New Wine in Old Bottles: Angela Carter’s Feminist Revisionary Fairy-Tale Narratives of “Beauty and the Beast” and “Snow White”

Abstract

This paper examines Angela Carter’s revisionary fairy-tale narratives of “Beauty and the Beast” and “Snow White” to demonstrate the marginalization of women's role in the traditional fairy-tale narratives. This paper evaluates how Carter questions, subverts, and reconstructs meanings crystallized by the traditional patriarchal fairy-tale narratives. It considers Adrienne Rich’s concept of revisionism to show how it employs intertextuality, parody, metafiction, narrative displacement, delegitimization of the tale, and the carnivalesque as postmodern strategies for rewriting traditional tales. Carter’s “The Tiger’s Bride” and “The Snow Child” are analyzed to show how feminist revisions question, subvert, and reconstruct the crystallized meanings of patriarchal traditions.

Keywords: Angela Carter, Feminism, Postmodernism, Revisionary Fairy-tale Narratives.