Women’s Studies, 36:57–78, 2007

Copyright © Taylor & Francis Group, LLC

ISSN: 0049-7878 print / 1547-7045 online
DOI: 10.1080/00497870601115724

THE MASQUERADER IN THE GARDEN: GENDER AND THE

Women's Studies,
1547-7045
0049-7878
GWST
Women’s Studies Vol. 36, No. 2, December 2006: pp. 1–30

BODY IN ANGELA CARTER’S THE MAGIC TOYSHOP

ELIZABETH GARGANO
Gender and
Elizabeth Gargano
Body in The Magic Toyshop

University of North Carolina at Charlotte, Charlotte, North Carolina

In a provocative recent essay, Joanne Trevenna questions what

she calls the “Butlerification” of Angela Carter’s postmodern fem-
inist fictions, as critics increasingly see Carter’s oeuvre through the
lens of Judith Butler’s analyses of gender performativity. Arguing
that Carter’s fiction “presents a model of gender acquisition”
more clearly associated with “earlier feminist approaches, such as
that …[of] Simone de Beauvoir” (268), Trevenna emphasizes
that Carter, “in contrast to Butler, … suggests that a pre-gendered
subject position exists.” At the same time, Trevenna is careful to
qualify her initial assertions, acknowledging that Carter, unlike
de Beauvoir, does not assume the unity and “integrity” of the indi-
vidual subject; instead, Carter portrays “the pregendered subject
as unstable and fragmented.” Thus, Carter’s “more postmodern-
ist/post-structuralist treatment of identity … reopens a partial
link to the work of Judith Butler” (275). In fact, then, as Trevenna
ends by acknowledging, to cut Carter’s work to the patterns
offered by either de Beauvoir or Butler is reductive. Carter’s work
remains fascinating today precisely because it so often eschews
theoretical consistency in favor of an experimental theoretical
engagement.1 For Carter, a feminist theoretical stance emerges as
a work in progress. In fact, it is more a dance than a “stance,”
more a deft series of adjustments in relation to changing

1
In her essay, “The Dangers of Angela Carter” (1992), Elaine Jordan deftly defends
Carter from a range of charges—from decadence to a re-inscription of patriarchal norms—
in part by arguing that Carter writes “speculative fictions” that test different scenarios and
possibilities rather than “[r]omantic works of art in which the whole significance might be
read off from any sample” (37). Carter’s “speculative” and provisional approach to con-
tent is typified by a work like The Bloody Chamber, in which apparently distinct stories ulti-
mately emerge most saliently as variations on one another, highlighting latent and
contradictory possibilities in the fairy tales that serve as their sources.
Address correspondence to Elizabeth Gargano. E-mail: egargano@uncc.edu

57
58 Elizabeth Gargano

conditions than a fixed position. Thus, Carter’s work engages us so

powerfully in part because it dances on the dangerous divide
between the potential essentialism of the feminist identity politics of
the 1960s and 1970s and the sweeping appeal of gender performa-
tivity in the 1990s. If theories of gender performativity tend to posi-
tion the gendered subject within vast networks of discourses that
continue to inscribe themselves, often in unanticipated ways,
through the subject’s actions, they nevertheless offer small
moments of subversive resistance through a species of parodic play.
In Butler’s words, gender constitutes an “‘act’… open to those
hyperbolic exhibitions of ‘the natural’ that, in their very exaggera-
tion, reveal its fundamentally phantasmatic status” (Gender Trouble
147). While they replace the binaristic determinism of two clearly
defined genders with the possibility of a multifaceted play of gen-
der, theories of gender performativity may also problematize calls to
action; they remind us, with good reason, how difficult it is to
decide whether we are resisting or merely re-inscribing preordained
gender identities and roles, or in what context such a re-inscription
might actually play a subversive role. Repeatedly, Carter’s fiction
deftly dramatizes this dilemma, even as it incorporates the drama
and energy of mid-twentieth-century identity politics.
Even in an early work like The Magic Toyshop (1967), Carter
sets up an implicit contrast between the lure of gendered essen-
tialism and an emphasis on gender performativity, a conflict that
the text finally refuses to resolve. In a later interview, Carter
reflected on the theoretical and philosophical engagements that
animated the writing of her second novel. Musing on her choice
to reenact Zeus’s rape of Leda through a surreal and absurd pup-
pet show, Carter emphasizes that Zeus’s iconic masculinity is
reduced to “an artificial construct, a puppet.” Modestly claiming
that “I really didn’t know what I was doing” in that novel, Carter
nevertheless asserts that the “idea” of retelling the ancient myth
in order to demythologize Zeus “was in my mind before I had
sorted it out” (Katsavos 12). Acknowledging her oeuvre as an evolv-
ing work in progress, Carter also refuses to limit any work to the
generally accepted theoretical parameters of its own time—to, for
instance, the essentialist definitions of gender so prevalent at the
time Toyshop was composed. Crucial to Carter’s sense of herself as
a writer is the notion that “ideas” can emerge in her work before
they are fully “sorted … out.”
 Gender and Body in The Magic Toyshop 59

The Magic Toyshop embodies its two warring impulses, one

toward gender essentialism and the other toward gender performa-
tivity, in two complementary tropes that serve to characterize the
female body–the garden and the masquerade. Drawing on, and also
parodying, the conventions of the classic coming-of-age novel, The
Magic Toyshop traces the development of fifteen-year-old Melanie’s
relationship with her body, her identity, and gender. Deploying the
ancient metaphor of the female body as a garden, Carter apparently
“naturalizes” Melanie’s female physical and psychic spaces as a virgin
territory that will someday be discovered by a male explorer—the
“phantom bridegroom” that Melanie repeatedly fantasizes about
(2). At the same time, however, Carter also undercuts the essential-
ism implicit in such a view by characterizing Melanie’s physicality
not merely as a territory but as an act—a performance or masquer-
ade. And crucially, it is not only Melanie’s enactment of gender but
also her sense of the physical reality of her own body that is main-
tained through a complex series of masquerades. As Carter’s con-
flicted novel offers us contradictory tropes for understanding
physicality, identity, and gender, it invites us to question our own
understanding of these terms and the relations among them.

