This paper aims to examine that women’s bodies become hysteria because of cultural violence in Fay Weldon’s novel The Life and Loves of a She-Devil. Hysteria must not be eliminated, but be read as women’s voices against the suppression of the patriarchal system.
She-devils, monstrous women, insane women, or hysteria in many texts, written by female writers, have been represented to regard themselves as monstrosity under the patriarchal system. Weldon also employs a monstrous and excess woman called Ruth. But Ruth gets plastic surgeries because she cannot live within the patriarchy and capitalism with her grotesque body .
To expose the cultural violence on the body, Ruth’s voice becomes a gigantic body and speaks through the body. So, Ruth’s hysterical symptoms can be understood as kinds of psychological and spiritual conflicts. According to Helene Cixous, hysteria is written on the body, and hysteria is the body’s voice.
Ruth peels away the mother and the wife, and finds a woman, and a she-devil. She becomes a she-devil. Her resisting gestures are fragmented bodies. While killing herself, she gets her own voice and her own pen.