Re-Visiting Angela Carter: Texts, Contexts, Intertexts

222 Pages·2006·1.03 MB·English

by  Rebecca Munford

Re-visiting Angela Carter
Texts, Contexts, Intertexts
Edited by
Rebecca Munford
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Re-visiting Angela Carter
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Books by the same author
(Ed. with Stacy Gillis and Gillian Howie) Third Wave Feminism: A Critical
Exploration(2004)
(With Stacy Gillis) Feminism and Popular Culture: Explorations in Post-feminism
(forthcoming)
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Re-visiting Angela Carter
Texts, Contexts, Intertexts
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Edited by 1-
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Rebecca Munford ct -
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Lecturer in 20th and 21st Century Literature on
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Editorial matter, selection and Introduction © Rebecca Munford 2006
All remaining chapters © respective authors 2006
All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this
publication may be made without written permission.
No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted
save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the
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The authors have asserted their rights to be identified as n
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the authors of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and C
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Patents Act 1988. av
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First published 2006 by al
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PHAoLuGnRdAmVilEl sM, BAaCsiMngILstLoAkNe, Hampshire RG21 6XS and oe -
175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 ms
Companies and representatives throughout the world Tro
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ISBN-13: 978–1–4039–9705–0 hardback ersit
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This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully o
managed and sustained forest sources. d t
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A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. en
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data m - li
Re-visiting Angela Carter: texts, contexts, intertexts/edited by Rebecca o
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Munford. ct.
p.cm. ne
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Includes bibliographical references and index. o
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ISBN 1-4039-9705-5 (cloth) ve
1. Carter, Angela, 1940-1992-Criticism and interpretation. 2. Women gra
and literature-England-History-20th century. I. Munford, Rebecca, 1975- al
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II. Title: Re-visiting Angela Carter. w.
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PR6053.A73Z84 2006 w
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Contents
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Foreword vii 3-0
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Jacqueline Pearson 1-
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Acknowledgements xii ct -
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Notes on Contributors xiii eC
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Angela Carter and the Politics of Intertextuality 1 Pal
Rebecca Munford oe -
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1. Convulsive Beauty and Compulsive Desire: et i Tr
The Surrealist Pattern of Shadow Dance 21 k
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Anna Watz Fruchart bli
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2. Something Sacred: Angela Carter, Jean-Luc Godard sitet
and the Sixties 42 ver
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Sarah Gamble o U
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3. Albertine/a the Ambiguous: Angela Carter’s n
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Reconfiguration of Marcel Proust’s Modernist Muse 64 m - li
Maggie Tonkin o
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4. ‘The Other of the Other’: Angela Carter’s n
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‘New-Fangled’ Orientalism 87 ve
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Charlotte Crofts gr
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5. Bubblegum and Revolution: Angela Carter’s Hybrid ww
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Shakespeare 110 o
Julie Sanders al fr
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6. ‘The Margins of the Imaginative Life’: The Abject and ht
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the Grotesque in Angela Carter and Jonathan Swift 135 yri
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Anna Hunt Co
7. ‘Circles of Stage Fire’: Angela Carter, Charles Dickens
and Heteroglossia in the English Comic Novel 158
Robert Duggan
v
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vi Contents
8. Behind Locked Doors: Angela Carter, Horror and
the Influence of Edgar Allan Poe 178
Gina Wisker
Index 199
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Foreword
Jacqueline Pearson
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Believe what you want to believe. What you want to 3-0
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believe is the truth. 1-
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(Angela Carter, Shadow Dance) ct - 2
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In Angela Carter’s first novel, Shadow Dance (1966), the ambiguous o
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Honeybuzzard takes out a ‘small, plastic rose on a coiling rubber stem v
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attached to a bulb [ ... ] he pressed the [ ... ] bulb and an obscene, ridged, al
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pink, tactile, rubber worm leaped out, quivered momentarily, and then e -
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sank back into the crimson nest of plastic petals, detumescent’ (65). In ms
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aa sn ao jvoekl es-osh foupll loitf esrcarlaizpast ioofn l iotefr Waryil lqiaumot aBtliaokne,’s i tw iasr enaisnyg toof rseecxouganliitzye cthoris- ket i Tr
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rupted by ‘the invisible worm’ in “The Sick Rose” (1795). This is entire- bliot
ly appropriate to the ersatz world of the novel where sexual desire is sbi
et
twisted by violence or futility, and where literature and art are trans- sit
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posed into their most fragmentary and meaningless forms. In Shadow niv
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Dance, Carter creates through quotations a blackly hilarious demotic o
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version of T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922), where allusions, explicit e
s
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and implicit, jostle to be recognized and to gain priority in the novel’s ce
competing realities. Morris sees the world through a cascade of imper- m - li
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fectly remembered and understood echoes: ‘A quotation floated from a ct.c
vague corner of his mind. “Besides, that was in another country, and the ne
n
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wench is dead.” Who said that?’ (17); ‘“Revenge is a wild kind of jus- c
e
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tice” […] Who said that?’ (33).1 Cut adrift from any aesthetic, political gra
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or moral context, fragments of Dante, Charles Dickens, Fyodor p
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Dostoevsky, Gulliver’s Travels (1726), King Lear (ca. 1605), Through the ww
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Looking Glass (1871), “Goblin Market” (1862), Lady Chatterley’s Lover o
(1928), Henry Vaughan and Thomas Traherne emphasize the funda- al fr
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mental incoherence and moral bankruptcy, but also the wildly imagi- at
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native fertility, of the novel’s world. ht
