Oh, Jo, where did you go?
Jane Gardam
BIG WOMEN by Fay Weldon Flamingo, £12.99, pp. 345 This novel is such quintessential Weldon that you feel that you must have read it before. Let it be said that you have not read it before, though it must have been her intention to write it for a very long time.
It is the history of English (well, London) feminism since the Seventies seen through the lives of four 'big women', big not as in large but as the opposite of little, as in Little Women of yesteryear. For the home- centred, male-dominated 19th-century Meg, Jo, Beth and Amy in small-town America read Layla, Stephanie (known always as 'fucking stuffy Stephi') Nancy, Alice, a 'sisterhood' in North London who in the last decades have 'turned the world upside down and inside out'. They are a `vivid group of wild-livers and free- thinkers, lusters after life, sex and experi- ence', which in fact is not altogether untrue of the March girls. They were not wild liv- ers and lust was a sin, but inside the picture frame of American provincial life they were as serious and passionate as anybody. Jo strode forth as a journalist, Beth came to terms with death, Meg learned to be married after a rocky start and I can't remember what Amy did except snap up the boy next door who should have been Jo's if Jo hadn't scandalised everyone by going off with an ugly old father-figure she needed more and who was probably more interesting in bed. But all of them centred their life upon the understanding and per- fecting of the self, the interpretation of the sexual and social patterns of family and marriage.
The difference in Big Women is that find- ing they are 'unable to change themselves' (why?) they have to 'set about changing the world and society for good or bad'. They are 'larger than life' but have put them- selves in the hands of unknown gods. They have new knowledge, and indeed all progress leads only to pain. Had there been no Christ there would have been no Inqui- sition. Eden is over. 'So it goes', she says.
These big women started a feminist press in the Seventies which is to become world- wide and give women great power. The night the press was conceived — it is called Medusa — the women danced naked in the curtainless living-room of a house in Chal- cot Crescent. As a result of this initiation ceremony husbands and children are swapped, dropped, picked up again. The women walk out, walk back, toy with les- bianism, exult, suffer but first of all manage their publishing house. In time they come to have secrets from each other, even anti- feminist secrets, for after years it turns out that Medusa was really owned by a man, and a Middle Eastern man at that. Layla visits him in 'old blue taffeta'. 'How beauti- ful you look,' etc.
Even worse things happen to the others. Of the two who attempt fidelity with their awful men one dies, not like Beth, philo- sophically certain, heaven assured, but from suicide caused by lack of love and the sisterhood's treachery. Another woman, who favours Aertex shirts, saves the com- pany, holds it in her power for a time but never matures from the rather boring schoolgirl they brought in as a dogsbody. Another takes to the tarot cards and the road to Glastonbury Tor.
Are they in the hands of the Furies or not? Cruel, ruthless, sometimes dishonest, feared, disliked and enormously admired by lesser women, do they cause or are they caused by the facts of history: Greenham Common, the plague of Aids, the enfeeble- ment of the whole male sex as the years roll by? Who's in charge here?
Through the two decades children get born. First they are pushed in push-chairs by their mothers, later they are in buggies pushed by siblings or anybody, later still they are carried in hideously coloured cocoons on the backs of their under- employed fathers. The children grow up and reproduce. Two neglected owl-like boys on the stairs of Chalcot Crescent, sated with television and (later) pizzas, become fathers at home while wives work. Others are stolid, drum, pitiable. One will always believe he was the cause of his mother's suicide. The husbands of the Big Women become maudlin drunks or shame- less wimps. There is a macho New Zea- lander who stays the course but he's a bore. A sole, handsome, heterosexual man upsets the girls because they can't take their eyes off him and he fades from the scene.
It is a girl, Saffron, who runs through the book like a gold thread reminding the women that they are mothers and should not forget it. Twenty years after the naked dancing of the future editors of Medusa (one does wonder what on earth Virago is going to think of all this!) Saffron has grown more ferocious than any of them as she sets out to avenge her mother's death. She remembers how, when the women flung off their garments that night, she sat scrabbling on the floor trying to put hers on again. Well, 'so it goes'.
Weldon's refrain chills the heart. The world is changed. Happiness is impossible. Everything is over. Mars in the future is the only hope. Only there can Layla, Stephanie, Kate and Alice become fulfilled.
There are those of course who wish that Layla, Stephanie, Kate and Alice were on Mars already; but they are not. They are blasting about down here 'for good or bad'. They have happened. They have changed women's lives supposedly for ever even though we may hate and fear them. Wel- don as usual does not hate or fear her extraordinary characters but loves them all. If she didn't this would be a ridiculous book, and it is certainly not that.
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