Masaryk University

2. British Novel after WWII

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 (Sage, 236).

Since the 1950s social development in Great Britain was radical and turbulent. The post-war school reform made education available to the broad public. During the 1960s new laws enabled divorce and abortion, housework was easier with new appliances, and last but not least, the availability of contraception and the free climate of the ‘permissive’ society meant a real breaking point and the role of women changed.

In literature, those years see the continuation of a literary discussion about ´the death of the novel´, which has been announced so many times, but it still hasn´t come. As Linden Peach says in her study of Angela Carter, the reason for it must be “ its capacity for growth, adaptation, self- renewal and self transformation ... it adapts itself quickly to a changing world ....New forms, techniques and the ability to accomodate new ideas and conceptions have been found.” (Peach, ix). So as a result, many kinds of literary genres arise. To name just a few, we must mention: The angry young men´s movement, the campus novel, political drama, women writers, postmodernists and many others and what they have in common is the reflection of changes within society.

One of the major topics of the 1980s was the criticism of Thatcherism, consumer society and the violance of our age present everywhere. London as a hybrid metropolis, is described as a protagonist more than a background. Franková in Britské spisovatelky gives an overview of other topics, which might include: conflicts of good and evil, religiosity and ethics of the world without God; general social attitudes and changes within the society incl. feminist, gay or postcolonial studies; ecological worries – a relationship of a modern man to life on earth; sexual explicitness – a direct description of births, abortions; authors from elsewhere bringing a different point of view of multicultural society and also an insight into the colonial past of their mother countries (10-11).

The authors are open to new ideas which come from abroad. The first mentions of the origins of the postmodern age (including all areas of culture) occured in the United States by the 1960s. In difference to the United States, where the movement finished in 1980, in Great Britain it only started in the 1980s and it still hasn’t finished yet. According to Kathleen Wheeler’s essay “Post-structuralist Theory and Fiction”,

the postmodernists were much influenced by early twentieth century psychological writings, by modernism, and by the development of the ‘new literatures in Englishes’. It has done much to expose and encourage the dismantling of authoritaritarian, patriarchal structures in literature and in life. Through its analysis of dualism and phallocentrism in language it has influenced fiction writers and poets, and encouraged astute articulation of feminist theory, theory about post-colonial literatures, and gender and gay theory. Its political implications have been greater than the more overtly politicised formulations such as Marxist literary theory and the new historicism, contrary to much opinion. For post-structuralism chalenged the hidden ideologies – those ’natural attitudes’ which are the basis of restrictive ideologies.

One of the greatest influences in literature was when a decade later, in the 1970s the second phase of feminism ² took off. The feminist literary criticism at the end of 1960s caused things to happen more than anything else. When Germaine Greer wrote about “feminine normality” she argued that for so long female sexuality has been denied and misrepresented as passivity. She explained, “The vagina is obliterated from the imagery of feminity in the same way that the signs of independence and vigour in the rest of her body are suppressed. The characteristics that are praised and rewarded are those of the castrate—timidity, plumpness, languor, delicacy and preciosity” (Greer, 25). Wallace in her critical essay The Female Eunuch comments that physically and psychologically the supression and deflection of women’s energy had rendered them eunuchs in modern society. It was time to revolt against the hopelessly patriarchal society.

Even if we don’t notice whether the woman author is a feminist or not, the change in the way, women write about women, is striking. The attention is paid to the intimacy of a woman’s body from the point of view of its biological function from naturalistic description of period, births, abortions and signs of menopause and even their mythologization. The problem of this construct of feminity is that the expectations and conventions limit women and show their perceptions in a new light. This paradigm is often illustrated in novels about single and lonely women and their situation is not enviable. The role of a mother is celebrated and questioned at the same time. The conflicts between motherhood and possibilities of fullfilment of a modern woman are shown in everyday details under the name ‘the aga saga’ ( aga stands for a make of a cooker) in literature.

There is a strong link between British post-war society and the occurring changes in literature. As Franková wrote in the introduction of her book Britské spisovatelky na konci tisíciletí, the English novel came to a crossroads and the pessimistically expected death of the novel as a literary genre didn´t happen. Instead the changes within society helped towards shifting the shape of the novel.

During the 1970s and 80s theorists developed a critique of so-called master (or meta- narratives). Master narratives encompass human nature, history, knowledge and law. The questions asked are far from superficial and perhaps not for the faint-hearted. Initially, at least, they focused on such dualist opposites as universalism and relativism; knowledge and the nature of being; subject and object; mind and body; individual and society; western and non-western; sciencific and 'humanist' values.

The famous British insularity and Englishness had to step aside to let in new influences rising from a multicultural society. A new debate about the role of art in society meant considering ideas which have been called postmodern since the beginning of the 1980s. The majority of authors decided to ´play it safe´ and chose oscilation between traditional conception and more daring experimental forms. According to Franková, it is hard to tell whether it makes point at all to differ between these two forms anymore because the term ´postmodern´ is so vague itself that it is difficult to base anything on it. The original meaning of postmodern was to include everything which had been excluded or marginalized but the postmodern authors altered this definition a bit and were in opposition to the traditional centre. But in the end, the idea of inclusivity seems to win - the proof of which is sophisticated use of the whole scale of experimental devices, well known under the name postmodern, although they don´t exclude the use of realistic features.

Old myths and fairytale motifs have always been a source of inspiration in literature, but when Angela Carter retold the stories with a feminist undertone to it, they become a controversial postmodern play. In combination with realism the myths and fairytales change into a source of fantasy and fabulous elements from which we obtain a British version of magic realism. Other representatives of this discourse apart from Angela Carter might be Salman Rushdie or Emma Tennant. But it is not so easy to identify Carter as a magic realism writer. As Jordan (1992) points out, ´there are no naturalistically credible imitations of experience in Carter´s work and no role models either, not in any simple sense´ (121). In an interview with Haffenden Novelists in Interview Carter herself has explained that the kinds of social forces that produced Gabriel Marcia Marquez, who is most often associated with this mode of writing, were very different from those that produced hers (81).

3. Common Experimental Devices

It is very difficult to define what the word ‘postmodern’ really means. Franková argues that at its centre is the idea of inclusivity, to include everything that was marginalized before (8). Some of the authors wanted to exclude the core of it, the original cannon of literature, in a novel it stood for the criticism of traditional realism. Jackson in his essay David (John) Lodge explains how the concept of „The Novelist at the Crossroad“ came into existence. Robert Scholes wrote a study The Fabulators (1967) , conveying the meaning that cinema has superseded the mimetic possibilities of literature David and as an answer to it David Lodge wrote in 1969 an essay “The Novelist at the Crossroads”, where he disagreed with it and affirmed his “faith in the future of realistic fiction.”

The proof of the idea of inclusivity winning is a whole scale of experimental features, known under the name postmodern, being in a juxtaposition with the literary tools of realism.

