These characters do seem to go through a transition of their own, beginning as the virginal madonna yet appearing more "bad" than "good" nearing the end of each tale...
Tuesday, January 27, 2009
Father to lover theme
As was briefly brought up in class, I have noticed Carter's recurring theme of the lover, in ways, replacing the father for the girls in her stories. I am curious to discuss this further in regards to what Carter may be suggesting by having many of her "girl" characters passed on to lover from father, whether it be through gambling or giving her away. Could Carter be playing with the idea that in most original Grimms (and even Disney) fairy tales, the young girl moves from father to lover as though she needs a man of some sort waiting for her after her transition out of girlhood? (Somewhat related - even the rewritten Snow White is a snow "child". What could be the significance of this?)
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This is an interesting question, and I do think female sexuality, maturation, and (sexual) agency are central to Carter's tales. I think that because her stories are so prismatic and complex, determining the centre can be complicated: i.e it is about patriarchy, no it is about mythology, no it is about rewriting gothic style as post modern pastiche, etc... But the art of her writing is that it is all of these things in definite and defining ways, and I think her critique of patriarchy exists in fine balance with her interest in how women might live their desire within and against it.
ReplyDeleteOne key to the link between her formal organization of these familial/desiring relationships, and the themes of sexuality, aggression, and fantasy which pervade her work, would be in the marriage of psychoanalytic inquiry (Freud), semiotics (Saussure) and anthropology (Levi-Strauss, particularly in his work on "Elementary Structures of Kinship"), in the structuralist psychoanalysis of Jacques Lacan, in which Oedipal relations are transposed onto the unconscious structured like a language. That is to say that Lacan plots the family romance as a local instance of an abstracted, almost mathematical signifying system, that governs who one can desire, how, and why kind of sexed subject one might be.
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ReplyDeleteI liked the mathematical metaphor that our professor approaches in her answer. yes, I see this abandonment of fathers towards daughters is a kind of moving from one authority to another, whereas, the second authority is harsher because of kin-less relation. That is to mean that the other, non paternal authority, has a sexual "access" and more.
ReplyDeleteWhile reading Carter, I definitely got the sense that she was exploring this thread - a girl being daughter and then wife, that the two are in succession without room for a girl to explore what it is to be a woman NOT in relation to a man.
ReplyDeleteI also think that the structure of the book was quite complex and at times hard for me to wrap my mind around. Initially, I expected the fairy tales to be subverted in an obvious black and white way - that the woman would break from the bonds of the patriarchal paradigm and the fairy tale would be completely re-written.
I was surprised to find that often, Carter's stories ended the same way as the original fairy tale. I think the main difference for me in Carter's story, is the ACT of retelling these stories in the language she tells them (this exaggerated baroque style that is often punctuated with moments of irony) draws ATTENTION to the fairy tales patriarchal paradigm in a humourous way. I guess kind of like parody.
Also, I found another key difference between Carter's stories and original fairy tales (which Trish mentioned) was that the female characters in Carter's stories are AWARE of the paradigm, whether they choose to live in them or against them. I felt that this was interesting - to explore the DESIRE to stay within the destiny of the fairy tale. For example, the desire to be an object of sexual consumption, as in "In the Company of Wolves".
My favourite of Carter’s fairytale re-workings found within The Bloody Chamber is “The Werewolf” for the simple fact that it completely subverts the original Charles Perrault narrative formally, stylistically and thematically. The presence of the father figure or any significant male presence is removed in Carter’s vision. Aside from the mentioning of upland woodsmen, the tale is structured around the child and the duality of grandmother/wolf. Male aggression becomes female aggression in establishing the duality of the grandmother as wolf, now both a nurturing figure and aggressor. The father is strictly mentioned in relation to the knife which the child wields herself reclaiming agency. The child is never made to suffer the sentence of death due to patriarchal concerns as with the original tale, instead “she prospers”.
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