Liminal Posthuman Corporeality: Decaying Zombie Ghosts and the ‘Living Impaired’ in Angela Carter’s “Heroes and Villains”

Abstract

The representation of graphic sexual violence and corporeal brutality in Carter’s fiction has sparked harsh feminist criticism about the author’s demythologising project. I wish to expand the frames through which Carter’s engagement with patriarchal topos of the body are perceived, and critically assess the tension revolving around her feminist agenda. Liminality is a state of in-betweenness. Accordingly, a living organism, hanging between life and death, like a zombie, is the site where liminality is more than a mere metaphor; it transforms into a 'corpo-reality'. Even though Carter’s novels cannot be said to feature zombies in the strictest sense of the term, this paper will explore how Carter’s Heroes and Villains epitomises a ‘zombified’ world where the collapse of civilisation exposes not only the fragility of the human body, but also the myth of patriarchal anthropocentrism. The novel portrays spectral figures, living in a fluid interzone between life and death, human and nonhuman.  This paper will use the trope of the zombie as a theoretical tool to rethink what it means to be human. My concern is to show that these living-impaired, liminal figures are part of a posthuman world where phallogocentric hierarchies and rational disembodiment are challenged. In her attempt to foreground images of liminality, Carter succeeds in destabilising the dialectical model of Western thought—mind/body, culture/nature, self/other—and proposes an alternative ontology grounded in relational coexistence. I will expand the scope from which to perceive the image of the zombie as a monstrous Other, to include a novel reading, whereby zombification does not mean pessimistic decay, but a possibility of transgression. The theoretical perspectives of posthumanist and corporeal feminist philosophers, particularly Rosi Braidotti, Catherine Hayles and Donna Haraway, provide an appropriate frame for discussing Carter’s investment in reimagining decay not as a destructive process but as a transformative one. This paper hopes to offer a fresh perspective on how bodies are imagined in a post-nuclear age by adopting posthuman and corporeal feminist theoretical insights as a lens through which to formulate my own interpretation of Carter’s novel.