Carter argues submissiveness, rather than passion, results in destruction: “to be the object of desire is to be defined in the passive case. To exist in the passive case is to die in the passive case - that is, to be killed. This is the moral of the fairy tale about the perfect woman.” Like pornography, the fairy-tale is practical fantasy – a form of Freudian ‘wish fulfilment’ which depicts “female masochism as a modus vivendi (and morendi)”(Simmon). Freud believed fantasy comes from an unsatisfied wish which will be never physically performed in reality; magic fulfils the same necessity, it “subject[s] the processes of nature to the will of man” . The vignette, The Snow Child, most closely follows the structure of a fairy-tale of any story …show more content…
The ‘Count and his wife’ are introduced through status (with the Countess in relation to her male counterpart) rather than their names to stunt the reader’s emotional response. An abrupt finality is added to their actions; through ambiguous temporal lexis and exaggeration they become depersonalized as symbolic entities. The narrative perspective further diminishes the worth of the girl: she is voiceless, merely ‘the child of [the Count’s] desire.’ Her use is expended when her ‘purity’ is no longer intact; she “pricks her finger on the thorn; bleeds; screams; falls.” Semi-colons minimise word usage to devalue the death as sudden but ultimately inconsequential. Notably, the Count’s wishes are immediately granted, whereas his wife’s must be achieved through planning and compliance with his necrophilia. The countess is handed ‘the rose’ used to kill the girl, but refuses it because ‘it bites’: like Ismene, the Countess’ inaction is compliance to injustices perpetrated by a patriarchal society; however, whereas Ismene emphatically declares ‘we are women, we’re not born to contend with men’, the Countess does not comply with her imposed …show more content…
Duffy reworks Ovid’s Metamorphoses to provide a voice for Galatea: ‘Cold I was, like snow, like ivory.’ The narrator is described through similes – her relation to other objects - as she lacks her own identity; the coldness and reference to ‘ivory’ alludes to an aesthetic desire for paleness, and the medium from which she arose. Ovid’s Pygmalion despised the ‘lascivious lives’ of other women and prioritised chastity, symbolised by ‘snow:’ Galatea is a direct product of the male gaze, having only aesthetic value. Carter’s concerns with the implications of beauty within a relationship could originate from her teenage anorexia. Actions relating to a sculptor have undertones of sexual assault: his ‘clammy hands’ are cold and intrusive, forcing her to ‘[play] statue, shtum’ for defence. This sibilant idiom combined with short lines and frequent punctuation, is cold and sold to echo her lovelessness – the first person narration is intimate and uncomfortable, conveying the narrator’s terror. It is only once Galatea manipulates his prejudices by ‘[becoming] warm, like candle wax’ she escapes his control. Short words lacking capitalism create a fast pace to mimic the build up to an orgasm: here, sexuality is liberating, and rejects ‘the literary tradition of Pygmalion as portrayed by Ovid and George Bernard Shaw and mock their assumptions of femininity.’ As in Pygmalion’s Bride, The