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VINTAGE CLASSICS

ANGELA CARTER

Angela Carter was born in 1940 and read English at Bristol University, before spending two years living in Japan. She lived and worked extensively in the United States and Australia. Her first novel, Shadow Dance, was published in 1965, followed by the Magic Toyshop in 1967, which went on to win the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize. She wrote a further four novels, together with three collections of short stories, two works of non-fiction and a volume of collected writings. Carter died in 1992.

ANGELA CARTER

Sh ORT S TOR i ES

Fireworks

Black Venus

American Ghosts and Old World Wonders

Burning Your Boats: Collected Short Stories

The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories

The Virago Book of Fairy Tales (editor)

The Second Virago Book of Fairy Tales (editor)

Wayward Girls and Wicked Women (editor)

N O v ELS

Shadow Dance

The Magic Toyshop

Several Perceptions

Heroes and Villains

Love

The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman

The Passion of New Eve

Nights at the Circus

N ON -fi CT i ON

The Sadeian Woman: An Exercise in Cultural History

Nothing Sacred: Selected Writings

Expletives Deleted

Shaking a Leg: Collected Writings

D RA m A

Come Unto These Yellow Sands: Four Radio Plays

The Curious Room: Collected Dramatic Works

ANGELA CARTER WISE CHILDREN

wi T h AN i NTROD u CT i ON BY Ali Smith

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First published in Great Britain by Chatto & Windus 1991 This paperback first published in Vintage Classics in 2025

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Introduction

What exactly is the wisdom advocated in Angela Carter’s final novel, Wise Children? First, there’s its blatant demand that we lighten up. ‘What a joy it is to dance and sing!’ Then there’s a much less exclamatory kind of wisdom. Take the word ‘child’. Carter, a writer fond of what words mean, will have known that for much of its history it was specifically a provincial word for ‘girl’. ‘Mercy on’s, a barne; a very pretty barne! A boy or a child, I wonder?’ as the old shepherd says when he finds, by chance, on the shores of Bohemia, the abandoned baby Perdita in Shakespeare’s late romance of birth, death and rebirth, The Winter’s Tale. Wisdom and innocence. Innocence and knowing. Wise Children is a knowing text, packed with interlayered allusion and literary embedding – most of all wise to the fertility there is in any notion of ‘embedding’. Cheerfully bawdy, it’s Carter’s most glorious, most comic, most fulfilled, certainly her most generously and happily orgiastic, fictional performance. By chance it was also her last novel. She died young, at only 51, the year after its publication, so it takes crowning place in her now recognisably revolutionary literary project.

‘Most intellectual development depends on new readings of old texts,’ she wrote in 1983. ‘I am all for putting new wine in old bottles, especially if the new wine makes the old bottles explode.’1 She was a committed feminist and socialist, ‘the pure product of an advanced, industrialised, post-

imperialist country in decline,’2 and someone who saw all art as helplessly political, because made by history and belonging to its time. Her feminism and socialism form a twinned impetus in her work. ‘Flesh comes to us out of history,’ she wrote in her ground-breaking study of women and gender-codification, The Sadeian Woman (1979), one of the books which caused even more than the usual critical alarm and outrage at its writer on its publication. After her first highly praised and steadily award-winning novels of the 1960s, her baroque, gaudy and often violent rejection of British realism in book after fearless book filled with nasty tyrant-puppeteers, falling and failing civilisations and clever lost heroines strung between violence or madness, had earned her a critical reputation as maddeningly uncategorisable. In the end critics liked to label her as tricksy magical-realist. This was a term she scorned in the same way that she scorned the notion that realism was the only available version of ‘real’. ‘I’ve got nothing against realism. But there is realism and realism. The questions that I ask myself, I think they are very much to do with reality.’3

Lorna Sage, Carter’s great friend and most assiduous critic, noted that 1979, the year in which she published not just The Sadeian Woman but also her most celebrated collection of short stories, The Bloody Chamber – the first of her collections in which she explicitly changed the endings of traditional tales to let, for instance, Bluebeard’s bride beard Bluebeard or Red Riding Hood seduce the wolf – was the year her interest in transformation as a theme became most accessible to her readers. After this a new laughter, a greater verve, and a sharper keenness to banish puritan constraint, entered her work.

