The Infernal Desires of Angela Carter: Fiction, Femininity, Feminism 0582291925, 0582291917

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The Infernal Desires of Angela Carter: Fiction) Femininity, Feminism

Edited and introduced by Joseph Bristow and Trev Lynn Broughton

Longman London and New York

The Infernal Desires of Angela Carter: Fiction, Femininity, Feminism

Studies in Twentieth-Century Literature Series Editor.

Stan Smith, Professor of English, University of Dundee Published Titles:

Peter Brooker, New York Fictions Rainer Emig, Modernism in Poetry: Motivation, Structures and Limits Lee Horsley, Fictions if Power in English Literature: 1900-1950 Richard Kirkland, Literature and Culture in Northern Ireland Since 1965: Moments

if Danger

Joseph Bristow and Trev Lynn Broughton, The Infernal Desires Carter: Fiction, Femininity, Feminism

\'

if Angela

AddIson Wesley Longman Edinburgh Gate Harlow Essex CM20 2JE England and Associated Companies throughout the world.

Published in the United States of America by Addison Wesley Longman Inc., New York

© Addison Wesley Longman Limited 1997 All rights reserved; no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without either the prior written permission of the Publishers or a licence permitting restricted copying in the United Kingdom issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency Ltd, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1P 9HE. First published 1997 ISBN 0 582 29192 5 CSD ISBN 0 582 29191 7 PPR

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record of this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog entry for this title is available from the Library of Congress Set by 35 in 10/12pt Bembo Produced by Longman Singapore Publishers (Pte) Ltd. Printed in Singapore

Contents

Notes on Contributors Preface and Acknowledgements Publisher's Acknowledgements

vu X

xu

Introduction Joseph Bristow and Trev Lynn Broughton

1

1. Gender as perfonnance in the fiction of Angela Carter and Margaret Atwood Paulina Palmer

24

2. Angela Carter's fetishism

43

Christina Britzolakis

3. 'The red dawn breaking over Clapham': Carter and the limits of artifice Clare Hanson

59

4. 'But elsewhere?': the future of fantasy in Heroes and Villains Elisabeth Mahoney

73

5. The fragile frames of The Bloody Chamber

88

6. The infernal appetites of Angela Carter

Luoe Armitt Sarah Sceats

100

7. Revenge of the living doll: Angela Carter's horror writing Gina Wisker

116

8. Angela Carter's The Sadeian Woman: feminism as treason Sally Keenan

132

9. Sexual and textual aggression in The Sadeian Woman and The Passion of New Eve Merja Makinen

149

10. Unexpected geometries: transgressive symbolism and the transsexual subject in Angela Carter's The Passion of New Eve Heather L. Johnson

166 v

The Infernal Desires oj Angela Carter

11. Boys keep swinging: Angela Carter and the subject of men Paul

A1ag~

184

12. Auto/biographical souvenirs in Nights at the Cirals Sarah Bannock

Afterword Index

VI

Elaine Jordan

198

216 221

Notes on Contributors

Lucie Annitt is a Lecturer in English at the University of Wales, Bangor. She is the editor of Where No Man Has Gone Before: Women and Science Fiction (Routledge, 1991) and the author of Theorizing the Fantastic (Edward Arnold, 1996). Current research projects focus upon contemporary women's fiction, feminist theory, the Gothic and the ghost story. Sarah Bannock is a Fellow of the British Studies Centre at Abo Akademi University, Finland. Joseph Bristow is Professor of English at the University of California, Los Angeles. He was previously Senior Lecturer in English at the University of York, England. His recent books include Effeminate England: Homoerotic Writing qfter 1885 (Open University Press and Colombia, 1995) and Sexuality (N ew Critical Idiom, Routledge, 1997). He is the joint editor (with Isobel Armstrong and Cath Sharrock) of Nineteenth-Century Women Poets (Oxford University Press, 1996). He is completing a study of Victorian poetry and sexual desire for Cambridge University Press. Christina Britzolakis is a Lecturer in the Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies at the University of Warwick. She has published essays on modernist poetry, fiction and drama, and is the author of Sylvia Plath and the Theatre of Mourning (forthcoming, Clarendon Press). Trev Lynn Broughton is currently Director of the Centre for Women's Studies at the University of York, England. She is completing a monograph on Victorian literary masculinities for Routledge, and publishes on feminist pedagogy, women's autobiography, and nineteenth-century prose. Her most recent work has appeared in Victorian Studies and Carlyle Studies Annual. She also regularly reviews for the Times Literary Supplement. Vll

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Clare Hanson is Reader in English at the University of Leicester. She is the author of Katherine Mansfield (with Andrew Gurr), Short Stories and Short Fictions, 1880-1920, The Critical Writings of Katherine Mansfield (ed.), Rereading the Short Story (ed.), and Virginia Woo!f(Macmillan Women Writers). She has published essays on a range of feminist topics, and is a regular reviewer of feminist criticislll. She is currently working on a study of 'the woman's novel' in the twentieth century. Heather L. Johnson has been a tutor at Edinburgh University for three years and is director of the Scottish Universities International Summer School. She is a member of the editorial board of Gothic Studies and publishes on Carter and on aspects of the contemporary Gothic. She is currently planning a book-length study of the surrealist painter Dorothea Tanning. Elaine Jordan is Reader in Literature at the University of Essex, where she directs the MA in Women Writing. Her major interests are in questions of gender and feminism, and in colonial/post-colonial writing in English. She is author of Alfred Tennyson (Cambridge University Press), editor of the New Casebook on Conrad (Macmillan), and has published essays on Austen and Gaskell, as well as on twentieth-century women writers, Carter, Toni Morrison and Christa Wolf. Sally Keenan is Lecturer in English at LSU College of Higher Education, Southampton. Her research interests include contemporary women's writing, feminist and post-colonial theory. She has published several essays on the work of Toni Morrison. Paul Magrs has published two novels, Marked for Life and Does it Show?, along with a collection of stories, Playing Out. He was recently awarded ~ doctorate by the University of Lancaster for his thesis on 'Angela Carter, fiction and the subject at the fm de siecle'. Elisabeth Mahoney is a Lecturer in English at the University of Aberdeen. She is currently completing a book on the twentieth-century city in mm, photography and literature, with particular interest in the representation of sexual difference in the cityscape. Other projects include work on contemporary Irish women poets and on Kristeva's theory of abj~ction. She has edited an edition of Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey (Everyman, 1994) and Thomas Hardy's A Pair of Blue Eyes (forthco·ming, Everyman). Merja Makinen is a Principal Lecturer in English, Cultural and Communication Studies at Middlesex University. She primarily teaches courses in Vll1

Notes on contributors women's writing and women in genre fiction. She is joint author (with Lorraine Gamman) of Female Fetishism: A New Look (Lawrence and Wishart, 1994), and, with the assistance of Kevin Harris, ofJoyce Cary: A Descriptive Bibliography (Mansell, 1989). Her recent essays include 'Embodying the negated: contemporary images of the female erotic', in Sarah Sceats and Gail Cunningham (eds), Image and Power: Women in Fiction in the Twentieth Century (Longman, 1996), and 'Angela Carter's The Bloody Chamber and the decolonization of female sexuality' in Feminist Review (1992). Her current research focuses on Carter.

Paulina Palmer lectures in English Literature and Women's Studies at the University of Warwick. Her publications include Contemporary Women's Fiction: Narrative Practice and Feminist Theory (Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1989) and Contemporary LesbiaH Fiction: Dreams, Desire, Difference (Open University Press, 1993). She is currently working on a book for Cassell on lesbian genre fiction, discussing Gothic narratives. Sarah Sceats lectures in English Literature at Kingston University. She took her first and Master's degrees as a mature student and was recently awarded a doctorate (QMW, University of London) on the literary and cultural significance of food and eating in contemporary fiction by women. She is joint editor (with Gail Cunningham) of Image and Power: Women in Fiction in the Twentieth Century (Longman, 1996). She has written on the work of Angela Carter and Doris Lessing, and has published a book (which she also illustrated) on the restoration of a wooden sailing boat (Batsford, 1983). Gina Wisker is Principal Lecturer in English and Staff Development Adviser at Anglia Polytechnic University in Cambridge, where she mainly teaches contemporary women's writing. She has edited Insights into Black Women's Writing (Macmillan, 1993) and It's My Party: Reading Twentieth-Century Womell's Wn"ting (Pluto, 1994), and has published essays on Angela Carter in the journals Literature Teaching Politics and Ideas and Production and in Creepers, a collection on horror writing (Pluto, 1994). Gina is currently editing Guns, Roses and Fatal Attractions: Subverting Romantic Fictions, also for Pluto.

IX

Preface and Acknowledgements

The fiction of Angela Carter appeared in many editions on both sides of the Atlantic, an~it is imE,22 These 'conditions of representability' must include the possibility of 'the spectator as female', as part of the construction of 'another vision'. 23 This spectator would then see differently, both in terms of ways of seeing and what is seen. De Lauretis's overview has a wider applicability for feminist theory and narrative beyond film studies. In terms of Carter's writing, these two 'stages' account for the differences between those texts in Carter's oeuvre which reveal structures of sexual objectification (such as The Magic Toyshop and The Bloody Chamber) and those which move beyond such structures (Nights at the Circus, for example). Heroes and Villains can clearly be aligned with the second stage described by de Lauretis: in its focus upon womanas-object and sexual subject, it is more radical in its representation of feminine desire than Carter's other pre-Bloody Chamber writing. This is, as I have suggested, because of its dystopian structure, which allows Carter to produce a fantastic narrative about sexual fantasy. 77

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By contrast, The Magic Toyshop cannot 'effect another vision'. Instead it concentrates on Melanie's moves towards subjectivity - especially the expression of her sexuality - through what de Lauretis terms 'man-centred vision'. The novel opens with a dressing-up scene in which Melanie explores 'the whole of herself ... behind a locked door in her pastel, innocent bedroom' (pp. 1-2). The flfteen-year-old's sense of self is shown to be constructed entirely through and by masculine representations of sexualized women: A la Toulouse Lautrec, she dragged her hair sluttishly across her face and sat down in a chair with her legs apart and a bowl of water and a towel at her feet. She always felt particularly wicked when she posed for Lautrec ... She was too thin for a Titian or a Renoir ... Mter she read Lady Chatterley's Lover, she secretly picked forget-me-nots and stuck them in her pubic hair. (pp. 1-2)

The novel emphasizes that Melanie's way of reading others is also through image and construction ('It was easier, for example, to face the fact of Uncle Philip·ifshe saw him as a character in a fum .. .', p. 76), and it foregrounds the woman as voyeuristic spectacle within masculine desire. During the performance of ' Leda and the Swan' in Uncle Philip's theatre, the swanpuppet enacts the rape of Leda ('played' by Melanie). The violent performance of masculine fantasy clearly emphasizes the cancelling out or silencing of the possibility of feminine desire: She felt herself not herself, wrenched from her own personality ... the mocked up swan, might assume reality itself and rape this girl in a blizzard of white feathers ... looking up, she could see Uncle Philip directing its movements. His mouth gaped open with concentration. (p. 166)

Carter stresses the antithetical positionality of subject and object with regards to the fantasy here: Melanie, as object, has no way of reading the scene (she cannot tell 'real' from fantasy here) and suffers dissolution of the self ('not herself', 'this girl'). Uncle Philip, by contrast, has a stronger presence here than at any other time (he is 'directing', he gapes 'with concentration'). Butler's description of the narration of fantasy is strikingly apposite to Uncle Philip's role: The narrator of the fantasy is always already 'in' the fantasy. The 'I' both contributes to and is the frame, the complex of perspectives, the temporal and grammatical sequencing, the particular dramatic tempo and conclusion that constitutes the very action of the fantasy. Hence, the 'I' is dissimulated into the entire scene, even as it appears that the 'I' merely watches on as an epistemological observer to the event. 24

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The Magic Toyshop thus represents 'man-centred vision' and reveals feminine desire and fantasy as textual gaps. Melanie, after all, cannot construct her own fantasies but must learn to read those of other people. She learns to do this by discovering how to look at how she is looked at. It is crucial that Melanie sees Philip looking at her, as this complicates the distinction between real and fantastic: 'a trapdoor in the swan's side might open and an anned host of pigmy Uncle Philips, all clockwork, might rush out and savage her' (p. 166). What we see of Melanie, then, is what the spectators see of her; we see through 'a subject who has a fantasy as a kind of interior and visual projection and possession' .25 Questions of how we look and the power invested in such a position are thus aligned with similar questions about the act of reading a fantasy scene. By blurring the boundaries between what might be 'real' and what might be fantastic, the reading subject is denied a comfortable or stable place from which to view the text. In their influential psychoanalytic essay on fantasy, Jean Laplanche and JeanBertrand Pontalis theorize this experience in the following terms: In fantasy the subject ... appears caught up himself in the sequence of images. He forms no representation of the desired object, but is himself represented as participating in the scene ... As a result, the subject, although always present in the fantasy, may be so in a desubjectivised fonn, that is to say, in the very syntax of the sequence in question. 26

The 'desubjectivized' sexual subject here takes us back to the radical potential of fantasy in Butler's argument; the bringing together in narrative of both the subject's presence and absence, its proliferation and its potential erasure, allows for a questioning of precisely how sexual subjectivities are constructed. The Magic Toyshop certainly interrogates how feminine subjectivities are constructed, but, for a challenge to that construction, and for another fantasy of fantasy, we need to look to Heroes and Villains. The novel is set in a post-apocalyptic world inhabited by three groups: the Professors (who live in dystopian replicas of 'communities', in university-like enclosures surrounded by barbed wire); the Barbarians (a tribal, 'phallic cult')27 and the 'Out People' (amongst whom 'the human form acquired fantastic shapes', p. 110). The protagonist, Marianne, is a Professor's daughter, but leaves her community with Jewel, leader of the Barbarians. On one level, the narrative is a fairy-tale romance between them, between 'the only rational woman left in the whole world' (p. 55) and 'probably the most beautiful man left in the world' (p. 61). This description of them signals a reversal of conventional representations of gender (masculine equated with mind; feminine with body), and reversal is an important element in Carter's subversion of such repressive ideologies. Within her rewriting of the fantastic text she attempts to 'decolonize' the representation of women's bodies and feminine 79

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desire,28 and within that attempt she risks losing control in the very way that Judith Butler advocates by working at the limits of representation. From the opening of the novel it is clear that Carter is representing a different way of looking at femininity from The Magic Toyshop: 'Marianne had sharp, cold eyes and she was spiteful but her father loved her' (p. 1). The focus is immediately on the 'eyes' through which we see the entire narrative; the detail of this specifically gendered spectator (not the one we might expect in the post-apocalyptic text) foregrounds the presence of a new 'way of seeing' and shows Carter bringing a new spectator not only to the text (as de Lauretis suggests) but into the text. This type of gaze is referred to throughout the narrative - 'she was the audience again' (p. 16) - and the power connected with the act of looking suggested in The Magic Toyshop is confirmed here. Marianne is always aware of the distinction between fantasy and the 'real', acutely so when it comes to her own desires, to an extent unimaginable for Melanie whose 'real' is transformed into other's fantasies. Marianne displays this insight into the construction of desire throughout the text and through a self-awaren,ess of her part in this process is able to claim both distance from and involvement in sexual fantasies. She says to Jewel: What I'd like best would be to keep you in preserving fluid in a huge jar on the mantelpiece of my peaceful room, where I could look at you and imagine you ... You, you're nothing but the furious invention of my virgin nights. (p. 137)

Here Marianne displays not only perception about the process by which her desires are constructed ('the furious invention'), but also of her desire for desire ('to keep you in a huge jar'): a fantasy Qf her power within the sexual fantasy ('What I'd like best ... '). The power contained within these imaginings is confirmed by Jewel's acknowledgement of his own transformation through those 'sharp, cold eyes': 'She converted me into something else by seeing me' (p. 122). Marianne is also able to reject the Barbarians' images of femininity; she refuses to accept the role they have in mind for her as 'our little holy image', 'Our lady of the wilderness', 'the virgin of the swamp' (p. 50). This refusal is made clear when Jewel tries to assert his authority over her: 'You'll go in the cart with Mrs Green, like a bloody lady: 'I'll go wherever you go.' An expression of terror briefly crossed his face; she could not fail to recognise it, printed as it was on her memory. 'Oh, no, you won't, you'll do as I say.' 'Oh, no, I won't, I'll do as I want.' (p. 97)

80

'But elsewhere?': the future oj fantasy in Heroes and Villains As in The Magic Toyshop, issues of fantasy and sexual identity are brought together in Heroes and Villains through a rape scene. The threat of rape or state decriminalization of sexual violence against women is a recurrent trope in the feminist dystopia. It is used as a sign of the extremity of oppression for women in the imagined future and in most texts is only represented implicitly (through details of changes in legislation, for example).29 Carter, however, risks using this most frightening dystopian 'reality' to expose the misogynistic fantasy behind the act and suggests that because it is a fantasy - a narrative - it can be contested and disrupted. Marianne experiences the threat of rape twice, employing different strategies of resistance in each case. First, while Jewel laughs 'with apparently pure pleasure', his brothers move towards her en masse: Marianne discovered she was not in the least frightened, only very angry indeed, and began to struggle and shout; at this the brothers laughed but did not cease to crowd in on her. So she closed her eyes and pretended she did not exist. (p. 49)

Marianne knows exactly what's happening here and has a strategy for dealing with the prospect of violation, which is in complete contrast to Melanie, pushed to the point of dissolution of her self. Rather than the reader's attention focusing on the erotic fantasy of the violator, such as Uncle Philip in The Magic Toyshop, we see only Marianne's anger, her struggle and, once again, her refusal to accept the stereotype of feminine desire upon which their fantasy depends. Her act of self-effacement, a 'desperate device for selfprotection' (p. 49), masquerades as ultimate passivity - feminine sexuality as a 'gap' - but is in fact a subversion of the meaning of their fantasy. If she does not see them, 'does not exist', the ontological status of their fantasy changes. Indeed, this resistance is shown to be effective: 'silent, the men fell away from her' (p. 49). A few pages later, however, Jewel does rape her. Again, the narrative focuses on the woman: 'You're nothing but a murderer,' she said, detennined to maintain her superior status at all costs. 'You'll fmd me the gentlest of assassins,' he replied with too much irony for she did not fmd him gentle at all. Feeling between her legs to ascertain the entrance, he thrust his fingers into the wet hole so roughly she knew what the pain would be like; it was scalding, she felt split to the core but she did not make a single sound for her only strength was her impassivity and she never closed her cold eyes. (p. 55)

The reference here to her cold eyes reminds us of both the power orchestrated by her gaze and that this is how we see the narrative. Thus her

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'superior status' in the narrative is not qvestioned: we get her reaction to Jewel's comment and both a physical and emotional response to the violation: 'she felt split to the core'. This representation of the rape of Marianne is obviously quite different from The Magic Toyshop, in which any response is either filtered through Melanie's bodily terror ('She screamed, hardly realising she was screaming', p. 167) or, in fact, is the voyeuristic, erotic response of the onlooker ('his mouth gaped open'). Here Marianne employs a different strategy: she keeps her eyes open and, despite the ritualistic rape taking place, she is able to retain 'her strength': 'It was the very worst thing that happened to me since I came away with you,' she said. 'It hurt far worse than the snakebite, because it was intentional. Why did you do it to me?' He appeared to consider this question seriously. 'There's the matter of our traditional hatred. And, besides, I'm very frightened of you.' 'I have the advantage of you there,' said Marianne, pushing him away and endeavouring to cover herself. (pp. 55-6)

The rape fantasy is disrupted by Marianne's 'superior status', which allows her a questioning and insistent voice ('Why did you do it?') - a voice which uncovers his fear. This voice also allows repressed feminine desire (as in TIle Magic Toyshop) to be articulated: She pulled the night-dress over her head and threw it away, so she could be still closer to him or, rather, to the magic source of attraction constituted by his brown flesh. And, if anything else but this existed, then she was sure it was not real . . . . There was no pain this time. The mysterious glide of planes of flesh within her bore no relation to anything she had heard, read or experienced. She never expected such extreme intimations of pleasure or despair.

