The Infernal Desires of Angela Carter: Fiction, Femininity, Feminism Studies in Twentieth-Century Literature Series Editor. Stan Smith, Professor of English, University of Dundee Published Titles: Peter Brooker, New York Fictions Rainer Emig, Modernism in Poetry: Motivation, Structures and Limits Lee Horsley, Fictions of Power in English Literature: 1900—1950 Richard Kirkland, Literature and Culture in Northern Ireland Since 1965: Moments of Danger Joseph Bristow and Trev Lynn Broughton, The Infernal Desires of Angela Carter: Fiction, Femininity, Feminism The Infernal Desires of Angela Carter: Fiction, Femininity, Feminism Edited and introduced by Joseph Bristow and Trev Lynn Broughton First published 1997 by Addison Wesley Longman Limited Published 2014 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon 0X14 4RN 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USA Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business Copyright © 1997, Taylor & Francis. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Notices Knowledge and best practice in this field are constantly changing. As new research and experience broaden our understanding, changes in research methods, professional practices, or medical treatment may become necessary. Practitioners and researchers must always rely on their own experience and knowledge in evaluating and using any information, methods, compounds, or experiments described herein. In using such information or methods they should be mindful of their own safety and the safety of others, including parties for whom they have a professional responsibility. To the fullest extent of the law, neither the Publisher nor the authors, contributors, or editors, assume any liability for any injury and/or damage to persons or property as a matter of products liability, negligence or otherwise, or from any use or operation of any methods, products, instructions, or ideas contained in the material herein. ISBN 13: 978-0-582-29191-1 (pbk) British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record of this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog entry for this title is available from the Library of Congress Set by 35 in 10/12pt Bembo Contents Notes on Contributors vii Preface and Acknowledgements x Publisher's Acknowledgements xii Introduction Joseph Bristow and Trev Lynn Broughton 1 1. Gender as performance in the fiction of Angela Carter and Margaret Atwood Paulina Palmer 24 2. Angela Carter’s fetishism Christina Britzolakis 43 3. ‘The red dawn breaking over Clapham’: Carter and the limits of artifice Clare Hanson 59 4. ‘But elsewhere?’: the future of fantasy in Heroes and Villains Elisabeth Mahoney 73 5. The fragile frames of The Bloody Chamber Lucie Armitt 88 6. The infernal appetites of Angela Carter Sarah Sceats 100 7. Revenge of the living doll: Angela Carter’s horror writing Gina Wisker 116 8. Angela Carter’s The Sadeian Woman: feminism as treason Sally Keenan 132 9. Sexual and textual aggression in The Sadeian Woman and The Passion of New Eve Merja Makinen 149 10. Unexpected geometries: transgressive symbolism and the transsexual subject in Angela Carter’s The Passion of New Eve Heather L. Johnson 166 V The Infernal Desires of Angela Carter 11. Boys keep swinging: Angela Carter and the subject of men Paul Magrs 184 12. Auto/biographical souvenirs in Nights at the Circus Sarah Bannock 198 Afterword Elaine Jordan 216 Index 221 VI Notes on Contributors Lucie Armitt is a Lecturer in English at the University of Wales, Bangor. She is the editor of Where No Man Has Gone Before: Women and Science Fiction (Routledge, 1991) and the author of Theorizing the Fantastic (Edward Arnold, 1996). Current research projects focus upon contemporary women’s fiction, feminist theory, the Gothic and the ghost story. Sarah Bannock is a Fellow of the British Studies Centre at Abo Akademi University, Finland. Joseph Bristow is Professor of English at the University of California, Los Angeles. He was previously Senior Lecturer in English at the University of York, England. His recent books include Effeminate England: Homoerotic Writing after 1885 (Open University Press and Colombia, 1995) and Sexuality (New Critical Idiom, Routledge, 1997). He is the joint editor (with Isobel Armstrong and Cath Sharrock) of Nineteenth-Century Women Poets (Oxford University Press, 1996). He is completing a study of Victorian poetry and sexual desire for Cambridge University Press. Christina Britzolakis is a Lecturer in the Department of English and Com­ parative Literary Studies at the University of Warwick. She has published essays on modernist poetry, fiction and drama, and is the author of Sylvia Plath and the Theatre of Mourning (forthcoming, Clarendon Press). Trev Lynn Broughton is currently Director of the Centre for Women’s Studies at the University of York, England. She is completing a monograph on Victorian literary masculinities for Routledge, and publishes on feminist pedagogy, women’s autobiography, and nineteenth-century