The natural body, the body as nature, and the nature of the body are three touchy topics in the realm of culture studies. As with most contested terrain, each territorial concept is imagined as fundamentally real or considered to be false or nonexistent. In the following article, Sabine Coelsch-Foisner boldly addresses all three through the lens of A.S. Byatt's short stories. The stories, which focus on lives of women whose bodies are changing and growing older, depict an ambiguous relationship between ideals, realities, and expectations. By focusing on the experiences of characters whose bodies, experiences of their bodies, and ideas about their bodies are caught in time, Coelsch-Foisner is able to give more than the static snapshot of being that many scholars are content with. Instead, readers are treated to a discussion of the natural body that is able to render biological "facts" in relation to biological "fictions" and to tell stories that resonate with our own, sometimes alarmingly unintelligible, sometimes deceptively straightforward, experiences of being in the world.

A Body of Her Own: Cultural Constructions of the Female Body in A.S. Byatt's Strange Stories

Sabine Coelsch-Foisner

<1> Byatt's short fiction, from her first collection Sugar and Other Stories (1987) to Elementals (1998) is marked by a continuous preoccupation with the body: the body as the product of social signifying practices, the body as the site of desires, fears, and anxieties, the body as the source of experience, the body as creator and created. In brief, the body is treated as the centre of existence, consciousness and identity. Yet, these are constantly called into doubt in Byatt's stories, which depict heroines trapped between asserting their identity and submitting to cultural dictates of beauty and behavior. In order to cope with this conflict, they pursue strategies that point beyond the normal context of their lives. The central aim of this paper is to explore these strategies and to demonstrate how Byatt uses the fantastic as a means of confronting cultural practices of body formation. For this purpose I shall first address the nexus between fact and fantasy in Byatt's short fiction and then explore individual instances of fantastic transgression in the stories.

Fact and Fantasy

<2> The circumstances under which Byatt's stories were written may help to explain her characters' obsession with the body. Byatt, who was born in 1936, was already in her fifties and an established novelist when her first collection, Sugar and Other Stories (1987) [1], was published. Three more volumes followed after her great breakthrough with her fifth novel, Possession: A Romance (1990) [2], which won the Booker Prize and brought her international fame: The Matisse Stories (1993) [3], The Djinn in the Nightingale's Eye: Five Fairy Stories (1994) [4], and Elementals: Stories of Fire and Ice (1998) [5]. Byatt had grown up in a social climate in which women struggled for professional careers against the dominant ideology of domesticity and in which they protested "against being judged solely by appearances," as Diane Barthel has shown in her study of gender and advertising [6]. Moreover, what attracted Byatt to the short story was an effort to "accommodate the strange," as she explained in an interview with Jean-Louis Chevalier in 1994 [7]. The fantastic in her stories is inseparably connected with the body and, in particular, with the experience of ageing.

<3> Byatt's protagonists, very often middle-aged women, experience a sense of alienation vis-à-vis their bodies, which they are used to subjecting to rigorous scrutiny. Obsessively monitoring lines and wrinkles, swollen ankles and grey hairs, they are haunted by feelings of self-hatred and inadequacy. What adds to their distress is their habit of contrasting their own flawed bodies either with the immaculate models beaming from advertisements or with the preserved inner images of their once young and perfect bodies. Mind and body are tragically at odds in the way Byatt's female characters - most of them writers, academics, and intellectuals - look upon themselves. They uniformly experience ageing as a relentless process of deterioration which marginalizes women and, therefore, hardly ever view it in its positive aspects: professional knowhow, social security, material comfort. This awareness is rooted in Byatt's own experience and, as she explained in an interview, it was shared by many of her female colleagues in the Department of English in University College, London: "... we had all observed that women, once they got over the age of 45, began to be persecuted by groups of people ..." [8]. Based on the assumption that women are judged by their beauty, an assumption for which there is considerable empirical evidence (Barthel, 9-10), Byatt's characters convey the impression that the ageing body with its perceived shortcomings offers a decrepit home to outstanding intellectual powers. By presenting heroines who suffer from the normative constructions of the female body as biological, beautiful, and passive in patriarchal society, Byatt highlights cultural practices of monitoring, modelling, and modifying bodies, without necessarily adopting or limiting her perspective to feminist heuristics [9]. Such practices pervade all areas of modern civilization: art, language, the educational system, social institutions, and the media.

