Marianne’s Body Politics in Angela Carter’s Heroes and Villains

Öz

Body politics is seen as a mechanism that imposes male-dominated norms upon the female body which is thus expected to be regulated according to the expectations of societies. Throughout history, the female body has been seen as a commodity and the theoretical premise of body politics is created based on how the female body is categorised by patriarchy. According to patriarchal ideology, women’s bodies are considered to be meaningless and secondary substrata whose values are ignored. However, feminism scrutinises women’s bodies from a literary viewpoint and it conceptualises and also offers alternatives for recreating various women’s identities by analysing the females. In this respect, there is a different attitude toward the historical and hypothetical explications of female body politics in Angela Carter’s works, and especially in Heroes and Villains. Most of Carter’s female heroines abuse and provoke male bodies. Thus, these female characters reflect abused and distorted forms of male bodies. Therefore, in Heroes and Villains, the female body, regarded as the power of femininity, is used as a weapon against patriarchy. In addition to the expression of theoretical and critical views of Carter, this paper analyses Carter’s Heroes and Villains in terms of the protagonist’s (Marianne) conduct which is in contrast with the patriarchal view on body politics. In this study, the protagonist’s rejection of patriarchal norms by using her body as an apparatus for claiming power, and her body politics for ‘survival’ in the male-oriented world is also examined.

Anahtar Kelimeler

• body politics
• the female body
• the power of femininity
• Angela Carter
• Heroes and Villains

Angela Carter’ın Heroes and Villains Adlı Eserinde Marianne’nin Beden Politikası

Öz

Beden politikası, toplumların beklentilerine göre doğal olarak düzenlenmesi beklenen kadın bedeni üzerindeki ataerkil kaideleri benimseten bir mekanizma olarak görülmektedir. Tarih boyunca, kadın bedeni bir araç olarak görülmüş olup beden politikasının kuramsal dayanağı, kadın bedeninin ataerkil ideoloji tarafından düzenlenmesine dayalı olarak ortaya çıkmıştır. Ataerkil ideolojiye göre, kadınların bedenleri, değeri olmayan değersiz, ikincil bir zemin olarak görülmektedir. Fakat feminizm, kadınların bedenlerini edebi açıdan inceler ve kavramsallaştırır ayrıca kadınları inceleyerek çeşitli kadın kimliklerini yeniden yaratır ve alternatifler üretir. Bu bağlamda, Angela Carter’ın eserlerinde özellikle de Heroes and Villains’da kadın bedeni politikasının tarihsel ve varsayımsal açıklaması üzerine farklı bir tutum vardır. Carter’ın birçok kadın kahramanları erkek bedenlerini provoke edip onları istismar eder. Böylece bu kadın karakterler, erkek bedenlerinin istismar edilmiş ve çarpıtılmış hallerini yansıtırlar. Böylece, Heroes and Villains’da kadın bedeni, kadınlığın gücü olarak görülmekte olup ataerkilliğe karşı bir silah olarak kullanılmaktadır. Bu çalışma, Carter’ın kuramsal ve eleştirel düşüncelerine ilaveten, Carter’ın Heroes and Villains adlı eserindeki ana karakter Marianne’in ataerkil düşüncenin beden politikası üzerindeki görüşlerine zıt olan tutumunu incelemektedir. Çalışmada ayrıca, ana karakterin bedenini güç elde etmede bir araç olarak kullanarak ve erkek egemen dünyada hayatta kalmak için beden politikasından faydalanarak ataerkil kaideleri reddetmesi incelenmektedir.

Anahtar Kelimeler

• beden politikası
• kadın bedeni
• kadınlığın gücü
• Angela Carter
• Heroes and Villains

Kaynakça

1. Alban, G.M.E. (2017). The Medusa gaze in contemporary women’s fiction: Petrifying, maternal and redemptive. Cambridge Scholars Publishing.
2. Carter, A. (2011). Heroes and Villains (R. Coover. Introd) Penguin Modern Classics.
3. Cavallaro, D. (2011). The world of Angela Carter: A critical investigation. McFarland & Company Inc. Publishers.
4. Chodorow, N. (1978). The reproduction of mothering: Psychoanalysis and the sociology of gender. University of California.
5. de Beauvoir, S. (1997). The second sex (H. M. Parshley. Ed. and Trans) Vintage.
6. Dworkin, A. (2007). Intercourse: The twentieth anniversary edition. Basic Books.
7. Engels, F. (2020). The origin of the family, private property and the state. Gece Kitaplığı.
8. Freud, S. (2003). The uncanny (D. McLintock. Trans; H. Haughton. Introd) Penguin Modern Classics.

9. Gamble, S. (2006) (Eds). The routledge companion to feminism and postfeminism.R outledge.
10. Hooks, B. (2000). Feminism is for everybody: Passionate politics. South End.
11. King, D. W. (2000). Body politics and the fictional double. Indiana University.
12. Kristeva, J. (1980). Desire in language: a semiotic approach to literature and art (Leon S. Roudiez. Eds; T. Gora and A. Jardine.Trans) Columbia University.
13. Lerner, G. (1986). The creation of patriarchy. Oxford University.
14. Mahoney, E. (1997). ‘But elsewhere?’: The future of fantasy in heroes and villains. The infernal desires of Angela Carter: Fiction, femininity, feminism. J. Bristow and T. L. Broughton, A. W. Longman. Eds), 73-87.
15. Makinen, M. (2001). Feminist popular fiction. Palgrave.
16. Meaney, G. (2000). History and women’s time: Heroes and Villains. New casebooks: Angela Carter (A. Easton. Eds) Macmillan, 84-106.
17. Millett, K. (2000). Sexual politics. University of Illinois.
18. Nead, L. (1992). The female nude: Art, obscenity and sexuality. Routledge.
19. Paglia, C. (2001). Sexual personae: Art and decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson. Yale University. Peach, L. (1998). Modern novelists: Angela Carter. Macmillan.
20. Plato. (1974). The republic (D. Lee. Trans) Penguin.
21. Sceats, S. (2005). Flights of fancy: Angela Carter’s transgressive narratives. A companion to Magical Realism (S. M. Hart, and W. Ouyang. Eds) Tamesis, Athenaeum Press, 142-150.
22. Todorov, T. (1975). The fantastic: A structural approach to a literary genre (R. Howard. Trans) Cornell University Press.
23. Walby, S. (1990). Theorizing patriarchy. Basil Blackwell.
24. Whitford, M. (1991). (Eds). The irigaray reader: Luce Irigaray. Blackwell.
25. Whitford, M. (1991). Luce irigaray: Philosophy in the feminine. Routledge.
26. Yeandle, H. (2017). Angel Carter and western philosophy. Palgrave Macmillan.
27. Electronic resources: H. (1976). The laugh of the Medusa, Keith Cohen and Paula Cohen (Trans). Signs, vol. 1, no. 4, Summer, 875-893. The University of Chicago Press, Accessed 11.03. 2017, http://www.jstor.org/ stable/3173239.
28. Stone, A. (2011). Mother daughter relations and the maternal in Irigaray and Chodorow. philoSOPHIA, 1, 1, 45-64. Project MUSE. https:// muse.jhu.edu/article/478299.
29. Suleiman, S. R. (1985). (Re)writing the body, the politics and poetics of female eroticism, Poetics Today, vol. 6, no. 1/2, The Female Body in Western Culture: Semiotic Perspectives, 1985, 43-65. Duke University Press, Accessed 31.10 2014, http://www.jstor.org/stable/1772120.