A Study Of Feminist Narrative Strategies In Angela Carter's Fiction

Being an eminent British woman writer,Angela Carter is highly instrumental in shaping the contemporary British literary landscape.Distinguished for her extraordinary imagination and dazzlingly rococo narrative style,her original narratives open a new possibility of writing modern fictions.Her work shows her great concerns for women.Her feminist ideology is in harmony with her distinctive narrative strategies,which signals the perfect unity of form and content.Although the Carter scholarship home and abroad have paid increasingly enthusiastic attention to her fictions with fruitful results,the study on the narrative aspect of them is still rare,not to speak of systematic and integral analysis and research from the feminist narratological perspective.Applying the feminist narratological theories and methods,this study therefore aims at a close reading of Carter‘s postmodern fictional narratives.It argues that by deploying the three primary narrative strategies representational in her fictions—collage,rewriting and metafiction,and a wide range of pertinent narrative strategies such as dual focalization,second person narration,speech representation,alternative time and space,Carter reveals the fictionality of the patriarchal representation of Woman,and expresses the female subject consciousness and sexuality.By focusing on the salient narrative features and innovations in Carter‘s fiction,this study tries to demonstrate that they are not merely formal choices,but also forceful narrative weapons which are deployed to subvert patriarchal ideology and foreground feminist consciousness.Chapter One is an introduction.It includes Carter‘s life and work,literature review,research background and purpose,the organization of the study.Chapter Two introduces feminist narratology and Carter‘s feminist narrative strategies.As a pioneering approach of postclassical narratologies,feminist narratology initiates a useful application of narratological methods in the realm of textual interpretation,which provides the theoretical framework for the study of narrative strategies in Carter‘s fiction.Chapter Three analyses how Carter uses collage in her early novels to have a feminist critique of surrealist representation of ?femininity?.As a feminist writer,Carter finds something very appealing about the surrealist use of collage—the non-linear way of constructing fictions.Meanwhile,she discovers that collage is rife with possibilities in its use of fragmentation and relational strategies.The first portion of the chapter explores how Carter deploys fragmented plots,collaged characters and collaged focalizations in ?The Bristol Trilogy? in order to break the patriarchal hegemony of plot and parody the traditional gender stereotypes.The second portion of the chapter first deals with collaged focalizations—the equivalent of narrative ?multiple focalization? in The Passion of New Eve.Carter illustrates how the constantly shifting,often ambiguous focalizations are in conjunction with the fluidity of sex and gender.This portion continues to analyze the collage of factual and virtual plots in the novel.We see that Carter‘s use of virtual analepsis interrogates the construction of the two main characters‘ original identities as seductive and suffering female archetypes.As have been analyzed,the final examination of simultaneous juxtaposition of past tense and present tense in the very same scene of the story seems anti-mimetic and flaunts the artifice of womanhood or femininity.Chapter Four deals with Carter‘s revision of the fairytale genre and its gender conventions so as to produce feminist narrative texts that contradict patriarchal ideologies.The first portion of the chapter deals with the rewriting of the plot,character and focalization in her best-known short story,?The Bloody Chamber?,which composes a song of feminist consciousness-raising.With few plot alterations,Carter makes great efforts to re-characterize the heroine in order to depict her awakening process.The most subversive rewriting in the story is the revision of focalization,since Carter‘s heroine,being the narrator and the focalizer simultaneously,is narrating her own past experience.The second portion focuses on Carter‘s another well-known short story,?The Company of Wolves?,which,contrary to Perrault‘s household tale ?Little Red Riding Hood?,rewrites Little Red Riding Hood into a female subject who dares to embrace her own sexuality and defy the morals of Perrault‘s tale.Resisting the conventions of single narrative authority,Carter also adopts the second-person narration in the novel,which pluralizes narrating voice,breaks down the boundary between narrator,narratee and reader,foregrounds the alternative representation of female sexuality and agency,and invites readers to participate in this narrative process.Chapter Five explores Carter‘s feminist metafictional strategy in her widely acclaimed novel,Nights at the Circus,which is deployed to subvert the traditional female archetypes,conventional time and space,and the female identity of objects.By constantly giving way to Fevvers‘ first person narration and through various self-reflexive speech representations in the first portion,Carter portrays a new woman with wings who is presenting herself as a speaking and performing subject.The second portion deals with alternative time and space.The cutting back and forth in the same tense about the child woman Mignon‘s past and present experience is indicative of the layered structure of time in the novel.We see that space in the novel is no more mere background but agent of resistance and apparatus for constituting autobiographical subjects and new forms of gender relations.The third portion of the chapter re-examines metafiction through the lens of autobiographical practice and feminist poststructuralist theories of self.Fevvers‘ self-reflexive remarks undermine the authenticity of her own autobiographical narrative and her narrative is also frequently destabilized by her foster mother‘s comments.As has been analyzed,Nights at the Circus is a feminist metafiction,highlighting the narrative in its inter-subjective terms and portraying the warmth of sisterhood and female affection.Chapter Six is a conclusion.It gives a review of the previous chapters,points out the limitation of this study and provides suggestions for future studies.This dissertation,by close readings of Carter‘s novels and short stories,seeks to combine the investigation of feminist narrative forms with gender politics.I hope that this study might enrich the existing feminist readings of her fictions and provide an example of the fruitful application of feminist narratology to the study of Carter‘s work.