(p ..83)

Marianne translates fantasy into the real - from what she has 'read' to what she experiences. This is the same process as Uncle Philip watching the 'play', but here the pleasure is not appropriated or assimilated by a controlling spectator. Rather, it is a 'mysterious' and paradoxical experience (the 'magic source of attraction' of her violator) but one which Marianne can take pleasure in all the same: 'Night came; that confusion between need and desire against which she had been warned consumed her' (p. 134). When Jewel dies, Marianne takes control of the Barbarians and thus of the fantasy narrative: 'I'll be the tiger lady and rule them with a rod of iron' (p. 150). Central to the process of empowerment is a rejection of her fantasy of J ewe!: 82

'But elsewhere?': the future of fantasy in Heroes and Villains She thought: 'I have destroyed him' and felt a warm sense of selfsatisfaction, for quite dissolved was the marvellous, defiant construction of textures and colours she first glimpsed marauding her tranquil village; it had vanished as if an illusion which could not sustain itself ... She got up and threw the pots of paint he left behind him into the weedy cleft between the station platforms. She threw the mirror after them, in case she saw his face in it, his former extraordinary face left behind there, for it must remain somewhere; she watched the mirror break with pleasure. (p. 147)

By foregrounding the female subject's 'warm sense of self-satisfaction' as she dissolves the fantasy that has kept her in thrall, Carter goes beyond a reversal of conventional representation of feminine desire. The 'female spectator' is able to articulate her own fantasies and, in so doing, to objectifY the masculine object of desire (,the furious invention of my virgin nights'). But here, as Marianne breaks the mirror, even that new way of looking is rejected, the construction is 'dissolved'. In its place Carter sketches a fantasy of a new narrative, and it is this that renders the novel more complex than a re-presentation of conventional sexual images of women. The end of Heroes and Villains suggests that, once empowered ('She felt the beginnings of a sense of power', p. 144), this new feminine spectator might be able to see her way to an innovative form of fantasy, which incorporates a multiplicity of desires, the very 'deregulation' that Butler recommends. This possibility is incorporated into the narrative. After we are told about Marianne's eyes, the opening of the text continues with details of her father: He was a Professor of History; he owned a clock which he wound every morning and kept in the family dining-room upon a sideboard full of heirlooms of stainless steel such as dishes and cutlery. (p. 1)

Although it is a condition of the fantasy, and particularly the postapocalyptic narrative, that time should be disrupted - its meanings and status must change - the Professor here obsessively clings to a sense of the 'real', through time and heirlooms. Time, Marianne realizes, is 'frozen ... and the busy clock carved the hours into sculptures of ice', and she is 'not impressed' by the clock (p. 1). By the end of the novel, the clock is, however, in different hands: Prominent among the minarets, spires and helmets of wrought iron which protruded from the waters was an enormous clock whose hands stood still at the hour of ten though, it was, of course, no longer possible to tell whether this signified ten in the morning or ten at night. This clock was held in the arms and supported on the forward-jutting stomach of a monstrous figure in some kind of plasterwork ... It was the figure of a

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luxuriously endowed woman scantily clad in a one-pIece bathing costume which, at the top, scarcely contained the rising swell of mountainous breasts in the shadowy cleft of which sea birds nested ... The head, equipped with exuberant, shoulder-length curls, was thrown back in erotic ecstasy and, though partially worn away by the salty winds, the face clearly displayed a gigantic pair of lips twisted in a wide, joyous smile ... (p. 138)

I have quoted this passage at length as it brings together the various problematics and possibilities of representing feminine desire that Carter's novel suggests. Thus we have another 'construction', a fantasy in sculpture of an eroticized, feminine figure, 'luxuriously endowed' with 'mountainous breasts' and 'exuberant' hair. This is not, however, passive, 'unspeakable' sexuality or the construction of the feminine sexual self by others that we see in The Magic Toyshop. Rather, it is an aggressive ('forward-jutting'), powerful, 'joyous' feminine sexuality, a sexuality which flaunts itsel£ That it should be this figure left holding the clock, holding 'time', suggests a displacement which is crucial both in Carter's narrative al).d in any progression towards a new representation of desire. 30 We have moved on from the Father/Professor obsessively 'holding time' and clinging to an outmoded version of the 'real', to a new construction of a feminine subject, taking pleasure in a new textual space. Marianne's mother dies early in the narrative (' ... when she ate some poison fruit she took sick almost gladly and made no resistance to death', p. 7) and fornls an absence which is only countered at the moment Marianne sees the statue. For this figure is the maternal body signifYing a subversive, 'monstrous' version of feminine desire. 3 ! The displacement, then, is from the realm of the Father, of time and of the 'real', to a maternal, desiring, fantasy space. This space is symbolized by the sea, out of which the statue rises and which Marianne sees for the first time when she sees the statue (,Marianne had never seen the sea', p. 2). This sea has the power to effect change: The grey sea horses which now looked so quiescent would grow violent in the equinoctial storms; they would assault the cliffs not merely with their own impetus but also with missiles concealed inside them, boulders, pebbles and abrasive sand ... The waves would in this way undermine the cliffs until the upper part finally collapsed. (pp. 138-9)

The sea symbolizes where we are, in terms of the representation of feminine desire, by the end of Heroes and Villains. It incorporates an empowered feminine subject (,missiles concealed', 'abrasive sand'), and once this subject has been brought into the narrative, and particularly the fantasy narrative, the novel begins to undermine the structures and conventions of representing

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feminine desire. In The Magic Toyshop, such structures are uncovered and critiqued, but in Heroes and Villains, gendered positions of subject and object are reversed then jettisoned, as Marianne destroys the mirror 'with pleasure'. Carter's dystopia signals the possibility of new narratives of sexual subjectivity which are not grounded in the victim/master dyad. Instead they reveal that opposition to be one way of looking at desire, one fantasy to be rewritten.

NOTES 1. Julia Kristeva, About Chinese Women, in Toril Moi, ed., The Kristeva Reader (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989), p. 158. 2. Judith Butler, 'The force of fantasy: feminism, Mapplethorpe, and discursive excess', differences 2 (Summer 1990), p. 111. .3. Kristeva, About Chinese Women, p. 158. 4. Krishan Kumar's Utopia and Anti-Utopia in Modem Times (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1987) gives a useful historical overview of these genres. 5. Women's experimentation with the dystopia has recently begun to receive critical attention. See: Lucie Armitt, ed., Mere No Man Has Gone BifOre: Women and Science Fiction (London: Routledge, 1991); Frances Bartkowski, Feminist Utopias (London: University of Nebraska Press, 1991); Sarah Lefanu, In the Chinks of the World Machine: Feminism and Science Fiction (London: Women's Press, 1988); Elisabeth Mahoney, 'Writing so to speak: the feminist dystopia', in S. Sceats and G. Cunningham, eds, Image and Power: Women in Fiction in the Twentieth Century (London: Longman, 1996), pp. 28-40; Jenny WoImark, Aliens and Others: Science Fiction, Feminism and Postmodernism (Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1993). Marleen Barr's work focuses on women's speculative fiction, looking at the connections between the fictions and contemporary feminist theory: see Alien to Femininity: Speculative Fiction and Feminist Theory (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1987). 6. For example, within feminist work on Carter, the novel is rarely discussed. An important exception to this is Gerardine Meaney's reading of the novel in (Un)like Subjects: Women, Theory, Fiction (London: Routledge, 1993). 7. Tom Moylan, Demand the Impossible: Science Fiction and the Utopian Imagination (London: Methuen, 1986), p. 32. Sarah Lefanu argues that fantastic narrative gives us 'a language for the narration of dreams ... for the interrogation of cultural order'. Lefanu, Chinks of the World Mac/line, p. 23. 8. For an historical overview of women's experimentation with utopian writing, see Nan Bowman Albinski, Women's Utopias in British and American Fiction (London: Routledge, 1988); Marleen Barr, ed., Future Females: A Critical Anthology (Bowling Green: Bowling Green University Popular Press, 1981); and Bartkowski, Feminist Utopias. The radicalism - both political and in terms of literary form - is the focus of my study of the feminist dystopia: 'Writing so to speak: the feminist dystopia' (unpublished Ph.D. thesis, University of Glasgow, 1995).

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711e InJemal Desires of Angela Carter 9. Examples of such writing include Bertha Thomas, 'A vision of communism', in Comhill Magazine, September 1873, pp. 300-10; Yevgeny Zamyatin's We (1924); and Ayn Rand's Anthem (1946). 10. Moylan, Demand the Impossible, p. 9; Bartkowski, Feminist Utopias, p. 15. 11. The Handmaid's Tale works in much the same way. It presents a terrifYing vision of a (near) future in which a right-wing religious regime has taken control of North America and in which women have no public or legal status, being defmed entirely by their reproductive function. Equally terrifYing is the novel's portrayal of women's complicity in this totalitarian state and, in some cases, their very vocal support of the regime (e.g. the 'Aunts' who run 'training' centres for the handmaids). Rebecca Brown's collection of short stories, The Terrible Girls, uses a dystopian backdrop (a post-apocalyptic cityscape) to represent the flip-side of conventional femininity: the 'girls' are obsessive, vengeful, violent. 12. Useful starting points for the vexed relationship between feminism and psychoanalysis include: Teresa Brennan, The Interpretation of the Flesh: Freud and Femininity (London: Routledge, 1992), especially Ch. 2; Jane Gallop, Feminism and Psychoanalysis: the Daughter's Seduction (London: Macmillan, 1982); Elizabeth Grosz, Jacques Lacan: A Feminist Introduction (London: Routledge, 1990); and Jaqueline Rose, Sexuality in the Field of Vision (London: Verso, 1986). 13. Butler, 'The force of fantasy', p. 105. See also Susan Rubin Suleiman, Subversive Intent: Gender, Politics and the Avant Garde (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990), p. 136, where she suggests that for a radical 'shake up' of gender and desire in narrative we need to look at feminist speculative flCtion. 14. Butler, 'The force of fantasy', p. 121, my italics. 15. Ibid. 16. Ibid. Butler is obviously privileging instability and chaos within the social formation. While her rhetoric may sound idealistic or utopian here, it is important to place her comments in the context of debates about pornography and censorship in the United States (her article is at one level a response to feminist - and other - calls for censorship of sexually explicit images). I find her argument useful in reading all of Carter's work but particularly the novels which foreground the 'persistently ungrounded ground' - to quote Butler between reality and fantasy, the world of rational thought and the realm of dream or mystery. 17. Angela Carter, The Bloody Chamber (London: Vintage, 1995), p. 118. 18. Angela Carter, The Magic Toyshop (London: Virago, 1994), p. 86. Subsequent references are to this edition and are given in the text. 19. Teresa de Lauretis, Technologies of Gender. Essays on Theory, Film and Fiction (London: Macmillan, 1987), pp. 127-48. 20. Laura Mulvey's article 'Visual pleasure and narrative cinema', Screen 16 (Autumn, 1975), was crucial as a starting point for debates around gender and spectatorship; Mulvey formulates the notion of a 'male gaze' which, she argues, is constructed by identificatory structures within mainstream film texts. See also Mulvey's 'Afterthoughts on "Visual pleasure and narrative cirfema" inspired by Duel in the Sun', Framework 15-:17 (1981). Both are reproduced in Constance Penley, ed., Feminism and Film Theory (London: Routledge, 1988). 21. De Lauretis, Technologies, p. 135. Mulvey's article best represents this approach, in which disruption of such 'man-centred vision' is the explicit aim: 'It is said that analysing pleasure, or beauty, destroys it. That is the intention of this

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22. 23. 24. 25. 26.

27. 28.

29.

30.

31.

iffantasy

in Heroes and Villains

article.' This approach has subsequently been critiqued for assuming a singular spectatolial position for both men and women; Mulvey's early work on the male gaze was unable to deal with shifting or multiple subject positions III spectatorship. De Lauretis, Technologies, p. 135, my italics. Ibid. Butler, 'The force of fantasy', p. 109. Ibid., my italics. Jean Laplanche and Jean-Bertrand Pontalis, 'Fantasy and the origins of sexuality', in Victor Burgin, James Donald and Cora Kaplan, eds, Formations of Fantasy (London: Routledge, 1986), p. 26. Angela Carter, Heroes and Villains (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986), p. 29. Subsequent references are to this edition and are given in the text. See Angela Carter, 'Notes from the Front Line', in Michelene Wandor, ed., On Gender and Writing (London: Pandora Press, 1983), pp. 69-77. Here, Carter writes that 'it is enormously important for women to write fiction as women - it is part of the slow process of decolonialising our language and our basic habits of thought' (p.- 75). State decriminalization of sexual violence against women is part of the bad place in much dystopian writing by women. See, for example, Katharine Burdekin, Swastika Night (1937); Suzy McKee Charnas, Walk to the End of the World (1974); Zoe Fairbairns, Bentifits (1979); and Rebecca Brown, The Terrible Girls (1990). Gerardine Meaney focuses upon the relations between gender, time, space and history in her reading of Heroes and Villains. Through a discussion of Kristeva's categories of time ('cyclical' and 'monumental'), she argues that in Heroes and Villains Carter 'attempted to "wind back" the clock of history, perhaps to uncover something undetermined'. In other words, if history is interrogated from a gender perspective (wound back on itself), oppressive myths of origin - here, psychoanalytic 'myths' of feminine sexuality - can be uncovered and subverted. Meaney, (Un)like Subjects, p. 217. 'Monstrous' is used here to signal an unruly, powerful and threatening presence contained in the representation of the feminine body. Mary Russo's article 'Female grotesques: carnival and theory' re~reads Bakhtin's theory of the carnival to argue that the woman's body which is coded as 'monstrous' has the potential power to disrupt not only limits of representation, but wider social formations. See Teresa de Lauretis, ed., Feminist Studies/Critical Studies (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1988), pp. 213-29.

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CHAPTER FIVE

The fragile frames of The Bloody Chamber Lucie Armitt

When critics respond in a hostile manner to the work ,of Angela Carter it is often because of their mistrust of or disappointment in her treatment of the domestic, its scenarios and its motifs. For. she is undoubtedly a writer preoccupied by the enclosing effects of domesticity and the negative impact these have upon her female characters. The resulting difficulty, as Paulina Palmer claims, is that patriarchy and its constraints can be made to appear inescapable. 1 Add to this Carter's evident fascination with the exploration of female sexuality through images of passivity, violence, bestiality and sadomasochism, and the controversial nature of her preoccupation soon becomes clear. The Bloody Chamber (1979) attracts the lion's share of such disquiet. So Robert Clark disparages 'The Company of Wolves' as 'Old chauvinism, new clothing', while Patricia Duncker expresses profound reservations about Carter's decision to rework the fairy-tale at all, perceiving this to fuel what she believes to be the author's passive entrapment Within heterosexist paradigms: 'Carter envisages women's sensuality simply as a response to male arousal. She has no conception of women's sexuality as autonomous desire.'2 But these viewpoints fail to come to terms with an unresolved question. If The Bloody Chamber is such a difficult text, then why does it exercise such a fascination over its readers, even as it angers and irritates them? Feminist critics such as Elaine Jordan and Melja Makinen have not only defended but welcomed Carter's resistance to what would become known, in the early 1990s, as 'political correctness,.3 They acknowledge the role these tales fulfIl as textual exploratipns of the genuine complexities that confront even the most assertive of heterosexual women under patriarchy. I agree with them. Carter is too important a writer to be dismissed simply for her problematic feminism. But although Jordan and Makinen present full and intelligent arguments detailing the ways in which Carter's representation offemale sexuality 'play[s] with and upoh-(ifnot prey[s] upon) the

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earlier misogynistic version' of the fairy-tale,4 neither engages with the way in which her chosen narrative form and structure contribute to this ideological reorientation. It is not simply the characters themselves (and the transformative potential of their bodily metamorphoses) that free up new and anti-conventional readings of women's pleasure. The stories comprising The Bloody Chamber are also (inter)textual metamorphoses of both the fairy-tale and each other. According to Duncker, the fairy-tale itself is so entrenched in patriarchally restrictive kinship systems that no amount of revision can free it up for positive feminist aims. But in fIrmly situating these texts within a predetermined formulaic inheritance it is actually Duncker, rather than Carter, who remains ensnared. Perhaps we either need to accept that these stories are not fairytales at all, or radically rethink what a fairy-tale is. After all, while Carter's two Virago Book[sJ of Fairy Tales (1991 and 1993) are self-evidently collections of revisionary fairy-stories, can the same so easily be said of a collection called The Bloody Chamber? Quite clearly, rather than being fairy-tales which contain a few Gothic elements, these are actually Gothic tales that prey upon the restrictive enclosures of fairy-story formulae in a manner that threatens to become 'masochistically' self-destructive. In order to comprehend this point fully, we need to elaborate upon what characterizes the structural conventions of a fairy-tale, namely the interrelationship between play, space and narrative consolation in the never-never world of the happy ever after. The conventional fairy-tale operates as a seemingly safe site of play, something it has in common with all formulaic fictions. This is the way Bruno Bettelheim insists not simply on reading, but also defIning, the fairy-tale form. Fairy-tales, he argues, playfully enable children to resolve real-life dilemmas through controlled textual means. But just as Clark and Duncker are misguided in their desire to play safe in their reading of Carter on female sexuality, so Bettelheim is wrong to stick so rigidly to consolatory mechanisms in his reading of the fairy-tale. If the fairy-tale only exists as the literature of consolation, then what happens to such a tale when it refuses to console? Or, to put it another way, if' "The Three Little Pigs" is a fairy tale because ... the wolf gets what he deserves', 5 then what happens in the case of 'The Company of Wolves', where 'what the wolf deserves' is neither here nor there? And what if a child reader is actually horrified by reading about a witch who dances to death in red-hot iron shoes, or one who is roasted alive in her oven? Does this mean s/he is reading a different text? Readings such as Bettelheim's condescendingly situate safety within a play-pen environment, where protection is really a disguise for restraint. Such approaches are not unusual. Many critics of fantasy fictions still tend to defllle genre in terms of rigid spatial demarcations which segregate the inner consensus of the formulaic from the amorphous 'outside world' of

