Az Eszterházy Károly Tanárképző Főiskola Tudományos Közleményei. 2002. Vol. 3. Eger Journal of English Studies.(Acta Academiae Paedagogicae Agriensis : Nova series ; Tom. 29)
Angelika Reichmann: Ledas and Swans in Angela Carter's The Magic Toyshop and Nights at the Circus
4.0 ANGELIKA REICHMANN traditional gender roles. It is taken for granted that Leda —that is, Woman —is the passive character in the sexual intercourse that takes place. It is also natural that her name does not pass into oblivion for the single reason of her assistance in divine male creation —both biological and artistic. Her desires and identity are irrelevant —she is an object of desire and a muse. Thus the story would have an absolutely legitimate place among the myths surrounding Woman mentioned by Simone de Beauvoir: It is always difficult to describe myth; it cannot be grasped or encompassed; it haunts the human consciousness without ever appearing before it- in fixed form. The myth is so various, so contradictory, that at first its unity is not discerned: Delilah and Judith, Aspasia and Lucretia, Pandora and Athena —woman is at once Eve and the Virgin Mary. She is an idol, a servant, the source of life, a power of darkness; she is the elemental silence of truth, she is artifice, gossip, and falsehood; she is healing presence and sorceress^ she is man's prey, his downfall, she is everything he is not and that he longs for, his negation and his raison d'etre. (Beauvoir 143) As Simone de Beauvoir points out, in the framework of myth women are seen as the Other, as Woman, but not as actually existing human beings. They are trapped in a patriarchal discourse that defines available —and often self-contradictory—role models for them. It is from this respect that the treatment of the myth of Leda and the Swan becomes emblematic of an attitude towards patriarchal discourse both in The Magic Toyshop and Nights at the Circus. The models of behaviour offered by myth —Woman as mute victim of a rape scene and man as aggressive divine creator/artist —undergo subversion in both novels, but to a different extent. In The Magic Toyshop "[Melanie's] passage to womanhood seems, in this patriarchal system, to demand a symbolic loss of virginity to an allpowerful phallic male" (Mills 175), which results in a row of theatricalised and ritual scenes, imitating and acting out the loss of her virginity. These "attempts" are, however, equally "unsuccessful", that is, they are not real initiations into adult womanhood, though for different reasons. On the one hand, they are the reenactments of prefabricated dreams created by popular fiction and magazines (Mills 173)—like the