As for authority, it was until recently quite a clear concept but Rolland Barthes‘ landmark essay The Death of Author rejected it or at least undermined it, although some authors fight and get acknowledged. Keep, McLaughlin and Parmar believe Barthes demonstrates that author is simply not a ‘person’ but a socially and historically constituted subject. In other words, it is writing that makes an author and not vice versa. Barthes is quoted: „[T]he writer can only imitate a gesture that is always anterior, never original. His only power is to mix writing[…] in such a way as never to rest on any one of them“ (146). Thus the author cannot claim any absolute authority over his or her text because, in some ways, he or she did not write it.

Next, Franková gives an account of a whole range of effective tools which are working together to create an original piece of writing. Pastiche can be explained as a kind of intertextuality, when we find references to other novels within the text. Discontinuity, arbitrariness and fragmentation causing linearity to be chopped up completely and goes in a counter direction. Places and time can be seen in a caleidoscopic pattern where everything is happening at the same time. Narrating is provided throug retrospection or chaotic associatons are brought by a method of stream of consciousness. Unstable identity asks multiple questions - psychological, sexual or national. The so called unreliable author switches from first persona singular to third persona singular (8-9).

Fantastic elements of literature are used and distinctions between high and low literature are erased. Humour and enjoyment are provided by the grotesque and Bakhtin’s carnivalesque (wild, subversive entertainment, laughter, subversion of authority). Playfulness covers many features - playing with the language in post-structuralist writing or playing with structures can develop new genres. Pastiche is a special literary form that allows us to either mingle or merge literary history.

Magical-realist writers use many devices, or 'special effects' to accommodate a particular discourse strategy. Although many of these tend to recur in the writings of authors with very different backgrounds, it is possible to isolate the ones that most magical-realist texts tend to have in common. In spite of this, many of these are also found in novels, which could fall under other genres as well. Fantastic elements may be intuitively "logical" but are rarely explained. Characters accept rather than question the logic of the magical element. Sensory details are richly exhibited. Symbolism and imagery are used extensively. Emotions and human sexuality as a social construct are often developed upon in great detail. Time is distorted so that it is cyclical or so that it appears absent. Another technique is to collapse time in order to create a setting in which the present repeats or resembles the past. Cause and effect are inverted, for instance a character may suffer before a tragedy occurs. Often, a myth, legend or folklore are incorporated. Events are presented from multiple perspectives, such as those of belief and disbelief or the colonizers and the colonized. Past and present, astral and physical planes, or characters are mirrored. The reader is kept uncertain and has to discern whether to believe in the magical or the realist interpretation of the events in the story, and to what extent.

4. Nights at the Circus

According to Franková Carter was the center of attention since the beginning of 1980s for many reasons. Literary critics took notice of her and her name could not be left out from any postmodern literature or feminist studies course. Both praised for her inventive attitude and criticised for pornographic, sado-masochist sex (47 ). Merja Makinen (1992) sees a great difference between the early years of Angela Carter and the last two novels, Nights at the Circus and Wise Children:

This is not to argue that the latter novels are not also feminist, but their strategy is different. The violence in the events depicted in the ealier novels (the rapes, the physical and mental abuse of women) and the aggression implicit in the representations, are no longer foregrounded. While similar events may occur in these last two texts, the focus is on mocking and exploding the constrictive cultural stereotypes and in celebrating the sheer ability of the female protagonists to survive, unscathed by the sexiest ideologies (p.3).

Fourteen years after Angela Carter´s death, Marina Warner wrote a theater review to a play Nights at Circus written on the basis of Carter’s book Nights at Circus (1984). She mentions a pamphlet war that broke out in Venice in the 18th century between two comedians about the nature and purpose of theater. The winner attracting bigger crowds was Carlo Gozzi, champion of the ancient commedia dell´arte troupes in the city, who beat Carlo Goldoni, a modern realist of the Age of Reason, who derided the artifice – the mummery - of Harlequin and Pantaloon stagecraft. Gozzi’ s message that true theatre’s roots lie in popular bawdy and sentiment, as well as in techniques such as masking, slapstick, pratfalls and so on, seems to have survived until present, especially in the work of Angela Carter, who considered theater a place where nothing was real – and yet where everything was more real, somehow, in direct consequence.

Marina Warner in her review Flights of Fancy describes Carter’ s writings in this way:

[they] have been called magical realist, but the term is a misnomer in her case, because she is a sceptic, a satirist and a supremely 18^th century spirit in her rational comedy. Yet magical realism also borrowed from Latin America marvellous fictions in which a Catholic cosmos of supernatural prodigies largely provides the fantasy. In Carter’s case, the fantasy is supplied by magic far closer to hand – the illusion conjured by performance – with its native roots in street balladry, mumming, freak shows and circus acts. And her imagination returns to traditional arts of illusion and legerdemain: juggling and rope – dancing, the high wire and flying trapeze, to the ambiguites of clowning and monster shows, of cross-gender play-acting and whiteface and panstick, costume and disguise.

According to Franková Carter´s style of writing didn´t change that much from the other novels she wrote before, but it took her eight novels to be described as a magic realism writer. Indeed, her work contains all the important characteristics of magic realism: extravagant fabulations in realistic frame, fantastic moments in the stories or other supernatural encounters, a mixture of fairytale, folklore and mythical features creates the real essence of „Carterland“. She refuses the idea of being influenced by other representatives of magic realism, e.g. Günter Grass or Latin-American novelists. She also explains, how her work differs from Gabriel García Márquez and Salman Rushdie. She believes her work is based on a completely different social background and is formed by different social forces. Márquez draws on a Columbia landscape and folklore, which offers him a rich source of fantastic material. That is why the source of her invention is from British and European literary heritage, which she uses as a kind of  folklore - as a folklore of intelligentsia/intelligence. At the same time she hopes, the critics or reader will be able to recognize in her phantasies or ´dream reality´ the critics of real social constructs and attitudes ( Haffenden, 77 ).

The novel opens with a theatre dressing room, where Fevvers narrates to an American journalist Walser her incredible story. Right from the start the reader is attracted and absorbed through the narrative as if watching a stand-up comedian:

"Lor' love you, sir!" Fevvers sang out in a voice that clanged like dustbin lids. "As to my place of birth, why, I first saw the light of day right here in smoky old London, didn't I! Not billed the 'Cockney Venus', for nothing, sir, though they could just as well 'ave called me 'Helen of the High Wire', due to the unusual circumstances in which I come ashore - for I never docked via what you might call the normal channels, sir, oh, dear me, no; but, just like Helen of Troy, was hatched (7).

This peculiar combination of Cockney English and classical erudition suggests her status as half human and half mythical .

