Abstract
In Angela Carter’s perplexing tale ‘Reflections’, the male narrator is forced to kiss himself in a mirror.3 Since he fully expects the reflected lips to be cold and lifeless, he is astonished when he discovers that they are warm and moist and that the embrace excites his sexual desire. The narrator is drawn through the mirror by the kiss, into the antithetical domain of its other side. Despite the strange, topsyturviness of this realm, where the reversed laws require the narrator to do the opposite to what he intends, it quickly becomes impossible for the narrator to distinguish between the real world and its reflection. Carter’s precise, elaborate descriptions make the hold this mirror world exerts over the narrator entirely convincing.
Not until all babies are born from glass jars will the combat cease.
Camille Paglia, Sexual Personae1
Am I fact? Or am I fiction? Am I what I know I am? Or am I what he thinks I am?
Angela Carter, Nights at the Circus2
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Notes
Camille Paglia, Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (London and New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990), p. 19.
Angela Carter, Nights at the Circus (1984; London: Picador, 1985), p. 290.
Angela Carter, ‘Reflections’, in Fireworks (1974; London: Virago, 1987), pp. 81–101.
Angela Carter, ‘Notes from the Front Line’, in Shaking a Leg: Collected Journalism and Writings (1997; London: Vintage, 1998), pp. 36–43, quotations on p. 38.
Angela Carter, The Sadeian Woman: An Exercise in Cultural History (London: Virago, 1979).
see Joseph Bristow and Trev Lynn Broughton (eds), The Infernal Desires of Angela Carter: Fiction, Femininity, Feminism (London: Longman, 1997), p. 156 (essay on pp. 149–165).
see Sarah Gamble, Angela Carter: Writing from the Front Line (Edinburgh University Press, 1997), p. 127.
see Mary Jacobus, First Things: The Maternal Imaginary in Literature, Art and Psychoanalysis (London: Routledge, 1995), p. 17.
Nicole Ward Jouve, Female Genesis: Creativity, Self and Gender (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1998) see especially her essay on Carter ‘“Mother is a Figure of Speech…”: Angela Carter’, pp. 141–62.
The essay Carter refers to is printed in Emma Goldman, Anarchism and Other Essays (New York: Dover Publications, 1969).
Aidan Day, Angela Carter: The Rational Glass (Manchester University Press, 1998) see p. 151.
Angela Carter, The Bloody Chamber (1979; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1982)
Mary Kaiser, ‘Fairy Tale as Sexual Allegory: Intertextuality in Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber’, in The Review of Contemporary Fiction, vol. 14, no. 3 (Fall, 1994), pp. 30–6.
Lorna Sage, ‘Introduction’, in Lorna Sage (ed.), Flesh and the Mirror: Essays on the Art of Angela Carter (London: Virago, 1994), pp. 1–23, quote on p. 16.
Elaine Jordan, ‘Enthralment: Angela Carter’s Speculative Fictions’, in Linda Anderson (ed.), Plotting Change: Contemporary Women’s Fiction (London: Edward Arnold, 1990), pp. 19–40.
John Haffenden, ‘Interview with Angela Carter’, Novelists in Interview (London: Methuen, 1985), pp. 76–96, quote on p. 93.
Anne Fernihough, ‘“Is She Fact or is She Fiction?” Angela Carter and the Enigma of Woman’, in Textual Practice, vol. 11, no. 1 (1997), pp. 89–107.
Angela Carter, Wise Children (1991; London: Vintage, 1992), Preface).
Michael Hardin, ‘The Other Other: Self-Definition Outside Patriarchal Institutions in Angela Carter’s Wise Children’, The Review of Contemporary Fiction, vol. 14, no. 3 (Fall, 1994), pp. 77–83.
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© 2001 Susan Sellers
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Sellers, S. (2001). New Myths or Old?. In: Myth and Fairy Tale in Contemporary Women’s Fiction. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4039-1920-5_7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4039-1920-5_7
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