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“I Was the Subject of the Sentence

Written on the Mirror”: Angela Carter's
Short Fiction and the Unwriting of the
Psychoanalytic Subject
Scott Dimovitz
Published online: 01 Mar 2010.

To cite this article: Scott Dimovitz (2010) “I Was the Subject of the Sentence Written on the Mirror”:
Angela Carter's Short Fiction and the Unwriting of the Psychoanalytic Subject, Lit: Literature
Interpretation Theory, 21:1, 1-19, DOI: 10.1080/10436920903544015

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 Literature Interpretation Theory, 21:1–19, 2010
Copyright # Taylor & Francis Group, LLC
ISSN: 1043-6928 print=1545-5866 online
DOI: 10.1080/10436920903544015

‘‘I Was the Subject of the Sentence Written

on the Mirror’’: Angela Carter’s Short
Fiction and the Unwriting of the
Psychoanalytic Subject

SCOTT DIMOVITZ
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Freud suggests that the relation with the mother regularly structures a
woman’s relation with her father . . . . Freud’s account of this process
has such extraordinary poetic force that, however false it might be, it
remains important as an account of what seemed, at one point in history,
a possible progression. It retains a cultural importance analagous [sic],
though less far-reaching, to the myth of the crime of Eve in the Old
Testament. (Angela Carter, The Sadeian Woman 124–5)

Angela Carter’s brand of feminist fiction continues to trouble the margins of con-
temporary feminist discourse. This is especially true in America, where Carter
cannot seem to attain the clear canonization she has had in Europe, and even
the popular view of Carter in America depends upon a dramatic repression of
the discordant parts of her body of work. This American Carter vacillates
between two versions. The first persona is the domesticated mother goddess
construction, inspired by the Marija Gimbutas branch of seventies feminism,
which Carter herself despised for what she saw as its ahistoricizing tendencies.
This persona depends almost solely upon her project of retelling traditional fairy
tales in The Bloody Chamber, and it seems to be crystallized now by Penguin’s
choice to run the photo of Carter’s hoary-headed self on the cover of its latest
American edition. The second persona is a function of the exuberant, if
ultimately pessimistic, trickster goddess of patriarchal capitulation offered in
the later novels, Nights at the Circus and Wise Children. This latter construction
coincides with a general post-Reagan=Thatcher-era post-feminism that attempts
a series of endless ‘‘subversions’’ of patriarchy’s paper tigers.

Scott Dimovitz is an assistant professor of English at Regis University in Denver, Colorado,

where he specializes in postmodern British=postcolonial literatures. His Angela Carter and
Paul Auster research has appeared in MFS and other journals.

1
 2 S. Dimovitz

Part of this limitation of Carter’s broad vision has to do with her

technique of literalizing the unconscious of Western society as a method of
critiquing the latent problems of that society, an undomesticated method
she borrowed from the Marquis de Sade and Japanese comics, and which
she famously called a ‘‘moral pornography’’ (Sadeian 7). Another limitation
arises from Carter’s refusal to bury Freud’s bleeding corpse, which keeps prop-
ping itself up throughout her fiction as an apparent testament to the omnipres-
ence of the return of the repressed. In Carter’s struggles with psychoanalytic
theory in all of its manifestations—Anglo-American and Franco-American,
structuralist and poststructuralist, literal and figurative Oedipus complexes—
she defines her fullest conceptions of gender identity under postmodernity.
While many fine essays have examined Carter’s works with an earnest
psychoanalytic lens, her early work remains largely unexamined, perhaps
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because of its opaque and alienating symbolism. In this essay, I will examine
how Carter’s writing of the early 1970s positions itself in relation to psycho-
analytic models of identity formation. I will focus on the tighter and more
limited structures of Carter’s earlier short fictions, which critics often overlook
in favor of the more fully dramatized allegories that constitute her speculative
fiction of the 1970s, The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman and
The Passion of New Eve. These stories, I will demonstrate, begin Carter’s
investigation, rejection, and final reinscription of the psychoanalytic models
she both admired and despised.
Carter’s relationship with psychoanalysis contains strange ambivalences.
On the one hand, she often negotiates psychoanalytic texts in her critical
writing and in interviews with little or no questioning, implying that she
found a truth value in psychoanalysis beyond a mere footnote in the history
of female oppression. In The Sadeian Woman alone, for example, she dis-
cusses and unproblematically incorporates Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams,
Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, New Introductory Lectures on
Psychoanalysis, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, and Three Essays on the
Theory of Sexuality. She also uses certain psychoanalytic concepts—the
unconscious, the return of the repressed, latent, and manifest content of
dreams and stories, and more—with the unquestioning confidence of one
who assumes that everyone in the audience agrees with the premises of what
she says. At other times, she gives the theoretical formulation as a proposition
without affirming or denying its truth, as in ‘‘Through a Text Backwards,’’ her
discussion of Poe’s ‘‘The Fall of the House of Usher,’’ where Carter writes: ‘‘ ‘I
have been here before.’ In The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud says this
feeling of familiarity means that we are remembering the bodies of our
mother. If so, Poe’s mother’s body is a haunted house, one haunted by
allusion’’ (Shaking 482). That ‘‘if so’’ provides enough distance so that she
can discuss the concept without committing herself to belief.
On the other hand, even while Carter demonstrates her familiarity with
psychoanalytic texts, concepts, and theories of psychic and social structure
 ‘‘I Was the Subject of the Sentence Written on the Mirror’’ 3

