An Interview with Fay Weldon Downloaded from by Guest on 23 September 2021

Wicked Women, Wicked Fictions, Wicked Laughter: An Interview with Fay Weldon Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/cww/article/11/2/259/4080713 by guest on 23 September 2021 MARY EAGLETON July The title above sets the tone for Fay Weldon’s long and highly productive 1 1 The title refers, career. Her play, A Catching Complaint, appeared as ITV’s Play of the Week respectively, to one of on 5 September 1966. Over fifty years later, she is still writing.2 Her latest Weldon’s short story collections, Barreca’s essay novel, Death of a She Devil, a sequel to The Life and Loves of a She-Devil (1983), collection, and Hebert’s was published in 2017. Weldon’s website lists thirty-six novels and novellas, essay title. 2 For further information eight collections of short stories, eight works of non-fiction, three books for about the play, please see children, twenty-two plays, and fifty-one film and television credits.3 There <www.imdb.com/title/ are very few years since the start of her career when she has not published a tt0397956/>. 3 See < fayweldon.co.uk >. book. Sometimes it is two; in 1987 and 1989, it was three. Moreover, Weldon has always been active in the literary field more widely. She was a member of Contemporary Women’s Writing 11:2 July 2017. doi:10.1093/cwwrit/vpx012 259 © The Author 2017. Published by Oxford University Press; all rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: [email protected] the film and video panel of Greater London Arts in the 1970s, and of the Arts Council literary panel in the 1980s; she was Chair of the judging panel for the Booker Prize (1983) and on the jury of the Berlin International Film Festival (1996); she continues to be Honorary Patron of the Bridport Prize. In addition, Weldon appears at literary festivals, gives lectures and interviews, and writes magazine and newspaper articles. Since 2012, she has been a professor of Creative Writing at Bath Spa University, UK. Across her career and across different media and forms, Weldon has gathered awards and honors. Her script for the first episode of the television drama Upstairs Downstairs (1971) won a Writers Guild of America Award; Polaris won the Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/cww/article/11/2/259/4080713 by guest on 23 September 2021 1978 Giles Cooper Award for the best radio play; in 1979, she was shortlisted for the Booker Prize for Praxis (1978); in 1989, she won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for The Heart of the Country (1987); in 1996, she was shortlisted for the Whitbread Novel Award for Worst Fears (1996) and won the PEN/Macmillan Silver Pen Award for her short story collection Wicked Women (1995). Weldon has been awarded several honorary degrees, including from her own university, St. Andrews, Scotland, where she studied Economics and Psychology. In 2001, she was made CBE (Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire) for services to literature. The critical assessment, however, is more difficult to make. Though Weldon is widely reviewed, features in nearly every survey of contemporary writing and, particularly, contemporary women’s writing, and continues to be the subject of academic articles, there have been only three monographs or edited collections devoted to her work, all in the 1990s: Regina Barreca’s Fay Weldon’s Wicked Fictions (1994), including five short contributions by Weldon herself; Finuala Dowling’s Fay Weldon’s Fiction (1998); and Lana Faulks’s Fay Weldon (1998). Beate Neumeier’s 2001 collection on contemporary British women’s writing contains three essays on Weldon, and Michael Meyer’s 2006 survey of Weldon’s short fiction provides a useful introduction to this under- researched area of her writing, but, generally, her work of the last twenty years is still waiting a critical overview. Katy Emck has described Weldon as “a moralist with a delinquent streak” (656). Certainly Weldon raises many issues of contention that demand an ethical response: for example, militarism (The Shrapnel Academy [1986]); reproductive technologies (The Cloning of Joanna May [1989]); psychoanalysis and the therapy culture (Affliction [1993] and The Stepmother’s Diary [2008]); the pharmaceutical industry (The Ted Dreams [2015]); and transgender (Death of a She Devil). The delinquency comes, firstly, in Weldon’s refusal to moralize or to adhere to any overarching philosophical or political position, any “ism.” Mara Reisman sees in Weldon’s work an “ethical ambiguity,” which will always “keep the moral ground in flux” (“Shifting” 647). And this is as true of Weldon’s exploration of her major ethical theme, that of sexual politics. Virtue is never unconditionally on the side of women. As Lorna Sage comments, Weldon’s plots are “invariably partisan and have female characters centre-stage,” but she “refuses to see women as experts Contemporary Women’s Writing 11:2 July 