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Underground > Books, Criticism & Writing >

Angela Carter

No star here laces

14:46 / 12.03.02

Go on then.

I love it by the way, but am bamfoozled.

Enlighten me.

05:42 / 13.03.02

Yeah -not an easy read, as I remember it. Have just spent ages looking for it - yet another book I seem to have lent to someone at some time & forgotten about - grrr.

Anyway, Lyra, I think the novel needs to be situated in the 1970s' consciously feminist context of anti-mythic writing; specifically the exposing, overturning, countering, rewriting etc. of the obviously inimical-to-women Genesis myth of Eve. Carter's interest is in laying bare the social or cultural production of femininity; of femininity as commodity.

Without looking over the novel again, I simply can't remember enough about the transvestite movie star, Tristessa, and his glass house and wax works - or about Evelyn and his capture, rape and emasculation by the castrating deity, Mother, with her two tiers of breasts. But the novel can be read at many levels; and at one level there's certainly burlesque of the Hollywood dream factory - its creation of illusions as tangible commodities.

No star here laces

05:42 / 13.03.02

Well, that stuff is very explicit in the book, I think.

The bit that confuses me is Carter's mixing up of traditional signifiers of masculinity with her "ultimate woman" - the mother figure with her multiple breasts. Why is she a scientist? What is the purpose of the coldly clinical practices and culture of 'the women'?

I'm only halfway through just now (last reading was a while ago) so need to get further to get my thoughts in order...

05:42 / 13.03.02

I also have not read this for an age.

Would make a good barbe book club text...

10:04 / 13.03.02

Sorry to be of no help. Can't recall the intricacies of the allegory of gender rebirth. There was something about parthenogenesis, wasn't there?

I'll have to buy another copy or borrow it from the library.

11:53 / 15.03.02

Well, I didn't like it. I thought it completely reinstalled heterosexuality as a transcendent principle of the universe: that, although notions of the inevitable connection of sex/gender/sexuality were disturbed, all these complications were ultimately reinscribed in the image of Man and Woman shagging. So... anyone, of any sex/gender/sexuality/combination of the above, can fill the places in the structure of heterosexuality, but the structure itself was left intact, if not even further valorized.

I don't know anyone who agrees with me about that, though. And I can't reread the book, because it, along with my early Sandman shades, went mouldy and died when I was living in a basement.

11:54 / 15.03.02

quote:Originally posted by Deva:
Well, I didn't like it. I thought it completely reinstalled heterosexuality as a transcendent principle of the universe: that, although notions of the inevitable connection of sex/gender/sexuality were disturbed, all these complications were ultimately reinscribed in the image of Man and Woman shagging. So... anyone, of any sex/gender/sexuality/combination of the above, can fill the places in the structure of heterosexuality, but the structure itself was left intact, if not even further valorized.

I don't know anyone who agrees with me about that, though. And I can't reread the book, because it, along with my early Sandman trades, went mouldy and died when I was living in a basement.

(Edited because I typed 'shades' for 'trades' in some sort of wishful Freudian slip)

10:33 / 30.09.03

I am going to move to turn this into a general Angela Carter thread unless there are many objections.

I have just finished Nights at the Circus and loved it... until the end, when all the symbolism got a wee bit too clunky and explicit for my liking. I know it is a fable really, and that's why it didn't annoy me that the voices of Sophie Fevvers and Lizzie were pretty much identical to that of the author (this was, perhaps, intentional). But I would have preferred it to have retained its magical character, and the rather laboured exposition of the caged bird metaphor at the end certainly dulled the gloss, for me at any rate.

I enjoyed it though. Didn't read it very critically, but I liked the sensation of being plunged into this rich, fruitcakey imagery.

The Return Of Rothkoid

12:43 / 30.09.03

I'm not particularly theorybitchy, but the Carter that I've read (a collection of short stories - Burning Your Boats, I think, offhand - did seem to me to exhibit some fairly questioning (as opposed to questionable, which would be Amis, really) attitudes to sexuality that blipped my radar as I read. Oddly, I enjoyed; a writer who makes certain points inside the flow of narrative so that there's food for thought there if you dig, and lovely stories if you don't. I do agree that there's an element of being submerged in the stories: I have an overwhelming feeling of threadbare velvet in mind when I read Carter's stuff...

13:24 / 24.11.03

I have just finished The Magic Toyshop as well. Synchronicities abound: I read this book, I visit fantastic exhibition of toymakers' automata and am overjoyed by the ingenuity and beauty (macabre and otherwise) of the iems, I pick up book on the history of automata (see 'Currently Reading' thread).

I loved it, anyway, and thought it perhaps more satisfying in the end than Nights at the Circus - maybe this was because it read as less of an allegorical story and therefore the end didn't seem so clunky. I wish I had encountered Angela Carter when I was younger - I think then I would have had a better opportunity to really appreciate and assimilate these books and make them part of my worldview.

Something about this one reminded me a little of Noel Streatfield, I think. I was a little fed up at the way that both Melanie and Finn know their eternal destiny and there's no indication that this will not be the case, but I suppose you can't have everything, and it would make for a very different ending.

11:53 / 03.12.03

And I have just finished Wise Children (latest in my quest to read everything by Angela Carter that I can lay my grubby mitts on). I sense a number of themes coming to the fore:

Legitimacy/illegitimacy (both in terms of parentage and in terms of activity)
Incest
Fascination with tawdry glamour, theatrical mechanisms etc.
Disputed parentage

She does seem to rely (as Deva said upthread) on a basically heterosexual view of all sexuality, especially female; but the preoccupation with incest, and the celebration of sexual relations between family members of near degree, does seem to me to queer the pitch a little. An interesting set of possibilities opened up by the relation of theatrical personages such as Sally Fevvers to automata and puppets - I'm thinking especially of the episode in The Magic Toyshop in which Melanie is forced to impersonate a puppet Leda. I imagine, from the title, that this sort of thing must be fairly important in The Infernal Desire Machines of Dr Hoffmann (anything to do with Hoffmann's story 'The Sandman', does anyone know?).

Scuse me for stating the obvious, I am relatively new to this author...

20:31 / 05.01.04

Have only read 'Sadeian Woman' -- what's a good next book?

10:16 / 30.01.04

I read The Passion of New Eve and didn't really enjoy it - certainly not as much as the other ones I've read. Perhaps because I resented having all that allegory stuffed down my throat - thought it was simultaneously obvious and obscure, and I think I have some of the same concerns as 'laces - at times it seemed muddled and at other times clunky. I didn't like the writing as much as I did in the other books either - it was so terribly literary and rather hard going.

I suppose it might improne on re-reading, but I have no desire to re-read it...

I can actually see Deva's point about the reification of heterosexual patterning - think this is a totally valid criticism.