Project and content management for Contemporary Authors volumes
WORK TITLE: Dangerous Bodies
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE: 8/21/1955
WEBSITE:
CITY:
STATE:
COUNTRY:
NATIONALITY:
http://people.uwe.ac.uk/Pages/person.aspx?accountname=campus%5Cm-mulveyroberts * http://getangelacarter.com/marie-mulvey-roberts * http://www.press.uillinois.edu/books/catalog/23hpc2yf9780252027932.html
RESEARCHER NOTES:
LC control no.: n 86088685
LCCN Permalink: https://lccn.loc.gov/n86088685
HEADING: Mulvey Roberts, Marie
000 01630cz a2200337n 450
001 634670
005 20170304073915.0
008 860605n| azannaabn |a aaa
010 __ |a n 86088685 |z nr 95032001 |z n 97116665
035 __ |a (OCoLC)oca01641831
040 __ |a DLC |b eng |e rda |c DLC |d DLC |d OCoLC |d DLC |d OCoLC |d UPB
046 __ |f 1955-08-21 |2 edtf
100 1_ |a Mulvey Roberts, Marie
372 __ |a English literature |2 lcsh
373 __ |a University of Manchester |2 naf
373 __ |a Open University |2 naf
373 __ |a University of the West of England, Bristol |2 naf
374 __ |a College teachers |2 lcsh
375 __ |a female
377 __ |a eng
378 __ |q Marie E.
400 1_ |a Roberts, Marie Mulvey
400 1_ |w nne |a Roberts, Marie
400 1_ |a Roberts, Marie E., |d 1955-
670 __ |a Her British poets and secret societies, 1986: |b t.p. (Marie Roberts) jkt. (part-time lecturer, English Dept., Univ. of Manchester and for the Open Univ.)
670 __ |a Her The Rosicrucian novel, 1989: |b CIP t.p. (Marie Roberts) data sheet (Marie E. Roberts; b. 8/21/55)
670 __ |a Literature and medicine during the eighteenth century, 1993: |b CIP t.p. (Marie Mulvey Roberts)
670 __ |a Perspectives on the history of British feminism, 1994: |b t.p. (Marie Mulvey Roberts) p. vii (Univ. of the West of England)
670 __ |a The Handbook to Gothic literature, 1998: |b CIP t.p. (Marie Mulvey-Roberts)
670 __ |a Literary Bristol, 2015: |b title page (editor Marie Mulvey-Roberts) front flap (Marie Mulvey-Roberts is an Associate Professor in English Literature at the University of the West of England, Bristol)
953 __ |a br31 |b ta30
PERSONAL
Born August 21, 1955.
EDUCATION:English literature and language, B.A.; M.A.; University of Manchester, Ph.D.; Manchester Metropolitan University, English and TEFL, P.G.C.E.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer. University of the West of England, UWE Bristol, associate professor in English literature and reader in literary studies. Women’s Writing, editor-in-chief and co-founder. “Strange Worlds: The Vision of Angela Carter,” art exhibit co-curator and catalogue coeditor. Mapping Literary Bristol Project, founder. Literary Bristol, editor. The Handbook of the Gothic, editor.
MEMBER:Editorial board member of Gothic Studies; Dissections: The Journal of Contemporary Horror; and Cauda Pavonis: Studies in Hermeticism.
AWARDS:Recipient of Leverhulme Trust Fellowship and Visiting Fellowship at the Humanities Research Centre, Australian National University.
WRITINGS
Contributor of chapters to books, including, “The Female Gothic Body” in Women and the Gothic: An Edinburgh Companion, “Angela Carter’s ‘Bristol Trilogy’: A Gothic Perspective on Bristol’s 1960s Counterculture,” “Bristol’s Romantic Poets: Robert Southey and Samuel Taylor Coleridge,” and “Gothic Bristol: City of Darkness and Light” in Literary Bristol: Writers and the City.
SIDELIGHTS
Marie Mulvey-Roberts is a writer and professor living in Bristol, England. She is an associate professor in English literature and a reader in literary studies at the University of the West of England in Bristol. She is also the editor-in-chief of Women’s Writing, an international journal highlighting women writers up until 1918, which she co-founded. Mulvey-Roberts is the co-curator of art exhibit “Strange Worlds: The Vision of Angela Carter,” for which she coedited the catalogue. She is the founder of the Mapping Literary Bristol Project and the editor of Literary Bristol. Mulvey-Roberts’ areas of interest and expertise include gothic, gender and the body in the long nineteenth century, radical women writers, literary freemasonry, and literature and medicine.
Dangerous Bodies examines the ways in which the demonization of bodies and groups of people can be traced back to particular periods of institutionalized prosecutions and times of war. Mulvey-Roberts presents this argument through researched interpretations of a number of Gothic films and literary works.
The opening chapters of Dangerous Bodies examine Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto and Matthew Gregory Lewis’s The Monk as examples of complicated Catholic or anti-Catholic influences in regard to the symbolism of blood. The book then looks to Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’s Frankenstein as a depiction of the brutalization of the body. Mulvey-Roberts argues that the reign over the body of the monster is a reflection of the attitudes of the time concerning slavery, revealing Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’s condemnation of the institute of slavery.
Mulvey-Roberts suggests that the use of blood and emphasis on the dangers of female sexuality in Bram Stoker’s Dracula reflect the medical attitudes at the time of its publication. She explains that fear of hysteria in women and subsequent demonizing of female orgasm, sexual exploration, and female masturbation can be gleaned from the storylines and depiction of female characters in Dracula.
Mulvey-Roberts describes the vampire figure in “Nosferatu” as symbolic of antisemitism of the time. This claim is supported in the book by illustrations of Jews as vampires. She also suggests that vampires and their associations with blood thirst are symbolic of warfare more generally, as later in history Nazis were also depicted as vampires. J.A. Saklofske in American Library Association wrote: “The chapters are well, though loosely, integrated into a holistic argument, but historical detail sometimes obscures the focus on the Gothic body, and some connections appear speculative and forced.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Choice, February, 2010, KP Ljungquist, review of The Handbook of the Gothic, p. 1062; October, 2016, J.A. Saklofske, review of Dangerous Bodies: Historicising the Gothic Corporeal, p. 205.
English Historical Review, Volume 113 Number 454, 1998, Philip Carter, review of Pleasure in the Eighteenth Century, p. 1324.
Journal of Social History, summer, 1998, Mary Lindemann, review of Pleasure in the Eighteenth Century, p. 961.
Reference & Research Book News, May, 2007, review of Writing for Their Lives: Death Row U.S.A.
ONLINE
Dissections, http://www.simegen.com (September 19, 2017), Gina Wisker, review of Dangerous Bodies.*
MARIE MULVEY-ROBERTS
Marie Mulvye-Roberts
Marie Mulvey-Roberts is an Associate Professor in English literature and Reader in Literary Studies at the University of the West of England, UWE Bristol. She is the editor-in-chief and co-founder of the journal Women’s Writing and has published widely in the area of Gothic and gender. Amongst her many edited books are The Handbook to the Gothic (rvd 2009) and Literary Bristol: Writers and the City (2015). Her most recent monograph is Dangerous Bodies: Historicising the Gothic Corporeal (2015).
She has contributed chapters relating to Angela Carter in The Female Gothic collections of essays and is editing a book called The Arts of Angela Carter: A Cabinet of Curiosities for Manchester University Press. She is the co-curator of Strange Worlds: The Vision of Angela Carter, the first art exhibition on the work of Angela Carter, at the Royal West Academy in Bristol which commemorates the twenty fifth anniversary of her death in 1992.
