Angela Carter: New Critical Readings

Sonya Andermahr, Lawrence Phillips, Sonya Andermahr, Lawrence Phillips

• Publisher: Continuum
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781441177766
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Littérature
• Subtopic: Critique littéraire pour les femmes auteures

Bringing together leading international scholars of contemporary fiction and modern women writers, this book provides authoritative new critical readings of Angela Carter's work from a variety of innovative theoretical and disciplinary approaches. Angela Carter: New Critical Readings both evaluates Carter's legacy as feminist provocateur and postmodern stylist, and broaches new ground in considering Carter as, variously, a poet and a 'naturalist'. Including coverage of Carter's earliest writings and her journalism as well as her more widely studied novels, short stories and dramatic works, the book covers such topics as rescripting the canon, surrealism, and Carter's poetics.

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Introduction

Sonya Andermahr and Lawrence Phillips

New Critical Readings

The year 2012 represents the twentieth anniversary of Angela Carter’s death. In those twenty years her work has given rise to much critical debate, which has consolidated her reputation as a major British writer of the post-war period. She is taught widely across the UK, US and internationally on twentieth-century literature and contemporary women’s writing courses. Indeed, according to Danielle M. Roemer and Cristina Bacchilega (2000), alongside Toni Morrison and Maxine Hong Kingston she is the most commonly taught woman writer on North American programmes. As befits her recent popularity, there have been a number of important surveys of her work. Monographic studies by Lorna Sage, Sarah Gamble, Linden Peach (2009), Nicola Pitchford (2002) and Aidan Day and essay collections (by Alison Easton and Rebecca Munford [2006]) have analysed her oeuvre in terms of literary experiment, iconoclasm, fantasy, radical politics, postmodernism and feminism. Biographical works by Sage (1994) and Gamble (2006) have linked her work to her life in illuminating ways; while Day calls for Carter’s work to be seen in the context of longstanding debates about Enlightenment reason (1998). Yet, while critics have acknowledged Carter’s versatility and hybridity, the dominant critical construction of Angela Carter is as a feminist and postmodern fabulist. Recent studies such as Gamble’s Angela Carter: A Literary Life (2006) have begun to offer a corrective to this tendency by placing Carter in her historical context, in line with her own materialist emphasis. As Gamble states:

Such a commitment to materialism made Carter an extremely astute observer of the cultural milieu within which she lived and worked. In both her fiction and her substantial body of non-fiction, she chronicled her times with a thoroughness which has sometimes been underplayed in studies of her work which concentrate on her as a fabulist, neo-Gothic or postmodernist writer. (Gamble 2006: 12)

In our view, too, Carter has been overly categorized as a postmodern folklorist. Just as we concur with Gamble that Carter’s work needs to be located historically, we also think her work needs to be put in a broader genre context, given that her career encompassed such a variety of different genres. It is our contention that Carter be viewed, not simply as a major feminist fabulist, but as a major late twentieth-century writer tout court. She is sometimes seen as narrowly focused but Carter was ambitious and would try anything. For us, Carter is a writer who was not restricted by particular genres or particular political positions (notwithstanding her work’s fierce political engagement). She was a public intellectual and the essays we have collected here reflect that emphasis. This volume therefore avoids the tendency to restrict discussion of Carter’s narrative techniques to the demythologization of fairy tale discourse, to embrace the uniqueness of her approach to narrative as a whole. We have not felt obliged either to go over ground that has already been well covered, or to cover every aspect of Carter’s substantial oeuvre; rather, we see this collection as an attempt to fill in some of the critical gaps and to re-evaluate earlier critical assessments of Carter. Our collection therefore needs to be read as a contribution to the development of Carter studies.

It is just this maturity in the Carter debate that signals the need for a critical revaluation covering the many recent new directions being taken by scholars and the broadening of the evaluation of her oeuvre. Writing about future possibilities for Carter Studies in 2000, Easton identified a number of areas for development: a more thorough historicization of Carter and her work including localized contexts; studies of her treatment of class; analyses of Carter’s dialogue with key thinkers such as Foucault and Benjamin; and more detailed analysis of her poetics, especially close textual work on her sources and multi-layered meanings (Easton 2000: 16). This collection goes a long way towards fulfilling Easton’s ‘wish list’. The volume seeks both to evaluate Carter’s critical legacy and provide richly detailed readings of her work. It draws together international scholars to provide new critical readings of Carter’s work from a variety of innovative theoretical and disciplinary approaches. It both evaluates Carter’s legacy as feminist provocateur and postmodern stylist, and broaches new ground in considering Carter as, variously, journalist, philosophical thinker, cultural critic, dramatist and ‘naturalist’. In particular, the volume identifies a shift from the politics to the poetics of Carter’s work, providing close readings of her use of myth, allegory and parody. It also seeks to interrogate the view of Carter as an ‘anti-nature’ social constructionist hostile to the biological sciences; rather, it argues that Carter’s work engages constructively with naturalism and evolutionary theory. Other topics covered include new perspectives on Carter’s relation to key art movements such as surrealism and the Pre-Raphaelites; her views on the politics of food, her mapping of the 1960s city, her ‘staging’ of the canon and Carter’s legacy for women’s writing. In offering a revisionary account of Carter’s work, it pays close attention to her early novels, such as Shadow Dance, her journalism and her less well-known short stories such as ‘Black Venus’, ‘Master’, ‘Alice in Prague or The Curious Room’ and ‘Penetrating to the heart of the Forest’. It therefore seeks to redress the critical neglect of aspects of Carter’s oeuvre and provide a good balance between her more obscure and more canonical works.

