As we like it

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As we like it (English original title: Wise Children ) is the last novel by the British writer Angela Carter, who died in 1992. It was published in Great Britain in 1991 and the German translation came out a year later. The British newspaper The Guardian included the story in a list of 1,000 novels that everyone should have read.

The novel thematizes the life of the twins Dora and Nora Chance, two aging glamor girls, and their bizarre relatives consisting of geek comedians, state actors and Hollywood stars. Carter deals with the question of fatherhood and parenthood in the novel. It remains unclear who the mother of the twins is, and it is only on their 75th birthday that their father, the respected Shakespeare actor Sir Melchior Hazard, confesses to his illegitimate daughters. The novel is shaped by Carter's admiration for Shakespeare: Individual occurrences of the novel are borrowed from Shakespeare's plays, and Shakespeare and his plays are repeatedly referred to in the plot. In the German translation, the title already refers to Shakespeare's comedy As You Like It . The English original title Wise Children alludes to the topic of fatherhood by shortening a saying: " It is a wise child that knows its own father " - "It is a wise child who knows its own father " . The burlesque plot has elements of magical realism .

action

The narrator of the plot, which begins with the 75th birthday of the identical twins Dora and Nora Chance, is Dora, who can look back on a long life in the theater and film world. The sisters, who were never among the greats of the show, have run out of wealth at the end of their lives. However, they still have the house that their foster mother bequeathed to them:

"If this house didn't exist, Nora and I would now live on the street, lug our little belongings around in plastic bags and hang on the bottle like babies, start singing for joy when we finally found a place in the night shelter and then immediately again as Troublemakers are kicked out ... "

The twins' birthday falls on April 23, the presumed birthday of Shakespeare. Dora calls it a bizarre coincidence that her father, Melchior Hazard and his identical twin, Peregrine Hazard, were born on this day. While Melchior Hazard has been denying the existence of his illegitimate children for 75 years, Peregrine Hazard has sporadically looked after the girls and ensured the financial survival of them and their foster mother. The alleged mother is Kitty, a maid in the theater who seduces Melchior at the beginning of the 20th century, then leaves and who dies shortly after the twins are born. The twins are raised by Grandma Chance, who (possibly selflessly) took care of the orphaned girls. However, the plot also allows for the possibility that the two twins are their biological daughters.

The 75th birthday of the two former glamor girls begins and ends dramatically: Tristram Hazard, who thinks he is the nephew of the twins but is actually their half-brother, visits the two women because he is looking for Tiffany, whose godmother she both sisters are. Tiffany is both a showgirl on Tristan's trivial television show and pregnant by him. It appears that Tiffany committed suicide because Tristram refuses to acknowledge paternity. The day ends with the celebration of the 100th birthday of Melchior Hazard, on which Melchior finally confesses to being the birth father of Dora and Nora Chance, Tiffany reappears unscathed and the long-lost Peregrine returns to his family. At the end of the festival, Melchior Hazard's castle burns down while the festival guests, who all managed to escape outside, continue to celebrate. At the end of this day, Dora and Nora have become foster mothers of another pair of young twins, which encourages the two of them to want to live another 20 years.

During the course of the day, Dora recalls events and encounters during her long active life in show business. She tells of the rise of her father Melchior, who is one of the most respected Shakespeare actors in his country and is ultimately ennobled, of the far less glamorous career of her uncle as a magician and entertainer who finds his wealth outside of show business, of the grotesquely failed attempt to To film Shakespeare's play A Midsummer Night's Dream in Hollywood, of her career as a glamor girl, as the operator of a dance studio and of the numerous love affairs that connect the characters in the actions. She also reports of her envy of the twin sisters Saskia and Imogen Hazard, the supposedly legitimate children of Melchior Hazard, who grow up on the right side of town and for whom an easier life seems to be paved. The novel ends with the words What a joy it is to dance and sing! - What a joy to dance and sing! , a theme that is one of the leitmotifs of the novel.

