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 tradition "that redifines the future of humanity from a feminist ideology" (D'Haen 199). Instead of using only body-language, her speech is her body, just like in Héléne Cixous' "The Laugh of the Medusa": Listen to a woman speak at a public gathering (if she hasn't painfully lost her wind). She doesn't "speak", she throws her trembling body forward; she lets go of herself, she flies; all of her passes into her voice, and it's with her body that she vitally supports the "logic" of her speech. [...] In fact, she physically materialises what she's thinking; she signifies it with her body. In a certain way she inscribes what she's saying, because she doesn't deny her drives the intractable and impassioned part they have in speaking. (Cixous 251) From this point on the only remaining question is how her overflowing speech should be read. Maybe not so surprisingly the validity of the stories told by Fewers and Liz is called into question at the very end of the novel, when after really making love to her at this time, Walser asks her: "... why did you go to such lengths, once upon a time, to convince me you were the 'only fully-feathered intacta in the history of the world'?" (NC 294) and the answer is "I fooled you, then! ... Gawd, I fooled you! ... To think I really fooled you! ... It just goes to show there's nothing like confidence" (NC 294-295). It should imply that either none of these stories are completely true, or at least one of them is not true, or there is at least one story missing. "The autobiography she sells to Walser [really may be] a staged performance" (Fokkema 172)—a repeated expression of Fewers' fear of the loss of her independence, freedom, and identity by giving in to possessive male desire that would cage her and fix her as a sign. The aim of telling these stories —not only about herself, but about other women as well, still all of them repeating the basic scheme of women escaping, gaining freedom and establishing an existence on their own——seems to be not telling the "truth", but storytelling itself and giving rewritings of "the literary past, the myth and folklore and so on [that] are a vast repository of outmoded lies" (Carter quoted in Mills 133-134). What is more, Fewers, "this overliteral winged barmaid" (NC 16) is not only a narrator, but also an author herself, who is, by the way, conversant not only with the male literary tradition, mythology and folklore, but also with modern and postmodern poetics. While in The
