A feminist parable set in an alternative-universe England in the 1980s, British author Fay Weldon’s (born Franklin Birkinshaw) work of satirical speculative fiction, The Cloning of Joanna May (1989), follows 60-year-old Joanna May as she discovers that her husband Carl, a corrupt nuclear power executive, has secretly arranged for her to be cloned. She sets out to track down her clones, three very different women in their thirties, and together they forge a women-only family so that they can finally have some fun. The novel opens as news of the disaster at Chernobyl reaches England, together with the radioactive fall-out. Carl May, the chief executive of Britnuc—a company which oversees many of Britain’s nuclear power stations—appears on television to calm people’s fears: “Children may safely drink milk, though sheep may no longer graze on the uplands.” He is watched by his ex-wife, Joanna. During their decades-long marriage, Carl was abusive and obsessed with Joanna’s fidelity, even killing their pet dogs when he decided she loved them too much. Joanna stayed with him in part because she recognized that his cruelty stemmed from a miserably abusive childhood: brought to the UK as a child from Eastern Europe, Carl was kept in a cage by his foster parents, and freed only when the foster parents were arrested for cruelty to animals. However, Joanna primarily stayed with Carl because she feared the drab boredom of spinsterhood. Boredom is her greatest terror. The marriage finally ended when Carl caught her having an affair with a much younger man. Joanna is quite sure that Carl had her lover murdered, although she doesn’t intend to waste time trying to prove it. Carl is too powerful to bring down. Since the divorce, he has made her life a misery, locking her out of all their homes and abandoning her financially, while continuing to insist that he loves her and only her, even to the point of remaining celibate. So, Joanna is outraged when, during the post-Chernobyl broadcast, she catches sight of his 24-year-old mistress, Bethany. She marches straight to the Britnuc offices to confront her ex-husband. Carl has a surprise for her. Thirty years earlier, when Joanna suffered a “hysterical pregnancy,” Carl regarded it as the ultimate betrayal, her subconscious rebelling against him. As punishment, or in his words to “multiply Joanna’s love for him,” he arranged for her senile, half-mad doctor to secretly extract one of her eggs, which was then used to create four clones, which were born and raised by four different women. Initially, Joanna is angry. She demands that he relinquish the clones to her as recompense for her lost opportunity to have children. However, when she has calmed down a little, she recognizes that she has no more right to own the clones than Carl does. Nevertheless, she is determined to meet them in order to find out what she might have become had she been born 30 years later, into a world where women enjoy more freedom than she did in her own youth. Above all, tracking down the clones will stave off the dreaded boredom. One by one, she gathers them in. Jane is a steely intellectual and successful career woman. Alice is a model, in love with beauty and pleasure but contemptuous of men. Gina is a housewife, desperately trying to protect her children from a violent husband. Julie closely resembles Joanna: a bored, childless housewife on the brink of starting an affair. Although the four women have enjoyed more options and opportunities in life than Joanna, each of them has suffered—or is still suffering—at the hands of men. Through a series of conversations and shared adventures, the women band together. They agree to share Gina’s children so that Joanna can experience motherhood and Gina can pursue abandoned ambitions. Finally, they decide to punish their husbands and other male oppressors. The women begin to enjoy life. The last target on their list is Carl, but before they can come up with a way to penetrate the armor of his wealth and power, Carl brings about his own death. In order to demonstrate to journalists that a power station is safe, he arranges to be filmed swimming in a cooling pond at a nuclear reactor. However, unbeknownst to him, as a result of his own bullying and corruption, the radiation measurements for the pond have been falsified, and the pond is far more dangerous than it is supposed to be. The Cloning of Joanna May explores the particular fears of the 1980s—the greed of corporate executives and the dangers of nuclear power—while also addressing more lasting themes of female solidarity and the struggle to achieve individual female personhood in an oppressively patriarchal society.

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Franklin Birkinshaw

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