Read Fay Weldon's Wicked Fictions Online

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

Fay Weldon's Wicked Fictions (32 page)

BOOK: Fay Weldon's Wicked Fictions
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Page 97
Yet there is no denying that Ruth's malicious actions, while disrupting order on one level, establish order on another. Thus, while Ruth's physical transformations defy God and nature and destroy the lives of Bobbo and Mary Fisher, the small steps she takes on her way to this transformation result in countless improved lives. The trickster's creative tendencies even in the midst of destruction support Jung's theory that the trickster figure is "the forerunner of the savior, and, like him, God, man, and animal at once. He is both subhuman and superhuman, a bestial and divine being" (p. 263). Jung focuses on the dual nature of the trickster that Ruth embodies so completely; though she calls herself a devil, she acknowledges another connection to the savior:
I am a she-devil. I wouldn't be surprised if I wasn't the second coming, this time in female form; what the world has been waiting for. Perhaps what Jesus did in his day for men, so I do now, for women. He offered the stony path to heaven: I offer the motor way to hell. I bring suffering and self-knowledge (the two go together) for others and salvation for myself.... If I'm nailed to the cross of my own convenience I'll put up with it. I just want my own way, and by Satan I'll have it. [P. 192]
Though Ruth stresses her amoral nature and her resolve to have her own way "by Satan," she hints at a larger social purpose, particularly directed at women.
Nowhere is Ruth's role as both savior and demon more clear than in her actions toward her enemy and victim, Mary Fisher. Ruth destroys Mary Fisher's complacent life in her high Tower, causing her to feel the pain of Bobbo's infidelity, the realities of motherhood, and a profound sense of failure. As Ruth tells us triumphantly, "Mary Fisher lives in the high Tower and wishes she didn't. She doesn't want to live anymore, in fact. Quite frankly, she wants to be dead.... She believes in hell now. She is in it already and knows she deserves it" (p. 243). Ruth has succeeded in destroying her enemy, yet Mary Fisher's ruin is also her redemption. Thanks to Ruth's actions, Mary Fisher stops living a lie; she accepts responsibility for her life and is finally redeemed. Mary Fisher wonders, "what was there ever to be frightened of, except coming face to face with her own guilt?" (p. 244) Though she is dying of cancer, Mary Fisher finally takes responsibility for others, Ruth's children and her own mother: "Mary Fisher, without knowing it, is almost happy. If happiness is anything, it is a feeling of being essential" (p. 245). As Ruth stated earlier, the deliverance she offers other women involves "suffering and self-knowledge." Ruth imposes suffering on Mary Fisher for her own satisfaction, not for Mary Fisher's sake; yet according to her own words, she is aware that such suffering leads to self-knowledge and therefore redemp-
 
Page 98
tion. Willing to undergo her own sufferings, Ruth faces a type of "crucifixion" in her final act as shape-shifter. Despite her constant assertions that she is divine and invincible, and despite the demonic red glint of her eyes, Ruth is just partially superhuman or divine. Like the archetypal trickster, with his "exposure to all kinds of torture" and "self-imposed sufferings" (Jung, 25556), Ruth must undergo unbearable plastic surgery to complete her transformation. She willingly accepts this torture as necessary for her salvation, and argues that "The more you want the more you suffer. If you want everything, you must suffer everything" (p. 187).
The result of this suffering is her "success." Looking exactly like Mary Fisher, she moves into the high Tower and reunites with Bobbo. Yet, despite her assertion that "Life is very pleasant," Ruth's happiness now depends on her ability to "cause Bobbo as much misery as he ever caused [her]" (p. 277). The final lines of the novel reveal a disillusionment with her power and role as a trickster. For the first time since her transformation into she-devil, she describes herself in human rather than divine or satanic terms: "I am a lady of six foot two, who had tucks taken in her legs. A comic turn, turned serious" (p. 278). While Ruth has previously changed identities with ease, she cannot "become'' Mary Fisher with the same facility that Satan "becomes" the serpent, for example. Ruth's ironic final words emphasize her realization that she "[is] not all she-devil. A she-devil has no memory of the pastshe is born fresh every morning. She deals with the feelings of today, not yesterday, and she is free" (p. 187). Being
driven
by memories of the past, Ruth is never completely free, but her adoption of trickster characteristics has certainly given her power if not freedom. Toward the end of her transformation, Ruth says of Mary Fisher, "She is a woman: she made the landscape better. She-devils can make nothing better except themselves. In the end, she wins" (p. 266). Yet Ruth, despite her own acknowledgment, is both a trickster figure (she-devil)
and
a woman. The difficulty in reconciling this apparent contradiction leads to a rather bittersweet victory for Ruth; yet this same duality enables her to achieve all of her original goals and redeem other women in the process. In the end, Ruth has improved much more than the landscapeand
she
wins.
All of Weldon's tricksters are not women characters; some closely resemble the more "traditional" tricksters of folklore and fiction. In
Life Force,
Weldon presents us with a seemingly classic example of the male trickster figure in the philandering Leslie Beck. Yet with Leslie, as with Ruth, Weldon employs the archetype only to subvert it. Leslie Beck can be read as the trickster in his ultimate preconscious state. He seems to possess naturally the attitudes and lifestyle that Ruth has cultivated
 
Page 99
painstakingly. According to him and his lovers, he is the incarnation of the Life Force, "the self of the night ... that creature of engorged delight" who, like the trickster, is "irrational, uncontrolled, universal, shameful" (p. 16). It is Leslie Beck's utter lack of consciousness that makes him irresistible to the bored neighborhood women who, like the narrator Nora, need to believe they are capable of being more than good wives to good husbands.
Like the archetypal trickster, Leslie is at times more animal than human, and this animal aspectemphasized by his ten-inch penisdraws the women to him. As Nora says, "Leslie Beck brandishes his giant phallus and women lie wounded all around" (p. 142). His lover Marion likens him to the trickster's bestial alter ego, the fox:
Once [his teeth had] put me in mind of some small, agreeable, nuzzling animal, or, as he became more imperative, something dangerous, some glossy fox, perhaps, rooting around and above mea vision which would occasionally change, even in the middle of lovemaking, to one of the fox loose in the hen-house, tearing and slavering, blood and feathers everywhere. [P. 8]
As Marion's and Nora's comments indicate, Leslie's animal nature is linked closely to his dangerous, even deadly, yet nevertheless "imperative" sexuality. Like Ruth, Leslie Beck seems to possess a supernatural ability to manipulate any situation. The neighborhood women who succumb to the Life Force are driven by an urgent desire, though, like Marion and Nora, they are aware of the risks they face, the least of which is losing their families. As Nora admits, "copulating with other women's husbands in secret, no matter how the self esteem rises, no matter how exciting secrets are, is also in some way to lower the self" (p. 84).
According to Nora, Leslie's Life Force is rooted in the present in the same way that Ruth's true she-devil can forget her past:
The Life Force is not about futures; it is all here and now. Leslie Beck could plan a building, plan a marriage, plan a site for a seduction, and achieve his plan simply because he didn't worry about the consequences. He looked ahead but never too far ahead. [P. 99]
This ability to exist completely in the present, with no thought to future consequences or past responsibilities, characterizes the trickster figure in traditional archetypal criticism. Statements like these by Nora and by Leslie himself invite us to read Leslie as a clear representation of a trickster figure. Yet just as Ruth veers from this paradigm by obsessing about her past and her future revenge, so does Leslie have a side to him that is driven by more than immediate pleasure. Though Nora says that Leslie could "plan a marriage" because he never considered the consequences, she ad-
BOOK: Fay Weldon's Wicked Fictions
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