SOURCE: Pollock, Mary S. “Angela Carter's Animal Tales: Constructing the Non-Human.” Lit: Literature Interpretation Theory 11, no. 1 (July 2000): 35-57.

[In the following essay, Pollock discusses Carter's representation of animals in her works.]

When she died in 1992, Angela Carter's close friend Salman Rushdie wrote that “English literature has lost its high sorceress, its benevolent witchqueen, a burlesque artist of genius and antic grace” (5). Carter disliked serious references to goddesses, sorcerers, and magic, and would have perhaps rejected the first two encomia, but she would have accepted the others.¹ Sometimes, she admitted ruefully that the “antic grace” of her stories threatened to obscure and muffle the hard core of meaning that was as important to her as the entertainment offered in stories; and she admired writers whose style did not distract from what they wanted to say—Christina Stead, for example, who taught herself to “compose […] like a blind man throwing paint against a wall” (“Christina Stead” 571).²

Nevertheless, even the first part of Rushdie's assessment rings true: Carter's work seems magically seductive. She had begun to attract an academic following several years before her death and, since then, the response to her work has burgeoned: her stories are overdetermined, resistant to analysis, and yet irresistible to critics. Carter began her career with journalism, which was deeply informed by structuralism and contemporary Marxism. Later, as the critical dialogue about her work developed, Carter came to theorize her own literary practice as postmodernist, thereby creating a body of fiction even more attractive to literary critics than before.³ But here is the catch: the dense intertextuality and lush surfaces of her work seem to resonate at so many points with contemporary postmodernism and postructuralist theory that the choice facing the critic seems to be between superficiality and impossible depth. “I do put everything in a novel to be read […] on as many levels as you can comfortably cope with at the time,” she told John Haffenden in 1985 (86). But what do you do with an author who cannot resist a pun, who deliberately situates her work in a dialogue that includes Benjamin and Bakhtin, whose knowledge of world culture rivals that of Milton (he was said to have read every book known in Europe), and whose heroes include Bugs Bunny?⁴

The tensions around and within Angela Carter's work are, to say the least, unconventional, and her zone of ontological significance includes not only biological human beings, but technologically enhanced human beings and non-human animals. Her writing expresses that view of the world articulated by Donna Haraway in her work on anthropology and science fiction: “We are all in chiasmatic borderlands, liminal areas where new shapes, new kinds of action and responsibility, are gestating in the world” (314, Haraway's italics). The numerous valiant attempts to analyze Carter's speculative fiction attest to the fact that her readers understand the importance of the cyborg in her work.⁵ On the other side of her fictional universe, however, are the non-human animals, and these animals have been almost invisible to Carter's critics except as extensions of the human kind.

That is because Carter's work has been read in the same way the “actual” world is perceived: anthropocentrically. In spite of very audible movements for animal welfare and animal rights in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the deep structure of Western discourse about non-human animals has changed little since the Enlightenment. Western ideology with reference to animal others is based on two assumptions: first, because they do not have recognizably grammatical languages, animals cannot have “consciousness” (for the religious, read “souls”) and thus function, in the metaphor of Descartes, as biological “machines”; second, the “animal kingdom” can be most accurately understood in taxonomic terms, which allow not only a classification of beasts based on empirical data, but placement within a hierarchy of value, with “man,” the only animal provided with a soul, at the top—and God above it all. Thus, it is man who decides the relative value of other animals and doles out rights to them from a position of self-conferred power and authority.⁶ So ingrained in Western culture is the perception that humans are qualitatively different from all other sentient life forms that we do not even possess the language to discuss this problem in all its complexity. The available words are blunt instruments. As Lynda Birke writes, the boundaries separating homo sapiens from beasts “shift from time to time […] but they still serve to demarcate, to draw the line firmly between ‘humans’ and ‘other animals.’”

Yet whatever are these other animals? What is the “animal nature” that they allegedly have? The trouble is that I cannot recognize any particular animal in these pronouncements: there is simply no one animal nature against which we can compare our wonderful human achievements […]. Humans are indeed unique, but so are dogs, ostriches, and parrots […].

(38)

The love and war between humans and other animals is an important theme in Carter's work; it is a constant baseline in almost all the fiction she wrote after the Bristol trilogy⁷ and some before, as well as in three of her radio plays, and in many essays. As she herself writes in a 1984 review of The Great Cat Massacre, by Robert Darnton, to explain the slaughter in eighteenth-century Paris of thousands of cats by a mob of disgruntled apprentices would serve as “the key to ‘an alien system of meaning’” (474). Yet her readers acknowledge Carter's animals—the actual animals, not the hybrid monsters—with little more than a passing reference.

One of the most pervasive critical assumptions about Carter's work is that her depictions of animals must represent aspects of human life. Taken together, Elaine Jordan's essays constitute one of the most successful readings of Carter.⁸ In “Enthralment: Angela Carter's Speculative Fictions,” Jordan tackles Carter's most controversial works—The Sadean Woman, a 1977 book-length essay on Sade, and her speculative fiction: Heroes and Villains (1969), The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman (1972), The Passion of New Eve (1977)—and the hostile criticism they have provoked. Assessing the importance of Mother, the powerful figure at the center of The Passion of the New Eve, Jordan writes that

Carter like Kristeva counters Mother's archaic slogan that “Woman is Space, Man is Time” (that is, “Man does; Woman is”—or, men are politically and economically significant, while women reproduce and alleviate) by writing a story of how women, and “the Question of Woman” or more properly of gender difference, have now irreversibly entered any adequate account of history.

(37)

In this essay, Jordan also begins to unpack what she considers the significance of animals in Carter's fiction. Invoking Lacan and Kristeva (again), she argues that

“Wolf-Alice,” the final story in The Bloody Chamber, could be taken as a training manual in Levi-Straussian anthropology and the Lacanian mirror stage: in “wild reasoning,” the derivation of a sense of time from women's periods and of selfhood from objectified images and the sacrifice of animal existence to human relations of subject and object. Saying that far from exhausts the story, in which a wild girl, not socialized into disgust, humanizes a male monster, the werewolf or psychotic that wolves would reject for preying on his own kind […].

