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摘 要

安吉拉·卡特因其丰富的想象力和睿智，一贯的女性主义的洞察力著称。在《明智的孩子》中，卡特创建了一个缤纷璀璨的家庭传奇，成功庆祝演艺界的传说和神奇的同时，探讨了父母和孩子、短暂和永恒、真实和谎言之间的关系。批评家从不同方面分析了文本,但小说中杂糅的魔幻现实主义和女权主义至今却被忽略。

因此，本文将分从五个部分解析小说中的魔幻现实主义和女性主义杂糅。首先论文就卡特及《明智的孩子》作了简要介绍，并对相关研究成果作了简要综述。第二部分主要对卡特在小说中杂糅魔幻现实主义和女性主义的原因进行了分析，其中包括她对两性关系的关注，对女性叙事技巧和时空的聚焦，以及想要通过对莎士比亚的的戏仿达到两性平等的愿景。第三部分从魔幻与现实视角下对人类世界的透视、神话原型的采用以及通过“镜子”对魔幻世界的映射来探讨魔幻主义、女性写作手法在小说中的具体应用。

第四部分从魔幻主义和女性主义的结合对小说主题传达所起的作用入手，研究小说魔幻背后隐藏的真实世界，详细阐明了男性为中心的世界的解构和女性自我身份的重组。其中还包括小说中的狂欢化的生活，对人物的二元性与成对效应、合法性与私生的分类。最后结论部分总结和概括魔幻现实主义与女性主义的糅杂在文本中的意义,重申本文的研究价值。

关键词：安吉拉‧卡特；《明智的孩子》；魔幻现实主义；女性主义；杂糅

Contents

1. Introduction 1

1.1 Carter and Wise Children 1

1.2 Literature Review 1

2. Reasons of Carter’s Mingling of Magic Realism and Feminism in Wise Children................................................................................................................3

2.1 Carter’s Concern with the Relationship between Men and Women 4

2.2 Parody of Shakespeare 5

2.3 Female Narrative Technique and Time 6

3. The Magic Female Space 7

3.1 The Magical Hall of Mirrors 7

3.2 Adoption of Mythological Techniques 8

4. Contributions of the Mingling of Magic Realism and Feminism to the Novel’s Themes....................................................................................................8

4.1 Deconstruction of the Other and Male-dominated World 9

4.2 Life as Carnival...............................................................................................9

4.3 Divisions........................................................................................................10

5. Conclusion 11

Works Cited 13

Introduction

1.1 Carter and Wise Children

Angela carter (1940-1992) is widely acknowledged as an original and daring writer. She wrote in the hybrid magic realism, Gothic, feminism and multiple styles. Wise Children (1991), the last novel written by Angela Carter, is a rollicking text that tells a lively story with satirical wit and wry, bawdy observation. Even without analysis, it stands on its own as an engaging story, with a few stretched coincidences and a mischievously humorous narrator. “Wise Children is certainly her most ebullient, cheerfully orgiastic and comic novel” (Boehm, 1994:31).

It opens on Shakespeare’s birthday, on a gusty spring morning in the late 20th century and it is the story of twins Dora and Nora Chance. They are the illegitimate daughters of a very famous noble English Shakespearean actor, Melchior Hazard, and a Hazard is nothing but a posh bit of Chance, as Carter suggests. The Legendary Chance Girls, as Dora and Nora become, are brought up on the wrong side of the family and in the wrong kind of entertainment, adopted by a kind old woman in a run-down old boarding house - number 49, Bard Road - on the wrong side of London. Wise Children is a book about the ingenuity of invention when it comes to both identity and art. It traces what happens to both sides of the family, and on the other what made a century’s worth of English entertainment.

The novel plays on Carter’s admiration of Shakespeare, incorporating a large amount of magical realism and elements of the carnivalesque that probes and twists our expectations of reality and society. “The novel is about the way in which English imperialism and patriarchy appropriated Shakespeare” (Sanders 2001: 195).

