The Magic Toyshop (1967), Angela Carter's second novel, is the story of a young middle-class English girl-Melanie, who with her brother and sister has to move to London and live with her uncle after the death of her parents in an accident. Uncle Philips functions as the primordial father in the household and does not tolerate any digression or transgression from the Law. This paper aims to offer a Lacanian analysis of The Magic Toyshop by focusing on the major polarity that stands out in the novel around which all the narrative is structured: Desire and Law.
They Came to Baghdad (1951), one of Agatha Christie's mid-career books, could be categorized as a political thriller that unravels the ideological conflicts during the early Cold War period and the fight over Iraqi oil reserves. The scenes of the novel, like an adventure movie alters from a spy hunt to an archaeological theme, then to a romance, and finally a murder story and a thriller, in which fear comes up unexpectedly. Particularly, the setting provides the grounds for the female protagonist of the novel, Victoria Jones, to cross cultural and social boundaries and explore the space as a naïve pseudo-spy working for the international forces in Baghdad. By the lens of Nigel Thrift's concept of "affective cities" and "spatialities of feeling", this paper aims to explore how the setting of the novel-Baghdadcreates an intensive field of conflicting cultural and social forces that inscribe the female body, which runs in parallel with the narrative tactics Christie uses in revealing the affective emplacements of fear, suspicion, increasing levels of anxiety and insecurity in the cityscape. This paper, in other words, offers a spatial analysis of the novel in order to explore how the cityscape is mobilized and altered by the shifting perceptions of it by Victoria Jones while she defies the patriarchal demarcations of space. Through her adventures, it becomes possible to comprehend how power is distributed and circulated within this Middle Eastern society.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.