“Castration or Decapitation?” A Feminist Reading of Two Stories by Angela Carter

This article examines two stories by Angela Carter, “The Bloody Chamber” (1979) and “The Executioner’s Beautiful Daughter” (1974) to account for Carter’s unique and ambivalent dismantling of patriarchal myths. Carter conflates two patriarchal tropes, castration and decapitation, to figure the oppression of women while allowing for an avenue of resistance. Using the French version of feminism, the work of Hélène Cixous in particular, the psychoanalytic theories of Freud and Lacan, and the postmodern critique of Linda Hutcheon, the article contends that Carter uses the trope of decapitation to link beheading to loss of agency and thus to serve her project of exposing violent patriarchal and sexual structures. She utilizes decapitation to interrogate female inferiority and project its castrating impact on those women who are threatened with this punishment. Decapitation, however, becomes a means of undermining patriarchal logic from within since Carter reverses its targets and logic just as she does with castration. Carter’s act of conflating castration and decapitation and unsettling their connotations revises power structures and challenges attributing castration to men and decapitation to women, offering a postmodern critique of patriarchal fixities, oppressive boundaries, and negative gender constructions imposed on women.

Rumpel-Stilts-kin

In a certain kingdom once lived a poor miller who had a very beautiful daughter. She was moreover exceedingly shrewd and clever; and the miller was so vain and proud of her, that he one day told the king of the land that his...

Chitra Banerjee’s empathetic view of Draupadi as a protagonist in The Palace of Illusion

It is said that “Whatever is here is found elsewhere. But whatever is not here is nowhere else.” These lines are said for the great epic of India The Mahabharata. The name means “great [story of the] Bharatas.” Bharata was an early ancestor of both the Pandavas and Kauravas who fought each other in a great war, but the word is also used for the Indian race, so the Mahabharata Sometimes is referred to as “the great story of India.” The portrayals of women Characters in this epic were left unsatisfied. It wasn’t as though the epic didn’t have powerful, complex women Characters that affected the action in major ways, for instance, there was the widowed Kunti, mother of Pandavas,who dedicates her life to making sure her sons become kings. There was Gandhari, wife of the sightless Kaurava king, who chooses to blindfold her in marriage, thus relinquishing her power as queen and mother. And most of all, there was Panchali, king Drupad’s beautiful daughter, who has the unique distinction of being married to five men at the same time-the five Pandava brothers, the greatest heroes of their time. Panchaali who, some might argue, by her headstrong actions helps to bring about the destruction of the third Age of man. But in some way, they remained shadowy figures, their thoughts and motives mysterious, their emotions portrayed only when they affected the lives of the male heroes, their roles ultimately subservient to those of their fathers or husbands, brothers or sons. Relevant to today’s war-torn world, The Palace of Illusions takes us back to a time that is half history, half myth, and wholly Magical. Narrated by Panchaali, the wife of the legendary Pandava brothers in the Mahabharat, the novel gives us a new interpretation of this ancient tale.