letter gesture, Weldon both forces the reader to "just" reconsider feminist strategies and unfixes existing notions of what radical feminism should and can be. Is her kind of feminism, she forces us to ask, really enough?
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This "well" also forces a reconsideration of the "feminine" gender and, in particular, its relation to morality. Weldon questions the "femininity" of both the narrator and Chloe at this moment. Indeed, the narrator herself displays none of the "feminine' acquiescence (understanding and forgiving) required by the gender police. The "well.'' "understands" Chloe's motives all too well and offers no redemption for them. This lapsed narrator also reveals Chloe's "good girl" image as a shamshe is not acquiescent either, it appears, only cupboard loving. Weldon is, here and elsewhere, much more interested in "immorality" than "morality," in the "disadvantages of being good" rather than the advantages; she says that she "refuses to preach a false morality which states that it is advantageous for a woman to be good, or grow old gracefully, or any of this absolute nonsense we have been fed for so long" (Bovey). In a transitory "well," the "absolute nonsense" of gendered morality is revolted against.
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A little language goes a long way in Weldon. She tells us this directly in
Female Friends,
when she remarks that once the word "cancer" is said, "the disease, dormant until the moment of recognition, proliferates and spreads" (p. 19). At the end of the novel, Chloe's last word shows just how much a "disease" has spread through the system of gender classificationthe "wife" falls ill, becomes invalidated. Chloe, faced with her husband Oliver's petulant, "But you can't leave me with Françoise" (his mistress), replies, "I can, I can, and I do" (p. 237). Space. The novel ends.
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The ordinary marriage vow becomes extraordinarily ironic here. "I do" now undoes the marriage; a dis-a-vow frees the "good wife." The space after is filled with the sounds of Chloe's leaving and with, it is said, real women taking leave of their husbands. "Words" really may, as Weldon suggests elsewhere, "turn probabilities into facts" (
The Fat Woman's Joke,
p. 32). Again, the nature of the "fact" is left up to the readerWeldon gives us no twelve-step program, only an "I do." We are left to our own devices. So just as Chloe's morning seems "ordinary enough," but is, in fact, the morning of "the day Chloe's life is to change" (p. 6), "Well" and "I do" seem like "ordinary enough" words, but perhaps are words that may change the world, or at least the perception of feminism and gender. Feminist-punkboth of revolt, and into revolt.
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