University of Pretoria etd – Buchel, M N (2003) ‘Bankrupt enchantments’ and ‘fraudulent magic’: demythologising in Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber and Nights at the Circus by Michelle Nelmarie Buchel Submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree Magister Artium in the Faculty of Human Sciences, University of Pretoria October 2003 University of Pretoria etd – Buchel, M N (2003) Note: The terms ‘bankrupt enchantments’ and ‘fraudulent magic’ in the title of this thesis are taken from Angela Carter’s The Sadeian Woman (1979:109). i University of Pretoria etd – Buchel, M N (2003) Acknowledgements I would like to thank my supervisors, Ms van Vuuren and Prof. Wessels, for their help, patience and kindness. ii University of Pretoria etd – Buchel, M N (2003) Contents Acknowledgements ii Contents iii Abstract iv Key terms vi Biographical outline vii Abbreviations ix 1 Introduction 1 2 New wine in old bottles: revisiting the past historic and re-imagining the future indefinite in The Bloody Chamber 29 ‘The Bloody Chamber’ 29 ‘The Courtship of Mr Lyon’ and ‘The Tiger’s Bride’ 46 ‘The Lady of the House of Love’ 67 ‘The Company of Wolves’ 80 3 No longer a bird in a gilded cage: secularising the eternal feminine in Nights at the Circus 96 Part 1: London 96 Part 2: Petersburg 117 Part 3: Siberia 147 4 Conclusion: demythologising and/or remythologising? 180 Bibliography 186 iii University of Pretoria etd – Buchel, M N (2003) Abstract Angela Carter (1940-1992) positions herself as a writer in ‘the demythologising business’ (1983b:38). She defines myth in ‘a sort of conventional sense; also in the sense that Roland Barthes uses it in Mythologies’ (in Katsavos 1994:1). Barthes states that ‘the very principle of myth’ is that ‘it transforms history into nature’ (Barthes 1993:129). This process of naturalisation transforms culturally and historically determined fictions into received truths, which are accepted as natural, even sacred. This thesis explores Carter’s demythologising approach in her collection of fairy tales, The Bloody Chamber, and her novel, Nights at the Circus. The readings of these texts are informed by the ideas that Carter discusses in her feminist manifesto The Sadeian Woman: An Exercise in Cultural History, which she describes as ‘a late-twentieth- century interpretation of some of the problems [de Sade] raises about the culturally determined nature of women and of the relations between men and women that result from it’ (1979:1). In The Bloody Chamber and Nights at the Circus, Carter questions the culturally determined roles that patriarchal ideology has ‘palmed off’ on women as ‘the real thing’ (1983b:38), and she scrutinizes the relations between the sexes that have resulted from them. In The Sadeian Woman, the subject-object dichotomy of gendered identity is explored as a predatory hierarchy. The Bloody Chamber explores the same ideological ground, and ‘the distinctions drawn are not so much between males and females as between “tigers” and “lambs”, carnivores and herbivores, those who are preyed upon and those who do the preying’ (Atwood 1994:118). The most discomfiting point that Carter makes in The Bloody Chamber is that patriarchal ideology has traditionally viewed iv University of Pretoria etd – Buchel, M N (2003) women as herbivores, or ‘meat’, that is, as passive objects of desire and inert objects of exchange. In Nights at the Circus, the subject-object dichotomy is presented in its spectator- spectacle guise. Fevvers, the female protagonist, is a winged aerialiste who articulates an autonomous identity for herself that exists outside of patriarchal prescription. She presents herself as feminine spectacle and, in so doing, becomes simultaneously a spectator, as she ‘turns her own gaze on herself, producing herself as its object’ (Robinson 1991:123). Mary Ann Doane refers to this strategy of self-representation as the masquerade. In ‘flaunting femininity’, Fevvers ‘holds it at a distance’, and in this way womanliness becomes ‘a mask which can be worn or removed’ (Doane 1991:25). Susanne Schmid points out that ‘every act of deconstruction entails a process of reconstructing something else’ (1996:155), and this suggests that Carter, in demythologising, also remythologises. Roland Barthes argues that ‘the best weapon against myth is perhaps to mythify it in its turn, and to produce an artificial myth’ (1993:135). In the characterisation of Fevvers, Carter creates an ‘artificial myth’ that does not present itself as either eternal or immutable. In masquerading as a feminine spectacle, Fevvers temporarily incarnates an archetypal femininity. But this is just a performance, for Fevvers is also an agent of self-representation, and so she is both a real woman and an artificial myth of femininity. v University of Pretoria etd – Buchel, M N (2003) Key terms Angela Carter Demythologising Feminism Gender studies Materialism Myth Subject-object dichotomy Nights at the Circus The Bloody Chamber The Sadeian Woman: An Exercise in Cultural History vi University of Pretoria etd – Buchel, M N (2003) Biographical outline 1940 Born Angela Olive Stalker, 7 May, Eastbourne, Sussex; spends the war in Yorkshire with her maternal grandmother; educated direct grant school in Balham. 