From the Bloody Chamber to the Cabinet De Curiosités: Angela

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From the Bloody Chamber to the Cabinet de Curiosités: Angela Carter's Curious Alices Through the Looking Glass of Languages Author(s): Martine Hennard Dutheil de la Rochère Source: Marvels & Tales, Vol. 30, No. 2 (Fall 2016), pp. 284-308 Published by: Wayne State University Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.13110/marvelstales.30.2.0284 Accessed: 07-04-2017 10:28 UTC

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This content downloaded from 188.62.129.27 on Fri, 07 Apr 2017 10:28:14 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms MARTINE HENNARD DUTHEIL DE LA ROCHÈRE

From the Bloody Chamber to the Cabinet de Curiosités Angela Carter’s Curious Alices Through the Looking Glass of Languages

Tant que la lecture est pour nous l’incitatrice dont les clefs magiques nous ouvrent au fond de nous-même les portes des demeures où nous n’aurions pas su pénétrer, son rôle dans notre vie est salutaire. —Marcel Proust, “Sur la lecture,” 208 Here’s what I mean by the miracle of language. When you’re falling into a good book, exactly as you might fall into a dream, a little conduit opens, a passageway between a reader’s heart and a writer’s, a connection that transcends the barriers of continents and generations and even death. And here’s the magic. You’re different. You can never go back to being exactly the same person you were before you disappeared into that book. —Anthony Doerr

Stories take you somewhere beyond what you know. —Marina Warner

From Wunderland to Wonderland: Traveling Words and Creative Encounters Angela Carter, a self-confessed bookish writer who memorably associated intellectual development with the “new readings of old texts” (“Notes from the Front Line,” 37), found food for thought and inspiration for her multifaceted oeuvre in reading widely across genres, periods, and languages. When Carter died from cancer in 1992, Margaret Atwood said in a deeply felt obituary for

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The Observer, “She was the opposite of parochial. Nothing, for her, was outside the pale: she wanted to know about everything and everyone, and every place and every word. She relished life and language hugely, and revelled in the diverse” (61). Traveling both reflected and fostered this insatiable intellectual curiosity. Carter’s exposure to foreign languages in particular was an important source of inspiration that fed into her literary project of boundary crossings and reading against the grain. During her two-year stay in Japan, she likened her experience to Alice’s time in Wonderland, because it revealed the constructed nature of language, cultural norms, and social order, to the point of changing her perception of herself as a woman and reinventing herself as a writer.1 A few years later, translating the fairy tales of Charles Perrault during the hot summer of 1976 was another eye-opening activity that stimulated Carter’s philological curiosity and revealed the potential of the familiar stories for retellings in different styles, genres, and media.2 Angela Carter’s entire oeuvre, I believe, was indeed shaped by a translational and transcreative dynamic that underpins the development of literature worldwide, although this phenomenon is often obscured by national canons, monolingual scholarship, and ideological agen- das.3 Examining Carter’s work from a cross-linguistic, transnational, and trans- cultural perspective therefore questions traditional conceptions of the fairy tale as either universal invariant or reified expression of national culture and instead brings out the complex web of interconnections, mutual borrowings and exchanges, translations, responses, and reinventions out of which it devel- oped.4 In this essay I link Carter’s encounter with foreign languages and cultures to her lifelong engagement with Lewis Carroll’s Alice books and the nonsense tradition, including its legacy in the surrealist movement. Specifically, I focus on the fictional possibilities opened up by the linguistic and literary resonances of the word cabinet, which Carter drew on to celebrate curiosity in The Bloody Chamber and beyond.

Carter’s Curious Alices: From Metaphysics in the Nursery to Japanese Cats and Wolf-Girls Like Carroll, Carter uses wordplay to quicken the intellect and unlock new imaginative doors. Because a foreign language confronts the learner with the challenge of making sense of unfamiliar words or signs, strange grammar, syntax, rhythms, and sounds, it brings an unsettling realization that no two languages are similar and makes cultural difference and worldviews palpable, and this experience is not unlike falling into a rabbit hole or stepping through a looking glass. As such, it provokes wonder about language, its relation to the world, and our perception of it and of ourselves. Marina Warner notes that the

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word wonder is inseparable from the fairy-tale genre and is itself a source of philological wonder.5 The etymology of the word is telling. The Indo-European root wen means “wish” or “desire.” Old English wundor signifies “wonder” and “marvel” but also “horror” and “monster.” In the modern sense, wonder refers to the emotion provoked by something curious, unknown, or surprising and to the intellectual experience, mental pondering, and thought process result- ing from it. It is no surprise that Angela Carter associated wonder with Carroll’s books, which so memorably capture the mixed shock and delight, epistemological dizziness, and imaginative response that comes with new ways of using language. As it turns out, even the word that has come to define Carroll’s fiction in English, wonderland, owes something to a foreign language and literary movement. Robert Douglas-Fairhurst observes that the word was much more unusual than it is now when Carroll decided to rename Alice’s Adventures Under Ground (1864), the title of the manuscript he offered to Alice Liddell: “For German writers such as Friedrich Schiller or Joseph Freiherr von Eichendorff, whose poems ‘In fernem Wunderland’ (‘In a Distant Wonderland’) and ‘Ein Wunderland’ (‘A Wonderland’) were often translated and anthologised in the period, Wunderland referred to a place where anything could happen because it existed only in the imagination” (par. 16). The probable influence of a German word on Carroll’s masterpiece illustrates the way words, texts, and genres travel and are constantly reinvented anew across languages and cultures. Along with loan words, calques, and cross-linguistic puns, intertextual references to Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland are scattered throughout Carter’s fiction, covering a thirty-year span. They can even be said to frame her literary production, from the early poem “Through the Looking Glass” (1963), recently anthologized in Unicorn: The Poetry of Angela Carter (2015), to “Alice in Prague or The Curious Room,” published posthumously in American Ghosts and Old World Wonders (1993).6 Carter’s whimsical and epigrammatic poem “Through the Looking Glass” sets the tone for her later literary engagements with the Alice books and Victo- rian nonsense: “Waking, Alice shook her kitten, demanding: / ‘Which dreamed it?’ and it peed with fright; / And the nursery grew rank with metaphysics” (7). We remember that at the beginning of Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonder- land, Alice talks out loud to reassure herself as she is falling down the rabbit hole. She misses her beloved cat Dinah and worries that her pet may not be fed milk in her absence, before puzzling over the conundrum: “‘But do cats eat bats, I wonder?’ . . . ‘Do cats eat bats? Do cats eat bats?’ and sometimes ‘Do bats eat cats?’” (Carroll, Alice’s Adventures, 11). Alice’s sleepy fantasy of Dinah chas- ing bats in the air stems from the phonic proximity of the monosyllabic pair (bat and cat) and from the disturbing possibility of a mirrorlike world of

