Using the critical anthology to support your argument, how far do these texts support or undermine this view?
-The Tiger's Bride
- female gaze
- male gaze
- liberated together
- innocence vs experience
- she takes control and almost liberates herself
- Faraway castles
- happy endings
- dutiful daughter
- sexually promiscuous
- Beast like male
-'white rose'- symbol of virginity
-'one profile of his mask is the mirror image of the other, too perfect, uncanny.'- attracted & repulsed at the same time- female gaze
-'I prick my finger and so he gets his all smeared with blood'- impure and tainted
-'scare me into good behaviour'- the story from her nurse of the 'tiger man' was used to frighten her- in her childhood he was used to scare her, now he becomes her liberation
-'the day my childhood ended'- innocence vs experience
-'my frail rose, already faded'- 'faded' like her purity
-'you should give me only the same amount of money that you would give to any other woman'- offers prostitution- allows herself to be used as a sex object
-'The sight of a young lady's skin that no man has seen before'- the beast longs for visual sexual pleasure
-'prepare yourself for the sight of my master, naked'- allowing the female gaze
-'I felt my breasts ripped apart as if I suffered a marvellous wound'- she gains sexual pleasure and liberation through the sight of the beast undressed
-'unfastened my jacket'- allowing the beast his sexual pleasure as she's had hers
-'pride it was, not shame'- she isn't embarrassed, she wants to impress him
-'I felt I was at liberty for the first time in my life'- liberated herself through allowing herself to subside to her own sexual desire
-'fear of devourment'- metaphor for sex
-'I, white, shaking, raw, approaching him as if offering, in myself, the key to a peaceable kingdom in which his appetite need not be my extinction'- lamb to the slaughter- but she wants to
-'He snuffed the air, as if to smell my fear; he could not'- she isn't scared- she's embracing desire
-The Erl King
- has sex with the erl king
- innocence vs experience
- liberates herself through killing him when she is experienced
- saves herself from getting trapped by him- liberation
- Beast like male
- sexually promiscuous
- isolated setting
-'He lays upon me his irrevocable hand'- first contact
-'I lie at the mercy of his huge hands'- she is almost his sex slave- he can do with her as he pleases
-'I lie down on the Erl-King's creaking paillasse of straw'- again lay down for him
-'I go back and back to him'- she can't help but going back to him
-'consumed by you'- metaphor for sex- similar to the Tiger's Bride
-'I shall strangle him'- kills the person she gained sex from
-'let the birds free'- liberated through setting the other birds free and killing him
-The Snow Child
- subjugated
- objectified
- not liberated
- raped
- subjected to male domination
- taken advantage of
- damsel in distress
- the evil matriarch
-'I wish I had a girl as white as snow' 'as red as blood' 'as black as that bird's feather'- his idyllic view of a woman
-'stark naked; she was a child of his desire'- his desire not hers
-'unfastened his breaches and thrust his virile member into the dead girl'- rape, she didn't want it, she isn't liberated
message- underlying material of fairy tales is that the women are sexually objectified
Carter said 'I was taking... the latent content of those traditional stories and using that; and the latent content is violently sexual.'
Approved.
ReplyDeleteNow add in possible quotations from the text to support your arguments, as well as quotations from critical theory where relevant.