I have decided that I will be using feminist criticism to analyse the following Angela Carter stories/essay:
Sadeian Woman
Tiger's Bridge/Courtship of Mr.Lyon (majority of analysis)
There are some of the notes I have made over the past month or so that I consider when writing up my essay. This is NOT all of my notes to consider with 8/9 other secondary resources/articles considered in other notes. Complexity of argument ranges variously
Feminism In
Tiger’s Bridge/Courtship of My.Lyon
Context
Carter developed her radical ideas in
Tokyo when she moved there in 1969. Carter’s best exploration of feminism seems
to be instituted into The Bloody Chamber
and the Sadeian Woman. Both were
written between 1976-1978 and were published in 1979. Charles Perrault and
Marquis De Sade in particular pay their influence into Carter’s writing.
There is no clear sense of time with
some taking part in a mythical past, whilst other stories reference to the 20th
century environments. Angela Carter’s writing was seen as part of the feminist
movement in Britain as she subverts the ancient fairy tales giving heroines
more agency and sympathy. In the Sadeian Woman there is an acceptance of De Sade’s
work which was a more radical viewpoint for feminism at the time, and she was
heavily criticised for this. Feminists put socio-historical circumstances as a
determining factor in the production of literature.
Carter draws upon Marxism and
structuralism as part of her feminist text, and wanted to construct a new canon
of women’s writing by rewriting history of the novel.
·
Kate Millet explored male exploitative and repressive male
characters in Sexual Politics 1970.
·
Feminism at the time saw widespread negative stereotyping
of women constituted a formidable obstacle to the road of true equality- Does
Carter’s writing exploit this?
·
Millet found “distribution of power over the male and
female partners mirrors the distribution of power over males and females in
society at large”- Does Carter’s writing re-affirm this?
AIMS
SUCEEDED IN TBC?
·
Attempt to understand nature of gender inequality?
·
Examine female social roles and experiences?
·
Respond to social constructions of both gender and sex?
·
Display struggles of social classes?
·
Display effects of ideology?
What I will consider when making my analysis
1.
Does Carters
writing demonstrate that the public and private sphere cannot be separated from
one another?
2.
Does Carter
attempt to intervene in the social order with a programme that aims to change
actually existing social conditions?
3.
What are the
roles of the characters and what themes are associated with these characters?
4.
What are the
implicit presuppositions of the characters with regard to readers?
5.
Does Carters
writing assume readers to be male?
6.
Does Carter
succumb to stereotypical representations?
7.
Does Carter in
relation to both texts reflect herself in her characters?
8.
Are the
characters necessarily a direct construction of their culture?
9.
Is female
independence seen as negative in Carter’s writing, does helplessness render
more endearable and admirable qualities in the context of the stories?
10.
Does independence
or dependence find indulgence?
11.
Does Carter
perpetuate inequality?
12.
Does Carter’s
writing expose the mechanisms of patriarchy?
13.
Does Carter
re-think the canon, and aim at rediscovery?
14.
Does Carter
revalue female experience?
15.
Does Carter examine
representations of both sexes?
16.
Does Carter
challenge representations of women as ‘other’ and ‘part of nature?
17.
Does Carter
examine power relations with a view to breaking them down?
18.
Does Carter
raise the question of men and women differing on social constructions or
biology?
19.
Does Carter
recognise the role of language in making social constructions seems natural?
20.
Does Carter make
clear the ideological base of mainstream literary interpretation?
21.
Is Carter
progressive? (Does she expose injustice in the way the fairy-tales are
written)?
Courtship of Mr
Lyon
In the courtship of my Lyon, Beauty’s
father seeks refuge from a snowstorm at an empty mansion. On his way out her
takes a white rose, and then the lion ask her to stay with him, promising that
her father’s fortunes will be restored. Beauty agrees , and she spends the days
alone and the nights talking with the Beast. When he father grows rich she
leaves promising to return before winter ends. Beauty forgets her promise and
only returns when the Beast is dying. She finds him in his bed and kisses his
bands, and he turns into a man.
·
Beast- a lion like creature that lives in a mansion and is
attended to by the spaniel. He falls in love with Beauty and is transformed
into a man known as ”Mr. Lyon” by her kiss.
·
Beauty- a brave , beautiful girl who falls in love with the
Beast but then is distracted by her father’s newfound wealth
·
Beauty’s father- a man who loses his fortune finds the
Beasts mansions and is the beneficiary of the Beast’s hospitality
·
Spaniel: Attendant of the Beast
Quotes to analyse:
1.
