Fay Weldon's Wicked Fictions (45 page)

Read Fay Weldon's Wicked Fictions Online

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
13.94Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
 
Page 141
band, Starlady Sandra seems, on the one hand, a contemporary Cassandra. And yet, as the rejected, fury-haunted daughter of a "mad" and murderous mother, "Driven mad by my father" (pp. 3031), she is also Electra to Tamara's Clytemnestra, to Oscar von Stirpit's murderous Agamemnon, and to her brother Robin's Orestes, the revenant, mad son of a mad mother. But of all the forms of classical revival working through the novel"revive with the revivers" is the motto of the band she follows, the wonderfully named Citronella Jumpers (p. 4)the most suggestive allusions cluster about the Furies, the novel's other (and, of course, female) band, "wielding their stick, their many-thonged whip, from behind'' (p. 18).
Who are the Furies? What passion or position do they inscribe? And what do they tell us about Fay Weldon's relation to the classical, and to her own, past?
I can locate three major stages of Fury as figure or trope. The most recent, that of the Renaissance, is human, heroic, and male. It is also frequently, if only temporarily, insane. And admirable. Always admirable. Earlier, in
The Aeneid,
there is a Latin, or maybe just a Vergilian, Fury: Olympian, antiheroic, ambiguously gendered. And detestable. And earliest, a Greek Fury, which is chthonic, antiheroic, but definitely even defiantly female. And loathsome. (I'm going to skip over the Vergilian here, fascinating as it is in itself, because it doesn't seem particularly relevant to Fay Weldon or her book.)
Heroic male fury emerges in the Renaissance: Macbeth's "sound and the fury, signifying nothing." It's what Prospero dismisses, when at the peripeteia of
The Tempest
he decides: "with my nobler reason 'gainst my fury / Do I take part: the rarer action is / In virtue than in vengeance." The pattern text: Ariosto's
Orlando Furioso
. Its paradigmatic moment, the fulcrum of that epic. There Orlando enters the cave where his beloved Angelica has made love with Medoro, and where the lovers have carved their names:
Three times, four times, six times, he read the script,
Attempting still, unhappy wretch!, in vain,
(For the true meaning he would not accept)
To change the sense of what was clear and plain.
Each time he read, an icy hand which gripped
His heart caused him intolerable pain,
Then motionless he stood, his eyes and mind
Fixed on the stone, like stone inert and blind. [XXIII: 111]
And then he's promptly driven
furioso
.
Macbeth's, Prospero's furies both effect an erasure. Whether for good (Prospero) or ill (Macbeth), their fury wipes out some kind of crucial text,
 
Page 142
annulling a signification that has become unbearable. Like Orlando, they refuse to read, specifically to read history. What really has happened is too intolerably painful to remember. Its clear, plain, and ugly inscriptions must be annihilated, if not from public witness then at least from the mind. Even madness is preferable to the debased narration the contemporary scene allows human expectation. (And here we hear fury's founding gesture toward what will become the Sublime.) This fury is neither Erasmus's (Greek-ish) insanity, "which the Furies let slip from hell, each time they release their serpents" (Foucault, p. 27), nor the "desperate passion" Michel Foucault hears in Ophelia's last, sad song (pp. 3031). Neither moralistic nor pathetic, heroic fury centers on the strong self. It works to deny the new age of the world-picture, with its all-dominating grid of univocally disciplined perspectives (in Heidegger's image), to retrieve an expanse of feeling that acknowledges no external restraint. Which is why, as Furor, fury soon becomes a more or less positive term for poetic inspiration. What Orlando reads on the cave's walls can't be, his fury insists, what his life really means. If that's what language and history now frame as the possible, it's clearly better to rage and to roam. Prospero, hero of literary, not martial, Romance, can surrender his fury because, through the magic of proto-imperialist technology, he's already gotten history to replace him as he'd like to be. (He's also already let his fury unleash the tempest that regains him power.) But "Lay on, Macduff," cries out Macbeth, refusing his knowledge that Macduff is prophetically promised victory. And Orlando's "rage and fury mount to such a pitch / ... so now the Count / Rips forests up as if of no account'' (XXIII: 13435). Whether with Birnam Wood or Italian forests, heroic fury refuses axiomatically to let history, literally, account.
In a completely different direction, the Greek Furies, the Erinys, attempt to align history and truth, to tell what really happened. Their name derives from
eris,
the Greek for strife, quarrel, and contention. In Greek culture, especially in early Greek, they fulfill a particularly complex function, a complexity Liddell and Scott trace in the difference between Homer's earlier
metros erinues,
"the curses from one's mother," and Hesiod's later
erinus patros,
the blood-guilt of the father (p. 314). The Erinys thus voice family history in all its horror: at the earliest, history as the memory of crime; later on, history as the contentious past's deadlock on a fresh present. Finally, Athens breaks with domestic history, as the antithesis of cultural progress, displacing the family with the polis. Thus, if modern male fury refuses to read history, runs mad away from it (as in the Latin root,
furo
: to run mad, to rave
10
), then classical, that is, Athenian, male history, refuses to hear fury, refuses to hear what it consistently marginates as the shriek of the demonic female.
 