1.2 Literature Review

With the general growth of the critic’s focus on a feminist interpretation of Carter’s novels, it is hardly surprising that the relationship between men and women has attracted considerable attention in recent years. While some research has focused only on one of Carter’s features, other work has sought to show how to apply carnivalized features in Wise Children. Accordingly, the research on Wise Children should focus on the mingling of magical realism and feminism that focus on difference between other studies.

The studies about Angela Carter abroad have related to nearly all of her works from the field of Feminism, Magic Realism, Fantasy, Science Fiction, and Gothic. The overseas research on Carter and her works goes many years ahead of China, which are much more theoretical. Many overseas critics observe the feministic importance implied in Carter’s works and their analyses go different direction. However, studies abroad on Wise Children are quite limited compared with Carter’s other novels. Few studies focus on this novel only.

In Modern Gothic: a reader, Victor Sage and Allan Lloyd Smith analyze Carter’s application of modern Gothic in her works. In addition, Michael Morrison examines elements of the fantastic of Wise Children in Trajectories of the Fantastic. Steven Connor discovers that the question of the legitimacy of cultural forms is central to Wise Children. Kate Webb specifically explores the relation of family, hierarchy and culture at great length. David Punter focuses on “to depict ‘magical’ boundary-breaking events as part of the texture of every experience” (Zhuo Huizhen, 2004: 142). In comparison, the domestic studies about Carter lag behind the international trend and have a limitation of perspectives. On the one hand, the attention and interest on Carter starts rather late, and the early studies are restricted to a narrow scope of her short stories and fairy tales.

In China, the translator Yan Yun in Taiwan has translated three works of Carter from 2004 to 2006. They are Nights at the Circus, Wise Children and Fireworks. A number of domestic research workers embark on exploring the use of feminism in Wise Children to dominate dichotomous thinking in British culture and on the writing conventions of literary autobiography. Chinese scholars often concentrate on feminism and modernism and nearly all papers relate to the feminism topic. Additionally, the reviews of Angela carter’s literary works mainly focus on the general introduction of her reputation of being a contemporary feminist novelist. Although Wise Children was published in 1991, only a few critics study it in China and the academic analyses of Carter and her early works have proliferated until in recent years. Meanwhile, a few researchers see the carnivalesque qualities, such as Cheng Yi refers to the carnivalesque elements in one chapter of his thesis.

Thus, the present researches leaves a broader space to explore the mingling of the magic based on the feminism. Therefore, this thesis conducts a tentative study to interpret the text through the exploration of Carter’s use of magic and feminism, hoping that domestic readers may know more about Carter and go deeper in studying her masterpiece Wise Children.

2. Reasons of Carter’s Mingling of Magic Realism and Feminism in Wise Children

“Carter’s novels use the mixture of magical and realistic events to explore the borders on which she lives” (Cooper, 1998: 285). In the world of magical realism, the supernatural realm blends with the natural, familiar world. Magical realism, as a form of narrative, witnessed an increase in the last decades; it became highly adopted by writers and enjoyed by readers across the globe. Magical realism is a literary form in which weird, supernatural, and unreal tales are narrated as if the events were commonplace. Angela Carter is a British author whose works, but not all, have been discussed by critics as magical realistic texts. She was strongly influenced by surrealism, by the Situationist cultural activism of the 1960s, with its stress on theatre and by sexual libertarianism; she unpicked the myths that sustain western social and sexual relationships. In her view, male desire dominated the popular imagination and female desire got squeezed, denied, warped and twisted. Carter was critical of conventional femininity, and Wise Children show her in celebratory mood, reveling in a heritage of music hall, pantomime and Shakespearian comedy.

In Wise Children, Carter uses the magical realistic writing techniques to represent the combination of reality and realism. Gabriel Garcia Marquez is a pioneer of the Latin American literature. He says that what is admirable about the fantastic in the magical realism works is that there is no longer anything fantastic: there is only the real. Hence, it is clear that magic realism is a fantastic manifestation of the physical reality. Although the magic realism blurs reality and fantasy, in fact it transforms the real into the unreal, so magic realism is actually an attitude towards reality.

