Expletives Deleted by Angela Carter

enslavement by Fanny burns with pain, although Fanny is far too motivelessly malign for any form of naturalist fiction; she is simply, emblematically, a
femme fatale
, or, perhaps, a bad angel.
    When Fanny accidentally meets Miss M.’s friend and would-be lover, her casual description of him – ‘a ghastly gloating little dwarfish creature’ – makes Miss M. see how Mr Anon must look to
other people
, and so wrecks her own idea of him.
    This question of the definition of identity recurs throughout the novel. Miss M. describes Fanny’s charm: ‘she’s so
herselfish
, you know’; Fanny is powerful because she knows who she is. But Fanny uses all her power to define Miss M. as a deviant: ‘Why was it that of all people only Fanny could so shrink me up like this into my body?’ This problem is not altogether resolved; on the last page of her narrative, Miss M. says: ‘We
cannot
see ourselves as others see us, but that is no excuse for not wearing spectacles.’ Yet the last words of the novel are a plea to her editor, to whom she dedicates her memoirs, to ‘take me seriously’, thatis, to see her as she sees herself. This unresolved existential plea – to be allowed to be herself, although she is not sure what that self is – is left hanging in the air. The suggestion is that Miss M. exists, like Bishop Berkeley’s tree, because the eye of God sees her.
    In another night interview between Fanny and Miss M. in the garden at Wanderslore, Fanny says: ‘There was once a philosopher called Plato, my dear. He poisoned Man’s soul.’ With that, Fanny declares herself the eternal enemy; she has denied idealism. And something very odd happens here; Fanny goes off, leaving Miss M. calling helplessly after her, ‘I love you’. They have been, apparently, quite alone. Then up out of nowhere pops the ‘gloating, dwarfish creature’, Mr Anon himself, to murmur to Miss M. how ‘they’ – that is, other people – ‘have neither love nor pity’. She runs away from his importunity as Fanny has run away from hers; but this is only one of several places in the text where Miss M., believing herself alone in the garden, discovers Mr Anon is there, beside her. At last she decides he has been watching her secretly since she first discovered Wanderslore, just as the eye of God, in her nursery lesson book,
The Observing Eye
, watches over everything.
    Although Mr Anon’s corporality is affirmed throughout the book – he even takes tea with the emphatically ‘real’ Mrs Bowater – he has certain purely metaphysical qualities, not least the ability to appear whenever Miss M. needs him. He is her good, her guardian angel, the spiritual pole to Fanny.
    But Miss M. is bewildered. Mr Anon’s ugliness is that of the flesh alone, yet it is sufficient to repel her; Fanny’s beauty is only an outward show, yet Miss M. finds her compulsively attractive. Poor Miss M., the psyche fluttering in between. ‘And still he [Mr Anon] maintained . . . that he knew mankind better than I, that to fall into their ways and follow their opinions was to deafen my ears, and seal up my eyes, and lose my very self.’
    Miss M.
does
fall into the ways of mankind for a season, however; indeed, not ‘a season’ but ‘the Season’. She is collected by rich, aristocratic, corrupt, easily bored Mrs Monnerie to add to an assortment of ‘the world’s smaller rarities’ in her London mansion. Miss M.’s stay in London is the most straightforward part of the novel, with a degree of satiric snap and bite oddly reminiscent of parts of Balzac’s
Lost Illusions
. She is not by anymeans the first young person from the provinces to go to hell at the dinner tables of the gentry. ‘What a little self-conscious donkey I became, shrilly hee-hawing away; the centre of a simpering throng plying me with