CULTURE, CLASS AND COUNTERFEIT GENEALOGIES IN ANGELA CARTER’S WISE CHILDREN
Text topic: Lie in Art and Culture
Text author: Татјана Милосављевић
Drawing on concepts from cultural studies and cultural materialism, Angela Carter’s novel Wise Children can be interpreted as a text where struggles between dominant and subordinate groups are fought, illuminating thus the markedly leftist undertones of its narrative. Carter foregrounds the family lies of the Hazard household to destabilize the entrenched notions of paternity, culture and class infrastructure in 20th century Britain, exhibiting a postmodern awareness of the multiplicity of truth and its distortion by the culturally hegemonic groups. The novel’s narrator, Dora Chance, tells her own and her sister’s history of exclusion from the Hazard clan – the British theatrical royalty – and their consequential rejection by the institutions of elite culture. Her account undermines the foundations of the British class system and the low vs. high culture dichotomy by divulging multiple misattributed paternities that underpin these social constructs.