Fay Weldon's Wicked Fictions Read Online Free PDF Page A

achievement" is that she has not married or borne children, which reverses the fairy-tale trajectory toward marriage to the prince.
Like many a fairy-tale heroine, Gabriella is orphaned and left to find her own way in life. Her mother, a "poor, pretty, inconsequential thing" (p. 36), is killed by a wasp sting, and her father, a largely unsuccessful gambler, dies when their house burns down. Gabriella is rescuedand immediately beddedby a doctor's assistant, but, in another of Weldon's inversions of fairy-tale plots, this experience neither ruins her nor serves as a cautionary tale for the reader, but instead launches her happily on a life of erotic pleasure. As Gabriella puts it, "One of the great rewards of

 

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my life has been the discovery that there is always a better lover than the last" (p. 55).
This portion of The Rules of Life engages and subverts some of the earliest versions of "Little Red Riding Hood." In the late-seventeenth-century version as recorded by Charles Perrault, the story of the little girl encountering the wolf in the forest had distinct overtones of sexual initiation and was meant as a warning to trusting, gullible young girls. The color of the girl's red cape has thus been linked by some to the blood of forced sexual encounter. Weldon reverses the moral purpose of the tale and prepares for Gabriella's delight in her first sexual experience with an episode she recalls from her childhood. At a children's mass that she attends, the priest tells a parable about a party at a castle to which only those children were admitted who were dressed in spotless white. A little girl who stains her dress by eating blackberries (like Eve and the forbidden fruit) is excluded from the "endless bliss" of the castle, and the priest warns his young listeners not to "be like the little girl who in her wilfulness stained her purity" (p. 24). At the age of five, Gabriella has already made up her mind on the issue of purity, especially because she senses that the priest, "with his little piggy eyes and his soft mouth," would like to get his ''fat white hand" under her dress, and she deliberately spills ink on her white dress. If "purity" leads to the likes of the priest, "I wanted to be stained" (p. 24).
In an even more sweeping way than Female Friends or The Life and Loves of a She-Devil, The Rules of Life turns on the concept of fiction itself, of which fairy tales are a part. In the futuristic world of this short novel, technology and skepticism hold sway, and the dominant ideology is the "Great New Fictional Religion." The fact that the deity of this religion, the "Great Screenwriter in the Sky," is known to have had "many a bad idea in his time" (p. 13) prevents its adherents from taking much of anything at face value; the priest of this religion who serves as the primary narrator of the novel can foresee the advent of the Revised Great New Fictional Religion, which would hold the Great Screenwriter to higher standards than his current B-grade movie tendencies.
The most un virtuous Gabriella Sumpter has in fact practiced the only virtue possible for one with such a second-rate deity: she has, according to the narrator, followed the script the Screenwriter has written for her. "Virtue," he comments, "lies in consenting to the parts allotted to us, and ... just as some can't help being victims others can't help being oppressors, and ... the best we can do is to help the Great Plot of life go forward, with all its myriad, myriad subplots" (p. 21). Life itself is thus a scripted fiction within which, as Gemma says in Words of Advice, "we all have to place ourselves as best we can." Gabriella has played the role of mistress

 

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to a succession of men; beginning as a potential beggar-girl, she has risen to the role of princess, though never marrying the prince in question.
At the same time, however, Weldon provides ample evidence that Gabriella's story is a tale no more true than any fairy tale. Gabriella