generation, she also finds them deeply problematic. The epigraph to this
essay, for example, comes from an entire page of her critical essay, The
Sadeian Woman, in which she replicates Freud’s account of the genesis of
female subjectivity with such fidelity that the phrase near the end, ‘‘however
false it might be,’’ comes as a bit of a shock. Throughout her work, Carter
seems caught in an argument with a formidable adversary, whose ability to
move the masses (and herself) riles her, for it is a major source of all of
our problems. ‘‘I love Freud,’’ Carter once told Lorna Sage, ‘‘as though he
were an uncle’’ (‘‘Angela’’ 56), and this typically subtle Carterian simile
reflects the structure of respect for someone whom one has to love, even
if only because of a family resemblance.
Carter most took from Freud, ‘‘that invader of the last privacy’’ (Exple-
tives 56), his conception of the dream as a symbolically structured wish fulfill-
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ment (Sage, ‘‘Angela’’ 56). ‘‘I don’t on the whole remember my own dreams,’’
she told John Haffenden in 1984, ‘‘but I quite often use the formal structures
of dreams—formal structures which I tend to get from Freud rather than from
my own experience’’ (82). It is here that psychoanalytic theory joins up with
her technique of reifying the West’s cultural unconscious, a technique she
exploited throughout her 1970s and 1980s fiction, for Carter constructed
her speculative fiction by mapping and dramatizing the psychoanalytic the-
ories of unconscious psychic structures. In fact, Carter’s use of surrealist
techniques springs from a complex matrix of associations of intellectual tradi-
tions, all of which crystallize around Freudian theory and all of which she
interpreted as firmly misogynistic. Though she loved the surrealist school
of art—‘‘a synthesis of Freud and Hegel’’—and the ‘‘surrealists, Freudians
themselves’’ (Shaking 365), she rejected them because they proffered an
image of woman as the source of mystery and otherness that arose not only
from its roots in neo-Platonic philosophy, but also in psychoanalytic theory.
Carter’s methodology of using psychoanalytic theory against itself is
actually the endpoint of a long-standing counter-tradition in psychosocial
discourse, which began almost from the moment Freud first wrote. For many
artists, philosophers, and critics, what had begun as an inquiry into the ori-
gins of neurosis had quickly transformed into an absolute and constrictive
ideology of the origins of all forms of identity, irrespective of race, class,
or gender. The artist who had hoped to deal with possibilities beyond the
parent-infant dyad and who wanted to investigate the implications of that
structure for women had to confront the accruing hegemony of the Freudian,
Kleinian, and Lacanian discourse in the humanities. These challengers gener-
ally did not argue against the actual importance of family influence, but
rather that the Oedipal logic as pure determinant of all later development
ended up limiting by its very wish to explain.
To disrupt this perceived limitation, several feminist writers of the 1970s
turned increasingly toward the deployment of the logical conclusions of that
narrative—a reductio ad absurdum, or exorcism through enunciation.
 4 S. Dimovitz

In 1975, for example, Laura Mulvey’s highly influential ‘‘Visual Pleasure and
Narrative Cinema’’ analyzed the object of the male gaze in cinema from
within the rhetorical framework of psychoanalytic theory, and she described
her methodology in terms that parallel Carter’s own:
This paper intends to use psychoanalysis to discover where and how the
fascination of film is reinforced by pre-existing patterns of fascination
already at work within the individual subject and the social formations
that have moulded him . . . . Psychoanalytic theory is thus appropriated
here as a political weapon, demonstrating the way the unconscious of
patriarchal society has structured film form. (14)1

Mulvey’s project used psychoanalysis not only against itself, but against
the ‘‘unconscious of patriarchal society’’ that causes the individual to react
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positively to such images.

In a similar way, Carter’s speculative fiction of the 1970s uses psycho-
analytic theory to show the forces that construct the contemporary form of
Western patriarchy. More specifically, both Mulvey and Carter’s main target
is not merely psychoanalytic theory, but the particular form of poststructur-
alist psychoanalysis offered by Jacques Lacan. It is perhaps no surprise that
Lacan would figure heavily in Carter’s critique, as he enormously influenced
key members of the surrealist movement. He knew Dalı́ and was friends with
Bataille and René Crevel; and one of his earliest papers was published in the
surrealist journal Le Minotaure.2
I should say a quick word about Lacan’s well-known notion of the
mirror stage, as its influence permeates almost every one of Carter’s works.
In fact, if there is a trope that she uses more often than the hermaphrodite,
with which it is implicated, it is the mirror. For Lacan, the mirror stage is
the origin of self-consciousness; it is the moment, from around six to
eighteen months, in which the child first recognizes that its mirror image is
in some sense itself. That is to say, the child mis-identifies with the spectral
other as the object of desire and begins to internalize an image of itself that
is whole and unified, not the fragmented byproduct of the flux of sensations
that is its actual experience. Lacan referred to this stage as being part of the
imaginary order, one of three orders, along with the real and the symbolic.
The term imaginary plays with the doubled signification of images (as in the
mirror image) and the dubiously unreal (imaginary), and it reflects Lacan’s
disparaging view of Anglo-American ego psychology, which hypothesizes
a (provisionally) stable ego as an index of mental health. To Lacan, a
‘‘healthy’’ subject is one who passes through the Oedipus phase, rejects
any feeling of or search for a unified sense of identity, and accepts his or
her symbolic castration—the status of fragmented subjectivity and alienation
from the real (whatever that real may be).3
We know that Carter knew Lacan’s theory from remarks she made in an
essay discussing Bertolucci’s 1979 film, La Luna: ‘‘A mirror is propped against
 ‘‘I Was the Subject of the Sentence Written on the Mirror’’ 5

the wall in a little homage to Jacques Lacan’’ (Shaking 364). As is clear from
this quote, by 1980, Carter easily equates the appearance of a mirror with a
direct reference to Lacan and not merely to the long-standing tradition of mir-
ror imagery from Plato to the present (251).4 In addition, she lists Lacan’s
essay ‘‘Kant avec Sade’’ from Ecrits II in the bibliography of The Sadeian
Woman, yet it is suspiciously one of the few works in the bibliography
she does not cite or treat directly within the text (and it seems to have had
no obvious influence on Carter’s study).
It remains unclear when Carter first read Lacan, though rhetorical evi-
dence would seem to indicate that she had had her first sustained exposure
in the early 1970s in Japan, where she lived following her divorce from her
husband, Paul Carter, and where she also became radicalized. For Carter,
Japan served as an overt model of patriarchal repression, which she read
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back into Western culture. ‘‘Flesh and the Mirror’’ and ‘‘Reflections,’’ two
short stories in Fireworks (1974), a collection of stories written around this
period, show particularly strong evidence of a close engagement with
Lacanian theory. Later, ‘‘Wolf-Alice,’’ the final story of Carter’s collection of
fairy tale revisions, The Bloody Chamber (1979), revisits and modifies these
themes and critiques. These stories, I will suggest, provide the reader a con-
densed version of the transformation in Carter’s relation to psychoanalysis.
‘‘Flesh and the Mirror’’ is the first-person account of an unnamed female
narrator who just returned to Tokyo from England, which she had revisited
upon the death of a family member. Her beloved does not arrive to meet her
at the dock as he had promised, so she wanders Tokyo’s streets, crying in the
rain until she meets a stranger with sequin eyes. They return to a seedy hotel
room, where she watches herself and her paramour having sex in the ceiling
mirror. The next morning, she finally meets her original lover, and they
immediately fight, she realizing that the person she thought she loved was
really a projection of her own idealizations, that she ‘‘created him solely in
relation to’’ herself ‘‘like a work of romantic art’’ (72). They go to another
hotel, which was ‘‘in every respect a parody of the previous night’’ (73),
and they try to act passionately, both realizing that their love has gone. An
intruder enters their room; the narrator screams, and her lover wakes, think-
ing she has gone mad, ‘‘and instantly trapped me in a stranglehold, in case I
murdered him’’ (74). She turns on a light to check the time and notices ‘‘that
his features were blurring, like the underwriting on a palimpsest’’ (74). They
part after a few days, and she wakes one day to find Tokyo to be demystified:
‘‘it had become home’’ (74).
While ‘‘Flesh and the Mirror’’ has a rather thin plot, it offers Carter’s first
sustained investigation of the mirror in relation to the fine line between self-
consciousness and solipsism. Lorna Sage has suggested that Carter suffered
acutely from self-consciousness, and ‘‘Flesh and the Mirror’’ does begin a
recurring theme of the anxiety of someone trapped within her own con-
sciousness, who does not want to fall into a solipsistic cage.5 The narrator
 6 S. Dimovitz