<4> The dominant myths shaping women's self-awareness in Byatt's stories are maternity and sexual attractivity. Both evoke feelings of inadequacy in her menopausal protagonists. Surpassing most of their peers in intelligence, they cannot help being influenced by the ruling norms of mass culture, its stereotypical images of femininity ("the stare, silver and supercilious or jetty and frenzied, of the model girl," "Medusa's Ankles," Matisse, 3), its deceptive ideals of beauty far removed from the mundane world, and its practices of body modification, to which they themselves half-reluctantly submit: attending the hairdresser, checking their figure or hiding their stoutness, using makeup, selecting their wardrobe, etc. Although they know how mass-manipulation works and how the beauty-role, defined by Barthel as "the importance of appearing attractive in public, of maintaining standards, of encouraging male attention" (10), runs counter to their autonomy, such knowledge does not automatically provide them with effective strategies of opposition. Wisdom is no antidote to cultural suppression. In fact, their shared alertness to the body, its processes and biological changes is a form of admitting the Western gaze on the female body and of succumbing to its constraining force. For consciousness of the body is both a mental and a cultural act. Not surprisingly, the Pygmalion myth runs like a connective thread through many of Byatt's stories. Woman is constructed either by the experts of the beauty industry (Lucian, the hairdresser in "Medusa's Ankles"), by the storyteller (the Clerk of Oxford's tale about Griselda in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales retold by the protagonist in "The Djinn in the Nightingale's Eye," 107-21), or by the numerous artists in Byatt's stories, e.g. Matisse's nudes in "The Chinese Lobster," Bernard Lycett-Kean's frantic effort to paint the watersnake in "A Lamia in the Cévennes," or the little prehistoric statues of fertility goddesses - "old fingers fashioning flesh of clay" - in "The Djinn in the Nightingale's Eye" (Djinn, 139). In the latter example the Pygamlion myth is combined with that of the archetypal mother. She, too, is a cultural phenomenon and liable to exert pressure on the individual.

<5> Byatt's heroines are victims of a culture whose value-systems are prejudiced against nature and natural processes of ageing [10]. They have surprisingly little to offer against its degrading iconography, gender policy and methods of (mis-)representing their sex. Such is the fate of their lives. Husbands complain about domestic trifles or elope with younger mistresses, male colleagues disparage women by making rude remarks about their figure, and the female body, on the whole, is either coveted or rejected. In either case, the status of women is denigrated, as the following examples demonstrate: "Dr Perholt [the female academic in "The Djinn in the Nightingale's Eye"] was angry at the blonde Lufthansa hostess who bowed gravely to the grey businessmen as they disembarked, goodgye, sir and thank you, good-bye, sir and thank you, but gave Dr Perholt a condescending 'Bye-bye, dear.'" (Djinn, 105-6) In "Medusa's Ankles," which is set in a hairdresser's salon, the narrator observes: "They were all girls now, not women" (Matisse, 3).

<6> Inscribed with patriarchal meanings, the body is perceived as the product and property of others, and to escape its object status is a central effort of Byatt's heroines. Yet, there seems to be no social remedy against such conspicuous instances of sex discrimination. How can they dissociate the body-for-herself from the body-for-others? The rape-scene remembered by Gillian Perholt in "The Djinn in the Nightingale's Eye" is an extreme example of how the female body is appropriated by men and how this destroys the young woman's self-esteem: "And I felt sick, and felt my body was to blame" (Djinn, 243). Even before this scene, Gillian's relationship to her body is marked by a sense of alienation: "It was terrifying. I was terrified. [...] But it didn't belong to me. I was tempted to - to love it - myself. It was lovely. But unreal. I mean, it was there, it was real enough, but I knew in my head it wouldn't stay - something would happen to it." As she retrospectively examines her estrangement from her own body, she adds apologetically: "I am a creature of the mind, not the body." (Djinn, 241-2) Is there a body untainted by male desire or the gloss of the beauty industry? Is there a natural body underneath the cultural body?

<7> Women in Byatt's stories are not left unredeemed. The intriguing element in her treatment of the body is the manner in which it is made to turn against its oppressor. Fantasy is the name of the game - both in the sense of the marvellous and in the broader meaning of fiction, fabrication, invention. By creating monstrous and hybrid bodies (a water-snake that is half woman and half serpent, a ghoul, a djinn that escapes from a bottle), fantasy provides a remedy in Byatt's fictions against feelings of self-hatred, frustration, and aggression. The grotesque body (whether in the form of an over-size or miniature body, a fat or neglected body) constitutes a blow against Western conventions of beauty and a liberating force against the monitoring systems forced on women. Transgressive bodies are the answer of the oppressed to externally imposed constraints.

<8> In her poem "Gas," a fantastic vision of how the sense of self is all of a sudden tied up with several bodies, Fleur Adcock writes: "You recognize a body by its blemishes: / moles and birthmarks, scars, tattoos, oddly formed earlobes" [11]. In a cultural environment anxious to cover up or obliterate such marks, fantasy makes it possible for characters to "recognize" their bodies. Such recognition may involve confronting their own deaths or entering into contact with ghosts, mythic and otherworldly creatures. Byatt's fantastic stories offer a corrective perspective to patriarchal constructions of the female body. The inhibiting mechanisms of external representation are opposed by self-recognition and radical transgressions of both social norms and natural laws. Such instances of transgression are: mythopoeic revision, witchcraft, madness, self-obliteration and horror, transformation. To demonstrate how these function and combine in the stories, I shall concentrate on: "The Dried Witch" (from Sugar and Other Stories), "Medusa's Ankles" and "The Chinese Lobster" (from The Matisse Stories), "The Djinn in the Nightingale's Eye" (from the collection of the same title), "Baglady" and "A Lamia in the Cévennes" (from Elementals).