Essential characters of the action

  • Dora Chance - the 75-year-old former glamor dancer from whose perspective the novel is told. She is the illegitimate daughter of Melchior Hazard and (rumor has it) the maid Pretty Kitty . She is mistaken for the illegitimate daughter of Peregrine Hazard by those who are not so close to the family.
  • Nora Chance - twin sister of Dora. The two not only grow up together, but also pursue a joint career as glamor dancers and spend their twilight years together in the house inherited from Grandma Chance.
  • Melchior Hazard - well-respected Shakespeare mime famous for his portrayals as Hamlet (as a young actor) and King Lear (as an aging actor). He pursues his career selfishly and with little consideration for his family.
  • Peregrine Hazard - Melchior's twin brother who took care of Nora and Dora for a long time. He is an adventurer, researcher and actor at the same time.
  • Lady Atalanta Hazard (wheelchair) - first wife of Melchior Hazard, mother of Saskia and Imogen. In a manner reminiscent of Shakespeare's drama Lear , she is deprived of her well-cared for old age and spends the last years of her life in the house of Dora and Chance. Only at the end of the plot does it become apparent that her daughters are from an extramarital affair with Peregrine Hazard.
  • Delia Delaney (Daisy Duck) - actress and second wife of Melchior Hazard and at the same time a former lover of Peregrine Hazard. She separates from Melchior in order to marry another actor.
  • My Lady Margarine - third wife of Melchior Hazard and mother of Gareth and Tristram. She is known as Lady Margarine because she is promoting a margarine brand on TV.
  • Grandma Chance - Dora and Nora Chance's foster mother, but possibly also their birth mother. Grandma Chance is a nudist and a vegetarian, she also rejects cut flowers as cruel.
  • Saskia Hazard - legitimate child of Melchior Hard who makes a career as a TV cook. The ambitious, bustling Saskia and the novelist share a lifelong love-hate relationship. Saskia also has a relationship with her supposed half-brother Tristram. Ultimately, she turns out to be one of Peregrine Hazard's two daughters.
  • Imogen Hazard - legitimate child of Melchior Hard and twin sister of Saskia, who has played a goldfish in a children's television program for years.
  • Tristram Hazard - son of Melchior from his third marriage, twin brother of Gareth and presenter of the television program Lashings of Lolly .
  • Tiffany - godchild of Dora and Nora Chance, friend of Tristram Hazard, of whom she is pregnant and whose show Lashings of Lolly , by performing normally, leaves her with a dramatic gesture.
  • Gareth Hazard - son of Melchior from his third marriage, twin brother of Tristram. As a young man he became a missionary and went to Latin America. It is his twin children, whose foster mothers Dora and Nora become at the end of the novel.
  • Estella 'A Star Danced' Hazard - mother of Melchior and Peregrine and once famous Shakespeare actress. Her nickname refers to a quote from Shakespeare's play Much Ado About Nothing : "Then there was a star danced and under that was I born."
  • Ranulph Hazard - husband of Estella Hazard, who murdered Estella and her lover Cassius Booth and then committed suicide.
  • Cassius Booth - lover of Estella Hazard and possibly also father of Melchior and Peregrine.
  • Pretty Kitty - simple maid in a theater and possibly the mother of Dora and Nora Chance. She allegedly died in childbirth. The twins Dora and Nora only know of their existence through the stories told by Grandma Chance.
  • 'Our Cyn' - mother of Mavis, grandmother of Brenda and great-grandmother of Tiffany. She is accepted into Grandma Chance's household as a refugee.
  • Genghis Khan - the film producer who wants to bring the Midsummer Night's Dream with Melchior Hazard as Oberon to the screen and, in the words of Dora, produces a masterpiece of kitsch . Dora and Nora are among the cast in this production, it is one of the few occasions they have worked with their father on. He is briefly engaged to Dora Chance.
  • Ross "Irish" O'Flaherty - an American writer and one of Dora's lovers who taught Dora a lot about literature.
  • Tony - Nora's lover, to whom she is briefly engaged. The planned wedding bursts due to the intervention of Tony's mother.
  • Brenda - granddaughter of 'Our Cyn' and mother of Tiffany.
  • Leroy Jenkins - Brenda's husband.
  • Miss Euphemia Hazard - Melchior and Peregrine's Presbyterian aunt whom Melchior adopted after his parents passed away.

