SOURCE: Wyatt, Jean. “The Violence of Gendering: Castration Images in Angela Carter's The Magic Toyshop, The Passion of New Eve, and “Peter and the Wolf.” Women's Studies 25, no. 6 (1996): 549-70.

[In the following essay, Wyatt argues that Carter rewrites Freud's theories on female sexuality in The Magic Toyshop, The Passion of New Eve, and “Peter and the Wolf.”]

In an essay on life in the '60s, Angela Carter describes how she became committed to “demythologising” “the social fictions that regulate our lives”: “I began to question … the nature of my reality as a woman. How that social fiction of my ‘femininity’ was created, by means outside my control, and palmed off on me as the real thing” (“Notes,” [“Notes from the Frontline”]71;70). Her novels and short stories take on some of the master narratives that continue to construct femininity in Western culture—giving us, for instance, in The Bloody Chamber, reconstructed fairy tales that transform the original tales' helpless virgins into active sexual subjects. The best defense against a social myth is, perhaps, another myth: by telling the old stories differently, Carter both points up the age-old patriarchal preference for certain kinds of heroines—passive, inert—and sets an alternative model of womanhood in place of the old. If fairy tales are among the “mind-forged manacles” that circumscribe female identity (“Notes,” 70), so, to judge from Carter's essays and interviews, are Freud's tales. I argue that Carter rewrites Freud's story of a little boy's discovery of sexual difference in “Peter and the Wolf”, explores the narrative possibilities of Freud's concept of woman as a castrated man in The Passion of New Eve, and rewrites Freud's account of a girl's oedipal transformation in The Magic Toyshop, exposing the power relations masked by Freud's emphasis on female anatomical lack.

The castrated female body, a pivotal image in Freud's narratives of sexual difference, strikes Carter as a powerful ideological tool for inscribing and so insuring women's inferiority. On the other hand, the image of woman's castration serves Carter's own polemical purposes as a metaphor for the painful curtailment of a woman's erotic potential and active impulses when she accepts the limitations of the feminine role. Carter returns to the image of castrated woman again and again, addressing it as ideological issue, as narrative device, as image.

The Sadeian Woman, Carter's essay on pornography, describes the cultural reverberations of the castration image:

The social fiction of the female wound, the bleeding scar left by her castration, … is a psychic fiction as deeply at the heart of Western culture as the myth of Oedipus, to which it is related in the complex dialectic of imagination and reality that produces culture. Female castration is an imaginary fact that pervades the whole of men's attitude towards women and our attitude to ourselves.

(23)

On the one hand, Carter emphasizes the force of the physical image: because it is present to our imaginations not as metaphor but as anatomical fact—as “bleeding wound”—the image of castrated woman provides a powerful physical correlative to the cultural assumption of women's inferiority. In an interview, Carter attributes the image to Freud: “he could only think of women as castrated men” (Sage, 56). And it is Freud who is Carter's target when she is working the physical register of culture. “Peter and the Wolf” challenges the story of Freud's generic little boy, who discovers with horror that a little girl's body has “nothing there,” where the penis should be: when Carter's little boy, Peter, catches a glimpse of his girl cousin's body he sees what is there—and the text describes in precise detail the complex configuration of female genitalia.

On the other hand, the passage from The Sadeian Woman reveals Carter's interest in the way that the image of woman as castrate interacts with other mythic images “in the complex dialectic of imagination and reality” that sustains patriarchy. It is Lacan, rather than Freud, whose theories are most helpful in understanding Carter's reflections on the cultural uses of the castrated woman image. The Magic Toyshop not only describes what lures are offered, what pressures exerted, to seduce and coerce a girl into accepting the limitations of femininity. It also explores how woman as castrated, silenced object supports the ideal of masculinity as mastery, self-sufficiency, control. But it offers an alternative as well, a deviation that upsets the power balance of gender: a young man, refusing to aspire to the mastery his gender entitles him to, rejects the phallic legacy—most graphically by chopping off and throwing away a clear and obvious symbol of the phallus.

CARTER'S DIALOGUE WITH FREUD: “PETER AND THE WOLF” AND THE PASSION OF NEW EVE

In “Peter and the Wolf,” as I read it, Carter challenges Freud's image of woman as castrate, attempting to displace it by entering into the cultural imaginary her own picture of an intact female body. In Freud's narrative of sexual discovery, a boy catches sight of a little girl's genitals, and seeing there no penis assumes she has been castrated; the idea that castration could be visited upon him, too, precipitates the boy's flight from his mother and his alignment with his father's authority, resolving the oedipal crisis and positioning him appropriately in the sex/gender system. Throughout Freud's many versions of this story, he endorses the small boy's “recognition that women are castrated” (“Passing,” 179), referring in his own voice to the “discovery of her organic inferiority” (“Female Sexuality,” 200), “the reality of castration” (“Infantile,” 231; 275), “the fact of her castration” (“Inhibitions,” 123; “Anatomical,” 188; “Female Sexuality,” 202).¹ Backed by Freud's authority, the fiction of female castration probably influences not only men's images of women, but, as Carter says in the passage quoted above, “our attitudes toward ourselves.” That is, the material terms in which woman's inferiority has been encoded undermine the bodily basis of woman's self-esteem, giving her a foundational sense of inferiority.

“Peter and the Wolf” attempts to revise this founding narrative of sexual difference by articulating the female genitalia as material presence. The plot need concern us only insofar as it brings about an encounter between Peter, a seven-year-old boy, and his cousin of the same age, who has been raised by wolves. When the family traps her and brings her into their house, she sits on the hearth howling for her brethren wolves:

Peter's heart gave a hop, a skip, so that he had a sensation of falling; … he could not take his eyes off the sight of the crevice of her girl-child's sex, that was perfectly visible to him as she sat there square on the base of her spine. … Her lips opened up as she howled so that she offered him, without her own intention or volition, a view of a set of Chinese boxes of whorled flesh that seemed to open one upon another into herself, drawing him into an inner, secret place in which destination perpetually receded before him, his first, devastating, vertiginous intimation of infinity.

