Decadent daughters and monstrous mothers

Angela Carter and European Gothic

Rebecca Munford

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781526103451
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Historical Geography
• Index: History

Decadent daughters and monstrous mothers interrogates Angela Carter's feminist politics through the lens of European Gothic. It illuminates her ambivalent relation to her European literary forebears, reveals her rich knowledge of French literature and offers fresh insights into her literary practices afforded by newly available archival material.

1

Sleeping Beauty and the Sadeian Gothic

The storytellers have not realised that the Sleeping Beauty would have awoken covered in a thick layer of dust; nor have they envisaged the sinister spiders’ webs that would have been torn apart at the first movement of her red tresses.

(Georges Bataille, ‘Dust’)

To be the object of desire is to be defined in the passive case.

To exist in the passive case is to die in the passive case – that is, to be killed.

This is the moral of the fairy tale about the perfect woman.

(Angela Carter, The Sadeian Woman)

DESECRATING THE FEMINIST TEMPLE

‘The satanic marquis, the ghastly figure with eyes like burning coals and a heart like a gigantic torture chamber’, is the most troubling and absorbing of Carter’s literary forebears. This Miltonic description of the Marquis de Sade appears as part of an unpublished fragment in Carter’s manuscripts (BL Add MS88899/1/84). In it she positions Sade as father of a Gothic mode that is at once political and appalling, foregrounding his imaginative legacy in the work of Edgar Allan Poe but signalling his wider influence on the unrestrained recesses of the European literary imagination. Carter’s most sustained dialogue with Sade structures The Sadeian Woman: An Exercise in Cultural History. Published in 1979, this text is frequently acknowledged as representing what Sally Keenan describes as a ‘watershed moment in [Carter’s] thinking about feminism, a moment when her fictional narratives become increasingly bound up with theoretical considerations’ (1997: 134). Through an exploration of three of his most famous works – Justine, ou les Malheurs de la vertu (1791), L’Histoire de Juliette (1797) and La Philosophie dans le boudoir (1795) – Carter asks whether Sade ‘put pornography in the service of women, or, perhaps, allowed it to be invaded by an ideology not inimical to women’ (SW 37). In so doing, she investigates the possibility of Sade’s status as a ‘moral pornographer’ who ‘uses pornographic material as part of the acceptance of the logic of a world of absolute sexual licence for all the genders, and projects a model of the way such a world might work’ (SW 19). Such a pornographer, she provocatively suggests, would not necessarily be ‘the enemy of women’ (SW 20).

Commissioned by the then newly founded Virago Press, The Sadeian Woman was positioned quite explicitly as a ‘feminist’ publication. However, if it was Carter’s ‘feminist book’, it was, as Sage argues, one ‘also aimed against a certain sisterhood. Other writers during these years were constructing women’s traditions; it’s characteristic of Carter that she was setting out to identify and demolish one’ (Sage, 1994b: 12). In a more recent broadcast for BBC Radio 4, Carmen Callil, the founder of Virago Press, similarly recalls Carter saying that the publication of The Sadeian Woman would ‘shock the sisters’ (In the Company of Poets, 2011). It is no wonder, then, that Carter’s work was received with some enmity. Just as scholars such as Mary Ellmann, Elaine Showalter, Barbara Smith, and Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar were developing critical paradigms grounded in the recovery of female literary traditions, so Carter was turning to the Marquis de Sade, the eighteenth-century pornographer and architect of female suffering, to uncover a model of sexual freedom that demystified the cult of victimisation that she perceived in the work of certain women writers and feminist literary critics.

That Carter took Sade seriously as a theorist of sexual politics notoriously affronted some feminist readers, especially in the context of the pornography debates of the late 1970s and early 1980s in the US and the UK.¹ Some of the most loudly voiced responses to The Sadeian Woman were unequivocally hostile, accusing Carter of wantonly elevating Sade from the position of ‘multiple rapist and murderer’ to that of ‘artist and writing subject’ (Kappeler, 1986: 134). In The Pornography of Representation, Susanne Kappeler argues that, in offering an analysis of the textual machinations of the Sadeian pornographic scenario, ‘Carter, the potential feminist critic, has withdrawn into the literary sanctuary, has become literary critic’ (1986: 134). Sharing Kappeler’s disquiet about the ideological efficacy of literary criticism, Andrea Dworkin famously censures The Sadeian Woman as a ‘pseudofeminist literary essay’ and accuses Carter of entering ‘the realm of literary affectation heretofore reserved for the boys’ (1981: 84–5). For Kappeler and Dworkin, Carter’s engagement with the ‘literariness’ of the Sadeian pornograph in some way delimits the possibilities of her feminist critique.² In other words, both install an opposition between the aesthetic and the political (or representations and acts) that allows them to place Carter’s analysis of Sade’s work firmly within the masculine realm of ‘literary affectation’.

