Fay Weldon's Wicked Fictions (54 page)

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BOOK: Fay Weldon's Wicked Fictions
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whilst making sure the less privileged don't get a look-in. They're the same sexually as they are financially. Capitalist to the core. They hand around the wives too ..." (p. 74). This may be the point at which we should qualify Aristotle's claim that comedy typically "aims at representing men as worse ... than in actual life" (
Poetics,
2.4). Though Weldon's comedy is often described as an exaggerated and humorously distorted picture of our culture, it actually offers an unnervingly accurate portrait of contemporary life. Weldon's humor, like the humor produced by other women writers, often works by providing what at first might seem like hyperbole ("men pass women around") which is then revealed to be a transcription of the everyday life of a number of her characters. Those characters or actions that would seem to be "an imitation ... of a lower type'' turn out to be simply median (
Poetics,
5.1). What is perceived as exaggeration is actually the product of an uncensored vision; the lower types are indeed running the system.
Comedy, however, can also disrupt the system by providing a context for women's refusal to participate while still allowing them to remain within the confines of accepted discourse. Weldon gives evidence of a woman's power, through sexuality and through humor, to refuse to be part of the masculine game. For example, the following anecdote from
Down Among the Women
prompts us to laugh at the figure of authority, not at the sexually active, socially marginal woman: "Reminds me of the story of Royalty visiting the maternity hospital. Royalty inclines towards young mother. 'What lovely red hair baby has, mother. Does he take after his father?' Answer: 'Don't know, ma'am, he never took his hat off' " (p. 21). Weldon implies women refuse to act as the currency of the dominant system when they realize the system has been constructed on a false basis. When women understand, as Elsa does in
Little Sisters/Words of Advice,
that for them, at least, sex is "not for procreation, it is for the sharing of privilege," they can abandon the rules and seek their own limitless pleasure and power (p. 134). Elsa, in fact, realizes that sex, outside the rules laid down for women's morality, proves fortifying rather than depleting, proves exhilarating rather than shameful. It proves, in fact, comedic. Shame, perhaps, is the province of the male, since sex proves to be his "loss" under these terms: "Man! Come to bed. Handsome, young, rich, powerful, or otherwise fortunateis that you? Excellent? Come inside. Because what I know and perhaps you don't is that by some mysterious but certain process of osmosis I will thereupon draw something of these qualities into myself ... gaining my pleasure through your loss" (p. 134).
This realization, Weldon suggests, is what has created the figure of the sorceress, the hysteric, the witch. Once the first rule is broken, all rules
 
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crumble. For Weldon, "the first step ... the breaking of the first rule" (
She-Devil,
p. 54), is often the rejection of discrimination: one learns to reject the false assembly of values. The second step is realizing that "when male power and prestige are at stake the lives and happiness of women and children are immaterial" (
President's Child,
p. 163). This leads to the ultimate realization that the public world, which is supposedly created in order to protect the vulnerable, actually sets about systematically to destroy the powerless, but only after those in authority have profited from them. "Let us now praise fallen women" demands Weldon in
Down Among the Women,
"those of them at any rate who did not choose to fall, but were pushed and never rose again ... truckloads of young Cairo girls, ferried in for the use of the troops ... lost to syphilis, death or drudgery. Those girls, other girls, scooped up from all the great cities of East and West, Cairo, Saigon, Berlin, Rome. Where are their memorials? Where are they remembered, prayed for, honoured? Didn't they do their bit?'' (p. 185). The most significant part of women's recognitions in these matters is to see that reality and nature are arguments used by men against women, used by men to enable themselves to keep the power they have assertedand, most importantly, that power and authority are constructs of language, not forces reflecting the inherent order of the universe.
Language permits those in authority to do exactly as they please. Even women's understanding of themselves has often been designed by men who have been "prepared to generalise about women, and women would not argue, but would simper, and be flattered by the attention paid" (
Praxis,
p. 217). The cost of this attention, however, is astronomical. Weldon writes in
The President's Child
that men "murder and kill with impunity: not so much in the belief of the rightness of their cause, or even telling themselves that ends could justify means, or in their own self-interest, but simply not realizing that murder was what they had done" (
President's Child,
p. 62). This occurs, as Isabel says, because they have the authority enabling them to change "language itself to suit their purposes. If ... anyone had to go, she would not be killed, let alone murdered; she would be liquidated, wiped out, taken out, obliterated, dealt with ..." (
President's Child,
p. 62). Women's marginality is written into the language, as feminist critics have pointed out. Monique Wittig, for example, writes that personal pronouns are "pathways and means of entrance into language," and that they mark gender through all language, "without justification of any kind, without questioning" (p. 65). Weldon confronts this in her fiction. "I know you have a low opinion of your own sex," says one woman in
Praxis,
"it is inevitable; our inferiority is written into the language: but you must be aware: you must know what's happening" (p. 154).
 
