Fay Weldon's Wicked Fictions (22 page)

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Authors: Regina Barreca

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BOOK: Fay Weldon's Wicked Fictions
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.
Female Friends
. 1975. London: Pan Books in association with William Heinemann Ltd., 1983.
.
Little Sisters
. 1978. London: Coronet Books, Hodder and Stoughton, 1987.
.
Puffball
. 1980. Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1990.
.
Letters to Alice on first reading Jane Austen
. 1984. New York: Carroll & Graf Publishers, Inc., 1991.
 
Page 58
.
The Rules of Life
. 1987. London: Arrow Books, Century Hutchinson Ltd., 1988.
.
The Hearts and Lives of Men
. 1987. New York: Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc., 1989.
.
The Cloning of Joanna May
. 1989. London: Fontana, An Imprint of HarperCollins, 1990.
 
Page 59
The Importance of Aunts
Rachel Brownstein
Fay Weldon has been compared to Jane Austenbut then so have Anita Brookner, Georgette Heyer (the author of Regency Romances), Alexandra Ripley (who wrote the sequel to
Gone with the Wind
), and even Doris Lessing, whose novel
The Fifth Child
reminded
Partisan Review's
reviewer of "a bit of Jane Austen but with a Mary Shelley twist."
The New Yorker
invoked "Jane Austen's description of her novels as fine brushwork on a 'little bit (two Inches wide) of Ivory' " in a piece on a nonfiction book about poor Americans by the writer Melissa Fay Greene.
1
Flattering on the face of it, the pervasive comparison verges on the odious, having come to mean mostly that the writer at hand is a woman.
To praise every writing woman as a species of Jane Austen is, of course, to diminish significant differences (and Jane Austen, and women generally). One way to arrest the lamentable tendency is to read Austen's books and savor their particularity. This is what Fay Weldon urges us to do in
Letters to Alice on first reading Jane Austen
(1984). Weldon is a writer who likes to buttonhole a reader ("Reader, I am going to tell you the story of Clifford, Helen, and little Nell,"
The Hearts and Lives of Men
begins); direct address is a mode that suits her. But Alice, to whom these letters signed "Aunt Fay" are directed, is not a surrogate for the rest of us. The implied reader of this epistolary novel is older and wiser than Alice, and has read Jane Austen already. She is meant to look indulgently down on "Aunt Fay's" correspondent (whose own letters we never see) while savoring her delightful naiveteto see her as one sees, say, Austen's Emma.
Modern Alice dyes her hair green and black, has quarreled with her parents, and lives with her boyfriend. Required to read Jane Austen's novels for a college course, she thinks them "boring, petty and irrelevant"
 
Page 60
and has written to ask advice of her literary aunt, who is in Australia on a book tour. (Alice's name must be meant to suggest the girl who went to Wonderland; "Fay" coyly promises a peek at the well-known novelist behind the scenes.) Raised on television, Alice doesn't read much, but this doesn't stop her from trying to write a novel, predictably about her own eventful love life. Its tentative title is
The Well of Loneliness
. In the single letter she writes to Alice's mother, Fay recalls her own mother's discovering a copy of Radclyffe Hall's book under her pillow and "ceremoniously burning it, as indecent and likely to corrupt"; she will persuade her niece to change the title of her novel and the plot as well, and effectively change her life, in the course of writing letters to Alice about Jane Austen. For discussing Jane Austen and the reasons why Alice should read her leads Weldon to consider from several angles the blurry and fascinating line between real lives and fiction. In the process, she places her own good sense and wit, her own ideas about women and novels, her own distinctly feminine tone of authority right beside Jane Austen's. She dares the daunting comparison with her great precursor mostly by setting up as an aunt.
Motherhood and daughterhood and sisterhood, real and metaphorical, have interested contemporary feminists to the exclusion of aunthood. This dismissiveness is by no means eccentric: one consequence of the nuclear family's psychosocial effects is that everyone thinks in terms of it. Furthermore, while uncles have important and well-defined roles, in some cultures, aunts are most acknowledged in ours when they are not really auntswhen the word is used as an honorific, "endearingly of any benevolent practical woman who exercises these qualities to the benefit of her circle of acquaintance," as the Oxford English Dictionary pithily puts it. (The OED describes that usage as American, but one edition of the American College Dictionary [1951] calls it "chiefly British.") Two further meanings of
aunt,
"an old woman; a gossip" and "a bawd or procuress; a prostitute," are listed in the OED as obsolete; also obsolete is the slang "Aunt Nancy men,'' used of male supporters of the movement for women's rights in nineteenth-century America. Nevertheless, the derogatory aura lingers. Auntie Mame and Charlie's Aunt and My Aunt Tillie are not to be taken very seriously. This is perhaps about to change, at least among feminists. Kate Millett suggested at a recent academic conference that Simone de Beauvoir should not be called the mother of us all, but the aunt; and Catharine R. Stimpson's neat chiasmus, that "mothers and aunts give the [Nancy Drew] books to their nieces and daughters," was quoted on the first page of the
New York Times
.
2
Having thought long enough about mothering and its discontents, feminists may be about ready to move on. And
 
Page 61
Fay Weldon might have been prophetic as well as wise in understanding, as early as 1984, that the feminist Jane Austen is Aunt Jane.
The insight is on the face of it perverse: isn't
that
Austen the decorous prim spinster in the parsonage, working away at her novels with her very fine brush, hiding the pages under the blotter when the parlor door squeakeda good woman who (therefore) never took herself too seriously as an author? It was her nephew J. E. Austen-Leigh who fixed this image, in an 1870 memoir. (Its mock-humble or mock-heroic epigraph is taken from a biography of Columbus: "He knew of no one but himself who was inclined to the work.") Austen-Leigh had been the youngest person at Jane Austen's funeral; he wrote as an old man. Like most eulogists of dead women, he focuses on his subject's piety, humility, cheerfulness in the face of adversity, etc. His authority is bolstered by his status as a man of the family (his sister Caroline also wrote a memoir,
My Aunt Jane Austen
) and by the pervasive stereotype of the maiden aunt, not to mention those memorable aunts of fictionoften not spinsters but widowswho, however personally outrageous, are stiff-necked sticklers for propriety: Tom Sawyer's Aunt Sally, Wilde's Lady Bracknell, Austen's own Lady Catherine de Bourgh. Nevertheless, the best things in his book work to subvert that too-familiar image of an aunt. They are quotations from Jane Austen's lively letters to him and her nieces, in which she elaborately plays the aunt, playing against the popular conception. The American novelist Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, assigned to write a chapter of a group novel,
The Whole Family,
from the point of view of a maiden aunt, threw a monkey wrench in the works by having her character run off with the heroine's husband-to-be: Austen's letters overturn preconceptions about tone rather than plot. But of course the real issue is characterthe fun of working against the social pressure to see individuals, when they are women, as representative and emblematic.
Jane Austen preempted the unattractive portrait of herself as a spinster aunt before it was quite drytook it on for herself in order to send it up. She writes, for example, to her novel-writing niece Anna Austen Lefroy, "I have been very far from finding your book an evil, I assure you. I read it immediately, and with great pleasure. Indeed, I do think you get on very fast. I wish other people of my acquaintance could compose as rapidly." The compliment is arch and a bit smug: Anna, after all, is trying to equal her aunt's accomplishment as well as to please her. Austen gleefully points to Anna's amateurishness: "St. Julian's History was quite a surprise to me; You had not very long known it yourself, I suspectbut I have no objection to make to the circumstanceit is very well told& his having been in love with the aunt gives Cecilia an additional Interest with him.

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