A baby found at the door of a brothel is looked after by the affectionate whores gradually she grows into a Cupid, a picture of Victory, imprisoned Sadean woman and nearly a victim of black magic. Walser can not resist the attraction, fascinated by the life history of this winged Venus, he takes a job in a cirkus as a clown and along with trying to reveal Fevver´s secret, travels with the circus to the far Siberia. The question whether Fevvers is a real winged giant or just a cunning cheat is not so important. It´s ´fin de siecle´ and the reader is caught up in this picaresque journey. The sad ending of the circus and Fevvers´ fame culminates with Fevvers´ strange victory over Walser, when she says: “'To think I really fooled you!' she marveled. 'It just goes to show there's nothing like confidence.'” ( 295). Yet when Carter was asked by John Haffenden what Fevvers means by this, she replied, It's actually a statement about the nature of fiction, about the nature of her narrative" (90). Finney in his essay Tall Tales and Brief Lives: Angela Carter's Nights at the Circus says:

The more closely you look at this novel, the more you realize just how literal Carter was being in that reply. More than any other of her works of fiction, Nights at the Circus takes as its subject the hypnotic power of narrative, the ways in which we construct ourselves and our world by narrative means, the materiality of fiction and the fictionality of the material world, and the contract between writer and reader that, according to Carter, invites the reader at the end of this book "to take one further step into the fictionality of the narrative, instead of coming out of it and looking at it as though it were an artefact" (Haffenden, 91). It is not just Fevvers who triumphs at having fooled Walser. It is Carter gloating over having fooled the reader into following her own narrative to this end point - and beyond.

In difference to the bluriness of time and place of previous novels, Nights have a realistic setting. Still, London and Petersburg won´t beat the dream reality of the circus environment of carnival ‘Carterland’, where in the second part, the novel degenerates to the Carterian wasteland in the middle of Siberia.

But more than time-space the magic is represented by the winged aerialist Fevvers or Cockney Venus. As Carter explained, Fevvers "is, fundamentally, the archetypal busty blonde: prototypes include Mae West, Diana Dors..." (Kemp,7). A heroine as original as Fevvers was. She has different names: L´Ange Anglaise, Woman, a bird, a star, a Cockney sparrow, Angel Azrael, a perfect example of bestiary of strange freaks, one of the greatest charlatans in the world, a cheat or a supernatural phenomenon, a mythical woman, Lautrec´s and other impressionists idol, an aspirant for a marriage with Alfred Jarry, a bird in a golden cage, irresistible vamp who is always direct to everyone, a gourmet with a giant´s appetite, who doesn´t hesitate to burp after having eaten a triple portion of caviar, a philosophing aerialist eager for everything that glitters, loving life in its every form. Fevvers is all that. Her trademark is a question: ´Reality or fiction?´

The main character of the novel is Fevvers, even though she encounters many other key characters, important for developing her feminist discourse. Walser is fascinated by her - is she fact or fiction? The possibility that she may be a hoax is what draws her audiences, and Walser, and the reader. A long account of dualities about her can be given: she is fact and fiction, a myth and vulgar reality, a virgin and an icon of single and strong  new Woman, how Madam Nelson dreamt of her when she first saw her wings : „ ...you must be the pure child of the century, that just now is waiting in the wings, the New Age in which no women will be bound down to the ground “ (25). Carter also used this image of the trapeze artist trying to find balance to herself when writing the introduction to Expletives deleted (1992).

The realism of Nights is interwoven with layers of allegory, phantasy and allusions to european heritage and refers to both the novel´s time of fin de siécle and the present. Its instability in postmodern text where every detail can mean something else can hardly be used for some kind of social analysis. In Nights, the atmosphere of life in the circus and the following ´shipwrecking´ in Siberia is more phantastic than realistic. Carterian ‘Carnival’ is completely different from the solid and good natured paternalistic hierarrchy of Bass´ Circus Humberto.

Suprisingly, we don´t notice the cheerfullness or artistic enthusiasm. Not even Bakhtin´s subversiveness of the carnival. Eventhough Walser, who is good with words, experiences freedom under the mask of a Clown, on the other hand he sees the desparation of the never ending mask of hapiness under which the real personality vanishes. The carnival environment in Nights is a metaphor for the dark powers and passions, there might even be the danger of death.

In the first part of the book which deals with the story of Fevvers until she joins the Circus in London, Fevvers narrates the story herself, which can be quite ambiguous at times. Neither the reader or Walser can decide whether to trust her or not. The reliability of the narrater is also affected by the switching of registers from intellectual jargon to Cockney English and down-to-earth realism in contrast to post-modern paradox of esoteric theory. Plus there is another secret narrator telling us about Walser´s life events or what effect Fevvers has on her audience – it is Walser who went through change. When Fevver´s supposedly mother Lizzie cuts into her speech, it is hard to tell who is actually speaking. While there is an omniscient narrator in the second part, in the third part Fevvers in her inner monologue with her adoptive mother lets us see her feelings. The narrators have different levels of credibility. While, the omniscient narrator is usually trustworthy, we consider him objective, the inner dialogues are subjective. This credibility within the characters of the novel applies also to the relationship between the reader and author.

Although the novel is written by a male, Fevvers´s is the controlling voice even to the point where the male voice is emasculated. Fevvers carefully evades all attempts by Walser to try to fix her identity and, in doing so, she not only challenges the male definitions of women but also, as Michael (1994) argues, notions of truth and reality (p. 497) Indeed, Walser loses his ability to write because his writing is dependant upon his masculinised view of the world.

Fevvers´ story of life as a New Woman is full of difficulties but in the end she wins. She undergoes several tests of encountering with paternal powers, such as escaping from the darkness of sado-masochist sexual services in the Freaky House, then she manages to save her life when a deviant politician wants to sacrifice her for his eternal youth, a Russian arciduke wants to change her into a miniatur toy in his collection or break the magics of a shaman in Siberia taiga. All of them came to take her pecularity as if if she needed them to .... The only crisis of identity Fevvers experiences when the train is derailed and she, with a broken wing, and her dyed hair growing away and feathers falling out looks more like a Cockney sparrow than a tropical bird (she dyes her feathers to look exotic), but wins because she finds trust in herself.

The account of characters who Fevvers meets on her journey would be very long but to name just a few:

Sophie Fevvers has her destructive techniques to set free from the prescribed feminity and its limitating representations. Fevvers, the monstrous aerialist with wings, incorporates the feminity myth of an angelic woman but at the same time acts as a “feathered frump” or “cripple”(19). She is simultaneously a “Cockney sparrow (41) and “tropical bird”. She subverts the clichés of femininity from within: she acts like an angel in a house of suffragette whores. All these women, who have to leave when the place is closed down, find jobs which are typical for new age women. She mocks the Victorian angel but we will never find out whether she herself is a claimed virgin or not.

But not only is she an angelic freak, she symbolizes a New Woman with her wings, who instead of being saved by her love, saves her lover, Walser. He becomes the New Man by running away with the circus for the sake of a “bottle blonde:” “Walser took himself apart and put himself together” (294). Fevvers is a confident New Woman when she says: “I'll sit on him, I'll hatch him out, I'll make a new man out of him. I'll make him into the New Man, in fact, a fitting mate for the New Woman, and onward we'll march hand in hand into the new Century” (281). This piece of text is a good example of how in the 19th century discussions about creation of a New man were going on. According to Sarah Grand, who wrote in 1894 a book “The New Aspect of Woman Question”, the man was imperfect an woman had to teach him like a child to her liking.