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TI,e Infernal Desires of Angela Carter general fiction. 6 One simply cannot do this with The Bloody Chamber. When Carter's collection is simply viewed as a rereading, reworking or revision of the fairy-tale mode, it inevitably has to function within a generic stranglehold that will always (however reluctandy) reduce its stories to closed dreamtexts. Bettelheim's readings are enlightening in many ways, but like his own definition of the fairy-tale they are always constrained by the limitations of a consolation that pushes towards narrative (en) closure. One thing remains clear: if Carter's reading of sexuality is positively problematic, then her usage of the fairy-tale form is even more so. In agreeing that the form of play Carter favours in The Bloody Chamber bears precious little relationship to Bettelheim's over-protective play-pen, we must start to loosen our grip on the formulaic fairy-tale structures and open this collection up to the vagaries of narrative free play. Nevertheless, one characteristic The Bloody Chamber undoubtedly shares with the fairy-tale form is the compulsive fascination it holds for Carter's critics. We return to it again and again, revising and refming our readings of it, trying to get it to do what we desperately want it to do. If nothing else, such an obsession must convince us that consolations are alien to the pleasures of this text. Indeed, we appear driven by what Leo Bersani calls the masochistic pleasure of unpleasure, a dynamic functioning akin to 'an itch that seeks nothing better than its own prolongation'.7 It is perhaps this masochistic dynamic that takes us to the world of the Gothic, a form less easily encompassed by formulaic convention, for although it flirts with the fairy-tale genre's own spatial trappings, it usually transcends their protective bounds. In this sense, the interrelationship between the Gothic narrative and our cultural conceptualizations of space frames our understanding of what Carter is doing with ideological symbols of enclosure. , Like play, it is conventional to read space in terms of the enclosures that defme it and the world beyond those enclosures in terms of the inside from which it differs. Gothic narratives are particularly preoccupied by such considerations. So the space surrounded by the four walls of the Gothic rriansion is determined as an interior dream- (or rather nightmare-) space, while it is the space beyond that functions as the outer world of daylight order. But such three-dimensional constraints are by no means inviolable, for a Gothic text becomes a Gothic text only when such fixed demarcations are called into question by the presence of an interloper who interrogates the existence of such boundary demarcations. In the process this character forces the night-dream into a daylight interaction with the so-called world of rational order. We are, of course, familiar with the idea that the overarching structure of the Gothic mansion is sub-divided up into a series of three-dimensional worlds within worlds: rooms containing closets, c.:losets containing locked chests, locked chests containing secret drawers, secret drawers containing

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The fragile frames of The Bloody Chamber trinket boxes. Carter's titular story 'The Bloody Chamber' illustrates this admirably, its enclosures progressively narrowing down to reach their claustrophobic extremity in a torturous coffin, 'the metal shell of [which] emitted a ghostly twang; my feverish imagination might have guessed its occupant was trying to clamber out, though, even in the midst of my rising hysteria, I knew she must be dead to find a home there'.8 Gothic chambers rarely succeed in fully constraining their hideous secrets, and in this scene the container is only most precariously in control of its contents. Such tension, as we shall see later, is woven through the entire narrative structure of this collection, as well as being the basis of the relationship between all the various metamorphic, characters and their own, rather fragile, anatomical limits. The expansive dynamic underlying The Bloody Chamber derives its focus from Carter's fascination with appetite. In the process we find what can only be understood as a typically oral compulsion to repeat. This gives the lie to Norman Holland's assertion that 'Literature creates a hunger in us and then gratifies US',9 because rather than satisfYing our voracious desires, Carter's stories of excess only promise us a gargantuan banquet, in fact presenting us with a sequence of (albeit beautifully arranged) mouthfuls of nouvelle cuisine. In these terms orality becomes self-consuming. Thus, in 'The Snow Child', we are confronted with the image of a young woman who exists as the fantasy creation of a King. In keeping with the fairy-tale's own oral traditions, it is enough to speak aloud the fantasy formula for the word to become flesh: 'As soon as he completed his description, there she stood' (p. 91). Like a voracious good read, or a delicious meal, the child whom the King desires is merely created to be consumed. Pricking her finger on the thorn of a rose, she 'bleeds; screams; falls' and then is sexually violated by the King. At this point, her body melts into nothing more than a bloodstain on the surface of the snow-covered ground, and the King's jealous Queen retrieves the rose. As she touches it, the Queen immediately lets it drop to the ground and utters the exclamation 'It bites!' (p. 92). This so-called passive victim clearly has a voracious appetite of her own - one, in true vampiric tradition, that reminds us of the fragile limitations of corporeality. This story is immediately followed by 'The Lady of the House of Love', a variation on a similar theme. Set within the domestic arena, the lady of this story not only inhabits but is, in herself, 'a haunted house' (p. 103). She is also, in this sense, a bloody chamber, for although the phrase has little bearing on the fairy-tale, it is fully in keeping with (one might even say it holds the key to) the precarious relationship between narrative overspill and narrative containment that we will continue to trace throughout this collection. A semantic deliberation over the title of the collection reveals its application to female sexuality. 'Chamber' carries two differing connotations. On 91

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one level, it is a room (usually a bedroo~) and therefore suggestIve of two related behaviour patterns: the activities of the erotic and the inactivities of sleep. Herein lies the crux of the debate over female sexuality in these stories: are the women active or passive, erotic or i..nert? The violence inherent in the world 'bloody' leads us to expect the chamber to be the location for hideous and violent sexual excess. But what if we read the word 'chamber' not as a room, but as a vase or a vessel for carrying liquid? In this case the blood is the liquid with ~hich the vessel is filled (indeed the substance that gives the vase its deftnition). The associated excesses are those of overspill, not those which threaten containment. In this case it is not the chamber that contains and thus constrains the woman (who then becomes a terrifted victim), but the woman herself who takes control as the body of excess. In the stories concerned with nocturnal or diurnal vampiric emissions, we ftnd Carter wrenching the fairy-tale away from what Duncker sees as its cultural position as 'vessel of false knowledge' .10 Instead, she rather more opportunely stamps the text with what Julia Kristeva would perceive as the mark of abjection. Abjection is a particularly useful concept to apply to any metamorphic narrative, and especially to a mode of writing which, like these tales, prides itself on the interrogation of apparently impenetrable limits. For our purposes it is best illustrated through Kristeva's application of this concept to the human body. Our physical selves are held in place through the excretion of substances, fonnerly intrinsic to and necessary for the maintenance of our well-being, but now transfonned into something unwanted or even dangerous. Abjection is also essential to the substances we take in: Food loathing is perhaps the most elementary and most archaic form of abjection. When the eyes see or the lips touch that skin on the surface of milk - harmless, thin as a sheet of cigarette paper; pitiful as a nail paring - I experience a gagging sensation and, still farther down, spasms in the stomach, the belly. 11

Weare therefore dealing with an interrogation of boundary demarcations particularly relevant to corporeal (re)deftnitions. Metamorphosis depends upon this, while life and death likewise hang in the balance: There, I am at the border of my condition as a living being. My body extricates itself, as being alive, from that border. Such wastes drop that I might live, until, from loss to loss, nothing remains in me and my entire body falls beyond the limit ... If dung signifies the other side of the border, the place where I am not and which pennits me to be, the corpse, the most sickening of wasters, is a border that has encroached upon everything.

Few writers are quite as willing to situate their concerns 'beyond the scope of the possible, the tolerable, the thinkable' as Carter. In doing so she

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The fragile frames of The Bloody Chamber illustrates how, as Kristeva asserts, this 'vortex of summons and repulsion places the one haunted by it literally beside [her] self' .12 Nonetheless, because abjection enables the cesspool of self-destructive excess to spill over into the uncontainable wet-dreams of the Gothic night-world, the presence of even bloody fluid excess is not necessarily evidence that women are victims rather than predators. It can equally signifY their menstrual flow, which continues to threaten to breach the limits of restrictively enclosing patriarchal representations (including its taboos, its silences and its secrets). Hence Carter's utilization of enclosure imagery need not deny positive assertions of female sexuality or autonomy. The unsuspecting interloper of 'The Lady of the House of Love' enters another version of Carter's bloody chamber of female sexual depravity: He was surprised to fmd how ruinous the interior of the house was cobwebs, worm-eaten beams, crumbling plaster ... endless corridors ... where the painted eyes of family portraits briefly flickered as they passed ... [evoking] a quite memorable beastliness. (p. 100)

We notice that it is not the solidity of the three-dimensional chamber or mansion that is important here, but the seemingly more precarious twodimensional enclosure of the frame of the ancestral portrait. Perhaps second only to the locked room, the portrait motif lies at the heart of the Gothic. To that extent it comes as no surprise that Elisabeth Bronfen, writing about the aesthetics of portraiture, draws upon the discourse of the uncanny in arguing that 'the good portrait [is a] ... ghost hovering in a liminal zone'.13 Despite the apparent ftxity of the frame that encloses it, the good (life)likeness of the human frame that is enclosed reminds us that the presence of the uncanny manifests itself most clearly at the point at which that ftxity becomes destabilized. This manifestation is never more evident that in the cliched motif of the portrait's moving eyes. In her tale, Carter rejuvenates this cliche by means of what only appears to be an allusion to fairy-tale passivity: her reiterated comparison of the lady with the fIgure of the 'Sleeping Beauty in the Wood' (p. 97). Far more interesting than its function as fairystory refommlation, this phrase embodies the Gothic paradox of the ancestral portrait in which a 'sleeping beauty' (objectified and apparently inanimate) is only partly encased by the wooden enclosure of the frame. In reality, as in the case of the snow child's 'bite', these eyes can devour from beyond the grave. Resonances of this trope can be found elsewhere in The Bloody Chamber. In 'The Erl-King', the narrator tells us: 'The woods [may] enclose ... [but] the wood swallows you up' (p. 84). This is a piece of linguistic play that sends tendrils out in deftance of the frames which segregate these stories.

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The Infimal Desires of Angela Carter While it reminds us that the forest (the woods) may contain lurking predators, it is the wood of the frame which, rather more successfully than the fragile bloody chamber of the coffin, may well 'bury the woman alive' by killing her into art. I deliberately use the cautionary 'may', however, for such burial depends as much upon the reader's inanimation for its success as it does on the inertia of the female protagonist, and the intervention of 'A single kiss' (p. 97), Carter tells us, will suffice to wake this sleeping fonn. It is here that Clark's reading of the collection once again becomes relevant. One of the potential strengths of his approach is that he situates his interpretation within an explicit acknowledgement of variable reading positions, futly acknowledging that '[t]his territory is evidently one in which boundaries are unclear and where to introduce a notional reader may be to mask a strategy of simplification, producing a verdict either/or where no such judgment is possible'. Despite this promising opening, however, his conclusion reasserts that readers not thoroughly versed in a feminist knowledge will leave the text as 'distraught witnesses of depravity ... encouraged to get what pleasure they can from their own sickness' .14 This is, at best, a disappointing capitulation that fails to ring true for readers of the Gothic. In contrast, Holland's approach reminds us that the reader is the crucial interloper in any text and it is up to her/him to breathe life into these inert fonns. 15 Witness the intricacies of a point that Carter herself affinns in 'The Erl-King': A young girl would go into the wood as trustingly as Red Riding Hood ... [but] she will be trapped in her own illusion because everything in the wood is exactly as it seems. The woods enclose and then enclose again, like a system of Chinese boxes opening one into another; the intimate perspectives of the wood changed endlessly around the interloper, the imaginary traveller walking towards an invented distance that perpetually receded before me. It is easy to lose yourself in these woods.

(p .. 85)

As we saw in the case of 'The Snow Child', it is common for Carter's female characters to become victims of their own illusory existence, but just how trusting is the girl in this case? If the narrator is drawing a comparison with the conventional Little Red Riding Hood of the child's tale, then we may well infer that Carter's protagonist is equally naIve, obedient and thus a victim. But her own version of Little Red Riding Hood in 'The Company of Wolves' is far more worldly-wise than this. A girl 'as trusting as her' would be wily, adventurous, but never gullible. Further evidence favours the second of these two readings. A strange and rather uncomfortable shift in tense and pronoun midway through the passage signals a shift in narrative voice. The first paragraph is written in the third person, suggestive of

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somebody else speaking on behalf of the girl. Once we enter the enclosures of the forest, however, that voice is replaced by the girl's own. This shift immediately transforms the otherwise cautionary note of the final sentence into a welcome anticipation of future events. The girl takes on the role of Gothic interloper, whereas the reader becomes the 'imaginary traveller'. And the woods endlessly change around us too, our interaction projecting us into their labyrinth, stirring up the fixity of the frame to find endless vistas of opportunity for this girl. Mter all, these frames only appear to close off all the options. No sooner have they closed down than they open up 'one into another' again, even if they remain defined by the wood. Despite her own wor-ds here, nothing in Carter's work is ever 'exactly as it seems' - let alone women's relationship with these wooden frames. Like the melted pools that leave only a trace, the framed portrait, we remember, denotes a presence dependent upon the absence of the woman. So the real power of the portrait is that it lives on after the death of both creator and 'subject' (who is really, of course, the object of desire). Similarly, in a Gothic narrative there is always a complex trickery inherent in the representation of the image as revealing and as reveiling. In Carter's case, Duncker effectively charges her with producing revelations which serve to re-encode terrible secrets, locking women away within a closeted existence as hideous corpses, sexless puppets, or those who fall foul of self-destructive excess. Certainly, in the case of the fairy-tale tradition, literary genealogies themselves depend upon passivity in the sense of formulaic conformity, and this is the legacy of The Bloody Chamber. But Carter takes issue with this genealogy, she does not simply accept it lying down. In 'The Lady of the House of Love', for example, the portrait's concern with the inheritance of familial characteristics is shown to be the cause of the protagonist's enslavement. Thus we are told that the lady's 'ancestors sometimes peer out of the windows of her eyes' in 'a perpetual repetition of their passions' (p. 103). She has, so to speak, been 'framed' by her own genealogy, the deliberate choice of the term 'peer' as opposed to 'stare' or 'gaze' reinforcing this awareness. Behind that glassy face, just as the eyes of the apparently inert portrait move, so her eyes encapsulate the conflict which exists on the precarious site of abjection between overspill and containment. The reader must positively engage with this conflict. Frames do not simply encase portraits in this short story collection. In overall structural terms they also strive to contain the free play of the individual tales in a manner that is highly unusual. Conventionally, the Gothic narrative sets the frame up in terms of a retrospective storytelling technique which shackles the night-dream world and situates the narrator safely beyond its limits. 'The Bloody Chamber' itself follows this dynamic, luring us into a false sense of narrative security in which the precise boundaries

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"

between the internal (present) and exten;al (retrospective) time sequences remain clear. But as we progress through the tales as a whole, the apparent limitations imposed upon each as discrete spatio-temporal (and even textual) entities are breached by the type of narrative overspill already witnessed between 'The Lady of the House of Love' and 'The Erl-King'. In other words, images, symbols and motifs from one story turn up in another in a way that reiterates and reworks the concerns of a previous vignette. As a whole, this multiplicity of interconnecting frames is, like the contents of the coffin, only precariously encased within the larger frame of the whole. The motif of the portrait should have prepared us for this dynamic. Just as the word 'form' synonymously refers to the anatomy inscribed on canvas and the mode of representation, so the word 'frame' can likewise define the skeletal content (the human frame) as much as it does the boundary marker. Undeniably, the central male protagonist of the story of 'The Bloody Chamber' and the vampiric central female protagonist of 'The Lady of the House of Love' are depicted as metamorphic figures oscillating along the boundaries between the human and the bestial, because they are anatomical representations (perhaps even portrait manifes~tions) of the transgressive and untamed excess of their own sexual practices. But since The Bloody Chamber functions less as a collection of individual short stories and more as a single narrative which uses the short story medium to work and rework compulsive repetitions, it should also come as no surprise that both these narrative metamorphoses and the metamorphic forms they depict work to destabilize each other from within. It is not simply that the eponymous Lady of the House is a metamorphic character within the frame of her own text but that, beyond the limits of that frame, she crops up in the guise of the eponymous Tiger's Bride and/or the wolf's lover in 'The Company of Wolves'. Similarly, it seems that there is really only one central~male protagonist who, beginning as a lion, passes through a variety of predatory masculine metamorphoses before ending up as a wolf who is simultaneously both man and woman. This ongoing metamorphic structure culminates in the fmal portrait manifestation of the book: The lucidity of the moonlight lit the mirror ... impartially recorded the crooning girl ... Little by little, there appeared within it, like the image on photographic paper ... first, a fonnless web of tracery ... then in fmner yet still shadowed outline until at last as vivid as real life itself, as if brought into being by her soft, moist, gentle tongue, fmallY, the face of the Duke.

(p. 126)

Throughout the collection, such oscillating figures perpetually appear and disappear before our very eyes, which gives them a disorientatingly ephemeral quality. Once we consider how this is mirrored by the narratives within which they are only partially contained, it is unsurprising that, with the

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exception of perhaps 'The Bloody Chamber', 'The Company of Wolves' and 'The Lady of the House of Love', one of the major problems facing the reader of these ten stories is that they seem always to be dissolving into each other. Neil Jordan's ftlm version of TI,e Company of Wolves (1984)16 offers an additional perspective on this dissolution. Simultaneously implicated by and yet distinct from Carter's own textual metamorphoses, this ftlm also deals centrally with the image of the frame. Narrative point of view rests with the main storyteller who is a female dreamer in her own bed. She is not only a sleeping beauty but one who takes up her position, again, in relation to the wood. At ftrst this interpretation seems inaccurate, for it is her sister, not herself, whom she despatches to take her chances with the wolves that roam outside in that forest. And yet to reiterate: 'The woods [may] enclose ... [but] the wood swallows you up' (p. 84). The dreamer is inert and 'at home' in her chamber, and our belief in the sturdiness of the boundaries between the inside and the outside remains as ftrm here as it is encouraged to be by 'The Bloody Chamber'. Then the camera angle shifts, turning through ninety degrees to face the open window, beckoning the viewer through and out into the night-world beyond. Once again, it is this twodimensional frame that has the real textual signiftcance and the greater power to effect destruction. In a narrative which tells its own story by setting up a series of interlocking tales, this is the ftrst of many such frames. We, the viewers, hold on to these boundary demarcations, hoping to use them to retrace our steps back to the chamber, just as Hansel hopes his trail of breadcrumbs will lead him home. But here the wolves arrive before us. As the ftnal sequence of the ftIm unwinds, we see a pack of wolves enter in by the open door of the house, run up the stairs and dive through the face/ canvas of a Gothic portrait before congregating outside the door of the dreamer's bedchamber. And yet these are only a subordinate grouping, whose function is simply to bar the girl's passage. It is by the wood of the windowframe that she will be engulfed and, as the ftnal scene fades, our gaze is aligned with that of the newly awoken, terrifted dreamer, confronted by a snarling wolfleaping through the window, knocking her toys onto the bed. Carter's depictions of toys and puppets are always sinister. Here they become horrifying accomplices in a cautionary tale, warning us that monsters are not to be toyed with. Jean Laplanche and Jean-Bertrand Pontalis, theorizing the relationship between dreams and desires, further our understanding of this world of play: 'The daydream is a shadow play, utilizing its kaleidoscopic material ... whose dramatis personae, the court cards, receive their notation from a family legend which is mutilated, disordered and misunderstood,.17 Laplanche and Pontalis's terminology is entirely in keeping with The Bloody Chamber, where the aristocratic protagonists ('court cards') are undoubtedly in conflict with the inheritances of the fairy-tale form as 97

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family legend. Mutilation, disorder and incomprehension are, inevitably, at the core of the collection. But it is their !eference to the kaleidoscope that is most applicable to the narrative fonn of the collection, particularly when we note that Laplanche and Pontalis continue by perceiving it as a perfect metaphor for what they see as the 'typical and repetitive scenarios beneath the varying clusters of fable' .18 Kaleidoscopes, giving pleasure through providing ever-shifting, compulsive repetitions of interconnecting images, epitomize more than anything else the mann~r in which The Bloody Chamber utilizes intertextuality inside and outside its frames. In this way, both Carter's stories and The Company of Wolves provide an endlessly destabilizing series of images which encode the metamorphoses that are their thematic concerns into the very fibre of both works. Therefore the wolf's entry into the bedchamber, at the end of the fUm, functions as a crucial disruptive device. Just as bodies cannot retain their abject fluids, so the limits set up by and within this narrative are inflitrated by fantasy creations from a world beyond. But this beyond lurks within the environs of the text. Portraits share these intertextual concerns, depending themselves upon a textual repetition that is also a compulsive re~niscence. We have seen that the Gothic portrait, despite its embodiment of inherited repetitions, paradoxically utilizes those repetitive drives in order to sever its own frame and, in the process, the far more restrictive frame of fonnulaic fictional enclosure. Carter pushes' frameworks to their very limits. In 'The Company of Wolves', the protagonist, desiring to become 'nobody's meat' (p. 118), frees herself from her passive genealogical inheritance by banishing all authority from her parents (,Her father ... is away in the forest ... and her mother cannot deny her' (p. 114)), and by pennitting the wolf to dispense with her grandmother, so giving herself every licence to trespass. Carter does much the same in banishing the fonnulaic fairy-foremother from her own literary inheritance. In the end, the oral dimensions of this compulsion to repeat inspire in adult readers of TIle Bloody Chamber much the same sense of unfinished business and untamed desires that take children endlessly back to their fairytale dreams. Taking a leaf out of her own protagonist's book, Carter flirts with textual danger on her own untamed tenus, refusing to give us clearly defmed answers. For her readers such flirtation proves all to the good.

