Featured Reading Guide
Angela Carter
A richly comic tale of the tangled fortunes of two theatrical families, the hazards and chances, Angela Carter’s witty and bawdy newnovel is populated with as many sets of twins, and mistaken identitiesas any Shakespeare comedy, and celebrates the magic of over a century of show business.
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Angela Carter was born in 1940 and read English at Bristol University, before spending two years living in Japan. She lived and worked extensively in the United States and Australia. Her first novel, Shadow Dance , was published in 1965, followed by the Magic Toyshop in 1967, which went on to win the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize. She wrote a further four novels, together with three collections of Short Stories, two works of non-fiction and a volume of collected writings. Angela Carter died in 1992.
topAbout the Book
A richly comic tale of the tangled fortunes of two theatrical families, the hazards and chances, Angela Carter’s witty and bawdy newnovel is populated with as many sets of twins, and mistaken identitiesas any Shakespeare comedy, and celebrates the magic of over a century of show business.
topAngela Carter interview/review
The Review of Contemporary Fiction, Volume 14.3, 1994
“I have had some following in science fiction. I didn’t read a lot of science fiction when I was younger, but there was a whole group of science fiction writers in Britain in the sixties, who really were doing very extraordinary things with the genre. They weren’t writing about bug-eyed monsters and space at all. One of them, J. G. Ballard, coined this phrase, ‘inner space’. I was quite profoundly affected by them.
The stories in The Bloody Chamber are very firmly grounded in the Indo-European popular tradition, even in the way they look. There’s this long history in Europe of taking elements from the oral tradition and making them into very elaborate literary conventions, but all the elements in that particular piece, The Bloody Chamber, are very lush.
There’s a story in The Bloody Chamber called ‘The Lady and the House of Love’, part of which derives from a movie version that I saw of a story by Dostoyevsky. And in the movie, which is very good, the woman, who is a very passive person and is very much in distress, asks herself the question, ‘Can a bird sing only the song it knows, or can it learn a new song?‘Have we got the capacity at all of singing new songs? It’s very important that if we haven’t, we might as well stop now. Can the marionette in that story behave in a way that she’s not programmed to behave? Is it possible?”
topStarting Points for Discussion
- Dora, as the novel’s narrator, has a very distinctive world-view. Is it possible to say that Angela Carter agrees with her principal characters? How far can the opinions of an author be inferred from his or her fictional work?
- The style of the novel’s narration might be called ‘colloquial’, in that it imitates the everyday speech of Dora. How possible is it to represent natural speech on the page? How successful is the author in this respect?
- Elsewhere in Angela Carter’s work, folk and fairy tales are reworked to bring out their darker, sexual undercurrents. In this novel, too, we see this theme, with the filming of A Midsummer Night’s Dream in Hollywood. What is it about the fairy story that enables such a revelation of sexuality?
- How well do you think Angela Carter achieves a balance in her fiction between creative imagination and rational intelligence?
- To what extent is Dora’s retelling of her life merely another colourful performance? Do we form a picture of the real Dora or just the Dora she wants us to see?
- Much of the action of the novel takes place in Hollywood. What effect does the language of the cinema and video have on the narration? And how has the medium of film in general influenced twentieth-century fiction?
Other Books by Angela Carter
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Love
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The Bloody Chamber And Other…
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Suggested Further Reading
- The Leto Bundle ~ Marina Warner
- Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit ~ Jeanette Winterson
- The Handmaid’s Tale ~ Margaret Atwood
- Book of Mrs Noah ~ Michele Roberts
- Angels and Insects ~ A.S. Byatt