Masaryk University

Faculty of Arts

Department of English
and American Studies
English Language and Literature
Teaching English Language and Literature for
Secondary Schools

Bc. Nikola Wiedermanov

Daddys Girl Growing up

The Portrayal of Female Adolescence in
Selected Fairy-Tale Figures by Angela Carter
Masters Diploma Thesis

Supervisor: Prof. Mgr. Milada Frankov, CSc., M.A.

2012

I declare that I have worked on this thesis independently,

using only the primary and secondary sources listed in the bibliography.
..
Bc. Nikola Wiedermanov

I would like to thank my supervisor, prof. Mgr. Milada Frankov, CSc. M.A., for all her kind
guidance and valuable advice.
I would also like to thank all who supported and encouraged me while I was writing this thesis,
especially my family and my dear friends from the Department of English and American
Studies.

One is not born a woman, but rather becomes one.

Simone de Beauvoir

Table of Contents
1 Introduction.....3
1.1 The Fairy Tale and its Feminist Rewritings.5
1.2 The Work of Angela Carter...10
1.2.1 The Magic Toyshop.........................................................................11
1.2.2 The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories.13
1.2.3 Nights at the Circus. ...16
1.3 Young Female Fairy-Tale Figures: Old and New..18
1.4 Feminist Foregrounding: Body, Voice and Gender...21
1.4.1 Body21
1.4.2 Voice...22
1.4.3 Gender.24
2 New Bodies, New Sensations...26
2.1 First Menstruation..26
2.2 A New Body..30
2.3 Virginity.37
2.4 Chapter Conclusion41
3 Mothers and Other Mother Figures..42
3.1 The Mother Myth...42
3.2 Womens Relationships in Patriarchy45
3.3 Mothers and Mother Figures as Girls Role Models.49
3.4 A Brothel as an Alternative53
3.5 Chapter Conclusion56
4 From Fathers to Husbands57
4.1 Father-Daughter Incest...57

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4.2 Sex and Desire...61

4.3 Marriage.68
4.4 Chapter Conclusion70
5 Heroines in Process...72
5.1 Melanie of The Magic Toyshop.72
5.2 Protagonists of The Bloody Chamber and The Tigers Bride75
5.3 Fevvers of Nights at the Circus.78
5.4 Chapter Conclusion79
6 Conclusion81
Works Cited.84
Resume87

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1 Introduction
In this master thesis, adolescence of female fairy-tale figures of selected texts by
Angela Carter is analyzed. The studied works are the novels The Magic Toyshop (1967)
and Nights at the Circus (1984) and the collection of short stories The Bloody Chamber
and Other Stories (1979). Many of the characters of these books are girls at the end of
their childhood or young women on the threshold of their adulthood, who in the course
of the stories go through their puberty and adolescence and ultimately grow up and
become women or at least significantly advance in this direction. Obviously, the process
of growing up brings along many new roles and challenges. The girls bodies are
changing, their sexuality is developing; their relationships and roles are altering as well
they are starting to take care of themselves, entering first partnerships and marriages,
having first sex, and much more. And in all this, they are choosing who they want to be,
learning to fend for themselves and trying to incorporate some fun and pleasure along
the way.
The analysis here starts with the most obvious aspect of adolescence physical
changes, which include first menstruation, new (sensual) awareness of the developing
body, or in the case of Fevvers of Nights at the Circus of growing a pair of wings
and learning how to use them to fly. Because adolescent girls are moving into roles
occupied by their mothers, stepmothers, aunts and nannies, next it is explored what
influence these characters have on the young heroines, to what extent the girls follow in
their footsteps, and, importantly, what their mutual relationships are. Special attention is
paid to the mother myth that Carter deconstructs. The thesis then continues with the
topic of the relationship with fathers, husbands and other men, and of living in a
patriarchal world, where the violence on and abuse of women is an everyday reality.
Relationships with men are explored also from the more positive side of love and

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affectionate sex, and the traditional pattern of marriage is discussed as well. Still further
in the thesis, it is attempted to answer questions of how the heroines themselves reflect
on the changes and the development they are going through and how the things that
happen to them in their adolescence shape them.
The fact that the adolescence of the selected female figures is interpreted in
fairy-tale terms leads to another dimension of the analysis. As is shown here, the genre
of fairy tale has become a patriarchal project to keep women in their places, and this has
become especially visible in the female characters of the genre. Thus it is discussed here
how Carters portrayal of young heroines reflects back on its classical counterpart.
Given the fact that the fairy tale was significantly altered under the patriarchal
influence, it seems natural that this thesis is grounded in feminist theory, especially of
the French feminist thinkers of the second half of the twentieth century. The feminist
concepts followed in this thesis are those of the female body, voice and gender.
This thesis shows that Carters young fairy-tale heroines grow up to be
independent women who reflect on their development and actively influence their lives.
In a way, they do not have any other option. In the world of Carters texts, all roles that
young women are traditionally expected to have are deconstructed. The women are not
pure in their virginity but well aware of their sexuality and active in the search for its
realization. They cannot hope that in marriage they will live in love and partnership,
because husbands can turn out to be ones fiercest enemy. Also motherhood is shown as
not everything it is cracked up to be. When all the certainties and stereotypes are taken
away from them, the heroines need to accept the responsibility for themselves and their
lives and learn how to make use of every bit of the power they have.
Main secondary sources that were used for the analysis here include the
collection of scholarly essays Angela Carter and the Fairy Tale, which offers various

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views of Angela Carters fairy-tale work; Cristina Bacchilegas study Postmodern Fairy
Tales: Gender and Narrative Strategies, which extensively deals with Carters The
Bloody Chamber, and Linden Peachs work Angela Carter, where she analyzes and
evaluates all Carters work with a special focus on the development of her novel. The
feminist aspect of this thesis is supported by Ann Rosalind Joness essay Writing the
Body: Toward an Understanding of LEcriture Feminine and Sandra M. Gliberts
study Lifes Empty Pack: Notes toward a Literary Daughteronomy, where she
analyzes the womans psycho-sexual development in terms of the father-daughter
incestuous relationship.
Angela Carter does not provide straightforward solutions to the questions her
texts pose. As Frankov remarks, her answers remain hidden under a rich layer of
images, allegories and allusions (47). It also seems that in every meaning that the reader
discovers in her texts, there is an aspect, perhaps only a detail, which serves to
undermine it. Thus this thesis inevitably offers only one out of many possible readings
of Carter.

1.1 The Fairy Tale and its Feminist Rewritings

Although the idea that comes to ones mind with the term fairy tale may be one
of a notoriously known story for children such as Cinderella, Little Red Riding
Hood, or Three Little Pigs, scholars and writers over the past few decades have
shown that there is much more to the genre of fairy tale than that. In her study Myth and
Fairy Tale in Contemporary Womens Fiction, Susan Sellers overviews some theories on
the nature and characteristics of the genre. For example, as she notes, for Maria Tatar,
the crucial identifying feature is the way fairy tale reverses all the conditions outlined
at the beginning of the story (9). Cronan Rose sees fairy tales as embryonic stories of

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development (10), and also Bruno Bettelheim focuses on the social and psychological
function when he claims that fairy tales symbolically present the path to independent
existence by reducing the complicated and difficult process of socialization to its
constituent paradigms (10). In the The Cambridge Guide to Women's Writing in
English, Bacchilega reminds us that it is characteristic of fairy tales that they perform
magic and that they have traditionally fulfilled complex, even conflicting, desires, and
they have done so with ease, reassuring predictability, dazzling variety and adaptability
(Fairy Tale 231). The listing of various definitions of the fairy tale could continue for
much longer, yet for the purposes of this thesis it is more important to note the feminist
approaches and strategies.
The connection between women and the fairy tale has been complex and
somewhat double-edged: on the one hand, many scholars have acknowledged and
researched the womens role in telling and shaping the stories, on the other hand, it
seems that at some point this originally oral, flexible and women-dominated genre got
under the spell of canonization forces and was significantly altered. Haase takes note of
the significance of women for the tale and of the tale for women when he mentions that
storytelling is a semiotically female art, as was purportedly argued by Karen E. Rowe
by pointing not only to womens traditional roles of storytellers but also to the ways
they have been represented as the spinners of tales in folktale collections, frame stories,
and literary tales. She showed that through their association with the fates, fairies, and
spinning, women are identified with the art and power of spinning tales (17). Some
scholars have gone even further when searching for the link between the fairy tale and
women. Haase remarks how Gttner Abendroth influentially argues that fairy tales
reflect the practices and customs of prehistorical societies, which were in her view
primarily matriarchal societies and that they contain remnants of a prehistoric

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matriarchal mythology (15). In this view, fairy tales did not only belong to the
womens sphere of power because they were told, shaped and kept alive by them, but
also because they carried evidence of their once prominent social status.
However, it appears that women lost the power connected with the genre. Haase
mentions Jack Zipess research into the history and sociology of fairytale: In specific
sociohistorical contexts Zipes demonstrated how the folktale had been appropriated and
reappropriated by European and American writers as a special discourse on
sociocultural values and how that fairy-tale discourse was intended to function in the
socialization of children especially in its modeling of gender-specific identity and
behavior (10). Thus the fairytales we know today are loaded with prescriptions on what
was once established as appropriate. The development of European fairy tales over the
past few centuries is recognized as an instance of such appropriation and
reappropriation:
Women tellers, as oral informants, and women characters abound in this
literary tradition, but their words are arranged, cut, embellished by
Charles Perrault (Les Histoires ou contes du temps pass, 1697), the
Brothers Grimm and Hans Christian Andersen in the 19th century,
L.Frank Baums The Wizard of Oz and Disneys glittery films and picture
books in the 20th century to list only the most prominent names. []
And as the audience for fairy tales increasingly narrowed to children and
women, the wise girl, the bawdy wife, the brave sister, the bold maiden
were hidden away. (Bacchilega Fairy Tale 231)
It is significant here that the change of audience and the limitations put on female
heroines are connected. Fairy tales gradually became the socialization stories that Zipes
suggests, and at the same time children came to be exposed to very little female power

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through the stories. Young girls thus had fewer strong female role models to follow and
young boys were not shown that female power was at all possible. It is interesting that
despite this ideological shift, the tales or at least their plots somehow seem to have
stayed the same. As Haase points out, Ruth Bottigheimer studied alternations the
Grimms made when recording the originally oral tales and their eventual effects:
Bottigheimer demonstrated how the Grimms editorial interventions
including their apparently simple lexical revisions weakened oncestrong female characters, demonized female power, imposed a male
perspective on stories voicing womens discontents, and rendered
heroines powerless by depriving them of speech, all in accord with the
social values of their time. (11)
It is suggested here that relatively minor changes in wording, point of view and ways of
narration brought about significant changes in the values and power dynamics the tales
carried. Thus stories that probably came into being when the fairy tale had still been a
women-dominated genre now started to work against them and to serve as a tool to keep
them in their place in a patriarchal society.
Given this ironic development, it comes as no surprise that feminist writers have
tried to repossess the genre of fairy tale, rediscover its lost dimensions and use it again
for their own good. As Bacchilega notes, there has been a long tradition of female
rewriting of fairy tales. This tradition has now stretched over three centuries and has
been present in works of such writers as Charlotte Bront, Christina Rossetti or Jean
Rhys. The late twentieth century brought about a real boom in rewriting and
reappropriating of fairy tale, with writers Angela Carter, Margaret Atwood, Anne
Saxton, Emma Donogue, Marina Warner and many others contributing to this
development (Fairy Tale 233).

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Yet many critics are skeptical about whether it is possible and worth the effort to
revive the lost voices and viewpoints of fairy tales. Susan Sellers researches into the
various attitudes to this issue and in this context mentions Purkiss, who is convinced
that the endeavour to retrieve a buried or marginal voice has the paradoxical function
of endorsing the original myth. Sellers goes on to the postcolonial critic Gayatri
Chakravorty Spivak, who even suggests that it is impossible to restore a voice that has
been dispossessed, since the very act serves to re-cover it (27). It is perhaps true that
every reading of a rewritten fairy tale brings to life also its stereotypical version
enforced by the Disney cartoon, but maybe these stereotyped and canonized versions
should not be overrated. Sellers quotes Elizabeth Bronfens persuasion that the
disruption caused leaves traces (28), and perhaps todays fairy-tale canon is not
disruption-proof. Sellers expresses her own optimistic idea of the strategies and
functions of feminist rewritings of fairy tales: Feminist rewriting could [] include
ironic mimicry and clever twists as well as whole gamut of tactics that would open the
myth from the inside as well as out, leaving in place enough of the known format to
provide evocative points of reflection for its readers, but also encompassing different
possibilities and other points of view (29). This approach reminds us of planting a
woodworm into a wooden construction and letting it live there and build its small
mazes, only to find out years later that it has made the construction dysfunctional.
Angela Carter herself says about the undermining effects of rewriting: I am all for
putting new wine into old bottles, especially if the pressure of the new wine makes the
old bottles explode (qtd in Makinen 5). The numerous writers who have told and
written their versions of fairy tales obviously believe that it is still possible to rescue the
genre of fairy tale for women and make it a womens tool of coding and carrying their
experience once again.

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1.2 The Work of Angela Carter

Angela Carter (1940 1992) is a well-known and prize-winning postmodern
British writer and literary critic. Her daring and experimental work has been regarded as
pioneering by some and as controversial or even insulting by others. Following Linden
Peachs listing, over twenty-six years, Angela Carter completed nine novels: Shadow
Dance (1966), The Magic Toyshop (1967), Several Perceptions (1968), Heroes and
Villains (1969), Love (1971), The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffmann (1972),
The Passion of New Eve (1977), Nights at the Circus (1984) and Wise Children (1991);
five collections of short stories: Fireworks: Nine Profane Pieces (1974), The Bloody
Chamber and Other Stories (1979), Black Venus (1985) and American Ghosts & OldWorld Wonders (published posthumously in 1993); and several works of non-fiction,
including for example The Sadeian Woman: An Exercise in Cultural History (1979),
Nothing Sacred: Selected Writings (1982) and Expletives Deleted: Selected Writings
(1992). Importantly, Angela Carter also edited and translated The Fairy Tales of Charles
Perrault (1977) and Sleeping Beauty and Other Favourite Fairy Tales (1982) and also
edited two collections for Virago: The Virago Book of Fairy Tales (1990) and The
Second Virago Book of Fairy Tales (1992). Carter is also an author of four collections of
childrens stories and four radio plays (2).
One of the threads winding through all her work would probably be what
Gerrard calls mocking iconoclasm (qtd in Peach 2) the effort to playfully uncover
and undermine rigid but false assumptions people have about the world and the society
they live in. Angela Carter famously wrote that she was in the demythologizing
business (qtd in Sage 79). In an interview, she explains what she means by this: Well,
Im basically trying to find out what certain configurations of imagery in our society, in
our culture, really stand for, what they mean, underneath the kind of semireligious

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coating that makes people not particularly want to interfere with them(Interview). This
effort could be traced in all her work, disguised in many forms and strategies.
Fairy tales are certainly a rich source of false ideologies, and yet they are
special, due to their folk origin. As Carter says about her fairy-tale writing: This is how
I make potato soup (qtd in Sage 79), which Sage interprets as that fairy tales are less
than myths []. They are volatile, anybodys (79). In this understanding, fairy tales
offer themselves to rewriting, deconstructing and being shaped into new or once-andfuture versions. As many fairy tales historically appeared in a number of coexisting
variations, the process of multiplying the versions of fairy tales in order to offer other
viewpoints seems fully in accordance with the genres nature.
Because any attempt to characterize Carters fairy-tale work in general would by
far exceed the space of this introduction, it may be better to look specifically at the texts
analyzed here, at their stories, their fairy-tale features, and the receptions and critiques
of them.

1.2.1 The Magic Toyshop

Carters second novel, The Magic Toyshop (1967), tells a story of fifteen-yearold Melanie and her two younger siblings, who lose their parents in an airplane accident
and have to move to London to live with Uncle Philip, whom they have never seen
before. Uncle Philip, a toymaker and an owner of a toyshop, turns out to be an
autocratic brute, who manipulates the lives of all around him: his mute wife Margaret
and her two brothers, Finn and Francie. Melanie has a hard time getting used to her new
ascetic life, but tries to create ties to her new family and even starts a relationship with
Finn. As the events around her forced enactment of Ledas story and the uncovered

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unfaithfulness of Aunt Margaret culminate, Uncle Philip sets the house on fire. Melanie
and Finn together manage to escape.
Because of the character of Uncle Philip and the way all inhabitants of his house
seem subordinated to him, this novel can be read as a critique of, or as Makinen calls
it as a disquietingly savage analysis of patriarchy (3), which she sees as
characteristic of Carters novels of the 1960s and 1970s.
The numerous fairy-tale features that can be traced in this novel include the
motif of orphaned children who go to live with a new family and have to face hardships
there, and also the setting of a toyshop and the possibility that toys may become alive
as is suggested in the theatre play where Melanie is raped by a puppet-swan is fairytale-like. Furthermore, Uncle Philips house, with its corridors, numerous rooms and
atmosphere of fear and mystery strongly reminds of Bluebeards castle. Of the fairy-tale
features that Linden Peach observes, it is worthwhile to mention the theme of
transgression and its punishment. As she notes on the genre of fairy tale: The stories
acquired a moral which often arose out of a young girl being punished or brought to
wisdom through realizing the foolishness of transgression (74). Peach sees such a
transgression in Melanies trying on her mothers wedding dress, which was followed
by the airplane crash and their forced leaving for London (73). It is important for the
purposes of this thesis that in The Magic Toyshop, fairy-tale elements reach to the bare
plot of the story and to the fate of the main female character. In this way, the characters
experience and development can be discussed within the extended frame of the genre of
fairy tale.

