"Blue Beard" is an old French tale that was retold by the French author, Charles Perrault. It formed the basis of Angela Carter's sPerrault and Carter
"Blue Beard" is an old French tale that was retold by the French author, Charles Perrault. It formed the basis of Angela Carter's story, "The Bloody Chamber".
I read two English translations of the story, one of which might have been translated by Angela Carter.
This review focuses on the narrative structure of the Perrault version, and compares it with the Carter story. Because it discusses plot, I'll use a spoiler warning for the review.
Blue Beard was a wealthy French nobleman who owned both town and country houses. The only unusual thing about him was that he had a blue beard, which frightened and disgusted the townfolk, despite his wealth. They thought he was ugly.
Blue Beard was seeking a wife. He asked a local woman of high standing if he could marry one of her two daughters, who were both beautiful.
The mother did not encourage them to marry Blue Beard, but left it to her daughters to decide for themselves. Initially, they were both reluctant, partly because they feared his blue beard, and partly because they had learned that he had been married before and his wives had disappeared, and were believed to have died in mysterious circumstances. Both daughters told their mother that they were reluctant to deprive their sister of the opportunity to marry Blue Beard.
When their mother conveyed this to Blue Beard, he invited the family and some friends to stay at one of his country houses for a week of hunting, entertainment, eating and drinking. The younger daughter enjoyed the week so much that she resolved to marry Blue Beard.
A month after their wedding, Blue Beard was called away to attend to some business. He encouraged his wife to invite some friends to stay while he was away. He gave her a set of keys to the mansion, including a little key for a secret room on the ground floor, which he forbad her to use. He threatened that, if she used the key, he would severely punish her on his return.
While he was away, she couldn't resist the temptation to open the door to the secret room. Once her eyes adjusted to the darkness, she saw a large pool of clotted blood on the floor, in which lay the dead bodies of some women, who she believed to be her husband's former wives.
Unfortunately, she accidentally dropped the litle key in the pool of blood. No matter how much she tried to clean the key, she could not remove the blood. It kept coming back.
The following day, Blue Beard returned from his trip, because the business had been completed in his absence and he was no longer required. He asked her to give him the keys, and when she did, he immediately noticed that the little key was missing. He asked her to look for it, and when she found it in her bedroom, he inferred from the blood that she had disobeyed his command.
The following morning, he resolved that he had to punish her by beheading her. She asked him if she could have 15 minutes within which to pray, which he consented to. She went to her bedroom and asked her sister, Anne (we never learn the wife's name) whether she could go up to the tower and see whether their two brothers were coming to visit them. When Anne said she could, her sister returned downstairs to confront her fate with Blue Beard.
As Blue Beard raised his scimitar above her neck, her brothers arrived, saw what he was about to do, and plunged their swords into Blue Beard, killing him instantly.
It turned out that Blue Beard had no legal heirs. As a result, his wife inherited his estate. She gave some of it to her family and some to an eligible young man, whom she subsequently married.
The Blue Beard
The blue beard is viewed as different and therefore ugly. It's enough to alienate Blue Beard from his community. The difference is symbolic of an alien race, religion or socio-political belief, or even a physical or mental disability.
Marriage
Marriage is portrayed as an institution where the wife is supposed to derive financial security from the husband, presumably in return for sexual favours (as the basis of procreation).
As a result, the wife is supposed to cease her financial dependence on her parents.
The husband gains the power to issue positive and negative commandments to the wife, which she must obey.
In this case, Blue Beard also assumed the right to punish disobedience or the failure to comply with a commandment. He assumed that this right extended beyond mere corporal punishment to capital punishment (death by murder).
Secrecy
Blue Beard also assumed that a husband was entitled to keep some aspects of his life or affairs secret from his wife. This could extend to past or present relationships, business or political affairs. If the husband disclosed any of the matters to his wife, she was obliged to keep them confidential. A breach of this obligation was punishable as marital disobedience.
Previous Wives
Perrault did not expressly reveal the number of previous wives that Blue Beard had (the translations say only that there were several). Carter implied that there were four (one for each corner of the secret room), although she did not clearly describe or name them all.
Blue Beard did not disclose the existence of any previous wives, although there was some limited knowledge or suspicion (gossip) about them and their fate in the community.
There is no speculation as to the reason for the deaths of the previous wives (e.g., were any of them punished for their curiosity?).
Killing Blue Beard
The biggest difference in Carter's story is the fate of Blue Beard.
In "The Bloody Chamber", the wife's mother comes to her rescue and shoots Blue Beard, with her father's gun. This restores the bond between the mother and daughter that had been diminished by her daughter's marriage.
Inheritance
It's interesting that the wife inherits Blue Beard's estate under both versions of the tale. She isn't viewed as legally complicit in the murder of her husband by one or other of her family members, in such a way that would disentitle her to her inheritance.
The Happy Ever After
The wife remarries somebody gentler and kinder than Blue Beard with the financial security offered by Blue Beard's wealth. Both husband and wife experience serial monogamy. There is no suggestion that a woman or girl should avoid wedlock, only that she should be more careful in her choice of husband. (hide spoiler)]...more
A Truly Gothic Novel Full of Dread and Glamour and Passion
Angela Carter enjoyed a major period of imaginative stimulation and production immediately bA Truly Gothic Novel Full of Dread and Glamour and Passion
Angela Carter enjoyed a major period of imaginative stimulation and production immediately before and then when she resided in Japan for several years at the cusp of the sixties/seventies.
According to the British Library, this was the first of two novels she wrote in Japan (the other being "The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman", still my favourite of her novels) in addition to her first collection of short stories, "Fireworks". However, it appears that she actually wrote this novel before her trip, while still living in Bristol.
Published in 1969, "Heroes and Villains" is a Gothic domestic drama set in a post-apocalyptic world where much of civilisation has been wiped out by some type of "blast" in a war. We don't learn what happened exactly. It might have been a nuclear bomb. All we learn is that the people who live in the world described in the novel have been splintered into several groups - the Soldiers (the remnants of the army), the Workers, the Professors, the Barbarians, and the outcast mutant Out People (she describes one as a "not-man", "what seemed to her a cruel parody of life").
The Surviving White Tower
The protagonist Marianne is the daughter of a Professor of History, who lives in a white (metaphorically ivory?) tower made of steel and concrete ("it stood among some other steel and concrete blocks" that survived the blast):
"Marianne had sharp, cold eyes and she was spiteful but her father loved her."
Father and daughter live in an academic community that is much like a rural village near where there are farms of corn, and apple orchards, beyond which there was nothing but marshlands and the "tumbled stone" of ruined buildings. "Here even the briars refused to grow and pools of water from the encroaching swampland contained nothing but viscid darkness."
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Henri Rousseau - "The Sleeping Gypsy"
The Barbarians
Marianne was not allowed to go outside the outer wire fence surrounding the community. It was out there that the Barbarians lived:
"If you're not a good little girl, the Barbarians will eat you."
The son of the Professor of Mathematics tells her, "The Soldiers are heroes but the Barbarians are villains."
Marianne is not averted by this old wives' tale. Rather, she is allured by the Barbarians. She doesn't play by the rules. "She was a skinny and angular child." (Like Angular Carter herself perhaps?) "She was very wiry and agile."
The Arbitrary Children of Calamity
Marianne's father explains to her:
"Before the war, there were places called Universities where men did nothing but read books and conduct experiments. These men had certain privileges...some Professors were allowed in the deep shelters with their families, during the war, and they proved to be the only ones left who could resurrect the gone world in a gentler shape, and try to keep destruction outside, this time."
