Traveling hopefully: the utopian impulse in the fiction of Angela Carter

Abstract

Angela Carter’s political allegiances would seem to align her with the utopian, yet in the view of most critics, her relation to utopia is somewhat fraught. Utilizing Russell Jacoby’s distinction between blueprint and iconoclastic utopianism, this essay reexamines Carter’s work to show that her writing consistently negates any blueprint for an ideal society yet engages with the historical debates surrounding utopia. Although Carter refuses to endorse programmatic utopias, her work nevertheless participates in what Jacoby calls the “anarchic breeze” of iconoclastic utopianism, utopianism that gestures rather than maps or legislates (21). Drawing on Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of concept making as utopian, I argue that Carter’s utopianism lies in her writing praxis, which interpellates readers as “hopeful travelers.”