[In the following essay, Goertz addresses the dangers for women of being objects of desire rather than active sexual subjects in Carter's writings.]

Vampires and sleeping beauties, winged trapeze artists and puppets, werewolves and showgirls—the female characters of Angela Carter's exuberant fiction assume a variety of roles, some from the conventions of realistic fiction but most from fairy tale and fantasy. By using magical realism with a feminist edge, she makes up for the rarity of the female perspective in initiation myths and quests for self-discovery. She portrays young women (and, in some cases, mature women) threading their way through their own awakening sexual desires, male desires, male threats, and self-knowledge. The way is filled with beauty and terror, danger and freedom. In story after story, one of the main obstacles that Carter's female characters confront is their treatment as objects, as things for men to look at, manipulate, and possess. Her protagonists learn that being an object of desire is dangerous, leading not only to a diminishing of the self, but sometimes to physical annihilation.

Carter discusses this issue on a theoretical level in her long essay on the Marquis de Sade, The Sadeian Woman, in which she says of his much abused character, Justine: “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” (77). In her fiction, Carter treats this theme in all its complexity. She acknowledges the pleasure as well as the danger of being desired, of being thought beautiful. She condemns neither women for wanting to be desired nor men for desiring them. However, as her protagonists examine their roles as objects, they learn more about themselves and discover ways to counter their objectification. At times they reverse the gaze and become the subject; at others they take control of their image and use it for their own ends. Looking at Carter's works chronologically, we can see that her treatment of this theme evolves through her female characters' increasing skill in overcoming the liability of their objectification by the male gaze.

Her second novel, The Magic Toyshop (1967), is probably one of the most delightful and disturbing coming-of-age stories ever written. It follows fifteen-year-old Melanie's perilous journey toward sexual awakening in which she discovers the reality of woman's position in an often hostile male-dominated world. Carter explores the way Melanie forms her self-image as a sexually mature woman: she relies at first on the role models of her mother and the images of women she sees in art and literature. These all lead her to picture herself as an object of desire—a pleasing enough fantasy when she playacts alone in her room, but a role that leaves her vulnerable in the real world. By alluding to a multitude of myths and fairy tales, including the stories of Leda, Sleeping Beauty, and Bluebeard (stories that Carter uses again and again in her fiction), Carter demonstrates the ways girls have as models women who are objectified and sexually passive.

When Melanie first begins to discover her sexuality, she fantasizes about herself as an object of desire. Early in the novel, she imagines herself as a painter's model:

She … posed in attitudes, holding things. … A la Toulouse-Lautrec, she dragged her hair sluttishly across her face and sat down in a chair with her legs apart and a bowl of water and a towel at her feet. She always felt particularly wicked when she posed for Lautrec. …

… she contrived a pale, smug Cranach Venus with a bit of net curtain wound round her head and at her throat the necklace of cultured pearls they gave her when she was confirmed.

(5-6)

Her model for adulthood is formed by the images of adult women in paintings: static images of women existing only because they were looked at by men. Carter's tone here is comic/lyrical, but later she will use similar images to show the darker side of Melanie's fantasy.

Melanie also imagines herself as a present to be opened by her future husband: “she used the net curtain as raw material for a series of nightgowns suitable for her wedding night. … She gift-wrapped herself for a phantom bridegroom” (6). This metaphor of bride-as-gift-object grows when Melanie sneaks into her absent parents' bedroom one night to gaze at their wedding portrait: her mother's elaborate dress is as elegant a bridal gift-wrapping as any fifteen-year-old could imagine: “an epiphany of clothing … a pyrotechnic display of satin and lace” (14). What more powerful role model of adult womanhood could a girl have than the image of her mother on the threshold of her sexual life? But again, Melanie's lesson on adulthood comes from a static image of a woman existing only to be looked at by men.

