Female Objects and Feminist Consciousness for the Purpose to Awake Readers’ Awareness: A Comparative Analysis between Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber and Anne Sexton’s Transformations

Liu Fenglin

doi:10.28991/esj-2020-01207

Abstract

The female object, as a symbolic image created by male authors to reduce the threat brought by females towards patriarchy, has become a method to express male sexual and domestic fantasies. However, in the fairy tale adaptation by two mid-twentieth century female authors-Angela Carter and Anne Sexton, the female object is used to evoke feminist consciousness. Although former studies have covered some feminism issues, for instance, the feminist awareness through the mirror image in Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber, and the direct metaphors such as “doll” and “soap pop” which lead to female objectification in Anne Sexton’s Transformations, little research has compared the distinctive psychological impacts that the narrative forms between the two mentioned texts have on readers. In the first section of this paper, how both authors deconstruct the female stereotypes and how they reinterpret modes of female agency in the original Grimm’s fairy tales have been examined. Based on the writers’ perspective, the first section would also explore the expression of female objects in their works. As for the second section, I would mainly focus on the psychoanalysis of Lacan’s mirror stages, and yet cover the awakening processes presented in the mirror images and symbols composed in the two adaptations. In the third section, the different narrative strategies utilized by Carter and Sexton in order to stimulate readers’ responses towards feminist consciousness would be illustrated.

Highlights

Fairy tale has always been a part of the world’s literature that could not be ignored
As time goes by, when oral folk tales transformed into fairy tales, some of the purposes and characteristics of its story narrating tradition has maintained—as both folk tales and fairy tales “ferret out [the readers and the authors’] deep-rooted wishes, needs, and wants and demonstrate how they all can be realized” [2] through their marvelous stories—to a certain degree, fairy tales possess the features of socialization, for they gradually became a kind of moral lessons which follow the rules of the patriarchal society and “serve to acculturate women to traditional social roles” [3]
When the Brothers Grimm edited the oral folk tales into fairy tale collections, they modified the original tales elaborately to fit the Middle-class morality by “[weakening] once-strong female characters, [demonizing] female power” [4], while at the same time “[emphasizing] specific role models for male and female protagonists according to the dominant patriarchal code of that time” [1]

Summary

1- Introduction

Fairy tale has always been a part of the world’s literature that could not be ignored. As the magic mirror to some extent symbolizes the perspective from the patriarchal authority, we could discover that Sexton is creating a kind of metaphor to emphasize that no matter the Snow White or the evil queen, they could somehow be mixed and considered as the same woman situating in the different age groups that have been objectified as males’ fetish and would merely refer to the desires of the patriarchy, yet have little consciousness towards their personal right and fate as a female. The strategy of alienation in Carter’s The Bloody Chamber, supplied an opportunity for all of the readers to defamiliarize both their social life under the structure of patriarchy as well as the original Grimms’ fairy tales, in order to form a new conception about gender and female object through the transforming processes of the heroines’ feminist awakening. In the two adaptations, another conception which has been clarified by the two authors is: people struggled for female right and appeal to the power equality between different gender, in modern society, it is still the social structure under the direction of patriarchal conventions that appears as the giant boundary and the limitation to the gender consciousness of both males and females

3- Conclusion

6- Conflict of Interest

7- References