METAMORPHOSIS AND TRANSITIONAL FEMALE IDENTITIES IN ANGELA CARTER'S FAIRY TALES

This thesis develops new readings of the poetics and the politics of Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber and other Stories (1979) through the key image of the metamorphosis, which becomes the core concept to develop and scrutinise reflections on desire, sexuality, identity, role positions, power-knowledge relations, storytelling and the materialization of the body. Metamorphic processes can be said to inform the fairy tales of the collection both under a thematic and a stylistic perspective, to the extent that transformation itself becomes a particularly suitable interpretative kernel within the analysis of their content as well as their style. Metamorphosis pervades indeed the plots and meanings of the tales, is a metaphor for alternative developments of female identity, and informs their structure and representation. In this work, the analysis of Carter’s fairy tales is carried out through ideas, images and narrative strategies conveying change and transformation, and is articulated into to four main issues. First of all, the way in which Carter plays with the generic conventions of fairy tales, and with their narrative structures and strategies is shown to be transformative, in that her re-writings perform a reconfiguration of, and disrupt readers’ expectations towards, the traditional genre in terms of pedagogic content, symbolical meanings, and political consequences. Secondly, the tales are shown to display metamorphosing female identities, so that they elicit a critical, on occasion even controversial, reflection on sexual politics, above all on its inscription in the development of subjectivity, social relationships, empowerment and freedom. Thirdly, and strictly connected with the previous points, the metamorphoses portrayed in Carter’s tales are explored with reference to the role played by the body in terms of textual and sexual politics. Representations of the body are thus questioned in order to show how they comply with or disrupt established generic norms and conventions of the genre, and how this has an impact on the feminine ideal that its conventions traditionally purported to fashion and hand down. Last but not least, given the importance and the subversive potential of Carter’s peculiar and challenging use of language, the last part of this thesis is devoted to a thorough analysis of her words. Hence, the last chapter endeavours to perform a corpus stylistic study of some tales of The Bloody Chamber, that is, to investigate the texts by applying corpus linguistic methods to literary analysis.