Fay Weldon's Wicked Fictions (23 page)

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BOOK: Fay Weldon's Wicked Fictions
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Page 62
I like the Idea: a very proper compliment to an Aunt!I rather imagine indeed that Neices are seldom chosen but in compliment to some Aunt or other. I dare say [your husband] was in love with me once, & wd never have thought of you if he had not supposed me dead of a scarlet fever" (
Letters,
pp. 42021). This aunt's advice is tempered by a sense of her own potentially comical positionand other people's.
A quick survey of Austen's novels yields an aunt's-eye view of the variety of aunts: in
Pride and Prejudice,
Lady Catherine stands corrected by Elizabeth's aunts Gardiner and Philips, who balance one another; Mrs. Norris and Lady Bertram are opposite kinds of aunts in
Mansfield Park
; the middle-aged aunt mentioned in
The Watsons
surprises her niece's family by still being a scandalously sexual creature; and
Emma,
of course, is among other things a novel about auntship, with its heroine who draws hasty chalk portraits of her sister's children (all looking more or less the same) and claims she will never marry partly because she "will always have a niece with me" as an object of affection. Miss Bates, whom Emma insults, is Jane Fairfax's doting aunt; like Frank Churchill's tyrannical aunt she is crucial to the plot. "I have always maintained the importance of Aunts as much as possible," Austen wrote to her niece Caroline, who had just become an aunt herself, "& I am sure of your doing the same now" (
Letters,
p. 428).
Austen's liveliest letters are to her brother's daughters, marriageable or recently married young womenwould-be heroines and novelists, like Weldon's Alice. How is the girlish wish to live a romance related to the desire to write one? How influential, in this connection, are the words of a novelist-aunt? Aunt Fay, like Austen before her, is aware of the muddled ambitions of her niece, who wants mostly to distinguish herself from other people. She is a briskly professional critic of her niece's plans for her novel (modern Alice evidently doesn't mail text), who advises against self-indulgence and first drafts: "Novels are not meant to be diaries, you know" (p. 110). She encourages Alice to notice the fine points of literary craft, and to look at her own story from another person's point of viewfor example, her lover's wife's. (The final title of her novel will be
The Wife's Revenge
.) And mostly she encourages her to readJane Austen and the other great literary works that make up what she reverently callswith a nod to BunyanThe City of Invention, "the nearest we poor mortals can get to the Celestial City" (pp. 1516). The very thought of the City heightens Weldon's rhetoric: "You must
read,
Alice, before it's too late. You must fill your mind with the invented images of the past: the more the better.... These images, apart from anything else, will help you put the two and twos of life together, and the more images your mind retains, the more
 
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wonderful will be the star-studded canopy of experience beneath which you, poor primitive creature that you are, will shelter: the nearer you will creep to the great blazing beacon of the Idea which animates us all" (p. 15). The aunt's passion for literature is nearly religious, but this is also simple good advice. J. E. Austen-Leigh's precocious sister Caroline recalled her aunt's telling her "that if I would take her advice I should cease writing till I was sixteen; that she had herself often wished she had read more, and written less in the corresponding years of her own life" (
Memoir,
p. 304).
Older and wiser than their nieces, Aunt Jane and Aunt Fay understand the vital connection between living and writing love stories; otherwise, a niece would hardly turn to her aunt. But the connections novelists relish are not the easy ones that most people see. A novelist thinks in terms of craft. To her niece Fanny's account of a romantic encounter, Aunt Jane writes, "Your trying to excite your own feelings by a visit to his room amused me excessively. The dirty Shaving Rag was exquisite!Such a circumstance ought to be in print. Much too good to be lost" (
Letters,
p. 412). Pay attention to salient details and differences, is the auntly message; keep on your toes and look sharp, and keep your distance from the swamp of sentiment. That way your feelings will be sharper, and your judgmentand your prose as well. Now here is Aunt Fay, who loathes academic critics, working at training her budding novelist: "You write complaining of the dreadful feeling of dry despair which your course in English Literature induces in you: you feel you are suffocating; as if your mouth was being stuffed with dry leaves; as if your brain was slowly dying of some mental poison. It makes you want to scream. How well you put it. I really have hopes for your novel: how is it going?" (p. 130) Ironized affection and shifts in tone calculated to startle are keys to auntly camaraderie. Writing as an aunt, to Fanny or Alice or
about
Emma, one keeps one's little distance.
By virtue of her own status in the world and the family, by virtue of her own self-confidence, by virtue of her distance and experience and clear standards, a writer aunt can teach important lessons. Before Jane Austen was born, Mrs. Chapone addressed her conduct book,
Letters on the Improvement of the Mind, Addressed to a Lady
(1773), to a niece. It begins, "Though you are so happy as to have parents, who are both capable and desirous of giving you all proper instruction, yet I, who love you so tenderly, cannot help fondly wishing to contribute something, if possible, to your improvement and welfare: As I am so far separated from you, ... it is only by pen and ink I can offer you my sentiments.... And if you pay me the compliment of preserving my letters, you may possibly reperuse
 