reveals her romantic, textual self-delusions through ironic deflations from

some later time, although this later perspective’s trustworthiness remains
uncertain. As she walks through the streets, she feels ‘‘as though I was the
creator of all and of myself, too . . . walking through the city in the third
person singular, my own heroine . . . . I was trying to subdue the city by turn-
ing it into a projection of my own growing pains. What solipsistic arrogance!’’
(68–9). The narrator meditates extensively on this problem of overt self-
consciousness and viewing experience as the projection of inner states—of
the world as a function of the self.
The narrator sees herself as an actor playing out a script that she writes—
‘‘my own heroine’’—but cannot feel, and Carter introduces a peculiar rhetori-
cal construction that seems particularly important to her: ‘‘It was as if I never
experienced experience as experience’’ (69). The importance of the phrase
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for Carter is suggested by the fact that she reuses it at least three more times
in her career. Each time she uses the phrase, it takes this form of a critique
of narcissistic solipsism and the position of women in a patriarchal society,
where experience is defined as the individual’s ability to appropriate and inter-
pret events self-consciously—to make events meaningful. Almost a decade
after ‘‘Flesh and the Mirror,’’ for example, Carter writes of Sade’s Justine:

She is not in control of her life; her poverty and her femininity conspire to
rob her of autonomy. She is always the dupe of an experience that she
never experiences as experience; her innocence invalidates experience
and turns it into events, things that happen to her but do not change
her. This is the common experience of most women’s lives, conducted
always in the invisible presence of others who extract the meaning of
her experience for themselves and thereby diminish all meaning . . . .
(Sadeian 51)

Carter later goes on to critique the entirety of Sade’s sexual worldview as a

complete solipsism, a sort of metaphysical masturbation: ‘‘In Sade, sexual
pleasure is an entirely inward experience . . . . This is a form of exacerbated
auto-eroticism. Sexual pleasure is not experienced as experience; it does
not modify the subject’’ (Sadeian 144). In each instance, solipsism emerges
as a defense mechanism of an intensely static kind, as the subject’s
self-alienation prevents growth, change, or true, unmediated encounters with
reality. Carter uses the phrase a third time in 1980s ‘‘Black Venus,’’ her fic-
tional account of Baudelaire’s relationship with Jeanne Duval, ‘‘this forlorn
Eve,’’ who ‘‘never experienced her experience as experience, life never
added to the sum of her knowledge; rather, subtracted from it’’ (Burning
231). Carter returns to Baudelaire—one of surrealism’s ‘‘immediate literary
avatars’’—often in her writings, but her attraction to the poetry is always
mediated both by the decadent romanticizing of the eternally elusive
love-object and by the historical realities of their production—‘‘His poetry
 ‘‘I Was the Subject of the Sentence Written on the Mirror’’ 7

is the product of a terminal despair,’’ she once wrote, ‘‘and he was a shit, to
boot’’ (Shaking 41).
‘‘Flesh and the Mirror’’ depicts the woman as deprived of experiencing
experience as experience not as the result of a particular masculine
oppression—the Marquis de Sade, Baudelaire—but by an internalization of
romantic scripts from an unnamed source. Whereas The Magic Toyshop’s
Melanie suffered as the Justine-like pawn of puppeteer Uncle Philip, and
while the Asiatic puppet master of ‘‘The Loves of Lady Purple’’ has his puppet
creation, Lady Purple, come to horrific life to bring into reality the assump-
tions of his misogynistic creation, the narrator of ‘‘Flesh and the Mirror’’ sees
her self-constructed drama as ‘‘pulling the strings of my own puppet; it was
the puppet who was moving about on the other side of the glass’’ (69). Her
own sense of self is mediated by this reflexive manipulation: her ‘‘character’’
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is her own creation.

In this state of heightened self-scripting, the narrator sees herself move
in the mirror in a remarkable passage that sets up Carter’s revision of the
Lacanian model:

During the durationless time we spent making love, we were not

ourselves. But the selves we were not, the selves of our own habitual
perceptions of ourselves, had a far more insubstantial substance than
the reflections we were. The magic mirror presented me with a hitherto
unconsidered notion of myself as I. Without any intention of mine, I had
been defined by the action reflected in the mirror. I beset me. I was the
subject of the sentence written on the mirror. I was not watching it. There
was nothing whatsoever beyond the surface of the glass . . . . Mirrors are
ambiguous things. The bureaucracy of the mirror issues me with a pass-
port to the world; it shows me my appearance. But what use is a passport
to an armchair traveller? Women and mirrors are in complicity with one
another to evade the action I=she performs that she=I cannot watch, the
action which I break out of the mirror, with which I assume my appear-
ance. But this mirror refused to conspire with me; it was like the first
mirror I’d ever seen. It reflected the embrace beneath it without the least
guile. All it showed was inevitable. But I myself could never have
dreamed it. (70)

In this rewriting of the Lacanian significance of the mirror in identify forma-

tion, Carter introduces a tripartite female consciousness that she develops
in the following years. She explores the first aspect in other works as a
pre-structured consciousness, a polyvalent potentiality before (patriarchal)
cultural inscription. ‘‘Baby is hermaphrodite,’’ Carter wrote of this pregen-
dered state of the infant at the mother’s breast; ‘‘It is polysexual. It is all the
sexes in one and first of all it will love the thing that feeds and caresses it,
out of necessity’’ (Sadeian 124). As we will see, it is this pure potentiality that
becomes the locus of her disruption of patriarchal inscription in ‘‘Wolf-Alice.’’
 8 S. Dimovitz

Cultural imprinting begins, however, from a very early phase, inaugurating

the second aspect of experience: the flesh. The flesh suggests the body as
unreflective consciousness, of being in the world that is always already
prescribed a function and structure by the society that precedes it: ‘‘our flesh
arrives to us out of history, like everything else does’’ (Sadeian 9). Flesh stands
in opposition to meat—the flesh reduced to an exploitable object by the other
(cf. Sadeian 137–150)—and is a product of the complex interaction between
the real, biological body and the retrospective interpretation of that body
from the perspective of a person’s particular social structure and moment in
history. This body begins to accumulate reflexively the various myths and
constructions of those societal mystifications, as Carter further elucidates:

Add to these socio-economic considerations the Judaeo-Christian

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heritage of shame, disgust and morality that stand between the initial
urge and the first attainment of this most elementary assertion of the self
and it is a wonder anyone in this culture ever learns to fuck at all.
Flesh comes to us out of history; so does the repression and taboo
that governs our experience of flesh. (Sadeian 11)

It is important to recall that for Carter, the moral pornographer’s primary task
‘‘would be the total demystification of the flesh and the subsequent revel-
ation, through the infinite modulations of the sexual act, of the real relations
of man and his kind’’ (Sadeian 19). In this sense, there is an authentic
position of self-consciousness, one that understands what exactly went into
structuring the self in an effort to dismiss what is erroneous or mystifying in
the hopes of coming to change.6 Carter’s entire project depends upon the
rejection of any deterministic system that denies individuals a potential
freedomization of the will in order to act upon reality.
This project, in fact, underwrites her justification of her Sadeian study:
‘‘Pornographers are the enemies of women only because our contemporary
ideology of pornography does not encompass the possibility of change, as if
we were the slaves of history and not its makers, as if sexual relations were
not necessarily an expression of social relations’’ (Sadeian 3).7 The Sadeian
Woman, therefore, forcefully argues for the potential for change in the social
relations of men and women through the articulation of the worst aspects of
the real conditions of gender relations.
The third aspect of consciousness Carter describes makes this potential
possible: the ability to posit consciousness as an object of consciousness.
Unlike Lacan’s vision of the mirror-as-illusion, Carter’s world of the mirror
has the capacity to make one see the self as other, thereby offering a new
realm of possibility and change beyond mere cultural inscription. Carter
reinforces this aspect in Doctor Hoffman, where the positivist Minister of
Determination covers the mirrors to subvert the Doctor’s images: ‘‘Since
mirrors offer alternatives, the mirrors had all turned into fissures or crannies
 ‘‘I Was the Subject of the Sentence Written on the Mirror’’ 9

in the hitherto hard-edged world of here and now and through these fissures
came slithering sideways all manner of amorphous spooks’’ (12; emphasis
added). The mirror, ‘‘without the least guile,’’ does not dissemble as in the
Lacanian model; it provides the I of the Cartesian cogito, a second-order
consciousness and a necessary shift for a reflective critique of consciousness
(no matter how empty the I of that reflecting position is). But, negatively, it
also has the capacity to alienate oneself from any sense of an immediate
relation to experience. The I that is born by the mirror image is the I of
language—a shifting pronominal signifier that places the subject into the
realm of social discourse—‘‘an objective lesson in the nature of things’’
(71). The I disrupts the unreflective sense of a uniform character, but it also
has the possibility to fragment the self through the sense of a gap between I
and she. The mirror, therefore, creates the self, yet alienates that very self
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from immediate experience. This may all sound as if Carter’s investigation

of Lacanian theory from a position clearly informed by the existential
analyses of Sartre and de Beauvoir8 is a minor quibble over an insignificant
piece of psychoanalytic doctrine, but this disagreement founds much of her
later critiques of patriarchy.
‘‘Flesh and the Mirror’’ ends on a rather ambiguous note: The narrator,
now at home in the city, continues her old character gestures of turning up
her coat-collar, while staring into mirrors; but now, ‘‘they’re only habits and
give no clue at all to my character, whatever that is. The most difficult per-
formance in the world is acting naturally, isn’t it? Everything else is artful’’
(74). This conclusion replicates the form of Maupassantian well-crafted
ambiguous twist at the end of realist fiction that Carter would later mock.
The story leaves the reader with nothing but questions. What is the final pos-
ition of the character? Has she come to a realization of the constructed nature
of her subjectivity that she now manipulates? Is character merely an illusion
performed for some unnamed purpose? Is this conclusion an affirmation of
the arbitrary and ultimately unknown nature of all identity, or is it a sly sub-
version of the narrator herself by a kind of belligerent, ironic self-effacement?
And what exactly does she mean by artful? Is the connotation meant to be
merely artificial, or is it deliberate deceitfulness? If the latter, how does this
differ from acting naturally? Isn’t acting naturally artful as well?
While ‘‘Flesh and the Mirror’’ comes to no formal conclusions, Carter
revisits the mirror motif in another short story from Fireworks, ‘‘Reflections,’’
where she begins to weave a critique of idealism and the Platonic androgyne
into this notion of the origin of self-consciousness, solipsism, and the projec-
tive construction of woman as the other of man. While I would normally
avoid plot summary, ‘‘Reflections’’ remains rather obscure in Carter scholar-
ship, and it would be presumptuous to assume familiarity with the important
details.
‘‘Reflections’’ tells the story of an unnamed male narrator who, while
walking in the forest one day, hears the voice of a young singing girl, and
 10 S. Dimovitz

he immediately discovers an impossibly dense shell. The rifle-toting, singing

girl, Anna, arrives and captures him. She is accompanied by a ‘‘lurcher,’’ a
dog with ‘‘balls the size of grapefruit’’ (83). Anna leads him to an ancient
house, on the threshold of which he feels a ‘‘vertigo . . . as if I stood on the
edge of an abyss’’ (84), and as he enters the house, he notices that the house
overflows with a gigantic muffler, sewn by a crippled androgyne: ‘‘One of
her profiles was that of a beautiful woman, the other that of a beautiful
man. It is a defect in our language there is no term of reference for these
indeterminate and undefinable beings; but, although she acknowledged no
gender, I will call her ‘she’ because she had put on a female garment’’
(85). The nameless androgyne, whom the narrator calls Tiresias several
times, reveals herself as Anna’s aunt, and she sits immobile in a ‘‘wicker Bath
chair’’ (85), sporting the breasts and penis of both sexes (this figure will
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reappear in New Eve as a ‘‘lone, mad old lady’’ who sits by the sea, singing
from ‘‘a wicker garden chair that had once been painted bright pink’’
(Passion 176)). She tells the narrator that the shell appeared from the moon’s
Sea of Fertility, ‘‘a reversed system’’ (Burning 86), as the result of her drop-
ping a stitch that morning. The yarn she uses for the muffler spins from an
‘‘immense mirror’’ that duplicates the room with ‘‘a touching fidelity,’’ and
Anna tosses the shell back through the mirror, where it disappears.
The narrator tries to escape but gets caught in the knitting and falls.
Anna places her hand on her aunt’s genitals, ‘‘so that the cock sprang up.
It was of redoubtable size’’ (87). They laugh, and the narrator finds ‘‘that I
was quite beside myself with fear and bewilderment.’’ The androgyne tells
the narrator to kiss his reflection ‘‘in the mirror, the symbolic matrix of this
and that, hither and thither, outside and inside,’’ in which he sees himself
‘‘complete from head to toe’’ (88). Once again we have the Lacanian model,
in which the self projects as a unified whole outside the self. The narrator
kisses himself and, when he opens his eyes, relates that ‘‘I had become my
own reflection’’ (89). The world in the mirror is a negation not only of the
appearances, but of the physical properties of the world, so that even light
is actually black: ‘‘through the glass, I saw darkly’’ (89), the narrator says. This
playful reference alludes to a passage from 1 Corinthians (13:11–12), ‘‘When I
was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child:
but when I became a man, I put away childish things. For now we see
through a glass, darkly . . . ,’’ which implies that the world of the mirror
corresponds to the period of adult maturation (also implied by the fact that
the mirror world is the moon’s Sea of Fertility).
In this other world, the lurcher is white and ‘‘its balls were gone; on this
side of the mirror, all dogs were bitches and vice versa’’ (92). Anna uncere-
moniously rapes the narrator, a typical Carterian transgression, and the nar-
rator seizes the gun, kills Anna and the dog, and returns to the house. The
androgyne tries to stop him from returning to the mirror, but he brings his
‘‘ham-hand’’ down upon her face and then crashes through the mirror: ‘‘Then
 ‘‘I Was the Subject of the Sentence Written on the Mirror’’ 11

