“These Tags of Literature”: Some Uses of Allusion in the Early Novels of Angela Carter

Abstract

Angela Carter has said that she is “in the demythologising business” (“Notes” 71); but, as Pauline Palmer has pointed out, that is only one aspect of her achievement, for her novels actually reveal “two antithetical impulses,” “demythologising” but also “celebratory and Utopian elements” (179). Carter's novels create complex and mocking dualisms, as is suggested by some of her favorite words, like “ambivalent” and “ambiguous,”1 and recurrent images, like mirrors, doubles, dolls, puppets that resemble or become human beings, films, and pictures. In particular, a rich layering of literary allusiveness is one crucial technique by which Carter balances those “antithetical impulses.” As she has remarked, her “fiction is very often a kind of literary criticism” (Haffenden 79).