Fay Weldon's Wicked Fictions (35 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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struggle to transform the physical body into the symbolized ideal of desire represents Weldon's view of the real cultural violence against women: not marriage to a Rochester, but desire to be his desire, desire to speak the self through a body that mirrors ideal models of femaleness. Such models are often beyond any possible transformations of the physical body. "And how, especially, do ugly women survive, those whom the world pities?" the narrator asks. "I'll tell you; they live as I do, outfacing truth, hardening the skin against perpetual humiliation, until it's as tough and cold as a crocodile's" (p. 7). Weldon's novel states directly what Brontë avoided: the violent cost of love and marriage for female identity in a world where women must be angelic beauties, where the body rather than the spirit must be improved, where violence is turned against women's bodies by women themselves in the name of self-improvement, transformation, beauty.
Jane Eyre outlives her rival, Bertha, but in Weldon's novel the rivals for the unhappy wife, Ruth, are fictional, mass-produced romantic heroines, so the ideal body is already a symbolic construct, not flesh-and-blood but a text: "In Mary Fisher's novels, which sell by the hundred thousand in glittery pink-and-gold covers, little staunch heroines raise tearful eyes to handsome men, and by giving them up, gain them. Little women can look up to men. But women of six feet two have trouble doing so" (p. 22). The novel is full of physical details: Ruth is six foot two, her handsome husband, Bobbo, is five foot ten, and his loverthe romance writer Mary Fisheris five foot four. Ruth's physical body is not ideal. And the fictions of desire function in the world as in books, for the heroines are the beautiful women like Mary, as Ruth sees: "Mary Fisher has made her books come true. It can be done. She's done it" (p. 66).
Weldon's novel asks whether a woman who does not look like a heroine can do it. Ruth is not betrayed by her mind, as Bertha Rochester is, but by her body, by her size, by her failure to look and therefore be feminine. Ruth's response is not renunciation of her embodied voice, or of desire, but renunciation of her excessive self:
"And I tell you this: I am jealous! I am jealous of every pretty woman who ever lived and looked up since the world began. I am, in fact, quite eaten up by jealousy, and a fine, lively, hungry emotion it is. But
why
should I care, you ask? Can't I just live in myself and forget that part of myself and be content? Don't I have a home, and a husband to pay the bills, and children to look after? Isn't that enough? 'No!' is the answer. I want, I crave, I die to be part of that other erotic world, of choice and desire and lust. It isn't love I want; it is nothing so simple. What I want is to take everything and return nothing. What I want is power over the hearts and pockets of men. It is all the power we can have, ... and even that is denied me." [P. 22]
 
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Ruth's powerlessness has an ideological causeshe does not fit the rules for female bodies; her body is not the appropriate female symbol but instead is embarrassing, excessive flesh-and-blood. Bodily interventions determine her story; her husband seduces her because she is a "vast obliging mountain" (p. 28) and marries her because she becomes pregnant and he contracts hepatitis. Yet the novel makes it clear that to both Ruth and her husband, her body defines her self, and her self is unacceptably monstrous: "It was obvious to both of them that it was Ruth's body that was at fault.... He had married it perforce and in error and would do his essential duties by it, but he would never be reconciled to its enormity, and Ruth knew it" (p. 31).
Ruth tries disembodying herself, silencing her voice. She is initially so submissive that she does not consistently have her own voice; the narrative alternates between first and third person. In moments of doubt she recites the "Litany of the Good Wife," which articulates the double standard of unequal marriage, including such axioms as: "I must pretend to be happy when I am not; for everyone's sake"; "I must be grateful for the roof over my head and the food on my table, and spend my days showing it, by cleaning and cooking and jumping up and down from my chair; for everyone's sake"; and "I must build up my husband's sexual confidence, I must not express any sexual interest in other men, in private or public'' because "I must render him moral support in all his undertakings, however immoral they may be, for the marriage's sake. I must pretend in all matters to be less than he" (p. 23).
It doesn't work. Ruth's voice is too strong. When Bobbo shouts, "How can one love what is essentially unlovable" (p. 40), Ruth is freed from the rules of the good wife, for she recognizes the inescapable body that defines her self. Ironically, her husband gives her a new identity: "I thought I was a good wife tried temporarily and understandably beyond endurance, but no. He says I am a she-devil. I expect he is right. In fact, since he does so well in the world and I do so badly, I really must assume he is right. I am a she-devil" (p. 43).
Having failed as woman and as wife because of her massive body, Ruth becomes a she-devil, a celebrant of female power. Like her other roles, it is based on another's view of her, another's naming of her. Even so, it allows her to give voice to her desire: "I want revenge. I want power. I want money. I want to be loved and not love in return. I want to give hate its head. I want hate to drive out love.... Peel away the wife, the mother, find the woman, and there the she-devil is. Excellent!" (pp. 4344). This process of self-transformation through peeling away social constructions of womanhood is not painless: "The roots of self-reproach and good behavior
 
