http://www.themodernword.com/scriptorium/carter.html
Angela Carter was, without question, a 20th Century original. No matter what one thinks of her writing, no one can argue that she was ever less than unique. Magic Realism, Surrealism, Fantasy, Science Fiction, Gothic, Feminism, Postmodernism – all of these categories apply, and yet all are one-dimensional in their application to Carter; none of them, with the possible exception of Surrealism, encompass the full spectrum of her accomplishments.
Carter's maiden name was Stalker, perhaps more fitting than the surname of her first husband, which she retained as her own. The daughter of socialists, Carter grew up in South London. All of her immediate female relatives were strong women of striking candor and pragmatism. And yet, paradoxically, Carter fought to overcome teenage anorexia caused by low self-esteem.
Well-off but pro-active, Carter anguished over the closing of mines and the breaking of mining strikes in the 1960s, and over the failures of the socialist revolution in general.(1) While a student at Bristol College, Carter hung out in sidewalk cafes and at smoky backroom poetry readings. In addition to absorbing the bohemian nightlife, Carter studied psychology and anthropology. She also developed a strong liking for Rimbaud and Racine, and for French literature in general.
A devout atheist who first dabbled in poetry and journalism, she metamorphosed into one of the most original writers of the post-World War II period. Her creativity was fed by travels to Japan and Russia that greatly influenced her fiction. When she did finally come to the United States, it was almost as an afterthought, although she captured the essence of the country in The Passion of New Eve (1977).
Lorna Sage makes the excellent observation that Carter seems to have lived her life out of the normal order:
Angela Carter's life – the background of social mobility, the teenage anorexia, the education and self-education, the early marriage and divorce, the role-playing and shape-shifting, the travels, the choice of a man much younger, the baby in her forties – is the story of someone walking a tightrope. It's all happening "on the edge," in no man's land, among the debris of past convictions. By the end, her life fitted her more or less like a glove, but that's because she'd put it together by trial and error, bricolage, all in the (conventionally) wrong order. Her genius and estrangement came out of a thin-skinned extremity of response to the circumstances of her life and to the signs of the times.(2)
Neither did her work ever fit, as Salman Rushdie pointed out, the definition of "moral fiction" as championed by John Gardner: Angela Carter was a thumber of noses, a defiler of sacred cows. She loved nothing so much as cussed – but also blithe – nonconformity. Her books unshackle us, toppling the statues of the pompous, demolishing the temples and commissariats of righteousness. They draw their strength, their vitality, from all that is unrighteous, illegitimate, low.(3)
Angela Carter was, without question, a 20th Century original. No matter what one thinks of her writing, no one can argue that she was ever less than unique. Magic Realism, Surrealism, Fantasy, Science Fiction, Gothic, Feminism, Postmodernism – all of these categories apply, and yet all are one-dimensional in their application to Carter; none of them, with the possible exception of Surrealism, encompass the full spectrum of her accomplishments.
Carter's maiden name was Stalker, perhaps more fitting than the surname of her first husband, which she retained as her own. The daughter of socialists, Carter grew up in South London. All of her immediate female relatives were strong women of striking candor and pragmatism. And yet, paradoxically, Carter fought to overcome teenage anorexia caused by low self-esteem.
Well-off but pro-active, Carter anguished over the closing of mines and the breaking of mining strikes in the 1960s, and over the failures of the socialist revolution in general.(1) While a student at Bristol College, Carter hung out in sidewalk cafes and at smoky backroom poetry readings. In addition to absorbing the bohemian nightlife, Carter studied psychology and anthropology. She also developed a strong liking for Rimbaud and Racine, and for French literature in general.
A devout atheist who first dabbled in poetry and journalism, she metamorphosed into one of the most original writers of the post-World War II period. Her creativity was fed by travels to Japan and Russia that greatly influenced her fiction. When she did finally come to the United States, it was almost as an afterthought, although she captured the essence of the country in The Passion of New Eve (1977).
Lorna Sage makes the excellent observation that Carter seems to have lived her life out of the normal order:
Angela Carter's life – the background of social mobility, the teenage anorexia, the education and self-education, the early marriage and divorce, the role-playing and shape-shifting, the travels, the choice of a man much younger, the baby in her forties – is the story of someone walking a tightrope. It's all happening "on the edge," in no man's land, among the debris of past convictions. By the end, her life fitted her more or less like a glove, but that's because she'd put it together by trial and error, bricolage, all in the (conventionally) wrong order. Her genius and estrangement came out of a thin-skinned extremity of response to the circumstances of her life and to the signs of the times.(2)
Neither did her work ever fit, as Salman Rushdie pointed out, the definition of "moral fiction" as championed by John Gardner: Angela Carter was a thumber of noses, a defiler of sacred cows. She loved nothing so much as cussed – but also blithe – nonconformity. Her books unshackle us, toppling the statues of the pompous, demolishing the temples and commissariats of righteousness. They draw their strength, their vitality, from all that is unrighteous, illegitimate, low.(3)
A literary guerilla and 20th Century Bosch, Carter infused her work with humor and wonderfully profane wisdom. At the heart of her fiction lay a sturdy, non-didactic Feminism. Few writers have as successfully told stories within stories, created dense, baroque prose, and still, in the end, delivered on an emotional level. Carter's untimely death from cancer in 1992 at the age of 51 was a great loss for fiction.
