SOURCE: Peach, Linden. “Pain and Exclusion: The Magic Toyshop (1967) and Heroes and Villains (1969).” In Angela Carter, pp. 71-98. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1998.

[In the following excerpt, Peach examines similarities between The Magic Toyshop and Heroes and Villains.]

I

As I pointed out at the beginning of the previous chapter, The Magic Toyshop (1967) and Heroes and Villains (1969) were Carter's second and fourth novels respectively. In some respects, they recall the Bristol trilogy. For example, Lorna Sage (1994b) has pointed out that Heroes and Villains mocks the cultural landscape of the 1960s such as the glamour of underground, countercultural movements; the siege of university campuses; the rebirth of dandyism; and the power acquired by intellectual gurus such as Timothy Leary who is parodied in Donally (p. 18). However, they are different from the other novels written in the 1960s in ways which anticipate the later fiction. Indeed, both novels may be seen as transitional works, bridging the gap between the Bristol trilogy and the less realistic mode of the post-1970 novels.

While there are good reasons for discussing The Magic Toyshop and Heroes and Villains in a separate chapter from the Bristol trilogy, there is also a valid case to be made for considering the two novels in tandem. Ostensibly, they appear to be very different works. The Magic Toyshop, drawing on elements of fairy tale, is concerned with a middle-class young girl, Melanie, and her brother and sister, who are forced to move to London to live with their uncle and aunt in a flat above their toyshop. Heroes and Villains is a futuristic, post-cataclysmic fantasy in which a young girl, Marianne, leaves the security of what remains of established society to join a nomadic tribe of so-called ‘Barbarians’ who exist outside.

Despite the obvious differences between them, however, the two novels have much in common. Both belong to the period before Angela Carter travelled to Japan (1969-72), which Sage (1994b) has described as ‘her rite of passage’ (p. 18). Both novels are in fact ‘rite of passage’ narratives—for Carter herself as well as for Melanie and Marianne. Both novels employ pre-novelistic strategies. The Magic Toyshop adapts narrative conventions borrowed from fairy tales. It also contains many allusions to theatre, not only through Uncle Philip's puppet theatre, but in the references to masks—Aunt Margaret, for example, assumes the ‘tragic mask’ of a mother who has sent all her sons to war (p. 135)—to opera, Renaissance drama and, in the account of the overgrown private park, to street theatre and carnival. Whilst at one level, Heroes and Villains is post-apocalyptic or decline-of-civilisation fiction, it, too, employs a pre-novelistic form of writing—the wandering serial formula of picaresque narrative. It also draws on motifs from European Romance fiction in, for example, the use of wilderness and the demon lover. There are also clear fairy tale elements, including an orphaned central protagonist who, as in The Magic Toyshop, crosses a threshold from one world to another.

Although both The Magic Toyshop and Heroes and Villains are third-person narratives, their focalisation is through the consciousness of an adolescent girl who has lost one or both of her parents after an act of transgression on her part. In what appear to be acts of surrogate self-mutilation, both Melanie and Marianne respond initially to the trauma of the deaths violently; Melanie breaks up her bedroom while Marianne cuts off her hair. In both novels, the acts of transgression and the deaths of the parents initiate a period of exclusion for the protagonists. Melanie is forced to go and live in London, where she is an outsider in the Flowers family; and Marianne chooses to flee from the community of ‘Professors’ as it is called.

In both novels, there is a problematic relationship based on a combination of attraction and repulsion—Melanie and Finn in The Magic Toyshop and Marianne and Jewel in Heroes and Villains. Both young women are raped, Melanie symbolically—as I shall discuss—and Marianne literally. Whilst The Magic Toyshop is more obviously a critique of patriarchy, both heroines have to contend with a dominant male—Uncle Philip in The Magic Toyshop and Donally in Heroes and Villains. As Paulina Palmer (1987) says, typical of women in a patriarchal society, they are ‘pressured to seek refuge from one man in the arms of another’ (p. 187). In both novels, she argues, ‘the contradiction between the romantic images of femininity reproduced in culture and art, and the facts of sexual violence’ are highlighted (p. 184). In particular, the violence of the myths which have sustained patriarchy is signified in the recurrent images of mutilation and castration, such as Melanie's phantasy of the severed hand. However, the severed hand may also suggest the psychic severance women experience in patriarchal society.

Both Melanie and Marianne, as Palmer says, are from a different social class from the people with whom they become involved, but this is more complicated than Palmer suggests. The social differences between Marianne and Jewel, for example, are elided by the fact that he is better educated than she expected and between Melanie and Finn by his artistic sensibility, evident in his engagement with music. In Marianne's case, her view of Jewel is mediated, as I shall discuss, through the stories circulating in her community about the Barbarians while Melanie's view of Finn is influenced by her middle-class English upbringing. Each novel is concerned with the ways in which notions of self and identity, especially female identity, are constructed through language and mythology.

II

Although The Magic Toyshop, is not a fairy tale as such, then, it reclaims a number of elements from the genre. The word ‘reclaim’ is used deliberately here, for the fairy tale has been marginalised as a literary form, relegated to the non-serious world of children's fiction. In The Magic Toyshop, Carter rediscovers its imaginative potential, especially for the feminist writer. The storyline of the novel itself is reminiscent of a fairy story. Its heroine, Melanie, her brother Jonathan and sister Victoria are orphaned; the death of their parents in a plane crash is linked in Melanie's mind to an act of transgression—Melanie secretly trying on her mother's wedding dress one night—and the children are forced to live with a relative they hardly know who turns out to be an ogre. The stock fairy tale motifs adapted by Carter include: the arduous journey—the children travel from their comfortable home in the country to their uncle's toyshop in south London; the dumb mute—their aunt in London has been struck dumb on her wedding day; metamorphoses—Uncle Philip's evil is revealed gradually in the course of the narrative; and even the winged creature—in the form of the swan puppet which Philip makes for the show in which Melanie takes part.

Traditional fairy tales, rewritten by male writers, became vehicles for the socialisation of young women producing a subgenre of ‘warning tales’. As Jack Zipes (1988) points out:

Almost all critics who have studied the emergence of the literary fairy tale in Europe agree that educated writers purposely appropriated the oral folk tale and converted it into a literary discourse about mores, values and manners so that children would become civilised according to the social code of that time.

