Fay Weldon's Wicked Fictions by Regina Barreca Page B
Authors: Regina Barreca
Tags: General, Social Science, History, Literary Criticism, European, England, English; Irish; Scottish; Welsh, 20th Century, Women Authors, womens studies, test, Women and Literature
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description of the different effects of Sensibility on different Minds" in Volume the First, in which the narrator consoles an invalid friend:
I am usually at the fire cooking some little delicacy for the unhappy invalidPerhaps hashing up the remains of an old Duck, toasting some cheese or making a Curry which are the favorite Dishes of our poor friend. [ Catharine, p. 68]
Delicate attentions turn into indelicate attentionsstrong, gamey, and spicy. Austenthe early, less-inhibited Austenhas her own enjoyment of comic lists and oral parades. Behind Austen and Weldon, behind even Rabelais, there is the carnal ass of Apuleius, jauntily eating with an appetite to equal Gargantua's or Esther Sussman's. The ass enjoys himself in the home of the cook and the pastry-cook:
In the evenings, after their most luxurious dinners most splendidly served, my masters used to bring back to their apartment great portions of the excess: the one pork, fowl, fish and all sorts of tasty things, enormous leftovers; the other, breads, cookies, doughnuts, hook-shaped cakes and lizard-shaped cakes and more honey-sweet delicacies. As soon as they closed the room and sought the
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baths to refresh themselves, I would cram myself to the full with these divinely-offered feasts ( oblatis ego divinitus dapibus affatim saginabar ). [Apuleius, Metamorphoses or Asinus Aureus, Bk X, c.13] 4
Not only satire but all rumination on human behavior and human fate demands attention to the ignoble, unignorable physical home of desirethe body with its open mouth, chomping jaws, and almost-interminable digestive tract.
Weldon's power lies partly in her ability to unite the satiric-fantastic, in which she is a descendant of Apuleius and Rabelais, with the ironic expressive situational story of human love and fate, in which she is a descendant of Chariton. She is thus a descendant of at least two strands of "classical" tradition and a relative (as each novelist is) of numerous other writers of fiction. She has her Austenian aspects. Austen has her Weldonesque side. Perhaps any strict barriers between narrative kinds of writingor between narrative writingsmust at some point break down. Chrétien de Troyes is after all very fond of teasing expressive situations, and if Rabelais had dramatized Chrétien, the result would have been interesting at the very least. All of these authors have a relation to an older and bigger narrative tradition which includes many more models than we have previously liked to acknowledge. Narrative tradition is a big affair. In her own ways of wedding satire and domestic crisis, sex and expressive nonnaturalistic situation, Weldon is truly in the classical vein. She is the stronger as she has her roots in the true Great Tradition.
Notes
1. Some will demur at this reference to the Magna Mater . At present, in reaction against a strong current in contemporary feminism, there is a determined scholastic endeavor to repudiate ideas of female power in any form as being associated with antiquity in any period. Mary Beard, in The London Review of Books (13 May 1993), refers scornfully to the "lunacy" which imagines "primitive mother goddesses ruling the roost in the never-never land of Stone Age matriarchy," along with other ''arguments about women and religion that would be promptlyand rightlylaughed into the dustbin in almost every other field" (p. 19). She follows Mary Lefkowitz, whose Women and Greek Myth (1986) seems chiefly designed to tell us that the Goddess is dead because there never were any real goddesses. Stone Age matriarchy has been attacked by Stella Georgoudi in "Creating a Myth of Matriarchy" in A History of Women, ed. Georges Duby and Michelle Perot (1990); see English translation by A. Goldhammer (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992), pp. 44963.
Certainly, feminists should and must search into the evidences of history, and it is true that some enthusiasts have leaped into premature assertions
Page 57
about the
I am usually at the fire cooking some little delicacy for the unhappy invalidPerhaps hashing up the remains of an old Duck, toasting some cheese or making a Curry which are the favorite Dishes of our poor friend. [ Catharine, p. 68]
Delicate attentions turn into indelicate attentionsstrong, gamey, and spicy. Austenthe early, less-inhibited Austenhas her own enjoyment of comic lists and oral parades. Behind Austen and Weldon, behind even Rabelais, there is the carnal ass of Apuleius, jauntily eating with an appetite to equal Gargantua's or Esther Sussman's. The ass enjoys himself in the home of the cook and the pastry-cook:
In the evenings, after their most luxurious dinners most splendidly served, my masters used to bring back to their apartment great portions of the excess: the one pork, fowl, fish and all sorts of tasty things, enormous leftovers; the other, breads, cookies, doughnuts, hook-shaped cakes and lizard-shaped cakes and more honey-sweet delicacies. As soon as they closed the room and sought the
Page 56
baths to refresh themselves, I would cram myself to the full with these divinely-offered feasts ( oblatis ego divinitus dapibus affatim saginabar ). [Apuleius, Metamorphoses or Asinus Aureus, Bk X, c.13] 4
Not only satire but all rumination on human behavior and human fate demands attention to the ignoble, unignorable physical home of desirethe body with its open mouth, chomping jaws, and almost-interminable digestive tract.
Weldon's power lies partly in her ability to unite the satiric-fantastic, in which she is a descendant of Apuleius and Rabelais, with the ironic expressive situational story of human love and fate, in which she is a descendant of Chariton. She is thus a descendant of at least two strands of "classical" tradition and a relative (as each novelist is) of numerous other writers of fiction. She has her Austenian aspects. Austen has her Weldonesque side. Perhaps any strict barriers between narrative kinds of writingor between narrative writingsmust at some point break down. Chrétien de Troyes is after all very fond of teasing expressive situations, and if Rabelais had dramatized Chrétien, the result would have been interesting at the very least. All of these authors have a relation to an older and bigger narrative tradition which includes many more models than we have previously liked to acknowledge. Narrative tradition is a big affair. In her own ways of wedding satire and domestic crisis, sex and expressive nonnaturalistic situation, Weldon is truly in the classical vein. She is the stronger as she has her roots in the true Great Tradition.
Notes
1. Some will demur at this reference to the Magna Mater . At present, in reaction against a strong current in contemporary feminism, there is a determined scholastic endeavor to repudiate ideas of female power in any form as being associated with antiquity in any period. Mary Beard, in The London Review of Books (13 May 1993), refers scornfully to the "lunacy" which imagines "primitive mother goddesses ruling the roost in the never-never land of Stone Age matriarchy," along with other ''arguments about women and religion that would be promptlyand rightlylaughed into the dustbin in almost every other field" (p. 19). She follows Mary Lefkowitz, whose Women and Greek Myth (1986) seems chiefly designed to tell us that the Goddess is dead because there never were any real goddesses. Stone Age matriarchy has been attacked by Stella Georgoudi in "Creating a Myth of Matriarchy" in A History of Women, ed. Georges Duby and Michelle Perot (1990); see English translation by A. Goldhammer (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992), pp. 44963.
Certainly, feminists should and must search into the evidences of history, and it is true that some enthusiasts have leaped into premature assertions
Page 57
about the
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