Feminism in "The Tiger's Bride"

Angela Carter Background

Angela Carter was a radical-libertarian feminist. They:
- Believe that all women will continue to be supressed by men regardless of the situation
- Believe that the patriarchy use rigid gender roles to keep women passive and gentle.
- Want women to reclaim their sexuality
- Fight for sexual equality with men.

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Criticised for works being too fantastical
- The way protagonists fight for equality is so magical it is unrealistic and women cannot relate.
- Patricia Duncker and Avis Lewallen claim it fails to show women having autonomic desires.
  - Fairytale framework prevents this
  - Heroines simply succumb to and embrace sexual desires as they know men will always have power over them.
    - Men always the ‘beast’ to women.
Duncker “the fairy tale itself is so entrenched in patriarchal restrictive kinship systems that no amount of revision can free it up for positive feminist aims”

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“Utopian stories”
- “Carter develops a vision of sexuality of mutuality, exchange and reciprocity”
  - “The Tiger’s Bride”, “Wolf-Alice” and “The Company of Wolves”
“The Tiger’s Bride”, “The Bloody Chamber” and “The Erl King” have a first person confessional narrator
- Allows muted female voice and agenda to speak out
  - Suppression of the female voice in the construction of fairy tales was a central element.

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Beauty and the Beast
- Oedipal attachment- shifts from a father to a suitable male
- Self-sacrifice over hedonism- truly feminine woman
- In patriarchal myths women do not grow up they simply change masters
Differences in The Tiger’s Bride
- Not a master/slave relationship- equals?
  - Freedom from paternal domination- no paternal bonding
    - Beast not a replacement or a father figure
Bettelheim “animals in fairy tales represent our animal nature”
- Significance of “Beauty and the Beast” to him “there comes a time when we must learn what we have not known before- or to put it psychoanalytically, to undo the repression of sex”
  - Carter keeps the undoing of the repression of sex but “The Tiger’s Bride” is also about undoing the repression of gender.
    - Beauty discovers the animal in herself, only by ********* herself of social expectations.

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P.70 “I was a young girl, a virgin, and therefore men denied me rationality just as they denied it to all those who were not exactly like themselves… I certainly meditated on the nature of my own state, how I had been bought and sold, passed from hand to hand. That clockwork girl who powdered my cheeks for me; had I not been allotted only the same kind of imitative life amongst men that the doll-maker had given her?”
- Discovers identity in the patriarchy
  - Nothing to lose.
- Soubrette society’s ideal creation of femininity
  - Men treat her like it/see her as the soubrette
    - Females as a creation of a patriarchal society- social construct to satisfy the needs of men.
    - Objectified. No matter how hard she tries to be equal she’ll always be an imitation
      - Equal to the beast who wears a mask to pretend he is a man.
P.71“the lamb must learn to run with the tigers”
- Must break free from weak doll-like (lamb) social identities and embrace the strong
  - Women are tigers who have been made to think they are lambs

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Beauty approaches Beast but he has to come to her
- Far more proactive- less being acted upon (like in “The Bloody Chamber”)
- Asserting her own sexuality.
- Able to live in harmony in the end despite partaking in ‘dangerous’ activities
  - Veering away from domestic, patriarchy set roles.
  - Acknowledges own personal curiosity
Sade’s roles of Justine (good) and Juliette (bad)
- More like Juliette? Than Beaumont’s?
Moving from clothes to skin to fur, she represents the multitude of female identity
- Beaumont emphasises the danger of this while Carter celebrates it.

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“The Tiger’s Bride” opens with the father openly bartering his daughter at a games of cards
- Trade-off enlightens protagonist about the confines of her nature as a woman in a patriarchal society.
  - Beauty means to her father the money he needed to pay off his debts (slight link to “The Bloody Chamber”? mother would rather be poor than have her daughter in a loveless marriage opposite in this?)
  - Objectification of women in society
Ability to transcend patriarchy occurs in the form of the beast?
- Metaphor for sexual predator?
“where the eyes that watch you take no account for your existence” (74)
- Male gaze theory? E. Ann. Kaplan.)

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