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Ifs, Buts, and Maybes: Angela Carter’s Grammar of Curiosity

Ben Masters

in Novel Style: Ethics and Excess in English Fiction since the 1960s

This chapter traces the fraught relationship between curiosity and explication in Carter’s major novels, and demonstrates how Carter’s experiments with grammatical modalities and syntax create a ... More

This chapter traces the fraught relationship between curiosity and explication in Carter’s major novels, and demonstrates how Carter’s experiments with grammatical modalities and syntax create a stylistically embodied curiosity that is responsive to uncertainty and contingency. It goes on to delineate an ethics of extrapolation, as enacted by Carter’s prose style, that draws us into a new kind of perception, and argues that this is fundamentally linked to what Carter called her ‘committed materialism’. Drawing on the work of thinkers and writers as diverse as Elaine Scarry, A.C. Bradley, Geoffrey Galt Harpham, Alex Houen, and William Burroughs, this chapter recovers Carter’s artistry (too often overlooked), to show how her ethics and politics are achieved first and foremost through the particulars of her extravagant prose style.Less

Mignon’s Modern and Postmodern Survivals

Terence Cave

in Mignon's Afterlives: Crossing Cultures from Goethe to the Twenty-First Century

Mignon’s fortunes in the twentieth century are explored in this chapter primarily through works in which she passes over the threshold of sexual maturity and encounters exploitation and corruption, ... More

Mignon’s fortunes in the twentieth century are explored in this chapter primarily through works in which she passes over the threshold of sexual maturity and encounters exploitation and corruption, e.g. Wedekind’s Lulu plays (and Berg’s opera), Gerhart Hauptmann’s novella Mignon, and Angela Carter’s Nights at the Circus: the fall of Lulu and the short-lived ‘rescue’ of Aga-Mignon by Hauptmann’s unreliable narrator are counterbalanced by a more positive denouement in Carter’s magic realist plot. This chapter also discusses an allusion to Thomas’s opera in Joyce’s ‘The Dead’ and the interest of Maria Kaschnitz for Mignon, whom she turns in an early novel into a figure of eternal return. Films featuring Mignon (including Wim Wenders’s Falsche Bewegung) are reviewed, and the chapter ends with an American novel (by Kim Chernin) of the dawning twenty-first century in which Mignon appears as an object of homoerotic desire.Less

The case of the cut-off hand: Angela Carter’s werewolves in historical perspective

Willem de Blécourt

in She-wolf: A cultural history of female werewolves

The motif of the werewolf’s severed paw occurs in a variety of texts of different periods. In contemporary popular culture, it is probably most familiar from Angela Carter’s fiction and Neil Jordan’s ... More

The motif of the werewolf’s severed paw occurs in a variety of texts of different periods. In contemporary popular culture, it is probably most familiar from Angela Carter’s fiction and Neil Jordan’s 1984 film The Company of Wolves (based on Carter’s short stories). That this motif specifically concerns the paw/hand transformation, as well as a female werewolf, is suggestive. In medieval European literary traditions, women’s cut-off hands symbolized their role as victims of incest. Moreover, in medieval religious and literary texts, incest was seen as something nonhuman and, in some cases, specifically pertaining to wolves. This chapter will argue that the metamorphosis associated with the severed paw motif thus contains a double incest metaphor, which was later obscured in popular culture and, eventually, lost through the switch in gender of the amputee (as seen in The Company of Wolves).Less

Seeing Red

James Gracey

in The Company of Wolves

This chapter looks into the heart of Neil Jordan's The Company of Wolves as a story of sexual awakening, literal and figurative formation, and the empowerment of women. It discusses how The Company ... More

This chapter looks into the heart of Neil Jordan's The Company of Wolves as a story of sexual awakening, literal and figurative formation, and the empowerment of women. It discusses how The Company of Wolves carries a strong feminist message that is more than a singular concept, like the short stories from Angela Carter's The Bloody Chamber. It also explains Carter's brand of feminism that represents one strand that was often at odds with those of other feminists at the time and even considered highly controversial. The chapter analyses how Carter sought to expose how women's sexuality is perceived as a myth instigated and perpetuated by moral and social conditioning. It discloses Carter's frequent visit to the world of fairy tales to critique culturally constructed notions relating to women, gender roles and femininity.Less