Kiliç believes Carter mocks the typical Victorian notion that what makes a man a perfect mate is being a good woman, and performing the “sweet domesticities” of the established order. So Fevvers represents “the pure child of the century that just now is waiting in the wings, the New Age in which no women will be bound down to the ground” (25), and hope for a better society in which women will manage to get out of patriarchal attitudes and gain their opportunities without having to be dependant on men.

A happy ending in the patriarchal order is almost always marriage, and Carter may well be ridiculing the limited choice offered by the social system. Women disappointed by their husbands and lovers, turn to different forms of love – marriage is challenged by homosexuality, being both a result and a sign of that time. Kiliç mentions the discussion about the roots of subversion and homosexuality which culminated at the fin de siècle, and the most solid form of these discussions was Oscar Wilde's trial in 1895 in which he publicly rejected his “natural masculinity”. If men can come out, then there is no reason, why women couldn’t.

Carter shows her support for exploited women with Mignon, beaten by her husband, the Ape-Man, and an easy sexual target for the men at the circus, she is a typical example of an abused woman. She finds love with the Princess and the harmony between them even calms down the tigers. Similarly, Olga and Vera develop a relationship during their stay in a prison for women, where Olga serves a sentence for killing her drunkard husband when he beat her.

And if not homosexuality, then there was the atmosphere of sisterhood in a brothel. The girls working there were the Suffragists knowing that help will come only from themselves and that is why they practised typing or other playing the flute for their future jobs, as Madama Nelson knew, that the era of brothels is retreating. Thus Carter portrays an all-female atmosphere which stands as an alternative to the ‘proper’ patriarchal institutions like marriage and family:

Even the dog who guarded it [the brothel] was a bitch and all the cats were females, one or the other of ‘em always with kittens, or newly given birth, so that a sub-text of fertility underwrote the glittering sterility of the pleasure of the flesh available within the academy. Life within those walls was governed by a sweet and loving reason. I never saw a single blow exchanged between any of the sisterhood who reared me, nor heard a cross word or a voice raised in anger (38-39).

After the death of Mama Nelson, the girls set the house on fire and start their new lives. Carter in an interview with Anna Katsavos notes that “All the women who have been in the brothel with her end up doing those 'new woman' jobs, like becoming hotel managers and running typing agencies”. So Louisa and Emily develop a close relationship and make a plan to save up sufficient money and run a little boarding-house in Brighton:

“..[they] often whiled away the hours of toil, while some dirty bugger poked away at them with his incompetent instrument, by planning whether their pillowcases should be left plain or edged with lace…“ Annie and Grace start up a small agency for typing and office work; Esmeralda plays the flute to accompany a snake charmer, the Human Eel, and has children with him. The only one who has no option but to get married is Jenny since “she had no special talent to put to work for her and never saved a penny but give it all to beggars” (45).

Kiliç further explains that Carter finds the the fin de siècle entertainment industry especially interesting because of the characters they provide: young girls singing, dancing and impersonating men and freaks being displayed in public for money. The actress was a worker under the constant threat of unemployment, whose workshop was music-halls, variety shows and circuses; that she displayed herself in return for money made her “the very antithesis of the Victorian lady” (Maitland 65).

Madame Schreck’s museum is full of freaks, one of them being the Wiltshire Wonder, who is conceived in the Fairy Mound when the King of Fairies „pleasured her, or so she said, as mightily as any man before or since“ (65). When the tiny Wonder is born nine months later, she is cradled in a walnut shell and later her mother exhibits herself as “the Fairy nursemaid”, while breastfeeding Wonder. Her mother sells Wonder to a French pastry cook for “fifty golden guineas cash in hand”. Kılıç explains that through her story, Carter subverts the myth of motherhood, which is one aspect of traditional feminine identity. After she is sold by her mother, the Wiltshire Wonder is mothered by a small girl who takes her home:

[This little girl] carried me off to the nursery and her nanny put soothing ointment on my burns and dressed me up in a silk frock that the young lady’s own doll sacrificed for me, although I was perfectly able to dress myself….I soon formed a profound attachment to the girl who’d been my saviour and she for me, so that we became inseparable and when my legs could not keep up with hers, she would carry me in the crook of her arm (67).

This suggest Carter believed it is not biology what makes a woman a mother, but the love and care given to the child by a woman.

The Sleeping Beauty provides another mocking of the stereotype of Victorian femininity;

„She was a country curate’s daughter and bright and merry as a grig, until, one morning in her fourteenth year, the very day her menses started, she never wakened, not until noon; and the day after that, her grieving parents watching and praying beside her bed, she opened her eyes at suppertime and said:“I think I could fancy a little bowl of bread and milk (63).“

So this now twenty-one year old woman stops any activity, even „her female flow grows less and less the time she sleeps..“ (63). As if she was scared of a normal life, she lives only through short breaks for food and through her vivid dreams. She basically refuses becoming a „woman“ and stays completely passive.

Another character is Cobwebs, whose face covered by cobwebs is a symbol of silencing women. Women of the 19th century never stood up against their husbands and just suffered in silence. Carter wants to point this fact out and encourage women not to be afraid to speak for themselves.

As Ruth Robbins's definition of the term New Woman says, these heroines become representatives of “emancipated women who sought professional careers, university education and the vote at a time when 'proper' ladies were supposed to be satisfied with marriage, motherhood and no franchise”(76).

How patriarchal powers are oppressed is expressed also through the male characters of Walser, Christian Rosencreutz or Grand Duke. When the story opens, Walser occupies a position of a career man, only willing to prove Fevvers is a hoax so that he wins an acknowledgement in his profession. He is in a misogynist sense not prepared to accept a different image of what a woman should be than he already knows. Similarly Rosencreutz, an esoteric charlatan, who believes in the power of phallus and hates everything about its women´s counterpart, „ is willing to pay for the privilege of busting a scrap of cartilege“ (80). Fevvers with the thought of setting up her family in comfort agrees and only closely escapes when she realizes Rosencreutz plans to stab her and gain the power of Goddess Flora, archangel Sophia and many other names he calls her mystically so that masculine power can continue. Grand Duke also attempts to make her an object of desire by transforming her into a precious miniature to imprison her in his Fabergé Egg.

To sum it up, Nights at Circus is a novel that can be read on many levels which can never be described in only one way. Carter herself is like a trapeze artist trying to juggle at the same time attracting readers to sink in the spectacular performance of images and colours and excitement. The way she plays with the English language and uses rich Baroque structure or plain and striking sentences when necessary is unique. The main character, winged Fevvers, gives us all hope for freedom to fly away anytime and anywhere we want, when we want to change something in our life – not only in relationships, because mainly, the novel can be interpreted as a feminist message to women.