NOTES 1. Paulina Palmer, 'From "coded mannequin" to bird woman: Angela Carter's

magic flight', in Sue Roe, ed., Women Reading Women's Writing (Brighton: Harvester, 1987), pp. 179-205.

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2. Robert Clark, 'Angela Carter's desire machine', Women's Studies 14 (1987), p. 49; Patricia Duncker, 'Re-imagining the fairy tale: Angela Carter's bloody chambers', in Peter Humm, Paul Stigant and Peter Widdowson, eds, Popular Fictions: Essays in Literature and History (London: Methuen, 1986), p. 228. 3. Elaine Jordan, 'The dangers of Angela Carter', in Isobel Armstrong, ed., New Feminist Discourses: Critical Essays on Theories and Texts (London: Routledge, 1992), pp. 119-31; Merja Makinen, 'Angela Carter's The Bloody Chamber and the decolonization of feminine sexuality', Feminist Review 42 (1992), pp. 2-15. 4. Makinen, 'Decolonization of feminine sexuality', p. 5. 5. This point is argued in Bruno Bettelheim, The Uses if Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance if Fairy Tales (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1991), p. 44. 6. In other words, genre fiction is perceived to inhabit a safe site of play of its own, shored up by internal rulings and protected at all costs from the far less clear-cut demands of non-formulaic flctional writing. This is often considered to be a desirable state of affairs by critics of fantasy, who place great stress on the importance of distinguishing between folk and fairy/faerie, or the fabulous and the marvellous, losing sight, in the process, of the (perhaps dangerous) pleasures of reading beyond such constraints. 7. Leo Bersani, The Freudian Body: Psychoanalysis and Art (New York: Columbia University Press-, 1986), p. 34. 8. Angela Carter, The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1981), p. 29. All further page references are to this edition and are given in the text. 9. Norman Holland, The Dynamics if Literary Response (New York: Oxford University Press, 1968), p. 286. 10. Duncker, 'Re-imagining the fairy tale', p. 223. 11. Julia Kristeva, Powers if Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), pp. 2-3. 12. Ibid., pp. 3,1. 13. Elisabeth Bronfen, Over Her Dead Body: Death, Femininity and the Aesthetic (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1992), p. 116. 14. Clark, 'Angela Carter's desire machine', pp. 147-8,159. 15. Holland, Dynamics, passim. This point constitutes the thesis of his book. 16. The Company if Wolves (dir. Neil Jordan, screenplay Angela Carter), 1984. 17. Jean Laplanche and Jean-Bertrand Pontalis, 'Fantasy and the origins of sexuality', in Victor Burgin, James Donald and Cora Kaplan, eds, Formations if Fantasy (London: Routledge, 1989), p. 22. 18. Ibid.

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CHAPTER SIX

The infernal appetites Angela Carter

of

Sarah Sceats

My chapter is about food. To be strictly accurate, it is about eating as well, and about cooking, feeding, appetite and hunger - and desire. So central, one way or another, in my own life, food and eating only became apparent as a subject of study when, as an undergradua~e student, I read an essay by Barbara Hardy ('The Dickensian feast') on the moral significance of eating in Great Expectations (1860-1). Meals, Hardy claims, 'underline and explain motivation and development ... ahnost all characters and groups are given moral and social definition by their attitudes to food and hospitality.'! I read this fine essay greedily and savoured it, I have to admit, unquestioningly, taking for granted - product as I was of a particular critical and educational tradition - the moral dimension of literature. Here was somebody making the connection I didn't know I had been waiting for, a connection between food and literature, identifying and exploring the fascinating, revealing detail of literary representations of eating, bringing together indeed two of my favourite subjects. My appetite was whetted. What occurred to me only later is how well that essay illustrates the value-laden place that food, and ways of talking about it, occupy in Western culture. Angela Carter's writing is, of course, embedded in this culture, and she both endorses and exploits the fact, and pulls against it. In several of her novels duty and benevolence are manifested, albeit ambiguously, in the regular provision of food. In TIle Magic Toyshop (1967), for example, Mrs Rundle the housekeeper routinely feeds the children, herself and her cat (albeit with an excess of bread pudding), and Aunt Margaret cooks as an act of love and defiance; while in Heroes and Villains (1969) Mrs Green's cooking is a way of keeping chaos at bay. Generosity and largesse are also evident, in Fevvers's sharing quantities of champagne, tea and bacon sandwiches at the beginning of Nights at the Circus (1984). But selfish and highly carnivorous greed are also sketched, for example in the youthful Saskia's

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devouring of a swan carcase while her mother's house bums down in Wise Children (1991). All of these instances are, I need hardly add, more complex than their broad outlines suggest - but I'll come to that in a while. The point I'm making here is that the cultural context of Carter's writing about food and eating assumes a shared set of values and sets up certain expectations. In her idiosyncratic reviews of cookery and 'food' books, Carter contrives to have things both ways, endorsing a moral view and mocking its sanctimoniousness. 2 Her mildly irreverent 1987 review of Elizabeth David's English Bread and Yeast Cookery identifies a supposed link between factorymade bread and lack of moral fibre, ' ... as if moral fibre is somehow related to roughage in the diet. The British, the real bread lobby implies, are rapidly going, if they have not already gone, all soft, bland, and flabby, just like their staple food. ,3 More signifIcant, perhaps, is the heavy cultural load bread has had to bear in a culture whose religion has at its heart the sacramental centrepiece of the last supper. If the symbolic resonances of bread are fairly constant, its material function, as Carter points out, depends to a large extent on personal circumstance; put simply, bread is the staple diet of the poor, but for the rich it is a mere accessory, the decorative margin to a meal, or else ... the material for a small but inessential meal, that very 'afternoon tea' beloved of the English upper classes, with which they used to stuff their faces in that desert of oral gratification between their vast lunches and their gargantuan dinners. 4

Although the language Carter is apt to use in her non-fIction writing on food is characteristically spirited ('an absolute concentration on the frivolous ... can, on occasion, aspire to the heroic'), there is generally a serious point ('some of the heartless innocence of style ... of a leisured class that took its leisure as a right and not as a privilege') and even a distinct sting: 'One can only conclude that a varied diet of junk food is, in the fmal analysis, considerably more nutritious than a diet of not very much food at all. ,5 Her review of three cookbooks in the London Review of Books at the beginning of 1985 ruffled several people's feathers by its combination of mockery and censoriousness, particularly in juxtaposing famine in Ethiopia with the 'rapt, bug-eyed concern with the small print not even of life but of gluttony', which she labels 'genuinely decadent'.6 Why review food books, the critics seemed to say, if you don't enjoy eating?7 They have, perhaps, a point, for all the trappings of civilized life are thrown into disarray in the face of starvation and death - though some of the indignation, it must be said, seems to relate rather to Carter's having treated Elizabeth David, 'the high priestess of postwar English cookery', with less than total reverence. Yet she describes Elizabeth David as 'holistic' and 'truly civilized', good food being as much part of civilization as 'the

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, The Infernal Desires oj Angela Carter sensuous appreciation of poetry, art or muslc'. She goes on to assert that in 'the value system of the person who is "civilised" in this way, the word carries the same connotation as "moral" does in the value system of Dr F. R. Leavis'. We are back, it seems, in the territory of Barbara Hardy's essay on Dickens. The point Carter makes about 'foodies' in her LRB review is that they shift food out of the moral into the aesthetic realm: 'Art has a morality of its own, and the aesthetics of cooking and eating aspire, in "foodism", towards the heights of food-for-food's sake.' Put together with her recognition of 'piggery triumphant' and her observation that gluttony is 'the mark of a class on the rise', this judgement suggests it is not the love of food but the complacency and frivolity of a 'mincing and finicking obsession' with food that attract her contempt. 8 The debate here centres upon the assumption of a connection between food and morality. Culturally speaking, morality inheres - to a variable extent and more or less reasonably - in the provision of food, the manner and extent of consumption, the sharing or withholding of food and even in the nature of the food in question. So far, so good. But, as Carter herself might have said, so what? Carter goes, I think, mllch further than simply using or reacting against conventional values associated with food and eating, and what this chapter sets out to examine is how her fiction discloses what might be called a politics of appetite - rather as her contextualizing of 'foodie' books within a world of deprivation exposes them as exploitative. 9 In The Sadeian Woman (1979), she radicalizes sexual desire, proposing the pornographer as terrorist; in revealing appetite and eating as a locus of vigorously exercised power relations, she similarly uncovers the processes, forces a (re-)examination of them and disallows the perception of eating as simply an autonomous, politically neutral activity.10 While hunger may be physically dictated, appetite comes not simply from inside; it is as much culturally constructed and as subject to external constraints and forces as is sexuality. The functioning of these constraints and forces, however, is far from straightforward, and operates through the most slippery of power relations, necessarily privileging neither the provider nor the consumer. The obvious place to begin, perhaps, is with the provision of food. In psychoanalytic and archetypal terms, this activity is associated with the mother, the first dispenser of nourishment and source of love. Unsurprisingly, the mother is seen in this framework as the most important figure in an infant's world, able to give (or withhold) everything that sustains, nourishes, fulfils, completes. Carter offers a helpless, infant-eye view of an almost monstrously all-powerful maternal figure in the multi-nippled Mother of The Passion if New Eve (1977), whom the truncated Eve(1yn), newly 'born' as a woman, is wholly unable to resist. Such an overwhelming Mother gives credence to Maud Ellmann's provocative claim that all feeding is force feeding, though 102

The infernal appetites of Angela Carter as Nicole Ward Jouve points out, mothers do tend to get short shrift in Carter's writing, and even grandmothers have a distressing tendency to get blown up or eaten by wolves. 11 The absence of mothers, of course, has a long and honourable literary history: think of all those maternally deprived children in Dickens, Austen, Eliot, the Brontes. A lack of maternal support is almost a requirement of the Bildungsroman, and greatly facilitates the achievement of autonomy, though, curiously enough, the absence of positive maternal images does not preclude the expression of what are arguably deep and archaic hungers for an unseparated pre-oedipal union with the mother. 12 Mothering, on the other hand, does feature considerably in Carter's work, in both its nurturing aspect and as an indicator of dis empowerment. In The Magic Toyshop, for example, Aunt Margaret, economically dependent, enslaved, rendered mute and controlled by patriarchy in the person of Uncle Philip, is given eloquent means of expression through her cooking and caring. The appetite she is required to cater for is Uncle Philip's, but the food's savour is directed towards her brothers and the children. When Melanie and her siblings fIrst arrive, in the absence of Uncle Philip, Aunt Margaret produces a magically welcoming meal with a steaming savoury pie; here she is nobody's servant, but benignly in command of the meal: It was as good as a ballet to watch Finn eat but Francie mopped gravy with bread and chewed bones from his fingers. He was also a noisy eater, as if providing an orchestral accompaniment for his brother. The food was abundant and delicious. There was both white bread and brown bread, yellow curls of the best butter, two kinds of jam (strawberry and apricot) on the table and currant cake on the sideboard ready for when they had dealt with the pie. Aunt Margaret poured fresh tea from a brown earthenware, Sundayschool treat pot that was so heavy she had to lift it with both hands. They drank their tea very dark and all put much sugar into it. Aunt Margaret presided over the table with placid contentment, urging them to eat with eloquent movements of the eyes and hands. The children ate hungrily, relaxing over the meal; she must, thought Melanie, be nice if she cooks so well. 13

The description has overtones of a story told to children, with its rhythms and wide-eyed vocabulary reminiscent of Beatrix Potter's tales and in the bright picture it paints and the satisfaction and comfort it evokes. It is as though the food in its abundance speaks for all the feelings that cannot be displayed. Just after this supper, when the girls go to bed, Aunt Margaret writes hungrily on her notepad of Victoria, 'What a fme, plump little girl!' - a sentence that completes the scene with distinctly Hansel and Gretel resonances. But she gives Melanie a 'desperate' stiff embrace, as though 'making an anguished plea for affection' (p. 49). 103

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The balance of power is unstable and shifts throughout this scene: Aunt Margaret serves the food, an ambiguous ro~e combining submission, nurturing and control; she 'presides' at the table; the food she has cooked soothes and delights, rendering her emotionally powerful; she and her brothers produce an atmosphere of relaxation, suggesting balance and equality; her brooding appreciation of the child Victoria betokens both the power of the witch/ cannibal and the impotent desolation of the barren woman. All this occurs in the absence of Uncle Philip, whose later presence reduces all exchanges to an apparently one-way flow of p~wer and oppression. But before considering Philip, there is more to be said about mothering. If New Eve's 'Mother' figures the oppressive maternal, then Aunt Margaret represents the disempowered nurturer, and Mrs Green, the barbarian Jewel's foster mother in Heroes and Villains, the archetypal mother- or grannyprovider, smelling of baking with her sleeves rolled up over muscular forearms, wearing a spotless white apron, with coiled grey hair and a face like a bun. Her primary function is to cook, and she looks after Marianne, but she is also protective of the existing order, such as it is, among Jewel's family, and produces a stream of saws and commonplaces in its support. In this she bears a number of similarities to the fairy-tale 'grandmother' archetypes. Marianne quickly identifIes her, in fact, as 'some kind of domestic matriarch', which is to say she is defined by her role. 14 Here again, however, the power situation is fluid, not to say volatile, because the Barbarians live under constant threat of attack from outside, on account of internecine strife within the 'family', and because Mrs Green, despite her fierce protectiveness, is always, in the end, resigned. Her 'maternal' position is essentially that of cook, housekeeper, even servant - albeit a once-educated and in some ways rebellious one - and she uses her food to sustain, cure and protect her charges and to maintain the status quo, but never to charm or influence or harm (this being Dr Donally's prerogative). The role of cook is potentially powerful in Carter's writing, though she never spells this out quite so explicitly as Alice Thomas Ellis, who speculates in several of her novels about the cook's murderous. capacity to add tigers' whiskers or deathly mushrooms or putrefIed catfood to a meal. iS The essence of a cook's power is that it is exercised covertly. The cook in Carter's short story 'The Kitchen Child' (1985), for example, wields her influence through the creation of lobster souffies. The cooking of the fIrst is interrupted by seduction - and both the cook's impregnation and her sad anniversary cooking of a lobster souffie might be seen as indicative of total disempowerment - but, the reprise, in which the cook hits her would-be seducer with a wooden spoon to prevent the souffie being spoiled, shows her thoroughly in command. Her single-mindedness is rewarded, and she takes from the oven 'the veritable queen of all the souffies, that spreads \'

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its archangelic wings over the entire kitchen as it leaps upwards from the dish in which the force of gravity alone confines it', a tumescence suggesting not only sexuality, culinary perfection and social rise (since she marries the duc) but a peculiarly female triumph. 16 The caring, motherly archetype is overlaid here and in the description of the cook's 'ample hips' with a bountiful eroticism that has its own kind of strength. The power that may be manifested by a sexual cook is taken to a less benign extreme in the case of Saskia in Wise Children, a novel which also encapsulates the most thoroughly benevolent, protective, strong - and fiercely vegetarian - figure of the maternal in Grandma Chance. It is Grandma, I would say, who embodies a response to the lacks and excesses of New Eve's oppressive 'Mother', of Aunt Margaret's dis empowerment and of the domestic sham revealed in Mrs Green's ineffectual platitudes. Not only does Grandma provide the twins with physical, emotional, political and spiritual nourishment, she also tactfully exits, with the aid of a flying bomb, so as to allow them, as they reach maturity, to achieve proper separation and autonomous development without having to move house. Saskia, by contrast with Grandma, is the negative epitome of woman as cook/ carer/ creator. Her power is not so much maternal as professional, and vindictive. When the occasion serves her interests, she liberally adulterates the food she offers: with aphrodisiacs for nephew Tristram, whom she seduces; with laxatives for his girlfriend; with poison for her resented father. Her power here is invisible, unrecognized, but irresistible. As a member of a theatrical dynasty and a professional cook, she is also a performer, enacting her manipulation and coercion by means of self-conscious charm and the exploitation of her sexuality. Like a witch, she cooks and schemes, using food as a material reinforcement of the magic she has already woven. Dora's description of the television food programme in which Saskia jugs a hare is worth quoting at length: She cut the thing up with slow, voluptuous strokes. 'Make sure your blade is up to it!' she husked, running her finger up and down the edge ... Next, she lovingly prepared a bath for the hare, she minced up shallots, garlic, onions, added a bouquet garni and a pint of claret and sat the poor dismembered beast in that for a day and a half Then she condescended to saute the parts briskly in a hot pan over a high flame until they singed. Then it all went into the oven for the best part of another day. She sealed the lid of the pot with a flour-and-water paste. 'Don't be a naughty thing and peek!' she warned with a teasing wink. Time to decant at lastl The hare had been half-rotted, then cremated, then consumed ... 'Delicious,' she moaned, dipping her finger in the juice and sucking. She licked her lips, letting her pink tongue-tip linger. 17 The combination of control, seductiveness and cruelty is manifest - and revealing. Saskia is, of course, a 'foodie', and one whose carnally macabre

105

The Infernal Desires of Angela Carter tastes are emphasized by Dora's description, with its privileging of associations of death and decay over those of sensual delight. Saskia's control, here and elsewhere, combines sexual domination and parodically maternal food provision. Since she has no motives but revenge and self-interest, her cooking activities are wholly subversive; she attempts only to place herself alone in the position of power. Food and sex, associated with what is life-enhancing and procreative in 'The Kitchen Child', relate in Saskia's case not so much to benevolent power as to megalomania, not to Eros but Thanatos. 18 Her sexuality· is portrayed as illegitimate and devouring, and her business feeds on greed and corruption of the bug-eyed foodie variety that Carter was so scathing about in that LRB review. While ostensibly providing food (such a maternal role), she is in fact indulging her own appetite for revenge and power. And if paradoxical, this is not altogether surprising, for - notwithstanding the ability of the cook to doctor the ingredients - in much of Carter's writing power is exercised through appetite. Appetite, both sexual and alimentary, makes demands upon the world. It is the active counterpart to hunger and yearning, and Carter exploits its importunate and urgent characteristics in representing those who will not be denied. Foremost among the ravenous is Melanie's Uncle Philip in The Magic Toyshop, a man whose 'omnivorous egocentricity' suggests him as an embodiment of the late twentieth-century capitalist world. 19 He is characterized as a domestic tyrant, a patriarchal monster in the mould of a Victorian pit-owner, who insists upon absolute rule of the household and its members. His command is manifested through physical bullying, unconditional control of the budget and most vividly by his behaviour at mealtimes. Uncle Philip's eating capacity is remarkable, though his oppressive presence drains all pleasure from the others' meals. His appetite seems most whetted at Sunday tea-time, by the fact that Aunt Margaret capnot eat, due to the discomfort of the ornate silver choker he made for her wedding present and which he obliges her to wear at this time. She is dehumanized, deprived of both speech and sustenance, her mouth unable either to take in ~r give out. A silenced woman, it seems, becomes a starved woman. Uncle Philip, meanwhile, tucks into a 'pink battalion' of shrimps, a whole loaf of bread with half a pound of butter and most of a large cake, before going on to satisfY his sexual appetite. Aunt Margaret's hunger is quite simply disallowed. What happens, of course, is the same as what happens wherever control is imposed purely by force: subversion. Aunt Margaret's se~al appetite is secretly satisfied by her brother Francie (thus negating Uncle Philip's marital 'rights') and her pleasures, satisfactions and nourishment are focused in what the patriarch would undoubtedly see as the margins of the household's life. She is able to relax and eat only when Uncle Philip is not present, and then

