Fay Weldon's Wicked Fictions (50 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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merely on the war between men and women, but on the tensions that drive actual men and women to do what they actually do. Joanna May may have found herself quadruple cloned, but I call Weldon a realist. Her launching pad is always firmly grounded in the real world.
There's reality aplenty in "The Wilder Shores of Self," which deals with the reality-altering practice of plastic surgery. The essay discusses from several angles the "whys" behind a woman's desire to remake her appearance. Weldon mentions early, "And of course our particular brand of feminism being what it is (I sometimes see it as a revival of the old puritanism) the sisters look particularly wrathfully upon plastic surgery; it is ideologically unsound, it smacks of vanity, of
pleasing men
. We call it cosmetic surgery, what's more, just to show it's frivolous." Then she runs through the awkwardness and unpleasantries associated with nipping and tucking. Then she gets to Ruth, hero of
She-Devil,
and Ruth's extraordinary makeover. The piece is essentially a defense of Ruth, and a well-reasoned one. Whether you agree with Ruth (Weldon?) or not"The means of subsistence arriving not because of what you do but what you
are
."you must admit, by the time Weldon charges ''To the Clinics!" in the essay's final sentence, that the woman (women?) got you thinking about several aspects of pride, self-image, and life in the age of mutability. Weldon's pieces about personal matters are uniformly as provocative as they are, in fact, political.
There are in this collection some short takes that are ... well ... ephemeral. They aren't necessarily about ephemeral topics. In "Thoughts We Dare Not Speak Aloud" Weldon addresses our distrust of science. In "The Great Egg Mystery" she ruminates upon contamination in the food supply. Both essays are interesting to a point, but lean. They reflect an intelligent person's quick ideas on these things. They're the kind of discourse you'd get from a thrice-weekly op-ed columnist when that person needs to write about
something,
and there's just not much to write about.
I would say: Weldon is a novelist of the first rank, not a hired-hand journalist, and she doesn't
have
to do short takes, and maybe she shouldn't. I found the ephemera even less engaging than the polemics. At least, say, Faludi-French was in the great British angry-intellectuals tradition that saw the likes of Graham Greene forever writing (and mailing!) letters to the editors. The ephemera are ephemeral.
Especially when set alongside the personal, as in "Personal View." This essay begins: "Let me tell you what it's been like this summer, down here in Somerset in the South West of England." It's a lovely essaya sort of pastoralwith a knife's edge. In looking about her world, Weldon finds it simple to comment upon real-estate costs, population swell, urban flight,
 
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the communication revolution, pesticides, cats, poverty, homelessness, drugs ("Don't think we escape"), and the question of who owns England. "And then this year we had our mad axe murderer, a serial killer as bad as any you get in New York or Los Angeles: a satanist, or so he thought, poor tragic wretch." One of Weldon's children was among "a group of vegetarian young" who found the body of one of the murder victims. Suddenly and shockingly (despite, or perhaps because of, the lulling prose of this piece), "Personal View" has its context. The texture of the essay is, oddly enough, the perfect one to set an axe murderer against, and imbue him with maximum impact; Shirley Jackson did a similar trick in
The Lottery
. "[I] look straight ahead,'' Weldon sums up, "past the cat sleeping on the fax, through the tendril fringed window, to the willows, and the variegated poplargrown another two metres this seasonand the green, green lush grass, and the pond with its graceful reeds and the languorous water lillies, and see the parading geese, and the grazing sheep, I might almost think, well yes, this is rural England, this is my view of it, and all is well with the world. Just keep your eyes straight." The reader can almost hear the lambs screaming.
The central point herethat Weldon is a world champion when looking inward, even if to comment about our larger world, and merely another competent critic when focusing at longer range upon the impersonal or exteriorhas become, by now, redundantly made. But I'd like to stress before going further: Weldon is at her best far, far more often than she is at less than her best. "When the Writer Visits the Reader," "Night Life in the Acre" (about caring for her animals), "The Creator, A Profile" (God v. Science) and "God and the Creative Imagination" are all stimulating pieces, and these constitute the bulk of what's left of this nonfictive pile I've been sent. They are each sufficiently intriguing that I could discuss each at length, and would relish the task. But such discussion would add little or nothing to the theories being expressed here; it would merely reiterate. When one starts to treadmill like this, it's time to stop spouting and push forth toward some kind of conclusion.
So then: The least of Fay Weldon. Nonfiction Writerin a reader-edification senseincludes her (happily few) toss-offs, and her overtly political essays. I am not saying she should leave the purely political realm to others. What she says needs to be said. But sometimes in saying, she produces un-Weldonesque essays. Think of the no-laughs Woody Allen films. I don't mean
Hannah and her Sisters,
I mean the really dour ones. Remember
Interiors
? I think the reason
Interiors
didn't work was because the director was denying a part of himself as he crafted his film. Woody Allen, despite the recent tabloid ugliness, must be a guy with a rarefied
 