The opening of The Magic Toyshop establishes fifteen-year-old

Melanie’s discovery of her body as a landscape, an uncharted terri-
tory that combines elements of both a wilderness and a garden:
“The summer she was fifteen, Melanie discovered she was made of
flesh and blood. O, my America, my new found land. She
embarked on a tranced voyage, exploring the whole of herself,
clambering her own mountain ranges, penetrating the moist rich-
ness of her secret valleys, a physiological Cortez, De Gama, or
Mungo Park” (1). Although she continues to await the explora-
tions of her imagined male lover, Melanie also initiates the journey
of discovery herself, establishing an equation between landscape
and body that will hold throughout the novel. Thus, the discovery
of the “garden” of her body will lead Melanie, by a species of
dreamlike associations, into external gardens that reflect various
incarnations of her body and her emotional state. As Nicoletta Val-
lorani contends in her essay “The Body of the City,” Carter’s Pas-
sion of the New Eve deploys diverse urban settings as images of the
60 Elizabeth Gargano

human body.2 In The Magic Toyshop, Carter also merges the bound-
aries between body and physical setting. While the cityscapes in The
New Eve emphasize the body as a construction, however, The Magic
Toyshop’s garden settings situate the body as a natural artifact in a
supposedly natural space, suggesting that sexuality and gender are
also “natural” and assigned at birth. Adopting the time-honored
convention of metaphorizing female sexuality as a garden of
earthly delights, Carter appears to embrace a tradition that is
linked with the objectification of an essentialized female body.
“There is a garden in her face,” Thomas Campion famously asserts,
before going on to imagine the moment when, with a cry of
“Cherry ripe,” the garden will be sold, presumably to a male buyer.3
But if the traditional analogy between the garden and the
female body grounds both of them in the realm of “nature,” Carter
interrogates this conventional linkage by juxtaposing garden imag-
ery with the motif of the masquerade, which in this novel denatural-
izes physical experience, representing it as a product of culture. In
the opening lines that identify Melanie’s body as a rich and fertile
landscape, Carter’s densely allusive language evokes a journey, not
only into the physical terrain of the body but also into history, geog-
raphy, art, and textuality. Casting Melanie’s voyage of self-discovery
in the language of John Donne’s “Elegy 22” (“O, my America, my
Newfoundland”), Carter emphasizes that her emerging sense of her
physicality is already mediated by culture and history.4 Unraveling
the boundaries between the realms of nature and artifice, Carter
depicts Melanie “masquerading” flamboyantly in the supposedly nat-
ural garden of her body. Melanie “performs” her discovery of her
sexuality by posturing in front of a mirror, enacting scenes from Lady
Chatterley’s Lover and posing by turns as a Pre-Raphaelite model, a
Toulouse-Lautrec “chorus girl” (1), and a Cranach Venus:

2
See Nicoletta Vallorani, “The Body of the City: Angela Carter’s The Passion of the New
Eve.” Science Fiction Studies 21:64 (November 1994): 365–379.
3
Thomas Campion, “There is a Garden in her Face,” ll.1, 6.
4
See “Elegy 22: To His Mistress Going to Bed,” lines 25–30:
License my roving hands, and let them go
Before, behind, between, above, below.
O, my America, my Newfoundland,
My kingdom, safest when with one man mann’d,
My mine of precious stones, my empery ;
How am I blest in thus discovering thee!
 Gender and Body in The Magic Toyshop 61

She … posed in attitudes, holding things. Pre-Raphaelite, she combed her

long, black hair to stream straight down from a center parting and
thoughtfully regarded herself as she held a tiger-lily from the garden
under her chin, her knees pressed closely together. A la Toulouse Lautrec,
she dragged her hair sluttishly across her face and sat down in a chair with
her legs apart and a bowl of water and a towel at her feet. She always felt
particularly wicked when she posed for Lautrec…. (1)

Although Melanie surrounds herself with props (bowls of water

and tiger lilies), it is in fact her naked body that serves as the ulti-
mate disguise. Embedded within a historical iconography of the
female body, Melanie’s poses are easily read: legs together, she is
a pure Pre-Raphaelite maiden; legs apart, her body is sexualized
and “wicked.” Melanie’s serial masquerades even incorporate ele-
ments from the garden. Filtered through the esthetic of Pre-
Raphaelite painting, however, the “tiger lily from the garden”
evokes stylized artifice, rather than a sense of the natural. Not sat-
isfied with miming the oppositional roles of virgin and whore,
Melanie enacts the pose of an amusingly prosaic goddess of love:
“she contrived a pale, smug Cranach Venus with a bit of net
curtain wound round her head” (2).
To be sure, the trope of the masquerade can serve to rein-
force the assumption of an essentialized female identity if it con-
trasts with the falsity of disguise with an authentic true self
masked by the deformations of culture. As Carter eloquently
asserts in “Notes from the Front Line,” the “official past”—including
the mélange of images from “literary” culture and the visual arts—
is a “vast repository of outmoded lies.” Yet it is particularly charac-
teristic of Carter’s thought that she goes on to contrast the old
lies, not with truth, but simply with the “new lies” that have
become current. As she “loot[s] and rummage[s]” in the archive
of cultural artifacts, Carter enjoys “check[ing] out … the old lies
on which the new lies have been based” (28). Ultimately, in
this essay, Carter hints at the possibility of uncovering truths,
while also allowing for the fact that the literary artist may simply
be rearranging “lies,” savoring their “decorative, ornamental
functions” (28). In The Magic Toyshop, similarly, Carter problema-
tizes the dichotomy between disguise and authenticity. At times,
Melanie’s identity appears merely a product of disguise—or more
precisely, a series of shifting disguises. Ironically, she even enacts
the cultural construct of “natural” sexuality as portrayed in Lady
62 Elizabeth Gargano

