Fay Weldon's Wicked Fictions (18 page)

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Authors: Regina Barreca

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BOOK: Fay Weldon's Wicked Fictions
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usually in terms of comic disappointment or some other form of inappropriate behavior and reaction. It is not the fuck that interests Weldon, but conception and generation. Her comedies are comic formally in the way that they support generation, the rhythm of life moving from the mature adults (woefully immature as they all are) to the fetus and child.
There is thus always some hope for the future. Liffey's pregnancy is ultimately redemptivethere is no greater believer of the power of pregnancy in all of English literature than Weldon. For an equivalent, one must turnwhere? Not in general to women writers or to the modern male sex-writers (though Lawrence's
Rainbow
might be cited, and the beginning of
Sons and Lovers
). I think in this aspect of Weldon she finds her closest relative in the Shakespeare of the last plays. Not that she has anything of Shakespeare's
tone
but one can imagine the story of
The Winter's Tale
retold by Weldon, who would lay even more stress than Shakespeare does on the progress of Hermione's pregnancy.
The Cloning of Joanna May,
a story of jealousy, revenge, and redemption, has some of the resonance of
The Winter's Tale
.
Weldon always seems to try to give cosmic rationalism a place: the cosmos is a set of accidents describable by Science, but in need of no explanation; human life is a fragile accident of random evolutionhuman beings behave brutally and irrationally and then they die. But such a tough negative sense is always counteracted by a more optimistic viewin part a progressive Darwinian or even Lamarckian vision. The knowledge as well as the sins of the parents may be taken on board, there are patterns in lifeand there is a moral order. That moral order, however, is not the order we are most usually taught about by the Church or State. Weldon would undoubtedly argue against Aeschylus and his Athena, who sold women down the river to support a stiff masculine order. She is much more on the side of the Furies, the female powers of knowledge and retribution that can stagger even a Victor, an Oliver, a Clifford Wexford, a Carl May.
The drumbeat of flesh and blood is always heard in Weldon's novelsshe is a supporter of the flesh, of woman's flesh, of fat women and of the carnal in a manner that would give Aristotle the heebie-jeebies. She is still, however, I insist, an Aristotelian in some degree in her interest in situation above character. She says in
Letters to Alice,
"Plots, I assure you, are nothing but pegs. They stand in a row in the writer's mind. You can use one or another for your purposes, it makes some difference, but not much, which one it is" (pp. 9596). Although she speaks of them as pegs on which the story hangs, her plots, or story lines, are much more like the interior scaffolding of a house. Without them the novel is nothing, just a
 
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set of commentaries and description; related to the plot (peg or scaffolding) the story becomes an entity, gathers its meaningand the characters have something to do. It is not fashionable in England to put plot above character, not since the Victorians came and conquered the novel, so it's no wonder that Weldon in
Letters to Alice
becomes almost tiresomely Forsteresque. Her real strength is that she can imagine not the character, but characters
in situations
. The bizarre circumstance is not there for its own sake, but to keep us alert to the true situation which invites us to pursue essential matters, considering the variations, the wildness, and yet the predictability of human behavior. What might be called "expressive situational narrative"in which the
situation
is the chief image and object for which the characters existdiffers from the "situation" in "situation" comedy only in that the latter is more watered-down and subjected to both mimetic realism and rapid neat closure. As a descendant of the drama of Menander (whose plots are closely related to the plots of ancient novels), television's situation comedy inherits its situational interest. Weldon's situationsrather than her charactersare capable of development and are richly meaningful. Just as it isn't Oedipus the personality who interests us, but the man who doesn't know he killed his father and is living with his mother, so it is not the "She-Devil" or her rival Mary Fisher who can interest us, but the way in which the ''She-Devil" takes her revenge and works out her relationship to the ladylike mistress of her husband. That interests us a lot.
The morality that informs Weldon's situations is a morality that urges us to reconsider moral life, especially the assumptions we have been bred on, or have bred in ourselves. Most particularly is that necessary for women, who have been fed so many cultural lies about their own wellbeing. It is thus inevitable that a woman characterany woman characteronce she comes to act for herself will make mistakes and even commit brutalities, but that process seems necessary for her to reach any point of independent action. All of Weldon's novels illustrate the dictum so cogently put in
Letters to Alice
: "It has come to my notice, Alice, that in the real world the worse women behave, the better they get on" (p. 135). As what the world calls "good" behavior in a woman is the most self-suppressing, timid, doormatlike abjectness, and what the world calls "bad" includes manifestations of sexuality, self-esteem, and energy, it is (or becomes) easy to see why Weldon comically champions the "worse" behavior and persuades us that giving virtue the go-by may have its own rich rewards.
We are so accustomed to thinking of Weldon in a context of late-twentieth-century feminism that it is difficult to offer her full context, the
 
