Images Of The East In Angela Carter’s Work

Angela Carter,born in 1940,is a leading British author and one of the most unique and recognisable British writers of the twentieth century.During her lifetime she wrote nine full-length novels and a large number of short stories,as well as compiling many fairy tales and folklore.Her novels are full of parodies and rewrites of fairy tales and classic literary texts,full of magic and feminist glory.Angela Carter has not only produced a great deal,but has also received numerous accolades,including the Maugham Literary Award for her work.Lorna Sage credits Carter’s experiences in Japan with contributing to her shift towards radical feminism,and Carter’s distinctive feminism and Orientalism are central to her ideas of portraying Eastern characters and presenting the Eastern world.However,because Carter’s own travels and knowledge of the East were at a relatively crude and rudimentary stage,her Oriental characters and worlds are more a combination of realism and imagination.The Oriental imagery in Carter’s writing can be analysed and studied from three aspects: ’people,places and thoughts’,where characters and scenes are interwoven with her unique Orientalism.Firstly,Carter’s oriental characters are characterised by their diversity,as she incorporates orientalism into the portrayal of oriental characters and their gender relations,while her oriental characters are characterised by their hybridity,numbness,magic and uncertainty.Secondly,her depiction of Oriental characters is also based on the construction of an Oriental world.The construction of the Oriental scenes in Carter’s work comes from her own two-year study tour in Japan,and Carter’s combination of her own Western perspective with what she saw in Japanese society at the time shapes the spirituality of her Oriental world,thus outputting a novel in which fantasy and reality are intertwined.Finally,Carter’s Eastern ideas are highly researchable.Carter’s unique perspective of the Western female traveller organically combines feminism with Orientalism.In Carter’s novels and essays,the reader can sense how her Orientalism shifts from a traditional Saidian Orientalism to a ’novel’Orientalism.She breaks away from the traditional East-West dichotomy by repeatedly shifting the narrative perspective and narrative identity in her work,allowing the reader to experience the aesthetic experience of being the other through the text.Angela Carter’s world of the East is full of her fantastic imagination,and her magnificent and varied writing offers the literary world a perspective on the East from a white Western female traveller.