(23, my italics)

She continues: “Carter's use of wolves and other beasts in her stories reminds us that we are animals, and, in the tradition of the fable, says that animals may have more sense than us, when we think ourselves most sophisticated” (25).⁹ When Jordan writes of “the sacrifice of animal existence,” she is referring not to the life or death of non-human animals, but to a continuity between animal nature and the human unconscious and the repression of what beasts and humans have in common. Jordan's word choice is revealing. In Jordan's analysis, “Carter's use of wolves and other beasts” enables her to make a point about humans: that humans share with nonhuman animals an undifferentiated animal nature which overlaps with or is identical to human sexuality. Carter's interest in individual animals is, then, in Jordan's project, folded back into the discussion of gender, rather than treated as a separate issue. Of course, the animal characters in Carter's fiction do shed light on the human characters, just as the human characters also illuminate each other. But Carter's animal tales are not simply modern beast fables.

Jordan's conflation of the human with the animal in Carter's work is typical of the way this subject has been handled in other Carter criticism—and it reduces the complexity of Carter's attention to other species. In her appreciation of Carter in The Flesh and the Mirror,¹⁰ “Running with Tigers,” Margaret Atwood also oversimplifies Carter's animals by reading them as metaphors for human beings, and by reading Carter's narrations of animal behaviors only as points of entry for consideration of human social structures. Atwood singles out, especially, the stories in The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories (1979), the work for which Carter is best known. As a novelist herself, Atwood pays special attention to Carter's craft, noting that the collection is “arranged according to categories of meat-eater: three cat family stories at the beginning, followed by “Puss-in-Boots” as a kind of comic coda; three wolf stories at the end; and three ambiguous supernatural creatures—erl-king, snow-child, female vampire—in the middle” (122). Atwood points out that the protagonists of these tales resonate with Carter's meditations elsewhere on love, sex, and gender politics. In “The Erlking,” for example, an

erotic male woodland spirit—who also comes equipped with a mane, who is also a heart-eater, a blood-drinker […] intends to imprison [the narrator, a young girl] in a pretty cage, like a Blakean lovebird […]. The return to a state of nature isn't always good news for the human being […].

(127)

Atwood's appreciation of Carter is insightful, wholehearted, and interesting as a tribute from one novelist to another, but, like Jordan's work, Atwood's essay stops short of considering Carter's animals as animals.

Carter began to challenge assumptions about non-human species years ago, however, with no less attention than she has challenged other controlling narratives fabricated by political philosophy, science, and religion. She does this overtly in her essays, covertly in her fiction. In the essays, Carter argues directly and anecdotally about the extension of the imperialist mentality into the lives of nonhuman species. She herself lived with cats and acknowledged her fascination with them, but her work suggests an attentive interest in other animals, too, and a searching curiosity about the barriers which separate human animals from all others. If she does not theorize Western Enlightenment thinking about beasts as thoroughly as she theorized hierarchies of race, class, and gender, she does make many statements in her nonfiction from which a tentative theory may be reconstructed, and this theory may, indeed, serve as a missing piece in a general understanding of her work. In Carter's fiction, contacts between humans and other animals are vexed and revealing. These contacts take shape within an alien discourse, or alien discourses, which, if they can never be translated into the human, can at least be understood darkly when we manage to minimize our own investments in the symbolic order. Since exit strategies from the symbolic are difficult, if not impossible, it is especially helpful in this context to remember that Carter's “antic grace” sometimes mattered less for her than the multivalence of her writing. However, since Carter, like the rest of us, lacked refined discursive tools for speaking of non-human animals, her antic language—the language which challenges and evades the symbolic order—contains the richest expression of the nuances in her thinking about them. (Indeed, despite her admiration for plain style, the language of Carter's overwrought fiction contains nuances of thought on many issues which could only be expressed when—to borrow a phrase from a very different writer, Emily Dickinson—the author found a way to “tell it slant” [#1129].) In her animal tales the meaning is on the surface, but it is also subterranean.

In her essays, Carter returns over and over to the notion that, like race, class, and gender, animal nature is a human construct: in an essay on Mr. Frederick (of Hollywood) and other mavens of lingerie fashion, she remarks that “the ‘natural’ is an invention of culture” (125). (Carter's work is nothing if not eclectic, and her concern with non-human animals persists as a subtext where it might least be expected.) Again, in an article written in the last year of her life about the carnivalesque matrix of the English music hall, Carter observes that “in the time of the sky wolf, when fertility festivals filled up those vacant, dark, solstitial days, we used to see no difference between ourselves and the animals”; nursery lore is a faded reminder that “little children remember […] how once we knew that the animals were just as human as we were, and that made us more human, too” (397). But the twentieth-century carnival is fleeting, she remarks at the end of the article: “Things don't change because a girl puts on trousers or a chap slips on a frock, you know. Masters were masters again, the day after Saturnalia ended” (399). Thus, Carter's thinking about the social construction of beasts is, if not as recognizable as her discourse about race, class, and gender, still clearly linked with these other concerns.

Part of the construction of animal nature consists of ideas about what animals are not. In “Little Lamb, Get Lost,” an essay written for New Society in 1978, Carter directly challenges the notion that humans differ essentially from other animals by being ensouled. “It used to give me a deep sense of inner peace, in the Far East, to know I was among people who had never built into their cultural apparatus some notion of anthropocentricity, because they thought they'd been made in the image of a god,” she writes. Absence of anthropocentrism flattens the hierarchy of beasts and puts

our co-tenancy of the world with the teeming multitudes of furred, clawed and feathered things on a different existential basis. It means you can't ponce about like the lord of creation. There, swinging from a tree or perched on a branch, but for a genetic quirk, goes one.

(307)

Carter presents another, more familiar challenge to Western assumptions about animals in the same essay: “People treat the animals they have in their power according to their expectations of their treatment by people who have power over them. (As, indeed, men do their wives)” (307). Consequently, treatment of animals in the West is not only philosophically flawed, but rooted in primitive emotions, especially fear: humans are “shit-scared […] of carnivores because, presumably, they would eat us, if they got half a chance” (306). And some of these fears, she suggests, are so deeply rooted that their sources are hidden in the mists of cultural history. We have cast “the carnivorous animal as id” (307). The wolf represents “ravening lust” (307); the dog, a more complicated case, inspires an ambivalent mixture of love and the fear of madness (308).