Dr Marie Mulvey-Roberts
Marie Mulvey-Roberts
BA (Hons) English Literature and Language, MA (by research), PhD University of Manchester, PGCE in English and TEFL, Manchester Metropolitan University
Position: Associate Professor in English Literature
Department: ACE - Arts and Cultural Industries
Contact me
+44 (0)117 32 84455
Marie.Mulvey-Roberts@uwe.ac.uk
Collaborations
Gender Studies Research Group UWE
Teaching
Gothic Literature
Gender Writing and Sexuality
About me
Following an initial focus on the eighteenth century, I developed an interest in Gothic Romanticism, especially Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. My Gothic interests continued further into the nineteenth century and led to publications on Charles Maturin, Edward Bulwer Lytton, Oscar Wilde and Bram Stoker. My latest book Dangerous Bodies: Corporeality and the Gothic (Manchester University Press, 2016) also connects with my interest in human rights. I have edited books on the death penalty in America, the most recent of which, Writing for their Lives: Death Row USA (Illinois University Press, 2007) was nominated for the Gustavus Myers Center's Outstanding Human Rights Book Award. Incarceration is an area which relates to my research on the imprisoned suffragette Constance Lytton and her grand-mother, the Victorian novelist Rosina Bulwer Lytton, who was put in a lunatic asylum by her husband, Edward and whose letters I edited for a three-volume edition (Pickering and Chatto, 2008). Her experiences of the asylum are documented in her memoir A Blighted Life (1880), one of several of her books, which I edited. My ongoing project is a critical biography of these radical women and their political and family connections.
I am the author of three monographs and have edited many books, including The Handbook of the Gothic (rvd 2009) which was translated into Japanese in 2015. I am the editor of the international journal Women's Writing, on women writers up to 1918. My membership of editorial boards includes Gothic Studies, Dissections: The Journal of Contemporary Horror and Cauda Pavonis: Studies in Hermeticism. I am the founder of the Mapping Literary Bristol Project and the editor of Literary Bristol (Redcliffe Press, 2015). I have been drawing attention to Angela Carter as a Bristol writer and to this end co-curated the exhibition Strange Worlds: The Vision of Angela Carter at the Royal West of England Academy Bristol (9 December-19 March 2017) and co-edited the cataolgue. I am also editing two more books on Carter, one with Charlotte Crofts. I have been the recipient of a number of fellowships, most notably a Leverhulme Trust Fellowship and Visiting Fellowship at the Humanities Research Centre, Australian National University. I welcome PhD students in areas of interest.
Area of expertise
Gothic, gender and the body in the long nineteenth century
Radical women writers
Literary Freemasonry
Literature and medicine
My Publications
All
Book (7)
Article (2)
Book Section (16)
Other (1)
Mulvey-Roberts, M. (2016) Dangerous Bodies: Historicising the Gothic Corporeal . Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press. ISBN 9780719085413 Available from: http://eprints.uwe.ac.uk/26578
Mulvey-Roberts (ed), M. (2015) The Handbook to the Gothic . Translated from the English into Japanese by Shigeki Kanasaki, Yukari Kanzaki, Koichi Sugata, Yoko Sugiyama, Chikako Nagao and Kazuko Hina. Tokyo: Palgrave Macmillan. ISBN 9784269820340 Available from: http://eprints.uwe.ac.uk/26587
Mulvey-Roberts, M. (2015) Literary Bristol: Writers and the City . Bristol: Redcliffe Press. ISBN 9781908326737 Available from: http://eprints.uwe.ac.uk/26581
Mulvey-Roberts, M. (2014) British Poets and Secret Societies . 2nd. Abingdon and New York: Routledge Revivals. ISBN 9781138796201 Available from: http://eprints.uwe.ac.uk/26568
Mulvey-Roberts, M., ed. (2008) The collected letters of Rosina Bulwer Lytton . (Vol1-3) London: Pickering & Chatto. ISBN 9781851968039 Available from: http://eprints.uwe.ac.uk/10601
Mulvey-Roberts, M., ed. (2005) The handbook of the gothic . 2nd ed. Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan. ISBN 9780230008533 Available from: http://eprints.uwe.ac.uk/10545
Mulvey-Roberts, M., ed. (2005) Rosina Bulwer Lytton, Cheveley: A man of honour . (Vol. 5) Pickering and Chatto. ISBN 9781851967797 Available from: http://eprints.uwe.ac.uk/6697
Marie Mulvey-Roberts is a Reader in Literary Studies in the School of English and Drama at the University of the West of England, Bristol. She has published extensively and has taught in a number of prisons in the United Kingdom, including Open University courses for prisoners serving life sentences. Jan Arriens is the founder of LifeLines, an international organization of correspondents who exchange letters with death row prisoners.
Interview with Marie Mulvey-Roberts and Fiona Robinson
Posted on February 21, 2017 by Caleb Sivyer
For my latest interview, I sit down with Dr Marie Mulvey-Roberts (UWE) and Fiona Robinson (RWA) to talk with them about their co-curated exhibition at Bristol’s RWA, Strange Worlds: The Vision of Angela Carter.
Caleb Sivyer: Could you begin by telling me about the genesis of this exhibition? Where did the original idea come from and what were your initial thoughts and wishes? For example, did you always plan to have both contemporary and classic pieces on display?
anagrams-of-desireMarie Mulvey-Roberts: It goes back to 2010 when I was planning to do something on Carter in Bristol for the 20th anniversary since her death. I had an idea for a kind of circus theme with wild and colourful aerial installations at the Watershed or Arnolfini or even at the City museum in Bristol, which is visited by a character in her first novel, a painter who contemplates two of the exhibits, still there today – the gypsy caravan and the Irish elk. I liked the idea of visitors stepping into her fiction from the real world. But then when time ran out, I decided instead to look ahead to the 25th anniversary in 2017. My colleague Charlotte Crofts at UWE, told me about an art film which Carter had made. Charlotte was the first person to write about it in her book Anagrams of Desire, and the notion of an art exhibition popped up, the starting point of which was to get hold of original paintings from the film.
Fiona Robinson: Yes, the initial idea for an Angela Carter exhibition came from Marie and she submitted a proposal to the Royal West of England Academy (RWA) Exhibition Advisory Group who accepted it. The current policy of the RWA and one which works really well is to show both historical works and contemporary works at the same time thus extending the reach of the exhibition to appeal to visitors who have different interests. I was invited by the RWA to curate the contemporary section of the exhibition because I have both a wide knowledge of contemporary art through my writing on that subject and my background in Art History and good contacts with contemporary gallerists and dealers through my own practice.
CS: Why was the RWA chosen and why Bristol? Can you talk about Carter’s connection to both of these?
“Carter started her writing career in Bristol and set three of her novels in the city, known as the Bristol trilogy. She also wrote The Magic Toyshop here (now made into a film) and Heroes and Villains, which appears to have reflected the time she spent studying English at the University of Bristol” (Marie Mulvey-Roberts).
MMR: The then President of the Royal West of England Academy (RWA), Jeanette Kerr, suggested to me that the galleries would be a good venue for the show, so I approached Director Alison Bevan. I had wanted to draw attention to a forgotten decade in Carter’s life, the 1960s, spent mostly in Bristol. She lived in Clifton where the RWA is located and so it made sense to have the exhibition in this stunningly beautiful building. It also seemed a female friendly space having been founded by a generous female patron, the artist Ellen Sharples and has a sizeable collection of paintings by women. This tradition continues with the current director, who is also a woman. Carter started her writing career in Bristol and set three of her novels in the city, known as the Bristol trilogy. She also wrote The Magic Toyshop here (now made into a film) and Heroes and Villains, which appears to have reflected the time she spent studying English at the University of Bristol. It was not until the week before the exhibition opened that I did some research and made the immensely satisfying discovery that she had actually studied art in the very same building where we were about to hold the exhibition.