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nonsense created through grammatical substitution in the sentence. But it also leads the girl to consider that the arbitrary closeness of signifiers may conceal some hidden truth because, she muses, a bat is “very like a mouse” (11). The notion of a bat as a flying mouse is indeed far less absurd in French than it is in English, because the word for bat is chauve-souris (owl-mouse). This draws attention to Carroll’s probable association of nonsense with learning French as a foreign language. In The Annotated Alice, Martin Gardner reports Selwyn Goodacre’s suspicion of a “subtle English/French joke” in Alice’s address to her foot as “Esquire” in the Pool of Tears episode, and he hints at the importance of French in Victorian children’s schooling in the same episode, when Alice assumes that the Mouse is French and tactlessly addresses the animal as follows: “‘Où est ma chatte?’ quoting the first sentence in her French lesson- book” (Carroll, Annotated Alice, 20n1; 26n9).7 Even the Cheshire Cat’s mysterious and memorable smile is punny—sourit/souris (smiles/mouse). Alice’s familiarity with the French language is taken for granted by the Red Queen, who advises her to “speak in French when you ca’n’t think of the Eng- lish for a thing—turn out your toes as you walk—and remember who you are!” (Carroll, Alice’s Adventures, 144). The fact that Alice has trouble express- ing herself in grammatically correct English shortly after reaching wonderland might also reflect the estranging effects of being exposed to different grammatical rules and syntax in one’s mother tongue: “‘Curiouser and curiouser!’ cried Alice (she was so much surprised, that for a moment she quite forgot how to speak good English)” (16), and this slip of the tongue creates a mixed reaction of delight, anxiety, and self-reflexiveness characteristic of wonder. Aside from paying homage to Carroll’s fairy-tale fantasy by associating wordplay and logic, Carter’s poem references the moment of waking at the end of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, when Alice exclaims, “Oh, I’ve had such a curious dream!” (109), and proceeds to tell it to her sister before running back home, while her older sister muses over the strange tale she has just heard and begins to dream it in her turn, so that “the whole place around her became alive with the strange creatures of her little sister’s dream” (109) in a dizzying mise en abyme of the story and its reception. As the title of her early poem “Through the Looking-Glass” indicates, Angela Carter also had Lewis Carroll’s sequel to Alice’s Adventures in Wonder- land in mind. The second book of Alice’s adventures opens with the “Looking- Glass House” chapter, when Alice is playing with Dinah’s kittens in the drawing room, falls asleep, and dreams that she crosses over from the cozy and familiar space into the depths of its uncanny double. At first, Alice scolds the black kitten for doing mischief and “pull[ing] Snowdrop away by the tail just as I had put down the saucer of milk before her!” (Carroll, Alice’s Adventures, 123). This echoes the first book in a mirrorlike fashion, except for the passing of time

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from spring to winter and the shift from the outdoors to the closed space and domestic setting of the Victorian drawing room. After proposing a game of chess to the black kitten, Alice considers stepping through the looking glass, where, she ponders, “The books are something like our books, only the words go the wrong way” (126). She adds, “‘How would you like to live in Looking- glass House, Kitty? I wonder if they’d give you milk in there? Perhaps Looking- glass milk isn’t good to drink—but oh, Kitty! Now we come to the passage. You can just see a little peep of the passage in Looking-glass House. . .. In another moment Alice was through the glass, and had jumped lightly down into the Looking-glass room” (127). The transition scenes from waking to sleep and dream to reality frame the book: Alice’s new adventures end in Chapter IX, when she shakes the Red Queen “with all her might” (235), and Chapters X (“Shaking”) and XI (“Waking”) mark the transition to reality and the metamorphosis of the Queen back into the black kitten. The final chapter, “Which Dreamed It?” (238), in which Alice ponders whether the Red King in her dream might have dreamed her, teasingly ends on an open question: “Which do you think it was?” (240). Thus Carter’s own “Through the Looking Glass” picks up where the Carrollian tale left off: she revisits the drawing room scene with her customary wicked humor as she links Chuang Tzu’s famous metaphysical conundrum of the butterfly’s dream (popularized by Borges) with bodily function, even suggesting an internal rhyme associating “piss” with “metaphysics,” as though she had picked on peep (a word italicized in the Pen- guin Classics edition of Carroll’s text) and dropped the final p (pee).8 Carter used the motif of the milk-in-the-mirror again a few years later to capture her experience of culture shock in Japan, when she compared herself to a modern-day Alice to convey the radical (self-)estrangement that was to mark a turning point in her life and writing career: “Japan is like going through the looking-glass and finding out what kind of milk it is that looking-glass cats drink; the same, but totally other” (Carter, “My Maugham Award,” 204). She therefore associated Carroll’s self-styled “interminable fairy-tale” with the estranging mirrorlike effects of Japanese language and culture on her sense of self.9 Carter tried (and failed) to learn Japanese, even though some words (e.g., hanabi), art forms, festivals, and customs inspired her; she did odd jobs for a living and had a steamy love affair in Tokyo that were all transmuted into semi- autobiographical pieces published in Fireworks (1974). Mayako Murai has unpacked the meanings of the mirror in “Flesh and the Mirror,” perceptively noting Carter’s use of the looking glass to frame her experience as both subject and object, self and other, dreamer and dreamed.10 Interestingly, in her prepa- ratory notes, Carter also related the mirror effect to the uncanny experience of hearing her own name echoed back in translation. In her notebook for 1969, under “A souvenir of Japan,” she records hearing her own name repeated over

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and over during love-making “with that immensely alien, thick, dark intonation, the voice issuing from a throat in which the chords had, for 23 years, been issuing a barking, clicking, uninflected language in which there are no endearments.”11 For Carter, hearing her name resonating in uncanny fashion captured the immeasurable distance that paradoxically lies at the heart of physical intimacy and the inevitable difference at the heart of identity that is only fully grasped in translation.12 Shortly after her stay in Japan, Carter experienced a different kind of linguistic and cultural difference when she translated Xavière Gauthier’s Surréalisme et Sexualité (1971), which echoes The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman (1972), a speculative, picaresque novel that weaves together Carter’s impressions of Japan, her critical reflections on surrealism from the vantage point of the sexual revolution and May 1968, and her interest in psy- choanalysis and transgressive French literature (notably Sade).13 Echoes of Alice can also be heard in Carter’s self-styled “stories about fairy stories,” as she described them in “Notes from the Front Line” (38), that she wrote in counterpoint with her translation of The Fairy Tales of Charles Perrault (1977).14 Carter’s modern heroines in The Bloody Chamber (1979) are unsurprisingly older, bolder, and a lot more knowing and sexually inquisitive than their prepubescent and well-behaved Victorian predecessor. As Veronica Scha- noes points out, these sexually maturing, strongly embodied, and desiring Alices are deliberately set against Carroll’s childlike, evanescent, ghostlike girls.15 They still fall into rabbit holes, but it is lovemaking that turns them inside out like a skinned rabbit or makes them grow big or small in the arms of their lover (“The Earl King”). The mirrors decorating their bedchamber evoke a brothel rather than a Victorian drawing room (“The Bloody Chamber”), and the talking flowers and animals peopling Carroll’s fairyland become beastly men and manly beasts. The closing tale of The Bloody Chamber, “Wolf-Alice,” is about a wild child raised by wolves who gradually discovers her self in a mirror when she comes of age.16 Unlike Carroll’s prettily dressed, well-groomed, and articulate dream child, Carter’s heroine is a “ragged girl” (Carter, Bloody Chamber, 119) who has no human language and who “crouched, trembled, urinated, defecated” when “the Mother Superior tried to teach her to give thanks for her recovery from the wolves” (120). The nuns abandon her near a castle inhabited by another outcast, a necrophagous Duke whose image casts no reflection in the mirror and who “lives as if upon the other side of things” (121). In this postmodern parody of Carroll’s fairy-tale tropes reconfigured through the Gothic genre, the milk waxes metaphorical in a passage of allitera- tive purple prose: “Spilt, glistering milk of moonlight on the frost-crisped grass” (121). Carter shows how her heroine develops a sense of time through menarche and a growing self-consciousness by watching her reflection in a