Her father, being a Professor of History, "reconstructed the past; that was his profession." The survivors were "the arbitrary children of calamity...If the Barbarians inherit the earth, they will finally destroy it, they won't know what to do with it."
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Francisco Goya - "The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters"
All Was Chaos
Marianne first witnessed an attack on the Professorial community by the Barbarians, when she was six years old. Many Soldiers died, and then "all was chaos...The rabble came to ravage, steal, despoil, rape and, if necessary, to kill." A Barbarian boy stabs her brother and then holds him with "a strange, terrible tenderness until he was still and dead." The Barbarian then looks up to Marianne's tower and realises she has been watching him. The two obsess about each other for much of the rest of their lives, until they meet each other when Marianne absconds from the village after the brutal axe murder of her father. The Barbarian's name is Jewel: "Perhaps he was called Jewel because he was so beautiful, though also very strange."
The Barbarians are described in much the same way as Gypsies ("Gypsy is a corruption of the word, 'Egyptian'). Marianne says:
"The Professors think you have reverted to beasthood. You are a perfect illustration of the breakdown of social interaction and the death of social systems."
The Prince of Darkness
Nevertheless, Jewel is "one of its aristocrats", "the ragged king of nowhere", "the Messiah of the Yahoos" and "the prince of darkness", is interested in books, and has a tutor, Doctor Donally, who is "a bit mad...The Doctor is a practical man and believes religion is a social necessity." (He seems to be a precursor of Doctor Hoffman.) Donally proclaims:
"It seemed to me that the collapse of civilisation in the form that intellectuals such as ourselves understood it might be as good a time as any for crafting a new religion."
He then quotes Hobbes:
"The passion to be reckoned upon is fear; whereof there be two very general objects: one, the power of spirits invisible, the other, the power of those men they shall therein offend."
The Sophisticated Groom
Jewel and Donally live in a large Gothic house, "a gigantic memory of rotten stone, a compilation of innumerable forgotten styles now given some green unity by the devouring web of creeper, fur of moss and fungoid growth of rot."
Donally's room is an old chapel, "everywhere a litter of books, bottles, vessels, strangely shaped utensils and bundles of dried plants."
Marianne escapes back to the wood, where Jewel finds her, rapes her and brings her back with him. It had been his plan to marry her the following day. Marriage proves little better, it being a succession of rapes: "Marianne must reconcile herself to everything from rape to mortality."
Donally inks an absurdist sign that says, "MISTRUST APPEARANCES, THEY NEVER CONCEAL ANYTHING."
Marianne subsequently concludes:
"I think that in the long run, I shall be forced to trust appearances. When I was a little girl, we would play heroes and villains, but now I don't know which is which any more, nor who is who, and what can I trust if not appearances?"
Donally advises her, "Gather yourself together, young lady. Marry the Prince of Darkness. You'll find him very sophisticated."
Sophistication, in this world, is supposed to be enough to warrant a relationship, or even a marriage.
The Savage Husband
Marianne acknowledges, "Our Jewel is more savage than he is barbarous." Like the Parisians of old, she worshipped the goddess Reason. Her white tower kept "unreason at bay outside, beyond the barbed wire". Though on her wedding day, she realised "her ruling passion was always anger rather than fear and she turned into a mute, furious doll which allowed itself to be totally engulfed."
She describes their relationship as a composite of signs:
"He had become the sign of an idea of a hero; and she herself had been forced to impersonate the sign of a memory of a bride."
She thinks of him as "an icon of otherness...The Barbarians are Yahoos but the Professors are Laputans."
The Infernal Pit of Their Embraces
There is no rational reason that explains their relationship and "the infernal pit of their embraces":
"You are the most remarkable thing I ever saw in all my life...You're nothing but the furious invention of my virgin nights..."
"They lay upon the narrow mattress and, involuntarily, by a compulsion that had nothing to do with reason, will or conscious desire, she found she moved closer and closer to him."
"She defended herself by denying him an existence outside the dual being they made while owls pounced on velvet mice in the forest, the moon passed through its phases and the idiot boy howled disconsolately in his kennel."
Another Metaphysical Proposition
By the end of the novel, she concludes, "You're not a human being at all, you're a metaphysical proposition."
And then, having negated each other, they "relapsed into silence".
An Astonishing Juicy, Overblown, Exploding Gothic Lollipop
The execution of this novel is astonishing. It consists of just seven chapters that total 164 pages in length. The plot is minimal, but efficient. The chapters flow together like a stream of romantic consciousnesses. A world is built beautifully and imaginatively, in the manner of a Gothic surrealism. The characters are drawn sympathetically, even when they are villains, not heroes. The heroes are real, complex people, not just angelic personae or delicate caricatures.
Robert Coover contributes (dials in?) a perfunctory three page introduction that does little more than quote Angela Carter’s essay “Notes on the Gothic Mode”. This novel exceeds in brilliance those maximalist tomes of Coover’s fellow American post-modernists Alexander Theroux (“Darconville’s Cat”), Joseph McElroy (“Women and Men”) and William T. Vollmann (“The Royal Family”).
Carter herself described it as "a juicy, overblown, exploding Gothic lollipop.
Suck it and see!
SOUNDTRACK: (view spoiler)[ Beach Boys - "Heroes and Villains"
This novel, Angela Carter's second, took a long time to get off the ground. Only 120 pages in (60% of the way through) does it start tBeyond Austerity
This novel, Angela Carter's second, took a long time to get off the ground. Only 120 pages in (60% of the way through) does it start to build any dramatic tension or apparent narrative direction. Then, only in the last chapter of 20 pages do we see what the novel is really all about. Fortunately, by that time, Carter had partially won me over again, although this is probably my least favourite work of hers.
The novel seems to be set in the early fifties, when England was just emerging from wartime austerity. There is a new sense of optimism in the air, although it's not yet tethered to the swinging sixties.
The New Found Land of My Body
Melanie, the protagonist, is just 15, going on 16. She has two younger siblings, Jonathan and Victoria. Their father is a writer, and Mummy was initially keeping Daddy company on what Victoria calls a "lecher tour" in America. Meanwhile, the children are cared for by their beloved housekeeper, Mrs Rundle (who was "fat, old and ugly and had never, in fact, been married"). They live in a red-brick house ("with Edwardian gables") in the country, "with a bedroom each and several to spare". Melanie had grown up with "the smell of money", even if she was too young to recognise it.
Melanie is just starting to discover herself and her body:
"The summer she was fifteen, Melanie discovered she was made of flesh and blood. O, my America, my new found land. She embarked on a tranced voyage, exploring the whole of herself, clambering her mountain ranges, penetrating the moist richness of her secret valleys, a physiological Cortez, da Gama or Mungo Park. For hours she stared at herself, naked, in the mirror of her wardrobe; she would follow with her finger the elegant structure of her rib-cage, where the heart fluttered under the flesh like a bird under a blanket, and she would draw down the long line from breast-bone to navel (which was a mysterious cavern or grotto), and she would rasp her palms against her bud-wing shoulderblades. And she would writhe about, clasping herself, laughing, sometimes doing cartwheels and handstands out of sheer exhilaration at the supple surprise of herself now she was no longer a little girl."
Mummy's Wedding Dress
Even when she goes to church, she is preoccupied with the flesh:
"Please God, let me get married. Or, let me have sex...Or at least, let me remember that I had sex."
