Masaryk University

Faculty of Arts

Department of English
and American Studies

English Language and Literature

Pavla Jarošová

Women in the Novels of Fay Weldon

Bachelor’s Diploma Thesis

Supervisor: prof. Mgr. Milada Franková, CSc., M.A.

2010

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 I declare that I have worked on this thesis independently,
using only the primary and secondary sources listed in the bibliography.

……………………………………………

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Acknowledgement

I would like to thank my supervisor for her useful advice and patient guidance.

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Table of Contents

1. Introduction: Why Fay Weldon? ............................................................................... 5

2. Selected novels .......................................................................................................... 9
3. Fay Weldon's Life and Work ................................................................................... 10
4. Fay Weldon and Her Conception of Feminism ....................................................... 13
5. Down Among The Women: The Dawn of Freedom ................................................. 15

What It Is Like to Be a Woman In the 1950s .......................................................... 18

6. The Life and Loves of a She-Devil: Story of a Perfect Revenge .............................. 20

Ruth and Mary: The Perfect Opposites ................................................................... 21

Ruth’s Plan and Evolution ....................................................................................... 22
Ruth as a Winner ..................................................................................................... 24

7. The Shrapnel Academy: Fictional, yet Dangerous Vision ....................................... 25

Men and Women Characters: Loving, Labelling and Fighting ............................... 28

The Guest List.......................................................................................................... 30
The Last Supper: Terrible Power of Prejudgements................................................ 32

8. Big Women: A Way Towards Independence ........................................................... 35

The Real Female Publishing House: Virago ........................................................... 36

Big Women: A Woman Needs a Man like a Fish Needs a Bicycle ......................... 38
New Independent Women ....................................................................................... 39

9. Down Among the Women vs. Big Women ............................................................... 43

10. Conclusion ............................................................................................................... 45
11. Works Cited: ............................................................................................................ 47
12. Resume .................................................................................................................... 50
13. Resumé .................................................................................................................... 51

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 1. Introduction: Why Fay Weldon?

“What I do have to do is be faithful to what I see around me, whether I like it or

not. My role is to look at the world, get a true, not an idealised vision of it and hand it

over to you in fictional form” (Fay Weldon).

This is how Fay Weldon characterizes her writing and also one of the reasons

why I have chosen this author. Although the role and position of a woman in society

has changed greatly during the last fifty years, there are still many issues which should

be discussed. In my opinion, Fay Weldon is not as well-known as she could be and that

is why I decided to work with her novels, because I find them rather poignant as to

women’s roles, positions and beliefs.

The topics she focuses on are quite universal; love, power, motherhood, sexual

attraction, fighting with each other, selfishness, superiority and inferiority. However,

her fresh and sophisticated style of writing makes her novels extraordinary. I decided to

write my thesis about her and her novels with focus on the heroines of these novels to

find out and learn more about this feminist British writer and her style.

Weldon takes an objective approach to relationships, but she is not necessarily

always on the women’s side. “[...] Weldon does not heavy-handedly use her female

characters to hammer out a simplistic thesis about nasty men and victimized women.

Through point of view and tone, her vision of women's relationships with men is more

satisfyingly complex” (Krouse).

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 In Weldon’s novels, women are not infallible, they make mistakes and often it is

their fault that things end up wrong. Often, a man is the open-minded and down to earth

part of the couple, and he also serves as a responsible and reliable element, when

woman wants to enjoy life and does not see the consequences of her actions. Weldon

wants to show women that with power comes responsibility.

Another, but not less important, reason for choosing Weldon as an author is her

special sense of humour. She is not just boringly claiming some feminist values and

popular opinions, nor is she repeating herself. Her point of view and narrative style are

fresh and mixed of tolerance, exaggeration and realism. As to her approach to her

characters, I must agree with Agate Krouse, who says:

Weldon’s interest in the experience of women, her perceptions about their

sexuality and friendship, her intelligent view that womens’ lives are of necessity

different from men's, her successful rendering of what to live ‘down among the

women’ means make her a most valuable contemporary novelist for the

committed feminist and for the general reader who is curious about women. But

Weldon’s novels are appealing even if one does not share her feminist insights.

Their structure, narrative techniques, point of view, style, and humor place them

among the finest achievements in recent fiction by women (Krouse).

Weldon describes women’s feelings in a very sophisticated and authentic style.

Her heroines have other roles than being objects of men’s lust and they want to be

equal, or at least they try to. According to her, ideal relationships do not exist; there is

always someone or something corrupting them. Her heroines have to face it and they

often conclude that in fact they need men to be happy and learn that relationships are

important for every human being.

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 As to her approach to her characters, Lorna Sage writes about Fay Weldon: “She

has a robustly dark view of the world, underlining the limits on her characters’

autonomy and understanding by holding them at arms’ length with authorial intrusions

and ironic, distancing devices” (Sage, 657).

Weldon also claims that you cannot own someone’s personality; there always

has to be a compromise between love and need of freedom. As many writers, she

realises that the worst thing you can experience in a relationship is detachment.

She is brilliant at writing dialogues, but the inner speech also plays an important

role. Her characters are thinking, analyzing and then deciding, labelling people and so

on. The reader learns a lot about the characters through their mental processes caught on

paper; Agate Krouse describes the characters and their functions as follows:

Weldon’s fiction often mirrors the insights of feminist theorists about the nature

and situation of women: love does not last, marriage is not happy, motherhood is

not serene. Her multiple female characters function particularly well to make

convincing a fictional world which indirectly questions many traditional

assumptions. The experiences of her characters complement each other and,

therefore, validate each other as well (Krouse).

In the first chapter of my thesis, I will briefly introduce the selected novels and

the aims of my thesis. The second chapter focuses on Fay Weldon, her life and her style

of writing and also offers some explanations about her writing. In the third chapter I

would like to describe Fay Weldon’s relationship and attitude to feminism. The next

four chapters deal with the four selected novels as follows: 4. Down Among the Women,

5. The Life and Loves of a She-Devil, 6. The Shrapnel Academy, 7. Big Women. In the

eighth chapter I would like to compare the characters of two of the novels, Big Women

and Down Among the Women and describe some of their similarities and differences.

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In the last chapter I would like to conclude what readers can learn from Fay Weldon’s

novels and what is her contribution to today’s modern woman.

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 2. Selected novels

In my thesis, I will inspect and analyze female characters in four of Fay

Weldon’s novels. I would like to show and explain their desires, opinions, their function

in the novels as well as how they reflect the evolution of the society. There are certain

differences in these characters and their aims and way of thinking which are caused by

the crucial changes in the society considering the role of the woman.

The earliest of the chosen novels, Down Among The Women (1971), describes

the lives of three generations of women after WWII. These women start looking for new

possibilities and roles for themselves. However, they are still very much dependent on

men. This novel is sometimes rather depressive, but still very useful to read.

The second novel I have chosen is probably the best-known among them: The

Life and Loves of a She-Devil (1983). It is a kind of a reversed and very dark fairy-tale

showing what a miserable and gritty woman is capable of doing.

The third of the chosen novels, The Shrapnel Academy (1986) is quite

extraordinary in comparison with the other three analyzed novels. It is considering and

describing men and their psychology more than women and its plot takes a very short

time as opposed to the other novels. This novel resembles a theatrical play, being a

study of inferiority and superiority.

Big Women (1997), the last novel which I am going to analyze, is similar to

Down Among The Women, also describing a group of women, female friends involved

in setting up the first feminist (fictional) publishing house, Medusa. In this chapter, a

history of a real feminist publishing house is also included.

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 3. Fay Weldon's Life and Work

Fay Weldon was born as Franklin Birkinshaw on 22nd September 1931 in

Alvechurch, Worcestershire, England. She spent her childhood in Auckland, New

Zealand, because her father worked there as a doctor. When she was fourteen, her

parents got divorced and she returned with her mother Margaret (who also wrote

novels) and her sister Jane to England. There she attended South Hampstead High

School, and then she studied psychology and economics at St. Andrews in Scotland.