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1.2.2 The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories

The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories (1979) is a collection of ten short stories
that can be seen as rewritings of classical fairy tales such as Beauty and the Beast,
Bluebeard, Little Red Riding Hood, Snow White or The Sleeping Beauty.
Carter strategically plays with the classical tales. Among other things, she transposes the
stories into modern times where there are trains, cars and telephones, she tells the story
or lets the story be told from the heroines point of view, or she explores the various
possible backgrounds behind the tales. Perhaps most significantly, and in a sharp
contrast with the tales in the Grimms or Perraults versions, Carters characters are
sexual beings and her tales are charged with eroticism.
Carter opens the fairy tales to new readings and new meanings, and she achieves
this also by offering more often somewhat contrary variations on the same tale. For
example, the fairy tale Beauty and the Beast is rewritten into two different short
stories, the fairy tale Little Red Riding Hood into three. It is suggested that this
multiplicity aims to activate the reader: By providing stories that can be read as
echoing one another [], Carter prompts readers to view a particular type of situation
from a variety of perspectives (Roemer 108). But it seems that the stories not only
can be read as echoing one another, but they even have to be read in this way, in the
context of the whole collection. Crunelle-Vanrigh shows the necessity of contextual
reading on the example of the story The Courtship of Mr Lyon: Not one of the
stories at play in The Bloody Chamber can be said to signify in itself, though it can be
enjoyed on its own. The meaning of Courtship is constructed through a process of
referring to other texts. Coming from, and pointing back and forward, to other stories, it
is only one signifier in the process of referring to other, absent signifiers. She goes on
to mention that The Courtship of Mr Lyon is thus intertwined with The Tigers

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Bride, but also with The Snow Child and Wolf-Alice (139). It is significant that
generally the stories of this collection are not only interconnected with the stories with
which they share the underlying fairy tale, but also with (all) others. Every tale thus
needs to be read in the context of the whole collection, even if this may in a way disrupt
the tale that is being read.
Although the stories of the collection are obviously postmodern texts, this does
not mean that they are devoid of their fairy-tale roots. On the contrary, Bacchilega is
convinced that Carter brings to life forgotten aspects of the genre. She states in
connection with the Little Red Riding Hood stories of the collection:
I want to argue that Angela Carters postmodern rewritings are acts of
fairy-tale archeology that release this storys many other voices. As an
enthusiastic listener/reader of both folk and literary tales, and as a writer
who draws from many versions, oral and literary, Carter tells tales that
reactivate lost traditions, trace violently contradictory genealogies, and
flesh out the complex and vital workings of desire and narrative.
(Postmodern Fairy Tales 59)
It is then remarkable that although Carter works within the traditions of the genre and
with well-known tales, she makes a full use of the authorial influence of a teller of the
tales.
The aspects of the fairy tales that Carter as their teller chooses to emphasize,
including the portrayal of sexual and power relations, have often been seen as
controversial and disconcerting. Indeed, Carters collection The Bloody Chamber has
had not only many enthusiastic reviewers, but also many upset critics. Interestingly,
Bruhl and Gamer notice: Perhaps the primary irony surrounding the reception of The
Bloody Chamber is that it has generated the most controversy among feminist critics

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(147). They also remind us that Angela Carter earned from feminist theoreticians many
denominations on behalf of her work: a pseudofeminist (Dworkin), an apologist
fleeing to a literary sanctuary outside of political criticism (Kappeler), or the high
priestess of post-graduate porn (Sebestyen) (149). Bacchilega overviews still other
critics of Carters The Bloody Chamber: also from a feminist point of view, Patricia
Dunker criticizes Carter for working within the fairy tale, for rewriting the tales within
the strait-jacket of their original structures (Bacchilega Postmodern Fairy Tales 51).
Dunker is convinced that Carter in this way inevitably reinforces the rigid patterns of
female sexuality: By amplifying these images, conflicts, and transformations [of the
fairy tales], Carters revisions simply confirm sado-masochistic arrangements instead of
conceiving of womens sexuality as an autonomous desire (51). As Bacchilega further
reports, Robert Clark sees Carters feminist merits as doubtful as well. In his view,
Carters fictions generally offer their readers a knowledge of patriarchy yet reinscribe
patriarchal attitudes (51). These are only a few of the critical voices that have been
raised in response to The Bloody Chamber, and especially to its sexual politics.
Considering the sources of problematic reception of The Bloody Chamber, Bruhl
and Gamer observe that what makes it problematic for both student and critical
audiences is the glee with which it mixes disciplines and refuses to draw recognizable
battlelines (148). As an example they offer the story The Bloody Chamber, which on
the one hand works as a critique of sadomasochism, but on the other hand includes
such descriptions of the satin nightdress or leather clothes that suggest that the heroine
is complicitous in sensual desires (149). Certainly, many situations and scenes of this
kind can be found in Carters texts, and they show that her characters are not simply
good or bad, and the fictitious world of her fairy tales is not only black and white, but
has many colours in many shades.

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1.2.3 Nights at the Circus

The novel Nights at the Circus (1984), narrates the story of Fevvers, a young
winged woman and a famous circus aerialist. At the beginning, Fevvers gives an
interview and an account of her life to an American journalist Walser, who decides to
join the circus as a clown and follow her incognito to Petersburg and then over Siberia
to Japan in order to reveal her as a hoax. They fall in love with each other and in the end
become a couple, after many adventures, including Fevverss saving Walser from a
Siberian shaman.
There are many characters and their numerous stories are introduced in the novel
as well, among others those of other inhabitants of Madame Schrecks museum of
women monsters, of other artists of the circus or of the female convicts in a Siberian
penitentiary, but Fevverss story remains central. She is a unique character; half-woman,
half-bird; she is symbolically, as Madam Nelson says, the pure child of the century that
just now is waiting in the wings, the New Age in which no women will be bound down
to the ground (Nights at the Circus 25). Financially independent, experienced and
ambitious, she really is, in a way, an embodiment of a new, liberated woman. But she is
no simplistic character, and many opposing elements meet in her: she is a performing
star with Cockney roots, a virgin who knows the tricks of a prostitute, and a diamond
lover with a big heart.
As for the fairy-tale aspects of this novel, although it cannot be seen as a
rewriting of a specific tale, many fairy-tale motifs can be traced here. Fevvers is a
hatched orphan on her journey to love and happiness, which together with her
changing feelings of beauty and ugliness evokes Andersens tale The Ugly
Duckling. It is also put forth here that her adoptive mother, Lizzy, does tricks and
magic. Furthermore, certain polemics or mirroring of fairy tales can be found here, for

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example in the characters of Madame Schrecks museum. For instance, the girl called
the Sleeping Beauty, suddenly, on the day of her first period, starts to sleep more and
more, until she spends no more than a few minutes a day awake. Such, in a way
medicinal description of excessive need to sleep offers itself to physiological and
psychological rationalizations like diseases, or depression, or self-denial and allows the
reader to see the well-known fairy-tale character of Sleeping Beauty in a new light. Or,
another inhabitant of the museum, Wonder, of unusually short height, looks back on the
time she spent with seven men of similar height that she met when they performed The
Snow White: Suffice to say I traveled with them seven long months, passed from one
to another, for they were brothers and believed in share and share alike. I fear they did
not treat me kindly, for, although they were little, they were men (68). It is thus put
forward that excessive sleep may not only be caused by thorns and cohabiting with
seven men may not be only idyllic, and that perhaps this is only a beginning of
uncovering of what is not right in fairy tales. Also in this way Carter explores meanings
of folk tales, opens them to new readings and reveals the ideologies inscribed in them.
It has been proposed that Nights at the Circus can be seen as a continuation of
previous works. Linden Peach writes: Carters works are best read not as independent
texts, but as part of an ongoing process of writing. Whilst to some degree this may be
true of any author, it is especially true of Carter (22). This dimension of Carters
writing will prove useful for this thesis, as the powerful character of Fevvers will be at
times taken here as an answer to the questions posed by young female heroines of her
other works. However, although Carters writing can be seen as one process, it cannot
be said that it did not change. The process Linden Peach talks about is a development.
Merja Makinen observes the progress made between Carters first and last works:

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This is not to argue that the latter novels are not also feminist, but their
strategy is different. The violence in the events depicted in the earlier [of
the 1960s and 1970s] novels (the rapes, the physical and mental abuse of
women) and the aggression implicit in the representations, are no longer
foregrounded. While similar events may occur in these last two texts
[Nights at the Circus and Wise Children], the focus is on mocking and
exploding the constrictive cultural stereotypes and in celebrating the
sheer ability of the female protagonist to survive, unscathed by the sexist
ideologies. (3)
Given the scope of the text analyzed here and this development, it follows that the
experience of the heroines ranges from going through abuse and recovering from it or
fighting out their own inner space in a restrictive environment - as in The Magic
Toyshop or The Bloody Chamber to withstanding attempted abuse by fleeing from it
and ridiculing it, as Fevvers does in Nights at the Circus. Thus a whole range of
womens experience is offered for the analysis here.
1.3 Young Female Fairy-Tale Heroines: Old and New
Because young fairy-tale heroines of Carters fiction are analyzed in this thesis,
it is perhaps useful to have a brief look at how young women are stereotyped in classical
fairy tales, and how Carters heroines tend to differ.
As has been already mentioned, fairy tales became by a certain point in history
loaded with patriarchal ideology. According to Jack Zipes, fairy tales thus turned into a
social project which served ideological purposes. Bacchilega explains his thesis: In
relation to gender, this social project has been to produce bold and entrepreneurial boys,
silent and accepting girls, heterosexual scenarios with happy endings (Fairy Tale
231). There are numerous examples that quickly come to ones mind that support this

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view. Cinderella dutifully accepts her fate of the unloved stepdaughter, for which she is
rewarded by a marriage with a prince, who energetically decides to find her according to
her cute high-heeled shoe. In Snow White, silence and acceptance are taken to
extreme when its protagonist sleeps for a long time and waits for a prince to rescue her.
Red Riding Hood disobeys and takes a shortcut through the woods, for which she is
punished by almost losing her grandmothers and her own life; and is only lucky to be
rescued by a woodcutter. Although it would not be impossible to find fairy tales where a
girl or a woman is an active agent and is rewarded for it, the tales that Bacchilega lists
as best known in the late twentieth century (Cinderella, Snow White, Red Riding
Hood, Beauty and the Beast and Sleeping Beauty) very much confirm Zipess
thesis (Fairy Tale 231).
It can be seen that the behaviour fairy tales hold as appropriate for young women
radically differs from what is acceptable and desired in young men. In fact, as many
scholars notice, boys and girls in fairy tales are judged by double standards. Zipes for
example maintains: What is praiseworthy in males, is rejected in females, the
counterpart of the energetic, aspiring boy is the scheming, ambitious womanWomen
who are powerful and good are never human (qtd in Sage 67). If they are to be good,
heroines in fairy tales are limited to only a small number of possible ways of conduct,
and the already mentioned acceptance and waiting seem to be the safest options. Such is
the message on socialization that girls and young women have been offered.
Also Angela Carter notices this strong tendency towards passive heroines, which
becomes an object of her criticism and rewritings. About the girls who just wait for their
princes and other rescuers, she writes: To be the object of desire is to be defined in the
passive case. To exist in the passive case is to die in the passive case that is, to be
killed. This is the moral of the fairy tale about the perfect woman (gtd in Sage 68). But

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Carter does not throw the baby out with the bath water, although she is aware of the
tight pigeonholes made for fairy-tale heroines. As Sage notes: Carter, while registering
with grim humour and clarity the awful legacy [], still sees in the genre a means by
which a writing woman may take flight (68). Many scholars deal with Carters female
fairy-tale characters and notice their empowerment. To give an example, in her preface
to a Carters collection, Marina Warner succinctly expresses what Carter achieves with
her rewritings in this aspect:
Angela Carter continues [] one of her original and effective strategies,
snatching out of the jaws of misogyny itself, useful stories for women.
[] She turns topsy-turvy some cautionary folk tales and shakes out the
fear and dislike of women they once expressed to create a new set of
values, about strong, outspoken, zestful, sexual women who cant be kept
down. (qtd in Haase 9)
Female characters of the kind described here certainly represent a significant departure
from the passive and thus self-destructive girls of classical versions.
To conclude, it has been outlined here what the classical representations of young
women generally signify and that Carter ventures to create new models. In the thesis,
this question of the stereotypical or stereotype-defying message on young heroines is
also followed, in terms of the behaviour for which they are rewarded or punished,
whether they are passive and accepting or rebellious, self-conscious, strong personalities
to be.

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1.4 Feminist Foregrounding: Body, Voice and Gender

1.4.1 Body
Because this thesis deals with female adolescence, of which the changes of the
body are an integral part, it is necessary to have a look at how the concept of the female
body is formulated in the feminist theory and thus in what terms it will be followed
here.
According to Peachs account, in the 1960s and 1970s, Anglo-American
feminist writers started to represent the female body in a revolutionary way in order to
challenge the Western traditions denial of womens experiences of their own bodies.
The portrayals of the female body included depictions of bodily changes and bodily
fluids, which subverted the bodys sense of closure (76). This was supported by works
of French feminists like Julia Kristeva, Luce Irigaray or Helene Cixous, who, as Jones
writes, also in general believe that Western thought has been based on a systematic
repression of womens experience (247). It has been suggested that this denial resulted
in women themselves being at a loss how to think of their bodies; but that this is
something that can be changed. Jones explains Irrigarays position:
She continues her argument that women, because they have been caught
in a world structured by man-centered concepts, have had no way of
knowing or representing themselves. But she offers as the starting point
for a female self-consciousness the facts of womens bodies and womens
sexual pleasure, precisely because they have been so absent or so
misrepresented in male discourse. (250)
As a remedy it is thus proposed to fully acknowledge the existence of ones body and
ones sexual pleasure, take them as magnitudes to be taken into account and not let them

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become invisible again. In this context, one must think of the female fairy-tale
characters that once again become sexual beings in Carters fiction.
Apart from the French feminists, Judith Butler is seen by Lorna Sage as another
theoretician whose work opened new ways of approach to Carters writing. Sage sees
her description of bodies that wear our cultural history as well-fitting to Carters
work. In Judith Butlers view, the body is a field of interpretive possibilities, the locus
of a dialectical process of interpreting anew a historical set of interpretations which
have become imprinted on the flesh (qtd in Sage 71). Bodies are thus seen as not
existing only on their own, in a vacuum, but in the frame of our cultural history.
Carter is very open in her descriptions of the (sexual) female body. In the texts
analyzed here, the female body is portrayed in many situations, including the first
menstruation and sexual activities; in the torture chamber in The Bloody Chamber,
the reader can even find out about dead bodies of the Marquiss previous wives. In her
tales, Carters interest in the link between sexuality, pornography and politics becomes
evident. She more closely pursues this issue in her study The Sadeian Women.
In this thesis, the concepts of body and sexuality are followed in terms of how
the maturing female body with its functions and fluids is represented and to what
effect, of how the heroines approach their developing bodies and their sexuality and
how aware they are of their bodily needs and desires, but also of what assumptions
about female bodies and sexuality are passed on them, and how their bodies are
approached by those around them, especially by their partners.

