TY - JOUR
AU - Paulusma,, Polly
AB - Abstract It is a little-known fact that Angela Carter was a traditional folk singer during the 1960s, that she played the English concertina, and that she co-founded a folk club in Bristol with her first husband, Paul Carter. A newly unearthed private archive of her folk song notes from the decade, which includes her musical notations and a recording of her singing, allows us to develop new understandings of her folk praxis and, when laid alongside her private journal entries, the folk album sleeve notes she penned, her undergraduate dissertation, and other unpublished papers, a whole host of possible new readings of her literary work emerges. This essay explores just one: gender fluidity in folk song performance and its impact upon Carter’s interpretations of gender identity in her debut novel, Shadow Dance. I will suggest that Carter learned gender ambiguity from her folk singing, and that her experience of singing afforded her freedoms to explore versions of sexual performance and gendered selfhood through male characters. More broadly, I will suggest that she buried musical folk song features into the structures of her writing to present her prose as a form of audial performance. ‘I like,’ he said obscurely, ‘I like – you know – to slip in and out of me. I like to be somebody different each morning. Me and not-me. I would like to have a cupboard bulging with all different bodies and faces and choose a fresh one every morning’.1 —Angela Carter, Shadow Dance Introduction: Carter, the folk singer The young novelist Angela Carter was a folk singer. She had a sweet voice that hit the high notes with surprising confidence, and she also played the English concertina proficiently.2 She co-founded a folk song club in Bristol with her first husband Paul Carter, a folk song collector, engineer, and producer; the club was called Folksong and Ballad, and it met fortnightly at The Lansdown pub. A newly discovered private archive of her folk song notes from the 1960s contains the club’s manifesto, among Carter’s own notes on folk song and musical notations of tunes. Combining these documents with her undergraduate dissertation on folk song submitted in 1965, the essays she published in the 1960s on folk song and folk singers, the knowledgeable folk album sleeve notes she authored for Topic Records artists, and entries in her journals throughout the 1960s, evidence of both a scholarly and practical interest in the folk song as art form emerges. This essay explores just one impact of her folk singing praxis on her imaginative output: gender fluidity in the tradition and its influence upon Carter’s depictions of gender in her debut novel, Shadow Dance. In 1964 Angela Carter was busy writing Shadow Dance.3 In the same year, her lucid essay in defense of the folk song form, ‘Now Is The Time For Singing’, was published in the Bristol University magazine Nonesuch, in which she evaluates from musicological and literary standpoints, not just folk songs such as ‘Blow the Candle Out’ and ‘The Dowie Dens of Yarrow’ but also the performance styles of contemporaneous traditional singers such as Harry Cox and Joe Heaney, with whom she was coming into contact either by hearing their recordings, seeing them live, or accompanying her husband Paul Carter on his frequent field trips to record them. She explains how the act of performing folk songs was influencing her own sense of creativity: the richness and allusiveness of imagery in folk poetry, which reaches one through singing almost on a subliminal level, means one’s appreciation of the mode grows with one’s knowledge. And so, naturally, does one’s imagination, one’s ability to think in images oneself, one’s sensibility and one’s perceptions, because folk song is an art, and these are the things all the arts do.4 She transcribed four long lists of folk song titles in her 1964 journal across a double spread; one is tantalizingly labelled ‘To Learn’. The different pens, edits, and deletions suggest that this page was a working document, one that she was continuously amending over time (Figure 1). Figure 1: Open in new tabDownload slide Photograph Taken of a Page in Angela Carter’s 1963-1964 Journal. Copyright © The Estate of Angela Carter. Reproduced by permission of the Estate c/o Rogers, Coleridge & White Ltd., 20 Powis Mews, London W11 1JN. Figure 1: Open in new tabDownload slide Photograph Taken of a Page in Angela Carter’s 1963-1964 Journal. Copyright © The Estate of Angela Carter. Reproduced by permission of the Estate c/o Rogers, Coleridge & White Ltd., 20 Powis Mews, London W11 1JN. During this period, Carter also wrote authoritative sleeve notes for Topic Records releases by folk singers Peggy Seeger and Louis Killen. As well as her hermeneutic analyses of the songs themselves, she reveals in these documents a singer’s sensitivities to the qualities of performance; Seeger ‘has a deep respect for tradition, but her singing is always direct and alive, an act of creation not resuscitation’;5 Killen ‘stamps each performance with his own musical individuality and dynamism through keeping to the disciplines of traditional singing, a paradox which is the basis of the serious folksong revival’.6 In 1965 Carter submitted to Bristol University her ninety-five-page undergraduate dissertation on the links between twentieth-century folk songs and medieval poetry, in which she reveals a clear scholarly interest in folk song as literature.7 I suggest that the folk songs in which Carter was immersed at the very moment she was writing Shadow Dance have seeped into her fiction, both structurally and thematically, and that new readings of Carter’s prose emanate from a deeper understanding of the accretive effects of song performance upon (perhaps unconscious) meanings accumulating in Carter’s work. Carter understood from the performance of folk songs that she could ‘sing’ a man’s point of view and, as a result, that she could explore ideas – of self, sexuality and gender – through occupying the ‘I’ position of all of her created characters, not just her female ones. Her later apologies for being a ‘male impersonator’8 may suggest that this exploration of performances of sexuality through the occupation of male perspectives was the result of what she sensed later as ‘colonialization of the mind’ or a by-product of growing up in the linguistic matrix of patriarchy. But I propose rather that her practice of singing the gender-ambivalent ‘I’ position in folk songs led her to a corporeal understanding of being inside other gendered experiences; because of singing folk songs, she felt free to explore versions of selfhood not just through the lives of her female protagonists (such as Melanie in The Magic Toyshop or Marianne in Heroes and Villains) but through her male characters such as Honeybuzzard and Morris in Shadow Dance.9 While it could be argued that folk song does not have a monopoly on gender ambiguity, and that other forms of popular music may lay claim to such degenderization, there is no evidence that Carter herself was as invested in them. In the recording of 15 January 1967, Carter stands up and performs a folk song – and the song she sings is a young man’s lament for unrequited love. Marc O’Day suggests that Honeybuzzard and Morris represent two sides of the same personality;10 I suggest they represent an early example of Carter experimenting with versions of herself. Carter's biographer Edmund Gordon notes Carter’s irritation than no one spotted she felt she was Lee, the male protagonist of her fifth novel, Love: ‘LOVE is autobiographical,’ she wrote to Carole [Roffe] after the book was published. ‘I might well be Lee; I even put in clues like knocking out his front tooth, dammit, and nobody guessed!’ In another letter she wrote, ‘if some biographer of the far-distant future got hold of the reference to Paul … in which I compared him to Annabel in LOVE — oh, there’d be meat there!’11 [emphasis in original] Gordon goes on to notice Carter’s double investment in Lee’s troubled brother Buzz, whom one might suggest was borne from the same character nursery as Honeybuzzard: If Lee and Annabel are dream-versions of Angela and Paul, then Buzz comes from an altogether more shadowy part of Angela’s psyche. When she reread the novel almost twenty years later, she wrote: ‘he’s come out of the pages to haunt me, whoever he was, the creation of my discontent . . . he is something to do with my libido, I think, the perpetually renewed fountain of desire who is the female myth or fantasy or dream of the male, the woman’s imaginary idea of male sexuality.’12 If Carter was prepared to inveigle versions of herself into the skins of her male characters for this later novel, it does not seem far-fetched to suggest she was applying the same modus operandi in her earlier work, even if subconsciously. Honeybuzzard, the vulpine antihero of Shadow Dance, can be seen through the prism of Carter’s folk song practice as a vehicle for exploring multiple potentialities of selfhood: he can be read as the potential version of self which revels in an innate cruelty, selfishness, and libido; the apologetic, conciliatory Morris might be read as a more dutiful version, who tolerates begrudgingly the obligations of marriage; within Morris’s kind but long-suffering wife Edna, one might read a version of Paul who, according to Carter’s own diaries and corroborated by Gordon, suffered from bouts of depression. This reading contradicts previous arguments proposed by critics such as Paulina Palmer, who argues that Carter’s depictions of sexual violence in her early novels inadvertently reinforces the very ‘self-perpetuating and closed nature of patriarchal structures and institutions’ that Carter was purportedly trying to challenge13 or Christina Britzolakis, who suggests that through Carter’s ornate and fetishized language, her fiction comes dangerously close to ‘complicity with the structures of domination against which these texts are often ranged’.14 Sarah Gamble too has not entertained the possibility that Carter could be ‘experimenting with female points of view’ by slipping inside male characters.15 But what if Carter is assuming the male position to pluralize gender identities, including her own, subverting all expectations of the nature of domination? Honeybuzzard has been framed clumsily until now as either a pantomime stock villain or a chilling representative of a devastating patriarchal force. Linden Peach describes him as ‘a comic stereotype of the Gothic villain’16 and a patriarchal abuser who sets out to commodify, defile, and destroy female victims remorselessly; Peach focuses on Honeybuzzard’s indifference to his murderous cruelty and reads Marxist messages in Honeybuzzard’s choice of location (graveyard) and prop (crucifix) in his ritualistic violations of Ghislaine: These details compound the horror arising from the way in which women are seen as ‘flesh’ and ‘meat’, especially as Honeybuzzard also thinks of selling pornographic photographs of Ghislaine on the crucifix. The interrelated but contrasting tropes of flesh signifying pleasure and of meat as signifying economic objectification occur throughout Carter’s fiction, which seeks to explore the boundaries between them.17 Rebecca Munford agrees with Peach, dubbing Honeybuzzard ‘the sadistic anti-hero’ and Ghislaine an ‘orphaned, passive and masochistic adolescent’ entwined in a sadomasochistic model designed to expose ‘the mystification and mythologisation of female virtue and victimhood’.18 She suggests Ghislaine’s suffering should be viewed through the lens of the ‘male imaginary’,19 and that through it her ‘complicity with the structures and narratives of male desire’ can be ‘interrogated’.20 But Maggie Tonkin argues that Carter’s ‘use of irony is inextricable from [her] deployment of dialectical images of femininity’, and that it has been missed in some of these readings.21 Other observations fail to see Carter’s exploration of multiple expressions of selfhood within the twinning of Honeybuzzard and Morris, implying that Carter’s portrayal of her male characters is merely superficial, just a case of ‘dressing up’. Carter is repeatedly accused of intellectual drag: Britzolakis suggests that her relation to literary history ‘frequently involves a cross-dressed or masculine narrative perspective’,22 noting her sometime implication in a ‘double drag, . . . an imaginary identification with or impersonation of femininity’.23 Robert Clark has accused Carter’s writing of being ‘a feminism in male chauvinist drag, a transvestite style’, and that ‘her fascination with violent eroticism and her failure to find any alternative basis on which to construct a feminine identity prevent her work from being other than an elaborate trace of women’s self-alienation’.24 One might argue this ‘self-alienation’ for Carter includes her own and becomes in her hands a positive, multifarious exercise in the proliferation of subjectivities. Lorna Sage gets closest when she suggests that ‘sex-roles come out reversed. Beautiful boys, called things like Jewel and Precious . . . are described caressingly and coolly as sexual objects’,25 and when she observes that Honeybuzzard ‘alone belongs to two worlds, in gender terms and, in terms just as vital to Carter the writer, the real (life) and the shadow (art)’.26 But she doesn’t go far enough as to suggest Carter is doing the same with versions of herself. In this regard, I propose that, through her intimate portrayal of male characters, Carter is revelling in the possibilities of variations of her own selfhood, interrogating the darker and crueller sides of fluid gender experience to conceive of fiction as a series of spaces where she can perform many selves into existence. Carter’s regular folk singing praxis would have encouraged this subliminal naturalizing of the occupied ‘I’ position in genders other than her own, this proliferation of positions, because ‘so many ghosts of so many pasts are looking back out of the mirror’ at the very moment the singer takes to the stage.27 Folk singing and the gender-fluid ‘I’ position In the folk song tradition, there is no essentialist conception of gender when it comes to the singer. To stand and sing is a social performance: singers who identify as female can sing what might be termed ‘men’s’ songs (or, songs positioned from a heteronormatively-assumed ‘male’ perspective), and singers who identify as male can sing ‘women’s’ songs (or, songs positioned from a heteronormatively assumed ‘female’ perspective). Folk song is by no means unique as a popular musical form to embrace this singer-persona gender inversion; in indie rock, for example, see Patti Smith’s self-penned ‘Gloria’ or Jack White’s heart-breaking rendering of Dolly Parton’s ‘Jolene’. But in these cases, gender inversion can be seen as a decisive act, a self-conscious violation of expectations intended to promote a counter-culture subversion of heteronormative social hegemonies. In contrast, traditional folk song’s quotidian disregard for singer-persona gender parity feels unselfconscious, unaware, almost innocent, and is all the more disarming given the form’s otherwise stifling atmospheres of heteronormativity and misogyny. While folk songs overtly play with concepts of gender identity (in the cross-dressing female warrior songs in particular), I have found no evidence of folk singers using a disparity between the gender of the singer and the persona of the song itself in any self-conscious way; nor do they use gender disparity between singer and persona in a wider discourse on counter-culture, sexuality, and subversion. More importantly, within the contexts of this study, it is the only form we know for sure that Carter performed, and performed repeatedly. The folk songs Carter chose to list in her 1964 journal reflect this disregard for gender parity between singer and song and vary wildly in terms of their narrative perspectives. Some songs, such as ‘Died for Love’ or ‘The Banks of Red Roses’, position themselves in the first person from a female perspective: Oh, when I was a young girl I heard my mother say That I was a foolish lass and easy led astray. And before I would work, I would rather sport and play With my Johnny on the banks of red roses.28 while ‘The Week Before Easter’ (also known as ‘The False Bride’) presents the first-person perspective of a man watching his beloved marrying another: Now the first time I saw my love she was dressed all in white, Made my eyes run and water quite dazzled my sight, When I thought to