5. Wise children

When Carter was writing Wise children, she must have known it will probably be her last piece of writing. The fact that she would soon die and leave a small son and a husband behind her, must have influenced her. So the sentence “What a joy it is to dance and sing!” brings a new light to its reading. It seems that what Carter provoked with(her early works), she came to a kind of atonement and cherished life in its beauty. In difference to Carter´s previous novels, which are generally recognized by critics as quite dark intellectual or feminist horror stories full of phantasy features, this time Carter created a witty and readable novel. Somehow, it seems the feeling is different, more humane and consequently more beliavable. Still, there are some moments of carnivalesque provided by the environment of theaters, alianation and masks, magic imagery and the basic scheme of strong women and weak men. Linden Peach describes the book as exuberant for several reasons. First, the narrative voice seems to be a continuation and development of her previous work – Puss-in-Boots from the collection The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories (1979). According to Makinen, there love, sex and desire are demythologised in a lighthearted commedia dell´arte rendition´ (11).

The narrator is Dora Chance, writing her autobiography on her seventy-fifth birthday and as Kate Web (1994) says, she appears to transcend the word processor on which she is writing (294-5). It positions us as if we were the audience of a theatre listening to a stand-up comedian. Dora and and her twin Nora´s mother dies in childbirth, so the girls are brought up by ´Grandma´ Chance, their mother´s landlady. While their father has his career with the most prestigious institutions, Dora and Nora star as dancers called the Lucky Chances in the music halls, the personation of the low.

Dora Chance in Wise Children speaks to her readers as if they would respond. “You can see for miles, out of this window. There's Westminster Abbey, see?” (3). Eventhough she is much more trustworthy than winged Fevvers, still we get some doubts about the stability of narrator “D'you know, ” she says at the end, "I sometimes wonder if we haven't been making him up all along. . . . If he isn't just a collection of our hopes and dreams and wishful thinking in the afternoons. Something to set our lives by, like the old clock in the hall, which is real enough, in itself, but which we've got to wind up to make it go. ” “Oh, very profound," her sister says. “Very deep” ( 230).

The time frame is more or less firmly given, but Carter managed to express some instability to a narrator who takes us through several decades (twenties to the eightees of the twentieth century) during one day, when the unacknowledged and illegitimate daughters of Sir Melchior Hazard, an icon of British Theatre, celebrate their seventy-fifth birthday. And to spice it up a bit more, it is also their father’s hundredth birthday.

The novel begins with an ending. Nights are set in the last months of the nineteenth century ‘the fag-end, the smouldering cigar butt, of a nineteenth century which is just about to be ground out in the ashtray of history’ (11). Wise Children begins with Britain, to use Carter’s own words, as an advanced, industrialised, post-imperialist country in decline. As Dora Chances observes: ‚these days there is no such a thing as a penny any more and it is as if this foggy old three-cornered island were dangling from a cloud (112). The novel associates this decline with that of the English theatre and, through the trope of the degenerating family line. […] The first wife of Melchior – himself called ‘Mr British Theatre – is now in a wheelchair, while Tristram has become the ‘weak but charming’ host of a sadomasochistic television game show, ‘Lashings of Lolly’, (a parody of Harry Enfield´s Loads of money) in which Hazard himself appears and is humiliatated - the ‘last gasps of the imperial Hazard dynasty that bestrode the British theatre like a colossus of a century and a half’ (10). In America, the English colony of actors, playing Disraeli, Queen Victoria and Florence Nightingale, is a parody of the British Empire.

According to Dora, there are a number of indications of Britain’s decline. One of them is the disappearance of the Lyon’s teashops. The nostalgia with which she describes them betrays the sense of cultural loss, which, as I suggested in the introduction, Carter observed in Britain though did not necessarily share herself:

Do you remember the Lyon teashops? Thick, curly white plaster on the shop-fronts, like walking into a wedding cake and the name in gold: J. Lyons. Poached eggs on toast keeping snug in little tin pigeon holes as you shuffled down the counter. The moist and fruity Bath buns with crumbs of rock candy glistening on the top, and a little pat of butter lined up alongside. The girl would pour hot water, whoosh in a steaming column into a fat white pot and there you were, your good, hot cup of tea, with leaves left in the bottom of the cup, afterwards, to tell your fortune with (111).

The demise of the Lyons teashops is seen as part of a larger sociocultural change reflected in the London railway stations. At Waterloo and Victoria , there is nowhere you can get a decent cup of tea, all they give you is Harvey Wallbangers, filthy capuccino (3).

The most obvious symbol of post-war Britain in the novel, however, is Gorgeous George – a latter day parody of the English patron saint. He is a comedian who has the map of the world tattoed on his body. But, as Dora notes, he is not comic at all but an enormous statement (66). Some of the irony is of his own design; he flexes his muscles to ‚God save the the King‘ and ‚Rule Britannia‘ ; the Cape of Good Hope is at his navel and ‚the Falkland Islands disappear down the crack of his bum‘ (67). The tatooed map is pink, but in limelight – suggesting how the Empire has eventually proved bad for the psychological and economic health of Britain. When Dora mentions „nothing queer about our George”, it suggests anxiety about homosexuality, which was a very topical question in the 1980s.

The basic structure of the book lies in system of dualities. The opposites of high and low we see through the whole book. We can not ignore the surprising number of twins in the story, which carries within itself a notion of carnivalesque. The twins pandemonium starts with Melchior and Peregrine Hazard (who present tragedy and comedy in the theatre, Dora and Leonora Chance (“the pair is like two peas” (5)) and Carter provides us with a good example of postmodern sense of selfawareness, when she presents two protagonists who are asymmetrical reflections of each other. Dora admits the spiritual link with her sister but implies the physical differences between them: "identical we may be, but symmetrical -- never. For the body itself isn't symmetrical. One of your feet is bound to be bigger than the other, one ear will leak more wax. Nora is fluxy; me, constipated” (5). The difference between their personalities, when Nora is described as impulsive, emotive and gushing, while Dora is cautious, thoughtful and reserved is best illustrated when Nora says ‘Yes!‘ to life and Dora says, ‘Maybe‘ (5).

Another also identical twin couple is made up of Saskia and Imogen Hazard, who represent in many ways the opposites of the Chances sisters. The humorous thing is, that the legitimate daughters of a well  respected lady and a their adoring father Melchior, born with a silver spoon in their mouth, are in reality, the daughters of Peregrine, Melchior´s brother. Although they inherited red hair from their good natured dad, Saskia has a really evil character and Imogen is dropping off to sleep constantly.

The children from Melchior´s third marriage are anything but alike. Tristram is a host of a game show, while Gareth becomes a missionary priest. "Both of them in show business," Dora reflects, on the subject of the brothers. "Both, in their different ways, carrying on the great tradition of the Hazard family -- the willing suspension of disbelief. Both of them promise you a free gift if you play the game” (36).

