Angela (Olive) Carter (1940-1992)

Angela (Olive) Carter (1940-1992)
English short story writer, novelist, journalist, dramatist and critic, representantive of magic realism added with Gothic themes, violence, and eroticism. Carter utilized throughout her career the language and characteristic motifs of the fantasy genre to dramatize her sense that the old orders of the Western world were breaking down. Her work represents a successful combination of postmodern literary theories and feminist politics. "-Then the city vanished; it ceased, almost immediately, to be a magic and appalling place. I woke up one morning and found it had become a home. Though I still turn up my coat collar in a lonely way and am always looking at myself in mirrors, they're only habits and give no clue at all to my character, whatever that is. --The most difficult performance in the world is acting naturally, isn't it? Everything else is artful." (from 'Flesh and the Mirror' in Fireworks, 1974)
Carter was born in Eastbourne, Sussex as the daughter of a journalist. She was removed by her grandmother to South Yorkshire during the war years. After rejoining again her mother she suffered from anorexia. At 20 she got married and before starting her English studies at the University of Bristol, Carter worked for the Croydon Advertiser and wrote features and record reviews. After graduating, she settled in the city of Bristol and began her literary career. "A good writer can make you believe time stands still."
Her first novel, SHADOW DANCE, Carter published in 1966. It was a kind of detective story and introduced her charasteristic interrogation of sexuality. THE MAGIC TOYSHOP (1967) developed further the themes of sexual fantasy and revealed Carter's fascination with fairy tales and the Freaudian unconscious. It told a modern myth of an orphaned girl who has the horrors when she goes to live with her uncle and grows through a rite of passage into adulthood. The book won the Jon Llwellyn Rhys Prize in 1967. THE INFERNAL DESIRE MACHINES OF DOCTOR HOFFMAN (1973) was a story of a war fought against diabolic doctor and his attempt to demolish the structures of reason and so liberate mankind from the chains of the reality principle.
"I can date to that time and to that sense of heightened awareness of the society around me in the summer of 1968, my own questioning of the nature of my reality as a woman.

How that social fiction of my "feminity" was created, by means outside my control, and palmed off on me as the real thing."
In 1970, having separated from her husband, Carter went to live in Japan for two years. The experience of a different culture had a strong influence on her work. 1979 Carter published THE SADETAN WOMAN, where she questioned culturally accepted views of sexuality, and sadistic and masochistic relations between men and women. Surprising some of her readers, Carter defended the Marquis de Sade's images of women. After the novel Carter's fiction was described by some less enthusiastic critics as 'entertainment for boys and girls who like their De Sade mixed with Suchard chocolate'.
In the late 1980s Carter's writings occupied a central position within debates about feminist pluralism and postmodernism. Her interest in changing gender roles formed the basis for novels HEROES AND VILLAINS (1969), set in the post-holocaust world, and THE PASSIONS OF NEW EVE (1977). The protagonist, Evelyn, comes to a futuristic New York which has become the City of Dreadful Night, where disolute Leilah performs a dance of chaos for him. Evelyn finds his promised job extinguished. He undergoes deranging adventures and is captured in the desert by a cold-blooded female scientist who calls herself Mother and has assembled in her person various attributes of the goddess. She intends to rape Evelyn, change his sex, and impregnate him with his own seed, so that he may give birth to an ambivalent new messiah. In the end, Eve, having transcended the various impersonations s/he has passed through metamorphosis, takes ship westward, en route maybe to Eden. Concern with sexual politicis was central to Carter's burlesque-picaresque novel NIGHTS AT THE CIRCUS (1984), which first begins in a gaslight-romance version of London, moves for a period to Siberia, and returns home. In this work the dystopia of The Passions of New Eve is replaced by humor and re-creation of the 19th-century bourgeois novel. Her other works incluce translations of Charles Perrault's fairy tales (1979), BLOODY CHAMBER (1979), a collection of stories retelling classic fairy tales, and screenpaly for the film THE COMPANY OF WOLVES (1984), a bloodthirsty retelling of the Little Red Riding Hood story, directed by Neil Jordan. BLACK VENUS (1985) featured Carter's fictionalisation of historical characters, such as Lizzie Borden and Baudelaire's syphilitic mistress. WISE CHILDREN (1991) focused on the female members of a theatrical family and was marked by optimism and humor.

