1. Although most critics have approached Weldon as a feminist writer, some have disputed this designation; see, for example, Alan Wilde, "Bold, But Not Too Bold: Fay Weldon and the Limits of Poststructuralist Criticism," Contemporary Literature 39 (1988). For discussion of the subversive technique and effect of Weldon's satire, see Ann Marie Herbert, "Rewriting the Feminine Script: Fay Weldon's Wicked Laughter," Critical Matrix 7, no. 1 (1993): 21-40.

2. Denise Riley, War in the Nursery: Theories of the Child and Mother (London: Virago, 1983), p. 96.

3. See Jessica Benjamin, "The First Bond," in The Bonds of Love: Psychoanalysis, Feminism, and the Problem of Domination (New York: Pantheon, 1988), pp. 11-50.

4. Juliet Mitchell, Psychoanalysis and Feminism (New York: Vintage Books, 1975), pp. 228-9.

5. Ann Dally, Inventing Motherhood: The Consequences of an Ideal (New York: Schocken Books, 1982), p. 90.

6. Mary O'Brien, The Politics of Reproduction (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981); see especially chapter I, "The Dialectics of Reproduction."

7. Fay Weldon, Female Friends (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1974), p. 116. Hereafter page references to Weldon's novels will appear in parentheses.

8. The phrase closes the first chapter and opens the last chapter. It also opens four of the first eight chapters of the novel (the first three of these chapters, 4, 6, and 7, focus respectively on brief comments about each friend in turn), and at less frequent, irregular intervals, it opens six subsequent chapters (24, 32, 36, 44, 52, 58). The refrain appears only once in the third person: "Marjorie, Grace, and Chloe" (the first words of chapter 24).

9. For the suggestion that Joanna May in The Cloning of Joanna May is also both first-person and third-person narrator, in a revision of the role of Eliot's Tiresias, see Betsy Ford, "Belladonna Speaks: Fay Weldoh's Wasteland," West Virginia University Philological Papers 38 (1992): 322-33.

10. In Drabble's recent trilogy, The Radiant Way, A Natural Curiosity, and The Gates of Ivory, friends Liz, Alix, and Esther take turns as the center of the narratives; the plots may focus on their individual experiences, but their friendship is of ongoing importance. Margaret Atwood's latest novel narrates the relations between three friends, Toni, Charis, and Roz, to a fourth character, Zenia, who has deceived and injured each of them. Rachel DuPlessis discusses a related phenomenon, what she calls the "group" protagonist or the "collective" or "communal" protagonist, in both the late novels of Virginia Woolf and in the more recent speculative fiction of Joanna Russ, Marge Piercy, and Doris Lessing, in Writing beyond the Ending: Narrative Strategies of TwentiethCentury Women Writers (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985), especially in chapter 11, pp. 178-97.

11. For a somewhat different reading that stresses the irony of the title, see Nancy Walker, Feminist Alternatives: Irony and Fantasy in Contemporary Novels of Women (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1990), esp. pp. 104-7.

12. In Weldon's Hearts and Lives of Men, it is difficult to know whether the story is about Helen or Nell, the mother or the daughter. The narrator alternately tells what happens to each of them during a fifteen-year period when Nell is lost and insists that the novel is about Nell. But readers know a lot more about Helen's feelings; Nell may be too lucky, indeed, to be penetrated by representation.

13. Fay Weldon, The Cloning of Joanna May (William Collins Sons, 1989; reprint, New York: Penguin Books, 1991, p.108. References are to the reprint edition.

14. The phrase is Donna Haraway's in "Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective," Feminist Studies 14 (1988): 575-99, an essay that speaks directly to many of the concerns raised in The Cloning of Joanna May .

15. Judith V. Jordan, "Empathy and Self Boundaries," in Women's Growth in Connection: Writings from the Stone Center, ed. Jordan et al. (New York: Guilford Press, 1991), p. 79.

16. Praxis's self-division is particularly interesting in light of the fact that she is also the author of the novel and hence a figure of the woman writer. In "Me and My Shadows," Weldon approaches the task of writing an autobiographical essay by splitting herself into two parts, the Interviewer and the Answerer, and further discusses the multiple personalities she experiences in daily life. "The writing of fiction," Weldon claims, "for me, is the splitting of the self into myriad parts" (162); Weldon, "Me and My Shadows," in On Gender and Writing, ed. Michelene Wandor (London: Pandora Press, 1983).

17. Fay Weldon, Praxis (Hodder and Stoughton, 1978; reprint, New York: Penguin Books, 1990). References are to the reprint edition.

18. Other minor characters in Weldon's fiction who go mad in part at least because they know too much (about others or about sides of themselves that they fear) include Miss Martin in Puffball and Marion in Words of Advice . Such women protect the "self" that has been abused and disbelieved by retreating like Lucy into madness.

19. Atlantic, August 1980, p. 84. A version of the following discussion of Puffball appeared in the Alumni Magazine of Haverford College, Spring 1994 (pp. 24-31).