“How strange he was. She found his bewildering difference
from herself almost intolerable; its presence chokedher. There seemed a heavy,
soundless pressure upon her in his course as it it lay under water, and when
she saw the great paws lying on the arm of his chair , she though: they are the
death of any tender herbivore. And ush a one she felt herself to be, Miss Lamb
, spotless , sacrificial.
2.
The Beast sunk his great head on his paws. You will come
back to me? It will be lonely here, without you. She was moved almost to tears
that he should care for her so. It was in her heat to drop a kiss upon his
shaggy mane but, though she stretched out her hand towards him, she could bring
herself to touch him of her own free will; he was so different from herself.
But, yes she said: I will come back. Soon, before the winter is over.
3.
She flung herself upon him, so that the iron bedstead
groanded, and covered his poor paws with her kisses. “Don’’t die, Beast! If
you’ll have me , I’ll never leave you”. When her lips touched the meat-hook
claws , they drew back into their pads and she saw how he had always kept his
fists clenched but know , painfully , like tentatively , at last began to
stretch his fingers. He tears fell on his face like and , under their soft
transformation, the bones showed through the pelt , the flesh through the wide
, tawny brow. And then it no longer lion
in her arms but a man…
Analysis part by part:
Beauty waits at home for her father to
return. He is attempting to restore his fortunes. Her father has to steal the
gift of the rose. In terms of Carter sequencing the book, Carter has ranged the
COML appropriately. The monstrosity of the Marquis will become more literal in
“the Beast”. Although the father is at the mercy of the Beast, he is at least
hospitable and kind. Picks the rose because “he loved his daughter”. This
covering up with the mask is almost feminine one may argue. Part of the
sacrificial aspect of virgins in this book involves the heroines giving
themselves up to save their families from punishment. Beaut is white rose now,
but she is in danger of the corruption the heroine of TBC experienced. The motif
o the sacrificial lamb almost becomes literal, as the Beat hunts. She is also
willing to sacrifice herself for his well-being. Although the beast has a
terrifying outward appearance, he has a lonely and sympathetic soul which
antagonises the handsome but monstrous marquis in TBC. In this case the Beast
seems just as virginal and shy as Beauty. Their differences require a
metamorphosis of some kind. Carter associates the act of love in the female
body – menstruating and losing virginity with a kind of magical transformation
one that brings both pain and enlightenment. Beauty has much more agency in
this story as the Beast does not abuse
his power over her and is in fact more love-struck than she is. Carter gives
her heroines greater freedom, but with it come more flaws, as Beauty is deduced
by the wealth and luxury that was part of the Marquis’ draw for the first
heroine. Carter brings back the image of rotted and decaying opulence as much
as she does that of extreme wealth. Though the beasts initially had all the
power in the relationship he has given it up out of love, sacrificing himself
like a lamb instead of a lion.
Tiger’s Bride
In the Tiger’s Bride a Russian man
gambles away his daughter to a mysterious nobleman called the Beast. The
Beast’s valet takes the heroine to a mansion where, where the Beast wants to
see her naked. The heroine refuses and is put in a room with an automaton maid.
The Beast then takes the heroine on a horse rode , where he disrobes and
reveals himself as a tiger. The heroin takes off her clothes in her response.
Later the heroine goes to the tiger’s room, where he licks her and her skin
comes off as she transforms into a tiger.
·
Beast – A tiger who disguises himself as a man with a mask
and cloak. He lives in an isolated mansion and plays cards with everyone who
passes through his town.
·
Heroine- A beautiful, virginal girl whose father gambles
her away to the Beast. At first she refuses the Beast and threatens to kill
herself, but then she undresses before him and is transformed into a tiger by
his “kiss”.
·
Heroine’s father – Wasteful , foolish man who gambles away
his fortunes and his daughter and tries to apologize
·
Valet and a Automan Maid: Attendants to the beast.
Quotes to Analyse:
1. And the Beast gave me the rose from
his own impeccable it outmoded buttonhole when he arrived, the valet brushing
the show off his black cloak. This white rose, unnatural, out of season, that
now my nervous fingers ripped, petal by petal , apart as my father
magnificently concluded the career he had made of catastrophe.
2. The valet held out his master’s cloak
to screen him from me as he removed the mask. The horses stirred. The tiger
will never lie down with the lamb; he acknowledges no pact that is not
reciprocal. The lamb must learn to run with the tigers. A great, feline, tawny
shape whose pelt was barred with a savage geometry of bars the colour of burned
wood. His domed, heavy head, so horrible he must hide… I felt my breast ripped
apart as if I suffered a marvellous wound.
