Chapter Seven: Beyond Gender Myths: Angela Carter's Feminist Fables

Simone de Beauvoir, spiritual mother of European feminism (Showalter 2001: 222), describes how traditional woman is the Sleeping Beauty, Cindarella, Snow White, she who receives and submits [...] she is locked in tower, palace, cave, she is chained to rock, captive, sound asleep; she waits (1952: 271).Feminist theory is rooted in women's perspectives and women's experiences. It returns again and again to centralising body and relationship between and sexuality as powerful marker of identity and ideology. Similarly, for de Beauvoir, woman must no longer be defined through masculinist discourse, where she is slave to male master, and way to freedom for is through body.Yet, as Judith Butler argues: a feminist view argues that should be overthrown, eliminated, or rendered fatally ambiguous precisely because it is always sign of subordination for women (1999: xiv). The first wave feminists in 1970's, discovered non-being of woman: paradox of being at once captive and absent in discourse, constantly spoken of, but of itself inaudible or inexpressible (De Lauretis 1990: 115). Across cultural and national divides, from late 1970's on, new forms of connection and solidarity were slowly being established; concepts of sisterhood were developed, and work of writers such as bell hooks discussed experience in terms of relationship between local and universal. In her essay Sisterhood: Political Solidarity between Women, hooks argues thatwomen do not need to eradicate difference to share solidarity. We do not need to share common oppression to fight equally to end oppression. We do not need anti-male sentiments to bond us together, so great is wealth of experience, culture and ideas we have to share one another. We can be united by our appreciation for diversity. (In Kouramy et al, 1995: 104)1Whether in western or more global feminisms, suppression of women's sexuality is perceived as central in maintaining control of both contemporary and traditional order by male elite. Just as postmodernism was concerned dismantling of narratives of truth, problematising subjectivity and representation, feminist authors (of both theory and fiction) in last decades of twentieth century wrote to subvert patriarchal foundations of narrative and society.Myths, fairy stories and gendered power gamesFairy tales, often said to be timeless and fundamentally oral, have long written history. Max Liithi discusses how fairy stories provide genre that offers a representation of man which transcends individual story and a particular way of looking at world and at human existence (1985: ix). Yet fact that writer in 1980's can title his work on Fairy Stories as portrait of Man suggests why feminists early on had located rewriting of genre as being of prime importance to revising society as whole in terms of feminist liberation. Challenging, and indeed reversing these myths therefore gains both theoretical and experiential importance. Despite their diverse origins, pattern of stories, in which enchanted people in fabulous worlds eventually receive their just reward or punishment, also served moral purpose as cautionary tales, subconscious system of warnings. Women were depicted as dependent upon men as figures of rescue and salvation in all dimensions of life; while stories also highlighted rivalries and hostilities between women.In context of consciousness and female self, cultural myths and fairy stories endorse gendered role-play and social values that surround us all from birth-myths that play into delusions of gender enforced through arts and sciences alike. Gender differences are believed to exist in both mind and body, neuroscience in particular reinforcing with all authority of science, old-fashioned stereotypes and roles (Fine 2011: 237). …