geons to recreate her body into one less powerful, more delicate, more desirable, moreas the surgeon complainsordinary.
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I think the novel can be read as an indictment of the violence women commit against their bodies in the production of an accepted ideal bodily self, and a warning about the potential for more active, outwardly directed violence against the men (and women) who demand that ideal self. Ruth's self-directed violence is horrifying, for she is intelligent, articulate, and aware of the power of her mind, yet is convinced that only the body articulates a self. The idea of self-transformation may be a common fantasy, often satisfied in romantic novels; but in Weldon's novel we are forced to face the violence of the model of female perfection that such novels reproduce by equating the female body and the female self. Ruth's last words remind us: "I am a lady of six foot two, who had tucks taken in her legs. A comic turn, turned serious" (p. 241).
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| Chawaf, Chantal. "Linguistic Flesh." In
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| Cixous, Hélène. "The Laugh of the Medusa." Trans. Keith Cohen and Paula Cohen.
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| Michie, Helena.
The Flesh Made Word: Female Figures and Women's Bodies
. New York: Oxford University Press, 1987.
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. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1982.
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| Rhys, Jean.
Wide Sargasso Sea
. London: Deutsch Press, 1966.
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| Suleiman, Susan Rubin, ed.
The Female Body in Western Culture: Contemporary Perspectives
. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986.
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| Weldon, Fay.
The Life and Loves of a She-Devil
. New York: Pantheon Press, 1984.
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