Critical Fictions/Fictional Critiques: Angela Carter and Decadent lconographies of Woman

269 Pages·2016·15.63 MB·English

by  Margaret K. Tonkin

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ìo
Gritical Fictions/Fictional Gritiques:
Angela Carter and Decadent lconographies of Woman
Margatet Kathleen Tonkin
Submitted fot the Degree of Doctot of Philosophy
Discipline of English
Univetsity of Adelaide
January 2007
Gontents
Declaration.
Acknowledgements v
Section L. Introduction: the Question of fetishism. T
Section 2: Olympia's Revenge 46
Section 3: The Muse Exhumed 87
Albertine/a the Ambiguous... .97
The "Poe-etics" of Decomposition: "The Cabinet of Edgar Allan Poe" and the Reading-Effect.............. 127
Musing on Baudelaire: "Black Venus" and the Poet as Dead Beloved 145
Section 4: Dialectical Dames: Manifesting the Absurdity of the Femme fatale. ...........174
Whose fantasy is the femme? 174
Thesis and Antithesis in The Sadeiqn l(oman 191
There Never was a Woman like Leilah: The Passion of New Eve 206
Conclusion 240
Works Cited. 245
ll
Abstract
Doctor of Philosophy: Margatet Kathleen Tonkin
Title: Critical Fictions/Fictional Critiques: Angela Cartet and Decadent
Iconographies of Woman
This thesis examines conflictìng claims made about the fictron of British femlnist wtiter
Angela Carter. The first claim, made by cdtics such as Bdtzolakis, Clatk,I{appeler and Dwotkin,
is that Carter's intettextual allusions to canonical male-authored texts constitute a form of litetary
fetishism that is antithetical to her professed feminism. The second claim, made by Cafier herself,
is that her frction is a form of literary criticism. In otdet to evaluate the validity of each of these
claims, the thesis examines Carter's intertextual allusions to that sttand of the European, male-
authored canon commonly termed the Decadence, which stretches from Hoffmannn through to
Proust, and which is characterised by a heavily feushrzed representation of \7oman. The thesis
performs a series of readings rn which Carter's fictions ate juxtaposed with the canonical texts to
which she alludes, and which also situate het fictional cdtique within the history of the critical
tradrtions and debates surtounding these texts. The thesis examines het intettextual allusion to
texts by Floffmann, Proust, Poe, Baudelaire and VilIiets de L'Isle-Adam, with sections on the
representation of \7oman as doll, Muse andy' mme fatale. I conclude that Carter' s deployment of
aspects of the decadent iconography of \X/oman is an i::onic, highly self-conscious feminist
strategy, which can best be undetstood as an instance of \X/altet Benjamin's dialectical image.
ut
Declaration
This work contains no matedal which has been accepted fot the award of any other degree or
rliFloma in any university or other tertJaty institution and, to the best of my knowledge and belief,
contains no material previously published ot wtitten by another person, except where due
reference has been made in the text.
I grve consent to this copy of my thesis, when deposited in the University Llbtaty,being avatfable
for loan and photocopying,
The authot acknowledges that copyright of published wotks contained withrn this thesis (as listed
below) resides with the copyright holdets of those works:
"The 'Poe-etics' of Decomposition: ,\ngela Carter's 'The Cabinet of Edgat A.llan Poe' and the
Reading-Effect" lYomen's Studies: an Inrerdiscþlinary Joarnal,33,1, (2004): 1,-21,.
"r\lbertine/a the Ambþous: Angela Carter's Reconhgutation of Matcel Ptoust's Modernist
Muse" ReuisitingArugela Carter: Texß, Conlexß, Inturtexß. Ed. Rebecca Munford. Houndmills,
Basingstoke: Paþave Macmillan, 2006. 64-87.
"Musing on Baudelaire: Angela Cattet's 'Black Venus' and the Poet as Dead Beloved."
LIT: Literatare Interþretation Theory. 1,7 (2006): 1,-23.
