Wanda is actually quite an unpredicted nature. She's a divorced educator whose self-governing thinking brings a school superintendent to “examine and testimony” (Lauret, 1994) certain things to the Education Authority. Wanda's mottled daughter, Scarlet, finds herself as an unwed mother with tremendously narrow choices, and as a “consequence of dire deficiency” (Westling, 1996) she marries most unsuitably. Sylvia lives with a bully of a conjugal man while in the making years for his split-up to confirm. Jocelyn marries well and becomes an uninterested, dreary housewife and can converse of not anything but hairdressers and hats. Audrey gives up a dazzling occupation in publishing, and moves to the state with her husband to live next to nature. In a ramshackle house with no electricity, Audrey breeds numerous times, juggles a vegetable garden and a hen house, while making cottage cheese in stockings. Helen a refugee floats along until she becomes embroiled in a disastrous affair with an artist.
This is not one of those sensitive feel good quality books about women's friendships. One of Weldon's much loved themes is that women are their own most awful enemies women revolve on each other, deceive each other, and are competent of the most savage performance towards their own sex. Women are not to be anxious about men being the adversary as that's beside the point. Women according to Weldon are ambitious to psychosis by their lemming like requirements to gratify the men in their lives, and for this, women eventually only have themselves to culpability. Weldon's view of the womanly mind is ferocious, undeviating, and quite remorseless. Weldon is principally regarded as a feminist writer, and I think that is a rather reductive explanation. She is beyond feminism, and her novels struggle to observe women's accountability not merely for their individual lives but also for their intact sex. Weldon's novels are about women for women and the significance is in the end, men are irrelevant. Women are happy or unhappy, fulfilled or unfulfilled, and it has nothing to do with men. And once the characters in Down Among the Women stop feeding notions of feminine ideals, and get on with pleasing themselves, they are a lot enhanced for it.
Men are irrelevant. Women are happy or unhappy, fulfilled or unfulfilled and it has nothing to do with men. So says Fay Weldon in her outstanding, droll and piercingly alleged novel. Her ladies are undeniably decrepit by life but the majority of them is harsh and hardwearing and manages to continue to exist the disappointments, the love relationships, and the broken marriages. While Praxis tells the story of a lady from untimely days to adulthood. The book begins in period of war Brighton and follows Praxis in her a variety of personalities whore, adulteress and finally murderer. Praxis is Fay Weldon's best, most determined, most delightful novel. And Praxis Duveen is truly a modern heroine, buffeted and battered by life, by women and men, by her - wry, funny, pretty, innocent, knowing - yet surviving. Her story begins in the 1920's in the seaside town of Brighton. When we leave her in the 1970's, in London, she has become - despite herself? – “A world-famous women's leader”. (Benstock, 1987) Praxis, Ms. Weldon tells us, is a Victorian woman's name. It also means turning point and orgasm. An astonishingly vivid and wickedly funny portrait of a woman and her times, Praxis is a story told from two viewpoints - Praxis as a young girl and Praxis as an old woman. At age five, Praxis Duveen is "the pretty one," her sister, Hypatia, "the artistic one, and very sensitive;" their mother, Lucy, "clearly valued sensitivity above prettiness." While Lucy fights to protect her place in the heart of her children's father - not her husband - and in the eyes of a society not of her choosing, Hypatia collects awards in school and Praxis propels herself into life and love. Looking back as an old woman, Praxis cannot forgive her mother or cherish her memories: I, Praxis Duveen, being old and scarcely in my right mind, now bequeath you my memories. They may help you: they certainly do nothing to sustain me, let alone assist my bones to clamber out of the bath. Neither the young nor the old Praxis are especially likeable, and both are subject to wild errors in judgment. Fay Weldon pulls no punches in her pointed and witty observations of British “middle-class values” (Felski, 1989) and behavior as she creates a discomfortingly authentic picture of an ordinary woman in a social organize that does not assessment women.
Works Cited
- Bauer, Dale M. Feminist Dialogics: A Theory of Failed Community. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1988.
- Baym, Nina. American Women Writers and the Work of History, 1790-1860. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1995.
- Chambers-Schiller, Lee Virginia. Liberty, A Better Husband: Single Woman in America: The Generations of 1780-1840. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1984.
- Lauret, Maria. Liberating Literature: Feminist Fiction in America. New York: Routledge, 1994.
- Westling, Louise. The Green Breast of the New World: Landscape, Gender and American Fiction. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1996.
- Yellin, Jean Fagan.. Women and Sisters: The Antislavery Feminists in American Culture. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1989.
- Fetterley, Judith. The Resisting Reader: A Feminist Approach to American Fiction. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1978.
- Douglas, Ann. The Feminization of American Culture. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1977.
- Benstock, Shari, ed. Feminist Issues in Literary Scholarship. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987.
- Felski, Rita. Beyond Feminist Aesthetics: Feminist Literature and Social Change. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989.