Fay Weldon's Wicked Fictions (26 page)

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Authors: Regina Barreca

Tags: #Women and Literature, #England, #History, #20th Century, #Literary Criticism, #General, #European, #English; Irish; Scottish; Welsh, #Women Authors, #Social Science, #Women's Studies, #test

BOOK: Fay Weldon's Wicked Fictions
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psychic moments where that which returns points to the castration of human existence, more globally understood as its fragmentary, imperfect, and mortal aspect. The double is an ambivalent figure of death since it signifies an insurance that one will continue to live, that the soul is eternal even as the body decomposes, and as such signifies a defense against death. The ghost, and ghostly representations, serve as a triumph over and against material decomposition in the realm or system of real bodily materiality. However, the double is by definition also a figure for a split or gap, a figure signifying that something that was whole and unique has been split into more than one part, and as such a figure for castration or fragmentation. The double simultaneously denies and affirms mortality.
Turning to the two novels by Fay Weldon that I want to focus on, one can ask, how is the excessive rhetorical turn, or the rhetorical turn of excess, that causes a sublation of comic and serious, of figural and literal, or animate and inanimate and produces the ghostly double brought into play? In
Remember Me,
Madeleine, the deserted first wife of the architect Jarvis Katkin, dies in a car accident at exactly the moment that her ex-husband drinks a toast, "death and damnation to all ex-wives," only to add, "Madeleine, I hate you ... die" (p. 83). While she was alive, she was figuratively compared by her husband and his new wife, Lily, to an ogre, a vampire, a leech, to succubi and to old women "who suck men's blood, destroy their life forces" (p. 80). As her dead body lies more or less uncovered on the road, in the hospital, in the morgue before its final interment, she literally becomes a revenant. In accordance with vampire legends, she splits in two. Though the state of her body is such that life cannot possibly be present, her face is that of a person in deep sleep. In the course of her uncanny presence beyond death, she repeatedly opens and closes her eyes, and to her spectators her face, drained of blood, smoothed out, is "as beautiful as it has ever been" (p. 91).
At the moment of death, uncanny disturbances occur; the window bangs and rattles, clocks stop, and Lily's son gets a fever, only to remain ill until the corpse is safely buried. More importantly, at the moment of death, Madeleine takes possession of Margot Bailey, her friend and exmistress of Jarvis, so as to turn her into her body double. At first Margot merely symptomizes the pains Madeleine would have felt had she not died, notably her severed leg and her crushed chest, and these pains remain with her for the period of the deceased woman's presence beyond death. In the course of her revenant visitations, however, Madeleine uses Margot's body to proclaim her own subversive statements on the subjugation of women, to which her peers would not listen during her lifetime. With the dead woman inside her, "warming her up to unspeakable deeds"
 
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(p. 212), Margot is herself endowed with an uncanny power to articulate her own grievances to her husband in a way she never could before. Significantly, her husband responds to this doubling of roles by saying, "Margot ... you are not Madeleine. You are my wife. Madeleine is dead. This is some kind of hysteria" (p. 224).
Furthermore, Madeleine uses her body double to regulate the future of her daughter Hilary. For at the moment of death she significantly forgets her anger at her husband and remembers her responsibility as mother. She thus returns from the dead, in accordance with vampire lore, not only to articulate her grievances but also because her child needs her to find her a more suitable home with the Baileys, away from a stepmother and a stepbrother. Madeleine's death comes, in Hilary's words, to be "the best thing she could do for me: this was her best and final gift" (p. 230).
The cultural commonplace Weldon thus resubstantiates so as to disclose its tacit assumptions is that a woman who alive, it seems, was nothing, once dead at least "proves a point and becomes the focus of womanly discontent" (p. 100). More effective in death than in life, the dispossessed Madeleine comes to assert her power as she haunts and takes possession of her survivors. Because the freezing unit at the morgue is full, her body remains among the living, lying sheeted and seemingly harmless on a trolley. In fact, as though Weldon wanted to show death to excess, Madeleine remains unburied for an exaggerated period of time because, as the undertaker drives her away, a second road accident occurs, and her corpse is returned to the morticians. Yet, far from lying still, forgetting the wrongs done to her, saying her good-byes and going, she visits her friends and family to proclaim precisely these wrongs.
Once she haunts Jarvis, he consciously acknowledges her interests in a way he didn't while she was alive, and for the period of her revenant return she causes strife and difference in his marriage. In a sense, her haunting presence unburies a hidden truth in the romantic and social exchanges among her survivors which, under normal circumstances, lie tacitly submerged. Only once she has been properly identified, inquested, taken to the undertaker's, and safely buried can a semblance of domestic order be recuperated. If during her life she used to bother her husband with her vengeful presence to no avail, her visitations as a dead woman have such an effect that Jarvis sides with her against his second wife (though ironically the issue is the cost of Madeleine's funeral). He accuses Lily of callous and monstrous selfishness in much the same way that Madeleine did, though unheard, while she was still alive. Furthermore, once Madeleine is dead, Jarvis desires her again precisely because her uncanny death undoes a firm division between the present and the past. One of Weldon's
 