Helen Simpson
“But while she used fantasy to discuss ideas, it is also obvious that it was the landscapes and imagery of fairy tales and legends that fired her imagination - bloodstains and ravens' feathers on snow, moonlight on a dust-grimed mirror, graveyards on Walpurgisnacht. The stories in The Bloody Chamber reverberate with deep and unmistakable imaginative pleasure. There is an astonishing extravivid materiality to this alternative world she invented, down to the last sensuous detail, like the candle which drops hot wax on to the girl's bare shoulders in "The Tiger's Bride". She loved to describe the trappings of luxury, to display rich scenery in rich language. Dialogue came less naturally to her and she avoided it for years, joking that the advantage of including animal protagonists in her work was that she did not have to make them talk.”
“But while she used fantasy to discuss ideas, it is also obvious that it was the landscapes and imagery of fairy tales and legends that fired her imagination - bloodstains and ravens' feathers on snow, moonlight on a dust-grimed mirror, graveyards on Walpurgisnacht. The stories in The Bloody Chamber reverberate with deep and unmistakable imaginative pleasure. There is an astonishing extravivid materiality to this alternative world she invented, down to the last sensuous detail, like the candle which drops hot wax on to the girl's bare shoulders in "The Tiger's Bride". She loved to describe the trappings of luxury, to display rich scenery in rich language. Dialogue came less naturally to her and she avoided it for years, joking that the advantage of including animal protagonists in her work was that she did not have to make them talk.”
Much of
contemporary women’s writing attempts to offer significant tactics for the
reclamation of women’s bodies with the aim of mapping out new territories of
female autonomy. The British
author Angela Carter (1940-1992)
demonstrates in the majority of her writings an intensive concern with how
embodied sites of power are often created or reinforced through various
mythological narratives or frameworks. More specifically, Carter interrogates the extent to which the
privileging or reappropriation of the maternal body as a source of feminine
power poses itself as a problematic terrain in various feminist discourses. In
contrast to the majority of Carter’s earlier texts, which tend to remain focused on contesting
patriarchal myths of femininity, in Heroes and Villains (1969) and The Passion
of New Eve (1977), the author explicitly parodies matriarchal myths in
order to examine how these do not necessarily guarantee a different symbolic
order but often end up reiterating phallocentric representations of women’s
bodies. Although these texts
clearly rely on deconstructive tactics, unravelling the ‘blind spots’ that are
inherently located in any ideological framework, Carter also begins to
suggest possibilities for constructing a specifically feminine discourse of
subjectivity, one that is located ‘elsewhere’ or outside of phallocentric
parameters. [3]
http://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/t/text/text-idx?cc=mfsfront;c=mfs;c=mfsfront;idno=ark5583.0021.104;rgn=main;view=text;xc=1;g=mfsg
Angela Carter’s critique of matriarchal myths is primarily explored through the narrative tactics of feminist dystopia. Generally, the speculative nature of dystopia works by pushing areas of representation to their extreme limit, portraying a ‘bad place’ (as opposed to utopia’s ‘good’ place) through the negative projection of existing social relations as they might play out in the near future (Mahoney: 74). According to Elisabeth Mahoney, feminist dystopia is an extremely discomforting realm, as its depiction of sexual violence and desire tends to implicate women as well as men in perpetuating those binary oppositions that keep gender relations confined to positions of “subject and object...master and victim” (73, 75). Feminist dystopia thus often challenges various feminisms to confront their own fantasies of power as a possibly ‘bad place’ (Mahoney: 75).
http://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/t/text/text-idx?cc=mfsfront;c=mfs;c=mfsfront;idno=ark5583.0021.104;rgn=main;view=text;xc=1;g=mfsg
Angela Carter’s critique of matriarchal myths is primarily explored through the narrative tactics of feminist dystopia. Generally, the speculative nature of dystopia works by pushing areas of representation to their extreme limit, portraying a ‘bad place’ (as opposed to utopia’s ‘good’ place) through the negative projection of existing social relations as they might play out in the near future (Mahoney: 74). According to Elisabeth Mahoney, feminist dystopia is an extremely discomforting realm, as its depiction of sexual violence and desire tends to implicate women as well as men in perpetuating those binary oppositions that keep gender relations confined to positions of “subject and object...master and victim” (73, 75). Feminist dystopia thus often challenges various feminisms to confront their own fantasies of power as a possibly ‘bad place’ (Mahoney: 75).
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