2017 260 Mary Eagleton • Wicked Women, Wicked Fictions, Wicked Laughter: An Interview with Fay Weldon in continuity or communion” (154). What Sage terms “matriarchal realism,” a form of realism that speaks to a sisterhood of women, constitutes, Sage believes, “an episode, or one kind of destiny, rather than a governing paradigm” (156). Secondly, Weldon’s characters repeatedly turn to “delinquency” to escape the position patriarchy has established for them. The women who are used, abused, or drably invisible become avenging, deviant, veritable “she-devils.” However, these are not stories of heroic achievement or resolution; ongoing struggles are everywhere. Weldon’s women fight with men but also among themselves. Mistresses will scheme to supplant wives; rejected wives will retreat and plot; female friends might help or hinder; mothers and daughters, Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/cww/article/11/2/259/4080713 by guest on 23 September 2021 or stepmothers and stepdaughters, battle it out. The tensions around divorce and remarriage, disputed property, “blended” families that are anything but harmonious drive the plots of many Weldon novels. In some cases, Remember Me (1976) and The President’s Child (1982) for instance, the child acts out the lies or distress of the parental generation. At the same time, the intimate familial and interpersonal clashes signify larger problems of politics and values. For Reisman, that most domestic arena – food, cooking, and the kitchen – is the location for power struggles and “food becomes an important symbol of gender and class tensions and an indicator of civility and survival” (“Food Fight” 4). For Imelda Whelehan, discussing Big Women (1997), Saffron’s loss of her mother and her revenge on her mother’s friends tell us about generations of feminism, Second Wave and after, and about tussles between political commitment and economic survival or advantage. Whelehan points out the ambiguities in Weldon’s work between changing the self and changing the world. Alongside Weldon’s material and social worlds, and her representation of physical bodies – fat, thin, pregnant, surgically transformed, ageing – lies another level of understanding. She mentions in her memoir, Auto da Fay (2002), the family interest in the occult. In her fiction, the present is disturbed by the ancient magic of Glastonbury Tor (Puffball [1980]), or the spirits of Maori culture (Kehua! [2010]), or he-devils as often as she-devils (Growing Rich [1992]). Characters can have psychic, seer-like qualities, and sometimes they inhabit the border between life and death. Elisabeth Bronfen indicates how, by disappearing, Ruth in The Life and Loves of a She-Devil can be certified as neither dead nor alive, while Madeleine in Remember Me refuses to stay quietly dead and becomes the revenant who haunts the text, having more power in death than life. The very title is saying, on the one hand, “don’t forget me now I’m gone,” and, on the other, “here I am again.” Bronfen explores the rhetorical strategies at work in these moves between the social death that is so often the misfortune of Weldon’s protagonists, literal death, and rebirth. As many writers do, Weldon also makes the connection, in The Stepmother’s Diary but particularly in Kehua!, between haunting and writing. The writer is possessed by stories, sounds, and voices; she is driven to write. Literary criticism has read Weldon’s rebellious characters chiefly in the context of feminism and deconstructive critiques. Mikhail Bakhtin’s work on the dialogic Contemporary Women’s Writing 11:2 July 2017 261 Mary Eagleton • Wicked Women, Wicked Fictions, Wicked Laughter: An Interview with Fay Weldon and the carnivalesque – a carnival actually occurs in The Heart of the Country – and Freud’s work on jokes are particularly prominent. Ann Marie Hebert looks to Bakhtin but also draws on theories of the performative to explore the feminine script of women’s subordination to love and romance. Alongside Bakhtin and Freud, Susan Sellers includes the essays of Hélène Cixous in noting the importance of the comic mode as a disruptive force, a way of both undermining internal prohibitions and mocking the voice of authority. Like Dowling and Hebert, Sellers sees Weldon’s women as caught in old stories, their energies confined, but enabled by the power of the comic to break out. Hidden stories can then be explored, and the old stories told in new ways. Weldon’s involvement throughout Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/cww/article/11/2/259/4080713 by guest on 23 September 2021 her career with myth and fairy tale is evidence of this. In addition, she transforms canonical texts and has written play adaptations of Madame Bovary, Jane Eyre, Tess of the d’Urbervilles, and A Doll’s House, while her short story “Lily Bart’s Hat Shop” (1992) is crowded with nineteenth-century literary characters.

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