Telling Your Own Stories: Women, Desire, and Narrative in Fairy Tales
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Telling Our Own Stories: Women, Desire, and Narrative in Fairy Tales (with Special Reference to the Works of Angela Carter and A. S. Byatt) Mayako Mural Ph. D. Thesis University College London 2001 ProQuest Number: U642970 All rights reserved INFORMATION TO ALL USERS The quality of this reproduction is dependent upon the quality of the copy submitted. In the unlikely event that the author did not send a complete manuscript and there are missing pages, these will be noted. Also, if material had to be removed, a note will indicate the deletion. uest. ProQuest U642970 Published by ProQuest LLC(2016). Copyright of the Dissertation is held by the Author. All rights reserved. This work is protected against unauthorized copying under Title 17, United States Code. Microform Edition © ProQuest LLC. ProQuest LLC 789 East Eisenhower Parkway P.O. Box 1346 Ann Arbor, Ml 48106-1346 Abstract This thesis explores the implication of desire in the fairy-tale narrative and investigates the ways in which the works of Angela Carter and A. S. Byatt deal with this issue. Using a methodology which combines Freud’s psychoanalytic theory with theories of narrative, this study argues that the desire which traditionally drives the fairy-tale plot is masculine, whether the protagonist be male or female. Whereas canonical fairy tales stage an Oedipal drama in which the masculine subject penetrates the feminine space in order to establish himself as Man, Carter’s and Byatt’s rewritings of fairy tales illustrate creatively different ways of offering alternatives to this masculine plot. This study concludes that a truly effective feminist critique of the fairy tale must take into account the desire at work in the traditional fairy-tale narrative and its inherently masculine nature, and that a truly challenging—^feminist and otherwise—rewriting of fairy tales must engage in reworking this universal/masculine conception of narrative desire. Table of Contents List of Illustrations Introduction Chapter 1 Women Rewriting and Reinterpreting Fairy Tales Chapter 2 The Plot Patterns of Fairy Tales: The Male Plot and the Female Plot Chapter 3 The Master’s Plot: Narrative, Desire, Gender Chapter 4 Beauty’s Desire?: Angela Carter’s Rewritings of ‘Beauty and the Beast’ Chapter 5 A Happy Ending for a Narcissistic Woman: Angela Carter’s Nights at the Circus Chapter 6 Caught in a Plot: A. S. Byatt’s Possession: A Romance Chapter 7 Imagining Different Desires: A. S. Byatt’s ‘The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye’ Conclusion Bibliography List of Illustrations 1. Gustave Doré’s 1862 illustration for Perrault’s ‘Bluebeard’ 72 2. John Austen’s 1922 illustration for Perrault’s ‘Bluebeard’ 73 Introduction This thesis proposes to explore the aspect of the fairy tale which concerns narrative desire. Using a methodology which combines Freud’s psychoanalytic theory with theories of narrative, this study analyses the desire at work in the narrative of fairy tales and demonstrates that the desire which drives the traditional fairy-tale plot is mascuhne, whether the protagonist be male or female. The notion of narrative desire is explored in two articles which not only bear similar titles but also use similar methods of investigation. Peter Brooks’s ‘Narrative Desire’ and Teresa de Lauretis’s ‘Desire in Narrative’, both published in 1984, engage in exploring the dynamics of narrative, especially how narrative functions in the process of its structuration. There is, however, a significant difference between their perspectives; this has led them to follow different lines of investigation. Whereas the former purports to offer a universal model of narrative which underlines the workings of desire as what drives the narrative forward, the latter throws doubt on just such ‘universality’ assumed by the existing theories of narrative and addresses the question: whose desire is at work?. In her exploration of desire in narrative, de Lauretis reveals the masculine desire inherent in all narrative movement. The point is clearly expressed in her interpretation of the stories of two female ‘monsters’: ‘Medusa and the Sphinx, like the other ancient monsters, have survived inscribed in hero narratives, in someone else’s story, not their own; so they are figures or markers of positions—places and topoi—through which the hero and his story move to their destination and to accomplish meaning’.