ABSTRACT

This chapter examines a number of key scenes from the novel which stage the relationship between the romantic performative and 'Shame on you'. Fowles mobilizes certain powerful speech acts crucial to the formulation of heterosexual romance narratives, and to the formation or individuation of the heterosexual romantic subject: 'I love you' and 'Shame on you'. The French Lieutenant's Woman enacts the constitutive relationship between shame and love in the construction of the heterosexual romantic subject. Sarah's performance in The French Lieutenant's Woman enables fruitful consideration of this space of renegotiation. Further, the drama she plays out highlights the performative or, to use another term, the interpellative force of such formulaic or idiomatically prescribed utterances as "I love you" and 'Shame on you'. Ernestina's successful interpellation into the marriage plot is intimately related to her internalization of the injunction 'Shame on you'.