Marianne's body politics in angela carter's heroes and villains

Abstract

Body politics is seen as a mechanism that imposes male-dominated norms upon the female body which is thus expected to be regulated according to the expectations of societies. Throughout history, the female body has been seen as a commodity and the theoretical premise of body politics is created based on how the female body is categorised by patriarchy. According to patriarchal ideology, women's bodies are considered to be meaningless and secondary substrata whose values are ignored. However, feminism scrutinises women's bodies from a literary viewpoint and it conceptualises and also offers alternatives for recreating various women's identities by analysing the females. In this respect, there is a different attitude toward the historical and hypothetical explications of female body politics in Angela Carter's works, and especially in Heroes and Villains. Most of Carter's female heroines abuse and provoke male bodies. Thus, these female characters reflect abused and distorted forms of male bodies. Therefore, in Heroes and Villains, the female body, regarded as the power of femininity, is used as a weapon against patriarchy. In addition to the expression of theoretical and critical views of Carter, this paper analyses Carter's Heroes and Villains in terms of the protagonist's (Marianne) conduct which is in contrast with the patriarchal view on body politics. In this study, the protagonist's rejection of patriarchal norms by using her body as an apparatus for claiming power, and her body politics for 'survival' in the male-oriented world is also examined. © 2023 Elsevier B.V., All rights reserved.