Fay Weldon's Wicked Fictions (29 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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the perfect woman, one who looked, listened, understood and was faithful" (p. 78). Selective breeding; gene splicing: "I can make a thousand thousand of you," Carl tells Joanna, "fragment all living things and recreate them. I can splice a gene or two" (p. 109). If genes determine human behavior, Carl wonders why
women's
behavior shouldn't be genetically determined. And once Carl had Joanna cloned, he ''thought if he had Bethany [his present young lover] cloned, he could undo the effects of her upbringing" (p. 78). Nevertheless, Weldon reminds us that breeding can't be done along benign lines, and that women cannot be culled as plants.
Carl May's self-serving notion that cloning Joanna would produce genetically-linked, submissive paper-dolls ultimately backfires: "How much easier theory was than practice.... He had thought to breed passivity, and had manufactured its opposite" (p. 231). What were intended to be fetishized, uniformed personifications of subjectivity, all under the tutelage of Carl, turn out to be unsubdued, uncensored, and unfaithful heroines who come in all shapes and sizes and who are only related by their unfaithfulness. In the spirit of Joanna, their "mother," the clones had no intention of remaining monogamous: "Like their master copy, Jane, Julie, Gina, and Alice, for good or for bad, were of a nature which preferred to have the itch of desire soothed and out of the way rather than seeing in its gratification a source of energy and renewal. Here comes sex, they said in their hearts, here comes trouble" (p. 81). Taken out of the context of their own oppression, the clones can only be seen by Carl as monstrous. Hélène Cixous's eloquently argued essay "The Laugh of the Medusa," which is an invocation to all "monstrous" women to acquiesce to their desires, addresses society's inability to accommodate women who refuse to capitulate to convention: "Who feeling a funny desire stirring inside her (to sing, to write, to dare to speak, in short to bring out something new) hasn't thought she was sick? Well, her shameful sickness is that she resists death, that she makes trouble" (p. 876). Despite Carl's wish for Joanna that "she must die, [because] she'll go on to ruin other men" (p. 209), Weldon's heroines don't die. As Weldon trenchantly dismantles the old double standard, unrepressed female sexuality does not lead to death. Weldon knows better. Her protagonists "resist" death because truth-telling for Weldon does not consist of the nihilism of women. Instead, her protagonists flaunt convention and law as they go on to commit a kind of cultural genocide.
Weldon provides a satiric commentary on the stifling institution of motherhood, which she cites as oppressive to both mothers and those who are not mothers. She presages an endangered future in presenting us with heroines who refuse to reproduce or who are unable to. In terms of prog-
 
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eny, the May nest is empty. And Alice "discovered the power of active nonpleasing ... looked at herself in the mirror one day and decided not to have children, not to get married" (p. 92); Gina, in which the "double helix of DNA became blurred," had "one stillborn baby, Down's Syndrome, and four abortions" (p. 88); Julie, who was born with ''one tooth already cut" and who had bitten her surrogate-mother on the way out (p. 87), "would have loved to have children, but Alec couldn't have them" (p. 86); and even proper mothering creates problems for Jane who, by the way, is also childless: "It was my mother made me what I am, and what I am is what I'm not. So thought Jane, as she looked for forks clean enough to lay the table with" (p. 221).
3
Here Weldon provides us with the ultimate breakdown of the tradition of woman-as-mother, and subverts cultural expectations by presenting us with heroines who refuse to conform to the gendered roles of wifehood and motherhood.
In Freudian terms, cloning might imply a return to the womb. In Christian terms, a cloning symbolizes a return to a particular God that Joanna's English teacher, Miss Watson, drummed into her impressionable young head: "I would define God as the source of all identity," thinks Joanna to herself at the outset of the novel, "the only 'I' from which flow the myriad, myriad 'you's'" (p. 45). It is interesting to note that later on in the novel Joanna dismisses her earlier "concept of a single God" which she now considered to be a "narrowing of [her] perception, not an expansion" (p. 98). The following passage is worth quoting at length:
God flew off in three stages, if you ask me.... God the Father flew off on the day mankind first interfered with his plans for the procreation of the species: that was the day the first woman made a connection between semen and pregnancy, and took pains to stop the passage by shoving some pounded, mudsteeped, leaf inside her. He flew off in a pet. "But this is
contraception,
" he cried, "this is not what I meant...." God the Son flew off the day the first pregnant woman made the next connection and shoved a sharpened stick up inside her to put an end to morning sickness and whatever else was happening inside. "But this is
abortion,
" he cried, "it's revolting, and no place for a prolifer like me to be...." And God the Holy Ghost flew off the day Dr. Holly of the Bulstrode Clinic, back in the fifties, took one of my ripe eggs out and warmed it, and jiggled it, and irritated it in an amniotic brew until the nucleus split, and split again, and split again, and then started growing, each with matching chromosomes, with identical DNA, that is to say faults and propensities, physical and social, all included, blueprint for four more individuals, and only one soul between them. [P. 155]
In this passage, Weldon cogently demonstrates how the ideologies of womanhood and motherhood are historically, ecclesiastically, and scientifically constructed. She shows how institutional religion, which devalues
 
