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 BODY IN ANGELA CARTER’S THE MAGIC TOYSHOP Women's Studies, 1547-7045 0049-7878 GWST Women’s Studies Vol. 36, No. 2, December 2006: pp. 1–30 Gender and Elizabeth Gargano Body in The Magic Toyshop ELIZABETH GARGANO 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 feminist 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 individual subject; instead, Carter portrays “the pregendered subject as unstable and fragmented.” Thus, Carter’s “more postmodernist/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 content is typified by a work like The Bloody Chamber, in which apparently distinct stories ultimately 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:
[email protected] 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 performativity in the 1990s. If theories of gender performativity tend to position 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