The Love of the Wolf

Judith Still

in Derrida and Other Animals: The Boundaries of the Human

Derrida’s The Beast and the Sovereign volume 1 explores above all the political philosophical figure of the animal, and, while sexual difference is repeatedly evoked, little sustained attention is ... More

Derrida’s The Beast and the Sovereign volume 1 explores above all the political philosophical figure of the animal, and, while sexual difference is repeatedly evoked, little sustained attention is paid to women writers or to the ramifications of woman occupying the place of the animal in a hierarchy with man. This chapter starts with Derrida’s intertexts for the figure of the wolf in a domestic context: Plautus (Asinaria), Montaigne and Rousseau’s Confessions. It then supplements these by focusing on writing of the twentieth century by Cixous, Vivien (The Lady with the She-Wolf), Duffy (The World’s Wife) and Carter (The Bloody Chamber) which evokes the love of the wolf as both desirable and frightening. Tsvetaeva’s writing comes in as an intertext in Cixous’s ‘Love of the Wolf’, in particular her long poem ‘Le Gars’ and her essays on Pushkin. Fairy tales, notably Red Riding Hood, are also key intertexts. The chapter also returns to Derrida’s analysis of Deleuze and Lacan in their specification of the animal against man.Less

Rational Distortions: Essayism in the British Novel after Borges

Michael Wood

in On Essays: Montaigne to the Present

This chapter explores the revival of various forms of the essay in fiction written in Great Britain from the 1970s to the present day. Angela Carter, Julian Barnes, W. G. Sebald and Kazuo Ishiguro ... More

This chapter explores the revival of various forms of the essay in fiction written in Great Britain from the 1970s to the present day. Angela Carter, Julian Barnes, W. G. Sebald and Kazuo Ishiguro are shown to integrate speculation and reflection into experimental narratives that open up spaces for these notionally old-fashioned strangers. Under the disguised and perhaps indirectly borrowed aegis of Jorge Luis Borges, these writers ask questions about time, history, laughter, invention, and much else. Dark fantasy in Carter, unreliable knowledge in Barnes, trauma in Sebald, memory and forgetting in Ishiguro all give rise to stories that think, and thinking that can’t do without stories.Less

Enthralment and Bondage: Love as a Prison

Monika Fludernik

in Metaphors of Confinement: The Prison in Fact, Fiction, and Fantasy

Chapter 8 introduces the prison amoureuse topos featuring the enslavement of the Petrarchan lover to his innamorata. The chapter opens with a reading of Mary Cholmondeley’s Prisoners (1906) as an ... More

Chapter 8 introduces the prison amoureuse topos featuring the enslavement of the Petrarchan lover to his innamorata. The chapter opens with a reading of Mary Cholmondeley’s Prisoners (1906) as an instance of a juxtaposition of literal and metaphorical imprisonment. The following section introduces the medieval prison amoureuse trope (Boethius, Froissart, Diego de San Pedro, Charles d’Orléans, James I), and its Renaissance repercussions in the work of Shakespeare, Spenser, and Lovelace. This leads on to a consideration of masochism and bondage, with Angela Carter’s short story ‘The Bloody Chamber’ as an illustrative example. John Dryden’s play All for Love with its opposition of love and duty as bondage concludes the chapter.Less

Contemporary Bluebeard

Casie E. Hermansson

in Bluebeard: A Reader's Guide to the English Tradition

Different versions of Charles Perrault’s French fairy tale “Bluebeard” proliferated throughout the latter half of the twentieth century. From Max Frisch’s novel Bluebeard: A Tale (1982) to Charles ... More