"Since she was thirteen, when her periods began, she had felt she was pregnant with herself, bearing the slowly ripening embryo of Melanie-grown-up inside herself for a gestation time the length of which she was not precisely aware."
She puts on her mother's wedding dress and imagines herself a (virgin) bride:
"I shall go down Into the garden. Into the night."
When she returns, she receives a telegram telling her that her parents have died. She holds herself responsible, because she dressed up in her mother's dress. It's now that the children move to London to live with their Aunt Margaret and Uncle Philip (Flower), who live in a house above his toyshop. They also take care of Aunt Margaret's brothers, Finn and Francie Jowle. Finn works in the toyshop, and Francie plays the fiddle at weddings, parties and dances.
The Silence of Women
This all happens in the first forty pages. Another eighty pages paints a picture of the almost Dickensian life they lead together. They eat tinned peaches, tinned beans, tinned sardines. Melanie forms a bond of sorts with Finn (her uncle), a Peeping Tom and "an ex-bog-trotter slum-kid", and they share her first kiss ("is there something wrong with me that I felt such a blankness?"). Aunt Margaret warns her about Uncle Philip:
"No make-up, mind. And only speak when you're spoken to. He likes, you know, silent women."
This is intimidating for Melanie, because she, like Angela Carter herself, is just finding her voice, and doesn't want to remain silent.
The Beast of the Apocalypse
For all the magic of the toyshop, life under Uncle Philip is puritanical and oppressive, even if he has a "shaggy, walrus moustache...[which] made him look like Albert Schweitzer, but not benevolent."
Melanie thinks of Uncle Philip as "the Beast of the Apocalypse". She thinks of their new home as Bluebeard's Castle. Finn describes it as a madhouse, and Melanie a crazy house:
"How could she, Melanie, have ever guessed her uncle would be a monster with a voice so loud she was afraid it would bring the roof down and bury them all?"
Even in the creative world of a puppet-maker, Uncle Philip is patronising, paternalistic and patriarchal. He makes a puppet in the form of a swan, which he intends to use in a performance of Leda and the Swan, starring Melanie. However, it becomes clear that his intention is to symbolically rape Melanie and take her innocence. "It was a grotesque parody of a swan...Its wings waved because Uncle Philip was pulling the strings...Almighty Jove in the form of a swan wreaks his will."
A Challenge to Authority in a Wild Surmise
Inevitably, Melanie and Finn challenge Uncle Philip's authority: "we shall all walk out on him together, while he grovels on the floor...Time to be gone."
Ultimately, "everything is gone...Nothing is left but us."
There is a new start in a new world:
"At night, in the garden, they faced each other in a wild surmise."
"A Garland of Wallpaper Flowers on the Grave of Love"
There are only 12 short chapters in this short but engrossing novel about the decline, fall and b"A Garland of Wallpaper Flowers on the Grave of Love"
There are only 12 short chapters in this short but engrossing novel about the decline, fall and burial of love.
Each chapter is a fragment that doesn't so much advance the narrative, as capture the domestic environment in which it occurs. Carter's description of the setting and characters is precise and alarming.
There are five main characters and a few additional neighbours and pub-mates. The five are Morris Gray, his wife Edna, his business partner in a small second hand/antique store, Honeybuzzard, and Honeybuzzard's female interests/objects of desire, Ghislaine and Emily.
"Slipping Through Nets of Obligation and Affection"
Most of the novel is narrated from Morris’ perspective or with him on centre stage. We only see the beautiful Ghislaine in the first and last chapters. Both men have had an affair with her, Morris first, who then passed her, chattel-like, to Honey, with the entreaty to “take her and teach her a lesson.” He does so, before the novel commences, by knifing the side of her face, from eye to throat, scarring her permanently.
Before that, Honey had used her to appear in a set of pornographic photos that he sold for just five shillings. Everything he does is calculated to annihilate her innocence and beauty, even if she proves resilient enough to return to him from hospital, in the absence of any reasonable alternative.
These five characters constitute each other's lives. Morris’ life is even more privative: “He began to pretend there was nobody alive but himself and everyone else was dead. The fantasy grew into a conviction.”
In many ways, the novel is a precursor or prequel to “Love", which also features a tragic/calamitous character called Honeybuzzard.
Like that novel, the characters live in vast run-down Georgian mansions that become the centrepiece of a Gothic horror show. All is derelict, including the occupants. Even though Morris is the least vindictive of the two men, “he was filled with revulsion at himself.” We soon concur with him, until we witness what Honey can achieve, this demon who once “slipped like a slim, blond porpoise through potential nets of obligation and affection”.
"A Francis Bacon Horror Painting"
Morris pretends to be a painter. He seems to be the most imaginative of the five. “He could best accommodate the thought of Ghislaine as the subject for a painting, a Francis Bacon horror painting of flesh as a disgusting symbol of the human condition; that way, she became small enough for him to handle, she dwindled through the wrong end of the telescope of art. Yet he could only think in this way, never execute; never paint the painting which would justify treating her as a thing and not a human being.” Instead, the room runs with her imaginary blood. “He wondered if he would drown in it.”
"A Disgusting Symbol of the Human Condition"
Too late, Morris realises “I never meant [Honey] to hurt her...It was a joke, a sort of joke. I'm not responsible for what Honey did. No, surely not.”
“He lived in a state of guilty fear, starting at sudden noises, frightened of shadows. He was tormented by a recurrent dream, a mutation of the nightmare of the first night...[in which] it seemed to him that she was a vampire woman,...and the moment she saw him she would snatch him up and absorb him, threshing, into the chasm in her face.”
The women come between the men (and their shadows), even if they bring diversity and difference to their lives. The women compromise the latent, self-preserving homo-eroticism of their male-centric shadow world. The men feel threatened by the women in their lives, and avenge themselves with horrific violence and disdain.
This is much more than a feminist horror story. It's a portrait of a late capitalist world in which all social relationships have become atomized. There is no love or sympathy, let alone empathy. Society has disintegrated, and the broken individuals who remain in the shadows tear each other apart with brutal efficiency. In “Love", Angela Carter would use this pessimistic framework to critique the hippy subculture that had grown up in the ruins of mid-twentieth century civilisation....more
Over a period of almost 20 years leading up to her death, Angela Carter wrote or published four volumes of short stories (this collMy Before and After
Over a period of almost 20 years leading up to her death, Angela Carter wrote or published four volumes of short stories (this collection, the last, was published posthumously in 1993, a year after her death).
All four volumes plus various previously uncollected stories were published in “Burning Your Boats”.
I read and reviewed each separate collection chronologically, which was a great opportunity to observe the progression in her writing over this period.
Initially, Carter revived the structure of the traditional fairy tale by injecting into its form a narrative that reflected contemporary feminist concerns. In the process, she made explicit what was previously only implicit in the traditional fairy tale – the patriarchal foundation of the original tale.
In the middle of this period, she created her own tales and fashioned them in structures analogous to fairy tales.
