Read Fay Weldon's Wicked Fictions Online

Authors: Regina Barreca

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Page 185

"recognition, realization!"so very emblematic of women's comedyoccurs. What should women realize?

For a start, they should pay careful and constant attention to the stories of their sisters, mothers, and grandmothers. Women must learn to validate and value the experience of other women, patterning their lives and thoughts from the alternative text feminine wisdom provides. Weldon counsels that if attention is paid, then the listener, sitting on her grandmother's cushions, "may not end as tired and worn and sad as she. Be grateful for the softness of the cushion, while it's there, and hope that she who stuffed and sewed it does not grudge its pleasure to you. The sewing of it brought her a great deal of pain and very little reward" (
Female Friends,
p. 309). Significantly, the validation of relationships apart from those of the usual pair of lovers is the hallmark of Weldon's endings. This validation can concern, as does Elsa's in
Little Sisters/Words of Advice,
a woman who finally sees the full range of emotions she holds for her mother. Elsa realizes that she "loves her, fears her, pities her, resents her, escapes her, joins her, loves her" mother and therefore "is saved" (p. 137). The traditional happy ending of boy-gets-girl-and-forms-a-new-society is at best '''like a happy ending,' Scarlet complains ..." (
Down Among the Women,
p. 183).

Weldon, like other women writers, has cause to complain about the traditional happy ending and the subsequent fate of women at the hand of conventional comedy. The heroines of conventional comedies appear to be in as insecure a position as the one in which Gemma finds herself in
Little Sisters
:


Silence. The knife blade trembled at her throat. Mr. First sighed and put the knife down.


A joke, after all.


Of course. Employers always joke with typists. [P. 94]

In Weldon, however, there is no such thing as "only" joking. "'I was only joking,' she says. But of course she isn't," Weldon writes in
Down Among the Women
(p. 88). Joking is an important business for the very fact that comedy is part of the survival process for women. Praxis goes through the full range of responses when she "wrote, she raged, grieved and laughed, she thought she nearly died; then, presently, she began to feel better" (p. 280). Comedy and power are interlocked in Weldon's writing: the power of comedy is to undo expectations and revise women's view of themselves in the system.

Most significantly, joking is a divisive, not a unifying experience.

Page 186

Chloe's laughter at the end of
Female Friends
is the laugh not only of the Medusa, of Medea, and of Clytemnestra, but is also the laughter heard in the wake of every woman's escape from any form of confinement:


Chloe finds she is laughing, not hysterically, or miserably, but really quite lightly and merrily; and worse, not with Oliver, but at him, and in this she is, at last, in tune with the rest of the universe. [P. 259]

Seven pages later, Weldon, as if to double-check, asks: "is she laughing at him?" The answer is "yes, she is. Her victory is complete" (p. 267).

It is no small victory. Why is comedy so important? Because laughter is as obvious a manifestation of refusal as the bite or the kick. The whole system of society and culture may, in fact, be set up by men in order to keep "women occupied, and that's important. If they had a spare hour or two they might look at their husbands and laugh, mightn't they?" (
Down Among the Women,
p. 54). And that laughter, Weldon implies, would bring down the house. Good for her, we say, and set about to help on this particularly Weldonesque project.

Notes

1. Unpublished interview.

2. Interview, "Me and My Shadows,"
On Gender and Writing,
ed. Michelene Wandor (London: Pandora Press, 1988), pp. 16065.

3. Unpublished interview.

4. John Hoffenden,
Novelists in Interview
(London: Methuen, 1985), p. 305.

Works Cited

Aristotle.
The Poetics
. In
Criticism: Major Statements,
ed. Charles Kaplan and William Anderson. New York: St. Martins Press, 1991.

Caldwell, Mark. "Fay Weldon's Microwave Voodoo."
Village Voice
(25 September 1984): 52.

Cixous, Hélène, and Catherine Clement.
The Newly Born Woman
. Trans. Betsy Wing.
Theory and History of Literature,
vol. 24. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987.

Krouse, Agate Nesaule. "Feminism and Art in Fay Weldon's Novels."
Critique
20.2 (1978): 520.

Walker, Nancy. "Humor and Gender Roles: The 'Funny' Feminism of the Post-World War II Suburbs."
American Quarterly
37 (1985): 98113.

Weldon, Fay.
Darcy's Utopia
. New York: Viking, 1991.

BOOK: Fay Weldon's Wicked Fictions

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