Carter taught and was writer-in-residence at universities in America and Australia, and spent two years in Japan, writing essays for New Society. For 20 years she was a major contributor to the magazine, the current affairs and culture weekly which is now part of the New Statesman. Carter served as Arts Council fellow at Sheffield University, England, and as visiting professor of creative writing at Brown University. She died on February 16, 1992, in London. For further information: Angela Carter and the Fairy Tale, ed by Danielle M. Roemer, Cristina Bacchilega (2000); Cult Fiction by Andrew Calcutt and Richard Shephard (1998); Angela Carter: The Rational Glass by Aidan Day (1998); Critical Essays on Angela Carter, ed. by Lindsey Tucker (1998); Angela Carter: Writing from the Front Line by Sarah Gamble (1998); Angela Carter by Linden Peach (1997); Angela Carter by Alison Lee (1997); The Infernal Desires of Angela Carter: Fiction, Femininity, Feminism, ed. by Joseph Bristow, Trev Lynn Broughton (1997); The Encyclopedia of Fantasy, ed. by John Clute and John Grant (1997); Angela Carter by Lorna Sage, Isobel Armstrong, ed. (1996); Eroticism, Ethics and Reading: Angela Carter in Dialogue With Roland Barthes by Yvonne Martinsson (1996); The Reader's Companion to Twentieth Century Writers, ed. by Peter Parker (1995); Women's Literature, ed. by Claire Buck (1992); 'The Journey of the Subject in Angela Carter's Fiction' by R. Schmidt in Textual Practice (Spring 1985); 'Re-imagining the Fairytale' by P. Duncker in Literature and History (Spring 1984)
Selected works:
· SHADOW DANCE / HONEYBUZZARD, 1966
· THE MAGIC TOYSHOP, 1967 - Maaginen lelukauppa
· SEVERAL PERCEPTIONS, 1968
· HEROES AND VILLAINS, 1969
· LOVE, 1971 (rev. 1987)
· THE INFERNAL DESIRE MACHINES OF DOCTOR HOFFMAN, 1972
· FIREWORKS, 1974
· THE PASSION OF NEW EVE, 1977
· BLOODY CHAMBER, 1979
· MARTIN LEMAN'S COMIC AND CURIOUS CATS, 1979
· translation: THE FAIRY TALES OF CHARLES PERRAULT, 1979
· THE SADEIAN WOMAN: AN EXERCISE IN CULTURAL HISTORY, 1979
· NOTHING SACRED, 1982
· MOONSHADOW, 1982 (with J. Todd)
· NIGHTS AT THE CIRCUS, 1984 - Sirkusyöt
· screenplay: THE COMPANY OF WOLVES, 1984 - film dir.

by Neil Jordan - Freudian version of 'Little Red Riding Hood', based on the premise that a wolf may not be what he seems
· BLACK VENUS, 1985
· radio drama: COME UNTO THESE YELLOW SANDS, 1985
· SAINTS AND STRANGERS, 1986
· ed.: WAYWARD GIRLS AND WICKED WOMEN, 1986
· WISE CHILDREN, 1991
· translation: SLEEPING BEAUTY AND OTHER FAVORITE FAIRY TALES, 1991
· EXPLETIVES DELETED: SELECTED WRITINGS, 1992
· ed.: THE VIRAGO BOOK OF FAIRY TALES, 1990-92 (2 vols.)
· AMERICAN GHOSTS AND OLD WORLD WONDERS, 1993
· BURNING YOUR BOATS: COLLECTED STORIES, 1996
SHAKING A LEG: COLLECTED WRITINGS, 1998 (ed. by Jenny Uglow).

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