Shadi S. Neimneh
Abstract:
This article examines two stories by Angela Carter, “The Bloody Chamber” and “The Executioner’s Beautiful Daughter,” to account for Carter’s dismantling of patriarchal myths. Carter conflates two patriarchal tropes, castration and decapitation, to figure the oppression of women. Using the French version of feminism, the work of Hélène Cixous, and the psychoanalytic theories of Freud and Lacan, the article contends that Carter uses decapitation to link beheading to loss of agency and thus to serve her project of exposing violent patriarchal and sexual structures. She utilizes decapitation to interrogate female inferiority and project its castrating impact on those women who are threatened with this punishment. Decapitation, however, becomes a means of undermining patriarchal logic from within. In “The Executioner’s Beautiful Daughter,” it is the son who is literally decapitated and thus symbolically castrated, not the daughter. In “The Bloody Chamber,” the female victim escapes decapitation and the husband threatening her gets shot in the head (symbolically decapitated/castrated) by her mother. Carter’s conflation of castration and decapitation revises power structures and challenges attributing castration to men and decapitation to women, offering a postmodern critique of patriarchal fixities and oppressive boundaries.
Keywords: Angela Carter; Castration/Decapitation; Cixous; French Feminism; Psychoanalysis; British Fiction
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