It Was So, It Was Not So: The Use of Fairy Tale in the Fiction of Angela Carter and Salman Rushdie

Abstract

This thesis explores the use made of fairy tales by two contemporary writers, Angela Carter and Salman Rushdie. Its aim is to investigate the ways in which fairy tale has enabled them to formulate and further their political positions. In Carter's case I suggest that the fairy tale has enabled her to explore and revise the roles played by women in society. In Rushdie's case I suggest that the fairy tale has provided a means by which he can investigate issues of cultural identity, and also functions as a tool with which ethnocentric assumptions can be challenged. By focusing upon their work I attempt to identify a specific and dominant strain in the contemporary appropriation of fairy tale that can be summarised briefly here as the use of fairy tale in fiction that aims to make statements in the field of identity politics. I concentrate, in Carter's case, upon The Bloody Chamber, Nights at the Circus and Wise Children. In Rushdie's case I look at the work in which he explores the concept of fairy tale most explicitly, Haroun and the Sea of Stories, and then I look in more detail at his use of The Arabian Nights in Midnight's Children and The Satanic Verses. By way of conclusion I suggest that they both use fairy tale as a tentative but nonetheless productive means of outlining utopian solutions to social problems.