(83)

Carter answers Freud's “no thing” with a complex whorl of fleshly things, his “nothing” with a material “infinity.” (Carter may be deliberately troping Freud here, her intact wolf girl playing off the figure of castrated wolf central to the “Wolf Man's” castration anxiety dream. [“Infantile,” 213-234]).

Carter revises the male look crucial to the oedipal turn. Peter doesn't reduce female difference to a logic of the same (having/not having the penis): he sees his cousin's vagina in all its “puzzling otherness,” its “unresolved materiality,” its heterogeneity (Gallop, 61).² Freud's cognitive alliance with the little boy who sees only that the girl's body is penis-less leaves him open to the criticism (made most persuasively by Irigaray) that he himself refuses to see what is there: if the female genitalia were admitted “as the signifier of the possibility of an other libidinal economy” (Speculum, 48), the social and linguistic categories constructed along the axis presence/absence—in fact the whole system of phallocentric meanings—would collapse. Indeed, when Peter, years later, gets a second glimpse of his cousin's radically other sexuality he ceases to believe in the masculinist systems—Catholic theology and Latin language—he has lived by: “What would he do at the seminary, now? … He experienced the vertigo of freedom” (86). He enters a world unmapped by linguistic and doctrinal meanings, a world wide open to his discovery (87). Carter's story suggests that the vision of real difference, taken in without denial or defensive categorization, opens the mind to the previously unsignified, springing the subject free from established categories of thought.

“Peter and the Wolf” performs an important service for women by honoring the female body through representation. If representation governs what we believe in as real, the absence of representation has the effect of erasing reality. The occlusion of female sex organs from cultural representations, as well as their resurgence in pornography as a “desexed hole” (Sadeian Woman, 20), has doubtless diminished female sexual capacity and undermined female self-esteem. Michele Montrelay's “Inquiry into Femininity” implies that verbal articulation is a crucial dimension of sexuality itself. Claiming that women generally have a “blank” where a representation of their sexuality should be, she cites several cases recorded by Maria Torok in which a female patient, following a session in which the analyst provides a description of her sexuality, has a dream which includes orgasm. Apparently a dialectic between body and word is necessary to a full experience of physical sensation. “Pleasure is the effect of the word of the other” (Montrelay, 95): hence the pleasure that women readers (at least this reader) derive from Carter's description. By entering the female body into a structuring discourse, Carter supplies a missing dimension of female sexual identity.

The Passion of New Eve deals with a literal castration: Evelyn, a man, is surgically deprived of his penis, and a female anatomy is constructed on the basis of that castrated body: he becomes Eve. Carter seems to be giving body to Freud's myth of woman as a castrated man and so reinforcing it—till it becomes evident that Eve, “the perfect woman,” is constructed according to the specifications of male desire. The relevant question then becomes, Why does man (including Freud) need to represent woman as castrated?

Feminist answers to this question begin with de Beauvoir's notion of woman as man's other: a man needs a defective other to reflect back to him his own full manly reality (xxiii). If woman's lack is integral to a male sense of sufficiency, then it is imperative to make a plausible case for her deficiency: what more convincing way to argue the inferiority of woman than to ground that inferiority in her body? It then seems to be a part of factual reality—irrefutable. Freud's insistent iteration of “the fact of her castration” then responds to a cultural imperative. (Thomas Laqueur's work shows that women's social subordination has always been encoded as genital inferiority. Before European science discovered her difference, it was her similarity to men that established her inferior status: pre-eighteenth century medical texts describe woman's uterus, ovaries, and vagina, as inverted and inferior imitations of, respectively, the male scrotum, testicles, and penis [4,25-62,236].)

Lacan carries the logic of the other one step further. In his lexicon everyone is “castrated”—but masculinity is founded on the denial of that fundamental lack. “Castration” is the founding term of subjectivity: when a child enters language and the social order it loses the direct and immediate relation to things (including the mother's body) that it had before signifiers intervened; and it is divided from itself, losing to the unconscious the part of the self split off from the socially determined narrow “I” of the linguistic register. The subject feels the loss of an originary wholeness, imagined retrospectively, from a site within the symbolic order, as a lost unity with the maternal body. “Through his relationship to the signifier, the subject is deprived of something of himself, of his very life” (Lacan, “Desire,” 28.) “Castration” in the Lacanian system represents the loss of that part one thought one had, the vital part that made one whole, “that pound of flesh which is mortgaged in [the subject's] relationship to the signifier” (Lacan, “Desire,” 28). The relevant point here is that no one retains the “pound of flesh,” no one has the missing link to completeness: “no one has the phallus—it is a signifier, the initial signifier of ‘the lack-in-being that determines the subject's relation to the signifier’” (Lacan, Ecrits, 710; qt. in Heath, 52). But conventional masculinity is founded on a pretense of wholeness, and on a pretension to the phallus as the insignia of masculine power, authority, and invulnerability—founded, in other words, on a denial of the “castration” that is the unavoidable price of entering the symbolic order.³ This affirmation of phallic intactness is both “central to our present symbolic order” and “precariously maintained,” since it rests on “a negation of the lack installed by language” (Silverman, 135-6).

