Achievements
With the publication of her first novels in the late 1960’s, Angela Carter received wide recognition and acclaim in Great Britain for blending gothic and surreal elements with
vivid portrayals of urban sufferers and survivors. She was awarded the John Llewellyn
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Rhys Memorial Prize for The Magic Toyshop and the Somerset Maugham Award for Several Perceptions. Critics have praised her wit, inventiveness, eccentric characters, descriptive wealth, and strongly sustained narrative while sometimes questioning her depth of
purpose and suggesting a degree of pretentiousness. Her imaginative transformation of
folkloric elements and examination of their mythic impact on sexual relationships began
to be fully appreciated on the appearance of The Bloody Chamber, and Other Stories, which received the Cheltenham Festival of Literature Award. Nights at the Circus, recipient of the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, helped to establish firmly for Carter a growing transatlantic reputation as an extravagant stylist of the Magical Realist school. Following her untimely death in 1992—which enabled her establishment in the syllabus of British
universities traditionally reluctant to venerate living writers—Carter was immediately
hailed as the most important English fantasist of her generation. Her critical writings, which add a robust and sometimes scathing rhetoric to the lucid prose of her fiction, also attracted new attention.
Biography
Angela Olive Stalker was born in Eastbourne, Sussex, England, on May 7, 1940. After
working as a journalist from 1958 to 1961 in Croyden, Surrey, she attended Bristol Uni-
versity, from which she received a bachelor’s degree in English literature in 1965. While married to Paul Carter between 1960 and 1972, she traveled widely and lived for several
years in Japan. From 1976 to 1978, she served as Arts Council of Great Britain Fellow in Creative Writing at Sheffield University. She was a visiting professor at Brown University, the University of Texas, Austin, and the University of Iowa. She spent the last years of her life in London, living with Mark Pearce, the father of her son Alexander, who was born in 1983. She died of lung cancer in London on February 16, 1992.
Analysis
The search for self and for autonomy is the underlying theme of most of Angela
Carter’s fiction. Her protagonists, usually described as bored or in some other way de-
tached from their lives, are thrust into unknown landscapes or embark on picaresque journeys in which they encounter representatives of a vast variety of human experience and
suffering. These encountered characters are often grotesques or exaggerated parodies
reminiscent of those found in the novels of Charles Dickens or such southern gothic writers as Flannery O’Connor. They also sometimes exhibit the animalistic or supernatural
qualities of fairy-tale characters. The protagonists undergo voluntary or, more often,
forced submission to their own suppressed desires. By internalizing the insights gained
through such submission and vicariously from the experiences of their antagonists and
comrades or lovers, the protagonists are then able to garner some control over their own destinies. This narrative structure is borrowed from the classic folktales and fairy tales with which Carter has been closely associated. Carter does not merely retell such tales in 63
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modern dress; rather, she probes and twists the ancient stories to illuminate the underlying hierarchical structures of power and dominance, weakness and submission.
In addition to the folkloric influence, Carter draws from a variety of other writers, most notably Lewis Carroll, Jonathan Swift, the Marquis de Sade, and William Blake. The
rather literal-minded innocent abroad in a nightmarish wonderland recalls both Alice and Gulliver, and Carter acknowledges, both directly and obliquely, her borrowings from
Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726).
She was also influenced by the Swiftian tool of grotesque parody used in the service of
satire. It was through Swiftian glasses that she read Sade. While deploring the depreda-
tions on the human condition committed by both the victims and victimizers in Sade’s
writings, she interprets these as hyperbolic visions of the actual social situation, and she employs in her novels derivatively descriptive situations for their satiric shock value. Finally, the thematic concerns of Blake’s visionary poetry—the tension between the contra-
rieties of innocence and experience, rationality and desire—are integral to Carter’s outlook. The energy created by such tension creates the plane on which Carter’s protagonists can live most fully. In Blake’s words and in Carter’s novels, “Energy is Eternal Delight.”
Although Carter’s landscapes range from London in the 1960’s ( The Magic Toyshop, Several Perceptions, Love) to a postapocalyptic rural England ( Heroes and Villains), a sometime-in-the-future South America ( The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman), a United States in which the social fabric is rapidly disintegrating ( The Passion of New Eve), and London and Russia at the beginning of the twentieth century ( Nights at the Circus), certain symbolic motifs appear regularly in her novels. Carter is particularly intrigued by the possibilities of roses, wedding dresses, swans, wolves, tigers, bears, vampires, mirrors, tears, and vanilla ice cream. Menacing father figures, prostitute mothers, and a kaleidoscope of circus, fair, and Gypsy folk inhabit most of her landscapes. It is un-fair, however, to reduce Carter’s novels to a formulaic mode. She juggles traditional and innovative elements with a sometimes dazzling dexterity and is inevitably a strong
storyteller.
