“Only a Bird in a Gilded Cage”: Avianthropes and the Embodiment of the Canorographic Voice in Angela Carter’s “The Erl-King” and Nights at the Circus

Abstract

Renowned for her fiction, Angela Carter was also a folk singer in the 1960s, played English concertina, and cofounded a folk club. A newly unearthed archive of her notes, musical notations, and recordings provides a window into her folk song praxis. When juxtaposed with her diaries, album sleeve notes, and unpublished papers, a new understanding of Carter’s writing processes emerges. This essay explores her “canorographic” writing or “songful” writing, embodied in avianthropes: the bird-girls in “The Erl-King” and Fevvers in Nights at the Circus. I compare Child Ballad “Lady Isabel and the Elf-Knight,” Ovid’s Philomel, and Petrarch’s nightingale with Carter’s bird-women to show how her tropes transcode the singing voice into prose, disclosing the porous boundaries between literature and song and reimagining prose as performance.