1.4.2 Voice
Another category that is followed in this thesis is womens voice a means of
ones expression and assertion. The question of how women can express themselves has

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been a crucial issue for feminists: If language is a carrier of patriarchal ideology, then in
what language and on what terms can women freely speak? Kristeva and Cixous
propose that women should express themselves outside of the patriarchal language,
through language of the body and through silence, so that silence becomes speech and
body becomes speechifier (qtd in Gilbert and Gubar 518). This seems a potentially
powerful reversal, but certainly has its failings. As has been already mentioned, the
silence of fairy-tale heroines has not served women well. Furthmore, the question arises
of how women can contribute to the general discourse with their bodies and their
silences. Xaviere Gauthier summarizes this problem: As long as women remain silent
or speak in a body language [], they will be outside the historical process. But of they
begin to write and speak as men do, they will enter history subdued and alienated (qtd
in Gilbert and Gubar 519). It seems then that womens language and ways of expression
need to be a balancing act between these two sides.
In the texts discussed here, Carter plays with the possibilities of focalization and
narration to give the heroines expression and experience larger space. In some of the
works, the events are only followed from the heroines point of view, as is the case of
for example The Magic Toyshop, The Courtship of Mr Lyon or The Company of
Wolves; other stories are told directly by their protagonists, as for example The
Bloody Chamber or the opening part of Nights at the Circus. It is interesting that in
these two texts the heroine defies and survives patriarchal violence, the stories they then
tell work against the patriarchal order twice once in their content, once in the fact that
they are told by a female protagonist.
In the studied texts it is observed whether and how the young heroines use their
voices or whether they remain silent, what examples of self-expression they are given

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by women around them, and also how they give account of themselves, how they word
their experience and tell their stories.

1.4.3 Gender
The third concept that serves as a basis for analysis here is the concept of gender.
It is a particularly potent concept for fairy tales, because, as has been noted, fairy tales
have served as guidance on how to socialize into gender-appropriate roles. As Mari
Mikkola overviews, in the 1960s, feminists started to use the term gender to
distinguish biological differences between the two sexes from social/psychological ones
and to talk about the latter. This distinction has been generally accepted. Nowadays it is
also commonly assumed that gender is a social construct. As Mikkola further explains,
this means that gender categories (women and men) and gendered traits ascribed to
them (being caring or ambitious) are, according to Haslanger, the intended or
unintended product[s] of a social practice. It is also believed that masculinity and
femininity are products of nurture - of how individuals are brought up. In the process,
females gradually acquire feminine qualities and learn how to act accordingly and thus
become women. In this process of becoming a woman or a man, the power distribution
and the rules of patriarchal society apply, so that women are socialised into subordinate
social roles: they learn to be submissive, caring, ideally seeing their fulfillment in
creating the hearth and home (Mikkola).
Carter is very experimental about gender, which can be observed for example on
the theme of transvestites, which appears in her work and can be traced for example in
the figure of Fevvers, in which the traits of female and male characters are mixed.
Sellers mentions Ward Jouves observation that Carter wants to sever the link between
biology and gender (115). Opinions on how successful she is with this project differ,

- 23 -

but it is clear that she sets out to deconstruct gender as another category that limits the
freedom of men and women.
In this thesis, it is attempted to find out what the message on the female
socialization is in the rewritten fairy tales. It is also analyzed what information and
advice the heroines become on how to be a woman, how they reflect on their
womanhood, how they gradually create it and grow into it, and also how the stereotyped
gender roles occur and develop in their relationships.

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2 New Bodies, New Sensations

When Fevvers of Nights at the Circus talks about the physical changes of her
puberty, she describes them as the marvellous blossoming of my until then reticent and
undemanding flesh (23). In her wording it can be seen how the girls bodies that were
taken for granted suddenly start to be there and to change on many levels: they start to
look, function and feel differently and through them, a whole new dimension opens up
to the young heroines. In this chapter it is discussed how they view and experience this
little revolution that their bodies start.

2.1 First Menstruation

While it seems somewhat absurd and out-of-place to wonder whether heroines of
fairy tales menstruate and how it is solved when for example Sleeping Beauties sleep
for long periods of time, Carter is open and literal when it comes to this issue. The
reader often finds out that the girls have just begun to menstruate and also how they feel
about it and how they put up with it psychologically and physically.
First menses of a girl is often taken as the first significant sign that she is
growing up into a young woman; it is a sign that the body is prepared for reproduction.
It is also a reminder of the roles that she will most probably take in her life: a mans
sexual partner, a mother and a homemaker. First menstruation is in a way a promise of
the future and brings along expectations but also anxiety. This becomes visible when it
is explained why Melanie of The Magic Toyshop feels uncomfortable when she has to
climb a tree up to her bedroom:
Since she was thirteen, when her periods began, she had felt she was
pregnant with herself, bearing the slowly ripening embryo of Melaniegrown-up inside herself for a gestation time the length of which she was

- 25 -

not precisely aware. And, during this time, to climb a tree might provoke
a miscarriage and she would remain forever stranded in childhood, a
crop-haired tomboy. (20)
In this passage it is put forward that although since her first menses Melanie is aware of
the fact that she will be a mature woman soon and that this will take her to in a sense
qualitatively different state, she fears that this process of transformation may still go
wrong, that she will interrupt it somehow and it will not be completed.
A womans menses is also a tangible source of her difference from a man and
often a source of shame and a lack of understanding. It thus seems that menstruation
can be a symbol not only for being a woman, but also for being a woman in a mens
world. A girl who starts to menstruate needs to come to terms with all this. But maybe
sometimes a girl decides not to accept it and looks for an avoidance strategy. Perhaps in
this way one can approach the story of the Sleeping Beauty of Nights at the Circus.
As Fevvers narrates in the interview with the young handsome journalist Walser, the
Sleeping Beauty, whom she met in the museum of women monsters, was a country
currates daughter, cheerful and smart, but on the day when her menstruation started
began to sleep more and more, until she spent awake only a few minutes of a day (63).
The first menses and the beginning of excessive sleep seem to be more than just a
coincidence. Perhaps the sleep was the girls avoidance strategy, as it is known to be the
case with depressions or states of self-denial. Perhaps as her flow started, she
unconsciously or through her body realized what there was in stock for her, and decided
to have a long sleep instead.
However, menses is portrayed generally positively in the texts analyzed here. It
is suggested to be a milestone and also a precious and powerful thing. This can be
observed for instance when Wolf-Alice of the short story of the same title in The Bloody

- 26 -

Chamber, a girl brought up by the wolves and having adopted only the very basics of
human conduct, is trying to figure out the cause of her first flow. Her first theory is
connected to wolves, the dearest part of her life:
The moon had been shining into the kitchen when she woke to feel the
trickle between her thighs and it seemed to her that a wolf who, perhaps,
was fond of her, as wolves were, and who lived, perhaps, in the moon?
must have nibbled her cunt while she was sleeping, had subjected her to a
series of affectionate nips too gentle to wake her yet sharp enough to
break the skin. (152)
Not only was the theory connected to the beloved wolves, but also to a demonstration of
their fondness for her achieved through delicate nibbling of her genitals. Wolf-Alice
instinctively searches for a positive reasoning of her first menstruation. In accordance
with this observation, Bacchilega in her analysis of Carters stories based on the story of
Little Red Riding Hood concludes that Carter here economically and symbolically
revalues womens menstrual and birth blood and shows it as empowering. Bacchilega
also mentions Irigarays thesis that blood was formerly equaled with life itself, but as a
symbol of wealth has been replaced by for example gold, penis or child (Postmodern
Fairy Tales 66). Menstruation is thus portrayed as something that may give power rather
than take it away, if approached positively.
Another example of Carters positive portrayal of menstruation blood, although
not connected to the first menses, can be found in Nights at the Circus. In the Siberian
penitentiary for women who murdered their husbands, Olga Alexandrovna, one of the
prisoners, starts to communicate with Vera Andreyevna, a guard that brings her food.
But because the ways of communication are limited to secret notes, and paper and
something to write with are scarce, these two women and soon also all others in the

- 27 -

prison make use of the inks that their bodies offer. They thus write and draw in blood,
both menstrual and veinous, even in excrement, for none of the juices of the bodies that
had been so long denied were alien to them (217). In accordance with the French
feminist theory, the women prisoners of the Siberian panopticon befriend the fluids of
their bodies and express themselves through them. Communicating in this way, the
prisoners and their guards manage to make a plan of rebellion against the Countess, the
head of the House of Correction, in which they succeed and thus regain their freedom.
Reflecting on this powerful use of menstrual blood that results in becoming free,
Michael notes: Olga thus uses one of the most overt emblems of femaleness,
traditionally used to set women apart as inferior to men, as a means of empowerment;
she literally writes herself into subjecthood with her menstrual blood (516). Because
Olga and other prisoners set out to found a new, women-only colony, it can be suggested
that they write themselves into a new world. This resonates with Joness explanation of
the treatment of bodily fluids in French feminism: [] To the extent that the female
body is seen as a direct source of female writing, a powerful alternative discourse seems
possible: to write from the body is to recreate the world (252).
Olga and her peers do exactly this; they turn to their bodies for a means that would
enable them to change their situation and find also their bodily fluids, including
menstrual blood, and they write themselves into freedom and into a new existence and
thus recreate their world.
To conclude, first menstruation is a moment for the girl to start to realize what
her future roles will be and to try find where she stands in the new situation. Although it
is connected to feelings of anxiety and uncertainty, menstrual blood is not portrayed as a
source of shame, but as a precious thing and a possible source of energy and power that
can be used later in life for the girls own good.

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2.2 A New Body

A girls puberty brings along many physical changes. The body develops from a
little girls body into one of a young woman. Breasts, hips, belly and skin change and
the body acquires new functions and brings new feelings, often to bewilderment of its
owner. Obviously, also fairy-tale characters go through puberty, although their tellers
usually do not make this known as Carter does. In her texts, for example, the reader
finds out about the Red Riding Hood character of The Company of Wolves that her
breasts have just begun to swell and she has just started her womans bleeding (141).
Suddenly, thus described, the character and then the whole story obtain a new
dimension, of a reality of the body.
Living in the new body is a huge novelty and the girls need to get used to the
new situation. They need to discover their new curves, shapes, and what the new body
feels like when touched. As it is read in the very first paragraph of the novel The Magic
Toyshop, Melanie spends long hours of the summer on this mission:
The summer she was fifteen, Melanie discovered she was made of flesh
and blood. O, my America, my new found land. She embarked on a
tranced voyage, exploring the whole of herself, clambering her own
mountain ranges, penetrating the moist richness of her secret valleys, a
physiological Cortez, da Gama or Mungo Park. For hours she stared at
herself, naked, in the mirror of her wardrobe; she would follow with her
finger the elegant structure of her rib-cage, where the heart fluttered
under the flesh like a bird under a blanket, and she would draw down the
long line from breast-bone to navel [], and she would rasp her palms
against her bud-wing shoulderblades. (1)

- 29 -

From this powerful passage, it follows that Melanie tries to acknowledge the changes of
her body and embrace its new form and appearance. She feels no anxiety or shame
because of her body or her exploring efforts; on the contrary, as the end of the passage
reads, she would laugh and do cartwheels out of joy. She simply has fun exploring her
new body. Many departures from fairy tales can be seen here, from the portrayal of the
changes on the female body caused by puberty to the exploration of ones body and the
enthusiasm that goes with it. As has been proposed about the passage: [Carter]
undermines [the] inscribed ideology by emphasizing what the misogynistic fairy stories
suppressed, an adolescent girls excitement about her body and the discovery of her
emerging sexuality (Peach 75). This observation about Carters subversion of fairy
tales by breaking their silence about a girls sexuality and her joy over it is also in
accordance with Irigarays and Cixouss persuasion that if women are to discover and
express who they are, [in opposition to being represented in the patriarchal discourse],
they must begin with their sexuality. And their sexuality begins with their bodies
(Jones 252). Thus such a portrayal of a pubescent girl enjoying her body has significant
consequences for the (fairy-tale) discourse, because it forces upon it a space for
unambiguously positive descriptions of the changing female body and the womans
relation to it.
Although it may seem that Melanies body and the mirror are the only
participants in this game of discovery, in fact, also the cultural and social images
connected to the female body are at play here. Melanie performs for herself little
sketches from cultural history: she poses in the style of Pre-Raphaelites or Toulouse
Lautrec (The Magic Toyshop 1), or, after she reads Lady Chatterleys Lover, she sticks
forget-me-nots in her pubic hair (2). She experiments with what it means to have a
female body in the twentieth century, after numerous artists and writers portrayed and

- 30 -

represented it, and she tries to get somehow orientated in the whole array of images. For
instance, she finds that she is too thin for a Titian or a Renoir (2) or that she feels
particularly wicked when posing for Lautrec (1). At the same time, Melanie is aware
of the expectations projected on a womans body that must be met to call it beautiful.
These naturally influence the way she perceives herself and her future chances. One of
the expectations that Melanie realizes and wants to conform to concerns her slimness.
She shovels large portions of bread pudding into her brothers plate from fear what it
would do to her: She was afraid that if she ate too much of it she would grow fat and
nobody would ever love her and she would die virgin (3). Melanie feels scared that if
she does not meet the demands she thinks are projected on her body, her future will be
hopeless. The process of the discovery of her new body is for Melanie somewhat
double-edged. On the one hand, she feels joy over her body as it is, on the other hand,
she measures her body against an ideal of beauty. However, it should be said that
Melanie sees her body as only one amongst many things that have the potential to
decide on her future. For instance, when she watches her five-year-old sister, she thinks:
Is Victoria retarded? [] Will I have to stay at home and help Mummy look after her
and never have a life of my own? (7). Thus it seems that she considers various
scenarios, and her body is not the only parameter in them.
All in all, putting her fears aside, it is suggested that Melanie receives as much
fun as she can from experimenting with her new self. At times she can even let go of the
idea that her beauty and her body are there to be given at a lovers or a grooms
disposal. When she is trying on her mothers wedding dress, is posing in it and sees in
the mirror how pretty she looks, she wonders: Moonlight, satin, roses. A bride. Whose
bride? But she was, tonight, sufficient for herself in her own glory and did not need a
groom (16). It can be proposed that what Melanie experiences here draws close to

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jouissance, a concept as Jones explains - appropriated by the French feminists

(Kristeva, Irigaray, Cixous and Wittig) as the direct reexperience of the physical
pleasures of infancy and of later sexuality, which is a form of resistance to the
institutions and signifying practices of a patriarchal culture (248). In her experiments of
the summer, Melanie embraces her emerging sexuality in a private joy and thus deepens
her relationship with her body, although this does not take place in a vacuum and she
needs to work out the cultural and social demands and influences.
For Fevvers of Nights at the Circus, physical puberty is even more challenging.
Her small toy-wings that she has had since the age of seven develop, to her great
dismay, into a fully-fledged pair. In her interview with the young journalist, she openly
talks about the moment when her wings appear in their new form:
For, as my little titties swelled before, so these feathered appendages of
mine swelled behind until, one morning in my fourteenth year [], I
spread. [] I had taken off my little white nightgown in order to perform
my matutinal ablutions at my little dresser when there was a great ripping
in the hind-quarters of my chemise and, all unwilled by me, uncalled for,
involuntarily, suddenly there broke forth my peculiar inheritance these
wings of mine! Still adolescent, as yet, not half their adult size, and
moist, sticky, like freshly unfurled foliage on an April tree. But, all the
same, wings. (24)
Perhaps every girl going through puberty to some extent feels that the changes in her
body come willfully and are unprecedented, but Fevvers can be quite sure that no
woman has had a body of her kind before. Therefore no-one can advise her how to deal
with the new, alien part of body that suddenly grows on her back.