Carter combines unrealistic elements with a realistic presentation of life and character. The impulse of magic realism to confront the past from a historical perspective is particularly seen in Wise Children.

2.1 Carter’s Concern with the Relationship between Men and Women

As being a prolific writer, Carter contributed herself into feminism. In her opinion: “growing into feminism was part of the process of maturing” (Carter 1984: 25). According to Elaine Showalter, “in the atlas of the English novel, women’s territory is usually depicted as desert bounded by mountains on four sides: the Austin peaks, the Bronte cliffs, the Eliot range, and the Woolf hill.” She got a place in man-dominant literature just because people could see her concern for women issues in her works. Carter tries to deconstruct the complex power structure between the male and female through various writing techniques.

In Carter’s eyes, she is “a feminist in everything else and can’t compartmentalize these things in one’s life”, there should be one thing for certain that Carter dares to break the literary forbidden zone, the sexual description. In Wise Children, the heroine Dora and Nora face themselves as the illegitimate child leisurely, when it comes to their natural father, the noble Shakespearian actor Melchior Hazard, who is a conferment of drama group, but never admits the two illegitimate daughters, because the crown is more important than wealth, reputation, women even his children. The man lacks of the power of love in this book, even afraid to face own flesh; finally become the illusion of light. However, the sisters do not hate the man and they have been grateful for the good genes of this family. Dora takes in the invalid ex-wife of Melchior who has been abandoned by her upper class twin daughters.

2.2 Parody of Shakespeare

To a growing number of Chinese, Shakespeare has morphed from a literary icon to which one has to show sufficient respect to prove one’s educational credentials, to a writer whose prescience and insight into the human condition have illuminated our own era of dizzying change. Throughout the novel, there are numerous references to the works and impact of William Shakespeare. Shakespeare is used continually, the ideas of his plays are incorporates, comparisons made continually between characters of the play and the book itself is written in five chapters just as a Shakespearian play often had five acts. Julie Sanders, who makes much of investigating themes of romantic love, sexual inversion and disguise, questions of identity, motifs of twinning, absent parents, and lost children. As Sanders explains, Carter"s novel tries to show the appeal of Shakespeare to a broad area through its pervasion of class, which also incorporates a wide scope of Shakespearean literary quotations from The Comedy of Errors and Twelfth Night for the motif of twins, Hamlet for the patterning of Dora and Nora"s god-daughter"s near-madness, Twelfth Night and A Midsummer Night"s Dream for the characterization of two over-the-top productions that Dora and Nora look back from their past, and mix-ups of the sort that derive from the romantic comedies. (Sanders 1978: 6) Sanders also notes that the novel uses the carnivalesque by including few festive occasions that compare to rites appearing in Shakespearean drama. In A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf sculptures Judith as Shakespeare’s sister, and what Carter has qualities make many critics said she was Shakespeare’s sister (Virginia, 1929: 53). “I was attempting to encompass something from every Shakespeare”, Carter said in radio interview only months before she died.

At the beginning of the novel there are three quotations, two of which allude to Shakespeare: “Brush Up on Your Shakespeare”, a song title from the musical “Kiss Me, Kate” based on Shakespeare’s “The Taming of the Shrew”, and the quote “How many times Shakespeare draws fathers and daughters” by Ellen Terry, an English stage actress. Another important parody is that Melchior idolizes his father, and also is from Shakespeare, worshiping earth from ground that Shakespeare once performed on more than his own daughters. A reminder that Melchior’s birthday is the same as Shakespeare’s: he was “doomed to wear the pasteboard crown”.

In Dora and Nora’s journey from young pirates to old interlopers Carter entertains us with an extraordinary interlaying of art and culture that breaches the boundaries and suggests that you need “smashing legs” to play Shakespeare.