However, she got pregnant and moved to London when her first son was born. She did

not want to be a single mother, so when Ronald Bateman, who was twenty five years

older, proposed to her, she agreed.

Unfortunately, the marriage did not last for long; she left her husband after two

years and started working in the advertising industry. All these experiences are strongly

reflected in her novels and her writing style is also inspired by her advertising career. As

Judita Minczingerová suggests in her BA Thesis, Weldon’s approach to womanhood

was strongly influenced by her sister Jane, because she was always quiet, nice and

rather submissive. Fay, on the contrary, was always rebellious, disobedient and not at all

the ideal young woman.

When she was twenty-nine, she met Ron Weldon, later they got married and in

the following years they had three sons. This marriage lasted about thirty years, they

both were seeing therapists, which became fatal in the end. One astrologist told Ron that

his and Fay’s star signs were not compatible, so he left his wife for a therapist (Saner,

Emine).

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 Ron Weldon died of a heart attack on the day the divorce was finalised in 1994.

Throughout this marriage, Fay Weldon succeeded in building a very successful career.

In 1967, she published The Fat Woman’s Joke, her first novel, which describes the

destruction of one marriage, told by the main character, Esther Wells. The first of my

analyzed novels, Down Among the Women, followed (1971). One of the most widely

known novels, Praxis (1978) is about a woman named Praxis Duveen, who went

through two unhappy marriages, tried a very lucrative career as a prostitute and also

killed a human being out of mercy.

The Life and Loves of a She-Devil (1983), another novel which I am going to

analyze, is one of the best known books by Fay Weldon. Besides The Shrapnel

Academy (1986), which I will analyze later, The Cloning of Joanna May (1989) is

another controversial novel which was published in the 1980s. The main character of

the novel, Joanna May, divorces her husband, who works for the nuclear corporation,

and when she visits him later, she realizes that he has made several clones of her.

In the 1990s, Fay Weldon published eight novels, including Big Women (1997),

the last of the selected novels, and she is still writing and publishing. She has also

published collections of short stories, wrote film scripts for television and became well-

known on the BBC.

In 1971, she wrote the first episode of a television series called Upstairs,

Downstairs, and later she won Writers Guild Award for the Best British TV Series

Script for this series. She is also the author of the screenplay of the 1980 BBC

miniseries adaptation of Pride and Prejudice. In 1998, she claimed in an interview for

the Radio Times, that rape is not the worst thing that can happen to a woman if she is

safe, alive and unmarked after the event. (Fay Weldon) This assertion led to her

condemnation by feminists.

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 Fay Weldon was appointed Professor of Creative Writing at Brunel University

in West London in 2006. In her own words: “A great writer needs a certain personality

and a natural talent for language, but there is a great deal that can be taught – how to put

words together quickly and efficiently to make a point, how to be graceful and eloquent,

how to convey emotion, how to build up tension, and how to create alternative worlds”

(Fay Weldon). As to her personal life, after the divorce with Ron Weldon, she married

Nick Fox, who became her manager later. They currently live in Dorset.

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 4. Fay Weldon and Her Conception of Feminism

Fay Weldon based her style, opinions and her characters’ features on her own

experiences. How did she become a feminist author? As Finuala Dowling suggests in

her book:

Weldon has pointed out that she did not need the Women’s Movement to

introduce her to feminism. Her explanatory comment, ‘I was an unmarried

mother in the 1950s and that was a salutary experience,’ not only suggests, in

her case at least, a direct correlation between permissiveness and consciousness

raising, it also allows us to make a fundamental connection between her literary

impetus and that of Betty Friedan and Germaine Greer (Dowling, 33).

Although Weldon claims that she chose her lifestyle long before the feminist

movement, her early novels fit into the context of the Women’s Liberation Movement.

As I have suggested earlier, she works with topics highly demanded and popular from

the woman’s point of view: sisterhood, love, infidelity, oppression, fate and faith,

contraception, abortion, sexual initiation, divorce, career, stereotype, patriarchy,

motherhood and other widely applicable motifs. Alan Massie in his book The Novel

Today writes about Weldon and feminism:

A feminist novelist like Fay Weldon is never in any doubt that the relationship

between the sexes is primarily a matter of power politics [...] Weldon writes with

a light touch that cannot disguise the clarity, indeed the ruthlessness, of her

vision. [...] Though her recent fiction has suffered from self-indulgence, which

manifests itself in displays of verbal whimsy, the novels she wrote in the 1970s

represent the sharpest statement of the feminist position (Massie, 38).

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 Weldon herself knows very well that it is quite difficult to define her approach to

feminism, because throughout life, our opinions and statements are changing. In 1985,

she said in an interview with John Haffenden:

I am a feminist, but I would not describe myself as a feminist novelist because

that would imply that the novels were written because I was a feminist. I am a feminist

and I write novels, and because I believe feminism to be the true view of the world what

I write is bound to come out to be feminist. You could advance the view that all good

writing is bound to be feminist...it depends how you are going to define feminist.

(Haffenden, 313)

It is obvious that Weldon is a feminist, but it is not possible to apply a short-

sighted, strictly feminist point of view on her novels, because their author is much more

complex and experienced, and feminism is just one part of her personality as well as of

her novels.

In my opinion, she, as an author, is trying to be as objective as possible and she

is aware of the fact that nothing is simply feminist or non-feminist. She is strongly

feminist in her criticism of men and their lust for power, but at the same time she is very

realistic. She is a feminist, but not a radical one, and reading her novels and examining

her point of view is enriching, not limiting.

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 5. Down Among The Women: The Dawn of Freedom

The earliest novel by Fay Weldon which I have chosen, Down Among The

Women, starts in 1950, shortly after WWII. The whole society has changed and women

started to recognize and realize where their power lies and how they can use it.

Characters in this book represent the women who are aware of their emerging

importance and usefulness, which became typical and more obvious in the post-war

generation. In my analysis, I would like to describe the characters and their actions

which represent this rebirth of womanhood, dignity and self confidence.

Down Among the Women is not one of the idealistic novels, because women, as

Weldon shows them, can be each others worst enemies; they turn on each other, betray

each other, and are capable of the most savage behaviour towards their own sex. They

do not need to be worried of men’s rivalry, they are perfectly capable of being rivals

themselves. According to Weldon, they desire to please the men, which drives them to

insanity, and for this they have only themselves to blame. This complicated and almost

unsolvable situation is also written about in Agate Krouse’s essay:

True, her (Weldon’s) women suffer intensely; she writes, ‘Down here among the

women you don’t get to hear about man maltreated; what you hear about is man

seducer, man betrayer, man deserter, man the monster.’ But she describes how

her characters—who live ‘down among the women’ rather than in some ideal

world where gender is irrelevant—perceive and discuss men (Krouse).

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 In this novel, Weldon focuses on one family of women (Wanda, Scarlet and

Byzantia) and their friends or other characters who have some connection to them.

Wanda and her daughter Scarlet are the first characters described in this book. There is

also a nameless, unidentified narrator (who remains unrevealed until the very end of the

novel), sitting in the park, where she sometimes meets Scarlet. As to the structure of the

book, the narrator starts four of the fourteen chapters, those other ten chapters begin

with some variation of “we down among the women”.

Wanda, a very tough and independent woman, left her husband Kim when she

was very young and brought up Scarlet almost only by herself. Scarlet is pregnant,

actually shortly before delivering her future daughter, Byzantia. The father of Byzantia

is never present, because Scarlet lost her virginity and became pregnant at once. Finuala

Dowling explains this, not very unusual, situation in her book: “Similarly, in the 1960s

and 1970s, contraceptive method or the lack thereof had to be treated authorially. Not

surprising, then, that the virgin made pregnant on her initiation into the mysteries of sex

is a motif running through several novels published in those decades” (Dowling, 36).