As Atwood and Jordan suggest, many of Angela Carter's animals do function as metaphors for human traits or behaviors. But they are not only metaphors. For Carter, actual, non-human animals have the same ontological status as homo sapiens. In “Animals in the Nursery,” a 1976 essay for New Society, she observes (in an analogy to Simone de Beauvoir's famous statement that a woman is not born but made) that “the formal division between beast and child is acquired, not inborn” (298). Toys and nursery lore exploit, vulgarize, and distort the child/beast nexus,¹¹ however, and the noxious results belong to what Carter calls elsewhere the “social fictions which regulate our lives—what Blake called the ‘mind-forged manacles’” (“Notes from the Front Line” 38). She concludes in “Animals in the Nursery” that

The whole heterogeneous global zoo is lumped together as “animals” on one side of the fence, with “human beings” on the other side […]. This convention simplifies the bewildering variety of the world in a very consoling way; and consolation derived from imposing human forms on apparently mysterious creatures is probably part of the role played by make-believe animals. Yet the arbitrary division between man and beast obliterates the fact that man himself is only another animal with particularly complex social institutions.

(300-01)

Carter's reaction toward the everyday human habit of finding “consolation” in the distinctions between human and animal is one of “incredulity with regard to the master narratives”—as Lyotard defines postmodernism (7). In Carter's view, human animals are different from other animals because, through their “complex social institutions,” they have learned to be, because they have so thoroughly repressed the nonverbal aspects of their being, which inhere within the semiotic. In another 1976 essay, again for New Society, Carter speculates that human animals, peering through the cages at the zoo, experience dim, uncomfortable intimations:

Only a whimsical quirk of evolution has separated Guy the gorilla, in his massive, obsidian repose, from an executive desk in an international corporation. As it is, he is trapped behind his glass panel […] the daily functions of his life performed before an impersonally curious audience […]. The most intimate details of his domestic life are on display […].

(“At the Zoo” 294)

At the end of the day, “when the crowds are gone and the beasts inherit Regent's Park,” Guy and the other primates “console themselves. And, perhaps, weep” (298). Out of context, quotations from Carter's work are easily distorted, and lest my selections from her words smack of sentimentality, I hasten to add that there is nothing sentimental about Carter's readings of zoos. “At the Zoo” is an exercise in comparative zoo-keeping: the discourses surrounding the animals in London's Regent's Park Zoo “bring home the analogy with the mad-house”; the Turin Zoo “is like a penal colony” (a heavily loaded statement from an author conversant with Foucault); the zoo at Verona, on the other hand, “seemed to have been designed by people who saw the beasts' side of things completely” (295, 296, 297).

Carter's materialism, her hostility to myth-making, are nowhere more evident than in her thinking about animals, which is worked out along two different thematic threads. The first thread, the more familiar one, runs through a body of fiction which problematizes, interrogates, and expands the boundary between humans and other animals—Carter's fictions of werewolves, vampires, and other monsters. I shall retrieve this thread later on. The second thread, which I have already been unwinding in her essays, is Carter's attention to ordinary animals, who are seen as themselves and not merely as metaphors for human nature gone awry. Despite Carter's concerns for animals who are patronized, abused, and misrepresented, despite her own affinities with some animals, especially cats, her discourse about beasts has even less in common with that of most contemporary animal rights theory and rhetoric than her feminism has, at first glance, with the discourse of mainstream feminist theory. Carter's belief that human treatment of and attitudes toward other animals are exploitive and imperialistic is a familiar one. However, more difficult to realize within the context of Enlightenment thought is Carter's insight that attitudes which have allowed mistreatment of other animals have been justified by the very hierarchical Enlightenment metanarrative which, ironically, has been invoked to justify the extension of our own human rights. Before dropping this thread, I would like to discuss two stories which have received little critical attention, probably because they are atypically (for Carter) aligned with the conventions of literary realism, and possibly because ordinary animals figure so prominently as characters. Cats are characters in both these stories, “The Quiltmaker” and “Lizzie's Tigers.”

Simply making a cat into a thoroughly feline character (as far as this can be done), rather than a projection of human nature onto a feline form, is in itself a statement about the possibility of subject status for an individual cat. One of the characters in “The Quiltmaker,” a relatively “plain” autobiographical story written for an anthology of contemporary women's writing, is an unnamed cat.¹² “One of those ill-kempt balls of fluff old ladies keep, this cat looks as if he's unraveling, its black fur has rusted and faded at the same time” (452). The other two characters are the narrator, a fictionalized version of Carter herself, and her elderly neighbor Letty, the cat's companion. (Although I suspect that the narrator is not entirely identical with Carter, I shall refer to her as Carter for the sake of simplicity.)

As the title suggests, this story is structured (uncharacteristically, for Carter) as a patchwork. The narrative begins with an explanation that

With all patchwork, you must start in the middle and work outward, even in the kind they call ‘crazy patchwork’, which is made by feather-stitching together arbitrary shapes scissored out at the maker's whim […].

The more I think about it, the more I like this metaphor. You can really make this image work for its living; it synthesizes perfectly both the miscellany of experience and the use we make of it.

(444-45)

The miscellaneous bits of fabric which make up this narrative quilt include Carter's observations on narrative form; childhood memories; reminiscences of intimate relationships (the break-up with her English companion presented in matter-of-fact fashion, the drawn-out separation from her Japanese lover, with nostalgia); a two-page, almost self-contained essay about the nature and history of henna (a preoccupation of both the narrator and her elderly neighbor); and the story of Letty's decay and rejuvenation. The “use we make” of these bits—the pattern—emerges only at the end of the story: together, they suggest a meditation on compassion and desire, which seldom coincide. For the narrator, Letty “is Atlantis to me […]. I cannot guess what were or are her desires” (451). And thus the compassion Carter extends to Letty and her cat is flawed.

The only point at which compassion does coincide with desire is in the life of the cat. After Letty falls in her basement apartment, and is rescued by Carter and the police, her cat appears to keep her company during the wait for an ambulance. Carter observes that

some cats are naturals for the caring professions—they will give you mute company long after anyone else has stopped tolerating your babbling, they don't judge, don't give a damn if you wet the bed and, when the eyesight fades, freely offer themselves for the consolation of still sentient fingertips. He kneads the shit-stained quilt with his paws and purrs.