Royal York Crescent.jpg
Royal York Crescent in Bristol, where Angela Carter lived in the 1960s
CS: What was the process of finding, borrowing and commissioning like? Were there any surprises or difficulties along the way? Did the exhibition change much in the process of putting it together?
leonora-carrington
Image: Leonora Carrington Estate
MMR: I started by re-reading Carter’ work and her archive at the British Library, noting down her references to art and artists and researching artists whose work resonated with hers. I met with artists and lenders. I compiled a list of around 120 paintings in order of preference. Tracking down the provenance was time-consuming. For that I mainly used the internet though I did draw on art books and talked to curators and art dealers. Once a loan was agreed with Fiona and the Exhibitions Curator Gemma, I researched the artist and the painting in more detail for a rationale explaining why it was important for the exhibition and how it reflected or corresponded to Carter’s work. It was a euphoric moment for us all when I managed to get the Chagall. There was also a huge sense of relief when my request for the Holman Hunt, amongst others, came through. One of the main reasons why requests were refused was because the work in question had been promised elsewhere or had recently been on loan, making some curators reluctant to let it out of the stable again so soon. There were other setbacks along the way. For instance, I had been keen for us to exhibit a fairy painting by Richard Dadd and spent a long time researching him and visiting galleries, but to no avail. The painting I most wanted to borrow had been spirited away long ago by the art market and had not been seen for decades: whereabouts unknown. This was his Come Unto these Yellow Sands, the title of Carter’s radio play about Richard Dadd. But I did manage to borrow Joseph Noel Paton’s magnificent fairy painting, a scene from Midsummer Night’s Dream, Carter’s favourite Shakespeare play, which connects with her last novel Wise Children. Another frustration was not being able to get any of Frieda Kahlo’s work, since most of it is in Mexico and we could only borrow work from the UK. Fiona joined in the hunt. Carter had popularised Kahlo in Britain when she brought out a box of postcard reproductions of her paintings, but I did manage to obtain the art work of her friend and fellow-painter Leonora Carrington, who had also lived in Mexico, and that made up for it.
“It was a euphoric moment for us all when I managed to get the Chagall” (Marie Mulvey-Roberts).
FR: For me the process of sourcing the contemporary works in the exhibition started with what art works and artists sprang to mind when the exhibition was proposed. I then did internet searches, checked out galleries, initially ones I knew of that dealt in edgy work like Charlie Smiths in London, and then widened that search by going to Art Fairs where hundreds of galleries exhibit. I saw Heather Nevay’s work at the London Art Fair and having requested one small work, The Murder, went on to commission a larger piece, The Lesson, from her. Thanks to Andrew Kelly, the Director of the Festival of Ideas, The Arts Council gave us a grant which I split four ways to commission work from four artists. The other three commissioned works were Untitled Forest by Sarah Woodfine, Tessa Farmer’s installation The Forest Assassins and Wendy Mayer’s powerful sculpture of two baby’s heads in a vase, The Parting Gift.
wendy-mayer-the-parting-gift
The Parting Gift by Wendy Mayer
All of the artists who were approached were keen to be involved in the show and I went for a combination of big names like Ana Maria Pacheco, the Irish artist Alice Maher and Eileen Cooper and less well-know artists. But the selection was always driven by a desire to show work which paralleled Angela Carter’s ideas, rather than illustrating them. Borrowing from contemporary artists is relatively straightforward since you are dealing either with the artists or their gallery and there are no issues around payment for the reproduction of images for example. Only one work, Wendy Elia’s Maxime, came from a public collection and that too was a very unproblematic loan. Securing the Ana Maria Pacheco The Banquet was a real coup although initially I had requested the whole of the three-part installation comprising Some exercise of Power, The Acrobats as well as The Banquet. However it transpired that because of the weight we could not show The Acrobats on the first floor so the decision was made to just some one element of it. In the event The Banquet fills the room and is extremely powerful.
“[T]he selection was always driven by a desire to show work which paralleled Angela Carter’s ideas, rather than illustrating them” (Fiona Robinson).
ana-maria-pacheco-the-banquet
The Banquet by Ana Maria Pacheco
The historical work was more difficult since there is a long run up time with requesting work from museums and major collections so you have to decide more than a year in advance what you want and then are faced with the problem that if that loan is turned down there isn’t time to get something from somewhere else. It was always necessary to have a plan B in terms of being prepared to compromise with the first choice and source works that were available. Some loans were confirmed very late. Karl Wescke’s Leda and the Swan needed expensive restoration and the cost was going to be prohibitive for the RWA but in the event the lenders contributed to that. However the loan was only actually confirmed a few weeks before the show opened which was nerve-racking.
CS: Which works by Angela Carter inspired the exhibition? And can you describe Carter’s relationship to art? Where does Carter write about art: in her fiction, in her journalism, in her private journals, or all three?
the-holy-family-album
Angela Carter’s The Holy Family Album (1991)
MMR: Carter’s film The Holy Family Album inspired the inclusion of three religious paintings by Stanley Spencer, William Holman Hunt and Arnulf Rainer in a side gallery, which appropriately resembles a Gothic chapel. The book Carter edited Wayward Girls and Wicked Women has a story by the Surrealist writer and artist Leonora Carrington. As Carter has been seen as a Surrealist in prose, it was important to have Surrealism within the exhibition and Carrington was an obvious choice. I managed to secure a couple of her paintings and the drawing, “I am an Amateur of Velocipedes”, which I associated with Carter’s vampire story in her most well-known collection The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories. It shows a man riding a bicycle with an eroticised female figure whose body is fused with the bicycle (her arm extends into a handlebar), trundling along on spokes resembling human bones. In “The Lady of the House of Love”, Carter’s Gothic blood-sucking Sleeping Beauty chateau is visited by the innocent and unwitting Hero, who arrives on a bicycle and imagines spiriting away this pale girlish occupant, presumably on his bicycle. It was a huge bonus to have been given permission to exhibit a typed copy of the manuscript, especially since it is my favourite story! Carter wrote about art in her journalism and there are reviews of exhibitions and of art books reproduced in the posthumous collection of her writings Shaking a Leg, for which Charlotte Crofts turns out to have been the researcher. Carter’s unpublished translation of a French book on sexuality and surrealism can also be found among her private papers. She wrote about art in her letters, where she conveys a deep love for Rembrandt, but unfortunately, his work was out of our reach.
“In ‘The Lady of the House of Love’, Carter’s Gothic blood-sucking Sleeping Beauty chateau is visited by the innocent and unwitting Hero, who arrives on a bicycle and imagines spiriting away this pale girlish occupant, presumably on his bicycle. It was a huge bonus to have been given permission to exhibit a typed copy of the manuscript, especially since it is my favourite story!” (Marie Mulvey-Roberts)
FR: Carter’s novels: Wise Children, The Magic Toyshop and Nights at the Circus seem to have been the most popular with artists who made work specially for the exhibition. The three most referenced stories were ‘The Bloody Chamber’, ‘Company of Wolves’, and ‘The Erl King’.
CS: How does this exhibition represent Angela Carter? What would you say are the dominant qualities of the exhibition?
“Fundamentally [the exhibition] makes concrete the visual quality of her writing and its diversity” (Marie Mulvey-Roberts).
