The French Lieutenant’s Woman: Chapter 48 Summary & Analysis

Charles hurries past Mrs. Endicott before she can ask him anything. It’s raining, and he only wants darkness. He accidentally heads into the bad part of Exeter and down towards the river. When he comes upon a church, he goes inside. A curate is closing up, but Charles asks if he can pray, and the man asks him to lock up when he’s done so that no one steals from the church. Charles is left alone. He sits halfway down the aisle and looks at the altar. Then he kneels and whispers the Lord’s Prayer. He prays for God to forgive him for his selfishness, his dishonor, his lack of faith. But as he speaks he sees Sarah’s face as the Virgin Mary in her sorrow. He sits up and stares at the crucifix, but Sarah’s face seems to replace Christ’s. He feels that his prayers aren’t heard, and he begins to cry.

Most atheist and agnostic Victorians feel excluded. With people who think as they do, they can make fun of the trappings of the church, but Christ confounds them. They can’t see him as a secular figure, as people do in the twentieth century, because everyone around them believes he’s divine. By 1969, government welfare separates well-off people from the poor, but the Victorians feel more personally responsible for the suffering of their fellow humans, which makes it more difficult to reject Christ, who represents compassion. Charles doesn’t really want to be an agnostic; his belief in science tells him he doesn’t need religion. But now he’s weeping because he can’t communicate with God.

Someone tries to enter the church, but the door is locked. Charles begins to pace the aisle, looking down at the worn gravestones in the floor. Eventually he feels calmer, and he has a mental conversation between his better and worse selves, or maybe between himself and Christ. Charles has been deceived, and he doesn’t know why. He doubts Sarah’s love. He thinks he must keep his vow to Ernestina, though he’s already broken it in some sense. His duty is clear, yet duty can mean whatever people want it to mean. Sarah wanted him to go, but she’s now lamenting his departure. Charles admits he has made many mistakes, but they were partly her fault. When the voice asks Charles why he’s free of Sarah now, he has no answer.

The dialogue continues. Sarah loves only one thing more than Charles, and she has given it to him, but he’s not brave enough to give it back. He feels mistreated by her, but he has no right to be alive and rich. Ernestina will not be happy in a marriage based on deceit. Charles feels that his indecision will choose his future, rather than he himself. The wise voice says that Charles wanted to escape his future, but escaping must be done at every moment, not just once. He can either be safe and follow convention, or he can be free and crucified, with everyone hating him. Charles says he’s weak, and his strength would do no good.

Charles approaches the altar and looks at the cross. He goes right up to it, and it’s dark. He sees himself crucified, but not on the cross. In the past, he’s almost thought of himself as crucified on Sarah, but now she seems to be next to him. Suddenly he realizes their purpose is to uncrucify. He understands that Christianity is not meant to celebrate the crucifixion, but instead to create a world in which Christ is no longer crucified and can smile at the victory of living people. Charles sees all the trappings of the Victorian Age as keeping him from what he desires. They have deceived him, but they only make up a machine, which can have no intentions. This machine has made him seem dead while he’s still alive.

Since he entered the church, Charles has felt that there’s a crowd behind him. He turns, but it’s empty. He thinks that if there weren’t an afterlife, the dead couldn’t judge him. He decides to believe that they can’t judge him. He’s shedding something that really bothers the Victorians. The fiftieth poem of Tennyson’s In Memoriam questions whether people actually want their lost loved ones to be near them, or whether they fear that the dead will perceive their faults and love them less. Charles now revolts against the idea that the past, more important than the future, exists in the present. It has made him live as though dead.

Christ seems to come alive with these revelations, which partly uncrucify him. Charles begins to pace again, seeing a new world. In a similar moment, Mrs. Poulteney went from thinking of going to heaven to thinking of Lady Cotton. Now, Charles thinks of Sir Robert. He knows that his uncle would blame himself if Charles married Sarah. He imagines Sarah triumphing over his uncle’s wife. He imagines traveling Europe with Sarah. This is a bad time to compare Charles to St. Paul on the road to Damascus, but his face looks radiant, and his vision of Sarah symbolizes awful but necessary freedom. Irrationally, Charles kneels and prays, then leaves the church.