20. Anita Brookner, "The Return of the Earth Mother," Times Literary Supplement, February 22, 1980, p. 202.

21. Pauline Palmer, Contemporary Women's Fiction: Narrative Practice and Feminist Theory (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1989), p. 102.

22. Susan Bordo, "Are Mothers Persons? Reproductive Rights and the Politics of Subjectivity," in Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), p. 94.

23. Gayatri Spivak, "French Feminism in an International Frame," Yale French Studies 62 (1981): 183.

24. Iris Marion Young, "Pregnant Embodiment: Subjectivity and Alienation," in Throwing Like a Girl and Other Essays in Feminist Philosophy and Social Theory (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), p. 160.

25. The novel also addresses a question posed by Barbara Johnson in "Apostrophe, Animation, and Abortion," the final chapter of A World of Difference (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), p. 190: "How might the plot of human subjectivity be reconceived (so to speak) if pregnancy rather than autonomy is what raises the question of deliberateness?"

26. The position is exemplified in statements such as: "Childbirth establishes the offspring's independent existence and simultaneously transforms the woman into a particular kind of social being, a mother"; Paula Treichler, "Feminism, Medicine, and the Meaning of Childbirth," in Body/Politics: Women and the Discourses of Science, ed. Mary Jacobus, Evelyn Fox Keller, and Sally Shuttleworth (New York: Routledge, 1990), p. 117. The fact that Liffey has a C-section adds another complication to the problem of including birthing labor in definitions of what makes a mother.

27. In Women Writing Childbirth: Modern Discourses of Motherhood (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1994), Tess Cosslett points out that the wording in these passages is very close to that of a popular manual, Gordon Breach's Pregnancy . Cosslett suggests that either Weldon used Breach or they had a common source (70).

28. Fay Weldon, Puffball (Hodder and Stoughton, 1980; reprint, New York: Penguin Books, 1990). References are to the reprint edition.

29. As Emily Martin puts it, "In this view [postmodern anthropology] scientific discourse is not more privileged in its relation to reality than any other form of description." Martin, "Science and Women's Bodies: Forms of Anthropological Knowledge," in Jacobus, Keller, and Shuttleworth, Body/Politics, p. 71.

30. This perspective corrects the bias that Young points to in "Pregnant Embodiment":

The dominant model of health assumes that the normal, healthy body is unchanging. Health is associated with stability, equilibrium, a steady state. Only a minority of persons, however, namely adult men who are not yet old, experience their health as a state in which there is no regular or noticeable change in body condition . . .. Regular, noticeable, sometimes extreme change in body condition, on the other hand, is an aspect of the normal bodily functioning of adult women. Change is also a central aspect of the bodily existence of healthy children and healthy old people, as well as some of the so-called disabled. Yet medical conceptualization implicitly uses this unchanging adult male body as the standard of all health. (169)

31. In Reproducing the Womb: Images of Childbirth in Science, Feminist Theory, and Literature (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994), which appeared after my discussion of Puffball was originally published, Alice Adams makes a similar point: "I think that the project of 'getting in touch with'—or 'writing through'—the body is more likely to confirm the inseparability of culture and biology than it is to help us rediscover an essential and constant woman's body" (7).

32. Hélène Cixous, "The Laugh of the Medusa," in New French Feminisms: An Anthology, ed. Elaine Marks and Isabelle de Courtivron (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1980), p. 261.

33. Tess Cosslett also stresses the "ambiguous" meaning, for a feminist critique, of the natural childbirth movement that Weldon so clearly articulates. See the introduction to Women Writing Childbirth, pp. 1-8.

34. See for example Janelle Sue Taylor, "The Public Foetus and the Family Car: From Abortion Politics to a Volvo Advertisement," in Science as Culture 3, part 4 (#17) (London: Free Association Books, 1993), pp. 601-18.

35. The literature critiquing visualization is too extensive to cite in full, but a few examples have particular relevance: Barbara Duden, "Visualizing Life," in Science as Culture, pp. 562-600, and The Woman beneath the Skin: A Doctor's Patients in Eighteenth-Century Germany (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991); Jane Gallop, Thinking through the Body (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989); Ann Kaplan, "Look Who's Talking, Indeed: Fetal Images in Recent North American Visual Culture," in Mothering: Ideology, Experience, and Agency, ed. Evelyn Nakano Glenn, Grace Chang, and Linda Rennie Forcey (New York: and London: Routledge, 1994), pp. 121-37; Bruno Latour, "Visualization and Cognition," Knowledge and Society 6 (1986): 1-40; Rosalind Petcheskey, "Fetal Images: The Power of Visual Culture in the Politics of Reproduction," Feminist Studies 13, no. 2 (1987): 263-92; Susan Squier, "Conceiving Difference: Reproductive Technology and the Construction of Identity in Two Contemporary Fictions," in A Question of Identity: Women, Science, and Literature, ed. Marina Benjamin (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1993), pp. 97-115; Barbara Maria Stafford, Body Criticism: Imagining the Unseen in Enlightenment Art and Medicine (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1991). For an interesting historical discussion of the link between eighteenth-century embryology and the fetal rights movement of the twentieth century, see Julia Epstein, Altered Conditions: Disease, Medicine, and Storytelling (New York: Routledge, 1995), pp. 123-56.

