Abstract
The present paper discusses Angela Carter’s Heroes and Villains (1969), which parodies both “post-apocalyptic” novels in the Cold War era and Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s theory on civilisation. By analysing this novel in comparison, not only to Rousseau’s On the Origin of Inequality (1755), but also to the works of various science fiction writers in the 1950s and 1960s, the paper aims to examine Carter’s reinterpretation of Rousseau in a post-apocalyptic context. As I will argue, Heroes and Villains criticises Rousseau from a feminist point of view to not only represent the dystopian society as full of inequality and violence, but also to show that human beings, having forgotten the nuclear war as their great “sin” in the past, can no longer create a bright future. Observing the underlying motifs in the novel, the paper will reveal how Carter attempts to portray a world where human history has totally ended, or where people cannot make “history” in spite of the fact that they biologically survived the holocaust. From this perspective, I will clarify the way in which Carter reinterprets Rousseau’s notion of “fallen” civilisation in the new context as a critique of the nuclear issues in the late twentieth century.
Highlights
In a newly discovered interview with David Pringle in 1979 in which she spoke about her dystopian novels between the late 1960s and the 1970s—Heroes and Villains (1969), The Infernal Desire
Machines of Doctor Hoffman (1972), and The Passion of New Eve (1977)—Angela Carter remarked that she had been highly influenced by science fiction since her childhood, from John Wyndham’s The Day of the Triffids (1951) to the works of “new wave” writers such as J
The present paper focuses on Carter’s neglected relationship with science fiction, reconsidering Heroes and Villains, which has been interpreted in various ways since its publication, in a political or cultural context
Summary
In a newly discovered interview with David Pringle in 1979 in which she spoke about her dystopian novels between the late 1960s and the 1970s—Heroes and Villains (1969), The Infernal Desire. The people described in this novel are mortal creatures always threatened by the possibility of a cruel death; most of them are still living as what biologists call “homo sapiens”, but they can no longer live as “human beings” in a real sense because there will be no positive growth or evolution for their societies in the future From this point of view, the present essay will examine the way in which Carter problematises the issue of nuclear weapons in the Cold War era and imagines “the end of human history”, investigating her depictions of human life in the world after nuclear war, in comparison to both Rousseau’s critique of “fallen” civilization and the science fiction novels of her time
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