Wise Children by Angela Carter

Wise Children by Angela Carter

In this essay I am going to talk about the subject matter and style

in which the opening of Wise Children is written.

Throughout most of the book, the story is told in a first person

narrative style. This style of writing addresses the reader directly

‘Good morning!’, and gives a conversational tone to the novel. In this

sense, the reader feels close to the narrator, as if you can feel what

she is going through. This closeness is emphasized by the honesty in

her writing. This could be shown when Dora says, ‘I know this sounds

out of this world, but try to imagine it anyway’. This is known as

self-conscious artifice and again Dora is addressing the reader

directly, as if she were right next to us.

Culture is another prominent theme in the book, and is immediately

introduced at the beginning of the novel. Dora talks about the divides

in New York, Paris and London, saying that London is ‘two cities

divided by a river’ with one side of the city being the high class

area, associated with the rich and wealthy ‘the rich lived amidst

pleasant verdure in the North’, and the other side ‘the side the

tourist rarely sees’ being labelled as a place in which ‘the poor eked

out miserable existences in the South’. But what Dora is saying, more

importantly what Angela Carter is saying, is that this divide is

disappearing, no longer can you distinctly see the split between the

different classes and the cultural background that relates to them

‘There’s been a diaspora of the affluent’.

Magic realism is also used throughout the novel. Magic realism (or

magical realism) is a literary genre in which magical elements appear

in an otherwise realist setting. There are many examples of magic

realism, one of the more noticeable cases is the names of the

identical twins Nora and Dora Chance. The word ‘Nora’ could be

interpreted as slang for ‘not a’. Combine ‘not a’ with ‘Chance’ and