The fiction that a man can embody the phallic ideal can only be sustained through a series of props—and the first of these is woman. “The subject is constituted in lack and the woman represents lack” (Heath, 52). In order to be “the woman men want,” then, a woman must put on the masquerade of femininity: as “the Real is full and ‘lacks’ nothing” (Lacan, “La relation,” 851-2), a woman has to disguise herself as “castrated” in order to appear desirable. In Lacanian symbology the veil constitutes the exemplary disguise: “Such is the woman behind her veil: it is the absence of the penis that makes her … object of desire” (Lacan, Ecrits, 322). The Passion of New Eve and The Magic Toyshop deploy veils as Lacan does—to signify the castrated female body whose lack confirms the value of what man has.⁴

In The Passion of New Eve the masquerade is literal: Tristessa, a Hollywood star who is every movie-goer's ideal of femininity, hides a male body beneath her veils. At the moment of her/his unveiling the narrator, Eve, understands that Tristessa has been “the most beautiful woman in the world” because “she” has been constructed by a man: “That was why he had been the perfect man's woman! He had made himself the shrine of his own desires … How could a real woman ever have been so much a woman as [he]?” (128-9). And what are the characteristics of this quintessential woman, this archetype of man's desire? Tristessa's attractiveness rests, the narrator says, on “your beautiful lack of being, as if your essence were hung up in a closet … and you were reduced to going out only in your appearance” (72). Here Carter spells out the meaning of Tristessa's veils: she is costumed as “lack-of-being.” She is equal to “the secret aspirations of man” (128) because she can act out man's lack—so he need not assume it. This Lacanian perspective focuses the otherwise puzzling behaviors of Tristessa on screen: throughout her many screen roles she weeps, seeming to “distill … the sorrows of the world”; her “melancholy,” her “ache of eternal longing” take on significance as elaborate rituals of mourning over some loss too fundamental to name (121, 110, 72).

“The woman men want” is a castrated woman. As if to hammer in the point, Carter doubles Tristessa's representation of lack with a literally castrated body: the narrator Eve, originally Evelyn, is (involuntarily) castrated, then surgically reconstructed as the “ideal woman” (78). Modeled on a blueprint “drawn up from a protracted study of the media,” including the Playboy centerfold, she is made to incarnate male fantasies of Woman (78, 75). Eve and Tristessa thus literalize the notion of femininity as a male construct. At their first encounter, the narrator Eve mentally addresses Tristessa in language that approaches the theoretical level of a Lacanian polemic on femininity:

The abyss on which [Tristessa's] eyes open, ah! it is the abyss of myself, of emptiness, of inward void … With her glance like a beam of black light, she ordered me to negate myself with her.

(125)

It is as “emptiness,” “void,” “negation” that “Woman” exists, as the negative sign—“minus phallus, minus power” (Féral, 89)—that establishes the man as the standard of positive value.⁵

BECOMING AN OBJECT: THE MAGIC TOYSHOP (I)

Beneath its patina of Gothic thrills, The Magic Toyshop presents a careful, if parodic, inventory of the practices, cultural and familial, that rob a young girl of agency—indeed, of subjectivity—reducing her to the position of feminine object. The fifteen-year-old protagonist, Melanie, puts on the veils of femininity twice: once before her mirror, where she decks herself out in the gauzy costumes pictured by various male artists, recreating herself as the object of their gaze (1-2); and again when her uncle Philip forces her to play a chiffon-draped Leda in a family theatrical.

Shortly after the novel opens, Melanie's parents are killed in an airplane crash, and she is placed in her Uncle Philip's household. Philip's only passion is making life-sized puppets and putting on puppet shows. Philip sees in Melanie the potential for embodying his idea of a naive young ingenue and casts her as Leda opposite his puppet swan in a production of “Leda and the Swan.”

I read this episode as a parodic enactment of the violence implicit in father-daughter relations. For despite its touches of the fantastic and macabre, The Magic Toyshop is at bottom a family novel. In an extreme but recognizable schematic of the lines of power in a patriarchal nuclear family, Philip's family is structured by his paternal authority. He effectively controls the time and labor of his wife Margaret and his “children”—Finn and Francie, Margaret's two brothers—from whom he exacts unquestioning filial obedience. His wife Margaret is correspondingly passive, without will and without voice (struck dumb on her wedding day, she has remained mute ever since.) When Melanie goes to live with them, she slips into the position of daughter to Philip. Given the hyperbolic imbalance of voice and authority in Philip's family, it comes as no surprise that Carter dramatizes the “daughter's” oedipal crisis in a way that heightens the power dimension of father-daughter relations.

The play, “Leda and the Swan,” fulfills the function of the oedipal stage: that is, it organizes Melanie's sexuality to accord with her gender role. And, as in the theories of feminist theorists like de Beauvoir, Chodorow, and Benjamin, it is the “father” who is the agent of Melanie's transformation from active girl to woman-as-object. As Leda, she goes on stage swathed in the white chiffon costume Philip has designed; and she is utterly dependent upon his voice-on-high for direction. “She halted, at a loss what to do next. … She prayed for a cue. Uncle Philip read out: ‘Leda attempts to flee her heavenly visitant but his beauty and majesty bear her to the ground’” (166). Melanie sees approaching from the wings a grotesque puppet-swan: “It was nothing like the wild, phallic bird of her imaginings. It was dumpy and homely and eccentric. She nearly laughed aloud to see its lumbering progress” (165). Crude or not, Philip's fantasy (as well as, by implication, the male sexual fantasies dramatized in myths like Leda and the Swan) is effective, holding the woman to her role within the male imaginary:

All her laughter was snuffed out. She was hallucinated; she felt herself not herself, wrenched from her own personality, watching this whole fantasy from another place. … The swan towered over the black-haired girl who was Melanie and who was not. … The swan made a lumpish jump forward and settled on her loins. She thrust with all her force to get rid of it but the wings came down all around her … The gilded beak dug deeply into the soft flesh. She screamed, … She was covered completely … The obscene swan had mounted her. She screamed again. There were feathers in her moutdh … After a gap of consciousness, she … looked around for her swan.

(166-7)

While the swan is, mercifully, not anatomically correct, the “act” of rape retains the psychological effect that theorists and survivors of rape report: that is, women experience rape not only as a physical violation, but as a denial of their humanity, of their agency and self-determination: “the real crime is the annihilation by the man of the woman as a human being” (Griffin, 39). The Sadeian Woman makes clear that Carter shares this understanding of rape: “In a rape … all humanity departs from the sexed beings. … Somewhere in the fear of rape is … a fear of psychic disintegration, … a fear of a loss or dismemberment of the self” (6). In The Magic Toyshop, then, Carter uses rape as a metaphor for the psychic “dismemberment” of a young girl. Like Gayle Rubin, Carter revises Freud's notion that it is the recognition of her anatomical lack, of her actual “castration,” that persuades a girl at the oedipal juncture to acknowledge her “inferiority” (“Female Sexuality,” 200); rather, oedipal socialization itself is shown as a castrating process that strips a girl of her active impulses, her agency, and indeed her subjectivity, reducing her to the feminine object required by a patriarchal social order.