Melanie cannot resist trying on the gown, and this role-playing begins a highly complex and symbolic scene in the novel. Although the gown makes her feel beautiful, it becomes a trap; the veil of tulle is particularly confining: “She unfolded acres of tulle, enough for an entire Gothic Parnassus of Cranach Venuses to wind around their heads. Melanie was trapped, a mackerel in a net; the veil blew up around her, blinding her eyes and filling her nostrils” (18). She manages better with the gown, but after she accidentally locks herself outside in the garden, the gown hampers her climb up the apple tree to return to her room. She removes it, but the gown is shredded and bloodstained. Obviously, the scene has many symbolic dimensions: wearing her wedding dress signifies Melanie's attempt to replace her mother; her bloodying of the dress, sexual maturity both through menstruation and loss of virginity; the climb up the apple tree, her loss of innocence. For my purposes, however, the experience with the wedding dress is most important because it develops the theme of women's objectification: Melanie's vision of herself as woman lies in herself as gift-wrapped package presented to the groom. Her playacting in the dress, even though it makes her feel beautiful and womanly, ultimately demonstrates that her objectification usurps her freedom.

Melanie becomes especially vulnerable when her parents' accidental deaths force her to live with her tyrannical Uncle Philip and his cowed family in a seedy London suburb. There her seemingly harmless fantasies are echoed in her uncle's humiliation of her: he decides she will be Leda in his puppet show of the myth of Leda's rape/seduction by Zeus-as-swan. Uncle Philip's objectification of Melanie works on several levels: not only is she the victim (object) in a mock rape, but since her costar is a puppet, she is reduced to the status of a puppet. Moreover, this dramatization is all part of a show, watched by the reluctant Aunt Margaret and the rest of the family.

The costume Uncle Philip designs for her echoes both the wedding dress and her improvised role-playing as artist's model. Melanie herself makes the connection as her aunt starts measuring her for the Leda costume: “Melanie would be a nymph crowned with daisies again; [Uncle Philip] saw her as once she had seen herself. In spite of everything, she was flattered” (135). Indeed, dressing up for the role of Leda takes her back to the ecstatic days of self-discovery in the first pages of the novel. For the first time since moving to Uncle Philip's, Melanie observes “with interest” her developing body: through the diaphanous material, her breasts “seemed to have grown and the nipples to have got rather darker” (135). But her joy at her sexual maturing contrasts painfully to Uncle Philip's crude reaction: “I wanted my Leda to be a little girl. Your tits are too big” (136). By intruding into Melanie's secret world of pubescent musings, he violates her almost as seriously as he will later do with the swan. Melanie now discovers the difference between dressing herself for an imaginary Toulouse-Lautrec or “phantom bridegroom” and dressing herself for a real Uncle Philip: he sees her quite differently from the way she sees herself.

The objectification of herself which previously brought her pleasure has become a source of humiliation and danger. Melanie understands the danger more clearly as she considers her role as rape victim: “it was not precisely the swan of which she was afraid, but of giving herself to the swan” (154). This view echoes the discussion of rape in Carter's Sadeian Woman: “Somewhere in the fear of rape, is a more than physical terror of hurt and humiliation—a fear of psychic disintegration, of an essential dismemberment, a fear of a loss or disruption of the self” (60). By becoming an object of desire, Melanie has been made vulnerable to a complete loss of the self.

But The Magic Toyshop is not a tragedy, and Melanie suffers neither psychic disintegration, nor murder, nor a real rape. Nevertheless, the pantomime rape frightens her enough that she momentarily loses her sense of self. Afterwards, she has to “put Melanie back on like a coat, slowly” (159). The phrasing echoes a line in Yeats's “Leda and the Swan”: “Did she put on his knowledge with his power … ?” Melanie, however, “puts on” the knowledge not of the swan but of herself—a somewhat changed version of herself. Although Carter gives her no conscious epiphany, Melanie's behavior implies that she has rejected her fantasy of being gift-wrapped for the phantom groom. She has moved out of the passive case into the active. She gives away to Aunt Margaret her best dress from her pre-London life, as well as the confirmation pearls that had formed part of her costumes as Cranach's Venus and Uncle Philip's Leda, thereby divesting herself of her ornaments from the days of self-objectification. No longer the “young and inexperienced and dependent” (80) girl who entered Uncle Philip's house, Melanie now feels “young and tough and brave” (179). She has grown away from her dependency on the relics she once thought essential for a mature woman, and in the process becomes better able to determine her own life's course.

In her collection of short stories based on familiar European fairy tales, The Bloody Chamber (1979), Carter returns to this theme of the objectification of women and examines it in a variety of settings. In three stories in particular—“The Bloody Chamber,” “The Tiger's Bride,” and “The Company of Wolves”—Carter uses the motif of undressing to portray the power relations between men and women: who is looking (the dominant/subject position) and who is being looked at (the submissive/object position). Although the women in these stories live in a culture where the male claims the right to objectify them through his gaze, they learn ways to overcome this oppression.