Chatterley’s Lover, imitating Constance Chatterley and Oliver

Mellors by plucking flowers and entwining them in her pubic
hair.
As Melanie discovers her sexuality, then, she also unwittingly
uncovers her “textuality.” Enveloped in a dense network of allu-
sions, her encounter with her own physicality is less an individual
discovery than a cultural rite of passage, illuminating what Carter
has called in another context, “the social fiction of … ‘femininity’
” (Tucker 25). If Melanie’s experience of her sexuality is rooted
in the soil of culturally produced images, the “virgin” landscape
explored by Cortez and de Gama, the emblem of Melanie’s body,
is already a familiar terrain. Still intent on recognizing herself as
special and distinctive, however, Melanie fails to reflect on the
extent to which her experience of her body is culturally medi-
ated. What seems to her a profound revelation of a natural physi-
cality is also a nexus of gendered and cultural expectations. In the
words of Sarah Gamble, “What is so fascinating about this scene is
that it simultaneously offers two equally valid interpretations”
(69). For Gamble, Melanie’s posturing can be read as both a cul-
turally mediated “male-identified” sexuality and a “self-absorbed”
narcissism that hints at a pre-social self that “remain[s]
unchanged underneath” (69–70). Such contradictory narrative
gestures risk “suspending” the text “between diametrically
opposed states and conditions” (69). In a similar vein, Eva
Karpinski has called attention to Carter’s fictive interrogations
and deconstructions of the traditional “binaries of self/other,
body/mind, male/female,” and “nature/culture” (Karpinski
137). The Magic Toyshop unsettles all these binary oppositions with
indecorous exuberance. As Melanie embraces her sexuality in the
private world behind her bedroom door, her understanding of
her body takes shape only when she costumes herself in images
drawn from history, art, and literature. Her secret garden is the
well-traveled territory of western culture, peopled by masquerad-
ers who constitute aspects of a self still under construction.
In Masquerade and Civilization, Terry Castle notes that, in fic-
tion, “the Garden” tends to facilitate transgressions outside of the
“self-regulating world of home,” in part because it represents a
“less stable and predictable” setting. While home frequently
serves as both the “starting point and the end point” for fictive
narrative, the garden introduces temptations, pleasures and
 Gender and Body in The Magic Toyshop 63

dangers that must be averted or resolved (Castle 116).5 From the

romances of Eliza Haywood to the fictions of Charlotte Brontë,
the private garden has served as an emblem that naturalizes
female sexuality, while also imbuing it with an element of danger:
cultivated by human hands, the garden nevertheless remains wild
in a profound sense. Often surrounded by high walls or hedges,
the site of labyrinths and mazes, it obscures visibility for those
within and without its borders. The very walls that confine errant
female energies may also give them the privacy to develop. Thus
the private garden’s protective, or even restrictive, enclosure par-
adoxically enables assignations, deceptions, and seductions. In
addition, of course, such public pleasure gardens as Vauxhall or
Ranelagh once opened an even more dangerous terrain, the
scene of the potentially transgressive eighteenth-century mas-
querades that Castle herself so deftly explores. In fact, the private
garden and the public garden—both associated in complemen-
tary ways with female sexuality—typify distinct pleasures, dangers,
and temptations. Significantly, Carter’s narrative includes both
settings as images of Melanie’s sexual development.
The Magic Toyshop is constructed around three crucial gar-
den scenes, each of which serves as a focal point for the sur-
rounding action. First, in her parents’ Edenic garden, Melanie
enacts the temptation of Eve, tasting the apple of sexual expe-
rience and precipitating a fall from innocence. Second, a
seedy and dilapidated public garden in the heart of suburban
London serves as the site of Melanie’s abortive romantic
encounter with Finn Jowle, an ambiguous figure who typifies
her sexual confusions. Embodying her postlapsarian experi-
ence of sexuality, the public garden further problematizes
boundaries between the private and the public, the personal
and the collective, forcing Melanie to confront more clearly
the cultural assumptions that govern her experience of sexual-
ity. Mimicking the first two gardens, the third is merely an imi-
tation garden, a painted stage set in the house of her uncle, an
eccentric puppeteer. Rife with nostalgia and parodic mockery,

5
Although Castle’s Masquerade and Civilization concerns itself particularly with eigh-
teenth-century fiction, it identifies motifs that continue to shape contemporary fiction. In
fact, Castle includes the garden as one of three conflicted sites, also comprehending “the
Road, [and] the City” as settings that that facilitate journeys and foster transgressions (Castle
116).
64 Elizabeth Gargano

it first uncannily recalls Melanie’s experience in her parents’