the glass gathered itself together like a skilful whore and expelled me. The
glass rejected me . . .’’ (94). Back in the world, the androgyne’s face cleaves
in two, and she begins to wither. Before she dies, she gives a last speech:
‘‘‘The umbilical cord is cut,’ she said. ‘The thread is broken. Did you not
realise who I was? That I was the synthesis in person? For I could go any
way the world goes and so I was knitting the thesis and the antithesis
together, this world and that world. Over the leaves and under the leaves.
Cohesion gone. Ah!’ ’’ (95). The narrator, ‘‘[p]roud as a man,’’ returns to the
mirror image to embrace his self, ‘‘my antiself, my self not-self, my assassin,
my death, the world’s death’’ (95).
‘‘Reflections’’ allegorizes the mirror stage as the origin of patriarchal nar-
cissism, and the story implicates both Anna and the androgyne in patriarchal
ideation. The image of the dog will recur in New Eve as Zero’s one-eyed dog,
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Cain, also a lurcher with ‘‘balls the size of grapefruit’’ (Passion 90); and the
image of the woman with the rifle recurs in Doctor Hoffman’s traveling circus
sharpshooter, Mamie Buckskin. Once again, we have one of Carter’s favorite
images, the phallic mother archetype—the mother with fructifying breasts
and threatening phallus, who symbolizes the combined parent (the infant’s
idealization of the preoedipal, uncastrated mother), who is whole, ambiva-
lent, and omnipotent. Anna and her aunt both form projections of the
twinned aspect of this archetype: the androgyne, whose ‘‘power is an exact
equivalent of her impotence’’ (Burning 87), is the static, benevolent aspect;
Anna, the rifle-toting hunter, is the dynamic, malevolent aspect. In this
‘‘system of equivalences,’’ as the androgyne describes it, the ‘‘gun and the
phallus are similar in their connection with life—that is, one gives it; and
the other takes it away, so that both, in essence, are similar in that
the negation freshly states the affirmed proposition’’ (88).
The phallic mother recurs constantly in Carter’s speculative fiction, and in
her non-fiction she shows her own system of equivalences in a form that
implicates the phallic mother’s benevolent and malevolent aspects with
Melanie Klein’s claim that the infant bifurcates the preoedipal mother into
the ‘‘good breast=bad breast’’ dyad. In the ‘‘Phallic Mother’’ section of The
Sadeian Woman (111–15), Carter describes a group of Sadeian characters
who all share this characteristic, but she focuses especially on Juliette’s Durand,
‘‘the queen of all these androgynes’’ (112), who is ‘‘like a version of the Terrible
Mother, the Hindu goddess, Kali, who stands for both birth and death . . . She is
a mother with a phallus; she can rape even nature itself’’ (115). Kali reappears
in Carter’s 1980 essay, ‘‘The Language of Sisterhood,’’ where she dismisses the
popular feminist ‘‘sentimental wishful thinking’’ that the world would be better
if women were running things: ‘‘This is the utopian aspect of traditional
feminism; in mythic terms, it is Kali, the mother goddess of destruction, in
her benign aspect, or, in Kleinian terms, it is Good Breast’’ (230).
For Carter, therefore, the phallic mother suggests a system of equiva-
lences: phallic mother ¼ Gaia=Kali (benign=malevolent) ¼ good breast=bad
 12 S. Dimovitz

breast. This twinned projection of the phallic mother structure recurs often in
Carter’s speculative fiction, most literally in Doctor Hoffman, where Mama’s
clitoris, Desiderio finds, ‘‘was as long as my little finger,’’ because ‘‘it was the
custom for mothers of young girls to manipulate their daughters’ private parts
for a regulation hour a day from babyhood upwards’’ (84). This detail seems
to come from Carter’s reading of Sade’s The 120 Days of Sodom, where
Madame Champville ‘‘has a clitoris capable of erecting itself three inches . . .
Erectile clitorida are a feature of Sade’s tribades; they are reminiscent in this
respect of certain African tribeswomen whose labia minor and clitorida are
artificially elongated until they resemble male genitals’’ (Sadeian 112).
Desiderio’s sexual intercourse with Mama and his engagement to Mama’s
nine-year-old granddaughter, Aoi (who carries the knife of Desiderio’s sym-
bolic castration), causes Desiderio to conceive of the two as ‘‘interchangeable
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and whose twinned textures was already part of my flesh’’ (Doctor 91).
This combining of interchangeability and fleshly extension of the
phallic mother projections replicates the structure offered in ‘‘Reflections,’’
a story that provides a combined myth of Kleinian and Lacanian theory.
The twinned androgynes condemn the narrator to pass into the mirror, to
attain the mirror stage of Lacanian theory, because he ‘‘know[s] too much’’
(87). The shell that the narrator discovered manifests as the result of a
dropped stitch, a hole in the voluminous (eternal?) fabric the phallic mother
weaved. For Lacan, the child’s recognition of the lack in the mother (her
being ‘‘castrated’’) causes the individual to pass into the mirror stage, where
subjectivity is ‘‘complete,’’ where ‘‘I had become my own reflection’’ (89).
‘‘Reflections’’ conflates and literalizes Klein’s and Lacan’s psychoanalytic
stage theories, but the story implies that if this process is true, if this is in
some way the way Westerners are structured, the result instantiates all of
the problems of modern society. The destruction of the phallic mother imago
and the embracing of the solipsistic world of the ego—‘‘my self, my antiself,
my self not-self, my assassin, my death, the world’s death’’ (95)—would seem
to imply that Lacan was correct: that the illusory world of the mirror image is
actually a point of individual and cultural entropy. But Carter’s work suggests
that this Lacanian psychic structure—the structure of loss, fragmentation, and
rejection of the real, biological mother because of the disappointment at the
lack in the idealized projection of the mother (yielding ‘‘castration anxiety’’ in
both men and women in Lacan’s reinterpretation of Freud), which situates all
subjects in the ‘‘castrated position’’ of the symbolic order—is, in fact, the pri-
mary solipsistic movement in the installation and reduplication of patriarchy.
In other words: while Lacan may be correct, he is only correct insofar as his
theory describes how Western culture has been formed to this point; but this
is not necessarily the case.
The same psychoanalytic allegorical structure and critique informs a later
tale, ‘‘Wolf-Alice,’’ published in Stand in 1978, the year after New Eve, and
reprinted the following year in The Bloody Chamber. This story, however,
 ‘‘I Was the Subject of the Sentence Written on the Mirror’’ 13

