Villains, Victims, or Voices Unheard: Angela Carter’s and Emma Donoghue’s Retellings of Fairy Tales
Abstract
This paper sets out to explore female protagonists in a selection of fairy tale retellings from Angela Carter’s 1995 collection, Burning Your Boats: The Collected Short Stories and 1979 he Bloody Chamber and Other Stories, and Emma Donoghue’s 1997 Kissing the Witch: Old Tales in New Skins in light of Victorian concepts of womanhood such as the Angel in the House and the Fallen Woman. These concepts tended to define and control women’s
behaviour, positioning them as either kind and docile or wicked, with the latter resulting in their exile from society. By radically rewriting well-known traditional fairy tales, the paper argues that both Carter and Donoghue often create a new type of heroine, the New Woman, who unapologetically challenges firmly established social and cultural stereotypes and thus
subverts traditional gender norms. The paper demonstrates that both Carter and Donoghue portray female characters who are not confined to specific roles, whether passive or transgressive, and that they are fully capable of making their own choices.
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.51558/2490-3647.2025.10.2.523
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