For the play teaches Melanie to define herself as object: “The swan towered over the girl who was Melanie and who was not” (166). John Berger has given us the paradigm for this doubling: existing within a world defined by the male gaze and dependent upon male approval for her welfare, a woman learns to see herself as men see her, carrying “the surveyor and the surveyed within her” (46). But Carter's description suggests a still more radical self-division. “The black-haired girl who was Melanie” is the girl seen from outside, not from the position of “surveyor within her,” not from a subjective (if colonized) center, but “wrenched from her own personality, watching this whole fantasy from another place”—from a place that approximates the site of the male gaze; and “the black-haired girl … who was not [Melanie]” is the void within. Rather than being split into an object which is seen and a subject who sees, Melanie is split into an object—viewed from a male perspective external to her—and, perceived from within, a nothing.

At tea after the play, Melanie retains the consciousness—paradoxically—of an object. Since she lacks a subjective center from which to organize the world, reality hemorrhages from the things she perceives, flowing toward the subject who now organizes her as an object in his world. “The cake seemed extremely unlikely, a figment of the imagination. She ate her slice but tasted nothing. The company round the tea-table was distorted and alien … Everything was flattened to paper cut-outs by the personified gravity of Uncle Philip as he ate his tea” (169). There is only one subject now, and “his silence reached from here to the sky. It filled the room” (168). Since Philip is silent, giving Melanie no script (or rather, no voice-over) she is silent too.

The violence of gendering is usually masked by the dynamic of love that produces it: according to the feminist theorists cited by Nancy Chodorow, a father “bribes” his daughter with “love and tenderness” when she exhibits the passive feminine behaviors that please him and so gradually trains her to derive self-esteem from his praise rather than from her own actions—to become, in the familiar phrase, the apple of his eye, the submissive object of his affection (Deutsch, 251-2; Maccoby and Jacklin, 329; qt. in Chodorow, 139, 119). The idealization of the father as powerful subject in relation to a passive and dependent self “becomes the basis for future relationships of ideal love, the submission to a powerful other who seems to embody the agency and desire one lacks in oneself” (Benjamin, “Desire,” 86). By stripping the oedipal conversion from subject to object of compensatory fatherly affection and condensing a process of adaptation that usually takes years into the space of a single scene, Carter dramatizes the violence of the father-daughter relations which force the identity of passive object on a girl—a violence already implicit, if unexplored, in de Beauvoir's description of a daughter's normal oedipal resolution: “It is a full abdication of the subject, consenting to become object in submission [to the father]” (287).

The oedipal stage which transforms an active girl into a passive object is always governed by the needs of a male-dominant social order⁶; but the social dimension is usually hidden by the family's enclosure within a seemingly private space. Carter emphasizes that the closed space of the family doubles as cultural space by superimposing the myth of Leda and the Swan on Melanie's oedipal initiation. At a founding moment of Western civilization—for the rape of Leda engendered Helen, hence the Trojan War, hence the master epic of the Western tradition, Homer's Iliad—as in every girl's oedipal experience, Carter implies, woman's subjectivity is erased as she is inserted into the patriarchal order. As the exaggerated conventionality of his patriarchal traits suggests, Philip's puppet workshop represents more than a family business: it doubles as a cultural site where the myths that sustain patriarchy are fabricated. (Philip's other puppet plays also dramatize a particular idea of womanhood: in “The Death of the Wood-Nymph,” for instance, his chiffon-draped ballerina puppet is exquisitely graceful and then, in death, exquisitely graceful, silent, and quiescent.)⁷

If Philip's imagination is crude, incapable of reaching beyond the terms of brute power, so, Carter implies, is the patriarchal imaginary. Rape is a basic trope of our Western cultural heritage: by Amy Richlin's count, Leda's is one of fifty rapes in Ovid's Metamorphoses alone (158). And Yeats's modernist update of “Leda and the Swan” manages to celebrate rape as an act of power and beauty by eliding, again, the woman as subject. Leda is reduced to a body part, her sensations of pain and feelings of violation dead-ended in a synecdoche: “How can those terrified vague fingers push / The feathered glory from her loosening thighs?” Carter's clumsy swan is a joke on patriarchal mythmakers who dress up the principle of male domination in grandiose poetry—but it is a serious joke. Yeats mystifies rape as a moment of divine transcendence (“Did she put on his knowledge with his power?”) Carter shows it to be an act of brute force.⁸

That Philip represents a cultural site for the production of social myths as well as a domestic tyrant, that the “rape” of Melanie's subjectivity is meant to represent not just the plight of one abused daughter but the structural alienation of woman in patriarchy—these larger meanings are reinforced by the parallel between Philip's ideal of a womanhood effaced behind white veils and the diaphanous white costumes that Melanie designs for herself at the beginning of the novel, before her parents' death and her move to Philip's house. Melanie is just coming into womanhood as the novel opens:

The summer she was fifteen, Melanie discovered she was made of flesh and blood. O, my America, my new found land. She embarked on a tranced voyage, exploring the whole of herself, clambering her own mountain ranges, penetrating the moist richness of her secret valleys, a physiological Cortez, daGama or Mungo Park.