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Following the appearance of her wings, Fevvers, aided by her adoptive mother
Liz, sets out to discover what the potential of her wings is and whether she can
eventually fly, or whether she is rather an ostrich-like creature that can spread wings but
not hover on them. This turns out to be a dangerous and lengthy project. In her first
attempt to fly, she jumps off a mantelpiece in the drawing room, goes straight to the
floor and ends up with a nosebleed and bruises. But, importantly, she experiences an
almost imperceptible moment of being carried by the air. In order to discover the
technique of flight and physical properties of the air, Fevvers and Liz watch birdmothers teach their young how to fly and study expert books, until one day, months after
the appearance of Fevverss wings, there comes the moment when Liz pushes Fevvers
over the edge of the roof of the brothel, and she flies. Untrained and new to the motion,
though, she quickly tires herself and on her return to the roof almost plummets to the
ground. Nevertheless, she discovers that her body is a little boat that [can] cast anchor
in the clouds (Nights at the Circus 27-35). Although she still needs to learn a lot of
lessons, she already knows what her body is capable of.
As she further narrates to Walser, her wings and the possibilities they gave her
naturally started to determine her plans for the future. She tells him: I saw my future as
criss-crossing the globe for then I knew nothing of the constraints the world imposes; I
only knew by body was the abode of limitless freedom (41). Having discovered its
potential, Fevvers sees her body as the source of unlimited liberty, which feels
somewhat out-of-place in a world full of limitations. Fevvers with her wings becomes,
according to Peach, the embodiment of freedom (134). It can be suggested that
Fevvers embodies freedom in a number of ways. Firstly, her wings provide her body
with unprecedented possibilities, when she can move, travel and view things in fashions
unknown to (other) human beings. Further, they give her the opportunity to make a

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living and live an independent life. Also, through creating the image of an artistic
aerialist, Fevvers decides what she wants to convey, and how she wants to be perceived.
And as it will be argued in chapters that follow, Fevverss unique origin of hatching out
of an egg and being brought up by a group of loving prostitutes frees her from the
limiting views and behavioural patterns that she would acquire in the classical Oedipal
setting.
It can be suggested that Fevverss unique experience of physical puberty can be
inspirational for young girls. The message it conveys is that a woman needs to embrace
her body in its peculiarity, learn about its functioning and explore its potential, and then
it can liberate her. Because even winged Fevvers has to learn how to fly, and if she were
not brave enough to find out what her wings can do, she would never learn to use them
and they would uselessly dangle on her back, making her more of a strange than a
wonderful creature. Like to Fevvers, also to Melanie of The Magic Toyshop it pays off
that she learns to know and appreciate her body. Consoling the fragile Aunt Margaret
who breaks down with tears, she suddenly realizes the strength coming from her body:
Cradling the worn, sad woman, Melanie felt herself to be very strong, young and vital
and tough. She knew and trusted her firm, quick, resilient body, fed on wholesome food
all its life, washed and tended so carefully. For a while she wonders whether the
repressive environment of Uncle Philips house will cause her to weaken, but then she
resolves to be too strong to be withered (138). Melanie knows her body and trusts it
and feels it can help her face difficulties.
However, given Carters interest in disrupting all possible stereotypical
categories, it comes as no surprise that Fevvers, her female embodiment of liberty can
hardly be seen as a conventional female character, and that she even has a streak of a
cripple in her. It has been proposed that the character of Fevvers does not conform to

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gender stereotypes, but represents both typically feminine and typically masculine
features. As Michael writes: Fevvers is altogether an ambivalent figure who threatens
traditional binary categories: she possesses both masculine strength and authority as
well as feminine charms and wiles (499). This can be observed for instance when
Walser, who is interviewing her and starts to be charmed by her, suddenly begins to fear
that she is actually a man and he is falling for a transvestite. At the same time,
depending on the point of view, Fevvers can be looked at not as a beautiful winged
woman artist, but as a freak of nature or a hunchback. The idea of Fevvers as a
humpback is very much present in the novel, as it is her disguise when she does not
want to be seen in her real nature. The plan originally comes from Ma Nelson, the
runner of the brothel of Fevverss childhood, who devises it in order to discourage
inquisitive clients. And when Fevverss body is not marveled at or covered up, she can
be seen as a monster. This point of view is suggested in the novel when she becomes
one of the living showpieces in Madame Shrecks museum of women monsters. The
fact that Carter makes her symbol of freedom a monster reminds of her statement from
The Sadeian Woman that a free woman in an unfree society will be a monster (qtd in
Bacchilega Postmodern Fairy Tales 52). Although it was originally noted in the context
of female sexuality, it also rather neatly fits Fevvers character, who is a free woman in a
world full of limitations, and can be seen as a monster. Discussing the character of
Fevvers, Sage reflects also on Jack Zipess observation of different fairy-tale
socialization patterns for girls and for boys (which has been already discussed in the
Introduction) where it is concluded that, in contrast with strong male fairy-tale
characters, women who are powerful and good are never human (qtd in Sage 67).
Sage notices that this is true also for the winged heroine Fevvers, as she is indeed
powerful and good and not exactly human (67). Thus the winged artist not only

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embodies the possible freedom and liberty of women, but also magnifies the restricting
prescriptions about what a woman should be like in order to exist within the given
categories.
To summarize what has been said in this subchapter, Carter portrays the bodily
changes of her young women and also how they come to terms with them. Melanie of
The Magic Toyshop and Fevvers of Nights at the Circus take the discovering of their
bodies as a mission in which they manage to befriend their physicality. In this process,
Melanie puts up with the social and cultural expectations on her body, and Fevvers with
the great challenge of having wings that are capable of flight. For both of them, their
bodies become a source of their strength and energy.

2.3 Virginity
Another aspect of a womans youth that Carter portrays and sets out to
deconstruct is a girls virginity. According to Carter, the redeeming purity of the virgin
is consolatory nonsense (qtd in Peach 9). Fairy tales practices of desexualizing women
and making them only sexual objects and not subjects are for Carter unacceptable. Her
young heroines feel the power of their sexuality and their conduct is often motivated by
it. By making her virgins sexually motivated, Carter undermines the rigid virgin/whore
binary the patriarchal view that women are sexually either completely untouched and
unaware, or exceedingly and improperly active, and that there is no option in between.
One of the tales where the young virgins sexuality moves the events forward is
The Company of Wolves. As Frankov observes, the heroine here is driven by the
curious unrest of her virginity to leave for the woods and the wolf (49). Indeed, as it is
read in the story, virginity is her way of being, which, surprisingly, makes her feel
dauntless and safe: She stands and moves within the invisible pentacle of her own

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virginity. She is an unbroken egg; she is a sealed vessel; she has inside her a magic
space the entrance to which is shut tight with a plug of membrane; she is a closed
system; she does not know how to shiver (The Company of Wolves 141). Feeling
secure and self-confident, Red Riding Hood insists on going through the woods to visit
her grandmother, although she knows well that as for the wolves it is the worst time of
the year (140-41). It seems that she wants to challenge herself and that she even hopes
there will be a danger in the woods she will have to face. Her longing curiosity is further
revealed when she meets a handsome huntsman in the woods. They agree to compete
about who will arrive first at her grandmothers house, and if he wins, she has to give
him a kiss. Despite the rising moon, she then purposefully drags her feet to make sure
that the lad wins the bet and they will kiss (143). Furthermore, on her arrival at the
grandmothers house, she is a little disappointed to see only her grandmother sitting
beside the fire (145). Although a virgin, she is obviously eager for sexual encounters.
But, of course, it is not the grandmother who is sitting by the fire, but the handsome
huntsman turned werewolf. The girl quickly sees that, having devoured her
grandmother, he now wants her, but reaches for the boldness and confidence of her
virginity and realizes her strength. The reader finds out her reaction to the werewolfs
threat that he will eat her: The girl burst out laughing; she knew she was nobodys
meat (147). Thus, putting her fears aside, the girl eventually becomes the werewolfs
partner in the striptease and in their savage marriage ceremony (147). It perhaps
surprisingly appears as if the wished for an encounter of this kind when she left her
mothers house.
Also other virginal heroines of the texts analyzed here are eager for sexual
experience. For example, Melanie of The Magic Toyshop, who has already plotted
various imaginative scenarios concerning her wedding night but has not been kissed yet,

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welcomes Finns decision to change this: She waited in an agony of apprehension. If it

was going to happen, it must happen and then she would know what it was like to be
kissed, which she did not know, now. At least she would have that much experience,
even if it was only Finn who kissed her (105). Melanie does not mind that she will not
get her first kiss from someone more attractive and loving than Finn; she is content with
the sheer fact that she will at last begin with her love life. Later, when they practice for
the show that Uncle Philip devised, in which Melanie in the part of Leda is raped by a
huge puppet-swan, they come close together in an embrace and Melanie is quite sure
that it is the moment when she will lose her virginity: He lay as close as a sheet to a
blanket; and he smelt of decay, but that no longer mattered. Shuddering, she realised
that this no longer mattered. She waited tensely for it to happen (149). As she does
when she is kissed for the first time, Melanie, impassioned, opens herself to the
experience and lets it come to her, and is rather upset when Finn decides not to advance.
This analysis attempts to show that in their virginity, (some of) Carters young
female heroines enthusiastically expect their first sexual encounters and go forward to
meet them; which speaks against the following Dunckers criticism of The Bloody
Chamber: Carter envisages womens sensuality simply as a response to male arousal.
She has no conception of womens sexuality as autonomous desire (qtd in Benson 38).
If it is accepted that Red Riding Hood is driven by the disquieting power of her
virginity, which seems to be quite neatly suggested in the text, it can be said that she is a
sexual being long before she strips and is stripped by the werewolf, although the
specific expression of her sexuality naturally comes in interaction with him.
However, the fact that virgins in Carters texts are sexual beings does not mean
that they know how to manage the powers of their sexuality and are able to safely face
the situations in which it leads them. As Frankov notes, by deconstructing the myth of

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a pure virgin, Carter gives her heroines the freedom to decide on themselves and their
bodies, but this freedom involves also the responsibility for their choices and the
necessity to bear consequences (49). And it seems that in their desire, the young women
cannot see as far as to the consequences. Melanie, for instance, focused on the new
experience, cannot see what Finn can see that the situation is cunningly prepared by
Uncle Philip, who wants the two of them to have sex and thus to pull Melanie down
(The Magic Toyshop 152). Neither does Red Riding Hood of The Company of Wolves
seem to realize how dangerous her conduct is. On a similar note, the young heroine of
The Bloody Chamber, seduced by an older, rich and mysterious suitor, is almost
murdered and is only very lucky to be rescued by her provident mother.
Carter further undermines the virgin/whore binary by making Fevvers of Nights
at the Circus the Virgin Whore, as she was known in the whole city of London due to
the fact that she was an employee of Ma Nelsons brothel (she posed there as a Little
Amour and later as Winged Victory), but never had any clients herself. In fact, Fevvers
remains a virgin until the very end of the novel, where she unites with her beloved
journalist Walser.
It seems interesting that Fevvers remains a virgin for so long when it is
considered that she in a way sees her virginity as a commodity that can be cashed,
should the need arise. As she narrates to Walser about a financially interesting offer she
was given: For what Mr Rosencreutz is willing to pay for the privilege of busting a
scrap of cartilage was quite sufficient to set my entire family up in comfort (81). It
appears that Fevvers views her virginity pragmatically and that it is more important for
her to be able to look after her family than to remain in the innocent state. However, in
both appointments that Fevvers goes to because of the promised money, she finds out
that it is not her virginity the two men want to get her rid of, it is her life: Mr

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Rosencreutz wants to sacrifice her in a ritual and the Grand Duke wants to turn her into
one of his ingenious toys. In these life-endangering situations, Fevvers is saved by the
equipment and knowledge she received in her native whorehouse. She is quicker than
Mr Rosencreutz in tossing her sword she got from Ma Nelson (83), and masturbates the
Grand Duke, escaping in the moment of his orgasm (192). Thus it can be said that her
whore-aspect of her personality saves both her life and virginity.
To conclude, it seems that Carter plays with the rigid assumptions of female
sexuality and the pigeonholes of virgins and whores. Her young girls are charged with
eroticism and eager for sexual experience, and her winged heroine Fevvers, brought up
in a brothel, who is willing to cash her virginity, in the end paradoxically loses it out of
love. But virginity for Carter is a dangerous state, because its desires and aspirations
outweigh the experience and information the girls have; thus her young heroines often
dangerously play with fire.

2.4 Chapter Conclusion

As has been shown here, to Carters young female fairy-tale figures, the physical
changes of puberty and adolescence suggest unknown potentialities and horizons. The
girls and young women perceive and explore their new bodies and start intimate
relationships with them. Contrary to stereotypical expectations, the virginal girls of the
analyzed texts are well aware of their budding sexuality and seek opportunities for its
further exploration. All in all, it can be suggested that Carter returns young girls and
women to their bodies and lets them face the joys and perils of it.

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3 Mothers and Other Mother Figures

In their puberty and adolescence, girls grow into and prepare for new roles of
adult women, of mothers, of their mothers friends. They look up to their mothers and
other mother figures for advice and model behaviour which would guide and inspire
them. The young womens relationships with their mothers, aunts and other women
change; they become their equals and possible rivals. In this chapter it is discussed how
the role of the mother is portrayed in the analyzed texts, what kind of role models the
mother figures of the texts are for their wards, what is proposed as characteristic of
womens relations in patriarchy, and whether there is any possible alternative.

3.1 The Mother Myth

Before it is discussed what influence mothers and other mother figures have on
their (surrogate) daughters, it must be noted that Carter does not agree with any kind of
glorification of a mother figure as a soother and ultimate giver, but is convinced that
such an idea of the mother is another construct that makes people unfree. She writes:
All the mythic versions of women, from the myth of the redeeming purity of the virgin
to that of the healing, reconciling mother, are consolatory nonsenses; and consolatory
nonsense seems to me a fair definition of myth, anyway. Mother goddesses are just as
silly a notion as father gods (qtd in Peach 9). In Carters view, the mythical mother
figure is generally a manipulative exaggeration. As is shown here, the characters of
mother figures of the analyzed texts vary, as their behaviour and their relationships with
their daughters do. This span of possibilities that Carter offers includes the mighty and
heroic mother of The Bloody Chamber who obeys her sixth sense, decodes her
daughters distress as a call for help and comes to rescue her from certain death, but this
is just one mother figure among many and certainly does not seem to be a typical one. It

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must be also pointed out that although Carter attempts to dismantle the mother myth,
she does not strip her mothers of all significance. Rather, as Sellers argues, Carters
attack has been directed against certain manifestations of the archetype rather than the
mother or origin per se (115). However, in the context of fairy tales it seems to be
inevitable to somehow undermine the image of a mother who is always good, loving
and self-giving, because this image was artificially instituted as the only possibility
during the recording and canonization of fairy tales. As has been noted: The Grimms
were also responsible for changing the wicked mother figure in many tales to a wicked
stepmother character so as not to challenge prevailing beliefs about motherhood
(Roemer and Bacchilega 10). Thus the earlier representation of mothers that included
also less good, giving and self-sacrificing examples was narrowed and distorted to only
one possible picture and everything else was rendered impermissible and unthought-of.
In her tales and novels, Carter shows that there are more possibilities of being a
mother. To mention those that would probably be unheard-of in classical fairy tales, for
example, Wonder of Nights at the Circus, an unusually short and petite woman whom
Fevvers gets to know in the museum of women monsters, is sold by her mother to a
French pastrycook who serves her in cakes as a surprise (66). The mother of Mignon of
the same novel is killed by her husband for lying down with soldiers from a nearby
barracks (128). Another mother of this novel, Olga Alexandrovna, kills her husband
who abuses her, is put into prison and leaves behind an orphan boy (211). Apart from
the criminal and unfaithful mothers, there are also mothers who are rather weak and
improvident, as Red Riding Hoods mother, who cannot deny her and lets her go off
through the woods, despite the obvious perils it entails (141). It might be suggested here
that Red Riding Hoods mom is so good that it is actually harmful for the daughter; and
the myth of the good mother works against itself. To give one final example of mother

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behavior that would probably not be found in classical fairy tales, Liz, Fevverss
adoptive mother, observes bird-moms teach their young to fly and sees what she adopts
as her own teaching strategy: [] Why, as it dithered there, its loving mother came
right up behind it and shoved it clean off the edge! (Nights at the Circus 33) Deciding
on this risky step, Lizzie hopes that with her help, Fevvers has already adopted enough
of the art of flying and that this fly-or-die attempt turns out successful. In Carters texts,
a wider scope of mother behaviour can be found, which seems more natural and truthful
than only the narrow given pattern of the mother figure.
One might suggest that the mother myth that establishes a caring, self-sacrificing
mother who is always there for her children and their father as the only possibility of
motherhood eventually serves to keep women in their place. Although the mother myth
suggests female power, it only seems to be power that is acceptable within the
patriarchal frame. It has been suggested that motherhood lies at the very heart of
patriarchy. As Gallop writes:
As Chodorow among others has shown us, the institution of
motherhood is a cornerstone of patriarchy. Although the father may be
absent from the pre-Oedipal, patriarchy constitutes the very structure of
the mother-child dyad. The early mother may appear to be outside
patriarchy, but the very idea of the mother (and the woman) as outside
culture, society, and politics is an essential ideological component of
patriarchy. (322)
This observation seems to find its manifestation in Nights at the Circus when Lizzie and
Fevvers, going through the Siberian forest, find an improvised hut and inside it a
woman who has just given birth to her baby and now is burning up with fever. Because
Liz and Fevvers (Sophie) are just discussing the issue of marriage and Liz tries to warn

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Fevvers against the institution, Liz uses the sight of the poor woman who has become a
victim of her mother role as her argument: [] This tableau of a woman in bondage to
her reproductive system, a woman tied hand and foot to that Nature which your
physiology denies, Sophie, has been set here on purpose to make you think twice about
turning from a freak to a woman (283). Although the birth of a child may be seen as
an intimate moment between the mother and her child that deserves a special approach
and a ritual, this appreciating attitude may easily turn against the mother and she is
moved to the periphery to struggle on her own for her and her childs lives. Thus
although the mother is celebrated on surface, in reality she is victimized.
The mother myth seems to work just in this way: although in its face value it
celebrates the unique role of women for their children, their sacrifices and nurturing and
life-giving abilities, in fact it restricts women by offering them very limited options and
modes of behaviour. Carter does not comply with this distorting representation of
mothers but shows that they are only people who can be strong or weak, good or bad,
and can approach their mother role in various ways.