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mirror and speculating on what she sees: “Moonlit and white, Wolf-Alice looked at herself in the mirror and wondered whether there she saw the beast who came to bite her in the night” (123). She plays at wearing the ball dresses found in the Duke’s “bloody chamber” (123) and brings him back to humanity when she licks his wounds, and so his image begins to appear in “the rational glass” (126). Here again, Carter reflects on the possibilities contained in exploring the other side of the mirror—and back. The film The Company of Wolves (directed by Neil Jordan and script written by Jordan and Carter, 1984) features another young maiden called Alice, but this time she is not saved but killed by wolves for being a “white goose.” Although Alice is punished for being too close to her Victorian model, her younger sister Rosaleen represents the more audacious and independent teenager closer to Carter’s heart (and Shakespeare’s wise heroine). The film uses multiplying framing devices, sub- plots, and mirroring effects in a dizzying fashion until the grand finale, when the wolves in Rosaleen’s feverish dreams break through the window of the teenager’s bedroom and wake her up in a scream.

Forbidden Rooms in the House of Fiction: Unlocking French Cabinets in “The Bloody Chamber,” or Carter’s Translational Poetics Charles Perrault’s contes and Lewis Carroll’s Alice books are linked in Angela Carter’s fairy-tale-inspired ﬁction by mysterious mirrors and hidden doors that their curious heroines step through to discover strange places that bring new and disturbing but ultimately liberating knowledge. As is well known, Carter’s fascination with the international fairy-tale tradition was a lifelong one, including “Bluebeard” and related folktales. Since childhood, she owned a copy of Joseph Jacobs’s English Fairy Tales (1890), which contains a variation on Bluebeard, “Mr. Fox,” in which she found the phrase “the Bloody Chamber” (capitals included).17 Carter later anthologized “Mr. Fox” in The Virago Book of Fairy Tales (1992), composed on her deathbed like a riddle addressed to the curious reader. The idea of the mysterious chamber, which resonates from Carter’s “The Bloody Chamber” to her last short story, “Alice in Prague or The Curious Room,” is echoed in Charles Perrault “La Barbe bleue,” which Carter translated for The Fairy Tales of Charles Perrault. Carter took delight in the French language, and the word cabinet, which recurs in Charles Perrault’s macabre conte of “La Barbe bleue,” reverberated throughout her oeuvre. In her translation for children, Perrault’s petit cabinet is a mere “little room,” and Carter tries to tone down the horror of the scene as much as possible. In “The Bloody Chamber,” however, she activates histori- cally, socially, and culturally speciﬁc meanings contained in the French word.

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The cabinet can therefore be seen as the matrix (literally and metaphorically) out of which “The Bloody Chamber” grew, the semantic richness and connotations of the word furnishing the material for Carter’s own rewritings.18 Because a cabinet in Perrault’s seventeenth-century French was a room in which priceless paintings were stored, it foreshadows Carter’s linking of the murders to the pictorial tradition of high art. Unlike her friends who visit Blue- beard’s house and marvel at its accumulated riches, the young bride is driven by another, more intellectual form of wonder, namely, a desire to know something, in particular, what lies hidden behind the door of the little cabinet on the ground floor whose key her husband temptingly gives her while forbidding her to visit it.19 The bride tremblingly opens the door of the cabinet and discovers the macabre spectacle of the bodies of the murdered wives hanging from the walls and mirrored in their own blood (Perrault, Contes, 150). The last reference to cabinet in Perrault’s text (a word that curiously occurs eleven times in this short tale) is when Bluebeard jokingly invites his disobedient wife to join the murdered ladies: “Well, madame, now you have opened it, you may step straight inside it and take your place beside the ladies whom you have seen there!” (Perrault, Fairy Tales, 36) (“Vous avez voulu entrer dans le cabinet! Hé bien, Madame, vous y entrerez, et irez prendre votre place auprès des Dames que vous y avez vues”; Perrault, Contes, 152). Fortunately, the bride’s brothers rescue her in the nick of time and kill the murderer, and so she inher- its her husband’s fortune and marries happily—this time, to a husband of her own choosing. When Carter retells the familiar stories for children in The Fairy Tales of Charles Perrault (1977), she translates cabinet as “room.” According to Furetière’s dictionary (1690), however, cabinet is itself a cabinetlike word that contains more than one meaning: it includes the farthest removed room in the apartment of a palace, castle, or mansion; a small room for study; a bathroom; a curiosity cabinet (with antiques and natural or artistic wonders); and an art- fully made piece of furniture with drawers to keep precious objects. In his Dictionnaire de la langue françoise, ancienne et moderne, Richelet also defines cabinet as a small room to store paintings and signals that there are very “ curious” ones in Paris. The cabinet therefore associates privacy, secrecy, art, learning, curios, and curiosity, as well as bodily functions, which must have appealed to Carter’s irreverent humor. We note that in Perrault’s tale the forbidden room is located at the end of the gallery, a geographic proximity that strengthens the link between the paintings that decorate the galleries of the palaces of the wealthy and the bloody bodies of the murdered wives stored away in the private little room. Carter, attentive translator and imaginative reader that she was, could not resist exploring this connection in her own bloody chamber as an occasion to reflect on the killing of women as a favorite

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subject of religious iconography and high art. Carter’s Bluebeard figure, a Sadeian count, is indeed a wealthy art collector who manipulates women into submitting to his cruel fantasies, as he eroticizes their punishment and aestheticizes their murder to the point of exposing their bodies as “exquisite corpses” (Carter, Bloody Chamber, 39) in his own private chamber of horrors. Perrault’s cabinet is therefore a key to Carter’s own bloody chamber. Unsurprisingly, the feminist writer was struck by the condemnation of female curiosity in Perrault’s moral and she wrote “The Bloody Chamber” in part to rehabilitate it. As the title of the entire collection signals, the room in which Bluebeard hides the bodies of his successive wives caught her attention. The rewriting revisits but also reclaims the master’s cabinet, which symbolizes his power and tyranny over women, as a space for female creation in The Bloody Chamber (1979).20 Carter indeed insisted on the “moral function” of curiosity against religious doctrine and patriarchal prohibitions as part of her demythologizing project (Haffenden, 96). Like Bluebeard’s wife in Perrault’s tale, Alice is driven by curiosity, and she also visits strange rooms uninvited. At the beginning of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, after falling down the rabbit hole, Alice finds herself in a “long, low hall” with doors that are “all locked.” She tries them all but cannot open them, “wondering how she was ever to get out again” (Carroll, Alice’s Adventures, 12). She eventually discovers a tiny golden key on a glass table, but it does not fit any of the locks. The key finally opens a small door hidden behind a curtain through which Alice glimpses a lovely garden, but she is far too big to go through, so she drinks from a bottle and “shuts up like a telescope” (14). In the Pig and Pepper episode, Alice again tries to get into a strange house where the Duchess, the Cheshire cat, a howling baby, and an irate cook make a lot of noise. This time, the door is not locked but guarded by the Footman. She politely asks to get in, but the Footman starts asking her questions, and so this time Alice enters unbid- den (52). Her confrontation with the tyrannical and bloodthirsty (if ineffectual) Red Queen later on even reads like a comic parody of Bluebeard’s obsession with beheading his successive wives (“Off with her head!”). Alice’s curiosity is confined to the world of imagination or dream and therefore bears no consequences for the child, except for the intellectual and aesthetic pleasures of wonder. Carter is even more determined to reward her curious heroine.

