ENGLISH 400: MONSTER THEORY
Alesha Garcia
Research Abstract
"The Horrors Beyond the Transgression of Virginity"
Angela Carter’s “The Bloody Chamber ” is a subversive, coming of age story in which a young bride loses her virginal status to a much older Marquis. The loss of virginity marks the transition of the bride from an adolescent girl to a woman and invites her into a bloody chamber full of the abject. By focusing on how the bride inhabits the inbetween space--liminal space-- where she is coming of age and experiencing sexual awakening, much can be revealed about why the protection of innocence is culturally emphasized during the transition from adolescence to adulthood.
Using Kristeva’s theory on the abject, this paper will explore how virginity lies at the threshold of a liminal space. It is a desirable yet repulsive sexual status for the bride as she aspires to fulfill societal expectations of marriage, but also retain her innocence. Like Kristeva, I will argue that true horror is found when liminal spaces are transgressed. When the bride transgresses the space in which she is coming of age (a liminal space), and experiences the dissolution of her virginity (defilement), she will encounter horror. These horrors live inside the bride as she feels disgust with herself, but also inside the bloody chamber where she will encounter violent pornographic images and grotesque dead bodies. By positioning defilement as something abject in Carter’s text and recognizing that the “abject and abjection are my safeguards. The primers of my culture”(Kristeva 2), transgressing virginity welcomes a horror that corrupts and disgusts, but also creates desire within the bride.
Capstone Presentation
"Menstruation in Angela Carter's 'Wolf Alice': It's a bloody shame."
Alice, a feral child raised by wolves, experiences a transformational moment in which her humanity is reclaimed by the onset of menarche: “At night, she prowled the empty house looking for rags to sop the blood up… although the nuns had not the means to inform her how it should be, it was not fastidiousness but shame that made her do so” (158). If this feral child, raised by wolves, did not grow up in a societal context that taught her to feel shame about menstruation, why does Carter emphasize Alice’s shame? In this presentation I will discuss limits of second-wave
feminism seen through Carter’s discomfort embracing complete female embodiment. Although Carter reflects many feminist ideals in her collection of stories The Bloody Chamber, the depiction of menstrual shame in “Wolf Alice” reveals she (or 1979 cultural ideologies about the female body) may not be as progressive as we would have hoped.