Weldon works with many possible ends and consequences of pregnancies in her

novel: her characters have babies, miscarriages and even abortions. There was not a big

choice of contraceptive methods at those times and that also contributed to the women’s

inferiority to men. Women could not control their lives and men were often deciding for

them. In Down Among the Women, the contraception is quite an issue:

Contraceptives. It is days before the pill. Babies are part of sex. Rumours

abound. Diaphragms give you cancer. The Catholics have agents in the condom

factories – they prick one in every fifty rubbers with a pin with the Pope’s head

on it. You don´t get pregnant if you do it standing up. Or you can take your

temperature every morning, and when it rises that’s ovulation and danger day.

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 [...] Every month comes waiting time: searching for symptoms. How

knowledgeable we are. Bleeding can be, often is, delayed by the anxiety itself.

We know that (DAW, 18, 19).

Four other characters: Helen, Audrey, Sylvia and Jocelyn are introduced through

their approach to men, contraceptives and sex. That is one of the significant Weldon’s

features; she describes someone in a few words, from one point of view or through a

certain situation, knowing that the reader has his or her own experiences, beliefs,

prejudices and moral obligations, so that every individual reader makes an individual

interpretation of the characters (and often she turns these interpretations upside down).

In this novel, the women characters “still see men as central to their existence

and the likely repositories of any happiness they might have the potential to obtain”

(Dowling, 47). According to Arthur Marwick, the position of woman changed greatly

after the Second World War, but the basic principles and separations of roles in the

family have prevailed (Marwick, 63) , which is clearly reflected in this novel. The

women’s way towards independence had only begun.

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What It Is Like To Be a Woman In the 1950s
Being the first adult generation which lived in the world after WWII, the

heroines of this novel were in a complicated situation. They all predict and want some

kind of social change, but they are not capable of making a revolution yet, because

“down among the women, if you are very very careful, shut your eyes and ears, and

keep your knees together nearly always, you can live quite happily” (DAW, 36).

The main female characters and their fates in DAW are as follows: Wanda, the

oldest of them all, is a divorced teacher and she tries to cope with her life and her

daughter as best as she can. Scarlet, who is a single mother, eventually marries,

however most unsuitably. Her marriage with Edwin, an older man, becomes unbearable

and she decides to leave him and returns to her mother’s flat.

Sylvia loves a married man, Butch, and they start to live together. Later, Sylvia

becomes pregnant, but she is not happy with Butch, who is rather aggressive. One day

he hits her in the head so badly that she becomes partially deaf. After this act, she

leaves Butch immediately.

Audrey, a very attractive and intelligent woman, gives up her career, marries

Paul, a man who takes control over her life, and moves with her husband to the country

to start a natural life in a house with no electricity or hot water. Instead of being happy,

she becomes only exhausted and decides to go back to the city.

Helen, who seems to be doing very well, ends up in a disastrous affair with an

artist, called just X. Artist’s wife, called Y, is an artist as well, and she generously buys

her husband a flat so he has his own place to work and to have his girls there. Y wants

to be a tolerant, open minded and liberal wife, allowing her husband to have mistresses,

but in the end she is only desperate of her situation and commits suicide.

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 Helen feels guilty of Y’s death and although she tries to keep the relationship

with X (they even have a baby), she becomes desperate and commits suicide as well,

turning on the gas. When poisoning herself, she also poisons her baby daughter, so the

tragedy of her life is complete.

Jocelyn, who was Audrey’s roommate before Audrey got married, loses her job

and cannot afford to pay the rent by herself. She is partly forced and partly willing to

get married to raise her social status and living standard. “She wants everyone to know

that she, Jocelyn is truly female, truly feminine, truly desired, is now to be married and

complete (DAW, 92).” She marries Philip and their marriage is quite usual, they are not

very happy bur they do not grudge each other either.

Lives of these women are full of choices: who they should date, who they should

marry, whether they should have a baby, have a lover etc. They are in many ways

trapped in their own homes, none of them has a happy marriage or a good job. Their

social background is a war background and their generation has a heavy burden of

making a new way of living. These women are not experienced enough to live without

men, as Jocelyn tells Scarlet before her marriage: “You don’t remain yourself when you

marry. [...] You take on your husband’s level in the world. You take on his status, his

income, his friends and his way of life. [...] You become an aspect of him” (DAW, 122).

Not only women were dependent on men, according to Arthur Marwick

“professional husbands, dedicated to success in their careers, depended very heavily

upon their wives providing them with the comforts and security of domesticity”

(Marwick, 65). This generally known pattern prevails even today, a moderate

dependence is still one of the major factors keeping men and women together.

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 6. The Life and Loves of a She-Devil: Story of a Perfect Revenge

This novel is outstanding in the context of Fay Weldon’s fiction, and also in the

context of other feminist literature. It was quite a shock in the eighties and has the

power to shock even today. Fay Weldon is not scared of extremes and unexpected

actions, making a brand new world of one desperate, yet dangerously determined

woman, Ruth Patchett.

Ruth, who is the narrator and who is everything, but not pretty, lives in the

suburb with her husband Bobbo and two children. At the beginning of the novel, she

says that Bobbo has a mistress: Mary Fisher, a charming and beautiful woman, writer of

romantic fiction, almost princess-like (as she seems to Ruth). Bobbo has cheated on

Ruth many times before, and he tried to justify himself by telling her about each of his

infidelities. Ruth feels that she cannot stand her situation anymore, a situation where all

she has is “her ugliness, unrewarding domesticity, a suburban home, ungrateful children

and unfaithful husband (Dowling, 105)”.

Ruth wants her husband back and at the same time, she wants to destroy Mary

Fisher and her perfect world. To reach these goals, she makes a complicated and perfect

plan. One thing after another, she finally succeeds, but her success is purchased by a lot

of pain. Through her journey and rebirth, she becomes a member of several social

communities and actually makes a lot of unintentional good by manipulating with

people.

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Ruth and Mary: The Perfect Opposites
Ruth Patchett and Mary Fisher are the most obvious contrast in this novel. Ruth,

six feet two inches tall, clumsy, dark and manlike, unable to make anyone truly love

her and feeling that her inner world and feelings shall never be understood or

appreciated. As Ruth describes herself:

I am as dark as Mary Fisher is fair, and have one of those jutting jaws which tall,

dark women often have, and eyes sunk rather back into my face, and a hooked nose. My

shoulders are broad and bony and my hips broad and fleshy, and the muscles in my legs

are well developed. My arms, I swear, are too short for my body. My nature and my

looks do not agree (LLSD, 9).

Mary, who is blonde, fragile, tender, neat and tiny, is a personification of her

own heroines. “Mary Fisher is forty-three, and accustomed to love. There has always

been a man around to love her, sometimes quite desperately, and she has on occasion

returned this love, but never, I think, with desperation” (LLSD, 5). She thinks that

nothing can interfere with the perfect world which she has created and which involves

champagne, smoked salmon, silk dresses, affectionate lovers, dinners and parties with

important people and freedom from the difficulties of the average women.

Unfortunately, soon she discovers how weak this world is when she suddenly

has to face the fact that she has to take care of Ruth and Bobbo’s children, Andy and

Nicole, not knowing that this is only the beginning of her misfortune. The contradiction

of Mary and Ruth is not only physical, but also spiritual. When Bobbo calls Ruth a

she-devil, she adopts this role and in the name of the she-devil begins her unbelievable

journey. She lives from hate, envy, and lack of love, whereas Mary, an angelic creature

lives from love, sex and tenderness.