(452)

It is clear that the cat loves Letty for the comfort she provides. However, as the story follows its unsentimental course, it becomes clear that the relationship between the cat and his elderly keeper is more intricate, and almost opaque to the narrator,¹³ whose confusion is foreshadowed in her initial fumblings with pronouns—“this cat looks as if he's unraveling, its black fur has rusted and faded at the same time” (452, my italics). After Letty departs for the hospital, the narrator admits that “for all my kind heart, of which I am so proud, my empathy and so on, I myself had not given Letty's companion another thought until today, going out to pick rosemary with which to stuff a roast for our greedy dinners” (455). Carter describes the cat's condition in horrifying detail. He is devastated. When she calls him, belatedly, the cat will not come. When she “chuck[s] half the contents of a guilty tin of cat food over” the wall (455), he refuses it. It is clear that he has not cleaned himself. When he tries to leave the windowsill of Letty's apartment, not to eat, but for reasons of his own which remain obscure to the observer, he staggers, then drags himself back to his perch “with a gigantic effort” (455). “You could almost have believed, not that he was waiting for the person who always fed him to come and feed him again as usual, but that he was pining for Letty herself” (455). And, clearly, he is. When Letty returns, against the odds, stronger and newly hennaed, he, too, recovers and is finally seen, “on the other side of the brick wall, lolling voluptuously among the creeping buttercups, fat as butter himself—Letty's been feeding him up” (457). To all appearances, the cat's desires for comfort and love have been fulfilled, just as he himself has fulfilled Letty's desires for compassion and sensual pleasure. To all appearances, the motives for his behavior have been more authentic and integrated than those of the neighborly Angela Carter. For it is clear that, at least initially, she is moved only by the cold, cerebral, charitable directives of the superego.

The cat's life is intertwined with and parallel to the life of his human companion; he is the object of compassion denied and desire misunderstood, but also of love. He is himself, a character in a story, whose subject status is equal to that of the human characters. He is not a metaphor.¹⁴ Another cat character is central in “Lizzie's Tiger,” written for Cosmopolitan ten years after the publication of “The Quiltmaker.” Again, the cat is himself and not a caricature or human projection; indeed, in this story, Carter interrogates the processes of human projection onto the animal other more searchingly than in “The Quiltmaker” and implies a more radical argument for the ontological status of non-human animals. This fictional account of four-year-old Lizzie Borden, a prequel to Carter's 1985 story “The Fall River Axe Murders,” operates on the same naturalistic surface as “The Quiltmaker.” In both stories about Lizzie Borden, Carter shows her in sympathy with wild and domesticated animals and deeply alienated, perhaps with good reason, from the human kind. She is the daughter of a grim and parsimonious father, whose fortune is made by exploiting the Portuguese and “Cannuck” workers in Fall River, whose control over “his women” is symbolized by the locks on both sides of every one of the numerous doors in the house, “narrow as a coffin” (“The Fall River Axe Murders” 301), and whose evil passions are acted out on the animals in his power. In “The Fall River Axe Murders,” the adult Lizzie spends most of her existence, against the grain, in compliance with the symbolic order, but she experiences violent psychotic episodes, during which she breaks out of her repression, and language and consciousness give way. This condition is exacerbated when her father kills Lizzie's beloved white pigeons and her step-mother tries to eat them in a pie. (Lizzie is allowed to give her pets a decent burial only because the sympathetic maid-of-all-work intervenes.)

“Lizzie's Tiger” takes place one evening when four-year-old Lizzie Borden sneaks out of her father's house to visit the circus. Recently orphaned by the death of her mother, Lizzie is easy prey to a drunken sexual predator haunting the early evening shadows around the circus tent (though she has no objection to his strange behavior until he tries to kiss her). After her encounter with the strange man, she wanders around the grounds until she happens upon the tiger whose image on the circus poster has drawn her here. He is imprisoned in a red and gold wheeled cage embellished with an image of a naked woman, and his “liquid motion” as he paces the cramped space mesmerizes the small girl: “It was all raw, vivid, exasperated nerves” (328). To the horror of the bystanders, Lizzie lunges at the bars and will not be dislodged. The tiger's eyes meet the child's; he kneels to study the small phenomenon clutching the other side of the cage, drawn to her by “the power of her love” (328), and “they never took their eyes off one another, though neither had the least idea what the other meant” (329).

Then the tamer arrives, posturing and cracking his whip. He is none other than the molester from the shadows. His relationship with the tiger, a struggle for absolute power, is based on mutual fear. Claiming victory over the tiger, “the Scourge of Bengal,” he declaims to the fascinated audience, boasting in the tones of a circus barker: “In its native habitat, it thought nothing of consuming a dozen brown-skinned heathen for its breakfast and following up with a couple of dozen more for dinner!” (320-30). He goes on: “I bring to bear upon its killer instinct a rational man's knowledge of the power of fear […]. In my cage, among my cats, I have established a hierarchy of FEAR and among my cats you might well say I am TOP DOG […]” (330). By claiming the tiger's dominance over the brown-skinned people in his homeland—obviously an effort of pure fabrication—the tamer also claims by proxy his own power over them.¹⁵ The boast is followed by a brutal humiliation of the great cat, who has the temerity to object when the tamer strikes him on the nose with the butt of the whip. The tiger act ends with the tamer's narrow escape; “Lizzie's stunned little face was now mottled all over with a curious reddish-purple, with the heat of the tent, with passion, with the sudden access of enlightenment” (331). Although Carter is not explicit about the nature of Lizzie's enlightenment—so different from the Enlightenment of the “rational man”—there is little doubt that she suddenly realizes her own place within a hierarchy of power. Lizzie understands her powerlessness under the “will to dominance” which maintains that hierarchy and is “exercised in the name of humanity” and rationality (Kappeler 325). The outcome is prefigured by the image of the naked woman presented to public view on the tiger's cage.

In the tamer and old Andrew Borden, multiple oppressions intersect. Susanne Kappeler's 1995 essay “Speciesism, Racism, Nationalism … or the Power of Scientific Subjectivity” echoes and illuminates Carter's writing about animals, which may be read as a deconstruction of the rights-based ethic of Enlightenment (and liberal) politics.¹⁶ Like Carter, Kappeler turns her gaze from the victim (it is difficult to see even the infant Lizzie Borden as a victim—dour, lumpish future murderess that she is!) to the power structures which replicate the many, ostensibly different forms of oppression:

Our focus should be less on the groups who are oppressed by or benefit from various singularized forms of oppression than on how the different oppressions operate, differently coopting us, and how the multiple systems of oppression intersect to concentrate cumulative power in veritable centers of power, combining the benefit of every single form of oppression.