The critics certainly felt a lot safer with her final two novels, tending to see the worlds of a feathered barmaid and high-kicking hoofers in Nights at the Circus and Wise Children as ‘more benign’4 on the whole than the earlier viii

work where, typically and casually, in works like The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman (1972) and The Passion of New Eve (1977), a male protagonist is every bit as likely to shift gender or be gang-raped by a troupe of male acrobats as the literary canon is to be questioned, satirised and rewritten.

But from her first novel, Shadow Dance (1966), all the way to Wise Children (1991), Carter’s work goes out of its way to take to pieces the powerful machineries of romanticism, desire, dominant narrative and social codification, as well as the machineries of fiction itself, to lay them bare before a reader and show her or him how those machineries are working.

From its sprightly opening riddle onwards, everything in Wise Children is about duality – and most immediately, Carter suggests, social duality. The aging birthday girl narrator is one half of a duo: Nora and Dora, ‘the legendary Chance sisters’. They’re from ‘the wrong side’ of a two-track city (and a two-track family and a two-track art form and a twotrack tradition and a two-track culture and a two-track world). ‘Once upon a time you could make a crude distinction thus,’ Dora says, making a fairy tale of the real, of the complications of the coming of affluence to this always poorer, always hybrid South of the city. There’s nothing else to do but to bless their chance ownership of a small patch of it, number 49 Bard Road. ‘If it wasn’t for this house, Nora and I would be on the streets by now, hauling our worldlies up and down in plastic bags . ..bursting into songs of joy when finally admitted to the night shelter and therefore chucked out immediately to gasp and freeze and finally snuff it disregarded on the street and blow away like rags.’

Never has the joy of dancing and singing been made so darkly and lightly relative in the same instant as in the opening pages of this all-singing, all-dancing delight of a novel which, in five chapters, or five good farcical theatrical acts,

travels from morning to evening of a single day and from one end of the twentieth century to the other, in a paean to, well, pretty much everything entertaining that ever happened, in a blend of literature, classical theatre, cheap vaudeville and Hollywood cinema.

Mostly, though, it’s a celebration of the champion English alchemist of fused high-and-low art, Shakespeare, whose windy spring birthday the twin old girls – and their twin father and uncle before them, and various other (twin, of course) members of their family – share. So all life is here in this virtuoso performance, whose chapters end in transformations, whose separate sentences resound with internal rhyme and rhythm, whose eye and ear are on Englishness and tradition, whose spirit is out for ‘a bit of fun’, and whose themes are the Shakespearian dualities – twins and doubling, fathers and daughters, lost family and found family, comedy and tragedy. But Wise Children’s aesthetic landscape is determinedly beyond tragedy – as Dora says, with a quite violent insistence, ‘I refuse point blank to play in tragedy’ – and beyond comedy too. Instead the novel is deep-steeped in the later romance plays, like Cymbeline, The Tempest, Pericles, The Winter’s Tale, where the yoked opposites of life and death are the crux of the story, but rebirth is the art.

Carter’s Chance girls are illegitimate twice (of course) –first when it comes to their natural father, the noble Shakespearian actor Melchior Hazard, king of the ‘Royal family’ of British theatre (and twin brother of the most benign of Carter’s Prospero figures, the magician Peregrine) – and second, in the twin unacceptability of their own ‘dramatic art’ – their hoofing it at the ‘fag end of vaudeville’ and their being girls on the halls, to boot. Although their real grandmother in her time played all the heroines in Shakespeare and even played Hamlet, they’ve ended up discarded illegitimate brats, named by chance (what’s a Hazard anyway, but a posh word for Chance, in another of Carter’s glorious, x

casual redefinings). They exist by the thread of chance, by the kindness, imagination and invention of Grandma Chance, only one of the remarkable old-lady-survivors in a book full of them. ‘Grandma invented this family. She put it together out of whatever came to hand – a stray pair of orphaned babes, a ragamuffin in a flat cap. She created it by sheer force of personality ...It is a characteristic of human beings, one I’ve often noticed, that if they don’t have a family of their own, they will invent one.’