(p. 3)

The stories acquired a moral which often arose out of a young girl being punished or brought to ‘wisdom’ through realising the foolishness of transgression. In a discussion of Perrault, whose tales Carter translated, Zipes points out that such stories do not warn ‘against the dangers of predators in forests’, but warns girls ‘against their own natural desires which they must tame’ (p. 29). In other words, Carter, like many feminist critics, recognises fairy tales as a reactionary form that inscribed a misogynistic ideology. However, critics have not always questioned, as Makinen (1992) has pointed out, whether women readers would necessarily identify with the female figures (p. 4). Carter's attempts to re-vision fairy tales in, for example, The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories (1979), have been the subject of much debate among critics. Some critics, following Anthea Dworkin (1981), have suggested that Carter has not adequately re-visioned the fairy tale form, working within the strait-jacket of their original structures, so that her attempts to create an active female erotic are badly compromised. Makinen takes issue with this view, arguing that ‘it is the critics who cannot see beyond the sexist binary opposition’ (ibid.). They have tended to assume that the fairy tale is a universal, unchangeable given. Although all narrative genres clearly do inscribe ideologies, as Makinen argues, later rewritings of a genre do not necessarily encode the same ideological assumptions.

Although The Magic Toyshop is not a fairy story as such, it anticipates how in her later collection, The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories, Carter adapted the form to criticise the inscribed ideology and to incorporate new assumptions. The novel incorporates the reactionary element of the fairy story in the consequences which befall Melanie borrowing her mother's wedding dress. However, it also undermines this inscribed ideology by emphasising what the misogynistic fairy stories suppressed, an adolescent girl's excitement about her body and the discovery of her emerging sexuality:

she would follow with her finger the elegant structure of her rib-cage, where the heart fluttered under the flesh like a bird under a blanket, and she would draw down the long line from breast-bone to navel (which was a mysterious cavern or grotto), and she would rasp her palms against her bud-wing shoulder-blades.

(p. 1)

Carter appropriates a Renaissance convention whereby the continent of America (of discovery and enjoyment) serves as a metaphor for the body: ‘The summer she was fifteen, Melanie discovered she was made of flesh and blood. O, my America, my new found land’ (ibid.). However, as Richard Brown (1994) points out, the implied male colonial explorer is now a young woman—an index in the text of female self-possession (p. 92). As I said in the Introduction, Fredric Jameson has suggested that one of the most potentially disruptive elements in narrative, and especially ‘magic realist’ narrative, is the appearance of the body. While I would not describe The Magic Toyshop as a ‘magic realist’ narrative for the reservations which I expressed earlier, the novel has more in common with ‘magic realism’ than ‘realism’. As Jameson suggests, the body, in this case Melanie's, in The Magic Toyshop diverts the narrative in a number of directions. According to Jameson, in the realist novel, the disruption is resolved through fetishising the body as image. In The Magic Toyshop, this is clearly not the case. Indeed, the disruption is not only sustained, but thematised in the narrative. Through her phantasies enacted before her mirror, Melanie begins to explore her different potential identities and the contradictory roles that make up the female subject in art and society such as a Pre-Raphaelite, a Lautrec model with her hair ‘dragged sluttishly across her face’, and a Cranach Venus. She indulges in secret acts of transgression, gift-wrapping herself for a phantom bridegroom and, after reading Lady Chatterley's Lover, sticking forget-me-knots in her pubic hair.

The novel's concerns here with the female body and sexuality are typical of Anglo-American feminist art and literature of the late 1960s and early 1970s and it is important to place the zeal of such work, which from a later feminist perspective may appear intellectually a little crude, in the context of the times. Feminist artists and writers of the day were mounting a challenge to the way in which women's bodies were rendered invisible in art and culture other than as idealised objects in works produced by men within the tradition of the classic female nude. The focus of their challenge was this Western tradition's denial of women's experiences of their own bodies. In other words, they attacked the mythical sense of the integrity of the body and its boundaries in the representation of the female nude and drew attention to the internal bodily changes or bodily fluids which regularly crossed those boundaries and subverted the body's sense of closure. As Lynda Nead (1992) points out, artists such as Judy Chicago, for example, were claiming, ‘that vaginal and vulvic forms were an innate and natural language for female artistic expression’ (p. 65). The notoriety which works such as Chicago's Red Flag (1971), depicting the removal of a bloody tampon, achieved was a result of the sanitised way in which the female body had hitherto been perceived in art. Much of the feminist artistic space now taken for granted had not been won at that time. As Nead (1992) argues:

The feminist claim of the 1970s to ‘our bodies, our selves’ put the issues of control and identity at the centre of the movement's political agenda … art that focuses on images and aspects of the female body, was one attempt within the sphere of culture to create a different kind of visibility for women.

(p. 64)

The episode in The Magic Toyshop in which Melanie enters the garden at night wearing her mother's wedding dress begins with a description of Melanie's anxieties about tree-climbing since she began menstruating. As if to reinforce what culture had so long denied, the novel mentions periods, pregnancy, embryo, gestation and miscarriage within one short paragraph (p. 20). Although this may seem like straining for effect to contemporary readers, Carter is following the feminist concerns of her day to challenge, and work against, traditions which reified the cosmetically finished surface of the female body and denied the abject matter of its interior. Ironically in London, Uncle Philip tries to turn Melanie into a fetishised object as spectacle, a wooden marionette. The image of the puppet, as Palmer (1987) points out, suggests the coded mannequin metaphor employed by the French psychoanalytic literary critic, Julia Kristeva, to represent the robotic state to which human beings are reduced by a process of psychic repression (p. 180).

The way in which the wedding dress episode is structured appears to suggest a young girl's first experience of sex and the anxieties around it. In The Interpretation of Dreams (1965), Freud observes that climbing in a dream signifies vaginal intercourse (p. 401) The purring cat at the centre of the tree she is about to climb gives Melanie the confidence to step out of the wedding dress and become naked. In her nakedness, she feels vulnerable, pulling her hair around her for protection. The cat unexpectedly hurts her, the dress which she had parcelled up and placed in the tree is symbolically ripped and there is now blood on the hem. Melanie now feels ‘a new and final kind of nakedness, as if she had taken even her own skin off’ (p. 21). Moreover, the season is the end of the summer—the end of childhood and ‘innocence’—and the moon, the female symbol to which menstruction is linked, is ‘beginning to slide down the sky’.

At this point in the novel, Carter rewrites the myth of the Garden of Eden of which we are reminded by the tree itself, clearly the Tree of Knowledge, by the reference to the shower of apples, and by an allusion to Eve's realisation of her nakedness after eating the forbidden fruit—Melanie is ‘horribly conscious of her own exposed nakedness’. However, if the biblical imagery reminds us of Genesis, there are counter elements drawn from witchcraft, paganism and superstition—the cat is a well-known witch's familiar, Melanie crosses her fingers, and there are references to blackness, the night, blood and nakedness. They remind us of elements absent from the biblical version of the Adam and Eve story and the novel seems to be challenging a myth which endorses the inferiority of women to men.