This book therefore provides a timely reassessment of Carter’s oeuvre, evaluating the development of Carter studies within that time frame and offering innovative ways of reading her work in the twenty-first century. It functions not only as an up-to-date study exploring recent trends in Carter criticism, but also provides a much needed historical perspective on the development of Carter studies, offering readers new perspectives on her work. It is divided into three sections, which reflect our re-evaluation of Carter and her work as cross-generic and traversing multiple canons; as a philosophical thinker and writer, engaged in an ad hoc but serious project of philosophical raiding and revisionism and, thirdly, as a figure who sought to engage in various ways with myth, both as (famously) demythologizer and as (a less-acknowledged) re-mythologizer of cultural narrative.

Genre and the Canon

In the first section, our contributors re-evaluate Carter’s relationship to genre and the canon in a number of key ways. First, the essays argue forcibly for viewing Carter, not as a postmodern folklorist tout court, but as a writer whose work traverses multiple genres including journalism, film scripts, plays for stage and radio, as well as novels and short stories. Secondly, these essays explore Carter’s relationship to the canon, both in terms of how she engages with and writes back to canons of various kinds, and in terms of how she herself is positioned in respect of canons of contemporary literature. The range and breadth of her output, we would contend, argues strongly for Carter’s position as a writer, intellectual and cultural commentator of major standing. In the first essay, while acknowledging her substantial influence on contemporary writers of both sexes, Sonya Andermahr examines Carter’s particular legacy for women writers and assesses her unique place in the canon of contemporary women’s writing. She argues that Carter’s work provides a model for subsequent generations of women writers in which politics and poetics are combined in a radical writing practice. In particular, Carter’s work has licensed the confident conflation of fantasy and realism, the subversion of gender and sexual norms and a linguistic playfulness and excess that may be seen in the work of women writers who have been published since the 1980s including Jeanette Winterson, Kate Atkinson, Sarah Waters and Ali Smith. Above all, Carter provides an exemplum of how the writing of literary fiction may be combined with an astute political critique in post-feminist times. In ‘Carter’s Excessive Stagings of the Canon’, Susanne Gruss demonstrates Carter’s ongoing project of demythologizing the male Western canon and its historical and theoretical contexts. Focusing on three short pieces, ‘The Cabinet of Edgar Allan Poe’, ‘Overture and Incidental Music for A Midsummer Night’s Dream’ and ‘John Ford’s “ ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore” ’, Gruss examines how Carter both stages and appropriates ‘the canon’. ‘The Cabinet of Edgar Allan Poe’ is a recreation of Poe’s childhood (and an excavation of his mother) in explicitly Oedipal terms; Carter does not merely interrogate Poe, she also deconstructs the psychoanalytic discourse that has dominated readings of Poe’s work. ‘Overture and Incidental Music’ gives a voice to ‘Golden Herm’, a marginalized figure in Shakespeare’s original text while simultaneously and humorously writing against the way in which Shakespeare was canonized and bowdlerized by the Victorians by making Herm and the fairies playfully transgressive in their sexuality. Finally, ‘John Ford’s “ ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore” ’ grafts the plot of the Jacobean play onto a fictitious screenplay for a film by the American director John Ford and thus transfers the revenge tragedy to what is arguably its twentieth-century equivalent – the Western. As Sarah Artt demonstrates, it is through these excessive and humorous (re)stagings of canonized authors, texts and contexts that Carter explores and explodes the canon.

Gamble revisits Carter’s use of the gothic in her chapter, ‘ “Isn’t it every girl’s dream to be married in white?”: Angela Carter’s Bridal Gothic’, focusing on the complex symbolism of the wedding dress in her fiction. Tracing its evolution across The Magic Toyshop, Heroes and Villains, The Passion of New Eve and Wise Children, Gamble argues that this archetypal bridal symbol becomes in Carter’s hands a gothic trope par excellence. Carter brings to the surface all the latent, suppressed meanings associated with the trope of the wedding dress, exploiting the tension between a series of binary oppositions: surface/depth, purity/putrefaction, life/death. Comparing Carter’s use of the trope to that of Dickens in Great Expectations, Gamble demonstrates how the combination of the wedding dress and the ‘wrong’ body sets off a series of unsettling associations that operate to disrupt the marital narrative, displacing it from its central cultural position as the ‘natural’ culmination of female dreams and desires. Carter’s fiction therefore works to expose the apparatus of power that underlies the institution of marriage, suggesting that, for women who permit themselves to be reduced to the level of an object, a ‘sexual thing’, the wedding dress is really a shroud, which signifies the death of autonomous female subjectivity. In ‘Between the Paws of the Tender Wolf: Art, Authorship, and Adaptation’, Lorna Jowett considers Carter’s writing for film, in particular her screenplay based on her short story for Neil Jordan’s The Company of Wolves. Comparing Carter’s text to the popular genre of Dark Romance that emerged in the 1990s, Jowett argues that Carter’s political contradictoriness as well as her gothic motifs find an echo in the contemporary genre and that neither should be dismissed as ‘dumbing down’.

