1Author of six novels, short stories, a collection of aphorisms, poetry, essays and non-fiction, John Fowles was a prolific writer. By the middle of the 1970s, he had imposed himself as one of the major figures of postmodernism. His fiction displays self-reflexivity and a questioning of reality that is emblematic of that movement. However, if ancient Greece is anything to go by, one can perceive an attachment to tradition, in so far as he recognizes the influence of the muse as a source of creative energy. In his essay “I Write therefore I Am,” he evokes that essential part of his creativity: “I know when I am writing well that I am writing with more than the sum of my acquired knowledge, skill and experience; with something from outside myself. Inspiration, the muse experience, is like telepathy.”1 In reality, he claimed to be walking in the footsteps of poets and authors and their muse such as Shakespeare and his dark lady (in Mantissa), Alain-Fournier and his princesse lointaine or Hardy and his Well-Beloved (in Wormholes), all three authors being major influences for him.

2In Greek mythology, the nine muses were the goddesses of the arts. However, Fowles’s muse is more than a concept or a myth; within the text itself, it takes the shape of a female character who becomes an object of desire for the male protagonist and for the writer. In “Gather Ye Starlets,” he writes that “if we reject woman as fertile mother and as mystic virgin, then we are (or appear to be) left only with woman as a source of pleasure, as an instrument.”2 As his muse is neither a fertile mother nor a mystic virgin, she is therefore an instrument in the hand of the artist. And thus, Fowles perpetuates a patriarchal view of society, in which the woman is subjected to male domination and desire. As Bruce Woodcock argues, in Male Mythologies: John Fowles and Masculinity, “though Fowles registers his deep sense of male power as at the root of what is wrong in modern society, the lever for his analysis is an idealisation of the feminine and the female which itself remains unquestioned.”3

3Indeed, most of his novels and short stories centre around a male character whose possible growth into an existentialist being depends upon his chance encounter with a woman who sparks his desire and attracts him out of his comfort zone. This man is a surrogate for the writer himself, and, through him, his desire may or may not be fulfilled. All these muses have common traits, but nowhere more than in Mantissa does he give her—or them—life. Taking up a simile from Hardy’s The Well-Beloved, they are like clay in his hand, which he can model according to his male fancy, thus enabling them to acquire the status of objects of desire. Who is this muse and how does she inspire Fowles to write? Throughout his work, he tries to give us a glimpse of how his creative inspiration is sparked by his muse, through the desire she kindles in him, as exemplified in the reification of woman through the male domination and the way this spurs the author’s desire and his creativity.

“Eternally malleable and acquiescent, like the sculptor’s clay model”⁴: Shaping the Muse

4The muse is, in some way, the origin of the novel. Before becoming the female character central to the protagonist’s quest, she emerges as a vision in the writer’s mind. In his notes on The French Lieutenant’s Woman, John Fowles reveals the birth of this novel through the vision of its main female character: “It started […] as a visual image. A woman stands at the end of a deserted quay and stares out to sea. That was all. This image rose in my mind one morning. […] I began to fall in love with her.”5 This woman is the title character, Sarah. Tellingly, when she first appears in the novel, on the quay, she is referred to by the pronoun “it,” as if she were not human. However, she can be viewed as the archetype of Fowles’s muse, for she combines the traits of all Fowlesian heroines.

5The key characteristic of those women is the mystery surrounding them. One never gets to know them, but part of their attraction is precisely their indefinability or numinous quality. Sarah, at the end of the novel, exclaims: “I am not to be understood, even by myself. And I can’t tell you why, but I believe my happiness depends on my not understanding.”6 Actually, everything seems to lie in the fact that if she were to be understood, there would be no reason for writing. In Daniel Martin, the protagonist is a would-be writer—i.e. a mask for Fowles himself—and he is attracted to Jane because “she was an old enigma in his life, and she had to be solved; tamed and transcribed.”7 The relationship between mystery and writing is stressed with the word “transcribed.” Yet, the use of the passive voice and the verb “tamed” are also expressive of the patriarchal view of woman propagated in Fowles’s fiction, as it was in Hardy’s, when, for instance, Bathsheba proclaims: “I want somebody to tame me,”8 in Far from the Madding Crowd.