Mythopoeic Revision

<9> "A Lamia in the Cévennes" is a prime example of deconstructing the dichotomy of culture and nature through mythopoeic revision. Escaping from London, the painter Bernard Lycett-Kean moves to the South of France, buys a house and has a pool built, which becomes the centre of his creative energies. When he beholds a Lamia, a mythic watersnake whose body is partly female, partly serpentine, he considers her the solution to his aesthetic questions of light, geometry, color, and transparency. Both horrid and beautiful, the Lamia is a mixture of myths recurring throughout the Western imagination: the dangerous siren, the opaque nature of the female sex, the inspiring muse, the woman as a projection of male desires ("I will do anything for you ..." Elementals, 99), the enchanted beauty waiting to be released by a male hero from her spellbound existence. Bernard is both enraptured and repelled by this snake. He does not kiss her because he prefers the mysterious creature to the real woman.

<10> The serpent's grotesque body sheds light on women's ambivalent status in modern culture: borrowed from Keats's poem of the same title, the Lamia is a cultural fantasy. Significantly, Bernhard prefers her cultural, i.e. as a hybrid creature. At the same time, the plot of Byatt's story marks a significant departure from the Romantic story, in which the beautiful maiden is transformed back into her original serpentine shape. In Byatt's story, the hybrid snake is an enchanted woman and has preserved her female consciousness and intuition. In the end her identity is restored, not by Bernard, who never overcomes his fear of real women, but by a friend of his. Still, the Lamia's transformation is no emancipatory act. After escaping the painter's control over her body ("A mystery to be explained by rule and line," 110), she enters a new kind of bondage, embodying the ideal woman for her savior: "She made a very good blowzy sort of a woman, just right for Raymond. He wondered what sort of a woman she would have become for him, and dismissed the problem. He didn't want a woman. He wanted another visual idea." (110, my italics)

<11> This juxtaposition of conflicting attitudes to the female body - here the aesthetic view versus the sexual view - is characteristic of Byatt's revisionist technique. The voices of Faust and Keats are evoked but made subordinate in this fantastic account of a woman serving patriarchal ideologies of power, possession, creation, and pleasure. "A Lamia in the Cévennes" does not offer a solution to her dilemma, but self-consciously points to the disruptive power of fantasy. The snake is an agglomeration of dominant cultural beliefs, but due to its irrational ontology calls these very beliefs into doubt and infuses subversive currents into the myth: the Lamia threatens to overthrow the pattern of Bernard's life, she is not to be trusted because her affection quickly turns from Bernard to Raymond, men are irresistibly attracted to her, and her hybrid body challenges basic scientific concepts of human physiology and anatomy: "He hoped that no natural scientist would come along and find Melanie's blood group to be that of some sort of herpes, or do an X-ray and see something odd in her spine" (110).

Witchcraft

<12> Inspired by Byatt's reading of Shen Tsunh Wen's Chinese stories [12], "The Dried Witch" is set in an Oriental culture and deals with a woman's difficulties in building an "autonomous place" [13] and in negotiating her sense of identity and her dependence on society. The "witch" is a middle-aged, ostracized peasant woman who, in an effort to define her role in the rigid structure of her village ("to be respected and feared," Sugar, 93), becomes a jinx, sets up an altar in her house and cures people with magic potions. When a death occurs in the village she is found guilty and sentenced to death by drying in the sun. The opening of the story is modelled on the Narcissus myth: A-Oa contemplates the image of her face mirrored first in the water, then in the convex surface of a pot. Contrary to the Greek hero's rapture over his own image, the reflected figure affords her no pleasure. She only beholds a distortion of her complexion and features: "Her pot-face, unlike her water-face, was round and beaming, a sunny shape in hot metal" (86). The feeling of alienation conveyed in this brief scene is indicative of A-Oa's disturbed relationship to her body, which circumscribes her fate.

<13> "The Dried Witch" is a metaphorical story of the persecution of a woman who does not comply with the cultural meanings inscribed in womanhood and is therefore considered dangerous. The anti-social character of her body is not the result of female sexuality, as anthropological accounts of primitive cultures have suggested [14], but originates in its very failure to perform vital functions such as fertility, sex, maternity:

She was dry. It was the dry season, but this was her own dryness. [...] Before her husband went she had buried four, eggshell-skulls under fine hairless skin, stick arms strapped to blown bellies, dead trailing feet with their beautiful useless bones, parcels wrapped in banana leaves tucked gently into pits scooped in the dust and hard clay. (85, 87)

Recurrent references to dryness in the story (the drying of bodily liquids - saliva, blood, pus, water, sweat, milk) are symbolic of A-Oa's hopeless situation, which she can only alleviate by becoming a jinx and, through this, assuming a social role. Both in the description of her dead children and in her charms, images of procreation are inverted: dried beans and seeds, the dried entrails of a rat, an unhatched egg with a chick inside, and a poisonous snake left to rot and dry in the sun.

