User talk:Fruglemonkey

1.Letter 6: Letter to a sister is written to Aunt Fay's sister Enid, where Fay responds to her sister that her influence on Alice is not negative. Enid believes she has been portrayed as one of the characters in a novel that Fay has written.

2.“People in fiction are conglomerates or abstractions: in personality and in appearance” Lizzy in Pride and Prejudice is an abstraction of Jane Austen's ideals and thoughts; an independent woman, knowledgeable and free in her decisions.

This parallels with Aunt Fay, a character created by Fay Weldon.

“See my letters as seed flung upon ground badly in need of literary fertilizer” Aunt Fay's initial purpose of this letter to her sister is to deny allegations that she is trying to influence Alice to follow her path. She quickly goes off on a tangent, however, and starts to talk about their relationship with eachother, whilst snidely talking down to her sister.

“Authors writhe and chafe at the notion that they are parasitical upon spouses, family, friends, colleagues” Notice that Aunt Fay is attempting to guide and shape Alice into the 'right' way of literature, and, in doing so, is she 'parasitically' living out herself through Alice? Is Fay Weldon suggesting that authors, and, indeed, all people are parasitic towards people that are connected to them? This can definitely be seen in the views of marriage in the Victorian era – people married not out of friendship and love, but for material purposes.

“When the writer describes and does not invent, he suffers the limitations of his own humanity” After saying this, Aunt Fay references a character from Pride and Prejudice, pointing out the fact that she must've been one of these 'borrowed' characters.

“Fictional characters are simple and understandable – real people are infinitely complex, incomprehensible and even in appearance look one way one day and another the next” Perhaps Fay Weldon is trying to suggest here that people can not be trusted, as they are constantly changing and shifting? There is irony here, in that Aunt Fay is both an invented, and a 'borrowed' character; she is a work of fiction made for the novel Letters To Alice, and yet Fay Weldon also uses her as a Mary Sue, to convey her own views on ideas such as feminism and Post-modernism. So, is Fay Weldon suggesting that she can not be trusted?

Throughout each of these quotes, there is an air of condescension, as if Aunt Fay holds herself above all others in the literary field. She speaks as if the matter were final, and her word being absolute truth, with a tone of certainty.