Abstract
SHEHRAZADE’S LEGACY: FEMICIDAL FEARS IN ANGELA CARTER’S FICTION
Literature often explores violence and crime and deals with the social and psychological motives that drive murderers to commit homicidal acts. Domestic violence is not excepted from the authors’ list of choice in their examination of family relations and the trauma that results from vicious acts of violence. In modern and contemporary times, female novelists, like Angela Carter, A. S. Byatt, and Margaret Atwood, focus on this omnipresent phobia in women’s lives. This research deals with Angela Carter’s rewriting of traditional folktales in an attempt to expose and condemn the patriarchal society that abuses women, both physically and psychologically. It focuses on two representative short stories: “The Bloody Chamber” and “The Erlking” (both published in 1979), stories that recount the experience of Bluebeard’s brides and the female victims of the mythical diabolical Erlking and shows how their experience echoes the suffering of their eastern counterpart, Shehrazade.
Keywords
Bluebeard, Carter, Erlking, homicide, Shehrazade, violence, women.