“The Bloody Chamber” reworks the story of Bluebeard and his fated wives. Like Melanie in The Magic Toyshop, the unnamed protagonist/narrator of this story finds herself under the power of a tyrant who treats her like an object; however, unlike Melanie, this character has sold herself to the tyrant through marriage and knows it. She understands early on that she has been seduced by her husband's wealth, has been “bought with a handful of coloured stones and the pelts of dead beasts” (18), but she still embraces her lot in the first half of the story.

The narrator expresses her husband's power over her in terms of his gaze: “I saw him watching me in the gilded mirrors with the assessing eye of a connoisseur inspecting horseflesh, or even of a housewife in the market, inspecting cuts on the slab. I'd never seen, or else had never acknowledged, that regard of his before, the sheer carnal avarice of it; and it was strangely magnified by the monocle lodged in his left eye” (11). This description makes explicit the relationship between his position as observer of her and his attitude toward her as a piece of meat. But even as it objectifies her, his gaze also becomes the means for initiating her self-discovery: “I saw myself, suddenly, as he saw me. … And, for the first time in my innocent and confined life, I sensed in myself a potentiality for corruption that took my breath away” (11). Carter creates a similar exchange a few pages later (20) to emphasize the narrator's dawning understanding of her own complicity in her husband's domination of her. By seeing herself through his eyes, even as object, she becomes subject by turning her inward eye on herself.

In another scene, Carter shows the sexual as well as economic nature of the husband's domination: the narrator describes his removal of her clothing after their wedding as “a formal disrobing of the bride, a ritual from the brothel,” and connects it with images from his collection of pornography: “the child with her sticklike limbs, naked but for her button boots … and the old, monocled lecher who examined her, limb by limb. He in his London tailoring; she, bare as a lamb chop. Most pornographic of all confrontations. And so my purchaser unwrapped his bargain. And, as at the opera, when I had first seen my flesh in his eyes, I was aghast to feel myself stirring” (15). Although the narrator realizes with horror that she is aroused by her own objectification, she does not reject her status until she discovers the extreme result of this objectification: the corpses of her husband's previous wives in the “bloody chamber.” (Thus, curiosity, instead of the moral failing of the original fairy tale, becomes in Carter's story the means of discovering an important truth: that allowing oneself to become an object can be annihilating.) Significantly, at the end of the story, the narrator chooses as a lover a blind man incapable of imposing his gaze on her—although she says, “I know he sees me clearly with his heart” (41).

Although both Melanie of The Magic Toyshop and the narrator of “The Bloody Chamber” learn the dangers of objectification, they remain largely passive, the latter to the point of mounting the beheading block while waiting for her heroic mother to save her from Bluebeard. The remaining characters discussed in this essay, however, take much more active roles in choosing their fates, manipulating their images, and reversing or even erasing the subject/object paradigm of male-female relationships. In “The Tiger's Bride” and “The Company of Wolves” the protagonists' self-determinism counterpoints “The Bloody Chamber” narrator's passivity through parallel scenes of undressing. Whereas in “The Bloody Chamber” the narrator is undressed and gazed upon by her husband, the characters in the former stories initiate their own undressing and insist that the antagonist males undress, too.

In “The Tiger's Bride,” one of the two reworkings of “Beauty and the Beast” in the collection, the narrator's father loses her in a card game to the Beast. Fully aware of her status as object to be bartered in a male economy, she bitterly resents it. When she discovers that the Beast wants only to look at her naked, she laughs in his face and, in tones that mock the obscenity of his request, makes a counteroffer, to expose herself only from the waist down (59): even though the tiger keeps her prisoner, she refuses to give in to his demand. Only after the tiger removes his clothes (his human disguise) for her does she freely undress for him, after which she feels “at liberty for the first time in my life” (64). Even though the narrative is “inherently voyeuristic,” Carter has turned the power structure around, as Sylvia Bryant notes (448). Not only does the protagonist refuse to become the object of the gaze until she obtains the status of the subject, but she also narrates her own story: “the terms of looking … are significantly altered,” as Bryant asserts, because the narrator is now both subject and object (448).

