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Abstract

The essay focuses on the proto-museum as a major leitmotif and narrative engine of Angela Carter’s fiction. I explore how hybrid collections of uncategorizable, monstrous– marvelous objects take a variety of forms, from the Renaissance cabinet of curiosities to the Victorian freak show or surrealist exhibitions of found object composites—each fictionalized in Carter’s oeuvre. My contention is that Carter’s interest in proto-museal assemblages reveals her curiosity about the secret life of things. Her agenda is to represent human subjects and inanimate objects enmeshed on equal planes of reciprocal interactions that hijack the ideologically invested male gaze that aims at a possessive, tyrannical ownership over the objectified othered. The “queering of the look” implied in this radically democratizing revision project ties in with Carter’s socialist feminist politics to which she has remained committed throughout her life.

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