III

An important aspect of the novel's re-vision of the Adam and Eve story is the female focalisation, or point of view, which stresses not only a developing sexuality, but the excitement, fears and phantasies to which sexuality gives rise and through which it not only finds expression but is explored and developed. The emphasis eventually falls upon anxiety, pain and disillusionment. The initial reference to the domestic in this episode promises reassurance—the cat purrs as if someone had lit a small fire for it—but it proves to be unstable and cruel. The purring cat turns out to have paws ‘tipped with curved, cunning meat hooks’ (p. 21). Melanie's experience of nude tree-climbing leads to injury and, quite literally, agony. Here the novel may be prefiguring more than what is in store for Melanie as a consequence of her parents' death and her enforced move to London. It may also be giving expression to a centuries old fear of women: that their husband's may turn out to be monsters and wedded bliss prove a nightmare. Ironically, while much of the passage suggests the irretrievable loss of childhood—Melanie has started her periods, decided to grow her hair long and has stopped wearing shorts—Melanie emotionally regresses to childhood: ‘Please, God, let me get safe back to my own bed again.’ Particularly important to the novel's concern at this point with Melanie explicitly and all women implicitly is the tension between desire and restraint which causes a scream to swell up in Melanie's throat. The unexpressed scream, of course, becomes a symbol of the condition in which Melanie, and perhaps many women, will come to live:

Once a branch broke with a groan under the trusting sole of her foot and she hung in agony by her hands, strung up between earth and heaven, kicking blindly for a safe, solid thing in a world all shifting leaves and shadows.

(p. 21)

Zipes (1988), drawing on Freud's theory of the uncanny, suggests that fairy stories have remained popular because they are concerned with the quest for an idealised notion of home which has been suppressed in the adult consciousness. In discussing the liberating power of feminist fairy tales, Zipes suggests that they present us with a means by which the idealised home may be reclaimed. These include the ways in which the opposed protagonists learn to free themselves from ‘parasitical creatures’. For Zipes, the latter are allegorical representations of the sociopsychological conflicts which have prevented the opposed protagonists from having a psychic realisation of home. They are also the conflicts which, in Zipes's psychoanalytic approach to fairy stories, the reader, in a similar position to the opposed protagonist, needs to revisit.

Zipes's argument is particularly relevant to Carter's fiction where a number of characters are motivated by a desire to realise the ideal of home. Desiderio in The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman, for example, temporarily realises the ideal of home among the River People and even more fleetingly with Albertina, the object of his desire, among the Centaurs. However, Zipes's work is especially applicable to The Magic Toyshop and Heroes and Villains where for Melanie and Marianne, as for so many of Carter's characters, their early home life is severely disrupted by trauma. After being raped by Jewel, on whom she projected her erotic phantasies, Marianne wants to escape, ‘as if somewhere there was still the idea of a home’ (p. 52). The description of the flat in London in The Magic Toyshop is in the third person, but the focalisation is Melanie's. The contrast between the new home and the one she has left opens up a new space in which Melanie imagines, locates and develops an ideal:

Porcelain gleamed pink and the soft, fluffy towels and the toilet paper were pink to match. Steaming water gushed plentifully from the dolphin shaped taps and jars of bath essence and toilet water and after-shave glowed like jewellery; and the low lavatory tactfully flushed with no noise at all. It was a temple to cleanness. Mother loved nice bathrooms.

(pp. 56-7)

She is cast as an opposed protagonist. Even though Aunt Margaret, Francie and Finn love each other, making Melanie feel ‘bitterly lonely and unloved’, the Flowers family become the parasitical creatures of fairy stories. Finn, for example, is described as ‘a tawny lion poised for the kill’. Melanie does consciously what Zipes argues all readers of fairy stories do unwittingly. She translates the parasitical creatures of fairy stories into the sociopsychological conflicts which separate her, and will continue to separate her, from the psychic ideal of the home. Finn comes to represent an ‘insolent, off-hand, terrifying maleness’ and the threat that he poses is suggested when, in order to comb out her hair, he ‘ground out his cigarette on the window-ledge and laughed’ (p. 45). For all the differences between Finn and his uncle, the laugh and grounding gesture at this point blur the boundary between them.

From the outset, The Magic Toyshop is concerned not only with the importance of phantasy but of ego disturbances within the psyche. These are often brought about by what Lorna Sage (1994b) has described as ‘the bad magic of mythologies’ (p. 18). In the novel, the psyche is perceived as constructed within a wide system of relationships including familial, social, cultural and political forces. Some of these—such as nature and sex—we tend to ‘mythologise’ and regard as if they are ‘outside’ of history and a particular social milieu. Desire and phantasy, especially, we tend to regard as ‘universal’ or ‘archetypal’, ignoring the way in which these, too, are socially constructed. Many teenagers, for example, may identify with the lyrics of chart-topping pop songs because they appear to reflect their emotions, anxieties and frustrations, without realising that these songs as part of popular culture contribute to the social construction of emotional identity, of gendered behaviour within relationships, and of desire itself. In her exploration of the different social roles and subjectivities available to women, Melanie not only challenges the notion of a singular female identity, but demonstrates how women have to negotiate a myriad of received assumptions and social conventions.

One approach to The Magic Toyshop, then, would be to consider Melanie's acquisition of an autonomous identity in the context of the circumstances which befall her. In this respect, the text poses a challenge to conventional psychoanalysis which has tended to be based on relationships within the kind of comfortable bourgeois family which for Melanie collapses. As Jennifer Fitzgerald (1993) has pointed out in a critical essay on the African-American writer, Toni Morrison, psychoanalysis has traditionally pathologised non-normative families such as the one to which Melanie moves. However, it is not really the function of literary criticism to examine characters as if they were people. As Fitzgerald goes on to argue, it is the purpose of literary criticism to analyse discourses not psyches. This seems particularly appropriate to Carter's novel which is sceptical of many of the discourses, such as the Adam and Eve story, which circulates through it. This does not mean that we should not bring a psychoanalytic discourse to bear on a discussion of Melanie within the novel. It means that we should recognise that psychoanalysis is only one of a number of discourses, such as female identity, patriarchy and the family, circulating in this text, and that one discourse is always articulated within other discourses. In the account of the relationship between Melanie and Finn, for example, there is a wide variety of allusions. There are references, for example, to Romeo and Juliet, Tristan and Isolde, loveknots, and lovers in New Wave films. Any one of these might trigger a different reading of what happens between them.

Since Melanie's normative family life is disrupted, classical psychoanalysis based on the traditional bourgeois family norm is not the most appropriate framework within which to explore what happens to her in the toyshop. A more sympathetic model is provided by the psychoanalytic school of thought known as object relations theory to which I referred earlier. In contradistinction to classical psychoanalysis, it recognises the range of relationships, including those within the family, which can influence the psyche. According to object relations theory as developed by Melanie Klein, an infant experiences complex and contradictory emotions which are projected into objects, including people, with which it comes into contact. These objects, subsequently transformed into positive or negative phantasy objects, or ‘imagos’, are ‘introjected’ back into the child's psyche. Eventually, the child forges a sense of its own identity out of these experiences and phantasies and begins to recognise others as separate individuals rather than ‘imagos’. Clearly, one of the most powerful, negative ‘imagos’ in Melanie's childhood is the jack-in-the-box with a grotesque caricature of her own face which Uncle Philip, whom she had never met, sent her one Christmas and which turned the uncle himself into an ‘imago’. The face is mocking and cruel, mirroring the way in which the father, according to Freudian psychology, imposes on the girl-child a sense of lack. Uncle Philip epitomises the intrusion of patriarchy: how the male will come between a young girl and her relationship with her mother and will seek to silence and control the female.

