As a subversion of what we understand today as the "male gaze", Angela Carter in The Bloody Chamber, The Company of Wolves and The Courtship of Mr Lyon exercises a postmodern parody in order to both expose and destabilize gender stereotypes by using desire as a driving force for the objectified woman's action and telling the stories from the female perspective. Carter skillfully weaves themes of rites of passage, sex, and death through the retelling of well-known traditional fairy tales in order to depict the unbalanced relationships contained within. The female protagonists all undergo a mental transformation that empowers them and prevents them from becoming one of the many women who came before them and succumbed to the fate of women in a patriarchal society. Carter subverts traditional gender positions by granting her female characters a subjectivity gained through their own telling of stories (Renfroe 89) – stories that in the past have been dominated by the male voice. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”? Get the original essay In The Bloody Chamber, it is this subjectivity that highlights the importance of the girl's journey toward self-discovery through the Bloody Chamber. Thus, in the same way that the narrator is introduced to a new way of thinking through her exposure to the Bloody Chamber, the reader is forced to reexamine the dominant ideologies that surround the original fairy tales that Carter reimagines (Renfroe 91). . Rites of passage, sex, and death become intertwined themes in these stories through the female characters exploring their sexuality in a way that allows them to become more aware of their own positions and relationship to a masculine world. metamorphosis is accompanied by the theme of death. According to Cheryl Renfroe in her article Initiation and Disobedience, in The Bloody Chamber the protagonist's probe into the forbidden chamber is his rite of passage and defines the chamber as a liminal space. As defined by Arnold van Gennep in The Rites of Passage (1909), a liminal space is a space in which the initiate is removed from ordinary life to a place of isolation where he experiences a tribulation that causes him to return to ordinary life. a normal life with a transformed point of view. This space is then the indeterminate intermediate phase where the initiate is exposed to a test in order to be able to leave one stage of his life to arrive at another (Renfroe 92). It is at this moment that the protagonist becomes aware of her character: “Until that moment, this spoiled child did not know that she had inherited the nerves and the will of the mother who had defied the outsiders. the yellow law of Indochina” (Carter 26). ). It's a moment of female empowerment as the girl grasps the true strength taught to her by the main female figure in her life. Her power therefore comes from her ability to appreciate her mother's power and channel that strength into her own situation. Furthermore, the emphasis on the woman as savior is a clear subversion of gender roles and encourages a new perception of women as capable of meaningful action. in a patriarchal society. Here, the unbalanced gender relations in traditional stories are overturned and readers are confronted with the fact that a female lead can have as much importance and influence as a male lead. It is in this room that she comes face to face with the intimate relationship between sex and death. Her sexual initiation becomes inextricable from the death of the women who preceded her. She surrendersrealizes that once she sexually satisfied her husband, she became disposable. This is how the term “le petit mort” for sexual orgasm literally takes on the meaning of “a little death”. Her husband's orgasm means death for her. Desire, power and death intertwine in this moment of confrontation with the implicit truth of who her husband is, and the protagonist cannot help but think of a quote from her husband's favorite poet: "There has a striking similarity between the act of love and the ministrations of an executioner” (Carter 26). The power gained through sexual dominance is thus explored, and the sexually dominant partner is able to control the submissive partner – roles that have traditionally been assigned to men for the former and women for the latter. Carter's re-exploration of the classic folk tale provides a bias for a female voice, as well as empowerment for the female characters. This is seen most clearly in the way the protagonist attempts to use her own sexuality to prevent the fate decided for her by the dominant male character: "I forced myself to be attractive, I saw myself as pale, supple like a plant who begs. being trampled, a dozen vulnerable and attractive girls reflected in as many mirrors, and I saw how he almost failed to resist me” (Carter 36). Right now, there is both a reversal of traditional gender roles and a subversion of power dynamics. Sex and death become even more intertwined when the protagonist states, “If he had come to me in bed, I would have strangled him then” (Carter 36). She is willing to take control of a sexual situation and exercise any power she may have acquired. Furthermore, power is given to the woman, notably through the twist which makes the mother the savior and not a man. Even after being freed from her