<14> The body in this story is conceived along two poles: its power and failure to create. On the one hand A-Oa's womb is barren, on the other her potions help others to overcome their dryness (e.g. the charm for Cha-Hun and his girl - to "[h]elp them to burn," 102). Power and failure are equally conjoined in A-Oa's final vision of a burning tree - the ultimate symbol of witchpower - while she witnesses her own slow death from exposure to the sun. Byatt's account of the jinx's stream of consciousness during her ritual killing ventures beyond the limits of verisimilitude. Her pain is traced to the extreme moment when mind and body separate:

Her eyelids: a last desperate prickle amongst the lashes and the fine skin began to lift away into blisters as she saw her own veins boil bloody on her retina. Her tongue, huge, a weightless boulder, cracking against her teeth. Heat ran down her spine and killed and fetched up the colorless scales and cushions of skin above the vertebrae, where it was thin, where it flaked back to expose raw wet flesh that dried, fast. A sound came in her ears, a hissing and squeaking, the contents of her skull writhing and shrinking like intestines in a frying pan. [...] She thought of herself: so this is where I was coming: and everything that had once belonged to herself seemed small and husked, dust to sweep, a stain to be wiped from the grid of the cooking-stove where something had spilled, and been baked blackly on, and had tenaciously adhered. Why begin, thought A-Oa, if we come here so quickly? On the third day, she was two. Her mind stood outside herself, looking down on the shrivelling flesh, with its blues and umbers, on the cracked face, the snarling mouth, the bared, dry-bone teeth. [...] The eddies of heat from the burning swirled out across the muddy ground and took her with them, away from the strapped and cracking thing, away. (108-11)

<15> Byatt's very emphasis on dead and dying bodies, on rotting and putrefying creatures signals a grotesque reversal of the functioning body as it predominates cultural and social debates and a withdrawal into the autonomy of the self. The more repressive a culture, the more such autonomy calls for the fantastic, the uncanny, and the weird, as Byatt herself argued: "... but when women couldn't move and couldn't act, they built a different kind of autonomous place, and there's been a lot of recent feminist criticism that suggests that women built romantic, gothic, unreal places" [15].

Madness

<16> Similar moments of escape and subversion are dramatized in "Medusa's Ankles," where the conflict between real and ideal bodies is resolved in a mad rage against the cult of beauty. The story is set in a hairdresser's salon - the ideal locus for enforcing dominant ideologies of the body. In the semi-religious atmosphere of Lucian's salon ("... his fine hands cupped lightly round her new bubbles and wisps, like the hands of a priest round a Grail," Matisse, 7), modifying practices yield ever new dream worlds, as is indicated by the sudden transformation of the place from a soothing pink and cream with "quiet seraglio music" (5) to a more sinister and glamorous [16], post-industrial "battleship-grey and maroon" (15) with heavy-metal sounds in the background. For the highbrow Susannah, such mimicry aggravates her inner struggle between subjecting to the rapidly changing dictates of fashion and maintaining her "natural" looks. In the end, Lucian's salon is literally turned into a battlefield.

<17> Lucian is a particularly unpleasant specimen of a male chauvinist - a self-appointed apostle of beauty ("Beauty, I want beauty. I must have beauty," 10), a severe critic of his wife's fat ankles, from which the title of the story derives, self-complacent, and rude to his clients (e.g. his comment about "making suburban old dears presentable," 9). Still, Susannah feels entirely at his mercy - "She came to trust him with her disintegration" (7) - especially since she needs to look presentable for a speech on television on the occasion of a Translator's Medal she won. She knows that beauty is an indispensable asset even for a woman whose sphere of activity is far away from the world of glamor and make-believe. Though not suffering A-Oa's destiny, Susannah experiences a more sophisticated form of prosecution. She is scared of the ruinous power of the media, for visual signs carry much greater importance in the civilized world than words:

She was in a panic of fear about the television, which had come too late, when she had lost the desire to be seen or looked at. The cameras search jowl and eye-pocket, expose brush-stroke and cracks in shadow and gloss. So interesting are their revelations that words, mere words, go for nothing, fly by whilst the memory of a chipped tooth, a strayed red dot, an inappropriate hair, persists and persists. (19-20)

Susannah's nervousness confirms what she experiences every time at Lucian's - a ritual of abasement and redemption, based on the miraculous power of beauty products and treatment. Hence, Susannah is reproved by her hairdresser for washing her hair without conditioner. He suggests highlights and makes irreverent remarks about her natural hairstyle. Beauty is a high-tech affair, a lucrative business, and a science performed by specialists.