Impressions on Various Narrative Vehicles
In this, the fourth volume, she advanced even further, by inventing narratives and placing them in more recent or newly appropriated literary structures:
“Lizzie’s Tiger” (a prequel to “The Fall River Axe Murders”);
“John Ford’s ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore’" (a Jacobean tragedy reconceived as a western film);
“Gun for the Devil” (a western genre novel/story set in Vienna and a Mexican border town);
“The Merchant of Shadows” (a film student’s research into a film director and his lead actress widow that reads like (and could almost have become) a film noir murder mystery);
“The Ghost Ships” (a Christmas story that is more pagan than Christian);
“In Pantoland” (a fictionalised thesis on the sexual innuendo and explicitness of pantomime that reflects anthropological, carnivalesque and feminist interests);
“Ashputtle (or The Mother’s Ghost)" (three investigations into the mutilation of children);
“Alice in Prague” (a Freudian casebook inspired by an animated film made in "an age in love with wonders": "there's a theory, one I find persuasive, that the quest for knowledge is, at bottom, the search for the answer to the question: 'Where was I before I was born?'");
“Impressions: The Wrightsman Magdalene” (impressions on the portrayal of Mary Magdalene over time, including Georges De La Tour’s ‘The Magdalen with the Smoking Flame”):
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Superficially, “In Pantoland” gives the impression that it's an unfinished sketch containing Carter’s notes to herself about the subject matter and style of her piece. However, she obviously felt it was suitable to offer to The Guarniad for inclusion in the issue published on Christmas Eve, 1991, just months before her death.
A Stranger Among Strangers
In "Lizzie's Tiger", Lizzie is attracted to a visiting circus, when she observes a poster showing the head of a tiger, but she cannot afford the entrance fee. For Lizzie, the circus "signifies a profane church." She identifies with the other children who surround the circus:
"She was a stranger among these strangers, for all here were those the mills had brought to town, the ones with different faces." They had come variously from Lancashire, Canada and Portugal. There is something exotic about the circus: "At sunset, the incomparably grave and massive light of New England acquires a monumental, a Roman sensuality" that derives from the unfamiliar, "a sense of profound strangeness."
It was then that, swept up in the crowd, "the devil got into Lizzie." She was accosted by a drunken man who tries to kiss her in return for a nickel. Soon she is persuaded to buy a ticket to see the tiger, which "walked up and down like Satan walking about the world and it burned...The tiger kept its head down; questing hither and thither though in quest of what might not be told."
Then it fell to its knees, subdued by Lizzie, "as if this little child of all the children in the world, might lead it towards a peaceable kingdom where it need not eat meat...It stopped roaring. Instead it started to emit a rattling purr."
'Tis Pity She's Your Sister
Johnny and Annie-Belle are brother and sister, though motherless:
"I imagine him with an intelligence nourished only by the black book of the father, and hence cruelly circumscribed, yet dense with allusion, seeing himself as a kind of Adam and she his unavoidable and irreplaceable Eve, the unique companion of the wilderness, although by their toil he knows they do not live in Eden and of the precise nature of the forbidden thing he remains in doubt...For surely it cannot be this? This bliss? Who could forbid such bliss! Was it bliss for her, too? Or was there more of love than pleasure in it? 'Look after your sister.' [his mother had said to him before she died.] But it was she who looked after him as soon as she knew how and pleasured him in the same spirit as she fed him."
This is the incest taboo raised and just as quickly shrugged off.
Later on, though, when Annie-Belle discovers she is pregnant, she confesses:
"Oh, Johnny, you knowed we did wrong."
Banned Daemonology
In "Gun for the Devil", Carter contrasts the old and new worlds:
"Out of the sandstorms, hallucinatory figures emerge and merge, figures of demons or gods not necessarily those of Europe. The unknown continent, the new world, issues forth its banned daemonology...The church seems to have disappeared."
Superstition is always just beneath the surface.
Flesh Becomes Her
The HOLLYWOODLAND sign represents the Holy Grail to a young London film student, "a student of Light and Illusion," who describes himself as "the Innocent Abroad" and an "enchanted visitor", come to visit the septuagenarian widow of a famous director, Hank Mann, (formerly Heinrich von Mannheim), "the dark genius of the screen, the director with the occult touch, that neglected giant etc. etc. etc."
"The denizens of these deeps...belong to no mythology but their weird own."
Just in case you're wondering, the Oscar-winning widow, though possessed of "some imperious arrogance...was no Gish, nor Brooks, nor Dietrich, nor Garbo, who all share the same gift, the ability to reveal otherness." Yet again, Carter is interested in the stranger, the exile, the abandoned, the rejected. The director's first wife had also been an actress, the star of Mannheim's "The Fall of the House of Usher", now lost, despite its interest to fans of Edgar Allan Poe.
The narrator, enchanted by the actress and her star quality, "assumed the stance of gigolo", in the manner of a private detective who gets too close to his female client. After three martinis, he acknowledges, "Yes, there was something undeniably erotic about it, although she was as old as the hills..." No wonder he mentions "Sunset Boulevard". "I must admit I fell into a great fear. I even thought they might have lured me here to murder me, this siren of the cinema and her weird acolyte."
Safely back in his apartment the next day, he reveals that "[I] grew glum to realise how peripheral I was."
The pupil in his study was no match for the secular gods and goddesses of the screen.
Dream, That Uncensorable State
The next story pits the liberty of the imagination against the constraints of Puritanism, as personalised by Cotton Mather:
"The greatest genius of the Puritans lay in their ability to sniff out a pagan survival in, say, the custom of decorating a house with holly for the festive season; they were the stuff of which social anthropologists would be made! And their distaste for the icon of the lovely lady with her bonny babe - Mariolatry, graven images! - is less subtle than their disgust at the very idea of the festive season itself. It was the festivity of it that irked them. Nevertheless, it assuredly is a gross and heathenish practice, to welcome the birth of Our Saviour with feasting, drunkenness, and lewd displays of mumming and masquerading. We want none of that filth in this new place. No, thank you...No; the imagination must obey the rules of actuality. (Some of them, anyway.)"
It's the role of fiction, especially the carnivalesque festival of Angela Carter's pagan stories, to subvert Puritanism. The master of these revels was the Lord of Misrule himself, the clown prince of Old Christmas..."He is mirth, anarchy and terror...During the twelve days of Christmas, nothing is forbidden, everything is forgiven...The Romans called it Saturnalia, when all was topsy-turvy...A merry Christmas is Cotton Mather's worst nightmare."
The Infinite Riches of a Dirty Mind
Angela Carter deconstructs the commercial and cultural aspirations of Disneyland in "In Pantoland".
"In Pantoland, which is the carnival of the unacknowledged and the fiesta of the repressed, everything is excessive and gender is variable...Now they talk in double entendre, which is a language all of its own and is accented, not with the acute or grave, but with the eyebrows. Double entendre. That is, everyday discourse which has been dipped in the infinite riches of a dirty mind...Filthy work, but somebody has to do it...Saturnalia, the topsy-turvy time, 'the Liberties of December', when master swapped places with slave and anything could happen..."
She then investigates the role that women play in Pantoland, "this rude femaleness...flirting, flattering, fluttering...in the most salacious manner...I have come back to earth and I feel randy!"
Then she recognises,
"As Umberto Eco once said, 'An everlasting carnival does not work.' You can't keep it up, you know; nobody ever could. 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...Things don't change because a girl puts on trousers or a chap slips on a frock, you know. Masters were masters again the day after Saturnalia ended; after the holiday from gender, it was back to the old grind..."
Angela Carter's short stories are truly excessive (they question and transcend social and literary boundaries), even transgressive, without being merely long and verbose. Her work is infinitely superior to the self-conscious pretence of the white male American post-modernists, even if, like Robert Coover, they purported to endorse her.
SOUNDTRACK: (view spoiler)[ Cotton Mather - "My Before and After"
“Black Venus” was Angela Carter’s third collection of short stories in 11 years.