3. He dragged closer and closer to me,
until I felt the harsh velvet of his head against my hand, then a tongue,
abrasive as sandpaper “He will lick the skin off me!” And each stroke of his
tongue ripped off skin after successive skin, all the skins of a life in the world,
and left behind a nascent patina of shining hands. My earrings turned back to
water and trickled down my shoulders: I shrugged the drops off my beautiful
fur”.
Virginity is both an invitation for
corruption and a kind of strength or shield. Virginity to the heroines is the most
attractive of qualities many may argue. Throughout her stories they inherent a
meaning of innocence and unique strength. Virginity is like the blank slate,
the potential for sexual violence, a metamorphosis of the self, or both.
There are also themes of manipulative
power and the objectification of women, with divides between the poor virginal
heroine and the wealthy powerful monster, but In Carter’s versions this divide
also leads to sexual oppression. In the Courtship of My Lyon the heroine is
indebted to a bestial man for lifting her out of poverty and so they must
endure their desires. The Beast’s room in the Tiger’s Bride serves most
naturally as the “bloody chamber” of that story.
Roses appear to generally symbolize the
female heroine of both tales. The rose serves as a traditional romantic image,
a symbol of female purity and the vagina, and the repetitive use of the image
reflects the archetypal characters. The rose as a symbol of femininity becomes
more complex in Carter’s stories , however as it initially acts as a sign of
virginity and purity ; Beauty’s father picks a while rose for her in “The
Courtship of Mr Lyon” – but the very act of
“symbolizing” then becomes a symbol of objectification. When the women
of the book are objectified by male power and sexual oppression, they have no
more agency than a beautiful but powerless rose. In the “tiger’s bride” and
“the snow child”, however the thorns of the rose prick the heroine’s finger.
This shows the suffering brought about by being objectified (usually through
sexual violence) , but it also implies some agency in the heroines themselves.
They are symbolised by the pure, beautiful rose but they also have thorns and
can “bite”.
In this case the father loses Beauty not
out of love (Mr Lyon with the rose) but out of his own weakness. Perhaps
because of this poo relationship with her father, the heroine here has more
pride and anger than the Beauty in COML. She is immediately associated with the
rose but grows more complex just no just a symbol of virginity but also thorns
, showing the pain of Beauty’s objectification and fierceness and pride. As the
heroine picked the petals off her rose, the Beast wants the heroine to expose
her true self , another kind of power Carter fids In virginity of nakedness
(body and soul) that has never been corrupted. The Beast has a ‘bestial’ desire
but he does not abuse his power.
Both stories involve transformations one
deals with an acceptance of gentleness and another with animality. The
heroine’s pain and metamorphosis is also symbolic of losing her virginity.
Roxie Drayson notes:
The Bloody Chamber (small
analysis)
Susanne Kappeler, have stated that
Carter's use of Sade's misogynist works did little other than reinforce
degrading patriarchal representations of women. Her accusation that Carter is
simply ‘playing in the literary sanctuary’ implies a refusal to acknowledge
that some pornographic literature may be open to a subversive re-appropriation
which could challenge the political and social status quo.
Similarly, Patricia Duncker commented in
relation to Carter's use of the traditional fairy tale in The Bloody Chamber
‘that the infernal trap inherent in the fairy tale, which fits the form to its
purpose, to be the carrier of ideology, proves too complex and pervasive to
avoid. Carter is rewriting the tales within the strait-jacket of their original
structures’.
Both texts highlight the connection that
binds sexual and socio-economic relations within a patriarchal society. In her
fairy-tale revisions, Carter attempts, just as Sade did in his black
fairy-tales, to expose a reality that those tales sought to disguise: that
female virginity operates as a token and guarantor of the ruling classes'
property rights.
Tiger's Bridge/ Courtship of Mr.Lyon / The Sadeian Woman
According
to the critic Betsey Hearne, the original eighteenth-century tale of 'Beauty
and the Beast' by Jeanne-Marie Le Prince de Beaumont – upon which two of
Carter's stories in The Bloody Chamber are based – can be read as a
proto-feminist text. Beaumont lived at a time when the archaic tradition of
arranged marriage based on social position and wealth was being challenged by
the progressive concept of courtly love. In the classic pattern of courtship,
Beauty is represented as having a choice.
The Beast repeatedly asks for her hand in marriage which she chooses to
refuse on several occasions, suggesting that her final decision to wed is
entirely voluntary and therefore indicative of romantic love. However in truth,
when Beaumont's Beauty first considers the possibility of marrying the Beast,
her motivations are primarily those of practicality and gratitude for the
generous gifts lavished on her: ‘“Am I not very wicked,” said she, “to act so
unkindly to Beast that has studied, so much to please me in everything? [...]
