A Analysis Of The Gothic Elements In Angela Carter’s Novels

Angela Carter(1940-1992)is one of the boldest and most original women writers in Britain in the 20 th century.Her writing style is extremely unique,and combines aestheticism,Gothic literature,magical realism and other styles.She is good at deconstructing and rewriting classic fairy tales.Her works revolutionize and subvert the cultural construction,gender narrative and disciplinary power of deep social texture,digging out the deep-level power oppression and terror of society hidden under the surface,vigorously publicizing the women’s subject consciousness,and call for a new world of equal communication and cooperation between the sexes.This thesis will take Angela Carter’s The Magic Toyshop,Heroes and Villains and Nights at the circus as the main research objects,analyze and interpret the Gothic elements in Carter’s works systematically,and point out Carter’s inheritance and innovation of traditional Gothic novels,as well as how to use Gothic elements to express contemporary themes better.The Introduction part gives a brief overview of Angela Carter’s life and creation,as well as the development of Gothic novels.Carter’s love of Gothic literature and her thought of contemporary life is gothic are the important reasons for her choice of Gothic writing.Carter’s Gothic writing has a significant influence on the development of contemporary Gothic novels.The first chapter analyses the Gothic characters and discusses the inheritance and innovation of the traditional Gothic characters in Carter’s novels.There are three types of characters.The first,the tyrant and sensitive villain-heroes.The tyrant is the inheritance of the common characters in the traditional Gothic novels.Compared with the villain-heroes in traditional Gothic novels.The sensitive villain-heroes are more delicate,sensitive and feminine.The second,the rebellious and resistant weak girls.The images of weak girls come from the traditional Gothic,but Carter stresses their self-consciousness and rebelliousness in her writings.Among them,The mysterious “Fevvers” in Nights at the circus is the bravest and the most independent female in Carter’s works.She is the spokesman of Carter’s feminism theory.Compared with the female images in traditional Gothic novels,she shows a strong subversive force.The third characters are the marginal grotesque people,These abnormal people’s life full of laughter and tears.Carter shows great sympathy and hope for this disadvantaged groups at the bottom of the society.The title of the second chapter is the visualized horror scenes,divided into three sections.The first section analyzes the fear of the characters in the novel from two aspects: the dark residence restricts and threats the characters in physical,and the strict regulations and prohibitions in the house suppress the characters in spirit.The second section analyzes the meaning of the repeated symbolic images in Carter’s novels,mainly including wedding dress,jewelry and so on.These images full of beauty and romance appear in Carter’s novels in a cruel and bloody way,which not only creates the Gothic horror atmosphere,but also has a deep symbolic meaning.The third section analyzes the function of Carter’s gorgeous,weird and sensual language in shaping the atmosphere of terror,which is the most wonderful feature of Carter’s Gothic style.The third chapter focuses on the Gothic expression of the contemporary theme.Carter’s novels reveal the horror in our daily life,expressing women’s pursuit of subjective consciousness.The open ending of the novel adds blankness and uncertainty to the theme of the novel,and shows the new possibility of traditional stories in contemporary society.The rebellious feature of Gothic art coincides with Carter’s “demythologising business”,and has made a beneficial attempt to combine Gothic art with postmodern creation.The conclusion points out that Carter’s Gothic writing in the post-modern context has unique significance.She skillfully uses Gothic art techniques to describe contemporary life and has deep thoughts on post-modern society.