"Utopian re-visioning" : Angela Carter’s feminist Utopia in the bloody chamber and other stories

• Main Author: Ang, Tabitha Shuqi
• Other Authors: Yong Wern Mei
• Format: Final Year Project
• Language: English
• Published: 2010
• Subjects: DRNTU::Humanities::Literature::English
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10356/38732
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

My reading of Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories understands Carter’s text as a feminist political project emblematic of feminist utopian thought. I use the term “feminist utopia” in a similar sense to the feminist utopia formulated by Lucy Sargisson in Contemporary Feminist Utopianism and Utopian Bodies and the Politics of Transgression. As such, I focus on Carter’s feminist utopian vision aligned with the feminist utopia that Sargisson posits, a “feminist utopian expression” manifested on the level of the narrative and is based on form rather than content. By employing Adrienne Rich’s concept of writing as re-visioning, I discuss how Carter’s feminist utopian re-visioning enters into the intertextuality of old forms such as the fairy tale genre and the pornographic masculine text to assail male-dominated histories and ideologies. Through these two narrative strategies, I suggest that Carter’s feminist utopia gestures towards an opening of new conceptual spaces for exploration and exploitation in projects of emancipation for women.