Her desires seemingly innocent are soon revealed as based on inexperience both of the world and the sexual nature of marriage. The heroine of the story, not unlike the Countess from The Snow Child, is drawn to a mysterious dark figure of a man who represents a potential passage not only to adulthood but also social recognition. Though The Bloody Chamber begins as a story of marriage between an unnamed 17-year- old, a virgin piano player, a culture’s child, and a much older aristocrat who seduces her, cunningly exploiting her gullible character and lack of experience by literally buying her into marriage, it is the use of fairytale-typical symbolism and motifs that Carter employs subversively for the purpose of unmasking the true nature of their desires and the ties that bind the two into a relationship of attraction and repulsion, and it is even more apparent in The Snow Child story. The Taboo and Gender and Culture Conditioned SexualityĪngela Carter materializes the universal fear of what is anomalous and dark, and personifies the monstrosity that is otherwise unwanted in the open, present yet tabooed and represented only through symbolism. In the subversive revisions of some of the most popular fairytales and their symbolism unmasked, The Bloody Chamber and The Snow Child, Angela Carter deals with the formula of ‘dreadful pleasure’ and gender and culture conditioned sexuality – the taboo of dark erotic desires and the attraction-repulsion relation and the possibility of altering the paradigms of the society assigned gender roles. The basic instinct that along with the survival instinct enables the species to continue is turned into a perversion both of manner of sexual gratification and the inversion of the object of desire, and trained in the fashion of the social and political context, revealing the deeply set fear of the limitless power of the dominating strata – aristocracy – and the inexhaustible power that status in society allows to the point of giving certain members the right to subdue, subjugate and defeat others in the acts of dominance – physical and psychological.
The modern twist on the fear of the consuming male figures is transformed into fear of villain-husbands with a horrid secret threatening to destroy the female, dark erotic desires exploding in violence, rape, torture – both mental and physical – and ultimately death.
Violence and the sublime are translated into the fear of consequences of the choices imposed on the female protagonists by the society and the dominating male-villains. The contemporary gothic form deals with the feminist perspective on sexuality and gender, as well as gender roles in the sense of them being socially and culturally conditioned.
0 kommentar(er)
