From the Bloody Chamber to the Cabinet de Curiosités: Angela Carter's Curious Alices Through the Looking Glass of Languages

Abstract

Angela Carter’s fiction, from her early poems to the last collection of short stories, is filled with references to Lewis Carroll’s Alice books. I show how Carter captured her experience of linguistic and cultural estrangement through this favorite intertext. Unlike the ordinary mirror, which presupposes equivalence between languages, the Carrollian looking glass opens up into a strange and wonder-filled space that Carter explored as a foreigner in Japan and as a translator from the French. The cross-linguistic and transcultural imaginary that informs Carter’s writing becomes visible through a translational and transcreative reading of her work, which in turn sheds light on her intertextual source(s) in mirrorlike fashion.