Carter’s “Alchemy of the Word” and Secret Connecting Rooms: From Renaissance coincidentia oppositorum to Carroll’s Portmanteau and Breton’s Explosive Poetic Squibs Carter’s famous declaration about reading, formulated in “Notes from the Frontline” (1983), hints at the creative potential of literary experiments that

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are not only cross-linguistic and intercultural but also transhistorical: “Reading is just as creative an activity as writing, and most intellectual development depends upon new readings of old texts. I am all for putting new wine in old bottles, especially if the pressure of the new wine makes the old bottles explode” (“Notes from the Front Line,” 37). Carter’s potent image provoca- tively contradicts the biblical caution against putting new wine in old bottles (Matthew 9:17) and aligns itself with the alchemical tradition that sought new knowledge by experimenting with combinations of seemingly incompatible elements. It notably evokes the alchemical principle of coincidentia oppositorum (conjunction of opposites) promoted by Michael Maier (1568–1622), a German physician, writer, and counselor to Rudolf II of Habsburg, and later theorized by Paracelsus’s pupil Gerhard Dorn in his Theatrum Chemicum (1659–1661). The principle of uniting unlikely things also characterizes Carroll’s own brand of literary magic, as in the portmanteau words comically deciphered by Humpty Dumpty in Through the Looking Glass.21 The French word portmanteau, typical of Carroll’s writing technique, in turn inspired the French surrealists’ chance combinatorial logic to produce explosive poetic effects. André Breton famously declared in his First Surrealist Manifesto (1924) that “convulsive beauty will be veiled-erotic, ﬁxed-explosive, magic-circumstantial, or it will not be,” which Carter refers to in her 1978 essay “The Alchemy of the Word” (512). She notes that the experience of wonder is placed at the heart of the surrealist movement as a way of recapturing a childlike ability to dream and marvel: “Surrealism celebrated wonder, the capacity for seeing the world as if for the ﬁrst time which, in its purest state, is the prerogative of children and mad- men, but more than that, it celebrated wonder itself as an essential means of perception. Yet not a naïve wonder. The surrealist did not live in naïve times” (“Alchemy,” 507).22 Although, like Xavière Gauthier, Carter was unhappy with the minor role attributed to women in the movement and objected to the eroticization of passive femmes-enfants, she still found their aesthetics exciting while claiming “her fair share of the imagination” (“Alchemy,” 512): But the old juices can still run . . . when I hear the old, incendiary slogans. . . . Surrealist beauty is convulsive. . . . What do exist are images or objects that are enigmatic, marvellous, erotic—or juxtapositions of objects, or people, or ideas, that arbitrarily extend our notion of the connections it is possible to make. In this way, the beau- tiful is put at the service of liberty. (“Alchemy,” 512) In her notes, Carter quotes Max Ernst’s elaboration of Lautréamont’s image of an umbrella and a sewing machine to “re-create the child-like experience of wonder through unlikely juxtapositions that renew their meaning against

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common sense ideas about them.”23 André Breton drew from the English tradition of nonsense in his cadavres exquis (exquisite corpses), and it is no wonder that he paid homage to Carroll in his Anthologie de l’humour noir (1940). In her turn, Carter used the surrealist technique as a generative principle, in her unexpected crossing of styles, texts, genres, and traditions. She even comically nods to Surrealist humour noir in her last take on the “Little Red Riding Hood” story, “Wolf-Alice,” when instead of being repelled by the peas- ants’ attempts to ward him off the village graveyard, the vampirical Duke rel- ishes garlic-stuffed “cadavre provençale” (Carter, Bloody Chamber, 121). This corpse in the Provençal style relished by the Duke, typically with tomato, garlic, and olive oil, is a variation on the darkly comic detail of the ogress mother- in-law asking the children to be cooked “à la Sauce-Robert” in Perrault’s “La Belle au Bois dormant,” revisited through the mirror of surrealist game playing and cadavre exquis, here taken literally. Throughout The Bloody Chamber Carter thus systematically goes against the biblical caution in her programmatic declaration about the creative process as an active, challenging, and explosive rereading of canonical texts filtered through foreign languages and the meth- ods promoted by the surrealist movement. The Perrault-Carroll-Breton-Carter connection thus testifies to fruitful exchanges across languages, cultures, and literary movements. Carter returned to the mysterious little room many years later in “Alice in Prague or The Curious Room,” which she first read in Basel (home of Paracel- sus, as she noted) at the 1989 annual conference of the Swiss Association of University Teachers of English (SAUTE), before selecting it for publication in the posthumous American Ghosts and Old World Wonders (1992).24 One of the last short stories she ever wrote, “Alice in Prague or The Curious Room” revisits the motif of the room in the looking glass one more time and draws connections between the baroque Italian Renaissance painter Giuseppe Arcimboldo, the English alchemist John Dee, and the contemporary Czech animator Jan Švankmajer through the conjuring magic of writing.

From One Tale to Another: Carter’s Laboratory of Fiction, or the Transcreative Magic of Foreign Words and Visual Media “Alice in Prague or The Curious Room” was written “in praise of Jan Švankmajer, the animator of Prague, and his film of Alice” (Carter, “Curious Room,” 121). A self-styled surrealist filmmaker and artist fascinated by dreams, Švankmajer formulated the principle of his highly personal adaptation of Carroll’s story for the screen in a way that curiously echoes Carter’s own “new wine in old bottles” metaphor. When she was working on her short story, Carter used a print of the synopsis of the film (the 1988 ICA Cinema English

