The other other: self-definition outside patriarchal institutions in Angela Carter's 'Wise

Children.
by Michael Hardin
IN A PATRIARCHAL, dualistic culture the male needs the female in order to define himself.
Without the female "lack," the male penis cannot be seen as "essential," "preferred," or
"extra." Consequently, if the female is to define herself outside of the male structure, she
must find a new basis for personal identification. It is being other in a group that is already
other that Angela Carter establishes as a means for that self-identification. In Wise Children
being an identical twin is one of the primary ways by which the female character removes
herself from the defining domain of the patriarchal structure through the blurring of her self.
Nora and Dora Chance are conscious of their common individuality, and they direct events to
confuse their public or external identities at the same time that they affirm and define their
personal or individual identities. They recognize that knowledge is power, and so long as they
have knowledge of themselves, they will maintain their control; their identity is their power.
By veiling their differences, both between themselves and between themselves and others,
they assume power to direct and to initiate events. Carter further alters the definition of
woman by removing her central female characters from the standard roles and stereotypes
associated with them, especially marriage and motherhood. By looking at Carter's unraveling
of the patriarchal definition of woman, we will see that in a postmodern world, identity, like
any other means of signification, becomes more and more tenuous. Through the rupturing of
the strict definition of woman, Carter opens up a surplus of space in which women can find
and create new definitions of self, and, at the same time, through her excessive use of
otherness, she exposes as fraudulent the idea that the penis is an originary or ultimate
signifier.
She emphasizes this lack of origin in Wise Children, primarily through the lack of definitive
paternity and, in a sense, maternity. Nora and Dora are not acknowledged by their true father,
Melchior Hazard, but are instead said to be the daughters of his twin brother, Peregrine, who
is himself more absent in their lives than he is present. Nora and Dora's half-sisters, Imogen
and Saskia Hazard, although claimed by Melchior, are actually the biological daughters of
Peregrine. These two examples of Carter's dissolution of conventional means of identity--the
name and identity of the father--provide access to one of the major functions of this work, to
challenge the very notion of true or final identity. How can a patriarchy exist if the very
patriarchs/fathers themselves are not known? Without a clear patriarchal lineage, there can be
no patriarchal privilege.
Nora and Dora have found a way to alter the Lacanian mirror stage: Lacan considers the
mirror-stage a misrecognition, because identity is created in the mirror, not in the individual
To be able to take on another's life and identity, to be able to lose one's self and find a new
self, is to challenge the very idea of personal identity. Melchior Hazard, Nora and Dora's
father, is a Shakespearean actor, and later in the novel he works in the movies. Nora and
Dora, music hall girls who perform musicals based on Shakespearean comedies, also end up
working in the movies. Imogen and Saskia, identical twin daughters of Peregrine (although
claimed by Melchiro), are actresses in London. Tristram and Gareth, identical twin sons of
Melchior, are in their own way actors or persons who take on another identity as their
vocation; Tristram is a television game-show host and Gareth is a priest. Taking on other
identities is a form of cross-dressing and a denying of any sense of originary identity or
signification. This entire family, not only Nora and Dora, is a threat because each member
denies or conceals one identity while he or she puts forward and promotes another.

Carter's characters all take on other identities; each one challenges the idea that there can be
an originary signifier or identity. If identity is so easily taken on and dismissed, as it is in
acting, then it cannot be transcendent but instead is susceptible to the same problems inherent
in all signifying processes. There can be no privileged or essential signifier; the penis can be
no more privileged than the vagina.
Carter places all her characters in overtly acting and performing environments; this
encourages the reader to look at the entire novel as a Bakhtinian carnival. Mary Russo
discusses the disruption created by the carnival in society:
The masks and violence of carnival resist, exaggerate, and destabilize the distinctions and
boundaries that mark and maintain high culture and organized society. It is as if the
carnivalesque body politic has ingested the entire corpus of high culture and, in its bloated
and irrepressible state, released it in fits and starts in all manner of recombination, inversion,
mockery, and degradation....
In Wise Children Angela Carter challenges the very ideas of definition, identity, and origin.
By creating a novel in which otherness is the standard, she provides a new perspective from
which one can see that original and other are merely signifiers that have no essential
meaning. Identity changing and masking both serve to expose patriarchal identity as an
institution that bases its authority on the belief that there is an origin and that the origin is the
phallus. Once it is realized that, in the postmodern world, there cannot be an origin or a
privileged perspective and thus a basis for external identity, then the individual is forced to
find a new space in which to exist.

