Weaving words a diachronic analysis of the representation of gender, sexuality and otherness in women’s (re)writings of La Belle et la Bête

摘要

This thesis endeavours to conduct a comparative analysis between two corpora of fairy tales. The first group of tales dates from approximately 1696 to 1756 and originated from the two French vogues of literary fairy tales from this era. The second group comprises contemporary Anglophone rewritings dating from 1979 to 1999. The purpose of this comparison is to investigate the lineage of similar tales by women writers and the representations of gender roles, sexuality and otherness in the tales, in light of the authors’ social contexts. The aim of this comparison is to uncover a common subversive message in both groups of tales that is specific to women authors in particular. The theoretical framework of the thesis is based on an interdisciplinary, comparative approach incorporating feminist criticism, intertextuality, reception theory and reader response theory. The tale type to be examined is the animal-bridegroom tale, more commonly known as La Belle et la Bête or ‘Beauty and the Beast’. In order to provide a context with which to compare the modern versions of the tale, Apuleius’ myth, ‘Cupid and Psyche’, is examined alongside tales by seventeenth- and eighteenth-century French authors, namely Mme d’Aulnoy, Catherine Bernard, Charles Perrault, Mme Leprince de Beaumont and Mme de Villeneuve. Subsequently, these are compared with contemporary rewritings by Angela Carter, Robin McKinley, Emma Donoghue, Tanith Lee and Wendy Wheeler. Both corpora are analysed and compared in order to uncover a dialogic relationship that exists within women’s fairy tales throughout history.