Wise Children by Angela Carter
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
In the guise of a vaudeville carnival, Carter tells a story of twin sisters who reduplicates their actions. Like their twin dads, the double aspect of the characters echo the reality of their situation by emphasizing not just the contingent singularity of each individual actor but also the collective milieu of how their family history doubly marks reality. Out of Shakespearean tragedy Carter takes the figure of the carnivalesque in its outlandish reality. Being actors, children of the theater, our narrator Dora comes to an appreciation of her role (and her uncle’s or father’s role) in life, an acceptance at old age that places them at the center of their story. The story of their father becomes the story of the daughters, as the father inscribes the limit upon which daughters can understand themselves
“D’you know, I sometimes wonder if we haven’t been making him up all along,” she said. “If he isn’t just a collection of our hopes and dream wishful thinking in the afternoons. Something to set our lives by, like the old clock in the hall, which is real enough, in itself, but which we’ve got to wind up to make it go.”
And like roles in a theater, the melodrama of a character is a willful desire for validation — their famous father pursues it–their capitalist uncle pursues it–the different aspects of Hollywood, the characters in their different roles as they try to negotiate their way to being recognized by the closest among them.
So while family is precariously anxious because absent father, absent mother, the daughters find their way through the various roles they play (burlesque dancers and singers) who are able to come of age, as wise children, always children even in their 70s, knowing more about their elders, and their role among them to an apex at which Dora can begin to see all that she is reflected in her lover-uncle at the end, where players and actors lose their roles and retain a distilled subjectivity. He “wasn’t only the one dear man, tonight, but a kaleidoscope of faces, gestures, caresses. He was not only the love of my life but all the loves of my life at once, the curtain call of my career as a lover.”
Carter teases out one of the truths of personal history. Through the filter of Shakespheare and drama entering the high capitalism of the mid to late 20th century, she shows us how we learn from our closest relations, parents, our place in the world as how we are to relate to others, how we are to relate at all even if the continuity is next to or even less than nothing.
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