6The muse is reified, for the male protagonist imposes his domination over her, or, to be more precise, over what he wants her to be, in a way that is reminiscent of Nabokov’s Lolita. Indeed, in The Collector, Miranda is captured like the butterflies her kidnapper collects that constitute his first objects of desire. The simile pervades the novel. Moreover, Frederick Clegg, the kidnapper in question, does not want Miranda to speak or to express her ideas. He simply wants her to correspond to the fantasy he has imagined. One day, she will get to know him and understand him and love him. Bruce Woodcock stresses this ambiguity: “Clegg’s interest is in the passive image of Miranda, an object which is his imagined version of her rather than her as a person.”9 And, in her diary, Miranda actually writes: “He doesn’t care what I say or how I feel—my feelings are meaningless to him—it’s the fact that he’s got me. […] It’s me he wants, my look, my outside; not my emotions or my mind or my soul or even my body. Not anything human.”10 Possession is what matters to Clegg as the auxesis, or amplification, in the last two sentences demonstrates. The last phrase is revealing of the objectification of the woman, with the stress laid on the adjective human presented in italics, but also on the pronoun “anything” which emphasises her status as an object. He is able to enjoy her body, nevertheless, once it is photographed, and therefore made inanimate. This partakes of the commodification of woman as a body which runs through Fowles’s work as a whole. Prostitution of some sort is alluded to in all of his novels, culminating in A Maggot with Rebecca Lee, a prostitute who acts the virgin for her clients.

7This is in fact another trait of the muse. The novelist plays on the basic virgin-whore dichotomy and his muses often embody both extremes of female representation. In Alone of All her Sex, Marina Warner explains how this division preserves the original myth of the Virgin and Mary Magdalene, as “[t]ogether, the Virgin and the Magdalene form a diptych of Christian patriarchy’s idea of woman. There is no place in the conceptual architecture of Christian society for a single woman who is neither a virgin nor a whore.”11 In The French Lieutenant’s Woman, Sarah is both attractive and repulsive because she is believed to be a fallen woman when, in reality, she is a virgin. Ironically, it is Charles, the protagonist, who deflowers her and makes of her an inverted Tess. In Tess of the D’Urbervilles, Angel Clare marries the young woman on the assumption of her virginity, while she had already experienced both sex and childbirth. Upon knowing the truth, her husband abandons her. On the contrary, Charles is attracted to Sarah because of her supposed experience and forsakes her—for a time—because she was a virgin. When he realizes his mistake, she is the one who has fled. In “Hardy and the Hag,” Fowles claims that “[b]oth […] the idolized love-object and […] the unforgiven ‘whore’ may very often be seen side by side in the same novel.”12 This is true for instance of Arabella and Sue in Hardy’s Jude the Obscure. In The Magus, Fowles also emphasises this longing for both extremes in the characters of the twin sisters called Lily and Rose, the two flowers symbolizing virginity and passion in the Victorian tradition. In Conchis’s godgame, Rose plays the role of seducer while her sister is the innocent maid whom Nicholas wants to seduce. As a male writer, Fowles perpetuates the conventional representations of women in the male psyche.

8However, in point of fact, fantasy underlies the creation of the muse. In Mantissa, the hero, an amnesiac writer, is free to indulge his passion for his muse inside his own mind. The muse, Erato, takes on different shapes, such as that of Dr Delfie, a psychiatrist, or Nurse Corie, who is a reincarnation of Shakespeare’s Dark Lady. At the end of the story, Miles Green imagines her next embodiments thus:

various mental slides of the vivacious, eager and now historically fascinating West Indian girl. But then he quite naturally elides, in the silence, to other solutions to his present predicament. Polynesian, Irish, Venezuelan […]; shy, passionate, pert, cool; dressed and undressed, tamed and wild, chased and chasing; teasing, in tears, toying, tempestuous… a whole United Nations of female eyes, mouths, breasts, legs, arms, loins, bottoms […] kaleidoscopically tumble through, or past, the windows of his mind.13

9The woman of his dreams is first ascribed different ethnic backgrounds, exposing the array of choice available to the writer, then she is described in oxymoronic terms which emphasize her versatile nature and finally she is disembodied with the synecdochical enumeration of her members. The short words and accumulation of plosives enhance the rhythm of change as well as the wide variety of shapes the muse—or rather muses—can take in the imagination of the author. She is a creation, and as such, the protagonist requires her to fulfil his fantasy.