back garden, and later foregrounds the least pleasant aspects
of her encounter with Finn in the pleasure garden. As the
three gardens contrast with, and at times merge into each
other, the originary power of the Edenic garden mutates and
fades. If its later incarnations seem increasingly distant from
nature, ever more problematic and parodic, it still hovers in
the background as a lost Eden, a moment of supposedly natural
innocence.
In each garden, Melanie adopts a characteristic “disguise,”
masquerading as a different persona in her own private cast of
characters. By presenting Melanie as a “masquerader” in the gar-
den, Carter undermines this natural image, hinting at the diffi-
culty of relating any fixed identity to the body, which is not only
perceived through a cultural lens, but is also perpetually chang-
ing. In her parents’ Edenic back garden, Melanie surreptitiously
costumes herself in her mother’s carefully preserved wedding
gown, fantasizing about her own eventual marriage. As she
becomes the metaphorical bride of the garden, however, Mela-
nie’s masquerade leads to a disastrous loss of identity, during
which she is forced to discard her disguise. Later, in the pleasure
garden with Finn, the scene of her conflicted attempts at
romance, Melanie takes on shifting identities, first imagining
herself as a film star and later identifying with the fallen “Queen
of the Wasteland,” a broken statue of Queen Victoria. In the third
garden, the stage set constructed by her sadistic Uncle Philip,
Melanie is forced to take part in a play with Philip’s life-sized
puppets, re-enacting the mythic rape of Leda by Zeus in the guise
of a swan. A circumscribed patriarchal enclosure, Philip’s staged
garden requires Melanie to adhere to a script of his making. The
scene is fraught with disturbing and provocative ironies, height-
ened by Carter’s analogical rendering of the three gardens as
aspects of one experiential terrain. Although part of an enforced
script, Melanie’s masquerade as Leda is in fact no more scripted
than those other disguises that she herself chooses—whether
Pre-Raphaelite maiden, Cranach Venus, bride, or film star.
In Masquerade and Gender, Catherine Craft-Fairchild reminds
us that masquerades traditionally carry a double-edged signifi-
cance in terms of gender roles. On the one hand, the act of
masquerading may promise a liberating potential, freeing women
 Gender and Body in The Magic Toyshop 65

to try out alternative identities as they discard the trappings of

patriarchal restraint. What Castle calls “the anonymity of the
mask”6 may indeed facilitate a sense of individual release from
restrictive social norms, fostering an expression of forbidden
female “desire.” At the same time, however, the masquerade can
also reinforce or re-inscribe gendered assumptions and roles.
Further, a so-called female or feminine identity may be simply
another disguise.7 Drawing on the formulations of Luce Irigaray,
Craft-Fairchild contends that masquerade can also be seen as “a
painful, desperate renunciation of female desire: the woman
experiences desire, but it is the man’s desire, not her own. She
desires to be desired; by catering to male fantasies, she becomes
objectified as spectacle” (Craft-Fairchild 54).8 Melanie’s serial
masquerades not only foreground this paradox, but also contex-
tualize it within a postmodern suspicion of the individual self:
whether self-selected or assigned, Melanie’s masquerades offer,
not a contrast between authenticity and artifice, or liberation and
constraint, but rather a bewildering proliferation of scripts and
disguises that calls into question the very notion of identity. Since
all the available scripts for women participate, more or less, in the
assumptions of patriarchal culture, the possibilities for feminist
resistance inhere, not in finding one “authentic” script, but sim-
ply in exercising, insofar as possible, one’s power to choose
among many.

II

The initial tension between the “garden of the body” and the
“masquerade of gender” heightens when Melanie’s excitement
about her newfound sexuality inspires her to wear her mother’s
wedding dress into her parents’ backyard at night. Melanie’s

6
Terry Castle, Masquerade and Civilization (254), quoted in Craft-Fairchild, Masquerade
and Gender (52).
7
In Joan Rivière’s seminal description of female identity as a masquerade, its enact-
ment is both coerced and joyless, an attempt to avert a species of patriarchal anger that
may always be lurking. See “Womanliness as a Masquerade.” The International Journal of Psy-
choanalysis (IJPA) 10 (1929): 36–44.
8
See Craft-Fairchild’s discussion of the double-edged nature of the female masquer-
ade in Chapter 3, pp. 5–55. For Craft-Fairchild, Castle implicitly acknowledges both the
liberating and constraining potential of the masquerade, but does not address the conflict
explicitly.
66 Elizabeth Gargano

masquerade in the garden is solitary and private; her younger

brother and sister are sleeping, along with the housekeeper who
cares for them in their parents’ absence. Ironically, while Melanie
is discovering the metaphorical America of her body in language
that echoes John Donne’s erotic poetry, her parents are literally
exploring America, traveling through the country on a lecture
tour. Once clothed in her mother’s wedding dress, Melanie feels
transformed into the beautiful and sexual adult figure who stares
back at her from the mirror. This reflected image propels Mela-
nie out into the garden at night, where she experiences an
intense vision of nature as a heightened reflection of her own sex-
uality. Unprepared for her vision’s intensity, Melanie becomes
frightened of the night-time wilderness outside, as well as the wild
landscape within herself:

The world, which was only this garden, was as empty as the sky, endless as
eternity. … The loneliness seized her by the throat. … She was lost in this
alien loneliness, and terror crashed into the garden and she was defense-
less against it, drunk as she was on black wine. … The garden turned
against Melanie when she became afraid of it. (17–18)

If the world is “only this garden,” the garden is also a strange

new world. The well-tended backyard of Melanie’s parents
stretches out until it seems to encompass all of nature, leaving
Melanie virtually alone in the universe. Yet the garden is also
linked to Melanie’s burgeoning sexuality. Her own developing
body scares Melanie, associated as it is in her mind with an
untamed wilderness that comprehends unexplored continents of
experience. As Carter goes on to make even more explicit, this is
Melanie’s fall from grace, the loss of an Edenic innocence. In her
confusion and fear, Melanie inadvertently locks herself out of the
house and then, ashamed to wake the housekeeper, climbs an
apple tree to reach the safety of her upstairs bedroom window. In
a dreamlike sequence that repeatedly alludes to the fall from
Eden, Melanie is pelted with fruit and attacked by the house-
keeper’s sinuous, snakelike cat as she climbs. The vast and terrify-
ing garden suggests that Melanie’s sexuality is greater than she
herself understands, a natural aspect of her burgeoning growth.
At the same time, however, the ambiguity of Melanie’s
masquerade undermines the garden’s powerful natural presence,
 Gender and Body in The Magic Toyshop 67