<18> One day when Susannah is again assaulted with Lucian's badly told stories about his corpulent wife and his escapades with a younger mistress, she objects to the blessings of a new style:

"She did it better than I do, dear," he said. "She gave it a bit of a lift. That's what they all want, these days. I think you look really nice."
"It's horrible," said Susannah. "I look like a middle-aged woman with a hair-do."
She could see them all looking at each other, sharing the knowledge that this was exactly what she was.
"Not natural," she said. (24)

Disgusted with her plump face and artificial coiffure, Byatt's protagonist runs into a mad fit and, in a scene brought before the reader's eyes with cinematic intensity, demolishes Lucian's salon. It is a symbolic breaking out of a system in which male supremacy asserts itself in such simple gestures as the postures adopted by the hairdresser and his female client: "A woman's relation with her hairdresser is anatomically odd. Her face meets his belt, his haunches skim her breathing, his face is far away, high and behind. ..." (4); "He stood above her ..." (7); "She bent her head submissively, and he scraped the base of her skull" (10). For a moment the roles are reversed: Susannah stands up and hurls bottles of gel, pots of cream, scissors, and boxes of hairpins and clips against the mirror, turning these instruments of invisible torture into visible weapons against the beauty industry.

It was a strange empty battlefield, full of glittering fragments and sweet-smelling rivulets and puddles of venous-blue and fuchsia-red unguents, patches of crimson-streaked foam and odd intense spills of orange henna or cobalt and copper. (26)

<19>The mirror cracks, recalling the moment of liberation in Tennyson's ballad "The Lady of Shalott" [17], when the imprisoned damsel is freed from her spellbound existence. The final encounter between her released body and the people of Camelot, however, is only possible in death. Susannah's look into the mirror prompts a violent reaction comparable to the turn in the life of Tennyson's heroine, but it lacks the ultimately transforming effect on her body that renders the Lady of Shalott visible to the outer world. Read against the background of this myth, Susannah is faced with a similar death-in-life. External monitoring, symbolized by the mirror, has an immobilising effect on her body. Charged with social values (beauty, youth, vigor, wealth, elegance) and aesthetic functions (attracting men, meeting their expectations), the body is reduced to a vessel of collective ideals. Hence body modifications take the seriousness of a rite of passage: the first "set" is compared to an "initiation into womanhood" (6), and the worst crime for a woman to commit is not to perform these rites - "to let herself go" (21).

<20> The end of "Medusa's Ankles" is an ambivalent avowal of subversion and submission. It takes us back to Tennyson's poem: "She has a lovely face," says Sir Launcelot upon seeing the Lady of Shalott floating dead in her boat through Camelot [18]. Susannah's husband employs the same phrase when commenting on her new style: "You look lovely. It takes twenty years off you. You should have it done more often." (28) His remark suffices to turn Susannah's revolt into a Quixotic battle against the invincible giant Culture. Destroying one salon does nothing to alter the situation of middle-aged women. Despite her rage, Susannah remains in the grip of the beauty industry.

<21> There is something fixed and inescapable about the situations trapping Byatt's female characters. Yet, even though they fail to set a more complex identity against the narrow roles imposed on them, the stories are shot through with subversive meaning. The shift from the benefits of a beauty maintenance programme (happiness, pleasure, privilege) to the manipulating processes which take place behind the scene in "Medusa's Ankles" conveys a disillusioning message: beauty means torture: "[d]ried blood and instruments of slaughter" (15). The hyper-realistic mode in which these processes are depicted ironically undermines the rhetoric of advertising with its powerful slogans - "exquisite," "singular," "exclusive," "extravagant," "sumptuous" [19] - just as A-Oa's eventual encounter with her own death, by overcoming narrative conventions, signifies a form of transgressing the body's cultural limitations.

Self-Obliteration and Horror

<22> "Baglady" from Elementals furnishes another example of a woman who runs into conflict with the maxims of a body-conscious society. Daphne Gulver-Robinson accompanies her husband to a meeting in the Far East and, throughout this trip, considers herself a social misfit a) because she is older than the other wives and b) because she lacks their raffinesse: "She has tried to make herself attractive for this jaunt and has lost ten pounds and had her hands manicured; but now she sees the other ladies, she knows it is not enough" (186). Daphne never wanted to travel and does not share her peers' excitement over the entertainment programme arranged for the directors' wives. Like Susannah, she feels uncomfortable and inferior. The story is a fantastic raid upon culture. An excursion to "The Good Fortune Shopping Mall" (188) turns into a nightmare for Daphne, who gets caught in a labyrinth of shops and caverns. What at first sight seemed to her like "an army barracks or a prison block" (188) proves to be a real trap. Ironically, all the shopfronts promising luxury, wealth and beauty only hasten Daphne's disintegration as she hobbles along a maze of streets, corridors and stairways:

... she looks hot and blowzy. Her lipstick has bled into the soft skin round her mouth. Hairpins have sprung out. Her nose and eyelids shine. [...] On one of these stairways a heel breaks off one of her smart shoes. After a moment she takes off both, and puts them in her shopping bag. She hobbles on, on the concrete, sweating and panting. [...] She begins to run quite fast, so that huge holes spread in the soles of her stockings, which in the end split, and begin to work their way over her feet and up her legs in wrinkles like flaking skin. (190-1)

Robbed of her money and passport, Daphne is last seen sitting on the pavement, exhausted and without any prospect of ever getting out of the Good Fortune Mall.

