Angela Carter's The Bloody Chamber through the Female Gaze

Författare

Julia Bällsten

Summary, in English

The discourse on Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber has primarily been focused on the feminist undertones of her neogothic fairy tale retellings. In this essay, I apply the male and female gaze to Carter’s collection, which are perspectives I believe previous research on Carter’s works has overlooked. The incorporation of the male gaze allows for a further nuancing of Soloway’s female gaze, and my analysis will thus utilize both perspectives as complementary frameworks. Analysing “The Erl-King”, “The Tiger’s Bride”, “The Company of Wolves” and “Wolf-Alice” against Soloway’s and Mulvey’s theoretical backgrounds, I will investigate how Carter dismantles the patriarchal hierarchy, and subverts the image of the objectified woman established through the male gaze which has previously dominated the European fairy tale tradition. I argue that Carter, through this subversion, utilizes the female gaze to prescribe agency and subjecthood to the heroines of her novellas “The Erl-King”, “The Company of Wolves”, “The Tiger’s Bride”, and “Wolf-Alice”. To explore this topic, I observe how each female protagonist is focalized to evoke empathy, how they negotiate looked-at-ness on their own terms, and how they ultimately escape falling victim to the male gaze. The female gaze consequently becomes a politically reformative deconstruction of objectification and lookedat-ness, and allows Carter’s heroines to claim subjecthood and agency.

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