The Infernal Desires of Angela Carter

Fiction, Femininity, Feminism

Joseph Bristow, Trev Lynn Broughton

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317887447
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Drawing on many aspects of contemporary feminist theory, this lively collection of essays assesses Angela Carter's polemical fictions of desire. Carter, renowned for her irreverent wit, was one of the most gifted, subversive, and stylish British writers to emerge in the 1960s.

Chapter One
Gender as performance in the fiction of Angela Carter and Margaret Atwood

Paulina Palmer

Introduction: Gender and Performativity

Gender as performance, a concept which in the 1990s has achieved prominence in theoretical writing in psychoanalysis and gender studies, is generally employed to analyse constructs of femininity and masculinity in society and to discuss forms of role-play in the lesbian and gay community. However, as I hope to demonstrate in this chapter, since gender and sexuality are important themes in contemporary literature, it also furnishes a useful tool in interpreting works of fiction. Its significance in this respect is illustrated by the fact that certain aspects of the fiction of two writers as different as Angela Carter and Margaret Atwood respond fruitfully to an analysis of this kind. Before turning to their texts, I will define the key features of the concept and summarize some of the different versions that have recently emerged.

The theorization of gender and performativity is chiefly associated with the writing of Judith Butler. Although Butler is by no means its first or only proponent, she gives the most detailed and complex account. Gender, she argues, rather than reflecting an essence, is constituted through a set of ‘discursively constrained performative acts that produce the body through and within the categories of sex’.¹ This has a bearing on sexual politics. It provides us with a means to denaturalize and deconstruct the conventional view of reality as interior essence and the belief, related to it, that heterosexual gender roles are ‘normal’ and ‘natural’. As Butler observes, ‘Reality is fabricated as an interior essence… Acts and gestures, articulated and enacted desires create the illusion of an interior and organising gender core’. The fabrication of this illusion is, she maintains, by no means innocent but is ‘discursively maintained for the purposes of the regulation of sexuality within the obligatory frame of reproductive heterosexuality’.² Emphasizing the relevance of these ideas to the understanding of lesbian and gay roles, Butler argues that:

The ‘presence’ of so-called heterosexual conventions within homosexual contexts as well as the proliferation of specifically gay discourses of sexual difference, as in the case of ‘butch’ and ‘femme’ as historical identities of sexual style, cannot be explained as chimerical representations of originally heterosexual identities. And neither can they be understood as the pernicious insistence of heterosexual constructs within gay sexuality and identity.³

Rather than passively reproducing heterosexual identities, lesbian and gay roles, in Butler’s view, serve a deconstructive purpose. As she points out,

The repetition of heterosexual constructs within sexual cultures both gay and straight may well be the inevitable site of the denaturalization and mobilisation of gender categories. The replication of heterosexual constructs in non heterosexual frames brings into relief the utterly constructed status of the so-called heterosexual original.⁴

Thus, butch/femme and drag roles, instead of reflecting original heterosexual identities, have the effect, Butler argues, of exposing and highlighting their constructed aspect. They achieve this by means of the element of parody and ‘excess’ they display. Butler’s ideas about the performative aspects of gender are relevant to the interpretation of the lesbian role-play of the 1950s, encouraging us, as Clare Whatling suggests, to re-evaluate it and regard it from a fresh perspective. Whatling claims:

The butch/femme stance of the 1950s, instead of figuring as a rigid imitation of heterosexual roles, in fact plays with visual assumptions about gender and sexuality, taking the limited erotic categories available to lesbians at the time and transforming them into something very different and highly subversive …⁵

Whatling’s interpretation of the 1950s lesbian social scene is, of course, controversial. Certain women who participated in the role-play of the period, such as Julia Penelope and Noretta Koertge, have a different viewpoint.⁶ They remember it not as subversive but as oppressive and psychologically damaging.⁷ However, Whatling’s comments are of interest since, contentious though they are, they illustrate the kind of re-evaluation of roles and identities that Butler’s analysis of the performative aspects of gender promotes. Butler concludes her discussion, in fact, by observing that ‘gay is to straight not as copy is to original, but, rather, as copy is to copy. The parodie repetition of the “original”… reveals it to be nothing other than a parody of the idea of the natural and the original’.⁸

