of the romance tradition. Weldon both extends and inverts the Cinderella story to demonstrate the awful power of the ideals of romantic love and physical beauty. As a child, the unlovely Ruth has two lovely stepsisters, and she is early on abandoned by both her stepfather and her mother. Her marriage to Bobbo is occasioned by her accidental pregnancy, and she is as unwanted as a wife as she had been as a child. Her drive to assume the physical image of Mary Fisher requires that her body be mutilated, which recalls that in some versions of the Cinderella story, Cinderella's stepsisters cut off parts of their feet to try to make the glass slipper fit. In the end, Ruth is no longer a woman but an artifice; further, by taking Mary Fisher's place as the author of romances (though she refuses to publish them), she is engaged in perpetuating the same notions of romantic ideality that had caused her, as Ruth, to be shunned. The last lines of the novel invite us to read beneath the wicked comedy of
She-Devil
: "I am a lady of six foot two, who had tucks taken in her legs. A comic turn, turned serious" (p. 278). Serious, indeed.
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Far more triumphant, though no less in thrall to cultural notions of feminine attractiveness, is Gabriella Sumpter in Weldon's
The Rules of Life
(1987). Having led a thoroughly self-centered life, Gabriella narrates her story from the grave in the year 2004, thanks to the discovery by the priests of the Great New Fictional Religion that the stories of the recently departed can be captured on tape. Gabriella is thus a kind of ultimate Sleeping Beauty, one who cannot be awakened but who can tell her storya woman who, at the time of her death at the age of sixty-one, was "still capable of inspiring erotic love": "My step did not have time to falter, my spine did not curve; my eyes had wrinkled but barely dimmed: my teeth, with considerable help from my dentist, Edgar Simpson, remained white, firm, even, and above all
there
" (p. 15). Despite the pleasure that Gabriella has derived from her erotic encounters, she finds death (sleep) preferable to life, for life is painful, and "the briefer the experience the better'' (p. 15). In fact, her "great achievement" is that she has not married or borne children, which reverses the fairy-tale trajectory toward marriage to the prince.
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Like many a fairy-tale heroine, Gabriella is orphaned and left to find her own way in life. Her mother, a "poor, pretty, inconsequential thing" (p. 36), is killed by a wasp sting, and her father, a largely unsuccessful gambler, dies when their house burns down. Gabriella is rescuedand immediately beddedby a doctor's assistant, but, in another of Weldon's inversions of fairy-tale plots, this experience neither ruins her nor serves as a cautionary tale for the reader, but instead launches her happily on a life of erotic pleasure. As Gabriella puts it, "One of the great rewards of
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