Plots, paradoxes and parodies: Women writers rewriting "Bluebeard"
Item
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Title
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Plots, paradoxes and parodies: Women writers rewriting "Bluebeard"
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Identifier
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AAI3037425
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identifier
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3037425
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Creator
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Moore, Emily Ruth.
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Contributor
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Adviser: Felicia Bonaparte
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Date
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2002
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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Literature, Comparative | Folklore | Women's Studies
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Abstract
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In this study, I examine the plots, paradoxes and parodies in re-visions of one fairy tale---"Bluebeard" written by Charles Perrault in 1697---in selected works written mainly by women in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: Charlotte Bronte, Anne Thackeray Ritchie, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Shirley Jackson, Angela Carter, Suniti Namjoshi, Joyce Carol Oates, and Margaret Atwood. I argue that these authors re-vise the old tale using the narrative strategies of focalization, text embedding and intertextuality in order to create new tales, which enable their narrators/heroines to claim authority over their texts and their lives. (To show contrast and enrich the discussion, I also examine several works by male authors, such as William Thackeray, Charles Dickens, and Richard Wright.).;Since writers who weave fairy tales into their writings have inherited the legacy of a controversial tradition that either directly or indirectly influences their writing, to contextualize my study, in the first chapter, I present a brief history of the literary fairy tale, discussing the controversy surrounding it from the eighteenth century onwards; the importance of acknowledging women as sources for the transmission of stories; the powerful effect fairy tales have had on our culture. The three subsequent chapters are devoted to analyses of retellings of "Bluebeard.";Whatever the meaning of this story, and that is what I discuss, the features, the focus, in all the retellings, tends amazingly not to change: the forbidden room concealing a secret, the keys, the wives who are dead or put away, the need for obedience in the new wife, generally her disobedience, almost always Bluebeard's demise. Clearly, this narrative is ingrained deep in the consciousness of our culture, and it is ingrained as a myth, that is, speaking in symbolic terms, as a universal paradigm, concretized in different ways by each writer, in each period, and occasionally in each genre, invariably and inevitably raising the identical questions.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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PQT Legacy CUNY.xlsx
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degree
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Ph.D.