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sense of humor; he made
Bananas,
and I rest my case. This humor is part of his character. To make a film like
Interiors,
he has to closet part of himselfhis essence, his being, his Woodiness. Now,
Interiors
is a proficiently done bleak-as-death movie, but it was a forced bleak-as-death movie.
As for Weldon: She retains her keen eye when she writes outrage, but I feel she scores her points better when she puts her whole soul on display: the incisive, tweaking, funny Weldon that we know from the novels. She's best when she doesn't deny all that she is. My evidence for this lies in the mass of her nonfiction, which is terrific and, I would argue, no less political than the Politicalcap Pwriting. I think Weldon's take on lunch ladies, to return to a favorite, says as much about working women as does her broadside attack on Britain's Equal Opportunities Commission. And it says what it says with engagement and wit.
Moreover, in the former essay Weldon deals with womenpeopleand in the latter she deals with a panel and with statistics. All of Weldon's novels, it should be noted, are thick with flesh-and-blood (read: passion). This, as much as the felicitous writing and the entertaining plots, is at the heart of their considerable strength. And Weldon, nonfiction writer, is at her best when using all of her tools as a quick-witted
seer
looking at
human beings
.
It strikes me, ultimately, that the assignment as first put forth by Gina was on target: Fay Weldon, Journalist. Weldon is this, and in spades. Her assignment isn't 10 Downing Street or Parliament, but the hearts and minds of her fellow world citizensparticularly the hearts.
A figure lurks in the shadows of several of the best essaysin the forceful "On Betrayal" and the elegiac "The Changing Face of Fiction." His name is Professor Knox, late (we presume) of a Scottish university where Weldon once studied"more time ago than I care to remember." Weldon writes in the essay about fiction: "I got along best with Moral Philosophy.... But alas, I was not my professor's favourite pupil. I found Kant, frankly, difficult. And besides that I was female. So on the whole he ignored my existence, apart from returning my essays unmarked and failing me my end of year examinationswhich proved he must have at least known, somewhere in his stony heart, that I and a couple of others like me, that is to say female, were there in his class. Otherwise he looked through us and round us. This Professor Knox of ours would remark, from time to time, during lectures, that women were incapable of rational thought or moral judgmenta view held by many then and some nowand the young men would nod sagely and agree. And we young women, those being the days they were, did not take offence: we thought that was the way the world was and there was no changing it: we just assumed there
 