myself that I might have been that man But she’s left me and gone with another.29 Some songs, such as ‘Reynardine’, are first-person testimonies rendered using the frame narrative technique of an accidental, anonymous, gender-neutral, eavesdropping ‘I’-observer: One evening as I rambled among the springing thyme, I overhead a young woman, conversing with Reynardine.30 Others are presented from a third-person omniscient narrator’s storytelling perspective in which the gender-ambiguous storyteller-observer’s attention closely follows certain identified protagonists to either sticky or happy endings: George Collins walked out one May morning, When May was all in bloom…31 or Down into this country, there lived a wealthy squire, Who had a only daughter, was charming, young and fair…32 or Fair Lucy she sits at her father’s door, A-weeping and making moan, And by there came her brother dear: ‘What ails thee, Lucy Wan?’33 The third-person narrator of the Child ballad ‘George Collins’ presents the ghosting of jack-the-lad George at the hand of a girl (possibly a water-sprite) as punishment for breaking too many hearts. In ‘Jackie Munro’, the narrator’s attention closely follows the eponymous Jackie as she dresses up as a man and enlists to follow her love into the war, rescuing him and receiving a promotion to boot. In ‘Lucy Wan’, the omniscient narrator’s unflinching gaze relays how pregnant Lucy is brutally dismembered by her brother-lover. Although these narrators’ stances are third-person, their chosen protagonists dominate and occupy privileged positions within the narratives. Narrative voices might even fluctuate between persons within the same song. ‘Bold Wolfe’, for example, opens with an exclamatory implied-second-person imperative rallying cry: ‘Come all ye young men all!’, moves to a first-person male perspective (‘I went to see my love, / Thinking to woo her’) and then shifts to a third-person narrator (‘Bold Wolfe, he took his leave’) who relays the facts of the battle and then finally reports Wolfe’s direct speech: ‘I will die in pleasure’.34 All these songs appear on Carter’s list. From the list of eighty songs (in which there appear four duplications and two unknown titles), twenty-six are presented from a male first-person perspective, eighteen from a third-person narrative position, and thirteen from a female first-person perspective.35 Carter could have sung any of these songs – she and Paul owned the books and LPs from which they learned them – and in the folk song tradition, it is entirely normal for female singers to sing a song presented from a (heteronormatively assumed) male stance, while male singers are equally able to sing a song from the female perspective. In the only known extant recording of Carter singing, she performs the Irish ballad ‘The Flower of Sweet Strabane’, in which the ‘I’ of the song is a lovelorn young man who, spurned by his love Martha, is setting sail for Ireland.36 Lucy White sang ‘The False Bride’ for Cecil Sharp, a song presented from the point of view of a male jilted lover who sees his girl marrying another, in 1904; Carter would have known contemporaneous recorded versions by men and women alike – Bert Lloyd (1960), George ‘Pop’ Maynard (1960), and Shirley Collins (1963). Tom Willett sings ‘Died for Love’ recorded by Paul Carter from a female perspective: (‘Now my love he is tall and handsome too…’).37 In unpublished teaching notes, Carter writes that in the ‘folk trad., both sexes may be virtuosi performers & the audience unisex’38 – she was immersed in and aware of the startlingly ‘modern’ gender-neutrality that the folk singing art form expresses at its core. One way of framing this gender-ambiguity might be to envisage the folk singer as a kind of everyman Tiresias, a voice, a transparent window, or mirror, through which certain histories, experiences, and stories may be gleaned. There is nothing strange about a singer not conforming to the gender of the ‘I’ of the song, for it is understood that there is an occupation taking place, a possession, a process in which, Bert Lloyd claims, ‘so many ghosts of so many pasts are looking back out of the mirror’.39 The individual folk singer disappears, to be replaced by a collective occupancy. But while singers erase themselves in performance, at the same time they also bring their personal experiences to the song as it passes through them. Suzanne Gilbert summarizes the findings of the ethnomusicologist James Porter on the singer-subject Jeannie Robertson: Jeannie Robertson’s involvement with a ‘muckle’ or big ballad exists on more than one level: her life experience is the unwritten part of the ballad text as she performs it. She responded in an intensely personal way, for example, to a variant of ‘Edward’ (Child 13), ‘My Son David’, a ballad she learned very early from her mother and in adult life associated with the death of her own young son. According to Porter, ballad-singing for Robertson became ‘a transformative’ act, ‘a way of distilling the life-world and its experiences into a ritualising gesture that compresses feeling, cognition and volition.’40 Georgina Boyes also notes this phenomenon, explaining that ‘what a song means to its singer doesn’t necessarily or only reside in its words. Through a song an individual can express something they feel is most significant about themselves or evoke a specific person or event’.41 Singers are folding themselves into the song and add fragments of themselves into the mix, and, through this process of accretion, songs become composites of all the singers who have sung them, all the ‘ghosts’ in the mirror, all the emotions that the song has channelled through the years: … after [the folk song] has come into being a multitude of other singers are likely to get to work on it, altering it about, de-composing and re-composing it, producing sometimes richer sometimes poorer versions of the original; now deepening the emotional and ideological content, now making it more shallow; now bringing the tune into sad decay, now re-creating and renewing it happily.42 This ‘remembering, repeating and working-through’ might be seen as a response to the trauma of societal change, a macrocosmic compulsion through communal music to try to retain an ever-decaying past across generations and between communities. As Nigel Thrift and John-David Dewsbury suggest, performance is ‘itself a form of knowledge, an intelligence in-action’.43 Carter recognized these processes of communal intelligence at work in folk song imagery, such as the long yellow hair of ‘The Dowie Dens of Yarrow’: The extraordinary image […] — the girl letting down her long, yellow hair and wrapping her dead lover up in it, to protect him or keep him warm — we know to be one created by the working over of a text. The song it comes from, the classic Scots ballad ‘The Dowie Dens of Yarrow’, is of some considerable antiquity; and these verses seem to have been transposed into it at an early date from another song from the times when young men themselves had long, yellow hair, for the song concerned a girl who pulled her drowned lover out of the river by his long, yellow hair. It was obviously something that cried out to be worked over. It is also quite clearly not a naturalistic image. It is meant to work on an allusive and symbolic level. . . .44 In this example, the image of the hair has been transferred from the male to the female; there is little or no gender distinction. Carter has osmosed from folk singing that gender is infinitely fluid and transferable. Pauline Greenhill has found ambiguity of sexual orientation lying latent in the internal narratives of the cross-dressing female warrior ballads, such as ‘The Handsome Cabin Boy’, ‘Polly Oliver’, and ‘Blue Jacket and White Trousers’, in the ‘possibility of same-sex attraction and nonheterosexual activity’ and the ways in which certain singers have teased out this interpretation in performance.45 Diane Dugaw elaborates on this destabilizing latency, seeing sexuality as one aspect of a wider question about gender-ambiguity in these ballad-worlds: Certainly, the ballads — like all forms that feature the transvestite heroine — enthusiastically exploit the homoerotic implications of the gender disguising. However, this probing of sexual ambiguity