MANY DIFF VERSIONS, ETC. Carter breaks new ground regarding adaptations of Beaumont’s version of The Beauty and the Beast. In her tale The Tiger’s Bride, Carter reworks the story, featuring evidently more androgynous and animalistic characters and a more somber, wintery setting. In the end, however, she flips both the traditional tale and the genre she is writing in on their heads, resulting in a story which depicts a strong, intelligent, and liberated heroine-narrator by contrasting Beauty’s tale to settings and symbolisms traditionally distinctive of the Gothic genre
The tone of the tale is set from the first sentence, “My father lost me to the Beast at cards” (***SOURCE***), simultaneously introducing the reader to the first-person narrator …show more content…
Carter opposes to this her unorthodox bride, pushing the envelope – Beauty’s physical envelope and the literary envelope of the traditional fairy-tale – even further by herself transforming into her Beast’s inhuman state. Indeed, though Madame de Beaumont’s Beauty is undoubtedly more active than other traditional heroines, Carter pushes her bride’s dynamism much further, ultimately turning into an animal herself in a metamorphosis into her true form, matching that of the Beast and valet, and thus going from the passive lamb she was taught to be to now purring with the lions (***SOURCE***). In patriarchal myths women do not grow up they simply change masters. Essentially, instead of restoring her identity through achieving a sense of belonging to the now human Beast, her master, the bride reinvents herself, painfully rebirthing into her mature form. Through this ultimate transformation, the heroine of the story liberates herself from objectification by society, as she accepts her visceral animalistic features. In an absolute break with tradition in favor of a feminist turn, the heroine’s self-affirmation includes the strongly implied acceptance of her own sexuality, yet without any forced interaction. Thus, she is transformed purely by her own desire. As for the Beast, he is empowered as well, and becomes more open and vulnerable towards the
The tone of the tale is set from the first sentence, “My father lost me to the Beast at cards” (***SOURCE***), simultaneously introducing the reader to the first-person narrator …show more content…
Carter opposes to this her unorthodox bride, pushing the envelope – Beauty’s physical envelope and the literary envelope of the traditional fairy-tale – even further by herself transforming into her Beast’s inhuman state. Indeed, though Madame de Beaumont’s Beauty is undoubtedly more active than other traditional heroines, Carter pushes her bride’s dynamism much further, ultimately turning into an animal herself in a metamorphosis into her true form, matching that of the Beast and valet, and thus going from the passive lamb she was taught to be to now purring with the lions (***SOURCE***). In patriarchal myths women do not grow up they simply change masters. Essentially, instead of restoring her identity through achieving a sense of belonging to the now human Beast, her master, the bride reinvents herself, painfully rebirthing into her mature form. Through this ultimate transformation, the heroine of the story liberates herself from objectification by society, as she accepts her visceral animalistic features. In an absolute break with tradition in favor of a feminist turn, the heroine’s self-affirmation includes the strongly implied acceptance of her own sexuality, yet without any forced interaction. Thus, she is transformed purely by her own desire. As for the Beast, he is empowered as well, and becomes more open and vulnerable towards the