Abstract:
Fay Weldon is a popular, prolific author whose oeuvre stretches from 1967 to the present
and includes 20 novels, three collections of short stories and numerous stage, radio and
television plays, scripts and adaptations. This thesis limits itself to her fiction and follows
the chronological course of Weldon's writing career in five chapters.
Fay Weldon's fiction, situated at the intersection of postmodemism and feminism, is
doubly subversive. It both overturns 'reasonable' narrative conventions and wittily
deconstructs the specious terminology used to define women. Weldon's disobedient female
protagonists - madwomen, criminals, outcasts and she-devils - assert the power of the Other.
Gynocentric themes - single parenthood, sisterhood, reproduction, motherhood, sex and
marriage - are transformed by Weldon into uproarious feminist revenge comedy. This she
achieves through an intertextuality which often involves unorthodox typography, genreswopping
and metafictional devices. Moreover, a unique ventriloquism enables her
omniscient first-person narrators to mimic 'Fay Weldon' herself.
Since her narrators are rebels and iconoclasts, Weldon has always been viewed as a
subversive individual worthy of media attention, especially interviews. For this reason, and
because she is a woman writer who struggled initially against social and domestic odds, the
thesis incorporates in its argument the author's biography and public personae.
Chapter One explores the connections between Weldon's first novels - notably Down
Among the Women (1971) - and early liberationist and anthropological feminism. In Chapter
Two, Bakhtin's dialogic imagination and Derrida's differance provide the basis for a
discussion of multiplicity in Weldon's novels of the late 1970s, particularly Praxis (1979),
shortlisted for the Booker prize. Chapter Three tests the limits of a psychoanalytical model
in accounting for Weldon's novels of (m)Otherhood, including The Life and Loves of a SheDevil
(1983).
Theories of humour and carnival inform Chapter Four's analysis of how Weldon's wit
- at its tendentious best in The Heart of the Country (1987) - declines into innocence.
Finally, Chapter Five sees Weldon's flagging literary reputation as the symptom of authorial
exhaustion and retreat from a feminist agenda. This concluding chapter is, however,
ultimately optimistic that the mercurial author's undeniable talents may reassert themselves
