Ever contrary, if everyone is talking about Sally Rooney, I’m going to talk about Fay Weldon who left us only last year.
When you think of unsentimental authors who happen to be women, the names which come to mind might include European philosophers (Arendt, de Beauvoir, Weil) and US journalists and essayists (Didion, Sontag). But what of these fair isles? Do we have our own tradition of tough-mindedness? And who are our novelists of toughness?
I’ve set about exploring toughness-as-style in British and Irish women novelists circa midcentury to the present. When I crowdsourced recommendations, Weldon’s name cropped up. Then, during a clear-out of books which didn’t make it onto our shelves last time we moved, I came across this slim volume. A friend had given it to me at my engagement party. In the inside cover she scribbled: “So you don’t get any ideas about obedience!”
For a resilient woman who wrote a novel populated by tough characters living in anarchic times, Down Among the Women (1961) is studded with moments of tenderness: between mother & daughter, between female friends, between ex-wives and ex-husbands. However grim the characters’ misadventures—and some are fatally grim—there is an undercurrent of vitality and acceptance of life-in-the-round, a buoyantly humorous tone, which cuts through.
Novels depicting the underbelly of women’s lives tend not to make easy reading. There was much that remained invisible, submerged and disavowed when it was first published and, although many things have changed, others have not. The author set out to skewer every sacred orthodoxy of 1950s Britain around marriage and children, yet she skewers emergent countercultural orthodoxies with equal aplomb. The text hums with the energy of resolving dialectics through character development.
Down among the women. What a place to be! Yet here we are by accident of birth, sprouted bellies and breasts, as cyclical of nature as our timekeeper the moon – and down here among the women we have no option but to stay. So says Scarlett’s mother Wanda, aged sixty-four, gritting her teeth.
Wanda and Scarlett form the mother-daughter dyad with whose trajectory the narrator is most deeply engaged. Scarlett’s struggles and misfortunes closely resemble those the author relates in her autobiography. She attempts to forge a path between Scylla—her mother, Wanda, whose self-sufficiency borders on misanthropy—and Charybdis—her step-mother, Susan, whose dependency makes her a drain. The various friends are avatars representing the conventional ways for women to get stuck in a half-lived life. The narrator wants Scarlett to prevail against the odds, as she matures from naive ingenue to a more assured stage of womanhood, and the culture shifts around her.
The narrator says, of her friends, that they “live quiet and happy married lives, or would claim to do so. I watched them curl up and gently, without drama, like cabbages in early March which have managed to survive the rigours of winter only to succumb to the passage of time. We are perfectly happy, they say. Then why do they look so sad?”
And yet, the characters who escape from marriage seem to fare no better, for example proto-liberationist Wanda, who left her husband “in search of a nobler truth than comfort.” The narrator views mould-breakers such as Wanda as helping, through “wicked words” to “bring about a new world.” Young Scarlett defends “sanctimonious motherhood” against these iconoclastic broadsides, considering it to be suffused with “love, life, mystery, meaning, sanctity.” Crude humour, stories and songs are Wanda’s weapons. This literary mother and daughter surely informed Jennifer Saunders’ Edina and Saffron in Absolutely Fabulous!
“What kind of mother are you anyway?” she asks. “Bad,” replies Wanda, with satisfaction, and Scarlett moans in outrage.
Wanda, who supports her daughter & granddaughter with her teaching job, is the epitome of toughness, embodying an archetype of unfeelingness. She is a human battering ram, clearing space so her daughter and granddaughter have room to breathe. When she burns her hand, she is “stoical to the point of mania, does not scream or even complain, but holds her poor red hand under the tap.” When she sings her granddaughter a lullaby, the tear in her eye frightens Scarlett, as a sign of forbidden vulnerability.
To be down among the women is to be intimate with the harsh facts of life, and not to look away. Susan, child-woman, new wife of Wanda’s ex-husband and step-mother of Scarlett, recoils from “that other terrible world, where chaos is the norm…where the woman goes helpless.” One such harsh fact, in the world of the book, is the myth of female solidarity. When Scarlett falls pregnant and is abandoned, her friends’ generous impulse is to pass around the hat so she has funds, but their various romantic entanglements get in the way. The friends live in the shadow of their men. Their response to precarity is a kind of detachment; giving up.
“Down here among the women, we do a lot of sleepwalking.”
One response to vulnerability which the text explores is complete adaptation to the submissive role, as a means of survival rather than clout on social media (side-eye at soi disant “tradwives”). One tragic plot line concerns married painters living out bohemian ideals. The cryptically named X and Y introduce a young refugee as the third wheel in their ménage. Helen, who has no family, is represented as somehow fated to abandon herself completely. Unlike Scarlett, who makes her own unsavoury compromises then achieves the ideal of professional independence, Helen fails to raise her daughter to maturity.
Wanda, the revolutionary, expected everything to change finally, and for the better, so she feels defeated to see her daughter fail to rise above the conditions of her life, thus compensating the sacrifices her mother understands herself as having made.
“Wanda had the same concerns years and years ago. They bore her now. She looks at her spotty and apathetic daughter, and laments the waste of her own youth, spent nurturing a child who has grown up no better than she.”
Nonetheless, protecting and nurturing Scarlett and Byzantia is the redeeming dimension of Wanda’s life.
“‘The thing about having babies,' she says sourly, ‘is that you can't. All you ever have is just more people.' And from the sound of it she doesn't much like people. All the same, when Scarlet isn't looking, Wanda croons to Byzantia, and weaves magic to make her smile, and be content, and good. She is better with Byzantia than Scarlet is; but then of course Byzantia expects more of Scarlet, seeing her mother as an extra limb which will do her bidding, and becoming frustrated and furious when it fails to live up to her expectations.”
The toughness of Weldon’s style, and her unflinching confrontation with material conditions, is a protective shell, an existential charm to invoke protection. It enables her to meet the novelists’ duty to recognise dimensions of reality that cannot be changed: the vulnerability of mother and child, and the profound interdependency between them.
Bracing, like being sprayed with a fire hose is bracing, Down Among the Women makes you give thanks for modern medicine and laws, and for the efforts of the mould-breaking generations, even as it reminds us of the limits on personal freedom, and the imperfectability of the world. Best of all, from a personal perspective, it made me want to write, and fearlessly.
Pick up a copy from wherever you get your secondhand books. It seems to be out of print but there is, helpfully, a Kindle edition.
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