Page 143
Curses from One's Mother
As a number of feminist scholars have argued, that marginalization is the particular cultural burden of Aeschylus'
Oresteia
. Conflating, as Froma Zeitlin suggests, "the myth of matriarchy and the myth of dragon combat" (p. 164), the play refuses the Furies' claims against the ephebe Orestes as "blind, archaic, barbaric, and regressive," the enemies of every structure or argument with any claim to be considered civilized (p. 162). This dismissal, however, is accomplished not by a male figure but, paradoxically, by a female, the goddess Athenaand here is where we return to Starlady Sandra, Athena's modern discoverer.
A female astronomer naming a new planet Athena might at first seem a gesture of feminist moment. We see this when Sandra fends off the hostility of the sexist Jumpers, apologetically claiming that she could make such a discovery "Only by mistake, ... Well, almost by mistake" (p. 66). Indomitable, self-sufficient, virginal Athena represents everything the Jumpers' kind of woman is not. Except that Athena, for the Greeks at least, was always Daddy's best girl. She is Zeus's own child, produced apparently on his own, from his prodigious brain, and carrying on her father's wisdom. Thus, when at the climax of the
Oresteia
she rejects the Furies, and their proto-feminist insistence that Orestes suffer for murdering his mother, the goddess grounds her reply on nothing but her simple preference for menin all things except (always Daddy's girl) marriage. In effect, in the founding gesture of Athenian justice, and virtually of Athenian tragedy, the archetypal father's daughter refuses a mother's enduring claim on her son.
Athena then turns out to be exactly the kind of female figure the Jumpers would approve. If that is so, then perhaps we have to re-read Sandra's crucial discovery as a kind of counterfeminist gesture. Not only does she repudiate any feminist taint in denying her originality to the Jumpers, but the discovery itself, or at least naming in Athena, seems almost a crypto-repudiation of feminism. And this is not merely a Derridean play on supplementary (read: classical) erudition. (Though it is that, or would like to be considered that, also.) The plot of the novel encases crucially the same discovery. Allying herself with Athena, Sandra inevitably boxes herself into playing Electra, that other, lesser and mortal Daddy's girl, the woman who plots her own mother's death. Electralike, Sandra grows up the daughter of an executed officer father, Oscar, vised between a mad murderous mother, Tamara, and an equally mad brother, Simon, "copying the behaviour of invisible masturbating demons, as my mother did ... flesh of her flesh, brain of her brain, mad of her madness" (p. 36).
 