Trivia

  • The surnames “Chance” and “Hazard” have a similar meaning in English. Both can be translated with the German term random , but “hazard” could also be translated as “risk” or “venture”, while “Chance” would not only be translated appropriately with the German term “ Chance ”, but also with “ possibility” or “ prospect” and generally a more positive meaning than “hazard " Has. Ali Smith , however, emphasizes in her introduction to Carter's novel the similarity of the two terms: ... what's a hazard anyway, but a posh word for chance - ... hazard is nothing more than a more elegant variant of chance .
  • Angela Carter died of cancer in 1992, leaving behind a young son, among others. Rumor has it that she knew about her potentially fatal cancer while writing the novel, which is the leitmotif of the novel What a joy it is to dance and sing! gives a special conciseness.

review

Writer Ali Smith described Wise Children as Carter's greatest, funniest, most satisfying, and generous narrative achievement. She points out, among other things, that Carter also succeeds narrative in placing the tragic next to the cheerful. The Shakespeare plays that are closest to the novel are among Shakespeare's late works: Cymbeline , a drama that is seldom staged today, The Tempest , Pericles, Prince of Tire and The Winter's Tale . These pieces have recently been referred to as Shakespeare's romances and no longer as comedy, in order to do justice to the dark basic conflicts of these plays. In a radio interview a few months before her death, Carter pointed out that she had tried to use elements from all of Shakespeare's plays in her novel - but in the end it would not have been possible, plays like Titus Andronicus would have been too difficult for that.

In addition to Shakespeare, Carter also refers to literary greats such as Jane Austen , John Milton , Noël Coward , Charles Dickens , Lewis Carroll , William Wordsworth , F. Scott Fitzgerald , Bertolt Brecht and George Bernard Shaw as well as show greats such as Fred Astaire , Ruby Keeler , WC Fields , Howard Hughes and Charles Chaplin .

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Secondary literature

  • Roger Appelbaum: "Welcome to dreamland": Performance Theory, Postcolonial Discourse and the Filming of "A Midsummer Night's Dream" in Angela Carter's "Wise Children" . In: Jonathan Bate et al. (Ed.): Shakespeare and the Twentieth Century: The Selected Proceedings of the International Shakespeare Association World Congress, Los Angeles, 1996 . Delaware University Press, Newark NJ 1998, ISBN 0-87413-652-0 , pp. 183-93.
  • Celestine Deleyto: "We are no angels": Woman versus History in Angela Carter's "Wise Children" . In: Susana Onega (Ed.): Telling Histories: Narrativizing History, Historicizing Literature . Rodopi, Amsterdam 1995, ISBN 90-5183-754-2 , pp. 163-80.
  • Michael Hardin: The Other Other: Self-definition outside Patriarchal Institutions in Angela Carter's "Wise Children" . In: Review of Contemporary Fiction 14: 3, 1994, pp. 77-83.
  • Anne Hegerfeldt: The Stars that Spring from Bastardising: Wise Children Go for Shakespeare . In: Anglia - Journal for English Philology 121: 3, 2007, pp. 351–372.
  • Richard Pedot: "49 Bard Road": le mythe shakespeare dans Wise Children d'Angela Carter . In: Études anglaises 63: 4, 2010, pp. 425-436.
  • Jeffrey Roessner: Writing a History of Difference: Jeanette Winterson's "Sexing the Cherry" and Angela Carter's "Wise Children" . In: College Literature 29: 1, 2002, pp. 102-122

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  1. ↑ Angela Carter, 1940-92: A Very Good Wizard, a Very Dear Friend by Salman Rushdie
  2. ↑ 1000 Novels Everyone Must Read: The Definitive List , accessed June 14, 2014.
  3. ↑ Angela Carter: Wise Children . Vintage, London 2006, ISBN 9781409022442 . S. 2. In the original the quote is: If it wasn't for this house, Nora and I would be on the streets by now, hauling our worldlies up and down in plastic bags, sucking on the bottle for comfort like babes unweaned, bursting into songs of joy when finally admitted to the night shelter and therefore chucked out again immediately for disturbing the peace, to gasp and freeze and finally snuff it disregarded on the street and blow away like rags.
  4. ↑ Introduction to Angela Carter: Wise Children . Vintage, London 2006, ISBN 978-1-4090-2244-2 .
  5. ↑ Hazarding Chance , Review of Wie's Uns Like It , accessed June 14, 2014
  6. ↑ Introduction to Angela Carter: Wise Children . Vintage, London 2006, ISBN 978-1-4090-2244-2 . The original quote is: Cheerfully bawdy, it's Carter's most glorious, most comic, most fulfilled, certainly her most generously and happily orgiastic, fictional performance.
  7. ↑ Introduction to Angela Carter: Wise Children . Vintage, London 2006, ISBN 978-1-4090-2244-2 . The original quote is: I was attempting to encompass something from every Shakespeare. I mean, I couldn't actually at all ... I mean, you know, "Titus Andronicus" was very difficult .... But I got a lot in! .