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them at some future period, when concurring circumstances may give them additional weight:and thus they may prove more effectual than the same things spoken in conversation" (p. 1). The little distance between an aunt and her niece's immediate family (Australia!), the regard her writing enjoys in the world, her difference from a nearer, more domestic and docile mother can be invaluable to an ambitious niece. An aunt is in a position to be an example to a young woman with dreams and ideas. And the writing aunt herself is gratified by the chance to have an immediate influenceto contribute to her niece's improvement and welfare, as Mrs. Chapone puts it. Austen goes so far as to hint that an intimacy with a niece is a nearly romantic thing, as fleeting as romance is: "Oh! what a loss it will be when you are married," Aunt Jane writes Fanny, sentiment neatly balancing irony. "You are too agreable in your single state, too agreable as a Neice. I shall hate you when your delicious play of Mind is all settled down into conjugal & maternal affections" (
Letters,
pp. 47879). (Austen's most recent biographer, Park Honan, conjectures that Fanny was a lot duller than her aunt chose to think she was.)
Weldon's Fay, who is divorced, gads about the world alone; Alice's mother bakes breakfast rolls for her husband every morning (and suspects her sister Fay made fun of her in a novel for doing so). The rebel who read Radclyffe Hall as a girl has much in common with her green-and-black-haired niece: her irreverence is a kind of sustained youth. Of Jane Austen, Honan reminds us that "at just the period of her greatest creativity, Jane Austen was happiest and most fully herself among children." Her niece Caroline remembered that of her two sister aunts "Aunt Jane was by far my favourite," although she "did not
dislike
Aunt Cassandra" (Honan, pp. 27071). Austen was in her thirties when she wrote her lively letters to Edward and Caroline and Anna and Fanny, then in their late teens and early twenties.
It seems to me significant that Jane Austen's well-known comments on the practice of writing novels exist largely in her teasing critiques of her young relations' fiction. "By the bye, my dear Edward," she writes, "I am quite concerned for the loss your Mother mentions in her Letter; two Chapters & a half to be missing is monstrous! It is well that
I
have not been at Steventon lately, & therefore cannot be suspected of purloining them;two strong twigs & a half towards a Nest of my own, would have been something.I do not think however that any theft of that sort would be really very useful to me. What should I do with your strong, manly, spirited Sketches, full of Variety and Glow?How could I possibly join them on to the little bit (two Inches wide) of Ivory on which I work with so fine a Brush, as produces little effect after much labour?" (
Letters,
pp. 468-
 
