The Demythologizing Business

Angela Carter, mythomaniac and demythologizer, is best known as a rewriter of the Western canon, and as an iconoclast who is always engaged in the shattering of male myths about femininity. In her numerous works, she presents archetypal virgins and monsters in quite different ways. By rejecting universal experience and equipping each with a reasonable and diversified life history, Carter gives a voice back to women who have been figured as objects in male literature without being allowed to tell their own stories.In this thesis, I examine two sets of Carter's re-visionist short stories. The first set includes her retellings of classic European fairy tales, and the second offers readings of a number of romanticists and their romantic aesthetic. This thesis consists of four parts. Chapter One serves as a general introduction to Carter's artistic achievements and her"demythologizing business". Chapter Two analyzes three types of Carter's re-visionist fairy tales, i.e. the"Beauty and the Beast"stories, the"Holy Mother"tales and the Becoming-Narratives (or metamorphosis stories). Chapter Three examines Carter's rewritings of three romanticists and their Romantic aesthetic. Carter's critique of William Blake's objectification of women, Edgar Allan Poe's notorious motif of"the death of a beautiful woman"and Charles Baudelaire's transforming into"Muse"of his Eurafrican mistress, Jeanne Duval are analyzed in detail. Chapter Four winds up the whole thesis with the conclusion that Carter's"demythologizing business"has been carried out under the camouflage of rewriting for she sees it as the most convenient way to achieve her ideological purpose.