Butler’s is not the only version of ‘gender as performance’ that has achieved currency in recent years. The French theorist Luce Irigaray proposes an alternative one. Irigaray’s version, which predates Butler’s and has exerted an influence on it, concentrates attention not on lesbian and gay roles but on femininity and its construction. Basing her analysis on the concept of feminine masquerade, associated in psychoanalysis with Joan Riviere,⁹ Irigaray describes the masquerade as the acting out on the part of the female subject of a set of male-defined roles and scripts. She comments:

I think that the masquerade has to be understood as what women do in order to recuperate some element of desire, to participate in man’s desire, but at the price of renouncing their own. In the masquerade, they submit to the dominant [male] economy of desire in an attempt to remain ‘on the market’ in spite of everything.¹⁰

Irigaray, however, does not leave the matter there, with woman relegated to the position of passive victim of male scripting. She recommends a strategy of resistance which women can employ to challenge and elude male-defined identities. She calls this ‘playing with mimesis’.¹¹ Woman, Irigaray argues, by parodically mimicking conventional images of femininity, can expose their artifice and inauthenticity. In this way, she can avoid being subject to male control and achieve a degree of agency. An advantage of the theory of mimesis, as Carole-Anne Tyler remarks, is that it ‘provides an alternative to adopting a masculine (and masculinist) point of view, without necessitating a naive idealist or essentialist belief in the ability to access a “genuine” femininity beyond patriarchal féminisation and the social construction of gender’.¹²

There are obvious similarities between Irigaray’s theory of mimesis and Butler’s concept of gender as performance. This is understandable, as the ideas of the two reflect a similar source. Both are influenced by, and revise, the psychoanalytic theory of Jacques Lacan. Their accounts of gender, as a result, are similarly anti-essentialist in emphasis and foreground the inauthenticity of gender roles. They argue that the performance of a parodie version of femininity, or, in Butler’s case, of drag or butch/femme roles, has the effect of deconstructing hetero-patriarchal gender roles and identities, thus exposing their very constructedness.

Challenging though these theories are, they do share certain shortcomings. From a practical point of view, mimesis and ‘gender as performance’ are admittedly problematic. How can we differentiate a woman who is passively enacting a male-defined image of femininity from one who is subversively ‘playing with mimesis’? How can we distinguish between a male-identified lesbian who regards the butch role as innate, and a lesbian who employs it playfully and subversively? And what about the femme role? How, unless she is accompanied by her butch partner, can one distinguish a femme lesbian from a feminine heterosexual woman? Is not a poststructuralist position easily confused with an essentialist? Moreover, as Tyler points out, ‘If all identities are alienated and fictional [as Lacanian-based psychoanalysis claims], then the distinction between parody, mimicry or camp, or playing it straight is no longer self-evident. What makes the one credible and the other incredible, when both are fictions?’¹³

Our ability to answer this question, Tyler suggests, depends, first, on the intention of the performer, since, she argues, ‘Parody is legible in the drama of gender performance if someone meant to script it, intending it to be there’.¹⁴ Secondly, it depends on her/his ability to introduce a note of parodic excess and incongruity into the gender performance to prevent the viewer from regarding it as straight. As Tyler emphasizes, it is this element of excess that prevents the mimetic and parodic performance of gender being misinterpreted and seen in an essentialist light.

Despite the attraction they hold for students of queer theory and gender studies, both ‘playing with mimesis’ and ‘gender as performance’ remain concepts that are, in my view, problematic. An obvious difficulty is that the challenge they direct at the hetero-patriarchal system takes place not in the daylight realm of overt political resistance but in the shadowy, slippery world of image, appearance and ‘surface’. Can a strategy of this kind be politically effective? Or is the idea of gender as performance, as critics such as Sheila Jeffreys claim,¹⁵ superficial politically as well as literally – a sell-out to society’s current obsession with stylizing the body and the erotic?

