Fay Weldon's Wicked Fictions by Regina Barreca Read Free Book Online Page B

feminist identity itself. For instance, Weldon laughs at the fact that the American publishers of The Life and Loves of a She-Devil cut out Ruth's less-than-joyous trip to a feminist commune"no ideological unsoundness" for them, she chuckles. When asked to define feminism, she dismissively says she can't remember what she said the last time, but that there is, for her, "no party headquarters," "nobody to issue an ideological card" (Mile). Clearly for Weldon, feminist identity is as slippery as all the other kinds. Sometimes, in fact, she seems highly critical of the movement's single-mindedness"In recent years," she argues, "feminism and the preoccupation with domestic justice has blinded us to the wider issues" (Bovey). Feminism cannot offer decrees for Weldon, that much seems certain.
The Audience: No Respect
Weldon may take responsibility for her own identity and its invention, its knowledge, and its affiliations, but she clearly takes no responsibility for

 

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her audience. This refusal is essentially punk in nature. For the punk, the audience is often, as Siouxsie Sioux puts it, "a miserable bunch of twisted people" and a legitimate object of abuse. The punk is not interested in idolatry of, or even respect for, the audience, and is "sick," as Mary Haron puts it, "of people being so nice" (Savage, p. 133). According to Greil Marcus, the "passive neologisms of the 1970s" like "thank you for sharing your anger with me'' are translated by the punk into "active English": "Fuck off and die" (p. 89). Not in so many words, but in effect, Fay Weldon constructs a persona who also tells her audience to "fuck off," to find validation elsewhere.
Weldon doesn't expect her "friends to behave well and they don't" and says that she has "no illusions about people." Such disillusionment is not expressed by Weldon by the grabbing of ankles or spitting in cameras. It is, rather, expressed by a refusal to nurture her readersMolly Hite says that "she is hardly a nurturing feminist, unless you count nurture a reading experience rather like being suckled on lemons." Weldon refuses to respectfully guide her reader through the text and tells you to "think what you like" (Mile) and to "work." Reading a Weldon novel should, she says, "be exhausting" (Barreca, p. 7), because she is not willing to "come to conclusions for you" (Mile). That, she says, would be "immoral" (Mile). If we want to find her books "disgusting," like her son's English teacher does, then so be itthe Sex Pistols were accused of "disgusting" behavior too. When I interviewed Weldon in July 1992, looking for validation for my literary critical analysis, she quite merrily refused to give it. "How could" literary criticism "matter, possibly?" she asked. It's better than making armaments, it seems, but not much else. Happily invalidated, I left.
IV
Writing Style: As the Word Turns
The quintessence of punk textual styleof situationsis the transitory, revolting gesture, rooted in the everyday and "saved" by what Larry McCaffery calls a "perverse optimism" (p. 221), a desire to change the world. The punk gesture is often violent (Rimbaud's "paradise of violence, of grimace and madness"), and often repulsively humorous, quite ridiculous. It is also, invariably, noisyhas what Marcus calls a "blinding intransigence" (p. 12). It also leaves a lot to be desired: it offers no coherent or formalized ideology but instead operates as a warning, Hebdige says, of differencea difference that raises suspicions, elicits rage, but gives no answers (p. 2).
A safety pin through the Queen's mouth; the Sex Pistols say "fuck" on

 

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live television; Sid Vicious wears a swastika in downtown Paris. These verbal and nonverbal grand slams are designed to generate shock as the ordinary becomes extraordinary. More than anything, they do not bear repetition. They aim to move in the moment; almost like Gertrude Stein's continuous present, these gestures define a discrete moment, a "space of time