Angela Cater’s second novel The Magic Toyshop (1967) is often discussed in connection with mythology and fairy-tales. Carter uses these two oldest literary genres in her novel and she also uses other narratives (especially she alludes to works of English literature, from Coleridge to D.H.Lawrence). Intertextuality thus becomes a theme. The novel is concerned with the role of intertextuality in the social construction of women’s identity, or more precisely women’s identities. How exactly does Carter work with myths in The Magic Toyshop will be the major issue of this essay.
Angela Carter, as a feminist writer is interested in the way mythologies enforce the patriarchal order in Western society. Mythology is a set of culturally valid images which are perpetuated through many generation and often reinforced by rituals held at regular intervals. Linden Peach writes in his book Angela Carter that “Carter, as other feminist critics, recognizes fairy tales as a reactionary form that inscribed a misogynistic ideology.” (Peach, 74) Carter takes over some of the formal aspects of myths and fairy stories and transforms them in order to give her own feminine perspective. She works with such traditionally authoritative texts as biblical myths and from these she chooses the very crucial myth of Adam and Eve. As the story is told in the third person narrative, yet the focalisation is through the young girl Melanie, the protagonist of the novel. Melanie re-lives the first woman’s sin and punishment follows. Yet we get an as if “unauthorised version” of the myth, version that “undermines this inscribed ideology by emphasizing what the misogynistic fairy stories suppressed, an adolescent girl’s excitement about her body and the discovery of her emerging sexuality“. (Peach, 75)
In that part of the first chapter describing the garden scene which is a rewriting and challenging of the myth of the expulsion from the Garden of Eden, Carter adds certain elements recalling rather pagan stories which give basis to superstition, like the sinister cat or the appearance of blood and the stressing of Melanie’s nakedness. Through adding the outward signs of pain, like blood, Carter points out the violence inherent in this myth. Melanie’s anxiety adds another, deeper and individualistic dimension to her experience which is very important because myths are not concerned with the individual but with the generalised and the common.
By merging the elements of the canonical with the apocryphal, to use the theological language, or the upper culture and the lower, folk culture, Carter argues that all these narratives have the same value in the culture as long as they carry some influential meaning along with them. And the modern author is entitled to use these narratives as units of meaning and if necessary destroy them. Angela Carter commented on her use of the biblical myth in the following way: “I took the Fortunate Fall as meaning that it was a good thing to get out of that place. The intention was that the toyshop itself should be a secularized Eden.“ Peach develops this even further and says that the “Fortunate Fall is not only from the toyshop but the cultural myths which have contributed to women’s intellectual, emotional and sexual oppression.“ (Peach, 85)
The units of meaning created by mythical tales are significant because they are the building stones of the self. They are the ready-made, prefabricated elements from which one creates his or her identity. This becomes evident when Melanie is posing in front of the mirror in her room and is “trying on” different ideas of woman, different ideas of femininity:
She also posed in attitudes, holding things. Pre-Raphaelite, she combed out her long, black hair to stream straight down from a centre parting and thoughtfully regarded herself as she held a tiger-lily from the garden under her chin, her knees pressed close together. A la Toulouse Lautrec, she dragged her hair sluttishly across her face and sat down in a chair with her legs apart and a bowl of water and a towel at her feet. …She was too thin for a Titian or a Renoir but she contrived a pale, smug Cranach Venus with a bit of net curtain wound round her head and the necklace of cultured pearls they gave her when she was confirmed at her throat. After she read Lady Chatterley’s Lover, she secretly picked forget-me-nots and stuck them in her pubic hair. (Carter, 1-2)
Linden Peach argues that the presentation of a succession of the different and – what is more importnat - clashing ideas of femininity implies that there is no single one female identity to be found. “In her exploration of the different social roles and subjectivities available to women, Melanie not only challenges the notion of a singular female identity, but demonstrates how women have to negotiate a myriad of received assumptions and social conventions.“ (Peach, 80) Melanie’s desire to buy false eyelashes again proves that her identity is forming under the pressure of the discourses outside herself. It is in this way that she loses the control over her body.
The act of creation is always an act of reaction or recreation. The cultural stories, or more generally, images are the material out of which a new image may be made. Melanie is represented as a passive entity to which the various mythic and cultural images claim their right. Mythical narratives are also significant in transmitting the social paradigms and also in developing the sense of guilt. This theme is developed in The Magic Toyshop and the novel itself follows the structural pattern of a sin followed by punishment.
The novel also explores the theme of roles. The deifinitions of roles are very often challenged and transformed, or more accurately, loosened. The situation when Melanie takes on her mother’s wedding dress and stands there as a bride makes an illustrative example: “A bride. Whose bride? But she was, tonight, sufficient for herself in her own glory and did not need a groom.“ (Carter, 16) It is of no importance that Melanie, in the role of a bride lacks the most important (?) thing for this. She is a bride nevertheless.
It has been mentioned that Carter draws on the tradition of European myths, starting from Greek mythology and the Bible. The act of Melanie‘s destroying the wedding dress of her mother which in the logic of the narrative, causes the death of her mother and father, however, recalls the much more ancient magic rituals typical of some African and native American mythologies. Another instance of this type is to be found later in the novel, when Finn buries the swan puppet made by Uncle Philip which was a crude representation of the God Zeus alias Uncle Philip.
This kind of thinking about world was described already at the beginning of the twentieth century by the famous British anthropologist, Sir James Fraser. In his book The Golden Bough he says that magic is based on two principles one of which is that “things which have once been in contact with each other continue to act on each other at a distance after the physical contact has been severed… the principle may be called … the Law of Contact or Contagion.“ (Fraser, 11) Clearly, Carter makes use of even more archaic modes of thinking and uses them to build her own narrative where the real and the imaginative are separated only by blurred boundaries.
