The Purpose of Fiction Theme Analysis

The narrator, Aunt Fay, begins writing to Alice, her eighteen-year-old niece, because she has heard from her sister Enid (Alice’s mother) that Alice finds reading Jane Austen in her college literature courses to be “boring, petty, and irrelevant.” Though Fay concedes that reading serious literature can sometimes be arduous, she implores Alice to continue her studies anyway, arguing over the course of the epistolary novel for the value of fiction as a means of exploration, self-improvement, and enhanced engagement with the world. Particularly because Alice herself wishes to write a novel, Fay feels that reading them must be an essential part of Alice’s self-actualization. However, Fay does not argue for fiction as a simple doorway into straightforward truth; rather, she builds a case for reading fiction as a means of grasping that there are, in fact, many different truths that can all exist at the same time. For Fay—a novelist herself—countless realities exist simultaneously, and her letters to Alice seek to demonstrate how fiction can reveal that multitude of realities.

Fay’s argument begins with an examination of the ways fiction can change its readers for the better. Depicting the act of reading as a process of exploration and exposure to new ideas, Fay focuses at first on the moral and instructional power of fiction. Throughout the book, Aunt Fay illustrates her points with the metaphorical City of Invention, where books are houses, authors are their architects, and readers are curious visitors who explore the neighborhoods. Her vivid descriptions of the City evoke the wealth to be found within books, depicting readers as explorers of a hidden geography, lit “by day by the sun of enthusiasm and by night by the moon of inspiration.” She tells Alice that the City is where “we understand ourselves and one another, and our pasts and our futures.” With such strong language and rich imagery, Fay makes it clear that she considers fiction a destination for new and essential learning. Fay also sets literature apart as a more effective form of learning than any other; she describes how reading brings the reader into a reflective space created by the author, where the reader is challenged to expand their thinking while still remaining physically safe. Fay notes that exploring the City of Invention is “all, really, education is about, should be about.” According to Fay, fiction improves the world as a whole, beyond just the individuals who actually read. She notes that  “if society is to advance then those that hath must empathize with those that hath not,” recommending that people in positions of power should read more novels in order to use that power in a more humane way. Then, Fay argues, additional lives will be bettered, rather than just the reader’s.

However, as Fay’s letters to Alice continue, it becomes clear that Fay is not arguing that readers of fiction are any closer to understanding some absolute truth. They are instead learning to accept the notion that truth is not fixed, but rather infinite and constantly changing. For Fay, only the vast and varied works that make up literature as a whole can fully reflect this complex, sometimes paradoxical reality. Several times throughout the book, Fay points out to Alice that failing to question assumed truths is one of the biggest mistakes a person can make. She guesses at the so-called truths that Alice may not have examined and advises her that “the real Secret of Life lies in Constant Rule Revision.” This repeated insistence on reevaluating truth underscores Fay’s core argument that no absolute truth exists. Fay’s analysis of Jane Austen’s many novels also provides a detailed example of exactly what it looks like to use multiple texts as a window into simultaneous and even conflicting truths. Fay finds different insights into Austen’s inner life from every one of her books, building a portrait of the author that is both happy and unhappy, kind and cruel, obedient and revolutionary. There is no one correct or accurate interpretation of Jane Austen, an implication which seems to drive Fay’s preoccupation with discussing her. At the novel’s conclusion, Fay reflects on the surprisingly successful novel that Alice has written and contemplates writing a new one of her own. Thinking about all the many books that she and Alice have yet to read and write, Fay says that “the exhilaration of all this being…is enough to make us immortal.” Here, the immense variety of fiction is more than just valuable; it actually transcends human life. Again, the very notion of truth depends on the combination of countless simultaneous truths.

While the character of Aunt Fay argues for the use of fiction in understanding the multifaceted nature of reality, the book itself also backs up that claim. The book includes multiple fictions within fictions and blurs the line between these different levels of reality, starting with the name shared by Aunt Fay and the author, Fay Weldon. Reading the book requires accepting all of these layered fictions at once, putting the real-life reader through a lived example of Aunt Fay’s idea of simultaneous truths. The novel overlaps with literal reality in a number of ways: in addition to sharing a name with her main character, Weldon bases the exchanges between Aunt Fay and Alice on a real-life exchange between Jane Austen and one of her nieces. The real and fictitious elements are almost interchangeable throughout, illustrating the idea that imagined realities are every bit as real as lived experience. The characters of both Fay and Alice write novels that may or may not be based on their “real” lives. The protagonist of the short story draft that Fay sends Alice is also a novelist, but in contrast, she insists that her novel is not based on her life, even though her audience believes that it is. With so many layers of fiction and reality even within the lives of the characters, it becomes necessary for the reader to accept all of these intertwined realities as one coherent whole, even though the details remain uncertain and conflicting. At the novel’s end, Fay’s feud with her sister and brother-in-law seems to be ending, but Fay’s statement that she will “be very happy” to avoid talking about novels, writing, and feminism rings false given Fay’s outspoken character throughout the rest of the book. The reader is left wondering whether this happy ending is genuine or if, like the happy endings of some of the Austen novels that Fay analyzes, it is intended instead to make a point to the reader. By leaving the book’s readers without a tidy ending and forcing them to accept multiple possible interpretations, Weldon again reiterates fiction’s unique power to illustrate the complexity of reality.