Dworkin in particular denounces Carter as part of a broader condemnation of the ways in which female suffering and victimisation are erased in critical accounts of Sade’s work that focus on the structural and generic aspects of his writing. This is an offence epitomised, for both Dworkin and Kappeler, by Roland Barthes’s Sade, Fourier, Loyola – a work that Carter includes in the bibliography for The Sadeian Woman.³ However, as I explore here, Carter is concerned neither with deifying nor with demonising the ‘divine Marquis’. Rather, like Simone de Beauvoir in the playfully titled ‘Must We Burn Sade?’ (1951–52), she refuses to make of him either a ‘villain’ or an ‘idol’ and, instead, is concerned with bringing him ‘back at last to earth, among us’ (Beauvoir, 1966: 4). Underlying her dramatic evocation of the ‘ghastly figure’ of the Satanic Marquis as a literary forefather is a serious feminist investigation of his contribution as a theorist of sexuality and power – one that does not rest upon a separation of aesthetics and politics, or material reality and representation. Rather, Carter’s analysis of Sade’s work resides in the Gothic space of ‘contradiction’ she establishes in ‘Notes on the Gothic Mode’.⁴

Although The Sadeian Woman represents an important contribution to feminist discussions of pornography, it also sheds light on the development of Carter’s textual strategies, especially with regard to the relationship between gender and genre. Here Carter uses two Sadeian women, the suffering Justine and the sexually aggressive Juliette, to explore the ostensibly dichotomous positions of the female victim and the female aggressor within a history of Gothic representation and discourse. Although the ‘Gothic’ is not addressed directly, its forms and operations are at play throughout the text (in, for example, its deployment of images of enclosure and entrapment, and its articulation of the deathly forces of sexualised power). Furthermore, Carter’s unpublished notebooks and manuscripts for The Sadeian Woman portray both Sade and his work in explicitly Gothic terms. His novels, for example, are described as ‘immensely long, immensely pornographic, immensely if bizarrely erudite’ and as a blend of ‘the Gothic tale and the moral fable’ (BL Add MS88899/1/84). This chapter is concerned, in part, with bodying forth – or awakening – the spectral presence of the Gothic in The Sadeian Woman to realign its political and aesthetic matters. To that end it explores the Gothic as a site for the intersection of Sadeian and feminist discourses of female victimisation.

The figure of Sleeping Beauty, as an embodiment of virtuous and victimised femininity in the Sadeian Gothic, provides a focus for this discussion. According to Hélène Cixous, Sleeping Beauty represents an archetypal image of female passivity that is reiterated throughout Western representation: ‘Beauties slept in their woods, waiting for princes to come and wake them up. In their beds, in their glass coffins, in their childhood forests like dead women. Beautiful, but passive; hence desirable: all mystery emanates from them’ (1996: 66; see also 1981: 43). A dormant subject on the brink of womanhood, Sleeping Beauty is an exemplary Gothic daughter, whose body is subject to the disciplinary practices fictionalised by the Gothic castle as a locus of paternal power. Most often interpreted as marking the sexual awakening of an adolescent girl on the threshold of womanhood or the onset of menstruation (see Bettelheim, 1991: 232), ‘Sleeping Beauty’ is an inevitably bloody tale. Revisiting the traditional fairy tale, I consider how the architectural thresholds of the fairy tale castle work to keep the daughter ‘in her place’ in the father’s house. Moving on to Sade’s Gothic, I explore how the passive female body becomes a source of erotic and deathly enthralment, subject to the bloody ‘prick’ of male punishment and violation without end.⁵ While Carter confronts the deadly boundaries of the Sadeian body/corpus in The Sadeian Woman, Sadeian inflections of ‘Sleeping Beauty’ reappear through her fiction, most strikingly in The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman and The Bloody Chamber. These Gothic re-imaginings of Sleeping Beauty do not return to find her immaculate, supine body in the ‘glass coffin’ described by Cixous. Rather, they visit her deathly and decomposing body in the dusty, mouldering space envisaged by Georges Bataille.