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Ruth’s Plan and Evolution
Ruth’s goals are quite clear, as she herself explains: “But what do I want? That

of course could be a difficulty [...] I want revenge. I want power. I want money. I want

to be loved and not love in return” (LLSD, 43). Unlike many desperate housewives,

Ruth decides to act. She is aware of the fact that she has to leave everything behind and

get ready for a new life. But she does not create her new life in any conventional or

common way, she plans every step and move very carefully, having one and only goal:

to destroy and discredit Mary Fisher, defeat her. At least this seems to be her goal, but

later she reveals her true plan; to become a new Mary Fisher and get everything that she

always wanted to have: men's admiration, love and respect.

Ruth is driven by hatred of her rival and this emotion forces her and helps her to

achieve everything she resolved. With every new identity she chooses comes a better

knowing of her inner self, she learns how strong and devil-like she really is. She tries

and succeeds in various jobs, finding that people can actually like her. When she starts

her career as a nurse in an old people’s home, she finds Mary Fisher’s mother there and

persuades her to go to her daughter’s house and help her in the difficult situation (which

Ruth caused). Poor Mary Fisher now has not only two children to take care of, but also

an unbearable and incontinent mother.

Ruth changes several professions and identities throughout the story and she

achieves social and material success in all of them. These social steps play only a minor

role in the whole process which she is planning to undergo.

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 She steals Bobbo’s money (money of his clients) and transfers it to Switzerland,

knowing that he has never been very careful about his own finances and soon, Bobbo is

accused of speculation. He is put into custody, thus deepening Mary Fisher’s misery.

Using Bobbo’s money, Ruth starts her physical evolution. With the help of three

plastic surgeons she goes through an incredible amount of operations and pain to “be

like other women.[...] ‘If you have been extraordinary all your life,’ reflected Mr.

Ghengis, ‘just to be ordinary must be wonderful’ ” (LLSD, 219).

During Ruth’s convalescence Mary Fisher dies of cancer and shortly after her

funeral Ruth comes to the High Tower to live with Bobbo, happily ever after at last:

“Now I live in the High Tower, and the sea surges beneath as the moon circles

and the earth turns, but not quite as it did. [...] Bobbo loves me, poor confused creature

that he has become, pouring my tea, mixing my drinks, fetching my bag. [...] Sometimes

I let Bobbo sleep with me. Or I take my lovers in front of him. What agreeable turmoil

that causes in the household! Even the dogs sulk. I cause Bobbo as much misery as he

ever caused to me, and more” (LLSD, 239, 240).

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Ruth as a Winner
By the end of the novel, Ruth has everything she planned to have: Bobbo and his

love, power, money, Garcia, and she lives in the High Tower. But is she really happy?

Perhaps she has seen too much weakness, hate and envy in people to be able to love

again. Her revenge is exemplary in its extent and complexity, nevertheless her goal is

quite trivial, similar to many other women’s goals. It is quite surprising, because she is

capable of reaching much more significant and attractive goals and she knows she can

do anything she wants to, but in a strange parody of Mary Fisher she is happy in her

tower, performing her role.

This unexpected, perky ending is seen controversial by many reviewers; Rhoda

Koenig from the New York Magazine wrote: “Women who love men lose their

identities; women who vanquish them lose their souls.” Ruth, who had done literally

everything to rule her own version of the world, is truly a soul vanquished. In contrast

to her bad and unpopular decisions, such as abandonment of her children, burning their

house down and stealing her husband’s money, the reader still tends to be on a Ruth’s

side, as Alan Wilde says in his essay: “It is more to the point to note and to applaud

Weldon’s triumphant achievement in managing, against often considerable odds, to

keep the reader in Ruth’s side even as her acts become increasingly vengeful and

destructive [...]” (Wilde, 404).

In my opinion, it is quite difficult and complicated to judge whether Ruth

Patchett is a good or bad person. She is, indeed, a winner. Firstly, she has won painful,

demanding and complicated evolution. Secondly, she managed to win reader’s

sympathies and full attention.

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 7. The Shrapnel Academy: Fictional, yet Dangerous Vision

This novel reaches far beyond Fay Weldon’s usual field of study. This piece of

satirical prose is not, unlike her other novels, written entirely from the woman’s point of

view and it does not very much concern feminism. Its content is much wider; Weldon

tries to explore and explain the roots of human behaviour, the causes of war and shows

us an enclosed society, full of borders, preconceptions, orders and restrictions. It is a

fictional, but nevertheless scary image of what can happen, when people feel

endangered for no reason. In her book, Kathleen Wheeler describes this shift of topics

as follows:

[...] Weldon has expanded her themes and settings as well as her techniques [...]

to deal explicitly with the various forms of exploitation (sexual, racial, economic

and class), the origins of violence and war in the human psyche and their

institutionalization in our social structures, and the role of biology or nature,

science and the past in our everyday attempts at free will, to defeat genes, fate

and external forces (Wheeler, 252, 253).

In the Shrapnel Academy, a traditional and famous institution, named after

Henry Shrapnel, the inventor of the exploding canon ball, there exist two different and

strictly divided worlds: the society up in the building and the servants who live down, in

the basement. This hierarchy is crucial and a prerequisite for the well being of the

Shrapnel Academy. At the time, the story takes place, an annual Wellington Lecture is

to be given by General Leo Makeshift and everything has to be perfect. The

organization of the evening is in the hands of the manager of the Academy and colonel's

widow, Joan Lumb.

25
 The rooms in the Shrapnel Academy are named after the warriors, which gives

the narrator an opportunity to talk about them; from Alexander the Great to Napoleon as

well as some less popular generals, such as the Swedish military tactician Gustavus

Adolphus. Besides these remote wars, fights and dramas, there is a real-time drama of

one day in the walls and rooms of The Shrapnel Academy. Drama, where good

manners, dignity and politeness struggle with prejudices, arrogance and lust for power.

26
 This satire is not aimed at Weldon’s usual field of study, but at a “more

fundamental distortion of human values that makes heroes out of murderers and

glorifies massacres by identifying them as significant moments of history” (Dowling

127).

As I have suggested earlier, women are not the main topic of this novel. It is

much more focused on men and their lust for fighting and also on the “institutionalized

carnage of state war machines” (SA, 117). The two-faced narrator, who stands outside

the story, introduces to the reader the greatest commanders and warriors of the human

history, while demythologizing them at the same time. The narrator talks to the reader

very often and also tells the reader how to perceive the narrating, making the reading

more dramatic:

“The Emperor Tiglath-Pileser III came to the Asyrian throne in 875 BC, and is

reckoned the first of the military genii. He it was who had the idea of organising the

entire state around a permanent regular army. [...]Reader, do not skip. I know you want

to. So do I. What has this ancient person to do with anyone? Surely his very name

prevents him being taken seriously! Tiglath-Pileser III!” (SA, 44).

According to Finuala Dowling, “readers are addressed as if they were flagging

troops, in need of morale-boosting before facing the next onslaught in the form of

explicit and historically accurate account of warfare” (Dowling, 122).

The narrator is uninvolved in the story itself, but judicial and ironical, constantly

appealing to the reader. The eccentric character of the narrator gives the book much of

its comedy and thrill and satirizes the military machine (Dowling, 120). In my opinion,

the narrator in this book only proves and strengthens Fay Weldon’s reputation of being

an ironic and distinctive writer.

27
Men and Women Characters: Loving, Labelling and Fighting
In The Shrapnel Academy, many sides of the human nature are being revealed.