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TIle infernal appetites of Angela Carter they all take their time to eat lavishly and festively. Their appetites for life - reflected not only in their eating and sexual appetites, but in Margaret's and her brothers' fIery hair, their music and dancing, the paintings - are expressed only within their close-knit relationship. Whether Uncle Philip has a sense of his own exclusion is never made specific, but his rage of control and possession certainly suggests as much. In this as in other qualities, Uncle Philip has some similarity with Albert Spica, the 'thief in Peter Greenaway's 1989 fllm, The Cook, The Thiif, His Wife and Her Lover. Both men's power is primarily economic, and implemented through degradation and brutality, those powerful tools in the service of tyranny (as Carter notes in The Sadeian Woman) which appear to allow little scope for any shifting in power relations. Both men might be seen to represent an oppressive or corrupt political reality which has something to do with patriarchy, something with capitalism (and in Greenaway's case Thatcherism) and something to say, perhaps, about the corruption of power itseleo Both men are capable of murder, and in both cases murder is linked with eating. Albert's gang kill his wife's lover Michael by forcefeeding him books, and Albert is himself forced at gunpoint to eat Michael's cooked body. In Uncle Philip's case, murder is initially sketched as a possibility when he carves the Christmas goose: He attacked the defenceless goose so savagely he seemed to want to kill it all over again, perhaps feeling the butcher had been incompetent in the first place ... The reeking knife in his hand, he gazed reflectively at

Finn ... (The Magic Toyshop, p. 160)

And when he finally sets flre to the house to bum them all to death, it is the kitchen he smashes up fIrSt, adding even the table, with its tablecloth and the remains of their meal, to the barricade at the foot of the stairs. Both men, I want to suggest, are powered by a cannibalistic appetite which is externally unrestrained because driven by an insatiable emptiness. This explanation holds good whether considered in the light of politics or psychoanalysis. I will suggest a psychoanalytic approach to cannibalism, but fIrst I want to offer a broadly political interpretation. In the fum, the emptiness of cannibalistic appetite is spelled out in Albert Spica's failure to conquer his wife and his pathetic dependence when she tries to leave, and in her ultimately naming him 'Cannibal'. The crushing of Aunt Margaret and her brothers in The Magic Toyshop, together with the sheer size Uncle Philip attains, suggests he is in some sense feeding off them. His desire for control, and Melanie's perceptions of him as Bluebeard, Saturn, the Beast of the Apocalypse, show him as monstrous and colonializing; indeed, he moves to bring the children into the same condition as the rest of the household:

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dirty, ill-clothed, uncomfortable, totally dependent and wholly in the service of the puppet theatre, itself a metaphor for vested control and manipulation. Notwithstanding the fairy-tale qualities of the novel, it has what Carter herself refers to as 'a system of signification', and it is not difficult to read as a parable of political oppression. 21 Michel Foucault writes of 'the limitless presumption of the appetite';22 in Uncle Philip appetite may be seen as a reductio ad absurdum of patriarchal licence and capitalist greed. In psychoanalytic terms, Uncle Philip (or indeed Albert) could be said to be stuck in the oral or oral-cannibalistic stage of development, longing for the sense of wholeness which is associated with the blissful sensations of the tiny infant at the breast, as yet unaware of itself as being distinct from the rest of world. 23 The infant's satisfaction in wholeness or completion is symbolized by the breast, the mother, the 'primary love object', so that ambivalent and even aggressive feelings are generated when the infant becomes aware that the breast is sometimes removed and that gratification is neither constant nor necessarily available on demand. According to the theory, the infant may sometimes wish to suck the breast dry (and thereby destroy it), while also fearing that the reverse will happen \~ a paradoxical relation illustrated by the negative desires and fears of the Count in The Infernal Desire Machines of Dr Hoffman (1972). Adult nostalgia for this sense of oneness is a nostalgia for something mythical which never existed, and which is certainly unobtainable, for the whole point of infantile bliss is its quiescence, while adult cannibalistic characters are nothing if not self-conscious. There is, it seems to me, a clear contradiction between the apparent power of men like Albert Spica and Uncle Philip and the driving emptiness that lies inside, whether we see this as psychic or political lack of substance. It may, of course, be this very contradiction, the subversion of ostensibly inexorable force by its own interior, that is Carter's main point. The external force is subverted both by the insatiability of the monster! cannibal's hunger and in the attempted, wholly self-referential resolution - take, for example, Uncle Philip's love for his puppets, which suggests both the emptiness and the solipsism. In TIte Passion of New Eve Carter likens the arid selfcompletion of Tristessa (who, incidentally, is literally empty, anorexic) to the uroborus, the snake formed into a circle with its tail in its mouth: 'the uroborus, the perfect circle, the vicious circle, the dead end', an image that seems equally applicable to the ravening tyrant whose negating hollowness threatens implosion.24 The description applies to Uncle Philip and to Zero, the Nietzschean poet of negation in New Eve, but I have in mind particularly the Count and his correlative the Cannibal Chief in The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman. The Count, more apparently vampire than cannibal, has the most voracious appetites imaginable, both gustatory and sexual. Yet despite his 108

The infernal appetites of Angela Carter depraved behaviour he is more deathly than libidinous, a fIgure of absolute negation, 'the hideous antithesis in person'. 25 His utter self-absorption, fantasies of omnipotence and relish for catastrophe and torture render him, he believes, invulnerable, but he is sabotaged by a driving sense of lack, a longing for 'the homely sensation of pain' (p. 125).26 It is this central lack which drives the Count's narrative, his fear and will together propelling him towards what he most dreads and longs for: 'That man - if man he be - is my retribution,' said the Count. 'He is my twin. He is my shadow. Such a terrible reversal; I, the hunger, have become my own prey. Hold me or I will run into his arms.'

(p. 139)

The 'man', the 'shadow', his other self, whom the Count both fears and desires, is embodied in the figure of the African Cannibal Chief who, in true comic book fashion, provides the solution to the Count's riddle by having him boiled in a cauldron. The Count is fmally able to feel, to name his pain, but as he boils he expires. Since the entire incident has probably been called up by the Count's own negating desire, it is clear he has willed his completion and destruction - in both guises, since the Cannibal Chief is also promptly despatched. The Count here is both the potential consumer ('I wish to taste myself', says the Cannibal Chief) and the food. What is more, he engineers this. Interestingly, both power and the pursuit of satisfaction in this novel relate not only to the provider and the eater but also to the eaten, which complicates the power relations. Cannibalism in general suggests the absolute supremacy of the consumer, and is presumably experienced as pretty well absolute by the victim - the dinner is, after all, hardly on equal terms with the diner. As Carter herself puts it, cannibalism is 'the most elementary act of exploitation, that of turning the other directly into a comestible; of seeing the other in the most primitive terms of use'.27 Yet even here, power is not concentrated wholly in one place. There is the effect of the eaten on the eater, as in the case of food poisoning, or as illustrated by the end of The Cook, the Thiif, when it is Albert who is degraded by being made to eat his wife's lover. Equally, some satisfaction or partial control may be wrested from the subjection, even if only temporarily, for a victim's agenda wields its own kind of power. The Count, as food, achieves a fleeting consummation before he dies. Elsewhere in Dr Hoffman, the narrating hero Desiderio also experiences cannibalistic desire as a potential victim - until, that is, he realizes the literal truth of what is going on. Desiderio longs to be consumed, metaphorically absorbed into the community of river people. Unfortunately for him they have more literal ideas about his consumption, preparing him at once for

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The Infernal Desires of Angela Carter the roles of bridegroom and wedding breakfast. 28 His temporary and partial incorporation suggests engulfment and regression. (This metaphorical incorporation is similar to that experienced by)oseph, the protagonist of Several Perceptions (1968), when he dreams that his friend's mother is an ice-cream which grows larger and larger as he eats it, finally engulfing him in an avalanche.)29 Desiderio's period of refuge on the boat is like a return to the womb (something Joseph also desires), the revisiting of an ultimately stifling pre-symbolic world from which his timely escape overboard resembles a rebirth. For, however much he might desire the completion promised by incorporation, as the Count's experience illustrates, it is fleeting if not illusory, and the net result is death. As Freud pointed out, eating the love object can only destroy it. All this suggests a profoundly negative estimation of appetite and its satisfaction. But this can only be a partial view, for appetite comes in many guises. Uncle Philip, the Count, the Cannibal Chief and even Desiderio are, like Saskia, motivated to a large extent by a negative, life-denying appetite that can have little to do with pleasure. Their hunger is monstrously insatiable because only satisfiable by an arid completion, stasis, death. They are powerful because ruthless politically, and in psychoanalytic tenns because impelled by one of the two main drives: Thanatos, the death drive. There is, however, another drive, Eros, which is just as unappeasable, but focused on life. Equally, there is an alternative to institutionalized power, and this can be seen in the Foucauldian model of unstable power relations where dominant and subordinate positions are not ftxed. 3o This flexible model reflects the frequent shifts of emphasis where food and eating are concerned, for hunger is continually renewed, acts of eating are perpetually recreated, and appetite is neither constant nor more than temporarily satisfied. 'The Kitchen Child' provides a clear and obvious example. First, the cook is seduced, her cooking disparaged by the housekeeper,~ her status as fallen woman only redeemed by the esteem of her fellow servants. Subsequently, she gains power through her skill and single-mindedness as the 'great artist' of the souffle. The shift towards Eros makes explicit the connection between eating and desire. For appetite in Carter's writing ~ even excluding the specifIcally sexual - is manifested as much in connection with desire as with the need for sustenance. In Kim Evans's Omnibus ftlm, posthumously broadcast on BBC Television, Carter speaks poignantly of 'the inextinguishable, the unappeasable nature of the world, of appetite, of desire'. 31 This, certainly, is Eros, the libidinous undercurrent that works so disturbingly and then bubbles so irrepressibly into Carter's later work. Here is the force, the fuel, the power that drives. Even in Dr Hoffman, when Desiderio kills the Doctor and his daughter and thus puts an end to the institutionalized release of desire, it 110

The infernal appetites of Angela Carter is desire itself, the irrepressible, wluch is in the end victorious, because the fonnerly passive Desiderio, the desired one, a man 'without passion', continues to yearn for Albertina for fifty years. I am cheating a bit here, perhaps, in shifting both the defmition and the grounds of power - but there is a serious point in suggesting that the libido has not only an internal influence in the 'construction' of appetite but that it therefore constitutes a force to be reckoned with in the play of external power relations. Just as Uncle Philip's and the Count/Cannibal Chiefs negative hollowness combine with external factors to lend them an oppressive power, so their later comic equivalents prevail through an appetite for life that is profoundly erotic. My earlier claim that Saskia is driven by Thanatos rather than Eros might seem bizarre, given her sexuality. Compare her with Fevvers, however, rising orgasmically like the cook's souffle, and I hope you will see what I mean. To state it in the most oppositional of tenus: where Saskia's appetite is a function of a negative, deathly sense of betrayal and the desire for revenge, Fevvers's appetite is, like the aerialiste herself, born of erotic power and the rejection of external constructions. 32 She is not the invention and refuses to be the victim of a male-created ideology; she carves out for herself (with a little help from her friends) an active, even - literally superior role. The signs of her appetite are abundant and often sexual (the sight of her open mouth gives Walser a 'seismic disturbance'), and Carter teasingly inverts the oppressiveness of cannibalism, showing Walser luxuriating in the imagined impression that 'her teeth closed on his flesh with the most voluptuous lack ofhann'.33 Fevvers's appetite is quite opposed to the extinguishing gluttony of the despot, and yet it too is powerful. She is as much an object of desire as Desiderio, but where he is essentially passive, a potential cannibal feast (twice), Fevvers is very much an active subject - and indeed a hearty eater. Fevvers, like Uncle Peregrine in Wise Childrm (an immense antithetical version of Uncle Philip), is a character who embodies much that accords with the Bakhtinian idea of carnival, including association with popular culture, the subversion or reversal of the expected, overblown bodily function and, above all, an inclusive, 'profoundly universal laughter' .34 Carter herself had apparently not read Bakhtin, at least until after she wrote Nights at the Circus, but her feeling for the traditional, subversive and affinnative aspects of carnival is undeniable. 35 As The Magic Toyshop draws towards its climax, for example, breakfast in Uncle Philip's absence turns into a mini-carnival of its own: there was such festivity in the kitchen ... The very bacon bounced and crackled in the pan for joy because Uncle Philip was not there. Toast caught fire and burned with a merry flame and it was not disaster, as he

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The Infernal Desires of Angela Carter would have made it, but a joke ... They sat around the table and mopped up egg-yolk with breadcrusts. Uncle Philip's ominous chair stood empty, the shell of a threat, the Siege Perilous. 'Sod it,' said Finn. 'I'm going to sit in his chair.' Aunt Margaret's hand flew to her aghast mouth. 'Don't fret, Maggie. It can't engulf me.' He sat at the head of the table like the Lord of Misrule, feeding the dog marmalade sandwiches, which it appeared to relish. Soon it seemed quite normal for Finn to be seated there. (p. 183, my emphasis)

Not surprisingly, this is the one occasion on which they eat the most lavish breakfast in the most leisurely fashion. After breakfast, the clock is smashed (,There goes the time', says Finn, Mad Hatter-like), and everybody dresses up, the holiday mood prevailing until the return of the dreadful Uncle Philip. If appetite is not so much innate as socially constructed, then carnival might perhaps be said to deconstruct it, resulting in something like a fi·ee play of appetites. The size and ostentation of Fevvers and Uncle Peregrine indicate large appetite, but appetite for wha~? Nothing Uncle Philip-like, and nothing limiting, certainly. Their power - since they unmistakably prevail - is manifested rather in exuberance, largesse and lust for life than insatiable hunger or greed. Each employs both sexuality and a touch of the super-normal against the status quo: Fevvers's confounding of the (male) establishment is aided by the magic in feminist/communist Lizzie's handbag; Uncle Peregrine, 'not so much a man, more of a travelling carnival' (Wise Children, p. 169), in his championing of the illegitimate branch of the family and the furthering of pleasure manifests a life-drive which so confounds the passage of time that he remains a potent redhead at 100 years of age. The positive appetites of the carnivalesque are, it seems, as powerful as those of the life-denying cannibal. But I must add a caveat. The work of Mikhail Bakhtin is sometimes used to support an argument that carnival's overthrowing of the existing order endorses subversion as a desirable end in itself However, as' Carter reminds us, 'The essence of the carnival, the festival, the Feast of Fools, is transience. It is here today and gone tomorrow, a release of tension not a reconstitution of order, a refreshment ... after which everything can go on again exactly as if nothing had happened', though her assertion that everything goes on exactly the same is, I think, an overstatement. 36 From this conservative perspective, however, the carnivalesque in Carter may be seen as rather less subversive than her .other writing, for the sting of the aberrant is drawn by legitimation or acceptance by the powers that be, and a sanctioned feast of fools has no real potency. Carnival embraces plurality and its very inclusiveness is aftirmatory rather than subversive. Thus Wise Children, 112

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through the gigantic figure of Uncle Peregrine, is able to embrace all appetites: murder, incest, poisoning, cruelty, gourmandism, as well as 'laughter, forgiveness, generosity, reconciliation' (p. 227). Where, then, does this leave the politics of appetite? To say that Carter's work as a whole is carnivalesque because it embraces both negation and affirmation is not to say very much. Yet it is only if we privilege carnival as an interpretative strategy - or indeed insist upon psychoanalytic exegesis - that we diminish her writing. 'Flesh comes to us out of history', she writes in TI,e Sadeian Woman, and this is worth remembering, whether the flesh is sexual or dietary. If sexuality is not 'an irreducible human universal', then neither is appetite, whether driven by Eros or Thanatos, and the morality of eating and attitudes to food can only be considered within a social and political system. 37 The fact that such systems are expressed obliquely in Carter's surreal and energetic writing is no reason to disregard their actuality. Those who feed, those who eat, those who hunger are real enough, both inside and outside the pure and infernal world of Carter's fiction.

NOTES

1. Barbara Hardy, 'The Dickensian feast', from The Moral Art if Dickens (London: Athlone Press, 1970), pp. 139-55. 2. This is not true of all Carter's reviews, many of which demonstrate a fascination with the history of diet in all its detail. See, for example, the reviews in the 'Tomato Woman' section of Expletives Deleted (London: Chatto & Windus, 1992). 3. Carter, Expletives Deleted, p. 94. 4. Ibid., p. 98. 5. Ibid., pp. 92, 98, 97. 6. 'Noovs' hoovs in the trough', London Review if Books (24 January 1985), also reprinted under the title 'An Omelette and a Glass oj Wine and other Dishes' in Expletives Deleted, pp. 77-82. 7. A selection of letters, including one from Christopher Driver, the disgruntled editor of the Guardian's food and drink page, is reproduced in Expletives Deleted, pp. 82-4. 8. All the quotations in this paragraph come from Expletives Deleted, pp. 98 and 80. 9. She rarely lets an opportunity slip; even in an otherwise laudatory review, she takes Patience Gray to task for a 'sloppy' reference to poverty: 'When Mrs Gray opines, "Poverty rather than wealth gives the good things of life their true significance", it is tempting to suggest it is other people's poverty, always a source of the picturesque, that does that.' Expletives Deleted, p. 102.

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10. Angela Carter, The Sadeian Woman: An Exercise in Cultural History (London: Virago, 1979). By power relations I mean verbal or physical transactions in which one party wields power over anOther. Every transaction contains the possibility of the exertion or subversion of power, but - especially where food and eating are concerned - I am inclined to agree with Michel Foucault that such relations are by no means fIxed or stable, though power may be culturally invested in one particular party (e.g. a mother). See also Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilisation: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason, trans. Richard Howard (London: Tavistock Publications, 1965). 11. Maud Ellmann, The Hunger Artists: Stawing Writing & Imprisonment (London: Virago, 1994), p. 36; Nicole Ward Jouve, 'Mother is 3 fIgure of speech .. .', in Lorna Sage, ed., Flesh and the Mirror (London: Virago, 1994), p. 156. 12. The point about such an ideal union being pre-oedipal is that there is as yet no sense of separation or difference from the mother, and thus no unappeased hunger. 13. Angela Carter, The Magic Toyshop (London: Virago, 1981) p. 47. Subsequent page references are to this edition and are given in the text. 14. Angela Carter, Heroes and Villains (London: Penguin, 1981), p. 43. 15. See especially Alice Thomas Ellis, The 27th Kingdom (London: Penguin, 1982), p. 104, and The Skeleton in the Cupboard (London: Penguin, 1988), pp. 68, 89. 16. 'The Kitchen Child' is in the collection Black Venus (London: Pan, 1985). This quotation is from p. 99. 17. Angela Carter, Wise Children (London: Vintage, 1992), pp. 180-1. Subsequent references are to this edition and are given in the text. 18. I am referring here to the two 'drives' suggested by Freud: Eros comprises the group of instincts, including the libido, which tend towards the enjoyment of life, and Thanatos refers to a universal death instinct. 19. In The Sadeian Woman, Carter says it is Sade, via the Romantics, who is responsible for 'shaping aspects of the modem sensibility; its paranoia, its despair, its sexual terrors, its omnivorous egocentricity, its tolerance of massacre, holocaust, annihilation' (p. 32, my emphasis). 20. In interview, Greenaway said that the ftlm represented 'my anger and passion about the current British political situation'. See Gavin Smith, 'Food for thought', Film Comment 26:3 (1990), pp. 54-60. 21. In an interview with John Haffenden, she maintains that her novels are intended to be read 'on as many levels as you can comfortably cope with at the time', although from this novel onwards she also aims to offer an 'entertaining surface'. See John Haffenden, Novelists in Intewiew (London: Methuen,. 1985), pp. 86-7. 22. See Foucault, Madness and Civilisation. 23. I am referring here to ideas put forward by Freud and developed by Melanie Klein and others. The idea of the flISt painful stage of psychic development being connected to a sense of loss or lack has been more recently developed by Lacan, but I have drawn largely on Klein because of her emphasis on the breast, which makes an explicit connection with food, and also because Carter -herself draws on Klein in The Sadeian Woman. 24. Angela Carter, The Passion of New Eve (London: Virago, 1982), p. 173. 25. Angela Carter, The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hqrman (London: Penguin, 1982), p. 124. Subsequent page references are to this edition and are given in the text.

