SACRED SPACES, INSTITUTIONAL POWER, AND PERSONAL REVOLT IN THE DA VINCI CODE AND THE FRENCH LIEUTENANT’S WOMAN

Abstract [English]

This paper offers a comparative reading of Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code (2003) and John Fowles’s The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1969), arguing that sacred spaces in both novels function as crucibles where institutional power and personal faith collide. It distinguishes between formal sacred spaces, churches, chapels, cathedrals, and symbolically sacred or liminal spaces such as The Cobb, the Undercliff, crypts, and museums. Formal sanctuaries embody institutional dogma and social control, while liminal spaces enable private epiphanies, feminist resistance, and existential self-discovery. Drawing on Kilde’s account of sacred space as culturally constructed, Van Huyssteen’s narrative theology, and existentialist perspectives from Tillich, Sartre, Beauvoir, and Taylor, the study shows how space in these narratives is never neutral but charged with theological and ideological significance. Both novels dramatise a broader cultural shift from publicly anchored, church-centred religion to privatised, experiential forms of the sacred. At the same time, the analysis acknowledges that ‘personal’ sacred spaces remain in dialogue with, and partly defined by, the religious institutions they contest. The paper argues that sacred spaces in these texts operate as ‘sites of tria’ where characters renegotiate the meaning of faith, authority, and freedom.