Angela Carter’s attitude towards her work has always been one with intrinsic feminism at its roots. Carter’s feminist attitude within her novel Wise Children has given the reader a much more realistic and intuitive approach to Shakespeare. Carter conveys ideas of feminism through matriarchy and the power of womanhood, or rather new family structures of an acceptance of an absentee father. In some aspects, her work is an invitation to criticisms towards Shakespeare’s lack of matriarchal concentration and sometimes all together absentation, and realistic approaches towards female characters. However, in other aspects it appears to be more of a praise towards him, meticulously alluding to countless amounts of Shakespeare’s works. Angela Carter uses Wise Children as her invitation for her own feminist criticism as well as paying homage by tempting the reader into comparing herself and Shakespeare, to hold them in the same high regard.
Angela Carter’s work could be described as radical, original, surreal, and has also incorporated elements into her novels that create a Shakespearean presence among them. Wise Children, manages to coalesce allusions and imagery towards Shakespeare’s plays, almost as an homage to the writer. The most comprehensive allusion perhaps being the book itself, which is structured with five chapters, an allusion to Shakespeare’s five act plays, accompanied with a Dramatis Personae at the end of her novel.
Almost like the beginning of a C.S. Lewis novel, Angela Carter, born Angela Olive Stalker, was evacuated as a child to Yorkshire to live with her grandmother because of the outbreak of World War Two. Her Grandmother was described as a working class, feminist ‘granny of the north’. Her grandmother would...
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