<23> The open ending invites several interpretations. "Baglady" is a strange story about a failed encounter between two cultures: Daphne feels cheated and fatally misunderstood in her Oriental environment. It is a fantastic story about the intrusion of weird forces into a familiar setting in the fashion of absurd literature (remotely recalling Friedrich Dürrenmatt's "Der Tunnel," a never-ending journey into a tunnel), and it has symbolic significance with regard to cultural constructions of the body. Sucked into this huge complex of shops with jewellery, pearls, jade, opal, and silk waiting to adorn female bodies, Daphne literally loses her identity: "a baglady, dirty, unkempt, [...] a tattered battery-hen" (193). The final impression is one of anonymity. Daphne's body has absorbed the character of her environment. Like the endless rows of shopfronts, she has become a nondescript figure herself, alien and no longer recognizable.

<24> A similar sense of defeat is symbolized by the Chinese lobster in the story of the same title [20]. Imprisoned in a crate, it connects with reiterated thoughts about suicide in the story. The main action is a conversation between Dr. Gerda Himmelblau, Dean of Women Students, and Professor Peregrine Diss over a female art student who filed a complaint against him on grounds of sexual harassment. Peggi Nollett's thesis about Matisse is an unconventional feminist project of "revising or reviewing or rearranging Matisse" (Matisse,103), which is fundamentally at variance with her supervisor's hedonist admiration for what he calls Mattisse's expansion of "male eroticism into whole placid panoramas of well-being" (122). In Peggy's eyes, Matisse's art is an expression of male violence against women. Turned into mere objects of pleasure, as she argues, his nudes only provoke feelings of repulsion in the observer, very much in the manner described in S. Firestone's The Dialectic of Sex (1972):

The tool for representing, for objectifying one's experience in order to deal with it, culture, is so saturated with male bias that women almost never have a chance to see themselves culturally through their own eyes. So that finally, signals from their direct experience that conflict with the prevailing (male) culture are denied and repressed. [21]

To counter such repressive iconography of female sexuality in patriarchal culture, Peggy embarks on an orgy of reworking Matisse's paintings by smearing and defacing them and with organic matter: "blood, [...] beef stew or faeces," "thrown tomatoes - and eggs" (111). Yet, her revolt is carried to its pathological extreme: she suffers from anorexia. The explanation we receive in the story from the Dean of Women Students - anorexia stems from the patient's "self-hatred and inordinate self-absorption" (119) - largely corresponds with psychological and sociological attempts to account for this phenomenon in terms of a "rejection of adult womanhood" and the patients' "desire to establish their own control over the world, even if that control is limited to their own bodies" [22].

<25> Peggy, like Gillian Perholt in "The Djinn in the Nightingale's Eye," despises her body, or rather what it signifies to men (here Matisse and her supervisor). Hence, her unkempt appearance efficiently eludes cultural control and subverts the painter's erotic gaze, as Peregrine Diss's unflattering comment on her body confirms.

If you have seen her you will know that I can have made no such - no such advances as she describes. Her skin is like a potato and her body is like a decaying potato, in all that great bundle of smocks and vests and knitwear and penitential hangings. Have you seen her legs and arms, Dr Himmelblau? They are bandaged like mummies, they are all swollen with strapping and strings and then they are contained in nasty black greaves and gauntlets of plastic with buckles. You expect some awful yellow ooze to seep out between the layers, ready to be smeared on La joie de vivre. And her hair, I do not think her hair can have been washed for some years. It is like a carefully preserved old frying-pan, grease undisturbed by water. (115)

Whether her allegations are true or not, Peggy holds against patriarchal concepts of female sexuality a subversive sexual fantasy. What Peregrine calls a "horrible fantasy" (the charge brought against him) is a valve against the self-annihilating impulses that threaten to destroy her. Peggy's recovery of social taboos - death, filth, stench, faeces, blood - becomes a violent means for affirming her identity. The dirty body is a statement against the tyranny of the beauty role and disrupts both male aesthetic conventions and erotic desires: "You cannot believe I could have brought myself to touch her, Dr Himmelblau?" (115) Male pleasure is the obverse of female sympathy. Peregrine Diss can only mock Peggy: "If she is so obsessed with bodily horrors why does she not obtain employment as an emptier of bedpans or in a maternity ward or a hospice?" (120). Gerda Himmelblau, on the other hand, shows a deeper understanding for her student's plight and, in the course of this conversation, becomes aware of a "quiet terror" (126) which engulfs her, too, and draws her into the same current of self-denial, because she knows: "She is next in line" (129).