It is true, I do not feel the tenderness of affection for him, but I find I
have the highest gratitude, esteem and friendship; I will not make him
miserable, were I to be so ungrateful I should never forgive myself”’. She is not a woman in love, but someone
calmly calculating her prospects and economic obligations. She can therefore be
read as a representation of female collusion within the patriarchal exchange system
of women.
Mimicking Sade by adopting the role of
‘moral pornographer’ who ‘through the infinite modulations of the sexual act’
reveals ‘the historical fact of the economic dependence of women upon men’,
Carter uses her first revision of Beaumont’s 'Beauty and the Beast' to
illustrate the system of material exchange upon which the original's romantic
concept of marriage is in fact founded. In the ironically titled 'The Courtship
of Mr Lyon', she highlights the construction of the female as a circulating
object of exchange by allowing, in a sentence concerning the white rose that
Beauty's father had promised to buy her, a fleeting syntactic ambiguity about
what is being bought, Beauty or the rose: ‘not even enough money left over to
buy his Beauty, his-girl-child, his pet, the one white rose she said she
wanted’. The white rose, signifying
Beauty's status as a commodity, later becomes a token of exchange in a system
of private ownership between the male Beast and Beauty's father. The Beast's
estate bespeaks a materialism reserved for the male patriarch; it is ‘a place
of privilege’. Just as Beauty's father
is the proud owner of ‘his girl-child, his pet’, the Beast is similarly
accustomed to being the possessor of beautiful and valuable objects. Carter
highlights the inexorability of the male-defined economy that structures the
original narrative in a sly aside after the Beast's quid pro quo proposal: ‘and
what else was there to be done’. Beauty
is represented as aware of, yet powerless to contravene, her position in this
system of symbolic exchange: ‘she stayed and smiled, because her father wanted
her to do so [...] For she knew with a pang of dread that her visit to the
Beast must be, on some magically reciprocal scale, the price of her father's
good fortune’.
As a
governess, Beaumont was viewed as a progressive thinker in her day who had a
‘reforming zeal for both the status and the education of women in
society’. Originally published in a book
that tells of a governess reciting different lessons and stories to a group of
girls in her charge, 'Beauty and the Beast' was designed as a sex-specific tale
intended to present a suitable model for little girls. However, as the
folklorist Jack Zipes states, the story suggests ‘that the mark of beauty for a
female is to be found in her submission, obedience, humility, industry, and
patience’. Beauty sacrifices her will to
that of two men, her father and the Beast, and seeks for her self-effacement to
be praised as a virtuous and courageous act. Carter ironises this position by
permitting the derisive description – ‘Miss Lamb, spotless, sacrificial’ – to emanate from Beauty's own perspective.
In her passive submission, Beauty is revealed to be a copy of Sade's Justine, a
character whom Carter described as ‘a good woman according to the rules for
women laid down by men and her reward is rape, humiliation and incessant
beatings [...] the living image of a fairy-tale princess’. In 'The Courtship of Mr Lyon', Beauty
expedites her own domination by offering herself to the Beast in desperation,
almost as if she fears not being taken otherwise: ‘if you'll have me, I'll
never leave you’. Carter is evidently impatient with Beauty's acceptance of her
subordinate status and commented that the original tale is ‘an advertisement
for moral blackmail when the Beast says that he is dying because of Beauty, the
only morally correct thing for her to have said at that point would be, “Die,
then”’. However in her own revision, no
such rebellion occurs, instead we are left with Mr. Lyon's self-regarding,
complacent self-satisfaction at the appropriation of his latest acquisition:
‘do you know, I think I might be able to manage a little breakfast today,
Beauty, if you eat something with me’.
In an
interview with John Haffenden, Carter commented that ‘some of the stories in The
Bloody Chamber are the result of furiously quarrelling with Bettelheim’,
specifically referring to 'Beauty and the Beast' as a tale of which her
interpretation differed markedly from that of the psychoanalytic critic. While
he viewed the fable as an allegory of the successful maturation of the girl
into sexual adulthood, in 'The Courtship of Mr Lyon', she indicates that within
patriarchal society autonomous female growth is in effect stunted. Bettelheim
framed his reading of the story entirely within the Oedipal narrative,
suggesting that Beauty, due to the incest taboo and her desire for her father,
has not been able to see the prince correctly and has imagined him as a beast.
Once she is able successfully to sever her Oedipal attachment to her father, she
can then see the Prince as he is and has always been. In her second revision of the tale, 'The
Tiger's Bride', Carter allows Beauty to escape from the oedipal narrative,
offering an alternative model for the development of female sexual desire.
