Convulsive Beauty and Compulsive Desire: The Surrealist Pattern of Shadow Dance

Abstract

Angela Carter’s first novel, Shadow Dance, was published in 1966, the same year that André Breton, the founder and theoretician of the surrealist movement, died. The movement largely came to an end with his death, but its thought nonetheless informed and inspired the founding of the new avant-gardes of the period, such as the nouveau roman, Situationism and Tel Quel.¹ Susan Rubin Suleiman points out that

[t]he idea of rupture, a radical break with the past, dominated both the aesthetic and the philosophical and political program of the Tel Quel group, for example, which for a few years (roughly, 1967 to 1977) came closest to espousing the doubly revolutionary project of the historical avant-gardes, notably of Surrealism: to transform both language (writing, reading, text) and the world, to transform the latter by transforming the former. (Subversive Intent 33–34; emphasis in original)

The idea of a break with the past runs through Carter’s début novel too, as, in line with the avant-gardes of the time and the surrealists before them, it wages war against the static conventional values and accepted truths of Western patriarchy. In Shadow Dance, as in the work of the surrealists, the rigid structures of old are made to crumble and fluidity and mutability rule in the wreckage.

It is this world, there is no other but a world transformed by imagination and desire. You could say it is the dream made flesh.

(Angela Carter, “The Alchemy of the Word”)