husband, the protagonist further defies tradition by living with a man outside the sanctity of marriage – an act that both defies societal expectations of women and affirms her own altered perceptions of the world and her role in In The Company of Wolves, desire, gender and power are important in the story while the role of the innocent Red Riding Hood is destabilized. In Carter's re-exploration, the protagonist is a girl on the verge of becoming a woman eager to explore her own sexuality. She has a sexual curiosity which is awakened when she meets a handsome man in the forest. The bet then becomes an opportunity for her to experiment with her own sexuality: “…because she wanted to hang around on her way to be sure that the handsome gentleman would win her bet” (Carter 140). What makes her interest so important is that it allows her to experience sexuality in a way normally reserved for men. Her curiosity is realized when, even in the face of the realization of what he had done to her grandmother, she “freely gave him the kiss she owed him” (Carter 144). Its choice thus becomes what differentiates it from its traditional counterpart. She is not saved by her father or a male figure as in the original story, but she saves herself by recognizing her own power – the power found in her sexuality. This is when power dynamics are subverted, both by allowing the subjectivity of the female voice and by portraying sexual desire as natural to both women and men. Additionally, the use of sexuality to attempt to escape patriarchal oppression is blatant when the protagonist mocks the werewolf's apparent threats: "She laughed at him in the face, she snatched him his shirt and threw it into the fire. , in the fiery wake of his own discarded clothes» (Carter 144). By laughing and proclaiming that she is “no one's meat,” she detaches herself from patriarchal pornography and grants herself sexual license as a strong woman (Lau 87). Furthermore, by burning the wolf-man's clothes, she chooses to accept his bestiality and thus decides to accept a concept of sexual liberation (Lau 87). This use of sexuality in order to lead men away from their original destructive paths makes Carter's female protagonists more interesting than the traditional virginal perception of the female character. Lorna Sage in Angela Carter: The Fairy Tale sums this up wonderfully by stating that "For Carter, the blameless woman is also the unimaginative woman" (Sage 58). Once again, the virginal qualities that make the traditional fairy tale woman so attractive to the male protagonist are undermined, and the woman gains agency. by going beyond the constructions of what is expected of her. Her very natural sexual desire serves to separate her from the unrealistic expectations imposed on her. In terms of sexual conquest, the woman reinforms traditional conceptions by making Little Red Riding Hood a sexual agent (Lau 86). While Little Red Riding Hood's character has been mostly changed, Carter retains some of the narrative techniques of the original story as Little Red Riding Hood follows the dialogue aimed at her, before completely destroying her historical power. After dictating the physical prowess bestowed on the male by saying the famous “What big arms you have” (Carter 144), Carter perfectly sabotages its meaning by following it with “I better hug you” (Carter 144). At that point, the wolf is no longer as threatening and Little Red Riding Hood gains freedom by freely indulging in her desire for the kiss they bet on. The Court of Mr. Lyon as a postmodern parody of Beauty and the Beast is powerful because of Carter's unique ability to subvert traditional power dynamics through the appropriation of new gender roles by focusing on the expression of latent female desire and sexuality. This subversion of gender roles is most evident in the Beast's reaction when Beauty lets him meet her father: "The Beast buried his great head in his paws. Will you come back to me? We'll feel alone here without you” (Carter 53). His response is that of a man in love who is easily led by Beauty (Brooke 73). Beauty too is very far from the innocent beauty of the traditional folk tale which does not recognize its own beauty; The beauty in Carter's tale becomes vain with the attention given to it. She often finds herself looking in mirrors and “She smiles at herself with satisfaction. She was learning, in her late teens, to be a spoiled brat, and her pearly skin was plumping up a little, thanks to high living and compliments” (Carter 54). This image is very far from the Belle of the traditional tale who only asked for a single rose when her father was traveling. This Belle “could sometimes become irritable when things did not go quite the way she wanted” (Carter 54). It is at this point that Carter's use of parody becomes evident as early in the story the reader is exposed to a Beauty who meets the expectations set by the traditional folk tale, but this perceived innocence becomes less appealing when declared by Beauty herself: “And such as she felt herself to be, Miss Lamb, impeccable, sacrificial” (Brooke 73). Carter takes this parody one step further by having Beauty take on the role of a submissive woman, but only because of the appearance she thinks it will create as a virtuous woman (Brooke 74). This, 12(1), 52-69.