Fay Weldon's Wicked Fictions (43 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 132
they?" And she accepts his offer of marriage, begging for more kisses, thus confirming that this twice-married woman has never really been kissed. Her swooning response to Rhett's first kiss confirms the image of Scarlett as a physically innocent woman.
Surely, you will now cry out that this analysis is outdated. It only applies to "old" movies. Look at the seductresses in
Presumed Innocent,
in
Fatal Attraction,
in
Basic Instinct
sexually active, ambitious, somewhat evil career women all of them. Well, look at them. The lawyer in
Presumed Innocent
is violently murdered by the outraged wife. After hearing about her evil deeds, the film often cuts immediately to photos of her bloody head. Does this indicate a causal relationship between her "bad" behavior and her eventual murder? The same thing happened to Glenn Close in the finale of
Fatal Attraction
. The seductress is killed by the "good'' wife. And in
Basic Instinct,
the true murderess is unveiled and murdered as well. While there is some ambiguity at the end (however contrived) concerning the Sharon Stone character, it is clear that she is safe as long as she truly loves Michael Douglas.
Yes, such evil heroines are now allowed on screen, provided they die there. When it comes to adaptations of books, where such wanton and capricious killings might not be practical, it is best to alter the heroine's basic character. Obviously, twentieth-century film audiences are even more conservative and demanding than nineteenth-century readers. Or so the major Hollywood studios believe.
Works Cited
Shaw, George Bernard.
Pygmalion
. New York: Penguin, 1957.
Weldon, Fay.
The Life and Loves of a She-Devil
. New York: Ballantine Books, 1983.
 
Page 133
Fay Weldon, Leader of the Frivolous Band
John Glavin
Part One
Caveat [Cannibal] Lector
Fay Weldon's
Leader of the Band
(1988). A book I think I'm not supposed to read. I hear myself warned off in passages like this one: Sandra recalling "male medical hands inside me, rubber gloved if one's lucky, feeling a this or feeling a that. What can they
know
? What can they be feeling for? Some ritual here that is beyond rational understanding, but part of the male desire to be in on the female act of creation" (p. 103). This "male interest in female insides," including, surely? the insides of females' fiction, "the determination to be there helping," the novel insists, "gets us nowhere, except increasingly to indicate that we are all without guide, leader, Prime Mover'' (pp. 103104). Concede, it seems to say, that obstetrics, now an overwhelmingly male specialty, poaches on
obstetrix,
the Latin word for midwife. And conceding that much, get your gynecological hands off of and out of this book.
But then, you may recall, the male doctor in the novel does hold the long-withheld answer to the plot's puzzle. He does, as Sandra puts it, "have something of importance to impart" (p. 152), whenironicallyhe reveals the secret that both settles Sandra's future and concludes her tale: "
puis-je vous offrir mes félicitations ... vous êtes certainement en-ceinte"
. And there is also the curious last moment of the book as a whole, the conclusion of the third appended story, "Falling in Love in Helsinki," which isn't about falling in love at all, but about the recovery of the father. Or rather about "falling into love with life" (p. 196), apparently through a recuperative reunion with the father. AndI'm almost sorry to keep
 
