Magic Toyshop Essay

The Magic Toyshop is the second novel of the feminist writer Angela Carter. It is one of the most popular of her early books. In Carter’s works mythological and Biblical themes often appear, and The Magic Toyshop is a good example of that. This essay is intended to discuss the introductory chapter of The Magic Toyshop, in which Carter rewrites a major Biblical story. The Magic Toyshop follows the story of a teenage girl, Melanie. She is one of three children, her younger brother is Jonathon and her five year old sister is Victoria. They live in the English countryside in a middle class family. Their house is spacious; they all have their own bedrooms. Their parents are rich, successful and the children have everything they need. The children have a middle aged governess Mrs. Rundle. She is overweight, was never married, only added the Mrs. title to her name a few years ago as a present to herself. Melanie has a fear of becoming someone like Mrs. Rundle. She does not believe in God but she prays that she would marry and have sex in her life. She is worried about her weight because she thinks she is too thin, but she would not eat too much either because then she might become fat and never marry. She already sees herself as someone’s wife; she looks at herself as a male would do. (Gamble 69) The novel tells the story of the children becoming orphans and having to leave their home. Their parents are killed in a plane crash and the three children must leave the countryside to live with their uncle in London. Uncle Phillip owns a toyshop and is a toymaker himself. The orphans do not know anything about him; Melanie’s only memory of him is that when she was a little girl he made her a jack in the box which was very scary. They do not know that the world they are about to enter is radically different from the one they lived in until now. At the beginning of the novel Melanie is a happy fifteen year old girl who is starting to discover herself. She explores her body, discovers it as a colonizer discovers the unknown land. She likes to pose in front of her mirror; she plays the roles of the characters of paintings (by male painters naturally). The novel uses the terminologies of explorers thus making us believe there is a male voice behind the words. Melanie’s only wish is to marry well. She is already getting ready for married life, she is making herself ready for a husband. She believes that marriage is the only way to have inancial and emotional security, the only way to be a respectable woman and to have a happy life. This is the only way she knows. This is what the culture, the social background of the age indoctrinated her to believe. She is dreaming of a perfect husband who is handsome, gentle, amiable, who has a good job and adequate financial background. Although she is a little worried about not getting this perfect life, not having sex, she genuinely believes that things are going to work out for the best. Melanie is planning to spend her adolescence preparing for the life that comes after. However soon enough she will realize that life is not a fairytale. She will meet and fall in love with a boy that does not fit in the image of the perfect husband she pictured for herself, a boy that she would have never thought to fell for under normal circumstances. She will realize how these circumstances can make her grow up in a few days – or even a few hours as on the train ride to London she realizes she has to be the mother of her little brother and sister – , and how they can suddenly take away all of her dreams and principles. However there is another way to interpret the beginning of the first chapter, the scene where she is exploring her body. Melanie is not only preparing herself for her future groom, but she is exploring her own sexuality too. She is in the age when she realizes that she is a woman, that she has not only grown mentally but physically too. â€Å"In Carter’s own words, Melanie ‘is very conscious of desire, she is filled with it. And that gives her power’. † (Gamble 69-70) One night Melanie decides to go further then posing in her own bedroom. Her parents are not home, they are in America. In the darkness of the night, when everyone in the house is asleep, she goes to her parent’s bedroom. She looks at their wedding photograph and starts thinking about her parents. How she cannot imagine her mother naked, as she never saw her that way – she even jokes about her mother being born with clothes on -, and how her father always wears the same suit. She wonders if her parents had sex before their wedding – this makes her believe she really is growing up if thoughts like this occur in her mind. She notices Uncle Phillip in the picture and thinks about the old jack in the box she was so afraid of. Then she goes