Different versions of Charles Perrault’s French fairy tale “Bluebeard” proliferated throughout the latter half of the twentieth century. From Max Frisch’s novel Bluebeard: A Tale (1982) to Charles Ludlam’s avant-garde play Bluebeard (1987) and Donald Barthelme’s story “Bluebeard” (1987), these referential texts are simultaneous with one another and foreground the reader’s own complicity and processes in reading intertextually. This chapter examines contemporary forms of “Bluebeard” in the Anglophone tradition and how they actualize self-reflexivity to explore various crises of artistic representation. These works include Kurt Vonnegut’s novel Bluebeard (1987), Edward Dmytryk’s film Bluebeard (1972), Cindy Sherman’s book Fitcher’s Bird (1992), the Mills and Boon/Harlequin romance Bluebeard’s Bride (1985), and Celia Fremlin’s story “Bluebeard’s Key” (1985). The chapter also analyzes the films The Silence of the Lambs (1991) and The Piano (1993), along with the works of the contemporary women writers Margaret Atwood and Angela Carter.Less

Introduction

James Gracey

in Devil’s Advocates: The Company Of Wolves

This chapter focuses on The Company of Wolves, as a dark fantasy film about the horrors of the adult world and of adult sexuality glimpsed through the dreams of an adolescent girl. It analyses how ... More

This chapter focuses on The Company of Wolves, as a dark fantasy film about the horrors of the adult world and of adult sexuality glimpsed through the dreams of an adolescent girl. It analyses how The Company of Wolves amalgamates aspects of horror, the Female Gothic, fairy tales, werewolf films and coming-of-age parables. It also illustrates how The Company of Wolves is drenched in atmosphere and an eerily sensual malaise that boasts striking imagery immersed in fairy-tale motifs and startling Freudian symbolism. The chapter mentions Neil Jordan as the director of The Company of Wolves, his second film and his first foray into the realms of Gothic horror. It cites several short stories from Angela Carter's The Bloody Chamber from 1979 as the basis for The Company of Wolves.Less

‘A She-Wolf Came…’

James Gracey

in The Company of Wolves

This chapter explains how werewolves have traditionally been a masculinised beast associated with cultural concepts of masculinity. It explores Neil Jordan's The Company of Wolves as an atypical ... More

This chapter explains how werewolves have traditionally been a masculinised beast associated with cultural concepts of masculinity. It explores Neil Jordan's The Company of Wolves as an atypical werewolf film that uses the figure of the lycanthrope to explore notions of adult sexuality from a distinctly feminine vantage point. It also mentions Angela Carter, who described The Company of Wolves as a menstrual film in which the wolves stand for the girl's own sexuality, rather than rough, hairy male sexuality. The chapter discusses female werewolves that have been used as the vehicle to discuss various 'human' anxieties for many centuries. It looks at Rosaleen's encounter and seduction of the huntsman as a significant and influential moment in the history of horror cinema that challenges the traditional representation of the werewolf that is inherently masculine.Less

Prisons of Femininity

Monika Fludernik

in Metaphors of Confinement: The Prison in Fact, Fiction, and Fantasy

Chapter 9 focuses on female imprisonment and on women’s confinement in patriarchy. The chapter starts with a consideration of real-life female imprisonment and its reflection in one literary example ... More

Chapter 9 focuses on female imprisonment and on women’s confinement in patriarchy. The chapter starts with a consideration of real-life female imprisonment and its reflection in one literary example (Alice Walker’s The Color Purple). This is followed by a discussion of the panopticon metaphor in Angela Carter and Sarah Waters, analysing these authors’ feminist and lesbian takes on Foucault. A third section concentrates on domesticity and the body in so far as they are perceived as metaphorically confining, contrasting Susan Glaspell’s Trifles with Nadeem Aslam’s novel Maps for Lost Lovers. A final section returns to Emily Dickinson and Glaspell, focusing on the predicament of the woman writer; it notes how the female artist can escape from the straitjacket of feminine decorum only by ending up in the role of another gynophobic stereotype: that of the hysteric or the madwoman.Less

Female Vampirism

Gina Wisker

Avril Horner and Sue Zlosnik (eds)

in Women and the Gothic: An Edinburgh Companion

This chapter examines how fictional vampires problematise received notions of women’s passivity, ‘natural’ nurturing skills and social conformity, suggesting that female vampires destabilise such ... More