Likewise, in “The Company of Wolves,” Carter's version of “Little Red Riding Hood,” the protagonist is in mortal danger of becoming the most vulnerable kind of object—the werewolf's dinner—when she takes action by removing her clothes and throwing them in the fire. This defiant gesture perhaps defies only her own fear at first, yet results in a positive outcome. Like the narrator in “The Tiger's Bride,” she laughs when the wolf proposes to eat her: “she knew she was nobody's meat. She laughed at him full in the face, she ripped off his shirt for him and flung it into the fire, in the fiery wake of her own discarded clothing” (118). By undressing the wolf, she puts herself in the dominant position, that of the subject of the gaze. Moreover, by burning their clothes, she determines their mutual fate, since that action makes them werewolves forever. In both stories, the protagonists choose to undress on their own terms. Avis Lewallan, though, argues that the “choice is already prescribed” since the characters exist in a male-dominated world in which the rule is to “fuck or be fucked” (149). To the contrary, I believe that the protagonists create an option outside this paradigm, for at the end of both stories their actions lead to amicable equality between female and male, human and animal. By trading sides of the subject/object paradigm, the characters erase it.

In her last two novels, Nights at the Circus (1985) and Wise Children (1991), Carter significantly makes her protagonists “showgirls”—a winged trapeze artist (“Is she fact or is she fiction?”) and identical twin vaudeville dancers, respectively. Of all professions (excepting modeling), that of showgirl most relentlessly places the woman in the vulnerable position of being looked at. Carter seems to have deliberately chosen this profession for her characters in order to explore their options for overcoming this liability. Although of all her characters these protagonists are in the most danger of being marginalized as objects, Carter depicts them triumphing through self-discovery and sheer force of will.

In the first chapter of Nights at the Circus, the winged protagonist, Fevvers, is an object not only to Walser, the main male character, but to the reader as well. Carter manipulates the point of view of the novel so that the reader learns to see Fevvers as a human being even as Walser does. In the first chapter, however, Carter compels the reader to look Fevvers from the outside and try to solve the mystery, “Is she fact or is she fiction?” As a woman who supposedly has wings, she is either a freak or a con artist, to us as well as to Walser who interviews her. Since she is by profession a spectacle, we are distanced from her and feel allied to the observer Walser: Fevvers is the Other. The narrative tone, moreover, conveys awe for Fevvers's larger-than-life persona, pronouncing her the “democratically elected divinity of the imminent century [it is 1899]” (12), and thus treats her more like symbol than woman. We find that almost everyone Fevvers comes in contact with gives her a role to play. The madame who helps raise her dresses her as first Cupid and then Winged Victory to amuse the customers; the proprietress of a “museum of woman monsters” poses her as the Angel of Death; a crackpot who buys her intending to kill her and absorb her life-giving essence sees her as the goddess Flora. Moreover, Fevvers promotes herself as an object, the Bird in the Gilded Cage. Creating wonder in her audience builds her ego, and it is good for business.

For the reader, Fevvers evolves from object to subject (as much as a fictional character can be subject, in the sense that we identify with her) because of shifts in the narrative point of view. As mentioned, the limited omniscient narration of the first section views her as a mystery. In chapter two of the first section, however, Fevvers begins to tell her story to Walser. Although she speaks within the third-person narration, she is in control of her own image as her story of her past creates it, and hearing her voice lessens for us the distance created by the perspective. In sections two and three, she shares the focus of the narration with Walser as, now a clown in the circus he joins to follow Fevvers, he begins a journey of self-discovery. In section three, however, the point of view shifts back and forth from third-person to first-person with Fevvers as narrator. Without announcing the shift through quotation marks, Carter begins the third part with Fevvers's voice: “How do they live, here? How do they cope with it? Or aren't I the right one to pop the question, I'm basically out of sympathy with landscape, I get the shivers on Hampstead bloody Heath” (197). This personal, particularized human reaction to the Siberian landscape helps us to identify with Fevvers rather than view her voyeuristically.