The novel's brief account of Melanie's childhood emphasises her reclusive nature, her privileged upbringing and a range of likely and unlikely ‘imagos’. Inscribed almost exclusively in terms of projection and introjection, it is clear that Melanie's privileged and limited childhood has prevented the full development of a sense of her own identity. This is exacerbated by the trauma of her parents' deaths. She is unable to recognise that other factors which had nothing to do with her were responsible which results in a form of self-loathing. In her own mind, she becomes the kind of part-object which I suggested in the discussion of Shadow Dance are characteristic of fairy stories: ‘The girl who killed her mother’ (p. 24). Unable to expel this imago—initially by vomiting—she projects it on her mirror image which she tries, unsuccessfully, to destroy. Ironically, she kills her parents a second time by destroying their photograph. However, the imago into which she has projected her guilt now consumes her so that she becomes inhuman: ‘She neither saw nor heard anything but wrecked like an automaton. Feathers stuck in the tears and grease on her cheeks’ (p. 25). Of course, this description of her anticipates the puppet which Uncle Philip tries to make of her. The distinction between her own intense subjectivity and external objects becomes blurred—for example, she refrains from cutting her hair short because it grew while her parents were alive. Although Mrs Rundle moves on to another family, Melanie continues to cling to her in her memories. Significantly, Mrs Rundle has created for herself an independent sense of self; although not married, she has chosen to be called ‘Mrs’ since it makes it easier for her to be ‘acceptable’ in a society geared towards men and married women. In the course of the novel, Melanie has to seek her own autonomous identity.

In London, Melanie's reactions to the people she meets is regressive. She projects her emotions into them as external objects, introjecting the resultant ‘imagos’ as part of herself. This is partly the consequence of the intensity with which Melanie sees things, as suggested in the image of Aunt Margaret's coal fire which is ‘rendered more fierce by the confines of the small, black-leaded grate’ (p. 41) In Melanie's case, the confines are those of Uncle Philip's flat and the guilt she feels over her parents' deaths. At the flat above the toyshop, the people she meets and the objects she encounters are rendered more fierce by these confines. Although, for example, it is the third-person narrative which introduces the fallen puppet—‘Lying face-downwards in a tangle of strings was a puppet fully five feet high, a sylphide in a fountain of white tulle, fallen flat down as if someone got tired of her in the middle of playing with her’—the focalisation is Melanie's: ‘“It is too much”, said Melanie, agitated. “There is too much”’ (p. 67).

In terms of Kleinian theory, the processes of identification and projection are particularly intense in Melanie's case. Regressively, she clings to the imago of a lover which she has derived from children's books and poems. While it is difficult for the reader to separate the reality of Finn from Melanie's perceptions of him and her projections into him, he at least draws her away from her past. Eventually, her idealised lover crumples ‘like the paper he was made of before this insolent, off-hand, terrifying maleness, filling the room with its reek. She hated. it. But she could not take her eyes of him’ (p. 45).

As the jack-in-the-box demonstrates, Melanie also becomes an object into which others, whom we may suspect of not having forged an adequate sense of their own identity, project their own phantasies and desires. Not only does Finn insist on combing her hair differently almost as soon as she arrives, but he paints her secretly through a hole in her bedroom wall. Uncle Philip sees her as a nymph covered with daisies. This is, of course, how in her regressive state she has tended to see herself. At one level, the toy shop is a parody of patriarchy, under which women are silenced. It is significant, albeit rather crudely, that Aunt Margaret is struck dumb on her wedding day and only regains her voice when Philip discovers her locked in an embrace with Francie.

As Nicole Ward Jouve (1994) points out, father figures in Carter's work are ‘attacked, deconstructed, shown to be hollow or vulnerable’ (p. 155). Uncle Philip's need to control, and manipulate others—on the poster advertising his puppet show he is depicted holding the ball of the world in his hand—is evident in one of his favourite creations—the ‘Surprise Rose Bowl’. The shepherdess which appears from a simulacra of a rose made out of stiffened card or wood shavings performs a perfectly poised pirouette. But Philip is so obsessive and violent—worryingly evident in the way he ‘attacks’ the Christmas goose with the carving knife—that he appears to have serious and deep-rooted psychological problems. He seems driven by a repressed and violently tinged sexuality—in manipulating Melanie in his version of Leda and the Swan, he appears to be performing a surrogate rape. The narrative makes him an even more disturbing personality by comparing him with the Nazis, especially bearing in mind how he is shown on the poster. Having attacked Finn because he has ruined the ‘Grand Performance’, we are told that Philip shoves the body aside ‘with the casual brutality of Nazi soldiers moving corpses in films of concentration camps’ (p. 132). Here Carter is introducing a popular connection between private sadism and the public brutality of totalitarian regimes. She is not necessarily arguing for the link, and indeed in the course of the novel it is not really developed. However, in the novel's more general exploration of private and socially sanctioned domination of one group by another, it is introduced as one position that can be, and has been, struck. Particularly ominous is Finn's blood-streaked vomit, a harbinger of the violence to come. The extent of Philip's callousness is reinforced by the way in which he laments the damaged puppet as a dead friend or sibling might be mourned in a Renaissance tragedy: ‘Poor old Bothwell! All his wires gone!’ But even more disturbing are the changes which occur in him. In the wake of the disastrous show, his language becomes increasingly crude and violent—Finn is accused of ‘buggering me Bothwell’ and the family are told to ‘piss off’ (p. 133). An especially chilling development is the way in which he becomes a parody of the wicked, incestuous uncle. In insisting that Melanie now acts with his puppets, ‘He rubbed his hands with satisfaction. ‘What's your name, girly? Speak up’ (ibid.). Particularly disturbing, he addresses her as if he does not know who she is. The word ‘girly’, robs Melanie of her identity as his niece, reinforces her vulnerability and confirms his power over her.

In contrast to Philip's favourite toy, the movements of Finn's own creation of a yellow bear with a bow tie around its neck riding a bicycle are erratic. They permit an unpredictability which has no place in Uncle Philip's universe, and the toy itself is witty. In fact, Melanie's reaction to the toy is different from her response to the objects which filled her bedroom as imagos at the beginning of the novel. In making her laugh, the toy and Melanie remain distant from each other so that it is able to represent the wit and perspective which Melanie needs to acquire in order to achieve a confident, autonomous self-identity.