3.2 Womens Relationships in Patriarchy

As girls are growing up, the relationships between them and other women are
changing. Girls become adult womens equals, peers and in a way also successors. They
begin to see what the relationships between women are and to be a part of them. Here it
is looked at the nature of some of the relationships between daughters and their
(surrogate) mothers and at the influence the mothers have on the young heroines.
One of the possible constellations of the mother-daughter relationship is
sisterhood and sympathy based on their common fate and hardship. This is for example
the case of Melanie of The Magic Toyshop and her Aunt Margaret. They both have to

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put up with the hardness of living in Uncle Philips house. This includes obeying him in
everything, having no money on ones own, not being allowed to wear trousers and
generally calculating at every moment what to do so as not to make him angry. In such
an environment, they become friends and support for one another and there seems to
develop a silent understanding between them. This becomes visible when Aunt Margaret
sadly explains to Melanie that she cannot give her any money to buy presents because
she is given none herself. Melanie tries to be supportive: I understand, said Melanie.
An ancient, female look passed between them; they were poor women pensioners,
planets round a male sun (140). They both know that they are dominated and
manipulated and try to ease their burden by offering each other warmth and sympathy.
Peach reads the passage in terms of a unique connection between the two women that is
however anchored in their inferior position: The look that passes between them is
evidence of a deeper female bond. []. However, the word bond is double-edged; the
women are also brought together by their shared economic dependency upon men (93).
Their friendship may be seen as rising out of necessity; crudely speaking, it can be put
forth that it is much easier for women to be loving, understanding and sympathetic to
each other, when neither of them is given anything from the mans wealth or privileges.
However, when the women (or just one of them) see themselves as competing
for the mans favour, the relationship changes drastically and they become rivals. Such a
situation is depicted in the tale The Snow Child. Here, when the Count and the
Countess are out riding, there, out of the Counts wish, appears a beautiful young girl.
Since the moment the Count sits her on his horse, there is only one thing on the
Countesss mind: How shall I be rid of her? (113) The Countess hates the girl from
the very beginning, sees a danger in her and wants to destroy her. Bacchilega observes:
In this snow-covered landscape, the only relationship possible between women is one

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that reproduces itself as rivalry, as struggle to survive at the other womans expense
(Postmodern Fairy Tales 38). This view is supported by the fact that whenever the
Count decides to give something to the girl or when he defends her against the
Countess, the Countess is stripped of her clothes, or her shoes, until she is bare as a
bone and the girl furred and booted (113). It seems that when the Count directs his
kindness and goodwill to one of the women, the other is inevitably endangered.
Perhaps the Countess of The Snow Child is afraid that she will be forgotten by
the Count, who will love the young girl instead and she, forlorn, will be doomed.
Indeed, it appears to be the case in fairy tales that young women overtake the positions
of older ones and replace them. This is put forward for instance in The Magic Toyshop,
where Melanie tries on her mothers wedding dress and then sees this as the cause of her
parents death: It is my fault, she told the cat. Her voice wavered like waterweed. It is
my fault because I wore her dress. If I hadnt spoilt her dress everything would be all
right. Oh, Mummy! (24) Melanie blames herself for her mothers death, as if there
were some kind of a rule that there cannot co-exist a mother and a daughter who are
both in the prime of their lives, as if the life went necessarily from the mother to the
daughter, making the daughter mature and the mother die. The events of The
Werewolf or of The Company of Wolves can be read along the same lines. In The
Werewolf, the girl cuts off her grandmothers hand when she is a wolf, initiates the
grandmothers beating and eventually moves into her house and prospers there (136). In
The Company of Wolves, Red Riding Hood ends in her grandmothers bed with the
wolf who a moment ago devoured her (147). Discussing this phenomenon in the Red
Riding Hood tales, Bacchilega reminds that in certain versions of this tale, the
(grand)mother and the girl are seen as central characters and the wolf only as a
connection between them that helps in the shift from the grandmother to the

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granddaughter. The violence committed on the grandmother then acquires a new

meaning: By eating the flesh and drinking the blood, the young girl incorporates the
grandmothers knowledge and takes her place (Postmodern Fairy Tales 56).
Bacchilega sees this passing on of experience, knowledge and life energy from a
(grand)mother to a young girl as a form of woman-centered genealogy (56). On the
other hand, one can pose the question why it is not possible for the women to live side
by side and perhaps only transform their relationship to adapt it to the new reality that
the girl is now a mature woman. Gilbert, discussing the principles and circumstances of
a girls psychosexual development in patriarchy, notices this pattern of replacement and
suggests that it is connected to the limits imposed on women: It is as if the very idea of
the daughters quest must necessarily kill the female progenitor, [] to emphasize the
unavailability of female power (369). Thus it can be concluded that although the
relationships of women of different generations are significantly influenced by the
limited power and space they have in patriarchal society, it seems that at least certain
continuation of female experience, knowledge and energy can be ensured.
In this subchapter, some relationships that come into being between women
living in a patriarchal setting have been explored. These include the friendship of
women growing from their common lot, rivalry between them and the principle that a
young woman tries to replace the one before her, which springs from their limited
positions. However, it must be said that although Carter acknowledges the existence of
these relationship patterns, they are not the only possible ones for her. As will be shown
in the subchapter dealing with a brothel as an alternative and later in the subchapter
about incest, Carter opens more varieties of womens relationships than the stern ones
analyzed here.
3.3 Mothers and Mother Figures as Girls Role Models

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A mother is certainly a strong role model for a daughter. Girls and young women
usually receive from their mothers a lot of information about how to be an adult woman
and how to be a mother and a wife. The mothers experience is passed on to her
daughter not only verbally but also through model behavior that can be both objectively
observable and subtle. It is questionable how well the model behaviour serves the
daughter; but it is also up to her to actively reflect on what is offered and to adopt or
refuse it.
Around Melanie of The Magic Toyshop, there are in the course of the story
different mother figures who provide her with varied messages on how to be an adult
woman. There is Mrs. Rundle, Melanie and her siblings babysitter and the housekeeper,
who, although not married, decides she will rather be a mistress than a miss: She
adopted the married form by a deed poll on her fiftieth birthday as her present to herself.
She thought Mrs gave a woman a touch of personal dignity as she grew older. Besides,
she had always wanted to be married (3). This step of Mrs. Rundle seems to be an
interesting coping strategy. Because she was not married and was thus deprived of the
respect it would have given her and of the pleasures and memories connected to married
life, she at least decided to use the married form and to convince herself that her
fantasies about her husband are actually her memories. However, this decision also
suggests that she considers remaining unwed to be somewhat second-rate. This is also
what Melanie starts to think and what becomes a source of her anxiety. The reader can
look into her thoughts: I hope I get married. Oh, how awful if I dont get married. I
wish I was forty and it was all over and I knew what was going to happen to me (6).
The parallel between Mrs. Rundles and Melanies attitudes is adumbrated in the
similarity of their prayers. It is read in the novel:

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Melanie prayed: Please God, let me get married. Or, let me have sex.
[] Mrs. Rundle prayed, astonishingly: Please, God, let me remember
that I was married as if I had really married. For she knew she could not
fool God by virtue of the deed poll. Or, at least, she continued, let me
remember that I had sex. Only she phrased it less bluntly. (8)
Mrs. Rundle most probably does not tell Melanie that marriage may not be the only way
to happiness. Right the other way round, Mrs. Rundle probably passes to Melanie the
idea that the only way to live in respect and happiness is to be married.
Another woman who becomes a surrogate mother for Melanie and who
inevitably serves as a possible model for her is Aunt Margaret, Uncle Philips wife. For
the most part of the novel, Aunt Margaret seems totally subdued to her husband. She
seems to patiently accept the suffering that he brings her and Melanie often wonders
why this is so, why she lets all this happen to her and why she chose him for her
husband. As Melanie finds out from Finn towards the very end, the surprising agenda
behind Aunt Margarets unhappy marriage is that she and her brother Francie are
incestuous lovers. Finn tells Melanie: They are lovers. They have always been lovers.
[] They are everything to each other. That is why we have stayed here, since Francie
and Maggie (194). It is thus revealed that Aunt Margaret and her brothers have a
reason to stay at Uncle Philips and that they even exploit him in a way, but it is not
clear whether the advantages of it outweigh the negatives. It is also open what Melanie
learns from this, but perhaps she at least sees that, contrary to appearances, Aunt
Margaret has her own will and her ways and pursues a goal that she has chosen. It is put
forth in the text that Melanie can understand her and her peculiar preferences. When
Finn asks her after the revelation whether she would like to get back the pearls that she
gave to Aunt Margaret, she replies: No. I love her. It was true. As she spoke, she felt

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the love, warm and understanding, inside her. And she loved Francie, too, there was no
helping it (195). Melanies sympathy and love for these two people is stronger than
any tendencies to judge them. Aunt Margaret thus becomes an unusual role model for
Melanie. In the end, it is up to Melanie to reflect on the behavior that she sees in the
women who become her surrogate mothers and add them to the array of possibilities of
being a woman that she already knows, this being for example a vague memory of what
her mother was like (My mother, said Melanie, invoking her with difficulty, wore
hats and gloves and sometimes sat on committees [116]). Generally speaking, both
Mrs. Rundle and Aunt Margaret are inventive in terms of their pursued goals and their
strategies; however, the message for Melanie appears to be ambiguous.
Another young woman of the texts analyzed here, the heroine of The Bloody
Chamber, a version of the Bluebeard story, has a very powerful role model in her
eccentric and heroic mother, who, already in her young age, showed an extraordinary
ability to survive and to save others in desperate situations. The heroine realizes what a
strong personality her mother is: My eagle-featured, indomitable mother; what other
student at the Conservatoire could boast that her mother had outfaced a junkful of
Chinese pirates, nursed a village through a visitation of plague, shot a man-eating tiger
with her own hand and all before she was as old as I? (The Bloody Chamber 8) In
addition to this, she had her will and married for love (8). After her husband died in a
war, she had a hard time but tried to make it possible for her daughter to have a career
and lead a life of her choice; when times were difficult, she sold all her jewelry, even
her wedding ring, to pay her daughters fees at the conservatory (15). This mother may
be seen as another extreme, for how is it possible for a daughter of such a heroic mother
to follow in her footsteps? It seems that the young bride respects and admires her
mother but feels she cannot be as extraordinary as her. Similarly to her mother, though,

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she has her will and decides on her marriage, although her mom is not sure it is a good
step, as is revealed when she asks: Are you sure you love him? Im sure I want to
marry him, I said. And would say no more (8). Unfortunately, she almost pays with
her life for the decision to marry the Marquis. It turns out that he is a sadistic maniac
who takes pleasure in killing his wives in various ways. Interestingly, on the threshold
of the forbidden chamber where the newly married woman is to discover her husbands
true, horrible nature, she realizes how much of her mothers character she inherited:
Until that moment, this spoiled child did not know she had inherited nerves and will
from the mother who had defied the yellow outlaws of Indo-China. My mothers spirit
drove me on, into that dreadful place, in a cold ecstasy to know the very worst (33). In
the moment of her horror initiation, the girl reaches for the strength that comes to her
from her mother and realizes how much she takes after her. On the other hand, it might
be proposed in the passage that the inherited fearless temperament led her to the
dangerous place, but it is debatable whether she is able to face the horrid situation and
survive it. In the end, she is rescued by her mother, who, alarmed by an earlier telephone
call in which the daughter irrationally cries about luxurious bath taps, rushes into the
castle and shoots the Marquis dead. Although the daughter probably lacks the
extraordinary heroism and resources of her mother and is powerless face to face with
her brutal husband, still it is suggested that what her mother taught her serves her well.
Thanks to the professional career as a pianist that she pursues, inspired and supported
by her mother, she gets to know Jean-Yves, a blind piano tuner hired by her husband,
who is her consoler in the most dreadful moments of her life, helps her mother get into
the castle and who eventually becomes her beloved partner.
It might be said that mother-figures give ambiguous examples to their daughters.
Although both Mrs. Rundle and Aunt Margaret devise original strategies of integrating

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their real selves and the expectations projected on them, it is disputable how well these
serve to Melanie. On the other hand, the advantage of it seems to be that Melanie can
observe various women figures and choose herself what suits her. The main character of
The Bloody Chamber has an unusually strong mother as a role model, but it seems
that she still needs to figure out what this means to her. All in all, daughters are not
copies or little versions of their mothers or minders, but need to decide on their own
who they want to be.

3.4 A Brothel as an Alternative

It is remarkable that Carter has her symbol of womens freedom, the character of
Fevvers of Nights at the Circus, born and raised outside of the usual nuclear family. In
fact, Fevvers was not even born but hatched out of an egg; abandoned by her parents but
found by affectionate Lizzie. She narrates to Walser:
And she who found me on the steps at Wapping, me in the laundry
basket in which persons unknown left me, a little babe most lovingly
packed up in new straw sweetly sleeping among a litter of broken
eggshells, she who stumbled over this poor, abandoned creature clasped
me at that moment in her arms and out of the abundant goodness of her
heart and took me in (12).
A hatched foundling taken by a prostitute with a big heart and brought up in a brothel,
Fevvers is neither an inheritor of the lot of the women before her, nor a product of the
nuclear familys Oedipal setting (in which, following Freudian psychoanalysis, the girl
child acquires a secondary and inferior sense of identity to the male child [Peach 135]).
In his discussion of Fevverss unique origin, Michael acknowledges Barretts conclusion
that it is within the family that masculine and feminine people are constructed and that

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the categories of gender are reproduced and expresses his persuasion that the
production of new forms of subjectivity requires new family structures and ideologies
(Michael 503). From the very beginning of her life, Fevvers lives in a unique structure
and can therefore become a unique personality.
The brothel where Fevvers grows up is portrayed in most ideal terms. As
Fevvers confides to Walser, she is grateful for where and how she was brought up, for
she was looked after and reared by the women as if she were the common daughter of
half-a-dozen mothers (21). Also, she was never treated unkindly or badly by them but
was always given the best of everything (22). Furthermore, the house of prostitution
is depicted as a residency of a group of ambitious and entrepreneurial woman, who are
busy with their pastimes and their education before their labour begins (27). Thanks to
the skills and plans they thus develop, they are able to find a new means of living after
the runner of the brothel, Ma Nelson, tragically dies (44-45).
The environment in which Fevvers grows up is in many ways unparalleled. The
relationships between the women there seem to be devoid of rivalry and envy. Although
they are dependent on men, these are their customers and the transactions with them are
rationalized and based on business. Paradoxically it could be proposed that, although
prostitutes, the professional women who in their free time develop their skills and
knowledge and who live in harmony with each other are ideal role models for little
Fevvers.
Fevvers was brought up by a whole group of women living together, by a small
community. As has been already noted, Michael sees this new family structure as a
pre-condition of Fevverss unique subjectivity. The idea of a community as a family
structure has been developed by a number of thinkers. Crowder mentions Wittigs
approach: By replacing the mother-child dyad with the tribal commune as the social

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unit, Wittigs works at one stroke eliminate relations of inequality and power, expressed
in psychoanalytic terms in the Oedipal conflict (123). However, although the
arrangement in which a commune replaces the nuclear family seems to free the child
from the negatives of the traditional roles, Carter probably cannot be seen as a supporter
of the feminist idea of women-only associations that should serve as alternatives to
patriarchal society. The doubt about such schemes is expressed for example in Lizzies
ironic reaction to the news about the group of ex-convicts who set out to establish a
female-only colony and plan to use a donators sperm for reproduction. Lizzie wonders:
Whatll they do with the boy babies? Feedem to the polar bears? To the female polar
bears? (241) Lizzie, although clearly a feminist and an adversary of marriage,
uncovers the impracticability of such a project. It is a paradox but a brothel is shown as
a much better solution to the problematic position of women in society and to the
relations between men and women, because it does not exclude men or strips them of
the significance they have, but at the same time leaves the women enough space and
power. Furthermore, according to Carter, this arrangement is also more sincere and
acknowledging to women, as they are at least decently paid on the nail and boast fewer
illusions about a hireling status that has no veneer of social acceptability (qtd in
Michael 503). The more respectable social status of married women is shown to be only
illusory.
By making her emblematic heroine Fevvers a daughter of a group of prostitutes,
Carter suggests a new, reverse view of a brothel. It becomes an institution where the
relationships between men and women are more transparent and where women have
more space for themselves, for their pastimes and their ambitions. Also what Fevvers
learns and observes in the environment, including the womens relationships, is depicted
in very positive terms. Furthermore, as was mentioned earlier, the brothel is the very

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place where Fevvers for the first time experiences that she hovers on the air, which can
be read as the first promise of her unusual abilities and her freedom.