As the shift in point of view moves her from object to subject in the reader's perception, so the events of the novel teach Fevvers more about her status as object and ways to free herself from it. Early on, her comments about her job as a living statue at a brothel show her awareness of the dangers of objectification, but she also acknowledges that this is her fate and she must learn to cope with it: “I existed only as an object in men's eyes after the night-time knocking on the door began. Such was my apprenticeship for life, since is it not to the mercies of the eyes of others that we commit ourselves on our voyage through the world? … I waited … although I could not have told you for what it was I waited. Except, I assure you, I did not await the kiss of a magic prince, sir! With my two eyes, I nightly saw how such a kiss would seal me up in my appearance forever!” (39).

On three occasions in the novel, in increasingly subtle ways, men attempt to seal Fevvers up in her appearance. Carter uses these crises as organizing and structuring devices, pointedly situating each near the end of one of the three sections of the novel. Near the end of section one, she tells Walser about the first attempt. A rich lunatic buys her to sacrifice her in a ritual of his own invention that he thinks will make him immortal. He “apostrophizes” her as “manifestation of Arioriph, Venus, Achamatoth, Sophia” (81). Clearly, he desires her not as a human being but as a hodgepodge of the symbols he tries to impose on her. Her greed for the treasures he offers her allows her to be kidnapped. When she sees he is about to stab her, she escapes from this obvious danger by attacking with her own sword and flying away. Her courage and quick action save her; this heroine rescues herself.

However, she has not quite learned her lesson about the connection between men paying money for her and their treatment of her as an object, and so she falls into another trap, lured by a Grand Duke in St. Petersburg who tempts her with gifts of diamond jewelry. Although Lizzie, her wily companion/mother figure, senses danger in Fevvers's visit to the Grand Duke, Fevvers herself does not fear him until she notices that his hall lacks windows through which she can fly to freedom. He then breaks the sword that had protected her in her previous danger. She finally recognizes the Duke's plans for her when he offers her a tiny jeweled egg containing a gold cage in which he intends to keep her, making real her theme song, “Only a bird in a gilded cage.” He will use her own stage image to trap her. In one of the more surreal moments in the novel, Fevvers chooses instead an egg containing a toy train, which somehow turns into the real Trans-Siberian Express, allowing her to escape. After this scare, she repudiates her greed by throwing away the diamond jewelry he gave her. She has also learned to repudiate the dangerous image of the caged bird she created for herself.

Fevvers's near miss and her growing attraction to Walser precipitate a bout of depression and introspection in section three. Lizzie forces her to examine her identity, accusing her of becoming “more and more like [her] own publicity” (198). Lizzie reminds her that she must seize her freedom to create her own autonomous identity and refuse to be the object that her profession demands her to be: “You never existed before. … You haven't any history and there are no expectations of you except the ones you yourself create” (198). Since Fevvers is associated with the New Woman of the twentieth-century, Lizzie's message may be intended for all of us about to usher in another century and its even Newer Women.

In this last section of the novel, Fevvers must negotiate the most subtle danger of all, that of “throwing herself away,” as Lizzie puts it, in marriage, allowing the kiss of the magic prince to trap her in her appearance. Will her love for Walser be the same kind of trap as her greed? At the end of the novel, her and Walser's journeys to self-discovery converge, and she hopes that he remains malleable enough for her to shape or objectify: “I'll make him into the New Man … fitting mate for the New Woman” (281). As it turns out, neither can pin down or objectify the other, although the potential for doing so lies on both sides. During this critical moment, however, as they readjust their views of each other, Carter illustrates Fevvers's complex relationship to the gaze. First, she resists becoming either object or symbol to Walser and the tribal shaman who is his tutor: “She felt her outlines waver; she felt herself trapped forever in the reflection in Walser's eyes. For one moment, just one moment, Fevvers suffered the worst crisis of her life: ‘Am I fact? or am I fiction? Am I what I know I am? Or am I what he thinks I am?’” (290). Prompted by Lizzie, she spreads her wings, one broken and both molting (her trip to Siberia has “diminished” her), and astonishes her viewers. She fits neither the categories created for her by the shaman and his temporarily befuddled pupil, nor those symbols partly imposed on her and partly self-invented earlier in the novel. She has escaped the confinement of the objectifying gaze.

At this point, however, Carter pushes her examination of the gaze one step further. Although Fevvers fears losing her human identity by being “trapped in the reflection in Walser's eyes,” she invites and revels in the gaze of the tribespeople in the hut: “the eyes that told her who she was” (290). The difference between these two gazes, the one that diminishes and the one that “refreshes,” is not immediately apparent. Perhaps the villagers' gaze, filled with “wonder,” “astonishment,” and “awe,” does not categorize Fevvers, but, since it is more generalized, restores rather than diminishes her self-esteem.