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points, of course, is to show that in love the concrete woman is interchangeable, insofar as she, reduced to being an object of desire, corresponds to a mental image of the beloved. Yet Weldon's critique is such that, in the midst of Jarvis's erotic bliss, the body double speaks the deceased woman's accusations: "You took away my life, my home, and gave them to Lily" (p. 205). Jarvis in turn comes to recognize "I was unfair to her." When in Weldon's text the dead beloved returns, she does so with a voice of her own that can now be heard for the first time.
Indeed, Madeleine's uncanny presence after death creates social bonds that stand diametrically opposed to her uncanny absence in life. The paradox Weldon enacts is that her body "so little regarded in life, has in death become the focal point of some kind of group energy ... which sends our communities lurching in one direction or another towards their gradual betterment" (p. 147). At the same time, her uncanny corpse also serves as the site for a general accusation of the mortification of women in culture. In her presence, the two mortuary attendants, Clarence and Goliath, seem to hear a chorus of voices asking "Why is she dead? Who killed her? Who drove her to it?" Yet hearing these voices merely serves to confront them with the insinuation of their own guilt"some man ... who? You? (pp. 100, 135).
Juliet Mitchell has suggested that the woman writer might well be a hysteric. Hysteria, understood as the simultaneous acceptance and refusal of the fictions of femininity culture offers, is, she suggests "what a woman can do both to be feminine and to refuse femininity, within patriarchal discourse." Rejecting the notion of female writing, of an authentic woman's voice, she argues instead for "the hysteric's voice, which is
the woman's masculine language
... talking about feminine experience. It's both simultaneously the woman novelist's refusal of a woman's worldshe is, after all, a novelistand her construction from within a masculine world of that woman's world" (p. 290). Or, to fit the theme of my discussion, it is the woman writer's comic refusal of the metaphorical death or nonexistence culture ascribes to herfor, after all, she writes and signs her textand her hyperbolic performance from within the masculine discursive formations of precisely that death which is woman's terrain.
Linda Hutcheon in turn suggests that postmodern parodic strategies are often used by woman writers "to point to the history and historical power of those cultural representations, while ironically contextualizing both in such a way as to deconstruct them" (p. 102). She adds that such a strategy may make for an ambivalent political stance, since its double encoding means the simultaneous complicity with and contestation of the cultural dominants within which it operates. Yet I want to argue that though comic
 