During this period, she pursued various writing States of Abjection
“Black Venus” was Angela Carter’s third collection of short stories in 11 years.
During this period, she pursued various writing strategies that built on a foundation of fairy tales.
In this collection, she progressed beyond the fairy tale, and wrote both more realistically and more metaphorically about the different states of exile, oppression, captivity, imprisonment, enslavement, disconnectedness, helplessness, domesticity, nostalgia, enchantment, piousness and solitude in which her mostly female characters and narrators (women and girls alike) found themselves. Each of these states could be construed as a state of abjection.
The victim is usually a real person (such as Baudelaire's muse Jeanne Duval in the title story) or a pre-existing fictitious or mythical character (the wife of Tamburlaine in “The Kiss”). However, sometimes, the oppressor was a male, sometimes a female, sometimes an institution (whether marriage, religion or the Church).
As with the previous collections, these themes are spread across the various stories. Overall, the collection is the sum of its parts, in the case of "Overture and Beginners" (a story about a golden hermaphrodite), it's even more than the sum of its body parts.
The Protracted Childhood of Lizzie Borden
Lizzie Borden, the focus of the story “The Fall River Axe Murders’, is “a motherless child, orphaned at two years old, poor thing.”
Lizzie’s natural father, Old Borden, remarried, though Lizzie and her stepmother did not get on:
“This stepmother oppressed her like a spell.”
Not even her father could protect her from such a spell, despite his material generosity:
“He would give his Lizzie anything, anything in the world that lives under the green sign of the dollar.”
Though a devout Christian, her father was an undertaker, a capitalist, a slum landlord, a materialist, dedicated to the Protestant (work) ethic:
“Morose and gaunt, this self-made man is one of few pleasures. His vocation is capital accumulation.”
He was motivated by money rather than love.
Following a burglary, Old Borden feels disconcerted, stunned, violated, raped. “It took away his hitherto unshakable confidence in the integrity inherent in things.” Everybody in the household must now lock their room, whether they are inside or outside. Isolation and privacy are imposed on Lizzie and her sister, Emma. Lizzie still lives with her father, stepmother and sister at age 32. Emma is well into her forties:
“The girls live in a fictive, protracted childhood.”
“She loves her privacy, she loves her room, she locks herself up in it all day.”
She and Emma have “resigned themselves to the thin condition of New England spinsterhood.” Her photos don’t reveal what would become of her and her parents:
“…in those early photographs of her young womanhood, she herself does not look so much like a crazed assassin as somebody in extreme solitude, oblivious of that camera in whose direction she obscurely smiles, so that it would not surprise you to learn that she is blind…She is a girl of Sargasso calm.”
Overture and Beginners for the Children's Theatre of the Abject (1.)
The narrator in “The Kitchen Child” comes from more modest stock: his mother is a cook. He is “conceived upon a kitchen table, born upon a kitchen floor.”
The narrator searches for a description that is analogous to the expression “born in a trunk” (which relates to a child who is born into the environment of theatre and “sups grease-paint with mother’s milk”). Interestingly, Angela Carter used this very expression in relation to Edgar Allan Poe’s mother in the earlier story, “The Cabinet of Edgar Allan Poe” (2.) (whom he describes as “born in a trunk, grease-paint in her bloodstream.”
The Kitchen Child says of his mother:
“My mother, wreathed in smiles, enthroned on a sack of spuds with, at her breast, her babe, all neatly swaddled in a new-boiled pudding cloth and the entire kitchen brigade arranged around her in attitudes of adoration, each brandishing a utensil and giving out therewith that merry rattle of ladles, yours truly’s first lullaby.”
At three years old, “I being too little to manage the [rolling] pin, she hoists me on her shoulders to watch her as she rolls out the dough upon the marble slab, then sets me to stamp out the tartlets for myself, tears of joy at my precocity trickling down her cheeks, lets me dollop on the damson jam and lick the spoon for my reward…So I became her acolyte.”
For the child, at least, the mother provided some relief from abjection.
In the earlier story, Poe easily transferred his adoration of his mother to his cousin, Virginia Clemm, who unfortunately died of consumption at the age of 24:
Goodnight, Sweet Prince [In the Words of Angela Carter]
On his brow her rouged lips Left the mark of Cain. He grows up Under the black stars Of the slave states. He flinches from that part Of women the sheet hid. He becomes a man. He was not put out By the tender years Of this young girl Whom he soon married. Was she not just Juliet’s age, Just thirteen summers? Did she not come to him Stiffly armoured in taboos? But didn’t she always look Like a pretty walking corpse? Her pupils contain In each a flame. Her eyes go out. She sleeps. All silent. All still. And his dust, too, blows Away on the wind. Goodnight, sweet prince.
Footnotes:
1. The preparatory warning 'Overture and Beginners' used in theatre is a signal for the orchestra to start the introductory music and the 'beginners' (the actors in the first scene) to get into their opening positions on stage.
2. This story had all of the various stylistic appeal of "Moby Dick", except that it was achieved within a mere 13 pages. Perhaps this is the nature of the theatrical illusion?
In my review of Angela Carter’s first collection of short stories, “Fireworks”, I focussed on a number of co Into the Unguessable Country of Marriage
In my review of Angela Carter’s first collection of short stories, “Fireworks”, I focussed on a number of concerns that seemed to form the basis of her writing strategy. They were scattered over the length of the individual stories.
In this collection, these concerns are less overtly stated. In most cases, she let the writing do the job. The writing is much more complete and functional in the service of her chosen genre. However, in retrospect, one paragraph (the first) in the story “The Bloody Chamber” stands out as evidence of her intent:
"I remember how, that night, I lay awake in the wagon-lit in a tender, delicious ecstasy of excitement, my burning cheek pressed against the impeccable linen of the pillow and the pounding of my heart mimicking that of the great pistons ceaselessly thrusting the train that bore me through the night, away from Paris, away from girlhood, away from the white, enclosed quietude of my mother's apartment, into the unguessable country of marriage...I felt a pang of loss as if, when he put the gold band on my finger, I had, in some way, ceased to be her child in becoming his wife.
The Virgin and the Marquis
Several things can be inferred from this paragraph:
The narrator is a young girl, a teenager, probably immediately (post-)pubescent, a virgin.
She is engaged to be married – to a man we later find out is a Marquis (like de Sade), who lives in an enormous castle and is “so rich; so well-born."
She is leaving the comfort of life with her mother, perhaps for the first time of any duration.
She has caught a train, alone, on the way to meet her fiancé, prior to their wedding (or their wedding night). She is midway between childhood and marriage.
The Silent Music of My Unknowingness
In a way, for all its derivation from the French folk tale "Bluebeard", the narrative is like that of Little Red Riding Hood, where the narrator has to leave the safety of her home and pass through the wood to her grandmother’s house. The question is whether she will safely make it through the wood, and whether she will be safe when she arrives (and thereafter).
The journey through the wood is analogous to the challenges of post-pubescent life, when a girl’s innocence and virginity are at the risk of unscrupulous males, whether boys or adults. Both innocence and virginity are things a male wants to take away from a girl:
"Then I realised, with a shock of surprise, how it must have been my innocence that captivated him - the silent music, he said, of my unknowingness...”
Removed from parental or maternal guidance and protection, a naïve, unworldly young girl is defenceless. The virgin can quickly become a victim.
