Fay Weldon's Wicked Fictions by Regina Barreca Page B

alert to the true situation which invites us to pursue essential matters, considering the variations, the wildness, and yet the predictability of human behavior. What might be called "expressive situational narrative"in which the situation is the chief image and object for which the characters existdiffers from the "situation" in "situation" comedy only in that the latter is more watered-down and subjected to both mimetic realism and rapid neat closure. As a descendant of the drama of Menander (whose plots are closely related to the plots of ancient novels), television's situation comedy inherits its situational interest. Weldon's situationsrather than her charactersare capable of development and are richly meaningful. Just as it isn't Oedipus the personality who interests us, but the man who doesn't know he killed his father and is living with his mother, so it is not the "She-Devil" or her rival Mary Fisher who can interest us, but the way in which the ''She-Devil" takes her revenge and works out her relationship to the ladylike mistress of her husband. That interests us a lot.
The morality that informs Weldon's situations is a morality that urges us to reconsider moral life, especially the assumptions we have been bred on, or have bred in ourselves. Most particularly is that necessary for women, who have been fed so many cultural lies about their own wellbeing. It is thus inevitable that a woman characterany woman characteronce she comes to act for herself will make mistakes and even commit brutalities, but that process seems necessary for her to reach any point of independent action. All of Weldon's novels illustrate the dictum so cogently put in Letters to Alice : "It has come to my notice, Alice, that in the real world the worse women behave, the better they get on" (p. 135). As what the world calls "good" behavior in a woman is the most self-suppressing, timid, doormatlike abjectness, and what the world calls "bad" includes manifestations of sexuality, self-esteem, and energy, it is (or becomes) easy to see why Weldon comically champions the "worse" behavior and persuades us that giving virtue the go-by may have its own rich rewards.
We are so accustomed to thinking of Weldon in a context of late-twentieth-century feminism that it is difficult to offer her full context, the

 

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long and large literary background out of which she emerges. Yet I want to spend the rest of this essay pointing out that in the realm of the Novel she has predecessors in late antiquity, that she is more classical than may be quite easy or comfortable for most readers (including Fay Weldon herself) to believe. The Novel in the West comes to us from the late Roman Empire, from a place (a very widespread place) and a time (a longish time) in which members of different cultures around the Mediterranean had to deal with one another and were thus able to recognize, with a certain degree of relativism, that there are different modes of behavior and different ways of going about things. The lack of a pure and perfect orthodoxy, applicable internationally, was one of the factors that made the novel possible. There is in these old works an ability to accept the existence of different nationalities and language groups and to set up one standard of manners beside another. One of the most surprising things about the ancient novels, particularly those in Greek, is the emphasis on female life and experience. The surviving "Greek" novels were written in the Greek language, but not by Athenians or others from the Greek mainland. The principal novelists whom we know about were by and large from the areas now called Turkey and Syria. As Asia Minor and parts of western Asia were regions supporting the goddess-cults, and had been the home of the Great Mother, 1 they were perhaps more hospitable to the representation of female experience as meaningful.
Probably the earliest surviving of all the antique novels is one called Chaireas and Kallirrhoe by one