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hyperbole, understood as a hysterical rereading against the grain, may be complicitous with the values it inscribes even as it subverts them, subversion does remain. I would thus like to call this comic hyperbole, this ghostly feminine transubstantiation, a hysterical strategy, so as to link parody explicitly with the feminine position.
What Jarvis says about the body double Margot/Madeleine he is erotically attracted to is equally applicable to Weldon's text as a whole: this is some kind of hysteria. There is no dialectic resolution or recuperative evasion of contradiction even as there is also complicity. The problem is that if the mastering gaze that separates the subject from the object of gaze is inherently masculine, can there be a feminine gaze? In response to this impasse, hysterical writing responds with a tautology. It installs conventions such as the masculinity of the gaze, the deadness of the feminine body, only to subvert and disturb the security of these stakes in cultural self-representation. Though such a critique is inscribed by complicity, such complicity may also be the most effective critique. As Hutcheon notes, "complicity inevitably conditions the radicality of the critique and the possibility of suggesting change, but it may also be one of the only ways for feminist art to exist" (p. 102).
The comic turn, turned serious in Weldon's narrative hinges on precisely such a ghostly hysterical duplicity of critique and complicity. For although Jarvis's joke turns literal and endows the revenant Madeleine with a power she never had in life, the seriousness is such that it takes the resubstantiated joke one turn further to the impasse that her heroine can also have this power only once she is dead. At the same time, though the last sentence of the novel implies that with Madeleine's burial, trouble was dispersed and peace has been restored, Weldon suggests that a moment of difference, of the woman's self-articulation in death, is preserved precisely at the site of her body double. It is not clear whether Margot speaks in her own voice or with the resonance that came with Madeleine's death. In fact, she says "I am Margot and Madeleine in one, and always was. She was my sister, after all, and she was right: her child was mine, and mine was hers" (p. 232).
In the other novel I want to discuss,
Life and Loves of a She-Devil,
the big, clumsy, and sulky Ruth enacts her social death as the first step in an intricate plan of revenge against her husband, Bobbo, who has deserted her to live with the graceful, delicate, and elegant romance writer, Mary Fisher. She burns down her house, sends her children to their father, and disappears, taking on the duplicitously ghostly position between presence and absence. As a result, Bobbo can't marry Mary Fisher because he can not get divorced from a woman he can't produce in court; though she
 
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might very well be dead, the law will not declare her so without specular proof of her corpse. In the liminality between a social and a biological death, with no distinct identity, the revenant Ruth, a double of herself, assumes different names to perform a variety of professions as part of a brilliant design meant to destroy her rival and get her husband back, ''but on my own terms" (p. 85).
She works as a nurse in an insane asylum, learns accounting and bookkeeping, opens an agency that places secretaries with firms, and finds a position as housekeeper to a judge, and then a priest. In the course of her monstrous plan, she breaks into Bobbo's office, alters his files to assure that he will be put on trial for embezzlement, convinces the judge to give him a seven-year sentence with no bail, and transfers two million dollars from his personal account to their joint account in Switzerland. Mary Fisher, in turn, loses all her money in the lawsuit, is forced to watch the slow deterioration of her beautiful home in a tower by the sea, and loses her gift for writing successful romance novels. Tired, impoverished, with Bobbo in prison and refusing to see her, she wants to be dead in the romantic image of being "at one with the stars and the foaming sea" (p. 243). Yet she dies in a hospital, forlorn and deserted by all, deprived even of her beauty as a result of medical treatment.
In this text also the excessive rhetorical turn, or the rhetorical turn of excess, engenders a sublation of the comic into the serious, a disturbingly uncanny enmeshment of the figural with the literal. The brilliant twist Weldon gives to the resolution of Ruth's vengeance against her husband and her rival is a critical rereading of the theme of the dead first wife returned at the body of her double, for which one could see Poe's romantic horror story "Ligeia" as the model. The exchange between social death and rebirth Ruth enacts with each new profession becomes concrete, or rather is enacted at her body, when in the course of surgery, this body is literally killed and reborn. And this desubstantiation and return is, furthermore, mirrored by the trajectory of her double, Mary Fisher's life. The more Mary Fisher's beautiful body deteriorates physically, the more Ruth changes her ugly body into a beautiful one; gets new teeth, loses weight. Indeed, the body she convinces her surgeons to change her into, with the money she has transferred to Switzerland, is precisely the pretty, delicate body of Mary Fisher, as Ruth finds it on the dust jacket of one of her novels. Recreating herself in the image of the woman her husband preferred to her, she recreates herself as a repetition of the publicity image of that fantasy.
The trope Weldon thus installs so as to critique it is first the cliché that woman needs to kill herself into a beautiful ideal to have power over her

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