A Transitivity Approach to Angela Carter’s Feminist Revision of “Snow White”

Abstract

Angela Carter rewrites Grimm’s fairy tale “Snow White” from the feminist perspective and creates her short story “The Snow Child”. Carter keeps the indispensable element, namely the magic mirror, but renders it invisible. Through it, Carter secretly reveals the mirror images between the Countess and the snow child, providing new insight into the Countess’s motivation to kill the child. An analysis of the transitivity system in the short story reveals that Carter deepens the theme from ostensible “female jealousy” to “oppressed female seeking liberation” in an attempt to encourage target readers (adult women) to challenge patriarchal forces and seek liberation. It meets the propaganda of the second feminist movement to pursue women’s freedom and sexual initiative. An in-depth exploration of the feminist ideology in this rewritten work can not only supplement the one-sided interpretation of “The Snow Child” by previous critics, but also reveal Carter’s unremitting efforts to make the classic fairy tale get rid of the label of “a carrier of the toxic patriarchal myths that are used to deceive women”, help it meet the trends of the contemporary era, and inject contemporary meaning into the classic fairy tale.