Fay Weldon's Wicked Fictions by Regina Barreca Page A

treated as if it were altogether new. While such a view may be flattering to the author, it can also be disturbing. Credit for originality is given only in exchange for an admission of shallowness. It is not doing the author out of her true originality to claim that her kind of novel is the more powerful because it has long roots and is securely grounded in a classical tradition. Weldon doesn't have to write like Jane Austen in order to be "classical." But Jane Austen herself in her early works is all expressive comic situationall game and play. G. K. Chesterton, looking at the early works in Volume the Second, asserts that Austen's inspiration "was the inspiration of Gargantua and of Pickwick; it was the gigantic inspiration of laughter." 3 That Austen herself is Rabelaisian (or has her Rabelaisian aspects) can be seen in reading her earlier or less official works, now freshly collected in Catherine and Other Writings . The elegant restrained realism of the six Austen novels, like the apparent modesty of the narratives, was something the author had to consent to acquire in order to get published.
Austen's early writings have the high comic energy, the sudden audacious push as if the reader has been sent on a rush in a swing, losing footing while gaining altitude. Her works exhibit the robust sense of the absurd and an insistent sense of the import of the physical. They break through reserves of feminine modesty on marriage, as of feminine respect of men:
He is quite an old Man, about two and thirty, very plain so plain that I cannot bear to look at him. He is extremely disagreeable and I hate him more than any body else in the world. He has a large fortune and will make great Settlements on me; but then he is very healthy. In short I do not know what to do. ["The Three Sisters," in Catharine, p. 55]
Such a blowing of the gaff, such overt deriding of the love storypossible for the early Austen, as not for the Austen who had tamed herself for her publishersresembles the frequent gaff-blowings in Weldon:
Look around you. All the women nicely groomed and attractive and good-looking, and the men no better than fat slugs, for the most part, or skinny runts. Unshaved and smelly as often as not. They get away with everything, men. [ The Fat Woman's Joke, p. 102]

 

Page 55
So says Brenda's mother after "cutting through a mille feuille with a silver cake fork in the tea-rooms at the top of Dickens and Jones" (p. 101). Weldon women in discontent very often find refuge in food. Depression or pregnancy, both important states, make the female characters all the more interested in ingestion. It is no wonder that the witchy Mabs Tucker in Puffball is able to poison Liffey, poison being administered (as it customarily is) in food and drink. Mabs is a bad-fairy Queen Mab, but her last name Tucker means "food" in Australian and New Zealand English. Esther Sussman, in The Fat Woman's Joke, is the most food-abandoned of Weldon's characters, abandoning even the slow pleasure of cookery:
She picked out a tin of curry and a tin of savoury rice from the shelf.
"It's not real curry, this, of course. Real curry is very tricky to make. You use spices, added at precise intervals, and coconut milk. It's not just a matter of making a stew and adding curry powder and raisins and bananas. You have to devote a whole day to making a true curry." [P. 53]
Esther, gaping ever for more food, is knowledgeable about the time-wasting cookery she has given up, and would be understood by one of Austen's most self-referential characters, the manic cook Charlotte Luttrell in "Lesley Castle" who is so disappointed when her sister's fiancé is killed as her wedding preparations have been in vain: "I had the mortification of finding that I had been Roasting, Boiling and Stewing both the Meat and Myself to no purpose" (''Lesley Castle," in Catharine, p. 110). Madly active and overproductive cooks are likely to turn up in Jane Austen's early fiction, as in "A beautiful