MMR: Fundamentally it makes concrete the visual quality of her writing and its diversity. It includes the work of painters who were important to her, as well as touching on themes in her fiction which reference art. She once said that she had wanted to write like Chagall painted – so we had to have a painting by him. She also loved the pre-Raphaelites, especially Millais’s Ophelia. loveThe artist heroine Annabel in Love, a novel set in Bristol, is obsessed by the figure of Ophelia and we managed to get hold of a haunting holograph of the drowning Ophelia by the Bristol artist and performers, Davy and Kristin McGuire. Then there were artists who have been associated with Carter, most notably Paula Rego, whose representations of women are both bookish and bold. Her illustrations of Jane Eyre put me in mind of the sequel to the Brontë novel, which Carter planned but never lived long enough to write. There are two of Rego’s book illustrations in the show, “Him” and “Moth”, from Blake Morrison’s book of poems, Pendle Witches (1996). The first is of an encounter between a girl and a man with a wolf’s head, which is evocative of Carter’s “The Company of Wolves”. The second shows a woman resembling a large doll straddling a wooden chest, as a doll-like child holds onto her frock with its frilly petticoat. The poem is about a moth, “this ghost of the wardrobe”, whose fur resembles the ermine it flies into and who is compared to a flighty woman. Rego’s aquatint gives the viewer the impression of looking back into the past, like a sepia-tinted aged photograph, or even of peering back into the woman’s childhood. Through her fairy stories for adults, Carter, like Rego, brings the worlds of the adult and child closer together. Rego’s The Artist in her Studio is indicative of Carter’s interest in women artists, and the number of women artists in this exhibition, unusually far out-number that of male artists.
“Rego’s The Artist in her Studio is indicative of Carter’s interest in women artists, and the number of women artists in this exhibition, unusually far out-number that of male artists” (Marie Mulvey-Roberts).
FR: Apart from the items which belonged to Angela Carter or which predate her, the work in the show reveals in some way or another a response to Carter either as defined by the artists or identified by the curators. The significance of this exhibition lies in its ability to reveal to a new generation of readers the extent of Carter’s influence on cultural thinking and feminism. Her highly original way of writing and use of language has not just influenced writers who came after her but, together with her very visual storytelling, has been a gift to artists. The contemporary work is edgy, hard-hitting and uncompromising, and parallels a similar disregard for the niceties of polite society and acceptable behaviour in Carter’s writing.
“The significance of this exhibition lies in its ability to reveal to a new generation of readers the extent of Carter’s influence on cultural thinking and feminism” (Fiona Robinson).
CS: A number of works on display in the exhibition were directly inspired by Carter’s writings. Why do you think she has spoken to these artists and inspired them to respond? Have any of the artists vocalised this with either of you?
FR: Carter’s iconoclastic attitude seems to appeal to contemporary artists. The richness of her narratives and her alternative views of social interaction and family relationships was always likely to appeal to a certain anarchic seam in artists’ work particularly in work which is political. Many artists, from whom I sourced work for the exhibition, had read Carter in their student days. Others reading it for the first time, were similarly entranced by her powers of description, her idiosyncratic use of language and her fearlessness in tackling subjects which were taboo for other writers.
“Carter’s iconoclastic attitude seems to appeal to contemporary artists. The richness of her narratives and her alternative views of social interaction and family relationships was always likely to appeal to a certain anarchic seam in artists’ work” (Fiona Robinson).
tessa-farmer-the-forest-assassins-2
Detail from The Forest Assassins by Tessa Farmer
Tessa Farmer has spoken about the way she used both ‘The Erl-King’ and ‘The Company of Wolves’ as inspiration for her installation The Forest Assassins. She says that, “The piece evokes the unsettling stillness of the woods and their lurking threats that can engulf you.” The title of the installation came from this quote in “The Company of Wolves”: “But those eyes are all you will be able to glimpse of the forest assassins as they cluster invisibly round your smell of meat as you go through the wood unwisely late. They will be like shadows, they will be like wraiths, grey members of a congregation of nightmare”. Wendy Mayer, whose startling sculpture Not Waving but Drowning, a life-size baby dressed in rags, trapped in a box, commented that although she was not conscious of the influence of Carter on her work, in retrospect she could see the parallels.
20170112_154529.jpg
Detail from Not Waving but Drowning by Wendy Mayer
CS: Might this exhibition change our view of Angela Carter and her work, and if so, how? And what has her legacy been so far? How is that legacy changing?
MMR: Tellingly, Carter revealed that her working method was to start with the images, and then “grope” for the words. So here we have gone full circle in a way by going back from word to image. The exhibition should make people more aware of the importance of art and the visual to her life and work and encourage them to see another side to her as a writer. Her legacy has often been limited to her use of fairy tales, but there is far more to her than that. Her interests were wide-ranging and included art, music and philosophy, etc… To the discerning, these are also detectable within her fairy-tales themselves. Carter’s multi-disciplinarity is now being explored by scholars which is indicative of how her legacy continues to evolve.
“Carter revealed that her working method was to start with the images, and then “grope” for the words. So here we have gone full circle in a way by going back from word to image” (Marie Mulvey-Roberts).
FR: I am not sure that it will change people’s perceptions of Angela Carter but it, along with the 25th anniversary, is likely to see her work becoming popular with a new generation of readers and also result in people re-reading her work. In fact Eileen Cooper, whose work Tail of the Tiger is in the show, said about Carter: “Her writing is image rich, which I adore. In fact I am going to reread them all!”
nicola-bealing
Tail of the Tiger by Eileen Cooper
CS: Can you pick a favourite piece from the exhibition and can you tell me why you chose it?
“Some have told me that there should have been a warning notice about what lies behind the curtain shielding the doorway, which reminded me of the heroine of “The Bloody Chamber” entering the forbidden room, which resembles a torture chamber” (Marie Mulvey-Roberts).
MMR: The Banquet by Ana Maria Pacheco is a very powerful sculpture which takes up an entire gallery consisting of chunky male figures with enormous heads, piercing eyes and real prosthetic human teeth, surrounding a life-size figure of a naked man lying on a table, his body taut, presumably with terror. The lighting is low, the gallery painted a specific grey. The work is open to multiple interpretations, as is Carter’s own work of course. As Pacheco left Brazil in the 1970s at a time of political repression, it is tempting to see this as a representative of political repression. It is a single component of a three-part installation, called Some Exercise of Power. The title of the piece is suggestive of cannibalism and the family resemblance of the figures is indicative of in-breeding. Carter had once said that the two great themes of the Gothic are cannibalism and incest. It is also possible to see the prostrate figure as a symbol of religious sacrifice. Carter was a very political, ardently anti-religious and demythologising writer and this installation can be seen to embody the cruelty and fear of a repressive ideology, projected onto a powerless individual. Many visitors find it a disturbing and even shocking encounter with an inner, as well as an outer, darkness. Some have told me that there should have been a warning notice about what lies behind the curtain shielding the doorway, which reminded me of the heroine of “The Bloody Chamber” entering the forbidden room, which resembles a torture chamber.
“Carter was a very political, ardently anti-religious and demythologising writer and this installation can be seen to embody the cruelty and fear of a repressive ideology, projected onto a powerless individual” (Marie Mulvey-Roberts).
FR: Sarah Woodfine’s Castle is one of my favourites. Like many of the pieces in the show it is deceptive. Initially it entrances you because it references those childhood snow globes that you turn upside down and then it snows on the landscape inside. It also has the romanticism of the castle. But then there are other readings. The isolated Castle with its empty landscape and Gothic turrets is sinister as if it is waiting for something to happen. The turrets look like pencils but they are also phallic shapes. Imprisoned in water the castle is trapped, it cannot escape and yet when you view the piece from certain angles it disappears completely!
sarah-woodfine-castle
Castle by Sarah Woodfine
CS: Can you talk a little about the pieces from Carter’s own life? How were these chosen and why?
“A visitor looking in the display case containing her fountain pen is reported to have said that it represented the single most important part of the exhibition. For me, handling it felt like holding a sacred relic” (Marie Mulvey-Roberts).