At the end of the novel, Melannie and Finn escape from the toyshop, like Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden, returning the reader to the biblical myth which is employed in the earlier description of Melanie's sexual awakening. In fact, Carter herself has said that she saw the novel in terms of the ‘Fortunate Fall’: ‘I took the Fortunate Fall as meaning that it was a good thing to get out of that place. The intention was that the toyshop itself should be a secularized Eden (Haffenden, 1985, p. 80). The ‘Fortunate Fall’ is not only from the toyshop but the cultural myths which have contributed to women's intellectual, emotional and sexual oppression.

The theme of a new Eden and the human race reduced to an elemental pair was common in science fiction of the 1950s and 1960s. Carter's adaption of it is ambiguous and possibly influenced by the art of the time, especially collage work that suggested that desire, as Thomas Crow (1996) maintains, is ‘held hostage’ by the Adam and Eve myth (p. 47). In Richard Hamilton's collage, Just what is it that makes today's homes so different, so appealing? (1956), for example, Charles Atlas, the model body-builder of comic-book back pages is the naked Adam and the pulp pin-up is Eve. In Hamilton's collaborative contribution, the same year, to the installation art exhibition, This is Tomorrow, the primal male is the robot from Forbidden Planet who holds a Jane-like figure in his arms. Next to him is Marilyn Monroe in a still from the pavement grating scene in Billy Wilder's film, The Seven Year Itch (1955). The latter, in which a married man has a fling with the girl up stairs, suggests through a series of dream sequences that desire is structured by the dominant fictions in society. At the end of The Magic Toyshop, Carter appears to imply, as she said, that the Fall was fortunate, but also that Melanie and Finn are trapped by the Genesis myth. It is ironic that in the fire ‘everything is gone’ but that the myth remains: ‘At night, in the garden, they faced each other in a wild surmise’ (p. 200).

IV

The agency which Melanie needs to acquire in her own life is evident in the early part of The Magic Toyshop in acts of transgression—Melanie trying on her mother's wedding dress and stealing her brother's books in order to raise the money to buy false eyelashes. Ironically, whilst, at one level, her desire for false eyelashes is a sign of her independence, at another, it is a symbol of the way in which her identity as a young woman is defined by discourses outside herself. Inevitably these discourses take from her control over her own body. Even at fifteen, Melanie is beginning to feel a failure because she has not yet married or had sex. In Heroes and Villains, which like The Magic Toyshop has a female focalisation, Marianne's acts of independence are similarly acts of transgression.

Heroes and Villains is a version of the post-apocalyptic novel which was popular in the Cold War 1950s. As Roz Kaveney (1994) has pointed out, it draws upon an older decline-of-civilisation genre which can be traced back to Mary Shelley's The Last Man (1826) and Richard Jefferies's After London (1885). More specifically, Heroes and Villains is based on tropes, especially that of living among the ruins, familiar in British and American post-apocalyptic science fiction written by women in the 1970s. As Nan Albinski (1988) reminds us, in the 1970s and 1980s, ‘women writers increasingly foresee the destruction of the cities, with groups of survivors (sometimes groups composed solely of women) living in the ruins, scavenging the left-overs’ (p. 133).

In Heroes and Villains, a nuclear war has transformed a mundane environment into a Gothic fantasy. Although there are numerous post-cataclysmic, science fiction fantasies, Carter's novel is one of the few to highlight the effects on people and the landscape. Marianne, from whose perspective the novel is told, runs away from what remains of civilisation, orderly communities based on farming and craftwork and guarded by soldiers who rule over them with the Professors, between whom there is little respect. She enters the outside, Gothic world of ruins and forests inhabited by the Barbarians, by whom she is taken captive, and by mutants who are the products of radiation. However, despite similarities between Carter's novel and post-apocalyptic science fiction written by women, it is unlikely that Carter had read much of it in any detail, if at all. Rather as Kaveney (1994) maintains, it is likely ‘that she was interested in those aspects of the culture where ideas from SF were liable to make their mark’ (p. 182).

Although a sense of loss pervades the novel at a number of levels—civilisation has all but been destroyed and Melanie loses her parents—Carter's novel avoids focusing on the decline itself. On a cursory reading, Carter appears to establish a clear polarisation between the two societies. The community of the Professors and soldiers is rigidly hierarchical, totalitarian, militaristic and sexually repressive. The society of the Barbarians is more strongly linked to the natural world, has a quasi-tribal structure and regards the community as a family. However, Carter does not establish, as the conventional post-apocalyptic novel would have done, a rigid binarism between the Professors/soldiers and the Barbarians or pursue the tensions between the soldiers and the intellectuals. The post-apocalyptic fantasy becomes a narrative space in which Carter explores the blurring of conventional boundaries and binarisms and the ways in which such artificial boundaries are maintained.

In playing ‘Soldiers and Barbarians’ with the son of the Professor of Mathematics, Marianne refuses to accept that she should always have the part of the Barbarian, the villain, and that, as the hero, he should always shoot her. The Professor's son thinks within a rigid, binary structure which he never questions and which has its external equivalent in the stout wall around the village, manned with machine guns and topped with barbed wire. The word ‘manned’ is significant for within the compound life is structured, as the game of ‘Soldiers and Barbarians’ indicates, according to male rules and male logic. Even Marianne's own mother prefers her brother to her. In tripping up the Professor's son, Marianne disrupts the male symbolic structure. Overturned by this sudden act of violence, the boy loses command of language and is reduced to ‘yowling’ in the dust. Marianne, like Melanie, learns that in order to achieve an autonomous sense of self she has to disrupt the symbolic structures which have taken away from her control of her own language and of her sense of self and identity.

Marianne, we are told, is a child who ‘broke things to see what they were like inside’ (p. 4). This might serve as a summary not only of Marianne but of Carter herself. Certainly, Heroes and Villains displays a similar scepticism about mythologies as The Magic Toyshop. Both societies in the novel employ mythology and folk tales to maintain their geographical, cultural and intellectual boundaries including those which define the ‘otherness’ of outsiders. The ‘warning tales’ told by Marianne's nurse that the Barbarians slit the bellies of women after they have raped them and sew cats up inside them (p. 10) and that the Barbarians wrap little girls in clay and bake them (p. 2) are echoed by the stories of the Barbarians themselves who believe the Professors kill and bake Barbarians in their ovens (p. 35). When Marianne first meets Donally, he alludes parodically to the Barbarians' belief that women in the society of the Professors have sharp teeth in their vaginas in order to bite off the Barbarians' genitalia (p. 49). Of course, like the European ‘warning tales’ of the seventeenth century discussed by Zipes (1988), the stories Marianne is told warn children, especially girls, ‘against their own natural desires which must be tamed’ rather than against the Barbarians in the forest.

