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Angela Carter's Toyshop
Angela Carter's Toyshop
ELIZABETH GARGANO
Gender and
Elizabeth Gargano
Body in The Magic Toyshop
1
In her essay, “The Dangers of Angela Carter” (1992), Elaine Jordan deftly defends
Carter from a range of charges—from decadence to a re-inscription of patriarchal norms—
in part by arguing that Carter writes “speculative fictions” that test different scenarios and
possibilities rather than “[r]omantic works of art in which the whole significance might be
read off from any sample” (37). Carter’s “speculative” and provisional approach to con-
tent is typified by a work like The Bloody Chamber, in which apparently distinct stories ulti-
mately emerge most saliently as variations on one another, highlighting latent and
contradictory possibilities in the fairy tales that serve as their sources.
Address correspondence to Elizabeth Gargano. E-mail: egargano@uncc.edu
57
58 Elizabeth Gargano
human body.2 In The Magic Toyshop, Carter also merges the bound-
aries between body and physical setting. While the cityscapes in The
New Eve emphasize the body as a construction, however, The Magic
Toyshop’s garden settings situate the body as a natural artifact in a
supposedly natural space, suggesting that sexuality and gender are
also “natural” and assigned at birth. Adopting the time-honored
convention of metaphorizing female sexuality as a garden of
earthly delights, Carter appears to embrace a tradition that is
linked with the objectification of an essentialized female body.
“There is a garden in her face,” Thomas Campion famously asserts,
before going on to imagine the moment when, with a cry of
“Cherry ripe,” the garden will be sold, presumably to a male buyer.3
But if the traditional analogy between the garden and the
female body grounds both of them in the realm of “nature,” Carter
interrogates this conventional linkage by juxtaposing garden imag-
ery with the motif of the masquerade, which in this novel denatural-
izes physical experience, representing it as a product of culture. In
the opening lines that identify Melanie’s body as a rich and fertile
landscape, Carter’s densely allusive language evokes a journey, not
only into the physical terrain of the body but also into history, geog-
raphy, art, and textuality. Casting Melanie’s voyage of self-discovery
in the language of John Donne’s “Elegy 22” (“O, my America, my
Newfoundland”), Carter emphasizes that her emerging sense of her
physicality is already mediated by culture and history.4 Unraveling
the boundaries between the realms of nature and artifice, Carter
depicts Melanie “masquerading” flamboyantly in the supposedly nat-
ural garden of her body. Melanie “performs” her discovery of her
sexuality by posturing in front of a mirror, enacting scenes from Lady
Chatterley’s Lover and posing by turns as a Pre-Raphaelite model, a
Toulouse-Lautrec “chorus girl” (1), and a Cranach Venus:
2
See Nicoletta Vallorani, “The Body of the City: Angela Carter’s The Passion of the New
Eve.” Science Fiction Studies 21:64 (November 1994): 365–379.
3
Thomas Campion, “There is a Garden in her Face,” ll.1, 6.
4
See “Elegy 22: To His Mistress Going to Bed,” lines 25–30:
License my roving hands, and let them go
Before, behind, between, above, below.
O, my America, my Newfoundland,
My kingdom, safest when with one man mann’d,
My mine of precious stones, my empery ;
How am I blest in thus discovering thee!
Gender and Body in The Magic Toyshop 61
5
Although Castle’s Masquerade and Civilization concerns itself particularly with eigh-
teenth-century fiction, it identifies motifs that continue to shape contemporary fiction. In
fact, Castle includes the garden as one of three conflicted sites, also comprehending “the
Road, [and] the City” as settings that that facilitate journeys and foster transgressions (Castle
116).
64 Elizabeth Gargano
II
The initial tension between the “garden of the body” and the
“masquerade of gender” heightens when Melanie’s excitement
about her newfound sexuality inspires her to wear her mother’s
wedding dress into her parents’ backyard at night. Melanie’s
6
Terry Castle, Masquerade and Civilization (254), quoted in Craft-Fairchild, Masquerade
and Gender (52).
7
In Joan Rivière’s seminal description of female identity as a masquerade, its enact-
ment is both coerced and joyless, an attempt to avert a species of patriarchal anger that
may always be lurking. See “Womanliness as a Masquerade.” The International Journal of Psy-
choanalysis (IJPA) 10 (1929): 36–44.
8
See Craft-Fairchild’s discussion of the double-edged nature of the female masquer-
ade in Chapter 3, pp. 5–55. For Craft-Fairchild, Castle implicitly acknowledges both the
liberating and constraining potential of the masquerade, but does not address the conflict
explicitly.
