Charles "with the woman he loved"("Hardy" 35); thus, he presents the happy ending.  On the other hand, to modify and even parody this too sweet ending by offering the unhappy one seems "more fertile and onward" to his "whole being as a writer" ("Hardy" 35).

     In the last ending, therefore, Sarah does not respond to Charles with the warm fact of a tolerant mother, but a sternest attitude of an artist who believes in the "inconsistency of conception" (351).  She, with her revealed aesthetics, believes that she should destroy the falsehood generated in their former relationship, while he only sees until their meeting "the folly of his assumption that fallen women must continue falling" (347).  In this not "less plausible" ending, we are not sure whether Sarah has a baby girl nor certain about her emotions (365).  The narrator says:
 

Sarah shows up as one mystery in gloominess, and ends up as another in brightness.  Her schematic falls pave her road to a rising status of individuality.  Her intolerance seems for me a certain reaction of one who newly wins his/her freedom or selfhood.  Fowles's sympathy with the female principle which could be the warm fact of reality, the tolerance, the anima which is the female ghost in one, all suggest the progressive or evolutionary force of the individual and the society.  He wishes that every human can be Eve-man rather than Adam-woman; by meaning so, he is affirming the progressive virtue of the female and condemning the sickness residing in "the selfish tyranny of the male" (Aristos 165).

     Fowles's questioning of the myth of fall is further demonstrated in his idea of loss and exile as necessary for a writer.  According to Peter Conradi, Fowles has referred to himself as a "novelist of loss" (27); which, as he interprets, projects Fowles's conception that writers are "living necessarily in exile, [as] outsiders even in their own country" (27).  Fowles, living in Lyme Regis, the seaside town featuring FLW, on the south coast of England, for James R. Baker, shows "a sort of exile," with "a rapport with the ghostly company of intellectual exiles who have contributed to the critique on British life" (Baker1 166).  Projecting in his work very often with the history of art and life in England, Baker says, Fowles reveals a "kinship with the brotherhood of English exiles" to oppose the "conceits of the [British] establishment and the rigidity of its laws" (Baker1 173).

     Fowles comments on his exile abroad and at home physically and ideologically in his "Notes" while writing FLW:
 

Accepting this "loneliness" or "solitude," Fowles feels his public self "very remote and often distastefully alien and spurious," the one more thing he feels his "real self in exile from" (148).  "My real self," says Fowles, "is here and now, writing" (148).  Exiled from the social routines of others with his "solitude, routinelessness, and freedom" (148), Fowles always feels like a visitor from outer space.  In the "Foreword" to Herald William Fawkner's criticism on his idea about time, moreover, Fowles mentions a common "unconscious, driving force" shared by all novelists, which is "a sense of loss," or "insufferable incompleteness, a deprivation"(9).  This "sense of loss" for him is the petroleum in the novelists's "psychic engines" (10).  This "fertile loss" comes from an inability to conquer time; therefore, "time-escaping" is, though "wicked," but a "sweet pleasure" for a novelist or any artist to create "succession of mythical presents" outside of historical series (10).  The exiles of Sarah and Charles in the struggle for their existential growths thus reflect Fowles's endeavor to live not in the provinciality of Britain but on the international motherland of ideas in all time.  To design a story to make Sarah meet a French lieutenant, Fowles seems to materialize his thinking of breaking the frames constructed by languages and ideas.

     The Victorian age is itself the most ambivalent and contradictory in "almost any point" (Altick 308).  Jerome Buckley summarized this ambivalence and contradiction as follows:
 

"Every assertion is met with a counter-assertion," in Altick's words  The same understanding of the Victorians can be seen in the novel.  In Chapter Forty-nine after Charles returns the church key to the curate, the narrator mentions the dichotomy of the Victorians:
 

     In the "endless tug-of-war" between every dichotomous thinking, an obsession with woman's dualistic image is the most obvious one.  This obsession, however, is Charles's, Rossetti's, or partly the narrator's, yet hardly Fowles's.  Since he discovers that the Pre-Raphaelites, though bearing the revolutionary force of a breakthrough, did not succeed in being "one-minded about both art and life;" thus in the novel, even though Fowles seems to follow his predecessors to endow his heroine with "masculine," and "strong" qualities in combination with femininity, he does not naturally label her as either this or that image of woman.  To give Sarah an "a-historic" personality (71), in Conradi's terms, outside of the masculine/feminine framework without being subjugated to a primordial masculine or feminine model, Fowles revises Sarah's Pre-Raphaelite image further by giving her autonomy to face and express her "sensual impulse," to have a sexual fulfilment and strength for living "in the here and now" (FLW 279), while also affirming her "inconsistency of conception" as an artist in life.  The association between Sarah and the Pre-Raphaelite Women with the dichotomous heritage, consequently, serves as an epitome of Fowles's idea of writing with a revisionist investigation of history.  His practice of the lesson from history is to break through, first by imitating it to confuse and then cause controversies.  Thus, from the different characters in the novel and then the critics, we see the controversial ideas on Sarah's image.  Behind all these confusions and disputes, Fowles tends to point out the dilemma between abstaining from dichotomy and preserving it and suggests that a coexistence of oppositions is the reality.  One can thus only search for a freedom, a self-knowledge, through constant choosing and looking for one's position by living in hazards.  Through the portrait of Sarah with the images of the Pre-Raphaelite Women, we can say Fowles breaks up the epistemological frames of women's dichotomous image, of the Pre-Raphaelite two-mindedness toward sexuality, of the myth of fall, and sustains Sarah's difference and mystery.