| Brimmed with brilliant and uncanny elements of fairy tales,the contemporary British writer Helen Oyeyemi’s literary works are also widely known for the juxtaposition of reality and fairy tale,actuality and fictionality.In Mr.Fox,the female writer relocates her story in New York in the 1930 s,and integrates her pondering over literary creation as well as gender relations through the intertextual references to the classic fairy tale “Bluebeard” and its series of variants,which vividly reinvigorate the traditional fairy tales.Through feminist lens,this thesis purports to focus on the revisionist strategies employed in Mr.Fox so as to further explore Oyeyemi’s literary motives in rewriting classic fairy tales.Apart from the introduction and conclusion,there are three chapters in the main body.The first chapter is primarily established upon the retelling project,which first combs through the tradition of rewriting as a feminist approach,and then examines the appropriation of the Bluebeard motif in the novel,casting light upon the fact that Oyeyemi’s rewriting is an inheritance of literary tradition.The second chapter revolves around the subversion and revision of traditional fairy tales,bringing the writer’s postmodern disenchantment of fairy-tale discourse to light.It scrutinizes how Oyeyemi recodes the Bluebeard tale into Mr.Fox from the facets of innovative narrative method,altered character relations as well as ingenious plot planning,further breaking the gender myth long-constructed by the dominant patriarchal discourse.Chapter three,capitalizing upon the concept of narrative voice,investigates how Oyeyemi dismantles the patriarchal monophony and debilitates the authority of the male narrator via unreliable narration,in the meantime,endows the silenced woman with voice,which expands the space for the expression of female consciousness and allows readers to hear the long-oppressed “her-story” in woman’s heart.Briefly speaking,Oyeyemi reproduces the fairy-tale motif while also tactically deflects it in order to unveil and critique the androcentric discourse as well as gender politics behind the mask of fairy tale.Furthermore,by dint of the game of vying for discourse power within the text,she symbolically expresses the promising hope for the future of female as well as the anticipation for the magnificent transition from “his-story” to “her-story”. |
