Angela Carter’s fiction is
often defined through her feminist re-writing of social conventions. Indeed,
Carter described herself as being 'all for putting new wine in old bottles,
especially if the pressure of the new wine makes the bottles explode' (from Carter’s
‘Notes From the Front Line.’) She does
this most notably in her 1967 novel The Magic Toyshop in which
the 15-year-old protagonist Melanie is torn from her middle class world
following the sudden death of her parents and flung within an oppressive familial
structure in which her uncle terrorises his mute Irish wife and her brothers.
Despite its misleadingly juvenile
title The Magic Toyshop is a sophisticated and well-written novel
in which Carter’s precise and focused writing breathes life into the mundane.
Like a painter, Carter is vividly able to create a scene in which she questions
almost every aspect of social convention. Gender, class, culture, patriarchy,
the nature of sexual taboo – not much is left unscrutinised by Carter, so much
so that the reader eventually feels as if Carter’s “putting old wine in new
bottles” is intended to shock, rather than being a genuine attempt to question
ingrained mindsets. Nevertheless, the characters do finally transcend
social constraints when placed in an alien setting. The Irish family, who
practise incest, gender equality and free love, are foreign, red-haired and
dirty and are therefore entirely removed from respectable 1960s British
society. Consequently, the reader ultimately feels that this social liberty is
unattainable within respectable means.
Undeniably, every line is
claustrophobically enveloped with symbolism and references to psycho-analytical
theory which causes the slowing of the plot. The theme of spying runs
throughout the novel and is clearly a nod to feminist theories of the male
gaze, whilst even the mundane act of an object falling is laden with symbolism:
“She said to the
Daisy girl with her big brown eyes: 'I will not have it plain. No. Fancy. It
must be fancy!' She meant her future. A moon-daisy dropped to the floor, down
from her hair, like a faintly derisive sign from heaven.”
Fortunately, this does not
reduce the effectiveness of the novel as a whole due to its focus being not on
the actual storyline, but on the message it attempts to portray. Nevertheless,
Carter’s anti-Patriarchal mindset teeters from the sublime to the ridiculous at
times, no more so than during the almost comical scene where Melanie, acting as
the mythological Leda in one of her uncle’s puppet shows, hysterically
overreacts to being raped by a wooden swan. As the novel’s genre is magic
realism, the reader is supposed to feel at this point that the puppet actually
transforms into the mighty Zeus. Yet Carter’s writing in this scene becomes as
wooden at the puppet itself, leaving the reader biting their cheeks in
amusement.
“It
was a grotesque parody of a swan; Edward Lear might
have designed it. It was nothing like the wild, phallic bird of her imaginings.
It was dumpy and homely and eccentric.”
Evidently, a home-made swan
puppet would be ‘dumpy and homely,’
thus Carter’s description is superfluous and serves no further narrative
function beyond prolonging the clumsiness of the scene.
Nevertheless, it is hard to
find fault with Carter’s style of writing as a whole, and her ability to evoke vivid
imagery without the use of clichés is one of the reasons why The Magic Toyshop is so encapsulating.
Her greatest descriptions revolve around Finn, Melanie’s romantic interest and
one of the more intriguing characters in the novel. His otherworldly air is
summed up beautifully through Carter’s alignment of him with both folklore and
mundane life:
‘Maybe his legs were hairy
under the worn-out trousers, coarse-pelted goat legs and neat, cloven hooves.
Only he was too dirty for a satyr, who would probably wash frequently in
mountain streams.’
Despite Carter’s tiring and
incessant attempts of pushing boundaries, The Magic Toyshop is
both a charming and disturbing novel in which a young, spoilt, virginal girl is
forced to accept the harsh realities of the real world and discover her role
within it. For many young female readers, Melanie is the female Holden
Caulfield, an accessible and likeable character who shares the universal woes
of teenage girls. Whilst Carter’s new wine does not necessarily cause old
bottles to explode, it is a task in itself to emotionally move on from the
all-encompassing, soul-absorbing world she creates.
-Claire Gogarty
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