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was something wrong with us; we could not be properly femalethat must be it."
Focus on that line "a view held by many then and some now" for just a moment.
Pause
.
Now let's proceed with Knox.
Weldon went forth from that Scottish school (it was St. Andrews, by the way) into a world that was, as we know, changing, evolving, growing and diminishing by turns. She became a writer. "All I can do, when considering the changing face of fiction, is to look back on my own life and, using my novels as evidence for and against me, give an account of a political and fictional journey through the last twenty years: taking, as it were, the feminist route: no other, or so I always felt, being open to me."
By taking the feminist route, and by being a writer, she did her part to effect changeto gradually wrest societal standards and expectations from Professor Knox and all the Professor Knoxes while learning, herself, to take offense ... or offence (as the Brits have it). So now she is delivered to the 90s a famous feminist writer and we expect that her expectations for Professor Knox are that he, if he is indeed
late,
is burning in hell.
As he should be!
Moreover, the "many then" butmuch more importantlythe "some now" will (and should!) someday roast with him.
Ah, but there's this, as the essay draws to its close: "Most of us these days know that racism is 'wrong'; a few of us know that sexism is 'wrong.' With good Professor Knox's saner words still ringing in my ears decades later, I could take a deep breath and begin to define 'wrong' but I will spare you. Moral Philosophy is no longer taught in British universities: philosophy itself is an endangered subject: it is enough just to teach us to read and write. So what we do read is the more important. Fiction carries now a weight of responsibility: it must teach us to think. Who else, what else, is going to? Governments, these days, and funding bodies, would rather we were informed than wise; that we learned how to clone and work computers than studied Kant, the incomprehensible: but we, writers and readers, must get the better of them. Professor Knox, in more senses than one, was the last of a breed, and I mourn for him. He taught me a lot in spite of himself, and what is more, against all reason and self interest, I
liked him
. How very female, he would have said.
"Not feminine, female, and nothing wrong with that."
It's interesting that Knox's subject was moral philosophy. He was, we might guess, a very good teacher after all. And wouldn't he be surprised that his "saner words" are being purveyed in the 90s by that former young woman in the corner, the one he thought incapable of rational thought or
 
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moral judgment. And that she was the only one left to do it, because his dear course had become an anachronism.
All of this knocking around of Knox leads me to amend the answer to another question that was raised near the top: The best of these essays are
not
wicked. They are incisive and even prickly but not, I think, wicked. They are kinder than that. They are helpful and understanding. They are not arrogant (we're talking about the best ones now). They're not arrogant, but they
are
knowing. They are the products of one of our age's keenest ... moral philosophers.
And they are, as was just recently mentioned, the products of a journalist. A crusader's instinct is to ignore the Knoxes, condemn them as the crusade presses forth. A journalist's instinct is to keep the ears open, and to query both sides. Weldon, obviously, has thought about why Knox felt the way he felt, and said what he said. Journalism gains what validity it has only when the journalist sees a whole. Weldon has bothered to look not just inside herself, but inside Knox. This female (not feminine) journalist whose assignment is the human (not just female) heart has bothered to investigate the heart of the perceived enemy. And she has delivered her report.
The heart. Weldon covers that waterfront like Runyon covered Broadway, like Drew Pearson covered Washington. It's her job. She's a pro. I see her now, finally, in fur-felt fedora. Her press card bears the particulars: Fay Weldon, Journalist. Beat: Heart.
 
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The Monologic Narrator in Fay Weldon's Short Fiction
Lee A. Jacobus
Some time in 1946, after "drinking just enough to make his thought processes churn," Samuel Beckett took a "late night prowl" on a jetty in Dublin harbor and had a vision. It changed his life because it changed his writing. In 1960 he advised John Montague, who was having trouble writing a poem, to use the method he had devised for himself that night: "Ah, Montague, what you need is monologue
monologue
!" (Bair, p. 351). Fay Weldon might have overheard that conversation. Readers of her short stories, especially those in
Moon Over Minneapolis,
find themselves in the grips of women narrators who impress themselves relentlessly in a stream of one-sided narration whose angst is arresting and whose intensity grows almost unbounded.
Fay Weldon's monologic narrator is less gloomy than Beckett's cadre of Molloy, Moran, Murphy, and Watt, but she is just as aware of her audience. When giving us a picture of Romula in whose heart is engraved the phrase "I do what I can and I am what I am," in the story of the same name, the unnamed narrator resembles the spectator in a seventeenth-century painting, the figure that peers out at us from the canvas apparently quite aware of our enduring gaze: "Let me tell you more about Romula" (p. 15), she says, telling us a great deal about the former winner of the Miss Skyways Competition. As with any narrator aware of her audience, this one speaks complicitly, as if we were gossip partners counted upon to keep the secret. For instance, the narrator has kept Romula's identity a secret: "Details have of course been altered to protect her identity" (p. 16), but we know of her dragon tattoo as well as her place of work, so we are warned that

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