Marianne, like Melanie in The Magic Toyshop, comes to realise that identity is produced in the perception of others and rendered real through linguistic mechanisms. As Baudrillard (1993) points out:

the progress of Humanity and Culture are simply the chain of discriminations with which to brand ‘Others’ with inhumanity, and therefore with nullity. For the savages who call themselves ‘men’, the others are something else.

(p. 125)

This is evident not only in the way in which folk tales and games are used in the society of Professors, but in the mythologising of death—her brother is said to have ‘gone to the ruins’—which Marianne is able to contrast with her own witnessing of his killing. Marianne realises that not only is the self located in the word, but when the word changes so does the concept of self. Increasingly, the ostensibly stable wor(l)d in the community of Professors is exposed through the soldiers slack use of language. On returning home, having committed an act of transgression by going into the ruins, Marianne discovers that her nurse has killed her father with an axe and then poisoned herself. The Colonel, her uncle, offers only the explanation that she was ‘seriously maladjusted’ (p. 15), which Marianne cannot equate with the love which the woman had shown them. This loose connection between fact and interpretation characterises the soldiers' discourse. The complex relationship between cause and effect, event and consequence, is frequently elided as in the Colonel's response to the (symbolic) killing of the Professor of Psychology which he believes to be justified because he, like Marianne's nurse, was ‘maladjusted’ (p. 17). Here Carter may well be parodying the way in which military language in the late twentieth century, employing evasive terms such as ‘conflict management’, has become increasingly diffuse.

A key text which the two societies in Heroes and Villains share, and which is tattooed on Jewel's back, is the myth of Adam and Eve. Encapsulating the story of Adam bewitched by Eve's smile, the tattoo signifies the ideologies through which Jewel's view of Marianne is mediated. Like Shadow Dance, Heroes and Villains places misogynism within a larger ideological and cultural context. Jewel's fear of Marianne is given as his explanation for raping her. However, his fear of her is also a product and reflection of the way patriarchal societies more generally fear the loss of control to women. Significantly, Jewel is happiest with Marianne in those moments when she has been subdued.

One of the most innovative aspects of Heroes and Villains is the way in which the confusion created by nuclear war, explored at the level of plot and theme in the conventional post-apocalyptic, futuristic novel, is pursued at the level of semiotics. The relationship between language and meaning is learned and arbitrary—as in the relationship between a word and the object to which it refers—and is always subject to change. However, meaning is conveyed through language because words relate to each other as part of a linguistic system. The wedding ceremony in the novel draws elements from so many different cultures and linguistic systems that they are unable to relate in any coherent way. Whilst Marianne wears a second-hand, white dress, Jewel wears a stiff, scarlet coat interwoven with gold thread that may have once belonged to a Bishop. Donally who performs the ceremony is robed from head to foot in a garment woven from bird feathers and wears a painted mask carved from wood. Although Donally reads from the Book of Common Prayer, the centre piece of the ceremony is taken from North American Indian culture, the cutting of the bride and groom's wrists and the mixing of their bloods. The semiotic confusion here is also an index of a greater confusion over identity created when traditional boundaries are crossed or blurred. Stepping outside the world which has been named and defined is exciting as Marianne realises near the end of the novel; on the seashore, she discovers how losing the names of things is ‘a process of uncreation’ (p. 136). However, the novel also suggests that without naming, everything reverts to chaos, to things ‘existing only to themselves in an unstructured world’.

V

Towards the end of Heroes and Villains, a sick and slightly drugged Marianne admits: ‘When I was a little girl, we played at heroes and villains but now I don't know which is which any more, nor who is who, and what can I trust if not appearances?’ (p. 125). As in The Magic Toyshop, shifting frames of reference are used in Heroes and Villains to disrupt and deconstruct mythologies which have gone unchallenged for many years. Two of the most obvious are connected with post-Enlightenment European thinking. The novel confounds the conventional binarism in post-apocalyptic novels between ‘civilised’ and ‘barbarian’. Jewel, for example, turns out to be an educated thinker. When he first meets Marianne, he quotes from Tennyson: ‘It's the same everywhere you look, it's red in tooth and claw’ (p. 18) and, much to Marianne's surprise, knows the zoological name for the adder which bites her (p. 28). This combination of encyclopaedic knowledge and primitive lore—he treats her with a folk remedy for snake bite, for example—is an index of the way in which Carter has created a ‘third space’ in her narrative about the Barbarians which defies analysis along the lines of conventional binarisms. Marianne's father makes the mistake of associating the Barbarians only with instinct—a view of which she is disabused shortly after meeting Jewel. Whilst her father and the other Professors believed that the painted faces of the Barbarians was an indication of how they had ‘reverted to beasthood’ (p. 24), she discovers that their masks are worn for a reason, it makes them look more frightening to their enemies in battle. The social structure of the Barbarians also challenges Rousseau's myth of the noble savage which is provocatively invoked at the outset of the novel. Whilst Rousseau envisaged natural man as an isolate, in the novel Marianne—the product of civilisation—is the outsider while the ‘natural’ people are social with a highly valued family structure.

Heroes and Villains also challenges the European Romantic notion of suffering, which has its origins in the Christian contemplative tradition and which valorises suffering as a pivotal experience whereby an individual becomes human. Post-apocalyptic narrative inevitably provides a space in which suffering as a means to full human subjectivity at the individual level can be expanded into the public realm where there is an obvious communal need to make sense of suffering as part of the human condition. However, the way in which the soldiers reductively attribute acts of violence and human breakdowns to ‘maladjustment’ suggests the difficulty of doing so. The death of the Professor of Psychology suggests that a means of explaining the bizarre instances of suffering which pervades the opening of the novel has been lost to the Professors of Mathematical Sciences. It may be difficult in terms of psychology to discuss fully, for example, the actions of the worker who ‘went mad’ and burned his wife and three children to death before killing himself. However, it is even more difficult to do so within a metaphysical framework which attempts to valorise human suffering.

In Heroes and Villains, suffering makes one less real rather than brings one to full subjectivity. This is evident in Jewel's whipping of his brother in which Precious swings under the blows ‘like a carpet being beaten’ (p. 113) and Jewel himself becomes ‘mechanical’ and ‘a man no longer’. Jewel's muscle movements animate the tattoo on his back whereby Eve offers Adam the apple in ‘an uncompleted series of actions with no conclusion’, suggesting that violence holds one prisoner within actions which cannot move beyond themselves or to any sense of completion. Indeed, pain and suffering in the novel frequently take away the power of language in which a sense of self and identity are located—Precious grunts in ‘a mechanical repetition of sounds’ (p. 113). Through the suffering inflicted on him by Donally, the boy which Marianne first sees chained is regressed to pre-language, ‘to a babbling murmur’ (pp. 12-13). Indeed, extreme violence of any sort frequently has the same effect. Jewel ‘howls’ in fury before he strikes Marianne (p. 20) while his brothers, tearing at their meal of meat, issue screeches and foul abuse (p. 46).