The Magic Toyshop
At the opening of The Magic Toyshop, fifteen-year-old Melanie is entranced with her budding sexuality. She dresses up in her absent mother’s wedding gown to dance on the
lawn in the moonlight. Overwhelmed by her awakening knowledge and the immensities
of possibility that the night offers, she is terrified and climbs back into her room by the childhood route of the apple tree—shredding her mother’s gown in the process. Her return to childhood becomes catastrophic when a telegram arrives announcing the death of
Melanie’s parents in a plane crash. Melanie, with her younger brother and sister, is thrust from a safe and comfortable existence into the constricted and terrifying London household of her Uncle Philip Flower, a toy maker of exquisite skill and sadistically warped sensibility. He is a domestic tyrant whose Irish wife, Margaret, was inexplicably struck dumb 64
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on her wedding day. The household is also inhabited by Margaret’s two younger brothers,
Finn and Francie Jowle; the three siblings form a magic “circle of red people” that is
alternately seductive and repulsive to Melanie.
Uncle Philip is a creator of the mechanical. He is obsessed by his private puppet the-
ater, his created world to which he enslaves the entire household. In aligning herself with the Jowle siblings, Melanie asserts her affirmation of life but becomes aware of the
thwarted and devious avenues of survival open to the oppressed. The growing, but ambiv-
alent, attraction between her and Finn is premature and manipulated by Uncle Philip.
Even the love that holds the siblings together is underlined by a current of incest. Finn is driven to inciting his uncle to murder him in order to effect Philip’s damnation. The crisis arises when Uncle Philip casts Melanie as Leda in a puppet extravaganza. Her symbolic
rape by the immense mechanical swan and Finn’s subsequent destruction of the puppet re-
lease an orgiastic, yet purifying, energy within the “cir
cle of red people.” The ensuing wrath of Uncle Philip results in the conflagration and destruction of the house. Finn and Melanie are driven out, Adam-and-Eve-like, to face a new world “in a wild surmise.”
In fairy-tale fashion, Melanie is threatened by an evil father figure, protected by the
good mother, and rescued by the young hero. Even in this early novel, however, Carter
skews and claws at the traditional fabric. The Jowle brothers, grimy, embittered, and
twisted by their victimization at the hands of Philip Flower, are as dangerous as they are endangered. They are unable to effect their own freedom. Melanie’s submission to Uncle
Philip’s swan catalyzes not only her own rescue but also, indeed, the release of the Jowle siblings. Melanie’s sacrifice breaks the magic spell that held the Jowles imprisoned.
Several Perceptions
Several Perceptions, Carter’s third novel, depends less on such folkloric structure. In this novel, her evocation of the late 1960’s counterculture is so finely detailed that she manages to illuminate the thin line between the idealism and solipsism of that era, without denigrating the former or disguising the latter. The clarity of observation is achieved by viewing the culture through the eyes of Joseph Harker, a classic dropout. He has failed at the university, been dumped by his Jane Austen-reading lover, is disheartened by his job caring for dying old men, despises the contentment of his hippie peers, and, early in the novel, bungles a suicide attempt. Joseph, like his biblical namesake, is a dreamer of
dreams: He dreams in the violent images of Vietnam War atrocities, the self-immolation
of Buddhist monks, and assassinations. His schizophrenic perceptions are colored by
shattered images from the books in his room, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Anne Gilchrist’s Life of William Blake (1863), by memories of his grandfather, visions of his psychiatrist, the purring of his pregnant cat, Anne Blossom’s custard, and the vanilla ice-cream breasts of Mrs. Boulder.
The novel narrates Joseph’s slow crawl back into the world of the living. Despite a
tough-minded acknowledgment of the grubby and quite desolate lives of the characters,
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the novel is written with a gentle touch and ends on an affirmative note. The Christmas
party that takes place at the end of the novel, in which Joseph symbolically reenters society, stands as a classic description of a hippie-generation party, just as F. Scott Fitzgerald’s description of Gatsby’s party stands as the image for the flapper generation. The connected-disconnected flow, the costumes, the easy sexuality, the simple goodwill, the silli-ness, and the sometimes inspired personal insights are vividly re-created. Carter wrote the novel as this lifestyle was being played out, and it is much to her credit that she succumbed neither to sentimentality nor to parody.
Science-fiction novels
Parody and satire are, however, major elements in Carter’s three novels that are often
classified as science fiction or science fantasy. In Heroes and Villains, The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman, and The Passion of New Eve, Carter’s protagonists dwell in societies that are described in metaphysical iconography. Carter seems to be questioning the nature and values of received reality. Marianne’s world in Heroes and Villains is divided into high-technology enclaves containing Professors, the Soldiers who protect them, and the
Workers who serve them. Outside the enclaves, in the semijungle/semicesspool wilder-
nesses, dwell the tribes of nomadic Barbarians and the Out-people, freaks created by nature gone awry. Marianne, the daughter of a Professor, motivated mainly by boredom, escapes
from her enclave with Jewel, a young Barbarian chieftain, during a raid.
