Fay Weldon's Wicked Fictions (58 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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Page 189
Tess of the D'Urbevilles,
to
Mrs Dalloway
(Virginia Woolf had got into the lists, somehow: but then she had the reputation of having a man's brain in a woman's bodythe highest accolade so long as no one was expected to
marry
such a woman), and Professor Knox confirmed it. There was indeed something very wrong with us. We plastered our faces with Max Factor pancake and girdled our hips, and tried our best to look like dolls, and did as our mothers suggested and pretended at parties to be nurses not students, and laughed at male jokes and tried to say nothing sharp or funny on our own account. But it just didn't work. We remained capable of rational thought and moral judgment: our un-femininity kept showing through. "Unfeminine!" A terrible word for what was seen as a terrible state. We cringed beneath the power of it: worse than "shrill"if you said anything more than once; "aggressive"if you answered back; because both of those you could do something aboutyou just shut up and smiledbut "unfeminine''! Oh, it went to the heart of one's naturalness. How we swept and cleanedwe girl graduatesand had babies and showed our garters to escape the insult!
Now by the mid-sixties I began to see the error of not just my but our ways. The myth that women didn't go out to work but stayed home and were supported by their husbandsa myth still believed by some though supported these days by very few statisticswas beginning to wear rather thin. A certain Shirley Conran wrote a famous book called
Superwoman
which explained how to keep every conceivable myth going at oncehow a womanif only she were sufficiently organized
could
be all things to all men and survive. Be wife, mother, cook, housekeeper, secretary, parlor maid, cleaner, mistress, delphic oracle, and breadwinner and no one notice any shortcoming in any of these areas. I remember beginning to find it odd that at home I had to pretend I didn't go out to work, and at work pretend I didn't have a home. Husbands, though beginning more and more to need their wife's earnings, still felt demeaned by them. "No wife of mine works," was the word on many a proud husband's lips. Meaning, "I am man enough to keep the lot of you. Only a failure lets his wife work." Employers, though needing women's workthen as now female labor costs less than malefelt persecuted by the notion that a woman might ask for time off to look after a sick child or do the shopping. And if you did stay homewhat were the rewards? Let me quote you a piece from the first novel I wrote, back in 1966,
The Fat Woman's Joke,
spoken by a certain Estheran apparently happy housewife, whose comfortable existence was shattered when she went on a diet:
By the end of the week I could see myself very clearly indeed, and it was not comfortable. My home was not comfortable either. It seemed a cold and chilly
 
Page 190
place, and I could see no point in the objects that filled it, that had to be eternally dusted and polished and cared for. Why? They were not human. They had no importance other than their appearance. They were bargains, that was their only merit. I had bought them cheap, yet I had more than enough money to spend, so where was the achievement? Those old things, picked up and rescued and put down on a shelf to be appreciated, were taking over my whole life. They were quaint, certainly, and some were even pretty, but they were no justification for my being alive. Running a house is not a sensible occupation for a grown woman. Dusting and sweeping, cooking and washing upit is work for the sake of work, an eternal circle which lasts from the day you get married until the day you die, or are put into an old folks' home because you are too feeble to pick up some man's dirty clothes and wash them any more. For whose sake did I do it? Not my own, certainly. Not [my son] Peter'she could as well have lived in a tree as in a house for all the notice he took of his surroundings. Not [my husband] Alan's. Alan only searched for flaws: if he could not find dirt with which to chide me, if he could not find waste with which to rebuke me, then he was disappointed. And daily I tried to disappoint him. To spend my life waging war against Alan, which was what my house-wifeliness amounted to, endeavouring to prove female competencewhich was the last thing he wanted or needed to know aboutwhat a waste of time this was! Was I to die still polishing and dusting, washing and ironing; seeking to find in this my fulfillment? Imprisoning Alan as well as myself in this structure of bricks and mortar we called our home? We could have been as happy, or as miserable, in a cave. We would have been freer and more ourselves, let's admit it, in
two
caves.
These days I must say, for many a woman, chance would be a fine thing. Just to be allowed to stay home and dustbut I was younger then. And "work" for the majority of women means part-time, low-paid work, often un-unionized, which breaks every "place of work" regulation, in cafés, factories, shops, laundries, the catering trade. The hands which serve you, you will notice, are mostly female or, if not female, dark. And though it has always seemed to me that if women had economic power, they could at least choose the direction their lives took, the economic power of women is never great enough. Two thirds of the world's work is done by women, according to UN statistics. Ten percent of the world's wealth is owned by women, and that figure hasn't altered in the last three decades. We scrabble forlornly, I think in my worst moments, against an immovable wall, made of prejudice, habit, and our own natures. And what is this battle for justice, fairness? Perhaps only the child's perennial complaint, the whine: ''it isn't fair." Perhaps that's all we're doing, whining.
Listen to this piecepoor Esther: the nonworking wife, her children have left home, and her husband is more interested in his young secretary than in her:
 
Page 191
I am finished. I am over. It is very simple, really. I am a woman and so I am an animal. All women are animals. They have no control over themselves. They feel compelled to have childrenthere is no merit in it, there is no cause for self-congratulation; it is blind instinct. When I was a girl I searched for a man to father my children. My eye lighted on Alan. I had my child. Now the child is grown up and I have no further need of the man. I shuffle him off. And he has no need of me, because women age faster than men, and I am no longer fit mother for his possible children. Let him get more if he can, and start the whole thing over again with someone else. That's his affair, not mine. The drive is finished in me. I am dried up. I am useless. I am a burden. I wait to die. I am making myself feel hungry again.
And she eats, because that's the only pleasure left to her. Or listen to this bit, which appears just after the husband observes that the male-female war is hotting up (this was 1966, remember) and she says she wishes she had been born a man. (One often heard that said by women in those far-off days. Not now, so much.)
Esther to Alan:
"Men are always accusing women of being unfeminine, and at the same time making sure that the feminine state is as unendurable as possible. You leave your dirty socks around for me to pick up. And your dirty pants. It's my place to pick them up, because I'm a woman. And if I don't, you accuse me of being unfeminine. It's my place to clean up your cigarette ash from the coffee cup where you've ground out your cigarette. I am only fit to serve you and be used and to make your life pleasanter for you, in spite of such lip service as you may pay to equal rights for women. You may
know
I am equal, with your reason, but you certainly don't
feel
that I am."
"Quite the suffragette."
And that, in those days, was one of the worst things a man could think of to say about his wife. Suffragette. By implication, shrill, aggressive, violent, unreasonable things. (These days, of course, "feminist" has replaced suffragette as a term of abuse, in some circles.) And the other is the accusation, posed as a question. "Tell me, do you hate men?" (That, then as now, is what women aren't supposed to do: their duty being always to forgive and forget. And it does sound an unnatural sort of thing to do, I suppose, to hate men.)
A few years later, in 1972, I wrote a book called
Down Among the Women
. What a place to be, I complained. Yet here we all are by accident of birth, I said; sprouted breasts and bellies, as cyclical of nature as our timekeeper the moon, and down here among the women we have no option but to stay. What I wrote then still applies: more's the pity.
There will now be a short intermission. Sales staff will visit all parts of the theatre, selling for your delight whale-fat ice-cream whirled into pink sea

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