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BOOK: Fay Weldon's Wicked Fictions
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Witch Weldon: Fay Weldon's Use of the Fairy Tale Tradition
Nancy A. Walker
One story or another ... what's the difference? It is all the same. It's the one-way journey we all make from ignorance to knowledge, from innocence to experience. We must all make it; there is no escape.
Fay Weldon,
Words of Advice
Lorna Sage, in
Women in the House of Fiction,
comes right to the point: "Fay Weldon's reputation as a 'woman of letters' is itself a measure of ... how far niceness has fallen out of fashion" (p.153). Weldon is author-as-good-witch, recovering for fiction a disruptive, irreverent character that recalls the instability and endless revision of the oral tradition. She is a teller of tales whose "truth" lies not in a faithful representation of some objective reality, but rather in the familiar rhythms and tropes of a mythic heritage that wears decidedly twentieth-century dress.
The particular set of myths that Weldon plunders and reworks in her novels and stories is the fairy tales collected by the Brothers Grimm in the early nineteenth century. The Grimms gathered the oral tales from the women who told them, and a century earlier, in France, Charles Perrault represented the teller of the tales he collected as "Mother Goose," an old woman by the fireside. Fairy tales are thus in some senses women's stories: not only were women their traditional transmitters, but the best-known of them narrate the fates of womenSnow White, Sleeping Beauty, Rapunzel, Little Red Riding Hood, Cinderella. And even though some of these heroines end up marrying princes, we must not forget what they endure on the way to those endings: being fed poisoned apples, sleeping
 
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for a hundred years, being locked in towers, wearing rags and scrubbing floors. In a post-Walt Disney world, it is easy to lose sight of the brutality and violence of fairy tales. Furthermore, the tales are notably silent on what happens
after
marriage to the Prince. Is he unfaithful, boring, abusive? And if Red Riding Hood escapes from the wolf (as, in some versions, she does), what becomes of her?
These questions and others have intrigued women writers, especially since the 1960s. Two of the most thoroughgoing reworkings of these fairy tales are Anne Sexton's
Transformations
(1971) and Angela Carter's
The Bloody Chamber
(1979). Sexton's alterations of the tales occur primarily in style and context, rather than in the plots of the stories themselves. Her slangy, breezy, crisp style modernizes the tales, while highlighting their horrific elements, and she prefaces and concludes them with analogous stories in order to suggest that they represent just one version of a common human plot. Carter, in contrast, embellishes the tales, making lush and suggestive what was originally formulaic. Other authors, such as Margaret Atwood in "Bluebeard's Egg" (1986) and Jill McCorkle in "Sleeping Beauty, Revised" (1992), tell clearly contemporary stories whose titles compel us to see them as palimpsests for traditional fairy tales.
Fay Weldon uses all of these methods and more. Her characters inhabit contemporary urban centersprimarily Londonbut also inhabit the tales they have been told, so that life and fiction blur and become indistinguishable, as do past and present. Weldon's female characters and narrators are obsessive storytellers, modern Mother Geese who spin tales compounded of truth and lies, and then revise these stories in much the same way as fairy tales have undergone revision over time. At times, Weldon invokes actual fairy tales, as she does most overtly in
Words of Advice
(1977); at other times, the invocation is more subtle, emerging in a trope or an image, or in the narrator's voice or the structure of the story. Always, though, there is the clear sense that her characters are immersed in a sea of talesfairy tales, old wives' tales, cultural mythologies, lies they tell themselves and othersin which drowning usually seems a distinct possibility. In short, in an important sense for Witch Weldon,
all
narratives are fairy tales, including those she writes, and because they are fairy tales they are also cautionary tales.
Today's folklorists agree that the fairy tales with which we are familiar did not originate as mere entertainments, but arose in largely preliterate cultures as ways of expressing common people's aspirations, needs, and relations to nature and the social order. They served, in other words, as cultural and sociopolitical oral documents that reflected values, fears, and hopes and that were readily altered as circumstances changed. By the time
 