It is easy to undestand why Carter chose the Greek myth of Leda and the Swan which is performed by the patriarchal despotic character of Uncle Philip. It was exactly this myth that had been perpetuated in the patriarchal culture, providing inspiration for such artists as Leonardo da Vinci and Corregio and many other painters and sculptors from Renaissance till the twentieth century. The culmination of the popularity in the representation of this myth in poetry is undoubtedly William Butler Yeats’s poem “Leda and the Swan“.
Uncle Philip‘s perversion is pointed out at the moment when he inspects Melanie’s looks before the performance. He is dissatisfied and says “I wanted my Leda to be a little girl. Your tits are too big.“ (Carter, 143) The greater the innocence of the girl, or Leda, the greater the act of rape, the better the ritual fulfillment of the myth, seem to be the thoughts Uncle Philip has. There is a real threat that the act of rape will not happen only symbolically on the stage during the great applause of the audience, but actually while rehearsing with Finn. Finn, however, revolts against being tangled in this myth and rejects Melanie. The abundance of descriptions full of vivid sensuality, tangibility and the appearance of the body such as it is, without any artificial adornment is disruptive too.
The rejection of the masculine myths treating a rape as a victory or treating woman as the primal cause of all sins and of the Fall of Man, is the rejection of the male imposition of a particular idea of femininity on women. The rebellion against these masculine myths is complete: the ‘Father’ figure is killed, and generally speaking the myth turns out to be a failure. The swan fails to be god-like, as is to be supposed because it impersonates “god” Uncle Philip: Melanie thought when she saw it for the first time on the stage that “It was a grotesque parody of a swan; Edward Lear might have designed it. It was nothing like the wild, phallic bird of her imaginings. It was dumpy and homely and eccentric.” (Carter, 165) Melanie adds that she felt like laughing when she saw it. The swan is also described very much in materialist terms, so that the reader knows that it is made of wood, its neck of rubber and its feet are made of PVC, or when her reads that its feet were “going splat, splat, splat“ (Carter, 166), which effectively and completely forbids any spiritual connotations of the swan. Thus its symbolic value is mutilated. So Carter begins with the deconstruction of masculinity in the myth in order to destroy the notion of passive feminity in it.
Such a deconstruction allows one to go deeper to the naked human being, devoid of all masks and costumes which culture makes us ‘wear’. Immediately after the performance of the rape, Melanie is so shocked and upset that she feels to be outside herself and for a moment does no know Finn. In a minute she pulls herself together and the narrative voice says: “She put Melanie back on like a coat, slowly”. (Carter, 167) So what we are concerned with here is the process of gradual giving up the masks, or roles, or the mythical notions of Man and Woman. The story points out that this is a painful process. On the other hand, it is a relieving process. After Finn buries the swan he comes to Melanie’s bed and tells her what has happened. The sense of relief is very intensive: “He went on and on talking. He was talking as freely as he used to do. More freely.“ (Carter, 173) Relief, pain, but most importantly freedom, is the consequence of such a process.
Carter herself commented on her understanding of myths:
All the mythic versions of women, from the myth of the redeeming purity of the virgin to that of the healing, reconciling of mother are consolatory nonsenses; and consolatory nonsense seems to me a fair definition of myth, anyway. Mother godesses are just as silly a notion as father gods. (Peach, 39)
Demythologizing is thus the basic method in the construction of the narrative and its meaning. Whether the agenda of the novel is too blatantly obvious is a matter of discussion. John Bayley, a critic, who wrote mainly with reference to Love, criticised Carter’s novels as vehicles for hard-line feminist ideologies. (Peach, 5) However, demythologizing is necessary for disencumbering the notion of Woman from the social and cultural constructs that have been here from time immemorial and thus have been taken for granted and have been assumed to be universal which they are of course not. The question arising out of this, however, is whether Carter is just deconstructing the old myths or whether she is creating some new myths, or what might be called, anti-myths.
Although Carter wanted to break free from the mythical structures, it should be pointed out that she took over some of the formal elements and conventional symbols. These include the arduous journey, the timelessness of the story (except for the reference to the radio, the story could have been set in any time), the purifying power of fire, certain signs of the supernatural etc.
The important thing, however, is that Carter does not continue in the tradition of giving the simplistic instructing myth. For that a conclusive ending would be necessary and that Carter does not offer in The Magic Toyshop. The ending is to such an extent ambivalent, that it allows no esay interpretation but leaves an open space for another story. Because in a way, where are Finn and Melanie at the end of the book bu at the beginning of their story? Are they going to live a different story? Are they going to repeat the well-known story as Melanie fears and thinks inevitable? All these questions remain unanswered. The threat of repetition of the same story is hanging over Melanie because it is the power of myths to go on and trap new generations in the same line of thinking and acting. If people get caught in this pattern, the only way to construct one’s self is of these units, defined by myths.
The Magic Toyshop was Carter’s second novel and it won the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize. With its blurred boundaries between the real and the imaginative it anticipated some of her later novels which became labelled as magic realism. With its interest in demythologizing it foreshadowed some of her later stories, especially her controversial collection of re-written well-known fairy tales, The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories (1979).
Bibliography
Carter, Angela. The Magic Toyshop. London: Virago Press. 1994
Fraser, James. The Golden Bough. Ware: Wordsworth. 1993
Peach, Linden. Angela Carter. London: Macmillan Press. 1988