man is not a simple happy ending. Brontë's tale is the subject of many revisions, and several reconsider Bertha's role in the story; for example, Jean Rhys's
Wide Sargasso Sea
also offers Bertha a chance to tell her story. Weldon's darkly humorous novel does more than give a voice to a modern mad wife, however; through this voice, this version of the tale, Weldon raises larger questions about narrative transformations and the bodily violence they produce. Helena Michie complains that "in the attempt to produce and to reproduce the literal female body, contemporary feminists have only succeeded in creating a metaphor" (
Flesh Made Word,
p. 149), but Weldon proves that writing can, indeed, articulate the body. In this novel, the female voice is embodiedfull-bodied, and speaking only through the body, in a sort of French feminist's nightmare. The monstrous female literally, physically, grotesquely transforms herself into the angela transformation that undermines conventional happy endings, just rewards, narrative process, and the moral development of heroines and villains. The transformation demands violence, just as it did in
Jane Eyre
. But the site of violence is narrowed from the husband or housealthough the wife in
She-Devil
does indeed destroy her husband and burn her house downto the female body itself.
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Growing up, here, does not mean coming into possession of self, power, and money; rather, it means dispossessing the self, remaking the body into another body and, therefore, the self into another self, since the body stands as the symbol of identity. In "(Re)Writing the Body," Susan Rubin Suleiman claims:
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 | | The cultural significance of the female body is not only (not even first and foremost) that of a flesh-and-blood entity, but that of a
symbolic construct
. Everything we know about the bodycertainly as regards the past, and even, it could be argued, as regards the presentexists for us in some form of discourse; and discourse, whether verbal or visual, fictive or historical or speculative, is never unmediated, never free of interpretation, never innocent. (
The Female Body in Western Culture,
p. 2).
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The discourse of transformations in Weldon's novel tells two distinct stories: one, the seemingly innocent desire to be better, to be an Ugly Duckling growing into beauty, to be a heroine; the other, the more violent tale of self-loathing, self-destruction as a means of improvement, where the body itself becomes the site of struggle. For Weldon takes the female body as symbol and turns that symbol back into flesh-and-blood, but flesh-and-blood dismembered by the symbolic demands on it.
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The moral of the story is not learning to love the body you have, but fighting to have the body you can love. Unlike the Ugly Duckling story, this is not a natural process, but a surgical one. And the unnatural, bloody
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