Each chapter celebrates the inventiveness of the imagination. In Nora’s and Dora’s journey from young pirates to old interlopers Carter entertains us with an extraordinary interlaying of art and popular culture that breaches both’s so-called boundaries – and suggests that you need ‘smashing legs’ to play Shakespeare. The interlayered (and sometimes actual cameo) ‘appearances’ from Austen, Milton, Coward, Dickens, Carroll, Wordsworth, Fitzgerald, Brecht and Shaw (to name only a few of the writers whose work is woven somewhere into the text) rub up against the fleeting starry presences of Fred Astaire, Ruby Keeler, W.C. Fields, Howard Hughes, Charlie Chaplin (resurrected and priapic, ‘hung like a horse’) – a litany of greater and lesser known stars in a book which thoroughly parodies Hollywood’s own 1930s version of A Midsummer Night’s Dream (only one of the many Shakespeare plays that Carter card-shuffles into her novel in the space of roughly 240 pages). ‘I was attempting to encompass something from every Shakespeare,’ she said in a radio interview with the writer Paul Bailey only months before she died. ‘I mean, I couldn’t actually at all . ..I mean, you know, Titus Andronicus was very difficult . ..But I got a lot in!’5

Each chapter also celebrates a family affair. Each celebrates a birthday. Each celebrates vulgar, forceful life, typically turning a sentence like ‘there he was, on the bed, brushing up his Shakespeare’ into its own funny, sexy innuendo. The key

concept here is celebration, which, though never uncomplicated, is always merry, carnivalesque. ‘Something nice, something nasty, I don’t give a monkeys. Just as long as something happens to remind us we’re still in the land of the living’ as Dora puts it; these wise children know very young that performance is about an openness to potential, a hope, which Dora calls anticipation. ‘I . ..have always loved it best of all, the moment when the lights go down, the curtain glows, you know that something wonderful is going to happen. It doesn’t matter if what happens next spoils everything; the anticipation itself is always pure.’

In 1980, in a very fine essay about the writer Colette and her years of notoriety and survival on the French stage, Carter reveals herself as fascinated by the life, ‘as picaresque as a woman’s may be without putting herself in a state of hazard.’ She sees Colette’s 1910 novel about stage-life, La Vagabonde, as ‘still one of the most truthful expositions of the dilemma of a free woman in a male-dominated society.’6 Elsewhere in Carter’s work, theatres burn angrily and liberatingly down. But in Wise Children and Nights at the Circus, she positively uses the space – she makes something else of it, with characters who use it and make a living by it in a world where it’s hard to make a living if you’re a girl and you’re poor.

Take the horrific graffiti representation of a woman as a zero, passive, a ring-shaped ‘O’, a ‘sign for nothing’, ‘a dumb mouth from which the teeth have been pulled,’ as Carter puts it in the first pages of The Sadeian Woman, a nothing from whose ‘elemental iconography may be derived the whole metaphysic of sexual differences.’ 7 If you compare this to what Carter does in her final two novels with the circus ring, the theatre – the space were we act – then a whole new performative metaphysic of potential becomes possible.

Elsewhere in her work, girls and women are hugely troubled by their mirror images and what to make of them. Here, xii

the mirror-image comes to mean more and differently than it has before. It means sisterhood, family, the kind of love that makes Dora want to survive – and it means strength. ‘Neither of us anything special on our own – skinny things with mouse-brown bobs – but, put us together, we turned heads.’ The duo is an inspired image for the power of the communal. ‘On our own, you wouldn’t look at us twice. But put us together . ..’ and something legendary happens.

This doesn’t mean that Carter is any less sharp – in a world where Shakespeare’s head is on the money, as it were – in her delineation of the social position of girls and women. ‘Hope for the best, expect the worst.’ Money, class and gender are tightly bound together in her take on the girls’ Freudian descents of endless showbiz staircases (particularly in the case of Tiffany, with ‘her feet leaving blood behind them as she came down’); in her reading of Hollywood as ‘a very peculiar brothel, where all the girls for sale were shadows’; and perhaps most particularly in this novel’s ghost, the fleeting near-invisible presence of Kitty, the girls’ birthmother, a thin rag of a girl who works emptying the slops in a poor theatrical lodging house, is made pregnant by chance or the usual design, and dies very young.

But Nora’s own first sexual encounter, cold and drunken, down a dark alley, as Dora reports it, as it happens, is with a married man, yes, but also a pantomime goose. Some might want to call it cheap and squalid realism, she suggests, but panto is full of wish-fulfilment and life can be larger than itself, if we choose to let it.