The Sheer Carnal Avarice of It
Marriage is a social institution, where a young girl, a virgin can be legitimately traded to a male for his sexual pleasure, not to mention the other burdens his wife must assume. Men have made marriage a transaction, something that complements and rewards their social and economic status. They must exercise good judgement in their choice of partner, notwithstanding the underlying impulse of lust:
"I saw him watching me in the gilded mirrors with the assessing eye of a connoisseur inspecting horseflesh, or even of a housewife in the market, inspecting cuts on the slab. I'd never seen, or else had never acknowledged, that regard of his before, the sheer carnal avarice of it...I sensed in myself a potentiality for corruption that took my breath away...The next day we were married.”
This suggests that a girl/woman is forced to become an unknowing accomplice to a moral crime, that of corruption, even though the institution is socially recognised and promoted and enforced by the Church.
A Glutton for Her Punishment
Paradoxically, the girl/woman is not entitled to any decency from her husband. She must endure his contempt for women. She must take him as the agent of corruption that he has become, with all the experiences that have made him the man he is (and the man or beast that he will be to her):
"...we should have a formal disrobing of the bride, a ritual from the brothel. Sheltered as my life had been, how could I have failed, even in the world of prim bohemia in which I lived, to have heard hints of his world?”
Sexually, the husband is a glutton:
"He stripped me, gourmand that he was, as if he were stripping the leaves of an artichoke...”
At the heart of the artichoke, he finds and plunders the narrator’s “split fig”.
The Iniquity of Marriage
Her husband surrounds her with white lilies, as if that is enough to buy off her innocence and compel her loyalty and subjection:
"The lilies I always associate with him; that are white. And stain you.”
This is no suitable transaction for a girl/woman. The institution is not virtuous, but stained:
"I longed for him. And he disgusted me... Did all that castle hold enough riches to recompense me for the company of the libertine with whom I must share it?"
This marriage is no fairy tale, certainly not one that was destined for a happy ending. Too late, the narrator realises that she should have taken more notice of the warnings implicit in fairy tales:
"I thought all these were old wives' tales, chattering of fools, spooks to scare bad children into good behaviour.”
Having allowed her narrator to come to her senses, Angela Carter also permits her to have a happy ending of sorts (which I won’t reveal). Suffice it to say that her mother comes to her rescue. This is one daughter who is not permanently abandoned to an iniquitous state of marriage.
Christine [An Homage]
"In my freshman and sophomore school years, when I was 14 and 15 years old, my group of friends intersected with Brett and his friends for a short period of time. I had been friendly with a classmate of Brett’s for a short time during my freshman year, and it was through that connection that I attended a number of parties that Brett also attended. We did not know each other well, but I knew him and he knew me. In the summer of 1982, like most summers, I spent almost every day at the Columbia Country Club in Chevy Chase, Maryland swimming and practicing diving. One evening that summer, after a day of swimming at the club, I attended a small gathering at a house in the Chevy Chase/Bethesda area. There were four boys I remember being there: Brett Kavanaugh, Mark Judge, P.J. Smyth, and one other boy whose name I cannot recall. I remember my friend Leland Ingham attending. I do not remember all of the details of how that gathering came together, but like many that summer, it was almost surely a spur of the moment gathering. I truly wish I could provide detailed answers to all of the questions that have been and will be asked about how I got to the party, where it took place, and so forth. I don’t have all the answers, and I don’t remember as much as I would like to. But the details about that night that bring me here today are ones I will never forget. They have been seared into my memory and have haunted me episodically as an adult.
"When I got to the small gathering, people were drinking beer in a small living room on the first floor of the house. I drank one beer that evening. Brett and Mark were visibly drunk. Early in the evening, I went up a narrow set of stairs leading from the living room to a second floor to use the bathroom. When I got to the top of the stairs, I was pushed from behind into a bedroom. I couldn’t see who pushed me. Brett and Mark came into the bedroom and locked the door behind them. There was music already playing in the bedroom. It was turned up louder by either Brett or Mark once we were in the room. I was pushed onto the bed and Brett got on top of me. He began running his hands over my body and grinding his hips into me. I yelled, hoping someone downstairs might hear me, and tried to get away from him, but his weight was heavy. Brett groped me and tried to take off my clothes. He had a hard time because he was so drunk, and because I was wearing a one-piece bathing suit under my clothes. I believed he was going to rape me. I tried to yell for help. When I did, Brett put his hand over my mouth to stop me from screaming. This was what terrified me the most, and has had the most lasting impact on my life. It was hard for me to breathe, and I thought that Brett was accidentally going to kill me. Both Brett and Mark were drunkenly laughing during the attack. They both seemed to be having a good time. Mark was urging Brett on, although at times he told Brett to stop. A couple of times I made eye contact with Mark and thought he might try to help me, but he did not.
"During this assault, Mark came over and jumped on the bed twice while Brett was on top of me. The last time he did this, we toppled over and Brett was no longer on top of me. I was able to get up and run out of the room. Directly across from the bedroom was a small bathroom. I ran inside the bathroom and locked the door. I heard Brett and Mark leave the bedroom laughing and loudly walk down the narrow stairs, pin-balling off the walls on the way down. I waited and when I did not hear them come back up the stairs, I left the bathroom, ran down the stairs, through the living room, and left the house. I remember being on the street and feeling an enormous sense of relief that I had escaped from the house and that Brett and Mark were not coming after me."
“Indelible in the hippocampus is the laughter...The uproarious laughter between the two. They’re having fun at my expense...They were laughing with each other.”
SOUNDTRACK: (view spoiler)[ Siouxsie And The Banshees - "Christine"
In 1969, Angela Carter left her first husband and moved to Japan for three years. Her move triggered an amazingly fertile period of writingFlower Fire
In 1969, Angela Carter left her first husband and moved to Japan for three years. Her move triggered an amazingly fertile period of writing, which resulted in the novel "The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman" (to date, my favourite of her novels) and this collection of short stories. The combined impression is one of the sudden release of an explosive talent, much like "fireworks".
The significance of the title is suggested in the first story, "A Souvenir of Japan". Some children pestered their father until he bought them fireworks, the Japanese word for which means "flower fire".
Later, a fireworks display occurs in an area "like a fairground - but such an ordered fair!...Everything was altogether quietly festive."
Watching the fireworks sparkle, "the smiling children cooed softly; their pleasure was very pure because it was so restrained...These children were all on their best behaviour because they were staying up late and held their parents' hands with a charming propriety."
There is a sense of excitement about some kind of behaviour that is normally forbidden. Yet the excitement is restrained, respectful or considerate, even if the subject matter is profane.
Carter's stories are neither didactic nor prurient, yet they investigate the nature of behaviour that is either tolerated or taboo in a considered or studious manner, in a manner of restrained propriety.
In the Afterword, Carter describes her stories as tales rather than short stories:
"Formally the tale differs from the short story in that it makes few pretences to the imitation of life. The tale does not log everyday experience, as the short story does; it interprets everyday experience through a system of imagery derived from subterranean areas behind everyday experience, and therefore the tale cannot betray its readers into a false knowledge of everyday experience."
In this review, I'll discuss aspects of Carter's system of imagery by highlighting significant parts of her text. Hopefully, this will lead to some understanding of her goals and achievements as a feminist writer.
The Double-Somersault of Love
Ironically, the female narrator and her partner grow bored and become restive, leading them to question their happiness and the pleasure they get from their relationship:
"We fought a battle of self-abnegation and I won it, for I had the stronger character."