In The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman, the aging Desiderio narrates his heroic exploits as a young man when he saved his City during the Reality War. Doctor
Hoffman besieges the City with mirages generated from his Desire Machines. Sent by the
Minister of Determination to kill Doctor Hoffman, Desiderio is initiated into the wonders of desires made manifest, Nebulous Time, and the juggled samples of cracked and broken
reality. His guide is Hoffman’s daughter, Albertina, who appears to Desiderio as an an-
drogynous ambassador, a black swan, the young valet of a vampiric count, and finally as
his one true love, the emanation of his whole desire.
The United States in The Passion of New Eve is torn apart by racial, class, and sexual conflicts. Evelyn, a young British teacher, travels through this landscape and is re-created.
The unconsciously exploitative and disinterestedly sadistic narrator suffers a wild revenge when captured by an Amazon-like community of women. He is castrated, resexed, raped,
forcibly wed and mated, and ultimately torn from his wife’s love by a gang of murderous
Puritanical boys.
Each of the protagonists of these novels experiences love but seems to be able to
achieve wholeness only through the destruction of the loved one. Symbolically, the pro-
tagonists seem to consume the otherness of the loved ones, reincorporating these manifest desires back into their whole beings. Each, however, is left alone at the end of the novel.
Symbolic imagery of a harshly violent though rollicking nature threatens to over-
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close to reality (for example, in The Passion of New Eve, the new Eve is incorporated into a polygamous group that closely resembles the so-called Manson family). Although some
critics have decried Carter’s heavy reliance on fantasies, visions, and zany exuberance, it is probably these qualities that have appealed to a widening audience. It must also be acknowledged that Carter continued, within her magical realms, to probe and mock the re-
pressive nature of institutionalized relationships and sexual politics.
Nights at the Circus
With Nights at the Circus, Carter wove the diverse threads of her earlier novels into brilliantly realized tapestry. This novel has two protagonists—Fevvers, the Cockney Venus, a winged, six-foot, peroxide-blond aerialist who was found “hatched out of a bloody great egg” on the steps of a benevolent whorehouse (her real name is Sophia), and Jack
Walser, an American journalist compiling a series of interviews titled “Great Humbugs of the World,” who joins Colonel Kearney’s circus, the Ludic Game, in order to follow
Fevvers and who is “not hatched out, yet . . . his own shell don’t break, yet.” It is 1899, and a New World is about to break forth. The ambivalent, tenuous attraction between Fevvers
and Walser is reminiscent of that between Melanie and Finn in The Magic Toyshop or Marianne and Jewel in Heroes and Villains, but it is now mature and more subtly complex.
The picaresque journeyings from London to St. Petersburg and across the steppes of Rus-
sia recall the travels in The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman and The Passion of New Eve but are more firmly grounded in historical landscapes. The magic in this novel comes in the blurring between fact and fiction, the intense unbelievability of actual reality and the seductive possibilities of imaginative and dreamlike visions. Are Fevvers’s wings real or contrived? Do the clowns hide behind their makeup and wigs or only become actu-alized when they don their disguises? As in most Magical Realist fiction, Carter is probing the lines between art and artifice, creation and generation, in a raucous and lush style.
Here, after a long hiatus from the rather bleak apocalyptic visions of her 1970’s novels, in which autonomous selfhood is achieved only through a kind of self-cannibalization of
destroyed love, Angela Carter envisions a route to self-affirmation that allows sexual love to exist. With shifting narra
tive focuses, Carter unfolds the rebirths of Walser and Fevvers through their own and each other’s eyes. Walser’s shells of consciousness are cracked as he becomes a “first-of-May” clown, the waltzing partner to a tigress, the Human Chicken, and, in losing consciousness, an apprentice shaman to a primitive Finno-Urgic tribe. As
star of Kearney’s circus, Fevvers is the toast of European capitals: an impregnable, seductive freak, secure in and exploitative of her own singularity. On the interminable train trek through Siberia, she seems to mislay her magnificence and invulnerability. She becomes
less a freak and more a woman, but she remains determined to hatch Walser into her New
Man. As he had to forgo his socially conditioned consciousness in order to recognize
Sophia, however, so she has to allow him to hatch himself. It is as confident seers that Sophia/Fevvers and Jack Walser love at the close of the novel.
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Wise Children
The fact that Carter produced only one novel during the last eight years of her life has more to do with the claims made on her time and attention by her son Alexander than the
depredations of the cancer that killed her. This was a sore point—her much younger part-
ner, Alexander’s father, did not keep promises he made to take primary responsibility for child care—and some of that soreness is evident in the pages of the satiric comedy Wise Children, in which disowned and abandoned children are extravagantly featured. The story comprises a century-spanning memoir written by Dora Chance, one of the “lucky
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