Aging & Wisdom Quote by Angela Carter

Carter captures a paradox of modern belief: when faith has been displaced by skepticism, only an ironic miracle can be believed. A culture trained to debunk grand claims instinctively distrusts the earnest announcement of the supernatural. Yet it will grant a hearing to wonder that declares itself a trick, because irony disarms our defenses. The stage magician who tells you it is an illusion still makes you gasp; the carnival barker who winks at the crowd gives permission to enjoy astonishment without feeling gullible. Credibility now attaches to the performance of disbelief.

This insight runs through Carter’s fiction, with its fascination for spectacle, masquerade, and metamorphosis. Her heroines inhabit playhouses, circuses, and dressing rooms where truth is inseparable from costume. The aerialist with wings is treated as a hoax to be sold by a canny manager, and precisely through that marketing becomes an emblem of the miraculous. The world that insists everything is constructed is not immune to enchantment; it simply demands that enchantment wear the mask of artifice. Declaring wonder to be manufactured paradoxically protects its possibility by allowing it to circulate as entertainment rather than doctrine.

There is a feminist edge here too. Patriarchal authority once ratified miracles through institutional power; in a secular marketplace, power resides in the savvy manipulation of signs. Women who control their image can smuggle awe into a realm that otherwise mocks it. A miracle that calls itself a hoax refuses the trap of sincerity that invites ridicule, and instead harnesses the currency of irony to move an audience. Carter suggests that modernity has not killed the appetite for the marvelous; it has merely changed the grammar of belief. To gain credit, the extraordinary must speak in the idiom of the ironic, the self-aware, the staged. The mask does not conceal the miracle; it is the condition under which the miracle can be seen.