She recalls going to a love hotel early in their relationship, and reading a children's book about a boy who who was born inside a peach ("there was the baby, where the stone should have been"). The boy, Tomotaro, and the narrator's partner, "had the inhuman sweetness of a child born from something other than a mother, a passive, cruel sweetness I did not immediately understand, for it was that of the repressed masochism, which, in my country, is usually confined to women."
The narrator describes her partner's "curious, androgynous grace with its svelte, elongated spine, wide shoulders and unusually well-developed pectorals, almost like the breasts of a girl approaching puberty."
"Sometimes, it was possible for me to believe he had practised an enchantment upon me, as foxes in this country may, for, here, a fox can masquerade as human and at the best of times the high cheekbones gave to his face the aspect of a mask."
Just like a fox, the object of love can disguise their true feelings and the subject can be deceived (or deceive themselves). Love can affect us like an enchantment or a spell.
The narrator's experience is particularly poignant, because she recognises that "as they say, Japan is a man's country...In a society where men dominate, they value women only as the object of men's passions."
Away from home, the narrator is an alien in a foreign country, which forces her to probe "the death-defying double-somersault of love", as it exists in both England and Japan:
"I had never been so absolutely the mysterious other. I had become a kind of phoenix, a fabulous beast; I was an outlandish jewel. He found me, I think, inexpressibly exotic. But I often felt like a female impersonator."
Woman as a Fabulous Beast
Ironically, the narrator becomes a vehicle of and for fantasy, while she learns to comprehend the real or normal world outside, even if it is Japan.
In a department store, she encounters a rack of dresses labelled "For Young and Cute Girls Only", which alienate her even more, making her feel like Glumdalclitch. Her partner tells her that "when he was in bed with me, he felt like a small boat upon a wide, stormy sea." He is tossed around by the tempestuous nature of a womanhood he doesn't completely understand. He affects the "radiant aimlessness of the pure existential hero."
Women can't be understood solely in terms of beauty versus man's beast. Women might be part beast as well.
Mirror Images of the Self
In return, the narrator realises that "I was suffering from love and I knew him as intimately as I knew my own image in a mirror. In other words, I knew him only in relation to myself. Yet, on those terms, I knew him perfectly."
Love is complicated by the dual/rival perspectives of the subject and the object.
Carter discusses the knowledge of the lovers in terms that seem to apply to the creative writing process she has embarked on:
"At times, I thought I was inventing him as I went along, however, so you will have to take my word for it that we existed. But I do not want to paint our circumstantial portraits so that we both emerge with enough well-rounded, spuriously detailed actuality that you are forced to believe in us. I do not want to practise such sleight of hand. You must be content only with glimpses of our outlines, as if you had caught sight of our reflections in the looking-glass of somebody else's house as you passed by the window."
She asks herself: "How far does a pretence of feeling, maintained with absolute conviction, become authentic?"
Relationships must be understood in terms of both pretence and authenticity, even if it's fleeting.
The narrator recounts the moving images of evanescence, fireworks, morning glories, the old, children, from which she has composed her story.
She concludes that "the most moving of these images were the intangible reflections of ourselves we saw in one another's eyes, reflections of nothing but appearances, in a city dedicated to seeming, and, try as we might to possess the essence of each other's otherness, we would inevitably fail."
Brief Imitations of Women and Men
In "The Loves of Lady Purple", we see life through the prism of love again. A character called the Asiatic Professor is a puppet master. His reality is different from those around him: "The puppeteer speculates in a no-man's limbo between the real and that which, although we know very well it is not, nevertheless seems to be real."
His pretence has succeeded in becoming authentic, at least in the eyes of his audience: "The master of marionettes vitalises inert stuff with the dynamics of his self...the dolls project those signals of signification we instantly recognise as language...they once again offer their brief imitations of men and women with an exquisite precision which is all the more disturbing because we know it to be false..."
Like the narrator of the first story, the puppeteer has the air of a "visitant from another world where the mode of being was conducted in nuances rather than affirmatives." He is like a foreigner, whereas his assistants are all "natives of the fairground and, after all, all fairs are the same...perhaps, dissociated fragments of one single, great, original fair which was inexplicably scattered long ago in a diaspora of the amazing...here, the grotesque is the order of the day."
Reality and Otherness
The puppeteer reveals his passions through the medium of his heroine, the puppet, Lady Purple ("the Shameless Oriental Venus") who "did not seem so much a cunningly simulated woman as a monstrous goddess, at once preposterous and magnificent, who transcended the notion she was dependent on his hands and appeared wholly real and yet entirely other."
"Her actions were not so much an imitation as a distillation and intensification of those of a born woman and so she could become the quintessence of eroticism, for no woman born would have dared to be so blatantly seductive."
The Magic Alternative
In performance, "the incantatory ritual of the drama instantly annihilated the rational and imposed upon the audience a magic alternative in which nothing was in the least familiar."
Soon after, Carter refers to "the rapt intensity of ritual". Carter also describes Lady Purple as a "corrupt phoenix who rose again as a 'mannequin of desire' who expressed the nameless essence of the idea of woman, a metaphysical abstraction of the female",..."the sole perpetrator of desire...who proliferated malign fantasies all around her and used her lovers as the canvas on which she executed bourdoir masterpieces of destruction."
"Her kiss emanated from the dark country where desire is objectified and lives. She gained entry into the world by a mysterious loophole in its metaphysics and, during her kiss, she sucked his breath from his lungs so that her own bosom heaved with it."
Interestingly, Lady Purple's career ended "as if it had been indeed a firework display, in ashes, desolation and silence."
The Desolate Smile
In "The Smile of Winter", Carter again lists the ingredients she used for her composition:
"Do not think I do not realise what I am doing. I am making a composition using the following elements: the winter beach; the winter moon; the ocean; the women; the pine trees; the riders; the driftwood; the shells; the shapes of darkness and the shapes of water; and the refuse. These are all inimical to my loneliness because of their indifference to it. Out of these pieces of inimical indifference, I intend to represent the desolate smile of winter which, as you might have gathered, is the smile I wear."
The narrator is afraid of being both alone and lonely.
Inexpressible Vistas of Love
In "Penetrating to the Heart of the Forest", two twins "could not help but feel a faint contempt, for their world, though beautiful, seemed to them, in a sense, incomplete - as though it lacked the knowledge of some mystery they might find, might they not? in the forest, on their own." The heart of the forest, like Eden, contains secrets which are and must be concealed. Confronted with ripe fruit, Madeline "extended a long, crimson, newly sensual tongue to lick her lips, laughing [like Eve]. 'It tastes so good!' she said. 'Here! Eat!' " After Emile took the apple and ate, they kissed, in "the hitherto unguessed at, unknowable, inexpressible vistas of love."
The Real Conditions of Living
In "Flesh and the Mirror", the narrator moves through "these expressionist perspectives in my black dress as though I was creator of all and of myself, too, in a black dress, in love, crying, walking through the city [of Tokyo] in the third person singular, my own heroine, as though the world stretched out from my eye like spokes from a sensitised hub that galvanised all to life when I looked at it...I think I know, now, what I was trying to do. I was trying to subdue the city by turning it into a projection of my own growing pains. What solipsistic arrogance!...The stranger, the foreigner, thinks he is in control; but he has been precipitated into somebody else's dream. You never know what will happen in Tokyo. Anything can happen."
"So I attempted to rebuild the city according to the blueprint in my imagination as a backdrop to the plays in my puppet theatre, but it sternly refused to be so rebuilt; I was only imagining it had been so rebuilt...None of the lyrical eroticism of this sweet, sad, moon night of summer rain had been within my expectations...My sensibility foundered under the assault on my senses...My imagination had been pre-empted."