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version) that is followed by an interview with the filmmaker, who declares, “My Alice could not be an adaptation of Carroll’s, it is an interpretation of it fermented by my own childhood, with all its particular obsessions and anxiet- ies.”25 Not only is Alice filtered through Švankmajer’s childhood memories in Prague, but also the visual medium itself transforms the nature and signifi- cance of the story.26 Carter reflects on this transcreative process in the aptly named “Introductory Speculations” to her keynote lecture for the SAUTE conference “On Strangeness” held at the University of Basel on May 26–27, 1989. She notes how human beings use fiction “to work out problems” and explains that the short story she is about to read begins with “Alice said: now you’re going to listen to a story,” in contradistinction to Švankmajer’s Alice, who, at the beginning of the film describes “the formal parameters of what is to follow” (Bridges 215) by telling the audience that they are about to watch a film. It is noteworthy that in the volume of conference proceedings edited by Margaret Bridges, the same story begins, “Alice said: ‘Now you’re reading a story’” (218). In her introduction, Bridges comments on the self-reflexive nature of Carter’s guest lecture and of the story itself as a complex mirrorlike composition: “No wonder that Carter pronounces her Alice to be not just Tenniel’s, or Carroll’s, but also Švankmajer’s, and that the Prague of Rudolph II and of Arcimboldo is refracted through André Breton and Ludwig Wittgenstein,” to the point that the story “could function as a cautionary tale for this volume as a whole” as another collection of “objects of curiosity, or curious inquiry” (Bridges 10). Epistemological curiosity is therefore stimulated by textual, visual, and filmic cross-references as well as by linguistic, generic, and medi- atic transpositions, in turn inviting intellectual speculation and creativity. Carter indicates that the story originated in her essay on Arcimboldo, “Pontus Hulten: The Arcimboldo Effect” (first published in The Guardian in 1987 and reprinted in Shaking a Leg), which reflects on mannerist style as an art of composition that provokes surprise, shock, and intellectual wonder because of the mixture of the marvelous and the bizarre: “Familiarity does not dull the peculiar shock, almost horror, given by the paintings of Giuseppe Arcimboldo, especially those ‘composed heads’ of which the features, with the logic of dream or child, are built up from material objects—flowers, vegetables, birds, beasts, books” (Carter, “Pontus Hulten,” 430). Carter also observes that in the richly illustrated catalog of the Arcimboldo exhibition at the Palazzo Grassi in Venice, Arcimboldo is said to have been “rescued from the historical cul-de-sac of the quaint” by the surrealists (431). Arcimboldo’s portraits, she remarks in her pre- paratory notes, are “not paintings to delight the eye but to tickle the wits; or, like nothing so much as visual filing cabinets.” She muses, “Who could paint the portrait of Arcimboldo? And what would it look like? An enigma to which the key is lost; a rebus in an unknown language.”27

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In addition to these cross-cultural literary and visual references, the title of Carter’s story also reactivates her French connections. “Alice in Prague or The Curious Room” echoes Charles Perrault’s “Cendrillon, ou la petite pantouﬂe de verre,” which Carter translated as “Cinderella, or The Little Glass Slipper” for The Fairy Tales of Charles Perrault and rewrote in “Ashputtle or The Mother’s Ghost,” published in the second part of the collection of composite stories making up American Ghosts and Old World Wonders. In “Alice in Prague or The Curious Room” Alice travels to early modern Prague, the beloved city of the great inquiring and inquisitive minds who, like Carter herself, were impatient with common sense and tirelessly curious about the world, including Švankmajer, Breton, Paracelsus, and Arcimboldo. The “curious room” of the title also references the fairy-tale tradition from Perrault to Carroll, because it activates meanings of the little cabinet that the author had not yet explored, including the cabinet of curiosities associated with Archduke Rudolph’s collection of wonders and curios and the privy that, in a typically bold association of the high and the low, becomes an occasion to med- itate on life and death. Even in her notes for the story, Carter associates Rudolph’s curiosity with transgressive knowledge and the Bluebeard story: “Rudolph kept a proto-museum, a wunderkammer, a collection of strange objects of all kinds, assembled out of pure curiosity—and that’s an image, too, for me, of the unconscious, and its marvellous and disorienting contents, that we keep shut behind a door marked ‘forbidden’ lest it interfer [sic] with our idea of what a norm is.”28 Echoing Perrault’s tale and beckoning the reader to enter the forbidden room, the story published in American Ghosts and Old World Wonders begins as follows: “In the city of Prague, once, it was winter. Outside the curious room, there is a sign on the door which says ‘Forbidden.’ Inside, inside, oh, come and see! The celebrated DR DEE” (Carter, “Alice in Prague,” 121). Carter’s carefully researched tale (itself a cabinetlike scholarly extravaganza) imagines the historical Doctor Dee, “the English expatriate alchemist” (124), conducting experiments “at the hinge of the sixteenth century” (123) in the “curious room” where “The Archduke Rudolph keeps his priceless collection of treasures” (124). Among the objects cluttering this marvelous cabinet de curiosités stands a crystal ball variously compared to “a glass eye, . . . a tear, . . . the shining drop that trembles, sometimes, on the tip of the Doctor’s well-nigh senescent, tend- ing towards the ﬂaccid . . . morning erection, . . . a drop of dew, the sign of the Do-Drop Inn ‘in old England, far away’” (122–23).29 Doctor Dee, helped by his assistant “Ned” Kelley (Edward Kelley in history), uses the crystal ball to try to conjure up an angel to pair with the mermaid he keeps in a jar “or, if dead, in a stoppered bottle” (125). The narrator comments with her characteristic humor tinged with melancholy, “It was an age in love with wonders” (125). The story takes place at a historical juncture where alchemy and chemistry, magic and science, were still indistinguishable. It is set at “the hinge of the

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sixteenth century, where it joins with the seventeenth century” (Carter, “Alice in Prague,” 123), which “is as creaky and judders open as reluctantly as the door of a haunted house” (123). The image of the temporal and spatial door also serves to connect historical and ﬁctional characters as well as different languages, genres, and texts as the prime condition for innovation and literary creation. Dee is trying to conjure up an angel, like his real-life model who used “scryers” to converse with spirits (Figure 1).30 In Carter’s short story, however, the “angel” visiting the alchemist and his assistant through the magic glass is no other than Alice herself: “She was kneeling on the mantelpiece of the sitting room of the place she lived, looking at herself in the mirror. Bored, she breathed on the glass until it clouded over and then with her ﬁnger, she drew

Fig. 1. Claude Lorrain’s mirror in shark skin case, believed at one time to be John Dee’s scrying mirror. Credit Science Museum, London, Wellcome Images.

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a door. The door opened” (132). In her notes on the story, Carter quotes Frida Kahlo, who, as a child, had an imaginary friend that she reached by breathing on a glass window. She drew a door on the glass with her finger, entered this other space, and when she came upon a fairy called Pinzón, went down the imaginary world where her double lived through the O of Pinzón.31 In her turn, Carter associates Kahlo’s rite of passage through the evocative power of the letter with Carroll’s looking-glass scene and explores the imaginative possibilities of traveling in time, space, and language. Coming from the future, Carter’s fictional double Alice-Angel-Angela changes shape several times and presents the baffled Dee and his assistant with riddles, problems, and logical games taken from Carroll’s book A Tangled Tale (1885), a collection of ten humorous mathematical brain teasers (or “knots”) that Alice invites the reader to untangle. In the published version of the short story, however, Carter gives the answers to the reader in endnotes, probably because her own riddles are of a different kind. The cross-linguistic dimension of the story as a source of wonder and literary creativity is perceptible in Carter’s revisiting of the word cabinet. The first meaning of cabinet that is activated in the story is “privy,” which is situated “at the top of the tower” of the alchemist’s workshop: it is “a hole in the floor behind a cupboard door” (Carter, “Alice in Prague,” 126), “situated above another privy, with another hole, above another privy, another hole and so on” (126). The narrator adds that “women loathe this privy. Happily, few venture here, into the magician’s tower, where Archduke Rudolph keeps his collection of wonders, his proto-museum, his ‘Wunderkammer,’ his ‘cabinet de curiosités,’ that curious room of which he speaks” (127).32 The juxta- position of the English phrase “collection of wonders” with their German and French equivalents reflects the author’s delight in foreign words (including Latin and the language of birds allegedly known to Dee). Analogies and portmanteau words are even literalized in the Archduke’s efforts to effect “vegetable marriages,” such as the mandrake and the coco-de-mer to breed “man-de-mer or cocodrake” (130), and his comic-heroic-erotic mating with an Arcimboldo-designed allegory of Summer made of fruits is described with relish. Foreign words thus offer a playful textual clue to the connecting rooms of Carter’s own fictional chamber.

