Fay Weldon's Wicked Fictions (55 page)

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Authors: Regina Barreca

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BOOK: Fay Weldon's Wicked Fictions
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don passage, the author vivisects the conventional bond between women and nature by at first declaring that "[i]t is nature, they say, that makes us get married. Nature, they say, that makes us crave to have babies.... It's nature that makes us love our children, clean our houses, gives us a thrill of pleasure when we please the home-coming male," but then undoes the rhetoric by asking, "Who is this Nature?" (
Praxis,
p. 147). [As Weldon has said in various books, "
They
will say anything."] "Nature does not know best, or if it does, it is on the man's side ... when anyone says to you, this, that or the other is natural, then fight. Nature does not know best; for the birds, for the bees, for the cows; for men, perhaps. But your interests and Nature's do not coincide. Nature our Friend is an argument used, quite understandably, by men'' (
Praxis,
p. 147). Weldon's humorous framing of such universals as "Nature our Friend" indicates the way women's comedy borrows clichés only to undercut them, and her off-handed remark concerning the nature of oppression ("an argument used, quite understandably, by men") calls our attention to her understanding of the social and cultural basis for the powerless position of women. There is nothing inherently natural any more than there is any inherently right answer or right way to live. And besides, as Ruth petulantly declares, women-as-she-devils are "beyond nature: they create themselves out of nothing" (
She-Devil,
p. 133). Women have to invent themselves from the beginning if they reject the sexual script prepared for them by the self-appointed guardians of righteousness.
The righteous view of the world set forth by the status quo would, for example, have women understand and forgive what should remain monstrously baffling and unforgivable. If the cultural catechism would have us "understand furcoated women and children without shoes," we will then be taught to rationalize "Hitler and the Bank of England and the behaviour of Cinderella's sisters ..." (
Female Friends,
p. 53). Constructing a classically Weldon mosaic of politics, economics, and emotion, the author underscores the reason we must combat the forces of generalization and justification. In addition, Weldon's unapologetic coupling of the supposedly important (Hitler, the Bank of England) with the supposedly trivial (Cinderella's sisters) is emblematic of the way her very prose encompasses her refusal to accept standardized systems of value.
Weldon's moral framework is based on the concept of situational morality, validating the multiplicity of experience against a drive for a unified vision. There is no one right way to live, women realize, if they do not accept the absolute, codified systems of their culture. Praxis recognizes this, for example, when she argues that there are a number of "different" worlds, "each with its different ways and standards, its different frame-
 
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work of normality" (
Praxis,
p. 190). This recognition eventually leads to laughter at standards arbitrarily imposed on women who can never meet them. But, significantly, these recognitions then lead to anger at the typically strait-jacketed definitions of femininity. In other words, humor is not merely a cathartic experience that purges anger or frustration. Instead, it is a catalyst, urging women on to anger and action. In Weldon novels, certainly, women are encouraged to harness and redouble their refusal and anger until it becomes an unholy transfiguration. They must see, like Ruth, that "it is not easy ... to forgo the reassuring pleasures of servitude, to face the unknown. Don't think it doesn't hurt. The first sea animals crawling up onto dry land must have had an agonizing time: struggling for breath, burning in the primeval sun" (
Remember Me,
p. 246).
As if formulating a mathematical equation for a child, Weldon explains: "if everything is inexplicable, anything might happen" (
Praxis,
p. 19). And if everything is open to question, then women should question the basis for their institutionalized oppression. There are several ways to question and disrupt the system, with the creation of art being one among many. Art, for Weldon, "is invention and distillation mixed ... it is fundamentally subversive."
4
Art, given its subversive roots, may well provide a more effective tool against the dominant order than politics, whose fundamental nature is conservative. Weldon insists that the possibilities for overturning the system lie not in political revolutions but in revising the entire concept of power and construction. "You could go to Israel and fight Arabs and really start something. Build a new country," suggests Elaine to Praxis, who replies that "new countries are in your mind." Elaine, although she acknowledges Praxis's point, suggests that ''they have to be, if you're a woman.... Personally, I'd rather carry a gun" (
Praxis,
p. 171). Carrying a gun is the easiest and least dangerous option; women are far more dangerous than weapons. When faced with the maxim "one comes to terms with this kind of thing in the end," in response to a miserable situation, a woman should reply, "I come to terms with nothing" (
Fat Woman's Joke,
p. 10). When truly marginalized, or in other words, when they have abandoned the attempt to naturalize their lives, women inevitably gain power from their exiled position. They secure for themselves the right to outright laughter and obvious outrage.
"Anger was better than misery," decides Praxis (p. 253). Weldon expresses her characters' rage through the apparently conventional forms of the domestic novel, but with subversive results. Weldon provides equally detailed recipes for dinner and for conflagrations. As one critic comments, Weldon "describes the modern all-electric kitchen with deadly accuracy,
 
