Feminist Criticism and Reference

A probable famous reference to Hélène Cixous and her feminist work The Laugh of the Medusa in Angela Carter’s The Tigers Bride is where the narrator [the heroine] reacts to The Beasts proposition “I let out a raucous guffaw, no young lady laughs like that!” (pg.65). It is a defiant laugh a laugh against the will of the patriarchal male and his wants instead Carter tries to destroy the ‘patriarchal myth’ that falsely represents the female experience. Carter creates female characters that refuse to be victims but rather a new set of characters with new identities in this new schema and here her female characters break the mould of female puppet roles. It is evident that Carter upholds to Cixous notion that you “must write about women and bring women to writing, from which they have been driven away as violently as their bodies ... women must put herself into the text – as into the world and into history – by her own movement” (Cixous in Burke, Crowley and Girvin, 2000 pg.161). Carter liberates the new female and her heroines as Cixous agrees “It is time to liberate the New Woman from the Old by coming to know her – by loving her for getting by, for getting beyond the Old without delay, by going out ahead of what the New woman will be ... in order to be more than herself” (Cixous in Burke, Crowley and Girvin, 2000 pg.163). This is evident in The Tigers Bride the heroine goes from a pawn of patriarchy to a powerful being using her initiative to approach his ‘carnivorous bed’(pg.74) and that ‘his appetite need not be my extinction’(pg.74) Beauty’s rejection of the old is now a liberation to the new and she is liberated with a more powerful identity.

Another piece of work which accentuates the feminist issue of objectification is that which is found in Angela Carter’s work The Sadeian Woman with issues regarding, sex, sexuality and prostitution, where Dworkin states “Any violation of a woman’s body can become sex for men; this is the essential truth of pornography” (Dworkin, 1987) an issue that by this men possess women. Philosopher Foucault explains that “Sadism is not a name finally given to a practice as old as Eros; it is a massive cultural fact which appeared precisely at the end of the eighteenth century, and which constitutes one of the greatest conversions of Western imagination; unreason transformed into delirium of the heart, madness of desire, the insane dialogue of love and death in the limitless presumption of appetite” (Foucault in Carter’s The Sadeian Woman, 1979 [2006]). Carter’s perspective is highly Freudian with use of psychoanalysis, researching the differences between the sexes “Pornography involves an abstraction of human intercourse in which the self is reduced to its formal elements. In its most basic form, these elements are represented by the probe and the fringed hole, the twin signs of male and female ... ineradicable sexual differentiation, a universal pictorial language of lust” (Carter, 1979 [2006]). Carter exemplifies here how sex is about power and control dependent on social and political matters, women should be seen from another perspective not just used for their biological function to breed and that there is much more to their sex than just their differed biology. The issue of sexual intercourse and position is merely touched upon and rather insinuated rather than specifically pointed out; in The Tigers Bride “I promise you I will pull up my skirt up to my waist, ready for you ... There you can visit me once, sir, and only the once ... If you wish to give me money, then I should be pleased to receive it. But I must stress that you should give me the same amount of money that you would give to any other woman in such circumstance” (pg.65) her reply is strong she agrees to have sex with The Beast but for a price, as an act of prostitution this insults as well as shames The Beast but it also highlights the heroines strength of character she is able to be in control and make her own choices over her own body and its function, her openness to her sexuality; and when the proposal is made again Beauty’s response is “I wished I’d rolled in the hay with every lad on my father’s farm” (pg.68) hints at pubescent desires of the sexual experience and then she may have made herself more readily available to The Beast.

Carter states in The Sadeian Woman “man aspires; woman has no other function but to exist, waiting. The male is positive ... woman is negative. Between her legs lies nothing but zero, the sign for nothing that only becomes something when the male principle fills it with meaning” (Carter, 1979[2006]. However in The Courtship of Mr. Lyon and The Tigers Bride Carter creates both heroines as characters with such strong sexual identities that they are able to defy the issues of patriarchy they oppose what was thought in The Sadeian Woman and that woman can uphold meaning without the interference of masculine interference, female sexuality is highly important and it should be used rather to liberate women rather than to marker them as sexually submissive and unequal.