36. The absence of any first-person narrator in Puffball may also reinforce the sense that we are trying to understand and discuss here experiences and feelings that are not readily available to verbal consciousness and linguistic representation. It recalls Daniel N. Stern's observation that "experience in the domains of emergent, core- and intersubjective relatedness, which continue irrespective of language, can be embraced only very partially in the domain of verbal relatedness"; Stern, "The Sense of a Verbal Self," in The Woman and Language Debate, ed. Camille Roman, Suzanne Juhasz, and Christanne Miller (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1994), p. 199. Another effect of this technique is that readers remain somewhat distanced from all the characters, including Liffey and Mabs, and questions of sympathy and judgment are complicated. Perhaps this is why some readers find that the novel "valorizes" precisely where I find that it strongly critiques.

37. For one strong statement of this argument, see Maureen McNeil, "New Reproductive Technologies: Dreams and Broken Promises," in Science as Culture, pp. 483-506.

38. Liffey's meditation on her own new auditory perceptiveness also suggests that it is now difficult to sort out her self and her capacities and needs from those of the fetus:

Liffey wondered if she had always heard the other voice, the tone that lies behind the words and betrays them; and if she had heard, why had she not listened? Perhaps she listened now with the baby's budding ears? And certainly this disagreeable acuity of hearing diminished within a week or two: perhaps because Liffey could not for long endure her new sensitivity to the ifs and buts in Richard's voice when he assured her he loved her: perhaps because the matter of hearing was, once properly established, less in the air so far as the baby was concerned. (147)

39. In fact, she has borne her husband only one child; her second baby was fathered by another man, demonstrating that what she viewed for years as her own maternal incapacity was in fact an effect of "the male factor."

40. See for example Nancy Scheper-Hughes's discussion of the effect of culture and scarcity on "maternal thinking" in a Brazilian shantytown in Death without Weeping: The Violence of Everyday Life in Brazil (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992).

41. She commits this theft by treating other women's children with more indulgence than "any natural mother" could, adds the sententious narrator in this third-person section: "The natural mother is ambivalent towards the child. The unnatural one behaves much better" ( Female Friends, 273).

42. It is useful to compare another badly behaved woman in Weldon's fiction, Madeleine in Remember Me, who finds the will or energy to come back from the dead because she is worried about who will care for her adolescent daughter, Hilary.

43. In prison, moreover, the meager diet brings back memories of the past that are also almost tangible, and mind and body come closer to sharing a sense of coherence: "Her body as much as her mind she felt—was allowed for once to feel, in the boring tranquillity of prison routine—was the sum of its experience" ( Praxis, 244).

44. At one point, one of the voices of reason and insight in the story, a teacher named Mrs. Pelotti, reassures the distraught Isabel that her son isn't lost, as she has assumed when she comes to collect him from school and finds the classroom empty. The boy has been taken home by a neighbor, as in fact Isabel informed the school he would be. As Mrs. Pelotti comforts Isabel with a glass of medicinal sherry, she observes: "I'm quite sorry for mothers these days. They have lost their children to the nation's education system. I quite often find them roaming the school, looking for children they fancy they've lost who are perfectly safe somewhere else"; Weldon, The President's Child (Hodder and Stoughton, 1982; reprint, New York: Penguin Books, 1992), p. 171. No doubt Mrs. Pelotti bespeaks a genuine problem, the psychological effect of social change in the way children are raised and educated and the way it gives a particular force to the Worm Anxiety. But just because women fancy their children are lost doesn't mean they aren't. The next time Isabel comes to school, Jason is indeed gone—kidnapped by Homer. Isabel thus represents the actual experience that so many female characters in Weldon's novels (not to mention the real world) imagine and fear, a woman's worst nightmare come true.

45. Useful representatives of the vast literature on this subject include the volume of Science as Culture noted earlier; Rita Arditti, Renate Duelli Klein, and Shelley Minden, eds., Test-Tube Women: What Future for Motherhood? (London: Pandora Press, 1984); Ruth Hubbard, The Politics of Women's Biology (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1990); Man-Made Women: How New Reproductive Technologies Affect Women, ed. Gena Corea et al. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987); Linda M. Whitford and Marilyn L. Poland, eds., New Approaches to Human Reproduction: Social and Ethical Dimensions (Boulder: Westview Press, 1989); Michelle Stanworth, ed., Reproductive Technologies: Gender, Motherhood, and Medicine (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987); Hilary Homans, ed., The Sexual Politics of Reproduction (Aldershot, England: Gower, 1985); Judith Rodin and Aila Collins, eds., Women and New Reproductive Technologies: Medical, Psychosocial, Legal, and Ethical Dilemmas (Hillsdale, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1991).

46. Given the actors in this plot, Ann Ferguson's concept of "husband patriarchy" seems particularly apt; see Ferguson, Blood at the Root: Motherhood, Sexuality, and Male Dominance (London: Pandora Press, 1989), pp. 102 ff.