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The infernal appetites of Angela Carter 26. The Count's anguish in shipboard captivity indicates the fragility of his socalled invulnerability: he suffers the terror of a disempowered monster. His fear may also be regarded, psychoanalytically, as tantamount to the infant fantasy that the love object s/he desires and wants to incorporate will, in fact, eat her or him. 27. Carter, The Sadeian Woman, p. 140. 'Primitive' here is problematic: it suggests something crude, uncivilized and exploitative, yet anthropologists stress that literal cannibalism is generally more hedged about with taboos, rules and rituals than any other form of eating. See, for example, Peggy Reeves Sanday, Divine Hunger (Cambridge: CUP, 1986). For an extensive (structural) analysis of primitive food-related behaviour see Claude Levi-Strauss, Structural Anthropology, The Raw and the Cooked: Introduction to a Sdence if Mythology, Vol. I (London: Jonathan Cape, 1970) and The Origin if Table Manners: Introduction to a Science if Mythology, Vol. III (London: Jonathan Cape, 1978). 28. At a 'realist' level the narrative draws on tribal beliefS that privilege the 'eaten': Desiderio possesses an ability to read, that the people want; the way to obtain this is by literally incorporating it; by eating him they will effortlessly receive his knowledge and skill. 29. Angela Carter, Several Perceptions (London: Virago, 1995), p. 76. 30. See Michel Foucault, TIle History of Sexuality, Volume 1: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (London: Allen Lane/Penguin, 1979). 31. Angela Carter's Curious Room, Director'Kim Evans, Omnibus (BBC Television, 15 September 1992). 32. Carter writes of herself 'questioning ... the nature of my reality as a woman. How that social fiction of my "femininity" was created, by means outside my control, and palmed off on me as the real thing.' See 'Notes from the Front Line', in Michelene Wandor, ed., On Gender and Writing (London: Pandora, 1983), p. 70. 33. Angela Carter, Nights at the Circus (London: Pan Books, 1985), p. 204. 34. Mikhail Bakhtin, The Problems of Dostoevsky'S Poetics, ed. and trans. Caryl Emerson (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984), p. 127. Fevvers's laughter at the end of Nights at the Circus reaches across the whole world until everyone and everything laughs 'as if a spontaneous response to the giant comedy that endlessly unfolded ... '. For a more extensive discussion of carnival, eating and the body, see Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World (1965), trans. Helene Iswolsky (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984). 35. 'Propp and structuralist theory in general were certainly part of her own early reading. After Nights at the Circus people assumed that Bakhtin on the carnivalesque was too, but not so: she eventually read him because he was invoked so often by readers.' Lorna Sage in Malcolm Bradbury, ed., New Writing (London: Minerva, 1992), p. 188. 36. 'In Pantoland', in Angela Carter, American Ghosts and Old World Wonders (London: Virago, 1994), p. 109. 37. Carter, The Sadeian Woman, pp. 11, 10.

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CHAPTER SEVEN

Revenge of the living doll: Angela Carter's horror writing Gina Wisker

THE 'FEARFUL INHERITANCE' OF HORROR WRITING - AND FEMINIST SUBVERSION

Angela Carter was, among much else, in the'vanguard of a popular feminist onslaught against the conventions of horror writing. Along with a whole generation of writers, she addresses a genre dominated not only by male practitioners, but also male fears of female sexuality and female subjectivity. This chapter illustrates her adaptations of the horror genre, and suggests that this project of revision resurfaces wherever her work uses fantasy and macabre humour to critique both patriarchal power relations and the stereotypical representation of women. Her sustained interest in subverting horror writing is certainly connected with her well-known, and polemical, reworking of fairy-tales in The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories (1979). By rereading traditional sexual scripts featuring monstrous witches and goldenhaired heroines of the fairy-tale genre, she exposes th; conservative meanings implicit in these narratives. The same is true of her approach to horror writing. Carter discloses that, by figuring women as either malevolen~ femmes fatales or idealized, doll-like icons, conventional horror disempowers femininity. But rather than simply reveal the limiting ways in which horror writing makes women into either bloodthirsty vampires or quaking violets, Carter's fiction sets out to redefine the genre altogether. To understand precisely how Carter turns conventional horror against itself, we need first of all to look at how the reactionary politics of this type o(writing contains the seeds of its own subversion. If conventional horror creates plots that invariably work against women's liberation, other characteristics of the genre tum out to be equally conservative. Although horror writing unleashes anxieties and fantasies about

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forbidden areas of our lives, it carefully holds in check those disturbing aspects of everyday experience we do our utmost to control. Even if bringing unspeakable forces into focus, this genre - like most literary genres - frequently features closural devices that return us to safety and order, and such devices habitually reinforce the status quo. Lisa Tuttle, a contemporary feminist practitioner of this genre, points out that conventional horror not only explores and embodies terror but also - through its comfortable closures and resolutions - returns us to a patriarchal order that devalues women: There is no reason why men should not explore their own fears and fantasies, but when they lose sight of the existence of an encultured male bias and mistake it for universal 'human nature'; when they forget there are other ways of being and feeling; when they confuse patriarchal social structures with natural law; when they perpetuate stereotypes and mistake their own fantasies for objective reality - then we're all imprisoned by their limitations, and horror becomes another kind of pornography. 1

Tuttle is right. But horror has its radical edge as well. In so far as the genre embodies and dramatizes the rejected Other (the monstrous, unsafe self that dwells within), horror writing certainly encourages us to confront our worst fears - fears that can bring about the hope of imagining change. It permits, as Freud would put it, the return of the repressed, and it is precisely this aspect which attracts Carter. In her hands, horror writing becomes a powerful vehicle through which she can critique established philosophical, political and sexual norms. Pursuing some of the most familiar scenarios of conventional horror with ironic paraphrase, Carter quickly discloses its downright sexism. Yet her work goes much further than simply condemning the patriarchal biases of the genre. Her interventions in horror writing supplant dehumanizing and oppressive social constructions, and offer an enthralling vision of permanent liberation from them. How? By insisting that we recognize the feared Other in ourselves, in all its cruelty as well as its beauty. Carter's reworking of the unsettling potential that abides in horror writing comes into much sharper focus when we look more closely at the genealogy from which this genre descends. Contemporary women's horror is the subversive granddaughter of eighteenth-century Gothic fiction, as well as the dark twin of fantasy writing, since like the Gothic it chooses terror and liberates repressed desire. It is widely recognized that the Gothic and its heirs - fantasy and horror - all shape the substance of the unconscious, the world of dreams, the realm of repressed wishes and desires. The Gothic came into its own with Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto (1765) and Ann Radcliffe's Mysteries of Udolpho (1794). Another generic touchstone is James Hogg's The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824), which concentrates on the trope of the split self, a feature which recurs in several later Gothic works, such as Robert Louis Stevenson's The Strange 117

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Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1883). Both of these novels present a polarization of the confonnist self and the dar~ Other that lurks in the unconscious. Countless Hollywood films have taken up this Gothic motif, including The Fly (1958). Similar in construction are films featuring werewolves, and the fear of the beast inhabiting the self emerges forcefully in the three popular Alien flims starring Sigourney Weaver. But in destroying the evil twin, the alternative creature self, the terrifying Other, these novels and flims generally restore order by disavowing the ine~itable and continuing presence of that alter ego. A parallel conservative strain in the Gothic focuses on male sexual violence and features virginal women pursued through dark dungeons and along dank corridors by powerful, predatory men. Radcliffe's novels feature this type of plot, and it recurs in different guises in many nineteenthcentury fictions, from Charlotte Bronte's Villette (1853) to Bram Stoker's Dracula (1897). Since numerous Gothic tales feature cavernous dungeons and labyrinthine corridors, they seem to represent male anxieties about both female sexuality and the domestic sphere. In his illuminating introduction to The Oxford Book of Gothic Tales, Chris Bal4ick emphasizes the distinctly sexual fears evident in the incarcerating designs of the genre. 'The imprisoning house of Gothic fiction', he writes, 'has from the very beginning been that of patriarchy.'2 And the imprisonments of the Gothic house are certainly a symptom of considerable cultural unease with the family home and the women who inhabit it. Baldick identifies two temporal and spatial pressures that make domestic space extremely threatening in this genre: 'for the Gothic effect to be attained, a tale should combine a sense of fearful inheritance in time with a claustrophobic sense of enclosure in space, these two dimensions reinforcing one another to produce an effect of sickening descent into disintegration'. 3 But to produce this pronounced sense of' disintegration', the Gothic appropriates old narrative matetials, subverts them, and puts them to new use. 'Gothic writers', Baldick observes, 'have borrowed fables and nightmares from a past age in order to repudiate their authority.,4 So even if in conventional Gothic tales women often escape from the clutches of one monstrous patriarch into the arms of a more friendly and familiar one, the genre is driven by an impulse to transform its 'fearful inheritance', since it alters the status of the stories on which it bases its plots. Extending this subversive potential, contemporary women Gothic and horror writers engage with the frightening cultural legacy and claustrophobic spaces characteristic of this enduringly popular form, only to devise ways of combating the sexist fears endemic t9 the genre and find ingenious means of escape from its domestic prisons. What, then, of fantasy, the Gothic twin of horror writing? Fantasy differs from the Gothic by dramatizing both fears and desires, liberating the 118

Revenge of the living doll: Angela Carter's horror writing repressed, and restoring order. In this particular descendant of the Gothic, what seems impossibly attractive is in fact enacted, what seems safe is made dangerous, and what has been hidden is ultimately revealed. Fantasy hollows out the real world and shows it is a tenuous construct. Rosemary Jackson recognizes that, in eroding the presumed stability of the real world, fantasy expresses a desire that is elsewhere disavowed in culture: Far from construing this attempt at erosion as a mere embrace of barbarism or chaos, it is possible to discern it as a desire for something excluded from the "cultural order - more specifically, for all that is in opposition to the capitalist and patriarchal order which has been dominant in Western society over the last two centuries. s

Jackson observes that the modern fantastic - the fonn of literary fantasy within the secularized culture produced by capitalism - scrutinizes and erodes the real by unleashing celebratory energies. Conventional horror follows the 'erosion' enabled in fantasy by bringing to light the sexual terrors lurking within the unconscious. But its methods are much more unsettling. Here the very worst nightmares are enacted. Disempowennent, dismembennent, dehumanization - these are the processes that distinguish the horror genre. In the world of horror writing, the Gothic 'disintegration' that Baldick identifIes is taken to terrifying extremes. People tum into animals. Floors, walls, homes, family, friends - all lose their stability. Structures oflaw and order rapidly dissolve, or worse still are exposed as flawed, founded upon mere dreams and hopes. Mark Jankovich sums up these tendencies: 'Throughout its history, horror has been concerned with forces that threaten individuals, groups, or even "life as we know it." It has been concerned with the workings of power and repression in relationship to the body, the personality, or to social life in general.,6 But such remarks need a feminist caveat, one which reminds us of how frequently horror writing has been used to keep women in their traditional place. So how does Carter counter the patriarchal impulses of the horror genre? In part, her work reinvests horror writing with liberating, often comic, energies of fantasy, and in doing so yokes horror with carnival, that equally subversive celebratory mode. A number of writers have observed that the Gothic and its related genres contain an explosive force that is fuelled with comic energy. Roald Dahl, for example, remarks: 'good horror is essentially funny, in fiction I mean,.7 And in his classic study of the American novel, Leslie Fiedler comments: 'The Gothic mode is essentially a fonn of parody, a way of assailing cliches by exaggerating them to the limits of grotesqueness. ,'S Carter knows only too well that carnival uses the grotesque and the parodic to provide a transfonnative vision of the world. A number of commentators have seen connections between the horror genre and this aspect of carnival. Building on Soviet theorist Mikhail Bakhtin's pioneering

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The Infernal Desires of Angela Carter work, James Donald defines the carnivalesque power of vampire films as a 'feast of becoming, change and renewal which is hostile to that which is immortalized and completed,.9 Carnival, according to Donald, revels in 'the noise of negotiation and dialogue' .10 Typically turning the world upside down, carnival creates a cathartic alternative to established values and meanings, and as such it enables dialogue between beliefS and behaviours, rather than insisting on one right way. Above all, carnival recognizes the vital relationship between opposites. And it is in the spirit of carnival that Carter seizes on each and every opportunity to yoke opposites together. Her characteristic fonnat for exploring the carnivalesque potential of the genre is domestic horror. Carter's work closes in on the family home as the locus of patriarchal tyrannies, large and small, putting the spotlight on the werewolf in the kitchen (,The Company of Wolves', 1979) and on the blood and feathers on the dinner table ('The Fall River Axe Murders', 1985). Throughout, Carter fastens on signifiers of male power, the small print of 'to obey' in the traditional homely partnership. She looks at husbands whose desire for total control renders their wives and relatives either silenced puppets (The Magic Toyshop, 1967) or victims for consumption ('The Bloody Chamber', 1979). And she empowers the women caught in these imprisoning plots to escape from or destroy oppression. Domestic entrapment erupts into carnage in 'The Fall River Axe Murders'. Bloodied hands lurk in kitchen drawers in The Magic Toyshop. Romantic lies about eternal love are exposed in the violent (but thwarted) intentions of a good-looking, rich, art-collecting Bluebeard (,The Bloody Chamber'). In making the familiar domestic realm such a horrifying place, Carter's work explores ideas similar to those discussed in French feminist theorist Julia Kristeva's Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. In this book, Kristeva defines the abject as those substances which the body needs to reject, or make other, in order for the subject to be able to reC()gnize itself as separate, and thus create an autonomous space for itself The first object of rejected abjection is the mother. In Kristeva's view, the painful rejection of the maternal body prefigures the extradition of women from ptedominandy male social territory to the borders of the imagination. The main cultural consequence of abjecting the maternal body is that women - whether idealized or demonized - remain definitely so 'other' that they must be restrained or destroyed. 'Fear of the archaic mother', writes Kristeva, 'turns out essentially to be a fear of her generative power. It is this power, a dreaded one, that patriarchal filiation has the burden of subduing~l1 In Kristeva's model of abjection, the mother remains for every subject - male and female - a terrifying source of generative power. As a result, the sexually aware woman is a threat to the patriarchal order. And women's bodies are thus a focus of cultural fear and loathing for the for~~s they might release. 120

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In a noteworthy essay, Victor Burgin clari£les this point about Kristevan abjection. Otherness, he argues, produces idealization, rejection and marginalization at one and the same time: This peripheral and ambivalent position allocated to woman, says Kristeva, has led to that familiar division of the field of representations in which women are viewed as either saintly or demonic - according to whether they are seen as bringing the darkness, or as keeping it out. 12

He adds: What is abject is not my correlative, which providing me with someone or something else as support, would allow me to be more or less detached and autonomous. The abject has only one quality of the object - that of being opposed to 1.13

Similarly, Luce Irigaray - who has a very different sense of the psychic from Kristeva - throws important light on our understanding of the relation between women and the Other when she writes: 'In this proliferating desire of the same, death will be the only representative of an outside, of a heterogeneity, of an other: women will assume the function of representing death. ,14 In other words, the desire to overcome the monstrous in horror, to render the terrifying and menacing female vulnerable, stems from a wish to control the most frightening threat - death. But the women in the house of Carter's horror £lction refuse to die. In fact, on occasions they actually rise up from the dead, since they are absolutely determined to go on living - and, what is more, on their own terms. In what follows, I give some detailed examples that show how Carter discovers in the horror genre resources of subversion that de£lantly resist its sexually repressive endings.

