Female Castration in Angela Carter's Fairy Tales

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Abstract:Angela Carter is most famous for her ability to retell stories. One of the most remarkable characteristics of Carter's new fairy tales is that Carter infuses her own comprehension of Castration theories into her stories, which challenges Freud's theory. She agrees that everyone is "castrated" and exemplifies this idea in her fairy tales.

Key Words:female castration, angela carter, Freud, fairy tales

When we talk about fairy tales, we immediately think of such familiar stories as Snow-white Princess, Cinderella and Beauty and the Beast. We can easily find some common characteristics in the protagonists of these stories: first of all, they are all beautiful and kind-hearted; secondly, they are all obedient to their parents; lastly they don’t have the right to pursue their own happiness but to wait for some brave men to save them or to get the happy ending by living together with their husbands. It seems that almost all the fairy tales are teaching children, especially girls, that as long as they are obedient and good-virtued, they will find their happiness or at least they won’t get themselves into trouble.

Angela Carter is most famous for her ability to retell stories. Often called “demythologizer”, Carter has rewritten many traditional social myths and fairy tales..

One of the most remarkable characteristics of Carter’s new fairy tales is that Carter infuses her own comprehension of Castration theories into her stories, which challenges Freud’s theory. In the patriarchal society, the only way out for women to find happiness is to accept their femininity and adore men’s masculinity. In other words, in the traditional fairy tales, female is unexceptionally castrated. And this castration makes female feel inferior to male. For instance, in Genesis, Eve is made of one of Adam’s ribbons, which in fact has determined her inferiority to Adam. And in Beauty and the Beast, Beauty has everything in her required by the patriarchal society: beauty, innocence and obedience and she is glad to accept her identity as a female given by the patriarchal society. But as a feminist writer, Carter strongly agrees with the feminist critic De Beauvoir that it has no scientific basis to connect women with femininity and connect men with masculinity. In her book The Sadeian Woman, she points out that female castration is a mythology deeply rooted in western cultural psychology, and this mythology dominates male’s attitudes towards female and female’s attitudes towards themselves. Carter challenged Freud’s concept of Castration in her story “Peter and the Wolf” in that when Carter’s little boy, Peter, catches a glimpse of his girl cousin’s body, he sees something instead of “nothing” there. In an interview, Carter said: “he(Freud) could only think of women as castrated men”.1 It is Jacques Lacan’s instead of Freud’s concept of Castration that can help us better understand Carter’s cultural uses of the images of castrated women. According to Lacan, everyone is “castrated”--- but masculinity is founded on the denial of that fundamental lack. Castration represents the loss of the part one thought one had, the vital part that made one whole, and the so-called masculinity is established on a series of pretence of wholeness. Such pretence needs to be propped up by stage properties and the most important property is female.

In her another story The Tiger’s Bride (adapted from Beauty and the Beast), Carter depicts a new woman who takes the initiative in the relationship and in the end conquers the Tiger and the Tiger displays shyness and gentleness which used to belong to women only. In other words, the tiger is castrated mentally.

In summary, one of the outstanding characteristics of Angela Carter’s revisionist fairy tales lies in the fact that Carter’s distinctive comprehension of the theories of castration.

Bibliography:

[1]Bressler, Charles E. Literary Criticism: an introduction to theory and practice. 北京：高等教育出版社，2004.

[2]Sage, Lorna. Women in the House of Fiction: Post-war Women Novelists. New York: Routledge, 1992.

[3]Lorna Sage, Women in the House of Fiction: Post-war Women Novelists (New York: Routledge, 1992), 56.

[4]Wyatt, Jean. “The Violence of Gendering: Castration Images in Angela Carter’s The Magic Toyshop, The Passion of New Eve, and ‘Peter and the Wolf’.” In Critical Essays on Angela Carter, edited by Lindsey Tucker. New York: G. K. Hall & Co., 1998.