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tangle deep in the living flesh; you can't ease them out gently; they have to be torn out, and they bring flesh with them. Sometimes in the night I scream so loud I wake the neighbors" (p. 51).
This is indeed the embodied voice, speaking through the body by making feeling physical. Female behavior and female flesh are "tangled," and a transformation of one is a transformationoften, destructionof the other. The symbolic construct and the flesh-and-blood body define the self, and they are inextricably, unhappily bound together. Deserted by her husband, who now lives with lovely Mary Fisher, Ruth leaves her two children with him. And her emotional pain is expressed physically, as bodily loss: "I must think of this grief as a physical pain. I must remember that just as a broken leg heals with time so with this psychic injury. There will be no disfiguring scar tissue: this is an inner wound, not an outer one. I am a woman learning to be without her children. I am a snake shedding its skin" (p. 77). The images are telling: the body represents the spirit. Emotional breaks parallel physical breaks. A cold-blooded serpent, able to renew itself physically, replaces the model of motherhood. Physical transformations can change women's stories, just as snakes can shed their skins. This seems to confirm the perception of the female body as symbolic representation of the self; Ruth's struggle supports the cultural view of her large body as wrong, as nonfemale, as unnatural.
Such a physical body is practically immoral, for its very existence breaks the rules for femaleness, the spiritualization of the fragile flesh. Asked about her plans, Ruth replies that "she was taking up arms against God Himself. Lucifer had tried and failed, but he was male. She thought she might do better, being female" (p. 83). Her site of battle is her body: she remakes herself, redefining herself in the bodily image she chooses. When a dentist, hired to remove her large teeth, claims that "we are as God made us," she replies: "That isn't true. We are here in this world to improve upon his original idea. To create justice, truth, and beauty where He so obviously and lamentably failed" (p. 115). Again, the text reconfirms the concept of the female body as the object of necessary transformations into the ideal; woman's body, as her self, cannot be accepted as natural or right, but must be remade. Part of Ruth's plan is to reject all her conventional female traits, since her unconventional body only asserts her failure to be female: "Any lingering spark of compunction, any trace of those qualities traditionally associated with womensuch as sweetness, the capacity to forgive, forbearance, and gentlenesswere at that moment quite obliterated'' (p. 118).
The result of her self-transformation through emotional shedding is ac-
 
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cess to power. Able to leave her emotional life behind, she is capable of changing her self:
"Out there in the world everything is possible and exciting. We can be different women: we can tap our own energies and the energies of women like uswomen shut away in homes performing sometimes menial tasks, sometimes graceful women trapped by love and duty into lives they never meant, and driven by necessity into jobs they loathe and which slowly kill them. We can get out there into the exciting world of business, of money and profit and loss, and help them, too.... And there waiting, too, is that other world of powerof judges and priests and doctors, the ones who tell the women what to do and how to think." [P. 120]
This sounds like a feminist claim, a resolution for equality, as Ruth succeeds in these male worlds despite her body, yet she is still markedand remarked uponbecause of her body. Her jobs are menial, domestic, and demeaning, requiring physical strength but no mind or heartaide in an abusive mental hospital and a dreadful home for the elderly, housekeeper for a priest and a judge. She starts an employment agency for women and becomes the disembodied telephone voice, the mysterious successful businesswoman "Vesta Rose" whose history is buried as her body is hidden.
Disguising her self, her identity, and her body, Ruth takes on male power with a vengeance. She destroys her husband financially so that he is jailed for embezzlement; she seduces the judge so the sentence is harsher; she seduces a priest and sends him off to seduce Mary Fisher. And she overwhelms her doctors, the plastic surgeons and reconstructionists she hires to remake her in the image she chooses. She seems to have power indeed, for she has written a self outside the definitions of the wife and the mother. Hélène Cixous writes in "The Laugh of the Medusa," "by writing her self, woman will return to the body which has been more than confiscated from her, which has been turned into the uncanny stranger on display" (p. 250).
But that is the twist of the novel. Rather than returning to the body, Ruth confiscates her own body. Ruth may destroy her husband, she may destroy her rival, but the power she takes on is the most conventional one: she kills her self, her body, so that she can be remade into the image of Mary Fisher, the beautiful woman, the heroine. "Isn't it rather ordinary?" one of the surgeons complains; the other replies, "If you have been extraordinary all your life, just to be ordinary must be wonderful.... [A]ll she has ever wanted is to be like other women" (p. 220). Like other women, then, she wants a body that fits the rules. She becomes, in the doctors' words, a "Venus,'' a "Pygmalion," "an impossible male fantasy made flesh" (p. 225). Impossible indeed; the body is surgically, painfully pro-

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