The French Lieutenant's Woman- By John Fowles

Like Darwin suggests certain appendages be dwarfed from lack of environmental need on some species, so Ernestina's real self has become eliminated by an environment which stifles its development.

Sarah, on the other hand, look atms more biologically evolved than Ernestina because she exercises more self-will in violating the social norms that limit Ernestina's personality development. As Ernestina is discreet, Sarah is bold. When Sarah picks out something to stand she is not concerned with social norms, she is concerned with accentuating her own surliness and personality. This is why she is described as some 1 whose personality is drawn-out by personal choices, especially in light of the item that so much of her desires need repressed in the prim era. What Sarah, "by way of compensation for so much else in her expected behavior, de mankindded of a color was brilliance, not discretion" (Fowles 11). Sarah's facial nerve features are not the passive, characterless features Charles sees on Ernestina. Instead, her eyes and babble out are an affront to current norms, and, far from making her innocent of personality, they "could not conceal an intelligence, an independence of spirit; a tendency to be what she was" (Fowles 99).

However, even though Sarah is biologically more evolved than Ernestina, her refusal to buy up social norms manages her even more ostracized from society and, thus, pushes her further refine t

he social evolutionary ladder. Today, she might be viewed more evolved in both domains, merely not in the Victorian era. Ernestina, from environmental forces, loses her own nature. Sarah, from patrimonial forces, loses social "nature.

" What this demonstrates is Fowles understanding that as beings within the evolutionary scale, we incur very little take over our own macrocosm from free-will alone. Ration cannot conquer social and evolutionary forces, and, we, just homogeneous other animals, are at the mercy of nature and Fate. We see this when Charles, a socially evolved character, tries to exert his free will to get word his longing for Sarah. He cannot any more than Sarah can cause social norms that oppress her true nature. Fowles is demonstrating the existential dilemma of man by showing the helplessness of man in the lay out of a much more powerful nature and society. notwithstanding though Ernestina and Sarah are both destined to lose (one socially, one biologically), they both attempt to gain some kind of control over their helpless state. Ernestina tries doing it by becoming the absolute perfection of the Victorian woman according to social norms of those Victorian norms deemed " exemplification" (as usual, the values of the upper-middle and wealthy classes). However, as Charles admits, all it has done is to make her a "prim little moppet" (Fowles 27). In other words, Ernestina i
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