Metamorphosis and Human-Animal Relationships in Angela Carter’s Fairy TalesLiminal Subjectivities in The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories

Resumo

This dissertation focuses on the analysis of the female characters and human-animal relationships in Angela Carter seminal collection of fairy tales The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories (1979). This dissertation examines how Carter’s reassessments of traditional fairy tales address the construction of women’s identity in its full complexity, thus departing from reductionist, binary oppositions by offering a satisfactory communion between animality and humanity. Hence, I here argue that the use of liminal metamorphosis and animal transformation in Carter’s narratives serve the purpose of deconstructing the traditional gender roles present in literary fairy tales in order to create an idiosyncratic conception of female subjectivity and sexuality. As such, the different formal and ideological possibilities of the short story genre are explored in connection to Carter’s postmodern rewritings of classical fairy tales. I here look into the characteristics of the genre which allow Carter to create a feminist, transgressive, deconstructive project, departing from Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of “minor literature” (1986), and Achilles and Bergmann (2015) and Drewery’s (2011) reassessment of the anthropological concept of “liminality”. The brevity, flexibility and hybridity of the short story allow Carter to explore the construction of the fluid and liminal self. I here contend that the use of animal metamorphosis in Angela Carter’s stories functions as a vehicle of hybridization and animalization, questioning Western patriarchal boundaries between human and non-human animals. This dissertation is also informed by significant findings in the fields of animal studies and posthumanism in order to deal with the symbolic and empirical treatment of animals and women through anthropomorphism and zoomorphism. Specifically, Kenneth Saphiro and Marion Copeland’s three-fold analysis (2005) serves as the basic structure for my analysis of Carter’s short stories. Thus, in order to critically examine the narratives, I draw on short story criticism, fairy tale approaches, literary human-animal studies, Gothic criticism and gender studies, as well as on specific critical works on Angela Carter.