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These intertextual strategies provide a comically exact textual equiva- yri
p
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lent of the junk-shop run by Honeybuzzard and Morris where false C
faces, junk of all kinds, dismembered bodies and dismembered phrases,
imply a culture in collapse. In Shadow Dance, and elsewhere in Carter’s
early novels,the fragments of high culture create not a nostalgic yearn-
ing for better, more ordered times, as in The Waste Land,but a vigorous
and abrasive celebration of ambiguity. The security of our knowledge
vii
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viii Foreword
totters in the face of ‘the fictionality of realism’ (Gamble 23). The reality
of reality becomes problematic, with Morris uncertain of whether he is
dreaming or not, even whether he really exists or not, and
Honeybuzzard explicitly denying the availability of objective truth:
‘Believe what you want to believe. What you want to believe is the
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truth’ (125). Again this seems to echo Blake, this time the Blake of The 3-0
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Marriage of Heaven and Hell (ca. 1790–93), apparently now adopted by 1-
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ability to deploy intertextual reference marked our knowledge of and o
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our ability to control the world, for Carter it is part of a project which av
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combines a lively appreciation of the literature of the past with a radi- al
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cal ‘demythologising’ project (“Notes from the Front Line” 71) which e -
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challenges our confidence in our social, cultural and psychic structures ms
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anFdr othme enaartluierset otfo relaatleitsyt iwtsoerlkf., Carter plays with allusions from litera- ket i Tr
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ture, art and film. From Shakespeare to Sade, from Baudelaire to the bliot
Brothers Grimm, from Proust to Poe, from Jean-Jacques Rousseau to Le sbi
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Douanier Rousseau, from John Ford the seventeenth-century dramatist sit
er
to John Ford the film-director, all is grist to her mill. For Carter, though, niv
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intertextual processes and the knowledge they encode seem always two- o
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edged. At the end of The Magic Toyshop (1967), with the toyshop burn- e
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ing in an apocalyptic conflagration and losing her family for the second ce
time, Melanie escapes on to the roof with Finn. An absolute break with m - li
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the past is indicated: as Carter herself commented, the toyshop burns ct.c
and ‘adult life begins’ (Sage 190) – though, ironically, even this scene ne
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merely replays the past, for Melanie has ‘already lost everything, once’ c
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(199). Finn and Melanie can now ‘only be like ourselves’ (199): gra
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metaphors, allusions, and images can no longer be appropriate, for p
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mature identity depends on multiple renunciations of the past (a liter- ww
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ary as well as a psychological past). But, of course, this return to the o
womb of a pre-literate existence cannot really happen. Carter herself al fr
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acknowledged the expulsion of Adam and Eve from Eden as a crucial at
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intertext here (Haffenden 80), and there are others. ‘At night, in the gar- ht
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den, they faced each other in a wild surmise’ (200). This quotation, yri
p
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from John Keats’s “On first looking into Chapman’s Homer” (1816), C
picks up and completes a quotation begun on the first page of the
novel, where Melanie is seen exploring herself, ‘a physiological Cortez’
(1). In repudiating art (Finn’s paintings are burned) and allusion in
favour of a grittier, more mature knowledge and individualism, Carter’s
characters can do so here only in the intertextual language of allusion.
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Foreword ix
If for Carter allusion helps to provide a language for ambiguity, one
way of achieving this is to tell and retell certain central narratives. I
have in mind especially her use of fairy tales. The Bloody Chamber (1979)
contains three engagements with “Little Red Riding Hood” (in which
respectively the grandmother, the hunter, and the girl herself prove to
9
be the wolves)3and two radically different retellings of “Beauty and the 3-0
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Beast”. In “The Courtship of Mr Lyon”, the cosiness of the fairy story 1-
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Mrs Lyon, the ordinary bourgeois married couple who were once Beauty o
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and the Beast, walk ‘in a drift of fallen petals’ (51), evoking at once the av
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garden of Oscar Wilde’s Selfish Giant and the Garden of Eden, al
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overblown images of transience which challenge the very fairy tale e -
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security they seem to affirm. “The Tiger’s Bride”, Carter’s exhilarating ms
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inward, deepest, essential Beastly nature and becoming transformed bliot
herself: ‘each stroke of his tongue ripped off skin after successive skin, sbi
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all the skins of a life in the world […] I shrugged the drops of my beau- sit
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tiful fur’ (67). niv
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Carter’s practice with allusion changes over the course of her career. o
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In Shadow Danceespecially, but also to some degree in other early nov- e
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els like The Magic Toyshop, Heroes and Villains (1969), and Love (1971), ce
a prodigal, apparently unstructured stream of allusions evokes lives, m - li
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families or cultures, that have collapsed into fragments. (Conversely, in ct.c
Several Perceptionsan apparently chaotic world and narrative may come ne
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into a newly, though perhaps ironically, clear form when we see it c
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through the prism of its main intertext, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland gra
[1865]).4 The later novels tend to limit or at least to redirect this lush pal
w.
undergrowth of allusion. In her last novel, Wise Children (1991), the ww
m
whole work is structurally shaped by its intertexts. As a novel ‘about o
English culture’ and about Shakespeare ‘as one of the originating al fr
eri
myths of English culture’ (Day 95), Wise Children simultaneously at
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demythologizes and remythologizes. English culture is depicted as sat- ht
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urated with commodified, fetishized versions of Shakespeare, evoked yri
p
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by the repeated reference to Shakespeare’s head on a £20 note (ibid.). C
But at the same time Carter appreciated Shakespeare, and not only as
the apotheosis of low culture, ‘the intellectual equivalent of bubble-
gum’ (Sage 186). Self-confessedly a ‘rather booksy person’ (Haffenden
85), she acknowledges the continuing power of his narratives, and their
ability to shape both the legitimate culture of the great Shakespearean
10.1057/9780230595873 - Re-Visiting Angela Carter, Edited by Rebecca Munford