Carter
reverses the child's willingness to sacrifice all for her beloved father into
the father's own willingness to sacrifice all, including his daughter and wife,
to his puerile egotism and frenetic pleasure-seeking. The role of women as
objects of exchange in classic fairy tales, adumbrated in 'The Courtship of Mr
Lyon', is further accented in 'The Tiger's Bride' as Beauty's father loses her
to the Beast in a game of cards. Appropriating the personal voice, this Beauty
avatar not only takes control of the narrative, and therefore the patriarchal
narrative tradition of the fairy tale itself, but in observing her surroundings
from a detached, acrimonious perspective is able to expose the predicament of
women within the patriarchal system: ‘I watched with the furious cynicism
peculiar to women whose circumstances force mutely to witness folly’. Unlike her twin sister in 'The Courtship of
Mr Lyon', she does not construct herself as a delicate ‘pearl’ but as a stronger, more resilient ‘woman of
honour’ who refuses to play the role of
victimized pawn. The white rose, which referred in the previous story to
Beauty's status as cultural commodity, is disdainfully returned by this Beauty
to her father ‘all smeared with blood’.
When the Beast asks her to undress, she refuses to discharge her
father's debt and submit to the Sadeian one-way pornographic gaze who she
believes will objectify and other her. However, just as this Beauty does not
represent the archetypal Beauty, this Beast does not represent the archetypal
Beast. He is no longer a man with the appearance of a lion but a tiger wearing
the crafted, ‘beautiful’ mask of a man, suggesting that identity is in itself
an artefact. Beauty is fascinated by his otherness, and she is soon able to
perceive that beneath the constructed façade of his social appearance, they
share an innate commonality: ‘we could boast amongst us not one soul since all
the best religions in the world state categorically that neither beasts nor
women were equipped with souls’. Both
excluded from patriarchal society, their relationship can therefore escape
androcentric structures in which sexual relations are governed by male
discourses of sexuality. It is the tiger who first undresses, revealing his
animality behind his human mask, allowing her, asserting herself, to do the
same. Rather than bothering its object, the tiger's gaze instead requires the
engagement of another subject, acknowledges ‘no pact that is not
reciprocal’. Moved by his restrained
ferocity and non-differentiating gaze, she exposes herself to him and in doing
so finds her perception of the ‘fleshly nature of women’ transformed.
Reading
The Bloody Chamber alongside The Sadeian Woman, Patricia Duncker comments, in
reference to 'The Tiger's Bride' , that ‘all we are watching, beautifully
packaged and unveiled, is the ritual disrobing of the willing victim of
pornography’, believing that Carter has absorbed Sade's misogyny and can
therefore have ‘no conception of women's sexuality as autonomous desire’. This interpretation undermines the agency
that Beauty displays in refusing to allow the Beast to cover himself and in
stripping herself. Not to do so would have confirmed the patriarchal view that
she has no animal self to expose. In the story's final moments, the Beast licks
away Beauty's skin, revealing the beautiful tiger beneath. Instead of the male
animalistic libido devouring the sexually unmotivated female, Beauty is in fact
revealed to possess an autonomous sexual libido of her own. Her transformation
from object of exchange into independent subject is solidified when she
dispatches her mechanical twin, a clock-work doll, back to her father: ‘I will
dress her in my own clothes, wind her up, send her back to perform the part of
my father's daughter’.
Like
Duncker, Avis Lewallen similarly suggests that the tale is trapped in ‘the
Sadean framework, fuck or be fucked, both in the literal and in the
metaphorical sense’. It is an
interpretation rooted in Lewallen's misreading of Carter's critique of Sade's
dualistic Juliette/Justine paradigm in The Sadeian Woman. While Lewallen
believes that ‘Carter is attempting to promote an active sexuality for women
within Sadean boundaries’, Carter’s analysis of Juliette/Justine, the female
libertine and the sacrificial victim, stresses that ultimately ‘Juliette's
triumph is just as ambivalent as Justine's disaster’; she believes that ‘the Sadeian woman does not
subvert her society, except incidentally, as a storm trooper of the individual
consciousness. She remains in the area of privilege created by her class just
as Sade remains in the philosophic framework of his time’. In 'The Tiger's Bride', Beauty is not based
on Sade's Juliette. Moving from clothes to skin to fur, she represents the
multiplicity of female identity. Whereas Beaumont's story emphasises the
potential danger of the polymorphousness latent in each individual and tries to
castrate and channel it in accordance with the requirements of a fixed social
structure, Carter celebrates indeterminacy and liminality as a desirable and excitingly
perverse state. In her revisionary tale, Beauty and the Beast are not trapped
within the Sadean fuck or be fucked mentality, they are subverting it as
neither can be read as predator or victim. Their relationship is modelled on
Carter's concept of reciprocal love in The Sadeian Woman which ‘will not admit
of conqueror and conquered’. It is a
model which Carter states Sade explicitly controverted as he ‘preserves his ego
from the singular confrontation with the object of reciprocal desire which is,
in itself, both passive object and active subject. [...] It is in this holy
terror of love that we find, the source of all opposition to the emancipation
of women’. Beauvoir, similarly
admonishes Sade for ‘never for an instant losing himself in his animal nature’, and for refusing in his misogyny to
acknowledge the way in which the ambiguity of his fleshed subjectivity could
open him reciprocally to the female other. Both women situate Sade's
solipsistic ethic of the erotic against their own feminist erotic, one which
‘allows one to grasp existence in one's self and the other, as both
subjectivity and passivity. The two partners merge in this ambiguous unity;
each one is freed of his own presence and achieves immediate communication with
the other’.
