husband. At the same time, she deconstructs the definition of love, which poses woman as man's phantom, as the symptom of his fantasies. Her story of a woman of six foot two, "who had tucks taken in her legs," literalizes the cliché of the perfect beloved serving as the site where an earlier love object or mental image is refound by the masculine lover, yet she does so to such an excess that the result is literally a comic turn, turned serious. Due to her exaggeration, Ruth exceeds, even as she performs the cultural dictate that if woman needs man's gaze to assure her being alive, she is as good as dead once she has lost this eye, so she can just as well literally kill her body. She fulfills the social death her husband performed by leaving her, and which she embellished by literally disappearing when, about to enter surgery, she says good-bye to her body "that had so little to do with her nature, and knew she'd be glad to be rid of it" (p. 242). Her social resurrection can only occur when she takes on the body of the woman who displaced her in her husband's gaze, when she returns as a copy of the body of Mary Fisher.
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Furthermore, her recreation is seen in analogy to the conventions of fairy-tale and gothic imagery, as though her reshaped body were not only resurrecting her dead predecessor but also revitalizing these clichés. Of one surgeon, she says "he was her Pygmalion," only to add "but she would not depend upon him, or admire him, or be grateful" (p. 249). When she finally leaves the hospital, she evokes Anderson's Little Mermaid, for the final dance with her doctor is such that "with every step it was as if she trod on knives " (p. 275). Another surgeon refers to her ''as Frankenstein's monster, something that needed lightning to animate it and get it moving" (p. 271), and indeed, what is being reanimated are doubly dead body partsher killed body and the imitation of the dead Mary Fisher. Rhetorically, one could thus add, Ruth seems to resubstantiate these cultural texts in the same gesture that she revitalizes Mary Fisher's conventional beauty. Yet the feminine transsubstantiation is here, too, duplicitous. In the monstrous act of totally refashioning her body, she both is and isn't the first Mary Fisher. She both confirms and critiques the textual models of Pygmalion's and Frankenstein's creations.
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In that she reemerges in the guise of the second beloved, who herself has died for loss of Bobbo's supporting gaze, Weldon's narrative ends with the first wife returned at the site of the second beloved's body, but as the ghost of the second woman. At Mary Fisher's funeral, Ruth makes her first appearance and is duly recognized by her rival's mother as the deceased sending "her own ghost to her funeral!" Bobbo, to whom she says she is his wife, answers, "My wife died ... long ago ... but there was someone called Mary Fisher. Aren't you her?" (p. 272). What Weldon implies, with
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