(322)

On another level, “Lizzie's Tiger” is also an exploration of the tension between what Julia Kristeva refers to as “two modalities, of what is, for us, the same signifying process,” the symbolic and the semiotic (Revolution in Poetic Language 24). Lizzie Borden is able to understand the parallels between her own existence and that of the tiger because she herself is still primarily allied with the semiotic, “preceding meaning and signification, mobile, amorphous, but already regulated” (102). Little Lizzie rebels against the symbolic order. Taciturn, stubborn, capable of finding her own way to the circus at night, she is attracted to whatever (and whomever) is able to meet her in the locus of the pre-verbal (or in the tiger's case, non-verbal). Contrary to what many commentators on Carter claim, her stories do not dramatize “our human/animal nature” as if all animal species, including human, are fundamentally the same (Kennedy 117). Lizzie's nature is not the same as the tiger's, however much it attracts her. Lizzie's emotional alliance with the tiger does not indicate that her interior life is chaotic, nor is it based on the sentimental or totemic identification with animals which characterizes much contemporary feminist writing about them.¹⁷ Instead, the actions of both the child and the tiger are intentional, valid, “common sense” responses to the connecting systems of dominance and control in which they are trapped. In “The Quiltmaker,” the character of the adult Angela Carter fails to comprehend or explain the lonely cat or his relationship with his elderly human companion because—when she operates discursively—she has lost contact with the realm of the semiotic through which she would have access to this information. Lizzie Borden has not.

These stories elaborate two themes which Carter has developed in her essays: first, both critique Western hierarchical thinking which denies ontological status to non-human animals; second, both stories suggest that human access to other animals as subjects occurs only through the semiotic realm of our own nature—emotion, sensory experience, instinct—which evades expression in the symbolic and is consequently trivialized or rendered invisible in hegemonic discourse.

In the work for which Carter is best known—the stories of “antic grace”—these two themes are inextricable. Fantastic rather than naturalistic, the tales in The Bloody Chamber reveal Carter's thinking about animals in a different, less overt way. As Atwood points out, Carter has arranged these ten stories as a taxonomy of carnivores, most of whom have human traits, however true they may be to their animal nature. Most of the stories are versions (some would say “per-versions”) of traditional tales or fairy tales written for children, such as those by Charles Perrault, whose stories are now so familiar that they have permanently stamped their impress on the autochthonous narrative materials from which Perrault drew his inspiration. All of Carter's stories, from her randy “Puss in Boots” to her tales of vampires and werewolves, situate both human and animal characters in a borderland between human consciousness and the consciousness of other species, the realm of the almost/not quite human.

This kind of psychic borderland corresponds to Kristeva's description of the thetic, the space between the semiotic field and the symbolic order. The thetic is dangerous, uncertain, and unstable, but it is also the locus of dynamism and creativity; for Kristeva, the thetic is “that crucial place on the basis of which the human being constitutes himself as signifying and/or social” (Revolution in Poetic Language 69). If the thetic cannot be completely expressed in language, it can nevertheless more closely approach articulation in literary language, with its multiplicity of appeals and meanings: “Mimesis and poetic language […] go through its truth (signification, denotation) […] to tell the ‘truth’ about it” (60). Kristeva's work is often invoked in Carter criticism, but Kristeva's analysis of the parallels between layers of consciousness and layers of language offers a powerful instrument for understanding Carter's effects which has still not been fully explored. Kristeva's psycholinguistic analysis applies to both the language and the formal structures in most, if not all, of Carter's fictional and dramatic work. And, although Kristeva herself does not theorize animals, she points a direction which might be followed to theorize—and render visible—the animals in Carter's writing.

One of the stories in the central section of The Bloody Chamber, “The Erlking,” offers another account of caged creatures—and one creature who, like Lizzie Borden, expects to be caged. “The Erlking” is one of Carter's most decorative and literary tales. The language glitters and shifts. This story is not a crazy quilt, but a fabrication of invisible stitches—of allusions and motifs drawn from Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland, Christina Rossetti's Goblin Market, Robert Browning's “Porphyria's Lover,” the plays of Shakespeare, the poetry of Blake (and perhaps Yeats), Grimms' tales, nursery rhymes, and traditional ballads (at least!)—woven into the Goethe/Schubert redaction of a Teutonic folk goblin, king of the elves, who haunts the Black Forest and lures his victims, mostly children, to their deaths.¹⁸ Goethe's victim is a passive little boy, snatched from his father's embrace as they wend their way home through the dark forest. In Carter's version, the child is a pubescent girl who wanders into the forest on her own, falls into bed with the Erlking, concludes that he intends to transform her into a caged bird, and plots his death.

Most of the critical literature on The Bloody Chamber has been devoted to the title story, based on Perrault's “Bluebeard,” and the werewolf stories in the final section. When they take note of “The Erlking” at all, Carter's readers interpret it as a feminist commentary on the dangers of puberty for young women. For Atwood, the forest king represents the danger of the “natural”; in Jordan's analysis, the story “re-examines Hegel's dialectic of master and slave” (“Dangers” 125) within the context of gender relations. For Harriet Linkin, “The Erlking” demonstrates the “failure of a Romantic aesthetics whose master plot requires the subjugation of the other” (322). Neglected in these readings, however, is the ambiguity of the story. Woman is not the only other. And what is the “other” for woman? Everything in this story shifts its shape. The plants are transformed into food, as is an occasional rabbit. But the plants and animals are also friends and companions, who flock around the Erlking of their own free will. The nanny goat serves as a watchdog. The larks and linnets are birds and girls. The Erlking's cottage is a vortex of tenderness, violence, and change. The narrator (unusually shifty, even for Carter) vacillates between speaking of herself in the third person and owning her story in the first, speaking of the Erlking in the third person and apostrophizing him in the second, rhetorically involving the reader and self-absorption, present and future tenses.

The Erlking himself is the most mysterious figure in the story, a lover and perhaps an “innocent” murderer. There is no father in this story, no mother—only the lover, who initiates the narrator into sexuality, into the beauty of the plant and animal kingdoms. The figure of the Erlking suggests (like Guy, the gorilla in the London zoo) “the arbitrary division between man and beast” (“Animals in the Nursery” 301). When the narrator first encounters him, she sees that he is beautiful. He is tall; his eyes are the color of summer leaves, his abundant mane the color of autumn foliage. Animals and birds flock to him; birds sit on his arms, bunnies lie at his feet, and “a fox laid its muzzle fearlessly upon his knee” (190). But there is nothing simple about him: the Erlking stands between nature and culture, plant and animal, the semiotic and the symbolic. He also recalls the Green Man of northern European pagan mythology, who represents cyclical time, the rhythm of life and death. The Erlking communicates through human speech, through the minimalist two-tone songs of the birds, and through silence. He sometimes hunts. But he is also “an excellent housewife” (110), adept at domestic culture. He knows the plants of the forest and how to cook them up into imaginative little dinners; his hut is always warmed by a crackling fire, fed by fallen branches, and it is scrupulously clean; his copper pans gleam; from the milk of his little goat he makes a “soft cheese that has a unique, rank, amniotic taste” (188).

