One of the most widely studied novelists and short story writers of the late twentieth century, Angela Carter also wrote scripts, poems, and newspaper articles that have been gathered in collected editions, testifying both to her prolific production over the course of her twenty-six-year writing career as well as to the unabated interest in a writer who has become an icon. In his 2016 biography of Carter, Edmund Gordon lamented the posthumous canonization of the writer, that occurred upon her early death from cancer in 1992 at the age of fifty-one. It seemed, to him, to run counter to Carter’s life-long commitment to escape confinement to patterns and roles. Gordon was not the first to point out the paradox of mythologizing a writer who had spent her career debunking myths. Right after the publication of Carter’s obituaries, Merja Makinen warned against what she perceived as a threat to the subversiveness of Carter’s writing: “this concurrence of white witch/fairy godmother mythologising needs watching; it is always the dangerously problematic that are mythologised in order to make them less dangerous” (Makinen, 1992, 2). Indeed, in Carter’s 1983 essay “Notes from the Front Line”, she famously declared herself to be in “the demythologizing business” (2013, 47). The piece, which is often quoted and can be regarded as Carter’s equivalent to Virginia Woolf’s “A Room of One’s Own”, was written when she was forty-two with the hindsight of seventeen years of writing, thus offering the writer’s own retrospective analysis of her trajectory. In it, she explicitly parallels her gradual feminist awakening with the influence of the 1950s critical theory of Theodor Adorno and Herbert Marcuse. Her early work precisely mirrors the period’s Marxist-oriented critical pursuit of liberation from the yoke of ideology and the Freudian-based critique of “the social fictions that regulate our lives” (Carter 2013, 47).
Carter’s first novel, Shadow Dance, was published in 1966, roughly ten years after Marcuse’s Eros and Civilisation (1955) and Roland Barthes’ Mythologies (1957). Set in her birth town of Bristol, it pictures the bohemian life of 1960s counterculture in a combination of realism and Gothicism. Marc O’ Day initiated the grouping of Carter’s first, third, and fifth novels – Shadow Dance (1966), Several Perceptions (1968), and Love (1971) – in what he labelled the Bristol trilogy. Linden Peach has connected Carter’s use of the Gothic genre to Leslie Fielder’s 1960 essay Love and Death in the American Novel which features in the epigraphic quotes to Carter’s fourth novel, Heroes and Villains (1969): “the Gothic mode is essentially a form of parody, a way of assailing clichés by exaggerating them to the limit of grotesqueness”. Early on, Carter’s novels displayed what would become the characteristic feature of postmodernism, parody, while her interest in the grotesque would later develop in a fully-fledged feminist appropriation of the grotesque body. In the Bristol trilogy, however, the predominantly male point of view adopted by Carter and the violent fate met by the female characters – Ghislaine is murdered in Shadow Dance and Annabel kills herself in Love – testifies to her initial unawareness of gender bias: “there was an element of the male impersonator about this young person as she was finding herself” (Carter 1983, 48) while uncovering the power structures inherent to sexual relations that would inform her whole œuvre. Carter’s violent eroticism also draws its inspiration from the surrealist dissident Georges Bataille, who famously defended the Marquis de Sade’s publisher, Jean-Jacques Pauvert, in a 1956 trial, and published L’Érotisme in 1957. Carter was first and foremost an enthusiastic reader of both literature and critical theory, but also a translator, very well versed in French. Anna Watz has made the case for the major influence of surrealism on her novels by uncovering an unpublished translation of feminist Xavière Gauthier’s Surréalisme et sexualité that Carter started working on in 1972.
Carter’s second novel, The Magic Toyshop, published in 1967, was her first commercial success and won one of the surprisingly few prizes that Carter was awarded, the John Llewellyn Rhys Memorial Prize. The Gothic story of the Oedipal initiation to patriarchal subjugation of Melanie, an orphan turned into a live puppet in her uncle Phillip’s show, would not only become a recurrent trope of Carter’s fiction, but also relates to the poems she wrote mostly between 1963 and 1966 which Rosemary Hill collected in 2015 in Unicorn: The Poetry of Angela Carter. The eponymous ‘Unicorn’ offers a theatrical strip club variation on the Lady and the Unicorn myth in which the virgin is bluntly told at the end: “You can put your knickers back on in a minute, dear” (6). The poem itself was no doubt the result of Carter’s study of medieval literature at Bristol University from 1963 to 1965. Referencing Hoffman’s fantastic tales, Freud’s reading of “The Sandman” as exemplifying the castration complex, the myth of Leda and the swan and of the garden of Eden, but also Hammer films, The Magic Toyshop testifies once again to Carter’s vast readings as well as to what would become her signature use of parodic intertextuality and her postmodernist blend of high and low culture.
