소설로 다시 쓰는 『한여름 밤의 꿈』: 안젤라 카터의 『현명한 아이들』을 중심으로

Angela Carter's Rewriting of A Midsummer Night's Dream in Wise Children

Central to Angela Carter's writings are deconstruction and rewriting of the master narratives of the Western world. In her last novel Wise Children(1991), Carter engages in the same project. She demythologizes the English Cultural hero, Shakespeare, whom she desired to rescue from the clutches of ‘high’ culture. Thus she suggests of reading and interpreting Shakespearean plays in a different point of view. This paper focuses on the third chapter of Wise Children, which covers the episode of filming Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night's Dream in Hollywood and rewrites the play. For Carter the wood or ‘green world,’ as Northrop Frye puts it, that the fairy king Oberon dominates is not free from inflexible fathers and arbitrary laws in Athens, but just an another patriarchal world. That's why Genghis Khan, in an allusion to Oberon in the play, is described as a “bloody dictator” in the novel. Whereas the fairy queen Titania becomes submissive to Oberon, Daisy Duck/Titania doesn't in the novel. And Carter transforms the Shakespearean triple marriage plot. The triple wedding ceremony proves never to be accomplished in the novel. What's more, the narrator Dora attends her own wedding “as Bottom the Weaver and as an ass's head,” by which Titania is humiliated and finally surrenders to Oberon in the play. Dora refuses marriage, the reproduction system of patriarchy, through the very device to reinforce patriarchal authority in the play. For Angela Carter rewriting/re-visioning is to surface what has been ignored, left out or suppressed, so it is subversive.