MMR: A visitor looking in the display case containing her fountain pen is reported to have said that it represented the single most important part of the exhibition. For me, handling it felt like holding a sacred relic. Its positioning, adjacent to two of Carter’s own art works, quintessentially brings together literature and art, which is what we set out to do throughout the exhibition. It was a real coup to include Carter’s own art work in the show, particularly since it has never before been on public display, and not least because she created art in the very same building. Another important and neglected aspect of Carter’s life and work is her contribution to the folksong revival of the 1960s – unique to the time she spent in Bristol. With her husband music producer, Paul Carter, she founded a folk-club in the city, notated folk songs and helped record for his record label folk singers, preserving their voices before they were lost forever. There is evidence of these activities in a display case, above which are head-phones bringing back from 1967 the eerie sound of Carter singing and playing the English concertina (you can hear an extract which accompanies an interview I did on Front Row for Radio 4). This is the only known recording of her singing and playing and was made possible with the help of Chris Molan, whose painting of Angela singing with her husband Paul is also on display there too. I succeeded in getting originals of the first appearance in print of “The Company of Wolves” and “The Erl-King” in the form of Bananas, a literary magazine, prior to their publication in her collection of short stories, The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories, and a copy of the exquisitely illustrated book version of Carter’s tale “The Tiger’s Bride”, brought out posthumously. The artist is Corinna Sargood, Carter’s most well-known illustrator (there are several others in the show too) and we are so pleased that she lent us so much of her work and came along to the preview. It was a privilege to have been able to display the tropically-themed screen which Corinna painted for the celebration of Carter’s life following her premature death on 16 February 1992 and to have a copy on display of one of the invitations which she also drew and designed.
“Corinna Sargood, Carter’s most well-known illustrator […] lent us so much of her work and came along to the preview” (Marie Mulvey-Roberts).
CS: What do you imagine Carter would have made of the exhibition, had she lived to see it?
MMR: People who knew Carter assure me that she would have been pleased with it. As for the location, she had left Bristol, the folk scene and her first marriage far behind for pastures new. The one time we met, I invited her back to the city, which she refused in no uncertain terms, and that has made me feel a bit uneasy about bringing her back, as it were, through the exhibition, but I hope that she wouldn’t have minded.
FR: I hope she would have liked it and been intrigued by it. She would no doubt have loved seeing the Chagall since he was a painter which she was fond of.
CS: What has the reaction been like, from Angela Carter fans, experts and those not acquainted with her writing?
MMR: The praise has been incredible. I never anticipated that it would have the response it has had. It has been quite over-whelming at times and fantastic that it has encouraged people to re-read her work and others to read it for the first time. That is exactly what I had hoped for.
FR: The reaction to the show across all types of visitors has been amazing with lots of very positive remarks about how exciting it is. It has had a lot of attention on social media and Anna McNay wrote a glowing review in Studio International.
CS: There have been a number of related events, such as the Fireworks conference and a concert. Were these events all planned at the same time? How did this broad range of events come together?
strange-worlds-concert
MMR: It has generated so much creativity, some planned, some not. Carter is such an important writer, that I was determined to organise an international conference rather than hold a relatively small and more localised symposium. As a result, the conference attracted delegates from around the world – Japan (where Carter lived for a few years and which had an immense influence on her work), USA, Australia, Switzerland, Sweden, France, Portugal, etc… The conference lived up to its title “Fireworks: The Visual Imagination of Angela Carter” (taken incidentally from a book of her short stories, many inspired by Japan) with excellent papers and discussions. For the final session, Charlotte and I arranged a unique and one-off installation, which consisted of her mini cinema theatre which she had built called The Fleapit, projecting films which we commissioned specially for the conference from around the world. For this, we hired the Dark Studio at the Arnolfini UWE City Campus, on the second day of the conference, where we also exhibited Layla Holzer’s Magic Theatre (she led a workshop at the RWA on Shadow Puppets on Sat 18 Feb) and screened Carter’s The Holy Family Album as a silent backdrop to the discussion Charlotte and I had with the producer John Ellis. After the conference ended, we moved from the Dark Studio to the real darkness outside for a group photo on the waterfront with delegates holding sparklers – fireworks indeed!
magic-theatre-cropped 20170110_171119
FR: The RWA normally stages some sort of conference or symposium with all its major exhibitions. The Fireworks Conference was put on the schedule early on in the process and at a later date UWE took it on and the bulk of it was organised by Marie and Charlotte Crofts. The concert by New Music in the South West was organised by their director Julian Leeks as part of their regular programme of commissioning composers to respond to art works. Other events happened in response to the exhibition and not planned in advance. The book signing and talks that Marie and I gave at Waterstones Piccadilly were set up by Sansom who published the Catalogue of the exhibition and the Art History in the Pub was organised by the Association of Art Historians in Bristol.
strange-worlds-catalogue
CS: What other Angela Carter events can people look forward to in the future, in Bristol or elsewhere?
angela-carter-folk-song-poster-rwa-2017
MMR: I am helping to organise a folk concert in the gallery on Sunday 5 March 2.00-4.00 with Chris Molan, the artist and folk-singer, who was a great friend of Angela Carter. This will be a tremendously exciting event as it brings together people who sang with Carter, for the first time in 50 years. I will be doing the very final readings on the last day of the exhibition on 19 March at 3.00 followed by my last curator’s tour. These will be from “The Lady of the House of Love” and “The Loves of Lady Purple” – two undead femme fatales – a vampire, and a puppet who comes back to life. For more information about this and other events, see the website I built with Charlotte Crofts – getangelacarter.com.
FR: Sarah Woodfine, who is exhibiting in the exhibition, is doing a special weekend drawing workshop on the 11th and 12th March.
CS: Thank you both for your time and for a wonderful discussion.
marie-mulvey-robertsMarie Mulvey-Roberts is Associate Professor of English Literature at the University of West of England, Bristol. Marie’s research interests range widely, from eighteenth-century literature to Gothic Romanticism, especially Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, and from human rights issues to Angela Carter. Marie is the author of several books, including Dangerous Bodies: Historicising the Gothic Corporeal (Manchester University Press, 2016), and she is editor of The Handbook of the Gothic (Palgrave, 2009) and Literary Bristol: Writers and the City (Redcliffe, 2015). Marie is currently editing a book called The Arts of Angela Carter: A Cabinet of Curiosities for Manchester University Press. She is also the editor-in-chief and co-founder of the journal Women’s Writing.
Fiona Robinson cropped.jpgFiona Robinson is a British artist whose primary practice is drawing. Her works “reference landscape, architectural spaces, music and literature focusing on the relationship between repetition, process and denouement across different art forms”. Her past projects include “site-specific drawings commissioned by The National Trust for High Cross House, Dartington and drawings centered on the repetition in a short story, La Plage by the French Nouveau Roman writer Alain Robbe Grillet”. Her recent work “prioritises music looking at the interaction between sound, mark-making and diverse drawing materials”. Fiona has won numerous prizes, including the Drawing Prize at the Royal West of England Academy Open Exhibition, Bristol (2011), First Prize in the University of Bath Painting Prize (2007), and third prize at the 4th International Biennale of Drawing in Sydney, Australia (2007). She was elected an Academician of the Royal West of England Academy in 2012 and is a Fellow of the Ballinglen Arts Foundation Co. Mayo. For information about Fiona’s work, head over to the RWA profile page here or to Fiona’s own official website here.
For more details of all the associated events at the RWA, head over to their website by clicking here. To find out more about Strange Worlds: The Vision of Angela Carter, click here. Finally, for news about all the events that are taking place as part of the Get Angela Carter festival, head over to the official website here.
Share this:
TwitterFacebook43Google
Posted in Adaptation, Art, Biography, Cultural Criticism, Discussion, Fairy Tales, Gothic, Horror, Interviews, Literary Criticism, MusicTagged Angela Carter, Bristol, Fiona Robinson, Interviews, Marie Mulvey-Roberts, RWA, Strange Worlds
Post navigation
Review: ‘The Snow, The Crow, The Blood’ by Layla HolzerOfficial Website for Edmund Gordon
3 thoughts on “Interview with Marie Mulvey-Roberts and Fiona Robinson”
Pingback: Angela Carter’s Folksong and Music Session – Angela Carter Online
Pingback: Strange Worlds Poetry Competition – Angela Carter Online
Pingback: WHAT LIES BENEATH STRANGE WORLDS: THE VISION OF ANGELA CARTER? – Bristol Women's Voice
8/12/2017 General OneFile - Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=ITOF&ts=1502588323549 1/6
Print Marked Items
Pleasure in the Eighteenth Century
Mary Lindemann
Journal of Social History.
