부산대학교 도서관

This thesis is to examine the identity of women characters in Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber and Wise Children. The issue of women’s identity has been discussed by a large number of feminists and theorists up to the present. It was also usually regarded as a weak and passive thing under the control of the male-dominated society and constructed as the effects of competing discourses in each historical context. Related to the issue, this study also examines the identity of women characters appearing in Angela Carter(1940-1992)’s two works in accordance with Judith Butler’s theory. First of all, an American post-structuralist philosopher and feminist, Judith Butler argues that sex(male, female) is seen to cause gender(masculine, feminine), in turn, which is seen to cause desire toward the other gender. She also suggests that certain cultural configurations of gender have seized a hegemonic hold, and calls for subversive action in the present. In other words, our identities, gendered and otherwise, do not express some authentic inner “core” self but are the dramatic effect of our performance. Seen in this way, this idea of identity as free-floating, as not connected to an “essence,” but instead to a performance, is one of the key ideas. Second, one of the Carter’s short stories, “The Bloody Chamber” rewrites traditional fairy tales and myths in order to deconstruct them and the story is about a pure pianist and her husband Marquis. In particular in three stories, “The Bloody Chamber,” “The Tiger's Bride,” and “The Company of Wolves,” Carter returns to this theme of the objectification of women and examines it in a variety of settings. Moreover, she uses the motif of undressing to portray the power relations between men and women. Although the woman in this story live in a culture where the male claims the right to objectify them through his gaze, they learn ways to overcome this oppression. In Wise Children, Carter changes the focus of her metafictional musings. Much of her previous work exposed the male bias behind literary and cultural constructs, in particular the construction and representation of “femininity.” The thesis “Is she fact or is she fiction?” is a main question about “woman” which motivates many of Carter’s narratives. In Wise Children, being an identical twin is one of the primary ways by which the female character removes herself from the defining domain of the patriarchal structure through the blurring of her self. In conclusion, Carter does not posit a world where women are free from the male gaze and their own objectifications of themselves, but rather worlds where women learn to deal with this inevitability. Awareness of the dangers is the first step, as she shows in “The Bloody Chamber.” Finally, the best protection against becoming an object, as the Chance sisters illustrate in Wise Children, is living one’s life as fully, actively, and autonomously as possible.