Speech, Silence and Female Adolescence in Carson McCullers' the Heart Is a Lonely Hunter and Angela Carter's the Magic Toyshop

Abstract This paper examines relationship between adolescent female characters and silence in Carson McCullers' The Heart is a Lonely Hunter (1940) and Angela Carter's The Magic Toyshop (1967). The established body of criticism focussing on McCullers' and Carter's depictions of female grotesque provides theoretical framework for this paper, as I explore implications of these ideas when applied to language and speech. In a white Western society, where a woman's sexuality, appetite and articulation are controlled and suppressed, this paper asks: what options for expression are there, for women whose speech is always limited to their body, and whose body always speaks alterity and abjection to male interpretation? Mute characters and their relationships with female protagonists of these two novels open up my discussion of disembodiment, silence, and appropriation of male-dominated cultural history in aid of female articulation. Ultimately I discuss ways in which these two writers explore extent to which women can 'speak for themselves', by working within and against existing social and cultural models of womanhood. Keywords Silence, representation, female adolescence, body Introduction 'They said I'd been reading too much Carson McCullers.' (Carter qtd. in Haffenden 1985:80). This is how Angela Carter summarizes critical response to her first novel, Shadow Dance, published in 1966. The comparison to Carson McCullers is one that lasted throughout Carter's career, re-emerging for example in Margaret Atwood's review of posthumously published Burning Your Boats (1995): ghostly godpersons gathered round her typewriter [...] Carson McCullers, and a gaggle of disreputable tale-telling old grannies (2005:152). But one cannot avoid derogatory connotations suggested by this opening quotation. How can you read 'too much' Carson McCullers, and why is this a bad thing? What is being implied here about McCullers' writing in particular, and women's writing and reading in general? This quotation provides a pertinent opening for my paper, which discusses ways in which discourses surrounding femininity, body and language intersect in of Carson McCullers and Angela Carter. In above quotation, Carter's relationship to language is mapped onto body, as she is imagined consuming--over indulging in--McCullers' prose. (2) Correspondingly, critics were reluctant to concede that there had ever been anything more than a lot of high-falutin bluster in [her] earlier work (Haffenden, 1985:81); an image which relates Carter's excessive literary consumption to production of bloated 'bluster'. The metaphors of appetite and emission used to describe Carter's writing evoke image, deeply ingrained in Western patriarchal culture, of female body as unruly and grotesque. This image is grounded in Biblical authority, as Eve--the 'blueprint' for womankind--is defined by her unchecked appetite for forbidden fruit. As Luce Irigaray has argued, excessive appetite is a common metaphor for female sexuality, which is often interpreted, and feared, as a sort of insatiable hunger, a voracity that will swallow you whole (1985:29) (3). This overlapping between women's digestive and sexual appetites is apparent in Eve's story; when she succumbs to temptation of phallic serpent, resulting punishment is childbirth. Women are also silenced as a result of Eve's sin: 1suffer not a woman to teach, nor to usurp authority over man, but to be in silence [...] woman being deceived was in transgression (I Timothy 2:12-14). Thus for women, themes of appetite, sexuality and speech coincide. As Thomas Laqueur explains in Solitary Sex: A Cultural History of Masturbation (2003), young woman who reads 'too much', has historically been regarded as the misguided reader par excellence [. …