The metaphors of exploration indicate that Melanie is discovering herself for herself—her body an uncharted territory for her delectation alone. But the text immediately suggests the impossibility of discovering anything new:

For hours she stared at herself, naked, in the mirror of her wardrobe; … she posed in attitudes … Pre-Raphaelite, she combed out her long, black hair to stream straight down from a centre parting and thoughtfully regarded herself as she held a tiger-lily from the garden under her chin … She was too thin for a Titian or a Renoir but she contrived a pale, smug Cranach Venus with a bit of net curtain wound round her head … After she read Lady Chatterley's Lover, she secretly picked forget-me-nots and stuck them in her pubic hair. Further, she used the net curtain as raw material for a series of nightgowns suitable for her wedding-night which she designed upon herself.

(1-2)

The sequence of artists' names draws the reader's attention to the male hand, the male gaze, that direct and define Melanie even in the apparently unmediated act of self-exploration. Melanie continues to think of herself as exuberant subject when she is already part of a system of representations that defines her as object. “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” (1). Between taking on the man's image of woman and presenting that same image to his gaze (“posing for Lautrec”), there is no room for an autonomous female subject; such a closed circuit makes a mockery of self-discovery. Rather than ask, as Melanie does, “What am I?” (141), a woman might well ask, “What do I represent?” Limiting her analysis to the visual register of culture, Carter condenses the process of interpellation, dramatizing “the passage from cultural representations to self-representations” (deLauretis, 12.) Melanie accepts the culture's representation of woman as her own because she believes it will give her power—the sexual power to attract a romantic bridegroom who will carry her off to “honeymoon Cannes. Or Venice.” But when she fancies her veiled self “gift-wrapped for a phantom lover” (2) she unwittingly acknowledges her subjection. As passive visual object offered to the man's gaze, she is utterly dependent on his desire to “invest her veils” with “charm,” to quote Emily Dickinson. In fact (as Dickinson's poem goes on to suggest) the “charm” attaches not to the woman, but to the veil: the woman herself is meant to recede behind the identity of the veil, a screen onto which the male viewer can project his ideal of womanhood.⁹

Lacan's theory of the gaze, because it is also limited to the visual register, can help explain how Melanie “becomes” a representation—how she is interpellated into the symbolic order. According to Lacan's schema of the visual field (diagrammed in The Four Fundamental Concepts), when I look at an object an “image” comes between my gaze and the object: when I in turn become the object of the gaze, the gaze surveys me through an intervening “screen.” What is this image through which I view an object? What is the screen through which the gaze fixes me? Lacan doesn't say; but Kaja Silverman treats both image and screen as cultural artifacts (145-52). The first proposition obviously fits Melanie's case: she cannot see her reflection directly, but only in a form dictated by the culture. The second part of Lacan's algorithm seems at first not to apply: the other looks at me through a cultural screen—or, more precisely (since, Lacan says, the screen is opaque), the gaze fits me into the configuration of the cultural screen it projects upon me. But Melanie is alone in her room: that is what gives her the illusion of creating her own image in an autonomous space. Lacan goes to great lengths, however, to distinguish the gaze from any specific eye. He repeatedly insists on our status as objects of the gaze, even if no one else is present: “That which makes us consciousness institutes us by the same token as speculum mundi … that gaze that circumscribes us … makes us beings who are looked at, but without showing this” (Lacan, Four, 75). The gaze is all around us, a function of our existence in a visual field; being the object of the gaze is an inalienable dimension of human being. Although she is alone Melanie is nevertheless subject to the world's gaze, and that gaze fits her into a screen of cultural images. To credit oneself as possessor of the gaze, as Melanie does in this scene of presumed visual power, is to be deluded: “In the scopic field, the gaze is outside, I am looked at, that is to say, I am a picture” (Lacan, Four, 106). Further, Lacan implies that being turned into a “picture,” being mapped onto a background of pre-existing images, pressures us to adopt their forms. “If I am anything in the picture, it is always in the form of the screen” (Lacan, Four, 97). Carter literalizes “the process whereby the subject assumes the form of representation—becomes a picture” (Silverman, 148) by having Melanie mold herself to the shapes of the cultural screen, step into the canvases of Lautrec, Cranach, the Pre-Raphaelites.

Compared to his analysis of the gaze, Lacan's notion of the mirror stage is relatively straightforward: the child takes on, assumes as his own identity, the unified body image in the mirror. Carter gives the mirror stage a cultural edge as Melanie accepts the icon in the mirror as her own self-image. In a final veiling, decked out in her mother's wedding dress, Melanie jubilantly declares, “she was … the beautiful girl … in her mirror. Moonlight, white satin, roses. A bride” (italics mine; 16), and so embraces her function as a cultural sign in a symbolic system not of her own making.¹⁰ Visually articulated into the cultural screen, Melanie leaves the prolonged mirror stage of the novel's opening pages not as agent, but as object of the gaze: to borrow Lacan's phrase, she defines herself as speculum mundi, offering her bridal-veiled self as spectacle to the world's gaze. “‘Look at me!’ she cried to the apple tree … ‘Look at me!’ she cried passionately to the pumpkin moon” (16).

Melanie has already absorbed her cultural identity as object, then, well before she acts out Philip's script. Carter's idea of how “the social fiction of [her] femininity” is “palmed off” on a woman (“Notes,” 70) is by no means simple. She complicates the psychoanalytic model of a femininity produced largely through father-daughter relations by connecting Philip's ideal of femininity as veiled impotence to the representations of women in Western art and myth.

Philip's brutal theater of gender does add some important information to the messages about womanhood that Melanie gets from the better known artisans of femininity whose images crowd her solitude. Throughout the mirror scene, Melanie is seduced by a hypocritical culture's promise that dressing provocatively gives a young woman sexual power. Philip's dramatization offers a more realistic assessment of the veils' power. The rape of Leda by a figure of omnipotent masculinity illustrates the power relations that patriarchal culture misrepresents as love relations. As in feminist accounts of rape as a political instrument of oppression that intimidates all women, Philip deploys rape to “teach the objective, innate, and unchanging subordination of women” (Brownmiller, 5; Mehrhof and Kearon, 80). Negated as subject, Melanie is forcibly instructed in what the veils mean in a masculine symbolic system: they represent the erasure of the female subject, her transformation into a place-marker signifying lack. As Lacan suggests, the veils' allure stems from their capacity to suggest an absence beneath—to suggest the nothing that supports the something of man. “Adornment is the woman, she exists veiled: only thus can she represent lack, be what is wanted” (Heath, 52).

