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The Shifting Moral Ground in Fay Weldon's Fiction

2011; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 40; Issue: 5 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/00497878.2011.581551

1547-7045

Mara Reisman,

Contemporary Literature and Criticism

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes 1Sybil Steinberg articulates the mixed reaction to the novel: “The book, a bestseller in England, ends with a crashing irony: the woefully unattractive protagonist, having achieved money and power, ruined her unfaithful husband and vanquished her beautiful rival, willingly undergoes agonizing surgery to transform herself into the very epitome of a romantic heroine. This provocative flouting of the feminists' creed is sure to inspire heated reaction” (Weldon, “Interview with Steinberg” 83). One of these heated reactions came from Michiko Kakutani, a reviewer for The New York Times, who argued that She-Devil ultimately undercuts a feminist ideology as “Ruth becomes something of a parody of the ‘liberated’ woman” (C17). On the other hand, critics like Carol Rinzler viewed Ruth's actions as representing female empowerment. Rinzler remarks: “Ruth's reaction [to Bobbo's departure] is at first unremarkable—she cries, she mopes, she feeds her children nothing but peanut butter, but then she parts from the company of wronged wives” (1). A Publishers Weekly reviewer, perhaps best sums up Weldon's complex ideological position, noting: “Weldon's moral fable savages the institution of marriage, the sexual double standard and even the pretensions of women's lib” (98). Like the reviewers, a number of critics focused on the contradictoriness of Weldon's position in regard to feminism. For example, Ann Marie Hebert argues that “Weldon refuses containment within patriarchal law, but she also steadfastly refuses an easy or artificial feminist solution. That no one is innocent, man or woman, complicates her searing critique of the current construction of heterosexual gender relations and makes her novels unsettling to conservatives and feminists alike” (28). Although some critics were uncomfortable with Weldon's slipperiness, others in the 1990s such as Finuala Dowling and Pauline Young recognized Weldon's work as a good example of postmodern feminism and revalued Weldon's complicated approach to ideologies. 2Nancy Walker addresses the contrasting critical interpretations of the novel when she writes: “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 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” (“Witch Weldon” 15). For more on the intersection of feminism, fairy tale, and romance plot in Weldon's fiction see Eagleton, Sellers, Becker, Young, Dubino, Hebert, and Peterson. Gina Wisker also addresses the ideas of feminism and romance in Weldon's work, but her article places these concepts within a larger discussion about horror writing. Along the lines of Wisker, Lorna Sage situates Weldon's novel as a discussion of the “confrontation between genres—Gothic versus romantic fiction, hate story versus love story” with the effect of “making novelistic conventions themselves the protagonists” (158). 3For a more in-depth discussion of the genre, see Greene 58–85. 4Weldon depicts the rampant use of tranquilizers among housewives in Praxis: “Praxis developed backache and headaches: she sat with the other wives in the doctor's surgery, and was prescribed tranquilizers, which unlike the others she did not take” (168). Remarking on this trend in the United States, David Farber notes that “By 1960, tranquilizer consumption, most of it by women, had soared to over a million pounds a year” (249). Along the same lines, in Weldon's The Fat Woman's Joke, there is the suggestion of serious domestic discord under the placid surface: “Phyllis Frazer's living room was rich, uncluttered, pale, and tidy and serene. Yet its tidiness, when the Wellses arrived, seemed deceitful, and its serenity a fraud. The Frazers, like their room, had an air of urbanity which was not quite believable. Phyllis's cheeks were too pink and Gerry's smile was too wide” (24). 5In Praxis, the eponymous character also addresses the relationship between height, power, and love: “Men, reflected Praxis, are commonly expected to marry someone poorer, less educated and of lower status than themselves. Women, likewise, are expected to marry above themselves. Thus every wife in the world will automatically feel, in her domestic life and status, inferior to her husband. Because in fact she will be: and perhaps this way happiness and acceptance lie. The husband looking down. The wife looking up. If only I could have looked up to Willie” (144). 6The first line of Anita Brookner's The Debut, which was published two years before She-Devil, emphasizes the negative effect of literature that perpetuates romantic expectations: “Dr. Weiss, at forty, knew that her life had been ruined by literature” (7). The “sad but improving” books Ruth Weiss's nurse gave her in order to instill morality—fairy tales and Dickens—do not match her life experience (11). They also do not match Ruth's experience in She-Devil. By showing that the romance ideology does not universally apply, these experiential discrepancies call into question its relevance to the lives of most women. 7Weldon was among a number of contemporary writers, including Anne Sexton, Olga Broumas, Margaret Atwood, and Angela Carter, who were revising fairy tales in the 1960s and 1970s. Drawing on the tale's historical and traditional meaning and then adding another layer to it in order “to resist the power of traditional plots” (Walker, Disobedient 49), these authors were rewriting fairy tales in an attempt to reveal and question the gender socialization process. For a good analysis of how revised fairy tale function culturally see Walker, “Twice Upon a Time” and Zipes. 