The narrator notices an old, unused fiddle with broken strings (whose?), but it is the linnets and larks, in wicker cages lining the kitchen walls, who fill the hut with music. Little by little the girl concludes that her lover, the “tender butcher” whose lovemaking always begins with a jovial command to “skin the rabbit” (189), will change her into one of these birds: “His touch both consoles and devastates me; I feel my heart pulse, then wither, naked as a stone […] while the lovely, moony night slides through the window to dapple the flank of this innocent who makes cages to keep the sweet birds in” (190-91). In the end, when his head is turned “so that I can't see the greenish, inward-turning suns of your eyes anymore,” she will strangle him with his own hair and free the birds, “who will change back, every one, each with the crimson imprint of his love bite on their throats” (192). In its original state, the fiddle would resonate with fully human culture, but when she finally restrings it with the dead goblin's hair, it will play “discordant music without a hand touching it. The bow will dance over the new strings of its own accord and they will cry out: ‘Mother, mother, you have murdered me!’” (192). And so the story ends. The Erlking is as yet dead only in the narrator's imagination.

An animal/plant/human hybrid, the Erlking happily inhabits the borderland between the symbolic and the semiotic: he meets the narrator within the dangerous, uncertain realm of the thetic. There is no proof in the story that the larks and linnets are not enchanted girls, but there is also no proof that they are. The Erlking may be a sexual predator, he may be an innocent, or he may be an innocent predator; there is no way for the narrator to know, and the reader is no wiser. Like the other stories in the collection, which are overdetermined explorations of aesthetic, biological, psychological, sociological, and political experience, “The Erlking” is certainly “about” sexual coming of age, as it is “about” the master narratives of romantic poetry.

But the story also offers for our contemplation the dark spot under the lamp, the limitations of human beings as we consider the minds of other beings and, inevitably, fail to understand them. Carter's grammar reflects the narrator's confusion about her surroundings, her emotional instability, and her narrowing tunnel vision. When the story begins, she speaks of herself in the third person, greedily interpellating the reader into the narrative: “You step between the first trees and then […] the wood swallows you up” (186). As the narrative progresses, she speaks of herself in the first person; but in the end, the “I” collapses once again into “she,” as the narrator plots to murder the Erlking. The adolescent narrator is disturbed by her new awareness of the frontier between childhood and adulthood, and, more frightening perhaps, the thin tissue which separates the symbolic consciousness from the semiotic, verbal language from other ways of knowing, the animal from the human. In Kristeva's analysis, adolescence is a defining moment in human development, the moment when the individual's allegiance finally shifts from the semiotic to the symbolic. In developmental terms, as Kristeva points out, adolescence itself is a “thetic break” (Revolution 70). At the end of the story, ambivalence gives way to destructiveness, and ambiguity must give way to certainty, however harsh. During the course of the story, the narrator comes to ally herself, as most adults do, with the repressive symbolic order, renouncing the nuanced energies of the semiotic—the powerful, non-verbal, yet ordered energies humans share with other species. For her, the birds in cages are girls, their songs the strangled verbalizations of animals who once were human and would be again; the goblin is only a sinister “natural” force who will consign her to the same prison after he has taken his pleasure. The story attests to the excruciating discomfort of the “speaking” subject—the narrator, the reader, the writer herself—with the unspoken and unspeakable.

The story ends in the future tense: the woods spirit may be killed, or he may not be. This uncertainty admits the hope that the thetic border between human and animal can be, in spite of our lust for power and certainty, a flexible, creative space—and it allows for the possibility that human beings can somehow temper the existential loneliness of our self-appointed place on top. And yet, of all the stories in The Bloody Chamber, this one, about the dangers of anthropocentrism and logocentrism, seems to me the closest to tragedy. For if she kills the Erlking, the still unnamed narrator will bar her own access to those elements of experience which lie outside the symbolic order, including the consciousness of the birds about whose welfare she is concerned. The story reveals the psychic fracture which results when humans attempt to understand, from a position entirely within the symbolic, the nature of non-human animals, or, indeed, our own pain, fear, desire, and sensory consolation, for these are human experiences which cannot be translated entirely into words.

Despite Carter's expressed wish to write plainly, her language of “antic grace” expresses the nuances of this fracture more richly and suggestively than the discursive language of her essays and the stories written about the plane of everyday life. For, as Kristeva observes, it is poetic language rather than expository expression which “make[s] free with the language code […] reorder[s] the psychic drives which have not been harnessed by the dominant symbolization systems […] and seek[s] out and make[s] use of […] the ensuing fracture of a symbolic code which can no longer ‘hold’ its (speaking) subjects” (“The System and the Speaking Subject” 30). And if poetic language seems sometimes to be in complicity with the symbolic order, or dogma, it “may also set in motion what dogma represses” (Revolution 60). Indeed, Carter's ability to set in motion what has been repressed may account for the highly partisan and emotional critical responses to her work. Because her work is deceptively dense and poetic, I think readers tend to make elementary mistakes: whether she speaks as a fictional subject named Angela Carter, or a nameless adolescent girl who has fallen in love with a wild goblin king, Carter is often taken personally and literally when she should not be. And, conversely, just because her writing does set in motion traces of experiences which are repressed by the symbolic order—such as the verbal constructs which define the human against the animal other—her words are sometimes taken figuratively when she means them literally. She really does mean that the human/beast nexus cannot be understood except by children, or through “an alien system of meaning.”

Even in what is to all appearances her most discursive, expository writing, from The Sadeian Woman to “Animals in the Nursery,” Carter, by her own admission, cannot completely trade in the literary for the phatic because her impulse to write is dominated by a desire to challenge the symbolic, even as she employs and refines it. This is a truth about her writing which Salman Rushdie has understood better than she herself.

Notes

1. Despite her radical skepticism of what she described as “certain configurations of imagery in our culture” (female mythological figures, for instance, or the goddess worship at the center of some circles in contemporary feminist spirituality), the description of Carter herself as a magician or witch has been persistent (Katsavos 12). Besides the language of the reviews, over which she of course had no control, an interview with Ann Snitow the Voice Literary Supplement was entitled “Conversation with a Necromancer,” and another with Santiago del Rey in Quimera (Barcelona) “Feminismo y Brujería” (Feminism and Witchcraft).