“DISMEMBERING” THE PHALLIC BODY: THE MAGIC TOYSHOP (II)

The Magic Toyshop offers an alternative as well as a critique of patriarchal sexual relations. Melanie forms a romantic alliance with Finn, her counterpart in age, status, and subordination to the father—her “brother,” in a word, in this family structure. Choosing the more egalitarian structure of the brother-sister bond defeats the aim of the father-daughter relation, which is meant to shape female desire to the passive responsiveness that sustains male dominance.¹¹ It is not that Melanie suddenly changes from the impressionable girl that I have been describing into an autonomous and self-defining heroine; rather, it is Finn who makes the revolutionary gesture of forfeiting the privileges of masculinity, opening up the possibility of a different relationship between man and woman.

During the night following the play, Finn comes to Melanie's bedside asking for comfort. He has destroyed the puppet swan, he says, and he is trembling with shock at his own audacity and with fear at the terrible vengeance that awaits him—for Philip loves all his puppets inordinately, especially the newly-created swan. Finn describes chopping up the swan and carrying the pieces to a park nearby to bury:

First of all, I dismembered [the swan] … with Maggie's little axe … the swan's neck refused to be chopped up; the axe bounced off it. It kept sticking itself out of my raincoat when I buttoned it up to hide it and it kept peering around while I was carrying it, along with all the bits of the swan … It must have looked, to a passer-by, as if I was indecently exposing myself, when the swan's neck stuck out. I was embarrassed with myself and kept feeling to see if my fly was done up … it seemed best … to bury it in the pleasure garden.

(171-173)

It is from his own body that the false “phallus” pokes out, so in chopping it off Finn refuses the masquerade of masculinity: he acknowledges his own castration. In the family structure, Finn is in the position of son to Philip, “apprenticed” to him ostensibly to learn the art of toymaking, but implicitly to learn the art of male dominance. “He is a master,” says Finn, referring to Philip's skills as dollmaker; but in the field of gender relations as in woodcraft Finn is meant to identify with the father figure, become “master” in relation to woman. (Before the play, for instance, Philip sent Finn to “rehearse” Melanie in the role of Leda—in other words, to play the part of the rapist swan; Finn initially complied, but bolted in the middle of the act). Severing and throwing away the paternal symbol is equivalent to refusing the phallic function. In Lacan's terms, Finn acknowledges the lack that is everyone's inevitable lot. He presents himself at Melanie's bedside as castrated—that is, as incomplete, insecure, in need of comfort: “Sick and sorry, he came creeping to her bed … ‘Melanie … can I come in with you for a little while? I feel terrible’” (170). Finn not only derails the family agenda; by rejecting “the affirmation central to our present symbolic order that the exemplary male is adequate to the paternal function” (Silverman, 135)’ Finn subverts the power relations of patriarchy.

A remark dropped during an interview suggests what Carter was up to when she staged this male castration.

But you see, one of the things I love about Charlotte Bronte, about Jane Eyre, is that she won't look at Rochester until she's castrated him … [Then] she's very nice to him, she can afford to be, this is where she can start behaving like a human being. Actually, in Freudian terms (not Freudian, Freud would be terribly upset) what she's done is to get him on an egalitarian and reciprocal basis, because in fact she hasn't castrated him at all, she's got rid of his troublesome machismo.

(Sage, 56)

Carter's nod to Freud's discomfiture suggests that she is aware of the revolutionary potential of shifting castration from woman to man. Freud would be “terribly upset” because he inscribed his notion of gendered power relations across the genitals, with the active penis representing the triumphant male subject and the corresponding blank representing a necessarily passive female space. Fixing the sign of castration on the male body, dispensing with a “troublesome machismo,” with the aspiration to invulnerable masculinity—with the phallus, not the penis—would shift the balance of power to which Freud subscribed, opening the way for an “egalitarian and reciprocal” relation between man and woman.

Indeed, Melanie responds to Finn's display of neediness with a new set of responses:

He must have been through a great ordeal. … “I have been in that place, too,” she thought. She could have cried for them both. … “You must have had a time of it, poor Finn.” She felt that somehow their experience ran parallel. She understood his frenzy. “Poor Finn.”

(172-173)

Finn's refusal to disavow castration has started a general collapse of the fortifications that defend the system of sexual difference. Melanie's recognition that she and Finn are alike undermines gender hierarchy. A founding principle of the sex/gender system, Gayle Rubin shows, is “the idea that men and women are mutually exclusive categories”; that social fiction contradicts “nature,” where “men and women are closer to each other than either is to anything else—for instance, mountains, kangaroos, or coconut palms. … Far from being an expression of natural differences, exclusive gender identity is the suppression of natural similarities” (179-80). Jessica Benjamin, analyzing the principles governing erotic dominance in “The Story of O,” finds that each act of the master “signifies the male pronouncement of difference over sameness” (“Master,” 288). Absolute mastery depends on absolute differentiation from the subjugated woman, especially on a denial of mutual dependency. In less extreme cases of male dominance as well, a man's fear of being demoted to the feminine position safeguards the system of sexual difference from an admission of similarity. “Psychological domination is ultimately the failure to recognize the other person as like, although separate from oneself” (Benjamin, “Master,” 283).

Finn is released from the fear that he will be reduced to similarity; he is already there. And Finn's renunciation of all claim to phallic sufficiency necessarily releases Melanie from the task of patriarchy's good woman—seeing and desiring a man “only through the mediation of images of an unimpaired masculinity” (Silverman, 42). The dangers to gender hierarchy of admitting resemblance are immediately clear, as Melanie moves from empathy to a geometry of equality: “their experience ran parallel” (173). The image of lives lived along parallel lines implies the replacement of hierarchy by a lateral relationship, “egalitarian and reciprocal.”