is only one aspect of their meaning. Indeed, the preoccupation with homosexual attraction — both for women and for men — that stories of female transvestites almost always feature, brings with it the larger implication that gender-based attraction is a fragile construction — indeed, that gender itself may be a fragile construct.46 Despite its overarching heteronormative assumptions, the folk song form is continually blurring boundaries between performances of male and female identities, fulfilling in Judith Butler’s terms ‘the repeated stylization of the body, a set of repeated acts within a highly rigid regulatory frame that congeal over time to produce the appearance of substance, of a natural sort of being’.47 The folk singer, harnessing a polyvalent gender identity, comes to perform into existence a ‘natural sort of’ gender-fluid being. From her folk singing praxis, I argue that aspects of the tradition’s gender fluidity percolated through the fiction Carter was concurrently constructing, and she actively migrated those very ideas of gender fluidity, learned from her occupation of the gender-ambiguous ‘I’ position in the songs, into her own writing. Through close analysis of several folk songs Carter was considering during the time of writing Shadow Dance – ‘Reynardine’,48 ‘Blow the Candle Out’,49 (and a brief look at ‘The Game of Cards’50) – and their various impacts upon accretive layers of meaning in her writing, it becomes possible to read Honeybuzzard, the dangerously attractive, murderous central villain of Shadow Dance, as a performance of aspects of Carter’s perceived selfhood, and his violent sexual aberrations as an exploration (explosion?) of female sexuality and power, rather than an assumed representation of an oppressive and sadistic patriarchal hegemony, over whom so much feminist ink has already been spilt. The songs – overview ‘Reynardine’ shot to folk-revival fame thanks to one of the second wave’s main proponents, A. L. Lloyd (fondly known of as ‘Bert’), who recorded the song in 195651 and again in 1966,52 and included it regularly in his live repertoire at folk club performances. Christine Molan, a friend of ‘the Folk Singing Carters’,53 remembers how Lloyd took the place ‘by storm’ one night performing ‘Reynardine’ at the Carters’ club, where he elided the song into a reading of the folk tale ‘Mr Fox’ from Joseph Jacobs’ English Fairy Tales to create a terrifying Gothic set piece.54 Carter also refers to this performance in her journal in the spring of 1964 when she writes, ‘See: Joseph Jacob’s “English Fairy Tales” for Mr Fox. (Bert’s Mr Fox?)’, and then, in a different pen, later, she’s added – ‘(Yes, it’s Bert’s Mr Fox all right).’55 In the song, an anonymous first-person narrator witnesses the seduction and abduction of a young girl by an irresistibly attractive, mysterious man: One evening as I rambled among the springing thyme, I overheard a young woman, conversing with Reynardine. Her hair was black, her eyes were blue, her mouth as red as wine, And he smiled to look upon her, did the sly bold Reynardine.56 In the sleeve notes to his 1956 version, Lloyd alludes to the dangerous attraction and zoomorphic ambiguities of the song’s eponymous villain: ‘Who was Reynardine, with his irresistible charm, his glittering eye, his foxy smile? An ordinary man, or an outlaw maybe, or some supernatural lover?’ In his later recording, Lloyd makes a very specific lyric alteration by changing shining ‘eyes’ to shining ‘teeth’, emphasizing Reynardine’s carnivorous nature as he leads the girl ‘over the mountain’ to his ‘castle’ and her fate.57 Another song of seduction on which Carter was ruminating during this period was ‘Blow The Candle Out’, which she analyses musicologically in her 1964 essay ‘Now Is The Time For Singing’. Peter Kennedy recorded the Irish tinker Jimmy Gilhaney singing it in the Orkney Isles, and his recording was included on Songs of Seduction, which was in the Carters’ record collection.58 The melody moves in precisely the ways Carter describes; here is the tune as sung by Gilhaney, represented by my own musical notation (Figure 2). Figure 2: Open in new tabDownload slide Author’s notation of the tune ‘Blow the Candle Out’. Figure 2: Open in new tabDownload slide Author’s notation of the tune ‘Blow the Candle Out’. Carter describes the shape of the melody as ‘an enormously virile tune that strides up and down the scale like a man in big boots’ and venerates the song as one of the great love songs in the English language and it expresses no yearning, no phony idealisation, no sentimentality, but a great warmth, a kind and easy loving that accepts men and women as they are with no fogging notions of sin or shame… . On the printed page, this looks like a piece of doggerel; sung, it becomes a celebration of sexual enjoyment, a piece of complete emotional honesty. For the texts are nothing without the tunes, which give them a further dimension of meaning.59 Carter notices a relationship between the song’s melodic shape and its subject matter, the tune that mimics the illicit climbing of the stairs, and its matter-of-fact acceptance of the quotidian reality of extra-marital sexual encounters, its depiction of a real truth concerning sexual relations: that women and men have extramarital sex, that unplanned pregnancies occur, that men may not necessarily return to accept their responsibilities as fathers, and that women may not necessarily want them to. I propose she uses this understanding of the internal symbiosis between melody, rhythm and lyrics, lived out in her folk singing praxis, as she constructed her own prose compositions. The songs – rhythmic influences The rhythmic landscape of ‘Reynardine’ is comprised of quatrains of iambic tetrameter, iambs which drive us compulsively along with the young maiden ‘over the mountain’ and create a surreal, dream-like atmosphere, a milky liquidity in which many possibilities present themselves: ˘  ´  | ˘ ´ | ˘ ´  | ˘ ´ | One eve- | ning as | I ramb- |-led (x) | ˘ ´ | ˘ ´ | ˘ ´ | ˘ ´ | a - mong | the spring- |-ing thyme | (x) (x)| ˘ ´ | ˘ ´ | ˘ ˘ ´ | ˘ ´ | I o - | ver - heard | a young wo |-man (x) | ˘ ´ | ˘ ˘ ´ | ˘ ´ | ˘ ´ | con-vers - | ing with Rey- | nar - dine. | (x) (x) | ‘Blow the Candle Out’ may be another song of seduction using the framework of iambic tetrameter, but there are profound differences: this time the female is doing the persuading, and the iambs create an atmosphere of quotidian familiarity, a compulsive earthy drive and libidinous desire of two young lovers who could be anyone: ˘ ´ | ˘ ´ | ˘ ´ | ˘ ´ | My fa- | ther and | my mo- | (x) -ther, | ˘ ´ | ˘ ´ | ˘ ´ | ˘ ´ | next bed- | -room they | do lie, | (x) (x)| ˘ ´ | ˘ ´ | ˘ ´ | ˘ ´ | (x) Kiss | - ing and | em-brac- | (x) - ing, | ˘ ´ | ˘ ´ | ˘ ´ | ˘ ´ | Then why | not you | and I? | (x) (x)| ˘ ´ | ˘ ´ | ˘ ´ | ˘ ´ | (x) Kiss | - ing and | em-brac-| (x) - ing, | ˘ ´ | ˘ ´ | ˘ ´ | ˘ ´ | with-out | a fear | or doubt, | (x) So | ˘ ´ | ˘ ´ | ˘ ´ | ˘ ´ | come roll | me in | your arms, | (x) love, | ˘ ˘ ´ | ˘ ´ | ˘ ´ | ˘ ´ | and we’ll blow | the can- | dle out. | (x) (x) | Both songs use these four-line stanzas to create discrete rhythmically spaced units of action, and both deploy various kinds of syntactic repetition as part of their structure: in ‘Reynardine’, it is the villain’s mysterious name, connoting carnivorous mischief, which repeats itself in epistrophe to conclude stanzas 1, 2, 7, and 8. The recurring burden of ‘Blow the Candle Out’, ‘Come roll me in your arms, love / And we’ll blow the candle out’, repeats at the end of every four-line verse to complete a discrete idea; the pathos of the final lines, ‘he never said when he’d come back to blow the candle out’, is increased by the expectation of the repeating burden. The euphemistic ‘blowing out of the candle’ is of course another way to describe sexual activity, and alongside this kind of double entendre, polyptotonic repetitions, where words derived from the same root are repeated, are also used in folk songs to create ensnaring nets of recognition and shared meaning. In ‘The Game of Cards’ (which also appears in Carter’s long journal list of songs), playing a game of cards becomes another extended metaphor for sexual relations, and repeated ideas of ‘play’, ‘game’, ‘playing’, and ‘gaming’ bind us into the light-hearted sensuality of the song. Now as we were a-walking and talking together Those sweet pleasant banks, I set myself down Then I says pretty fair maid, would you sit yourself beside of me And then I will show you a sweet pleasant game. I’m not given to gaming, I’m not given to gaming I’m not given to gaming, kind sir, she did say But if I do play you, then it must be All Fowers And then I will gave you two chalks to my one.60 [bold emphasis added] Similarly, polysyndetic repetitions, strings of conjunctions, are used to build tension in folk songs; the repetition of ‘and’ in every stanza of ‘Reynardine’ suggest through syntax the relentlessness of the villain’s assault, the girl’s loss of consciousness, and her eventual collapse of resistance: Her cherry cheek and ruby lip, they lost their former dye, Andshe fell into his arms there, all on the mountain high. [bold emphasis added] So rhythmic quatrains of iambic tetrameter and repetitive rhetorical devices, such as epistrophe, anaphora, polyptoton, and polysyndeton, play an important role in threading together the rhythmic landscapes which are so recognizable in folk song. Carter’s Shadow Dance – rhythmic figures When one begins to read Shadow Dance as musical prose, one starts to hear the rhythms and figures of these songs transfused into Carter’s writing. Iambs underpin Carter’s milky, surreal descriptions, such as this depiction of Ghislaine’s facial scar: ˘ ´ | ˘ ´ | ˘ ´ | ´ ´ | ˘ ˘ ´ | The scar | was like | a big, | red crack | a- cross ice | ˘ ˘ | ´ ˘ | ˘ ´ | ˘ ´ | and might | sudden- | -ly o- | -pen up | ˘ ´ | ˘ ˘ | ´ ˘ | ˘ ´ | and swa - | -llow her | in-to | herself, | | ´ ˘ | ˘ ´ | ˘ ´ | ˘ ´ screa-ming, | herself | in-to | herself.61 When Morris floats in and out of reality, Carter borrows iambs from folk song: ˘ ´ | ˘ ´ | ˘ ´ | ˘ ´ | ˘ ´ | ˘ ‘This is - | - n’t real,’ | thought Mor- | -ris. ‘I | am dream- | ing’62 to sound out his seduction by Honeybuzzard and to obfuscate his ability to ‘see’ the destructive nature of their friendship. Four-line stanzas from folk song structure persistently cut across Carter’s prose syntax in repetitious, folded descriptions that fall into canorous quatrains. Ghislaine is described in four parts as ‘a beautiful girl, a white and golden girl, like moonlight on daisies, a month ago’,63 and when she surrenders herself to Honeybuzzard, she does so in a prose that sings like a four-line stanza: ‘I’ve learned my lesson, I can’t live without you, you are my master, do what you like with me.’64 Carter also uses rhetorical devices of epistrophe and anaphora to echo the folk song technique of a recurring burden. An early description of Ghislaine, for example, uses a kind of weakened epistrophe to stitch us rhythmically into the scene: She was a very young girl. She used to look like a young girl in a picture book, a soft and dewy young girl. She used to look like the sort of young girl one cannot imagine sitting on the lavatory or shaving her armpits or picking her nose.65 [bold emphasis added] Using a similar strategy with anaphora, Carter repeatedly sounds out the name of Honeybuzzard, her murderous former lover: They belonged to Honeybuzzard. Who came in pat, like the catastrophe in an old comedy. Honeybuzzard, lithe and slick as a stick of liquorice in his black leather jacket and corduroy trousers. Honeybuzzard, who seemed to be affecting a Groucho Marx stunt walk, his black legs scuttling in the wake of his thrust-forward torso. Honeybuzzard, crowned with an extremely large peaked cap, checked in screaming orange and shouting purple. . . .66 [bold emphasis added] Carter also uses polyptotonic repetitions to tumble descriptions over one another in syntactical streams within clauses and sentences. Morris ‘ran down the road, faster and faster till he thought he might leave the ground and start flying, so fast was he running, running to get away from the flat and all the rank memories it contained’.67 She also deploys polysyndeton, creating songlike strings of dream-prose, such as when Ghislaine is ‘pulling both flowers and grass and nettles and piss-the-beds’68 or the longer description of her childlike appearance (note the yellow hair): And she had long, yellow, milkmaid hair and her eyes were so big and brown they seemed to gobble up her face . . . And her darkened lashes swept down over half her cheeks. And she was so light and fragile and her bones so birdy fine and little and her skin was almost translucent.69 [bold emphasis added] Carter is tugging at the sounds and images of folk songs in her writing, borrowing rhythmic features with which she would have been familiar, such as the iambic feel, the four-line quatrain shape, and internal repetitions such as epistrophe, anaphora, polyptoton, and polysyndeton, so intrinsic to folk song, in her own syntactical constructions. The songs – melodic influences The songs’ melodies also have structural impacts on ways in which Carter builds her prose. Carter took a great interest in the tunes of folk songs: her careful musical notations have been preserved in her folk notebook, in which she draws childlike lollipop crotchets and quavers on musical staves for over thirty songs, marking out the undulating patterns of the melodies, presumably in an effort to learn them. One can see, for example, her child-like notation of the folk song ‘Three Pretty Maids’, sometimes known as ‘The Blackbird’ or ‘The Bird in the Bush’ (Figure 3). Figure 3: Open in new tabDownload slide Photo detail of 'Three Pretty Maids’ from 'Paul and Angela Carter’s Folk Music Archive’ Copyright © Christine Molan. Reproduced by permission of Christine Molan. Figure 3: Open in new tabDownload slide Photo detail of 'Three Pretty Maids’ from 'Paul and Angela Carter’s Folk Music Archive’ Copyright © Christine Molan. Reproduced by permission of Christine Molan. Carter transcribed thirty-two other songs in this fashion, revealing a sensitivity to, and an awareness of, individual melody shapes, the repetitions in pitch and rhythm undulations, the semantic messages encoded within folk song tunes, and the different ways in which melodic movement and repetition could contribute to a song’s overall meaning.70 I propose she understood the melodies of all the songs with which she engaged in similar terms. In particular, she noticed in ‘Reynardine’ and ‘Blow the Candle Out’, melodic shapes of parabola and chiasmus, which she then imported into her own prose constructions. The melody of ‘Reynardine’ creates the shape of a parabolic arc which complements the song’s disturbing narrative. The eponymous Reynardine is a devilishly vulpine anti-hero, an enigmatic man-beast, a villain with what we infer are only ill intentions for the vulnerable girl caught in his sway. ‘Her hair was black, her eyes were blue, her mouth as red as wine’: her physical description, reminiscent of ‘Snow White’ from fairy-tale tradition, alerts us instinctively to danger through ancient chains of association and labels this girl a victim in the Sadeian sense; she will never escape this narrative and must succumb to the rake’s ‘sly, bold’ advances every time the song is sung, to be led over the mountain by him to his mysterious ‘castle’ – and her fate. The mixolydian ABCD melodic structure of the tune intensifies the meaning, suggesting a dragging, a pulling, a resistance, a darker and more menacing compulsion. The tune opens with an optimistic spiral-climb phrase up the scale only as far as the VI (so its mixolydian nature remains hidden without the revealing flattened VII expression), before lowering its eyelids flirtatiously to the IV to rest; a second hopeful spiral up, an attempt to escape, in line three touches the VI once more before descending back to the tonic through a flattened VII – revealing its dark mixolydian truth – and then rotating back between the III of the scale and the flattened VII below, to come to rest on the tonic. There’s an unsettling queasiness to the shape, from the two moments of attempted escape represented in the recurring VIs to the nauseating final circumnavigation of the tonic and the undertow of the mixolydian flattened VII. The chiastic melodic shape of ‘Blow The Candle Out’, in contrast, reveals what an honest, everyday seduction might sound