Carter's dual revisions of the
traditional fairy tale 'Beauty and the Beast' act as intratextual companion
pieces within The Bloody Chamber and exemplify the collection’s textual tactics
as a whole. The first version deconstructs the original story by exposing the
contrived gender differences and positionalities which inform it. The second
reconstructs by permitting the feminine subject to exceed the projected desire
prohibited by the patriarchal forces of the classic fairy tale that insist on
restricting female sexuality to that of an economic commodity. Employing Sade's
liberatory philosophy strategically, Carter exposes the patriarchal framework
that structures such narratives, and reformulates it into a feminist tale of
erotic experience. As Marina Warner states: ‘Carter snatches out of the jaws of
misogyny itself 'useful stories' for women. There she found Sade a liberating
teacher of the male-female status quo and made him illuminate the far reaches
of women's polymorphous desires. The effect is to lift Beauty [...] out of the
pastel nursery into the labyrinth of female desire’. By insisting on understanding Sade, by giving
themselves over, through a method of critical sympathy, to the logic of his
philosophy, while exposing his misogyny, both Beauvoir and Carter are able to
make Sade work for them.
The Sadeian Woman (small
analysis)
·
Carter writes in The Sadeian Woman that ‘sexual relations
between men and women always render explicit the nature of social relations in
the society in which they take place and if described explicitly will form a
critique of those relations’.
·
The Sadeian Woman “demonstrated a profound unease with the
ethics of any appropriation of Sade by feminism”.
·
“Angela Carter similarly (to Beauvoir) appropriates the
writings of Sade to further her own feminist project of demythologising;
hegemonic and essentialist conceptions of female sexuality”
·
Carter “considers his (Sade’s) pornography to be unique in
that he used it to reveal rather than conceal the actuality of sexual
relations”
·
“He treats the facts of female sexulity not as a moral
dilemma but as a political reality”
·
Carter: “(Sade) urged women to fuck asctively as they were
able[…] to fuck their way into history and in doing so change it”
·
“For Sade, ‘sexuality was not a biological matter , but a
social fact”
·
“it is as a moralist rather as a poet that Sade tries to
shatter the prison of appearances”
Ozum Notes
(Fairy-tales)
fabricate a subverted form of the monstrous and the evil? In some of the
stories of The Bloody Chamber, Angela Carter is concerned not only with the
shortcomings of conventional representations of gender, but also with different
models of deconstructed masculine evil which take various shapes in evil and
wicked female format.
Carter, in an
interview, claims to have used “the latent content of those traditional
stories” and “that latent content is violently sexual.” It is impossible to
evaluate these stories in The Bloody Chamber independently from Carter’s The
Sadeian Woman which was published in the same year, in 1979. The latter work
received antithetical criticism from feminist critics of pornography; Susanne
Kappeler accuses Carter of valuing the pornographic – in the name of equal
rights and opportunities – by employing the literary. However, what Carter
depicts in The Sadeian Woman is not the mere objectification of the female to
the pervert male world, but reinforcing the idea of separation of women’s
sexuality from their reproductive function. She also asserts that Sade “put
pornography in the service of women, or, perhaps, allowed it to be invaded by
an ideology not inimical to women ...” In the stories selected from The Bloody
Chamber, Carter not only deconstructs but also discloses the fixity of the
frame that encloses the motif of the masculine evil to one single referent by
playing with the slippery ground where content and form of the fairy tales are
fabricated. Hence, in the stories the representation of the female evil in the
reappropriation of the fairy tales saves the woman subject from being
victimized in the traditionally acknowledged frameworks.
Carter’s tales
fabricate new cultural and literary realities in which sexuality and free will
in women replace the patriarchal traits of innocence and morality in
traditional fairy tales. In some of the stories of The Bloody Chamber, Carter
is concerned not only with the shortcomings of conventional representations of
gender, but also with different models of deconstructed masculine evil which
take various shapes in wicked female format.
the stories,
in effect, deconstruct and demystify evil which is closely linked with masculinity
and patriarchal values and norms and that the stories intentionally display a
potential harshness of the female evil simultaneously existing with the
masculine evil.
