The Sadeian Fairy Tale Pornography: An Exploration Into A New Feminist Language
Humanities
LTMO 190N Feminist Transformations of the Fairy Tale
While Angela Carter’s story “The Snow Child” is the shortest in her anthology of fairy tale retellings, The Bloody Chamber, its multi-level structure allows for a multitude of punches and critiques, thus exhibiting an attempt at a new feminist language. “The Snow Child” was born from Carter’s simultaneous fascination with pornography and the fairy tale, as seen in her publishing both The Bloody Chamber and The Sadeian Woman: An Exercise in Cultural History in 1979. The density of her subversive tools in this story creates such a vast array of critiques that address not only rudimentary patriarchal norms such as female absolutes and archetypes, but also more complex phallogocentric histories such as Freud’s Oedipal complex and the masculine monopoly on language itself. She purposefully and intricately confuses phallogocentric reason and distinction, rendering a patriarchal reading useless in its superficiality. Through this carefully woven tale, Carter’s subversions metamorphose into a uniquely feminine writing, a construction of deconstructions; a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts.
