Writings

Preamble

Right after ELT107, I was going to take the Level 2 poetry module. Then I heard that they were turning the module into an exam-based format starting this semester and I thought some terrible things about the department.

This being the first formative assessment, I had to keep my words under 1000, strictly. It is uneven in parts and not very well analysed in others, and one big issue was the lack of context (but which would have caused me to exceed the word count) behind each piece of analysis. It came back as a borderline A-.

What Carter Talks about When She Talks about Hailing: “The Courtship of Mr Lyon” and “The Snow Child”

Angela Carter’s “The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories” extracts “the latent content from the traditional stories” (Carter, qtd. in Haffenden 84) to foreground issues of gender and class. However, the extent to which she is successful in dismantling conventional gender and class ideas remains debatable. Through an Althusserian lens and a discussion of subject-making in “The Courtship of Mr Lyon” and “The Snow Child”, I argue that while Carter succeeds in deconstructing bourgeois domestic-marital ideology (in the former) and virgin/commodity binary (in the latter) at the level of syntax and language, she fails at the level of plot to reconstruct their replacements. In particular, Beauty fails because she reverts to the old ideology intact by the story’s end, whereas the eponymous Snow Child fails through erasure – she dissolves into almost nothing.

“The Courtship of Mr Lyon” destabilises gender and class subject ideology through syntax and narrative voice; yet, the plot ultimately reasserts them. The first clause of the tale fuses her with the space she occupies – “Outside her kitchen window” and positions her in domestic labour doing “chores in the mean kitchen” (Carter 43). Beauty is further subjectified successively by her father vis-à-vis “his Beauty, his girl-child, his pet” – placed in the same sentence fragment as the “white rose” she wants (Carter 43). The syntax here accentuates Beauty’s lack of agency by reducing her to possession, infantilising and finally dehumanising her before situating her as the equivalent of a commodity (which materialises as the price for her father’s legal aid). The male figures set Beauty up as both domestic labour and commodified hostage, yet the narration begins to resist through register and pronoun changes – it imperatively declares “Do not think she had no will of her own” (Carter 48). Beauty also returns to Mr Lyon “Fast as you can” (Carter 53) even when cognisant of the “perfect freedom, as if she has just escaped from an unknown danger” (Carter 51). The short imperative and “you” suggest both urgency and agency, as though the command came straight from Beauty rather than the narrator. Yet, even as Beauty acquires some agency, her domestic position remains unchallenged and in fact, foregrounded. In a mansion where “all the natural laws of the world were held in suspension” (Carter 50), she encounters “invisible gardeners” (Carter 48) and “dumb waiter” (Carter 49). The fantastic register renders the class labour sustaining the mansion invisible. Though Beauty is ultimately elevated to Mrs Lyon, her marriage naturalises the “army of invisibles” (Carter 50) hierarchy whose concealed labour makes possible this domestic fantasy. She finds herself “happy there” (Carter 50) and the story ends in their marriage, with the metaphor of “fallen petals” signifying her complete domestication and the reassertion of the status quo.

In “The Snow Child”, Carter similarly dismantles gender ideologies on a syntactical and intertextual level but leaves nothing reconstructed in place of erasure. The eponymous Snow Child is ritualistically hailed into existence by the count in a subversive reversal of the original Schneewittchen’s maternal desire through grief. The religious diction “immaculate” (Carter 105) further alludes to the image of immaculate conception as the count speaks the child into existence. This intertextual subversion simultaneously re-territorialises the conception within male desire and lends the outcome a religious layer of sanctity. Yet, this child is then devoid of interiority – the count “lifted her up and sat her in front of him on the saddle” (Carter 105) – effectively positioning her without acknowledging consent or personhood. The text denies her interiority – things happen to her and the count treats her as an object that “picks a rose; pricks her finger on the thorn; bleeds; screams; falls” (Carter 106). The asyndetic verb chain accentuates her complete lack of agency and echoes the spindle-prick idea of coded sexual awakening vis-à-vis Sleeping Beauty. Carter further subverts the scene by pushing the idea of a man coming to claim her to its extreme – the count “thrust his virile member into the dead girl” (Carter 106), claiming what’s left of her purity and leaving her to “melt” into a “feather” and a “bloodstain, like the trace of a fox’s kill on the snow”. These images in her dissolution mark her as prey fated to die. Ultimately, she represents the product and fate of the male fantasy – the destruction of purity and innocence without regard to personhood and agency. The tale offers only erasure, no reconstruction. Carter escapes neither the sexist language of the erotic nor the position it assigns women.

Synthesising across both tales, Carter’s deconstruction of gender and class ideologies succeeds through narrative language but their replacements fail through two distinct mechanisms – reversion and erasure. I argue this gap is deliberate because dismantling an ideology and replacing it are different labours. Collapsing them into a singular narrative of triumphant, empowered heroines with agency would have been simplistic. Beauty exemplifies a subject who has “in all consciousness freely chosen” her position (Althusser). Thus, she reproduces the ideology unprompted: collapsing the Beast – antichrist/“Gospel, Saint Mark” (Carter 49) tension into the sanctified reading, consciously interpreting Mr Lyon’s licking as “kissing my hands” (Carter 50). Where Beauty fundamentally cannot perceive an ideological position with which to resist, the Snow Child lacks interiority required to recognise herself as a subject. She exposes a limit-case for Althusserian subject-making. Before she can“turn round” in recognition (Althusser), patriarchal fantasy has already produced her as a disposable object instead of a speaking subject.

Seen through the lens of subject-making, Carter’s tales fall short in constructing a new language of desire and ownership that does not subjugate women. Further, Carter’s deconstruction via intertextuality privileges readers with the right set of cultural capital; taste and allusion-recognition here reproduce the class hierarchy the text is deconstructing. However, this read is bounded by scope. The eponymous Lady of the House of Love, for instance, escapes this ownership logic but loses her life. A better litmus test might be structural – can Carter’s re-vision of fairy tales escape the ideologies they encode?