Angela Carter's The Bloody Chamber and the Decolonization of Feminine Sexuality
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 4996459 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Merja Makinen (corresponding author) |
| Year | 1992 |
| Volume | 42 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Pages | 2-15 |
| Publication date | 1992-11-01 |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Feminist Review (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0141-7789 • E-ISSN: 1466-4380 |
| Publisher | SAGE Publications Inc (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.1057/fr.1992.44 |
| OpenAlex | W2088989817 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 3 |
| References cited | 3 |
The last thing you'd ever need to do with an Angela Carter text is to send it on an assertiveness training course. With her death (and no one has spoken more effectively on that than her last novel, Wise Children, 'a broken heart is never a tragedy. Only untimely death is a tragedy') the obituaries have started to evoke her as the gentle, wonderful white witch of the north. But far from being gentle, Carter's texts were known for the excessiveness of their violence and, latterly, the almost violent exuberance of their excess. Many a reader has found the savagery with which she can attack cultural stereotypes disturbing, even alienating. Personally I found (and find) it exhilarating you never knew what was coming next from the avant-garde literary terrorist of feminism. Margaret Atwood's memorial in the Observer opens with Carter's 'intelligence and kindness' and goes on to construct her as a mythical fairy-tale figure: 'The amazing thing about her, for me, was that someone who looked so much like the Fairy Godmother ... should actually be so much like the Fairy Godmother. She seemed always on the verge of bestowing something some talisman, some magic token . . .' Lorna Sage's obituary in the Guardian talked of her 'powers of enchantment and hilarity, her generous inventiveness' while the Late Show's memorial on BBC2 had the presenter calling her the 'white witch of English literature', J. G. Ballard a 'friendly witch', and Salman Rushdie claimed 'English literature has lost its high sorceress, its benevolent witch queen . . . deprived of the fairy queen we cannot find the magic that will heal us' and finished by describing her as 'a very good wizard, perhaps the first wizard de-ltlxe'. But this concurrence of white witch/fairy godmother mythologizing needs watching; it is always the dangerously problematic that are mythologized in order to make them less dangerous. As Carter herself argued strongly in Sadeian Woman, 'if women allow themselves to be consoled for their culturally determined
Art · Art history · Feminism · Human sexuality · Kindness · Literature · MAGIC (telescope · Psychoanalysis · Sociology · Theology · Tragedy (event · White (mutation · Witch · Contemporary Literature and Criticism · Gender Studies · Gender, Feminism, and Media · History · Irish and British Studies · Philosophy · Psychology
| Citations per year | 0.1 |
|---|---|
| Citation span | 1996 - 2017 (22) |
| Highly cited | No |