signals Carter’s works’ turn against the idea that fictional critique could
function as a method of transformation. In this story, a young girl is found
in a wolf den next to her foster mother, who was killed by the townspeople
for no apparent reason, and it follows her development from animalistic
wolf-girl to inscribed pawn of patriarchy.
Carter explained the wolves’ significance in Neil Jordan’s film adaptation
of ‘‘The Company of Wolves,’’ where they ‘‘represent lots of things, though
basically they are still libido in the movie’’ (Haffenden 84). Wolf-Alice takes
on this significance as well, and we are to read her as a literalization of preg-
endered, preoedipal, libidinous selfhood. In this feral state, Wolf-Alice is
taken to live with a group of nuns, who attempt to teach her to cover her
nakedness like Eve after biting the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good
and Evil. The Mother Superior—no accidental name for Carter—tries to teach
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Wolf-Alice to feel appreciation for having been rescued, but Wolf-Alice resists,
so they ship her off to the household of the Duke. The superior Mother, in this
allegory, fails to structure Wolf-Alice’s female subjectivity, so she must be
given to the father, the Duke, yet another of Carter’s pasteboard patriarchs.
The Duke is a werewolf whose victims’ remains constitute his ‘‘bloody cham-
ber’’—another Bluebeard manifestation, as in the collection’s titular story—
and who ‘‘came shrieking into the world with all his teeth, to bite his mother’s
nipple off and weep’’ (Burning 224). He cast no mirror image, since, like the
narrator of ‘‘Reflections,’’ he had ‘‘passed through the mirror and now, hence-
forward, lives as if upon the other side of things’’ (222).
In her wolf state, Wolf-Alice had ‘‘no direct notion of past, or of future,
or of duration, only of a dimensionless, immediate moment’’ (224), but this
all changes at the moment of her first menses: ‘‘you might say she discovered
the very action of time by means of this returning cycle’’ (225). Wolf-Alice
hypothesizes that a wolf who lived in the moon ‘‘must have nibbled her cunt
while she was sleeping’’ (224), thereby causing the blood to flow. Immedi-
ately following her menstruation, Wolf-Alice discovers her mirror image, first
believing that it was another who mimicked her gestures, with whom she
tries to play. When she plays with the Duke’s grandmother’s wedding dress
and the image does the same, she comes to realize that the image’s ‘‘habitual,
at last boring, fidelity to her very movement finally woke her up to the regret-
ful possibility that her companion was, in fact, no more than a particularly
ingenious variety of the shadow she cast on sunlit grass’’ (226).
After this realization of her projected self, Wolf-Alice puts on the
wedding dress and watches the transformation of herself in the mirror. These
actions revisit two images from Carter’s early fiction, demonstrating either a
restatement of the motifs in a new Lacanian vocabulary, or a more explicit
drawing of parallels than she had done before. Carter explored the notion
of the shadow as a variation of the projected mirror self already in her first
novel, Shadow Dance (1966), where the central mise en sce`ne depicts Morris’s
dance with his violent ‘‘shadow’’ Doppelgänger, Honeybuzzard, in front of a
 14 S. Dimovitz

mirror until their ‘‘reflections merged together, rippling on the dark surface of
the mirror’’ (Shadow 93). Similarly, Melanie, in The Magic Toyshop (1967), dis-
covers at fifteen that ‘‘she was made of flesh and blood’’ (Magic 1)—again,
knowledge of the flesh through self-conscious maturation—and poses in
her mother’s wedding dress in front of a mirror, an action, she believes, that
leads to her parents’ deaths and her being sent to her Uncle Philip’s house,
where she is submitted to the trials of her uncle’s patriarchal microcosm.
Whereas The Magic Toyshop ends with Melanie’s escape with her
uncle-lover, Finn, from Philip’s house after it is set ablaze, an aggressive over-
throwing of the patriarchal structure by way of the violation of the incest
taboo (a motif revisited less violently in Wise Children), ‘‘Wolf-Alice’’ ends
with the opposite signification. In the wedding dress, which restricts move-
ment so that she ‘‘could not run so fast on two legs in petticoats’’ (226),
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Wolf-Alice takes on the vestments of female exchange under patriarchal auth-

ority. Her ‘‘footprints on damp earth are beautiful and menacing as those Man
Friday left’’ (227)—the first blatant indication that Wolf-Alice undergoes, as
the Robinson Crusoe simile implicates, a colonization of the mind. The towns-
people organize to take revenge on the Duke’s latest desecration and manage
to shoot his shoulder, but he escapes. Wolf-Alice follows him back to the cas-
tle, where he lies wounded; after a moment’s apprehension, she leaps into his
bed to lick his face clean, while the mirror, ‘‘the rational glass, the master of
the visible,’’ reflects her impartially: ‘‘Little by little, there appeared within it,
like the image on photographic paper that emerges, first, a formless web of
tracery, the prey caught in its own fishing net, then a firmer yet still shadowed
outline until at last as vivid as real life itself, as if brought into being by her soft,
moist, gentle tongue, finally, the face of the Duke’’ (228). With this highly syn-
copated syntax, a rarity for Carter, ‘‘Wolf-Alice’’ ends with the image of the
newly-subjected girl, who had rejected the superior mother, passed through
the mirror stage and taken on the symbols of patriarchy (licking the filth from
the Duke, so that his mirror image appeared ‘‘as if brought into being’’).
Several stories in The Bloody Chamber share this same theme of
women’s role in the reproduction of patriarchy. The titular story, a retelling
of the Bluebeard fairy tale with a Marquis instead of a Duke, for example,
includes this exchange between Jean-Yves, the blind piano tuner, and the
female narrator who is about to be punished for looking in the Marquis’s
forbidden room:

‘‘You do not deserve this,’’ he said.