8The artist Orlan's “carnal art” offers an intriguing counterpoint to Ruth's surgeries. Although there is not enough space here to elaborate fully on the implications of the comparison, I want to offer a few points to consider. Since 1991, Orlan has been engaged in a project called “The Reincarnation of Saint Orlan” in which she has been reshaping her body through cosmetic surgery. She has chosen features from works of art whose subjects she admires: “the Mona Lisa, Botticelli's Venus, Diana, Psyche and Europa. … She did not want to resemble them visually, but she admired and wanted to associate herself with their qualities of character—androgyny, carnal beauty, temerity and aggressivity, fragility and vulnerability, and fascination by adventure and the future” (Ince 125). Both Orlan and Ruth, then, are trying to reconstruct themselves in order to show the influence of certain figures on women's identity. For Ruth, this image is specific—Mary Fisher—and her goal is not necessarily to celebrate Mary but to gain her power; for Orlan, her choice of images is multiple and both an act of celebration and identification. Like Ruth's surgeries, Orlan's are not ideologically unproblematic for the audience. Just as we squirm when we read the vivid details of Ruth's surgeries, watching Orlan's procedures—despite their performative, camp aspect—is highly uncomfortable. Yet both projects can be read (not unproblematically) in feminist terms because of the attention they bring to issues of beauty, women's bodies, and female identity. As Orlan notes: “My work is not a stand against cosmetic surgery, but against the standards of beauty, against the dictates of a dominant ideology that impresses itself more and more on feminine (as well as masculine) flesh” (qtd. in O'Bryan 19). Accordingly, Orlan's procedures and Weldon's depiction of Ruth's surgeries emphasize the lengths women may go to in order to make a statement not only about beauty but also about politics and art. 9In the British edition of She-Devil, Ruth's stay at a feminist commune in order to lose weight emphasizes the perception that feminism is humorless: “The Wimmin did not take easily to those who disagreed with them: they made them honorary un-women” (Weldon 200). Although Weldon's description of the Wimmin sets up a stereotypical view of separatist feminists as serious, ascetic, and accepting of people only if they are women, Weldon is not necessarily critical of the beliefs underlying this feminism; what she is critical of is the intolerance to difference and disagreement, this position—like any ideological position—is capable of producing in its members. In other words, it is the moral self-righteousness of belief systems in general that Weldon seeks to question. Historian Sheila Rowbotham shares Weldon's concern about the moral implications of the personal politics feminism of the 1980s: “The emphasis on identity in women's liberation politics can become a claim to a superior moral authority. … How is a balance to be found between contesting privilege within our own ranks and indulging in a political gambit to suppress argument simply by notching yourself up on a hierarchy of oppression?” (263). Weldon's strategy for dealing with these claims of “superior moral authority” is to deflate them by presenting stereotypes and clichéd philosophies and then pushing her description to its extreme—the moment when it becomes darkly humorous and we can laugh at the image. In this chapter, the dark comic moment occurs when Weldon pushes the separatist position to its zealous conclusion and describes what happens to the boy children in the commune: “They had daughters but no sons: the latter they disposed of in ways which to the outside world would seem sinister, but to them perfectly reasonable” (199). Because she sees humor as crucial to change, Weldon wants everyone, including the Wimmin, to be able not only to laugh at themselves but to do this as part of a continual self-questioning of their belief systems. By pointing out contradictions and idiosyncrasies in Ruth's and the Wimmins' positions, for example, Weldon tries to generate a space in her novels where readers can acknowledge and accept difference without moral judgment. 10See, for example, Waugh, Caldwell, Koenig, and Seidenbaum. 11Along these same lines, Kakutani calls She-Devil “an unforgiving parody of the women's movement” (C17). 12Siàn Mile makes a similar observation about Weldon's allegiance to feminism: “Despite the fact that she is invariably called a feminist, she refuses a totalizing notion of feminism and, in fact, ridicules and problematizes feminist identity itself” (28). 13Ruth in She-Devil echoes this sentiment when she notes that Bobbo could have plastic surgery to improve his appearance and regain his youth but instead chooses to accept his fate. Ruth equates this choice with weakness. “How weak people are!” she muses. “How they simply accept what happens, as if there were such a thing as destiny, and not just a life to be grappled with” (Weldon 277). 14More than twenty years later, this issue of choice remains central to the discourse about cosmetic surgery (as well as to readers' responses—including my own—to Ruth's surgery). Whether one argues that “cosmetic medicine exists because sexism is powerfully linked to capitalism” (Cognard-Black n. pag.) or that cosmetic surgery is “the independent choice of a liberated woman” (Aikenhead n. pag.), the terms of the debate are about control. As Jennifer Cognard-Black argues: “the cosmetic surgery industry is doing exactly what the beauty industry has done for years: It's co-opting, repackaging and reselling the feminist call to empower women into what may be dubbed ‘consumer feminism.’ Under the dual slogans of possibility and choice, producers, promoters and providers are selling elective surgery as self-determination” (n. pag.). 15One critic who is disappointed by Weldon's “inconclusiveness” in She-Devil is Sara Martin (203). She asks: “Can female novelists get away with the telling of the tale, refusing to take sides and letting others, especially the women they address, draw their own conclusions?” (203). Martin's answer is a resounding no, and she concludes that Weldon's novel fails in its ambiguity. According to Martin, because it “contribute[s] little to the ongoing debate about what woman is” (203), it is not politically effective in terms of feminism. In contrast, Finuala Dowling contexualizes Weldon's fiction by looking at it in terms of postmodernism and feminism. Within this framework, Weldon's insistence on not coming up with conclusions is a political strategy: “Feminism and postmodernism seek to displace the dominant ideologies of, respectively, patriarchal politics and Enlightenment philosophy. In different ways, feminists and postmodernists reject ‘truths’ and ‘objective knowledge’ that for centuries have formed a kind of epistemological bulwark against other ways of conceptualizing” (13). Dowling's reading of Weldon's narrative and political strategy is more in line with my argument about why Weldon continually destabilizes the moral ground in her work.