The tattoo on Jewel's back is a permanent reminder of oppression and of the infliction of cruelty upon others; Jewel admits that when Donally tattooed him he was delirious and that only Mrs Green's care saved him from blood poisoning. It is also a reminder that suffering does not valorise pain but repeats the circumstances in which the suffering originated. Whilst Jewel believes that the tattoo on his back is impressive, Marianne is only reminded of the pain which it must have caused. For her, there is no question of the tattoo's beauty transcending Jewel's suffering even though pain is eroticised. Asking Jewel why he allowed Donally to ‘attack him’ with the needles (p. 86), she wants to know how much it hurt him (p. 96). Indeed, Marianne is preoccupied with the imposition of pain upon one person by another. Carter's own retrospective essay, ‘People as Pictures’, in Nothing Sacred, on the subject of Japanese tattooing, ‘irezumi’, provides a gloss on what Donally has done to Jewel. Irezumi, Carter maintains, ‘transforms its victim into a genre masterpiece’ (p. 33), but the technique employed is particularly painful. Indeed, Carter observes that the novelist, Junichiro Tanizaki, describes one particular tattoo artist as a sadist: ‘His pleasure lay in the agony men felt … The louder they screamed, the keener was Seikichi's strange delight’ (p. 35). Donally's art is similarly sadistic—an extension of the abuse he inflicts on his own child. Significantly, he tattooed Jewel when he was a young and made most use of green—according to Carter's own essay one of the most painful colours to use. He was also responsible for the death of the little girl who died as he tried to turn her into a ‘tiger lady’. Eschewing romantic valorisation of suffering enables Carter to explore the extent to which men are trapped within codes of violence and aggression which sometimes eroticise suffering, and the extent to which violence and pain are used to dominate women.

VI

In the lives of both Melanie and Marianne an older woman—Mrs Rundle and Aunt Margaret in The Magic Toyshop and Mrs Green, Jewel's foster mother, in Heroes and Villains—proves to be important. The relationships which Melanie establishes with Mrs Rundle and Aunt Margaret are much closer and less ambiguous than the relationship between Marianne and Mrs Green. As is evident when Melanie gives Margaret her dress and lends her her mother's pearls, Melanie comes to see Margaret as a surrogate mother. At another level, however, their relationship suggests that women might establish among themselves an alternative community to the male-dominated social structure represented by Uncle Philip (a concept of which Carter is explicitly critical, though, in The Passion of New Eve). When Margaret tells Melanie that Philip does not allow her any money, Carter describes ‘an ancient, female look’ that passes between them:

‘I understand’, said Melanie. An ancient, female look passed between them; they were poor women pensioners, planets round a male sun. In the end, Francie gave Melanie a pound note from his fiddling money. He slipped it into the pocket of her skirt and she hardly knew how to thank him.

(p. 140)

The look that passes between them is evidence of a deeper female bond. At the puppet show, Margaret pushes a toffee into Melanie's hands, a compensatory gesture between two females. However, the word ‘bond’ is double-edged; the women are also brought together by their shared economic dependency upon men. Even though Finn helps Melanie, the basic problem reminds the same—she is still a planet circulating around a male sun. Although Mrs Rundle has cared for the children, she is powerless to stop them from having to go to London if she wanted to, and she has had to change her own title to that of a married woman to survive in a patriarchal society. Margaret may offer Melanie a toffee to console her, but she is unable to rescue them from the oppression of their uncle. Moreover, at one level, both Mrs Rundle and Margaret are complicit in their own and Melanie's oppression. The message which Margaret has written on the toffee paper reads: ‘Look as though you're enjoying it, for my sake and Finn's’ (p. 128). The toffee suggests the kind of consolation that a mother would give to a child. This in turn suggests that one of the risks in valorising the mother/daughter relationship as an alternative to the male line, as critics such as Kristeva have done, is that it can locate the daughter in a state of childlike dependency.

The theme of women being complicit in their own oppression is developed further in Heroes and Villains where Marianne is regarded with suspicion by the other women of the tribe who believe that she is possessed of dangerous powers and separated from them by her social background. Like Margaret, Mrs Green is dependent on the goodwill of the men. However, unlike Margaret, she identifies with the men, encouraging Marianne to do likewise, although there are moments when she sympathises and tries to be supportive of Marianne. As Palmer (1987) points out, ‘in a patriarchal society, contact between women is frequently ambiguous. They help to arrange each other's hair and make each other beautiful not for their own pleasure and satisfaction, but in order to attract men’ (p. 192). Maintaining that often the only gift women can bestow on each other is ‘tears, images of suffering and pity’, Palmer draws attention to the fleeting moment of closeness between Marianne and her cousin, Annie:

Annie shrank away but she was as much afraid of Jewel's displeasure as she was of Marianne and he had perversely ceased to give her signals. Marianne saw the baby's bleared, red face pressed against a breast from which it was too ill to suck and helplessly she began to cry. Her tears splashed on Annie's cheek. Annie touched them with her finger and then licked her finger to see if they were salt enough. Marianne slid down to her knees, sobbing as if her heart was breaking. Annie pushed the girl away and turned her back on her with a sigh.

(p. 104)

However, the passage is even more ambiguous than Palmer suggests; Marianne is ordered by her husband to kiss Annie and she does so unwillingly—afraid that she will pick up an infection from Annie's baby. Although Marianne is moved to tears by Annie's baby, Annie is suspicious of her tears—she has to test the level of humanity, the salt, in them. Marianne can fall on her knees sobbing, but Annie, who has responsibility for the child, pushes Marianne away and turns her back on her—as if tears were an indulgence that, in different social circumstances from Marianne, she can not afford herself.

As in Melanie's case in The Magic Toyshop, Marianne's lack of an adequately defined, autonomous sense of self is evident in the intensity of her processes of projection and introjection. Like Melanie at the outset of the novel, her close identification with her possessions are important to her sense of self and identity: ‘She marked all her possessions with her name, even her toothbrush, and never lost anything’ (p. 3). From the moment when Marianne sees Jewel killing her brother, she projects on him the phantasy of the homme fatale. Although Jewel has killed her brother instead of his own, she perceives the tattoo on his back as the mark of Cain, a figure she then eroticises. The idealised nature of the phantasy which she projects on Jewel is evident in the appeal that even the word ‘barbarian’—‘the wild, quatrosyllabic lilt of the word’ (p. 4)—has for her.

