1This article first appeared in South Atlantic Review 62, 2 (1997): 74-87. REWRITING WOMEN'S STORIES: OURIKA AND THE FRENCH LIEUTENANT'S WOMAN I chose the name of the hero in my own novel, The French Lieutenant's Woman, quite freely--or so I thought at the time. It came as a shock, months after my typescript had gone to the printers, to pick up Ourika one day and to recall that Charles was the name of the principal male figure there also. That set me thinking. And though I could have sworn I had never had the African figure of Ourika in mind during the writing of The French Lieutenant's Woman, I am now certain in retrospect that she was very active in my unconscious. (1) Most readers of John Fowles's celebrated The French Lieutenant's Woman, written in 1969, are probably unaware of the debt it owes and the strong similarity it bears to Ourika, a slave story written by a nineteenth-century woman writer, Claire de Duras, in 1823. Not only was Fowles influenced by that early work, but in 1977 he chose to translate it and write a Foreword and Epilogue explaining its importance to literary history and to him as a writer. There exists, then, a small corpus of texts--two novels, a translation, and two commentaries--that merits analysis for several reasons. A comparison of the two novels sheds light generally on both works, especially since Fowles has explicitly commented on the subject of their similarities; and an identification of some of the salient features of Fowles's translation and of his analysis of Duras's work points up significant aesthetic and ideological differences between the two authors. More importantly for the purposes of this essay, these texts provide an occasion for analyzing how a twentieth-century male writer reads and rewrites the work of a nineteenth-century female writer and thus for providing insight into important differences between feminine and masculine writing. It is true that Fowles highlights the historical issue of women's emancipation in The French Lieutenant's Woman, leading some critics to interpret the novel as feminist. (2) Others, however, call into question its feminist tendencies, as I will in my comparison of Ourika and The French Lieutenant's Woman and my comments on Fowles's translation of Duras's novel. (3) In both cases Fowles often diminishes or at least modifies the salient feminine features of Duras's novel--notably, its treatment of feminine voice, vision, identity, sexuality, and community. These feminine features of Duras's novel will be considered under the rubrics of "male authority" and "the feminine body or self." I argue that Fowles enhances the male authority of narrators or writers that is present, but significantly counterbalanced and controlled, in Duras's novel; and moreover that Fowles is unable to produce the kind of feminine identity found in Duras's novel, an identity that is grounded in physical and social bonds with women. (4) * * *2Duras's Ourika and Fowles's The French Lieutenant's Woman provide two significantly different treatments of male authority. Although both works open with authority vested in male narrative figures, Duras's female protagonist Ourika acquires a voice and the means of a competing feminine authority shortly after the beginning of Duras's text, whereas, as will be seen shortly, the central woman character in Fowles's work, Sarah Woodruff, is virtually silenced and remains largely disempowered until quite late in the novel. The difference in the treatment of narrative structure between the two works corresponds to a difference in the treatment of gender inasmuch as Duras displays a greater interest in and respect for the point of view and the voice of women characters than Fowles. Ourika opens with the voice of a male frame narrator, an unnamed medical doctor who recounts how he was summoned to cure a young nun suffering from acute melancholy. The control that he exercises through the act of narration is enhanced through the role of the focalizer--"the persona who sees the events of the story" (5)--that he also plays, for it is he who describes the external appearance of the nun to the reader in the opening pages. He recounts that as he and an accompanying sister enter the convent, he was surprised to find that the nun was a black woman: "Elle se tourna vers moi, et je fus étrangement surpris en apercevant une négresse!" ["She turned towards me. I had a strange shock. I was looking at a negress"]. (6) He then elaborates upon her physical appearance: Son aspect ne confirmait que trop cette triste description de son état: sa maigreur était excessive, ses yeux brillants et fort grands, ses dents d'une blancheur éblouissante, éclairaient seuls sa physionomie; l'âme vivait encore, mais le corps était détruit, et elle portait toutes les marques d'un long et violent chagrin. (28) [Her appearance only too exactly confirmed this unpromising syndrome. She was excessively thin. The sole things that gave light to her face were her abnormally large and luminous eyes and her dazzlingly white teeth. Her mind still lived, but her body was destroyed. She showed every sign of having suffered from prolonged and acute melancholia]. (14) With the presumably objective eye of the neutral observer and medical authority, the narrator exercises the authority to dwell on Ourika's physical properties and to describe them in the male medical discourse of feminine pathology. Interestingly, in translating this passage, Fowles strengthens the male medical discourse by enhancing the clinical tone of the text: thus for example "sa maladie" becomes "her symptoms" rather than merely "her illness"; "cette triste description de son état" is translated as "this unpromising syndrome" rather than "this sad description of her state of health"; "ses yeux brillants et fort grands" turns into "her abnormally large and luminous eyes" rather than merely "her large and shiny eyes"; "un long et violent chagrin" is rendered as "prolonged and acute melancholia" instead of "a long and acute grief." (7) The male authority that the frame doctor and focalizer exercises over Ourika is of limited duration, however. After a few short pages, it is Ourika herself, a black woman, who acquires a voice and assumes narrative control over her past life. With the exception of two short sentences by the doctor at the very end, the rest of the novel consists of Ourika's narrating her story to the doctor. We learn that shortly before