problematizing the uneasy “nature/culture” divide that, accord-

ing to Karpinski, Carter’s writing consistently challenges. Dressed
in her mother’s wedding gown, Melanie feels transformed into a
figure of beauty and romance. Although the dress fails to fit—both
the garden and the dress are described as “too big for her” (18)—
Melanie is content to move within its “rich tent” of white satin,
which “illuminate[s] her like a candelabrum” (16). Safe within a
costume that also provides her with a culturally approved script—
Melanie as future bride and wife—she feels free to move into the
garden of her own desires. Yet ultimately, both the script and the
garden fail her. Imagining herself a “bride,” Melanie is forced to
pose the question: “Whose bride?” (16). Unable to answer, she
decides that she doesn’t “need a groom” because she is “sufficient
for herself” (16). Her symbolic wedding will be to her own poten-
tial, her future as a sexual being; in the midnight garden, she will
marry her own desires. Yet as she attempts to evade the cultural
significance of her bridal disguise, Melanie encounters a wrench-
ing cosmic loneliness and hastily retreats from the now frighten-
ing garden. Scurrying up the apple tree to the safety of her
second-floor window, she loses the wreath of flowers that she
wore in her hair. It remains dangling from a high branch, a sad
reminder of her unsuccessful masquerade. As the housekeeper’s
snakelike cat scrapes its claws across her white satin skirts, the
wedding dress is torn and spattered with her own blood. Her dis-
guise now shredded to “ribbons,” she must “drag” it “behind her,
like Christian’s burden” (22) in Pilgrim’s Progress. Forced to
remove her cumbersome disguise as she climbs, Melanie is far
from feeling liberated. Instead, she experiences a “new and final
kind of nakedness, as if she had taken even her own skin off and
now stood clothed in nothing, nude in the ultimate nudity of the
skeleton” (21).
Melanie’s new and terrifying nudity not only evokes Adam
and Eve’s fearful recognition of their nakedness after the fall; it
also serves to dramatize the degree to which her loss of a “script”
results in a loss of identity. Deprived of her disguise, Melanie also
loses the ability to envisage her own body: “She was almost sur-
prised to see the flesh of her fingers; her very hands might have
been discarded like gloves, leaving only the bones” (21). Earlier,
Melanie had enjoyed contemplating her naked body because she
could masquerade in the disguise of conventional gestures and
68 Elizabeth Gargano

traditional iconography. But now her identity—even her physical

identity—dissolves; without a disguise, her body not only lacks
coherence, but also hovers on the verge of invisibility.

III

In Carter’s fiction, narrative causation often seems analogous to

the surreal logic of dreams. When Melanie learns the next day of
her parents’ death in an airplane crash, her metaphorical loss of
the garden becomes literalized. Furthermore, when she blames
her parents’ death on her own destruction of the wedding gown,
the novel’s dreamy, fragmented style encourages us to accept this
interpretation as one possible reading of reality. Or, to put it
another way, the equation set up in the first pages between the
imaginative terrain and physical landscape still holds. As Melanie’s
geography of emotion and sensibility changes, the physical land-
scape follows suit. After the garden and its loss comes the city:
the grimy streets and cluttered shops of South London where
Melanie finds a home with her uncle, a toy maker and puppeteer
who rules his family like the demented god of a postlapsarian
world.
Initially cast as the opposite of Melanie’s Edenic green world,
her new South London neighborhood gradually emerges as a
fallen or decayed garden, a place of broken fragments where
everything is “diseased,” “weary,” or “withered.” Thus Melanie’s
urban experience derives its hints of fertility from the paradisia-
cal garden that she has lost. Within her uncle’s urban household,
vistas of the lost garden continually beckon. Like a debased cur-
rency, such images of the garden are revealed as counterfeit, min-
iaturized, or trivialized.9 The apple tree in Melanie’s country
garden is replaced by “a weary sycamore tree with white patches
on its trunk, like a skin disease” (38). As the serene landscape of
her childhood home gives way to a jumble of fragmented pastoral

9
The miniaturized but evocative gardens in The Magic Toyshop present a telling con-
trast to Carter’s depiction, in Wise Children, of the gigantic “garden” on the Hollywood set
for the film version of Midsummer Night’s Dream: “there wasn’t the merest whiff of the kind
of magic that comes when the theatre darkens … none of the person-to-person magic you
put together with spit and glue and willpower. This wood, this entire dream, in fact, was
custom-made and hand-built, it left nothing to the imagination” (125).
 Gender and Body in The Magic Toyshop 69

images displaced within an urban setting, these muted pastoral

images now exist within an economy of commercial exchange:

There were a number of shops, all brightly lighted now. A fruitshop, with
artificial grass banked greenly in the windows and mounds of glowing
oranges, trapped little winter suns …[and] giant crinkly green roses which
turned out to be savoy cabbages. … A butcher’s shop where a blue-
aproned, grizzle-headed man in a bloodstained straw boater reached
between two swinging carcasses of lamb for sausages from a marble slab. (38)

If the fruit shop mimics a miniature and parodic garden, with

artificial grass and roses that turn out to be cabbages, the bloody
scene at the butcher shop places us after the fall, serving as an
unwelcome memento mori. The shop windows assemble a collage,
prosaically realistic and symbolically disturbing, juxtaposing the
butcher shop’s dismembered body parts against the metaphorical
“green roses” that subtly suggest a not yet ripened sexuality. And
this of course is exactly how Melanie experiences her relation to
her own sexuality. Cast out of the garden prematurely, Melanie
too withers before she has ripened. Attempting to resume her
schoolgirl identity, she braids her hair tightly and painfully, repu-
diating the fantastic revel in the nighttime garden of her sexuality.
In the midst of this diseased landscape, Melanie encounters
the ironically named Philip Flower, her uncle and new guardian,
along with Philip’s wife Margaret and Margaret’s two younger
brothers. Finn, the younger of the brothers, will become Melanie’s
guide to the new world of urban experience. Just as Melanie’s sex-
uality is typified by the garden, so Finn’s physical appearance is
associated with the city. Like the urban world that both fascinates
and repels Melanie, Finn too appears ragged and patched-
together, in ill-matched clothes that come from urban thrift
shops. The fastidious Melanie feels that Finn, like the city land-
scape, is never quite clean. His red hair is straggly and long, and
his teeth are yellowed by his continual smoking. Increasingly,
Melanie comes to regard Finn as the antithesis of the innocence
and romance that she once associated with the garden. Yet, in the
new and uncertain territory of the patriarchal urban household—
where the family lives at the mercy of her abusive and unpredict-
able Uncle Philip—Finn also becomes the focus of Melanie’s
sexual curiosity and semi-repressed desires.
70 Elizabeth Gargano

