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Realism In The Tiger's Bride By Angela Carter

2049 Words9 Pages
The comment on Beauty’s freewill accentuates the lack of volition in Beauty’s case for she had to pay for her father’s transgression and the Beauty, as other women in the patriarchal social setup is aware of it and willingly accepts her plight. The magic realist tendencies of Angela Carter’s writings also come to the fore in the intermingling of the world of humans and animals, and the mundane and the magical. It is a type of postmodern gothic, which treats a ghost at the table as an everyday occurrence rather than something to be afraid of. In contrast to the “The Courtship of Mr. Lyon,” “The Tiger’s Bride” is explicitly sexual and more radical in its exploration of feminine-masculine stereotypes and relationships. The titular bride herself narrates the story “The Tiger’s Bride” and she begins her story with the statement, “My father lost me to The Beast at cards” (BYB 154). The first line of the tale itself points to the idea of women as objects of exchange between men. This is further accentuated when she states that her mother had also been bartered for her dowry to the Russian nobility and died young owing to her father’s gaming, whoring and agonizing repentances (BYB 155). The story begins with the girl and her father travelling from Russia to Milan, where, the girl helplessly watches her father lose all her inheritance to the Beast in a game of cards. She states, “I watched with the furious cynicism peculiar to women whom circumstances force mutely to witness folly,
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