From Švankmajer’s Stop-Motion Cinema to the “Cinemagician” Quay Brothers, or the Visual Magic of the Camera Obscura Carter’s “Alice in Prague or The Curious Room” transposes the idea of the room to other media through her dedication of the piece to the Czech stop-motion

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artist Jan Švankmajer (born and living in Prague), who freely adapted Carroll’s masterpiece in Alice (Neˇco z Alenky, 1988), a fabulous movie adaptation that mixes live action and stop-motion animation (Figure 2).33 Švankmajer, who is known as the alchemist of ﬁlm, revisited the Victorian fairy tale as a strange, uncanny, and disturbing dream complete with vivid, compelling, dreamlike,

Fig. 2. Jan Švankmajer, Alice (Neˇco z Alenky), 1988.

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and surreal imagery akin to Carter’s own (and strongly visual) imaginary. The filmmaker foregrounds the darker side of the familiar story, and he resorts to analogical logic and self-conscious strategies, which Carter also puts to good use in her fiction: “Alchemy,” says Švankmajer, “is about trying to connect things that you cannot connect, that are ‘un-connectable’” (quoted in Ryan- Sautour 67). Likewise, analogies abound in Carter’s story and reveal not only the cross-cultural ramifications of the fairy-tale tradition but also the creative force of fusion, mixing, and re-inventing anew that results from linguistic and cultural translation—from the manifold meanings of cabinet to the glass “drop” analogies and the “jovial pun” on “Drop-Inn,” giving a light and humorous twist to Andrew Marvell’s metaphysical poem “On a Drop of Dew,” which Carter requested Salman Rushdie to read at her funeral. Such creative devices open connecting rooms that link free and curious spirits through the ages, from the European Renaissance alchemists, philosophers, poets, and painters, to Carroll and the surrealists, and on to Švankmajer and Carter herself, who all share a sense of wonder about life and the world and are not afraid to cross boundaries to inquire into their mysteries. In her multilayered celebration of boundary crossing and transcreation, Carter also nods, albeit in a more hidden (perhaps even riddlelike) fashion, at the work of the Quay Brothers, the East London–based artists whose surreal stop-motion film “The Cabinet of Jan Švankmajer, Prague’s Alchemist of Film” (1984), pays homage to the Czech animator. Carter knew Keith Griffiths, the producer for the Quay Brothers, with whom she had “numerous long discus- sions” on alchemy, Prague, and Švankmajer and who even received the first typed manuscript of her short story.34 The prelude of the short film depicts Švankmajer “à la Arcimboldo” as a mechanical illusionist-magician-scientist experimenting with the hidden power of inanimate things and natural wonders (Figure 3). The action takes place in a boxlike room whose walls are made of cabinetlike drawers revealing marvels (geometric shapes, bones, more drawers . . .) and optical toys, including a glass ball, a three-dimensional ana- morphic portrait of Arcimboldo, collapsible telescopelike drawers, a playroom, and a miniature anatomy theater for teaching analogical series (spider, fox fur, fir tree) (Figure 4). The film starts with a section on “loose geographies” relat- ing Paris and Prague, and it continues with the artist’s atelier juxtaposing the sixteenth and twentieth centuries and introducing “an unexpected visitor,” a doll-child who becomes the artist’s apprentice and takes leave of his master after being initiated into the technique of stop-motion film. At the end of his apprenticeship, the doll’s empty head is filled with a glass eye and a book to symbolize the dual nature of his apprenticeship. Mixing various languages, the cabinet de curiosité is referred to as a Wunderkammer and a “metaphysical playroom.” Although Carter does not mention the Quays explicitly, her short story

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Fig. 3. Figure of the artist-alchemist on an Arcimboldo background. Quay Brothers, The Cabinet of Jan Švankmajer, Prague’s Alchemist on Film, 1984. © Quay Brothers.

Fig. 4. The artist-alchemist and his apprentice in the cabinet of curiosities. Quay Brothers, The Cabinet of Jan Švankmajer, Prague’s Alchemist on Film, 1984. © Quay Brothers.

borrows several elements that she replays in the realm of ﬁction as though to dramatize the idea of “the migration of forms” that introduces the short but central section of the ﬁlm.

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Angela Carter’s Curious Room, or the Gift of Wonder The term curious room, which Carter used in relation to fiction and film as well as television in “The Box Does Furnish a Room” (1979), can thus be traced back to Perrault’s cabinet and a constellation of other texts and films that demonstrate the creative power of crossing linguistic, cultural, generic, and media boundaries, let alone transgressive conjoinings taking place in the scientist-artist-alchemist’s workshop, like the Archduke having “intercourse with a fruit salad” (Carter, “Alice in Prague,” 129).35 Their unlikely union does not produce new life but delicious fruit juice. The narrator even encourages the reader to join in and “dip your finger in the puddle and lick it” and exclaims, “Delicious!” (130). The mix of body and fruit juices, we imagine, could macerate into another creative reader’s heady beverage. In her essay on “Lewis Carroll” (1939), Virginia Woolf perceptively noted that the Alice books are not books for children but rather books in which we become children. According to the author of “A Room of One’s Own,” Carroll’s childhood was “lodged whole and entire” inside the man, which made him unfit for the world and at the same time enabled him to recreate this magical room full of funny, strange, creepy, and curious enchantments, and she concluded with a note of melancholic puzzlement: “Is there, then . . . any such thing as completeness?” Shortly before Carter’s death, the BBC did a program on her titled “Angela Carter’s Curious Room” (1992), which explores Carter’s own idea of the room as the space that contains all the secrets of a person’s life before they are born and which they spend their lifetime trying to remember.36 To honor Carter’s memory today probably means rummaging in the house of fiction beyond national, linguistic, and cultural frontiers in search of that little room of childhood that keeps one’s sense of wonder alive and of a strong belief in the intellectual, artistic, and moral function of curiosity. To quote the Quay Brothers in a recent interview, “It’s like when you open a wine bottle, there’s that bouquet that blossoms, suddenly the walls retreat, and the place enlarges and conversa- tion becomes fabulous. And then you close the book, and you go back to work again” (Nolan 16).