31.4 (Summer 1998): p961.
COPYRIGHT 1998 Oxford University Press
https://academic.oup.com/journals
Full Text:
Edited by Roy Porter and Marie Mulvey Roberts (New York: New York University Press, 1997. xv plus 273pp.
$35.00).
"De gustibus, non disputandum," and pleasure seems as fickle and individualized as taste. Certainly pleasure has no
simple definition or universally accepted meaning. Pleasure in the Eighteenth Century recognizes the ambiguities of
pleasure and historicizes what may initially seem an ahistorical or even nonhistorical topic. The contributors all accept
"that pleasure came into its own in the eighteenth century," when for the first time sensual pleasures came to be viewed
as "legitimate, fulfilling and to be encouraged." (pp. 1-2) Obviously none of these authors believes that no one enjoyed
him- or herself before 1700. The volume as a whole, however, argues that in the eighteenth century pleasure came to be
condoned as a good in itself and viewed as morally valid.
Pleasure takes many forms and this collection addresses several enjoyments of mind, body, and soul. Roy Porter's
introductory essay on "Enlightenment and Pleasure" gets the volume off to a rousing start. Porter sketches out how the
Enlightenment legitimized a "rational hedonism . . . that the pursuit of pleasure would advance the general good." (p.
17) Eighteenth-century thinkers in championing individualism and stressing rights of self-determination and selfimprovement,
developed the concept of earthly happiness. The age separated enjoyment from sin and elevated it to a
basic human right. Crucial to this evolution from guilty pleasures to permissible, even virtuous, ones were the
contributions of those two Enlightenment betes noires - Bernard Mandeville and Thomas Hobbes - who saw prosperity
in vice and located the advancement of the commonweal in greed and self-aggrandizement. Porter follows this
introduction with an intensely vivid picture of the material pleasures of eighteenth-century consumer society, reminding
us of those "Georgian delights" J. H. Plumb described so brilliantly almost twenty years ago. Eighteenth-century people
consumed as never before, not only porcelain and calicoes, umbrellas and sets of silver, but also food, drink, sex,
spectacles, sport, and culture.
Whereas Porter focuses on the material pleasures of the eighteenth century, the other essays in the volume turn
elsewhere: the pleasures of homosociality, the pleasures of opera, the pleasures of "doing good," and the pleasures of
terror, for example. With only one exception - Simon Varey's slight article on "The Pleasures of the Table" - the rest of
the contributors are far more concerned with what might best be termed the aesthetics of pleasure rather than its
experience. To be sure, experience is not totally neglected. Marie Mulvey Roberts's article on homosociality and clubs
portrays the pleasures of club-life as, in part, a chance to enter into make-believe worlds and to enjoy the shared
satisfaction of good company. Still, this essay (like others in the volume) is marred by a series of "may haves" and
"might have beens" that leave the reader quite rightly wondering whether real people ever had such feelings. For
example, Roberts suggests that one of the reasons "why men excluded women [from clubs] was that their presence may
have inhibited them from finding the female in themselves." (Emphasis mine, p. 75) Similarly, Vivien Jones in her
discussion of how to analyze conduct books provocatively suggests that such literature was perhaps read in a manner
quite different from what its authors intended. But again we find ourselves in the world of wishful thinking. Jones
writes "on behalf of numerous historical readers who, I want to believe, read conduct books more actively and
unpredictably, more resistantly, than the texts - and some modern accounts - seem to assume." (Emphasis mine, p. 112)
Other excellent opportunities to explore the worlds of pleasure are missed. E.J. Clery's article on "The Pleasure of
Terror" sounds extremely promising: one expects to learn about the delights of fright. And this is indeed how the article
8/12/2017 General OneFile - Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=ITOF&ts=1502588323549 2/6
begins, with Gothic romance and the "pleasurable" experience of being scared out of one's wits. But Clery quickly
moves away from this orientation and toward the "reevaluation of terror in aesthetic theory," eschewing a closer look at
"the production and consumption of the terrible." (p. 166) In fact, the article is not much more than a perceptive, if
narrow, examination of Edmund Burke's Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and
Beautiful (1757).
The geographical focus is England, and only Porter thinks to justify this choice in terms of England's preeminence as an
eighteenth-century consumer society. The choice of pleasures examined is one-sided, and the authors consistently avoid
topics that might have offered greater room to explore the experience of pleasure rather than merely its philosophy.
What about, for instance, the pleasure of work? Certainly eighteenth-century businessmen were as industrious as they
were leisure - and luxury - loving. The joys of combat, too, should not be undervalued whether we are talking about
spectator sports (bull-baiting and prizefighting, for instance), the manly art of self-defense, or dueling. The pleasure of
display - of clothes, gardens, uniforms, and curiosities - was as satiating and as characteristic of eighteenth-century life
as were the satisfactions of the table and the bed. And we should not fail to mention the pleasure taken in success - in
business, at court, in empire building. Of course, when broadly defined the catalog of pleasures is unending and one
cannot expect every topic to receive attention if a volume of essays is not to swell to gargantuan proportions. What is,
however, striking is how few historians are represented here. Historians do not, of course, have a monopoly on the
examination of culture. Still, the relative absence of the historical voice perhaps accounts for the curiously flat character
of a set of essays more concerned with dissecting the aesthetics of pleasure than documenting its substance and
celebrating its abundance.
While it is unfair to suggest that the articles in this volume totally fail to grapple with the experiencing of pleasure, few
convey effectively the energy this pleasure-creating and pleasure-consuming society must have generated. The
exuberant consumers of Porter's two essays, the richness of the age's entertainments, and even the occasional cruelty
and perversity of its pleasures, fade all too rapidly. Little consideration is given to the meaning of pleasure to those who
felt it. Likewise the presupposition that supposedly drives the book - that pleasure came into its own in the eighteenth
century - is, after the first thirty-five pages, never plumbed in any depth. Nor is there much attempt to understand why
the eighteenth century gave birth to the cult of pleasure at all. It is ironic that a book about pleasure can be so bland.
When and how did these dreary souls come to replace the enterprising and often raunchy Georgians Hogarth portrayed?
Mary Lindemann Carnegie Mellon University
Source Citation (MLA 8
th Edition)
Lindemann, Mary. "Pleasure in the Eighteenth Century." Journal of Social History, vol. 31, no. 4, 1998, p. 961+.
General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA20870405&it=r&asid=f2d33ffa50577af0a8aa8b87bcb4eaae.
Accessed 12 Aug. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A20870405
8/12/2017 General OneFile - Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=ITOF&ts=1502588323549 3/6
Pleasure in the Eighteenth Century
PHILIP CARTER
The English Historical Review.
113.454 (Nov. 1998): p1324.
