All the Miss Havishams

Posted on | April 23, 2010 | 9 Comments

This weekend I will be at home in Glasgow for the wedding of a dear friend and I thought it appropriate to schedule a wedding-themed Angela Carter post.  Being Carter, of course, it’s not happily-ever-after; she had a penchant for depicting daughters wearing their mothers’ wedding dresses, as a Gothic symbol for loss-of-innocence.  I opted to feature the Roxanna Bikadoroff illustration for the US edition (Penguin) of The Magic Toyshop because it shows Melanie in the wedding-dress  that is so central to the plot.  The Magic Toyshop is a coming-of-age novel that focuses on the pubescent Melanie and celebrates her burgeoning sexuality and the loss of  her innocence.  The first chapter of the novel is about her the trying on of the dress, her mother wore on her wedding dress; the subsequent spoiling of the dress when she is locked out in the garden and has to climb a tree, spilling blood in the process; the eventual blame upon herself for her parents’ deaths, putting it down to the wearing of the dress.

She examined the wedding dress more closely.  It seemed a strange way to dress up just in order to lose your virginity.  She wondered if her parents had sexual intercourse before they were married.  She felt she was really growing up if she had started to speculate about this … Symbolic and virtuous white.  White satin shows every mark, white tulle crumples at the touch of a finger, white roses shower petals at a breath.  Virtue is fragile.  It was a marvellous wedding-dress. Did she, Melanie wondered for a moment, wear it on the wedding night?

The title of this post refers to Miss Havisham from Great Expectations by Charles Dickens. Jilted on her wedding day, humiliated and heartbroken, Miss Havisham never removes her wedding dress  -which she was already dressed in- and leaves the wedding cake uneaten on the table.  Miss Havisham is a haunting female character and I think that Carter is acknowledging her standing in literary tradition as a scorned female and significant character.  Melanie, of course, is a young girl, blossoming into herself, whereas Miss Havisham is a woman whose life has been lived in resentment at a broken heart; the decaying image of a woman living in the similarly ruined mansion, with all the clocks stopped at the hour of her betrayal, contrasts to the heightened life-blood of Melanie.  The vampiric eponymous lady of  “The Lady of the House of Love” in The Bloody Chamber is even more reminiscent of Miss Havisham:

Wearing an antique bridal gown, the beautiful queen of the vampires sits all alone in her dark, high house under the eyes of the portraits of her demented and atrocious ancestors, each one of whom, through her, projects a baleful posthumous existence; she counts out the Tarot cards, ceaselessly construing a constellation of possibilities as if the random fall of the cards on the red plush tablecloth before her could precipitate her from her chill, shuttered room into a country of perpetual summer and obliterate the perennial sadness of a girl who is both death and the maiden.

All day, she lies in her coffin in her négligé of blood-stained lace. When the sun drops behind the mountain, she yawns and stirs and puts on the only dress she has, her mother’s wedding dress, to sit and read her cards until she grows hungry.

First of all, he saw only a shape, a shape imbued with a faint luminosity since it caught and reflected in its yellowed surfaces what little light there was in the ill-lit room; this shape resolved itself into that of, of all things, a hoop-skirted dress of white satin draped here and there with lace, a dress fifty or sixty years out of fashion but once, obviously, intended for a wedding. And then he saw the girl who wore the dress, a girl with the fragility of the skeleton of a moth, so thin, so frail that her dress seemed to him to hang suspended, as if untenanted in the dank air, a fabulous lending, a self-articulated garment in which she lived like a ghost in a machine.

Read the beautiful prose in the above passages; Carter has re-envisaged Miss Havisham as well as loosely using the premise of the Sleeping Beauty fairy tale.

The character too of Tristessa in The Passion of New Eve is a type of Miss Havisham, négligéed and forced into marriage; however, to reveal how Carter subverts the notion of Tristessa as a reclusive Miss Havisham is to spoil the novel.

I don’t pretend to offer any profound insights in this post but I did want to highlight Carter’s progressive use of similar images, themes and her use of intertextuality in her work.  Previously I have mentioned Carter’s wealth  of literary allusion but she also relies on the images and reputation of classic texts to shape her own, which makes her intricately crafted prose all the richer.

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A book blog written by a reader who enjoys The Beatles and who is not wholly averse to hardbacks.

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