Just as the private backyard garden epitomized the sheltered

sexuality of Melanie’s prelapsarian world, so an urban public gar-
den serves as an emblem of her ambivalent attraction to Finn.
Skillfully, Carter fuses imagery of the city and the garden in a
scene that brings Melanie and Finn together as a fallen Adam and
Eve in an urban park or “pleasure ground” (101). A relic of the
Grand Exposition of 1852, this decayed and abandoned park in
what is now South London is described pointedly as an urban
“Waste Land” (101). In fact, the public garden in which Finn and
Melanie kiss for the first time evokes a 1960s counter-culture ver-
sion of Eliot’s Wasteland, dense with allusions to many of the land-
marks of Western literature and myth, woven into a tapestry that
mixes references to high and low culture. Previously, a solitary
and cloistered Melanie discovered her budding sexuality through
culturally iconic texts and images. Now, as sexual fantasy blos-
soms into attraction, Melanie is overwhelmed by the seedy and
fertile public garden in which Carter plants references to Noah’s
ark, the wasteland, Narcissus, Pan—Finn is described as “grinning
like Pan in a wood” (105)—Ozymandias, Robin Hood, new wave
film, Eden, Victorian England, the paintings of Rubens, and
World War I.
Like Melanie’s secret descent into the private garden, her
entrance into the public garden also involves trespassing into for-
bidden territory. Because her authoritarian uncle is away from
home, Finn and Melanie surreptitiously escape from work in
Uncle Philip’s shop to explore London. Although Finn mysteri-
ously possesses a key to the locked garden, Carter’s narrative
characteristically makes no attempt to explain this fact. Clearly,
the moment is symbolically resonant; Finn will reopen the garden
of sexuality from which Melanie once fled. As she will learn, how-
ever, the garden has metamorphosed as she was busy erecting
barricades around it. Once pristine and Edenic, the garden is
now rife with loss and decay. To Melanie’s dismay, the garden is
located in a bleak neighborhood that has seen better days:
“Crumbling in decay, overladen with a desolate burden of
humanity, the houses had the look of … eagerly embracing the
extinction of their former grandeur, of offering themselves to
ruin with an abandonment almost luxurious” (98–99).
A nostalgic image of lost innocence, the garden was once
centered around a papier maché castle that burned down in 1914
 Gender and Body in The Magic Toyshop 71

at the time of World War I, a reminder of the lost certitudes of

pre-war culture that animate the angst-ridden tapestry of Eliot’s
Wasteland. The decayed public garden serves as a ravaged store-
house of Western culture, enshrining its fallen gods: “Dryads,
slave girls, busts of great men” (102) and a broken statue of
Queen Victoria. Significantly, Finn describes the public garden
as “the graveyard of a pleasure ground” full of “pervasive
despair” (101).
Yet, decayed as it appears to Finn and Melanie, the lost
garden is actually rampantly fertile. Untamed, it has now
become a wilderness, mingling images of death with signs of
ferocious rebirth: “the park lay in sodden neglect, sprawling
over its rank acreage. … Trees had carelessly let go great
branches or had toppled down entirely, throwing their roots
up into the air. Bushes and shrubs, uncared for, burst bonds
like fat women who have left off their corsets, and now many
spilled out in mantraps of thorny undergrowth. It was a claggy,
cold, moist, northern jungle” (100). If the “uncorseted”
bushes evoke patriarchal fears of an unbounded female sexual-
ity, these are also fears that Melanie herself experiences. A
product, in part, of patriarchal scripts, roles and disguises,
Melanie recoils from the seedy promise of the garden. With its
broken statuary and Victorian rubble, the pleasure garden
strikes her as a “nightmare”; she wills herself to awaken “in her
own long-lost bed” in her parents’ country house where she
can “say good morning to the apple tree” in the garden (103).
Thus, in the midst of the fallen postlapsarian garden, Melanie
longs for its previous Edenic incarnation. Analogically, Carter
links the two sites, reminding us that, for all their differences,
both gardens inhabit the same physical and psychic territory.
Thus Melanie questions whether the garden is “real” (103), a
dream, or perhaps an enchantment. If she steps on the cracks
in the pavement “where the grass peer[s] through,” she fears
that the cracks will “open up and engulf her” (103). In a simi-
lar way, Melanie feared being engulfed in the private garden
of her own night-time fantasies and desires.
In this garden, too, Melanie takes on a protective disguise.
When Finn kisses her in the heart of the paradoxically fertile waste-
land, she deliberately distances herself from her own physical experi-
ence, imagining herself as the star of a new wave film:
72 Elizabeth Gargano

they must look very striking, like a shot from a new-wave British film,
locked in an embrace beside the broken statue in this dead fun palace,
with the November dusk swirling around them and Finn’s hair so ginger,
hers so black, spun together by the soft little hands of a tiny wind, yellow
and black hairs tangled together. She wished someone was watching
them, to appreciate them, or that she herself was watching them, Finn
kissing this black-haired young girl, from a hundred yards away. Then it
would seem romantic. (106)