10The domination of male desire explains why so much of Fowles’s fiction revolves around the tradition of romance and chivalry, as a review in The New York Times highlights in October 1982: “the novels of John Fowles have […] featured rich vigorous narratives and old-fashioned characters of great vulnerability and charm. Whether it is Sarah in The French Lieutenant’s Woman, Jane in Daniel Martin or Lily in The Magus, the most powerful of those characters have always been women—women who like the princesses lointaines of medieval romances remain mysterious and aloof.”14 The relationship between the male and the female characters is idealized, romanticized in the mind of the man, which implies submissiveness on the part of the woman. In The French Lieutenant’s Woman, Charles dreams of himself as the knight protecting Sarah from gossip and from the evil Mrs Poulteney. Daniel Martin answers the last plea from his dying friend to take care of his wife and bring her back to her real self, therefore becoming the knight errant coming back to rescue his former lover, in a rewriting of the lais of Marie de France which Fowles translated and which evidently inspired him.

11However, this does not mean that the woman is passive. On the contrary, Fowles explains that “the female characters in my books tend to dominate the male ones. I see man as a kind of artifice, and woman as a kind of reality.”15 This tends to imply an objectification of the male characters rather than the female ones, the men being mere foils to demonstrate the depth of feminine personality. Indeed, though reified by the male protagonist, the woman demonstrates an ability to manipulate him. Even in The Collector, Miranda has a voice of her own in the diary she writes, proving that she is able to manoeuvre Clegg to some extent. Through their individuality and freedom of will, they can show the protagonist the way to his own sense of existential freedom. Indeed, in The French Lieutenant’s Woman, Sarah repeatedly lies to Charles in order to ensnare him, but right after they have made love, she disappears, letting him confront his own self and liberate himself from the stifling conventions of his life. Women, through the desire they inspire, are the driving force towards existentialism in the male characters. Nevertheless, to achieve that existential awakening in their male counterparts, they have to remain out of reach, for, as Fowles states in “The Lost Domaine of Alain-Fournier,” “the black paradox at the heart of the human condition [is] that the satisfaction of the desire is also the death of the desire”16 and that “[t]o attain ideals is to kill them.”17

12Borrowing the words from Alain-Fournier’s Le Grand Meaulnes, Jan Relf explains in the introduction to Wormholes, that

[t]he haunting presence that inhabits the lost domaine is, of course, the figure of the princesse lointaine, the archetypically unattainable woman, and its supplement is John’s self-confessed nympholepsy, that perverse but persistent condition of desire for the unattainable which in his case is so paradoxically productive.18

13In point of fact, the author’s productivity depends on the elusiveness of the muse. This summarizes Fowles’s creative process and is redolent of psychoanalytical concepts which the writer himself made use of. Indeed, this princesse lointaine is no less than an expression of the Oedipus complex.

Looking for “the vanished young mother of infancy”¹⁹

14“It may be that we were all destined to direct our first sexual impulses toward our mothers and our first impulses of hatred and violence toward our fathers.”20 With the Oedipus complex, Freud has laid down one possible paradigm for defining who the muse stands for. She is the vanished mother of infancy. John Fowles was interested in psychoanalysis and was aware of the role of the unconscious in desire. He used this knowledge in his novels to describe the attitude of his male characters towards women in psychological terms. Actually, in all but his last novel, his protagonists display the same features: they have lost their mother in infancy, are orphans by the time they come of age, have no brothers or sisters and they are quite repressed in their behaviour, as if they had not grown into adulthood. They show signs of immaturity, as evidenced in their habits of collecting things, for, according to Fowles, collecting is “a sign of an inferior and insensitive intelligence.”21 They represent the typical contemporary male who, after the two World Wars is essentially a man in crisis. This is what Nicholas Urfe is accused of at his fake trial at the end of The Magus. The doctor explains his case thus:

The motives for this attitude spring from an only partly resolved Oedipal complex. The subject shows characteristic symptoms of mingled fear and resentment of authority, especially male authority and the usual accompanying basic syndrome: an ambivalent attitude towards women, in which they are seen both as desired objects and as objects which have betrayed him.22

