Fairy tales, Gothic fiction, a baroque sensibility, feminism, gender bending, and science fiction: from this mélange emerges Angela Carter's fiction. A phantasmagoric opus that wavers between the horrific, the erotic, and the humorous, Carter's work is a series of appropriations and...
[more]Fairy tales, Gothic fiction, a baroque sensibility, feminism, gender bending, and science fiction: from this mélange emerges Angela Carter's fiction. A phantasmagoric opus that wavers between the horrific, the erotic, and the humorous, Carter's work is a series of appropriations and transformations; she stepped inside the world of traditional stories and re-imagined them from a woman's perspective.
Just what kind of "woman's perspective" is a matter of debate. Known -- and sometimes heavily criticized -- for an ambiguous form of feminism, Carter seemed oddly enamoured of the traditions she was scrutinizing. She was notorious for her elusive views on sexuality, and lambasted for embracing a Sadeian image of women. Indeed, Carter's protagonists -- often girls on the brink of becoming women -- typically find themselves in passive positions, subordinated to the perverse and often violent desires of men.
Carter saw this as the gender dynamic underlying the typical fairy tale. She wanted to expose it, and her instrument was perverse exaggeration. As her men become ferociously violent, her women seem more wedded than ever to passivity. In her short story "The Blood Chamber," for example, a young woman finds that her new husband is preparing to murder her. Rather than resisting this fate, she seems to accept it, submitting to her husband's desires in a state of stupefied fascination, as if attracted to the idea of becoming a martyr. Of course, she escapes -- a carriage arrives just in time, as it always does in a fairy tale. But the question remains: has Carter transformed a traditional narrative of masculine violence and feminine submission, or merely reinforced it?
Carter's messages are subtle, critical, and cynical. She doesn't rewrite fairy tales in order to give us a utopian version, where women exist on equal terms with men. She reveals the horror inherent in traditional gender dynamics by inflating the respective roles of men and women to the bursting point. She doesn't show us the way things ought to be, but rather how bad they really are. This is the lesson her female protagonists are always forced to learn. Ultimately, the transformation they undergo involves a hideous revelation: they come to see themselves as products of a narrative tradition. They discover that they've been duped. It is a question of discovering, as Carter says in relation to her own experience, "how that social fiction of my 'femininity' was created, by means outside my control, and palmed off on me as the real thing."
Carter also dealt with sexual politics in her science fiction, most notably in "Heroes and Villains" and "The Passion of New Eve." Exploring post-apocalyptic worlds replete with sex changes, toxic waste, and mad scientists, these novels established her within the circle of Postmodernism -- even though her ideological position remained, as always, interestingly opaque.
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