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BOOK: Fay Weldon's Wicked Fictions
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very core of the outrageous violence toward womengives Carl the illusion that he will be able to control them.
To be sure, Weldon can see through Carl May's and Dr. Holly's actions, and can see clearly where their machinations will end. She has her heroines plot a punishment for Carl and Dr. Holly which is far more appropriate (and funnier) than the one that they had planned for them. The downhill slide begins to Carl May and Dr. Holly when Joanna's clonesJulie, Jane, Gina, and Aliceset out to find each other and eventually unite. The results are disastrous for the men. At one point, Dr. Holly, who "suffers from gigantitism of the head" (p. 243) wonders: "Supposing they felt as entitled to end him as he has to begin them? What would happen to his research? Has he remembered to put away his own dehydrated DNA?" (p. 235) And by the end of the novel, nuclear-devotee Carl May abandons his own nefarious scheme as he slides inexorably toward his own extinction. He ridiculously ''jumped into the cooling pond [of a nuclear reactor] to prove low-level waste was no threat to anyone, and the future of nuclear power, clean, efficient, safe, would be assured" (p. 258). "Fate was unkind," writes Weldon, "but just" (p. 262).
Carl and Dr. Hollywith the physician's arrogance that historically comes from knowing that patients will hang on his every word and then accept unquestioningly what he tells themare not prepared for the reaction of the clones. Using Carl's idea, Weldon transforms the masculinity of his fantasized omnipotence into a subversive critique of patriarchy: "You should carry on," Joanna tells Carl, "you might end up doing more good than harm" (p. 109). Weldon inaugurates a counterstrategy as she subverts Carl's notion of cloning as a loss of individuality. Joanna offers the cloning of women as a creed against the prevailing ideology which manhandles and regulates women's bodies. She tells Carl: "I see a different world.... I see one which is perfectible without tampering" (p. 109).
Nevertheless, Weldon's heroines forge a pact and fight back, and the collective sisterhood of Joanna and her clones, Julie, Gina, Jane, and Alice, provides Joanna with an emotional network in which her power is quadrupled rather than divided: "When I acknowledged my sisters, my twins, my clones, my children, I stood out against Carl May.... Joanna May is now Alice, Julie, Gina and Jane" (p. 247). In Weldon's matrilineal line of descent, only the malignant guilt is divided: "They felt the inherent guilt of the female, but not all powerfully; being four that guilt was quartered. The soul was multiplied, the guilt divided. That was a great advance" (p. 236). Weldon's works configure into a tradition of novels by women writers in her illustration of the ways that society psychologically and sexually ravages women: "We've had so many oughts and shoulds, all of us,
 
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we're all but given up being critical of one another. Good for her, say we" (p. 265). With astonishing psychological acumen, Weldon understands women who have been bamboozled into creatures of someone else's making as she openly acknowledges what women have been forced to fight.
In
The Cloning of Joanna May,
Weldon hopes to flash a warning signal about dead-end values which imply that intellectual excellence requires depersonalization as Dr. Holly laments the condition of his office: "The room was male, male; straight lines, hard-edged: he now saw what was wrong with it. No pot plants, no family photographs, no cushionsnot an ashtray, not a coffee cupnothing to bear witness to human frailty, everything to further unimpassioned thought, that divine inspiration, that necessary trigger if Utopia was ever to be achieved" (p. 232). To be sure, Weldon, whose stories are like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, not strings of beads, disestablishes scientific authority as she exposes the narrowness of antihuman behavior which does not include potted plants, family photos, and coffee cups and all that they come to represent. She is asking us to rename the affective lives of women.
Weldon's women throw open the curtains of the bay windows and take a penetrating look at the outside world: "Nail me and alter me, fix me and distort me," Joanna tells Carl, "I'll still have windows" (p. 110). Joanna's rebuttal to Carl articulates Weldon's plurality of visiona kaleidoscopic viewan interplay of infinite possibilities for women. And after her heroines have looked outside, they know enough to look inside themselves as well, and they often like what they see. Not the kind of pabulum which makes us feel good, Weldon's stories nevertheless offer us an inspirational message and convince us that things will get better: "We are not denatured remnants of the human race," Weldon once said in an interview. "On the contrary we are more sensitive, more humane, more culturally aware than our forefathers. We understand better what it feels like to be someone else.'' Weldon also offers us women a future as she makes us feel the risky joy of venturing beyond our circumscribed, narrow plots. For her optimism, as well as her wry skepticism, her readersincluding this oneare grateful.
Notes
1. For an in-depth discussion of DNA, see Sam Singer's
Human Genetics: An Introduction to the Principles of Heredity
(San Francisco: W. H. Freeman & Co., 1978).
2. In her discussion of the thematics of birth in Mary Shelley's
Frankenstein,
Susan Winnett provides a theoretical grid for understanding Carl's be-
 
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havior: "Frankenstein is a
male
mother; unlike the women in the novel, he is entirely unwilling to nurture the creature(s) dependent on him." Winnett goes on to write that: "In other words, his indulgence in the retrospective mode of 'male' sense making keeps him from acknowledging his ongoing responsibility to the birth he clones as well as from seeing that henceforth his plot inevitably involves the consequences of an act of creation that he regards as a triumph in and of itself" (p. 510).
3. In
The Reproduction of Mothering,
Nancy Chodorow's central thesis is that women have symbiotic relationships with their daughters but not with their sons. Because they are the same gender, women tend not to experience their daughters as separate from them in the same way that they do their sons. Women as mothers then go on to produce daughters with mothering capacities and a desire to mother. Chodorow claims that most of our problems will wither away if men are brought into child-rearing.
Works Cited
Chodorow, Nancy.
The Reproduction of Mothering: Psychoanalysis and the Sociology of Gender
. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978.
Cixous, Hélène. "Le rire de la Meduse."
L'Arc
61 (1975): 354. Trans. Keith and Paula Cohen. "The Laugh of the Medusa."
Signs
1/4 (Summer 1976): 87593.
Daly, Ann.
Women Under the Knife: A History of Surgery
. New York: Routledge, 1991.
Ortner, Sherry. "Is Female to Male as Nature is to Culture?"
Woman Culture and Society,
eds. Michelle Zimbalist Rosaldo and Louise Lamphere. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1974.
Rich, Adrienne.
Of Woman Born
. New York: W. W. Norton, 1976.
Singer, Sam.
Human Genetics: An Introduction to the Principles of Heredity
. San Francisco: W. H. Freeman & Co., 1978.
Spacks, Patricia Meyer. "Women's Stories, Women's Selves."
The Hudson Review
30 (1977): 2948.
Weldon, Fay.
The Cloning of Joanna May
. New York: Penguin, 1989.
Winnett, Susan. "Women, Men, Narrative, and Principles of Pleasure."
PMLA
(Summer 1990): 50518.

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