Fay Weldon's Wicked Fictions (36 page)

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Authors: Regina Barreca

Tags: #Women and Literature, #England, #History, #20th Century, #Literary Criticism, #General, #European, #English; Irish; Scottish; Welsh, #Women Authors, #Social Science, #Women's Studies, #test

BOOK: Fay Weldon's Wicked Fictions
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duced and maintained. And it is a male fantasy; she can desire no self other than the self designed by male desire. Her body remains her text.
During the process of transformation, Ruthnow naming herself Marlene Huntermakes headlines, but no one can find out who she really is, because she erases her past along with her body, her identity, and becomes the new body. In "The Clinical Eye," Mary Anne Doane argues that in illness "the female body is located not so much as spectacle but as an element in the discourse of medicine, a manuscript to be read for the symptoms which betray her story, her identity' (
Female Body,
p. 157). Hiding her past identity, Ruth becomes a discourse of absence; as her body shrinks in every dimensionheight, jaw, teeth, limbs and allher story seems to represent the symptoms of femaleness itself. Her presence becomes absenceabsence of self, of physical identity. She presents herself literally as the other woman. That painful, complicated surgical processdescribed in awful detail in the novelmakes the process of self-transformation answer a larger question. The female body in this novel is still a text to be inscribed, yet the woman herself controls the writing, revising herself physically into the image of the perfect woman. The dead body is her own; she is the murderer of herself as Ruth, and the creator of herself as a series of women: Vesta Rose, Polly Patch, Georgiana Tilling, Marlene Hunter, and, finally, Mary Fisher, her husband's lover.
That self-transformation is a form of sexual suicide, since it is essential self-destruction in order to fit the rules for female sexuality. Margaret Higonnet writes in "Speaking Silences: Women's Suicide":
To embrace death is at the same time to read one's own life. The act is a self-barred signature; its destructive narcissism seems to some particularly feminine.... The desire to control one's own life may extend into manipulation of the lives of the survivorsand women are thought to be particularly prone to this motive. The act may be dedicated, like a poem, to some one in particular. [
Female Body,
p. 69]
Note her language: the body becomes, through its destruction, a work of art, a linguistic act, a poem dedicated to another. The "destructive narcissism" that marks suicide also marks the female body as symbolic construct, for it is produced only by destroying the individual woman, the separate self. Higonnet claims that "When women represent the death of the self on their bodies, they do so in a gesture that remains open-ended" (p. 69). Ruth's gesture is certainly that: she can commit suicide, can kill herself off, and yet transform herself into the object of desire she could not otherwise be.
Thus the death of the self through self-directed violence becomes the transformation that allows the happy ending. Ruth is like the heroine of
 
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Marge Piercy's 1973 poem "Barbie Doll," for whom success is measured by self-destruction and self-mutilation in the quest for physical perfection:
She was advised to play coy,
exhorted to come on hearty,
exercise, diet, smile and wheedle.
Her good nature wore out
Like a fan belt.
So she cut off her nose and legs
And offered them up.
In the casket displayed on satin she lay
with the undertaker's cosmetics painted on,
a turned-up putty nose,
dressed in a pink-and-white nightie.
Doesn't she look pretty? everyone said.
Consummation at last.
To every woman a happy ending.
This physical dismemberment certainly undermines the promised happy ending by illustrating the ironic consummation of achieving beauty at the cost of life. Self-transformation is self-destruction, and its violence transforms the mind as well as the physical body. Ruth discovers the repercussions of vengeance after she reclaims her husband with her revised body: "I cause Bobbo as much misery as he ever caused me, and more. I try not to, but somehow it is not a matter of male or female, after all; it never was: merely of power. I have all, and he has none. As I was, so he is now" (p. 241). And that is her equality.
This is a darkly humorous novel, as I pointed out earlier; Weldon is not writing a murder story in the traditional sense, and the deaths of the characters are less simple than the stabbing of Alec D'Urberville, the blinding of Rochester, and other violent acts explained by the "gentle" motives of desperate women. Yet the process of
self
-destruction here is even more direct, and since it is located in a hatred of the physical body it has much in common with anorexia nervosa, as Noelle Caskey defines it:
It is the literal-mindedness of anorexia to take "the body" as a synonym for "the self," and to try to live in the world through a manipulation of "the body," particularly as it is reflected to the anorexic by the perceived wishes of others. Anorexia is the cultivation of a specific image
as an image
it is a purely artificial creation and that is why it is admired. Will alone produces it and maintains it against considerable physical odds. [
Female Body,
p. 184]
Ruth's dramatic weight loss, plastic surgery, and willful insistence on surgically shortening her arms and legs, seriously risking her health both now and in the future, make her the object of great admiration. She becomes
 
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an artificial creation, a pure image; the surgeons work with giant photographs of Mary Fisher as their models, and Ruth becomes the image of Mary Fisher that is so admired by othersher husband, in particular. She changes her self by destroying her body. That reduction of self to body, the reduction of body to image, fulfills the perceived desire of the culture for female beauty.
Weldon's novel comments on the violence of cultural demands for female bodies resulting in self-loathing, in anorexia, in suicide. Written with a feminist swerve, the novel illustrates the speaking body that destroys both men and women, both the other and the self. By mastering female seduction and male deduction, Ruth violently revises the story of her life. In the process she kills herself, but gains her own voice, her own pen, as she writes the story of her transformation into the object of her husband's desireand perhaps her own desire. But she does not tell a story with a happy ending, for she plays into the hands of the culture that equates body with self, and questions her narrative violence in transforming herself into the image of a heroine.
That is the larger issue the novel addresses: the appropriation of violence by women merely destroys women, remaking them but not in a better image. The violence is turned against the self in bodily transformations, and such transformations only rewrite the body as self without revising the conventions of the text. Weldon's novel illustrates that boldly. By revising the triangle of
Jane Eyre,
by illustrating the inequalities of male-female relations in marriage, and by transforming Ruth the vengeful giant into the physical image of a beautiful romance writer, Weldon contains the violence in very fictional terms, and in a perverse sort of domestic comedy. Ruth, at the end of the novel, even writes a romance and sends it to Mary Fisher's publishers, who want to buy it. She can indeed write the right fictions, produce the appropriate stories that will sell the romance that destroyed her. The novel comes full circle, with Ruth, now Mary, living in Mary's house with Ruth's husband/Mary's lover, living Mary's successful romance. But the process of writing the self is violent. Mary is dead, Ruth's children are gone, Ruth's husband is aged and confused, and Ruth suffers the side effects of the agonizing surgery she has undergone.
If the closure of
Jane Eyre
is frustrating to some feminist readers who are angered by Jane's self-satisfied reduction into a wife, the end of Weldon's novel is terrifying. Ruth does not challenge the rules for female bodies, the role of body as self and symbol. Instead, Ruth literally reduces herself into another woman in order to regain her place as the wife. She transforms herself into something smaller. She speaks only through the body. She employs her powerful mindand her wealthto command sur-

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