15She adds that his method of seduction is “to play the little boy in search of the lost mother.”23 The Freudian concept serves as a ploy to denounce, but also justify the character’s attitude towards women. Later, in Daniel Martin, he also parodies the psychoanalytical discourse when discussing his eponymous character’s accumulation of mistresses: “A psychoanalyst might say he was searching for the lost two-in-one identity of his first months of life; some solution for his double separation trauma; the universal one of infancy and the private experience of literally losing his mother.”24 In other words, Daniel’s female conquests act as “transitional objects” replacing his dead mother. However, the narrator of this passage being an older Daniel commenting on his past actions, his self-psychoanalysis is soon rejected as false, as the modal “might” suggests. Indeed, he adds that the Freudian theory he applied to himself is denied by the fact that “he was neither dissatisfied nor guilt-ridden”25 as he should have been.

16The hunting of the female, of the lost mother, reflects both the male character’s unconscious drive, but also the writer’s. The writer explores the extent of the typical masculine role towards women through the interaction of hero and heroine. The narrator’s presentation of the protagonist is a means for Fowles to castigate this attitude while at the same time he condones it and partakes in it insofar as the male character is a surrogate for the writer himself.

17One can here refer to Lacan’s theory of the “objet petit a”, the first object of desire which becomes “la cause du désir, et cet objet cause du désir, c’est l’objet de la pulsion.”26 This object is what the subject wants to find over again in the other, but which can never be retrieved. The object of desire belongs to imagination, to fantasy. Therefore, in Fowles’s fiction, the “objet petit a” is the mother and the fictional women stand for re-creations of this lost mother. This principle also governs the relationship between muse and writer. In Mantissa, Erato tells Miles Green, the writer and Fowles’s substitute: “That is because I am inevitably cast as a surrogate for your mother—in other words, as a chief target for your repressed feelings of Oedipal rejection.”27 The muse thus attributes Miles’s drive to write to his infancy trauma, which induces him to cast her as a romantic heroine. Although the comment is certainly derisive, it is nonetheless a self-reflexive statement on the part of the author, for, when commenting upon the novel in 1982, Fowles exclaims:

I think the drive to write fiction is mainly a Freudian one. Male novelists, anyway, are really all chasing a kind of lost figure—they’re haunted by the idea of the unattainable female and, of course, the prime unattainable female is always the mother. The attitudes of most male novelists toward their heroines, I think, practically always reflect some sort of attitude toward the mother.28

18The process underlying the creation of a muse is therefore apparent to the writer, especially after he had read an essay on The French Lieutenant’s Woman by Gilbert Rose analysing what the book revealed about its author’s unconscious. Rose argued that the artist was marked in young infancy by the memory of his oneness with his mother, before becoming conscious of his separate identity and this made him want to regain those sensations. Fowles was so interested in this idea that he devoted an essay to the subject, analysing Thomas Hardy’s Well-Beloved along the same lines. The essay “Hardy and the Hag” provides an insight into the writer’s theory of the muse as he explains:

We must also remember that the voyage undertaken is back to an indulged primal self and all its pleasures, and that the main source of those pleasures was that eternal other woman, the mother. The vanished young mother of infancy is quite as elusive as the Well-Beloved; indeed, she is the Well-Beloved, though the adult writer transmogrifies her according to the pleasures and fancies that have in the older man superseded the nameless ones of the child—most commonly into a young female sexual ideal of some kind, to be attained or pursued (or denied) by himself hiding behind some male character.29

19In other words, the writer, be it Fowles or Hardy, recreates the image of his lost mother, his objet petit a, in his fiction, and thus, by proxy, he can try to have his desire fulfilled. However, as Zizek argues in an interview, “we don’t really want what we think we desire.”30 The object of desire has to remain virtual, since if it is actualized, it loses its desirability. Zizek goes on to say that “people do not really want or desire happiness.”31 Therefore, it is better if consummation is never achieved. The muse has to remain elusive, which explains Fowles’s preference for inconclusive endings, as he explains in “Hardy and the Hag”:

There is something in the happy ending that resolves not only the story, but the need to embark on further stories. If the writer’s secret and deepest joy is to search for an irrecoverable experience, the ending that announces that the attempt has once again failed may well seem the more satisfying. […] In the deeper continuum of an artist’s life, where the doomed and illicit hunt is still far more attractive than no hunt at all, the “sad” ending may therefore be much happier than the ‘happy’ ending. It will be both releasing and therapeutic.32

