SOURCE: Britzolakis, Christina. “Angela Carter's Fetishism.” Textual Practice 9, no. 3 (winter 1995): 459-75.

In the following essay, Britzolakis examines Carter's fascination with the performance, or spectacle, of femininity.

Like so many girls, I passionately wanted to be an actress when I was in my early teens and I turn this (balked, unachieved and now totally unregretted) ambition over in my mind from time to time. Why did it seem so pressing, the need to demonstrate in public a total control and transformation of roles other people had conceived? Rum, that.¹

It is understandable, I suppose, that someone could approach the fantastic and exotic surface of your fictions and not be able to bridge the gap to the central point that your theatricality is meant to heighten real social attitudes and myths of femininity.²

Her two favourite periodical publications were Vogue and The New Statesman.³

If there is a single theme...