Transformation

<26> The story most comprehensively dealing with the body is the title story from The Djinn in the Nightingale's Eye. Dr. Gillian Perholt is another "woman in her fifties, past child-bearing, whose two children were adults now" (Djinn, 101) and abandoned by her husband. Like the "dried witch," she feels "redundant as a woman, being neither wife, mother nor mistress" (103). The feminine body is still defined by biology, but a shift has occurred from its reproductive function to an object of corrective medicine. Thus Gillian compares her own situation - "a woman with porcelain-crowned teeth, laser-corrected vision" (105) - with that of women in previous ages:

Dead in childbed, dead of influenza, or tuberculosis, or puerperal fever, or simple exhaustion, dead, as she travelled back in time, from worn-out unavailing teeth, from cracked kneecaps, from hunger, from lions, tigers, sabre-toothed tigers, invading aliens, floods, fires, religious persecution, human sacrifice, why not? (104)

Far from being exposed to such perils, her body is secure and benefits from the advantages which modern civilization offers her: mobility, material comfort, a "field of power" (105), and space, which constitutes the ultimate guarantee of selfhood. Gillian has a room of her own, contemplated with great joy when she learns that her husband has left with a twenty-six year old girl: "It was a sunny day in Primrose Hill, and the walls of the study were a cheerful golden color, and she saw the room fill up with golden light and felt full of lightness, happiness and purpose" (103) [23]. Still, her independence cannot compensate for a deep-seated malaise connected with her body. Fantasy, as the story will show, provides a more potent antidote. This is already suggested in the images of spatial enlargement describing Gillian's newly gained freedom, because the "gas confined in a bottle," hinted at in the following passage, anticipates the pivotal fantasy of the story:

She felt, she poetically put it to herself, like a prisoner bursting chains and coming blinking out of a dungeon. She felt like a bird confined in a box, like a gas confined in a bottle, that found an opening, and rushed out. She felt herself expand in the space of her own life. (103-4)

<27> The awareness of topography in elaborating the tensions between confinement and freedom is an important structural device for conceiving the body in its realistic (social, imprisoned) and fantastic (transgressive, liberated) dimensions. Both are equally important in the protagonist's awareness of herself. There is a sense of release in Gillian's travelling from London to a conference in Turkey on "Stories of Women's Lives," yet her feeling of "delightful redundancy" (137) is counterbalanced by a disconcerting awareness of a stoppage in her life, experienced for the first time when she tells the terrible story of Griselda from Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. Griselda is submitted to cruel tests by her husband only to be rehabilitated in the end, when her best years are spent. The happy ending cannot redeem the tragic waste of years, as Gillian explains: "the stories of women's lives in fiction are the stories of stopped energies" (121). In the course of telling the story, Gillian has a vision of Griselda's worn body:

... she saw a cavernous form, a huge, female form, with a veiled head bowed above emptiness and long slack-sinewed arms, hanging loosely around emptiness, and a draped, cowled garment ruffling over the windy vacuum of nothing [...] her eyes could distinguish each fold, could measure the red rims of those swollen eyes, could see the cracks in the stretched lips of that toothless, mirthless mouth [...] The creature was flat-breasted and its withered skin was exposed above the emptiness, the windy hole that was its belly and womb. (118)

There are many parallels between the Griselda-ghoul and Gillian's inability to come to terms with her ageing body, which she considers "hot, anglo-saxon, padded and clumsy" (159). Moreover, Griselda's emptiness is the equivalent of A-Oa's dryness, and both are reversals of the procreative body prevailing in cultural images of womanhood. In fact, the declining body marks the transition from the symbolic sexual body to the medical [24], or rather pathological, body, so persistently called forth in this story. The former is given expression in the little clay figures of fat goddesses with bulging bellies and breasts in the Museum of Anatolian Civilizations (139) and in the pillar with the wet hole for fertility wishes in the Hagia Sophia (172-8). In contrast to these mythic representations of fecundity, Gillian depicts with anatomical accuracy the unwholesome effects of flying on her middle-aged body: "the belly balloons, the ankles become cushions of flesh and air, the knees round into puffballs, toes and fingers are swollen and shiny" (169). As a consequence she avoids mirrors upon arrival "for what stared out at her was a fleshy monster" (169).