20This somehow justifies Miranda’s death in The Collector, the mystery hovering over Nicholas and Alison’s relationship at the end of The Magus, and the three possible endings offered for The French Lieutenant’s Woman. In A Maggot, the woman, Rebecca Lee gives birth to her daughter but the mystery of the disappearance of the protagonist is never solved, and he reappears as a ghost by her side. Finally, in Mantissa, the story comes full circle, since the last paragraph is a rewriting of the first one, with only one notable difference, the clock striking the hour. Still, the mutability of the muse inside the plot provides enough space for change, thus opening up a full area of possibilities of new interactions between Erato and Miles Green.

21Nevertheless, the relationship between author and muse in his imaginative world may pose a problem in real life, as Fowles argues about Hardy and himself:

No one who spends most of his life in pursuit of a chimera can live comfortably with his everyday self or with that of the person closest to him. At one level he must know that for as long as he is on his voyage, the central emotional truth of his life is not where it should be; at another, that he is constantly, if only imaginatively, betraying his wife in other ports.33

22What Fowles implies is that he enters the fictional world alongside his female characters which can only collide with his actual marital life. Indeed, his creativity is spurred by this sexual fantasy, and the muse is the gateway to sublimation, for, through her, the novelist sublimates his erotic drive within his work.

“I began to fall in love with her”³⁴ or How Desire Sparks Creativity

23In Le Plaisir du texte, Roland Barthes links body and text together: “Le texte a une forme humaine, c’est une figure, un anagramme du corps ? Oui, mais de notre corps érotique. Le plaisir du texte serait irréductible à son fonctionnement grammairien (phéno-textuel), comme le plaisir du corps est irréductible au besoin physiologique.”35 This essay deals with le plaisir and la jouissance which can arise from an interaction with the text. This implies a certain sensuality in the acts of writing and reading. Mantissa is representative of this as the muse Erato, sometimes in the guise of Dr Delfie, sometimes in that of Nurse Corie, engages in a sexual game with the unconscious writer. Through the interplay of sexual relations, the novel is created, justifying Lacan’s theory that “La réalité de l’inconscient, c’est à la fois ce que tout le monde sait… ce qui est vrai et ce qui en est la vérité insoutenable… c’est la réalité sexuelle.”36 In the novel, Dr Delfie is having sex with Miles Green as a therapy to recover his memory. She enjoins him to go “A little faster. From deep as you can. Splendid. Push with your whole body. Keep the rhythm. It’s better for you, it’s better for your baby. […] Keep going, don’t stop. Right to the very last syllable.”37 And a few paragraphs later, Nurse Corie is holding a bunch of papers, “Her eyes on him, cradling the papers she had been sorting: ‘It’s a lovely little story. And you made it all by yourself.’”38 In fact, while Dr Delfie and Miles Green are making love, they are engendering a story, the writer’s baby, as the metaphor suggests. The collocation of words such as “body,” “baby,” “cradling” with “syllable,” “papers” and “story” is surprising for the reader who, at this point, still does not know who the fictional characters stand for. The story to which Green has given birth begins with the first paragraph of the novel, making it self-reflexive.

24Although the novel was decried at the time it was published as a “sluggishly played jeu d’esprit”39 or “a tedious novel,”40 it actually describes how Fowles imagines his interaction with the muse. Indeed, in several of his essays, he identifies it with an affair, as Jan Relf summarizes in her introduction to Wormholes, which contains

his most confessional statements about the guilty pleasure of what he calls the godgame of writing fiction. Writing, it seems, is a sexy business. Fiction making, the creating of another world, is a ‘haunting, isolating, and guilt-ridden experience’; his characters need ‘constant caressing’ he falls in love with his heroines and is, if only imaginatively, unfaithful to his wife with every novel he writes. His relationship with the novel, for the duration of its writing, is like an affair, full of guilts, anxieties, secret delights.41

25When compiling Fowles’s essays and articles, Relf came to understand the way the author’s creativity worked, and it was indeed linked to a particular state the creative drive puts him in. He abandons the real world and his wife to plunge into the fictional world which he shares with his muse. But all is not bliss from beginning to end. For instance, in “Notes on an Unfinished Novel,” Fowles writes:

in the beginning one tends to get dazzled by each page, by one’s fertility, those nice muses always at one’s shoulder… but then the inherent faults in the plot and characters begin to emerge. One starts to doubt the wisdom of the way the latter make things go; the stage is an affaire when one begins to thank God that marriage never raised its ugly head. But here one is condemned to a marriage of sorts—I have the woman on the quay (whose name is Sarah) for better or for worse, so to speak.42

