Angela Carter and Decadence: Critical Fictions/Fictional Critiques by Maggie Tonkin (review)

Maggie Tonkin’s Angela Carter and Decadence: Critical Fictions/Fictional Critiques is an ambitious reading of Carter’s lifelong engagement with enduring iconographies and mythologies of femininity. Organized around three dominant representations of femininity—the living doll, the muse, and the femme fatale—Angela Carter and Decadence situates Carter’s novels and stories in relation to their primary intertexts and to Carter’s critical reception in order to capture the complexities of Carter’s oeuvre and politics and to analyze some of the more vitriolic feminist responses to her work. Although Tonkin does not focus on Carter’s fairy tales and does not include any of Carter’s tales in her study, her interpretations are nonetheless relevant for fairy-tale studies insofar as they privilege many of the themes that Carter investigates, critiques, and reimagines in The Bloody Chamber (1979) and in her other transformed tales (indeed, in one telling example, Tonkin mistakenly refers to Aunt Margaret’s silver and moonstone choker in The Magic Toyshop as “the choking ruby collar” [44; my emphasis], thus conflating Aunt Margaret and the heroine of “The Bloody Chamber” and emphasizing Carter’s point that women may be active, perhaps even eager, participants in their own oppression).

Tonkin’s introduction seeks to frame the book’s case studies as Carter’s strategic fetishization of women intended to deconstruct the literary genealogies and cultural mythologies that instantiate and perpetuate such images. As suggested by the book’s title, Tonkin argues that decadence, as a literary tradition, is critical to understanding both Carter’s feminist politics and her richly detailed, postmodern writing style, which is often called out by her critics as antithetical to feminist politics. Against the feminist literary criticism that castigates Carter for fetishizing women, Tonkin contends that Carter’s use of irony—frequently overlooked and/or misread by critics who fail to see it as a “feminist” genre—recalibrates the meanings of her fetishized female characters. Although much of Tonkin’s complex, at times convoluted, argument rests on the homology that she identifies between fetishism and irony, her conclusions are not all that startling: Carter’s seemingly fetishizing representations of women turn out to be ironic commentaries on the hegemonic iconographies and mythologies of femininity. At the same time, Tonkin’s overemphasis in the introduction on Carter’s critics rings a bit hollow. Not only are these critics in a minority, but they have also been heartily and compellingly dispatched.

The introductory chapter is the weakest aspect of Angela Carter and Decadence because it never quite gets at why decadence, in particular, is so significant for Carter’s critical fictions and fictional critiques. Tonkin often gestures toward the importance of decadence for Carter, but she fails to articulate how the decadent tradition holds her case studies together or how such an aesthetic motivates Carter’s ironic play with fetishism. Several of the authors of the primary intertexts under discussion can be linked to the decadent period, but only Charles Baudelaire and Auguste Villiers de L’ Isle-Adam would conventionally be considered decadent authors; E. T. A. Hoffmann, Edgar Allan Poe, and the Marquis de Sade all influenced decadent writers, and Marcel Proust was influenced by the movement and is sometimes characterized as writing in the decadent style, but Tonkin never makes a clear case for decadence as the pivotal thread tying together this collection of Carter’s writings.

Despite these shortcomings, Angela Carter and Decadence offers some excellent, nuanced close readings and new insights. In Chapter 2 Tonkin provides a convincing analysis of The Magic Toyshop in relation to Hoffmann’s “The Sandman” (1817) and Freud’s “The Uncanny” (1919), arguing that the novel highlights and corrects Freud’s blind spot—gender—and his elision of Olympia. Tonkin’s reading of Finn as Melanie’s double and her analysis of the kitchen scene in which Melanie self-identifies as a wind-up doll and sees a severed hand in the knife drawer are especially...