2. Carter's nonfiction has been collected in Shaking a Leg: Collected Writings (1997); all page numbers for essays and articles will be referenced to this publication. In the interview with Snitow, Carter speaks of her admiration for Christina Stead's progress from the fancy to the plain—and of her own inability to cultivate the plain style. To a question asked by Ann Snitow in her Voice Literary Supplement interview—“You, too, write beautifully. Are you trying to stop?”—Carter answers, “Yes, except that I can't […]. This is the awful thing” (14).

3. Lorna Sage's 1992 interview with Carter, though not a complete survey of theoretical influences on Carter's work, is nevertheless a good place to begin such a study, as is “Notes from the Front Line,” a short autobiographical essay about the genesis of her work during the sixties, first published in the anthology Gender and Writing (1983), edited by Michelene Wandor. In her interview with Snitow, Carter specifically addresses Foucault's influence on her work with Sade.

4. Elaine Jordan remarks, “She traces a substantial part of twentieth-century cultural and political experience and theory with scepticism and commitment, delighted irony and a sense of fair play: as she once characterised Bugs Bunny in a midday radio programme I happened to hear: ‘an undeceived rabbit, streetwise in the best sense, expecting the worst and hoping for the best” (“The Dangerous Edge” 211).

5. In Angela Carter: The Rational Glass (1998) (seven chapters in total), Aidan Day devotes an entire chapter to The Passion of the New Eve, two-thirds of a chapter to Heroes and Villains, and a chapter to The Sadeian Woman and Doctor Hoffman as theory and practice. Thus, the proportion of critical attention given to the speculative fiction in this recent study is greater than the proportion of this genre in Angela Carter's total opus, but is representative of critical trends in response to her work.

6. The history of attitudes about animals is moving into the center of recent discourse about environmental and animal rights issues. For example, see Harriet Ritvo's The Animal Estate: The English and Other Creatures in the Victorian Age (1987), or, more recently, Matthew Senior's article “When the Beasts Spoke: Animal Speech and Classical reason in Descartes and La Fontaine” in Animal Acts: Configuring the Human in Western History (1997). A few challenges to Western assumptions about non-human animals have come from the natural sciences, the ecology movement, and various new religious movements, and they are beginning to be heard in cultural and literary studies. When literary scholars do integrate the concern with non-human animals into their various frames of reference, the resulting scholarship is likely to be considerable. For a preview of this trend, see Lingua Franca (March 1999): in a short article entitled “Moo!,” Jennifer Schuessler reports on ecocriticism sessions at the 1998 MLA Convention, quoting Marian Scholtmeijer's comment that “We proceed from the idea that animals have not only been mistreated, they have also been misrepresented. Too many people are still stuck with animals as symbols of things other than what they are to themselves. That is passé in modern times” (10). [Ed. note: Also see Lit 10.4.]

7. Informally known as the Bristol trilogy, three of Carter's early novels—Shadow Dance (1966), Several Perceptions (1968) and Love (1971)—share a theme (the deconstruction of camp) as well as a setting.

8. Jordan's “The Dangers of Angela Carter” (1992) is a defense of Carter's work against reductive feminist readings. Jordan is especially repelled by Robert Clark's article, “Angela Carter's Desire Machine” (1987), but takes issue, as well, with Susanne Kappeler's treatment of Carter in The Pornography of Representation (1986) and Patricia Duncker's 1984 lesbian feminist analysis, “Re-imagining the Fairy Tale: Angela Carter's Bloody Chambers.”

9. Because Jordan's approach is to defend Carter against various hostile or careless readers, the framing of her argument is established by the critics with whom she takes issue—especially those arguing from a feminist position against Carter's perceived political incorrectness.

10. The Flesh and the Mirror (1994), edited by Lorna Sage was the first important collection of criticism on Carter, and it is still essential reading.

11. In the recent fad of teddy bears for adults, Carter sees not only market exploitation of animal images, but also a “half-serious, half-playful, wholly nauseous re-creations of an illusory childhood” (“In the Bear Garden” 304).

12. “The Quiltmaker” is unusual for Carter in its merging of fiction and autobiography. Also, it was one of only three stories not republished as part of a collection until Burning Your Boats, the complete collected short stories which appeared after Carter's death. All page references to this and other short fiction will be to Burning Your Boats.

13. Another unusual feature of “The Quiltmaker” is its resonance with the naturalistic old-age narratives by Doris Lessing in The Diaries of Jane Somers, the two parts of which were first published in 1983 and 1984. This unusual coincidence leads me to speculate that the work of Carter, the younger writer, may have influenced Lessing in this instance.

14. Although she does not mention Carter in “The Power of Otherness: Animals in Women's Fiction,” Marian Scholtmeijer observes that “I have found little tendency in women's writings to convert the animal into a symbol or an abstraction” (260 n4). Scholtmeijer's observation may well be an overgeneralization, but it does describe Carter's depictions of animals. Carter's critics suggest repeatedly that her animals are metaphors for humans, but in fact it is only the monsters or human/animal hybrids in Carter's fiction who stand in for aspects of human existence.

15. In The Animal Estate, Ritvo examines at length the symbolic control of indigenous peoples through the actual possession and control of exotic animals, and through control of the discourse about them. Although Ritvo analyzes European empires, especially the Victorian British Empire, her point applies as well to the discourse in North America about exotic animals; the argument is in fact more complicated in North America by the discourse about large predatory animals native to North American soil. In Europe, these species were already extinct well before the age of empire.

16. Kappeler's essay is the last and most broadly conceptualized piece in Animals and Women: Feminist Theoretical Exploration, an anthology edited by Carol J. Adams and Josephine Donovan. Kappeler's work clearly had a formative influence on the project which was not limited to the essay: the acknowledgement page begins, “This anthology has benefited considerably from the active involvement of Susanne Kappeler over the years that it was being assembled. She played an important role […] in the shaping of the anthology as it exists” (ix).

    Animals make strange bedfellows—and interesting rapprochements. In a well known and stringent critique of Carter's The Sadeian Woman, Kappeler claims that in her attempt to recuperate the female sexual subject from a (mis)reading of Sade, Carter “lapses into the fallacy of equal opportunities” (134). Although she accorded some respect to the rigor of Kappeler's argument, Carter gleefully wrote in private to Elaine Jordan, “if I can get up Suzanne Kappeler's nose […] then I have not lived in vain” (“The Dangerous Edge” 332, 5n). Indeed, between The Sadean Woman and The Pornography of Representation there are some logical commonalities which Carter suspected (and Kappeler seems to have overlooked). The parallels between Carter's work and Kappeler's more recent examination of the politics of the animal rights movement, however, are more explicit and striking.