To sum it up, the twinning dualities plays a very important role. We have the motif of comic and tragic, represented in Peregrine and Melchior. Dora and Nora as metaphorical mirror images and Saskia and Imogen serve as an inversion of the Lucky Chances themselves. Other inversions include situations, when Saskia and Imogen come into the world on the same day that Dora and Nora become women. Saskia and Imogen even push their mother down the staircase and rob her off her house while the Chances take care of the Wheelchair. While Saskia and Imogen are presented as English roses, Nora and Dora were "more coquette than finishing school. . . . Nymphettes, I suppose they'd call us now. Jail-bait” (70).

Not only do we have the twinning of couples, but we feel at times like in a hall of mirrors. Dora is confronted with her fiancé´s ex-wife :

“I saw my double. I saw myself, me, in my Peaseblossom costume, large as life, like looking in a mirror. ”

First off, I thought it was Nora, up to something, but it put its finger to its lips, to shush me, and I got a whiff of Mitsouko and then I saw it was a replica. A hand made, custom-built replica, a wonder of the plastic surgeon‘ s art …

“And after all, she looked very lifelike, I must say, if not, when I looked more closely, not at all much like me, more like a blurred photocopy or an artist’s impression…” (155).

The situation when the ex-wife wants to win Dora’s fiancé, known as “Genghis Khan”, seems to be similar to a book The Life and Love of a She Devil by Fay Weldon, an English feminist writer. But while Weldon character takes fortune into her own hands and is in control of the situation ( in fact after she achieves her goal, she dumps her ex-husband), in Wise children, the ex-wife can be perceived as weak, too, to undergo such a physical change because of love of a man: “she’d had her nose bobbed, her tits pruned, her bum elevated, she’d starved and grieved away her middle-age spread. She’d had her back molars out, giving the illusion of cheekbones. Her face was lifted up so far her ears had ended up on the top of her head but, happily, the wig hid them” (155).

Her effort brings her the desired goal – she wins her man’s heart forever. Which is maybe not as realistic as it would be in real life. In fact, it is Dora, who is not a real fiancée and is a kind of fake instead, because she and Genghis Khan are only going to get married from different reasons which are anything but love.

Amusing experimental practice is writing fiction within fiction. When Dora breaks up with her lover called Irish, he finds comfort in writing a book called Hollywood Elegies, which is so successful it earns a posthumous Pulitzer. The picture he gives of her is not very pleasant:

I’m bound to say my best friend wouldn’t recognize me in the far-from loving portrait he’d penned after I’d gone. I’m the treacherous, lecherous chorus girl with her bright red fingernails and her scarlet heart, sexy, rapacious, deceitful. Vulgar as hell.. The grating Cockney accent. The opportunism. The chronic insensitivity to a poet’s heart. And you couldn’t trust her behind a closed door, either” (119-120).

Dora shows her independence by admitting she had another affair besides the one with the Irish – at the same time she slept with her German teacher. So eventhough it certainly is not the right thing to do, she is not as bad as the Irish makes her to be. When a film is made of the book later, Dora shows how little importance it had for her: “I forget who it was played me. Some painted harlot.” (154). Suprisingly, we can feel some bitterness when Dora mentions Irish: “I never rate more than a footnote in the biographies; they get my date of birth wrong, they mix me up with Nora, that sort of thing” (119).

The text is full of allusions – she paid homage to the bard, greatest of all, William Shakespeare. Dora, as self-appointed chronicle writer describes the family history nearly like John Galsworthy and apart from Dora and Nora´s love life and other secrets we get to know about Dora´s grandparents, Victorian actors, who die in a theatrical way and their sons, Melchior and Peregrin, twins divided and united by life and the rest of their family.

Shakespearer is present through the whole book, in fact it is a kind of pastiche. Not only is Melchior the prime British shakespearian actor , member of dynasty, spreading the word of Bard like the word of God. There are quotations and references to nearly thirty Shakespeare’s plays. Especially the play Midsummer Night Dream has been paid special attention, it occupies a whole chapter describing how the play is being turned into a Hollywood movie. Or when heartbroken Tiffany as an allusion to Ophelia from Hamlet hands out flowers on the stage. Ophelia goes mad from grief for her dead father and hands out flowers, one of them being rue, well known as a symbol of regret and also for its powerful poisonous and abortive effects. Carter might have wanted to indicate Tiffany’ s pregnancy.

According to Martin Hilský (77) in his preface to Hamlet, he explains that Ophelia was under a censorship for nearly two centuries – all her indecent utterances Shakespear intended, were left out. That explains why she was perceived by some as a minor character, just an object of sexual desire for a young prince, Hamlet, lacking an identity. Still, she has a very remarkable position and importance, which is proved by a spectacular cultural history, in which pictures of insanity, death and sexuality dominate. During the eighteenth and nineteenth century Ophelia was pictured as an angelic girl, chaste, defenceless, shy to bashful, ethereal, charming, guileless and innocent. This Ophelia was accepted as a victim of man power, as Ophelia who couldn´t resist it.

But in the second half of the twentieth century Ophelia started appearing as more aggressive, rougher and harder, standing up against her father´s directions, not taking her brother´s advice seriously. Questions, which couldn´t be thought of a hundred years ago arose, asking, whether Ophelia lied with Hamlet or not, or if she is an innocent girl or a clever courtesan. And different answers enabled different realizations, in which there is always present a moment of hidden passionate sexuality, insanity and death by drowning. The similarity with Tiffany is obvious.

But the influence is not only on the surface but it influences the whole structure of the novel. The book is divided into five parts in the same way Shakespeare used to write five acts in a play. At the end of the book, there is a cast in order of appearance, as if we were in a theatre. Wise children contain all the features typical of Shakespeare’s comedies: dramatic structure with a happy ending, relationships between fathers and daughters, mirrorings of characters and situations, intrigues and a dark story of incest and death of a young girl.

S. L. Deefholts deals in his exhausting article Hazarding chance with the topic of carnivalesque and its origins. He claims that originally, carnival came into existance as a time of wild revelry that takes place before Lent. People are allowed to enjoy themselves before the weeks of restraint that are to follow. In the modern world, carnival still thrives in diverse forms, from the elegant masks and elaborate costumes in Venice, to the wild debauchery of the New Orleans Mardi Gras. And the term "carnivalesque" refers to a certain distinctive spirit that pervaded the medieval European carnivals as described by a Russian critic named Mikhail Bakhtin. Bakhtin lived in the 20th century, but in his book, Rabelais and his World, he studied the works of the medieval French writer and satirist Rabelais.

According to Bakhtin, carnival was a time when all the hierarchies that were so firmly established in medieval life were inverted. The lowliest were placed at the same level as those who were ordinarily socially superior -- and sometimes even elevated above them. This was a time of flux. It acknowledged the organic functions of the body with bawdy references to eating, drinking, copulation and defecation. Carnival was marked by inclusion rather than exclusion -- it embraced the diversity of humanity in all its forms and imperfections, and, in fact, privileged those imperfections over the perfected, Classical conception of humanity. The emphasis was on our earthy side, and so much of the carnival imagery dealt with humans when they are closest to the earth: namely, at times of birth and of death.