like from a musical point of a view. The tune consists of four phrases which together form a chiastic ABBA figure; the first phrase makes a brave, bold opening octave jump up and marches back down the Ionian scale to the tonic with a kind of rumpus authority that smacks of indomitable male confidence. The second line plaintively lingers between the V of the scale and the top octave, teasingly questioning as it jitters back and forth on the V – it tickles, flirts, and cajoles, and the focus on the V sounds like a kind of pleading; this tentative, flirtatious tune repeats itself on line three, whereupon on line four, we return to the bolder octave jump, reinforcing the persona’s persuasive line of argument. Here the neediness of seduction takes on a chiastic form, according to the melody of this song. Carter’s Shadow Dance – melodic influences Because of her folk singing praxis, Carter absorbed these melodic figures of the parabolic arc and the chiasmus and translated them into both the narrative structure and the imagery of Shadow Dance. From a macrocosmic perspective, the novel climbs from the ‘tonic note’ of Morris’ humdrum everyday life and his drab marriage in which the ‘voluptuous shadows of the city trees moved with black shadows’71 to the parabolic and feverishly life-affirming homoerotic dance with Honeybuzzard, which lies at the very centre of the novel as Chapter 6 closes. In this frenzied scene, Honeybuzzard dismisses their friends – ‘They are all shadows. How can you be sorry for shadows?’72 – before he and Morris perform the eponymous ‘shadow dance’: Morris came into his arms and they circled the room. Because of his greater height, Morris found himself taking the man’s part and Honey bending himself to the girl’s movements. Who was he being now? A great lady, a grand-dame collecting hearts like butterflies, stabbing them through with her hairpins and keeping them in a glass case? Morris was gradually drawn into the game, too.73 Carter warps conservative ideas of gender here, suggesting how gender becomes irrelevant, almost superfluous, in the annihilation of their embrace. This kind of ludic performance of gender roles reflects the fluidity of gender to which Carter was accustomed in folk song praxis, where men sang women and women sang men as a matter of course. Morris and Honeybuzzard forge new identities from their ‘stylized repetition of acts’.74 And so the men’s ‘dance’ (another sexually-charged extended metaphor) reaches fever pitch: Laughing, breathless, they whirled to the invisible rhetoric of a hundred violins. The patches of candlelight illuminated only their feet for odd moments, and then they were back, dancing in darkness again. They neared the extravagant climax of the dance.75 Their movements become violent, and the dance (reminiscent of the dance of the clowns in Nights at the Circus) threatens to annihilate the world: But when the time came for parting and bowing and curtseying to one another, Honeybuzzard instead convulsively crushed his partner in a fierce embrace, pressing his sweating face deeply into the other’s shoulder, straining bruising fingers into neck and back, wet mouth fastened on his throat, clinging as if he would never let go until the round world toppled into the sun and the last bell-tower rang midnight and everything was extinguished.76 Honeybuzzard is sexually aroused by this homoerotic encounter but translates his feelings into heterosexual rage: ‘“I’m going to stuff my Emily rigid,” he said, thrusting the keyring into Morris’s hand.’77 Homoerotic arousal incites in him a desire to dominate and punish his female partner. Viewing this encounter through the lens of Carter’s gender-fluid folk song praxis and her native ability to sing the voice of men in folk song, it becomes increasingly apparent that Honeybuzzard embodies some kind of fantasized projection of a cruel version of Carter. Through Honeybuzzard, Carter allows a ludic, cruel, destructive version of the self to emerge, the selfish dandy who experiences without censure what it feels like to make the world dance to one’s whims and desires. The dance of Honeybuzzard and Morris represents the apex of the parabolic arc which declines after this point; Honeybuzzard’s spiral into murderous madness and Morris’s inability to extricate himself from Honeybuzzard’s destructive thrall together bring about the recoil back into the influence of the ‘shadows’ into which Morris ambiguously vanishes; the parabola completes its final descent. Chiasmus appears microcosmically in imagery Carter uses during moments of remembered or projected near-perfection. In the fantasies of both Morris’s escape and the seduction of Ghislaine, Carter recreates a figure similar to the confident melodic A-sequence, the two more tentative B-sequences and the return to the A-sequence of ‘Blow The Candle Out’. Morris dreams of escape from the shadows and Honeybuzzard: ‘He would go away, really go away, (A) and forget about them all, (B) really forget about them all, (B) and find an honest job, glass-blowing or gas-fitting or building roads, somewhere far, far away. (A)’.78 A repetitive, choric quality similarly surrounds those aforementioned descriptions of Ghislaine: ‘A month ago, (A) she was a beautiful girl; (B) how could such a girl not be beautiful? … She was a beautiful girl, a white and golden girl, (B) like moonlight on daisies, a month ago (A)’. The chiastic structure of this description opens and closes with the comforting deictic referent of ‘a month ago’, a safe time; the internal oscillation and repetitive questioning of ‘how could such a girl not be beautiful?’ and the repetition of the diminutive ‘girl’ rock back and forth beseechingly, before returning to the closing ‘a month ago’. This structure highlights the innocent and honest nature of Ghislaine’s sexual energy, her practical promiscuity, and yet Carter finds something unsettling in it too: the shape carries within it the contour of a specific kind of self-reflexion; Honeybuzzard’s sadistic abuse of Ghislaine (‘The scar was all red and raw’) and her irrepressible masochistic desire to be annihilated in turn by him (‘you are my master, do what you like with me’) creates a Sadeian mirroring of death and desire which will come to obliterate them both. Chiasmus encapsulates at once the innocence and the corruption of their trajectory. Songs and Shadow Dance – thematic influences Carter’s influences from these songs did not stop with structural features; she also absorbed the songs’ thematic influences, the rich allusive layers of imagery, and the dense semantic associations embedded within them. The figures of Reynardine, the mysterious bestial villain whose ‘teeth so bright did shine’, and the song’s anonymous victim-girl-lover who is compelled to follow him to her doom infuse the text of Shadow Dance. Honeybuzzard shares many of the characteristics of the mysterious Reynardine; their bestial charactonyms open a string of resemblances. Honeybuzzard is described, like Reynardine, as disturbingly vulpine: He had a pair of perfectly pointed ears, such as fauns have and, curiously, these were also covered with down; his pointed ears poked whimsically through his golden love-locks, under the shadow of the extraordinary cap. And then, disquieting, strange, at odds with the cherub-face, there was the mouth. It was impossible to look at the full, rich lines of his dark red mouth without thinking: ‘This man eats meat.’ It was an inexpressibly carnivorous mouth; a mouth that suggested snapping, tearing, biting, a mouth that was always half-smiling in a pretty, feline curve; and showing in the smile, hints of feline, tearing teeth, small, brilliantly white, sharp, like wounding little chips of milk glass. How beautiful he was, and how indefinably sinister.79 His teeth, like Reynardine’s, shine brightly; Lloyd might have written this description of Honeybuzzard. Carter also imports from the song the self-sacrificing, sadomasochistic victim-girl in Ghislaine, whose desire for the dangerous lover overwhelms her. Ghislaine is like the victim-girl of the song, described in such passive terms: ‘doll’, ‘automaton’, ‘Jumping Jack’; Carter suggests she is nothing more than Honeybuzzard’s puppet: ‘Why not? She always did jump when I pulled her string, poor little girl’.80 Ghislaine’s subjugation to Honeybuzzard’s will represents an annihilation of the self, an obliteration: ‘I’ve learned my lesson. I can’t live without you. You are my master. Do what you like with me’. This feels like a fantasy of stylized female subjugation, not one which can be sustained in any kind of reality; it is the Justine of feminine behaviour, humility to the point of annihilation. Honeybuzzard and Ghislaine’s relationship is choreographed, one could argue, to resemble two extreme aspects of feminine sexuality, examining through exaggeration the sexualized aggrandizement or capitulation of the self as sexual being, rather than making any comment on an exterior ‘battle of the sexes’. When one witnesses Carter’s folk song praxis up close and understands its narrative positioning as wholesale occupation, it allows for a reading of Honeybuzzard as occupation: Carter can be read as the singer within the character she has created, a version within a version, and her authorial voice ‘sings’ to us through the text: ‘I like,’ he said obscurely, ‘I like — you know — to slip in and out of me. I would like to be somebody different each morning. Me and not-me. I would like to have a cupboard bulging with all different bodies and faces and choose a fresh one every morning.’81 Honeybuzzard’s plurality adds to his macabre attraction; like ‘Reynardine’, he is ultimately unknowable, he is nothing but surface and performance, and as such Carter can use him to perform multiple versions of self. Carter was regularly standing up and singing from different perspectives at folk clubs, singing herself into the personas of both men and women. In addition to the gender-fluid identity of the singer, some of the songs (such as ‘Jackie Munro’ and ‘Polly Oliver’) sang of cross-dressing women. As Dugaw explains: [t]he formulaic structure of the ballads regularizes to predictability a world which is criss-crossed, inside-out, upside-down. Although the outline of the story is strenuously upright — the separation and reunion of separated heterosexual lovers — almost anything in fact is possible, for inversion and reversal rule this world. Daughters overturn the wishes of lovers and fathers; the pressgang which enslaves her sweetheart becomes an avenue of liberation for the heroine; women matter-of-factly decide to pass themselves as men and play the rescuing role; sailor sweethearts and merchant fathers weep and repent while female heroines smile, set things right, and earn and bestow rewards.82 Reading versions of Carter within versions of Honeybuzzard through the lens of her folk song praxis reveals Carter, very early in her career, eschewing any essential sense of a unified self for a fragmentary, illusory performance – an understanding gleaned directly from the experience of folk singing. The narrative of the stoical and practical Emily, who without fuss decides to raise Honeybuzzard’s baby without him, echoes that of the song ‘Blow the Candle Out’ and its ‘kind and easy loving that accepts men and women as they are with no fogging notions of sin or shame’.83 In the song, we do not know if the man-lover is going to return or indeed whether the woman-lover in the song really wants him to. Emily encapsulates that spirit of independence, that fearlessness of autonomy: ‘If it hadn’t been him, it would have been somebody else, sooner or later. So it can be sooner and I’ll have my baby’.84 Morris describes her attitude as ‘peasant fatalism’, but Emily’s simple acceptance of her situation also illustrates the kind of folk pragmatism Carter so admired in ‘Blow The Candle Out’, that ‘there’s no room for regret when the young man goes away … And that’s that, and there’s no point in grieving’.85 Honeybuzzard’s cruel indifference is rendered powerless here; he is erased from the story of this baby and its mother, and Emily becomes an expression of a new self-sufficiency to replace the old ‘shame’, a new social construct of the elective single mother, a new voice in the panoply of Carter’s polyvocal explorations of the many different ways one can imagine the self. Emily might have walked out straight out of a folk song. Conclusion This new understanding of Carter’s folk singing praxis provided by the archive reveals that, even in a work as early in her career as Shadow Dance, Carter shows herself to be in process of exploration of selfhood through imagination and occupation. With a disregard for gender learned from folk singing, Carter becomes everyone and anyone; regardless of gender, she is free to ‘slip in and out of’ bodies to make versions of herself as male, herself as female, because she is at once male and/and-not male, female and/and-not female. Her semi-credible apology in ‘Notes from the Front Line’ about being a young ‘male impersonator’ flies in the face of her far more authentic confessions in letters about Lee, Buzz (and by extrapolation Honeybuzzard) being ‘something to do with [her] libido’. This is not ‘impersonation’ but occupancy, which can be seen as a direct result of her folk singing, and which embodies a freedom of gender performance that would go on to become one of the main creative tenets of her oeuvre. Carter creates these fictive spaces in which we can ‘slip in and out’ of performances of ‘dreams’ of the male and female, spaces which are culturally specific and therefore always expressive of power relations, in order to choose how to perform gender identity. I propose that folk singing naturalized gender fluidity for Carter, a naturalization that manifests itself in the intricate matrices not just of Honeybuzzard/Morris/Ghislaine in Shadow Dance but in so many works that followed — Joseph/Charlotte/Annie (Several Perceptions), Lee/Buzz/Annabelle (Love), Anna/the narrator (‘Reflections’), Desiderio/Albertina (The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman),86 Evelyn/Eve (The Passion of New Eve), Fevvers/Walser (Nights at the Circus) and even Dora/Nora/Peregrine/Melchior (Wise Children), to name but a few. Through them all, Carter harnesses and appropriates the extraordinary capacity, learned first from her folk singing, of the radically traditional, traditionally radical gender imaginary. Moreover, the musicality embedded within her fiction demands that we reperform her performances of self as we read, so that the reciprocity between writer and reader grows to resemble that of the singer and listener: we respond to her fictions in musical terms, in acts of ever-evolving and sympathetic resonance. Footnotes 1 Angela Carter, Shadow Dance, first publ. 1966 (London: Virago, 1995), p. 78. 2 Angela Carter, ‘The Flower of Sweet Strabane’ (sung) and ‘Saint Mary’s & Church Street’ (concertina medley), recorded live at The Cheltenham Folk Club, 15 January 1967, © Denis Olding. 3 Angela Carter, 1963–64 Journal, London, British Library MS 88899/1/89. On 9 July 1964, Carter wrote in her journal, ‘About ⅔ of the way through “Shadow Dance”; another three or four chapters should see the first draft finished. It’s coming along.’ 4 Angela Carter, ‘Now Is The Time For Singing’, Nonesuch Magazine, 122 (1964), 11–15 (p. 15). 5 Angela Carter, sleeve notes, on Peggy Seeger, Early in the Spring (Topic Records 73, 1962). 6 Angela Carter, sleeve notes, on Louis Killen, Ballads and Broadsides (Topic Records 12T126, 1965). 7 Angela Carter, ‘Some Speculations on Possible Relationships between the Medieval Period and 20th Century Folk Song Poetry’ (unpublished BA thesis, University of Bristol, 1965), London, British Library MS 88899/1/116. 8 Angela Carter, ‘Notes from the Front Line’, first publ. 1983, repr. in Shaking a Leg: Collected Journalism and Writings, ed. by Jenny Uglow (London: Vintage, 2013), pp. 45–53 (p. 48). 9 Sarah Gamble, Angela Carter: Writing from the Front Line (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1997), p. 63. Gamble argues that this was ‘the period in which [Carter] began experimenting with female points of view’. 10 ‘They’re perhaps the serious and frivolous sides of the same coin.’ Marc O’Day, ‘“Mutability is Having a Field Day”: The Sixties Aura of Angela Carter’s Bristol Trilogy’, in Flesh and the Mirror: Essays on the Art of Angela Carter, ed. by Lorna Sage (London: Virago, 1994), pp. 24–59 (p. 37). 