Angela Carter does not idealize the sibling model of erotic relations, either. A relationship with a vulnerable other who is needy like oneself entails giving up dreams of romantic love—and Melanie is reluctant to give up the fantasy bridegroom who would transport her to “honeymoon Cannes. Or Venice” (2). If the man doesn't have enormous power in relation to one's small self, then he doesn't have the power to sweep one off one's feet and carry one away to a new life. Melanie has to sacrifice transcendence in the passive mode.

They were peaceful in bed as two married people who had lain in bed easily together all their lives. … She knew they would get married one day and live together all their lives and there would be … washing to be done and toast burning all the rest of her life. And never any glamour or romance or charm. Nothing fancy.

(174)

If the other is not markedly different from oneself, there is no hope of a radical break between the humdrum present and a glamorous future—only an infinitely protracted dailiness.

In the light of Finn's “simple and honest” (170) declaration of vulnerability and request for comfort, Philip's conventional masculinity takes on the appearance of masquerade (or parade, Lacan's term for masculinity). The assumption of phallic identity—of a masterful, coherent and self-contained sufficiency—entails an impossible consistency: Philip is invariably overbearing, always brutal and insensitive, single-minded in his determination to control everyone—with no lapses, no gaps, no needs. His one-dimensional consistency makes the model of dominant masculinity look implausible.

Likewise, Finn's relationship with Melanie, based on a recognition of mutual need, throws a parodic light on the standard patriarchal couple represented by Philip and Margaret. Since Philip pretends to the phallic ideal, his wife must support the fiction by revering him as the phallic ideal: in Silverman's phrase, the “dominant fiction” requires that both the man and his attendant woman “deny all knowledge of male castration by believing in the commensurability of penis and phallus, actual and symbolic father” (42). Margaret attests to Philip's absolute power by applauding his omnipotence as puppet-master (128) and by maintaining a consistent show of shrinking, cowed obedience.

In other words, the parade of phallic sufficiency requires the masquerade of castrated woman. If the man is to deny castration, the woman must serve as the site where he can deposit his lack. Margaret's lack is indeed conspicuous: she has no voice. And every Sunday she puts on a rather literal masquerade of femininity, donning the necklace Philip has made for her. This silver necklace, reaching from shoulder to chin, is alternately described as a “choker”—it prevents any movement of the head—and a “collar,” worn like other collars in the spirit of subjection (112-113). Finn says that Margaret and Philip make love every Sunday: to attract the man the woman ornaments herself; but the ornament itself signifies her subjection to the man; and it is adornment as a sign of submission that makes her desirable.

Silent, passive, and compliant, Margaret appears to be the perfect “castrated woman.” But if such true womanliness is “a presentation for the man, … as he would have her” (Heath, 50), a question lingers: what hides behind the presentation? In particular, if “the masquerade … is what women do … in order to participate in man's desire, but at the cost of giving up their own” (Irigaray, This Sex, 133), what becomes of that displaced desire? Is there perhaps a hint of anxiety in Freud's question, “What does a woman want?”

In the concluding pages of the novel, the reader, Melanie, and Philip all find out what is behind the mask. Margaret and Francie (Margaret's other brother) are lovers: “They have always been lovers” (194). When Philip finds his wife in her brother's arms, he burns down the house. Given Carter's affection for Jane Eyre, the parallel with Bertha and her fire seems inescapable: female desire, forced into a patriarchal lock-up by a system of repressive gender roles, gains in intensity from its very suppression until it explodes from within, destroying the patriarchal family structure that confined and silenced it.

Finn and Melanie, escaping to the garden next door¹² while “everything” burns, “faced each other in a wild surmise” (200). This closing allusion to Cortez's discovery of the Pacific (in Keats's “On First Reading Chapman's Homer”) encourages readers to hope that the destruction of Philip's factory of patriarchal fantasies opens up before Melanie and Finn an uncharted space free of the old gender demarcations. Or does it? The opening page's metaphors of global exploration have taught us to be skeptical about the possibility of brave new worlds.

Critics have objected that Carter's early novels (The Magic Toyshop, 1967, Heroes and Villains, 1969, and The Passion of New Eve, 1977) critique patriarchy without offering any positive alternatives: thus Paulina Palmer comments that “while presenting a brilliantly accurate analysis of the oppressive effects of patriarchal structures, [the novels run] the risk of making these structures appear even more closed and impenetrable than, in actual fact, they are” by discounting all possibilities for change (180-181).¹³ I would argue that although Carter rewrites social myths in ways that bring out their hidden damages—the pain of Melanie's gendering, for instance, is not softened by parental tenderness—her revisions are liberatory not just because of their “demythologizing” effect: they also suggest alternative forms of masculinity—and therewith, since gender is a relational term, the possibility of revising notions of femininity as well. Both “Peter and the Wolf” and The Magic Toyshop picture what would happen if a male subject refused the privileges of masculinity. “Peter and the Wolf” revises the look central to male identity formation, substituting an active receptivity to female difference for Freud's defensive wrestling of difference into a familiar binary that separates those who have from those who don't. Finn's “castration” undoes the rigid structural opposition between man and woman, suggesting the possibility of distributing strength and weakness, need and comfort, more equably between the sexes. What Carter is unwilling to compromise or soften in these early novels is her depiction of woman's structural position within patriarchy: becoming a woman requires, in The Passion of New Eve, a literal castration and, in The Magic Toyshop, a “rape,” an alienation of a woman's subjective agency that amounts to a mutilation.¹⁴

Notes

1. Shortly after the publication of Freud's first essay on femininity in 1925, Karen Horney shrewdly observed that Freud's description of female development “differs in no case by a hair's breadth from the typical ideas that the boy has of the girl” (174). See also Luce Irigaray's analysis of Freud's “nothing there” (Speculum, 48) and Jane Gallop's commentary on Irigaray (58-9;65-6). Juliet Mitchell is more forgiving: she argues that Freud was consciously analyzing women's condition under patriarchal oppression; recognizing her “castration” meant recognizing her lack of phallic power (34).

