On The Living Predicament And Solution Of Female In Angela Carter’s Literary Creation

Angela Carter(1940-1992)is considered one of the most avant-garde and pioneering spirit writers in contemporary Britain literary history.She is always concerned with women’s living predicament.In her works she expresses her original and profound thoughts about female problems with a distinguished personal style.This dissertation chooses six masterpieces of Angela Carter,and discusses Carter’s unique contribution to the discussion about women’s living predicament.There are three parts in this dissertation,including the introduction,the body(1-5 chapter),and conclusion.In the introduction,I first present a short introduction of Angela Carter and her works,and then raise the question which I will discuss in the dissertation.After that I introduce the origin of this research,and then I delineate the current state of research on Angela Carter,and introduce research methods,significance of the research and framework of this dissertation.There are five chapters in the main body.In chapter one,I will examine Carter’s life experiences and thoughts changes,and point out that in her writing career,Carter wrote about,reflected on,and explored the predicament and solution of women’s living in terms of society predicament,spirit predicament,and body predicament respectively.Chapter two examines the society predicament of the female in Carter’s works.I will discuss Shadow Dance and Nights at the Circus in this chapter.In Shadow Dance,the focus of Carter’s writing is patriarchy.In the novel she writes about the life of Ghislaine and Edna,and points out that these two women become the victim of erotic and marriage in the shadow of patriarchy,and they have been trapped in passivity and subjection in gender relationship for a long time.Carter creats a new female Emily in the novel and claimed that the woman must dare to get rid of the bondage of marriage and family,and refuse the traditional subordinate role in order to escape from the control of patriarchy.In Nights at the Circus,Carter examines the equal rights of female.She focues on the status of economic and working rights of women,and points that the origin of female’s subjection is from their dependency of male in economy.In employment,they often become passive object during the working under the domination of patriarchy and capitalism.In the novel,Carter writes about the tour of Fevvers,and calls for women fighting for their economic and political right.In order to get away from the control and suppression of patriarchy at social level,Carter considers that women should get the independence economic basis,develop their potentiality,and built a political utopia of the female.Chapter three discusses the spirit predicament of the female in Carter’s works.I will discuss The Magic Toyshop and Love.In The Magic Toyshop the women are shaped up as romantic free woman and silent tame woman.Their spirit,identity and personality are shaped by macho cultural symbols,and their mind is imprisoned in male ideology.This chapter interprets Melanie’s growing progress,and points out that Melanie revolts and get away from the bondage and traditional patriarchal cultural discourse to her own spirit and establishes autonomous ideology.In another novel Love,Carter reflects on the spirit crisis of female in the process of reconstructing their independent thinking.Since Annabel cannot clear off the relationship of traditional culture and new cultural discourse,so her idea of men,women,and marriage are all contradictory,and her spirit is always in internal division when she revolves the bondage and shaping of traditional cultural discourse to her ideology and personality.Carter believes that the female must clear off the spirit colonization of traditional cultural discourse on morality,marriage,values,and gender etc.,before they can achieve spiritual liberation,and join in the sexual politics in daily life positively.Chapter four examines the body predicament of the female in Carter’s works.In this chapter I will discuss The Sadeian Woman and The Passion of New Eve.The article points out that Angela Carter pays more attention to the cultural construction of female’s body and the female’s bodily practice.Through rereading the works of Sade,in The Sadeian Woman,Carter points out that the female’s body is just a conceptual body which has always been constructed and restrained by religion,ethics,and gender for a long time.Carter considers that the female should become the Sadeian Woman who could disrupt the traditional body system,construct performing body mode,subvert mother authority and achieve body autonomy in order to transform the conceptual body into experiential body which could return the real and natural state,and escape from the barrier of body repression.In The Passion of New Eve,Angela Carter explors the body politics of the female.She points out that the female’s body is constructed by consumption mythology,matriarchy mythology,and patriarchy mythology.In these mythological discourses,the female’s body is fashioned into silent passive Other and the conceptual production of mythological idea.In this novel Angela Carter explores the transsexual journey of Evelyn and deconstructs the stable relation of signification between body and sexuality and presents a body practical project which is based on pluralistic sense experience.And what’s more,she invents a body utopian which returned to pre-historical cultural period.Chapter five examines the originality and intellectual contribution of Angela Carter in the process of reflecting on and exploring the living predicament and solution of the female.In this chapter,I compare Carter’s ideas with contemporary feminist theory in terms of society,spirit and body.I consider that Carter does not rely on it totally,but choose what she needs on the base of circumstance when she confronts the feminist theory.When discussing women’s society predicament,Carter gets rid of traditional dualism power view,and points out that the patriarchy is productive,and at this point the female could be seen as the accomplice of patriarchy.Based on her socialist position,Carter places additional focus on the rights of underprivileged women,and expressed an idea of establishing a female political utopia at the level of political rights.When examining women’s spirit predicament,Carter abandons the biological determinism of ideology,and insists that the ideology is the production of cultural symbols,and raises the more practical scheme for women.When examining women’s body predicament,Carter not only criticizes the idea of androgyny which is favored by most feminists,but insists on the materialistic idea of body and the pluralistic body experience,and explores a practical solution for female’s body politics.This dissertation concludes that in her writing career Carter always explores the more inclusive,different,pluralistic and autonomous postmodern gender epistemic model which could get rid of the standardization,identification,systematization,and objection of gender through writing women’s living predicament.Although there are some deficiencies,it is no doubt that Carter’s creation provides practical scheme for sexual politics,and offers valuable intellectual resource for the development of feminist theory,and makes a profound influence on contemporary European and American writers,especially female writers’ creation.