Every character in this book has his or her own truth, attitude and aims and more or less

selfishly fights for these aims and beliefs. Each of them has a special scale, by which

they evaluate other people and thanks to these scales, their world seems to be more or

less stable. For example, Joan Lumb’s scale is as follows:

Employers, male, white

Employers, female, white
Servants, male, white
Employees, male, black
Servants, female, white
Employees, female, black
Servants, male, black
Servants, female, black
This seemed to Joan the natural order of things; and exceptions, of course,
proved the rule (SA, 52).
These scales are the crucial part of the characters and very helpful for the reader,
who can perceive and understand the characters better, based on this point of view and
the characters’ amount of tolerance. It is one of Weldon’s often used methods, people
labelling each other, thus leading to making prejudices.
There are not many characters in this novel, it is quite a small and miscellaneous
group of people, who invited or uninvited, come for the lecture and dinner. From many
in the opposites of this book, Joan Lumb, the manager of the Academy, and Acorn, the
black butler, are quite important.

28
 Joan, who in many aspects is the main female character here, thinks of herself as
a very virtuous and consistent woman. Nevertheless, she is also quite marginal and not
aware of many things happening downstairs, in the employees’ space, where Acorn,
“the uncrowned king of the downstairs domain” (SA, 53), rules. In the downstairs
domain, there are thirty people, according to Joan Lumb’s assurance. But Acorn knows
and never tells her that there are not only the servants, but also their family members,
babies, spouses etc., thus making several hundred illegal inhabitants. This absurd
kingdom is controlled by Acorn, who provides more or less tolerable safety and food for
its citizens.
Unselfish love is a rare thing in the Shrapnel Academy. Only Shirley, a happy
housewife, is truly devoted to her children and her husband. However, Joan Lumb’s
feelings for Murray Fairchild, which will be discussed in the next chapter, are also very
strong. The characters of this book often think of themselves as loving creatures, but
their love is made of vanity, fear of loneliness, benefits and inferiority. In the whole
book emerges a highly criticised men’s love or passion for arms, wars and killing. The
need of violence and grudge is the opposite of the need of love, but both feelings are
really strong and shape people’s characters. According to Milada Franková, the
characters in Shrapnel Academy are not driven by love, but more often by sex, simple,
animal sex, which serves as a tool of power (Franková, 188).
Fighting is being carried out on every level in The Shrapnel Academy. The
characters fight for power, attention, social appreciation and superiority. Male
characters in this novel are not that aggressive, except for Acorn, they are more or less
enjoying their dinner and discussing each others’ opinions. Female characters, on the
contrary, are clearly antagonistic. They are jealous of Bella, because she is pretty, young
and a powerful man’s mistress. Joan Lumb despises all women for their female
characteristics, being superior to them. Every female character knows her weapons, no
matter if it is beauty, intelligence or kindness, and uses them to win the eternal fight for
being the most wanted woman.

29
The Guest List
The guests, who eventually sit at the Eve-of-Waterloo dinner table together, are;
General Leo Makeshift, his mistress Bella Morthampton, Joan Lumb’s brother Victor
and his wife Shirley, Muffin, the Academy’s secretary and her lover Baf, an arms
dealer. There is also Murray Fairchild, retired soldier and a war hero, who is adored by
Joan, Mew Whittaker, an uninvited and unwanted guest, since she is a pacifist and
writes for a feminist magazine called Feminist Times.
Then there are two of the members of the Academy staff, who had been found
convenient for such an occasion, Sergei and Panza. And of course, at the head of the
table sits the brain and soul of the evening, Joan Lumb. Since the temporal extent of the
novel is so short, I will briefly characterize all of the guests who are sitting at the dinner
table.
General Makeshift is an elderly man who fought in the Second World War and
who tries to save some dignity and respect for himself. He has been addicted to sleeping
tablets since ordering the destruction of a small French town and quite confused and
disgusted with life, but hoping that a young mistress will revive his body and soul. He
also can “keep his mind on two things at once. It’s a capacity generals have. They share
it with mothers” (SA, 125). Bella, his mistress, is seen as a gold-digger and selfish
woman by the others and grudged for her good looks. “Whatever she did to herself, she
remained beautiful, and looked more like a mistress than a secretary” (SA, 10).
Victor is a family man, but also “no less a villain than the men who have seen
action in the field” (Dowling, 124). He is an economist and constantly thinking about
productivity and profit. His wife Shirley is very much devoted to him and their three
kids (Serena, Piers and Nell) and she is very happy to have such a family, but also tired
of the constant demands and obligations of a mother and wife. When they receive an
invitation to the dinner, she sees it as an opportunity to escape from the stereotype and
also rest for a while, since she will not have to cook and keep an eye on the children all
the time. This couple also has a dog named Harry with them, which becomes an
accelerant of the final battle and tragedy.

30
 Muffin, a young secretary of Joan Lumb, is an innocent creature, who wants to
live as easy and smooth life as possible. She is planning to marry “one of the young
officers who came to the Shrapnel Academy [...] She also sometimes thought,
regretfully, that it probably wouldn’t make much difference which one it was.” Muffin
and Baf have a balanced relationship as to their expectations, neither of them wants to
marry each other.
Baf, an arms dealer, cannot wait to show to the general his brand-new gadget, a
miniaturised weaponry, which he carries in a velvet-lined Victorian knife box. This box,
looking very elegant and sophisticated, eventually becomes fatal for everyone, because
not even Baf realizes its true power.
Murray Fairchild is one of the few men who had been brave enough to pass
Joan Lumb’s scale and criteria. “The sight, indeed even the thought, of Murray made
Joan Lumb’s heart beat faster, made her swallow, made her moisten her lips, made her
voice rise to a higher pitch” (SA, 37). Unfortunately for her, he is immune to any kind
of her seduction, hoping that some young and exotic female servant will be sent to his
room. Murray has experienced horrible torture; when he was a prisoner of war, the
enemies made him drink acid, but he managed to survive. He still suffers from serious
digestive problems and he is the first to know that they have been served a dog’s meat.
Mew Whittaker is a young reporter and heated feminist who wants to find out
some poignancy and injustice about The Shrapnel Academy. Joan Lumb does not want
any intruder to ruin her dinner and does not like Mew from the very beginning, but in
the end she admits that it is more polite to accept Mew as a guest.

31
The Last Supper: Terrible Power of Prejudgements
When the guests are at last eating their dinner (in Chapter XVIII.), they are
confronting each other’s opinions and from time to time the atmosphere at the table is
quite uncomfortable:
‘Of course she isn’t his secretary, at all,’ said Muffin to Mew, rashly. ‘Everyone
knows she is his mistress. Bella Morthampton’s famous. [...] ‘Really’ said Mew
and took something small and black from inside the elasticated cuff of the sĺeeve
of her blouse and pointed it down the table. Click! Click! ‘Army Sex Scandal!
General’s Sexual Toy!’ But that’s a camera, Muffin thought. She’s taking
photographs (SA, 115).
Mew is acting quite impertinently, but that is just a minor problem. The actual
war between upstairs and downstairs starts when Shirley reveals her concern for Harry
(their dog) who has been put in the downstairs domain to be looked after. When she
says her opinion about the Shrapnel Academy staff, Acorn, who is serving the dinner,
hears her: “‘Well, anyway,’ said Shirley, ‘all I hope he's all right down there with the
servants. You know what these people are. Some of them actually eat dog!’”(SA, 112).
After this exclamation, Acorn decides to take some action. He is angry at himself as
well because earlier that day a young girl died while delivering his baby and they could
not tell anyone nor could they call for help, because he did not want that to happen. He
tells Inverness, the old and peaceful servant, to kill the dog and stew it.
It is done and decided to serve the dog as a pate with late-night sandwiches.
Acorn talks to the inhabitants of the downstairs and tells them there will be no more
oppression, and that the rule life for life has to be obeyed. He has an argument with
Inverness, who does not want any violence, but the crowd is so excited that they decide
to follow Acorn’s ideas of dignity, justice and vengeance.