Addressing yet another genre that Carter made her own, Maria José Pires discusses Carter’s journalism, focusing on her food writing from the 1970s. Pires provides a detailed analysis of two of her articles from New Society which, she argues, establish Carter not merely as having an interest in food, but as a keen cultural commentator and ideological critic of her day. Indeed, her writing can be seen to endorse the demythologizing cultural criticism of Barthes and Bourdieu. In ‘The New Vegetarians’ and ‘Saucerer’s Apprentice’, Carter argues that the new-wave vegetarianism and the ‘Elizabeth Davidisation’ of food represent a means to regenerate man and as an antidote to rationing and the austerity of the post-war period, respectively – being products which exult food as a generous gift from nature or celebrate the opportunity of tasting Mediterranean food. Arguing that we use food as a way of establishing relationships and social positions, Carter debunks what some believe to be the real real by questioning its transcendence and establishes herself as an important critic of the relationship between food, morality and ‘circuits of culture’. In ‘The Alchemy of Reading’, Michelle Ryan-Sautour explores how Carter’s texts produce what she terms an ‘alchemical transformation’ in the reader. She focuses on one of Carter’s most obscure short fictions, ‘Alice in Prague or The Curious Room’ which, as she points out, challenges the reader’s understanding to the limits and, perhaps in consequence, has received very little critical commentary. Shifting the emphasis from thematics, Ryan-Sautour concentrates on the forces of interpellation at work in reading – on what Carter’s fiction does. She argues that Carter’s story is a conglomeration of speculative strands that provoke thought but withhold clear answers. When the characteristic didactic pull of Carter’s work is counterbalanced as it is here by a series of multi-layered, intertextually saturated language games, the reader’s subsequent vertigo becomes a ‘laboratory’ in which the alchemical processes of Carter’s aesthetic occur, where the ideological forces of language momentarily surface and interpellate the reader. The essay points to what we see as a key Carter strategy, namely the importance of readerly unsettlement: Carter writes texts which get the reader to work, think and finally, perhaps, experience a kind of cognitive unravelling through the series of impossible contradictions she sets up. Finally, Mine Özyurt Kılıç considers Carter’s foray into adaptation and drama in her 1988 stage adaptation of Frank Wedekind’s Lulu plays. Noting both the difficulty of ideological as well as aesthetic issues inherent in adaptation and crossing of genre boundaries, Carter utilizes the modern myth of the femme fatale to draw out the ideological repression of women that underpins Wedekind’s original character. Carter’s play was rejected as unstageable by Richard Eyre who commissioned it for the National Theatre. The play is an important milestone in Carter’s art and it is valuable to reflect on what appears to be one of her few generic failures. Like her preference for folktale over myth, this represents more of a commentary on the rigidity of the formal constraints of the theatre and the problem of adaptation as opposed to re-imagination which characterizes Carter’s work. In a sense, the ‘institutionalization’ of a pre-existing ideologically informed work and the institution of the theatre in the form of the National Theatre kills the creativity of the liberation Carter was able to release through the figure of the femme fatale drawn from yet another genre, film. As Jowett’s chapter suggests, as a form film was a more congenial genre for Carter’s powerful demythologization of modern life.

Philosophies

In the second section of the book, Philosophies, the authors advance the view that Carter was more than an important writer of literary fiction, and seek to establish her as a major public intellectual, whose work explicitly engages with various philosophical ideas and traditions. Although Carter was not a trained philosopher (she read Medieval Literature at Bristol University) and did not study philosophy in any systematic way, she was nevertheless an avid, if eclectic, reader of philosophy. She was an intellectual magpie, a voracious and enthusiastic reader of (and writer back to) classical and unconventional thinkers. It is typical of Carter that she would choose the iconoclastic, morally problematic de Sade for her major work of non-fiction, The Sadeian Woman, which still, and rightly, divides and disconcerts humanist, feminist and other critics. Lawrence Phillips in ‘Sex, Violence, and Ethics – Reassessing Carter’s “Moral’ Relativism” argues that the prevalence of, frequently extreme, violence across her oeuvre represents far more than a simple strategy to shock the reader into reflection. Instead Carter’s discursive and aesthetic use of violence enters into a much broader debate about Western ethics, morals and Enlightenment reason by means of the acute defamiliarization of content and context that is part and parcel of her insistence on a materialist stance and the productive dialogue between myth and folklore. Equally as intriguing in relation to Carter’s committed materialism is Anja Mueller-Wood’s investigation of Carter’s engagement with evolutionary science in ‘Angela Carter, Naturalist’. Famous for arguing that the social construction of her ‘femininity’ had been palmed off on her, Carter’s work also reveals that the influences on individual id...