A Study of Feminist Theme in the Work of Angela Carter

Exploring Angela Carter's Feminist Reconstruction in Dramatic Works

Abstract

The study analytically addresses Carter's dramatic works, rare as they are, from a feminist approach. Carter’s concentrated attention on post-modern feminism projects itself in the path of its gross corpus which mostly reviews, reproduces and replicates other classical artists who have viewed women in a somewhat different way, in order to clarify how the existing post-modernist discourse ignores or disregards the considering of women within its globally increasing masculinity. The study shows that Carter retrieves the often overlooked reconstructive features of postmodernity that unfold in an integrated manner which ends the feminism of the victims as a result of continued changes in female psychology and women's lives so that feminism cannot restricted itself to hostility, brutality, dominance and sexual exploitation of women by men. The dramatic works of Carter are per se intended to reclaim a rebuilding aspect of postmodernism that defies the preconditions of modern feminism, thus re-building the imaginary revision of the world and finally showing modern women, as critically assessed in this study, in a victimized yet emancipating way. Angela Carter created the leitmotifs for her dramatic adaptations in order to show that falling into the pit of lust is not a cultural phenomenon but a work of nature like The Bloody Chamber, Wolf-Alice or many others. Consequently, she exploited the motifs of the Gothic literature, which have many Gothic fairy tales, including partners, blood, and sexual initiation. So, it is no wonder that in her drama scripts and fictions that have been adapted for the stage, like The Magical Toyshop, The Company of Wolves, Come to These Yellow Sands and The Curious Place, Carter screened these forbidden, profane subjects of pornography, sexual obsession, murder, incest, and cannibalism. Carter's plays were also represented in her feminist approach to violence and the brutality of men against women. She describes the bestial male and victimized female, in which women remain fractured in her plots by the pressures around her instead of by reconciliation with men or by patriarship in society. Those of the female subjectivity to male predation, parental alienation, and a constant search for the (sexual) identity and origin were therefore the dominant themes of their plays and fiction.