Page 134
doing thisit's when "Listening to Jack" play the trumpet that Sandra "perceived all of a sudden that there might well perhaps be another way" to live, otherthat isthan duty or madness (pp. 9697). And, finally, it's clearly Sandra's attempt to recover at least the memory of her father from his own monstrosity that turns her from flight to life: "if you are determined to be proud of your father. Forget your mum.... the stains are gone" (p. 107). Can a Weldon novel really turn on getting back in touch with Dad, "the Bastard" (p. 155) that he is now, always has been, and probably ever shall be? Can such a Mum-refusing heroine really come from the pen that inscribed the She-Devil, that told the Fat Woman's Joke, that wondered and wandered Down and Out Among the Women? Remember Greta Garbo's response to the end of Cocteau's
Beauty and the Beast
? Watching Prince Charming's pretty face emerge, she was heard to sigh: ''Give me back my beast." Do we, even the men among us, really want a responsible, reasonable heroine in the pages of a Weldon novel? Surely not. And that's not what we get. We get Sandra, "tough and frivolous." Which brings me back to where I began: my title.
Finding the Frivolous
Admit. Reader, you felt put off, finding frivolous in the title. (If I were more modish I'd win you at once with discipline or surveillance or scrutiny, or just plain police.) It won't help if I say that by frivolous I don't mean minor, silly, insignificant, or slight, as in the traditional usage: having little weight or importance, trifling, having no basis in law or fact. That is merely melodrama's way of reading and deflating what it means to be frivolous. And it's unlikely to ameliorate your distaste if I add that I mean frivolous as a compliment. Or even that I'm pretty sure Fay Weldon herself would accept the compliment.
But, in
Leader of the Band,
Sandra does define herself as hero with just that term: "I have become both tough and frivolous" (p. 34). That frivolity, that particular toughness of mind and feeling combined, is what I search for in fiction. Rarely do I find it; in fact, I don't find it in recent work by men. Sandra talks about that when she asks if we: "remember Sophie, of the Styron novel, who was told to decide by a Nazi officer which of her two children was to live? It was seen (by a man) as a hard and beastly choice, but if you ask me it was better than none. Why didn't she just grit her teeth and get on with it, or kill herself and both children with the material at hand if she couldn't bear it? Moan, moan, moan, Sophie!" (p. 105). The recent male imagination can't seem to avoid melodrama. (Perhaps because it's generally women's bodies, even in men's fictions, that
 
Page 135
endure the pain, and therefore spawn the toughness that distinguishes between the frivolous and the facile.) When men try to swerve, they tend to become arch (David Lodge), or mean (Malcolm Bradbury), or merely sad (J. R. Ackerley). Yet an astonishing company of (though by no means all) British women writers seem to find the frivolous their natural voice: Angela Carter, Penelope Fitzgerald, Mary Wesley, Jeanette Winterson, to name only a few.
1
And from this frivolous group Fay Weldon emerges, this essay argues, "the leader of the band." She leads this talented band, in part because she generates so intelligent a metafictive discourse about the kind of writing she practices, and in part because she and her characters are so boldly eager to face head-on the difficult (read: tough) choices frivolity demands. It's that combination of discursive analysis and eager boldness that makes
The Leader of the Band
a paradigmatic text in the history and theory of frivolity. No recent novel, even by Fay Weldon, takes on more clearly or more successfully the frivolous imperative of "falling into love with life," nor reveals more frankly how nearly impossible it is to evade the automatic sadness bourgeois society imposes, and bourgeois fiction encodes.
Vamping Till Ready
So, in his male knowing, he's going to enlist this woman's book
Leader of the Band
as a paradigmatic text in his male-generated category, the frivolous, a genre no one else has ever even heard of. ExceptI could rush to point outJacques Derrida. Which hardly improvesyou saythe situation.
Actually, the frivolous does have a history, though not a place in history. A history that can suggest its claim to be taken seriously, if that does not seem too oxymoronic, as a sort of metagenre stranding its way through the other and more familiar taxonomies of the last two centuries.
2
Historically, the frivolous has meant everything the good bourgeois is not. Even now, lawsuits the courts do not respect they will dismiss as "frivolous." "As the social power of the bourgeoisie grows," Norbert Elias argues, ''Bourgeois groups emphasize more and more their specifically bourgeois self-image.... Above all they counterpose [their] 'virtue' to 'courtly frivolity' " (p. 315). This kind of distinction has been ongoing at least since the nineteenth century. The dawning age of
laissez-faire,
to distinguish itself from what had preceded,so argues Jean Starobinski, the inimitable historian of liberty"had recourse to a falsified image of a 'frivolous' eighteenth century ... solely intent on the culpable and delightful pursuit of unrestrained enjoyment" (p. 9). But even in the eighteenth century it-

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