The way Carter
re-presents female sexuality, the arousal of which is triggered by cunning,
evil, sly and sometimes pervert revelations, plays with the earlier
misogynistic versions of the fairy-tale genre.
The link which
combines the subverted version of the fairy-tales and The Sadeian Woman is
embedded in the way Carter reimagines the young heroines as active in their own
sexual development and experience. In The Sadeian Woman, Carter reads Sade in
such a way that, she believes he claimed the “rights of free sexuality for
women” and created “women as beings of power in his imaginary worlds.”2 She
also acknowledges Marquis de Sade’s belief that “it would only be through the
medium of sexual violence that women might heal themselves of their socially
inflicted scars, in a praxis of destruction and sacrilege.”3 Carter concludes
the “Polemical Preface” of The Sadeian Woman by asserting that Sade “put
pornography in the service of women, or, perhaps, allowed it to be invaded by
an ideology not inimical to women.”4
“A moral
pornographer … would not be the enemy of women, perhaps he might begin to
penetrate to the heart of the contempt for women that distorts our culture.”
Susanne
Kappeler, a critic of pornography accuses Carter of valuing the pornographic,
in the name of equal rights and opportunities, by employing literary. Carter’s
concern is rather metaphoric in her stories. In fact, Kappeler acknowledges
this intention of Carter, while teasingly stating that “[s]ince it all happens
in the realm of the literary, it cannot possibly be ‘inimical’ to women in the
real world.”11 Carter however does not “lapse into the fallacy of equal
opportunities … to cause suffering, ‘just as men do.’”12 She employs literary
devices to impose the idea that evil and wickedness cannot be attributed to the
male solely, and she deconstructs the solid link between evil and masculinity
in most of the fairy-tales.
Courtship of Mr.Lyon
"The
Courtship of Mr. Lyon" is based on a classic story, "Beauty and the
Best," and told in the "once upon a time" third person common to
traditional fairy tales. Carter's classic backdrop of basic story and narration
emphasizes her tale's unconventionality, with its feminist themes and plot
reversal. Like many of Carter's stories, far from "classic,"
"The Courtship of Mr. Lyon" is a tale of self-discovery and rejection
of female objectification. According to Meyre Ivone Santana da Silva, the
story's primary thematic difference from "Beauty and the Beast" is
its manipulation of that story's "act of mirroring." In "Beauty
and the Beast," we are forced to see Beauty and Beast as diametrically
opposed forces; Beauty is feminine, beautiful, innocent, and gentle, while
Beast is masculine, ugly, experienced, and wild. The original story suggests
that the sides of this dichotomy are irreconcilable, or in da Silva's words,
"completely dissociated."
Yet Carter's
characters are more "ambiguous." In the story of "Beauty and the
Beast," according to da Silva, "One side is always empowered in
relation to the other." Although "The Courtship of Mr. Lyon"
begins this way, Carter quickly reverses the convention. Beauty begins as a
penniless, helpless girl, whom the rich, powerful and world-weary Beast forces
to live in his house. However, she rapidly becomes the more active,
experienced, and adventurous character. While the Beast hides from the world,
she is confident enough to live a high-profile life in the city. While at first
she is afraid of him, she comes to realize that he is actually afraid of her.
In the end, Carter totally reverses the Beauty/Beast dichotomy; the Beast takes
on the role of fairy-tale princess, wasting away in his attic
"tower," guarded by a beast (in this case himself), and needing
Beauty to rescue him from that beast or beastliness.
Carter uses
symbolism in "The Courtship of Mr. Lyon" to emphasize her main
feminist agenda. She employs a paradigm commonly found in literature,
distinguishing the city as a masculine place of experience and corruption and
the country as a feminine one of inexperience and purity. However she uses this
literary convention to undermine a gender convention; the Beast is trapped in
isolation in the country while Beauty has free range of the city. Because the
characters need to access both their "masculine" and
"feminine" attributes in order to be happy, they are both are unhappy
when they are limited to being in one place. The country is so
"innocent" or devoid of activity that it weakens the Beast almost to
the point of death. The city is so "worldly" and full of superficial
interactions that it hardens Beauty and begins to replace her inner beauty with
a spoiled, false air. Carter uses the city and country as symbols to strengthen
her contention that a person needs to be both "masculine" and
"feminine" to have an authentic and fulfilled existence.