M I(athleen Tonkin
January 2007
IV
Acknowledgements
The writing of this thesis has been a protracted and torturous business, and I could not have
completed it without the suppott of many individuals. First and fotemost my thanks ate due to
my supewisors, Professot Penny Boumelha and -,\ssociate Professor Amanda Nettelbeck, for
their ntellectual guidance, critical aculnen, and continutng optimism that, despite all evidence to
the contrary, I would one day finish the task, I would also like to express my gratitude to my
supervisor during two years spent on remote candidatute rn Oxford, Mrs. Patricia Ingham, who
has continued to read drafts and to offer encouragement even when het official duties as
supewisor were over. Thanks are due to members of the English Depafiment at the Univetsity
of -Adelaide, especially Dr Heather l(er, Dr Rosemary Moote and Dt Sue Hosking, fot their
unfailing support of my project, despite its endlessly deferted conclusion, Thanks also to Shirley
Ball and Sue Mlezcko of the English Department office, who have supplied both practical help
and good humour.
I would also like to thank my brother, Petet Tonkin, for helping to locate texts and always being
wilLng to share the angst.
Frnally, vety special thanks to Chen '\u and Oscat.
Section 1. lntroduction: the Question of fetishism
"r\ felish is a story masquetading as an object" (Stoller 155)
Fetishism is a very sticþ subject. Äs Baudrillard obsewes, "the tetm "fetishism" almost
has a life of its own. Instead of functioning as a metalanguage for the magical thinking of others,
it turns against those r.vho use it, and surreptitrously exposes their own maglcal thinking"(50).
A.ttempts to critique representations of fetishism tend to become enmeshed in replicating that
long-drawn out and repetitive Lngering over Lngutstrc and visual detarl that in itself constitutes
the fetishisttc. This tendency of fetishism to rebound on those who set out to expose it makes a
theoretical or fictional feminist criuque of the fetishization of women in cultutal fotms doubly
problematic. Neither Angela Carter's ptofessed feminism, nor her claim to be engaged in an
investigation rnto the social fiction of femininity, has staunched a flow of accusations by other
feminists that het writing reinscribes the misogynistic, highly fetishized tepresentations of women
that are endemic r.vithin patùarchal cultures.
Carter's labyrinthine intettextuality has also rendeted het r.'ulnerable to the charge of
indulging in literary fetishism, of being "parasitic upon... empty styles" in Robert Clark's
dismissive words (156), Her ptocliviry for makrng intettextual allusions to those strands of the
male-authored literary canon, such as the Symbolists and thefru de siècle Decadents, which are
saturated by a fetishistic iconography of femininity, has futthet compounded het offence in the
eyes of m^ny feminist critics. Fot example, Christina Britzolakis, in her essay "Angela Cattet's
Fetishism" suggests that Catter's fiction comes perilously close to participating in the masculine
scenalios of fetishism that sheis purpotedly deconstructing (53). Btitzolakis clarms that Cartet's
fetrshism is enacted at the level of representation, particularly the representations of femininity as
spectacle that permeate het fiction, and also at the linguistic level. Indeed, she posits an
interelation between these two levels, seetng the objectifrcation of women as spectacle as
inseparable from the highly figurative language in which this objectification is conveyed, a
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language "saturated with sensuous detail, with cotuscating surfaces and ornate façades"(45)
Hence Britzolakis proposes that Catter's use of language, because it "foregtounds its own
spectacular stylistic effects", is itself a form of fetishism, a "fetishism of the sþifret"(47):
An intensely specular fìgurative eûergy turns language into a matter of collecting, hoatding,
displayrng, fondling, possessing and contjnually looking, an activity at once clinical and
museological.... \ùZords are flaunted as objects; disctete irnages are isolated from their context.
