Fay Weldon's Wicked Fictions (41 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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Page 126
Mary's image, her self re-creation, is complete. She gets what she wants: her rival's life. After her successful efforts to ruin her husband's life, it is the book's deepest irony that all she wanted in the end was to be the object of her husband's desire, even though, as we have seen, she is incapable of loving him as she once did. This ending has no easy answers. We are forced to contemplate the uglier sides of love and power and the uncomfortable trade-off between love and freedom. We are, as Weldon wants us to be, dumbfounded.
In the context created by the film, it would make no sense for Ruth to transform herself into the film's "
BAD
" woman, Mary. Ruth wants to be
GOOD
, and to get what she Deserves. And she does. The film is determined, against all odds, to deliver that most tyrannical of Hollywood requirements, a Happy Ending. And
She-Devil
didn't lend itself easily to this formula. Only drastic cutting, and a complete removal of the book's ultimate message, could secure these ends. We are left with Ruth forgiving her chastened husband, and given no reason to understand why this would happen.
A more acceptable heroine, a simpler bad "guy," and a happy ending
: A happy ending is more life-affirming and more comfortable for the paying audience. Ultimately, it offers a confirmation of society's rules and institutions. Marriage is not humiliated. Unfaithful men are redeemable. Clearly, the film chose not to acknowledge the she-devil story as a humorous indictment of society.
It is interesting to look at Weldon's novel as a feminist comedy and to see how the film fought, consciously or unconsciously, to fit the story into a conventional patriarchal definition of comedy. For our purposes, classic comedy can be defined as one that deals with cycles of fertility and regeneration. It shows the old corrupt order being replaced by the new; it is characterized by the purging of anything distressful; it portrays a place where order is created out of chaos; and, finally, has a happy ending. Conversely, and as defined by this book's editor, Regina Barreca, women's comedy can be seen as follows: it does not necessarily have a happy ending; it destroys the social order; rather than purging distress, feminist comedy acts as a catalyst for women to take action.
Clearly,
She-Devil
fits perfectly into the definition of women's comedy. It is without a simplistic "happy ending." Ruth's decision to give up her husband, her family, and all of society's normal requirements for a woman illustrates perfectly the destruction of the existing social order. And, finally, it is as clear a portrait of a woman taking action as ever there was.
 
Page 127
The film version ends up remaking the story into a classic patriarchal comedy. We have already shown the fact that the film has a happy ending: the evil husband repents and is reunited with his children. There is a possibility for him to get back together with Ruth, or, at the very least, he wants to be in her future.
Mary Fisher can be defined as the old corrupt order in that she has power, money, and worldly success, yet she is an adulteress, an insincere writer, and a successful hypocrite. Needless to say, she is undone. She loses her man and her invulnerability. She is no longer without a care in the world. Hard-working, victimized Ruth is triumphant. This can be seen as the corrupt order being replaced by new. Virtue will win out. And as for regeneration, what is nearly the last scene in the film? The happy children. The husband offering to feed them. The perfect symbol of regenerationand they seem happier and more cooperative than before.
We have seen how the film adaptation attempted to lighten the text and turn it into popular entertainment in an inoffensive manner. We have seen how the story's meaning is utterly subverted by these attempts to parcel out pieces of the story. On a deeper level, now, we can see that the film, wittingly or unwittingly, managed to take a woman's story, a comic turn, turned tragic, and make it into a man's. Reinvented it so that it would fit the patriarchal definitions of comedy.
This is the final turning upside down of all that the book attempted to portray. An examination of many classic films shows that the pattern set by the film of
She-Devil
fits perfectly into the history of Hollywood film adaptations. There is a striking similarity among the films that attempt to put powerful literary heroines on the screen. In these films, in general, as much power as possible is removed from the women; virginity remains at all costs, or some semblance of physical purity; and, finally, women are rarely loved without loving in return. It is interesting to note these points when discussing such adaptations as
Great Expectations
. It seems that Charles Dickens expected his audience in 1861 to be more accepting of "certain" kinds of women than David Lean thought an audience could handle in 1947. Hollywood always expects their audience to have less moral tolerance, and a more narrow definition of women, than books have expected from their readers throughout time.
Weldon deals with this theme when she describes the work of Mary Fisher. When she describes the formula behind Mary's romance novels she could equally well be speaking of the Hollywood tradition: "Now. 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,
 
