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BOOK: Fay Weldon's Wicked Fictions
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dream even while they reveal themselves as false dreams. "Myths," says the narrator in
Down Among the Women,
"are not true. Myths simply answer a need" (p. 158). Nowhere in Weldon's fiction is the need for myths and fantasy more clearly demonstrated than in the character Gwyneth in
Female Friends,
who "retreats from the truth into ignorance, and finds that the false beliefs and half-truths, interweaving, make a fine supportive pillow for a gentle person against whom God has taken an irrational dislike" (p. 45). She raises her daughter, Chloe, on old wives'tales and aphorisms: "Red flannel is warmer than white''; "Marry in haste, repent in leisure" (p. 45). The greatest falsehood that Gwyneth tells herself is that she has only to declare her love to Mr. Leacock, her employer, and her Prince will come to her. "Gwyneth believes she has only to speak the words and Mr. Leacock will be hers; and forever procrastinates, and never quite speaks them.... And so [women] grow old in expectation and illusion, and perhaps it is preferable to growing old in the harsh glare of truth" (p. 108).
Living with myths and fairy tales not only insulates women from the truth, it also divides them from one another and makes them competitors for the few available prizes. Indeed, the fairy tales themselves provide the models for such competition, with their endless pattern of beauty contests to determine the "fairest of them all." Louise Bernikow, in
Among Women,
recalls the message of "Cinderella" as one of female hostility:
It is a story about women alone together and they are each other's enemies. This is more powerful as a lesson than the ball, the Prince or the glass slipper. The echoes of "Cinderella" in other fairy tales, in myth and literature, are about how awful women are to each other. The girl onscreen, as I squirm in my seat, needs to be saved. A man will come and save her. Some day my Prince will come. Women will not save her; they will thwart her. [P. 18]
Chloe, as narrator of
Female Friends,
expresses similar sentiments as she reflects on her relationship with her friends Marjorie and Grace. "Fine citizens we make, fine sisters! Our loyalties are to men, not to each other":
Well, morality is for the rich, and always was. We women, we beggars, we scrubbers and dusters, we do the best we can for us and ours. We are divided amongst ourselves. We have to be, for survival's sake. [P. 249]
The most extreme instance of the power of female jealousy in Weldon's fiction is
The Life and Loves of a She-Devil
(1983), a novel saturated with fairy-tale motifs. Mary Fisher is a princess in a tower, both fictional creation and creator of fictions. The popular romances she writes are the modern equivalent of the fairy tale; or, as the narrator, Ruth, puts it, "She tells lies to herself, and to the world" (p. 1). Ruth, in turn, is compounded of Cinderella's jealous stepsisters and the evil fairy who contrives to bring
 