over to her mother’s dressing table and looks into the mirror. She starts posing there too and feels that she looks different in her mother’s mirror. This moment can be understood again as a flesh of transition between childhood and becoming a woman. Being in her parent’s room is like pretending to be an adult just like they are. Posing in her mother’s mirror Melanie is trying to imagine how she will look like and feel as an adult, married woman. This moonlit night is the one when the fall happens†¦ Looking at her parent’s wedding picture Melanie decides to try on her mother’s wedding dress. She finds the dress and puts it on but it is too big. She is a little disappointed but still thinks she looks beautiful in it. She feels like a bride. â€Å"A bride. Whose bride? But she was, tonight, sufficient for herself in her own glory and did nor need a groom. † (Carter 16) Melanie decides to go out to the garden. She first feels free and excited; the night was so different from the one she imagined. The moonlit garden was like the Garden of Eden. â€Å"She was alone. In her carapace of white satin, she was the last, the only woman. † (Carter 17) This realization of loneliness soon turns into panic. She truly feels alone and feels what happening is too much. Crying she runs back to the front door but it is closed†¦ She forgot her keys. Suddenly the sweet, dark night turns into a scary land. Melanie realizes what she did was forbidden. She is frightened, she thinks there is something in the dark. After Mrs. Rundle’s cat appears in the garden, Melanie feels a little more comfortable. She starts to pull herself together and decides she will climb up the apple tree to her window. (The apple tree can be a symbol of Eden again). But she cannot do that in the wedding dress. The cat gives her so much comfort that she can take the dress off. Then something happens: she realizes her own nakedness as never before. â€Å"She was horribly conscious of her own exposed nakedness. She felt a new and final kind of nakedness, as if she had taken even her own skin off and now stood clothed in nothing, nude in the ultimate nudity of the skeleton. (Carter 21) This scene might be interpreted as the happenings in the Bible right after the Fall. The serpent deceives Eve so she and Adam both eat from the forbidden tree. â€Å"Then the eyes of both of them were opened, and they realized they were naked; so they sewed fig leaves together and made coverings for themselves. † (New International Bible, Genesis 3:7) The naked Melanie puts down the dress and the cat climbs on it. It scratches the dress. Melanie starts climbing up the tree, she does not know how long it takes but she finally gets to her room. She bleeds form â€Å"hundreds of cuts† but does not mind the pain. She honestly regrets what she had done that night, but cannot take it back. She ate from the forbidden fruit and knows that she deserves the consequences. Right now pain seems to be the punishment. The morning has come and when Mrs. Rundle, Jonathon and Victoria leave the house Melanie is alone in the house with her sin. Somebody is knocking on the door. It is a messenger boy with a telegram in his hand. â€Å"As soon as she saw him, she knew what the telegram contained, as if the words were printed on his forehead. (Carter 24) She runs to the bathroom and vomits. She reads the telegram and realizes what she already guessed was true. Her parents were dead. Melanie’s childhood, her fairytale life ended in this moment. She committed a sin last night and now was expelled from Eden. â€Å"This ‘wedding dress night when she married the shadows’ (Carter 77) exiles her and her younger brother and sister from their comfortable, liberal, middle-class home in the country to live in a dark, narrow house above Uncle Phillip’s toyshop in south London. (Sage 15) And what was Melanie’s fault really? As Lorna Sage says it was the â€Å"stepping over the boundary between reality and fantasy† (Sage 15) Melanie, Jonathon and Victoria are taken to their Uncle Phillip’s house. Melanie soon realizes she will have to live there in terror, in constant fear of her uncle. She has to say good bye to the magical life she had in the countryside and has to grow up sooner then expected. We can understand Uncle Phillip’s house as Purgatory. She goes through a grueling rite of passage into the state of being a woman. Whatever way she might once have grown up is simply cancelled after she arrived at Uncle Phillip’s. † (Day 25) Melanie goes through hell until one day Uncle Phillips ends this story. When he learns that his wife has a sexual relationship with her own brother, he sets the house on fire. â€Å"In the end only Melanie and Finn are left standing amongst the wreckage staring at one another in wild surmise, Adam and Eve at the beginning of a new world. †