2.3 Female Narrative Technique and Time

In Wise Children, the present time accounts for many possible explanations of the past. Narrative technique is a general term that discusses the procedures used in the telling of a story. Examples of the techniques we might use are point of view, manipulation of time, dialogue, or interior monologue. Narrative techniques are the methods that authors use to tell their stories. When analyzing a novel, it is important to identify these techniques in order to shed light on the ways in which they function in the story. Although there are far too many types of narrative techniques to cover in Wise Children, there are a few types of techniques that can be found and are important to think about when beginning a novel analysis. Carter also used shifts in time in this novel as a narrative technique. When the storyline jumps backward to show something that has happened before the main events of the novel and that has relevance to the present story.

The central episode is told in graphic detail and real time by Dora. The time before and after, covering many years, is told in summary covering few pages. The shift of time and space reveals the change of relations. The aftermath of the party including Melchior’s departure, Lady A’s fall, Saskia and Imogen’s departure, which are told out of sequence, partly through old nanny’s phone call and later visits. Dora and Nora’s preparations for the party are in detailed real time but with plenty of nostalgia, regret and memory. Almost each chapter starts in present in dingy London with trip to cinema bringing back past glories. Then told in sections by Dora which set pieces the final party, the earth ceremony, Irish and Dora and linking sections covering more time that like the section “And now began a dreary time” about the endless rehearsal and shooting schedule.

The Magic Female Space

Magical realism is a primarily Latin American literary movement from the 1960s onwards, which integrates realistic portrayals of the ordinary with elements of fantasy and myths. The result of this is a rich but disturbing world that appears at once to be very dreamlike. The term “magical realism” was first used by German art critic, Franz Roh, who said it was a way of “depicting the enigmas of reality” and literary critic Isabel Allende has said that in magic realism we find the transformation of the common and the everyday into the awesome and the unreal. Professor Matthew Strecher defines magic realism as ---what happens when a highly detailed, realistic setting is invaded by something too strange to believe. The existence of fantasy elements in the real world provides the basis for magical realism. It is unnecessary for the writers to invent new worlds but reveal the magical in this world, as was done by Gabriel García Márquez.

3.1 The magical Hall of Mirrors

Else in her other works, girls and women are hugely troubled by their mirror images. However, in Wise Children, the mirror-image comes to mean more and differently than it has before. It means sisterhood, family, the kind of love that makes Dora want to survive and it means strength.

If we were to begin with Dora, as she is the narrator and in that sense the focal point of the story, Nora would, in many ways, be her mirror image. As a pair, the Lucky Chances are also metaphorical mirror images of their cousins, Saskia and Imogen. Hopefully, the sense of the vividly postmodern hall of mirrors is beginning to emerge in your mind -- with an added twist as the magical mirrors whisk us away to a region on the very outside border of realism, even as they add depth to the motif of inversions and reflections that have been introduced. “To reinforce this sense, add some funhouse -- one might even say carnivalesque -- distorted reflections of the central image of Dora in various media, from flesh through written fiction, to film, and hopefully the image of these reflective rooms will have solidified” (Hart, 2005: 32).

3.2 Adoption of Mythological Techniques

Angela Carter’s works are engaged in an ongoing exploration of the female’s relation to origins through the intersections of myth and history as discourses constructing gendered identities. The origin myths that have been handed down to us primarily reflect masculine desires, which support and help keep in place the patriarchal order in its repression of the ‘feminine’. In addition, just like Shakespeare tries to express his view by using the mythological in his works and many other humanists in the Renaissance advocating the bourgeois’ views by suggesting the rediscovery of the value of classic Greek and Roman literature. Myth is ubiquitous in time as well as place for Carter; it is a dynamic factor everywhere. So it is certain that those allusions have added abundant mysteries into her works. Just like Carter takes the potentially abject story of her own mother, Kitty, a mere ghost of a gone girl.

