The Magic Toyshop as Nucleus of Desire: A Lacanian Analysis

Serkan Ertin, Özlem Türe Abacı

Abstract


The Magic Toyshop (1967), Angela Carter’s second novel, is the story of a young middle-class English girl –Melanie, who with her brother and sister has to move to London and live with her uncle after the death of her parents in an accident. Uncle Philips functions as the primordial father in the household and does not tolerate any digression or transgression from the Law. This paper aims to offer a Lacanian analysis of The Magic Toyshop by focusing on the major polarity that stands out in the novel around which all the narrative is structured: Desire and Law.

Keywords


the Magic Toyshop; Angela Carter; Lacan

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References


Carter, A. (2006): The Magic Toyshop. London: Virago.

Freud, S. (2004): Totem and Taboo: Some Points of Agreement between the Mental Lives of Savages and Neurotics. London and New York: Routledge.

Gamble, S. (1997): Angela Carter Writing from the Front Line. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

Grosz, E. (1990): Jacques Lacan: A Feminist Introduction. London and New York: Routledge.

Homer, S. (2005): Jacques Lacan. New York and London: Routledge.

Lacan, J. (2006): Écrits. Trans. Bruce Fink. New York and London: W. W. Norton and Company.

Mellard, J. M. (1991): Using Lacan, Reading Fiction. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.

Pyrhönen, H. (2007): Imagining the impossible: The erotic poetics of Angela Carter’s ‘bluebird’ stories. Textual Practice 21.1: 93-111.

Sarup, M. (1992): Modern Cultural Theorists: Jacques Lacan. Hemel Hempstead: Wheatsheaf.




DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.17951/lsmll.2017.41.1.73
Date of publication: 2017-07-04 09:02:32
Date of submission: 2017-06-26 12:12:19


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