One potent image that Bakhtin evokes as being emblematic of the carnival spirit is that of the laughing hag who is heavily pregnant and on the verge of giving birth. Her flesh is aged and sagging, and she is close to death, but she is also about to bring fresh life into the world and to continue the cycle of birth, life and death, well beyond her own return to the earth. And, so, she laughs at life, at death, at humanity and at the cycle of existence

The hierarchies outside of carnival are undermined - it reminds us that even the most exalted of men and women are just as humans as the rest of us. Like us, they drink, eat, copulate and defecate. And, like us, they were born and they will die. And so, this humour elevates the lowly, even as it reduces the lofty. Like the celebrations of the imperfections of humanity, its frailties and its links with its earthy origins, carnival laughter allows for the destruction of hierarchies.

Bakhtin argues that, as with the carnival spirit, carnival humour has no real equivalent in contemporary satire, which is purely exclusive, laughing at a subject outside of itself. Carnival laughter ridiculed the humanity that it encompassed. By reducing humanity to its physical forms and the cycles of birth, aging and death to which these forms are subject, it allowed for a kind of regeneration to take place that is not possible in a sterilized, perfected context of humour.

So what are these characteristics of the carnivalesque? revelry and celebration, leveling or inversion of hierarchies, the chaos of change and of fluctuation, inclusion of all humanity, laughter that regenerates even as it reduces, acknowledgement of the body and its cycles of birth, aging and death as well as the organic functions of eating, drinking, copulation and defecation.

The repeated refrain in Wise Children is “What a joy it is to dance and sing! ” It is a book about celebration and about the lighter side of life -- it glances away from tragedies, and even from the plodding passage of the everyday. The spirit of the carnivalesque permeates the work. And so it is that Dora has absolutely no reverence for the more exalted characters in the novel. The Lady Atlanta Hazard, first wife to Dora's father, Melchior, affectionately becomes “Wheelchair". And even when she is at her height of beauty and glory -- widely regarded as the loveliest woman of her generation -- Dora insists on associating her features with livestock: “a fair-haired lady with a sheep's profile, ” (56) and “a sheep in a tiara" (70). Similarly, the Lady A.'s twin daughters, Saskia and Imogen -- reknowned beauties in their own right -- are also described as resembling “sheep with bright red fleece” (74). Time and time again, Dora refuses to pay homage to her social “superiors. ” Instead, she is more than ready to pull away the veil of mystique that enshrouds those who are higher up in the social hierarchy: “ 'The lovely Hazard girls', they used to called them. Huh. Lovely is as lovely does; if they looked like what they behave like, they'd frighten little children,” (7) she says of the Lady A.'s daughters.

And, despite his lofty reputation, Dora's own father is similarly subjected to her cheeky commentary. She doesn't hesitate to take him down a peg or two -- or to remind us that for all his high-flown language and ambitions, he's as human and as flawed as the rest of us. She knows that the quickest way to undermine dignity is to bring up images of copulation and defecation -- and so, she often evokes such associations when her father enters the scene: “... smashing legs... I did piss myself when I saw him, in fact, but only a little bit, hardly enough to stain the sofa. Such eyes! Melchior's eyes, warm and dark and sexy as inside of a London cab in wartime... those knicker-shifting, unfasten-your-brassiere-from-the-back-of-the-gallery eyes... ” (72). Later, it is not Melchior's eyes that come under scrutiny, but some other, considerably more private, parts: “...the way that Melchior filled those tights was the snag; Genghis hadn't gone to all this expenses so that his wife would be upstaged by her co-star's package” (132). And so it is that even the head of the "Royal Family of the theatre” (37) is temporarily dethroned by Dora's irreverence.

She doesn't care about who was born as what, and so she is ready to reduce everyone to the same level by bringing out all their common flaws and their humanity. Nor does she pretend to be any better than they. She willingly admits to her own shortcomings and transgressions -- often as not without shame and with few regrets. And so it is that in her laughter, we can find our own humanity as well -- our virtues and our shortcomings. We can never quite take ourselves seriously when we think of Dora's stories, because as she points out, “nothing is a matter of life and death except life and death” (215).

The events she recounts are surreal, chaotic and wonderfully vivid. Dora happily discards the option of a chronological, ordered account in favour of freezing her account in the middle of one scene in order to jump several generations back into the past and regale her audience with an evocation of her grandparents (11-12), even though they don't have any direct relevance to the scene that she has frozen. And, by the time she finally returns to set the present scene back into action, we've practically forgotten that it had been frozen in the first place.

Again and again, she jumps across the span of her life. An account of her childhood shares the same page as the story of how they lost their adoptive mother when they were on the verge of turning thirty. From there, we jump back again to age fifteen and the tale of how she and her sister ended up dyeing their hair (78-79).

Of course, the carnivalesque -- and the chaotic -- is not merely confined to events or to narrative styles. People can also carry about them that aura of unpredictability and magic. Perry is one such character: when he enters the scene, magic, revelry and pandemonium follow. He has a full laugh and a vast presence. He is a magician who can summon doves out of handkerchiefs (31), make a full set of china and cutlery disappear after an afternoon picnic (62), extricate a couple of cream buns from Grandma Chance's cleavage (73) or, best of all, extract a scarlet macaw from Melchior's tights, thus resolving the problem of the size of his brother's “package” (133). His laughter, like Dora's own, is full and infectious -- he's ready to see the funny side of most situations and is ready to include himself in that carnivalesque humour of his. He is monumental -- “the size of a warehouse, bigger, the size of a tower block” (206) and as far as he's concerned "'life's a carnival”'(222).

Of course, it is important to note that, like the other elements, the revelry of the carnivalesque does have a darker side. This always carries with it an element of danger -- the wild card that can suddenly turn a happy crowd into a vicious or panicked mob.

Outside of medieval carnival itself, times of revelry and celebration encompass the moments that are closest to the carnivalesque. And so it is during these times that Dora allows her vision of events to slip even further from the bonds of realism and shift into a magically real perspective. Anything can, and does happen. And so it is that during the party following the filming of the movie The Dream, the set of the Athenian wood can be transformed:

The tin roof over our head seemed to have cracked open and disappeared, somehow, because there was a real, black sky above us... And I no longer remember that set as a set, but as a real wood, dangerous, uncomfortable, with real, steel spines on the conkers and thorns on the bushes, but looking as if it were unreal and painted, and the bewildering moonlight spilled like milk in this wood, as if Hollywood were the name of the enchanted forest where you lose yourself and find yourself, again; the wood that changes you; the wood where you go mad; the wood where the shadows live longer than you do (157-8).

The culmination of all these wild, surreal celebrations can be found at the end of the novel, during Melchior's 100th birthday celebration. Here, we find food and drink. But, we are also witness to the other aspects of the material bodily principles and the idea that we are all ultimately eating, drinking, copulating and dying beings.

