In the film adaptation, titled
She-Devil,
the main character, Ruth, has altogether different aims: in the short term, she wants to ruin her husband's home, family, career, and freedom. Please note that she doesn't, as she does in the book, want these things for herself. In the long term, we will see, she wants happiness, acceptance, love. She never stops loving her husband, she is simply very angry with him. She wants shallow revenge and cinematic apologies. She wants, it ultimately seems, to save her marriage. She never separates herself from the society and the world that imprisons her, and therefore never attains freedom or power. The film's Ruth never breaks free of her stereotypical status as a woman in a man's world and therefore constitutes no threat to its institutions. The film chooses to ignore the novel's irreverent view of society and people, and in so doing, it fails as a comedy. The story of this sanitized Ruth simply isn't funny.
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Without Ruth's moment of transformation from housewife to she-devil, so explicit in the book, her ability to pull off elaborate plans for revenge seems entirely implausible, even in a comedy. When the film chooses to disregard the most pivotal moment in the bookwhen Ruth renounces the world and no longer lives by its rulesher subsequent attempts to destroy Bobbo's life seem hard to believe, difficult to understand, and, finally, not very funny. Ruth's transformation is the key to the book's meaning. In removing this element, and simply portraying Ruth as a pitiable and abused housewife (who gets very upset), the most important underpinning of the story's meaning is utterly destroyed. The book comments scathingly on the role of women in society, the effect of true love on women, and, finally, on the nature of humanity. The film insists on simplifying the characters and, moreover, it attempts to make Ruth more acceptable and likable. The result is dilution to the point of distortion. In trying to keep the movie on a light comic level, the film was forced to abandon the darker forces of evil which help to explain Ruth's re-creation into a she-devil.
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I would like to compare the novel
The Life and Loves of a She-Devil
and the film
She-Devil
with regard to three basic themes: first, the Weldon claim that "not loving" is the first step to freedom; second, that once freed of the chains of love, a woman can entirely
re
-create her identity (we will see this to be true not only of the "heroine," Ruth, but also of her rival, Mary Fisher); and, finally, that it is necessary to interpret the novel as a feminist
Faust,
a deeply black comedy about the forces of good and evil. The film refused to acknowledge the evil component in the novel, and therein lies its final failure. Weldon's tightly bound universe can't be randomly dissected and ransacked for the "funny parts." It's all or nothing,
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