FEMININITY, CARNIVAL AND HORROR IN THE PATRIARCHAL HOME

If one subversive figure contests conventional horror in her £lction, then it is surely the living doll. The living doll that British pop idol Cliff Richard sang of in the late 1950s, and which American poet Sylvia Plath deconstructs in 'The Applicant' (1962), marks the threshold of horror and carnivalesque comedy in Carter's work. The living doll is the central conceit of The Magic Toyshop, blurring the boundaries of performance and experience, of effect and affect. Uncle Philip aims to turn his hapless extended family into puppets, and in particular to control Melanie's sexuality. The high art resonances 121

The Infernal Desires of Angela Carter of the Leda and the Swan myth - celebrated in W. B. Yeats's poem of 1917 - permeate the narrative. Melanie designs herself according to the male gaze to fulfIl her interpretations of various fantasies of women produced by male artists, writers of romantic fictions, and popular genres such as horror itseli. The pyrotechnic display of her mother's wedding dress equates her with the swan with whom she is forced to perform Uncle Philip's little patriarchal puppet scenario. Uncle Philip figures himself as a god, one who tries to enforce his phallocentric will upon the household. Melanie's identity is snuffed out in the farcical, horrible rape scene as she is literally transformed into the doll of Uncle Philip's imaginings. As in some of the more bizarre scenes of Jacobean drama, farce and horror are played out in equal measure. Farce is used to expose force, and force legitimizes farce: Well I must lie down, she thought, and kicking aside shells, went down on her knees. Like fate or the clock, on came the swan, its feet going splat, splat, splat ... all her laughter was snuffed out. She was hallucinated. She felt herself not herself, wrenched from her own personality ... and in this staged fantasy anything was possible. Even that the swan, the mocked up swan, might assume reality itself and rape this girl in a blizzard of white feathers. 15 ,. Here the description of the mechanical movements of the swan emphasize both Uncle Philip's ruthless control and the potential reification of Melanie in the stage act. 'She felt herself not herself': this sentence clearly points to her disempowerment, and her loss of identity. This is certainly a drama enacting Uncle Philip's perverse sexual fantasies, and it is a scene of utmost horror for Melanie. The swan may be phoney but the terror is real. Yet Carter also makes the scene ridiculous - depicting the swan's 'feet going splat, splat, splat'. So while the genuine danger and horror are not reduced, the comic style debunks Uncle Philip's arrogant manipulativeness, and thus points to how carnivalesque excess can refute the psychological hold patriarchal power can have over women and their sexuality. Perhaps the cardinal example of Carter's domestic horror featuring entrapment and reification is 'The Bloody Chamber', a rewriting of the Bluebeard legend, the archetypal fantasy of male control over women. This version of the traditional story features an art connoisseur who treats his new wife purely as a commodity, an ornament, and a sexual feast for the eyes: 'Rapt, he intoned: "Of her apparel she retains only her sonorous jewellery" ... A dozen husbands impaled a dozen brides while the mewing gulls swung on invisible trapezes in the empty air outside.'16 Threats of violence simultaneously attract and repel the new bride, who recognizes how his 'connoisseur's look' scrutinizes her: 'I saw him watching me in the gilded mirrors with the assessing eye of a connoisseur inspec'ting horseflesh, or even of a housewife in the market, inspecting cuts on the slab.'17 But she is eventually

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overwhelmed by his attention and the undying love he offers. Poor and innocent - like the celebrated female protagonists in Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre (1847) and Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca (1936) - the young girl is flattered by his gifts, his wooing, his fmancial security. Precisely because she is treated like meat, frissons of cannibalism (the ultimate act of abjection) pervade the story. Sexual relations are thus reduced merely to carnal knowledge, which is here also carnivorous knowledge: the roots of the two words are deliberately emphasized. In 'The Bloody Chamber', the monstrous husband fIguratively devours his bride as he ravishes her, attempting to govern her imagination and her quest for knowledge. The close connections between sexual oppression, cannibalism and horror are spelt out dearly in The Sadeian Woman: An Exercise in Cultural History (1979), the controversial essay Carter published in the same year as 'The Bloody Chamber'. 'Sexuality, stripped of the idea of free exchange', she writes, 'is not in any way humane: it is nothing but pure cruelty. Carnal knowledge is in the infernal knowledge of the flesh as meat.'18 In the same book, Carter frequently underscores the Sadeian sexual impulse to consume the flesh: 'The strong abuse, exploit and meatify the weak, says Sade.'19 It is in this Sadeian spirit that the patriarch of 'The Bloody Chamber' desires total ownership and control, needing to test his powers by leaving suddenly, entrusting the household keys to his new wife. Not surprisingly, when the girl seeks knowledge, fIgured in the key she fmds to the locked and forbidden room, she falls foul of his need for complete domination. In opening up the room, it looks as if she shall be the next in the series of dismembered wives. But her warrior mother, in a moment that comically mocks traditional chivalry (as well as reminding us of the legendary figure of Joan of Arc), races to the rescue, aided by the singularly non-heroic blind piano tuner. So the patriarchal myth is undermined and neutralized when the girl escapes from the castle. Here the camivalesque assuredly overcomes the repressive closures of conventional horror. She and her distinctly untraditional warrior mother (together with her male accomplice) cross the forbidden boundaries established in this myth, and thus refuse the reification and engulfinent historically legitimated for Bluebeard. The girl neither becomes a victim nor forfeits her sexuality. The same is true of the child parricide Lizzie Borden (1860-1927) in Carter's 'The Fall River Axe Murders' (1985), where domestic entrapment exemplifies the repressive nature of the Puritan neighbourhood in New England and its effect on the young girl's claustrophobic family. She, too, inhabits a confining domestic space: 'A house full of locked doors that open only into other rooms with other locked doors, for, upstairs and downstairs , all the rooms lead in and out of one another like a maze in a bad dream. ,20 In this story, the only response to such repression and incarceration 123

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is eruption. For many pages, Carter's narrative holds us in a terrifymg stasis, awaiting Lizzie Borden's violent explosion into the ostensibly cahn domestic interior. She is the product of a strict religious upbringing, the undertaker father's capitalist insensitivities, and a shuttered existence that promises only a dead-end future. Here Carter both dramatizes the paradigmatic urban horror tale of the disruptive and destructive female and enables us to interpret its causes from a woman's point of view. Lizzie Borden finally explodes when her pigeons are cruelly killed. She carves her family up with the axe used to ·convert the beloved birds into a pie for her stepmother. Like much good horror writing, the lurking threat to the calm suburban neighbourhood reminds us all how close we sail to the wind of a normality that itself perpetrates inequalities, repressions, stagnations. Lizzie's earlier life, charted in 'Lizzie's Tiger' (1993), gave plenty of warning that she would erupt from a domestic world described in imagery echoing the well-known fairy-tales of the Brothers Grimm. Standing among 'the old wooden homes' which looked 'like an upset cookie jar of broken gingerbread houses lurching', 21 Lizzie equates herself with the circus tiger she has been forbidden to see. Likewise, in 'The Fall River Axe Murders', when Lizzie is denied the spirit of carnival, her repression shrieks from her silences because 'outside, above, already in the burning air, see! the angel of death roosts in the roof-tree'.22 The time has come for Lizzie to hack her parents to pieces.

EMBRACING OPPOSITES: THE ABJECT WELCOMED BACK

The Magic Toyshop, 'The Bloody Chamber' and 'The Fall River Axe Murders' all show how Carter's horror writing refuses to succumb to the source of the repression from which the horror arose in the first place. Glittering, contradictory, terrifying and funny, her interventions in tl--..is genre collapse conventional boundaries between internal and external, animate and inanimate, the acceptable and the taboo. Exploiting the liberatory mode of carnival, her horror writing points gleefully to the necessary artifice of any type of narrative closure. Hence The Magic Toyshop high1ig~ts the factitiousness of its ending as Finn and Melanie stand in the garden like Adam and Eve, the house of patriarchal tyranny burning behind them, for they are on the threshold of a whole new world. Likewise, Carter gives us a whorish puppet which comes to life and stalks off to enact erotic fantasies ('The Loves 124

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of Lady Purple', 1974). Exactly the same is true of her unorthodox representation of Little Red Riding Hood, a little girl who fearlessly rips off her clothes and jumps into bed with the wolf ('The Company of Wolves', 1979). Any restoration of the established male-dominated order is ironized, as this passage from the end of 'The Company of Wolves' makes perfectly clear: Every wolf in the world now howled a prothalamium outside the window as she freely gave him the kiss she owed him. What big teeth you have! She saw how his jaw began to slaver and the room was full of the forest's Liebestod but the wise child never flinched, even when he answered: All the better to eat you with. The girl burst out laughing; she knew she was nobody's meat. She laughed at him full in the face, she ripped off his shirt for him and flung it full in the fire, in the fiery wake of her own discarded clothing. 23

Carter's renowned reinterpretation of this fairy-tale overturns the conventional generic formulae that consistently cast women in negative roles as victims or predators. Carter's self-aware and sexually active young woman defuses the nightmarish situation by recognizing the beast in herself and the man in the beast. In this story, Little Red Riding Hood does not find the werewolf - the customary figure of sexualized horror - either terrifying or potentially engulfing. Together, both her sense of sexual power and her fine sense of humour undercut his status as a mythic figure of horror. This episode highlights Carter's favourite rhetorical trope - the oxymoron, which involves the paradoxical twinning of opposites. In yoking opposites together - such as self/Other, good/evil - her work declines to privilege one version of identity and its exclusive values over another. At the same time, her fictional techniques - which often involve balancing documentary and historical realism with speculative, magical and fantastic narrative - dramatize the oxymorons conspicuous at the level of character and theme. Combining opposites both in the content and the form of her texts, Carter's horror writing enacts a structure of fear and fascination, attraction and repulsion - as this passage from 'The Company of Wolves' reveals: At night, the eyes of wolves shine like candle flames, yellowish, reddish, but that is because the pupils of their eyes fatten on darkness and catch the light from your lantern to flash it back to you - red for danger; if a wolf's eyes reflect only moonlight, then they gleam a cold and unnatural green, a mineral, a piercing colour. If the benighted traveller spies those luminous, terrible sequins stitched suddenly on the black thickets, then he knows he must run, if fear has not struck him stock-still. 24

Here the narrator starts with a vibrant simile before moving into the realm of oxymoronic beauty and pain - focused in the 'luminous, terrible sequins'.

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The Infernal Desires of Angela Carter Benighted travellers, we are told to run but realize we cannot. For this description locks us in the terrifying stasis of nightmare. Held still, we know from the verb 'fatten' that the wolves lorig to devour us. And the flashing of the lantern to the eye indicates an uncomfortably close and inevitable relation between traveller and wolf Through such techniques, 'The Company of Wolves' shows us not only that horror is disturbingly near to us, but also that we ourselves produce what we most fear. Such writing allows us to see our dark side - the side that must, Carter insists, be acknowledged. This, too, is Kristeva's point. By recognizing the Other and the abject as part of ourselves, we can, she argues, overcome the need to find victims, scapegoats and enemies. In Strangers to Ourselves, a political exploration of the way the West treats foreigners, Kristeva develops the claims made in Powers of Horror, linking the need to expose the abjected boundaries of Western patriarchy with the need for racial and political equality: our disturbing otherness, for that indeed is what bursts in to confront the 'demons', that threat, that apprehension generated by the projective apparition of the other at the heart of what we persist in maintaining as a proper, solid 'us'. By recognizing our uncanny strangeness we shall neither suffer from nor enjoy it from the outside. The foreigner is within me, hence we are all foreigners. If I am a foreigner, then there are no foreigners. 2s

WOMEN'S HORROR BITES BACK

If in Carter's horror writing the wolf represents the abjected beast within, then her vampires focus the insurgent power of female-sexuality that patriarchal culture does everything it can to repress. Vampires traditionally invade the space of the home and the body, and so they represent our fears of invasion by Otherness. Male vampires, including Dracula, frequently epitomize threats to men's ownership of women's sexuality. Similarly, female vampires often represent male anxieties of sexually voracious women. That Carter became increasingly absorbed by the parodic potential of this stock figure from the horror genre can be seen in numerous reworkings of the vampire myth. Her Gothic antecedents include Isak Dinesen (1885-1962), whose interests lay in the perversions and power of decayed aristocracy, as well as the heavily Jacobean, nightmarish, lesbian Gothic of Nightwood (1936) by Djuna Barnes (1892-1982). The focus of much lesbian Gothic is on questions of sexuality and normality raised by such borderline creatures as

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Revenge of the living doll: Angela Carter's horror writing werewolves and vampires. In an essay on the homoeroticism associated with vampires, Richard Dyer remarks: 'the vampire seems especially to represent sexuality ... s/he bites them, with a bite that is just as often described as a kiss' .26 This is precisely what happens in Carter's 'The Lady of the House of Love' (1979), which features a female protagonist who is the last relative of Vlad the Impaler. She sits in a castle coated in dust and moth-ravaged velvet - a place of 'disintegration' where she 'notices nothing' .27 Her beauty is intense, ideal, unnatural. She feasts reluctantly each night on woodland creatures, using her mandarin-long nail to gouge her prey, and she carries out the traditional vampiric routine: 'All day, she lies in her coffin in her neglige of blood-stained lace' (p. 96). Powerful scents intoxicate and overwhelm the potential victim. The flowers that line the path to her home are as voluptuous and vaginal as any depicted by Georgia O'Keeffe: 'almost too luxuriant, their huge congregation of plush petals somehow obscene in their excess, their whorled, tightly budded cores outrageous in their implications' (p. 98). The lady is thin, waiflike and lost, with a 'lovely death's head' (p. 101). A living contradiction of death and sensuality, she never sees her reflection returned in the mirror. Unnaturally beautiful, she has 'an extraordinarily fleshy mouth, a mouth wide, wide, full, prominent lips of vibrant purplish-crimson, a morbid mouth' (p. 101). But her destiny as a vampire changes unexpectedly. Seen by the young, respectable First World War soldier peddling away on his bicycle through the Carpathians, she appears to have 'a whore's mouth' - 'but', being the good young man he is, 'he put the thought away immediately' (p. 101). On his accidental visit to the vampiric Countess, he shows that he cannot avoid patriarchal constructions of women. He can only compare her to flowers and whores. But, signiflcantly, she also strikes him as doll-like, encaged like her pet bird, helplessly fulfilling age-old roles: she is like a doll, he thought, a ventriloquist's doll, or, more, like a great ingenious piece of clockwork. For she seemed inadequately powered by some slow energy of which she was not in control; as if she had been wound up years ago, when she was born, and the mechanism was inexorably running down and would leave her lifeless. The idea that she might be an automaton ... deeply moved his heart. (p. 102)

Noble though the soldier might be in appearance, he is erotically turned on by her marionette-like demeanour. Not only that, but the Countess responds to his advances, and romantic love proves to be her undoing. For she falls victim to her own vampire's promise of eternal love when she feels the lips of the soldier on her skin. One kiss from this young man helps heal her wounded hand, and she becomes human. In this encounter, several 127

TIle Infernal Desires of Angela (:arter other unforeseen reversals occur. Ironically, instead of confonning to the stereotype of the sexually aggressive suitor, the hero is celibate. His distinct lack of sexuality corresponds more closely with the virginity that protects countless heroines in folklore as a magic talisman against evil. Likewise, the approaching historical moment of great blood loss is the corollary of the eternity promised by vampire loves. What is more, the First World War - a -bloodbath where millions lost their lives - represents the apotheosis of all military conflict. And, in this context, war itself stands as the violent outcome of a masculinist logic involving mechanical control that moves relentlessly in one fatal direction. Perched on his bicycle, the young soldier is, with great precision, pedalling his way towards disaster, and the meagre geometry of his machine implies the brutally rigid logic that has produced the bombs that will blast him ('the bicycle is the product of pure reason applied to motion', p. 97). His logical challenge to the Carpathians' superstitions cannot protect him from death in the trenches. And, misguidedly logical to the last, he misses the grand passion of the Countess herself An upstanding English hero who wants to take her 'to an eye specialist, for her photophobia, and to a dentist to put her teeth into better shape', he is far too unimaginative to understand the nature of her desires (p. 107). Finally, the vampire's rose he revives back in his quarters - in all its 'corrupt, brilliant, baleful splendour' (p. 108) - ironically prefigures the approaching carnage of the Great War. All these details show how the story thrives on contraries. The Lady herself lives a contradictory existence, in a kind of waking dream: 'She herself is haunted house. She does not possess herself ... sleeping and waking, behind the hedge of spiked flowers, Nosferatu's sanguinary rosebud' (p. 103). Hovering between life and death, the Countess inhabits a half-way existence. She both occupies the traditional vampiric role of uniting opposites (life/death; human/animal) and exposes the destructive antitheses between logic/superstition and malelfemale which produce wars and romantic lies. Carter reworked the story for a radio play, Va mp irella , first broadcast on BBC Radio 3 in 1978. Radio was a medium that Carter felt better enabled the vital mix of irony, comedy and horror, encouraging both enjoyment and critique. 'In radio', observes Carter, 'it is possible to sustain a knifeedge tension between black comedy and bizarre pathos. ,28 The dexterities and subtleties of radio, she feels, allow ambiguities that do not emerge in the short story: '''The Lady of the House of Love" is a Gothic tale about a reluctant vampire; the radio play Vampirella is about vampirism as metaphor. >29 In the radio play, Count Dracula and the insane, wicked waste of the First World War provide both a context and a set of parameters against which we can measure the life, loves and ultimate decay of the lady vampire. Here Henri Blot goes further than the young soldier in the short story. 128

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Blot is not Just attracted to the doll-like quality of the lady vampire, he desires her because she resembles a corpse: Corpses don't nag and never want new dresses. They never waste all day at the hairdressers, nor do they talk for hours to their girlfriends on the telephone. They never complain if you stay out at your club; the dinner won't get cold if it's never been put in the oven. Chaste, thrifty - why, they never spend a penny on themselves! and endlessly accommodating. They never want to come themselves, nor demand of a man any of those beastly sophistications - blowing in the ears, nibbling at the nipples, tickling of the clit - that are so onerous to a man of passion. Doesn't it make your mouth water? Husbands, let me recommend the last word in conjugal bliss - a corpse. 30

Blot indicts bourgeois husbands who fail to see that their preferences are also for corpse-like women. Their living, ostensibly respectable wives, he suggests, suck these men dry while they (the predatory husbands) 'perpetrate infamies'.31 He implies that women, safer as dolls, are even more tractable as corpses. The marionette, the living doll - the main focus of Carter's use of horror as a form of social and sexual critique - is central to the final story I shall discuss, 'The Loves of Lady Purple' (1974).32 This tale of male fantasy, power and lust features woman as a controllable automaton. The story brings together several familiar motifs from the horror genre: the vampire; the flesh-eating zombie; the Pygmalion icon; and the predatory puppet. Lady Purple herself is a compendium of all these effigies. She is the 'Queen of the Night' (p. 26), the 'undead' (p. 23) created from the perverse sexual longings of her male creator. In the hands of the Asiatic Professor (who 'knew only his native tongue', p. 24), together with his deaf apprentice and mute assistant, Lady Purple - 'the famous prostitute and wonder of the East' (p. 28) - appears on stage to perform her 'Notorious Amours' (p. 29). Her act consists of playing out the sexual excesses which supposedly precipitated her fall from humanity into puppet, and her perversities in turn objectify her own lovers who come beneath her reifying spell: 'In the iconography of the melodrama, Lady Purple stood for passion and all her movements were calculations in an angular geometry of sexuality' (p. 29). Enacting these stories, she fills the silences of the men who manipulate her limbs, while she herself is literally voiceless. A sideshow presenting unnatural desires, Lady Purple is hung up lifeless after each performance. Hers is the female body onto which her male manipulators write their hidden fears and fantasies. She is the 'petrification of a universal whore' (p. 28), both the 'nameless essence of the idea of woman' (p. 30) and yet, once brought to life in her performance, 'the image of irresistible evil' (p. 32). The archetypal horror figure, she embodies all 129

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that attracts and repulses her audience, and yet can be conveniently tidied away out of sight for future use. But this is the case only until she seizes the initiative, comes to life, and writes her own tale. One night the Professor, enamoured of his creation, kisses her. Time freezes as the tableau turns the doll into a living being. Lady Purple awakens, vampirically drains him of blood, and walks off to wreak havoc in a nearby brothel, vivifying the stories she was constructed to enact. Lady Purple is both vampire and automaton - but certainly not in terms of conventional horror. In the horror genre, desires are exposed, enacted and discarded. But Carter takes this scenario to its ironic and logical extreme. Lady Purple, the embodiment and repository of the punters' horror, cannot be packed away. This monster of their own making will finally neither lie down nor be hung up: even if she could not perceive it, she could not escape the tautological paradox in which she was trapped; had the marionette all the time parodied the living or was she, now living, to parody her own performance as a marionette? Although she was now manifesdy a woman, young and beautiful, the leprous whiteness of her face gave her the appearance of a corpse animated solely by dem,onic will. (pp. 38-9)

Here Carter uses paradox and irony to show how Lady Purple represents male fears of the vampiric femme fatale and patriarchy's necrophilic desire to make women into inanimate dolls. Lady Purple embodies both the vengeful vampire and the lifeless marionette. Yet in her determination to stalk into the village, she ultimately returns the horror genre· to its own sick source. Brought alive, the living doll at last has her revenge. Weaving together the literary and the popular, the creepy and the comic, the mythic and the mundane, Carter's horror writing is ultimately both entertaining and disquieting: magical realism with a healthy dose of sexual politics. Her fictional world is bizarre, unnerving, highly tharged, powerfully erotic, and yet it is also domestic and everyday. She offers us the werewolf in the kitchen, the living doll in the bedroom - all that we abject from home sweet home.

NOTES 1. Lisa Tutde, ed., Skin of the Soul (London: Women's Press, 1990), p. 6. 2. Chris Baldick, ed., The Oxford Book of Gothic Tales (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), pp. xiii-xiv.