3.5 Chapter Conclusion

In this chapter it has been shown how much the lives of women are influenced
by the inevitably patriarchal setting. Although they are on the surface celebrated by their
mother role, in fact it keeps them in place. They can be each others friend in need, but
they are as well rivals competing for a mans favour. Young heroines of the texts can
often watch how the life of their mother figures is limited by their positions in relation
to men. Carter seeks remedy in uncovering such confinement and rigidity and offers an
alternative as well. In her brothel of Nights at the Circus, the matrix of mutual
dependency of men and women becomes transparent and free of appearances and this
paradoxically seems to liberate the women. The brothel is thus portrayed as a place
where women can act freely and be real friends to each other and good mothers to
Fevvers, who is thus brought up as knowing no restraints to her liberty.

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4 From Fathers to Husbands

To a certain extent, a girls adolescence can be seen in terms of leaving the care
and protection of the mother and entering the world which works according to the
fathers rules. In the following three subchapters, it is analyzed how the heroines adapt
to the new realities and the new phase of their lives. At the same time, it is discussed
how their relations with men change in connection with the fact that they are becoming
mature women and sexual objects.

4.1 Father-Daughter Incest

Father figures of the analyzed texts seem to be even more problematic than
mothers. In her discussion of Carters male characters, Peach quotes Jouves observation
that father figures in Carters work are attacked, deconstructed, shown to be hollow or
vulnerable (83). Indeed, in the texts analyzed here, there is most probably not one
positive father figure. Fathers that could be good or at least normal are absent or dead;
Melanies father in The Magic Toyshop dies in the plane crash, the father of The
Bloody Chamber is killed in war, Red Riding Hoods dad is away in the forest (The
Company of Wolves 141). Other fathers are gamblers or incompetents who lose all
their property and their daughters, as is the case in The Courtship of Mr Lyon or in
The Tigers Bride. The negative father figure is taken into extreme and at the same
time mocked in the character of Uncle Philip of The Magic Toyshop, a brutish and an
obviously psychologically disturbed toymaker, who does not like people playing with
his toys (86).
As a girl is growing up into a young woman, the relationship between her and
her father is becoming troublesome. In the essay Lifes an Empty Pack: Notes toward a
Literary Daughterognomy, Sandra M. Gilbert convincingly shows that the western

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cultural pattern of a girls development is one of father-daughter incest. Because it is

remarkable how much the conclusions of this essay can be followed in Carters texts, it
is used here as the basis for the analysis of the relationship between the father and his
maturing daughter. First the essay is overviewed here and then it is analyzed how the
uncovered principles are portrayed in Carters texts and how they are further worked
with and undermined.
To summarize the main points of Gilberts essay, the coming of age of a daughter
is seen as an entry of the daughter into a culture shaped by the codes of the father
(364). A daughter needs to leave the world created by her mother and to enter the world
dominated by her father and working according to his rules. In this, the girl is
figuratively told: You must bury your mother, you must give yourself to the father
(364). For the father, his maturing daughter represents the embodiment of all his
longings, stretching from his childhood sweetheart to the all-giving mother. In addition
to this, fathers see their daughters as belonging solely to them alone (373). Further it is
suggested that incestuous behaviour is a continuum and that women in patriarchal
culture are encouraged to behave incestuously and marry men who resemble their
fathers: men who are taller, richer and have more power than the women themselves
(372). Other principles rooted in patriarchal society include the impossibility for a
daughter to inherit fathers wealth (358), the tendency that a daughter replaces her
female progenitor (already discussed in the subchapter on womens relationships)(369)
and the daughters incestuous desire for her father which results in renouncing more
natural desires for her lover/brother, for her mother and her self (371).
Carters short story The Snow Child is a tale about a young womans initiation
by incest stripped to its bare plot. Out on a horse ride, the Count tells the Countess what
girl he would like to have and once he says it, there she is: As soon as he completed

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her description, there she stood, beside the road, white skin, red mouth, black hair and
stark naked; she was the child of his desire [] (113). Such a depiction of a nude
young girl with red lips has strong sexual connotations; furthermore, the fact that the
girl was born out of his wish chimes in with the idea that a father sees in his daughter all
his desires come true. Basically, the whole plot of the tale is that a girl is born out of her
fathers wish, her mother sees her as a dangerous rival and wants to destroy her, the
father has sex with her and she melts and disappears. The youngster has no other
purpose in her life than to fulfill her fathers wish. At the same time, she is a passive
heroine taken into extreme. It is telling that her actions are described in a minimal
number of words: So the girl picks a rose; pricks her finger on the thorn; bleeds;
screams; falls (114). By allowing the heroine as little space of the text as possible, her
passivity is magnified. Carter further mocks the incest through an outspoken description
of the sexual act: Weeping, the Count got off his horse, unfastened his breeches and
thrust his virile member in to the dead girl. The Countess reined in her stamping mare
and watched him narrowly; he was soon finished (114). Carter makes the Count not
only incestuous but also necrophilic and his lets wife watch the act knowingly, with the
satisfaction that her rival is dying.
Many other examples of incestuous behaviour of fathers toward their daughters
or wards can be traced in the texts analyzed here. For example, Melanie is forced by
Uncle Philip to play Leda in an enactment of Leda and the Swan story. It becomes
basically a staging of Melanies rape. It is proposed that Melanie senses the real
meaning of the puppet show. The reader finds out about Melanies feelings: But it was
not precisely the swan of which she was afraid but of giving herself to the swan (162).
Melanie is vicariously raped by her Uncle, and also other young girls are treated
willfully by their fathers. In the tale The Tigers Bride, the father loses his daughter in

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cards. She realizes what the transaction revealed about her position; she is thought of
and treated as property. She says: You must not think that my father valued me less
than a kings ransom; but, at no more than a kings ransom. (78). The fact that she is
much valued does not change anything, in her fathers eyes she is still an asset.
In the short story The Bloody Chamber, significant elements of the incest
pattern can be observed as well. The Marquis is rich as Croesus (11), while his brideto-be is a poor conservatory student; he is also much older and much more experienced
than her. She narrates: I was seventeen and knew nothing of the world; my Marquis
had been married before, more than once, and I remained a little bemused that, after
those others, he should have now chosen me (10). In their relationship, he is the older,
richer, more experienced one, and she is a little child compared to him. Furthermore, in
accordance with the patriarchal dictum that a maturing girl must forget her mother and
start to be there only for her father, the heroine feels as if she were losing her mom:
And, in the midst of my bridal triumph, I felt a pang of loss as if, when he put the gold
band on my finger, I had, in some way, ceased to be her child in becoming his wife (7).
In this story, however, the patriarchal status quo that a daughter exists for the
father/husband only and he can do whatever he pleases with her is disrupted. The
already analyzed moment where, on the threshold of the torture chamber, the heroine
starts to think about her mother and what she takes after her could be possibly read as
her realization of where the desire for a father-figure has led her and the wish that she
could return to the world of her mother. In the end, her mom revives her again to the
mother-world when she shoots her husband dead. The ending of the story shows further
significant departures from the rules of the father world (as are put forth in Gilberts
essay). The rescued bride inherits from her husband a huge fortune, which goes against
the observation that daughters rarely inherit from their fathers; she finds a lover in the

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blind, young piano tuner from the nearby village, who is certainly not another father
figure; and all three of them live together, which defies the principle about a daughter
replacing her female progenitor. Although it is the mother who so remarkably changes
the events, the daughter also struggles to be an active character. It is suggested that she
is aware of the dangers of being passive. She wonders about whether she caused the
terrible fate to come to her: Who can say what I deserve or no? I said. Ive done
nothing; but that may be sufficient reason for condemning me (45). The girls rescue
might be seen as a joint venture of her and her mother, for it is after all the daughters
telephone call that alarms her mother and that eventually results in the happy ending.
The theme of incest can appear in numerous shades and forms. Carters novel
The Magic Toyshop offers an unusual handling of this topic in the incestuous
relationship between Aunt Margaret and her younger brother Francie. Interestingly, here
the incest works against the patriarch. What has worked for so long against girls and
women is thus turned against the very makers of the scheme. All in all, it can be said
that Carter does not avoid the problematical issue of father-daughter incest, but makes it
impossible to overlook, as for example in the minimalistic and mocking tale The Snow
Child or in the staged rape of Melanie of The Magic Toyshop. In The Bloody
Chamber, Carter has a heroic mother disrupt the incestuous principles and regain her
daughter back to her world of free and empowered women. It is also suggested that an
active heroine can to an extent fight or face incestuous tendencies from her father, but a
passive one is fully at his mercy.

4.2 Sex and Desire

As has been already shown, Carters young women characters, although virgins,
are erotically charged, aware of the new bodily sensations and full of expectancy. With

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time, opportunities arise for them to find realizations of these feelings in sexual
relationships. However, because the sexual partners are most often men, they are
challenged to learn to understand them and embrace them in their difference but not to
lose anything of their own personality along the way. This may not be an easy task. The
heroine of The Tigers Bride reflects on the gap between her and men: I was a young
girl, a virgin, and therefore men denied me rationality just as they denied it to all those
who were not exactly like themselves, in all their unreason (78). She sees men as a
different species, but assumes that this will somewhat change with her wider experience
with them.
It seems that discovering mens ruthlessness is quite a common part of first
sexual experiences. Such an unhappy introduction into sexual life is the case of the
heroine of The Bloody Chamber. After her first sex with the Marquis, she feels
infinitely disheveled by the loss of [her] virginity (20) and cradles her hurt body to
comfort it (21). The Marquis says consolingly: My dear one, my little love, my child,
did it hurt her? Hes so sorry for it, such impetuousness, he could not help himself; you
see, he loves her so (21). Although these are apologetic words, it is not difficult to
see that in fact he tries to manipulate her into believing that sexual love and its practices
are beyond her understanding, that it is him who knows the rules of their love and
therefore sets them, and, finally, that she will have to accept that love will hurt her. For
Carter, all sexual reality as political reality, (qtd in Bruhl and Gamer 152) and this
principle can be well observed in this instance of the Marquiss treatment of his bride.
By setting the rules and the terms, he tries to take over her sexuality. The bride is aware
of the power her husband has over her. After he leaves for urgent business and she stays
on her own, she contemplates about him as about the mysterious being who, to show
his mastery over [her], had abandoned [her] on their wedding night (26).

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But sexuality and desire are complex matters and although the girl feels
overpowered by her husband, she is also aware of the intense sensations sex inflamed in
her. She recalls the moment after he had abandoned her: I lay in our wide bed
accompanied by, a sleepless companion, my dark newborn curiosity. I lay in bed alone.
And I longed for him. And he disgusted me (26). She is conscious of her mixed
feelings which include desire, anticipation and repulsion. Still later, after the young
woman discovers the dark secrets of the forbidden chamber, the rules and practices of
her husband overwhelm her so much that she is thunderstruck when she sees that more
forms of enchantment and desire are at all possible. When the piano tuner visits her
while she is practising in the middle of the dreadful night, she literally passes out
because of the novelty of his gentleness. She narrates: After the dreadful revelation of
that bloody chamber, it was his tender look that made me faint (38). Also the fact that a
man she fancies is her equal is new for her, and she realizes the power it: Although he
was scarcely more than a boy, I felt a great strength flow into me from his touch (39).
Her falling for the piano tuner can be read as evidence that although the Marquis
dominates her and it is him who initiates her into sex, she is able to think of her
sexuality independently to the extent that she welcomes an alternative to him, although
its form shocks her.
There seems to be had more positive energy and pleasure out of more equal and
democratic sexual relations that involve both partners rules, wishes and needs. An
intriguing portrayal of womens developing sexuality is provided in the two mutually
reflecting Beauty and the Beast stories of The Bloody Chamber, namely in The
Courtship of Mr. Lyon and The Tigers Bride. In both of these tales, a daughter is
forced by her fathers circumstances to become a companion for the Beast, which is at
first terrible for her, but gradually she voluntarily becomes the Beasts partner and lover.

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The heroines of the stories are attracted by the Beasts and at the same time scared of
their difference and of what it would do to them. When the girl of The Courtship of Mr
Lyon sends the Beast a bunch of flowers as an expression of gratitude that he helped
her father and let her go, she realizes the array of feelings connected to him:
She sent him flowers, white roses in return for the ones he had given her;
and when she left the florist, she experienced a sudden sense of perfect
freedom, as if she had just escaped from an unknown danger, had been
grazed by the possibility of some change but, finally, left intact. Yet, with
this exhilaration, a desolating emptiness (59).
The Beast represents to her something she deeply longs for but cannot easily give in to
because she is afraid it would change her. However, it is suggested in the two stories
that the heroines actually have more potentiality to change than it may at first seem. As
Beauty of The Tigers Bride thinks: The Tiger will never lie down with the lamb; he
acknowledges no pact that is not reciprocal. The lamb must learn to run with the tigers
(79). It is put forward here that the lamb can change, that there is a tiger quality in it that
can develop; that there is a beast in a woman which can become a partner for the Beast.
It is possible to see the beast as a symbolic representation of womans libido, as for
example Makinen does. She writes: Beasts signify a sensuality that the women have
been taught might devour them, but which, when embraced, gives them power, strength
and new awareness (10). When the young women start to develop their sexuality in
their relationships with the Beasts, it will most probably change them, but chances are
that it will not harm them.
It is ironic that in the texts analyzed here, the inhuman Beasts appear to be better
lovers than the experienced, self-confident and self-centered Marquis; for they do not
set forth any given terms and conditions of sexual conduct. Thus the mutual getting to

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know and getting used to the other is for the Beasts and Beauties a process that engages
both parties and gives space to both of them. The sentence quoted earlier here, that the
Beast acknowledges no pact that is not reciprocal (79) thus gains another meaning.
Surprisingly, Beasts are partners for Beauties also in their fear and apprehension. In both
tales, it is proposed that they are afraid of their young human companions. For example,
when the girl of The Tigers Bride comes to her lover, nude and open to things to
happen, she senses his fear: He went still as stone. He was far more frightened of me
than I was of him (82). Beasts and Beauties of the two tales are gradually beginning to
know each other and to lose barriers; they are creating their relationships and
influencing each other. For example, in The Courtship of Mr Lyon, it is read: He
forced himself to master his shyness, which was that of a wild creature, and so she
contrived to master her own [] (57). Both of them are unaccustomed to each others
company but they both try to come closer to one another.
Although the heroines need to come to terms with the Beasts difference and
with what it does to their sexuality, they do not submit themselves to their bestial
companions; they are sexual subjects; they are knowledgeable and initiative. This is
revealed for instance in the following passage of The Courtship pf Mr Lyon where the
Beast kisses Beauty good night: She stayed stock-still, transfixed; she felt his hot
breath on her fingers, the stiff bristles of his muzzle grazing her skin, the rough lapping
of his tongue and then, with a flood of compassion, understood: all he is doing is kissing
my hands (57). The girl appears to already have certain knowledge of sex and finds the
Beasts attempt to kiss her clumsy but sweet. Crunelle-Vanrigh sees this passage as
evidence that some of Carters fairy-tale heroines have an awareness of sex that would
have been foreign to heroines of classical fairy tales (131). It might be said that this
holds truth also for heroines sexual initiative: it would have been perhaps even more

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foreign to classical fairy-tale female figures, but is possible and even quite common in
Carters figures. The heroine of The Tigers Bride bravely acts on her own initiative
when she, as has been already mentioned, goes to the Beast naked and full of
expectations.
At the moment when the Tigers bride visits him in his chamber, there opens the
realm of their intimacy and sharing. The young woman decides to usher the two of them
there: The beast and his carnivorous bed of bone and I, white, shaking, raw,
approaching him as if offering, in myself, the key to a peacable kingdom in which his
appetite may not be my extinction (82). In her initiative, she offers herself to him in a
way that respects them both and that is a fruitful compromise between them. They
together create a space where they can meet in their instincts, desire and love.
For the purposes of the analysis here, the two Beauty and the Beast tales are
followed as having one plot, but it is not to suggest that they are the same. Many
differences between them could be found, in which they intertextually reflect on one
another. An important distinction between the two stories comes at their ends. In The
Courtship of Mr Lyon, the Beast becomes a man, when the girl starts to see him in that
way; in The Tigers Bride, on the contrary, the woman turns into a beast when her
human skin is licked off and fur appears. It might be proposed that both of the
transformations happen in accordance with the womens wishes and needs. The heroine
of The Courtship of Mr Lyon dearly loves her father and enjoys the worldly pleasures
and thus stays on the human side of the line and her Beast becomes more of a man. The
final lines of the story suggest that their marriage is quite normal, a union of a male and
female that are both human: Mr and Mrs Lyon walk in the garden, the old spaniel
drowses on the grass, in a drift of fallen petals (62). On the other hand, the girl of The
Tigers Bride, who is sick of her father and of her position, turns into a beast and thus

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destroys for her the human world in which she was made a property. The destruction of
her old world can be read in the description of the consequences of the Beasts purring
during their love play: The reverberations of his purring rocked the foundations of the
house, the walls began to dance. I thought: It will all fall, everything will disintegrate
(83). The symbolic house that represents her fathers dominance and the roles which
were prepared for her falls down and she eventually becomes free in her animality.
Thus, either in staying human or turning into a beast, both heroines of the stories go
only as far in their change as they can and as is pleasant and useful for them.
As it follows from the two tales, a womans sexual wishes and limits have their
significance, and, if respected, serve well to both partners. A woman is an active sexual
subject on her own, and creating a couples sexual life should be seen as an interactive
and mutual project rather than as subjecting the woman to the mans rules. Carter is a
supporter of absolute sexual license for all the genders (qtd in Bruhl and Gamer 154).
Thus, for example, a woman can be dominant and a man submissive if it works for
them. It appears that the liberty to sexually behave according to ones needs and wishes
is independent of both gender stereotypes and the previous experience. Such sexual
license for women is symbolically represented in Fevverss first sex. Because of her
unusual physiology, she can have sex in one position only. In their intimate moment,
Walser remembers this piece of information: Her released feathers brushed against the
walls; he recalled how nature had equipped her only for the woman on top position
and rustled on his straw mattress (Nights at the Circus 292). Thus Fevvers loses her
virginity in the position on top. Although she is reportedly the inexperienced one, she
dominates and determines what is going to happen.
To conclude this subchapter, in exploring their sexuality and finding
opportunities for its realization, Carters young female characters have to face the

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difference between them and their male counterparts and the attempts to colonize their
sexuality. If the heroines follow their instincts, make use of their knowledge and
potential and are active and initiative in their sexuality, their sexual partnerships become
a source of energy and balance. Gender stereotypes or any other imperatives should not
pose any limits. It appears that the proposal here is that the only way not to be devoured
by the Beast is to become its equal; and the only way not to be harmed by sexuality is to
actively approach, co-create and enjoy it.