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that Perrault in France in the late seventeenth century and the Grimm Brothers in Germany in the early nineteenth century had gathered folk tales and made them part of written literature as fairy tales, they reflected, as Jack Zipes puts it, "late feudal conditions in their aesthetic composition and symbolic referential system." Because the stories were devised by the "folk" rather than by the ruling classes, Zipes continues, "the initial ontological situations of the tales generally deal with exploitation, hunger and injustice familiar to the lower classes in pre-capitalist societies. And the magic of the tales can be equated to the wish-fulfillment and utopian projections of the people, i.e., of the folk, who guarded and cultivated these tales" [p. 6]. In this context, it is easy to see why marrying a prince, turning straw into gold, and having a fairy grant one's wishes assume so much importance in the tales, and also why wolves and other dangers seem to lurk behind every tree in the forest.
There are at least two reasons why fairy tales hold a natural appeal for Weldon. One has to do with class, and the other with gender. The contemporary world of which she writes seems nearly as rigidly class-bound as the postfeudal world of the fairy tale, with the haves and the have-nots separated by a gulf that is both economic and ideological. Thus intones her narrator at the beginning of the story "Pumpkin Pie" (
Moon Over Minneapolis,
1991):
The rich have got to come to some accommodation with the poorand by that I don't mean provide housing (though I can see that might help) but "to accommodate" in its old sense: that is to say recognize, come towards, incorporate, compromise. [P. 81]
"Pumpkin Pie" is reminiscent of the Cinderella storywithout the fairy godmother or the rescuing prince. Instead of being converted into a coach (à la Disney), the pumpkin is here converted into a pie that similarly becomes an instrument in the class war. The tale is told by a wry, scolding narrator, a contemporary Mother Goose, who warns her listeners to "pay good attention," and later asks, "Are you still listening? Or have you turned the music up?" (p. 81).
The Cinderella figure in "Pumpkin Pie" is Antoinette, the Latino maid at the Marvin household. As "a dumpy 45-year-old Latino with a scar down the side of her face," she "wasn't right for opening doors and smiling" (p. 85), so she is kept in the kitchen to fix Thanksgiving dinner for the Marvins and their guests. The dinnerincluding the piemust be strictly non-fat because of Mr. Marvin's heart condition and Mrs. Marvin's ostensible adherence to the Pritikin diet, but when the fat-free pie burns because Antoinette must sneak home to handle a family emergency, she
 
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substitutes a traditional pie made with whole eggs. As cholesterol is a slow poison, no one drops dead at dinner, but Weldon's narrator finds the danger sufficient to issue a moral to the story:
The pumpkin pies of the poor taste as good if not better than the pumpkin pies of the rich; so if you can't make your own, do without, and let the hired help stay home for a change. Or you'll find cholesterol in your pie and a knife in your back, and a good thing too. [P. 88]
Yet despite this warning to the rich, Weldon's narrator recognizes that real life is more complex than the fairy tale with its sharp dichotomy between good and evil. Midway through the story, she stops to assess her listener's awareness of this complexity: "Whose side are you on, I wonder? ... The rich or the poor? Have I loaded the scales? No. You wish I had, but I haven't" (p. 85). The narrator thus signals her position as storyteller, with the power to make choices, revise, and control the reactions of her listeners.
If fairy tales seem to prescribe certain behaviors for womenthe passivity of Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty, for exampleand to caution against others, such as the gullibility of Snow White and Little Red Riding Hood, this is a legacy of their nineteenth-century versions rather than earlier ones. In some earlier versions of the tales, Cinderella got to the ball because of her own cleverness rather than fairy dust, and "Little Red Riding Hood" was as much a tale of sexual initiation as of girlish innocence, but once the tales became the written property of the literate classes, they could be used to further the goals of gentility and Victorian propriety. Specifically, they could be used to instruct young children in the rules of proper behavior and the dangers of improper behavior. The language as well as the plots of the tales underwent revision in this process, as Angela Carter notes: "Removing 'coarse' expressions was a common nineteenth-century pastime, part of the project of turning the universal entertainment of the poor into the refined pastime of the middle classes, and especially of the middle-class nursery" (
Virago,
p. xvii).
It is these sanitized versions of the tales that permeate the regions "down among the women" in Weldon's fiction. And Gemma testifies to their prescriptive power in
Words of Advice
: "Princes, toads, princesses, beggar girlswe all have to place ourselves as best we can" (p. 20). Weldon's characters not only tell stories, they are surrounded by them, sustained and oppressed by them. "There is more to life than death," says the narrator in
Down Among the Women
(1972): ''there is, for one thing, fiction.... Give yourself over entirely to fiction, and you could have eternal life" (p. 159). Myths, including fairy tales, allow Weldon's women to

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