Moonlit Mirrors, Bloody Chambers, and Tender Wolves: Identity and Sexuality in Angela Carter’s “Wolf-Alice”

Abstract

Who are you? said Caterpillar. This was not an encouraging opening for a conversation. Alice replied rather shyly, I--I hardly know, Sir, just at present--at least know who was when got up this morning, but think must have been changed several times since then. --Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland FROM ONE IDENTITY TO ANOTHER In her well-known collection of stories about fairy stories, The Bloody Chamber, Angela Carter revisits and revises traditional folklore; or, rather, she continues tradition of revision inherent in this originally orally transmitted literary form. The shifting structures inherent folklore, she claims, made it easier for her to deal with shifting structures of reality and (Notes 25). Carter's appropriation of fairy tale form is a conscious infiltration and disruption of western patriarchal ideologies and binary modes of thinking traditionally embodied therein, an effort question nature of gendered reality and extent which our experiences of self are defined by the social fictions that regulate our lives: in demythologizing business. I'm interested in myths--though I'm much more interested in folklore--just because they are extraordinary designed make people unfree (25). Overtly, here, in her revisioning of folklore, and elsewhere, as in her analysis of Marquis de Sade's novels in The Sadeian Woman and Ideology of Pornography, Carter's agenda is one of dismantling myths of human sexuality that amount oppression of all but of women and feminine in particular. Myth deals in false universals, dull pain of particular circumstances. In no area is this more true than in that of relations between sexes, she claims (Sadeian Woman 5-6). In Women's Time, an essay contemporaneous with The Bloody Chamber, Julia Kristeva argues for a feminism that allows for plurality of identity and individual differences in notions of woman and rejects dichotomy between masculine and feminine as metaphysical: the dichotomy between man and woman as an opposition of two rival entities is a problem for metaphysics. What does 'identity' and even 'sexual identity' mean in a theoretical and scientific space in which notion of 'identity' itself is challenged? (368). The deconstruction of sexual identity is authentically feminist practice engaged by both Carter and Kristeva, and both rely on materialism of body do so (Moi 12). Fundamentally, Carter seems be critiquing mythology of western philosophy, beginning with that father of lies Plato and his subjugation of body and material world realm of ideal forms (Notes 27). Her writing undermines basis of oppositional logic and kind of mind/body divide propagated as a love of wisdom. Carter once said in an interview, I do think that body comes first, not consciousness ... remember there's a materiality symbols and a materiality imaginative life which should be taken quite seriously (qtd. in Roemer 7). Her emphasis on materiality of body and language recalls work of Julia Kristeva, (1) which gives body a place of primacy in contemporary psychoanalytic theory and reconnects body and its drives language. Kristeva, though building on ideas of Freud and Lacan, emphasizes undecidable element of language, semiotic disruption of symbolic, and thus posits speaking as a heterogeneous, always questionable subject-in-process. She not only advocates an analytical theory that searches for the unsettling process of meaning and subject rather than for coherence or identity, but she also locates origins of such a process in pre-oedipal, pre-linguistic body (Kristeva, Desire 125). In The Bloody Chamber, Carter presents an array of characters whose subjectivity is often quite literally shown be in process, whose condition is always somewhere in-between. …