32
 Finally, the sandwiches are served and highly appreciated, even by Victor and
Shirley. When the telephone wires between upstairs and downstairs stop working and
the lights go out, it is because of the snow, but everyone who is upstairs thinks that
the staff are planning some strike or even attack. The stress is growing and the war is
declared when Murray announces them that they were eating Harry.
Unfortunately, there is a pot left on the flame, when the staff go to bed,
peacefully, and the smell of something burning leads to suspicion, that they want to
burn down The Shrapnel Academy. It is decided to intimidate the enemy (downstairs)
by using Baf’s miniature armature. What they do not realize is its actual power,
which leads to tragedy:
So Baf overcame his hesitation – pure superstition- and let the cherries fall into
the dark on the other side of the green baize, and pushed the button in what
he thought was the correct way [...] The armed, but not fired, CS gas cylinder
was activated by the grenade blast and sparked an explosion in the napalm
thrower and the tiny howitzer and the strategic nuclear cannon and in the space
of seconds that was that [...] Only two people survived the explosion the night
the Shrapnel Academy went up. The other 331, for there were 333 souls in
residence that night, all died (SA, 199, 201).
This novel helps the reader to realize true origins of war and the terrible impact
as well as the inevitability of violence. No matter what the reasons are; religion, race,
land, power, there will always be violence and death, unfortunately. It is important to
understand these rules, because “never say a harsh word if you can say a kind one: it
may be you who starts the war” (SA, 139). The events described in the Shrapnel
Academy serve as a perfect example of the power of prejudices. It is also obvious
that the morality of every person is pretentious to a certain extent and that people
cannot predict their reactions in critical situations until they must cope with them.
The story is a picture of inevitable destruction of one small world. Today, when
we are living in a danger of a nuclear attack, the message of this novel is alarming.
The narrator criticises the army-leaders from the beginning of history, ironically
counting how many lives have been destroyed by these wars. Clancy Sigal calls the
novel a “pacifist allegory”, saying that “Ms. Weldon has shown a firm grasp of the
principles of wicked irony. She has few illusions and wishes us to have none”
(Sigal).

33
 The wry, pacifist, radical and ironic narrator is Fay Weldon’ alter ego, a voice
she uses to appeal to readers and to imply her own statements on class, race,
immigration and militarism. The clear and radical critique of the militarism has been
widely discussed earlier in the thesis. The class and race are secular inflictors of
conflicts and prejudices, which are obvious in the novel; Joan Lumb does not know
and does not want to know any more information than is necessary about her staff.
Weldon claims that ignorance, indifference and disinformation can be deadly and the
reader should be aware of it.

34
 8. Big Women: A Way Towards Independence

The fourth and last of the analyzed novels, Big Women, is the most recent book

by Fay Weldon, which I would like to analyze in my thesis. It describes the creation of a

first female publishing house, called Medusa. It is fictional, but based on a true story,

which will be dealt with later in my thesis. It starts in 1971, the time of emerging

freedom, the time, when women became much more independent. This novel also has

an alternate title: Big Girls Don’t Cry, which can be a little bit confusing when referring

to this book.

The 1970s were revolutionary in many ways, many rules were broken during

that era and the feminist movement was emerging. The heroines of this book feel and

appreciate this new era and they decide to make some major changes in the society; they

decide to create a feminist publishing house, called Medusa, to show the men that they

are equal. Their self constituted leader, Layla, is the richest and also the least dependent

of them, so it is decided to put her money in Medusa. Then there is Alice, a philosopher

and a superstitious woman, who still lives with her parents. Stephanie and Zoe are both

unhappy in their marriages, though each in a different way, and each of them solves

their life situation differently. Then there is Nancy, who decides to leave her fiancé and

join the Medusa women later, becoming an irreplaceable member of its office .

The plot of this novel moves from the early 1970s to the late nineties and shows

the changes of the heroines, as well as their life decisions and their consequences. In the

end, they all must face their previous decisions and cope with them. The narrating

connects feminism, the real history of feminist publishing houses, and Weldon’s well

known sense of humour as well as her straightforward, wry, ironic style.

35
The Real Female Publishing House: Virago
Medusa is, in many ways, a parallel to a feminist publishing house, called

Virago1. It was established in 1972 by Carmen Callil and its first official meeting took

place a year later. Carmen Callil explains the establishing of Virago in the following

words:

I remember my ambitions clearly. I started Virago to break a silence, to make

women’s voices heard, to tell women’s stories, my story and theirs. [...] I started

Virago to publish books which celebrated women and women's lives, and which

would, by so doing, spread the message of women's liberation to the whole

population and knock on the head for ever the idea that it was anything to do

with burning bras or hating men (Callil).

Virago was at its beginning run by Carmen Callil, Ursula Owen and Harriet

Spicer. One of its most successful projects is the Virago Modern Classics, which started

in late 1970s and still continues. In an article about this project, Carmen Callil wrote:

In the publishing world of the 60s and 70s, women rarely had the opportunity to

choose which books to publish, and paperback lists, particularly, reflected

this.[…] In explaining my literary stance at the time I wrote: by the word

‘classic’ we do not always mean ‘great’, though we often do. And then there is

laughter: this is the secret key to instant republication as a Virago Modern

Classic. (Callil).

In 1978, the first five novels of this edition were published. In 1979, they

published Margaret Atwood's Surfacing, which was a huge success, and Atwood still

remains one of the Virago's greatest supporters and bestselling authors.

1
strong, brave, warlike woman

36
 During the 1970s and 1980s they published works of many major feminist

thinkers, including Kate Millett, Adrienne Rich, Eva Figes, Juliet Mitchell, Lynne

Segal, Sheila Rowbotham, and Elaine Showalter. They have also published one of the

most famous British feminist authors, Angela Carter. Carmen Callil remained an

important part of the direction until the early 1990s. In 2003, Virago celebrated thirty

years of its existence, still seeking for the provocative, controversial and stylish authors.

Today, it remains a strong publishing house, contributing to the education in feminist

literature and literature written by women.

37
Big Women: A Woman Needs a Man like a Fish Needs a Bicycle
Big Women (or Big Girls Don’t Cry) resembles DAW in many ways. Firstly, this

novel also tracks the lives and loves of a group of women: Layla, Stephanie, Alice, Zoe,

Nancy and Daffy. These women only got luckier, because they were born later and

growing up in the fifties and sixties and they were the auricular witnesses and

co-makers of the social revolution in the second half of the twentieth century. Secondly,

as well as DAW, Big Women is a realistic novel, opposed to the exaggerated and in

many ways hyperbolic The Live and Loves of a She-Devil. It consists of four parts:

1: Will You, Won’t You, 2: A Nest of Randy Vipers, 3: Saffron’s search and 4: Well,

I’m Sorry.

The heroines of this novel, a group of young women who are not satisfied with

their current social position and the situation of women in general, decide to take an

action. Their story starts in 1971, they gather in one of their homes (Stephanie’s), get

drunk and very bold pronouncements are being made, such as: “Men control the means

of production, capital and labour” or “Men have art, women have babies” (BW, 33).

This dramatic and history-making situation turns into absurd, when Stephanie

accidentally catches her husband Hamish red-handed with their friend Daffy, who was

also invited to the party. One thing after another, Stephanie decides to leave her

husband and her two sons immediately and escapes from her own house naked, with

none of her personal stuff, and goes to live in Layla’s house. Later, Daffy decides to

stay in the house and replace Stephanie as a mother and a wife.

The women in this book try to live their lives without men, in accordance with

their own motto “Woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle.” However, good ideas

can lead to bad endings and they all have to struggle with their need of love, safety and

motherhood.

38
New Independent Women
The women in this book want to find an area where they could fulfil their

potential without serving the men. Layla, their leader and the least typical woman of

them all, being rich and never willing to get married or have children, brings in an idea

of establishing their own publishing house, so they can “reclaim female history,

women’s art, our self-esteem. We will record the ideas that shake the world” (Big

Women, 41).