Carter uses
food or sustenance as an equalizer because it is symbol of both animal and
human nature; both animals and humans must eat in order to survive. At first,
food signifies civilization and humanity. When the Beast leaves out food for
Beauty's father, he shows his humanity by being courteous to his guest. It is
the same when he feeds Beauty; he may be a lion who eats raw flesh, but he
provides her with the finest human food. At the story's end, food signifies
animal nature. The Beast is dying because he is not eating, just as humans can
die from starvation because we too are animals.
Beauty proves
herself to be more than a traditional fairy tale heroine, but in the beginning,
she conforms to the paradigm. Like many of Carter's heroines, she must start
within and then break free from the restrictions and assumptions of patriarchal
society. As da Silva phrases it, "The daughter is conscious of her annihilation
in the patriarchal society but she doesn't have autonomy to overcome it."
While Beauty is living with the Beast, she finds amusement in reading fairy
tales. It is as though despite living in a modern world with telephones and
automobiles, Beauty wants to believe in the conventional "happily ever
after." Her request for a single white rose also conveys this wish for
conventionality; the rose symbolizes her chasteness and delicateness. Carter
emphasizes Beauty's femininity, innocence, and virginity by comparing her to
the immaculate snow upon which she gazes. By saying the snowy road, and by
association, Beauty is "white an unmarked as a spilled bolt of bridal
satin," Carter seems to insinuate that Beauty's uniqueness lies in her
gentle femininity and that her destiny is marriage.
Like mostly
any written text, this story can be interpreted, from a psychoanalytical
perspective. I have chosen these two perspectives-psychoanalytical and feminist
approaches because I find that the chosen text does lend itself to such
analysis. First and foremost, there are some elements in the text that
psychoanalysts would certainly take into account and would be willing to
interpret, and secondly, since the story is written by a feminist, it must
contain some typically feminist aspects and elements that could be interesting
to study here.
The
psychoanalytical approach applied to this text may take several directions: one
can either analyse the author, the characters, or the content of the story
itself. I will refer here mostly to the psychoanalysis of the characters and of
some relevant elements that can be found in the story.
As
psychoanalytical theory affirms, in the growing-up process, the child keeps on
to his/her imaginary identification with objects, and that is how his/her ego
is slowly built up; in fact, the girl firstly identifies herself with the white
rose she asks for her father to bring her upon his return home. The white rose
is a clear symbol of purity, virginity, femininity, but also of matrimony.
There are also
some other elements at the beginning of the text which stress this idea of
marriage, or of wedding, to be more specific. The author indeed mentions the
existence of snow, and then the image gets crystal clear: "the road is
white and unmarked as a spilled bolt of bridal satin." We are given clear
allusions to the young girl's purity and also that she has reached a
marriageable age.
As it has been
previously mentioned, what we can notice about her is her tendency to identify
herself with exterior elements. She seems in search of her true self. First she
identifies herself with the symbolically-charged white rose, than we are told
about her newly-discovered pleasure of looking into the mirror. In this way,
her ego gets more and more developed, she becomes more and more self-conscious.
Freud might have said in this case that the young girl shows signs of
auto-eroticism, that she takes erotic pleasure in her own body. And by looking
into the mirror all the time, her exterior beauty causes her to become a bit
vain and self-centered, and to forget about the promise she had made to the
Beast, that of returning to him after the end of the winter. She may be said to
suffer, at least temporary, from the "delusions of grandeur" Freud
once mentioned. Yet she manages to escape this, we could say that she is cured
at the moment when the spaniel arrives to inform her of its master's, the
Beast's, tragic state, and when she thus manages to escape from her egotistic
prison, she succeeds in becoming aware of the other.
From the same
psychoanalytical point of view, we could say that she does suffer from the
so-much-discussed Oedipus complex. The mother is absent in this story, and
neither is there any mentioning of her whatsoever. The Father, the
representative of the Law follows the principle of "sexual division of labour."
He is the bread-winner, the business man who has to provide himself and his
only daughter financial support. Beauty has a rather passive role in this
respect, at least at the beginning of the story-she merely stays home, waiting
for her father to return and bring her the desired white rose. Her other role
is to ensure the emotional "maintenance" of the family. She is
"both 'inside' and 'outside' male society, both a romantically idealized
member of it and a victimized outcast. She is sometimes what stands between man
and chaos."
This latter
assumption, the fact that woman stands between man and chaos, is most obvious
at a certain instant of the story, after Beauty's leaving Mr. Lyon, with the
promise to return to him, the "Beast" becomes victim of such chaos:
not only he gets seriously ill, but also his luxurious dwelling place gets
extremely untidy and looks rather poor. So, the woman is the one who can
restore the disturbed order, since she was the one to initially have broken
into this order.