"The mirror distilled the essence of all the encounters of strangers whose perceptions of one another existed only in the medium of the chance embrace, the accidental...The magic mirror presented me with a hitherto unconsidered notion of myself as I...I had been precipitated into knowledge of the real conditions of living..."<
Breaking Out of the Mirror
Just as the mirror informs the self, it deludes the self, and must be escaped:
"Women and mirrors are in complicity with one another to evade the action I/she performs that she/I cannot watch, the action with which I break out of the mirror, with which I assume my appearance...
"The most difficult performance in the world is acting naturally, isn't it? Everything else is artful."
Outside and Inside
The mirror theme is continued in "Reflections": "Embrace yourself in the mirror. You must go, now. Now!...Kiss yourself in the mirror, the symbolic matrix of this and that, hither and thither, outside and inside."
"When my eyes opened, I had become my own reflection. I had passed through the mirror...I gave birth to my mirror self through the mediation of the looking-glass, yet my sensibility remained as it had been...The world was the same; yet absolutely altered...The effect was as of the reflection of a reflection, like an example of perpetual regression, the perfect, self-sufficient nirvana of the hermaphrodite...
"Proud as a man, I once again advanced to meet my image in the mirror. Full of self-confidence, I held out my hands to embrace my self, my antiself, my self not-self, my assassin, my death, the world's death."
Living and Dying in Parentheses
"Elegy for a Freelance" describes life in a revolutionary cell in a futuristic London. The narrator and X have been in love, until X murders their landlord as practice for the planned assassination of a senior politician:
"You made assassination sound as enticing as pornography...
"We had purposely exiled ourselves from the course of everyday events and were proud to live in parentheses."
From Pussycat to Tiger Lady
They live like exiles or aliens "amongst the architecture of desolation" and decay. "This abyss was that of my own emptiness."
Still, they share some kind of love:
"I was always a little afraid of you because you clung to me far too tightly and made me come with the barbarous dexterity of a huntsman eviscerating a stag...
"Your kisses along my arms were like tracer bullets. I am lost. I flow. Your flesh defines me. I become your creation. I am your fleshly reflection."
While the relationship ends with X's revolutionary trial and hanging, one of the narrator's fellow cell members observes that "you are turning into a tiger lady when I always thought you were such a pussycat."
The assertiveness and strength of the tiger lady might be what is needed to overcome the loneliness of the female pussycat.
I wonder whether Carter is a feminist, precisely because she examines the nature of relationships, love, desire and longing, as well as questioning what role one, a woman might play inside or outside such relationships. Her solution isn't necessarily separatist (it's relationships that must be repaired and bettered - both subject and object perform a somersault in the double-somersault of love), although she seems to acknowledge the attraction of multiple forms of gender and sexuality, including androgyny. It seems that her (and her narrators') ultimate erotic quest was for someone who appreciated that she was a tiger lady. She was no mere passive object of men's desire or passions, something she learned in Japan, both as person and writer.
SOUNDTRACK: (view spoiler)[ Siouxsie & The Banshees - "Fireworks"
The three protagonists of this 1969 novel "moved disinterestedly in the floating world centred loosely upon the art school, the universiBristol Gothic
The three protagonists of this 1969 novel "moved disinterestedly in the floating world centred loosely upon the art school, the university and the second-hand trade and made their impermanent homes in the sloping, terraced hillside where the Irish, the West Indians and the more adventurous of the students lived in old, decaying houses where rents were low."
We aren't expressly told the name of the city, although Angela Carter refers to it as "provincial" and it's generally believed to be Bristol (where Carter was living at the time).
Like the psychiatric hospital in which Annabel ("the mad girl") eventually finds herself, their flat is in a Gothic "house [that] was built in the Age of Reason but now it has become a Fool's Tower."
And so we have the set-up of a Gothic novel that charts the decline and fall of 60's English counterculture.
Annabel’s Axle
Annabel starts off as a middle class virgin, "a sparse, grotesquely elegant, attenuated girl"...whose "movements were spiky, angular, and graceful" (she actually sounds more proto-punk than hippy to me). She's determined not to be "common" (like her parents) and jealously guards her privacy. She rarely speaks or reveals anything about her psyche. For all her secretive introversion and lack of energy, she's still incredibly self-centred (she thinks of herself as the "helpless pivot of the entire universe as if sun, moon, stars and all the hosts of the sky span round upon herself, their volitionless axle.")
Liberty for Lee
When her parents discover that she's living with Lee, they force them to get married, even though they don't think his prospects are good (being a school teacher from a modest working class background).
Neither is particularly committed to marriage, especially Lee:
"Lee expressed a desire for freedom; in the last years of his adolescence, freedom was his grand passion and a principal condition of freedom, it seemed to him, was lack of possessions.
"He also remained cool and detached in his dealings with women for freedom from responsibilities was another prerequisite of this state. So his sentimentality found expression in the pursuit of a metaphysical concept of liberty."
Mythic Flicker Book
Annabel is little better:
"She saw, in everyday things, a world of mythic, fearful shapes of whose existence she was convinced although she never spoke of it to anyone; nor had she ever suspected that everyday, sensuous human practice might shape the real world. When she did discover that such a thing was possible, it proved the beginning of the end for her for how could she possess any notion of the ordinary?"
This mythic world is one of her own construction, not one imposed on her by culture, society or the outside world. It's a product of her own imagination, which can produce both dreams and nightmares:
"I don't know from one minute to the next what it is that exists for her, it's like a flicker book."
We learn little of the physicality of the relationship. It matters not to Annabel, who's more concerned with her own mythic world. Meanwhile, Lee indulges in a number of extramarital affairs in a quest for simple pleasures.
Catastrophe
Carter alerts us in the first paragraph to the fact that a catastrophe is coming, and come it does.
As if the chemistry between Annabel and Lee isn't explosive enough, they share their flat with Lee's brother, Buzz, a photographer who reeks of "incense and chemicals."
Inevitably, there is a greater psychic rapport between Annabel and Buzz: "Your brother seems to take your wife's fantasies for granted, as if they were real."
Even then, the relationship is a shadowy diffuse one of surface and surface:
"Everything is subtly out of alignment. Shadows fall awry and light no longer issues from expected sources...
"They represented, now, a fissure of tiny cracks in her scrupulous imaginary edifice."
Disintegration
This is a world of diffused dreariness that has started to disintegrate. Nothing purports to hold it together:
"...though she did not long for him, she waited for his physical return with a certain irritation that it was delayed so long.
"On the other hand, he might return to her in some other shape. Sometimes she thought of him as a mean, black fox and sometimes as a metamorphic thing that could slip in and out of any form he chose..."
The disintegration of their shared world is reflected in Carter's mode of story-telling. She gives us a kaleidoscopic perspective on an emotional labyrinth:
"There is a condition of shared or, rather, mutually stimulated psychotic disorder known as 'folie a deux'...
"In time, the principal actors (the wife, the brothers, the mistress) assembled a coherent narrative from these images but each interpreted them differently and drew their own conclusions which were all quite dissimilar for each told himself the story as if he were the hero except for Lee who, by common choice, found himself the villain."
And so it is that Angela Carter creates a contemporary myth that reveals how the Gothic mansion of the sixties became a Fool's Tower. Things ain't what they're supposed to be. This ain't the Summer of Love! But it is the aftermath.
SOUNDTRACK: (view spoiler)[ The Blue Aeroplanes - "Colour Me"
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