The Review of Contemporary Fiction

Angela Carter: The Rational Glass by Aidan Day
Joanne Gass

Aidan Day. Angela Carter: The Rational Glass. Manchester Univ. Press, 1998. 224 pp. $24.95.

Nearly all critics who set about the task of reading Angela Carter’s oeuvre rightly begin with her asserted desire to deconstruct the “consolatory nonsense” of mythic versions of women and her insistence that we attend to woman’s material condition; Aidan Day begins his book as do the others, but he calls Carter’s commitment to feminist politics “metaphysical materialism” grounded in “her empiricism and her passion for reason.” Day’s argument rests upon a carefully and thoroughly argued distinction between universalized and essentialized “Enlightenment reason of egocentricity, exclusion, and oppression” and her replacement of it with “the reason of mutuality, communication and exchange.” Day traces Carter’s development of this anti-essentialist materialism beginning with her critique of essentialist mythologizing of woman by an egocentric patriarchy in her early novels and culminating in the invention of the new, material woman and man in Nights at the Circus and Wise Children. According to Day, Carter steals the female figure from masculine appropriation and rehistoricizes and refeminizes it, giving women material reality and individual identity. She breaks down the old patriarchal, imperialistic order and replaces it with reciprocity and love.
Some feminist critics have accused Carter of reinscribing patriarchal, sexist oppression especially in her rewritten fairy tales and above all in The Sadeian Woman, finding themselves discomfited by the concept of the “moral pornographer” and the apparent glee with which some of Carter’s characters leap into bed with big bad wolves and rapacious counts. Day unflinchingly takes on these critics, assesses their arguments, then counters with his own well-reasoned and supported defense and explication of Carter’s arguments. By distinguishing between Enlightenment rationality and Carter’s reason of “reciprocity, tolerance, and equality,” Day celebrates Angela Carter’s allegories of reconciliation. Aidan Day’s explications and arguments are both readable and convincing. [Joanne Gass]


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The Review of Contemporary Fiction Angela Carter: The Rational Glass by Aidan Day Joanne Gass Aidan Day. Angela Carter: The Rational Glass. Manchester Univ. Press, 1998. 224 pp. $24.95. Nearly all critics who set about the task of reading Angela Carter’s oeuvre rightly begin with her asserted desire to deconstruct the “consolatory nonsense” of mythic versions of women and her insistence that we attend to woman’s material condition; Aidan Day begins his book as do the others, but he calls Carter’s commitment to feminist politics “metaphysical materialism” grounded in “her empiricism and her passion for reason.” Day’s argument rests upon a carefully and thoroughly argued distinction between universalized and essentialized “Enlightenment reason of egocentricity, exclusion, and oppression” and her replacement of it with “the reason of mutuality, communication and exchange.” Day traces Carter’s development of this anti-essentialist materialism beginning with her critique of essentialist mythologizing of woman by an egocentric patriarchy in her early novels and culminating in the invention of the new, material woman and man in Nights at the Circus and Wise Children. According to Day, Carter steals the female figure from masculine appropriation and rehistoricizes and refeminizes it, giving women material reality and individual identity. She breaks down the old patriarchal, imperialistic order and replaces it with reciprocity and love. Some feminist critics have accused Carter of reinscribing patriarchal, sexist oppression especially in her rewritten fairy tales and above all in The Sadeian Woman, finding themselves discomfited by the concept of the “moral pornographer” and the apparent glee with which some of Carter’s characters leap into bed with big bad wolves and rapacious counts. Day unflinchingly takes on these critics, assesses their arguments, then counters with his own well-reasoned and supported defense and explication of Carter’s arguments. By distinguishing between Enlightenment rationality and Carter’s reason of “reciprocity, tolerance, and equality,” Day celebrates Angela Carter’s allegories of reconciliation. Aidan Day’s explications and arguments are both readable and convincing. [Joanne Gass]

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