‘‘Who can say what I deserve or no?’’ I said. ‘‘I’ve done nothing; but
that may be sufficient reason for condemning me.’’
‘‘You disobeyed him,’’ he said. ‘‘That is sufficient reason for him to
punish you.’’
‘‘I only did what he knew I would.’’
‘‘Like Eve,’’ he said. (Burning 140)
 ‘‘I Was the Subject of the Sentence Written on the Mirror’’ 15

The narrator of ‘‘The Bloody Chamber’’ escapes destruction in the penulti-

mate scene by the intervention of her mother, who rides in with a fury on
a horse, freezes the Marquis ‘‘as if she had been Medusa’’ (142), and puts a
bullet through his head with the narrator’s ‘‘father’s service revolver.’’ The
story ends with an ambivalent triumph: the mother overthrows the patriarch,
but only with the weapon of her father; and the narrator remains with
lingering doubts about her culpability. She had found herself either doing
nothing, which may be ‘‘sufficient reason for condemning’’ her, or, like
Eve, performing behavior that was already scripted.
Wolf-Alice has no mother to save her, and the story describes the guilt of
her fall as a manifestation of her extrapolation of her subjectivity from
biological processes (her first menstruation). Jean-Yves’s association of the
narrator of ‘‘The Bloody Chamber’’ with Eve is no accident, as it links the
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story to another theme explored by ‘‘Wolf-Alice,’’ where the unnamed

narrator wonders:

If you could transport her, in her filth, rags and feral disorder, to the Eden
of our first beginnings where Eve and grunting Adam squat on a daisy
bank, picking the lice from one another’s pelts, then she might prove
to be the wise child who leads them all and her silence and her howling
a language as authentic as any language of nature. In a world of talking
beasts and flowers, she would be the bud of flesh in the kind lion’s
mouth: but how can the bitten apple flesh out its scar again? (223)

Here lies the crux of Carter’s critique in a highly compressed format. What we
are to understand by the image of a girl who is raised by wolves and who has
no access to language is an allegory about the origins of the structuring of
female subjectivity before the mediation of the mirror stage, the Oedipus
complex, or the final submission to the reality principle and the symbolic
order. As the epigraph to this essay suggests, Carter equated the ‘‘extraordi-
nary poetic force’’ of psychoanalytic theory’s account of identity formation
with the Biblical myth of the Fall of Man, and Carter’s metaphors for preoe-
dipal subjectivity repeatedly conflate with prelapsarian Eve; the corollary is:
Oedipus complex equals Fall of Man. For Carter, these narratives form
Western patriarchy’s two primary myths that we must challenge in the inter-
ests of an alternative view of humankind—one informed, of course, by the
socialist and feminist ideals Carter struggled all her life to attain.
But can they be overturned? Can ‘‘the bitten apple flesh out its scar
again?’’ Can Western culture reverse these two primal images of its own gen-
eration? The metaphor of prelapsarian Eve as ‘‘the wise child’’ would seem to
indicate a serious disbelief by this point in Carter’s career that a revolution
could be undertaken. ‘‘Wise child’’ comes from Samuel Butler’s translation
of Homer’s Odyssey, where Telemachus expresses doubts to Minerva over
the truth of his paternity: ‘‘[I]t is a wise child that knows his own father’’(I.216).9
 16 S. Dimovitz

Linking a prelapsarian Eve with another of the founding texts under

Occidental patriarchy, which happens to include the search for the father as
a primal myth, complicates Carter’s position beyond any easy conclusion.
Even the prelapsarian, preoedipal state of women is defined through an
absent father. Outside patriarchal inscription, the text implies, there is no
female identity or societal possibility. Even if there could be, it might be a
howling, bestial existence, outside language and thereby unknowable.
‘‘Wolf Alice’’ suggests another major transformation of Carter’s critiques
of female subjectivity under psychoanalytically informed patriarchy, which
we can see by her history of political involvement. In her early years in the
1960s, Carter was much more committed to direct political action in a non-
literary capacity when she was rather heavily involved with the Campaign
for Nuclear Disarmament (CND), mostly because of her socialist beliefs
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(Shaking 48–9). She left the CND after the Cuban missile crisis for two reasons:
‘‘Despair’’ and ‘‘Rationality,’’ for she saw no inherent difference between types
of weaponry (Shaking 48; cf. 22 and 113), and she started to believe that she
would not see a socialist revolution in her lifetime.
This ‘‘despair’’ signals a distinct shift in Carter’s thinking, and it presages
the transformation of her project from the deeply feminist allegories of
the 1970s to the third wave feminism suggested by her later works. After
her phase of early direct political activity, she seems to have relegated her
commitment to socialist critiques of cultural forms, the abuses of the Labour
Party (Shaking 6), and the rather despondent realization that most of her
fellow citizens in England and those in the United States seemed to prefer
the politics of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan (Shaking 29, 50).10
Indeed, like many other intellectuals of the time, Carter viewed this political
scene with a deepening cynicism and a resignation that the red dawn
would not, in fact, break over Clapham, which seems to have influenced
her changing attitudes between her fiction of the 1970s and the 1980s.
Carter’s critiques of the social creation of female subjectivity under
patriarchy in both The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman and
The Passion of New Eve hoped to make a uroborus of surrealism and
(Lacanian) psychoanalytic theory of subject formation by turning them back
onto themselves as a means to critique the culture that such theories produce
by demonstrating the horrific unspoken assumptions and images of that
culture—to make ‘‘moral pornography.’’ Robert Clark has been the most
articulate literary critic of how this moral pornography plays out in Carter’s
fiction, questioning ‘‘to what extent the fictions of Angela Carter offer their
readers a knowledge of patriarchy—and therefore offer some possibilities
of liberating consciousness—and to what extent they fall back into reinscrib-
ing patriarchal attitudes’’ (147).11 It is true, as I have attempted to show, that
Carter’s critical techniques often require a specialist’s knowledge in several
different domains to attain any kind of ‘‘a knowledge of patriarchy.’’ Unless
one argues for a homogenized, quasi-transparent prose, however, one
 ‘‘I Was the Subject of the Sentence Written on the Mirror’’ 17

can hardly fault Carter if her readers do not always live up to the high
expectations she had of them.