4. Contributions of the Mingling of Magic Realism and Feminism to the Novel’s Themes

In effect, magic realism is as its name implies. It is not marvelous in the scene of fantasy and if realism is a mirror of the real world, then magic realism is just like a warping one. Comparing the cruel life to actual world through magical reflection, so many fantastic events happening in the magical realism works depend on the reality of daily life. As critic Luis Leal notes that in magical realism, the writer confronts reality and tries to untangle it, to discover what is mysterious in things, in life, in human acts.

As a literary form, magical realism actually is a mode of writing that combines social reality with fantasy and it conveys the truth beyond the surface of everyday. Magic realism aims to re-imagine the world and it is not an escapist literature but rather a chance to see the extraordinary things every day.

4.1 Deconstruction of the Other and Male-dominated World

Carter specifically challenges how origin of the other are employed as a means of reinforcing those boundaries that distinguish ‘man’ from his ‘others’ (Hardin, 1994:23). Thus, for Carter, as well as various feminists, the question of origins becomes necessarily centered on dismantling the master narratives that have been used to reinforce patriarchal representations of women. The exploration of the other is necessary and useful in exposing the violent and often perverse drives underlying human desire, and how those desires construct human relationships and identities. Angela Carter’s own use and abuse of the other is primarily concerned with deconstructing “the social fictions that regulate our lives”. Through constructing alternative relations to both the mother and father, Carter suggests how this might provide a different model for relations between self and other. Furthermore, in Wise Children Carter makes us to know that we need to remain highly self-critical. In Wise Children, Dora manages to construct her own origin narrative, she must struggle against the allure of the paternal law, which offers the daughter legitimacy but at the expense of a continuing repression of the mother’s role in contributing to the child’s subject-identification.

4.2 Life as carnival

Carter uses the carnivalesque to illustrate some of her points about social boundaries, such as illegitimacy and highbrow/lowbrow. Important instances include the scene at the burning mansion, where she describes the “orgiastic” element to the scene, using images of the “flickering flames” to emphasize this: the highbrow party and mansion is reduced to a ruined, passionate near-orgy by the fire and the breaking of social boundaries. (Xia Zhong xian, 2009: 18) This is similar to the final chapter when Dora and Perry have sex, as Nora says she wishes Dora would “fuck the house down”: as well as physically damaging the Hazard residence, Dora and Perry having sex almost brings down the divide between the highbrow and lowbrow sides of the family.

The final party and ceremony masked and mistaken the identity, Melchior in the crown. In the second chapter of Wise Children, Carter describes Melchior:

My crown, my foolish crown, my paper crown of a king of shreds and patches,’ he lamented. ‘The crown my father wore as Lear - to have survived so many deaths, so much heartbreak, so many travels ... and now, gone up in smoke! Oh, my dear girl, we mummers are such simple folk ... Superstitious as little children. The fire was welcome to take everything, the frills and furbelows, the cloisonne, the Elizabethan oak ... but, oh, my crown! That cardboard crown, with gold paint peeling off. Do you know, can you guess, my dear, how much it meant to me? More than wealth, or fame, or women, or children ... (105).

4.3 Divisions

4.3.1 Duality and pairs

To some extent, everything in Wise Children is about duality, it has copious amounts of twins and this twin theme mirrors the themes of illegitimacy versus legitimacy, upper class and lower class, illusion and reality. Twins are difficult to avoid in Wise Children. The symmetry derives from the pairing off of so many characters, while the pandemonium emerges from the mistaken identities, the inversions and the turnabouts that ensue as the twins in this story. Before we discuss their significance, we had better print out the inventory for easy reference when reading about the various twins in the story. When it comes to the twinning dualities, the comic and tragic faces of the theatre represents in Peregrine and Mechior. With Dora and Nora, the notion of reflection is advanced. They are metaphorical mirror images, in the sense that they are inversions of each other. These two live out those asymmetries as benign reflections of the other. As an additional duality, Saskia and Imogen serve as an inversion of the Lucky Chances themselves. They born to privilege and propriety, Saskia and Imogen are portrayed as unsympathetic and, in some cases, downright sinister. Saskia and Imogen cast their own mother out of her ancestral home, and it is Dora and Nora who take her in. While Saskia and Dora have squared off against each other from the time of Saskia"s infancy, while Imoge’s tendency towards dropping off to sleep under any circumstances contrasts with Nora"s “passion to know about life with all its dirty corners” (Carter, 81).

