Expletives Deleted by Angela Carter Page B

In the secure garden of childhood, she has ‘reached up and plucked from their rank-smelling bush’ a few blackcurrants very similar in appearance to the ‘black, gleaming’ poison berries on which, in her extremity, she gazes ‘as though, from childhood up, they had been my one greed and desire’. But, desire them as she may, she cannot eat them; she seems physically incapable of doing so. She picks one, its ‘bitter juices’ jet out upon her, and then, overcome, she flings ‘the vile thing’ down. The fruit remains forbidden. Whatever taboo it represents remains unbroken, and the breaking of this taboo involves the ‘stinking mystery’ of mortality, anyway.
    So the central core of the novel remains mysterious to itself; we never penetrate the real nature of the ‘stinking mystery’ in thegarden, represented by the rotting carcase of the mole. Miss M. will remain a stranger in this world. She will not even learn to rejoice in her estrangement, although at last she rejoices in her solitude. But that is not the same thing.
    The image of forbidden fruit has all the more potency because Miss M. customarily subsists on a fructarian diet. She drinks milk, nibbles biscuits but partakes freely only of cherries, slices of apple, strawberries, nectarines. Her diet is similar to that of the heroes of de la Mare’s metaphysical novel for children,
The Three Royal Monkeys
, who promise their mother never to taste blood, to climb trees, or to grow a tail; their diet is a sign of their spiritual ascendancy over the other apes and Miss M. marks the beginnings of her own spiritual erosion in London when a doctor puts her on a strengthening diet of white meat. She starts to put on weight and that seems to her also a sign of degeneration; there is an interesting touch of the anorexic about Miss M. revealed in her choice of words to describe her padded circus costume: ‘monstrous mummery’. This is connected with an odd little episode during her life at Mrs Bowater’s, when she buries a bloodstained nightdress in a rabbit hole in the Wanderslore garden, just as young girls sometimes attempt to hide the evidence of their menses. (Miss M. tells us that this blood, however, comes from a scratch.) Mr Anon later returns this nightdress; nothing, nothing whatever, can be hidden from him. No wonder he annoys her.
    After she throws down the forbidden fruit, untasted, she suffers a period of derangement and hallucination. We know in advance from her editor’s preface that sufficient private means are stumped up somehow to buy back for her her father’s house, and there she lives on, in seclusion, with Fanny’s mother to wait on her. We leave Miss M.’s life in the same state of purposeless rustic gentility as it began but we already know she will be ‘called away’, by, it is implied, that spiritual messenger from the Other World, perhaps the beautiful stranger she saw in the audience in the circus tent. And yet the mystery of her departure seems arbitrary and forlorn.
    De la Mare has certainly equipped the novel with hermetic meaning, yet this does not, finally, seem to console even the writer. The metaphysical sub-text seems to me a decoy; he offers a key to a door behind which is only another door. The novel remains dark, teasing, a system of riddles, leaving a memory ofpain, a construct of remarkable intellectual precision and scrupulous dovetailing of imagery, finally as circular as hopelessness.
    Something awful is looking out of the windows of the novel, just as it looks out of Fanny’s eyes in Miss M.’s startling description of her: ‘a beautiful body with that sometimes awful Something looking out of its windows.’ De la Mare himself found this image sufficiently striking to use a version of it again in his own Introduction to the 1938 Everyman edition of a selection of his stories, essays, and poems:
Feelings as well as thoughts may