Notes

I would like to express my gratitude to Marina Warner for her comments on an earlier draft of this essay and to Didier Coste for his punning and encouraging response. I am thankful to E.D. Distribution for waiving the rights for the two images from the Quay Brothers’ short ﬁlm. Quotations from Angela Carter’s papers are held in the British Library, Copyright © Angela Carter. Reproduced by permission of the Estate, c/o Rogers, Coleridge & White, 20 Powis Mews, London WII IJN.

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1. See Murai. Murai’s paper was given at the International Conference of the British Comparative Literature Association, University of Wolverhampton, in 2005. 2. Writers who have placed translation at the heart of their creative process include famous self-translators Rabindranath Tagore, Vladimir Nabokov, Samuel Beckett, and Nancy Huston, but many more writers have used translation as a source of inspiration to the point of troubling the boundary between the translated text and their own writing. In Translating Women (2011), Luise von Flotow has collected essays on female translator-editors, translator-critics, and translator-poets who have all integrated “other” texts into their work in various ways and used the subjective, critical, and creative dimension of linguistic and cultural transposition to respond to the translated text. 3. In “The Better to Eat You With” (1976), Carter says, “I sweated out the heatwave browsing through Perrault’s Contes du temps passé on the pretext of improving my French” (452). The translation that ensued nourished Carter’s transfictional and transmedial creativity. For an analysis of the interplay of translation and rewriting and Carter’s translational poetics, see Hennard Dutheil de la Rochère, Reading, Translating, Rewriting and “La magie des mots étrangers.” 4. Responding to Donald Haase’s plea to “decolonize” fairy-tale studies in Marvels & Tales (2010), Cristina Bacchilega puts the European fairy-tale tradition in a global frame as she reflects on the politics of wonder. The present essay is a rejoinder to “meet the challenge of a truly comparative fairy tale studies” (Bacchilega, Fairy Tales Transformed, 243) that is alert to linguistic and cultural difference but wary of identity politics. 5. Marina Warner ponders the word wonder in the introduction to her ground- breaking study of the fairy-tale tradition, From the Beast to the Blonde: “The word ‘to wonder’ communicates the receptive state of marvelling as well as the desire to know, to inquire, and as such it defines very well at least two characteristics of the traditional fairy tale: pleasure in the fantastic, curiosity about the real. The dimension of wonder creates a huge theatre of possibility in the stories” (xvi). 6. “Through the Looking Glass” was originally published in Vision (1963): 49–50. 7. This is the first sentence in the first lesson of the popular textbook La Bagatelle: Intended to Introduce Children of Three and Four Years Old to Some Knowledge of the French Language (1804), as Martin Gardner points out in Carroll’s Annotated Alice. Jean-Jacques Lecercle has explored the philosophical implications of wordplay in Philosophy of Nonsense, though not in relation to foreign-language learning. I sus- pect that Carter was alert to the sexual connotations of chatte in French (and Puss in English), which play a central role in her bawdy retelling of “Puss-in-Boots” for The Bloody Chamber. Milk itself is connoted in Spanish, English, and French slang and in the cross-linguistic Italian-German pun on latte. 8. Carter (“Tell me a Story”) associates Carroll’s “dreams on the edge of nightmares” (441) with Borges’s “metaphysical riddles” (442) in her review of Borges’s Introduction to English Literature, which “appears to have been composed . . . at some eternal teatime” (441). 9. In his diary for August 6, 1862, Lewis Carroll describes the famous river trip with Alice Liddell as “an interminable fairy-tale of Alice’s Adventures” (Alice’s Adventures, xiv). Later that year, he writes, “Began writing the fairy-tale for Alice . . . I hope to finish it by Christmas” (xv).

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10. Carter’s Fireworks was inspired by the hanabi festival (hanabi means “fireworks,” literally “fire flowers”), and Carter’s collection is accordingly composed like a bouquet (or florilège) of brief texts, essays, and stories, also reminiscent of ike- bana. Fireworks shows how a Japanese lexicon, but also genres and art forms (from erotica to fantasy), are coupled with French words and literary references, as well as Latin phrases, in Carter’s prose. It is relevant of course that one enigmatic and sexually charged short story, “Reflections,” tells about the misadven- tures of a first-person (male) narrator who explores a looking-glass world (“It looked like the mirror image of a shell, and so it should not have been able to exist outside a mirror”; Carter, Fireworks, 105). He encounters an androgyne and a girl capable of “go[ing] both ways” (114), who rape him and send him crashing through the mirror “in Tiresias’ bed-sitting room” (128). The short story antici- pates Carter’s exploration of androgyny in The Passion of New Eve (1977). 11. Carter Papers, British Library, 88899/1/93-4. 12. Carter’s Japanese lover is exoticized as a child of the wild and a loving brute who is in some ways the male equivalent of Wolf-Alice; unlike her, however, he is perfectly at ease in the ultra-urban environment of Tokyo that Carter experiences as a wilderness. Their relationship is a two-way mirror: each is the other’s eroti- cized Other. In Japan, Carter feels like a freak, a giantess with huge feet and wild hair. Her bewilderment is captured in the reference to Swift’s Glumdalclitch (“I felt as gross as Glumdalclitch”; Fireworks, 9), an object of amusement, curiosity, and desire. 13. The War of Dreams, a.k.a. The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman, got mixed reviews. Victoria Glendinning praised Carter’s “surrealist world,” and another insightful reviewer underlined the “translated” quality of the novel: “This novel reads, in the best sense, as if it had been translated from the Spanish. It is Borgesian but brisker, full of linguistic and logical games but never bogged down in them, borne along on a current of adventure” (Kirkus Reviews, Carter Papers, MS 88899/2/19). 14. On the contrapuntal dynamic in Carter’s fiction, see Hennard Dutheil de la Rochère (Reading, Translating, Rewriting). On the second page of her journal of her Japan years (red leather notebook, Carter Papers, MS 88899/1/93-4), Carter defines the words fugue, contrapuntal, and counterpoint as though to define her own method of composition and poetics. 15. See Schanoes; and Ryan-Sautour. 16. See Cristina Bacchilega’s analysis of “Wolf-Alice” and Carter’s sequence of women- with-wolves tales in Postmodern Fairy Tales (64–69). 17. See Hennard Dutheil de la Rochère (Reading, Translating, Rewriting, 46). Carter’s course notes discuss the tale in “Roots of Narrative” under the subheading “The Wise Virgin” (see Carter Papers, MS 88899/1/82): I’m going to look at a story, or, rather the constellation of stories and ballads that assemble themselves around the story, “Fitcher’s Bird” . . . in the edition of my childhood and try to extract some of what I believe to be the latent meaning out of a story that is already so haunting and so explicitly about itself—a young girl falls in with some kind of sex maniac and triumphantly turns the tables on him. . . . Because in Perrault’s “Bluebeard”—his version has been almost completely purged of supernatural elements—the husband