The emphasis in the novel, through its focalisation in the consciousness of a female character, presents us with an erotic objectification of men. However, Marianne's eroticising of Jewel is a product of the way in which her own feelings are strange and unknown to her. As Carter herself maintained in a letter to Elaine Jordan: ‘she is very much a stranger to her own desire, which is why her desire finds its embodiment as a stranger’ (Jordan, 1994, p. 198). The occasion during which, without the light of the moon, Marianne explores Jewel's face with her hands, is a discovery of her desire as much as his body. The strangeness of his face to her is expressed in geographical metaphors so that it becomes a ‘landscape’ which is also the terrain of her sexual feelings. Once again, we are reminded of Jameson's (1986) argument, that this kind of manifestation of the body is what remains in a culture where larger perspectives have lost their validity and older narratives have been neutralised (p. 321). And also that in this type of non-realist narrative, as in The Magic Toyshop, such a manifestation of the body diverts the narrative logic of the unfolding story in new directions.

Forced to wear a second-hand wedding dress, Marianne becomes, in terms reminiscent of Melanie, ‘a mute furious doll’ (p. 69). Again this reminds us of Aunt Margaret and of the scream that swells in Melanie's throat during the tree-climbing episode. Like many women, Marianne has been rendered mute, but her enforced silence is accompanied by a swelling rage. At one level, the dress suggests that there is a universal element to women's experiences, occurring as it does in both novels and located in two societies which have similar expectations of women. At the same time, the wedding dress, occurring in different circumstances in each novel, reminds us of the difficulties of, and dangers in, attempting to essentialise women's experiences.

The wedding dress which Marianne is made to wear has sweat stains left by the previous bride, reminding her of her own sexuality and her own desire to which she is a stranger. However, as the bride, she is also a sacrificial victim. In fact, the way in which she is handed over to the male is linked to cannibalism. When Mrs Green adjusts Marianne's wedding dress, she brings with her ‘the sharp smell of burned fat and roasting meat’ (p. 69). The bodice of the dress itself is said to have ‘crackled and snapped’—like roasting meat. In the chapel, the congregation are turned out like animals, in rags and fur, reminding us that their leader Donally has his teeth filed to points—a detail which links him tellingly to Dracula. In Bram Stoker's Gothic tale, where the victim becomes predator, the subjects in question, as in Carter's novel, are sexuality and desire.

In the relationship between Marianne and Jewel, Carter also rewrites a further traditional story, that of the demon-lover, of whom Jewel has many of the characteristics—he is powerful, mysterious, supernatural; and he can be cruel, vindictive and hostile. However, in her depiction of him, Carter challenges the male-female binarism which ascribes so-called ‘masculine’ qualities to men and ‘feminine’ characteristics to women. In discovering the nature of her own desire, Marianne finds that male-female attributes exist within each individual. The demon-lover is also reconfigured as part of her eroticisation of the male ‘other’. So Marianne is surprised, in exploring Jewel's face when he is asleep, to discover tears. Marianne, too, is not entirely the traditional victim of the demon-lover. Normally, she is persuaded to leave home and travel to unknown places, but in Heroes and Villains it is Marianne who makes the decision to do so of her own volition. In fact, Marianne is far from as malleable as the conventional victim. Normally the demon-lover returns to remind his victim of a bond from the past, but in Heroes and Villains it is Marianne who reminds the demon-lover of the bond—in this case the bond that developed between herself and Jewel when he killed her brother.

The way in which the initiative in Heroes and Villains is shifted from the demon-lover to the so-called victim, and the way in which Marianne subverts the role of the female in traditional demon-lover stories, is an index of the power which is ascribed to the novel's female focalisation. Melanie responds to her symbolic rape and Marianne to her literal rape with anger and indignation. As Palmer (1987) points out, Carter highlights a distinction between the young women's physical vulnerability and the strength of their independence of spirit (p. 188). After marrying Jewel, Marianne gradually turns from victim to predator, surmounts rape and humiliation, and takes Jewel's place as leader. Nevertheless, even this is ambiguous. She says to Donally's son: ‘I'll be the tiger lady and rule them with a rod of iron’ (p. 150). The phrase ‘tiger lady’ associates her with what Donally was trying to create from the little girl he killed. Whilst she seems unaware of the irony in talking to Donally's son who has suffered so much abuse at his father's hands of rods of iron, there is the strong suggestion that one tyranny will be replaced with another.

VII

In conclusion, then, the focalisation of both The Magic Toyshop and Heroes and Villains gives priority to a female consciousness. However, readers will probably find themselves assuming a complex, if not ambivalent, attitude towards the key female protagonist. These are novels where nothing can be taken for granted. The allusions to key literary traditions, such as the fairy story and the post-apocalyptic novel, are designed to call into question some of the grand narratives—such as the Western romantic view of suffering—which we have tended to accept unquestionably. But they also alert us to ways in which human action is shaped by literary and other cultural forms. Hence the reclamation of the fairy story as an appropriate genre for serious writers in The Magic Toyshop is also a deconstruction of some of the ways in which the genre was used to regulate female sexuality. And in Heroes and Villains, Carter appears interested in the ways in which the societies of the Professors and soldiers and of the Barbarians, both construct and police their boundaries through myth and folklore.

There is a sharper focus in these two novels than in those discussed in the previous chapter on how identity is produced in the process of other people's perceptions and rendered ‘real’ through linguistic and other symbolic mechanisms. The Magic Toyshop, for example, explores some of the consequences of the Genesis account of creation, especially its role in the construction of female subjectivity and sexuality within twentieth-century psychoanalytical thought—a topic pursued in the later novel, The Passion of New Eve. In both the novels discussed in this chapter, some of the more important of the linguistic and symbolic mechanisms, as in the scene where Melanie tries on a number of different female roles, are presented in ways which alienate the reader from them. In other words, the text defamiliarises them. This is in turn evidence of the way in which Carter was beginning to see her culture as ‘foreign’, without may be realising the full implications of this position, even before her visit to Japan.

In The Magic Toyshop and Heroes and Villains, the processes of demythologising and defamiliarisation emerge as two sides of the same coin. Within this twin process, intertextuality plays an important part. A further difference between these novels and those discussed in the previous chapter is that whereas the other novels proceed intertextually, The Magic Toyshop and Heroes and Villains turn intertextuality into a theme. They are concerned with the role of intertextuality in the social construction of women's identities. The casting of Melanie as a puppet for the wicked puppet master, her uncle, provides a means to explore a number of the key facets of women's lives within patriarchal societies: the female as rendered passive, controlled and silenced; the denial of many aspects of female sexual identity; the idealisation of the female form yet debasement of women as Woman; and the way in which women are exposed to prurient commercial exploitation. Through the intertext of Marianne as the victim of a demon lover, Heroes and Villains explores some of the challenges, difficulties and barriers women face under patriarchy in trying to achieve a sense of agency in their own lives and an autonomous sense of self. The interconnection between the processes of cultural defamiliarisation and thematising intertextuality in the fiction itself is especially obvious in The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman, which was completed while Carter had her award to travel to Japan, and The Passion of New Eve which she wrote subsequently. The way in which these novels thematise intertextuality in a much bolder way, probably, as a result of the defamiliarisation process Carter experienced in Japan, is discussed in the next chapter.