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69). And to Anna, "You are now collecting your People delightfully, getting them exactly into such a spot as is the delight of my life;3 or 4 Families in a country Village is the very thing to work on& I hope you will write a good deal more, and make full use of them while they are so very favourably arranged. You are but
now
coming to the heart & beauty of your book; till the heroine grows up, the fun must be imperfectbut I expect a great deal of entertainment from the next 3 or 4 books, & I hope you will not resent these remarks by sending me no more" (
Letters,
p. 401). The famous maxims of the novelist seem drenched in irony when put back in context, at the heart of the friendly effusions of a vastly entertained, drily encouraging, playfully teacherly aunt.
Letters to Alice
begins by observing, quite as Alice does, that the world of Jane Austen's novels was nothing like our own. It is, accordingly, full of information about the worth of money and the age of menarche and the way people cooked cabbage and the percentage of servants in the population of England and the risks of childbirth in Austen's dayfacts that shed valuable light on the novels. But a larger point about difference is made as well: arguing for literature against trash and television, Weldon stresses the great divide between a serious novel and a simple and simplifying transcription of fantasy, "real life" mediated by clichés rather than observation and wisdom. In this she echoes Austen. Behind Austen's youthful fiction in lettersand all the rest of her workglimmers the wicked, benevolent intent to parody and thus improve on popular romantic fiction. It shows itself most openly as narrative self-consciousness and consciousness of the reader. Toward the end of
Northanger Abbey,
for example, the narrator observes "the tell-tale compression of the pages" that makes us conclude that we and our hero and heroine are "all hastening together to perfect felicity," then challenges the reader to decide "whether the tendency of this work be altogether to recommend parental tyranny, or reward filial disobedience." Aunt Fay quotes that passage to her niece, and takes it very seriously: "What do
you
think, Alice, since it does concern you? She is still talking to you, and she knows you are there. You, the reader, are involved in this literary truth, as much as the writer.'' You must know the City of Invention, she insists, if you plan to build there. You must learn from example to think of your readerand also to think more, demand more, of both literature and life. When writing, the important thing to remember is "that, in generosity, forgetting your individual self, you must use your craft to pass on energy and animation and involvement; and if you do it properly, then the craft is understood to be art. You must
aspire,
in order that your readers can do the same" (p. 124). The aunt preaches aspiration not only to good writing but to "moral refinement," lessons
 
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which are taught by
Emma,
which Weldon therefore terms "subversive reading" (p. 70). Subversiveness of a banal culture (ours) is not a matter of dyeing your hair or indulging in adultery with your English teacher; one would do better to observe the complex texture of human relations, as Austen did, and keep true, as she did, to standards of fairness and honesty. This is the ultimate lesson of
Letters to Alice,
Weldon's reason for revering Jane Austen and her claim to being connected with her.
Weldon, I said, comes on as an aunt; she comes on even more strongly as a novelist.
Letters to Alice
insists it is a novel even before it begins, in a dedication: "To my mother (who is not, I may say, the one in this book, this epistolary novel;
she
is an entirely invented character, along with Alice, Enid and so forth...." Why then does Weldon sign the letters "Fay"especially as she is honoring the least unzipped of novelists, who never even put her name on her novels? The answer, I think, is implicit in Weldon's amused viewshe shares it with Jane Austenthat the reader's expectations and the writer's self-awareness are equally involved in the production of what she calls "literary truth.''
Weldon would probably shudder to be classed among proponents of "personal criticism," which is a term some criticslargely feministuse to characterize the kind of writing about literature and culture in which the writer's strong emotion, personal history, physical being, or other undignified aspects are revealed, confessed, exhibited, or performed. But she might fairly be accused of writing it, in
Letters to Alice
. Nancy K. Miller, tracing the history of such criticism, describes it as a reaction to the academic criticism that takes for granted a strict separation between the intellectual and the personal life, and puts the first first; she locates the strength and specificity of personal criticism in its commitment to overturning the (gendered) hierarchy.
3
Fay Weldon might not invoke this (American) practice (defined since 1984) to describe
Letters to Alice,
but she enthusiastically embraces a more venerable tradition of criticism (Jane Austen's own) which seems to me to be distantly but palpably related to itone might say, reaching out for a metaphor, as an aunt and a niece are related. Self-revelation is eschewed by Weldon as it is by Austen; dignity and decorum are maintained; but the partisanship for a devalued "feminine" genre is personal and passionate.
Declaring solidarity with her fellow novelists, the narrator of
Northanger Abbey
protests, "Let us not desert one another; we are an injured body. Although our productions have afforded more extensive and unaffected pleasure than those of any other literary corporation in the world, no species of composition has been so much decried. From pride, ignorance, or fashion, our foes are almost as many as our readers. And while

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