Angela Carter (1940 – 1992)

“The amazing thing about her, for me, was that someone who looked so much like the Fairy Godmother […] should actually be so much like the Fairy Godmother” (obituary by Margaret Atwood)

You cannot, in the end, separate the woman and the writer. One of Angela Carter’s most impressive and humorous achievements was that she evolved this part to play. How to be the Woman Writer. Not that she was wearing a mask, exactly; it was more a matter of refusing to observe any decorous distinction between art and life. (Sage 1994: 1)

Angela Carter’s life […] is the story of someone walking a tightrope. It is all happening ‘on the edge’, in no-man’s land, among the debris left by past convictions. (Sage 1994: 4)

She was born subversive. She had an instinctive feeling for the other side, which included also the underside. (obituary by Margaret Atwood)

• Novels (Shadow Dance, 1966; The Magic Toyshop, 1967; Several Perceptions, 1968; Heroes and Villains, 1969; Love, 1971; The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman, 1972; The Passion of New Eve, 1977; Nights at the Circus, 1984; Wise Children, 1991) • Short-story collections (Fireworks, 1974; The Bloody Chamber, 1979) • Non-fiction, essays (The Sadeian Woman, 1979; Expletives Deleted, 1992) • Children’s stories • Radio plays •Translation of fairy tales (The Fairy Tales of Charles Perrault, 1977; The Virago Book of Fairy Tales, 1990)

While her non-fiction, short-fiction, children’s fiction and novels all interconnect, Carter was always interested, too, in blurring the boundaries between them, challenging our perceptions of what we mean, for example, by a short story or a novel. (Peach 1998: 3)

• Persistence of Carter’s themes; kinship between the early novels and the last, carnivalesque books. • There’s a recurrent Carter plot from these years [the 60s] which, if you translated it into more or less realistic terms, would go like this: a middle-class virgin bewitched and appalled by the fictions of femininity falls in love with a working-class boy, a dandified, dressed-up tramp who’s meant to make sense of her desires, but doesn’t. However, the material is not represented in a realist way, in steady, middle-distance focus. • What applies to people and plot applies to setting as well. Carter concentrates on the decay of houses, and municipal parks and gardens, to the point where you can glimpse a shamelessly symbolic setting – the Gothic mansion, the weedy Eden of paradise lost.

(Sage 1994: 17)

Carter’s recurrent tropes • “Texts that specialize in liminal pleasures – pleasures of the threshold” (Sage 1994: 18): between dread and bliss, fear and desire • Undefined identities, vagrant point of view: gender and species - METAMORPHOSIS, hybridity • Between reality and imagination, fact and fiction • Performativity: puppets, puppet masters, theatre, dressing up • Visual imagery: mirrors and lenses • Intertextuality and originality • (New) Gothic • Feminist writer? • Meat and the body

Liminality “For the reader there is the exhilarating sensation of recognizing that the binary oppositions are themselves being called into question” (Sage 1994: 19) • Masculine / feminine • Animal / human • Reality / illusion • Fact / fiction • Literature / philosophy • Original / copy • Art / life

GENDER “Apocalypse of gender” (Michelle Ryan Sautour) “Genre and gender tensions” (Sara Martin) The Passion of New Eve cfr. Virginia Woolf’s Orlando Gender vs. sex; gender as a cultural construct; Simone de Beauvoir; Judith Butler (Gender Trouble and performativity)

SPECIES The human/animal hybrid and metamorphosis The Magic Toyshop; Nights at the Circus; The Bloody Chamber “A body of fiction which problematizes, interrogates and expands the boundary between humans and other animals” (Mary Pollock) Cfr. G. Deleuze’s divenir animal and J. Derrida’s L’Animal que donc je suis

BODIES AND BODY PARTS: MEAT

Female bodies being reduced to meat; meat as a metaphor for bodies that are being consumed (as food; sexually; visually). Everything is reduced to the same when subjected to the ‘dominant gaze’. - cfr. VISUAL IMAGERY The Bloody Chamber and The Sadeian Woman (both 1979): Deconstruction of cultural constructs about women (latent content)

Feminism and ambivalence “I don’t see the point of feminism” “I don’t think I’d be the person I am if it weren’t for the women’s movement in the Sixties” (Wisker 2003: 71)

Freaks, hybrids, queer and camp: “culture as a dressing-up box”; “in Carter’s fiction, people dress up (or down) to play themselves” (Sage 1994: 8-9). PERFORMATIVITY. “The convention whereby the theatre and illegitimacy were linked provided Carter with a means of developing illegitimacy in its various guises as a theme” (A. Findlay). Donna Haraway: “ontological choreographies”; ‘kinetic' writing and mobile identities

Structuralism and poststructuralism: labels and definitions [The Minister] believed that the city – which he took as a microcosm of the universe – contained a finite set of objects and a finite set of their combinations and therefore a list could be made of all possible distinct forms which were logically viable. These could be counted, organized into a conceptual framework and so form a kind of check list for the verification of all phenomena, instantly available by means of an information retrieval system. (The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman)

Gender and genre: a correlation? Hybrid characters and mobile identities are always featured in texts that question the definition of literary genre. REWRITINGS, INTERTEXTUALITY, ORIGINALITY Ours is a highly individualized culture, with a great faith in the work of art as a unique one-off, and the artist as an original, a godlike and inspired creator of unique one-offs. But fairy tales are not like that, nor are their makers. Who first invented meatballs? In what country? Is there a definitive recipe for potato soup? Think in terms of the domestic arts. ‘This is how I make potato soup’ (cfr. Sage 1994: 43

The Bloody Chamber

HYBRIDITY

A hybrid collection in terms of style, form, structure and content. “A new literary hybrid admirably suited to her uncategorizable genius” (Simpson).