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Mary Fisher down from her tower. The style of the novel is incantatory, the language of spells"I sing in praise of hate, and all its attendant energy" (p. 3)and the plot hinges on transformation, that staple element of the fairy tale, by which frogs become princes. Ruth, aided by the modern magic of plastic surgery, transforms herself from a six-foot-two, unattractive woman into the image of the delicate, lovely Mary Fisher and regains her husband, Bobbo, who remains more frog than prince.
One of Weldon's purposes in
She-Devil
is to deflate the notion of ideality that is the goal of fairy tales and myths, and the perfection of prelapsarian Eden is one of her targets. Ruth and Bobbo live "exactly in the middle of a place called Eden Grove," a suburban development "planned as paradise" (p. 4). The emptiness and artificiality of this ''paradise" are immediately evident, not only in the deceit that characterizes their marriage, but also in the social interaction among the neighbors, which is a thin defense against nothingness:
My neighbors and I give dinner parties for one another. We discuss things, rather than ideas; we exchange information, not theories; we keep ourselves steady by thinking about the particular. The general is frightening. Go too far into the past and there is nonexistence, too far into the future and there you find the same. [P. 5]
Bobbo, deep into his affair with Mary Fisher, tells Ruth that "it is a good life," although he is increasingly absent from Eden Grove and therefore "does not say so as often as he did" (p. 5). Ruth, for her part, finds "this centerless place" barely tolerable, and observes wryly that it is "a better place to live than a street in downtown Bombay" (p. 4).
Ruth is thus a dissatisfied Eve in a trumped-up Eden, and it is appropriate that her first major act of rebellion is to burn down the house in Eden Grove, tellingly located at "No. 19 Nightbird Drive" (p. 4). Hers is a willing departure from the Garden, not an expulsion, and it is the beginning of her quest for self-transformationa quest undertaken out of hate, not love, for love, Ruth remarks, "is a pallid emotion. Fidgety and troublesome, and making for misery" (p. 12). As Ruth undergoes the lengthy process of physical transformation into the image of Mary Fisher, she takes on a succession of false identities, becoming in turn Vesta Rose, Polly Patch, Molly Wishant, and Marlene Hunter as she manages the ruin of Bobbo and Mary Fisher in order to assume her place in the High Tower.
Although
The Life and Loves of a She-Devil
has been read by many as a triumph of the unattractive, betrayed wife over the forces of idealized romance, a consideration of the fairy-tale elements that inform the novel leads to a much bleaker reading that embodies an even stronger indictment
 
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of the romance tradition. Weldon both extends and inverts the Cinderella story to demonstrate the awful power of the ideals of romantic love and physical beauty. As a child, the unlovely Ruth has two lovely stepsisters, and she is early on abandoned by both her stepfather and her mother. Her marriage to Bobbo is occasioned by her accidental pregnancy, and she is as unwanted as a wife as she had been as a child. Her drive to assume the physical image of Mary Fisher requires that her body be mutilated, which recalls that in some versions of the Cinderella story, Cinderella's stepsisters cut off parts of their feet to try to make the glass slipper fit. In the end, Ruth is no longer a woman but an artifice; further, by taking Mary Fisher's place as the author of romances (though she refuses to publish them), she is engaged in perpetuating the same notions of romantic ideality that had caused her, as Ruth, to be shunned. The last lines of the novel invite us to read beneath the wicked comedy of
She-Devil
: "I am a lady of six foot two, who had tucks taken in her legs. A comic turn, turned serious" (p. 278). Serious, indeed.
Far more triumphant, though no less in thrall to cultural notions of feminine attractiveness, is Gabriella Sumpter in Weldon's
The Rules of Life
(1987). Having led a thoroughly self-centered life, Gabriella narrates her story from the grave in the year 2004, thanks to the discovery by the priests of the Great New Fictional Religion that the stories of the recently departed can be captured on tape. Gabriella is thus a kind of ultimate Sleeping Beauty, one who cannot be awakened but who can tell her storya woman who, at the time of her death at the age of sixty-one, was "still capable of inspiring erotic love": "My step did not have time to falter, my spine did not curve; my eyes had wrinkled but barely dimmed: my teeth, with considerable help from my dentist, Edgar Simpson, remained white, firm, even, and above all
there
" (p. 15). Despite the pleasure that Gabriella has derived from her erotic encounters, she finds death (sleep) preferable to life, for life is painful, and "the briefer the experience the better'' (p. 15). In fact, her "great achievement" is that she has not married or borne children, which reverses the fairy-tale trajectory toward marriage to the prince.
Like many a fairy-tale heroine, Gabriella is orphaned and left to find her own way in life. Her mother, a "poor, pretty, inconsequential thing" (p. 36), is killed by a wasp sting, and her father, a largely unsuccessful gambler, dies when their house burns down. Gabriella is rescuedand immediately beddedby a doctor's assistant, but, in another of Weldon's inversions of fairy-tale plots, this experience neither ruins her nor serves as a cautionary tale for the reader, but instead launches her happily on a life of erotic pleasure. As Gabriella puts it, "One of the great rewards of

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