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then invests it with the occult resonance of a magic cave. Suburban dinners do of course get fixed, between bouts of hysteria and plate-throwing, but behind them you can hear the thunder and smell sulfur" (Caldwell, p. 52). Ruth's sorceress-recipe from
She-Devil
illustrates this union:
I make puff pastry for the chicken vol-au-vents, and when I have finished circling out the dough with the brim of a wine-glass, making wafer rounds, I take the thin curved strips the cutter left behind and mold them into a shape much like the shape of Mary Fisher, and turn the oven high, high, and crisp the figure in it until such a stench fills the kitchen that even the fan cannot remove it. Good. [P. 10]
In this passage, Weldon's humor is at its best: she is irreverent toward domesticity and is shamelessly furious, yet relates everything in deadpan-clean prose. In making a kitchen the scene of her anger, Ruth is playing out an argument by Catherine Clement, who asserts that "Cooking badly is also being badly married ... there is a family, household, intimate stench hanging over it all ..." (p. 37). Ruth also acts out Clement's directive that the hysteric weeps but the sorceress does not when she reveals that "I ran upstairs, loving, weeping. I will run downstairs, unloving, not weeping" (
She-Devil,
p. 24).
Indeed, Weldon creates a number of characters similar to those described in
The Newly Born Woman,
women who "revolt and shake up the public, the group, the men, the others to whom they are exhibited. The sorceress heals, against the Church's canon ... the hysteric unties the familiar bonds, introduces disorder into the well-regulated unfolding of everyday life, gives rise to magic in ostensible reason" (p. 5). Ruth becomes expert at healing physical, emotional, and spiritual woes as she progresses through her unholy transformation. She forces science to bend to her wishes and relies on magic to secure her eventual triumph. She is a great force of disorder and a powerful adversary to received wisdom. Ruth, as a result of her triumphs, recognizes, however, that the usual field of battle is misleadingly reductive. To reduce all women's struggles to a mere fight between the sexes is to unify them into an absurdity of the sort propagated by the dominant culture. It is a more complex battle than that because "it is not a matter of male or female, after all; it never was: merely of power" (
Praxis,
p. 241). It is the structure of power itself that needs subverting; men, deluded and decorative, are dangerous to women because they try to make women into the sign that will permit the system to flourish.
One of the ways, as we have seen, that women revise the constructed order is by rejecting the typically happy ending and, by implication, rejecting the rewards for behaving within the rules. Women will, like Wel-
 
Page 184
don, conclude that this is the end of the world as we know it, and still feel fine. Yet happy endings in women's writing, as we have also seen, are the triumphs of nonclosure, multiplicity, and limitlessness. Happy endings in women's writings often replace "integration" and "reaffirmation" with recognition and realization. As Weldon writes in
Letters to Alice,
happy endings do not mean "mere fortunate events" but a reassessment or reconciliation with the self, not with society, ''even at death" (p. 83). But part of women's defiance, and one of Weldon's strongest comedic structures, is the refusal of women to accept finality, even the finality of death or marriage. Her novels often end with the dissolution of a marriage, with the defeat of reason, with the triumph of the female Lucifer, with the abandonment of children, or with the laying to rest of a ghost. Weldon systematically inverts the normal happy ending, so that we applaud Chloe's abandonment of her husband at the end of
Female Friends
. Chloe's triumph rests on the fact that she has finally stopped understanding and forgiving her infuriatingly narcissistic husband. "As for me," she says at the novel's conclusion, "I no longer wait to die. I put my house ... in order, and not before time. The children help. Oliver says 'But you can't leave me with Francoise,' and I reply, 'I can, I can, and I do'" (p. 311).
Similarly, at the end of
Praxis,
we have an old woman with a broken toe, who laughs in delight at her own triumph. "Even here," says the heroine, "in this horrible room, hungry and in pain, helpless, abandoned by the world in general and the social worker in particular, I can feel joy, excitation and exhilaration. I changed the world a little: yes, I did. Tilted it, minutely, on its axis. I, Praxis Duveen" (p. 50). Triumph at undoing the structures, undermining the system, likens daily life to a battle, "an exhilarating battle, don't think it wasn't. The sun shone brightly at the height of it, armour glinted, sparks flew" (
Female Friends,
p. 309). Weldon sheds her particular light on what has remained shadowed in the typical happy ending, the acceptance of mutability and possibility. As she instructs her female reader: "... days can be happywhole futures cannot. This is what grandmama says. This moment now is all you have. These days, these nights, these moments one by one" (
Female Friends,
p. 310). Therefore, she insists that womenand men as wellmust "treasure your moments of beauty, your glimpses of truth, your nights of love. They are all you have. Take family snaps, unashamed" (
Remember Me,
p. 310). Madeleine, soon to die in a car crash on the A-1, buys heather from a poor woman, taking coins from the milk money: " 'Never mind,' says Madeleine from her heart. 'Never mind. Good times will come again. Or at any rate, we had them once' " (p. 18). It is in
Remember Me
that Weldon's refrain

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