^ In de * * Teresa de Lauretis, Alice Doesn't: Feminism, Semiotics, Cinema (Bloomington: Lauretis’s view, stories of women, be it the story of Snow White or that of Sleeping Beauty, are not their own stories but are embedded in masculine desire. In my own exploration of the desire which drives the fairy-tale plot, I will follow the line of investigation proposed by de Lauretis’s essay which foregrounds the implication of the sexual difference in narrative structuration. But why read for the plot? First of all, because fairy tales urge us to read for the plot since the fairy tale is a genre which, above all, privileges the linear movement of plot. Secondly, because plot is directly implicated in desire with which fairy tales, as stories of wish-fulfilment, are particularly concerned. The masculine narrative desire suppresses and obliterates a desire which is different, a desire which may be called ‘feminine’. What, then, is feminine desire? Towards the end of his career, Freud confessed in his letter to Marie Bonaparte, his friend and benefactor, that, despite his endeavour, he still could not solve the enigma of femininity: The great question that has never been answered and which I have not been able to answer, despite my thirty years of research into the feminine soul, is ‘What does a woman want?’ Freud, who sought to reveal the nature of our desires, could imagine only one desire, which is masculine. ‘What might it mean’, Shoshana Felman asks. for a woman to reclaim (reread, rewrite, appropriate) Freud’s question? The answer, Freud acknowledged, was not available to him. It is not certain that the question has an answer. It is not certain that the answer—if it exists—can become available to any man, or, for that Indiana University Press, 1984), p. 109. ^^Ci Cited in Ernest Jones, Sigmund Freud: Life and Work, II (London: Hogarth, 1967), p. 468. matter, to any woman in our culture. But the question can be truly opened up and radically displaced, I would suggest, by being repossessed, reclaimed by women.^ Freud’s question, ‘What does a woman want?’, will resonate throughout my discussions of desire in the fairy-tale narrative. I will not, of course, attempt to find a single, definitive answer to the question; instead, my objective here is to explore the possibilities which women’s reclaiming of the question about femininity may open up for women and for men in imagining different desires which would enable them to tell different stories. This study will attempt to argue that a truly effective feminist critique of the fairy tale must take into account the desire at work in the traditional fairy-tale narrative and its inherently masculine nature, and that a truly challenging—feminist and otherwise—rewriting of fairy tales must engage in reworking this universal/masculine narrative desire. Chapter 1 considers the nature of the fairy tale and gives a historical overview of women’s creative and critical contribution to the genre. Chapter 2 investigates the basic plot pattern of fairy tales delineated by Vladimir Propp, and points out the problem in his formulation, i.e., its male-centred assumptions which obliterate sexual difference. Chapter 3 goes on to scrutinise whose desire it is that drives the narrative of both the male and the female plots. The following four chapters (Chapter 4- 7) examine how my analysis illuminates, and is illuminated by, the creative writings of Angela Carter and A. S. Byatt. ^ Shoshana Felman, What Does a Woman Want? Reading and Sexual Difference (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), pp. 2-3. Chapter 1 Women Rewriting and Reinterpreting Fairy Tales The fairy tales with which we are most familiar, the so-called ‘classic’ fairy tales, are literary fairy tales, which means that these ‘original’ stories are already rg-writings of older ones, either oral or literary. The nature of the literary fairy tale, above all, is characterised by its multiple hybridity. Its reworking of the communal past to create the new involves literary/textual crossbreeding; it uses archaic language to express the present, and evokes old themes and motifs to envision new ideas. The literary fairy tale is also hybrid in its juxtaposition of the magical and everyday reality. The fairy tale as a genre may seem to be tied so strongly to the past that there is apparently no room for innovation; however, as I will show in this chapter, this has not been the case. A brief look at its history makes it clear that the fairy tale is a form which allows individual tellers a space for artistic creation. Contrary to the common impression given by a cluster of texts which form its standard canon, the fairy tale is a versatile genre which contains a great variety of differences within itself. My interest throughout this thesis lies less in finding the universal principles in different tales than in focusing on the differences each writer makes in retelling the same old tales, particularly in terms of plot. This chapter will examine how women have contributed towards giving shape to the fairy tale as a literary genre. Women’s contribution to the fairy tale falls into two categories, (re)writing and (re)interpretation, although these are in essence inseparable from each other in the sense that every rewriting is a reinterpretation and every reinterpretation is a rewriting. But first, what is a fairy tale? Defining the Fairy Tale Although it sounds tautological, fairy tales are those tales which incorporate certain conventions of the genre recognised by all as such.