11 Edmund Gordon, The Invention of Angela Carter (London: Chatto & Windus, 2016), p. 127. 12 Ibid. 13 Paulina Palmer, ‘From “Coded Mannequin” to Bird Woman: Angela Carter’s Magic Flight’, in Women Reading Women’s Writing, ed. by Sue Roe (Brighton: Harvester, 1987), pp. 177–205 (p. 181). 14 Christina Britzolakis, ‘Angela Carter’s Fetishism’, Textual Practice, 9.3 (1995), 459–75 (p. 470). 15 Gamble, p. 63. 16 Linden Peach, Angela Carter, first publ. 1998 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), p. 23. 17 Ibid., p. 26. 18 Rebecca Munford, ‘“The Desecration of the Temple”; or, “Sexuality as Terrorism”? Angela Carter’s (Post-)feminist Gothic Heroines’, Gothic Studies, 9.2 (2007), 58–70 (p. 64). 19 Nicole Ward Jouve, ‘“Mother is a Figure of Speech …”’, in Flesh and the Mirror: Essays on the Art of Angela Carter, ed. by Lorna Sage (London: Virago, 1994), pp. 136–70 (p. 148). 20 Rebecca Munford, ‘Angela Carter and the Politics of Intertextuality’, in Revisiting Angela Carter: Texts, Contexts, Intertexts, ed. by Rebecca Munford (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), pp. 1–20 (p. 11). 21 Maggie Tonkin, Angela Carter and Decadence: Critical Fictions/Fictional Critiques (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), p. 15. 22 Britzolakis, p. 466. 23 Ibid., p. 469. 24 Robert Clark, ‘Angela Carter’s Desire Machine’, Women’s Studies, 14.2 (1987), 147–61 (p. 158). 25 Lorna Sage, Angela Carter, first publ. 1994 (Tavistock: Northcote, 2007), p. 12. 26 Lorna Sage, ‘The Savage Sideshow: A Profile of Angela Carter’, New Review, 4.39–40 (1977), 51–57 (p. 52). 27 A. L. Lloyd, Folk Song in England, first publ. 1967 (Frogmore: Paladin, 1975), p. 151. 28 Sarah Makem, ‘The Banks of Red Roses’, recorded by Paul Carter and Sean O’Boyle, on Sarah Makem, Ulster Ballad Singer (Topic Records 12T182, 1968). 29 Bob Copper, ‘The False Bride’, on The Folksongs of Britain Vol 1: Songs of Courtship (Caedmon Records TC1142, 1961). 30 A. L. Lloyd, ‘Reynardine’, on First Person (Topic Records 12T118, 1966). 31 Enos White, ‘George Collins’, on The Folksongs of Britain, Vol 4: The Child Ballads Vol. 1 (Caedmon TC1145, 1961). 32 A. L. Lloyd, ‘Jackie Munro’, on English Street Songs (Riverside RLP12-614, 1956). 33 The Penguin Book of English Folk Songs, ed. by R. Vaughan Williams and A. L. Lloyd (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1959), p. 65. 34 Elizabeth Bristol Greenleaf and Grace Yarrow Mansfield, Ballads and Sea Songs of Newfoundland (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1933), pp. 96–98. 35 Of the remaining songs, nine use the anonymous eavesdropper frame narrative device, three present a conversation between two lovers, two are a mixture of more than one method, and one is from the perspective of a horse. 36 Carter, ‘Flower’, 1967. 37 Tom Willett, ‘Died for Love’, recorded by Bill Leader and Paul Carter, on The Willett Family, The Roving Journeymen: English Traditional Songs sung by Traditional Singers (Topic Records 12T84, 1962). 38 Angela Carter, teaching notes on the ‘Bluebeard’ cycle, in ‘Angela Carter: Papers Miscellaneous fairy tale material (1984, 1992, n.d.)’, (unpublished papers), London, British Library MS 88899/1/82, p. 57. 39 Lloyd, England, p. 151. 40 Suzanne Gilbert, ‘Orality and the Ballad Tradition’, in The Edinburgh Companion to Scottish Women’s Writing, ed. by Glenda Norquay (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012), pp. 35–43 (p. 42). 41 Georgina Boyes, ‘Introduction’ (2004), to A. L. Lloyd, The Singing Englishman, first publ. London: Workers’ Music Association, 1944, repr. Musical Traditions <http://www.mustrad.org.uk/articles/tse.htm> [accessed 26 April 2018]. 42 Lloyd, England, p. 65. 43 Nigel Thrift and John-David Dewsbury, ‘Dead Geographies – and How to Make Them Live’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 18 (2000), 411–32 (p. 425). 44 Carter, ‘Now Is The Time For Singing’, p. 15. 45 Pauline Greenhill, ‘“Neither a Man nor a Maid”: Sexualities and Gendered Meanings in Cross-Dressing Ballads’, Journal of American Folklore, 108.428 (Spring 1995), 156–77 (p. 157). 46 Dianne Dugaw, Warrior Women and Popular Balladry, 1650–1850 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 145. There is not opportunity here to explore in more depth the implications of expressions of diverse sexualities secreted within the seemingly heteronormative fabric of the folk song tradition nor the possible implications of these on Carter’s writerly imagination and on cultural production more widely. Further research could follow this rich vein of enquiry. 47 Judith Butler, Gender Trouble (London: Routledge, 1990), p. 33. 48 ‘Reynardine’ appears on Carter’s 1964 journal list. 49 Carter analyses the melodic and lyrical content of ‘Blow The Candle Out’ in her 1964 essay ‘Now Is The Time For Singing’. 50 ‘The Game of Cards’ appears on Carter’s 1964 journal list. 51 A. L. Lloyd, ‘Reynardine’, on The Foggy Dew and Other Traditional English Love Songs (Tradition Records TLP1016, 1956). 52 A. L. Lloyd, ‘Reynardine’, on First Person (Topic Records 12T118, 1966). 53 Gordon, p. 104. 54 Christine Molan, ‘Angela Carter’, fROOTS, July 2017, p. 21. 55 Carter, 1963–64 Journal. 56 ‘Reynardine’ as sung by Lloyd on First Person in 1966. 57 See Stephen D. Winick, ‘A. L. Lloyd and Reynardine: Authenticity and Authorship in the Afterlife of a British Broadside Ballad’, Folklore, 115.3 (December 2004), 286–308. 58 Jimmy Gilhaney, ‘Blow the Candle Out’, on The Folksongs of Britain, Vol 2: Songs of Seduction (Caedmon Records TC1143, 1961). 59 Carter, ‘Now Is The Time For Singing’, p. 12. 60 Tom Willett, ‘The Game of Cards’, on The Willett Family, The Roving Journeymen: English Traditional Songs (Topic Records 12T84, 1962). 61 Carter, Shadow, p. 10. 62 Ibid., p. 138. 63 Ibid., p. 3. 64 Ibid., p. 166. 65 Ibid., p. 2. 66 Ibid., p. 55. 67 Ibid., p. 158. 68 Ibid., p. 3. 69 Ibid., p. 2. 70 A list of titles of the thirty-three folksongs musically notated by Carter in this notebook is as follows: ‘The Banks of Sweet Dundee’; ‘The Wagoner’s Lad’; ‘Down in the Meadows’; ‘Tom’s Gone to Ilo’; ‘The Gipsy Countess’; ‘King Herod and the Cock’; ‘The Undaunted Female’; ‘The Dowie Dens of Yarrow’; ‘George Collins’; ‘Higher Germany’; ‘Pretty Saro’; ‘Earl Brand’; ‘Come All Ye Fair and Tender Ladies’; ‘Lucy Wan’; ‘Three Pretty Maids’; ‘The Bold Lieutenant’; ‘Good Morning, My Pretty Little Miss’; ‘Who is That that Raps at my Window?’; ‘Geordie’; ‘Peggy Gordon’; ‘Down by the Seaside’; ‘Bold Wolfe’; ‘Polly Oliver’; ‘The Banks of the Nile’; ‘The Brown Girl’; ‘The Swan’; ‘The Duke of Argyle’; ‘The Lover’s Ghost’; ‘The Courtship of Willy Reilly’; ‘Girl from the North Country’; ‘Fair Annie’; ‘Tarry Wood’; ‘The Small Black Rose’. Where she acknowledges a source they are mostly textual, although some are taken down from records, such as ‘Higher Germany’, for which she cites Phoebe Smith’s recording as the origin. 71 Carter, Shadow, p. 11. 72 Ibid., p. 86. 73 Ibid., pp. 92–93. 74 Judith Butler, ‘Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory’, Theatre Journal, 40.4 (December 1988), 519–31 (p. 519). 75 Carter, Shadow, p. 93. 76 Ibid., p. 93. 77 Ibid., p. 94. 78 Ibid., p. 159. 79 Ibid., p. 56. 80 Ibid., p. 125. 81 Ibid., p. 78. 82 Dugaw, p. 91. 83 Carter, ‘Now Is The Time For Singing’, p. 12. 84 Carter, Shadow, p. 168. 85 Carter, ‘Now Is The Time For Singing’, p. 12. 86 See Natsumi Ikoma’s observation that ‘Albertina in [Doctor Hoffman] is modelled after Sozo.’ Natsumi Ikoma, ‘Her Side of the Story’, in Seduced by Japan: A Memoir of the Days spent with Angela Carter, ed. by Sozo Araki, transl. by Natsumi Ikoma (Tokyo: Eihosha, 2017), p. 167. © The Author(s) 2020. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the English Association. All rights reserved. For permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oup.com This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/open_access/funder_policies/chorus/standard_publication_model)
TI - ‘Me and Not-Me’: Folk Songs, Narrative Perspectives, and The Gender Imaginary in Angela Carter’s Shadow Dance
JF - English
DO - 10.1093/english/efaa011
DA - 2020-06-01
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/me-and-not-me-folk-songs-narrative-perspectives-and-the-gender-2ixzv6HqFT
SP - 145
EP - 171
VL - 69
IS - 265
DP - DeepDyve
ER -