Weldon attacks the medical profession's tendency to diagnose women's illness as psychosomatic; performing an abortion on a "non-baby," so to speak, was Carl's and Dr. Holly's clever way of promoting the idea that Joanna was "sick" while at once denigrating her. It is because Carl does not have the capacity to provide "Love and Kisses" (p. 33), the alternative treatment that Dr. Holly suggested in lieu of a "mock abortion," that Carl opts for the surgical removal of Joanna's "non-baby'' (p. 33).
2
Carl explains his manhandling of Joanna's body to his new, young lover, Bethany: "So that's what we did. Told her she was to have a termination, anaesthetized her, and whee-e-ee, like a balloon going down, went Joanna's belly. When she woke up she was cured. My lovely wife, slim and fresh and all for me again" (p. 33). While under anesthesia and consequently unconscious of what was happening to her, tentacles of the patriarchy now reached literally into Joanna's womb to remove her eggs as Carl reminisces on his Frankensteinesque omnipotence: "While she was opened up we took away a nice ripe egg; whisked it down to the lab: shook it up and irritated it in amniotic fluid till the nucleus split, and split again, and then there were four.... We kept the embryos in culture for four whole weeks, had four nice healthy wombs waiting at hand and on tap for implantation" (p. 34).
The Cloning of Joanna May
is replete with examples of medical atrocities performed in the interest of male power, in which women's bodies are violated: "'Bloody men,'said Mavis, Dr. Holly's secretary, 'so competitive, always muscling in on women's wombs'" (p. 183). And Annette, the surrogate-mother of one of the clones, underscores the antiwoman bias of the medical community when she says: "They told a friend of mine she had cancer and they'd got the slides mixed. She got the radium treatment and the worry while the other stayed home happy and died. They'll tell you anything that suits them, these doctors" (p. 212). Weldon contextualizes women's vulnerability as the policing of women's bodies becomes more and more intrusive and fundamentally antidemocratic. Annette goes on to say: "No such thing as rights.... A girlfriend of mine was raped under anaesthetic, but would anyone believe her? No" (pp. 21213). One need not delve far into the annals of medical history to locate the inestimable damage done to women's bodies by male doctors. Weldon sees the horror of the medical profession's abuse of women and, in response, we see the horror.
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Weldon, however, delights in fouling up male expectations by presenting us with women who are legitimate spoils of power. She constructs a kind of inverted pyramid of unlikeliness, the whole thing balanced precariously on the idea (or
absurdity,
if one is already familiar with Weldon's work) that in cloning Joanna May, his unfaithful wife, Carl "might create
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