Recycling the Fairy in Angela Carter’s "The Bloody Chamber"

Abstract

Angela Carter’s rewriting of fairy tales is a backlash to the patriarchal folkloric heritage. Though her writings are firmly grounded in the original tales, Carter gathers the textual remnants to rebuild postmodern feminist plots that pay tribute to her heroines, who have been mispresented and victimized in the earliest male narratives. Whether in her collection of short stories: The Bloody Chamber, or other works, Carter re-reads a plethora of well-known traditional tales to probe beneath their latent patriarchal motif. The thematic transformations she brings to plots are meant to unveil the position of women as portrayed by male writers and to foreground a feminist postmodern revision of these fairy tales instead. Following a comparative approach, the study of Carter’s fairy tales showcases her feminist postmodern modifications of the bygone patriarchal texts, though still based on the original plot. To take the example of Beauty and The Beast, Carter writes and rewrites it with different plots and characters in her book: The Bloody Chamber. Her primary focus while reworking Madame Leprince de Beaumont’s Beauty and The Beast is to reveal the prevailing unjust gender relations and to show the patriarchal atrocity committed against females, while strengthening her heroines in contradistinction to the original folktales that have marginalized and victimized female characters. The issue of women’s position and gender relations are at the heart of Carter’s feminist project of fairy tale recycling. Both The Courtship of Mr Lyon and The Tiger’s Bride unveil the writer’s postmodern feminist attempts to deconstruct the initial tale by displaying the male role in undermining the female position, meanwhile empowering the latter. Besides, the way how Carter mingles traditional folkloric narratives with her postmodern feminist agenda yields a revolutionary text featuring long-established fairy tales rewritten from a feminist lens.