Fay Weldon's Wicked Fictions by Regina Barreca Page A

repudiation of conception. It is not only biology (rationally considered) that intervenes but the power of Glastonbury Tor, the old gods and forces that refuse to be thwarted. Mabs Tucker, the jealous witch who tries to curse Liffey's pregnancy, is herself a representative of that older world of blood-knowledge, the forces that must be respected. In Puffball Weldon carries to its most extreme degree the interest in the great drama of egg and sperm. (At times, one could wish her drama were more Shandyesque in the treatment.) Weldon characters often have sex, and the encounters are wittily described,

 

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usually in terms of comic disappointment or some other form of inappropriate behavior and reaction. It is not the fuck that interests Weldon, but conception and generation. Her comedies are comic formally in the way that they support generation, the rhythm of life moving from the mature adults (woefully immature as they all are) to the fetus and child.
There is thus always some hope for the future. Liffey's pregnancy is ultimately redemptivethere is no greater believer of the power of pregnancy in all of English literature than Weldon. For an equivalent, one must turnwhere? Not in general to women writers or to the modern male sex-writers (though Lawrence's Rainbow might be cited, and the beginning of Sons and Lovers ). I think in this aspect of Weldon she finds her closest relative in the Shakespeare of the last plays. Not that she has anything of Shakespeare's tone but one can imagine the story of The Winter's Tale retold by Weldon, who would lay even more stress than Shakespeare does on the progress of Hermione's pregnancy. The Cloning of Joanna May, a story of jealousy, revenge, and redemption, has some of the resonance of The Winter's Tale .
Weldon always seems to try to give cosmic rationalism a place: the cosmos is a set of accidents describable by Science, but in need of no explanation; human life is a fragile accident of random evolutionhuman beings behave brutally and irrationally and then they die. But such a tough negative sense is always counteracted by a more optimistic viewin part a progressive Darwinian or even Lamarckian vision. The knowledge as well as the sins of the parents may be taken on board, there are patterns in lifeand there is a moral order. That moral order, however, is not the order we are most usually taught about by the Church or State. Weldon would undoubtedly argue against Aeschylus and his Athena, who sold women down the river to support a stiff masculine order. She is much more on the side of the Furies, the female powers of knowledge and retribution that can stagger even a Victor, an Oliver, a Clifford Wexford, a Carl May.
The drumbeat of flesh and blood is always heard in Weldon's novelsshe is a supporter of the flesh, of woman's flesh, of fat women and of the carnal in a manner that would give Aristotle the heebie-jeebies. She is still, however, I insist, an Aristotelian in some degree in her interest in situation above character. She says in Letters to Alice, "Plots, I assure you, are nothing but pegs. They stand in a row in the writer's mind. You can use one or another for your purposes, it makes some difference, but not much, which one it is" (pp. 9596). Although she speaks of them as pegs on which the story hangs, her plots, or story lines, are much more like the interior scaffolding of a house. Without them the novel is nothing, just a

 

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set of commentaries and description; related to the plot (peg or scaffolding) the story becomes an entity, gathers its meaningand the characters have something to do. It is not fashionable in England to put plot above character, not since the Victorians came and conquered the novel, so it's no wonder that Weldon in Letters to Alice becomes almost tiresomely Forsteresque. Her real strength is that she can imagine not the character, but characters in situations . The bizarre circumstance is not there for its own sake, but to keep us