The French Lieutenant’s Woman: Chapter 38 Summary & Analysis

When Charles leaves the Freemans’ house, it’s dusk. He walks towards his club. When he runs into a traffic jam, he tries to take a shortcut and heads into Mayfair. Thick mist makes everything seem dreamlike. Charles feels like he’s lost his sense of irony and is naked. It now seems absurd that he went to visit Mr. Freeman rather than just sending a letter. The thought of having to be careful with money seems equally ridiculous. Wealthy people travel by carriage, so everyone walking around Charles is poor. He knows his income is unimaginable to them, but it doesn’t seem enough to him. He doesn’t understand the moral implications of his wealth because he feels so unlucky in other respects. He’s unhappy. He feels like his rank is weighing him down. He stops, a living fossil, as fitter humans bustle around him.

Charles sees people of various lower-class professions in front of him. A boy runs up to try to sell him a picture, and he turns towards a darker street. The boy chases him, singing a vulgar song. It reminds Charles of the presence of sin in London. The city offers anonymity. No one looks at him as he passes, and he feels a frightening sense of freedom stemming from invisibility. He hears a couple speaking French and wishes that he were traveling, that he could escape. He passes a mews where coachmen are preparing their horses. He suddenly wonders whether the lower classes are actually happier than the upper. Perhaps they’re like happy parasites on the rich. He feels like a hedgehog with fleas between its spines, rolling up and playing dead, with his only defense his aristocratic prickles.

Charles sees a girl buying candles and begins to think about commerce. He sees Mr. Freeman’s offer as an insult to his class. He should have rejected it immediately. But really he’s distressed because his money will now come from Mr. Freeman, and Charles will be under his influence. The tradition of this kind of marriage comes from a time when marriage was only a business contract, but now there’s more emphasis on the sanctity of a marriage for love. Ernestina will constantly demand that Charles love her, which will also require him to be grateful for her money.

Charles finds himself on Oxford Street, by Mr. Freeman’s store. He walks into the street to take in the whole store. People are going in and out, but Charles can’t imagine himself doing so. He hasn’t really thought of the store as real, but now he sees how powerful it is. Many men would savor that power, but Charles doesn’t want it. In part, he’s being snobbish; in part, lazy. He’s also frightened of dealing with so many people below his class. However, he does feel that earning money isn’t enough to fulfill him. He knows he’ll never be a great intellectual, but he feels that choosing to be nothing is the virtue of a gentleman and preserves his freedom. The store would ruin him.

Charles can’t imagine how little of the ethos of the gentleman will be left by 1969, but every form that seems to disappear actually only transforms into something else. The qualities of a Victorian gentleman come from the knights of the Middle Ages and turn into those of modern-day scientists. Every culture needs an elite class ruled by certain conventions. Some of those conventions might eventually cause the death of the class, but they give structure to their good contributions to society. Across time, the type to which gentleman belong are connected by their rejection of possession as a goal. Scientists, too, will one day become irrelevant.

The Bible tells a story of temptation in the wilderness. Everyone who’s educated has a wilderness, and will one day be tempted. Their rejection is never bad. If one has ever made a decision that rejects personal benefit, one cannot judge Charles as a snob. In fact, he’s struggling to overcome history. He feels he’s being asked to sacrifice his own identity, and he can’t believe that his old dreams were useless. He was seeking the meaning of life, though he couldn’t articulate his search to others. In any case, he knows that Mr. Freeman’s store does not hold the meaning of life.

At the base of everything is the fact that a person’s ability to analyze the self provides an advantage in the evolutionary struggle for survival. The ability to choose how to change in order to survive means that people have free will. But in reality, Charles feels trapped. He feels chilled with rage against everything Mr. Freeman stands for. He gets into a cab, and when he closes his eyes, he sees a comforting image of milk punch and champagne.