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3. Ibid., pp. xii-xiv. 4. Ibid. 5. Rosemary Jackson, Fantasy: The Literature of Subversion (London: Methuen, 1981), p. 176. 6. Mark Jankovich, Horror (London: Batsford, 1992), p. 118. 7. Roald Dahl, 'Interview', Twilight Zone, January-February 1983 (no page number available). 8. Leslie Fiedler, Love and Death in the American Novel (New York: Stein & Day, 1960), p. 452. 9. James Donald, Sentimental Education: Schooling, Popular Culture and the Regulation oj Liberty (London: Verso, 1992), p. 16. 10. Ibid., p. 17. 11. Julia Kristeva, Powers oj Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), p. 77. 12. Victor Burgin, 'Geometry and abjection', inJohn Fletcher and Andrew Benjamin, eds, Abjection, MelancllOlia and Love: Essays on the Work oJJulia Kristeva (London: Routledge, 1990), p. 116. 13. Ibid. 14. Luce Irigaray, Speculum oJthe Other Woman, trans. Carolyn G. Gill (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press), p. 27. 15. Angela Carter, The Magic Toyshop (London: Virago Press, 1981), p. 166. 16. Angela Carter, 'The Bloody Chamber', in Carter, The Bloody Chamber and Otller Stories (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1981), p. 17. 17. Ibid. 18. Angela Carter, The Sadeian Woman: An Exercise in Cultural History (London: Virago Press, 1979), p. 141. 19. Ibid., p. 140. 20. Angela Carter, 'The Fall River Axe Murders', in Carter, Black Venus (London: Picador, 1986), p. 107. 21. Angela Carter, 'Lizzie's Tiger', in Carter, American Ghosts and Old World WOllders (London: Vintage, 1994), p. 4. 22. Carter, ·'The Fall River Axe Murders', p. 121. 23. Angela Carter, 'The Company of Wolves', in Carter, The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories, p. 118. 24. Ibid., p. 110. 25. Julia Kristeva, Strangers to Ourselves, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (Hemel Hempstead: Harvester-Wheatsheaf, 1992), p. 192. 26. Richard Dyer, 'Children of the night: vampirism as homosexuality', in Susannah Radstone, ed., Sweet Dreams: Sexuality, Gender and Popular Fiction (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1988), p. 54. 27. Angela Carter, 'The Lady of the House of Love', in Carter, The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories, p. 84. Subsequent references to this story are from this edition and are given as page numbers in the text. . 28. Angela Carter, Vampirella, in Carter, Come Unto These Yellow Sallds (Newcastleupon-Tyne: Bloodaxe Books, 1985), p. 10. 29. Carter, Come Ullto These Yellow Sands, p. 10. 30. Carter, Vampirella, p. 108. 31. Ibid., p. 109. 32. Angela Carter, 'The Loves of Lady Purple', in Carter, Fireworks (London: Virago Press, 1987). Subsequent references to this story are from this edition and are given as page numbers in the text.

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CHAPTER EIGHT

Angela Carter's The Sadeian Woman: feminism as treason Sally Keenan

Critical discussion of Angela Carter's The Sadeian Woman has tended to be oblique, focusing mainly on its relationship to her fiction, and the ways in which she worked through the theoretical issues it raises in fictional form. In particular, attention has been directed at her deconstruction of cultural myths of femininity and the repression of women's sexuality that those myths reinforce. Such studies give the impression that TIle Sadeian Woman has been read for the most part unproblematically, as a powerful feminist treatise, its attack on pornography constituting an attack on the pornographic representation of women in much cultural production past and present. Yet when it was first published in 1979, the book was widely reviewed in the press and received contradictory and in many cases ambivalent critical responses. The plenary discussion at the conference held in honour of Carter's work in 1994 at York University, 'Fireworks: Angela Carter and the Futures of Writing', suggested to me that many Carter enthusiasts still felt a considerable degree of ambivalence about The Sadeian Woman that was not evident in evaluations of her later' work. What retrospective reading of the text from the perspective of the mid-1990s reveals, however, is Carter's extraordinary capacity to tap into crucial critical debates relevant to feminism and cultural politics, long before "those debates had been fully staged. If some of the book's reviewers in 1979 were either provoked or mystified by Carter's linking of Sade's work with the feminist project to promote women's sexual freedom, none of them could have anticipated how pornography was to become a key issue in feminist debates during the 1980s. It seems uncanny now that The Sadeian Woman was originally commissioned by Virago to launch the press in 1977 (although it did not finally appear until two years later). A controversial yet appropriate choice it proved to be, since it offered a prophetic intervention into the battle that was to ensue, writ most star~y between feminists campaigning

a

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Angela Carter's The Sadeian Woman: feminism as treason

against pornography and the counter-arguments put forward by feminists opposed to censorship. Although the book has received no detailed critical treatment, two well-known feminist critiques of pornography, Susanne Kappeler's TIle Pornography of Representation (1986) and Linda Williams's Hard Core (1990), addressed TIle Sadeian Woman, albeit briefly, in strongly antithetical tenns. As we shall see, Kappeler accused Carter of validating the pornographic - in the name of equal opportunity - by appealing to the literary. Williams, on the other hand, employed Carter's text in an argument which attempted to claim a positive value for women in pornography. Situated on opposite sides of the feminist controversy about pornography, Kappeler's and Williams's responses are symptomatic, and illustrate the significant role Carter's work has played in that debate. However, neither of their arguments, in my view, does justice to the complex way in which Carter negotiated this difficult terrain. I will begin this chapter by giving some consideration to where I place The Sadeian Woman in Carter's work as a whole, in particular its relationship to The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories, which appeared in the same year (1979). I will also review some of the critical reactions to the book when it was first published and subsequently. In thinking about the source of Carter's interest in Sade, I will return to those antithetical responses by feminist critics, which will provide a context within which to examine the role of Carter's work in the controversies about pornography. Where are we to place Carter in that apparently intractable binary of anti-pornography/anticensorship? And to what extent is Carter successful in her daring attempt to appropriate Sade, the arch misogynist, for her own project of'demythologizing' - that is, the demystification of those persistent, essentializing conceptions of women in our culture, especially regarding female sexuality and motherhood? The Sadeian Woman may not have received the detailed and serious treatment it deserves because of the ways in which Carter reworked or worked out some of the issues it touches on in her fiction, notably in The Bloody Chamber, The Passion of New Eve (1977), and later in Nights at the Circus (1984). In Nights at the Circus, it might be argued, she fmally laid the ghost of Sade to rest in her presentation of the circus as a parody of some Sadeian orgastic nightmare. The fIgure of the circus clown, Buffo, whose mask is described as 'a fingerprint of authentic dissimilarity, a genuine expression of [his] own autonomy', is perhaps an avatar of the libertine in his ultimate Sadeian fonn, Sovereign Man, splendid in his isolation, detached even from his own pleasure. I And Fevvers herself can be read as the image of Sade's Juliette transformed. Like Juliette, Fevvers is bold and transgressive, bearing not a trace of passivity, but humanized, invoking wonder rather than horror. She does not play the victimizer, only attempting to use her sexuality 133

The Infernal Desires oj Angela Carter to dupe the master at his own game. More erl'darrgered than dangerous, she nearly loses. Although I do not read Carter's oeuvre as a neat chronological progression towards a more utopian feminist perspective, it is possible to see The Sadeian Woman as a watershed moment in her thinking about feminism, a moment when her fictional narratives became increasingly bound up with theoretical considerations. Returning to examine The Sadeian Woman in the light of the later fiction and its reception, one is brought £ace to face with the radical nature of Carter's work: its complex paradoxes, its theoretical seriousness, and that characteristic refusal to settle in one fixed place. Perhaps, above all, what a retrospective examination of the text highlights is its almost heretical disagreement with certain aspects of feminist thinking current in the 1970s. First, her suggestion that women too readily identify with images of themselves as victims of patriarchal oppression, that in effect they are frequently complicit with that oppression, was a distinctly unfashionable notion in the mid-1970s. Her savage indictment of the figure of Sade's Justine as an extreme embodiment of this complicity made her argument the more treasonable since she was using the arch misogynist in support of it. Second, there was the attack she launched on the idealization of motherhood in its various fonus. The wide spectrum of that idealization manifested in much 1970s feminist theorizing is rejected in The Sadeian Woman, either explicitly or implicitly: the recreation of mother goddesses or the eco-feminists' reassertion of Nature as Mother, for instance. 2 Third, there is her challenge, albeit an oblique one, to the revisionary psychoanalytic theories of the French feminists, especially Helene Cixous and Julia Kristeva, in whose work during the 1970s, motherhood and the maternal body assume crucial significance in a whole variety of ways.3 If The Sadeian Woman was a response to certain assumptions current in feminist thinking in the 1970s, what was the critical reaction to the book? How was Carter's provocative intervention into debates about female sexuality received in 1979? What is most striking is the wide range of the media giving it review space - both tabloids and broadsheet papers in the mainstream press as well as the alternative press. That diversity of coverage is matched by a diversity of critical responses: the anticipation of sexual titillation (from a clearly disappointed reviewer in The Birmingham Sun); an interesting failure with little relevance to modem women (The Financial Times); a serious contribution to contemporary cultural politics (Gay News). The book was clearly controversial, and with some notable exceptions, many of the reviewers expressed puzzlement as to the main thrust of its argument. Several feminist reviewers, while conceding Carter's claim that Sade may be useful for women in that he separates women's sexuality from their reproductive function, nevertheless expressed qualms about 'the ethics of 134

Angela Carter's The Sadeian Woman: femtnism as treason the connection' (Ann Oakley) between Sade and feminism, an imaginative leap they could not make. A repeated point was that Carter failed to sustain her argument in support of Sadeo and was forced to throw him over in an abrupt and unsatisfactory conclusion (Sara Maidand,Julia O'Faolain, Women's Report), and that she had led her readers on a 'wild goose chase', as Maidand called it.4 The implicit desire for a clear conclusion that could be slotted into a feminist agenda fails to acknowledge certain characteristic features of Carter's writing: an intention to provoke questions rather than to provide answers, to engage with contradictions without seeking necessarily to resolve them. In the 'Poleniical Preface' where Carter sets out her thesis, it is clear that the use of Sade is paradoxical. This is the point and challenge of the book: an attempt to jolt the reader out of customary associations and habits of thought. Carter was not looking to Sade for a model, but rather to provide a speculative starting point. The most positive reactions to the book in 1979 came from those who acknowledged Carter's understanding of Sade's work as a founding moment for our modern sensibility regarding sexual matters. Marsaili Cameron, writing in Gay News, made the valid point that This book is not primarily a study of de Sade himself either as a writer or as an historical figure ... Ranging from pornography and mythology to psychoanalysis to points west, it is mainly concerned with the elucidation of our own tortured ideas of sexuality inherited from the past.

In thinking of Carter's work as a complete body of work, as we now must, I am interested in the location of this text in that body of writing, and even more perhaps in the place I sense that it has occupied in many women's reading of Carter, and in the formation,of their feminist politics. In thinking about this chapter, I asked Carter readers of my acquaintance about their responses on frrst encountering The Sadeian Woman, and also crucially at what point in time they had read it. I was interested to learn that for several it had not only been the book of Carter's that had frrst engendered their interest in her work, but that it had played a signifIcant role in forming or reformulating their feminism. For some, it presented a puzzling mix of the fascinating and disturbing which prompted them to think through questions about their own sexuality and their attitudes to pornography in new ways. Yet for others, it provided a turning point that caused them to dispel previously unchallenged assumptions about being on the side of ' innocence', One woman described her first reading as a shock of recognition, of how Carter had crystallized her own not fully formulated ideas about the issue of women's complicity with their sexual oppression. It is more than coincidental that 1979 marked the publication of both The Sadeian Woman and The Bloody Chamber. Carter's revisionary fairy-tales brilliandy display how the discursive structures we inherit are not inevitably

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monolithic, or resistant to recasting. Through them, she wittily presents the relationship between cultural structuration and human agency as dynamic and malleable. Simultaneously exposing the structures of power manifest in our most conventional narratives of gender relations, she transforms those stories into images of erotic experience from the perspective of heterosexual women, reimagining the heroines as active agents in their own sexual development. However, the route she takes towards that revision constitutes what could be called a scandalous liaison with the book on Sade. Taken together, her revisionary fairy-tales (traditional literature for children) and her analysis of Sade's work (considered adult reading - that euphemism for pornographic literature) are deeply implicated in one another; they are, it could be said, contrasting sides of the same genre. That year, 1979, also saw the publication of several works of feminist revision in which an analysis of fairy-tales played a part, most notably of course Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar's The Madwoman in the Attic. Thinking about the conjunction of The Madwoman in the Attic and The Bloody Chamber draws attention to Carter's capacity to tap into the Zeitgeist. At the same time, in measuring the distance between the two works one can gauge the extent to which Carter resisted· being pulled into prevailing ways of thinking. In their introduction, Gilbert and Gubar map those feminine stereotypes of the nineteenth-century cultural imagination, the angel in the house and the whore in the street, on to the fairy-tale of Snow White and her counterpart the wicked queen, just as Carter does in her story, 'The Snow Child'. If the Victorian domestic angel, an avatar of the divine virgin of Christian mythology, represented an eternal feminine whose purity rendered her virtually lifeless (an angel of death), her antithetical mirror image was to be found in the monstrous whore, who constituted, in Gilbert and Gubar's reading, an embodiment of female autonomy, threatening to the social status quo. The only escape from the prison of the glass coffin, according to Gilbert and Gubar, is not through the prince's kiss, which will only enclose .her in the mirror of his own desires, but through the wicked queen's "'badness," through plots and stories, duplicitous schemes, wild dreams, fierce fictions, mad impersonations'. 5 Carter's revision of the same story focuses on the older of the two women just as Gilbert and Gubar do, but emphasizes her recognition that neither position is desirable: each still represents the reverse side of the same coin. In 'The Snow Child', the wicked queen's vindictiveness is not regarded as subversive, nor an escape from her patriarchal inscription. Witnessing the fate of the compliant pure virgin enables her to acknowledge that her story is also mapped out by the king'S' authority. For Carter, rebellious rage at her victim status is not enough to release the female heroine from her powerlessness. 6

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Angela Carter's The Sadeian Woman: feminism as treason

The countess (queen) in Carter's story is clad in a manner befitting a brothel, echoing Sade's Juliette, just as the innocent but deathly snow child is an avatar of Sade's Justine. Justine, writes Carter in The Sadeian Woman, is 'a good woman according to the rules for women laid down by men and her reward is rape, humiliation and incessant beatings ... a beautiful penniless orphan, the living image of a fairy-tale princess in disguise but a Cinderella for whom the ashes with which she is covered have become part of her skin,.7 Juliette's story is 'Justine-through-the-Iooking-glass, an inversion of an inversion ... in a world governed by god, the king and the law, the trifold masculine symbolism of authority, Juliette knows better than her sister how useless it is to rebel against fate' (p. 80). While Justine martyrs herself to the pursuit of virtue, Juliette responds to the same assaults on her honour by turning herself into the perfect whore. If Carter's analysis of Sade's texts emphasizes their fairy-tale-like abstraction, then hex revision of traditional fairy-tales serves to highlight the pornographic nature of the stereotypes of women that they have recirculated. Both texts stress the connections between sexual and economic relations in a patriarchal society. The archetypes of both the pornographic and fairytale worlds confuse the 'historical fact of the economic dependence of women upon men'. Although, as she points out, this is largely a fact of the past, its effect lives on as a 'believed fiction and is assumed to imply an emotional dependence that is taken for granted as a condition inherent in the natural order of things' (p. 7). Both pornography and fairy-tales are typically anonymous, a feature which contributes to the sense that they are products of a universal experience. Lorna Sage points out that Carter takes advantage of the 'anonymous' voice from our communal oral culture, 'multivoiced, dialogic, hybrid', capturing part of that old fluid power that seems to blend together author and community.8 But there are dangers in that anonymity, too. It is after all the very quality that enables an interpreter of fairy-stories like Bruno Bettelheim to assign them a fixed meaning. 9 Far from asking who authored them, he assumes they emerge out of some primordial cultural unconscious. The producer of pornographic literature is likewise usually 'invisible', his very anonymity lending power to the suggestion that the pornographic scenario is invoking universal fantasies. But as Susanne Kappeler emphasizes, this assumption of anonymity disguises the actual structure of the pornographic scenario which is always tripartite: the master/producer, the object (typically the woman/victim), and the onlooker (the producer's guest). What makes Sade different and useful for Carter is that he is the least invisible of pornographers, his name having become synonymous with the sexual practices he describes (although he actively denied writing his most infamous texts). In his own life, long years of imprisonment could not bury the subversive

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The Infernal Desires

of Angela

C,arter

potential of his writing, or the infamy of his ,name which 200 years later still has the power to discompose, provoking cries for its suppression. The source of Carter's fascination with Sade is his potency as a satirist of his times, in particular his understanding and exposure of the central role of sexuality in the maintenance of the social status quo: 'since he is not a religious man but a political man, he treats the facts of female sexuality not as a moral dilemma but as a political reality' (p. 27). '[T]he prophet of the age of dissolution, of our own time, the time of the assassins', she calls him, the man whose danger lay in naming as his 'pleasure' what society sanctioned only as licensed legal crimes to be exercised as punishment by institutional authority (p. 32). Furthennore, Carter argues, unlike all other pornographers, Sade claimed the 'rights of free sexuality for women', and created 'women as beings of power in his imaginary worlds' (p. 36). In her fairy-stories, she seeks to expose a truth that those old tales have only thinly disguised (just as Sade did in his black fairy-tales): that female virginity is the precious jewel of the ruling classes, token and guarantor of their property rights. This is something the Sadeian libertines understood, since it was the virgin daughters of the aristocracy who received the most vile treatment at their hands. The only real difference between pornographic and mythic archetypes, Carter suggests, is in the artful beauty with which sexual encounters are represented in the latter. Carter claims that Sade is different from all other pornographers in that he discloses rather than hides the actuality of sexual relations: He creates, not an artificial paradise of gratified sexuality but a model of hell, in which the gratification of sexuality involves the infliction and the tolerance of extreme pain. He describes sexual relations in the context of an unfree society as the expression of pure tyranny. (p. 24)

The provocation in Carter's use of Sade is not her supposed validation of pornography, but her employment of his work to expose her female readers to their own complicity with the fictional representations of themselves as mythic archetypes. Such mystification of femininity amounts, in her view, to a complicity with the pornographic scenario on which the unequal gender relations of our society are founded. The figure of the innocent Justine - the 'repository of the type of sensibility we call "feminine'" (p. 47), 'the broken heart, the stabbed dove, the violated sepulchre, the persecuted maiden whose virginity is perpetually refreshed by rape' (p. 49) -- embodies the dangerous idealization of the passive victim. She is a fIgure of repression, 'repression of sex, of anger, and of her own violence; the repression demanded of Christian virtue, in fact' (pp. 48-9). Most provocatively of all,

138

Angela Carter's The Sadeian Woman: feminism as treason Carter says: 'In the looking-glass of Sade's misanthropy, women may see themselves as they have been and it is an uncomfortable sight' (p. 36). It is important to remember that the viliflcation of Justine is part of Carter's reaction to a mythicization of female virtue that infUtrated aspects of radical feminist discourse in the 1970s. Writers such as Mary Daly and Susan Griffin popularized notions of femininity as having innate qualities arising from women's reproductive function: virtuous, nurturing and peaceenhancing. Such ideas inevitably reinforced a conception of women as the passive victims of male victimizers. Carter does not deny that women are 'frequently victims of male violence and exploitation, but she is arguing forcefully against the danger of turning that victimization into a virtue, of becoming enthralled by it. In do,ing so she runs the risk of seeming to blame the victim for 'choosing' to 'collaborate', as Kappeler puts it. But it needs pointing out that in The Sadeian Woman she is careful to say: 'let us not make too much of this apparent complicity. There is no defence at all against absolute tyranny' (p. 139).10 On the whole, contemporaneous and subsequent critical responses to The Sadeian Woman reveal a profound unease, especially on the part of feminist critics, about Carter's precise intentions. In Heroes and Villains (1969), The Infernal Desires of Dr. H