4.3 Marriage
A classical fairy-tale ending involves a wedding and the conclusion that the
couple lived happily ever after. Marriage is seen as the destination toward which all
events, efforts and challenges are directed. It is the most typical form of a happy ending,
especially for a young heroine. In Carters texts, marriage is not the haven of rest it is in
classical fairy tales. It can be possibly happy, as it is for Mr and Mrs Lyon of The
Courtship of Mr Lyon, but it can also be fateful, as it almost becomes for the heroine of
The Bloody Chamber.
Fevverss adoptive mother Lizzie of Nights at the Circus is a passionate
adversary of marriage. When they walk through the Siberian forest in order to find
Fevverss beloved Walser, who lost their company when the train they were travelling
on exploded, Liz warns Fevvers against the dangers of the institution. She tells Fevvers
that marriage would put an end to her (financial) independence: Orlando takes his
Rosalind. She says: To you I give myself, for I am yours. And that, she added, a low
thrust, goes for a girls bank account, too (280). Liz wants Fevvers to understand
how, in certain aspects, marriage would inevitably limit her. She also warns her against
a rushed union that would diminish her personality:

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The heart is a treacherous organ and youre nothing if not impetuous. I

fear for you, Sophie. Selling yourself is one thing and giving yourself
away is quite another but, oh, Sophie! what if you rashly throw yourself
away? Then what happens to that unique meness of yours? On the
scrap-heap, thats what happens to it! I raised you up to fly to heavens,
not to brood over a clutch of eggs! (282)
Liz expresses her rock-solid conviction that marriage is not an option for somebody as
unique as Fevvers and that she would betray her own self. Actually, Liz is skeptical of
the institution of marriage in general, for she is persuaded that it is not all it is cracked
up to be, that its inner dynamics are not exactly democratic or egalitarian. She says:
What is marriage but prostitution to one man instead of many? No different! (21) Liz
does not see marriage as the unique union of a man and a woman in which the rights
and needs of both partners are fulfilled in love an understanding, but as an institution in
which a woman is in no different position than a prostitute; only the externals are
different. The character of Liz offers an interesting analysis of marriage. On the one
hand, she mentions the fact that true lovers reunions always end in a marriage (280),
on the other hand, she argues that marriage poses a serious danger for an independent
young woman. She contrasts the view of marriage as a romantic union of two lovers
with the bleak reality it often brings. Michael concludes that by comparing wives to
prostitutes and reminding us of the idealistic image of wedlock, Carter reduc[es]
marriage to nothing more than an unquestioned custom grounded in a false ideology of
happiness (504). Carter thus shows that marriage is another construct that manipulates
people, in this case especially women.
In her deconstruction of marriage, Carter does not suggest that a loving and
happy relationship between a man and a woman is impossible. But she shows that in

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marriage, a woman can be in jeopardy and that it is perhaps better to live in a less
stereotypical and more transparent union. In The Bloody Chamber, the two
partnerships that the heroine has in the course of the story are powerfully contrasted.
Her marriage with the Marquis is almost deadly to her. In her second relationship, she
probably opts for unwed cohabitation only. It is not clear whether she is married to her
beloved piano-tuner, but given that their cohabitation is the source of much rumour, it
may not be the case. To make it still more an unusual home, all three of them the
young woman, her partner and her mother live together. The heroine narrates: We
lead a quiet life, the three of us. []. We know we are the source of many whisperings
and much gossip but the three of us know the truth of it and mere chatter can never
harm us (49). Renfroe sees the young womans decision to settle with her lover and
her mother as similar to, and perhaps even more radical than, her mothers defiant
choice a generation earlier (98). Renfroe thus acknowledges the heroines autonomous
approach to her lifestyle as brave and mature. All in all, it is proposed in the analyzed
texts that there is a possible danger in following the stereotype of marriage, and maybe
it is better to look for an alternative.

4.4 Chapter Conclusion

It has been revealed her that there are many forces that seek to subject a young
woman. A girls father sees her as an embodiment of his wishes and as belonging to
him, which seems to have a bleak effect of incestuous tendencies. Other men may want
to take over the womans sexuality and make her accept their rules only. But Carter
shows that the heroines need not necessarily succumb to mens effort to dominate them.
Her young heroines are shown as self-confident, self-reflecting subjects. If they stand up
for themselves, do not accept partnerships other than equal, make use of the power they

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have and search for what makes them happy, men have to accept them in that way. In
Carters portrayal of relationships between men and women, one can see her persuasion
mentioned for example by Frankov that women are partially responsible for their
position in the society (50). In her young heroines she shows that when a woman wants
to change her situation, she can find a way to do so.

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5 Heroines in Process
In the last chapter of the thesis, it is analyzed how the protagonists themselves
reflect on the process of growing out of their children shoes and becoming adult. This
chapter deals with the questions whether they see themselves as changing and how they
conceptualize the change. Some of the heroines of the analyzed texts tell their stories
directly and it is then looked at how they voice their experience. In telling the stories of
their adolescence and early adulthood, the heroines create their autobiographies. Peach
reminds us about the power of this genre: Autobiography is one of the strategies by
which women can take responsibility for their own sense of self in a restricted and
restrictive environment or milieu, challenging the traditional appropriation of womens
lives and histories by men. Self-making is an essential element in womens
autobiography [] (133). By telling their stories on their own, the heroines are in
charge of them and do not let them be distorted or censored by others.

5.1 Melanie of The Magic Toyshop

Although Melanie of The Magic Toyshop does not tell her story directly, the
narrative is focalized from her perspective and the reader can look into her thoughts. In
the course of the story, Melanie goes through an abrupt change that turns her life upside
down. She loses her parents and together with her two younger siblings moves to Uncle
Philips. Her life could not change more. Until now she lived in a supportive and loving
environment, now she has to come to terms with living in the house haunted by Uncles
oppression. She was used to relative luxury, to taking baths and pampering herself, now
she has to do without hot water and proper toilet paper. She does not even go to school
anymore but works in the toyshop. This drastic turn that her life takes naturally results
in her confusion about who she is. This is further reinforced (and also symbolized) by

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the fact that there are no mirrors in her new home where she could see what she looks
like. She is unsure she would even know she is looking at herself: She was seized with
panic, remembering that she had not seen her own face for so long. Do I still look the
same? Oh, God, could I still recognise myself? (103) In her new home, her life
drastically alters and so does Melanie herself. The changes are so fast and so significant
that Melanie loses her old sense of self.
It is not only the novelty of her new home that is challenging for the protagonist,
but also the oppressive nature of it. In her mind, Melanie tries to take a step back from
the everyday reality of living at Uncle Philips. She imagines she is at the peaceful place
painted on the plates she puts away, and she likes to watch other people through the
door of the shop to see that life goes on. She also considers the option of leaving the
place: I suppose I could run away. [] I could get a job and live by myself in a bedsitting room, like the girls in stories and magazines (78). But Melanie realizes it is not
a realistic plan and that there is not much she can do. She wishes to be older, more
mature and more experienced in order to be able to have more liberty and more options
at her hand. She regards her age to be her bad luck: Her youth was a rock round her
neck, her albatross. She was too young, too soft and new, to come to terms with these
wild beings whose minds veered at crazy angles from the short, straight, smooth lines of
her experience (136). However, it can be observed that on the one hand she wishes to
grow up and be more autonomous and independent; on the other hand, she is afraid of it.
The fact that she fears growing up is proposed for example in the choice of books she
reads at Uncle Philips. The reader finds out: She never touched the few adult books,
and she hid the copy of Lorna Doone, but she clung to the rest as if they were lifebelts
(91). Melanie probably wants to cling to her childhood for just a little longer and thus

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reads her childhood books only, as if in hope that she could stop the time and forever
remain a child.
But for Melanie - as for all young women - there is no real way of returning to
childhood. Melanie seems to be aware of this. With time, her fears of what the future
might bring disappear. After she comes out relatively unharmed of the enactment of
Ledas rape and, significantly, after Finn stands up for her and destroys the puppet that
molested her, she stops being afraid of her adulthood because she knows she will not be
completely lost and alone in it. With this newly found energy and self-confidence,
Melanie decides to get rid of the relicts from childhood. She starts with giving away her
dresses to Aunt Margaret: She would give her her own dress. She had plenty more;
and, even if she had not, she could live off the fat of fifteen (nearly sixteen) years of
nice clothes (186). She feels she can stop clinging to her childhood and move on
because she was pampered enough and brought up to be strong and independent.
Melanie decides to give Aunt Margaret also her confirmation pearls and enjoys the
symbolic power of this gift: Melanie slid them round her neck and would not take No
for an answer. Let it all go, let it all go (189). Melanie takes the difficult but powerful
step and says goodbye to her old self.
At the end of the novel, Uncle Philip sets his house on fire and Melanie escapes
with Finn and is thus forever separated from her sister Victoria and brother Jonathon
and also from her new family consisting of Aunt Margaret and Francie. Nothing is left
there for her; there is only she and Finn. In the shock, Melanie thinks of her teddy bear
only. She says: My bear. Hes gone. Everything is gone! (200) And with her bear,
which she took with her from her old home and to which she hid her pajamas (which
she was growing out of anyway) and which was her consoler, also her childhood is gone
for good and now she realizes she needs to be adult and it seems she is ready for it.

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5.2 Heroines of The Bloody Chamber and The Tigers Bride

In the collection The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories, two female characters
narrate how they were forced by the circumstances to grow up. These are the
protagonists of The Bloody Chamber and The Tigers Bride. The heroine of The
Bloody Chamber tells the story of her marriage to the Marquis, of how he courted her
until she married him, seduced by the unknown luxurious mysteries he offered, of the
days of their short marriage and their first sex, of her daring exploration of all his castle
including the forbidden chamber and of how he almost murdered her but eventually got
killed by her mother. In the end of her narrative, she moves into the present and
mentions also the circumstances of her life now, her new partner and the music school
that she started. It cannot be easy for her to tell a story which includes her unwise
decision to marry the Marquis, a murder attempted on her and the details of their
intimate moments. It is not surprising that it is difficult for her to confess what happened
behind the walls of the aristocrats castle. Manley notices about her narrative: She only
gradually [] develops a sufficiently strong subject position from which to attempt to
tell her own story (91). However, although her voice quivers, she is brave enough to
tell her story and does not stop until the listener/reader knows it all.
It looks like the protagonist thinks of herself in two phases: before and after she
discovers the contents of the forbidden chamber. It seems that she is only a child when
she enters it but a grown-up woman when she leaves. Interestingly, she calls herself
often a child when she speaks about events that happened before entering the chamber,
but not once afterwards. From her story it follows that at the very moment when she
was exploring the place of torture, she realized what impact it was making on her:
Each time I struck a match to light those candles round her [of one of Marquiss
previous wives] bed, it seemed a garment of that innocence of mine for which he had

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lusted fell away from me (The Bloody Chamber 34). At that forlorn place, the
heroine moves definitely away not only from her childhood, but also from the role of
the Marquiss bride and from his projected demands on her. Renfroe writes about the
consequences that the terrible experience brought her: It is the girls daring and
disobedient exploration of the forbidden chamber that actually changes her, develops
her, and allows her to see her husband, and more importantly herself, from a more
knowledgeable perspective (97). Contrary to classical fairy tales in which womens
curiosity is punished, here it eventually enriches her and makes her a more insightful
person. It might be said that if forbidden chambers are this powerful a source of
womens experience, it is understandable why they are devised in such a way that
women cannot leave them alive. The knowledge of their husbands, of the world and
most significantly of themselves that they gain there makes them strong personalities,
and powerful women are undesirable in patriarchal society. Although the protagonist
herself sees the exploration of the torture chamber as the moment when she grew up,
she still needs to process the whole experience and the part that she played in it. It is put
forward in the story that she feels ashamed about what happened to her. The very last
paragraph of the tale reads: No paint nor powder, no matter how thick or white, can
mask that red mark on my forehead; I am glad he cannot see it not for fear of his
revulsion, since I know he sees me clearly with his heart but, because it spares my
shame (The Bloody Chamber 49). It might be suggested that the shame she feels is
connected to the potentiality of corruption she sensed in herself even before they got
married (12). Perhaps she feels ashamed because she knows why she married him in the
first place. Her feeling of guilt seems to be remorse for something she has done as an
active participant. It might be proposed that, if the red mark on the protagonists
forehead is seen as a symbol of a heroines active participation that is not always pure

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and blameless, the whitening and camouflaging layer put on it can be understood as the
classical fairy tales effort to erase and silence any examples of a young womans
conduct that would reveal her as an active agent, perhaps with a potential for
controversies or trespassing. However, as Carter seems to show, this can never be
entirely achieved, just as the mark on the girls forehead cannot be covered up.
Also the main character of The Tigers Bride has to grow up quickly. She sees
the day when she is left at the Beasts palace as the day when she comes of age. This is
proposed when she looks back on the gossip she used to hear about beast-like creatures
when she was little and realizes the wider circumstances: I knew well enough the
reason for the trepidation I cozily titillated with superstitious marvels of my childhood
on the day my childhood ended. For now my own skin was my sole capital in the world
and today Id make my first investment (70). She begins to see her position of a young
woman who has nothing and has limited options of conduct. She realizes that being
undefended and having nobody to rely on but herself is the essence of her adulthood.
Later in the story, when she is free to go, she considers the options that are available to
her. She can return to her father who treated her like a property when he bet her in cards,
but decides that the mechanic toy that serves her as a maid would do just as well in that
position: I will dress her in my own clothes, wind her up, send her back to perform the
part of my fathers daughter (81). Another option is to explore the possibilities of
staying with the Beast. The Beast is a creature from a different world; as the reader can
find out, nothing about him reminded [her] of humanity (79). As was already
uncovered in the discussion on desire and sexuality, the heroine takes the initiative and
goes to visit the Beast at night, and eventually turns into a beast herself. It seems that
she decides that to be an inhuman beast is better than to be a mechanical woman.
Bacchilega notes on the transformation Beauty opts for: The metamorphosis of the

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furiously silent daughter into the tigers bride [] subverts the humanistic and
patriarchal order (Postmodern Fairy Tales 98). It is interesting that such a mighty
change springs from the very limited position that she has. When she goes to the Beast,
she bets everything on the possibility that there is something that could connect them
and that would enable them to be together. She does not hesitate to use the little power
that she has and wins a whole new existence.

5.3 Fevvers of Nights at the Circus

In the whole first part of the novel Nights at the Circus, the winged heroine
Fevvers gives an interview to the young American journalist Walser. She gives an
account of all her life, starting with how she was found by the prostitute Liz, continuing
with her childhood in the brothel and the following bleak days in the museum of women
monsters, and finishing with the promising development of her career. Her manners are
unrestrained (she occasionally burps and farts), and so is her narration. She includes
everything she finds worth telling, also her first menstruation, all juicy details from her
home brothel, the fact that she is a virgin, and much more. It is her, not the journalist,
who decides how the interview advances. As Peach observes, Fevvers tak[es] control
of her own story-history and assert[es] herself as the author of her own words and
actions (132). Fevvers is not ashamed of herself or any part of her story and is not
afraid of the impact her words make. Her way of telling her life story is so powerful that
Walser feels enchanted by her voice: Her voice. It was as if Walser had become a
prisoner of her voice, her cavernous, somber voice, a voice made for shouting about the
tempest, her voice of a celestial fishwife (43). Fevvers gives an account of herself and
her life in such a way that she charms and overpowers even the journalist who hopes to
reveal her as a hoax.