As Walser fails to objectify Fevvers, so her plan for reshaping him fizzles out when she realizes that he has already “reconstructed” himself after losing his memory when their circus train wrecked. Moreover, the now-awakened but still partly amnesiac reporter no longer attempts to confine her as he fires new questions at her: “What is your name? Have you a soul? Can you love?” She approves of this new interest in her humanity rather than her symbolic value.

Until now, Lizzie's earlier question remains unresolved: will the obligatory happy ending—marriage—require Fevvers to “give” herself to Walser? The “Envoi” gives an answer. As Walser orally reconstructs his identity, including a reference to “my wife, Mrs. Sophie Walser” (294), he abruptly stops, saying “Oh!”—presumably in response to Fevvers's sexual advances. When he resumes talking, he avoids using the “married” name for her. Also, he is surprised to learn that, contrary to her insistence earlier in the novel, she is not a virgin. Fevvers has successfully controlled her image not only in Walser's eyes but also in ours. She feels so pleased with having fooled him that she lets rip a gargantuan “spiralling tornado” of laughter that magically creates laughter all over the world. Far from giving herself away, Fevvers has grown larger in her union with Walser, as shown by this cosmic laughter in the grandest of all happy endings.

Rory Turner has explored Fevvers's ability to be object of wonder without losing her humanity, and asserts that “she is full-blown symbol but she is also a living, changing, thinking person” (42): “She is a double symbol, one breaking out of the other. First, she is a frozen, virginal queen of ambiguity and wonder, a fetishized commodity in male fantasy without any room for her swarming subjectivity. Beyond that, she is grotesque [in the Bakhtinian sense], uncontained and uncontainable, a symbol that defies placement in any structure except finally the newborn anti-structure of freely given love” (48). By the end of the novel, for both Walser and the reader, Fevvers is more than just something to look at. Along the way, she also learns about herself as object.

Perhaps Carter felt that she made her fullest statement about the subject/object paradigm in Nights at the Circus, for the theme is muted in her last novel, Wise Children, even though the twin protagonists' careers as showgirls would seem to call for a more foregrounded treatment of it. However, compared to the previous works examined in this essay, Wise Children contains fewer passages about objectification. Carter does add a few new twists to the theme in this novel, though. Dora Chance, the narrator, and her twin, Nora, take more active control in their careers than does Fevvers. Fevvers emphasizes the portions of her life when she posed as a living statue. Moreover, she never fully uses or feels unrestrained pleasure in her miraculous wings. Ironically, she must conceal her powers to maintain her essential mystery, “Is she fact or is she fiction?” Her wings are a burden. On the other hand, Dora makes a firm distinction between passive posing on stage and the more active roles she and her sister perform. She bemoans the nudie shows at the “fag end of vaudeville” (59) that caused her profession to decline: “There was a law that said, a girl could show her all provided she didn't move, not twitch a muscle, stir an inch—just stand there, starkers, letting herself be looked at. … We always kept our gee-strings and our panties on, mind. Never stripped. We'd still sing, we'd still dance” (165). The activity of singing and dancing is of central importance to the Chance sisters; they display their art, not their bodies, and their art gives them pleasure in their lives: the last sentence of the novel, which is also a refrain throughout, is “What a joy it is to dance and sing!” Even though their profession requires them to be looked at, they maintain their subject-ness as active creators of art rather than objects.

Carter does not posit a world where women are free from the male gaze and their own objectifications of themselves, but rather worlds where women learn to deal with this inevitability. Awareness of the dangers is the first step, as she shows in The Magic Toyshop and “The Bloody Chamber.” Reversing the paradigm by making the male the object is one possible recourse, as “The Tiger's Bride,” “The Company of Wolves,” and Nights at the Circus suggest. But in these three works, too, the sharing of the roles of subject and object by male and female makes a happier ending. And, finally, the best protection against becoming an object, as the Chance sisters illustrate, is living one's life as fully, actively, and autonomously as possible.

Works Cited

Heroes and Villains. London: Heinemann, 1969.

Honeybuzzard. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1967.

The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman: A Novel. London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1972.

