Mannequins in the Marketplace: Angela Carter, Pat Barker and Margaret Atwood

Abstract

The magic of magic realism, discussed in the previous chapter, is conjured up again in the title of Carter second novel, The Magic Toyshop (1967). Published earlier in her career than both The Infernal Desire Machines of Dr Hoffman (1972) and Nights at the Circus (1984), one might expect it to operate as a prototype for ideas developed in greater depth in those two texts. To some extent this is true, not least in the fact that Carter’s treatment of this material in The Magic Toyshop is, to some extent, more generically enclosed. Structurally the novel utilizes the metaphor of the dream to construct a series of enclosed circular worlds. We begin at the outer circumference of this set of ever-diminishing circles with Melanie and her siblings in their parental home. Fantasy as it exists at this stage of the text is that of the simplest kind in narrative terms: adolescent wish-fulfilment conceptualized from within a largely realist framework. On the death of Melanie’s parents, however, we find ourselves moving into the world of the gothic, as we enter the toyshop itself and, along with it, a “Walpurgisnacht of carved and severed limbs”.² It is in this space that worlds subdivide into the shop, the living quarters and, most sinisterly of all, a crypt-like basement which is home to Uncle Philip’s puppet-booth and the space of his darkest, most clandestine desires. In itself it forms a replica of a sinister dollhouse, “Occupying a space within an enclosed space … center within center. Within within within. The dollhouse is a materialized secret …”³

Dolls revive childhood memories. They stir up feelings about our mothers and our relationships with them … In a doll’s face, we see ourselves …¹