2. Peter's way of seeing problematizes the Freudian concept of “disavowal.” As Freud defines it, “disavowal” is the boy's refusal to accept that the woman has no penis, to admit “the reality of castration” (“Infantile,” 231;275); that denial of “reality” becomes the basis of fetishism and the psychoses. If looking (as Peter looks, without defenses) in fact yields a view of what is actually there, then the term “disavowal” would seem to fit the perception that Freud calls “normal,” the perception that there is nothing there; and what Freud calls pathogenic “disavowal” would seem to be a refusal to deny what is there. (Admittedly, all this is complicated by the recessed position of the female genitals: nevertheless, Carter's story makes us question the pathogenic character of what Freud calls “disavowal,” as well as what Freud means by the “reality” of castration.)

3. A developmental perspective may serve to sort out some of the values attached to the phallus. The phallus signifies lack—the lack accompanying the accession to language and the symbolic order. But at the oedipal phase, the phallus also becomes implicated in sexual difference, with the father presumed to have it and the mother to lack it. So “having the phallus” would mean in the first instance possessing wholeness; secondarily, “having the phallus” would extend that sufficiency to include qualities attributed to the (idealized) father such as mastery and control (See Lapsley and Westlake, 72-3; Heath, 52-3). See also Rose, 38-9.

4. This essay deals with the veil as signifier in Western cultural discourse only. For the complex relation of the veil to gender and politics in Muslim countries see Enloe, Odeh, and Wikan.

5. Roberta Rubenstein makes the crucial point that Tristessa and Eve both suffer from the “recognition that each is an Other, an object constructed by others—as in a mirror or in another's gaze—and not a subject or self” (111). Rubenstein thinks that Carter's story remains too bound by prevailing definitions of gender to provide a “re-gendered” vision of human possibility (116). Likewise, Carol Siegel comments that while the novel insists upon “the constructed, anti-natural quality of gender,” it does not “release passion from determination by the concept of femininity as the binary opposite of masculinity or from the association of masochism with femininity” (12). Susan Suleiman, on the other hand, credits the novel with “expand[ing] our notions of what it is possible to dream in the domain of sexuality. … It is to the … dream of going beyond the old dichotomies, of imagining ‘unguessable modes of humanity’ that The Passion of New Eve succeeds in giving textual embodiment” (139-40).

6. As Irigaray says, “In the last analysis, the female Oedipus complex is woman's entry into a system of values that is not hers, and in which she can ‘appear’ and circulate only when enveloped in the needs/desires/fantasies of others, namely men” (This Sex, 134).

7. Bram Dijkstra documents the popularity of the dead beauty in nineteenth century paintings; the dead woman represents “the apotheosis of an ideal of feminine passivity and helplessness” (36). See also Bronfen, 59-64.

8. Lynn Higgins and Brenda Silver's anthology, Rape and Representation, shows that the simultaneous inscription and erasure of sexual violence against women that characterizes Yeats's poem occurs again and again in classical as well as modern texts. See especially the introduction by Higgins and Silver and the essays by Joplin and Silver.

9. The relevant stanza reads:

   A Charm invests a face
   Imperfectly beheld—
   The Lady dare not lift her Veil
   For fear it be dispelled.

   I am indebted to Cay Strode's analysis of the poem's visual power dynamic.

10. It is the underlying male structure, the exchange of women between men, that gives the wedding dress its meaning: while a woman may think her wedding dress celebrates her power—the beauty and virtue that have secured her a husband—the white of the wedding dress refers to male interests only, signifying that the woman is unexchanged, unused, and so keeps her full value as commodity, as the gift that ratifies the bond between the father who gives her and the husband who takes her. Perhaps because it thus suggests the alienation of woman into a symbol, the wedding dress is often an accoutrement of femininity in Carter's novels. In Heroes and Villains Marianne is forced to put on an ancient wedding dress for her arranged marriage, becoming a signifier in Donally's symbolic system, which incorporates Levi-Strauss's model of the exchange of women. In Love and “The Bloody Chamber” a wedding dress is likewise imposed upon the woman rather than self-chosen.

11. I have discussed the structural similarities (including power asymmetries) between father-daughter relations and romantic love relations in Reconstructing Desire, 26-31. Elizabeth Abel analyzes the subversive potential of the brother-sister bond in Sophocles' Antigone and in Doris Lessing's work: by making the familiar, the familial, man the object of desire in place of a stranger, brother-sister incest challenges “the fundamental structure of partriarchy” by preventing the exchange of women.

12. Flora Alexander finds a parallel between Finn and Melanie's new beginning in the garden and Adam and Eve's: “They have quarreled with a patriarchal figure like God the Father and it has been their good fortune to escape” (65).

13. Robert Clark faults Carter for not always providing enough cues to produce a parodic reading of the patriarchal tropes she incorporates into her fiction. “The ideologic power of the form being infinitely greater than the power of the individual to overcome it,” Carter risks reinscribing the ideology of erotic domination by presenting rape and other forms of sexual violence as thrilling, without the necessary “moral and historical context” (152-3) to provide a critical perspective. Elaine Jordan makes a spirited rejoinder to Clark's argument. She claims that “Angela Carter is offering experiments in overcoming ideas, images, representations, that have determined our options for thinking and feeling” (34).

14. In the later Nights at the Circus (1984) Carter offers a picture of female sexuality exuberant in its excesses rather than curbed of its potential. In that novel she rewrites “Leda and the Swan” to a woman's advantage, creating in the protagonist Fevvers her own mythic version of Leda's offspring. Because she is sprung from the egg laid by Leda, Fevvers has too many appendages rather than too few—and her wings are just one of the excesses that contribute, like her laughter and her verbal fluency, to stumping definitions of femininity (as spectacle, as sexual victim, and so on) that various male characters try to impose on her. See Robinson, 117-131.

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