Heroes and Villains (1969) adopted yet another genre of popular fiction: science fiction. Set in a post-apocalyptic world, this novel of ideas opposes the surviving world of the Professors to the new world of the Barbarians with the mediating figure of Marianne, another variation on the bourgeois virgin who is kidnapped by the brute Jewel. The rape scene in the novel proved highly contentious with the critics debating its endorsement or rejection of masculinist fantasies. The polemical aspect of her work in relation to feminism would also be a constant in Carter’s reception within academic circles.
However, it was her experience abroad, when she spent two years in Japan between 1969 and 1971 thanks to a Somerset Maugham Travel Award, that raised her awareness that she “was, as a girl, suffering a degree of colonisation of the mind” (2013, 48), and thus turned to the demythologizing business to “write fiction as wom[a]n” engaging in “the slow process of decolonising our language and our basic habits of thoughts” (2013, 51). During this period, she wrote her first collection of short stories, Fireworks, published in 1974, and the novel The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffmann, published in 1972. As it happens, Barthes also visited Japan in 1970 and wrote The Empire of Signs in whose introduction he explains that Japan offered him a satori-like “situation of writing” “in which a certain disturbance of the person occurs, a subversion of earlier readings, a shock of meaning lacerated, extenuated to the point of its irreplaceable void, without the object’s ever ceasing to be significant, desirable” (4). Carter went through a similar experience which she accounted for in the autobiographic story “Flesh and the Mirror” which related to her personal situation while she was travelling in Japan, taking a lover, and would lead to her divorce from her first husband Paul Carter upon her return to England. The fact that the country and the mirror it extended to her refused to conform to her expectations and the role she had cast herself in provoked, as it did with Barthes, “a seism which causes knowledge, or the subject, to vacillate” (Barthes 1989, 4). The other stories in Fireworks lay the groundwork for Carter’s future fiction with its self-conscious feminist deconstructionist tropes such as performance (“Flesh and the Mirror”), artificiality (“The Loves of Lady Purple”), and metamorphosis (“Master”), while also reflecting a postcolonial sensibility in their treatment of the motifs of orientalism and savagery.
The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman, set in an unnamed South American country, contributed to Carter’s reputation as a magic realist writer. In the same vein as Heroes and Villains, it is a novel of ideas which opposes the Reality Principle represented by the Ministry of Determination and the Pleasure Principle materialized by the fantasies with which Doctor Hoffman assaults the Ministry’s city. The split between reason and imagination is exemplified in the epigraphic quotes to the novel which reference the analytical philosopher Wittgenstein along with surrealist writers Robert Desnos and Alfred Jarry. The novel thus gives shape to Carter’s understanding of “surrealist theory” as “a synthesis of Freud and Hegel” (“The Alchemy of the Word” 2003, 621), a “philosophical […] art created in the terms of certain premisses about reality” (622). Once again narrated from the perspective of a first-person male narrator, Desiderio, the novel also depicts the victimization of women in a variety of pornographic situations, objectified and mutilated at a peep-show or in a Sadeian brothel. The Japanese influence on Carter’s imagination transpires in the erotics of torture. Furthermore, her experience as a foreign woman in Japan which led to the realization that she “had never been so absolutely the mysterious other” and that “they value women only as the object of men’s passion” (“A Souvenir from Japan” 1987, 7) correlated her gradual estrangement from surrealism which, she realized, only presented idealized women figures: “I had to give them up in the end. They were all, with a few patronised exceptions, men and they told me I was the source of all mystery, beauty, and otherness, because I was a woman – and I knew that was not true” (“The Alchemy of the Word” 2003, 626).
Her last surrealist novel was published at the end of the 1970s, in 1977. The Passion of New Eve is, in Carter’s own words, her “one anti-mythic novel […] a feminist tract about the social creation of femininity” (“Notes from the Front Line” 2003, 47). Set in a post-apocalyptic North America where sex and race wars rage, it questions femininity as a performance with Hollywood transvestite actress, Tristessa, whose male identity explains her success on screen: “If a woman is indeed beautiful only in so far as she incarnates most completely the secret aspirations of man, no wonder Tristessa had been able to become the most beautiful woman in the world” (129). The sexist narrator, Evelyn, is turned against his will into a transsexual by former plastic surgeon turned eight-breasted goddess, Mother, who plans to impregnate him. As Eve, having escaped Mother, he is kidnapped by the opposite machist cult figure of Zero who rapes her, thus forcing “me to know myself as a former violator at the moment of my own violation” (102). Eve’s experience of reprogramming at the hands of Mother and her forced compliance to Zero’s requirements lead to the realization, inspired by Simone de Beauvoir, that “although I was a woman, I was now also passing for a woman, but, then, many women born spend their whole lives in just such imitations” (101).
