Expletives Deleted by Angela Carter Page A

flattery.’
    Miss M. brings her own doom upon herself by introducing Fanny into this artificial paradise, where the only garden is that of the square outside, an arid, over-cultivated town garden where only ‘piebald plane-trees and poisonous laburnums’ grow. Fanny immediately seizes her chance and usurps Miss M.’s position as court favourite; she will marry unscrupulously for money and entertain herself by leading the
haute monde
a dance in preference to disrupting a vicarage tea party.
    The climax of the London sequence is Miss M.’s twenty-first birthday party, with its cake decorated with replicas of twenty-one famous female dwarves, a fiesta of bad taste which is only exceeded by the dinner menu composed entirely of the minute, culminating in a dish of nightingales’ tongues, on which Miss M. gags. Enough is enough. So Midgetina comes of age, in an orgy of humiliation, drunkenly making a spectacle of herself. ‘Sauve qui peut!’ she cries to Fanny, intent at last on rescuing her from damnation, calling out the name of a book Fanny once gave her as a satiric jest, Jeremy Taylor’s
Holy Living and Holy Dying
, and passing out.
    Banished to Mrs Monnerie’s country house, Miss M. now exhibits herself in a circus in order to earn the money to buy her freedom. She paints her face and pads her bust and bottom; the disguise appears to her to be ‘monstrous’. She takes on, in other words, the appurtenances of the flesh, and those of the flesh of a mature woman, at that. It is sufficient indirectly to cause Mr Anon’s death.
    This raises some interesting questions about the central spiritual conflict for which the dreamy beauty of the novel is a disguise. For, even if Mr Anon
is
Miss M.’s Good Angel and her rejection of him in favour of Fanny brings her near to losing her soul, why should she marry him, when she has no wish to do so, simply because they are a match in size? Not only is de la Mare quite definite about Miss M.’s not wanting to marry Mr Anon – ‘not even love’s ashes were in my heart’ – but he scrupulously documents her absolute revulsion from physical contact. She flinches from all human touch except that of her childhood nursemaid.Miss M. seems as alienated from sexuality as she is from all other aspects of the human condition, and if her passion for Fanny suggests it is only heterosexual contact from which she is alienated, de la Mare feels himself free to describe her emotional enslavement by Fanny because the idea this might have a sexual element has been censored out from the start. Although Miss M. declares repeatedly that she is in love with Fanny, the reader is not officially invited by de la Mare to consider this might have anything to do with her rejection of the advances of Mr Anon. The conflict is played out in terms of pure spirit.
    And, at the circus, when she is in her erotic disguise, it is as if the spectacle of Miss M. suddenly transformed from visible spirit (she is slight, fair, pale) to palpable if simulated rosy flesh is too much for Mr Anon, who is, as ever, watching her. He refuses to allow her to degrade herself still further and takes her place in the circus ring on an unruly pony for the last parade, suffering a fatal injury while doing so. Miss M., therefore, out in the world on her own for the first time, tremulously experimenting with the appearance of sexuality, and, indeed, of work, too – for this circus turn is the first time she has attempted to earn her own living – actually loses her soul; and has to undergo an ordeal in the same neglected garden of Wanderslore where she used to meet both Fanny and Mr Anon before she can start out again on the path to regeneration, the return home.
    This ordeal concludes with a balked attempt to poison herself with the fruit of the deadly nightshade, with ‘forbidden fruit’.
    This is not the first time she has been tempted by forbidden fruit.