Full of ideals, enthusiasm and with a lot of Layla’s money, they establish

Medusa. Medusa, that means Layla, Stephanie, Alice and Nancy, a girl from Australia

who decided to break up with her boyfriend and started working for Medusa as a

secretary.

Layla is very generous, independent and an unconventional character, but she is

also very dominant and sometimes she says very harsh things. Stephanie regrets leaving

her husband and sons, but when she tries to renew her relationship with them, she sees

they are much happier under Daffy’s surveillance. She is confused and it seems

impossible for her to find her peace of mind. Alice is very intelligent and also a big fan

of tarots, prophecy and anything paranormal, which drives Layla, who is strictly

pragmatic, crazy.

Nancy is quiet, reliable, almost unnoticed, strong and a very hardworking

woman, maybe the only one who wants to do some serious work in Medusa, she is

trying not to be included in any personal quarrels. She is truly a silent element, which

keeps Medusa working efficiently.

And then there is Zoe, an intelligent and unhappy woman, who is not a member

of Medusa only because her husband Bull did not want her to be involved in this

publishing house. Zoe stays at home as a housewife, and in her free time she writes a

39
book, the only thing she considers meaningful in her life. She sends the manuscript to

Medusa and they find it very promising, Stephanie decides to call her, but Bull answers

the phone.

He tells Zoe that Medusa’s statement is that her work is unpublishable and

nobody shall want to read it. Zoe sees this act as the last drop and eventually commits

suicide. At her funeral Bull accuses the Medusa women of her death, saying they

implied dangerous and wicked ideas into her mind. Saffron, Zoe’s daughter, is a little

girl when this happens, but she still wants to understand why her mother killed herself.

After Zoe’s death, Saffron is forced to take care of her younger brother

Sampson, because their father is useless and gets drunk very often. When she talks to

her father she says that “‘It’s worse to lose a mother than a wife. You can get a new

wife but you can’t replace a mother’ ” (BW, 220). After interviewing Layla and Alice,

Saffron concludes that her mother’s death is her father’s responsibility. Finally, she

makes Bull give a copy of Zoe’ manuscript to Stephanie.

Stephanie, who is not satisfied and hates Layla for the necessity to always have

the last word, meanwhile leaves Medusa and establishes her own radical feminist

magazine called Menstra, which turns out to be a very unsuccessful project, so she

wants Layla to take her back. Medusa is going through bad and better times, Zoe’s

novel, Lost Women, becomes a very well selling book. Nevertheless, Layla feels that

Medusa emptied its potential, that “feminism is now mainstream” (BW, 284) and she

decides to sell it.

40
 In the last part of the novel, Saffron is a young, self-confident woman, who

knows very well (and much better than her mother) how to take care of herself. She is a

chief editor of a magazine called Tiffany, one of the first truly modern magazines for

women. She buys a hold in Medusa from Johnny, one of Layla’s few male friends,

when he is dying in hospital. Finally, the publishing house is sold, after Saffron and

Layla made a secret deal and overvoted the rest of the Medusa members. One big step

in improving women’s position has been finished.

Throughout the novel, according to Elizabeth Gleick, Weldon asks and tries to

answer two rather complicated questions: “What were the early feminists thinking? And

was the women’s movement really worth it?” (Gleick) The reader does not get a

specific answer, which is typical of Weldon, she only describes bits and pieces of her

characters’ lives, making a mosaic from which anyone can choose a character of his or

her likeness. At the end of the novel, only Nancy has a partner, because she is together

with Brian, her former and abandoned fiancé, again.

Weldon claims that when you are twenty something and an attractive woman,

freedom, independence and rejection of men may seem to be the best achievements for

you. Nevertheless, when you are forty, you may regret, as well as Layla did. She never

wanted to have children, but when she finds out she is infertile, she is sad and

disappointed. This is a feature of many Weldon’s characters, they always want to have

the reach of every possibility. Those contradictions are almost in every woman and a

universal solution of this eternal contradiction does not exist. The narrator herself talks

about these contradictions in the novel:

Well, we are sorry. Every generation must apologise to the future, and the

greater the change was brought about, the profounder the apology needs to be.

Let Galileo apologise for pointing out that the earth goes round the sun,

41
 undermining our sense of our place in the universe. [...] The brighter the idea

the worse the consequences. Let the feminists apologise for the death of love,

lost children, and the diminishing of man. But what was a girl to do? Someone

has to reform the world. You can’t see what you see and do nothing” (BW, 267).

To conclude, an universal solution does not exist and no man or woman can be

perfectly happy. The female characters of this novel are driven by the consequences of

their previous decisions and they feel that a choice which is too wide can be

paradoxically very limiting. It is quite complicated, because the natural need of love is

fighting against the ideals of independence. Every intelligent woman wants to lead a

satisfactory, meaningful and fulfilling live. Their concepts of what is meaningful or

satisfactory, vary greatly. It is always bad when a woman is pushed to do something she

does not want. Sixty years ago, it was recommended to be married and have children, it

was almost the only choice. On the contrary, pushing a woman into independence is not

a good thing, either. Extremes, universal truths and traditions cannot guarantee a happy

live.

42
 9. Down Among the Women vs. Big Women

In this part of the thesis I would like to compare two novels which are similar in

their concept and context, as well as in the characters. They all want to achieve a solid

social position, they want to be admired and cherished, equal to men. They all have had

more or less successful relationships with men and they have realised what is important

in their lives.

One of the significant similarities and features of some of the characters lives is

suicide. Two of the characters of Down Among the Women and one character of Big

Women commit suicide, because they cannot bear their life situation anymore. They are

unhappy, desperate and do not see any other way out of their suffering.

Of course, there are also many differences between these women. The most

evident difference in the heroines’ lives is their experience of motherhood. Almost all

the characters in DAW have children or at least they have very close relationship to

them. In their era, men, marriage and motherhood were everything they could desire.

Even though they had a notion of independence and the post-war society began to

change greatly, it was still unusual not to marry and stay childless. Getting married and

being a wife and mother was the easiest way to gain a good social status.

In BW, the female characters reject men on purpose. However, they still have

sexual relationships with them. Apart from Stephanie and Zoe, they are not married and

neither have they children. They are claiming their independence, intelligence and

power, but the society, their own prejudices and contradictions are still limiting them.

They are basically unhappy, married or not, but they would never share these feelings

with their objectors.

43
 The most traditional female figure in BW is Daffy, at first sight a very naive and

disregarded person, who is in fact very generous and tolerant. She takes care of

Stephanie’s sons, when Stephanie leaves her husband and brings them up to their

adulthood instead of their mother. Daffy replaced her more than successfully, which is

almost unbearable for Stephanie, but she cannot do anything about it, since she left her

children out of her free will.

The female characters of these novels are influenced by the era, in which they

are living. It is almost unbelievable how the society has changed in those twenty years

which separate the plots of the novels. The characters of Big Women are, or at least feel,

free and independent as they please, while those of Down Among the Women still have a

long way to go.

The heroines of both these novels have much in common, they want to live a

fulfilling, meaningful life and gain the freedom of mind, speech and actions. They want

to be admired and appreciated for their personal qualities. They want to have the

possibility to do anything they want to and arrange their way of living as they please.

44
 10. Conclusion

The novels of Fay Weldon which I have read and analyzed turned out to be very

interesting and inspiring. She asks provocative questions and gives disturbing answers.

She plays with the readers and her point of view is original, critical, funny and

enriching. The readers are warned not to be prejudicial, hypocritical or short-sighted.

Through the characters study and with the narrator’s commentaries they can look deep

inside the human relationships. Fay Weldon is a feminist in many aspects, which I have

suggested earlier in my thesis, but she is quite universal in her criticism. Female figures

are under her critical eye as much or even more than male ones.

