Fay Weldon's The Life And Love Of A She-Devil

A Happy Ending?

Fairytales. Fairy tales, having been around for centuries, are sending all kinds of important moral messages from being a child to facing the ?beautiful? world of adulthood. Fairy tales surround us; almost as if they are haunting us and are presented in many books that we would never think could be an option. But what classifies a fairy tale or makes a fairytale? Fay Weldon?s classic feminist tale The Life and Love of A She-Devil is a strong candidate of an icily adult fairytale. This is a tale of how one woman, a mother and a normal housewife, is abandoned by her pig of a husband and replaced. The revengeful based novel shows many attributes on how it classifies as a post-modern fairy tale. The scornful woman, Ruth

?The Little Mermaid?, is also played through the role of Mary Fisher. We see a drastic transformation of a woman who was surrounded by riches, in her ?tower?, and was loved by the man she would talk about in her novels of ?little staunch heroines raise tearful eyes to handsome men, and by giving them up, gain little? (Weldon 25). Mary ultimately goes through a transformation of wishing her life were different and ?Weldon lays bare the romance heroine, exposing the lies and manipulation that are integral part of it (Dubino 110). With Ruth?s assertiveness with Father Ferguson, he tells Mary ? she has damaged the lives of a million readers: she has given them false expectations. She is personally responsible for much of the misery of the female multitude? (Weldon 228). Given the harsh criticism that makes fun of the romance tales, Mary ?doesn?t want to live anywhere, in fact. Quite frankly, she wants to be dead. She wants to be at one with the stars and the foaming sea, she fishes the flame of her life to burn out and be over, forever?(Weldon 243). From getting the kids thrown at her house, to Bobbo having an affair, nothing is going right for Mary and this is not something she is use to. This attribute is an adult fairytale element, for it defines how Ruth uses her way through people affecting others, and Mary struggles to transform herself- and she ends up dying.

Although Ruth did end up getting what she wanted, was it a true happy ending? In her eyes and for her it was. She now lives in the beautiful High Tower and is a clone of the woman she scorned for many years. But with all that beauty and being surrounded by power and money, it was Fay Weldon?s The Life and Love of a She-Devil, not only created a very dark humor novel that makes the protagonist cringe-worthy and desperate, she cleverly illustrated a fairy tale base for the eyes of adults. The novel is a skillfully moral fable written to telling a story about a women?s impression of society roles. Readers get a taste of the fairy tales we all know and love, from transformations of appearance and self-worth to the suffering that Ruth had to endure as well as her enemy,

Works Cited

Dubino, Jeanne. "The Cinderella Complex: Romance Fiction, Patriarchy and Capitalism." Journal of Popular Culture 27.3 (1993): 103-18. Nassau Community College Database. Web. 2 Dec. 2015.

Reisman, Mara. "The Shifting Moral Ground in Fay Weldon's Fiction." Women's Studies 40.5 (2011): 645-71. Nassau Community College Database. Web. 20 Nov.