COPYRIGHT 1998 Oxford University Press
http://ehr.oxfordjournals.org/
Full Text:
Hogarth's 1733 The Laughing Audience is an appropriate cover illustration for Roy Porter's and Marie Mulvey
Roberts's edition of Pleasure in the Eighteenth Century (London: Macmillan, 1996; pp. xv+273. 38 [pounds sterling];
pb. 13.99 [pounds sterling]). The imagemen and women enjoying a theatrical performance while, in the boxes, fops flirt
with the orange-sellers -- echoes several subjects in this volume, including the pleasures of sociability, food, opera and
the opposite sex. Hogarth has other things to tell the historian of pleasure. According to Porter, Hogarth's world as
reproduced in works like Southwark Fair (for which The Laughing Audience was a subscription ticket) was one in
which good times were had not just by a lascivious elite or the feckless poor but also by respectable bourgeois families
more used to industry and prayer. This idea that `pleasure came into its own in the eighteenth century' is the subject of
Porter's two chapters which begin the volume. While aware that pleasure was not `invented' in the period, he argues for
a shift in the intellectual and economic climate during the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century which
stimulated a new culture of pleasure. Through Mandeville's iconoclasm, Hume and Smith's conjectural histories, and
Bentham's theory of the `felicific calculus', moral absolutes were contextualized, and pleasure became a source not of
ruin but social unity and productivity. In daily life, pleasure stemmed most readily from the results of this productivity;
a vibrant commercial economy keeping the nation in material goods, making for a life not just of beer and skittles but
also coffee and theatre. Of the essays that follow, the more successful place their specific case-study within this broad
historical context. Vivian Jones's chapter on pleasure and conduct literature, Carolyn D. Williams's essay on pleasure
and the Royal Humane Society, and E. J. Clery's discussion of pleasure in Burke's Philosophical Treatise are good
examples of this. Clery also demonstrates that many commentators continued to view pleasure with ambivalence,
something which is implied rather than boldly stated in the volume as a whole. The fact that Hogarth's laughing
audience contains a scowling critic or that the engraving was also used as a ticket for the tragedy of The Rake's
Progress therefore goes undiscussed. Other essays, while interesting, lack this specific focus on contemporary attitudes
to pleasure. Simon Varey's `The Pleasures of the Table' or Derek Alsop's piece on Italian opera are more concerned with
the enjoyment or happiness to be had from food and continental music. This is at odds with Roberts's brief discussion
of post-structuralist theory in which histories of happiness and desire are distinguished from the `taboo' subject of
pleasure. Certainly pleasure can be derived from misery, although there is little discussion of this apparent inversion in
a volume where pleasure is stimulated by virtuous, risque, corrupting but never mentally or physically painful pursuits.
Some reference to the pleasures to be had from that quintessentially eighteenth-century affliction, melancholy, would
have been welcomed, for example. Ultimately, the absence of any rigorous discussion of the methodological
approaches to, or the meanings and etymology of, pleasure means that the volume works better as a collection of
interesting essays rather than as a clear, focused investigation of a historical theme.
PHILIP CARTER
Wolfson College, Oxford
Source Citation (MLA 8
th Edition)
CARTER, PHILIP. "Pleasure in the Eighteenth Century." The English Historical Review, vol. 113, no. 454, 1998, p.
1324. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA53706931&it=r&asid=304eec93ef3f6b69a015e4d8ab8ec2a2.
Accessed 12 Aug. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A53706931
8/12/2017 General OneFile - Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=ITOF&ts=1502588323549 4/6
The Handbook of the gothic
K.P. Ljungquist
CHOICE: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries.
47.6 (Feb. 2010): p1062.
COPYRIGHT 2010 American Library Association CHOICE
http://www.ala.org/acrl/choice/about
Full Text:
47-3001 PN3435 2009-15113 CIP
The Handbook of the gothic, ed. by Marie Mulvey-Roberts. 2nd ed. New York University, 2009. 355p bibl filmography
index ISBN 9780814796016, $75.00; ISBN 9780814796023, $25.00
Originally published as The Handbook to Gothic Literature (CH, Dec'98, 36-2007), this guidebook, in its second
edition, contains new entries on such celebrated figures in the supernatural tradition as Susan Hill, Shirley Jackson,
Stephen King, and Daphne du Maurier. Thematic entries have also been added: the book now includes discussion of
children's literature, humor, music, medicine, graphic novels, and comics. Contributions on film and drama in the
original edition have been revised and expanded into a new, highly detailed filmography. A final section, "Gothic
Locations," traces the impact of the genre in regard to place from Anglo-Caribbean to African American writers. As
Mulvey-Roberts (English, Univ. of the West of England, UK) acknowledges, reference works on gothicism have
proliferated; but this volume contains entries by recognized authorities in the field (Clive Bloom, E. J. Clery, Benjamin
Fisher, Robert Miles, Victor Sage, and Alan Lloyd Smith). Given the British academic affiliations of the majority of the
contributors, the treatment of some American writers (such as Edith Wharton and Mary Wilkins Freeman) is thin.
Useful and accessible, the expanded bibliography is divided into subsections: anthologies, general studies, and gender
and the gothic. Summing Up: Recommended. ** Upper-division undergraduates through faculty.--K. P. Ljungquist,
Worcester Polytechnic Institute
Ljungquist, K.P.
Source Citation (MLA 8
th Edition)
Ljungquist, K.P. "The Handbook of the gothic." CHOICE: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries, Feb. 2010, p.
1062+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA251859883&it=r&asid=9d5a3dd82b26beaa2ad000c7d715d007.
Accessed 12 Aug. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A251859883
8/12/2017 General OneFile - Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=ITOF&ts=1502588323549 5/6
Writing for their lives; death row U.S.A.
Reference & Research Book News.
22.2 (May 2007):
COPYRIGHT 2007 Ringgold, Inc.
http://www.ringgold.com/
Full Text:
9780252070990
Writing for their lives; death row U.S.A.
Ed. by Marie Mulvey-Roberts.
U. of Illinois Press
2007
304 pages
$19.95
Paperback
HV8699
Comprising an extended and impassioned plea for the removal of the death sentence, poems, interviews, short stories,
reports, correspondence, and essays describe the Death Row experience. This collection includes works by offenders--
looking deeper inside themselves than they have before; lawyers, who ruminate on alternatives to the death sentence;
journalists who describe the death chamber and the event itself; and families of the victims and the executed, who
discuss their experiences. An enclosed sister in the UK recalls her contacts with those enclosed by crime rather than
faith in the US.
([c]20072005 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR)
Source Citation (MLA 8
th Edition)
"Writing for their lives; death row U.S.A." Reference & Research Book News, May 2007. General OneFile,
go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA162864483&it=r&asid=2d2a0a7a31dc244c3305ca026cca5721.
Accessed 12 Aug. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A162864483
8/12/2017 General OneFile - Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=ITOF&ts=1502588323549 6/6
Mulvey-Roberts, Marie. Dangerous bodies:
historicising the Gothic corporeal
J.A. Saklofske
CHOICE: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries.
54.2 (Oct. 2016): p205.
COPYRIGHT 2016 American Library Association CHOICE
http://www.ala.org/acrl/choice/about
Full Text:
Mulvey-Roberts, Marie. Dangerous bodies: historicising the Gothic corporeal. Manchester University Press, 2016.
258p bibl index ISBN 9780719085413 cloth, $ 110.00; ISBN 9781784996758 ebook, contact publisher for price
(cc)
54-0536
PN56
MARC
This well-researched, detailed reinterpretation of a number of Gothic literary and cinematic works demonstrates that
demonization of the Other via monstrous bodies can be traced to historical instances of institutional prosecution and
acts of war. Mulvey-Roberts (Univ. of the West of England, UK) demonstrates the complex response to Catholic
perceptions of blood in Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto (1764) and Matthew Gregory Lewis's The Monk
(1796); explores the discourses of slavery that run through Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley's Frankenstein (1818);
connects the brutal history of female genital mutilation in Western medicine to Bram Stoker's Dracula (1897); unpacks
the antiSemitism that fed cinematic figures of Nosferatu; and draws a broad connection between vampirism and 20thcentury
warfare. The overall argument, as presented in the conclusion, is that "the body is a potential site of monstrosity
for those who do not fit into the body politic." That these monsters persist after such historical moments is perhaps the
most frightening thing of all. Mulvey-Roberts acknowledges related studies, e.g., Judith Halberstam's Skin Shows (CH,
Mar'96, 33-3759), and includes excellent notes and a thorough bibliography. The chapters are well, though loosely,
integrated into a holistic argument, but historical detail sometimes obscures the focus on the Gothic body, and some
connections appear speculative and forced. Summing Up: ** Recommended. Lower-division undergraduates through
faculty; general readers.--J. A. Saklofske, Acadia University
Saklofske, J.A.
