‘Brush Up Your Shakespeare’ or Learning to Dance with the Bard: Angela Carter’s Wise Children

Abstract

It is almost certainly not by chance that Dora Chance, the narrator of Angela Carter’s Wise Children, bears the same name as Freud’s most famous woman patient nor that her twin sister Nora should share her name — whatever the necessities of rhyme and repetition — with the rebellious heroine of Ibsen’s play. All Carter’s novels reveal her ‘addiction’ to intertextuality,¹ to a kind of writing which, through both allusion and quotation, insistently and self-consciously weaves its present out of a densely determined history of words and images. She was also both a socialist and a feminist, historically attuned to the idea of femininity as a ‘social fiction’ which is ‘palmed off on us as the ‘real thing’; her job as novelist, as she saw it, was to draw attention to the fictions of the past through transforming, transposing and parodying their canonical status:

So I feel free to loot and rummage in an official past, specifically a literary past.... This past, for me, has important decorative, ornamental functions; further, it is a vast repository of outmoded lies, where you can check out what lies used to be à la mode and find the old lies on which new lies have been based.²