NOTES

1. Merja Makinen also discusses Mulvey’s article, but in relation to Carter’s depiction of Tristessa in
New Eve (159).
2. The article ‘‘Le Probleme du style et la conception psychiatrique des formes paranoiaques de
l’experience’’ (1933); in the same issue, Dalı́ quoted Lacan’s thesis in his essay, ‘‘L’Interprétation
paranoı̈aque-critique de l’image obsédante.’’ The fact that both Dalı́ and Lacan were trying to arrive at
a ‘‘paranoiac theory of art’’ (Marini 141) led Lacan later to make disparaging remarks about Dalı́ (203).
For an excellent introduction to the links between Lacan and various intellectual and artistic movements
of the twentieth century, including surrealism, see Marcelle Marini’s Jacques Lacan: The French Context..
3. Carter exploits and critiques the narcissistic circuit of desire implied by the mirror stage constantly
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throughout her work: the Doppelgänger motif is in just about every novel, and she repeatedly uses the
image of the uroborus, the snake that eats its own tail—yet another traditional mythological symbol of
perfection or unity—such as when The Passion of New Eve’s Leilah refers to the transvestite Tristessa as
having ‘‘an atomised, fragmented existence, his cock stuck in his asshole so that he himself formed the
uroborus, the perfect circle, the vicious circle, the dead end’’ (173). Tristessa is a uroborus in himself,
but also as the projected mirror image of Eve’s self. For Carter, the imaginary unity of the mirror stage
and the subsequent ‘‘fragmented’’ structuring of the symbolic order always imply a complete solipsism.
4. It is possible that Carter encountered Lacan in Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex, in which de
Beauvoir writes the following passage: ‘‘[the infant] discovers finiteness, solitude, forlorn desertion in a
strange world. He endeavors to compensate for this catastrophe by projecting his existence into an image,
the reality and value of which others will establish. It appears that he may begin to affirm his identity at the
time when he recognizes his reflection in a mirror—a time that coincides with that of weaning: his ego
becomes so fully identified with this reflected image that it is formed only in being projected.’’ De
Beauvoir footnotes Lacan’s Les Complexes familiaux dans la formation de l’individu (1938), in reference
to the mirror stage and claims that ‘‘[t]his observation, one of primary importance, would explain how it is
that in the course of its development ‘the ego retains the ambiguous aspect of the spectacle,’ ’’ though I
cannot help but wonder how approving she would have been had she referenced ‘‘Le Stade du miroir
comme formateur de la fonction du Je, telle qu’elle nous est revellee dans l’experience analytique,’’ which
contains Lacan’s rather bilious reduction and rejection of existentialism: ‘‘existentialism must be judged by
the explanations it gives of the subjective impasses that have indeed resulted from it; a freedom that is
never more authentic than when it is within the walls of a prison; a demand for commitment, expressing
the impotence of a pure consciousness to master any situation; a voyeuristic-sadistic idealization of the
sexual relation; a personality that realizes itself only in suicide; a consciousness of the other that can be
satisfied only by Hegelian murder. These propositions are opposed to all our experience’’ (Ecrits 6).
5. Sage even goes so far as to claim that Carter’s anorexia, from which she suffered as an adolescent,
was rooted in this reflexive mindset: ‘‘Self-consciousness had been her bane from the start, hence the
anorexia’’ (Angela 29).
6. This interpretation and the story itself may have come from a reworking of a passage from The
Second Sex, where de Beauvoir writes of Otto Rank’s discussion of the mirror’s function in myth and
dreams: ‘‘In woman particularly, the image is identified with the ego . . . . Man, feeling and wishing himself
active, subject, does not see himself in this fixed image; it has little attraction for him, since man’s body
does not seem to him an object of desire; while woman, knowing and making herself object, believes
she really sees herself in the glass. A passive and given fact, the reflection is, like herself, a thing; and
as she does covet female flesh, her flesh, she gives life through her admiration and desire to the imaged
qualities she sees’’ (594).
7. The notion of the possibility of a freedomization of the will rather than an absolute free will is key
for Carter, as she was versed well enough in the social sciences to be skeptical that one could completely
eradicate deterministic factors. For example, discussing who she was in her twenties, she referred to
herself as a ‘‘person in the process of becoming radically sceptical, that is, if not free, then more free
than I had been (Shaking 38). Skepticism is seen here as a positive trait, which makes problematic the
 18 S. Dimovitz

contention that Jack Walser’s skeptical position at the beginning of Nights at the Circus is something that
must be overturned.
8. Much of ‘‘Flesh and the Mirror’’ seems caught up in a dialogue not only with Lacan, but with a
well-known section in Sartre’s ‘‘The Transcendence of the Ego.’’ Compare the story with the following
Janet-at-the-window passage: ‘‘A young bride was in terror, when her husband left her alone, of sitting
at the window and summoning the passers-by like a prostitute. Nothing in her education, in her past,
nor in her character could serve as an explanation of such a fear. It seems to us simply that a negligible
circumstance (reading, conversation, etc.) had determined in her what one might call ‘a vertigo of possi-
bility.’ She found herself monstrously free, and this vertiginous freedom appeared to her at the opportunity
for this action which she was afraid of doing. But this vertigo is comprehensible only if circumstances
suddenly appeared to itself as infinitely overflowing in its possibilities the I which ordinarily serves as
its unity’’ (285).
9. In The Merchant of Venice, Launcelot plays on this line when his father, Gobbo, does not
recognize him: ‘‘it is a wise father that knows his own child’’ (II.2). Carter either was not aware that the
quote was from The Odyssey, or she was covering her tracks (which I find more likely), as she attributes
the quote in Wise Children to an ‘‘Old Saw.’’.
10. Lorna Sage quotes a letter Carter wrote to her in 1977: ‘‘The notion that one day the red dawn will
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indeed break over Clapham is the one thing that keeps me going. Of course, I have my own private lists
prepared for the purges but . . . I’m more interested in socialist reconstruction after the revolution than the
revolution itself, which seems to mark me out from my peers’’ (Angela 22–23). Clare Hanson sees this as
revealing a tension ‘‘between a radical will and a sceptical pessimism’’ (59).
11. Paulina Palmer has similarly pointed out that even while the novels present ‘‘a brilliantly accurate
analysis of the oppressive effects of patriarchal structures’’ the lack of a potential for change brings them at
times perilously close to ‘‘making these structures appear even more closed and impenetrable than, in
actual fact, they are’’ (‘‘From ‘Coded Mannequin,’ ’’ 180–1).

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Carter, Angela. Burning Your Boats: The Collected Short Stories. New York: Penguin,
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———. Expletives Deleted: Selected Writings. London: Chatto & Windus, 1992. Print
———. ‘‘The Language of Sisterhood.’’ The State of the Language. Ed. Leonard
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———. The Magic Toyshop. New York: Penguin, 1996. Print.
———. Nights at the Circus. 1984. London: Vintage, 1994. Print.
———. The Passion of New Eve. London: Virago, 1982. Print.
———. The Sadeian Woman: An Exercise in Cultural History. London: Virago, 2000.
Print.
———. Shadow Dance. New York: Penguin, 1996. Print.
———. Shaking a Leg: Collected Writings. Ed. Jenny Uglow. New York: Penguin,
1998. Print.
Clark, Robert. ‘‘Angela Carter’s Desire Machine.’’ Women’s Studies: An Interdisciplin-
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