Reading the Novel in English 19502000

Kazuo Ishiguros The Remains of the Day is a profound novelistic exploration of narrator and
narrative repression and of emotional fascism. Ishiguros third, best-known, Booker Prizewinning novel is also a provocative examination of Englands nostalgic, sentimental myths
about its past and a commentary on its presently burgeoning heritage industry. Like all of
Ishiguros protagonists, Stevens the butler, despite his ostensible eagerness to divulge his life
story, works hard to conceal the alarming signicance and troubling consequences of his past
Ishiguro deems The Remains of the Day, his next novel, more English than English,7 and
reports having felt a great sense of liberation when moving his novelistic terrain from the
Japan of his rst two works to the England of his third. There was a part of me that wanted
to nd out if my acceptance was conditioned on the fact that I was acting as mediator to
Japanese culture. I wanted to see if people could appreciate me purely as a novelist as
opposed to a Japanese novelist
Ishiguro revealed his own understanding of Mr Stevens, the novels rst-person protagonist
and aging butler of Darlington Hall, who narrates his 1956 expedition to the English West
Country against the backdrop of an even more signicant journey: a journey into his past life
at Darlington Hall during the politically turbulent 1920s and 1930s. In these interviews,
Ishiguro emphasizes repeatedly Stevenss suppression of emotion,9 his use of memory to
trip himself up or to hide from himself and his past.10 Stevens, Ishiguro contends,
Ishiguro here describes what Freud would call repression, a function of the unconscious
that censors, displaces, and condenses dangerous material, driving it from the conscious into

the unconscious.12 Stevens is repressed in his sexual and political life: in his relationship
with his co-worker Miss Kenton, a woman to whom he is deeply attracted, though he never
admits it; and in his relationship with his two fathers, his natural father, also a butler, and
his employer and father-substitute, Lord Darlington, behind whom he hides his political
conscience and on whom he bestows his uncritical loyalty. But while it is difcult to miss
Stevenss repression, it is easy to overlook the myriad ways in which Stevens conceals his
striking sexual and political disengagement, by clothing it under a heavy overcoat woven of
a tissue of lies.13
What is original about Ishiguros use of clothing tropes is that Stevens conceals his sexual
and political disengagement beneath his professional suit that he hides his avoidance of
amatory and social intimacy beneath the garb of his professional demeanour and
emotional restraint (43). In this sense, it is no surprise that Stevens is incapable of
removing what Rousseau calls the uniform and deceptive veil of politeness and instead
insists upon wearing mythic draperies heavy enough to stie his own self-knowledge.16
However, Ishiguro is also original in that he invokes but then transforms the traditional
English novelistic treatment of the relationship between servants and their aristocratic
masters
he Remains of the Day is one of the most profound novelistic representations of repression
masquerading as professionalism, yet it is also aimed at an entire nations mythical selfidentity. Indeed, the novel associates Stevenss deceptive self-conception with that of
Englands at large. Stevens equates the signicance of events in Darlington Hall with those in
England generally, confuses house knowledge with world knowledge, and moves freely
between the subject of what makes a great butler great and what makes Great Britain
great, arguing that both exhibit calmness and a sense of restraint (289). And Stevens
clearly equates a decline in the status of Darlington Hall52 with the decline of English
prestige, with the postwar Americanization of England,53 and with what David Gurewich
calls the disintegration of the good old world where Stevens and his ideals held value.54 (It
is surely no coincidence that the present of the novel is set in July of 1956, the time of the
Suez crisis, a turning point for the British Empire,55 which decisively marked the end of
Englands claim to world military supremacy.) Yet if Stevens exhibits nostalgia for this good
old world of grand old English houses, The Remains of the Day does not.