On Angela Carter 's Deconstruction Of "Female Myth"

Angela Carter (1940-1992), a female writer with a most distinctive writing-style, is well known for her active creativity in the different kinds of writings. Her work includes nine novels, five collections of short stories, four collections of essays, collections of poems, drama works, and collections of fairy tales that she translated or edited. Carter’s work in all angles has turned out to be feminist, and she also has described herself as a "feminist writer", announcing her writing-career as a "de-mythologising business". Based on an investigation on her writing intensions and her works themselves, this thesis, by assuming a perspective of "deconstructing the myth of women", primarily discusses how Carter’s writings expose the social-historical creation of femininity. In accordance with her four forms of writing-practice, this thesis mainly consists of four chapters.The introduction provides an overview of Carter’s life, her works and her personal living experience as a woman. It reveals that through her entire life Carter has experienced the impersonation and transformation of the traditional female role, and thus draws attention to the uniqueness of her feminist writing, i.e. raises the focus of her work that imaginary worlds are created to resist the restriction of universal female experience.The first chapter, by adopting Roland Barthes’s theoretical idea of "mythology", analyzes the connotation of the statements of "myth" and "myth of women" in this thesis, and then reveals the main purpose of Carter’s writings:to deconstruct "the myth of women", or as I will explain in this thesis, to expose the social-historical creation of femininity. Chapter1then looks into Carter’s reviews on literary works, and gives an analysis on how she resists "the myth of women" by critical reading. The second chapter, focusing on Carter’s re-writing of classic fairy tales, discusses how Carter’s rewritings overturn the classic female images. An examination on the text difference of the classic fairy tales and the rewritings will stand as main grounds of argument in this chapter. The third chapter, based on a close reading on Carter’s original stories, argues that by constructing imaginary worlds against reason, Carter’s invented stories create subversive female images to explore the possibilities for females to lead a life challenging "the myth of women". Chapter4provides an investigation on Carter’s editing activities of selecting and editing marginal folk tales and marginal literary works. By analyzing the intension and approaches of her editing and by text-analysis, this chapter further argues that, in those edited works, Carter brings into sight diverse manifestations of femininity in the unofficial culture.The final part of the thesis concludes that, in all forms of her writing practice, under all her attempts to deconstruct "the myth of women", Angela Carter is experimenting on a way of changing the traditional role for readers. In her unique feminist writing, by stimulating her readers to transform from the voluntary receivers of mythology to the re-thinkers of mythology, Carter is actually involving her readers into the business of "deconstructing the myth of women".