Although Carter describes herself as an allegorist, hete, as elsewhere, she writes as an unabashed
female fetishist; and it is the conjunction, as well as the disjunction, between these two terms,
fetishism and allegory, that requiles closet scrutiny. (46)
,{.lthough her thesis is infinitely more complex and subtle, Btitzolakis' accusation contains
an echo of charges laid earher by anti-pornography feminists, particularly in tefetence to Tbe
Bloo$t Cbamber and Tþe S adeian ltr/oman, that Catier ends up by teduplicating the pornographic
objectrficatron of women that she is ostensibly ctitiquing. This point is made ttenchantly by
Patricia Duncker in het review of Tþe B/ooþ Chamber. !7hilst lauding Carter's genuinely odginal
style, and her ambition to re-imagrne "the atchetypes of the imaginauon" through her revision of
the fafuy tale, Duncker asserts that Carter ends up teptoducingra;ther than altering "th" original,
deeply, rigrdly sexist psychology of the etotic"(6). Äs fat as Duncker is concetned, Catter's
attempt to rewri.te the tales from a female perspective and tnfuse their etotic component with
female desire fails because she does not imbue them with an autonomous female sexuality, only
"female erotic rngenuiry" in response to masculine sexual aggression. "I would suggests that all
we are watching, beautifully packaged and unveiled," Duncker concludes, "is the dtual drsrobing
of the willing victim of pornography"(7). Avis Lewallen expresses a similar disquiet about the
ambivalent representation of female sexuality n The B/ooþ Chamber. Although she acknowledges
the ironic discourse that Cartet sets in motion by forcrng the teader to read het tevisions of the
tales against their famthar written precedents, Lewallen still contends that the tales ultrmately
rernscdbe the Sadeian dualism of victot/victim. She finds the narrative strategy of rnducrng the
readet to identi$r and sympathize with the masochism of the female victrm of the title story
especially troubling, objectìng in panicular to the seductive quality of Carter's wtitìng (151,-152).
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-As the readet will have noted, these ctitics unanimously hnd against Carter both
thematically and on the basis of her ornate prose style. Het habitual use of figuratrve language, or
as Bdtzolal¡rs would have it, her "fetishism of the sþifrer"(47) is seen somehow to rendet the
fetishistic images of women that pepper het fiction even more teptehensible. The singling out of
Catter's language usage as particulat grounds for offence by these critics is revealing. Ate they
suggesting that fetishized images of women presented in a platner, more litetal prose style, devoid
of the extravag nt lexicon, the zeugmas, oxymorons, and other figutes of speech that chancterize
Catter's writing, would be more acceptable? Can the alleged fetishizauon of women in Catter's
fiction be separated from her alleged fetishrzation of language? As far as her wtitng style is
concerned, Carter has openly described herself as a mannedst incapable of writing "plain,
transparent prose," even though she admires such writing (Haffenden 91). She claims that het
mannerism is simply a response to the tenor of the times, which, after Cyri. Connolly, she
describes as "closing trme in the Gardens of the West"(Haffenden 91). Herein, I will atgue, lies
the explanation as to why her highly figurative and ornamented sfyle evokes such a hostde
response from these ctitics.
In Reading in Detai/: AeslheÍics and the Feminine, Naomi Schot demonstrates that whrlst rn
pre-Renaiss^rtce att the detail was ttaditionally linked to the sacted, since the Renaissance
excessive ornamentation rn all cultural forms has been censured. -According to Schor, the
immensely influential aesthetic theories of Sir Joshua Reynolds and Hegel both sttess that the
ideal of Att is to rmprove upon Natute, to eÍase the natural flaws of matter, which is gendered
femrnrne, by the rmposition of fotm, which is gendered masculine (Schot Reading in Detail 11-22).
In his Discourse on Art Reynolds ptoclaims that the great style rn att is to avoid details, which are
identihed with monstrosity, pathology and pollution. The system of aesthetics that Hegel
expounds further demonizes the detail by associaung excessively ornamented or detailed art with
the withering of cultural forms, that is to say, with decadence. Even Baudelaite, so often called
the father of French Decadence, states "att is nothing but an abstraction and a sactiftce of the
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detail to the whole" (Baudelaire "Salon of 1.846" 149). Schor claims that much of the critical
hostility duected towards realism, natutalism and decadence in the nineteenth century was
provoked by their tendency to focus on the patticular rathet than the general, in deFrance of the
axioms of Neo-Classical aesthetics.