66 Elizabeth Gargano
The world, which was only this garden, was as empty as the sky, endless as
eternity. … The loneliness seized her by the throat. … She was lost in this
alien loneliness, and terror crashed into the garden and she was defense-
less against it, drunk as she was on black wine. … The garden turned
against Melanie when she became afraid of it. (17–18)
III
9
The miniaturized but evocative gardens in The Magic Toyshop present a telling con-
trast to Carter’s depiction, in Wise Children, of the gigantic “garden” on the Hollywood set
for the film version of Midsummer Night’s Dream: “there wasn’t the merest whiff of the kind
of magic that comes when the theatre darkens … none of the person-to-person magic you
put together with spit and glue and willpower. This wood, this entire dream, in fact, was
custom-made and hand-built, it left nothing to the imagination” (125).
Gender and Body in The Magic Toyshop 69
There were a number of shops, all brightly lighted now. A fruitshop, with
artificial grass banked greenly in the windows and mounds of glowing
oranges, trapped little winter suns …[and] giant crinkly green roses which
turned out to be savoy cabbages. … A butcher’s shop where a blue-
aproned, grizzle-headed man in a bloodstained straw boater reached
between two swinging carcasses of lamb for sausages from a marble slab. (38)
they must look very striking, like a shot from a new-wave British film,
locked in an embrace beside the broken statue in this dead fun palace,
with the November dusk swirling around them and Finn’s hair so ginger,
hers so black, spun together by the soft little hands of a tiny wind, yellow
and black hairs tangled together. She wished someone was watching
them, to appreciate them, or that she herself was watching them, Finn
kissing this black-haired young girl, from a hundred yards away. Then it
would seem romantic. (106)
IV
While the first two gardens that Melanie encounters are mediated
by images from literature and painting, the third garden
Gender and Body in The Magic Toyshop 73
his private theater, re-enacting the rape of Leda with a giant swan
puppet. While Philip transforms the sylvan landscape of the
theater’s backdrop into a wild beach so that Melanie can stroll on
the shore under the gaze of the puppet-swan, her costume of a
white chiffon tunic—painstakingly sewn by Philip’s oppressed
wife—recalls both her wedding-dress disguise and the white tulle
of the look-alike puppet. The Leda performance not only recre-
ates what Melanie describes as “the wedding dress night, when
she married the shadows and the world ended” (77); it also ges-
tures emphatically at her experience in the public pleasure gar-
den with Finn. Perched on the statue of the fallen queen of the
Waste Land, Finn had impersonated a bird descending upon
Melanie from above: “seized by some eccentric whim in mid air,
[he] raised his black p.v.c. arms and flapped them, cawing like a
crow” (105). Like Melanie, Finn too has a taste for masquerade.
His dramatic gesture transforms his prosaic p.v.c. raincoat into
the black, flapping wings of a crow. When Finn descends upon
her in a parodic embrace, Melanie reacts in fear of the implicit
sexual coupling: “Everything went black in the shocking folds of
his embrace. She was very startled and near to sobbing.” In an
unsettling image, Finn relishes his semi-monstrous disguise, wrap-
ping Melanie in darkness and repeating his strange cry: “‘Caw,
caw,’ echoed his raincoat” (105). Finn quickly retreats from what
he regards as a prank, affirming that he has no intention of
frightening her; nevertheless, his brief bird-like disguise clearly
foreshadows the puppet-swan’s descent from the skies, within the
constructed landscape of Philip’s theater. As Philip’s grotesque
swan descends on shaky strings, it combines comic, grotesque and
frightening aspects in a surreal mixture of clashing attributes:
[Melanie] felt herself not herself, wrenched from her own personality,
watching this whole fantasy from another place; and in this staged fantasy,
anything was possible. Even that the swan, the mocked up swan, might
assume reality and rape this girl in a blizzard of white feathers. The swan
towered over this girl who was Melanie and who was not. (166)
Melanie and Finn may have “thrown off the sexist oppressiveness
of the old” order, establishing a new relationship of “equality”
(31), Paulina Palmer sees the lovers’ escape into the garden as
simply another incarnation of patriarchal relations.10 Sarah
Gamble aptly expresses the tale’s haunting and provocative lack
of resolution: “At the end of change lies … what?” (69).11
Inviting diverse interpretations, the novel eschews both nar-
rative closure and thematic resolution, creating instead a narra-
tive loop, in which the ending leads us back to the beginning of
the tale. As Melanie and Finn face each other in the night-time
garden “caught in a wild surmise” (200), the final line of Carter’s
novel echoes the opening pages, with their compromised trope of
a virgin wilderness that is already a familiar cultural terrain. In
fact, the narrative that began with the language of John Donne
ends with a reference to John Keats. The allusion is to Keats’s son-
net “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer,” where Cortez
and his men see the Pacific Ocean for the first time, then “look at
each other with a wild surmise” (200).12 As Keats’s image brings us
back to the equation set up in the first pages of the novel—in which
Melanie, the explorer of her own body, is compared to Cortez—
we experience a dizzying sense of flux and stasis.13 Everything—
and nothing—has changed. In Carter’s words, “writing” is “only
applied linguistics” after all (“Notes” 28). Gestures at an authen-
tic female “nature” and identity may serve a dramatic function,
as may the deconstruction of such gestures. Such narrative strate-
gies clearly make no claim to resolving feminist debates. Rather,
in the words of Elaine Jordan, Carter’s novels “never” move
“toward conclusion or resolution, only toward the assertion of
certain principles or negations, in the light of which the struggle
10
See Aidam Day’s dicussion of this in Angela Carter: The Rational Glass, pp. 30–32.