Carter and Atwood are primarily creative writers, and, as a result, they employ the ideas of performativity and mimesis discussed above imaginatively rather than discursively. Their treatment of them is, as we shall see, varied, involving a range of different emphases and contexts. Rather than discussing Carter’s approach in isolation, I have chosen to compare it with that of her Canadian contemporary Atwood. This strategy has the advantage of casting into relief the distinctive features of Carter’s texts, highlighting their limitations as well as their strengths. A comparison of the two writers’ treatment of motifs of theatricality and ‘gender as performance’, as well as revealing points of connection and alerting attention to the interests they share, also exposes points of difference in terms of perspective and horizon. The theories of Butler and Irigaray provide an appropriate frame for discussing Carter’s and Atwood’s writings, since they offer an insight into their representation of gender and relations between the sexes, as well as their manipulation of male-defined images of femininity.

Carter: The Magic Toyshop, Nights at the Circus and Wise Children

A focus on the construction of femininity and its links with performance is, in fact, central to Carter’s writing. To start with, her novels frequently introduce themes, and employ locations, relating to theatre. Some of the most important episodes in The Magic Toyshop (1967) take place in the theatre where Melanie’s tyrannical Uncle Philip manipulates puppets and, when he has the opportunity, human beings into performing scenarios of his own invention. These frequently represent themes of a sexual kind, as in his dramatic enactment of the mythological topos of the rape of Leda by the swan, in which Melanie is forced to participate. Carter’s passion for the theatrical is even more evident in Nights at the Circus (1984), since the protagonist Fevvers is a music-hall artiste. As I have illustrated elsewhere,¹⁶ in the latter novel Carter inventively exploits the camivalesque connotations of the circus ring. Buffo, the leading clown in the circus troupe, is described as ‘the Lord of Misrule’;¹⁷ indeed, his feats of self-deconstruction in the ring, wearing ‘his insides on his outside’ (p. 116), recall Mikhail Bakhtin’s vision of carnival: a world in which ‘objects are turned inside out’ in accordance with the symbolic ‘destruction of the old and the birth of the new’ that carnival celebrates.¹⁸ However, rather than employing Bakhtinian ideas of carnival unquestioningly, Carter exposes their misogynistic aspect. The brutal slapstick in which the clowns engage is by no means funny but verges, at times, on the murderous. The dance they perform is described as ‘cheerless arabesques as of the damned’ (p. 243), and, as the narrative progresses, the circus ring, with its hierarchy of male performers and ‘camivalesque proceedings’ (p. 146), becomes a potent image for the patriarchal social order.

Carter’s last novel, Wise Children (1991), in exploring the fortunes of two theatrical families, the Chances and the Hazards, focuses even more prominently on theatre. It introduces parodie versions of the plays of Shakespeare and explores the contradictions inherent in the concept of performance, both on stage and off. Acting is in the Chance family’s blood. Describing the antecedents of herself and her twin Nora, Dora Chance comments:

Sometime in or around the year 1870 (her date of birth, like that of so many actresses, a movable feast) our paternal grandmother was bom in a trunk and trod the boards from toddler-hood as fairy, phantom, goblin, eventually, an old stager of eight (give or take a year or two) making her London debut as Mamilius in The Winter’s Tale at the Theatre Royal, Haymarket.¹⁹

The twins likewise devote themselves to theatre and the new medium of film, acting in numerous productions of Shakespeare and experiencing the pleasures and hardships of a theatrical lifestyle. The personal dimension of their lives, reflected in their relations with men, as well as their public performances on stage, focus emphatically on the concept of ‘theatre’.

In addition to introducing a variety of theatrical motifs and locations, Carter also associates gender with performativity. As early as 1977, in The Passion of New Eve, she indicates her interest in the motif by interrogating the construction of the feminine role and foregrounding its artifice. It is ambiguous, in my opinion, whether, at this stage of her career, she regards all roles and identities as constructs or whether she accepts an ‘onion’ view of subjectivity, with the subject peeling off layers of unauthentic roles to reveal ‘the true self’. While seeking to demonstrate that gender and identity are constructs, she sometimes slips inadvert...