Page 144
An Electra lives out Freud's fantasy of the castrated female. She enters the Oedipal scenario merely by proxy. Only by depending on Orestes has she any hope to satisfy her fantasies of revenge. And even with a brother to act for her, she still cannot establish a self, behaving "not as a person in her own right but as a mass of responses to other persons and their deeds and wishes, whether true or false" (Grene, p. 136). But, as Sandra's story begins, Robin, her Orestes, is dead. An Electra who can no longer even borrow the family phallus, she's left with nothing but its domestic demons. "And the furies buffeted me too, saying this is your punishment, this desolation, put up with it. Pride goes before the fall" (p. 45).
Sandra responds to Simon's death by casting jaunty Jack Stubbs in the empty role of protector, subordinating herself to the "well-hung" male whose "carrot I'd followed south" (p. 18). Yet even when most infatuated with Jack, Sandra senses that carrot's insufficiency. Having been "powerfully and briskly fucked," "truly colonised " (p. 27), she immediately has to satisfy herself with the brass handle of the doorknob. Only then does she feel "involved in the patterns of the changing universe'' (p. 29)those forms that found the frivolous. Flight does nothing to protect her from the past: the harpies "shrieking in my head ... no, no, no, run, run: you can't look back" (pp. 4445).
Athena's discoverer must run from Athena's crime: disowning maternity. Defending himself, Orestes denies Clytemnestra's maternal rights, insisting he and his heart belong only to Daddy. But Sandra-Electra's crime against the mother goes Orestes one worse. "I remember the moment when I discovered Athena.... All she did was whirl about in her own rather unexpected orbit; a simple thing, a lump of stone, incapable of reproduction, helpless in the grip of her own qualities, which kept her suspended there between heaven and hell, and not so different, when I came to think of it, from myself" (pp. 14445). Sandra believes that in becoming a mother, she can only replicate
her
terrible mother. And so she denies not only the mother but maternity itself. "I mean to help the evolutionary process along by failing to reproduce" (p. 85).
Running away with Jack, Sandra thus mimics heroic, male fury, the fury that refuses history, that flees anywhere, anyhow, even to, or perhaps especially to, a ruined
hôtel de ville,
to escape seeing and admitting a connection to that terrible narrative that claims one for its own. At the same time, she continues buffeted by the ancient Furies who clamber to revenge her primordial crime against the mother. Commingling furies, ancient and modern, leaves Sandra simultaneously, confusedly, both mad man and bad woman, not leading the band, merely chasing the leader's member. Just as
 
Page 145
earlier, in reading
She-Devil,
we saw Ruth's fury lead her not to discover her own real self, but merely to become the indolent clone of her former nemesis. In both cases, fury leads only to impasse.
The Blood-Guilt of the Father
Ironically, release from this maternal dead end comes through the father. When Sandra thinks, or rather, rethinks her father, "the Mad Sadist of Bleritz" (p. 85), and the father's science, eugenics, in the pivotal chapter 16, "Truth Being Stranger Than Fiction," she counters and finally deflates the constraining force of her mother's furious madness, releasing herself from her bed of mysterious, debilitating pain. Sandra executes this self-liberation by an eminently frivolous bidhere is the "scandal" of Weldon's text, and the heart of the frivolousto "establish him in my own mind," this Nazi beast, this executed Nuremberg criminal, "as a reasonable and well-motivated man'' (pp. 10910).
We can probe this liberation by stressing its parallels in performance theory. Moving from Ruth to Sandra, Fay Weldon pushes beyond fury to the frivolity that undergirds Stanislavsky's insistence that actors continue performing even when someone else's chair unexpectedly collapses. "Once you learn to accept offers ... you are suddenly in contact with people who are unbounded, whose imagination seems to function without limit" (Johnstone, p. 100). The She-Devil's insistent refusal of her subjected status clearly outflanks Mary Fisher's characteristic pattern of denial of anything even vaguely unpleasant. But even furious refusal never escapes the seesaw reversal of a master-slave dialectic. However, as Keith Johnstone insists, "the actor who will accept anything that happens seems supernatural" (p. 100). Supernatural because ultimate power (read: integrity
and
integration), generous power that rests on and regenerates serenity, such power roots in never permitting yourself to feel outpowered, in taking anything and everything that happens, planned or not, wanted or not, as part of what you can and should use. This acceptance has nothing to do with quietism. For the frivolous hero, every accident incorporates extraordinary opportunity. Thus the last lines of the last narrator of this book: "Anyway, sufficiently enamored of just the sheer dignity of creation to realize I shouldn't offend it the way I had been doing. I think everything's going to be all right now. I'll make out" (
Leader,
p. 196).
For Sandra, that frivolity requires her to accept as serious science, in all their horror, Oscar's eugenic experiments, the monstrous experiments that caused her being. That acceptance suddenly, shockingly deprives her of criminal abnormality. Oscar emerges a compeer not only of figures like

Other books

A Knight's Reward by Catherine Kean
The Adversary by Michael Walters
Blood Testament by Don Pendleton
Classic Ruskin Bond by Ruskin Bond
Dog House by Carol Prisant