We are also presented with reminders of the other end of life: birth. Three-month old twins, “brown as [...] quail[s], round as [...] egg[s] ” (226), presented to Dora and Nora, courtesy of Perry. Nora in particular, is thrilled by the prospect of raising the two wee scraps: “'Babies!' she said, and cackled with glee” (229). And so it is that the novel ends with the marvelous, memorable, utterly carnivalesque image of the laughing hags, serenading their babies in two-part harmony as they head toward their home on Bard Road.

Fevvers is out to earn a living. Everything she says in that direction is undercut by her mother, but the stuff that she says in the beginning about being hatched from an egg, that´s what she says. We are talking about fiction here, and I have no idea whether that´s true or not. …..Part of the point of the novel is that you are kept uncertain. …..When she is talking about being a new woman and having invented herself, her foster mother keeps on saying it´s not going to be as simple as that. Also, they have quite a long conversation about this when they are walking through tundra.

One of the original ideas behind the creation of that character was a piece of writing by Guillome Apollinaire, in which he talks about Sade´s Juliette. He´s talking about a woman in the early twentieth century, in a very French and rhetorical manner. He´s talking about the new woman, and the very phrase he uses is, “ who will have wings and will renew the world.” And I read this, and like a lot of women, when your read this kind of thing, you get this real “bulge” and think, “How wonderful,” “ How terrific,” and then I thought, “Well no; it’s not going to be as easy as that.” And I also thought, “ Really, how very, very inconvenient it would be for a person to have real wings, just how really difficult.”

Something that women know all about is how very difficult it is to enter an old game. What you have to do is to change the rules and make a new game, and that´s really what she´s about. That novel is set at exactly the moment in European history when things began to change.

Angela Carter was always the performer par excellence: she is associated with many literary styles ranging from gothic fairytales, magical realism, science fiction to feminist writing. She must have felt a reason for writing about the relationships between daughters and fathers (in the same way Shakespeare writes only about daughters and fathers, never mothers) or generally, men and women. To the question whether Angela Carter managed to escape from the patriarchal attitudes, I say yes, she did. The following account of ideas and concepts will prove it.

Merriam-Webster dictionary explains that patriarchy has two meanings. It is either a social organization marked by the supremacy of the father in the clan or family, the legal dependence of wives and children, and the reckoning of descent and inheritance in the male line; broadly : control by men of a disproportionately large share of power. The other meaning is a society or institution organized according to the principles or practices of patriarchy.

Within feminist theory, patriarchy refers to the structure of modern cultural and political systems, which are ruled by men. Such systems are said to be detrimental to the rights of women. However, it has been noted that patriarchal systems of government do not benefit all men of all classes (Wikipedia).

Michael Hardin claims in his article that in a patriarchal, dualistic culture the male needs the female in order to define himself. Consequently, if the female is to define herself outside of the male structure, she must find a new basis for personal identification. It is being other in a group that is already other that Angela Carter establishes as a means for that self identification (77). So the search for its own identity will be the answer.

Both Dora and Nora, not knowing their mother or father, have to find identity of themselves somewher else: „ our mother died when we were born“ (164). Maybe it even makes them stronger. Hardin maintains: Lacking a mother, Nora and Dora, in a perverse psychoanalytical sense, are privileged: they do not experience what what Lacan and Kristeva say is the first loss, being removed from the breast – one cannot lose what one has never possessed.

In fact, the whole Hazard family, whether it be Melchior, the great Shakespearean actor, Nora and Dora, the music hall girls or their step-sisters Imogen and Saskia and the twin brothers Tristram and Gareth, a TV show presenter and a priest, make their living in films or theatres by putting on different identities and thus denying the original identity symbolising patriarchy.

The fact that Dora and Nora in Wise Children are identical twins serves as one of the ways by which Carter manages to win above the patriarchy. Nora and Dora Chance are conscious of their common identity which can be easily mistaken, and as long as they can recognize themselves from each other, they have control of the situation ( and men). Dora utilizes the ability to swap their identities and pretends to be Nora in order to win an affection of a boy, she fancies. She puts on her sister’s perfume and becomes her for a while:

„I smelled the unfamiliar perfume on my skin and felt voluptuous. As soon as they started to call me Nora, I found that I could kiss the boys and hug the principals with gay abandon because all this came quite natural to her. To me, no… Now I was Nora, who was afraid of nothing provided it was a man“ (84-85). It is as simple as that - Dora becomes her sister through an application of perfume.

The sisters knew how to enhance and sell their external identities, while the inner one was hidden to the public: by looking absolutely the same:

Nora often talked witfully about going blonde. She felt the future lay with blondes. Should we? Shouldn’t we? One thing was certain – she couldn’t do it unilaterally. On our own, you wouldn’t look twice. But, put us together… (77).

Hardin quotes Carter In the Sadeian Woman, where she talks of the position of women in an unfree society (which I interpret as patriarchy): „A free woman in and unfree society will be a monster.“ (27). This is a perfect example suiting both to Fevvers, the winged aeralist, and to the twins which become the outcasts not in th physical, but in the spiritual sense.

What is generally expected of every woman is marriage and at some point in her life motherhood, as if a woman who decides from whatever reason not to have children, was somewhat useless. Carter was predicting that the process which started with the introduction of the pill will develop and become an issue which puts enormous pressure on women nowadays.

The sisters are also removed from the above mentioned concepts. Both Dora and Nora are just about to get married but are saved at the last minute by women turning up without any notice.

“ I saw my double. I saw myself, me, in a Peaseblossom costume, large as life, like looking into a mirror. First off, I thought it was Nora, up to something… then I saw it was a replica…[S]he looked very lifelike, I must say, if not, when I looked more closely, not all that much like me, more like a blurred photocopy or an artist’s impression“(155).

Dora recognizes this person to be the ex-wife and after realizing how much she must have loved him to undergo plastic surgery operation she lets her to become Dora and marry Czingischan (without him knowing , which can be read as another example of women being in control and men just going along with it. Dora dresses up and watches the wedding from distance, not taking part in this game. Nora‘ s marriage, which does take place, loses all sense of seriousness and sacrednes, when groom’s furious mother storms in in the middle of the wedding.

The concept of motherhood as the indisputable proof of feminity since the prehistoric times is also included. Dora thinks to herself that “a mother is always a mother, since a mother is a biological fact, whilst a father is a moveable feast” (216). So despite Dora’s statement that “mother” is dependent upon biology, the seventy-five year old twin sisters become mothers by being given Gareth’s threee-month old twins. On top of that, the babies are pulled out of pockets, which implies no biological birth is necessary anymore; Nora says to Dora, “We’re both of us mothers and fathers…They ‘ll be wise children, all right” (230). And what more, these children will be allowed to escape the culturally imposed stereotypes and roles assigned according to gender. They will create their own identities, more so even than Nora and Dora. One twin is male and the other female; this will allow for seeing each other’s mirror images, not the gender difference (Hardin, 77).

Fevvers´s character is very complex and can be appreciated on many levels. I chose to interpret the novel and Fevvers´s character as giving a feminist message to women. In the novel Fevver´s triumphs both over Walser – changing him for better or into New Man and also finds her own identity as a New Woman.