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It is significant that Fevvers speaks also about her negative experience, about
situations when she is abused or endangered. In Madame Schrecks museum, although
she goes there voluntarily to earn a living for her family, she lives in poor conditions
and receives no pay at all. Twice she is almost murdered by men who are attracted by
her uniqueness. However, Fevvers is always able to fend for herself and to escape
unharmed, although sometimes her escape is very narrow. By giving this account of her
power and ability to survive, she breaks the dictum that human culture is bound by
rules which make it possible for a woman to speak but which oblige her to speak of her
own powerlessness (Gilbert 358). Her story is one of oppression and its defiance. It
does not even matter that Fevvers is quite an unreliable narrator. It is more significant in
this context that she makes sure that she can tell her story the way she wants, does not
shy away from its negative content or the strength and singularity it brings her.

5.4 Chapter Conclusion

As far as the reader can look into the heroines minds or deduce from the way
they tell their stories, they see themselves as changing and moving into new phases of
their lives, which is often accompanied by uncertainty and pain. Yet it seems that it is
exactly the ordeal that eventually makes them stronger and more adult. For example, the
protagonist of The Bloody Chamber regards her exploration of the torture chamber
and of the fate her husband prepared for her as the moment when she comes of age, for
Beauty of The Tigers Bride such a milestone is being lost in cards and left to the
Beast.
It seems that the heroines growing up and becoming adult is an ongoing and
never really finished process. This does not mean that they remain children forever; it is
rather to suggest that once they discover the possibilities of self-making, they probably

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cannot stop. Many of the analyzed characters are portrayed as having finished a phase
of their development, but at the same time it is clear that there are new challenges in
front of them. At the moment when Melanie of The Magic Toyshop loses everything in
the fire and realizes she must be adult, she clearly has a lot of work and difficulties
ahead. Also Fevver of Nights at the Circus will need to figure out how to be happy in a
relationship or even marriage with Walser and not lose her uniqueness, not to mention
that first they will have to find a way out of the Siberian wilderness. It seems that for
Carters female fairy-tale figures, there is no happy ever after. For young women of
classical fairy tales, marriage seems to be the point which signifies that they have come
of age and that they can stop developing; for Carters character there is no similar
certainty. They have grown up to be independent beings who decide on their lives, and
cannot but go on with actively shaping them and being responsible for their own
happiness.

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6 Conclusion
The aim of this master thesis was to analyze how the adolescence of fairy-tale
figures of selected works of Angela Carter is portrayed and how it can be understood in
the wider frame of the genre of fairy tale and its rewritings. The theme of female
adolescence and socialization carries special significance because of the complicated
role of the fairy tale for women. Once the genre was a vessel of female experience and
power, but in time has been significantly reshaped into educative stories instructing
young girls how they should behave and what they should aspire to in their lives. The
interest here lay in Carters deconstruction of the rigid and outlived stereotypes that
seem to determine the lives of women characters, and in the new message about fairytale figures youth that Carter inscribes into her stories and novels.
The discussed texts here were the collection of short stories The Bloody
Chamber and Other Stories and the two novels The Magic Toyshop and Nights at the
Circus. Thus the analyzed figures spanned from very traditional fairy-tale heroines like
Red Riding Hood, Snow White, Bluebeards bride or Beauty of Beauty and the Beasts
to novel protagonists in whom fairy-tale features can be traced and whose stories
resemble a fairy-tale storyline. Due to the intertextuality of Carters writing, the
characters were analyzed as if mirroring each other and being with each other in a
dialogue. In suggesting more than one possible reading and one solution, Carter relies
on the reader to be able to find his or her way through the stories. In activating the
reader of the fairy tales, Carter promotes the folk dimension of the genre and at the
same time gives it a postmodernist coat.
In this thesis, the categories of the female body, voice and gender were followed.
When it comes to the female body, it is revealed that the characters overcome their
anxiety and embrace their changing bodies, despite any images of what they should look

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like. Their bodies become sources of energy and possibility. When they thus befriend
the bodies, they accept also their sexual instincts. Importantly, the heroines become
sexual subjects first and only then sexual objects. However, the protagonists are not
freed from the negatives of the patriarchal world they inhabit. Their bodies can become
colonized by their manipulative fathers or dominating husbands. But they can be also
used for ones liberty and happiness. Winged Fevvers is a case in point; but,
controversially, also the prostitutes of her home brothel seem to benefit from the way
they use their bodies.
Apart from the body, voice and self-expression is another thing that Carter
returns to girls of the fairy tale. It is not only words that the protagonists speak through.
The ambiguous Aunt Margaret of The Magic Toyshop stops speaking on her wedding
day, but expresses herself through her body when she is unfaithful to her oppressive
husband with her own brother. Red Riding Hood of The Company of Wolves
significantly laughs when the wolf threatens he will eat her. Other characters tell their
own stories, which is in the case of Fevvers of Nights at the Circus and the protagonist
of The Bloody Chamber a story of womens defiance of mens brutality.
The category of gender is perhaps the most complex one. Carter does not limit
her heroines to the accepted gender roles. They often do things that are considered as
characteristic of men: they pursue professional careers, bravely solve desperate
situations, are sexually initiative and dominant. But it seems that if there is a trait that
women benefit from, it is the quality of being cunning. Being able to use every little
opportunity and crevice in the system for ones own good seems priceless. Melanies
Aunt Margaret marries in order to be able to keep her incestuous lover; Beauty of The
Tigers Bride explores the very limited options she has and gains a whole new world for
herself. It is important that the girls find their own space and learn how to fend for

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themselves, for as can be seen on the Counts daughter of The Snow Child women
who only fulfill mens wishes do not live for long.
Both institutions to which a young woman usually aspires marriage and
motherhood have been shown to lose its veneer of guaranteed happiness. With no
given roles to automatically aspire to, the heroines need to figure out on their own what
they want from their lives. Interestingly, Carter shows that there always is at least a little
opportunity to change the situation according to the girls wish. In Nights at the Circus,
Carter makes even the emblematically passive heroine the Sleeping Beauty - an active
agent. Carter suggests that her long sleep is her voluntary decision that she made when
she found out what the patriarchal world has in store for her.
It must be pointed out that there is no final, completed state of being adult that
the heroines reach. Although they themselves feel that they are changing and growing
up, it is also evident that their journey will go on, that they will continue to develop,
learn and find strategies to survive in the patriarchal world. Young girls in process turn
into adult women in process. This seems potentially disruptive: it is not only in their
youth when they can open their husbands forbidden chambers, voluntarily turn in to a
beast or strip (for) the werewolf, it can happen in their adulthood, too. For these deeds
are not acts of silly girlies, but of autonomous and self-confident young women.
To conclude this thesis, in her portrayal of female adolescence of selected fairytale figures, Carter breaks many silences and uncovers stiff patterns fed on patriarchal
ideology. It should be said that Angela Carters tales are no bedtime stories for children.
Her young heroines engage in behaviour that should be perhaps kept secret from them.
However, the message that Carter demonstrates in her young female characters may be
useful even for little girls: although it may seem dangerous to try to find ones own way,
it is actually much more perilous to give up on it.

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Works Cited
Bacchilega, Cristina. Fairy Tale. The Cambridge Guide to Women's Writing in
English. Ed. Lorna Sage, Germaine Greer and Elaine Showalter. Cambridge:
Cambridge UP, 1999. 231-33. Print.
---. Postmodern Fairy Tales: Gender and Narrative Strategies. Philadelphia: U of
Pennsylvania, 1997. Print.
Benson, Stephen. Angela Carter and the Literary Mrchen: A Review Essay. Angela
Carter and the Fairy Tale. Ed. Danielle M. Roemer and Cristina Bacchilega.
Detroit: Wayne State UP, 2001. 30-58. Print.
Bruhl, Elise and Michael Gamer. Teaching Improprieties: The Bloody Chamber and the
Reverent Classroom. Angela Carter and the Fairy Tale. Ed. Danielle M.
Roemer and Cristina Bacchilega. Detroit: Wayne State UP, 2001. 145-57. Print.
Carter, Angela. Nights at the Circus. London: PanBooks, 1985. Print.
---. The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories. London: Victor Gollanz, 1989. Print.
---. The Magic Toyshop. London: Virago P, 1981. Print.
---. Interview by Anna Katsavos. Dalkey Archive Press. Dalkey Archive P, n.d. Web. 2
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Crowder, Diane Griffin. Amazons and Mothers? Monique Wittig, Helene Cixous and
Theories of Womens Writing. Contemporary Literature 24.2 (1983): 117-44.
JSTOR. Web. 2 Feb. 2012.
Crunelle-Vanrigh, Anny. The Logic of the Same and Diffrance: The Courtship of Mr
Lyon. Angela Carter and the Fairy Tale. Ed. Danielle M. Roemer and Cristina
Bacchilega. Detroit: Wayne State UP, 2001. 128-144. Print.
Frankov, Milada. Angela Carterov. Britsk spisovatelky na pelomu tiscilet. Brno:
Masarykova Univerzita v Brn, 2003. 47-61. Print.

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Gallop, Jane. Reading the Mother Tongue: Psychoanalytic Feminist Criticism.

Critical Inquiry 13.2 (1987): 314-29. JSTOR. Web. 2 Feb. 2012.
Gilbert, Sandra M. Lifes Empty Pack: Notes toward a Literary Daughteronomy.
Critical Inquiry 11.3 (1985): 355-84. JSTOR. Web. 4 Apr. 2012.
Gilbert, Sandra M. and Susan Gubar. Sexual Linguistics: Gender, Language,
Sexuality. New Literary History 16.3 (1985): 515-43. JSTOR. Web. 2 Feb.
2012.
Haase, Donald. Feminist Fairy-Tale Scholarship. Fairy Tales and Feminism. Ed.
Donald Haase. Detroit: Wayne State UP, 2004. 1-36. Print.
Jones, Ann Rosalind. Writing the Body: Toward an Understanding of LEcriture
Feminine. Feminist Studies 7.2 (1981): 247-63. JSTOR. Web. 2 Feb. 2012.
Makinen, Merja. Angela Carters The Bloody Chamber and the Decolonization of
Feminine Sexuality. Feminist Review 42 (1992): 2-15. JSTOR. Web. 19 May
2011.
Manley, Kathleen E.B. The Woman in Process in Angela Carters The Bloody
Chamber. Angela Carter and the Fairy Tale. Ed. Danielle M. Roemer and
Cristina Bacchilega. Detroit: Wayne State UP, 2001. 83-93. Print.
Michael, Magali Cornier and Angela Carter. Angela Carters Nights at the Circus: An
Engaged Feminism via Subversive Postmodern Strategies. Contemporary
Literature 35.3 (1994): 492-521. JSTOR. Web. 2 Feb. 2012.
Mikkola, Mari. Feminist Perspectives on Sex and Gender. The Stanford Encyclopedia
of Philosophy. Stanford U, n.d. Web. 28 Mar. 2012.
Peach, Linden. Angela Carter. Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire: Macmillan P,
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Renfroe, Cheryl. Initiation and Disobedience: Liminal Experience in Angela Carters

The Bloody Chamber. Angela Carter and the Fairy Tale. Ed. Danielle M.
Roemer and Cristina Bacchilega. Detroit: Wayne State UP, 2001. 94-106. Print.
Roemer, Danielle M. The Contextualization of the Marquis in Angela Carters The
Bloody Chamber. Angela Carter and the Fairy Tale. Ed. Danielle M. Roemer
and Cristina Bacchilega. Detroit: Wayne State UP, 2001. 107-27. Print.
Roemer, Danielle M. and Cristina Bacchilega. Introduction. Angela Carter and the
Fairy Tale. Ed. Danielle M. Roemer and Cristina Bacchilega. Detroit: Wayne
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Danielle M. Roemer and Cristina Bacchilega. Detroit: Wayne State UP, 2001.
65-81. Print.
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Resume
This master thesis deals with the portrayal of female adolescence in fairy-tale
figures of selected works by the British postmodern writer Angela Carter. The analyzed
texts are the collection of short stories The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories (1979)
and two novels, The Magic Toyshop (1967) and Nights at the Circus (1984). Angela
Carter rewrites and is inspired by the fairy tale, which she does not see as bedtime
stories for children but as a carrier of adult experience and a powerful ideological tool.
As well as in all her work, in the texts analyzed here Carter seeks to reveal and
deconstruct myths and commonly accepted constructs that limit peoples freedom.
The analysis here starts with physical aspects of puberty and adolescence, such
as first menstruation and budding sexuality. Carters female fairy-tale figures are
generally not innocent, pure virgins, but sexual beings aware of their bodies and the
energy that comes from them. Next it is discussed how influenced the young characters
are by the examples of their mothers and of the womens relationships they can observe.
It turns out that the lives and relationships of women are choked by the patriarchal
setting in which they inevitably exist. Carter approaches also the mother role as a
construct which under the appearance of its uniqueness serves to limit womens
freedom. The relations of the young heroines to their fathers are even more complicated.
It is shown that fathers see their daughters as the embodiment of all their desires and
tend to treat them accordingly, also under the influence of the assumption that their
daughters belong to them. However, Carters heroines are generally autonomous beings
able to stand up to various pressures and attempts to limit their freedom. They manage
to create real partnerships based on equality and affection. They are also sexual subjects,
knowledgeable and initiative, in which they radically differ from their counterparts of
classical fairy tales. The last discussed topic of this thesis is the way the characters view
themselves. It turns out that they reflect the process they are going through and decide
on their future as well as on how they tell their stories.
Carter uncovers the assumed purity of virginity, the sacredness of marriage and
the uniqueness of motherhood as images that are not based on reality and that hinder the
young heroines on their way to adulthood. The power and strength that is taken away
from these constructs is given to the heroines themselves, who are active, independently
thinking beings, who learn from their mistakes and enjoy the pleasures life and youth
offer.

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Resum
Tato magistersk diplomov prce se zabv pojetm dospvn pohdkovch
hrdinek ve vybran prze britsk postmodern spisovatelky Angely Carterov.
Zkoumanmi texty jsou jej sbrka povdek Krvav komnata a jin povdky (1979) a
romny Magick hrakstv (1967) a Noci v cirkuse (1984). Pohdky, ktermi se
Carterov ve svm dle inspiruje, nevid jako pbhy pro dti, ale jako nositele
zkuenost dosplch lid a tak jako mocn ideologick nstroj. Stejn jako v celm
svm dle, i v textech analyzovanch v tto diplomov prci se Carterov sna odhalit a
nahlodat mty a vit konstrukty, kter omezuj lidskou svobodu.
Analza v tto prci zan u fyzickch projev dospvn jako je prvn
menstruace a rozvjejc se ensk sexualita. Ukazuje se, e pohdkov hrdinky
Carterov vtinou nejsou nevinn, nedoten panny, ale stvoen vdoma si svch tl a
sv energie a sexuality. Dle je pedloena otzka, jak jsou hrdinky ovlivnn pklady
svch matek a vztah mezi dosplmi enami. Zde vychz najevo, do jak mry jsou
ivoty i vztahy en svazovan patriarchlnm prostedm, ve kterm se nutn nachzej.
Carterov pojm i roli matky jako smylenku, kter, pod pozltkem jedinenosti, slou
k omezovn ensk svobody. Vztahy hrdinek s jejich otci jsou jet problematitj.
Ukazuje se, e otcov vid sv dcery jako ztlesnn vech svch tueb a maj tendence
s nimi podle toho zachzet; tak pod vlivem domnnky, e jim jejich dcery pat.
Nicmn pohdkov hrdinky Angely Carterov jsou povtinou autonomn subjekty
schopn se postavit vemonm ntlakm a pokusm o omezen jejich svobody. Dok
vytvet opravdu partnersk vztahy a jsou rovnocennmi partnery i v sexualit oproti
hrdinkm klasickch pohdek jsou nejen sexuln uvdoml, ale tak iniciativn.
Poslednm diskutovanm tmatem v tto prci je pohled hrdinek na sebe samotn; kdy
se dospvajc dvky a mlad eny vyjevuj jako bytosti reflektujc svou zkuenost a
rozhodujc o svm smovn i o zpsobu, jakm vyprv svj pbh.
Carterov ukazuje domnlou nevinnost panenstv, posvtnost manelstv a
jedinenost matestv jako pedstavy, kter nevychzej z reality a kter mladm na
cest k dosplosti spe ubliuj. Moc a slu, kter Carterov odebr tmto pedstavm,
dv svm hrdinkm, kter jsou aktivn, samostatn smlejc bytosti, kter se u ze
svch chyb a uvaj poten, kter jim ivot a mld nabz.

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