The sacred may not be the same as the religious: Angela Carter's ‘Impressions: The Wrightsman Magdalene’ and ‘Black Venus’

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Notes

The first version of ‘Impressions: The Wrightsman Magdalene’ was published in FMR Magazine, February 1992; ‘Black Venus’ was first published as Black Venus's Tale, London: Next Editions, 1980. The texts used here are those in Carter 1996.

See Carter's last film, The Holy Family Album, and also Crofts 2003.

Butler calls Kristeva's concept of subversion a ‘doubtful’ strategy. Kristeva's theory, in her understanding, ‘appears to depend upon the stability and reproduction of precisely the paternal law that she seeks to displace. Although [Kristeva] effectively exposes the limits of Lacan's efforts to universalize the paternal law in language, she nevertheless concedes that the semiotic is invariably subordinate to the Symbolic, that it assumes its specificity within the terms of a hierarchy immune to challenge’ (Butler 1990:80).

The Virgin Mary is the only Christian woman conceptualized both as a holy virgin and a holy mother. The concept of a parthenogenetic virgin birth releases the Madonna from hysterical experiences. In Warner's understanding, the Roman Catholic Madonna does not menstruate (she is not fertile), her physiological integrity in pregnancy and post partum is astonishing, her birth pains are never mentioned and her virginity is never violated. There is no split in her body between the virgin and the mother.

As Warner observes, the love goddesses of the Near East and of classical mythology, such as Venus, Ishtar, Astarte and Anat, ‘are entitled virgins despite their lovers, who die and rise again for them each year’ (Warner 1990:47). Moreover, the goddess Aphrodite ‘was sometimes surnamed Porne, or Courtesan . . . This facet of human personality could not be represented by the Virgin Mary, however beautifully and youthfully and enticingly she is portrayed. Her unspotted goodness prevents the sinner from identifying with her, and keeps her in the position of the Platonic ideal; but Mary Magdalene holds up a comforting mirror to those who sin again and again, and promises joy to human frailty. Although the Virgin is both the bride of Christ and of mankind, Mary Magdalene when she mourns and lays out Christ's body usurps that role, leaving the Virgin of Sorrows a more restricted maternal character’ (235).

I refer to de Beauvoir's concept of ‘the complexity of woman’ as a locus of male delight in her role as ‘a wonderful servant who is capable of dazzling him—and not too expensive. Is she angel or demon? The uncertainty makes her a Sphinx . . . “Who are you, whence come you, strange Sphinx?” And there is still no end to dreaming and debating on the feminine mystery. It is indeed to preserve the skirts, petticoats, veils, long gloves, high-heeled shoes: everything that accentuates the difference in the Other makes her more desirable’ (de Beauvoir 1993:203).

De Beauvoir's hetaira incorporates seduction: ‘she is beyond all others flesh and spirit, idol, inspiration, muse. The whole life of a hetaira is a show; her remarks, her parroting, are intended not to express her thoughts but to produce an effect’ (de Beauvoir 1993:601).

Both the original and this translation of lines from Baudelaire's poem ‘Sed Non Satiata’ are included in Carter's text (1996:244): ‘Bizarre déité, brune comme les nuits,/ Au parfum mélangé de musc et de havane,/ Oeuvre de quelque obi, le Faust de la savane,/ Sorcière au flanc d’ébène, enfant des noirs minuits’.

In ‘Seriously Funny: Wise Children’, Webb analyses Carter's understanding of the ‘real’ and drag/fantasy (210–11).

In Dancing at the Edge of the World (1989), Le Guin classifies the ‘barren childhood’ as the first ‘waiting room’ to ‘fruitful maturity’ that will be followed by ‘the barren old age, another waiting room’ (3). She questions the concept of fruitfulness/fertility as ‘the only meaningful condition for a woman’ (5).

Gloria Anzaldúa's influential essay, ‘La Conciencia de la Mestiza: Towards a New Consciousness’ (Anzaldúa 1987), reveals the consciousness of the ‘mestiza’, the Chicana living in the borderlands that link the south-western United States with Mexico, as a product of racial (ideological and biological) cross-pollenation. For Anzaldúa, the space between and within opposing cultures is a creative space, where la mestiza can revel in the strength and the ambiguities that result from the ‘struggle of flesh, [the] struggle of borders’, the ‘cultural collision’ she embodies.

I am referring to Le Guin's concept of the crone as the third (and most fulfilling) self in the final stage of a woman's life, developed in Le Guin 1989.