17. The best-known of the recent compendia of stories about women and animals is probably Clarissa Pinkola Estés' Women Who Run With the Wolves: Myths and Stories of the Wild Woman Archetype (1992). Others include two anthologies edited by Theresa Corrigan and Stephanie Hoppe, With a Fly's Eye, Whale's Wit, and Woman's Heart: Animals and Women (1989) and And a Deer's Ear, Eagle's Song, and Bear's Grace: Animals and Women (1990); Sisters of the Earth, ed. Lorraine Anderson (1991); and Intimate Nature: The Bond Between Women and Animals, ed. Linda Hogan, Deena Metzger, and Brenda Peterson (1998). (This list does not include recent anthologies of ecofeminist theory.)

18. In her article “Isn't It Romantic?” Linkin interprets Carter's complex intertextuality as evidence of a hostile rewriting of Romantic tradition, which has induced in women a kind of “cultural vertigo” (309).

    There is another way to account for the intertextuality in the story. According to Kristeva, the passage from any signifying system to any other replicates the action of the thetic; in this moment of passage, the perceived unity between the object and the word gives way to the perception that the “‘place’ of enunciation and its denoted ‘object’ are never single, complete, and identical to themselves, but always plural, shattered” (Revolution 60).

Works Cited

Atwood, Margaret. “Running with Tigers.” Flesh and the Mirror: Essays on the Art of Angela Carter. Ed. Lorna Sage. London: Virago, 1994. 117-35.

Birke, Lynda. “Exploring the Boundaries: Feminism, Animals, and Science.” Animals and Women: Feminist Theoretical Exploration, Ed. Carol J. Adams and Josephine Donovan. Durham: Duke UP, 1995. 32-54.

Carter, Angela. Burning Your Boats: The Collected Short Stories. New York: Henry Holt, 1995.

———. The Sadeian Woman. New York: Pantheon Books, 1978.

———. Shaking a Leg: Collected Writings. New York: Penguin, 1998.

Clark, Robert. “Angela Carter's Desire Machine.” Women's Studies 14 (1987): 147-61.

Day, Aidan. Angela Carter: The Rational Glass. Manchester: Manchester UP, 1998.

del Ray, Santiago. “Feminismo y Brujería: Entrevista con Ángela Carter.” Quimera 102 (1991): 20-27.

Dickinson, Emily. Complete Poems. Ed. Thomas H. Johnson. Boston: Little, Brown, n. d. # 1129. 506-07.

Duncker, Patricia. “Re-imagining the Fairy Tales: Angela Carter's Bloody Chambers.” Literature and History 10 (1984): 3-14.

Haffenden, John. “Angela Carter.” Novelists in Interview. New York: Methuen, 1985. 76-96.

Haraway, Donna. “The Promises of Monsters: A Regenerative Politics for Inappropriate/d Others.” Cultural Studies. Ed. Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson, Paula A. Treichler. New York: Routledge, 1992. 295-337.

Jordan, Elaine. “The Dangers of Angela Carter.” New Feminist Discourses: Critical Essays on Theories and Texts. Ed. Isobel Armstrong. New York: Routledge, 1992. 119-31.

———. “Down the Road, or History Rehearsed.” Postmodernism and the Re-Reading of Modernity. The Essex Symposia. Ed. Francis Barker, Peter Hulme, Margaret Iversen. NY: Manchester UP, 1992. 159-79.

———. “The Dangerous Edge.” Flesh and the Mirror. Ed. Lorna Sage. London: Virago Press, 1994. 189-215.

———. “Enthralment: Angela Carter's Speculative Fictions.” Plotting Change: Contemporary Women's Fiction. Ed. Linda Anderson and Edward Arnold. London: Routledge, Chapman, Hall, 1990. 19-40.

Kappeler, Susanne. The Pornography of Representation. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1986.

———. “Speciesism, Racism, Nationalism … or the Power of Scientific Subjectivity.” Animals and Women. Ed. Adams and Donovan. Durham: Duke UP, 1995. 320-52.

Katsavos, Anna. “An Interview with Angela Carter.” Review of Contemporary Fiction. 14 (Fall 1994): 11-17.

Kennedy, Susan. “Man and Beast.” TLS 8 Feb. 1980: 146. Rpt. in Contemporary Literary Criticism, Vol. 41, 117.

Kristeva, Julia. Revolution in Poetic Language. Trans. Margaret Waller. New York: Columbia UP, 1984.

———. “The System and the Speaking Subject.” The Kristeva Reader. Ed. Toril Moi. New York: Columbia UP, 1986. 24-33.

Linkin, Harriet Kramer. “Isn't It Romantic?: Angela Carter's Bloody Revision of the Romantic Aesthetic in ‘The Erl-King’.” Contemporary Literature 35 (Summer 1994): 305-23.

Lyotard, Jean-François. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi. Manchester: Manchester UP, 1985.

Ritvo, Harriet. The Animal Estate: The English and Other Creatures in the Victorian Age. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1987.

Rushdie, Salman. “Angela Carter, 1940-92: A Very Good Wizard, a Very Dear Friend.” New York Times Book Review: 8 March 1992: 5.

Sage, Lorna. “Angela Carter.” New Writing. Ed. Malcolm Bradbury and Judy Cooke. London: Minerva Paperbacks, 1992. 185-93.

———. Flesh and the Mirror: Essays on the Art of Angela Carter. London: Virago, 1994.

Scholtmeijer, Marian. “The Power of Otherness: Animals in Women's Fiction.” Animals and Women. Ed. Adams & Donovan. Durham: Duke UP, 1995. 231-62.

Schuessler, Jennifer. “Moo!” Lingua Franca: The Review of Academic Life. March 1999: 10-11.

Senior, Matthew. “When the Beasts Spoke: Animal Speech and Classical Reason in Descartes and La Fontaine.” Animal Acts: Configuring the Human in Western History. Ed. Jennifer Ham, Matthew Senior. New York: Routledge, 1997. 61-84.

Snitow, Ann. “Angela Carter, Wild Thing: Conversation with a Necromancer.” Voice Literary Supplement 75 (June 1989): 14, 16-17.