NEW GOTHIC “A Gothic mode but with narratives suggested by traditional western European fairy tales”; “an exotic new hybrid which would carry her voice to a wider audience” (Simpson) Gothic tales provide opportunities for social critique. Through the ostensibly sound surface of society creep and leak contradictions and alternatives which undercut that neat surface. These contradictions provide an opportunity to analyze and criticize relationship of power and money affecting gender, identity, and the way people live their lives. (Wisker 1997: 18)

My intention was not to do ‘versions’ or, as the American edition of the book said, horribly, ‘adult’ fairy tales, but to extract the latent content from the traditional stories and to use it as the beginnings of new stories. LATENT CONTENT: cfr. The Sadeian Woman

Interview by Anna Katsavos (1988): DEMYTHOLOGISING BUSINESS “to show what certain configurations of imagery in our society, in our culture, really stand for, what they mean, underneath the kind of semireligious coating that makes people not particularly want to interphere with them”.

“The Bloody Chamber” • De Sade • Visual imagery; dominant (male) and conceptualizing gaze (p. 6, 11, 13, 14, 17, 28). The girl is saved by a BLIND piano player: “He was blind, of course” (p. 20). • Woman as meat; imagery of meat and leather (p. 8, 11, 12, 13, 29 – slaughterhouses are mentioned –, 32, 33, 39.

“The Courtship of Mr Lyon” • Intertextuality: Alice in Wonderland (p. 45) • Humans and animals: human gaze on animals, animal gaze on humans. “He drew back his head and gazed at her with his green, inscrutable eyes, in which she saw her face repeated twice […]. Then, without another word, he sprang from the room and she saw, with an indescribable shock, he went on all fours” (p. 50). “How was it she had never noticed before that his agate eyes were equipped with lids, like those of a man? Was it because she had only looked at her own face, reflected there?” (p. 54). “And then it was no longer a lion in her arms but a man” (p. 54-55).

Derrida: seeing oneself being seen by the animal and the limits of the human Before the cat that looks at me naked, would I be ashamed like a beast that no longer has the sense of its nudity? Or, on the contrary, like a man who retains the sense of his nudity? Who am I, therefore? Who is it that I am (following)? Whom should this be asked of if not of the other? And perhaps of the cat itself? […] And from the vantage point of this being-there-before-me [the animal] can allow itself to be looked at, no doubt, but also [...] it can look at me. It has its point of view regarding me. The point of view of the absolute other, and nothing will have ever given me more food for thinking through this absolute alterity of the neighbor or of the next(-door) than these moments when I see myself seen naked under the gaze of a cat. (The Animal that Therefore I Am, trad. David Wills).

“The Tiger’s Bride” • Animal/human liminality. Questioning of what is traditionally considered to be ‘proper to man’: language, rationality, clothes, crying. p. 68-69: “mute understanding” and the horses’ speech. p. 70: women and animals are denied rationality in patriarchal cultures. p. 72: nudity and human pride.

“Puss-in-Boots” • “The first story I wrote that was supposed to be really funny, out-and-out funny” • Italian commedia dell’arte, farce

“The Erl-King” • P. 96: style (see also “The Company of Wolves” • p. 98, 103: dominant gaze and bodies as meat • p. 99 – 100: gender hybridity – “he is an excellent housewife”; “he is the tender butcher who showed me how the price of flesh is love: skin the rabbit, he says! Off come all my clothes”. • p. 102: intertextuality. Alice in Wonderland again.

“The Lady of the House of Love” • Gothic tropes with gender reversal -> animals and men become meat for a woman.

“The Company of Wolves” • Style: lyrical language and rythm. • Human / animal metamorphoses. • Body (esp. female body) as meat; possibility to escape female passivity and ‘meatification’ (p. 138: “the girl burst out laughing: she knew she was nobody’s meat”).

“Wolf-Alice” • Becoming human: self-awareness (mirror, footprints p. 147), time (femininity!), clothing (p. 146) language, rationality. “A kind of wild reasoning” (p. 144).

The Bloody Chamber: 2007 Vintage Edition Critical works: Peach, L., 1998, Angela Carter, MAcMillan Press LDT, London. Roberts, S., 2008, The Bloody Chamber – York Notes Advanced, York Press, London. Sage, L. 1994, Angela Carter, Northcote House Publishers Ltd, Plymouth. Wisker, G., [2003] 2007, Angela Carter – A Beginner’s Guide, Hodder & Stoughton, London.