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
LED AS AND SWANS 41 "love scenes" in the Pleasure Garden or in Finn's room. On the other hand, the covert or overt element of violence and exertion of male power is always rejected, like in the actual culmination of these scenes, in the theatrical performance of the rape of Leda. In all of these cases — apart from the wedding-dress night, where Melanie is alone, and the actual or symbolic male partner is missing—-Melanie is sometimes victimised and definitely always plays a passive part —that of Leda —, never making a decisive move: it is Finn who hides in the cupboard and decides not to make love to her, and she passes out when the Swan covers her. In Nights at the Circus Fewers' birth is implied to be the result of an event similar to Leda's rape —in fact, she "never docked via what you might call the normal channels, sir, oh, dear me, no; just like Helen of Troy, was hatched " (Nights at the Circus 7). However, instead of being a symbolical descendent of a god —that is, a Swan in this case —and a human being, she is a "divinely tall" bottle blonde with "wings [...] unfolding fully six feet across, spread of an eagle, a condor, an albatross fed to excess on the same diet that makes flamingoes pink" (NC 15). She literally embodies the most important physical characteristic features of both her "parents", thereby transferring the novel into the fantastic world of magic realism —and also becoming one of the typical mixed creatures of a carnivalesque universe. If in the original myth "the rape of Leda by Zeus engendered [Helen and by that] the oldest Western work of literature known to us[,] Homer's Iliad", then the offspring of this intercourse is a creature whose slogan is "Is she fact or is she fiction?" (NC 7) Though Fewers certainly does not look like Helen of Troy, there is no doubt about her physicality: there is something "fishy about the Cockney Venus" (NC 8), she "launch[es] a thousand quips, mostly on the lewd side" (NC 8), her smell is that "of stale feet" (NC 9), "she look[s] like a dray mare" (NC 12) and "Her face ... might have been hacked from wood and brightly painted up by those artists who build carnival ladies for fairgrounds or figureheads for sailing ships" (NC 35), so that the question emerges in Walser if she might be a man. In fact, "there is a [carnivalesque] provocative element in the descriptions of the bodily functions" (Fokkema 166). Her identity cannot be decided in any terms, let alone the terms of her mythical story of origin, though at 1 From now on NC as a source after quotations.