prose. Her most recent work has appeared in Victorian Studies and Carlyle Studies Annual She also regularly reviews for the Times Literary Supplement. Vll The Infernal Desires of Angela Carter Clare Hanson is Reader in English at the University of Leicester. She is the author of Katherine Mansfield (with Andrew Gurr), Short Stories and Short Fictions, 1880—1920, The Critical Writings of Katherine Mansfield (ed.), Re­ reading the Short Story (ed.), and Virginia Woolf (Macmillan Women Writers). She has published essays on a range of feminist topics, and is a regular reviewer of feminist criticism. She is currently working on a study of ‘the woman’s novel’ in the twentieth century. Heather L. Johnson has been a tutor at Edinburgh University for three years and is director of the Scottish Universities International Summer School. She is a member of the editorial board of Gothic Studies and publishes on Carter and on aspects of the contemporary Gothic. She is currently planning a book-length study of the surrealist painter Dorothea Tanning. Elaine Jordan is Reader in Literature at the University of Essex, where she directs the MA in Women Writing. Her major interests are in questions of gender and feminism, and in colonial/post-colonial writing in English. She is author of Alfred Tennyson (Cambridge University Press), editor of the New Casebook on Conrad (Macmillan), and has published essays on Austen and Gaskell, as well as on twentieth-century women writers, Carter, Toni Morrison and Christa Wolf. Sally Keenan is Lecturer in English at LSU College of Higher Education, Southampton. Her research interests include contemporary women’s writ­ ing, feminist and post-colonial theory. She has published several essays on the work of Toni Morrison. Paul Magrs has published two novels, Marked for Life and Does it Show?, along with a collection of stories, Playing Out. He was recently awarded a doctorate by the University of Lancaster for his thesis on Angela Carter, fiction and the subject at the fin de siècle’. Elisabeth Mahoney is a Lecturer in English at the University of Aberdeen. She is currently completing a book on the twentieth-century city in film, photography and literature, with particular interest in the representation of sexual difference in the cityscape. Other projects include work on contem­ porary Irish women poets and on Kristeva’s theory of abjection. She has edited an edition of Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey (Everyman, 1994) and Thomas Hardy’s A Pair of Blue Eyes (forthcoming, Everyman). Meija Makinen is a Principal Lecturer in English, Cultural and Commun­ ication Studies at Middlesex University. She primarily teaches courses in viii Notes on contributors women’s writing and women in genre fiction. She is joint author (with Lorraine Gamman) of Female Fetishism: A New Look (Lawrence and Wishart, 1994), and, with the assistance of Kevin Harris, of Joyce Cary: A Descriptive Bibliography (Mansell, 1989). Her recent essays include ‘Embodying the neg­ ated: contemporary images of the female erotic’, in Sarah Sceats and Gail Cunningham (eds), Image and Power: Women in Fiction in the Twentieth Century (Longman, 1996), and ‘Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber and the decol­ onization of female sexuality’ in Feminist Review (1992). Her current re­ search focuses on Carter. Paulina Palmer lectures in English Literature and Women’s Studies at the University of Warwick. Her publications include Contemporary Women's Fiction: Narrative Practice and Feminist Theory (Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1989) and Contemporary Lesbian Fiction: Dreamsf Desire, Difference (Open University Press, 1993). She is currently working on a book for Cassell on lesbian genre fiction, discussing Gothic narratives. Sarah Sceats lectures in English Literature at Kingston University. She took her first and Master’s degrees as a mature student and was recently awarded a doctorate (QMW, University of London) on the literary and cultural significance of food and eating in contemporary fiction by women. She is joint editor (with Gail Cunningham) of Image and Power: Women in Fiction in the Twentieth Century (Longman, 1996). She has written on the work of Angela Carter and Doris Lessing, and has published a book (which she also illustrated) on the restoration of a wooden sailing boat (Batsford, 1983). Gina Wisker is Principal Lecturer in English and Staff Development Adviser at Anglia Polytechnic University in Cambridge, where she mainly teaches contemporary women’s writing. She has edited Insights into Black Women's Writing (Macmillan, 1993) and It's My Party: Reading Twentieth-Century Women’s Writing (Pluto, 1994), and has published essays on Angela Carter in the journals Literature Teaching Politics and Ideas and Production and in Creepers, a collection on horror writing (Pluto, 1994). Gina is currently editing Guns, Roses and Fatal Attractions: Subverting Romantic Fictions, also for Pluto. IX