The conclusion of Fay Weldon's The Life and Loves of a She-Devil presents what a grammarian more concerned with form than content might perceive as a problematic tense shift:

I am a lady of six foot two, who had tucks taken in her legs. A comic turn, turned serious.

Why would Ruth Patchett, the eponymous protagonist, say, "I am a lady of six foot two," when she had already "had tucks taken in her legs" and was therefore only five foot eight? Grammatically speaking, we could read the subject complement "a lady of six foot two" and the dependent phrase that follows as a unit indicating that Ruth's final state is, unquestionably, an altered one. Yet I would also suggest that Weldon's use of "I am" in her protagonist's closing statement is indicative of the ontological problem the text requires the reader to confront: Exactly who, by the end of her narrative, is Ruth Patchett?

The Life and Loves of a She-Devil chronicles the process by which the ugly duckling Ruth achieves high-tech revenge against her faithless husband Bobbo and his mistress Mary Fisher, a writer of popular romances who is "small and pretty and delicately formed, prone to fainting and weeping and sleeping with men while pretending that she doesn't." Through an elaborate scheme involving constantly changing identities and egregious acts of computer fraud, Ruth brings about Bobbo's financial ruin and subsequent imprisonment for embezzlement, while she personally acquires wealth and success through her more legitimate business endeavors. Her ultimate revenge against the guilty pair, however, is her becoming Mary Fisher by means of plastic surgery. Ironically, by doing so she becomes, both literally and figuratively, her own worst enemy.

Weldon's concluding fragment employs the figure of chiasmus to indicate the constantly evolving, and devolving, nature of Ruth's identity as she changes not only names but also the conventional character types that she enacts through the course of the narrative. She is first presented as a tragicomic variant of the pharmakos, masochistically accepting blame and victimization from her husband, her children, and, ultimately, her idol Mary Fisher.

Yet while Northrop Frye dictates that ironic comedy requires "driving out the pharmakos from the point of view from society," Weldon's woebegone scapegoat turns the table on her persecutors. As Bobbo abandons her, she experiences a moment of enlightenment and embraces as her new identity the diabolical character he attributes to her: "Self-knowledge and reason run through my veins: the cold slow blood of the she-devil." This shift in Ruth's subject position, together with her new, secret self-consciousness, marks her evolution into the eiron. In this comic figure, she is empowered as she accumulates worldly experience, material wealth, and self-esteem through her adventures as she avenges herself on the self-deceived Bobbo and Mary. Although she achieves enviable material and personal successes, Ruth is nevertheless unwilling or unable to accept the ironic adage that living well is the best revenge, and she embarks on an inevitably self-defeating and self-erasing strategy, that of becoming the very object of her own wrath.

As she is externally transformed through plastic surgery into the physical image of Mary Fisher, she is simultaneously transformed mentally as she unconsciously assumes the romance writer's self-deceptive world view. The final chapter serves as Ruth's apologia, in which she triumphantly boasts of all she has accomplished, the usurpation not only of the now-dead Mary's outward form but also her wealth, her social contacts, and her lovers, including the broken Bobbo. In her smug superiority, however, Ruth reveals her own self-deception. In the strangest of comic turns, the eiron has subsumed the alazon and thus has turned ridiculously—and even pathetically—serious.

The Life and Loves of a She-Devil would seem to validate the argument of The Anatomy of Criticism that irony is the polar opposite of romance. Weldon's novel is not, however, merely a clever deployment of Frye's flow charts of modes and mythoi. Rather, through this examination of the complex and overlapping relationship between the female eiron and the female alazon, Weldon anatomizes the self-deception afflicting women who relentlessly internalize not only the falsehoods presented by the purveyors of romantic fiction but also the limited and limiting gender roles that the genre supports and attempts to reify. Through Ruth's eiron phase, her ability to form community with other women, although motivated, ironically, by nothing more recondite than her obsessive desire for revenge, nevertheless allows her to escape her initial abjection and results in personal and economic gain for herself and for the women around her. But although Ruth is aware that "Mary Fisher did a wicked thing" in offering false hopes and dreams to her readers, she is herself unable to eschew such chimera. Subsequently, she rejects what she perceives to be "the muddy flood of purgatory wastes" of cooperation with other women in order to pursue illusionary glamors "flickering and dangerous with hell-fire."

Late in the novel Ruth surreptitiously observes the daughter that she abandoned long before. Noting that Nicola lives and works with, rather than against, other women, she assesses her with disdain: "She will never make a she-devil." Ruth fails to see that Nicola, having found an alternative to the deceptions of romance fiction, has no need to be a "she-devil." For readers who read Weldon's multifaceted irony clearly, it is apparent that Ruth has chosen the wrong plot upon which to structure her metafiction.