How does Carters presentation of acting and performance affect your interpretation of the novel?
Angela Carter presents acting and performance in Wise Children in a very theatrical, carnivalesque way. The carnivalesque, in terms of the novel and performance, is shown partly through the several links to Shakespeare’s plays and through the main motto of the novel ‘what a joy it is to dance and sing’.
The novel is structured in five parts, with a first person retrospective narrative, in the same way a Shakespeare play is structured into five acts. The Hazard and Chance families in the novel, including Dora and Nora’s ‘legitimate’ and ‘famous Shakespearian actor of a father,’ Melchior, are all performers. The appearance of twins is a particular link to Shakespeare where this is a common element. This also links to the twins in the Shakespeare play ‘twelfth night’ where Viola dresses as her bother Sebastian producing confusion and comedy for the viewer. This display of deception links to when Dora asks Nora for Nora’s boyfriend for the night and they pretend to be each other and deceive him into thinking he is with Nora. Indeed, deception is a common theme throughout performance: Melchior deceives nearly everyone into thinking that he’s a nice man who’s ‘Our greatest living Shakespearian’ when really, underneath the performance he puts on, he’s really the ‘Prince of players’ and doesn’t really care about his own daughters, only that he’s centre stage. .
Dora’s narration makes constant references to performance, music hall and theatre. The opening of the novel ‘welcome to the wrong side of the tracks’ links to performance as it sounds like the standard opening of a play. Also, near the start, we see another link to performance through Dora re-living the ‘memory’ of her birth until she can go on no longer and tells us that ‘everything fades to black’ in the same way that marks the end of a performance.
Carter presents the separation of music hall and theatre as a social class divide. We can see this divide in lots of ways in the novel. For example, the novel begins with Dora recalling her past when she and her sister Nora grew up on ‘the wrong side of the tracks’. The separation between North and South London also represents the division in social class, with the south side said to have a populations of rejected, working class people and the north having population middle to high class citizens. The divide is clearly shown through Perry referring to the twins as being ‘Cockney to the core’.