This chapter examines how fictional vampires problematise received notions of women’s passivity, ‘natural’ nurturing skills and social conformity, suggesting that female vampires destabilise such comfortable, culturally inflected investments. Performativity, abjection and carnival lie at the heart of their construction and representation so there is a constant tension between punishment and celebration of their transgressive nature. Ranging across a number of nineteenth-century texts, it is suggested that they can be read as indicating gaps and fissures in social certainties and as nightmares emanating from the zones of patriarchy. In the twentieth century powerful female vampires may be found in the fiction of Angela Carter, who provide templates for later authors. In these later texts and in various lesbian vampire fictions, vampires become liberating, feminist figures: sexually transgressive, they undermine received certainties of identity, family, and hierarchy based on gender, sexuality and ethnicity. But they can also represent the energy of social activism as in Nalo Hopkinson’s ‘Greedy Choke Puppy’. The chapter concludes with an analysis of two recent dramatic works by Ana Lily Amirpour and Moira Buffini, in which vampires are shown as becoming angels of mercy and women become self-sufficient, despite poverty and vulnerability.Less

Reading for the Test, Trying the Heroine: The Curiosity Defense

Hilary M. Schor

in Curious Subjects: Women and the Trials of Realism

This chapter goes back to Paradise Lost and Eve in the garden, drawing on the nature of the “test” in the history of the English courtship novel, from Samuel Richardson and Jane Austen to Charlotte ... More

This chapter goes back to Paradise Lost and Eve in the garden, drawing on the nature of the “test” in the history of the English courtship novel, from Samuel Richardson and Jane Austen to Charlotte Brontë and George Eliot. At the heart of this chapter is a reading of the Marquis de Sade, Angela Carter, and being struck by lightning, the powerful and ironic version of enlightenment available for the heroine. The chapter focuses on the fascinating delay, the space of curiosity, between the proposition and the contract—the trial that is the heart of the realist novel and that makes possible (or not) the eventual marriage. Realism is itself a contract: a contract into which the reader enters, a contract that provides belief. This corresponds to formal philosophical ways of knowing, particularly through probability and problems of “credit,” what has been called the antimony of fictional knowledge.Less

Coda

Ben Masters

in Novel Style: Ethics and Excess in English Fiction since the 1960s

This final chapter considers how far the broader arguments made about style in the previous chapters could be applied to other economies of novelistic prose (e.g. minimalism), before arguing that ... More

This final chapter considers how far the broader arguments made about style in the previous chapters could be applied to other economies of novelistic prose (e.g. minimalism), before arguing that excess enacts its own peculiar and ethically enriching powers of thought and perception that cannot be so fully activated in a plainer style. To evidence this, it offers quick readings of Burgess, Carter, and Amis’s plainest books, showing how the ethical power of their characteristic styles is muted when the excess is tamed. Excess is shown to be both the product and regulator of the intellectual and political divisions that animate their thinking (especially between the conservative and the transformative), and the key to how their texts affect and engage the reader.Less

Ruptures: Metafiction and Postmodernism

in Solar Flares: Science Fiction in the 1970s

Metafiction refers to fiction that is aware of its own fictionality. Coined in 1970 by the critic and novelist William Gass, metafiction took to extremes the tension between realism and the real in ... More

Metafiction refers to fiction that is aware of its own fictionality. Coined in 1970 by the critic and novelist William Gass, metafiction took to extremes the tension between realism and the real in the nineteenth-century novel. Examples of metafiction within the science fiction genre include Philip K. Dick's post-1974 novels such as Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said (1974) and Joanna Russ's The Female Man (1975). The strategies of metafiction and the undecidability between fiction and reality were symptomatic of postmodernism, whose definition also proved problematic. This chapter focuses on postmodern science fiction writers such as Richard Cowper, Christopher Priest, Robert Sheckley, Barry Malzberg, Richard Brautigan, Tom Robbins, Kurt Vonnegut, Philip José Farmer, William S. Burroughs, Thomas Pynchon, Robert Shea, Kingsley Amis, Angela Carter, Emma Tennant, John Sladek and Frederik Pohl. It also examines the television programme Welt am Draht (World on a Wire/World on Wires and cyberpunk.Less