Fay Weldon's Wicked Fictions (53 page)

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Authors: Regina Barreca

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BOOK: Fay Weldon's Wicked Fictions
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It's the End of the World As We Know It: Bringing Down the House in Fay Weldon's Fiction
Regina Barreca
"I've just heard a song called 'It's the End of the World as We Know It, and I Feel Fine.' Do you know it? It's now my favorite song," declared Fay Weldon during a telephone conversation three years ago, in 1990. I knew the song, imagined that one of her sons had no doubt been playing it over the stereo, and recognized the gleeful sound of Fay's delight in the idea that we could all feel fine as the world was shattered around us. The ending of one thing can only signal the beginning of something new, and isn't that cause enough to celebrate? The end of the world as we know it sounded good to Fay Weldon, and somehow she made it sound good to me.
Weldon's ability to transform endings into beginnings, tragedy into comedy, comedy into tragedy, the familiar into the exotic, or the sacred into the profane is her signature. The term "Weldonesque" is invoked when one of her readers sees in life or literature the kind of reversals, revisions, wickedness, and wisdom that mark Weldon's chronicling of the absurdities of a woman's life in the twentieth century. Your sister telephones, feeling ill, the minute you've told your mother that you just got a promotion? Your cat refuses to enter the room when your new lover is there? You discover that the aged and needy woman you live next door to is your aunt's former school rival and enemy? "Weldonesque," we mutter, and get on with our lives.
I want to argue that Fay Weldon is a novelist, short story writer, and essayist who sees herself as writingto use her words"rather wicked"
 
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material. Enjoying her work, Weldon imparts to her loyal readers a sense of complicity and cunning, and offers them permission to laugh out loud at the sanctimonious. When I asked her about her narrative style and her apparent commitment to writing a particularly lethal form of deadpan humor, Weldon declared that "it would not be fair to make people feel safe when safety is, in fact, an illusion. It is dangerous to be reassuring."
1
She went on to explain that "humor allows the reader to feel pleasure even as something important is being passed onto them." Women have been driven so far from their genuine centers of pleasure that, according to Weldon, they must be introduced to the obvious audience for their particular humor: themselves. And that is why, as Weldon writes in
Letters to Alice,
"any seminar on Women and Writing, or Women Writers, or the New Female Culture, or whatever, is instantly booked up ... we are not alone in the oddity of our beliefs. Our neighbour, whom we never thought would laugh when we laughed, actually does'' (p. 74).
At what do women laugh? They laugh at the way women are systematically trained to misread their own perceptions of the world, as well as the way that they are simultaneously encouraged to ascribe power to any man, however feeble, dull, or impotent. For example, the twenty-one-year-old unwed mother Scarlet of
Down Among the Women
misreads her response to Edwin, an appalling man nearly forty years her senior. She kisses his dry, thin lips and feels something, but Weldon tells us that "[i]t is not desire that is stirred, it is her imagination; but how can she know this? She feels she loves him. When she thinks of him kissing her, she is simply enchanted" (p. 110). In this novel, which the author regards as her most autobiographical, readers are encouraged to laugh at the disjuncture between Scarlet's romance script and her choice of a leading man, but the laughter is not directed at Scarlet. Significantly, the humor of the passage resides in the cultural structure that would quite naturally pair an old man with a young woman. Weldon's humor does not reject Scarlet but instead questions the conventional notion of desire. Weldon instructs us that "we see the world as we are taught to see it, not how it is," implying that if we are taught to find old men attractive, then we will seek them out and subsequently rationalize our attraction (p. 34).
Even beautiful, successful, and worldly Mary Fisher, in Weldon's well-known
The Life and Loves of a She-Devil,
falls from worldly and wordy success the moment she relies on her new lover's opinions of her writing. Bobbo, once only Mary Fisher's accountant but now her loverand, by extension, the supreme critic of her worksuggests that her wildly successful novels should be written with an eye toward the presentation of reality. Mary shows her manuscript in progress to Bobbo, "as any loving
 
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woman would her man, and he had even helped her with it. He'd wanted her heroes to be a little graver, a little less tall" (p. 103). Not seeing that Bobbo wants all heroes to be created in his image, Mary Fisher listens and subsequently tailors her writing to fit Bobbo's tastes. She gains his grudging approval but nearly loses her publishing contract. How and why does this happen: why are women so willing to forfeit success and personal happiness? Or, as Weldon asks, "Why does it take so long? Why do we stay so stubbornly blind to our own condition, when our eyes are not only open, but frequently wet with grief and bewilderment?" (
Praxis,
p. 229). Perhaps it is "our passivity" that "betrays us, whispering in our ears, oh, it isn't worth a fight! He will only lie on the far side of the bed!" (p. 229). "Whereas the male humorous figure ... seeks escape from the moral domination of women,'' argues Walker in her article "Humor and Gender Roles," "the female figure in women's humor struggles vainly to live up to expectations for her behavior emanating from a culture dominated by men" (p. 101). Weldon shows the impossibility of achieving perfection in the eyes of a man who will only lie on the far side of the bed when confronted with any requirements from his partner. In addition to passivity, in women's disparagement of their own sex lies powerlessness. "We prefer the company of men to women," wryly observes one of Weldon's characters (
Praxis,
p. 229). Women's identification with and desire to please men even as they fear them, coupled with an inherited fear of independence, keep women at one another's throats. "We betray each other," writes Weldon in an early novel. "We manipulate, through sex: we fight each other for possession of the malesnap, catch, swallow, gone! Where's the next? We will quite deliberately make our sisters jealous and wretched" (
Praxis,
p. 229).
As Judith Wilt has noted, women have also been encouraged to turn humor against themselves in order to render neutral an experience that might otherwise cause them to act to the detriment of the system. Women in Weldon's novels do so at their own risk (usually high) and then only for those periods in which they are going through what Weldon calls a "stupid patch" of attempting to live "an agreeable fiction" (
Down Among the Women,
p. 127). Praxis, for example, at her most self-denying stage:
turned the meeting with the Women's Libbers into a joke, into a dinner-table story, and presently could stop trembling when she thought about it. [P. 237]
When Gwyneth in
Female Friends
uses the cliché "you have to laugh ... it's a funny old life," the third-person narrator responds only with an ironic "Ha-ha" (p. 47). Gwyneth is using the phrase as the system would have her use it, to continue justifying her own powerlessness.
 