Source Citation (MLA 8
th Edition)
Saklofske, J.A. "Mulvey-Roberts, Marie. Dangerous bodies: historicising the Gothic corporeal." CHOICE: Current
Reviews for Academic Libraries, Oct. 2016, p. 205. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA479868757&it=r&asid=f91cc58e5af638b77370c9a1a60d6e1f.
Accessed 12 Aug. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A479868757
Review
Dangerous Bodies: Historicising the Gothic Corporeal by Marie Mulvey Roberts
(Manchester University Press 2016. pp 258 +xiii)
Review by Gina Wisker
Marie Mulvey Roberts’ Dangerous Bodies is that rare, fine, rich mix of the scholarly and the visceral, perfectly suited to its topic of the Gothic corpus and corporeality, the text, context and the (usually bleeding) body. Dangerous Bodies dissects the literary corpus of the Gothic in its cultural and historical context, starting with the early literary days of tales of dangers, dank corridors, and bleeding nuns. Its intent is ‘to expose real-life horrors lying beneath the fictional terror and horror of gothic literature and film’ (p. 1), concentrating on the persecutors and persecuted, the gruesome and the occasionally disgusting (where the disgust of some vile oppressor concerning women’s bodies, blood, the Other is usually the problem). One of its unique contributions is to unflinchingly deal with abject bodies, fluids and behaviours, exposing as themselves the demons, those who perpetrate the abjection and the terrible invasive controlling violence which results from this abjection. The both brutal and intellectually informed power operated by the church, the law, medical science and the state is seen to cause political and personal, bodily invasion, mistreatment, a violent injustice born of fanaticism. Such physically brutal, bloody violence springs at varied times from the excesses of Catholicism, slavery, mutilation of women’s bodies, to the horrors of several wars, particularly the First World War and the Vietnam War. All of this sounds really quite excessive, and it is, richly excessive, but never the excess of pantomime, of the seeking after the showy, of mere shock and gore.
Each torment and bodily abjection, bodily invasion, each chapter of blood and Gothic horror is deeply steeped in the meticulous detail of very fine scholarship. This includes some extraordinary horrible propaganda images, especially in both ‘Nazis, Jews and Nosferatu’ (ch. 4) and ‘The vampire of war’ (ch. 5). The relentless tracking down of Gothic turns in historical moments presents an unarguable case concerning the dangers in which physical bodies (and minds) are placed under the distortions of grand controlling ideas about the regulation of the physical, particularly the sexual, female sexuality, the individual, and of inferiority regarding race and gender. The book is concerned about the laws and the medical, political and religious arguments concerning ownership of bodies and property, which lead to and licence degradation, castration, enslavement, brutalisation of bodies and of the lifeblood of the people whose bodies are under exploitation – by the organs of political, psychological and bodily control, whether the Catholic church (ch. 1), imperialism (ch. 2), medicine and the law (ch. 3), racism (ch. 4), or the tyrants and mind controllers who perpetrate war (chs. 4 and 5). Blood is definitely the life in this text, and its legal, psychological, physical, personal and political abjection and control is the work of institutions and those who buy into their versions of reality, and enforce others to follow, victim or victimiser. The historical, legal and medical detail is pursued, hunted down, exposed as informing the historical moments of control of dangerous bodies, considered dangerous because they offer a solid, corporeal contradiction to religious and political controls, and versions of what should be controlled. They offer the potential for refusal, questioning and revolt. So this is a book which bases radical questions of the imposition of the straitjackets of control of bodies, which human beings impose on each other, debasing enslaving and torturing with actions based in religious, racist, sexist constructs. With a surgical skill, Marie Mulvey Roberts has plunged her researcher’s questioning and refusal to accept lies and absences into the texts and the contexts from which they spring, and in which they are read.
The first chapter, ‘Catholicism, the Gothic and the bleeding body’ traces the Catholic legacy in the Gothic with parallels between Henry VIII and Manfred in The Castle of Otranto, usurers, legitimacy or illegitimacy. Parallels between the first Gothic novels and Catholicism or anti Catholicism are carefully traced, while the Bleeding Nun is seen in the light of the Terror of the French Revolution.
The exposure of the brutalising of the body under slavery is explored brilliantly through discussing Frankenstein (1818), and the body of the monster. It starts by situating slavery as a civil death, uses Alan Lloyd Smith’s identification of the slave narrative with the novel’s many modes of writing, stitched together like the monster, and links Shelley’s own history and that of her times and its concern with slavery. It considers Shelley’s alignment with the ameliorist tendencies of Canning, so the novel is perhaps both an indictment against dehumanisation and a warning against early, unmanaged release of slaves.
The chapter (ch. 3) on Dracula (1897) is equally highly original. It builds on the critical views of women’s bodies as sites of dangerous desires, and abjection. Blood is of course at the heart of this chapter and Marie Mulvey Roberts does not stop with fangs, demonised vampire women and Lucy being staked by her fiances and the forces of patriarchy led by Professor Van Helsing. Dracula is seen as a medical novel, and of its time. It exposes the legislating against female orgasm through vilifying masturbation and active female sexuality as a dangerous threat to patriarchal order, and so seen or presented here as both demonic and disgustingly gory, ‘the slaying of Lucy by Van Helsing and his team can be seen as a sublimation of the castrating surgeon and his assistants operating on hysterical female patients’ (p. 44). The texts relates to the ‘Victorian pathologising of feminist and Freudian hystericisation of women’s bodies’ (p. 94).
But she goes further, linking sexual surgery to a correction of women seen as immoral, physical, sexual behaviour which leads to hideous gynaecological operations.
Chapters 4 and 5 each deal in many ways with war. Chapter 4 explores the conflation of the Jew, especially the Wandering Jew figure, and the vampire. Dracula’s own arrival by ship, bringing plague and vampirism, is compared to the rats travelling on ships bringing pestilence and plague when they invade, spreading the Black Death across Europe. There are some extraordinary propagandist cartoon images of Jews as vampires, which are matched by those of Nazis as vampires in this and the next chapter, signalling vampirism as a metaphor for war and invasion. We are informed that Stoker’s own father-in-law retold gruesome and terrible tales of the Crimean war, while Dracula’s step by step invasion, and the counter invasion of Mona and some of the Crew of Light pursuing him to his Transylvanian lair resemble war tales of moves and counter moves. As Marie Mulvey Roberts notes, ‘war is the ultimate horror and supreme blood-sucker’ (p. 179) and chapters 4 and 5 break new ground in meticulously tracking this relationship through event, tract, image, text and fictional texts.
I really love this book. It does a particularly fantastic job linking excellent, sound scholarship in terms of history, popular beliefs, and the way in which these are developed in the Gothic texts of different times and places. It is immensely scholarly and pursues its argument with dedication, tracking through history, the texts chosen and all those other texts which link with the argument, in appropriate detail. It also has an abundance of genuinely new and very significant things to say: about Catholicism and a terrified, pathological male response to women, Gothic and slavery, Gothic interest in blood, surgery, in control of women’s sexuality and women’s bodies, terrors of Otherness and miscegenation, anti Semitism, and the horrors of war.
This book will change the way readers and scholars look at and interpret some new and those established, ostensibly familiar Gothic texts, including Dracula and Frankenstein. More broadly, it exposes the way the Gothic channels more overt and more covert disease/unease/terrors of its time (and of the times which replay the key texts), while sometimes it is critiquing them and more often, perhaps, it is reinforcing them.
References
Shelley, M. (1818) Frankenstein (London: Lackington, Hughes, Harding, Mavor & Jones).
Stoker, B. [1897] (1979) Dracula (London: Penguin Books).