Gothicism In The Bloody Chamber
Angela Carter’s texts vehemently attacks the stereotypical notions asserted by the culture with a sturdy intention of deconstructing the collective order of society. There is an excessive use of violence, sexual brutality, pornographic contents and exuberance of female power in Carter’s writing. Makinen addresses Carter as the “avant-garde literary terrorist of feminism” (2) for savagely attacking the cultural stereotypes which is both disturbing and alienating. Carter’s The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories is a set of re-structured fairy tales with an obtrusive purpose of altering the formula set by the traditional stories. Carter reassembles the well known fairy tales to an adult version of those tales with a feministic angle to explicate …show more content…
This article intends to study Carter’s attempt in revising the gender role and applying a different approach to the Gothic genre in The Bloody Chamber. Though a retelling of the fairy tales, The Bloody Chamber is branded as a Female Gothic text because of the dark motives and Gothic elements present in the book in association with the female sexuality. Like a conventional Gothic story, the setting of The Bloody Chamber is in a remote castle which symbolizes doom from the beginning of its description in the story. The castle is described …show more content…
He is an inhuman embodiment of sexual perversion and destructive power, ultimately a symbol of death itself…..The Bloody Chamber is a contemporary transformation of that quintessentially grotesque motif, the dance of death and the maiden, a modern, feminist transformation in which for once the maiden is victorious over death itself. In fact, it is the interpretation of death with such richly positive facets of life-wealth, beauty, youth, and sexuality- that gives the symbolism of this novella its grotesque and uncanny
Bluebeard Patriarchy
1041 Words | 5 PagesFor generations, fairy tales have served as a source of wonder and horror in equal measure. For each moment of magical fantasy or romantic bliss, there is a terrifying monster or gruesome act of violence, and there are few monsters more terrifying than Bluebeard. On the surface, Bluebeard is the story of one man's gruesome test and the young girl who escapes the punishment of failing it, with a simple message of being careful with your curiosity. However, like all fairy tales, Bluebeard is a symbolic parable of larger, real-world ideas, specifically those dealing with obedience and gender politics. Bluebeard and his bride serve as representations of both the predator and the innocent, akin to the Grimm's tale of Little Red Riding Hood decades
Feminism In A White Heron
1276 Words | 6 PagesMost of the children read about many fairy tales, especially Snow Whites, Sleeping beauty, and Cinderella when they grew up. It is a surprising fact that to discover a hidden, unexpected political intention in the simple plot of fairy tales. That is a feminization of woman. The fairy tale world suggests a male-centered patriarchy as an ideal basic society and impliedly imply that man and woman need to have a proper attitude toward this opinion. However, Jewett’s A White Heron describes a new perspective of fairy tale’s plot.
Fairy Tale Vs. Perrault's The Sleeping Beauty In The Wood
1025 Words | 5 PagesPerrault, a 17th century French author, wrote about women as damsels in distress in his fairy tales, while Atwood, a 20th and 21st century Canadian author, offers a more realistic and modern approach in her writing. Sharon Wilson, author of the essay “Margaret Atwood and the Fairy Tale: Postmodern Revisioning In Recent Texts”, calls Atwood’s use of fairy tales to talk about current issues in society as “meta-fairy tales”. Atwood’s “meta-fairy tales” offer insight on gender politics in a current patriarchal society. Instead of using generic conventions to tell her story, like Perrault does, Atwood uses them and then dismantles them in order to show the reader the problems within the genre like she does in her poem.
Gothic Elements In The Masque Of The Red Death
1023 Words | 5 PagesEdgar Allan Poe was an American author and editor, who was best known for his works in Gothic literature. Most of Poe’s stories deal with the theme of horror, as was reflected in Poe’s life as it was full of tragedy involving the loss of many of his beloved wives and mothers. The following stories are amongst Poe’s most celebrated stories; The Tell Tale Heart - a short story told by an unreliable narrator who persuades the readers of his sanity, while telling of a murder he committed. The Masque of the Red Death - a story that illustrates Prince Prospero’s efforts to eschew the dangerous plague by hiding in his castle, where he throws a party.
Violence In Bram Stoker's Dracula
1461 Words | 6 PagesBram Stoker, describes one of the verbal taboos of the Victorian era, violence, through the representation of vampires as “monsters” through the point of view of their victims in his novel Dracula. Stoker portrays violence in three distinct categories- physical, visual and psychological. Each one of these categories is described by one of the antagonists in the Novel, with Count Dracula as the physical aspect of violence, his underlings, the female vampires as the visual and Renfield, the patient at Dr. Seward’s mental asylum, as the psychological aspect of violence. This essay looks at the portrayal of such Categorical violence as different renditions of a “monster” and considers why Stoker would segregate violence in such a manner.
Female Sexuality In Dracula
1622 Words | 7 PagesThe earlier gothic works as well as Dracula covered something that is outside the social norm. Female sexuality, something that was unacceptable and under the surface of society, it is exposed in these writings. The earlier readings such as Carmilla, as well as the poem of Christabel question the boundaries. The texts from these literature pieces contain passages of female sexuality and the passages contain phrases that hint towards the social taboos. In the era when women were thought of mere objects these pieces decide to give them a personality or at least a voice that can express desire, a voice that states women have a purpose apart from pleasing men.
