Fay Weldon's Wicked Fictions by Regina Barreca

Christian, her references to Christianity being more caustic and detailed in the aggregate than those to Judaism. Yet she is often at her best, her most witty, when pondering or playing with some piece of Scripture: "If thine eye offend me take a good look at yourself. If thine I offend thee, change it" ( Cloning, p. 324).
At times Weldon seems to be trying to invent or interpret a religion of Darwinism; although she speaks negatively of Hardy's Tess in Letters to Alice, there are moments of approximation of a Hardyesque cosmology, but without any tragedies or Presidents of the Immortals. Weldon is not trying to do without religion altogether; the religion summoned up in the novels is less rational Epicurean than a mythical or mythological relative of Wicca, even though one can sense the author trying to keep the lid on this.
At one point in Puffball (1980), the narrative voice remonstrates against personifying blind forces:
Not that "nature" can reasonably be personified in this wayfor what is nature, after all, for living creatures, but the sum of the chance genetic events which have led us down one evolutionary path or another. And although what seem to be its intentions may, in a bungled and muddled way, work well enough to keep this species or that propagating, they cannot be said always to be desirable for the individual. [P. 14]
No, perhaps nature cannot reasonably be personified, but what excites Weldon is not reason but the great Life Force, the biological drive which generates life.
Having repudiated personification, Weldon brings it back:
We no longer see Nature as blind, although she is. Her name is imbued with a sense of purpose, as the name of God used to be.... if we can not in all

 

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conscience speak of God we must speak of Nature. Wide-eyed, clear-eyed, purposeful Nature. Too late to abandon her. Let us seize the word, seize the day; lay the N on its side and call our blind mistress Nature
*. [ Puffball, p. 118]
At one level, this is prosy nonsense. Of course, some of us, another "we," can in "conscience" speak of God and have more difficulty speaking of "Nature.'' And why is it "too late" to abandon "her" rather than perhaps merely too early? Weldon's rather labored and hectoring narrative statement is refreshed by the invention at the end, the expression of desire for another word that would call for another typography. The word beginning with an N-on-its-side looks like "Sature" and creates interesting resonances with "Saturn," "satire," and "suture." A new word is needed for the mental suture or stitching together of a gap or rent, though this reconciliation can be performed only satirically. And yet there is need for recognition of a feminine force in things, "our mistress" who is, however, to be recognized as old, slow, determined, inconsiderate, somewhat balefula female counterpart of Saturn. This is the female Life Force.
Women are interesting to Weldon because they have a close and unreasonable relation to the female Life Force, to generative power, a matter which men don't understand. When women try to intercede with the Life Force, begging it to obey their personal wishes by taking contraceptive pills or undergoing abortion, they are meddling in a masculine way, and Weldon enjoys the comeuppance administered by pregnancy. The generative religion is Weldon's religion, which makes her a dangerous companion at times, admittedly. She is best when she can project and laugh at her own tendencies to fascistic control through nature-ism. Comedy customarily intervenes to save her from Lawrentian solemnities. Yet conceptually her novels sometimes wobble a little on their axes.
Puffball itself presents an interesting internal conceptual conflictnever resolvedbetween the philosophical vision of ultimate Meaninglessness and a Wicca or Goddess-shaped vision of Meaningful Rhythms. Liffey, the heroine, is one of the yuppies who try to order the world according to their wishes, symbolized by her willful