Puppets in The Garden: Artifice and Nature in Angela Carter’s The Magic Toyshop
Loading...
Authors
Pritchard, Hazel
Issue Date
2020-01-01
Type
essay
Language
Keywords
puppets , the magic toyshop , fiction , literature , feminism , Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies
Fiction
Modern Literature
Other Theatre and Performance Studies
Alternative Title
Selected Undergraduate Works
Abstract
Puppets are uncanny figures, both in and beyond literature. They embody a ‘thing life’, according to author and academic Kenneth Gross, combining object materialism with imitations of human thought, emotion, and action. The combination of unrelatable object life and relatable human narrative combines to create the emotion Sigmund Freud terms the uncanny, in which something strange and unknown invokes a sense of the familiar. British feminist author Angela Carter uses puppets, and their uncanniness, in her novel The Magic Toyshop. Her characters remind us of puppets, treading a line between familiar and unrecognizable.