Excavating Childhood: Fairytales, Monsters and Abuse Survival in Lynda Barry’s What It Is

This article investigates the excavation of abused childhood in Lynda Barry’s What It Is. Looking at the centrality of childish play, fairy tales and the Gorgon in the protagonist’s effort to cope with maternal abuse, it argues that comics complicate the life narrative and allow the feminist reconfiguration of the monstrous mother of Western psychoanalysis and art

The Bluebeard Syndrome in Atwood’s \u3ci\u3eLady Oracle\u3c/i\u3e: Fear and Femininity

The multiple identities of Joan Foster in Lady Oracle are the by-products of many literary and social models. Joan exists partly as a central narrative agent and partly as a nexus or repository of language and culture. At stake, however, is something more than an authorial display of postmodernist temperament and virtuosity. The intricate weave of the Bluebeard syndrome into the heterogeneous narratives that constitute Lady Oracle dramatizes the complex exchanges between popular culture and the reality of women’s lives. Margaret Atwood explores the unsettling transpositions between literary and literal romance, on the one hand, and between imagined and experienced aggression against women, on the other

Madame d’Aulnoy’s “The White Cat”: A Factographic Fairy Tale

In “The White Cat” (1698), Marie-Catherine d’Aulnoy controverts received notions of the fairy tale in length, complexity, and subject matter by presenting a covert critique of the symbolic paternal order she inhabited: the society revolving around the absolutist Louis XIV of France. When embedded in sociocultural, political, and personal contexts, this tale thus invites reading as a factographic text grounded in lived experience. Part 1 foregrounds several precursor texts interwoven into d’Aulnoy’s narrative. Retelling old tales dissociates her subversive story from direct correlation with the author. Part 2 examines the repetitive motif of emboîtement or enclosure throughout “The White Cat” and its generative causes

The Bluebeard Syndrome in Atwood’s \u3ci\u3eLady Oracle\u3c/i\u3e: Fear and Femininity

The multiple identities of Joan Foster in Lady Oracle are the by-products of many literary and social models. Joan exists partly as a central narrative agent and partly as a nexus or repository of language and culture. At stake, however, is something more than an authorial display of postmodernist temperament and virtuosity. The intricate weave of the Bluebeard syndrome into the heterogeneous narratives that constitute Lady Oracle dramatizes the complex exchanges between popular culture and the reality of women’s lives. Margaret Atwood explores the unsettling transpositions between literary and literal romance, on the one hand, and between imagined and experienced aggression against women, on the other

The Infernal Desire Machines in Anne Thackeray Ritchie’s \u3ci\u3eBluebeard’s Keys\u3c/i\u3e and Angela Carter’s “The Bloody Chamber”

Between 1866 and 1874 Anne Thackeray Ritchie published nine revisions of classic fairy tales, such as: “Beauty and the Beast,” “Bluebeard,” “Cinderella,” “Jack and the Beanstalk,” and “Little Red Riding Hood.” Ritchie’s novella Bluebeard’s Keys (1874) is not only one of the more subversive narratives among these revisions but also, demonstrably, the most personally inflected fairy tale she undertook to rewrite. This essay begins with an exploration of the extratextual reality that informs Bluebeard’s Keys and its revisionary relation to Charles Perrault’s “Bluebeard.” The focus then turns to the intertextual grid in which Angela Carter’s “The Bloody Chamber” (1979) converges with diverse particulars in Perrault’s and Ritchie’s versions. Among the main points considered in this analysis are the distinct ways that an illicit erotic dimension of experience leaves its mark on a range of situations in Bluebeard’s Keys and “The Bloody Chamber.