26Here again the lexical field of adultery is mixed with that of creation and authorship. Yet the evanescence of that state is hinted at through the analogy with the affair and marriage. The female character who inspires the author can only be his muse for the duration of a novel, for she is a representation of the lost mother who can never be retrieved. As Fowles explains in “Hardy and the Hag”: “The Well-Beloved is never a face, but rather the congeries of affective circumstances in which it is met; as soon as it inhabits one face, its erotic energy (that is the author’s imaginative energy) begins to drain away. Since it cannot be the face of the only true, and original, Well-Beloved, it becomes a lie, is marked for death.”43 This is nonetheless also part of the writing process and the disappearance of the muse, at the end of the work of fiction, is a necessity for the creativity to be spurred again through the reincarnation of the lost mother in another shape. And this also explains why an unhappy ending is preferable to a happy one, as Fowles observes in relation to Thomas Hardy’s Well-Beloved or muse:

Because they were never truly possessed, they remain eternally malleable and acquiescent, like the sculptor’s clay model. The repeated use to which they can be put may even finally suggest a fuller possession of them than any mere real or carnal knowledge could ever have allowed. And this above all is why, to the extent that a creator of fiction needs such a figure behind his principal heroines, he is unlikely to want to grant her even imaginary happiness at the end of the narrative; and must therefore deny it to himself in the male character who is his surrogate. […] Lost, denying and denied, she lives and remains his; given away, consummated, she dies.44

27One may argue that each novel or poem is for Fowles a sort of psychotherapy, as he is trying to exorcise the loss of his oneness with his mother with each different heroine, and his fictional interaction with her. He is, after all, the creator of each muse; she is his fantasy, and, as Erato insists in Mantissa, all this is imaginary: “You know perfectly well the real ‘real me’ is imaginary. I’m only being real in your sense because you want me to be.”45 Through the muse, he probes the limits of reality and fiction. Yet, however imaginary and taken out of Fowles’s unconscious, more than re-creations of the lost mother, these female characters are rooted in the real. They were inspired by real women whom Fowles desired and who stimulated his creativity. This is hinted at in Daniel Martin where the omniscient narrator reveals about Jane: “Even when she was being thoughtless, she made him think. […] Increasingly he knew it was of value to him, to both of him, Daniel Martin and ‘Simon Wolfe.’”46 Jane is becoming his muse as she inspires him for his novel. For Fowles, his wife Elizabeth was his first muse, as he says in an interview: “I’ve often said that I’ve written about only one woman in my life. […] that woman has been my wife, Elizabeth.”47 She was not his only inspiration though, as Eileen Warburton, his biographer, makes clear. When writing The Magus, “[h]e decided that in addition to Sanchia’s considerable influence on the character of Lily Montgomery, there was a touch of Micheline Gilbert in Lily.”48 Both were women he had been infatuated with in the early 1950s. Yet, behind the novel The French Lieutenant’s Woman, the story of John Fowles and his wife can be perceived: “The forbidden love affair between Charles Smithson and Sarah Woodruff spoke of the emotionally harrowing, but enduring passion between Fowles and his wife. […] The mysteriously suffering Sarah Woodruff dramatized Elizabeth’s sense of guilt, isolation, and obliterating entrapment, as well as her intuitive longing for something better.”49 Thus reality also integrates fiction insofar as these muses derive from real-life persons.

28As the commodified version of the ideal woman, the lost mother of infancy and his wife, the muse is the perfect object of desire. It can be moulded according to the fancies of the artist and, belonging to the fictional domain, it remains accessible only through creation. In Mantissa, Fowles gave her back her real status, both character and source of creativity, and tried to impart to the reader the way in which his own imagination worked when writing. Yet, however wilful and strong-minded she may appear to be, she must remain an object, or objectum, “something presented to the mind” and cannot become real. Were she to gain substance, the author would certainly cease to create, as Jocelyn Pierston finally did in Hardy’s Well-Beloved.