THE PATERNAL PRICK

Although Carter is best known for her re-imagining of traditional fairy tales in The Bloody Chamber, she was also an accomplished translator. Her translation of Charles Perrault’s Histoire ou Contes du temps passé (1697) as The Fairy Tales of Charles Perrault appeared in 1977 and was followed by a second illustrated collection, Sleeping Beauty and Other Favourite Fairy Tales (1982), which includes two tales by Jeanne-Marie Le Prince de Beaumont. Although Perrault’s ‘Sleeping Beauty and the Wood’ (1697) and the Grimm Brothers’ ‘Little Briar Rose’ (1812) are the most enduring versions of ‘Sleeping Beauty’, both are, to varying degrees, censored reworkings of Giambattista Basile’s ‘Sun, Moon and Talia’, a tale of necrophilia and cannibalism, collected in The Pentamerone (1634–36). In Basile’s story, the young and beautiful Talia is gazing out of her window when she sees an old woman spinning outside. She beckons the woman inside and attempts to handle the thread herself, upon which she catches a splinter of flax under her fingernail and, as foretold by the wise men summoned by her father at her birth, falls dead to the ground. Talia’s distraught father lays out his daughter’s body ‘on a velvet throne under a daïs of brocade; and closing the doors, being desirous to forget all and to drive from his memory his great misfortune, he abandoned for ever the house wherein he had suffered so great a loss’ (Basile, n.d.: 373). It is, therefore, at the moment of her bleeding – of the first ‘prick’ – that the abandoned daughter is immobilised within the father’s house. Another king, passing by the palace and finding it empty, goes inside to explore, where he discovers the unconscious, and seemingly ‘enchanted’, beautiful body of Talia: ‘Crying aloud, he beheld her charms and felt his blood course hotly through his veins. He lifted her in his arms and carried her to a bed, where he gathered the first fruits of love’ (Basile, n.d.: 374). In Basile’s version, then, the sleeping woman is explicitly presented as the victim of a necrophilic violation. Although the king returns to his own kingdom and his wife and forgets all about the encounter, Talia (still in her somnolent state) gives birth to two children – Sun and Moon. When one of the babies accidentally suckles Talia’s finger, rather than her breast, the splinter is removed and she awakes. Accordingly, the first part of Basile’s tale lays bare the sacrifice of the daughter, and the eroticisation of her passivity, that underlies this cultural narrative of adolescent femininity.⁶

In the unpublished notes for her translation of Perrault’s ‘Sleeping Beauty in the Wood’, Carter links the story directly to the ‘older, literary versions of the tale, in Basile’s “Pentamerone” and the prose romance, “Perceforest”’, which includes a similar violation of a sleeping woman (BL Add MS88899/1/82).⁷ While Perrault leaves out the princess’s conception during sleep, he makes two significant additions to the contextual situation of the Sleeping Beauty – both of which are paramount in Carter’s Sadeian re-workings of the fairy tale. The first of these is the detail of the one-hundred-year sleep as the sentence of immobility imposed upon the daughter; the second crucial adaptation is the addition of the thorny hedge, ‘so thick that neither man nor beast could penetrate it’, that grows up around the castle when the princess falls into her somnolent state and makes the castle (and the female body) impregnable (‘SB’ 20). This hedge opens only briefly to allow the prince who is destined to ‘have’ the princess to enter the castle one hundred years later and wake her up. As in Basile’s story, it is the aesthetic staging of the recumbent female body – hovering on the boundary of life and death – that arouses the prince’s desire:

At last he arrived in a room that was entirely covered in gilding and, there on a bed with the curtains drawn back so that he could see her clearly, lay a princess about fifteen or sixteen years old and she was so lovely that she seemed, almost, to shine. The prince approached her trembling, and fell on his knees before her.

The enchantment was over; the princess woke. She gazed at him so tenderly you would not have thought it was the first time she had ever seen him. (‘SB’ 21)⁸

Resplendent in her passivity and perfection, the Sleeping Beauty is cast here as a divine and untouched body, her radiant exterior linking her to the Virgin Mary who, as Carter remarks in her unpublished notes on Sleeping Beauty, ‘conceives with neither sin nor pleasure’ (BL Add MS88899/1/34).⁹ Perrault’s rendering of ‘Sleeping Beauty’ thus calls attention to the spectacle of the virtuous and virginal female body cast in relation to a series of corporeal and topographical thresholds. Encased at the centre of the narrative’s Chinese-box configurations (within the bedchamber, within the castle, within the hedge, within the forest), the deathly female body is located as the mysterious secret locked away at the centre of the Gothic castle.

The spectacle of the virginal female body within highly choreographed Gothic geographies becomes a more explicit source of erotic enthralment in male Gothic reiterations of the ‘Sleeping Beauty’ narrative, and especially in Sade’s depiction of Justine, where the simplistic boundaries demarcating fairy tale space proliferate into a claustrophobic Gothic excess.¹⁰ Barthes suggests that there is a ‘relentlessness’ about the Sadeian enclosure which both works ‘to isolate, to shelter vice from the world’s punitive attempts’ and also ‘forms ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• List of abbreviations
• A note on translation
• Introduction: Angela Carter and European Gothic
• 1 Sleeping Beauty and the Sadeian Gothic
• 2 Poe, Baudelaire and the decomposing muse
• 3 Dolls, dreams and mad queens
• 4 Daddy’s girls and the Gothic fiction of maternity
• Afterword: The Museum of dust
• References
• Index