JEANNETTE BAXTER 105 domains normally reserved for male leaders Moreover, Fevvers’ immersion in and exploitation of commercial culture of Victorian Britain shows her to be an economic miracle of the sort that Thatcher would have admired: ‘Everywhere you saw her picture; the shops were crammed with “Fevvers” garters, stockings, fans, cigar, shaving soap She even lent it to a brand of baking powder’ (Pt I, Ch 1, p 8) As the name ‘Fevvers’ (the plural form ‘feathers’ means commodity) verifies, the aerialiste is a circulating product within a postmodern capitalist spectacle of merchandising, branding and celebrity endorsement.32 Although intriguing parallels can be drawn between Thatcher’s and Fevvers’ narratives of female influence, a paradox nevertheless exists between Fevvers’ exploitation of a capitalist spectacle that calcifies the imagination and her role as an artist whose survival depends, in part, on the liberation of the imagination Ironically, this textual ambiguity, which Ernst’s painting replicates visually, touches on the paradoxical position to be occupied by Carter who, following the success of this novel, was at the height of her career success in the 1980s since, as Sarah Gamble notes, it was during this period that her novels were remarketed and ‘repackaged for more general consumption’.33 As Malcolm Bradbury observes: ‘Novelists were themselves an economic miracle, anti-Thatcherite icons in an age of “lifestyles”, “role-models” and a culture of consumption, emulation, stylistic competition, presentation, glossy and mannered “success”.’34 That Carter incorporates this cultural double bind into the contradictory figure of Fevvers suggests her anticipation of and critical resistance to this co-opting of literary authors as figures to be consumed like any other in the postmodern marketplace After all, Fevvers is sought out initially by advertisers precisely for her uniqueness and character, but the ubiquity of her name and picture in advertising soon erodes the very virtues upon which it first seized What is worse, Fevvers’ very existence is threatened when her journey leads her to lose ‘some vital something of herself [ .] some of that sense of her own magnificence which had previously sustained her trajectory’ (Pt III, Ch 8, p 273) As this sense of loss of self suggests, then, there is more to Fevvers than a purely performative postmodern identity Although the postmodern idea of the self as ‘a social and ideological construct which is endlessly in process’ fits certain aspects of the artiste (the way the audience constructs her, her endless layers of make-up, her self-conscious form of narration), it does not tell the whole story.35 Another dimension exists, therefore, to Fevvers’ instruction to the audience at the Alhambra – ‘Look at me!’ (Pt I, Ch 1, p 15) The implication is that beneath Fevvers’ excessive surface, an inner depth also resides Fevvers is a site of tension, in other words, between the metaphoric and the material, between the performing body and the physical body Lizzie gestures to this duality when she reminds Fevvers that her ‘singularity’ is not entirely dependent on her construction by others; ‘You’re fading away, as if it was only always nothing but the discipline of the audience that kept you in trim’ (Pt III, Envoi, p 282) Fevvers’ material disintegration towards the end of the novel (her dark roots are showing, her feathers are 32 33 34 35 Oxford English Dictionary, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979, F:119, p 974 Gamble, The Fiction of Angela Carter, p 137 Bradbury, The Modern British Novel, p 451 Ian Gregson, Postmodern Literature, London: Arnold, 2004, p 40