4.3.2 Legitimacy versus illegitimacy

Nora and Dora are from “the wrong side of the tracks” and were “born out of wedlock”, their father is “a pillar of the legit theatre” and throughout the book the twins are constantly trying to become legitimate and be accepted. However, Carter questions the concept of legitimacy, and whether it is just a perception rather than reality: even the characters that are seen to be from the legitimate side do not always act in a respectable way, for example Saskia has an affair with Tristram, her half-brother.

Saskia makes gibes about Dora and Nora being bastards, not knowing that they are bastards too. Perry adores Saskia and Imogen and tries to make them love him because of the blood tie but they give him nothing back. Melchior loves Saskia and Imogen because he believes they are his but ignores Dora and Nora because they are illegitimate. Dora and Nora love Perry but Melchior makes them feel “joy, terror, heartsick, lovesick”. Saskia and Imogen, accepted by society as legit, are monsters, selfish, evil, and dangerous. They have a hand in crippling their own mother and leave her lying at the bottom of the stairs.

5. Conclusion

Throughout this study, from the perspective of the mingling of magic realism and feminism, it provides a framework to study the magical realism and feminism relations reflected in the novel. The efforts invested in this thesis bring about three major findings. As an important subject matter in her works, Carter makes use of the fantastic to reveal the real world and her feminist ideas. The combination of fantasy and realism displays not only the social reality but also the co-existence between men and women.

In Wise Children, through the employment of the feminism, Carter subverts the conventional social norm about women and gender relationships and by creating a fantastic world. It mainly deal with the question: why Carter adopts the milling of feminist ideas and magical realism as her major literary strategy. The thesis finds that Carter’s concern with the relationship between men and women and Carter uses parody of Shakespeare to reveal those targets as instruments of domination, while at the same time undermining their legitimacy and authority. Fantastic female characters are the most impressive innovation in the novel. Dora and Nora, ‘Grandma’ Chance are the three typical subversive female images. The relationship between characters in the novel is thought-provoking. However, no matter what kind of people they are in this novel, they never treat women as the equal individual as themselves. So Carter wants to tell us that we still have a long way to achieve gender equality put forward by feminists.

Magical realistic writing techniques further deepen the feminist themes in the novel. In the novel, Carter also portrays many people who possess carnivalesque traits, for instance, the paired-images embodied by the Chance sisters as well as Saskia and Imogen. In the future study, different aspects of modernism can be combined to study her feminist ideas. In this way, the reader can have a more comprehensive understanding of Wise Children.

Works Cited

[1] Boehm, Beth A. “Wise Children: Angela Carter’s Swan Song”, Review of Contemporary Fiction, Issue 3, 1994.

[2] Cooper, Brenda. Magical Realism in West African Fiction: Seeing with a Third Eye [M]. London amp; New York: Routledge, 1998.

[3] Carter, Angela. Nights at the Circus [M].London Vintage Press, 1984.

---.The Sadeian Woman: And the ideology of Pornography [M]. London: Penguin 2001.

[4] Hardin, Clifford M, “The Other Other : Self-Definition Outside Patriarchal Institution in Angela Carter’s Wise Children.” The Review of Contemporary Fiction.30 Sep.1994.

[5] Hart, Stephen M. and Wen-chin Ouyang, eds. A Companion to Magical Realism. Chippenham, Wiltshire: Tamesis, Woodbridge, 2005.

[6] Sanders, Julie. Novel Shakespeares: Twentieth-Century Women Novelists and Appropriation. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001.

[7] Sage, Victor. Modern Gothic: a reader [M]. London, 1996.

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