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

story to tell. It's a fairy tale. I love fairy tales, don't you?" When Elsa responds that she does, Gemma says, "I thought you would" (p. 20). The tale Gemma then tells concerns the betrothal of Mr. Fox to Lady Mary, who, on the eve of their wedding, discovers Mr. Fox eating human flesh and carries home as evidence a finger with a ring on it. Her brothers kill Mr. Fox to save her from a horrible fate.
The tale is one that Gemma heard on the train on her way to London as a young girl, and she believes that the hearing of it predestined her to fall in love with a Mr. Fox. "Fairy tales," she tells Elsa, "are lived out daily" (p. 21), and the story of her own life that she tells Elsa intermittently during the rest of the novel is as fabricated as the tale of Lady Mary and Mr. Fox that she had heard on the radiofabricated to explain her missing finger and inability to walk as well as the loss of her prince, Mr. Fox. Only at the end does Hamish tell the truth that frees both Gemma and Elsa: Mr. Fox, his business partner, was a homosexual; rather than being severed by Mr. Fox, Gemma's finger was caught in an elevator door and subsequently amputated; and the paralysis of Gemma's legs is emotional, induced by her realization that she has been betrayed by the prince and has married the frog. Stripped of her fairy tale, Gemma is able to walk, and exhorts Elsa to run away from fairy tales: "Run, Elsa! Run for all you're worth. Don't fall. Please don't fall, the way I did.... You must run for me and all of us" (p. 233).
Victor's wife, Janice, is in thrall to the more prosaic cultural mythology

 

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of the ideal wife, as defined by Victor. She is to be Snow White, the eternal virgin, "someone as pure and helpful as his own mother" (p. 154). But the mask of wifely respectability she assumes according to his wishes hardens as it obscures her individuality. Finally, she has become a type rather than a person, as Weldon's narrator sarcastically notes:
What we have here, ladies and gentlemen, is no woman, but a housewife. And what a housewife! Note her rigid, mousy curls, kept stiff by spray; her quick eyes, which search for dust and burning toast, and not the appraisal or enquiry of the opposite sex; the sharp voice, growing sharper, louder, year by year: at home in a bus queue or ordering groceries or rebuking the garbage, but hardly in the bed. Does that suit you, Victor?
No. [Pp. 15455]
Bored by his own creation, Victor turns to Elsa, but he returns to Janice once she is rejuvenated by an affair with a Polish carpenter and her own daughter's involvement with an American student. The carpenter's wife laments the separation of women required by male fantasies"I only wish women would stick together a bit" (p. 160)and Gemma echoes the same sentiment when she says, "If only ... we women could learn from one another" (p. 183).
Gemma's statement is both plaintive and ironic, reminding us that women in Weldon's fiction do learn from each othersometimes the wrong things, such as Gwyneth's old wives' tales and Mary Fisher's romances, and sometimes the right things, the "words of advice" that cut through the bonds of myths and fairy tales. Weldon's critique of the power of the tale is by no means completely negative. To believe you are a princess when you are actually a beggar-girl may be dangerous, to be sure, and some frogs, when kissed, remain frogs. But Weldon's use of fairy-tale plots and motifs is also a way of honoring that tradition, of honoring women as tellers of tales, and ultimately a way of recognizing the human desire for magic and transformation that created those tales in the first place.
Works Cited
Atwood, Margaret. "Bluebeard's Egg." Bluebeard's Egg and Other Stories . Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1986.
Bernikow, Louise. Among Women . New York: Harmony Books, 1980.
Carter, Angela. The Bloody Chamber . 1979. New York: Penguin, 1993.
Carter, Angela, ed. The Virago Book of Fairy Tales . London: Virago Press, 1990.
McCorkle, Jill.