Gender-Bending Fantasies inWomen's Writing: Fantastic in Angela Carter's The Infernal Desire Machines of Dr. Hoffman, Nights at the Circus, and Jeanette Winterson's The Passion, The.PowerBook. Mine Ozyurt Kilic
Year: 2010
Type: article
Abstract: Mine Ozyurt Kilic’s discussion of gender bending in Angela Carter’s The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman and Nights at the Circus and Jeanette Winterson’s The Passion and The.Powerbook is particularly insightful in illuminating how the fantastic is deployed subversively by these two contemporary women writers. As a part of her analysis, she revisits Tzvetan Todorov’s concept of hesitation between the marvellous and the uncanny, convincingly demonstrating the pertinence of this to the surrealistically winged Fevvers in Carter’s Nights at the Circus and the web-footed Villanelle in Winterson’s The Passion and clarifying how Todorov’s “road to the marvellous” is exemplified by Patrick’s miraculously voyeuristic vision in The Passion. Deploying Rosemary Jackson’s insights in her 1981 study Fantasy: The Literature of Subversion, Ozyurt Kilic illustrates how the deconstruction of gender roles in these novels of Carter and Winterson enables characters to evade the constraints of patriarchy, breaking through traditional boundaries. She ranges widely historically and thematically, exploring links within these four narratives to a breadth of topics such as the New Woman, the Angel in the House, the Marquis de Sade, historiographic metafiction, surrealism, compulsory heterosexuality, and the pataphysical. Ultimately, she argues that gender-bending metamorphosis liberates characters to create their desired fantasies.
Source: Contemporary Women s Writing
Author: G. M. E. Alban
Institution: Doğuş University
Language: English
Subfield: Literature and Literary Theory
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
SDG: Gender equality
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W1965335446