DV: The French Lieutenant's Woman has been described as a feminist novel. Do
you see yourself as a feminist writer? Is it possible
to be a feminist writer if one's female characters are
essentially symbols as opposed to fully integrated, individuated
characters in their own right?
JF: I hope I am a feminist in most ordinary terms, but
I certainly wouldn't call myself one compared with many
excellent women writers. Part of me must remain male.
DV:One critic [Pamela Cooper] has suggested that your female
characters are essentially passive, that they are objects of
male desire or inspirational muse figures but not independently
creative themselves. Is there any reason that you seem to take
them to the brink of artistic creativity but never over the
threshold?
JF: This reproach is probably justified. In part it's because
woman remains very largely a mystery to me - or perhaps I should be
more honest and admit that this mysteriousness has always seemed
to me partly erotic. It's certainly not because I resent their
artistic skills.
DV: How do you feel about your novels being taught in English classes?
JF: A great deal of pity for the poor devils. But more seriously
I believe the literary process is fundamentally beneficial, both for
its artists and its audiences and especially when it widens their concept
of freedom, both personal and social. I like feeling a vast stream
of artists is both behind and ahead of me.
JF:Darwin, Freud, and Nietzsche sent this century, almost as much by
being misunderstood as the reverse, through a prolonged typhoon……
DV: Your essay "Hardy and the Hag" refers to Gilbert Rose's
psychoanalytical theory in which he posits that the love interest in
most novels, i.e., the male character's pursuit of an idealized young
female, masks the novelist's sense of separation from and loss of the
original mother/child bond, perhaps Oedipal in the Freudian sense.
You have written about your father in The Tree, but I don't recall
any reference to your mother. Do you attribute any particular aspect
of your own artistic development to your mother's influence?
JF: I found Rose's use of separation-and-loss theory useful, but to
say that it has deeply influenced me is not really true. As always
I am driven back to a natural history image. A common small fly of
trout streams over here, the caddis (Trichoptera), builds a case for
its chrysalis out of the grit. on stream-beds. I've been the same
over countless theories and views of existence and literature. I have
made them a part of me, but never the whole of me.
full interview here
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