Fay Weldon's Wicked Fictions (21 page)

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BOOK: Fay Weldon's Wicked Fictions
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Page 56
baths to refresh themselves, I would cram myself to the full with these divinely-offered feasts (
oblatis ego divinitus dapibus affatim saginabar
). [Apuleius,
Metamorphoses
or
Asinus Aureus,
Bk X, c.13]
4
Not only satire but all rumination on human behavior and human fate demands attention to the ignoble, unignorable physical home of desirethe body with its open mouth, chomping jaws, and almost-interminable digestive tract.
Weldon's power lies partly in her ability to unite the satiric-fantastic, in which she is a descendant of Apuleius and Rabelais, with the ironic expressive situational story of human love and fate, in which she is a descendant of Chariton. She is thus a descendant of at least two strands of "classical" tradition and a relative (as each novelist is) of numerous other writers of fiction. She has her Austenian aspects. Austen has her Weldonesque side. Perhaps any strict barriers between narrative kinds of writingor between narrative writingsmust at some point break down. Chrétien de Troyes is after all very fond of teasing expressive situations, and if Rabelais had dramatized Chrétien, the result would have been interesting at the very least. All of these authors have a relation to an older and bigger narrative tradition which includes many more models than we have previously liked to acknowledge. Narrative tradition is a big affair. In her own ways of wedding satire and domestic crisis, sex and expressive nonnaturalistic situation, Weldon is truly in the classical vein. She is the stronger as she has her roots in the true Great Tradition.
Notes
1. Some will demur at this reference to the
Magna Mater
. At present, in reaction against a strong current in contemporary feminism, there is a determined scholastic endeavor to repudiate ideas of female power in any form as being associated with antiquity in any period. Mary Beard, in
The London Review of Books
(13 May 1993), refers scornfully to the "lunacy" which imagines "primitive mother goddesses ruling the roost in the never-never land of Stone Age matriarchy," along with other ''arguments about women and religion that would be promptlyand rightlylaughed into the dustbin in almost every other field" (p. 19). She follows Mary Lefkowitz, whose
Women and Greek Myth
(1986) seems chiefly designed to tell us that the Goddess is dead because there never were any real goddesses. Stone Age matriarchy has been attacked by Stella Georgoudi in "Creating a Myth of Matriarchy" in
A History of Women,
ed. Georges Duby and Michelle Perot (1990); see English translation by A. Goldhammer (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992), pp. 44963.
Certainly, feminists should and must search into the evidences of history, and it is true that some enthusiasts have leaped into premature assertions
 
Page 57
about the Goddess Religion. Nevertheless, the chorus of negative Marys is not without ideological objectives, and may be treated as an academic backlash. Traditional classical departments (or leading members of these) often have a strong vested interest in sustaining a traditional view of the classical eraa nineteenth-century view, very largely. Any woman who visits Asia Minor today is likely soon to be struck by the insistent presence of images of female divinities and the remaining' evidences of worship of a being or beings describable as female. If there never "really" were a Cybele or Aphrodite, it would only be in the same sense that there never "really" was an Apollo or Dionysius. Contemplation of the history of the novel in the West has given me a considerable respect for the possibility of goddess-centered religion(s).
2. Page references to Chariton's novel are to Budé edition (see Works Cited); the translations offered here are my own. The reader may wish to turn to the English version in
Collected Ancient Greek Novels
(see Works Cited).
3. G. K. Chesterton, "Preface" to
Love and Freindship
[sic]
and Other Early Works ... by Jane Austen
(New York: Frederick A. Stokes Co., 1922), pp. xivxv.
4. The Latin is taken from the Loeb edition of Apuleius'
Metamorphoses,
translated by J. Arthur Hanson (Vol. 2, pp. 23841); my translation is slightly different.
Works Cited
Apuleius.
The Metamorphoses of Apuleius
. Ed. and trans. J. Arthur Hanson. Cambridge, Mass., and London: Harvard University Press, 1989. Translations in essay are not Hanson's but my own.
Austen, Jane.
Catharine and Other Writings
. Ed. Margaret Anne Doody and Douglas Murray. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1993.
Chariton.
Chaireas and Kallirrhoe,
as
Le roman de Chaireas et Callirhoé
. Ed. Georges Molinié and Alain Billault (French-Greek dual language Budé edition). Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1979. For another translation see B. P. Reardon,
Chaereas and Callirhoe,
in
Collected Ancient Greek Novels
. Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 1989, pp. 17124.
Chesterton, G. K. Preface to
Love and Freindship
[sic]
and Other Early Works ... by Jane Austen
. New York: Frederick A. Stokes Co., 1922.
Rabelais, Francois.
Oeuvres Complètes
. Ed. Guy Demerson. Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1973.
Weldon, Fay. (Works are in chronological order; list includes only books quoted.)
.
The Fat Woman's Joke
. 1967. London: Coronet Books, Hodder and Stoughton, 1990.

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