1959 Junior reporter, Croydon Advertiser. 1960 Marries Paul Carter. 1962-5 Reads English at the University of Bristol, specializing in the medieval period. 1966 First novel, Shadow Dance, published. 1967 Wins John Llewellyn Rhys prize for second novel, The Magic Toyshop. 1968 Wins Somerset Maugham Award for third novel, Several Perceptions. 1969-72 Visits, then lives in, Japan, working briefly for NHK Broadcasting Company; sending articles back to New Society. 1972 Divorced from Paul Carter. 1976-8 Arts Council for Great Britain Fellow in Sheffield. 1977-9 Settles in South London, with Mark Pearce; member of Virago advisory board; Virago commission The Sadeian Woman (1979). 1980-1 Visiting Professor on the Writing Programme at Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island, USA, substituting for John Hawkes. 1983 Son Alexander Pearce born. 1984 Writer in residence, University of Adelaide, South Australia: Company of Wolves (based on The Bloody Chamber [1979]) released on film, Nights at the Circus published by Chatto & Windus (joint winner of the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for 1985). vii University of Pretoria etd – Buchel, M N (2003) 1984-7 Teaches part-time on the Writing MA at the University of East Anglia in Norwich. 1991 Publishes her last novel, Wise Children. 1992 Dies, 16 February. (Sage 1994a:ix-x) viii University of Pretoria etd – Buchel, M N (2003) Abbreviations BC The Bloody Chamber. 1995. London: Vintage. First published 1979 by Victor Gollancz. NC Nights at the Circus. 1994a. London: Vintage. First published 1984 by Chatto & Windus. SW The Sadeian Woman: An Exercise in Cultural History. 1979. London: Virago. ix University of Pretoria etd – Buchel, M N (2003) Chapter 1 Introduction But we live in very confused, confusing and dangerous times, and fiction, which is a kind of log of these times, changes its nature and expands and sucks in material from all manner of places and from all manner of styles and genres to be able to adequately describe ourselves to ourselves at all kinds of levels. (Carter 1982:36) Angela Carter (1940-1992) wrote fiction that investigates the ‘mind-forg’d manacles’ that govern our lives (Carter 1983b:38). She has been described as a ‘spell-binder’ (Sage 1994a:1), as an ‘avant-garde literary terrorist of feminism’ (Makinen 1992:2) and even as the ‘high-priestess of post-graduate porn’ (from New Socialist in Makinen 1992:3). As disparate as these epithets may seem, they succeed in describing aspects of a writer whose versatile literary feats have never failed to provoke reaction. As a ‘spell-binder’, she creates extravagant landscapes where the marvellous and grotesque become indistinguishable as boundaries are blurred and traditional categories exploded. As a ‘literary terrorist of feminism’, she savagely hacks away at the assumptions, preconceived ideas, old stories and old ‘truths’ that have been accepted unquestioningly as natural, even sacred. And, in the guise of the ‘high-priestess of post-graduate porn’, she reappropriates pornography and uses it to demystify sexuality and critique the existing relations between the sexes. Carter’s fictional landscapes are spectacular. Lorna Sage writes that Carter’s fictions ‘prowl around on the fringes of the proper English novel like dream-monsters – nasty, erotic, brilliant creations that feed off cultural crisis’ (1977:51). Aidan Day says that Carter’s fiction is ‘a bit extreme’ (1998:1) and Marina Warner states that Carter’s imagination was dazzling, and through her daring, vertiginous plots, her precise yet wild imagery, her gallery of wonderful bad-good girls, beasts, 1 University of Pretoria etd – Buchel, M N (2003) rogues and other creatures, she causes readers to hold their breath as a mood of heroic optimism forms against the odds. (1992b:xii) ‘[Nasty], erotic, brilliant’, ‘extreme’, ‘daring, vertiginous’ and ‘wild’ are words which aptly describe the antirealistic style of a writer who believed that there ‘were no limitations to what one could do in fiction’ (Carter 1982:35). Yet, as Aidan Day observes, Carter also insists that ‘her writing, contrary to the way it might sometimes appear, [is] not disengaged from social reality’ (1998:10), a point that she reiterates in an interview with John Haffenden: JH: I know you find it fundamentally important to have an intelligent awareness of society, and yet the highly stylized and decorative apparatus of your novels might appear to be disengaged from the social and historical realities you want to illuminate. AC: Yes, this is a very real risk, really tricky. Obviously the idea that my stories are all dreams or hallucinations out of Jung-land, or the notion that the world would be altogether a better place if we threw away our rationality and went laughing down the street .