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

Ledas and Swans in Angela Carter's The Magic Toyshop and Nights at the Circus Angelika Reichmann I become mildly irritated [...] when people (...) ask me about the 'mythic quality' of work I've written lately. Because I believe that all myths are products of the human mind and reflect onlv aspects of material human practice. I'm in the demythologising business. ("Notes from the Front Line" by Carter quoted in Day 3) Angela Carter's The Magic Toyshop and Nights at the Circus are both "overtly intertextual" (Fokkema 175), containing numerous and innumerable allusions to the Bible, myths, fairy tales and other literary works of art. Among these references, however, the myth of Leda and the Swan plays a central role in both of them (D'Haen 199, Mills 173). Theo D'Haen in his essay points out the implied relationship between this myth and "the foundation of a male line in Western literature": "the rape of Leda by Zeus engendered [Helen and by that] the oldest Western work of literature known to us [J Homer's Iliad

" (199). It is in the context of the roles this mythological story plays in the two novels that 1 will examine their similarities and differences, and show the close connection between them, concentrating mostly on Nights at the Circus: in a sense, it really starts where The Magic Toyshop ends, can be read as a "sequel" to the other novel written almost twenty years earlier. Since Carter took a rather radical stance against myth as such

—she claimed in "Notes from the Front Line" that she is "in the demythologising business"—it is of crucial importance to examine in what sense this term is applicable to her works. In a 1988 interview with Anna Katsavos she said the following: "[I am defining myth] in a sort of conventional sense; also in the sense that Roland Barthes uses it in Mythologies

—ideas, images, stories that we tend to take on trust without thinking what they really mean" (Day 4). From this point of view the story of Leda and the Swan is not only a myth in the classical sense of the word but also an element in patriarchal discourse reflecting liger |ourn;il of I English Studies, Volume III, 2(X)2 39-53