The Intertextuality In Angela Carter's The Lady Of The House Of Love

Angela Carter(1940-1992)is a famous contemporary British female writer.Her works are known for various thought-provoking themes.Her works are full of feminism,magic realism,gothic style and picaresque works,in particular she specialize in using the technique of intertextuality.The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories published in 1979 has been translated into Chinese in recent years.It gets the greatest concern of Chinese people,including literary critics.There are 10 pieces of short stories in it and all of them are embedded with intertextuality.For most literary critics the hypo-texts or intertexts are traditional European fairy tales,such as “Snow White”,“Blue Beard”,“Sleeping Beauty” and “The Beauty and the Beast”.However,this thesis comes up with the idea that one of the short stories “The Lady of the House of Love” has more than one hypo-texts,not only fairy tales but also literary works written by other writers.Moreover,we can hardly find any criticism about this story in the literary criticism works so far.Most critics take “Sleeping Beauty” as the hypo-text of “The Lady of the House of Love” and investigate the intertextual features in the short story.Based on the studies of interrtextuality made by scholars domestic and abroad,this thesis intends to analyze the intertextuality embedded in The Lady of the House of Love and its three other hypo-texts and figure out the new meanings that Carter wants to convey.This thesis includes five parts.The first part is the introduction of the previous studies about Angela Carter's The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories and the skill of intertextuality used by her.In also contains the introduction of the theory of intertextuality.The second part analyzes Carter's parody of William Faulkner's short story A Rose for Emily,which mainly focuses on the similarities and differences between the two protagonists,Countess and Emily,and the writer's intention of parody.Carter gives more attention to the damage women have suffered in the patriarchy society,she then deconstructs the patriarchy myth by shaping new characters and plots more thoroughly.The third part investigates Carter's rewriting about the second hypo-text Sleeping Beauty.She reshapes its archetype and changes its plots then reshapes a new motivational myth that females will only be saved by self-awakening and themselves.She also deconstructs the plots that women always have no voice and they are always in a passive and persecuted position.The forth part focuses on the intertextuality between Dracula written by an Irish writer Bram Stoker and The Lady of the House of Love.Carter reconstructs the vampire's image of a monster with a sarcastic tone and integrates some romantic elements into it and this kind of image makes the vampire more like a human.Carter puts forward the sex problems again by shaping a female vampire and a male soldier.The conclusion summarizes the significance of the multi-intertextuality used by Carter and the three hypo-texts of The Lady of the House of Love.The author hopes to enrich the study of this collection of short stories The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories and to have a better understanding of Carter's rewriting significance and her writing strategy of intertextuality.