11
Gamble and Day disagree about the outcome of the fire. According to Day, “We are
given to understand that Francie and Margaret [Finn’s siblings, who are also incestuous lovers]
escape” (Day 30). In contrast, for Gamble, Francie and Margaret appear to be immolated in
“the fire of patriarchy’s self-inflicted destruction” (Gamble 73). Clearly, Carter’s narrative
courts such conflicting interpretations, by seeding in diverse possibilities. As Gamble notes,
“All endings [for each of the characters] are rendered partial and uncertain” (73).
12
Keats mistakenly referred to Cortez, although it was Balboa who in fact reached the
Pacific.
13
Day adroitly analyzes how Carter’s allusion to Keats’s sonnet helps to evoke “a new
order of being” at the end of the novel (Day 32), but does not note the connection with
the novel’s opening.
Gender and Body in The Magic Toyshop 77
goes on” (37). The intertextual play that links the opening and
conclusion of The Magic Toyshop is metonymic of its ambivalent
explorations of culture and nature in regard to gender. When last
seen, Melanie may be once again a masquerader in the garden,
though what form her next disguise will take—and whether it will
be in fact a disguise or an unveiling—we can hardly hazard a wild
surmise.
Works Cited
Brooke, Patricia. “Lyons and Tigers and Wolves—Oh My! Revisionary Fairy
Tales in the Work of Angela Carter.” Critical Survey 16:1 (2004): 67–88.
Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble; Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York:
Routledge, 1990.
Carter, Angela. The Magic Toyshop. New York: Penguin, 1967.
Carter, Angela. “Notes from the Front Line.” In: On Gender and Writing. Ed.
Micheline Wandor. London: Pandora, 1983. 69–77. Rpt. in Critical Essays on
Angela Carter. Ed. Lindsey Tucker. New York: G. K. Hall, 1998. 24–30.
Carter, Angela. Wise Children. New York: Penguin, 1991.
Castle, Terry. Masquerade and Civilization: The Carnivalesque in Eighteenth-Century
English Culture and Fiction. Stanford: Stanford U P, 1986.
Craft-Fairchild, Catherine. Masquerade and Gender: Disguise and Female Identity
in Eighteenth-Century Fictions by Women. University Park: Pennsylvania U P,
1993.
Day, Aidan. Angela Carter: The Rational Glass. Manchester: Manchester U P, 1998.
Gamble, Sarah. Angela Carter: Writing from the Front Line. Edinburgh: Edinburgh
U P, 1997.
Harries, Elizabeth Wanning. Twice Upon a Time; Women Writers and the History of
the Fairy Tale. Princeton: Princeton U P, 2001.
Jordan, Elaine. “The Dangers of Angela Carter.” In: New Feminist Discourses:
Critical Essays on Theories and Texts. Ed. Isobel Armstrong. New York:
Routledge, 1992, 119–131. Rpt. Critical Essays on Angela Carter. Ed. Lindsey
Tucker. New York: G. K. Hall, 1998. 33–45.
Kaiser, Mary. “Fairy Tale as Sexual Allegory: Intertextuality in Angela Carter’s
The Bloody Chamber.” The Review of Contemporary Fiction 14:3 (Fall 1994): 30–36.
Karpinski, Eva C. “Signifying Passion: Angela Carter’s Heroes and Villains as a
Dystopian Romance.” Utopian Studies l1:2 (Spring 2000): 37.
Katsavos, Anna. “An Interview with Angela Carter.” The Review of Contemporary
Fiction 14:3 (Fall 1994): 11–17.
Lappas, Catherine. “‘Seeing is believing, but touching is the truth’: Female
Spectatorship and Sexuality in The Company of Wolves.” Women’s Studies 25
(1996): 115–135.
Palmer, Paulina. “From ‘Coded Mannequin’ to Bird Woman: Angela Carter’s
Magic Flight.” In: Women Reading Women’s Writing. Ed. Sue Roe. Brighton:
Harvester Press, 1987. 179–205.
78 Elizabeth Gargano