Page 128
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).
1
The very power that heroines of classic novels have is the power that Weldon gives to Ruth. And the movie took it away. Weldon acknowledges the issue of power quite bluntly toward the end of her novel: "... it is not a matter of male or female, after all; it never was: merely of power. I have all, and he has none" (p. 241). It is this raw power that films are still unwilling to grant to women on the screen.
To sum up, what have the thematic differences between the movie
She-Devil
and the novel
The Life and Loves of a She-Devil
enabled the movie to do in its quest to be conventional, commercial, and popularly successful in Hollywood terms?
First of all, the movie clearly fits into the classic Hollywood tradition of smoothing out the heroine, virginalizing her, making her better, making her Good. Second, unwittingly or otherwise, the film adaptation transformed a black feminist comedy into a light patriarchal conventional comedy complete with a happy ending.
And last, the film has attempted to portray a more politically correct Ruth. It seems that this is also a requirement for a contemporary Hollywood movie. You can't portray a truly powerful woman, but she shouldn't be "dated" either. You don't want anyone accusing you of trying to remake "Father Knows Best," not after the success of
Thelma and Louise,
or, for that matter, after Anita Hill. And
She-Devil,
don't forget, was directed by a woman, and proper feminist politics would be "expected" by the audience the studio is counting on her to draw. These days, in the context of a commercial, conventional Hollywood film, the heroine must also be politically correct. She should be a woman with a reasonable gripe trying in her own small way to correct a wrong, and thereby fix her marriage. Along the way, she also employs women who have difficulty getting jobs. She identifies with these women, ''the unloved and the unwanted." By running this agency, Ruth gets a job herself, which maybe, in the film ideal of a politically correct world, was her real problem, after all. Perhaps they even expect us to believe that Ruth became more interesting to her husband because she joined the professional world. (Near the end of the film, Bobbo compliments Ruth for the first time. As she stands there in her professional businesswoman clothes, mole removed, he says (and means it), "You look great!"). But this political correctness is a shallow requirement. On a deeper level, the film
She-Devil
made sure that our male-dominated institutions and societal rules were all confirmed and supported. What began as a novel about a woman became a film about a woman finally receiving her husband's approval.
 
Page 129
The real Ruth, the Ruth of the novel, is not such a socially respectable creature. She serves no one except herself. She has only her own interests at heart. Her ideas about reuniting with her husband are bizarre. Her employment agency is anything but a "do-good" operation designed to help women. She abandons the agency after it accomplishes its purpose and we never hear about it again. In the film, it seems as though the organization took on a life of its own, and she is still the president.
This brings us to the title of this essay. Ms. Weldon described the problem with the film adaptation in two sentences: "They should have called it 'She-Angel.' They tried to make Ruth nice and politically correct. And you see, she just isn't."
Notes
1. In this quote, Weldon also explains much of the mentality behind the Hollywood film. A heroine is heroic by gaining her man. That is her key to happiness. To attain this exalted plateau, a woman must be good, virtuous, and almost always a virgin. Power for women is what little their hero willingly bestows upon them. Women are not powerful in their own right. Sound exaggerated? Let's take a brief look at some adaptations of classic works.
The play
Pygmalion
by George Bernard Shaw (1914) and the film
My Fair Lady
directed by George Cukor (1964)
Since many found the play ambiguous concerning whom Eliza marries, Shaw wrote an essay to make his intent clear. According to Shaw, Eliza marries FreddyFreddy, the dull, silly, penniless aristocrat who adores her. In the film, we are led to believe that she marries Professor Higgins, her benefactor, who does not adore her all the time, but to whom she owes her ability to speak properly. In the film, a powerless woman (Eliza) who is helped by a powerful man (Higgins) would be unforgivably ungrateful if she refused to marry him. Even though Shaw went to great effort to ensure that the meaning of his play's ending be correctly interpreted, the film still chose to ignore him. At the end of the film, we hear Rex Harrison say the famous words "Where the devil are my slippers?" and we see Audrey Hepburn gleefully returning to Higgins's hearth. What more could a woman want? In the play, the power tables are turned: in the beginning, she wants his help; he gives it only for his own benefit, in the interests of an experiment; in the end, he wants her, putting her in the powerful position. She cannot marry him without losing herself, so she declines. And therefore remains powerful. It is possible to say that in the play, Eliza is loved without loving in return. Not so, in the film. This is something that Shaw anticipated by noting in his famous postscript to the play:
... people in all directions have assumed, for no other reasons than that she (Eliza) became the heroine of a romance, that she must have married the hero of it. This is unbearable, not only because her little drama, if acted on such a thoughtless assumption, must be spoiled, but because the true

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