For a few terrifying years in the 1980s Fay Weldon was in charge of our moral education. If you were alive in Britain her revenge drama The Life and Loves of a She-Devil was a must-watch, must-comment scandal, the TV adaptation airing on BBC2 in 1986 as millions of families on the brink of newly popular divorce gathered around, dinners on laps. Soon-to-be-single dads felt sickened at the ruthless sadism of Ruth towards her ex-husband, and clutched their napkins to their crotches a little more protectively. Unhappy middle-aged women grabbed their dinner knives with renewed strength.
Meanwhile, impressionable young girls — me, in fact — trying to understand loving adult relationships sat and took mental notes as Ruth, the tall, fat, middle-aged, ugly, warty and dutiful wife, transformed herself from a loving mum who did a lot of ironing into a glamorous revenge-mad monster. New, devilish Ruth had plenty of meaningless sex, money, beachside properties and cosmetic surgery, and with cunning genius exacted one of the cruellest punishments in fiction as she systematically destroyed the man she once loved. “Yay! Go Ruth!” I would cheer, as if this was some kind of strange sex panto, Ruth transformed from boring old Cinderella to the Snow Queen with the thrillingly evil line: “I am a snake shedding its skin.”
Did I want to be a She-Devil when I grew up? They seemed to have more fun. Wait, were we even meant to cheer? I looked to my father, who seemed nervous, and to my mother, who was dutiful and, yes, did do a lot of ironing, and found no answer. We switched over to watch shots of Greenham Common on the news. I’ll never forget She-Devil, mostly because I don’t understand it even now.
The 1980s were marked by a series of zeitgeist films and TV that expressed an almost comic fear of the new wave of women entering the male workplace. These women were, according to Fatal Attraction (1987), going to lure men to sex with their office high heels and then kill them, like some kind of black widow spider disguised in shoulder pads. Middle-aged women who had divorced their husbands, or women who had never married at all, were a menace and a threat: just as destabilising as the outcast witches of old (in fact, The Witches of Eastwick, a film adaptation of a John Updike novel, described just that).
Weldon was ahead of her time as ever: when she wrote She-Devil she had separated from both the father of her first child and her first husband. While Fatal Attraction and The Witches of Eastwick still depend on the audience being seduced by Michael Douglas or Jack Nicholson respectively, She-Devil is a book entirely about one woman, Ruth, and her envy of another woman, the fey romance novelist Mary, who is her husband’s mistress.
Advertisement
When women were only ever one-dimensional and simpering bit parts, in She-Devil the bit part bit back. Weldon would later write that she was no “Queen of Revenge”, as she was dubbed; the book was instead an exploration of envy. The Biblically named Ruth and Mary were two sides of her own personality, the worthy and the vain. Still, her background in the advertising industry was not for nothing. Like any canny advertiser she took female rage — not just that erupting in the feminist 1980s, but also that kept under pressure for centuries further back — bottled this white-hot lava, and sold it back to us. It burnt all the way down.
Ruth has unfeminine anger running through her veins like a Marvel superhero. It gives her power: “Hate obsesses and transforms me, it is my singular attribution.” She-Devil is an Elizabethan revenge tragedy transposed to a very modern and female future, as Ruth, in her efforts to eradicate her husband, also eradicates herself. She undergoes mutilating and brutal cosmetic surgery, including cutting off half her legs to get Mary’s petite, winsome look. Nearly three decades before Instagram was invented, an era before lunch-hour tweakments, Weldon prefigured it all. Ruth becomes desirable but also tiny and weak.
And, looking back, I can hardly imagine this being televised now. Too bitter, too strange. Anger is no longer fashionable in a lady. It’s not a good look. If middle-aged women don’t want to be ignored, they’d better do a “she-devil” and get hot, although it’s not called “she-devil” any more, it’s called “spending your unequal salary on cosmetic surgery”. I don’t think I’d cheer for Ruth; I see now Weldon was exacting an equal-opportunities revenge on all her characters. Ruth gets what she wants, which is to be exactly what her man wanted, and nothing like herself.