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It is when women begin to use comedy not to justify the ways of god/ man but rather to expose the folly of such ways, or when women's comedy is misread by convention, that it gains its real power. By understanding the social and economic basis for women's exclusion from the patriarchal structure or, as Weldon defines social structure, "the government, the church, the civil service, educational and caring organizations, lobbies, societies for this and that, quangos and so forth and so on" (
Darcy's Utopia,
p. 18), women can undermine the system by refusing to participate within their assigned roles. Weldon humorously but unrelentingly exposes the myths that have helped keep women in their place. For this reason, in part, she establishes her right to be called a feminist author. Indeed, Weldon has been said to "create a work whose very structure is feminist." In ''Feminism and Art in Fay Weldon's Novels," Agate Krouse goes on to say that Weldon "may be unique among the new feminist novelists in developing such a structure" (p. 5). Weldon's carefully constructed characters rarely present themselves as role models. Weldon is not of the let's-present-the-best-possible-images-of-the-modern-woman school; her women are, well, no better than her men, although they are usually more complex, interesting, and important. Her novels are intricate weavings of politics, aphoristic commentary, romance, and satire. One recent novel,
Darcy's Utopia,
published in 1990, fulfills expectations for a Weldon work: the reader must pay attention to every curve in the narrative to stay in control of the tale or risk being taken in by the false prophets whose words line the pages.
Darcy's Utopia
is a disturbing and fascinating comic novel requiring enormous attention. Her particular brand of humor laces these pages in a particularly wicked manner, to borrow Weldon's own term, because it plays on the role of the reader as well as the roles of the characters. On the face of it, the novel deals with Eleanor Darcy and her ideas for a new society where "we have to start again, rethink everything, from how and why we brush our teeth to how and why we bury our dead" (p. 185). Eleanor is an example of the sort of ambitious, if not ruthless, protagonist Weldon created in
She-Devil,
but this time instead of changing herself to suit the world, Eleanor wants to change the world to suit herself. The characters who meet her are uneasy around Eleanor and their experience mirrors our response as readers: Eleanor is hardly a heroine, given to pronouncements such as "all babies will be automatically aborted unless good reasons can be shown why they should be allowed to proceed to term," and "it's only women who can't find lovers, who only have husbands, who have to make do with babies" (pp. 133, 163). This is hardly the talk of a heroine; Eleanor commands center stage, but Weldon offers the reader clear caveats concerning the various seductions of her vision. In other words, it is danger-
 
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ous to approach this novel believing that Weldon is providing a blueprint for a desirable social order, however superficially appealing Darcy's thought of a "unicultural, multiracial, secular society" (p. 135) might be; seeing the split between the author's voice and the voice of the protagonist was never more important than in this ironic tour de force.
Eleanor Darcy preaches in order to convert journalists Valerie Jones and Hugo Vansitart to her doctrine. Like Weldon's other works,
Darcy's Utopia
concerns itself with the distribution of, right to, and uses of power. As in her other works, humor undercuts what first appear to be the most serious declarations; Eleanor's closest friend tells the journalists that it's "hard to tell when she's joking and when she isn't" (p. 188), reminiscent of the much-commented-upon last line in
She-Devil,
"A comic turn, turned serious" (p. 241). Nearly every character in these novels ends by questioning the right of any society to govern; indeed, questioning the very idea of society itself: "Rules? You want rules? You really can't survive without a book of rules? ... Can't you decide, one by one, what's right, what's wrong? Do you have to continue to believe in groups?" (p. 225).
Weldon's satire encompasses everything from high culture"museums will be very boring places indeed. If you want to subdue the children you only have to take them on a visit to a museum, and they will behave at once, for fear of being taken there again" (p. 171)to elections"there will be elections, but people will be expected merely to vote for people they personally like. It will be a popularity contest. An annual 'boy or girl most likely to run the country' jamboree" (p. 87). A structuring principle for all Weldon's fiction is an unevasive acknowledgment of the mutability of perception and definition. Only the worst are full of unconsidered conviction.
Individual characters more than announce prepackaged convictions; they attempt to live by such falsehoods. When a physical education teacher announces proudly that "female fidelity ... is the cornerstone on which the family, the heredity principle, and the whole of capitalism rests" (
Down Among the Women,
p. 196), we hear echoes of Cixous and Clement, as well as echoes of Marx and Levi-Strauss. Tellingly, Weldon, who can certainly be identified as a writer concerned with materialist analysis, holds degrees in both economics and psychology, and her novels reflect both these influences. In addition, Weldon writes frequently on the hard sciences, and offers conclusions drawn from her knowledge of structural anthropology. In fact, Levi-Strauss's concept of woman as sign is converted into everyday language by Weldon when a character from
The President's Child
explains that "men ... pass girls on, you know. They're forever doing each other favors. They like to share the good things of life,

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