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long and large literary background out of which she emerges. Yet I want to spend the rest of this essay pointing out that in the realm of the Novel she has predecessors in late antiquity, that she is more classical than may be quite easy or comfortable for most readers (including Fay Weldon herself) to believe. The Novel in the West comes to us from the late Roman Empire, from a place (a very widespread place) and a time (a longish time) in which members of different cultures around the Mediterranean had to deal with one another and were thus able to recognize, with a certain degree of relativism, that there are different modes of behavior and different ways of going about things. The lack of a pure and perfect orthodoxy, applicable internationally, was one of the factors that made the novel possible. There is in these old works an ability to accept the existence of different nationalities and language groups and to set up one standard of manners beside another. One of the most surprising things about the ancient novels, particularly those in Greek, is the emphasis on female life and experience. The surviving "Greek" novels were written in the Greek language, but not by Athenians or others from the Greek mainland. The principal novelists whom we know about were by and large from the areas now called Turkey and Syria. As Asia Minor and parts of western Asia were regions supporting the goddess-cults, and had been the home of the Great Mother,
1
they were perhaps more hospitable to the representation of female experience as meaningful.
Probably the earliest surviving of all the antique novels is one called
Chaireas and Kallirrhoe
by one Chariton. He was secretary to a
rhetor,
that is, a sort of big-time lawyer and public speaker in the world of the Roman Empire, and he came from a beautiful town in Asia Minor called Aphrodisias, dedicated to the goddess Aphrodite. In his novel (which has been dated anywhere from 50
B.C.
to 150
A.D.
) the man from Aphrodisias celebrates the work of Aphroditethat is, the work of generation and the pulse of life. In the story, beautiful young Kallirrhoe and handsome young Chaireas of Sicily fall in love and marry. But jealous former suitors of Kallirrhoe soon cheat Chaireas out of his happiness by "proving" his wife unfaithful, using a trick very like that in
Much Ado about Nothing
. He comes home in a rage and kicks his wife in the stomach. She falls lifeless. Her family have her buried in a beautiful tomb, and Chaireas is almost beside himself with grief and self-accusation.
Kallirrhoe, however, is not dead. She comes to in the tomb (a very frightening experience) but is inadvertently rescued by grave robbers. They take her away from Sicily and sell her as a slave in Ionia. The heroine's new owner, Dionysius, recently widowed, to his own embarrassment falls violently in love with the beautiful girl. She rejects his advancesbut then,
 
Page 49
her fellow slave Plangon, the steward's wife, tells the girl what ignorance kept from hershe is pregnant! Kallirrhoe is miserable. She knows the child is the product of her and Chaireas' love, but people will say she got pregnant while with the banditsand in any case, what point is there in bearing a child who must be born a slave? Kallirrhoe believes she should have an abortion. She addresses the baby in her womb:
"It will not be agreeable to you, Child, to be born into a life of suffering; having come to be, you ought to flee it. Die free, ignorant of misery." [
Apithi eleutheros, apathes
*
kakon
*.] [Chariton,
Chaireas and Kallirrhoe,
pp. 8788]
2
Although she believes it is her duty to spare her child the wretched life of slavery, Kallirrhoe has many pangs, accusing herself of being a Medea (who killed her sons). Plangon the fellow slave offers to help her with an abortion if she wants, but Plangon has a better idea. Dionysius is so madly in love with Kallirrhoewhy not marry him?and then she can father her unborn child on him. It is early enough, Plangon calculates, for Dionysius to be none the wiser. Plangon does not, of course, tell Kallirrhoe that she sees rewards in this arrangement for her husband and herself; Dionysius has urged her to work on the beautiful slave girl for him.
Kallirrhoe has some doubt as to whether she ought to consent to this arrangement. She goes to her own room and closes the doorthe first instance of a Room of One's Own for a woman in Western literature, I think. (Penelope, always surrounded by maid-servants in the
Odyssey,
can scarcely count.) Then she holds a kind of council:
She put the picture of Chaireas on her stomach and "Now then," she said, "here are the three of us together, man and wife and child. Let us hold a council about our common concerns." [P. 90]
The result of the "council" is very satisfactory. Kallirrhoe, ventriloquizing all parties, finds that they agree that it is best for her to give Chaireas' son (she is sure it will be a son) a rich new father.
Thus we watch Kallirrhoe, a model of virtue and wifely chastity, decide her own and her child's life. Of course, the reader, ancient or modern, must root for her to do what she doesand what she does do is decidedly subversive. She is in the wrong by very social (male) law and by the laws of all male religions. According to the Greek and Roman law that pertained in Chariton's world, a mother, even if she were not a slave, had no rights over her own child. Roman law had become increasingly anxious about property and under Augustus was clamping down on (female) adultery, so anxious were the upper-class citizens of the Roman Empire to preserve purity of bloodline and property. A slave, of course, could have no rights

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