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women and practices censorship of opposing voices, provides no comfort as she invites all women to redefine for themselves what is sacred.
Sherry Ortner's well-known article "Is Female to Male as Nature is to Culture?" is relevant in helping us to understand that the issue of women's reproduction is directly linked to the valuation of women and the location of their cultural, economic, and political power in society. The thrust of Ortner's elegantly argued essay is that cultural notions of women center on their biological functions as women, which universally get allied with what is natural, primitive, and untamed. Men, in contrast, are associated with "culture": they decide essentially what is valuable or worthwhile or weighty in this worldthey make the rules. Patricia Meyer Spacks underscores Ortner's thesis when she writes that "Culture is a male concept. The woman dismisses talk about it as mere 'babble,' her own orientation personal. Its personal quality, however, implies her capacitycontradicting Freud's generalizationto accept 'the great exigencies of life' not by explaining them, but by enduring them" (p. 46). It should come as no surprise that when Mavis revisits the locus of her own psychic pain after her abortion, she reflects on it with hardly suppressed outrage: "They knocked you unconscious and did what they wanted: you couldn't object, what you were doing was wrong, illegal. She was sorry to have to speak like this, it sounded unhinged, but she'd never recover from the experience, for it was thirty-five years ago" (p. 215). The intimidatory tactics of the medical and legal system leave very little room for moral diversity and speak to women's lack of legislative power. Weldon drives home the point that still to be heard are the voices of women, like Mavis, who have chosen abortion, and their complicated and legitimate reasons for opting to terminate pregnancies. Adrienne Rich touches the philosophical essence of Weldon when she writes: "The repossession by women of our bodies will bring far more essential change to human society than the seizing of the means of production by workers.... We need to imagine a world in which every woman is the presiding genius of her own body.... Sexuality, politics and intelligence, position, motherhood, work, community, intimacy will develop new meanings; thinking itself will be transformed. This is where we have to begin'' (p. 292).
Also in keeping with Ortner's argument, the text invites another reading: cloning Joanna symbolically embodies Carl's masculine fantasy of giving birth as a way of compensating for his inability to reproduce biologically, as he attempts to transcend nature and by extension women who, because of their reproductive capacities, get allied with nature and all that is natural. Carl tells Joanna: "I, man, want to teach nature a thing or two, in particular the difference between good and bad" (p. 111). The ideolog-
 
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ical implications of Carl's thinking are readily apparent to us as Carl realizes that "the shuffling of DNA, the improvement of physique and personality, could now be done at will.... What could you do to them? Require the skill, refine the spirit, make
good
(Weldon's italics) not bad" (p. 240). In
Women Under the Knife: A History of Surgery,
Dr. Ann Daly writes that "Science tends to grow from the established ideas and institutions of its age.... The strongest powers of science were invoked to keep women in their place...." (p. 69) Of importance is the implication we can garner from the scientific framework for understanding genetic reproduction, which then takes on the significance of superior/inferior or masculine/feminine or active/passive within the framework of values that are culturally developed and defined.
Yet to focus on the cloning of Joanna by Carl as a masculine and therefore artificial substitute for the creative process would be to miss the wider and more dangerous significance of Carl's action. We are talking about much more than womb-envy here. We need to put Carl's ambitious effort into a political context as we take into consideration what Carl means when he talks about "shuffling" the DNA molecule and making "good not bad." We know that what constitutes good and bad is all relative to the person who is doing the identifying. It is also crucial to note that a ''good" gene, in biological terms, is that which is capable of differential reproduction success; that is, that which reproduces at the greatest rate. Here Weldon explores what happens when scientific theories, which are primarily male constructs, are applied to social thought in which women occupy a fringe, political position. Carl's and Dr. Holly's misogyny comes under the guise of scientific authority, as well as their desire to better "mankind" (and I use "mankind" here purposefully):
Dr. Holly felt, and Carl felt with him, that an evolutionary process which caused so much grief could surely be improved upon by man: genetic engineering would hardly add to the sum of human misery, so a great sum that was, and might just possibly make matters a good deal better.... No doubt in time techniques of artificial reproduction would be further advanced and manipulation of DNA itself made possible so that improved and disease-resistant human beings could in the end be produced. [P. 89]
But those in power decide what is genetically desirable, both inside and outside the laboratory and inside and outside the womb. After all, for Hitler, the Holocaust was a side effect. Hitler's quasi-honorable aim, like Carl's and Dr. Holly's, was to improve mankind. But the concomitant of Carl's argument is that artificially reproducing womenmanufacturing them as assemblages of parts without rights, which, by the way, is at the

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