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In
She-Devil,
Ruth indicates that it is not surprising that women are not offered easy access to traditional authority given their exclusion from language: "we are powerless, and poor, and have no importance. We are not even included in everyone" (p. 50). If women subscribe to the conventional role assigned to them within the traditional system, they are stripped of their humanity. "Human beings rant and roister, fuck and feed, love and smother, shake their fists at the universe in thunderstorms and defy a creator who is sure to get them with the next lightning bolt," explains Weldon in
Female Friends
. "These little English girls, with their soft, uncomplaining voices, and their docile hearts, whose worst crime has been a foul on the hockey pitch, are quite alien ..." (p. 130). Women have not been permitted to participate as human beings and so are perpetually alien to the world of men while creating distance between themselves and other women. On the other hand they can realize that, as Esther says to Phyllis in
The Fat Woman's Joke
: ''Any woman who struggles to be accepted in a man's world makes herself ridiculous. It is a world of folly, fantasy and self-indulgence and it is not worth aspiring to. We must create our own world" (p. 83). While not a separatist feminist in her personal politics, certainly Weldon would advise women to leave behind the masculine model and find a vision that accommodates a woman's perspective. Women must, to begin with, see themselves and all women as human beings, and as guardians of their own integrity and fate. This simple agenda is at the heart of Weldon's feminism.
This leads to Weldon's assumption that although "you could advance the view that all good writing is bound to be feminist ... it depends on how you're going to define feminist," claiming that "it took me a very long time to believe that men were actually human beings. I believed the world was female, whereas men have always believed the world is male. It's unusual for women to suffer from my delusion."
2
As Weldon illustrates in her novels, however, the apparently vigorous world of men pales in comparison to the world of women: "affairs of state ... are child's play compared to the affairs of the home ... of the intricacies of a marriage and the marriage bed," she writes in
Remember Me
(p. 203). In this way, Weldon illustrates one element identified by Nancy Walker as characteristic of women's humor, that "[m]en are nearly extraneous to the 'real' lives of women; their experiences outside the home are so remote as to seem nonexistent, and their lives within the orbit of the home are trivial, insignificant, or mysterious" (p. 113). Weldon sees the tasks designated as women's workthe primarily emotional responsibility of caring for other human beings on a day-to-day basisas far more dangerous than work in the corporate world. Weldon argues convincingly that "if a corporation
 
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had to decide at what point it was feasible for a small child to ride its bicycle in the road, they would hire a dozen consultants and probably be unable to arrive at any conclusion. A mother has to make that decision in one afternoon based purely on her good sense and instinct. And she has to accept responsibility for her decision herself."
3
For Weldon the traditional cliché is inverted; she regards "men as, for the most part, decorative." The real weight of the world's work falls on women.
If women are able to cope effectively with the world's emotional work, why are they so often so ill-prepared to care for themselves? Where did they learn to see themselves as failures or victims? From Mary Fisher, for one, who "writes a great deal about the nature of love. She tells lies" (
She-Devil,
p. 1). If we examine the philosophies of the aging barmaid Gwyneth of
Female Friends,
we see that she absorbs her platitudes from "dubious sources, magazines, preachers and sentimental drinkers," and that these "often flatly contradicting the truths of her own experience, are usually false and occasionally dangerous" (p. 45). And, of course, women get instructions directly from the state: "There was much talk of 'the bond' down at the clinic and a good deal done to foster it. It was less taxing on welfare funds to have mothers looking after their own progeny than leaving the state to do it" (
She-Devil,
p. 180). Weldon points out that women often begin from a false point if they start by "supposing there's a world in which there's a right way to do things.'' Nothing is obvious, least of all the truth. When Ruth of
She-Devil
takes her whining, clinging children to the high tower where Mary Fisher lives with Ruth's adulterous husband in order to leave the children there ("the only place they'll have a chance to witness" the primal scene, she dryly offers) she is confronted with a stock truth:
"It is obvious that the children can't stay here. They must go home where they belong, with their mother."
"Why is it obvious?" asked Ruth. [P. 72]
Just as there is no hard core of reality, since truth, as Weldon describes it, is like an onion where you simply peel away layer after layer only to find that there is no heart of the matter, there is also "no such thing as the essential self." So admits one of Ruth's many doctors when she asks about changing her physical self: "It is all inessential, and all liable to change and flux, and usually the better for it" (p. 221). When women recognize that the apparent orthodoxy is upheld by mere consensus, they can begin to acknowledge the powers of subversion which they have within them. Every prevailing notion is then held up for questioning, especially those as fundamental as the concept of nature itself. In one quintessentially Wel-

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