Carter liked, herself, to be a bit unexpectedly larger-thanlife. She notes, in one of her last introductions to her books, the liberation in being ‘notoriously foul-mouthed’, a ‘softspoken, middle-aged English gentlewoman who swears like a trooper when roused.’8 More than a decade earlier she’d written to Lorna Sage about a particular legacy of wisdom she’d like to leave any daughter she might have. Having met

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the drunken, self-lacerating novelist, Elizabeth Smart, at a literary party and having been prompted by this to remember her own dislike of what she saw as a self-indulgent, selfhurting streak in some writers who happened to be women, she wrote to Sage about why she’d decided to take a place on the board of the brand new venture in publishing that would become Virago books. ‘I am moved towards it by the desire that no daughter of mine should ever be in a position to be able to write BY GRAND CENTRAL STATION I SAT DOWN AND WEPT, exquisite prose though it might contain. BY GRAND CENTRAL STATION I TORE OFF HIS BALLS would be more like it, I should hope.’ 9

The buoyancy in Wise Children is all to do with what you might call an equivalent largeness of voice – and with its darker twin, its mirror opposite, silence. ‘The rest is silence’ is a line straight out of tragedy. The trick of the live voice is to refuse, like Austen, to dwell on guilt and misery. The life and soul of Wise Children is Dora, whom Carter herself called ‘Englishness as a persona,’10 and Dora’s personality is her indefatigable first-person delivery – her voice. ‘It’s the American tragedy in a nutshell. They look around the world and think: “There must be something better!” But there isn’t. Sorry, chum. This is it. What you see is what you get. Only the here and now,’ as she says, in chapter three, whose theme is heaven and its impossibility, in a voice careful to soften and humanise its own blow with every cliché.

Cliché is always larger than life, and a kind of oral communal agreement in itself. Carter was particularly drawn to the politics of voice – how the oral tradition often outwits, and is often the live source, for the written. ‘It’s an accident of the twentieth century that I’m literate,’ she said, recalling her own family history, since literacy was had by chance, in the shape of an early Scottish education for members of her father’s family and, on her mother’s side, a much later education via ‘that Education Act in the 1880s . ..This elevation

of the named writer has always seemed to me very very unfair on something like 95% of the human race, who didn’t have the ability to write, but which didn’t stop them, you know, inventing things ...One of the things I’ve always deeply respected about Shakespeare – it was obvious he didn’t very much care whether he was published or not. I mean it seems to me that he really is in many respects something rather archaic in that he did actually write for the voice.’11

Dora Chance is the only completely female first-person protagonist in Carter’s novels – one who knows, like Carter, that ‘we carry our history on our tongues,’ and knows too that she’s very much an illegitimate chronicler, that the female voice has had much less chance to be recorded over time, history being what it is. A brilliant creation, Dora’s voice infers a double act, individual and communal at once, speaking for an experience communally had, a life communally lived. She loves cliché, which keeps so many dangerous stories survivable: ‘What hoops the kept woman has to jump to work her passage.’ And cliché can be sexy: ‘to travel hopefully is better than to arrive, as Uncle Perry used to say. I always preferred foreplay too.’

‘The unofficial chronicler’ is the more literary sister in a duo whose names summon connections with twentiethcentury male giants of thought and literature, Freud and Joyce, and whose characters escape the fates of their inferred namesakes. This particular Dora is a writer able to take issue with her own literary ‘education’ at the hands of her American boyfriend, Irish (a thinly disguised F. S cott Fitzgerald): ‘a man of parts even if some of them didn’t work too well.’ Finally, Dora’s role as narrator is a double-edged one, as Carter, who saw Dora’s voice as close to a stand-up performance, likes to remind us from time to time. Is she maybe nothing more than a batty, drunk old woman, ‘in her ratty old fur and poster paint, her orange (Persian Melon) toenails sticking out of her snakeskin peep-toes, reeking of

liquor’ who wants you to buy her a drink and to regale you with her life story? Because if she is – even if she’s the female twentieth-century version of the Ancient Mariner – then she’ll also, the very next moment, be the author of a knowing literary jolt of a paragraph like this:

But truthfully, these glorious pauses do, sometimes, occur in the discordant but complementary narratives of our lives and if you choose to stop the story there, at such a pause, and refuse to take it any further, then you can call it a happy ending.

In that essay on Colette, Carter wrote about the moment in Simone de Beauvoir’s memoirs when she records the surreality of her being in the same room as (if not actually speaking to) Colette. ‘Of course,’ Carter mused, ‘Colette could no more have written The Second Sex than de Beauvoir could have danced naked on a public stage, which precisely defines the limitations of both these great ladies.’ 12 Carter’s final great creation is a lot closer than either of them to being capable of both.

