“Castration or Decapitation?” A Feminist Reading of Two Stories by Angela Carter

Shadi Neimneh

doi:10.32996/ijllt.2021.4.5.8

Abstract

This article examines two stories by Angela Carter, “The Bloody Chamber” (1979) and “The Executioner’s Beautiful Daughter” (1974) to account for Carter’s unique and ambivalent dismantling of patriarchal myths. Carter conflates two patriarchal tropes, castration and decapitation, to figure the oppression of women while allowing for an avenue of resistance. Using the French version of feminism, the work of Hélène Cixous in particular, the psychoanalytic theories of Freud and Lacan, and the postmodern critique of Linda Hutcheon, the article contends that Carter uses the trope of decapitation to link beheading to loss of agency and thus to serve her project of exposing violent patriarchal and sexual structures. She utilizes decapitation to interrogate female inferiority and project its castrating impact on those women who are threatened with this punishment. Decapitation, however, becomes a means of undermining patriarchal logic from within since Carter reverses its targets and logic just as she does with castration. Carter’s act of conflating castration and decapitation and unsettling their connotations revises power structures and challenges attributing castration to men and decapitation to women, offering a postmodern critique of patriarchal fixities, oppressive boundaries, and negative gender constructions imposed on women.

Highlights

1 Decapitation has been used since antiquity as a form of punishment for serious offences against people of high rank or dishonored traitors
It can be seen as part and parcel of her overall feminist project of giving agency to women and rethinking dominant power structures
In “The Bloody Chamber,” she saves the woman from decapitation and allows the victim’s castrated/decapitated Medusa-like mother to shoot the threatening husband in the head

Summary

Introduction

The renowned British writer Angela Carter (1940-1992) published many novels and stories, the theme of decapitation and its relation to castration is very rarely utilized in her oeuvre It can be seen as part and parcel of her overall feminist project of giving agency to women and rethinking dominant power structures. In another story entitled “The Executioner’s Beautiful Daughter” (1974), the actual decapitation of the incestuous brother of a beautiful girl by his father is used to figure the girl’s own sexual submissiveness and silence, i.e. her castration In both stories, Carter tweaks decapitation to serve feminist ends of following patriarchal logic only to subvert it by exposing its injustice to women. Carter conflates castration and decapitation and makes related images of castration and decapitation a dominant theme in both

Methods

Discussion

Conclusion