Analysis Of The Bloody Chamber
1938 Words | 8 PagesAngela Carter, the author of the collection of short stories The Bloody Chamber was an English novelist, journalist and short story writer. The Bloody Chamber, published in 1979, is one of Carter’s most popular short story collections (Carter 1). The collection consists of ten stories including "The Bloody Chamber". All stories are rewritings of fairy tales and folktales. This paper will firstly offer a narratological analysis of the short story “The Bloody Chamber” while in the second part the short story will be analysed from a feminist perspective.
Analysis Of Margret Atwood's Short Story 'Lusus Naturae'
854 Words | 4 PagesIn addition to virginal innocence, during her funeral, the girl wore white “fitting for a virgin” to increase the significance of this chastity. Reaching the end of the story, the same innocent girl comes back into view. She “put on [her] white burial dress, [her] white veil, as befits a virgin” and excepts her fate just as women accepted their place in society (Atwood 266). Quite unexpectedly, I have attempted to show this story in a new light. Through the reading of Margaret Atwood’s short biography and her clever “Lusus Naturae,” I found an interesting symbolic connection between the treatment of women and the monster in this story.
Gothic In The 19th Century
1096 Words | 5 PagesGodwin, “turned to the gothic and reinvested it with a power that would render his work influential to later writers in the genre as Charles Brockden Brown, Percy Shelley, Charles Robert Maturin ,and his daughter Marry Shelley” . 45 It is impossible to talk about early gothic novels without mentioning Marry Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), or The Modern Prometheus for it creates anew turn in gothic fiction. Frankenstein is an idealistic scientist believes that he has discovered the secret of life, but he loses control over his experiment. The gothic, in general, tends to break the crucial bounders between life and death, and interested in certain issues – bringing dead to life, obtaining immortality, living as ghost after death, these theme
Mystery And Suspense In Gothic Literature
1959 Words | 8 PagesIn any novel, mystery and suspense is a popular characteristic, but contributes very well to what secures a gothic theme to a novel. Here, mystery and suspense are built throughout the novel based on the predicament of the characters. Initially, mystery is built very early on in the story, where the reader is interested to know who the
Sexual Anxieties In Bram Stoker's Dracula
650 Words | 3 PagesThis unsettling evokes some of the key features of the Gothic, such as the use of phantasmagoria, transgression, and excesses, all of which disturbed the reader by surrounding them with dark reflections of a reality portrayed through fiction. Pacts with the devil to obtain one’s desires, monks and aristocrats who revel in luxury — even if this means they must stain their hands with blood —, vampires and mad scientists: all corrupt one’s morals, all corrupt the false appearance of serenity. Likewise, the female vampires who torment Jonathan Harker disturb the harmony of the domestic sphere and unsettle the delicate balance between the private and the public domain. These vampiric women are marked by heightened sensuality and tacked to other fatal women that permeate art and European literature at the end of the nineteenth century. In this novel, fear and desire are often confused, a clue modern anxieties surrounding desire toward sensuous but degrading bodies.
Gender Stereotypes In Disney's Cinderella
1880 Words | 8 PagesThese well-known characters purposely stand on opposite ends of the pole, together with all they represent. On one end, there is the virginal and almost childlike heroine, and on the other, the mature and sexually threatening stepmother. Jerilyn Fisher and Ellen S. Silber, the authors of the article: “Good and Bad Beyond Belief: Teaching Gender Lessons through Fairy Tales and Feminist Theory,” claim that in the absence of the heroine’s true and righteous mother, her pathological stepmother is “the only available, living ‘model’ of feminine maturity” (124). However, since the stepmother is put under harsh social criticism, the heroine is likely to associate herself with “the passive, feminine identity of the first queen, avoiding any identification with the active principle embodied in the characterization of the bad mother/witch” (Fisher and Silber 124). Such is the case of the tale of “Snow-white,” in which we only see the good queen when working on her embroidery, (considered a typical female activity) and wishing for a child (Grimm 215).
Role Of Women In Horace Walpole's 'The Castle Of Otranto'
2050 Words | 9 PagesIntroduction In this paper I want to portray role of women in gothic writing by seeing qualities of the gothic novel, in the point of view of Horace Walpole 's 'The Castle of Otranto '. In 1747, Horace Walpole purchased Strawberry Hill, which was situated on the Thames close London; here he resuscitated the Gothic style numerous decades prior to his Victorian successors. It was a response against neoclassicism. This whimsical neo-gothic invention started another design incline.
Realism In The Tiger's Bride By Angela Carter
2049 Words | 9 PagesThe comment on Beauty’s freewill accentuates the lack of volition in Beauty’s case for she had to pay for her father’s transgression and the Beauty, as other women in the patriarchal social setup is aware of it and willingly accepts her plight. The magic realist tendencies of Angela Carter’s writings also come to the fore in the intermingling of the world of humans and animals, and the mundane and the magical. It is a type of postmodern gothic, which treats a ghost at the table as an everyday occurrence rather than something to be afraid of. In contrast to the “The Courtship of Mr. Lyon,” “The Tiger’s Bride” is explicitly sexual and more radical in its exploration of feminine-masculine stereotypes and relationships.
Patriarchy In The Handmaid's Tale
1122 Words | 5 PagesMargaret Atwood’s novel, The Handmaid’s Tale, argues that women are instruments of the patriarchy, that women know this, and that women allow the system of oppression to live on. Her fictions ask, “What stories do women tell about themselves? What happens when their stories run counter to literary conventions or society’s expectations?” (Lecker 1). The Handmaid’s Tale is told through the protagonist, Offred, and allows readers to follow through her life as a handmaid while looking back on how life used to be prior to the societal changes.
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