In addition to exposing male violence against women and criticizing male desire in the media iconography of femininity, the novel also debunks the popular feminist myths of motherhood and Nature, echoing Carter’s non-fictional reflections in The Sadeian Woman, which she started working on in 1974. Its reception in feminist circles proved controversial for its exposure of women’s complicity with sexual oppression and its celebration of Sade as “a moral pornographer” encouraging women to free themselves from the burden of reproduction. The figure of the complicit woman would recur in her later works with the Juliette-like countess in furs in “The Snow Child” (The Bloody Chamber) or the murderess turned penitentiary head Countess P. in Nights at the Circus. The Hollywood iconography of woman as victim and butt of the joke is also treated in The Sadeian Woman with the series of Justine-like figures among whom Marylin Monroe stands prominently. Her comic films, writes Carter, disarm the threat of her sexuality through voluntary castration: “She has desexed herself by acknowledging how comic her own sexuality is; she is prepared to allow her tits and bum to turn into cues for raucous laughter, like a clown’s red nose and baggy pants” (78). Carter singles out Mae West as the actress escaping the Juliette-Justine deadlock with the “double bluff” (69) of her female impersonation who “made her predatoriness a joke that concealed its power, whilst simultaneously exploiting it”, aided by the disguise of “the middle-aged woman, whose prototype is the nurse in Romeo and Juliet” (70).
While creating controversy at a time when pornography was a heated topic within the women’s movement, The Sadeian Woman also marked the beginning of a fruitful and unending collaboration between Carter and the feminist publisher Virago Press that was founded in 1973. The essay was commissioned by Carmen Callil, the founder of Virago whom Carter first met that same year. To help the press start, Carter also authorized them to publish the stories written in Japan which formed the Fireworks collection (see Gordon, 221). As a member of the editorial committee at Virago, Carter would later promote fellow women writers, some of whom she encountered during the creative writing classes she started to teach at UEA in 1978, most famously Pat Barker.
The Sadeian victim/abuser duo would inform the collection of short stories published in 1979 that brought Carter unprecedented academic attention and cemented her iconicity in the eyes of the public. The fairy tale revisions collected in The Bloody Chamber were inspired by the translation work Carter carried out for Gollancz’s in 1976 of Charles Perrault’s tales. An article, published in New Society in 1976, “The Better to Eat You With”, anticipates Carter’s rewritings in The Bloody Chamber with, for instance, the depiction of Puss-in-Boots as “a Figaroesque valet” (2003, 556). During her research, Carter also read Bruno Bettelheim’s psychoanalytical interpretations of the tales in The Uses of Enchantment and would make their latent sexual content manifest in her own revisions. Once again, Carter’s work sparked controversy. Critic Patricia Duncker, especially, was very vocal in her condemnation of what she perceived as Carter’s endorsement of male sexuality as “the capture, breaking, and ownership of women” (7) in the tales that variously revisit “Bluebeard”, “Beauty and the Beast”, “Puss-in-Boots”, “Snow White”, and “Little Red Riding Hood”. On the opposite end of the spectrum, Margaret Atwood famously interpreted the collection as “a talking-back” to Sade (120) with the animal metamorphoses in the tales as alternatives to the “lamb-and-tiger dichotomy” (120), an image that Atwood derives from “The Tiger’s Bride”. The tales indeed read as variations on the predator/prey motif which is revisited through a variety of iconographies that have traditionally posited women as either idealized or demonized objects. “The Bloody Chamber” thus offers a diverse gallery of Rococo (Fragonard), decadent (Rops), and orientalist art (Gauguin) while “The Erl King” revisits Victorian Romantic poetry (see Linkin). “Puss-in-Boots” adopts the perspective of an operatic cat, a Figaro-like rogue, to demystify the romance of its human characters. A great number of the stories revisit Gothic topoi to contrast its “timeless eternity” with historical contextualization (“The Bloody Chamber”, “The Lady in the House of Love”) or with the intimate experience of duration (“Wolf Alice”), thus offering feminine versions of the coming-of-age story that debunk both the traditional male-focused psychoanalytical narrative as well as the literary bildungsroman. Carter would go on to publish two fairy tale anthologies with Virago in 1990 and 1992, working on the second book until her death. They were inspired by the nineteenth-century colour-coded fairy tale books by Andrew Lang. Their driving principle was to “centre around a female protagonist; be she clever, or brave, or good, or silly, or cruel, or sinister, or awesomely unfortunate, she is centre stage, as large as – sometimes […] larger than life” (Carter 2006b, xv). Carter’s work also started to appear on screen after the success of The Bloody Chamber. “The Company of Wolves”, directed by Robert Jordan, was released in 1984 with Carter writing the screenplay while “The Lady of the House of Love” was a reworking of a radio play Carter wrote in 1976, “Vampirella”. Carter’s work as a playwright for the screen and radio, and the opera libretto she worked on to adapt Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, was collected in The Curious Room: Plays, Film Scripts and an Opera (1996) and is the subject of Charlotte Croft’s book Anagrams of Desire: Angela Carter’s Writings for Radio, Film and Television (2003).