Fay Weldon is really good at satirising various conventions, and even though she

is a very successful author, she remains quite modest. She does not see herself as

extraordinary, in her own words: “Male and female, we all busily gender role-played, in

a way that seems extraordinary today”. The word which can characterize her style of

writing most pregnantly is objectivity. She is not trying to claim her opinions as the one

and only truth; the biggest danger, according to her, lies in radicalism, even feminist

radicalism. She is often exaggerating and unforgiving, but if she was not, the message in

her books would not be so appealing.

The prototype of a devil-like woman in The Live and Loves of a She-Devil, the

realistic and struggling characters of Big Women and Down Among the Women, as well

as the absurd group of people in The Shrapnel Academy, they all create an attractive,

irrestisible and funny microcosm made by Fay Weldon.

However, behind her characters’ stories lay the big historical events, major

social and political changes, but they are, in most cases, not reflected there. The history

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she writes about is the little, personal history of ordinary women from middle class

background which makes the world go round.

Apart from these normal, ordinary women, Weldon offers absurd, hyperbolic

figures, such as Ruth from The Life and Loves of a She Devil to make a significant

contrast. With a lot of exaggeration, she makes the reader think, often from a new point

of view.

In most of the situations and characters described in her books, readers can

acknowledge their own faults, relationships and lives. An ideal relationship does not

exist, but it is never too late to try. Fay Weldon’s goal is nothing smaller than to add

some uniqueness to every one of her books and to achieve a significant and intelligent

story; in her own words:

Readers crave explanations of their lives: the writers of fiction provide it,

enlarging experience, giving meaning and significance where none was before. I

see myself as someone who drops tiny crumbs of nourishment, in the form of

comment and conversation, into the black enormous maw of the world’s

discontent. […] See me as Sisyphus, but having a good time (Fay Weldon).

To conclude, Fay Weldon and her literary work are still inspiring and appealing

and her narrative techniques are compelling and brilliant. Her characters and their acts

are unique and not only the female readers can realise what is important in life while

reading Weldon’s books.

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 11. Works Cited:

Primary sources:

Weldon, Fay. Big Women. London: Flamingo, 1997.

---. Down Among the Women. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1973.

---. The Life and Loves of a She-devil. Kent: Hodder and Stoughton, 1984.

---. The Shrapnel Academy. Kent: Hodder and Stoughton, 1987.

Secondary sources:

Printed:

Dowling, Finuala. Fay Weldon’s Fiction. Madison: Farleigh Dickinson UP, 1998.

Franková, Milada. Britské spisovatelky na konci tisíciletí. Vyd. 1. Brno: Masarykova

univerzita, 1999.

Haffenden, John: Novelists in Interview. New York: Methuen & Co., 1985.

Massie, Alan. The Novel Today: A Critical Guide to The British Novel, 1970-1989.
London: Longman, 1990.

Marwick, Arthur. British Society Since 1945. 3rd ed. Harmondswort: Penguin Books,
1996.

Sage, Lorna; Greer, Germaine, Showalter, Elaine. The Cambridge Guide to Women’s

Writing in English. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999.

Wheeler, Kathleen. A Critical Guide to Twentieh-century Women Novelists. Oxford:

Blackwell, 1997.

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Non printed:

BBC News. “Fay Weldon: Rape Isn’t the Worst Thing That Can Happen”.

BBC News.co.uk. June 1998. Web. 25. May 2010.

<http://news.bbc.co.uk>.

Callil, Carmen. “The Stories of our Lives”. Guardian.co.uk. Guardian News and Media

Ltd., April 2008.

Web. 10. October 2010. <http://www.guardian.co.uk/books>.

Fay Weldon Interviews and Articles.

Web. 14. Mar. 2010. <http://redmood.com/weldon/interviews.html>.

Fay Weldon’s Biography on Answers.com.

Web. 14. Mar. 2010 < http://www.answers.com/topic/fay-weldon>.

Gleick, Elizabeth. “The Women’s Room. ” New York Times 25 Oct. 1998.

Web. 24. September 2010. <http://www.nytimes.com/books>.

Hancock, Ann. Dictionary of Literary Biography on Fay Weldon. Dictionary of

Literary Biography. U of the West of England, Bristol. Thomson Gale, a part of

the Thomson Corporation.

Web. 20. Nov. 2009. <http://www.bookrags.com/biography/fay-weldon-dlb2/>.

Koenig, Rhoda. “Women Beware Women. ” New York Magazine 24 Sep. 1984. 97-99.

Web. 18. May 2010. <http://books.google.cz/books>.

Krouse, Nesaule Agate. “Feminism and Art in Fay Weldons Novel’s” In Critique,

Vol. XX, No. 2, 1979, 5-20.

Web 20. Nov. 2009. <http://www.bookrags.com/criticism/weldon-fay-1931_2/>.

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Minczingerová, Judita: “Feminine Roles in Fay Weldon’s Selected Novels”: BA Thesis.

2006.

Web. 12. Dec. 2009. <www.is.muni.cz>.

Patten, Eve. “Fay Weldon” Fay Weldon at Contemporary Writers. 2003.

Web. 18. May 2010. <http://www.contemporarywriters.com>.

Saner, Emine: “‘I’m the Only Feminist There Is – the Others Are All Out of Step’”.

An Interview with Fay Weldon. Guardian.co.uk. Guardian News and Media

Ltd., August 2009.

Web. 18. May 2010. <http://www.guardian.co.uk/theguardian/2009/aug/>.

Sigal, Clancy. “Dinner at 8. When’s the Revolution? ” New York Times 26 Apr. 1987.

Web. 20. Nov. 2010. <http://www.nytimes.com/books>.

Wilde, Alan."Bold, but Not Too Bold: Fay Weldon and the Limits of Poststructuralist

Criticism“. Contemporary Literature, Vol. 29, No. 3, Contemporary Literature

and Contemporary Theory. (Autumn, 1988), 403-419. JSTOR.

Web. 20 Nov. 2009. <http://www.jstor.org/search>.

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12. Resume

My Bachelor Diploma Thesis deals with four chosen novels by Fay Weldon:

Down Among the Women, Life and Loves of a She-Devil, The Shrapnel Academy

and Big Women. The thesis focuses on description, depiction and analysis of the

novels and its characters. The female characters are being analysed and discussed

from today’s point of view.

My aim was to introduce Fay Weldon and her heroines in the wider perspective

and offer the reasons why is she, from my point of view, an important author of the

second half of the twentieth century. I have commented on the most important

features of her literary work and I have tried to describe her narrative techniques as

well as her style of writing.

I have tried to make a compact picture of Fay Weldon and her work and to

analyse how much feminist she really is. I hope that my thesis will offer interesting

ideas and topics for discussion or literary research.

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13. Resumé

Tato bakalářská diplomová práce se zabývá britskou spisovatelkou Fay Weldon

a čtyřmi jejími romány: Down Among the Women, Život a lásky jedné ďáblice,

Shrapnelova akademie a Velké ženy. Ve své práci jsem se zaměřila na popis a

rozbor těchto románů a jejich, především ženských, postav. Ženské postavy v těchto

románech jsou chápány z dnešního úhlu pohledu s přihlédnutím k dobovému

kontextu.

Mým cílem bylo představit Fay Weldon a hrdinky jejích knížek v zajímavé

perspektivě a zahrnout do své práce důvody, proč ji považuji za nedílnou součást

lliteratury druhé poloviny dvacátého století. Pokusila jsem se popsat vývoj postav i

doby, ve které se pohybují.

Rovněž jsem se pokusila analyzovat, do jaké míry je Fay Weldon feministkou a

jak přistupuje ke svým postavám coby vševědoucí vypravěč. Ráda bych, aby tato

práce nabídla podněty k diskuzi a přispěla zajímavými nápady do teorie literatury.

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