Re-writing the Body: Angela Carter’s re-visioning of contemporary ideology through transformations of the physical body.

• Main Author: Leow, Serene Sing Ning.
• Other Authors: Yong Wern Mei
• Format: Final Year Project
• Language: English
• Published: 2011
• Subjects: DRNTU::Humanities::Literature::English
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10356/45686
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

This paper explores the relation between women’s writing and portrayals of the physical body, and bases its argument in Hélène Cixous’ concept of l’écriture féminine -- a female literary tradition that emphasises the need for women to “bring women into writing, from which they have been driven away as violently as from their bodies”. Studying short stories and novels of British author Angela Carter, this essay demonstrates how Carter’s re-imagination of the physical body equates to a re-visioning of our contemporary ideology, i.e., the phallocentric strains of thought that govern our everyday lives. For Carter, the physical body is the female writer’s text. Social myths of women are based on biological determinism and essential links between “sex” (anatomical and physiological characteristics that distinguish men and women) and “gender” (social and cultural constructions of masculinity and femininity). Carter, in her transformations of “sex” and manipulations of “gender”, and in her involvement of not only the female, but male body, exposes social fictions of women for their mythic nature and deconstructs them to create new possibilities for women, as well as men, in society.