jamiehooper

Contains one of PB's All Time Greats : "Weekend" by Fay Weldon (1978) The development of one's own consciousness is often incremental, but sometimes, on occasion, you get to experience epiphanies, when something that's been hanging around just over your left shoulder mumbling and buzzing faintly suddenly wheels right round and stares at you right in the face and you see things for what they are. And it's a shock. On even fewer occasions these epiphanies come from books. This story was one such for me. It's a kind of horror story with universal application for men and women. It's the single most pungent, most hair-raising encapsulation of What Feminists Are On About I've ever come across. It blew my mind open like Fay Weldon had broke into my skull and planted gelignite. One of the scariest things about it is that there's no violence, no swearing, no overt male brutality at all. It's just an account of middle-class English family life, no big dramas. Nobody dies, no one gets married, no one gets born. So what makes it so explosive? Because it shows the reader, sentence by sentence, the interior violence, the interior horror of the shit that gets piled onto women all the time every day by the situations they get maneouvered into by the expectations of men and the roles they've been educated to accept. The story's situation is so simple : our couple are fairly well-off but not especially rich. They're just wealthy enough to have bought themselves a second home which is, naturally, in the country. So every weekend (hence the title) they pile the kids and a whole lot of food and drink into the Range Rover and swan off down to Swan-Throttling-On-Thames. What could be nicer? What more pleasant? & while they're at it they invite Harry and Susan down for Sunday lunch...he's the life and soul and she's such a pretty little thing. And then - for the wife - the interior horror begins. All she has to do is to reconstruct the country house into the house they live in during the week, clean it, make all the meals, having remembered to bring all the right food, because the nearest supermarket is an hour away, then entertain the kids because daddy's on the phone to his office buddies all the time, then plan the giant haute cuisine meal with the friends for Sunday, then smile excitedly when husband says he's invited yet another random pal for Saturday dinner, so that's something else, and since this pal is important in the company can she make a bit of an effort, and then since it's the weekend he's thinking they really ought to have some sex because they hadn't had time all week.... and on and on and on it goes for about 40 pages, then the weekend's over and they pile everything into the Range Rover and head back to London, with the entrancing prospect of repeating the whole thing the following weekend but next weekend would she mind if he asked her to look a bit more cheerful because after all, what did they buy this cottage in the country for if it just causes long faces and irritableness? Anyway, I hope I've given a hint of the horror. This was really seeing things from a whole new perspective for me. I'd heard a lot of the rhetoric of course, I'd read Kate Millett and Germaine and even Andrea Dworkin, god help me, but that was theory, and this little story by Fay Weldon was a whole other thing. It changed me. In my mind it marked the end of my Stupid Hippy phase and the beginning of my Hard Line Politics phase.

2022-10-21 05:34