Allegory is also enmeshed rn detail, rn that it always involves a synecdochal substitution of
the parucular lot the general, the part for the whole. It is interesting that Britzolakis identifies the
conjunction of allegory with fetishism in Carter's work as requinng futther scrutiny, given that
both fetishism and allegory hinge on foregtounding the detail whilst gestunng towatds something
other, something that remains unspoken. It is also intetestìng to find that allegory, Iike feushism,
has been linked to decaden ceby at least one critic, In Studies in Euroþean Realìrm Geotg Lukács
denigrated allegory as the exemplary modern forrr', claimrng that the oversþifrcation of
^tt
allegorical detail testrfies to the loss of ttanscendental sþifiers in modetnity, and that allegoty,
like Moderni.sm, denies typicality and desttoys the world's cohetence. From the distinctive
Marxist perspective that Lukács adopts, the rise of modemist allegoty is concomitant with the
decline in the integtity of European cultute that took place as the nineteenth century drew to its
close, and thus concomitant with the advent of the decadent movement.
The rmbdcation of ornamentalism with decadence, and decadence with fetishism, in the
art of the -Aestheuc movement of the late nineteenth century is beyond dispute. The Decadents
coritïavened the tenets of Neo-Classical aesthetics by teverencing the detail, honouring the thing-
rn-itself as rvorthy of contemplation, without requfuing that it necessatily be subsumed into some
greater whole, \Øhilst the most striking and tecogntzable characteristic of Decadent and
Symbolist art is the tdeabzation of atttfice,fn de siècle art also has much in common with the art of
earü.er pedods that are similarly desþated as decadent, such as the Batoque. Lrke the art of the
Baroque period, Symbolist and Decadent art is characterized by extreme embellishmeri.t, Iush and
hyperbolic language and imager/, and an excessive preoccupation with that which is usually
deemed rnsþificant, that is, a fetishism of detail. "Decadence," Schot asserts, "is a pathology of
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the detail" (Reading ìn Detail 3). Commentìng on the essence of literary decadence, Paul Boutget
writes, "a decadent style is one where the unity of the book decomposes to glve v/ay to the
independence of the page, whete the page decomposes to give way to the independence of the
word"(20). There is an obvious homology here between the operations of fetishism and the
decadent style. In both, supposedly insignificant detail has the ability to seduce the subject away
ftom the prescribed lelos of the activity, whethet it is the normative goal of heterosexual
intetcourse or the pursrut of narrative to its ending.
Given the percepuon that feushism, "detailism" (to adopt Schot's neologism) and
decadence are inextricably linked, it is perhaps rnevitable that Carter's foregrounding of the word,
her virtuosic metaphoricity, her ptedilection for the over-wrought and overwritten figure of
speech rather than "plain, transpaïent prose," is read by hostile ctitics as a mark of decadence.
This unstated but implied perception that Cattet's linguistic "detailsm" constitutes a kind of
decadence surfaces most revealingly rn Btitzolakis' claim that her language is "saturated with
sensuous detail, with coruscating sutfaces and ornate façades"(45), and in het comment that in
Carter's writrng "words ate flaunted as objects; discrete images ate isolated ftom their
context"(46).Brítzolakts' phrasing accentuates the erotic quality of the wotd, the sensuality of the
detail that she detects in Carter's writing, and finds so disturbing. Schot, who assetts that thete is
always a link between the detail ot ornament and the erotic, also makes this connection between
detailism and the erotic (Reading in Detail156) . In Decadent litetature, the fetishism of the
sþifier is inseparable from the fetrshism of the signified, and it is this dual fetishization, this
con¡ugated erottcization, which Britzolakrs senses and censutes in Carter's fiction.
Of coutse, Carter's ficuon doeshave affiniues with Decadent litetature: both foregtound
language, and both dwell obsessively on the intensely specularized frgure of \7oman. \ùØhat is at
issue here is whethet the stylistic and themauc affinities between them constitute srmple
tepention unmediated by any analysis, ot whether Carter's citation of this patticulady
misogynistic cultural mode opens up a space in which it can be critiqued. This question has, in
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