Taking on the disguise of an actress in a “new-wave” film, Melanie

distances herself from Finn’s sexual overtures; it is not herself being
kissed, but the “black-haired girl” a “hundred yards away.” Torn
between the wish for romantic innocence and the lure of sexual
experience, Melanie’s divided sensibility requires this physical dis-
placement. Once again, Melanie is cast out of the garden of her
own illusions and wishes. Frightened and dismayed by the overt sex-
uality of the kiss, Melanie “sway[s] to and fro”: “she almost slipped
down onto the ground beside the dead queen in the mud” (106).
Although Finn’s grip prevents her from literally sinking to the
ground, the analogy with Melanie’s earlier symbolic “fall” in the night-
time garden becomes clear, as Carter associates Melanie with the
statue of the “Queen of the Wasteland” (101) who lies “face-down in a
puddle, narcissistically gazing at herself” (104). In fact, Melanie began
the novel studying herself in the mirror with just such a gaze,
absorbed, as Sarah Gamble emphasizes, “in the realm of narcissistic
desire” (69). Now the fallen garden casts a revelatory light on the
poses and gestures of prelapserian innocence. The myths of Eden and
Narcissus merge, as narcissism permeates both the originary paradise
and its flawed after-images, both the garden and the city. Like the
fallen statue, Melanie too is a queen of this garden; in other words, it is
her own garden that she is exploring, and flees from once again. At
the same time, as Melanie enters into a new relation with the fallen
garden, she once again forges a new relation with her body, one
tainted by trauma and loss. The wasteland at the end of history retains
its glimpses of Eden, haunted by a mysterious and unsettling potential.

IV

While the first two gardens that Melanie encounters are mediated
by images from literature and painting, the third garden
 Gender and Body in The Magic Toyshop 73

announces itself aggressively as an artistic construction. Melanie

first encounters her uncle’s private theater when Finn, her guide
into the world of sexual and sensory experience, leads her into
the basement where Philip, a demonic figure, has his under-
ground workshop. Studying the stage set that Philip uses for his
puppet shows, Melanie discovers a backdrop of a “hushed,
expectant woodland, with cardboard rocks” where a “fallen”
puppet lies apparently abandoned (67). In a white satin gown,
the puppet looks eerily like Melanie on the night when she tried
on her mother’s wedding dress: “This crazy world whirled about
her, men and women dwarfed by puppets .… She was in the night
again, and the doll was herself” (68). Once cast out of the garden,
Melanie appears doomed to repeat her fall in remembrance and
ritual.
Clearly, the artistic representation of Melanie in the mid-
night garden casts new light on Melanie’s role as a puppet who
enacts and performs her sexual discoveries by means of previ-
ously produced cultural scripts. As should be apparent, Melanie’s
experiences in the garden increasingly foreground “artifice”
rather than “nature,” as they are more and more populated by
statues, puppets, and artistic images. Further, the space of the
originary garden tends to contract dismayingly. Once an Edenic
space that stretches to include “the world” (17), it later shrinks
into a pleasure ground bounded by a “stout fence” (100). Here,
replicated in the guise of Philip’s theater, the garden is a “box-
like construction” behind “[r]ed plush curtains” that provides a
stage for “puppets of all sizes, some almost as tall as Melanie her-
self” (67). In Philip’s workshop, Melanie is fascinated and
appalled by the array of “blind-eyed puppets, some armless, some
legless, some naked, some clothed, all with a strange liveliness as
they dangled unfinished from their hooks” (67). As noted earlier,
Melanie is in the process of constructing a self that remains unfin-
ished. Her fear of both the puppets and the theater—she begs
Finn to close the curtains on the eerie pastoral scene—underlines
her own identification with the “blind-eyed” puppets who lack
individuality and agency, and exist merely to be manipulated in
various poses by Uncle Philip, who serves as both a satanic figure
and a domineering, deterministic god.
Melanie’s nascent identification with the life-size puppets
heightens when Uncle Philip forces her to perform with them in
74 Elizabeth Gargano

his private theater, re-enacting the rape of Leda with a giant swan
puppet. While Philip transforms the sylvan landscape of the
theater’s backdrop into a wild beach so that Melanie can stroll on
the shore under the gaze of the puppet-swan, her costume of a
white chiffon tunic—painstakingly sewn by Philip’s oppressed
wife—recalls both her wedding-dress disguise and the white tulle
of the look-alike puppet. The Leda performance not only recre-
ates what Melanie describes as “the wedding dress night, when
she married the shadows and the world ended” (77); it also ges-
tures emphatically at her experience in the public pleasure gar-
den with Finn. Perched on the statue of the fallen queen of the
Waste Land, Finn had impersonated a bird descending upon
Melanie from above: “seized by some eccentric whim in mid air,
[he] raised his black p.v.c. arms and flapped them, cawing like a
crow” (105). Like Melanie, Finn too has a taste for masquerade.
His dramatic gesture transforms his prosaic p.v.c. raincoat into
the black, flapping wings of a crow. When Finn descends upon
her in a parodic embrace, Melanie reacts in fear of the implicit
sexual coupling: “Everything went black in the shocking folds of
his embrace. She was very startled and near to sobbing.” In an
unsettling image, Finn relishes his semi-monstrous disguise, wrap-
ping Melanie in darkness and repeating his strange cry: “‘Caw,
caw,’ echoed his raincoat” (105). Finn quickly retreats from what
he regards as a prank, affirming that he has no intention of
frightening her; nevertheless, his brief bird-like disguise clearly
foreshadows the puppet-swan’s descent from the skies, within the
constructed landscape of Philip’s theater. As Philip’s grotesque
swan descends on shaky strings, it combines comic, grotesque and
frightening aspects in a surreal mixture of clashing attributes:

[Melanie] felt herself not herself, wrenched from her own personality,
watching this whole fantasy from another place; and in this staged fantasy,
anything was possible. Even that the swan, the mocked up swan, might
assume reality and rape this girl in a blizzard of white feathers. The swan
towered over this girl who was Melanie and who was not. (166)

In the pleasure garden, Melanie imagined herself an actress

performing a kiss and being watched by onlookers in order to dis-
tance herself from her physical experience. As Craft-Fairchild
contends, the pleasures of masquerade are double-edged; in this
 Gender and Body in The Magic Toyshop 75

case, seduced by her own poses, Melanie “desires to be desired”

and “by catering to male fantasies … becomes objectified as spec-
tacle” (Craft-Fairchild 54). Now Melanie’s introjection of male
desire is literalized, as her sense of herself as a passive object of
desire is horrendously enacted on a literal stage, before the audi-
ence of Philip’s family. Re-enacting the rape of Leda, Melanie
finds herself being savaged by a wooden swan in a painted land-
scape, a grotesque initiation that recapitulates more brutally both
her midnight “fall” in the garden and her temptation toward self-
objectification and displaced desire—the desire to be desired—in
the pleasure garden.
A classic essentialist explanation of Melanie’s dilemma might
focus on her alienation from her authentic self and the true
meaning of her gender. Similarly, her masquerade as Leda would
be contrasted with the “real” Melanie, and the garden of her
female sexuality would remain, in some sense authentically
present, even if circumscribed by the high walls and cultural
constraints of patriarchy. But in fact, as Carter’s virtuoso use of
metaphorical tropes illuminates, the garden of the body, experi-
enced so powerfully as primal and originary, is also, seen from
another perspective—or in another incarnation—a bare stage set, a
construction. And the masquerader in the culturally orchestrated
pageant of gender is both Melanie and “not” Melanie. Melanie’s
performance of the role of Leda is both a disguise and a revela-
tion. To paraphrase Butler, it is “one of those hyperbolic exhibi-
tions” that reveal the “phantasmatic status” of gendered relations.
Enacting patriarchal power relations in a hyperbolic register, the
drama of Leda and the swan exposes an “artificial construct” (in
Carter’s words) that still has the power to coerce and traumatize.
At the end of the novel, Carter blasts Uncle Philip’s house of
patriarchy, incinerating it in an apocalyptic blaze, and allowing
Melanie and Finn to come together in the “garden” behind the
burning house. From one perspective, this final encounter can be
seen as a return to an essential nature outside the deforming
culture of patriarchal domination, an Eden in which gender
relations can be renegotiated, reinvented, or perhaps even
negated; from another viewpoint also prepared for by the novel’s
rich imagery, Melanie may simply be on the verge of another
more engaging disguise. The critical conversation only empha-
sizes the ending’s ambiguity. While Aidan Day argues that that
76 Elizabeth Gargano

Melanie and Finn may have “thrown off the sexist oppressiveness
of the old” order, establishing a new relationship of “equality”
(31), Paulina Palmer sees the lovers’ escape into the garden as
simply another incarnation of patriarchal relations.10 Sarah
Gamble aptly expresses the tale’s haunting and provocative lack
of resolution: “At the end of change lies … what?” (69).11
Inviting diverse interpretations, the novel eschews both nar-
rative closure and thematic resolution, creating instead a narra-
tive loop, in which the ending leads us back to the beginning of
the tale. As Melanie and Finn face each other in the night-time
garden “caught in a wild surmise” (200), the final line of Carter’s
novel echoes the opening pages, with their compromised trope of
a virgin wilderness that is already a familiar cultural terrain. In
fact, the narrative that began with the language of John Donne
ends with a reference to John Keats. The allusion is to Keats’s son-
net “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer,” where Cortez
and his men see the Pacific Ocean for the first time, then “look at
each other with a wild surmise” (200).12 As Keats’s image brings us
back to the equation set up in the first pages of the novel—in which
Melanie, the explorer of her own body, is compared to Cortez—
we experience a dizzying sense of flux and stasis.13 Everything—
and nothing—has changed. In Carter’s words, “writing” is “only
applied linguistics” after all (“Notes” 28). Gestures at an authen-
tic female “nature” and identity may serve a dramatic function,
as may the deconstruction of such gestures. Such narrative strate-
gies clearly make no claim to resolving feminist debates. Rather,
in the words of Elaine Jordan, Carter’s novels “never” move
“toward conclusion or resolution, only toward the assertion of
certain principles or negations, in the light of which the struggle

10
See Aidam Day’s dicussion of this in Angela Carter: The Rational Glass, pp. 30–32.
11
Gamble and Day disagree about the outcome of the fire. According to Day, “We are
given to understand that Francie and Margaret [Finn’s siblings, who are also incestuous lovers]
escape” (Day 30). In contrast, for Gamble, Francie and Margaret appear to be immolated in
“the fire of patriarchy’s self-inflicted destruction” (Gamble 73). Clearly, Carter’s narrative
courts such conflicting interpretations, by seeding in diverse possibilities. As Gamble notes,
“All endings [for each of the characters] are rendered partial and uncertain” (73).
12
Keats mistakenly referred to Cortez, although it was Balboa who in fact reached the
Pacific.
13
Day adroitly analyzes how Carter’s allusion to Keats’s sonnet helps to evoke “a new
order of being” at the end of the novel (Day 32), but does not note the connection with
the novel’s opening.
 Gender and Body in The Magic Toyshop 77

goes on” (37). The intertextual play that links the opening and
conclusion of The Magic Toyshop is metonymic of its ambivalent
explorations of culture and nature in regard to gender. When last
seen, Melanie may be once again a masquerader in the garden,
though what form her next disguise will take—and whether it will
be in fact a disguise or an unveiling—we can hardly hazard a wild
surmise.

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