Wise Children’s insouciance is near stoic. A book about old ladies is, helplessly, going to be a book about ‘the way of all flesh’. ‘Whence came we? Whither goeth we? I know the answer to the second question, of course. Bound for oblivion, nor leave a wrack behind.’ It’s a limelight novel that knows the dark, that ‘wars are facts we cannot fuck away’. Its insouciance is its response in the face of tragedy, poverty, illegitimacy, hierarchy, and most grave of all, ‘untimely death.’ What to do? ‘We’ll go on singing and dancing until we drop in our tracks, won’t we kids?’ In her critical writings Carter associates lightness with stoicism more than once. She comments on one of the movie stars she was most fascinated by, Louise Brooks, who, in Pabst’s Pandora’s Box, xvi

‘typifies the subversive violence inherent in beauty and a light heart.’13 In a book as much about the degeneration game as it is about generation and generations, Dora and Nora, in their seventies, at the fag end of the British empire, go to a broken-down old cinema and see the film of their young selves in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, ‘two batty old tarts with their eyes glued to their own ghosts.’

In the face of this, a book whose celebration of the lifeforce is so very forceful, whose countless births and birthdays and rebirths from the dead crescendo in its great fertile explosion of an ending, is a designed kindness. Wise Children is, from start to finish, a performance – an act. And what an act. It’s an act of love. It’s an act of suspension of disbelief – in other words, an act which invites belief. It’s an act of survival. It’s an act of voice against silence. It’s an act of communality – and the proof that a role like mother, father, even self, can be taken by more than one person, in other words, can be shared. And it’s an act of mending broken things of the past, too, a backhand gift to history from a writer who liked, in her wisdom, to demonstrate that the given shape of things can – if we use our imaginations – be altered. ‘Hope for the best, expect the worst.’ By the end this catchphrase has been turned on its head. It ends in hope.

Carter’s last heroine knows how to role-reverse. She takes the potentially abject story of her own mother, Kitty, a mere ghost of a gone girl, and gives her a presence and a sexual power that’s ‘bold as brass’. ‘My Aunt Cynthia,’ Carter told Paul Bailey in the late radio interview, not long before she died,

we called her Kitty. My Aunt Kitty was a desperately unhappy and unfulfilled woman who went mad, spectacularly, in her sixties, and died ...in Springfield Mental Hospital ...She had a soubrette personality ...

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which had always been thwarted. She was at a secondary school round here towards the end of the 1914 war and my grandmother was asked in and they wondered what they were going to do with Kit, what she was going to do when she left school, and my grandmother said, in all innocence and seriousness, well, we always thought she could go on the halls ...and she never did, I mean the headmistress thought that my grandmother had suggested that she should go on the streets ...and Kit became a clerk, and was very unhappy, as I say. And I thought, you know, that maybe I would send her on the halls.14

Wise Children lets the lost be found and the old be young. It invents impossible fertilities. It renews everything it touches. It bursts with energy, passion, wit, hilarity, hope, skill, art and love. Resurrective in so many ways, it’s Carter’s final legacy, and it’s a legacy of good, fierce, raucous potential. What a wisdom. What a joy.

Ali Smith, 2006

1. Angela Carter, Shaking a Leg: Selected Journalism and Writings (London: Chatto & Windus, 1997), p. 37.

2. Ibid., p. 40.

3. ‘Omnibus: Angela Carter’s Curious Room’, BBC transmission script, 15 September 1992, p. 24.

4. Entry on Angela Carter, The Cambridge Guide to Women’s Writing in English, ed. Lorna Sage (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 116.

5. ‘The Third Ear’, Interview with Paul Bailey, BBC Radio 4, June 1991. (I use this interview, in which xviii

Carter talks a great deal about Wise Children ,which had just been published, throughout this introduction, and am much indebted to Paul Bailey for finding me a copy.)

6. Shaking a Leg, pp. 520-1.

7. Angela Carter, The Sadeian Woman: An Exercise in Cultural History, (London: Virago Press, 1979) pp. 4–5.

8. Shaking a Leg, p. 604.

9. Lorna Sage, Good As Her Word: Selected Journalism, (London: Fourth Estate, 2003), p. 75.

10. ‘The Third Ear’, Interview with Paul Bailey.

11. Ibid.

12. Shaking a Leg, p. 525.

13. Ibid., p. 351.

14. ‘The Third Ear’, Interview with Paul Bailey.