Introduction. Villette. By Charlotte Brontë. London: Virago, 1990.

“Is Santa Claus Really St. Nicholas or Just Some Jolly, Beery Old Elf?” New York Times Book Review 7 Dec. 1986: 7.

The Magic Toyshop. London: Heinemann, 1967.

“A Magical Moment in Prague.” New York Times Book Review 10 Feb. 1991: 1.

“Masochism for the Masses.” New Statesman 3 June 1983: 8.

“The Miracle Game.” New York Times Book Review 10 Feb. 1992: 1.

“Missing the Titanic, Drowning in the Bath.” New York Times Book Review 6 Apr. 1986: 7.

“The Mummy: Or Ramses the Damned.” New Statesman and Society 1 Sept. 1989: 31.

Nights at the Circus. New York: Viking, 1985.

“Notes from a Maternity Ward.” New Statesman 16 Dec. 1983: 25.

Nothing Sacred: Selected Writings. London: Virago, 1982.

The Passion of New Eve. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1977.

“A Ribbon around a Bomb.” New Statesman and Society 12 May 1989: 32-33.

“Rumors Come Too Often True.” New York Times Book Review 23 Apr. 1989: 14.

The Sadeian Woman and the Ideology of Pornography. New York: Pantheon, 1978.

Several Perceptions. London: Heinemann, 1968.

Shadow Dance. London: Heinemann, 1966.

“Tokyo: Choreography of Protest.” Nation 3 Nov. 1969: 476.

“Told and Re-told: Picture Books 2.” Times Literary Supplement 29 Nov. 1985: 1360.

The Virago Book of Fairy Tales. Ed. Angela Carter. London: Virago, 1990.

Wayward Girls and Wicked Women: An Anthology of Stories. Ed. Angela Carter. London: Virago, 1986.

Wise Children. London: Chatto & Windus, 1991.

The Second Virago Book of Fairy Tales. Ed. Angela Carter. London: Virago, 1992.

Selected Works about Angela Carter

Brown, Richard. “Postmodern Americas in the Fiction of Angela Carter.” Forked Tongues? Comparing Twentieth-Century British and American Literature. Ed. Ann Massa and Alistair Stead. London: Longman, 1994. 92-110.

Bryant, Sylvia. “Reconstructing Oedipus through ‘Beauty and the Beast.’” Criticism: A Quarterly for Literature and the Arts 31.4 (Fall 1989): 439-53.

Clark, Robert. “Angela Carter's Desire Machine.” Women's Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal 14.2 (1987): 147-61.

Duncker, Patricia. “Re-Imagining the Fairy Tales: Angela Carter's ‘Bloody Chambers.’” Literature and History: A Journal for the Humanities 10.1 (Spring 1984): 3-14.

Goldsworthy, Kerryn. “Angela Carter.” Meanjin 44.1 (March 1985): 4-13.

Haase, Donald P. “Is Seeing Believing? Proverbs and the Film Adaptation of a Fairy Tale.” Proverbium: Yearbook of International Proverb Scholarship 7 (1990): 89-104.

Hanson, Clare. “Each Other: Images of Otherness in the Short Fiction of Doris Lessing, Jean Rhys, and Angela Carter.” Journal of the Short Story in English 10 (Spring 1988): 67-82.

Kinmonth, Patrick. “‘Step Into My Cauldron’: A Chat with Angela Carter.” Vogue Feb. 1985: 224.

Landon, Brooks. “Eve at the End of the World: Sexuality and Reversal of Expectations in Novels by Joanna Russ, Angela Carter, and Thomas Berger.” Erotic Universe: Sexuality and Fantastic Literature. New York: St. Martin's, 1986. 61-74.

Lewallen, Avis. “Wayward Girls But Wicked Women? Female Sexuality in Angela Carter's ‘The Bloody Chamber.’” Perspectives on Pornography: Sexuality in Film and Literature. Ed. Gary Day and Clive Bloom. New York: Greenwood, 1986. 144-58.

Lokke, Kari E. “Bluebeard and ‘The Bloody Chamber’: The Grotesque of Self-Parody and Self-Assertion.” Frontiers: A Journal of Women's Studies 10.1 (1988): 7-12.

Mitgang, Herbert. “A Separate World in South London.” New York Times Book Review 7 Sept. 1986: 129.

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