Fay Weldon's Wicked Fictions (20 page)

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BOOK: Fay Weldon's Wicked Fictions
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Page 53
young woman." Fate is always up to somethingand, as the ancient novelists (like the moderns) know, novel characters are there for nothing if not to have fates, although those fates are really handed them by their authors. Woman's anatomy, her fate to be a reproducer, is always in large part her "Fate"a notion that Weldon celebrates. That sexual "Fate" always plots against virtue, niceness, nice-mindedness,
sophrosyne
*. The Fate of many novels is felt to be in Eros-Amor, Love, which, as Chariton says in the beginning of his novel, loves to stir things up and take control: "Eros loves conflicts." So it does in
Hearts and Lives
which begins with "Love at first sightthat old thing!'' (p. 1). Nell is, of course, to be restored to her parents, recognized through the classic token, her emerald, although by this point she has had a life and has embarked herself on the course of love and sexuality. Her parents, however, can rejoice in their renewal: "But how lucky they were, to be given this second chanceand how little, you might think, they deserved it" (p. 373).
The parents in this kind of novel, ancient or modern, often do
not
deserve to have the children restored to themthe very children whom their own carelessness or cruelty, greed or frailty have put at risk. Nell is restored, like the heroine Charikleia of Heliodorus, or like the heroine in
Evelina
by Frances Burney (another situational writer). But the process of restoration portrays the independent agency of the child and the weakness of the parents. The weakness of the parents is most strikingly seen in
The History of Apollonius King of Tyre,
one of the ancient novels best known to us because of Shakespeare's adaptation of it in
Pericles, Prince of Tyre
. In the novel, which is the basis of the play and which bears some odd ancestral relation to Weldon's
Hearts and Lives,
the heroine grown up is not rescued by the parent, but must herself perform the rescuing of a parent gone astray spiritually and emotionally.
Secrets of human behavior, of human meanings, of the possible ways we can relate ourselves to the cruel but fascinating physical world in which we find ourselvesthese are "secrets" that the novel as a form of literature can deal with, partly by setting us upon a quest for meanings, an increased attentiveness to what we are and what we do. Attentiveness may sometimes be increased by a jolt, a sudden shove, a journey away from what we find comfortable and ordinary. Jean Marsh introducing the dramatized
Cloning of Joanna May
to the Arts and Entertainment Network in the United States calls it "surreal," and suggests that the story relates to science fiction. This is true enough, but the terms don't get us very far. We don't think of
Cloning
as science fiction much more than we think of the ring of Gyges as science. What we see in this situation is certainly an image of the world our society has used science to produce, the world in
 
Page 54
which men are trying to control the business of generation. The author's production of an expressive central comic situation works by giving us (as well as the characters) extra bursts of energy combined with astonishment. The situation is a comic emblem with possibilities that the author as narrator can then set out and read or interpret with hermeneutical gusto.
Fay Weldon's kind of novel is sometimes treated as if it were altogether new. While such a view may be flattering to the author, it can also be disturbing. Credit for originality is given only in exchange for an admission of shallowness. It is not doing the author out of her true originality to claim that her kind of novel is the more powerful because it has long roots and is securely grounded in a classical tradition. Weldon doesn't have to write like Jane Austen in order to be "classical." But Jane Austen herself in her early works is all expressive comic situationall game and play. G. K. Chesterton, looking at the early works in
Volume the Second,
asserts that Austen's inspiration "was the inspiration of Gargantua and of Pickwick; it was the gigantic inspiration of laughter."
3
That Austen herself is Rabelaisian (or has her Rabelaisian aspects) can be seen in reading her earlier or less official works, now freshly collected in
Catherine and Other Writings
. The elegant restrained realism of the six Austen novels, like the apparent modesty of the narratives, was something the author had to consent to acquire in order to get published.
Austen's early writings have the high comic energy, the sudden audacious push as if the reader has been sent on a rush in a swing, losing footing while gaining altitude. Her works exhibit the robust sense of the absurd and an insistent sense of the import of the physical. They break through reserves of feminine modesty on marriage, as of feminine respect of men:
He is quite an old Man, about two and thirty, very plain so plain that I cannot bear to look at him. He is extremely disagreeable and I hate him more than any body else in the world. He has a large fortune and will make great Settlements on me; but then he is very healthy. In short I do not know what to do. ["The Three Sisters," in
Catharine,
p. 55]
Such a blowing of the gaff, such overt deriding of the love storypossible for the early Austen, as not for the Austen who had tamed herself for her publishersresembles the frequent gaff-blowings in Weldon:
Look around you. All the women nicely groomed and attractive and good-looking, and the men no better than fat slugs, for the most part, or skinny runts. Unshaved and smelly as often as not. They get away with everything, men. [
The Fat Woman's Joke,
p. 102]
 
Page 55
So says Brenda's mother after "cutting through a
mille feuille
with a silver cake fork in the tea-rooms at the top of Dickens and Jones" (p. 101). Weldon women in discontent very often find refuge in food. Depression or pregnancy, both important states, make the female characters all the more interested in ingestion. It is no wonder that the witchy Mabs Tucker in
Puffball
is able to poison Liffey, poison being administered (as it customarily is) in food and drink. Mabs is a bad-fairy Queen Mab, but her last name Tucker means "food" in Australian and New Zealand English. Esther Sussman, in
The Fat Woman's Joke,
is the most food-abandoned of Weldon's characters, abandoning even the slow pleasure of cookery:
She picked out a tin of curry and a tin of savoury rice from the shelf.
"It's not real curry, this, of course. Real curry is very tricky to make. You use spices, added at precise intervals, and coconut milk. It's not just a matter of making a stew and adding curry powder and raisins and bananas. You have to devote a whole day to making a true curry." [P. 53]
Esther, gaping ever for more food, is knowledgeable about the time-wasting cookery she has given up, and would be understood by one of Austen's most self-referential characters, the manic cook Charlotte Luttrell in "Lesley Castle" who is so disappointed when her sister's fiancé is killed as her wedding preparations have been in vain: "I had the mortification of finding that I had been Roasting, Boiling and Stewing both the Meat and Myself to no purpose" (''Lesley Castle," in
Catharine,
p. 110). Madly active and overproductive cooks are likely to turn up in Jane Austen's early fiction, as in "A beautiful description of the different effects of Sensibility on different Minds" in
Volume the First,
in which the narrator consoles an invalid friend:
I am usually at the fire cooking some little delicacy for the unhappy invalidPerhaps hashing up the remains of an old Duck, toasting some cheese or making a Curry which are the favorite Dishes of our poor friend. [
Catharine,
p. 68]
Delicate attentions turn into indelicate attentionsstrong, gamey, and spicy. Austenthe early, less-inhibited Austenhas her own enjoyment of comic lists and oral parades. Behind Austen and Weldon, behind even Rabelais, there is the carnal ass of Apuleius, jauntily eating with an appetite to equal Gargantua's or Esther Sussman's. The ass enjoys himself in the home of the cook and the pastry-cook:
In the evenings, after their most luxurious dinners most splendidly served, my masters used to bring back to their apartment great portions of the excess: the one pork, fowl, fish and all sorts of tasty things, enormous leftovers; the other, breads, cookies, doughnuts, hook-shaped cakes and lizard-shaped cakes and more honey-sweet delicacies. As soon as they closed the room and sought the

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