Carter would further explore Perrault’s use of the tales as “a vehicle for moral instruction” or “fables of the politics of experience” (“The Better to Eat You With”, 554) with her 1984 novel, Nights at the Circus, whose purpose, she said in an interview, was “to entertain and instruct” (Haffenden, 37). She correlated this specific purpose to the picaresque form of her novel which narrates the adventures of the winged woman Fevvers, nicknamed the Cockney Venus, touring Europe at the turn of the century in a Barnum-like circus. Carter’s use of the carnivalesque in the novel echoed the revival of Bakhtinian studies in the 1980s and the feminist readings of the grotesque body (see Russo). Analyses of the novel predominantly call on the topsy-turvy world of the carnival and the spectacle of the freak body. Similarly, in the collection of short stories that appeared a year later, Black Venus, Carter’s aim was to herstoricize the colonisation of the female body as spectacle with the title story reconstructing the life of Charles Baudelaire’s Creole mistress and muse, Jeanne Duval. The story “Overture and Incidental Music for A Midsummer Night’s Dream” heralded Carter’s demythologizing of England through the bowdlerization of Shakespeare in her last novel from 1991, Wise Children. Narrating the downfall of a theatrical dynasty through its music hall illegitimate progeny, the elderly twins Nora and Dora, the novel debunks the family myths both domestic and nation wise. Its title references Shakespeare’s phrase from The Merchant of Venice: “It is a wise child that knows his own father” and the novel may reflect Carter’s late experience of maternity, with the son she had from her second husband, Mark Pearce, in 1983. In this ultimate novel “written with her unique brand of deadly cheeriness”, as per the parting words of her friend and admirer Salman Rushdie, Carter said she had finally reconciled herself with “the Falstaff in [her] soul”: “All these years, I’ve had this deep conviction that I was the Prince of Denmark when, really and truly, I was Juliet’s nurse” (Kemp). Wise Children was thus a fitting conclusion to the development of Carter’s voice from tragic Sadeian Juliette to comic Mae West/Juliet’s nurse. A posthumous collection of short stories was published in 1993, American Ghosts and Old World Wonders, and the whole of Carter’s short fiction was collected in the anthology Burning Your Boats in 1995.
Works Cited
Atwood, Margaret. “Running with the Tigers.” Flesh and the Mirror: Essays on the Art of Angela Carter, edited by Lorna Sage. London: Virago Press, 1994, pp. 117-35.
Barthes, Roland. The Empire of Signs, translated by Richard Howard. New York: Noonday Press, 1989.
Carter, Angela. Fireworks. London: Virago, 1987.
––––. Shaking a Leg. Collected Journalism and Writings. London: Vintage, 2003.
––––. The Passion of New Eve. London: Virago, 2006a.
––––. Angela Carter’s Book of Fairy Tales. London: Virago, 2006b.
Carter, Angela, and Hill, Rosemary. Unicorn. The Poetry of Angela Carter. London: Profile Books, 2015.
Croft, Charlotte. Anagrams of Desire: Angela Carter’s Writings for Radio, Film and Television. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003.
Duncker, Patricia. “Re-Imagining the Fairy Tales: Angela Carter’s Bloody Chambers,” Literature and History, vol. 10, no. 1, 1984, pp. 3-14.
Gordon, Edmund. The Invention of Angela Carter. A Biography. London: Vintage, 2017.
Haffenden, John. “Magical Mannerist.” The Literary Review, November 1984, pp. 34-38.
Linkin, Harriet Kramer. “Isn’t it Romantic? Angela Carter’s Bloody Revisions of the Romantic Aesthetic in The Bloody Chamber.” Contemporary Literature, vol. 35, no. 2, 1994, pp. 305-23.
Makinen, Merja. “Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber and the Decolonization of Feminine Sexuality.” Feminist Review, vol, 42, 1992, pp. 2-15.
O’ Day, Marc. “Mutability is Having a Field Day: the Sixties Aura of Angela Carter’s Bristol Trilogy.” Flesh and the Mirror: Essays on the Art of Angela Carter, edited by Lorna Sage. London: Virago Press, 1994, pp. 24-58.
Rushdie, Salman. “Angela Carter, 1940-92: A Very Good Wizard, A Very Dear Friend.” The New York Times Book Review, 8 March 1992, p. 5.
Russo, Mary. “Female Grotesques: Carnival and Theory.” Feminist Studies/Critical Studies, 1986, pp. 213-29.
Watz, Anna. Angela Carter and Surrealism. ‘A Feminist Libertarian Aesthetics’. London and New York: Routledge, 2017.
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Citation: Walezak, Emilie. "Angela Carter". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 11 January 2022 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=5060, accessed 05 December 2025.]
