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The Erl-King The Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System Isn't It Romantic?: Angela Carter's Bloody Revision of the Romantic Aesthetic in "The Erl- King" Author(s): Harriet Kramer Linkin Source: Contemporary Literature, Vol. 35, No. 2 (Summer, 1994), pp. 305-323 Published by: University of Wisconsin Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1208841 . Accessed: 19/05/2011 08:34 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use. Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at . http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=uwisc. Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed page of such transmission. JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. University of Wisconsin Press and The Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Contemporary Literature. http://www.jstor.org HARRIET KRAMER LINKIN Isn'tIt Romantic?:Angela Carter's Bloody Revisionof the Romantic Aesthetic in "The ErI-King" How sweet I roam'd from field to field, And tasted all the summer's pride, 'Till I the prince of love beheld, Who in the sunny beams did glide! He shew'd me lilies for my hair, And blushing roses for my brow; He led me through his gardens fair, Where all his golden pleasures grow. With sweet May dews my wings were wet, And Phoebus fir'd my vocal rage; He caught me in his silken net, And shut me in his golden cage. He loves to hear me sit and sing, Then, laughing, sports and plays with me; Then stretches out my golden wing, And mocks my loss of liberty. William Blake, "Song" /H*ow does a contemporary writer with her imagination as clearly immersed in the Romantic tradition as An- gela Carter's is deflect the aesthetic that inscribes so many of her nineteenth-century predecessors as ro- manticized subjects? How does she mark a path out of the dark Romantic woods once made consonant with her being, having been transformed, like Daphne, from huntress-nymph to laurel tree as she fled Apollo's rapacious embrace, only to find herself worshiped ContemporaryLiterature XXXV, 2 0010-7484/94/0002-0305 $1.50 ? 1994 by the Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System 30 6 * CON T E MPORARY LITERATURE by druidical poet-sons who crown their work with her leaves? How does she claim a voice that projects beyond the bars of idealized domesticity's golden cage, having been converted from wild bird to proper lady, deified as the house-bound angel who economically husbands her song for the private pleasures of her spouse? As articulated by feminist critics, both high Romantic aesthetic theory and Victorian cultural ideology make the act of writing problematic for nineteenth-century women. They cannot participate in the Bloom- ian oedipal conflict that enables young male poets to replace their fathers by wedding themselves to nature, because the female is nature.1 Nor can they violate the strictures of that proper lady who establishes the boundaries of the woman writer's separate sphere.2 Published even as the feminist project began its critique, Carter's revisionary fairy tales in The Bloody Chamber (1979) venture through these woods and houses again and again, demarcating paths that may or may not lead to a new aesthetic theory more enabling to the woman writer. Among all these venturings, the most pronounced investigation of the Romantic heritage occurs in "The Erl-King," a literalization of William Wordsworth's "we murder to dissect" ("The Tables Turned" 28) that offers literary criticism through fiction by narrating the position of the Romantic subject. Carter's reimagining of the subject's position in Romantic poetics and ideology offers a more complex analysis than the simple iden- tification of blatant oppression; seeking a larger understanding of the many manifestations of desire in all her writings (to the palpa- ble discomfort of quite a few critics and readers), Carter examines not only the ways in which male desire defines and confines the female, but also the ways in which female desire colludes in erect- ing the bars of the golden cage for the Romantic as well as the contemporary writer.3 Balancing desire with aesthetic empower- 1. Both of Margaret Homans's discussions of Romanticism as well as Sandra Gilbert's and Susan Gubar's analysis of nineteenth-century women writers point to the psycho- logical problems the anxiety of influence holds for women. 2. Several feminist critics, including Ellen Moers, Elaine Showalter, Nina Auerbach, and Mary Poovey, have pointed to the doctrine of separate spheres and its implications for British (and American) nineteenth-century women writers. 3. I number myself among those critics and readers made uncomfortable; it is hard not to cringe before some of Carter's more baroque descriptions of the real or fantasied LINKIN * 307 ment is the ultimate feat her characters attempt to perform as they dance across the tightrope of cultural expectations; and the geomet- ric variations that the conflation of desire, aesthetic theory, and cultural ideology produces shape the stories that compose TheBloody Chamber.Most critical discussion of The BloodyChamber focuses on Carter's feminist rewriting of the patriarchal plots and perspec- tives that inscribe gendered roles in traditional tales, particularly noting her technique of recentering consciousness in the minds of increasingly aware female participants and often criticizing the lack of "political correctness" in her rendition of human sexuality and her stance as self-styled "moral pornographer."4 Almost no attention has been paid to the deliberateness with which Carter reshapes the Romantic myth of creation to restore speech to the subordinated or silenced female voice. As much about the act of storytelling as it is the subversive undoing of old stories and sex- ual politics, The BloodyChamber ultimately recodes literary history to sanction the feminist writer who comes to embrace her own desire. In "The Erl-King," Carter tests the outlines of the Romantic ideology to see whether and how its contours might embody a female aesthetic form. The narrative of "The Erl-King" is so conspicuously overlaid with echoes of canonical nineteenth-century lyric poetry that the leaved woods which house the erl-king might furnish an anthology of William Blake, Wordsworth, Samuel Coleridge, John Keats, Percy Shelley,Robert Browning, and ChristinaRossetti. Unlike other stories in The BloodyChamber that stay relatively close to their antecedents in Charles Perrault's fairy tales, "The Erl-King" strays far afield of Perrault as well as the Goethe ballad of fathers and sons the title invokes. Carter's story turns on the protagonist's refusal to enact one of the constituent master plots of nineteenth-century masculin- ist poetry, which relegates women to the silence, containment, ab- excesses of human sexual experience, such as the rape of Desiderio by the nine Moroc- can acrobats of desire in The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman. Despite its parodic and deconstructive elements, the scene still horrifies. 4. For discussion of Carter's feminist revisions of patriarchal plots, see Rose, Lokke, Wilson, and Bryant. Readers who focus on Carter's stylistic technique of recentering consciousness in female protagonists include Lewallen, Duncker, and Sheets. See Duncker, Clark, Lewallen, and Palmer for interrogations of Carter as "pornographer." 308 * CONTEMPORARY LITERATUkE sence, or death awaiting such figures as Wordsworth's Lucy, Shel- ley's high-born maiden, Keats's Belle Dame, or Browning's Por- phyria.5 So often requiring a male interlocutor to transliterate their embodied language-like Keats's fairy child in "La Belle Dame Sans Merci," whose feckless knight translates her "language strange" as "I love thee true" (lines 27, 28) but reports the dire warnings of his spectral male precursors in plain English; or Wordsworth's "dearest Friend" Dorothy, in whose "voice I catch / The language of my former heart, and read / My former pleasures in the shooting lights / Of thy wild eyes" ("Tintern Abbey" lines 116-19)-the women whom the masculinist tradition represents are almost always encap- sulated within the male, as if they can only be Blakean emanations whose separate existence in a public sphere so threatens the integrity of the male Zoa that it precipitates the collapse of Edenic civilization. When the protagonist of "The Erl-King" describes how a walk through the woods leads her directly into the seductive arms of an erl-king, whose practice of caging his singing birds strikes her as ominous, the narrative foregrounds her generic danger: the plots of countless captivity or transformation tales warn that "Erl-King will do you grievous harm" (85), while the Romantic literary archetype invoked through the citation from Blake's "How sweet I roam'd" (88) conditions a belief that the erl-king plans to cage her, too: "I shall become so small you can keep me in one of your osier cages and mock my loss of liberty.
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