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is a psychopathic murderer, a type who rarely intrudes into fairy tales. But if the husband is an ogrish wizard, as he is in “Fowler’s Fowl,” then his activi- ties are normalised; comfortingly, he is only behaving in a way which is natural to him. He is not a psychopath. He is acting according to types. . . . Let’s look at “Mr Fox,” the story in Joseph Jacobs’s collection of English Fairy Tales. 18. Carter’s aim in her translation was to caution young girls against marriage, as she explains in “The Better to Eat You With”: “We must cope with the world before we can interpret it. The primitive terror a young girl feels when she sees Bluebeard is soon soothed when he takes her out and shows her a good time, parties, trips to the country and so on. But marriage itself is no party. Better learn that right away” (453). 19. Jean-Pierre Collinet’s note in the Folio Classique edition of Perrault’s Contes indicates that the lord’s apartment was usually situated on the ground floor of the palace and the lady’s on the first floor. Royal apartments typically included a room, anteroom, cabinet, and gallery. 20. Cristina Bacchilega notes that a shift of focus from the bloody key to the forbidden chamber as “the tale’s central motif” implies that “‘Bluebeard’ is no longer primarily about the consequences of failing a test . . . but about a process of initia- tion which requires entering the forbidden chamber” (Postmodern Fairy Tales, 107). She unpacks the manifold meanings and connotations of the “bloody chamber” (141) motif but does not discuss the polysemous word cabinet. 21. According to Roger Lancelyn Green, “Jabberwocky” is a parody of the old German ballad “The Shepherd of the Giant Mountains.” The ballad had been translated into English in blank verse by Carroll’s cousin Menella Bute Smedley in 1846, many years before the appearance of the Alice books (see Carroll, Annotated Alice, 156–61). See also Reichertz (99). 22. In a paper on Wuthering Heights given at a conference on the language of passion at the University of Pisa in 1990, Carter also mentioned Carroll’s Alice as “a favourite book of the surrealists” (“Love in a Cold Climate,” 598). 23. Carter Papers, MS 88899/1/40. 24. See Carter (“Curious Room”). I am grateful to Margaret Bridges for sharing with me her memories of editing Carter’s story (with her idiosyncratic spelling) for her collection On Strangeness. 25. Carter Papers, MS 88899/1/40. 26. Carter is also alert to the sounds of the Czech language. She notes, “Czech con- sists of many words consisting only of consonants: e.g. ‘Strcˇ prst skrz krk’ (Put the finger down the throat)” (Carter Papers, MS 88899/1/40). 27. Carter Papers, MS 88899/1/40. 28. Carter Papers, MS 88899/1/40. 29. In her notes, Carter jots down the following “workpoints” (as she calls them): the “wunderkammer” is the unconscious the crystall ball: an eye; a tear; the shining drop at the tip of his prick; Marvell’s dew drop; The Dewdrop Inn

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She also comments on “the coarse alchemy of the body, in which all that we ingest is transformed: air / food / water / sperm = gas / shit / piss / child; the mouth that takes in, the oriﬁces that expell” (Carter Papers, MS 88899/1/40). It is moving that the image of the drop of dew taken from Marvell’s poem “On a Drop of Dew” that Carter turns into a pun captures her ethics and poetics, which unites the metaphysical and the trivial, the bodily and the playful, as an occasion to ponder the mysteries of life and the world that she would choose to be read at her funeral. 30. Carter mentions Aubrey’s Brief Lives as a source of information on John Dee in Margaret Bridges’s edited volume. Dee’s library and collection of magical objects (including the crystal ball and the scrying disk) could be seen at the Royal College of Physicians Museum in January 2016: www.culture24.org.uk/history-and-heritage/ royal-history/art539858-a-magical-glimpse-into-the-tudor-imagination-lost-library- of-john-dee-to-be-revealed (accessed December 24, 2015). 31. Carter Papers, MS 88899/1/40. 32. See www.habsburger.net/en/chapter/kunst-und-wunderkammer-emperor-rudolf- ii (accessed December 24, 1915). 33. Švankmajer acknowledges his debt to Carroll as “one of the precursors of Surrealism, primarily on account of his perfect understanding of the ‘logic of dreams’” (quoted in Thomas 35). 34. See Spicer et al. (183). Keith Grifﬁths paid homage to Carter in “Anxious Visions.” 35. See Croft. 36. See Evans.

Works Cited

Atwood, Margaret. “Magic Token Through the Dark Forest.” The Observer (February 23, 1992): 61. Bacchilega, Cristina. Fairy Tales Transformed? 21st-Century Adaptations and the Politics of Wonder. Detroit: Wayne State UP, 2013. ———. Postmodern Fairy Tales: Gender and Narrative Strategies. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1997. Bridges, Margaret, ed. On Strangeness. Tübingen: Gunter Narr, 1990. Carroll, Lewis. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass. Ed. Hugh Haughton. London: Penguin Classics (The Centenary Edition), 1998. ———. The Annotated Alice: The Deﬁnitive Edition. Intro. Martin Gardner. London: Penguin, 1970. Carter, Angela. “The Alchemy of the Word.” (1978). Shaking a Leg: Collected Journalism and Writings. By Angela Carter. London: Vintage, 1998. 507–12. ———. “Alice in Prague or The Curious Room.” American Ghosts and Old World Wonders. By Angela Carter. London: Vintage, 1994 [1993]. 121–39. ———. “The Better to Eat You With.” Shaking a Leg: Collected Journalism and Writings. By Angela Carter. London: Vintage, 1998. 451–55. ———. The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories. London: Victor Gollancz, 1979. ———. “The Curious Room.” On Strangeness. Ed. Margaret Bridges. Tübingen: Gunter Narr, 1990. 215–32. ———. Fireworks: Nine Profane Pieces. London: Quartet Books, 1974.

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Reichertz, Ronald. The Making of the Alice Books: Lewis Carroll’s Uses of Earlier Children’s Literature. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s Press, 2000. Ryan-Sautour, Michelle. “The Alchemy of Reading in Angela Carter’s ‘Alice in Prague or The Curious Room.’” Angela Carter: New Critical Readings. Ed. Sonya Andermahr and Lawrence Phillips. London: Continuum Press, 2012. 67–80. Schanoes, Veronica. “Fearless Children and Fabulous Monsters: Angela Carter, Lewis Carroll, and Beastly Girls.” Marvels & Tales 26.1 (2012): 30–44. Spicer, Andrew, Anthony McKenna, and Christopher Meir, eds. Beyond the Bottom Line: The Producer in Film and Television Studies. New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2014. Švankmajer, Jan, dir. Alice (Neˇco z Alenky). Channel Four Films, Condor Films, Hessischer Rundfunk (HR), and Schweizerische Radio- und Fernsehgesellschaft, 1988. Thomas, Karima. “Angela Carter’s Adventures in the Wonderland of Nonsense.” Rewriting/Reprising in Literature: The Paradoxes of Intertextuality. Ed. Claude Maisonnat, Josianne Paccaud-Huguet, and Annie Ramel. Newcastle, UK: Cambridge Scholars, 2009. 35–42. Von Flotow, Luise, ed. Translating Women. Ottawa: U of Ottawa P, 2011. Warner, Marina. From the Beast to the Blonde: On Fairy Tales and Their Tellers. London: Chatto & Windus, 1994. Woolf, Virginia. “Lewis Carroll.” (1939). The Moment and Other Essays. By Virginia Woolf. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1947. gutenberg.net.au/ebooks15/1500221h. html (accessed September 11, 2015).

For Pascal, in our little room.

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