<28> Gillian's sense of a "strange stoppage" in her life (167) signals a profound crisis of identity, triggered - as so often in Byatt's stories - by biological processes of ageing. On one occasion it takes the form of a confrontation with a monster, on another that of an encounter with her own death, which again looks out of a mirror and moves towards her (189-90). Gillian's inability to relate her mental life to her body is strengthened by a proleptic vision of her ageing body within an analeptic description of her youthful body:

She remembered, [...] how perhaps ten years ago she had looked complacently at her skin on her throat, at her solid enough breasts and had thought herself well-preserved, unexceptionable. She had tried to imagine how this nice, taut, flexible skin would crimp and wrinkle and fall and had not been able to. It was her skin, it was herself, and there was no visible reason why it should not persist. She had known intellectually that it must, it must give way, but its liveliness then had given her the lie. And now it was all going, the eyelids had soft little folds, the edges of the lips were fuzzed, if she put on lipstick it ran in little threads into the surrounding skin. (189)

Such leaps backwards and forwards in time are disruptive of the coherence of the self and anticipate the intrusion of otherworldly forces into the realistic setting of a conference. What is achieved through fantasy is a liberation from sequential time.

<29> The day before her departure, Gillian acquires a little glass flask, a so-called "nightingale's eye." When the stopper comes off, a djinn emerges, like a giant in a cloud of exotic scents. At first she can only see a huge foot, described in minute detail with its "olive-coloured" skin, "yellow horny toenails," and a vein beating inside it (191-2). Then the foot shifts its size and Gillian catches sight of the djinn's entire body: his huge, oval and heirless head, his "hooked nose," and "the complex heap of his private parts" (193). As in all fairy tales the djinn grants her three wishes. Gillian's body is restored to its youthful appearance, she is made love to by the djinn, and eventually sets him free. Through the djinn's interference with her life, the anatomical body is transformed back into a sexual body:

... and saw in the demisted mirror a solid and unexceptionable thirty-five-year-old woman, whose breasts were full but not softened, whose stomach was taut, whose thighs were smooth, whose nipples were round and rosy. Indeed the whole of this serviceable and agreeable body was flushed deep rose, as though she had been through a fire, or a steam bath. (202)

What is important is that the body regained is her body, the body she recognizes, as Adcock has argued, by its marks and scars:

Her appendix scar was still there, and the mark on her knee where she had fallen on a broken bottle hiding under the stairs from an air raid in 1944. [...] I can go in the streets, she said to herself, and still be recognizably who I am, in my free and happy life; only I shall feel better, I shall like myself more. (202-3)

By restoring Gillian's positive attitude to her body, Byatt's Oriental fantasy manages to set a corrective image against patriarchal practices of sex discrimination and male dominance. "The Djinn in the Nightingale's Eye" redeems the horrible story of Griselda. Gillian's encounter with the djinn is both an encounter between bodies and an encounter between minds. For once the divide is mended.

<30> Through fantasy, Byatt's protagonist overcomes feelings of alienation and self-hatred. As in the other stories, there are no signs of social change. Gillian's triumph is the triumph of the imagination. She is a story teller and through telling stories discovers new meanings, like the ancient forerunners of her profession - the pythonesses, abbesses and sibyls who "revealed mysteries" (Djinn, 103). This metafictional reference to the protagonist's redeeming capacity of fantasising in "The Djinn in the Nightingale's Eye" leads me back to my initial assumption that Byatt's uses of fantasy serve a critical purpose. Having shown how various forms of transgression oppose cultural constructions of the body, I shall in conclusion point to the significance of such opposition.

<31> The ambivalence in Byatt's stories between cultural determination and fantastic escape may make many readers doubt the practical value of her characters' defence strategies. Byatt's stories prescribe no pills or anti-ageing diets and, in this respect, offer little solace to those expecting ready-made solutions. Confronting patriarchal culture in Byatt's stories is not a matter of preaching or proselytising [25]. It is a matter of shifting perspectives and deconstructing existing patterns. The critical impact of her stories lies precisely in their refusal to hand out any of the panaceas advertised by the male exponents of this culture - beauty specialists, painters, art critics. The task of the (postmodern) storyteller is not to offer alternative truths, but to test existing patterns. The British tradition of the short story, in particular, gave Byatt the generic framework within which to challenge dominant ideologies of the body, as her comment on the genre in connection with the publication of The Oxford Book of English Short Stories (1998) suggests: "... a kind of rather gleeful, slightly surreal constant twisting of the given so that it looks completely different and you're completely bewildered" [25].

<32> By self-consciously drawing the reader's attention to their status as works of fiction, Byatt's fantastic narratives create a forum for re-imagining the female body - as magic, metamorphic, hybrid. In doing so, they engage with the myth most profitably exploited by the modern beauty industry, most ardently defended and attacked by feminist criticism, and most radically undermined in constructivist theories of the body: the myth of woman's natural body, a body of her own. Transgressing both cultural constructions of the female body and familiar spheres of female experience, Byatt's stories preclude the recovery of a body existing prior to, beyond, or minus cultural inscription. What they recover instead is the liberating power of fantasy in the everyday contexts of modern civilization. Fantasy itself appears to be the site for the "natural" body. It is the realm where cultural images and practices are transgressed (often in favor of more viable modes of existing), where desires and fears may come alive. In this spirit, Byatt's strange stories represent a constant project of "twisting the given" and, as the open endings of many of her stories indicate, it is an open project.