Angela Carter’s Deconstruction of Traditional Tales

Year 2018, Volume: 4 Issue: 1, 7 - 24, 28.06.2018

Asena Abbasoğlu

Abstract

Like Helene Cixous, Virginia Woolf and Miriam Robins Dexter, Angela Carter is also one of the writers attempting to back up the struggles of women, by her fictional and non-fictional dense metaphorical prose. She supports their endeavor to change women’s destiny and to demolish their traditional role of being the ‘angel in the house’. In order to emancipate them from the stereotypical identity of the social order, Carter sometimes shifts the protagonists’ function by transfiguring them into victimizers, instead of portraying them as victims. She tries to break the shackles that imprison the authentic woman in the image of a ‘chaste and virtuous stereotype’ or ‘a second-class individual in need of a dominating male figure’. Thus, the analogy and distinctness between Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber and other short stories in Burning Your Boats provide a crucial insight into Carter’s mentality and intentions together with her writing style. To compare and contrast the protagonists’ behaviors, their attitudes towards the situations they face, and how they use their sense and reason to overcome certain issues, reveal Carter’s disagreement with women’s predetermined place and status in the social order. Moreover, women’s objectification and terms like ‘wisdom’, ‘reason’ and ‘experience’ offer further clues in relation with existentialist worries for a deeper understanding of Carter’s methods and purpose. Additionally, the protagonists’ struggles to survive also hint at their search for creating the authentic individual and their need to accomplish their maturation and individuation process, free from the stereotypical qualities like ‘chastity’ and ‘perfection’ attributed to them.   

Keywords

Stereotype, Objectification, Wisdom, Reason

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