70 CRITICAL READINGS yet, her fiction also aims, at the same time, to offer a feminist challenge to our assumptions about those established conventions: namely, history, reality and fictional worlds From Heather Johnson, ‘Metafiction, Magical Realism and Myth’ The fantastic in Nights at the Circus reveals not only a love of fictional play but also a political urge, born in part out of the feminism that emerged from the mid-1960s onwards to challenge representations of women, question restrictive views of the real and, thereby, open up new political possibilities Like many of her generation in Britain and North America, Carter also used the fantastic to experiment with fictional form The fantastic has been regarded as ‘a mode in which dreams, or metaphors, are employed to say something about social and historical or psychological realities.’1 Fantastic writing unmasks the metaphorical dimension of cultural discourses, since it addresses the metaphors belonging to these same realities of history, culture and psychology In its attention to metaphoric language, feminist writing is sensitive to the act of representation itself Looking askance at reality leads the ‘alternative tradition’ of the fantastic in women’s writing to question strictly realist forms As Nancy A Walker points out, the fantastic is employed in feminist writing, whereby dreams and fantasies ‘represent the possibility of change rather than stasis and entrapment’, not as a means of escape, but rather as a thoughtful engagement with an entire cultural tradition and its often static representations of the female figure.2 Insisting on the relativity and mutability of truth and reality, contemporary feminist writers question established conventions to help us begin to see the strangeness of the assumptions of the ‘real’ world Carter’s novels and short stories certainly bear out this account of fiction written by women of her generation Yet the sophistication of Carter’s engagement with modes such as magical realism and myth has long marked her as a distinctive voice in British fiction from the 1960s to the 1980s Amongst her contemporaries, Carter is in fact unique; not content with revisions of male-authored texts or fiction that champions women’s experience, Carter’s range of interests includes philosophy, science and art as well as gender relations, popular culture and poststructuralist theory Her evident intellectualism and razor-sharp scepticism about inherited concepts, particularly as they relate to women, are frequently packaged in her fiction in forms associated with fanciful storytelling An example of this, she imports magical realism into British writing as a means of presenting a feminist perspective on cultural, political and representational traditions Through this mode in particular, she is able to expose the idealistic as ‘unrealistic’ by investigating the reality that lurks behind idealized forms Her characteristic blend of high culture and popular culture, along with the three modes considered Alexander, Contemporary Women Novelists, p 61 Nancy A Walker, Feminist Alternatives: Irony and Fantasy in the Contemporary Novel by Women, Jackson, Miss.: University Press of Mississippi, 1990, p 117