 | That the frivolous is fundamentally British, as Mannerism is essentially Italian, and the Rococo is quintessentially French.
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| That, from the late eighteenth century on, a series of frivolous texts has resisted the hegemonic virtues of caution, prudence, and the fear of power. That these novels include some of the key titles in the Victorian canon: novels like
A Tale of Two Cities, Barchester Towers, Cranford, What Maisie Knew,
and
The Ordeal of Richard Feveral
. (Critical resistance to the frivolous may well be the principal cause for Meredith's contemporary eclipse; that and the fact that his prose sometimes seems like a labored and exact transcription from an original in Eskimo or Gorilla.)
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| That the triumph of the Great Secular Inquisitionwhat the academy calls Modernismleft Beerbohm the last but not the least in this line. Perhaps the final frivolous gesture of the nineteenth century, Zuleika Dobson's Eights Week hetacomb of happily suicidal undergraduates. Probably because they anticipated the kinds of books they'd soon have set for their study.
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| And finally,
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| That an extraordinary resurgence of the frivolous has been one of the great joys of the contemporary renaissance in women's writing.
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| 5. My understanding of antinomianism relies heavily on J. G. A. Pocock's illuminating discussion in
The Machiavellian Moment,
pp. 346ff. Both Pocock and Christopher Hill stress the crucial way in which the historical thrusts of English antinomianism separate it from the more apocalyptic stress of continental, for example Genevan, Calvinismsa distinction Americans especially have reason to note, since that historicism resulted in the founding of New England. This is a dimension worth stressing because it helps clarify why so much contemporary, continental theory, universalizing and apocalyptic in its own way, misreads the particular complexity of British culture.
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| 6. A much-needed study of Fay Weldon's intellectual training, especially in the intellectual precincts of St. Andrews, would trace out the connections between her education and the continuing emphasis on antinomian individualism fundamental to Scottish culture. A culture as important to her as it is to the writer whom she in so many ways resembles, the Edinburgh-born and -trained Muriel Spark. Indeed, in some ways, Fay Weldon is the twentieth century's Thomas Carlyleor vice versa.
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| 7. My presentation of melodrama relies heavily on Peter Brooks's magisterial analysis in
The Melodramatic Imagination
. Though there are some grounds for quarreling with his history of the genre, and particularly of his understanding of the theatre-history of melodrama, he is unsurpassed in helping us see what melodrama has meant for the past two hundred years to the culture at large. For a supplementary reading of melodrama, see Louis James,
Fiction for the Working Man 18301850,
and Michael Booth,
Theatre in the Victorian Age
.
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| 8. This was Fay Weldon's reading of
She-Devil,
offered during her response to the MLA Session on her work, "
A Comic Turn, Turned Serious": Fay Weldon's Wicked Fiction
(29 December 1989) in Washington, D.C.
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| 9. Without chagrin I acknowledge that my argument about the novel's frivolity is itself deeply frivolous. It makes no claim that Fay Weldon knows either the classics or the genetics to which it alludes. (And which I know because of a typically patriarchal liberal education.) Indeed, in her response to the ver-
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