Study of Female Consciousness in Female Gothic Literature

A Case study of Angela Carter's the Company of Wolves

Abstract

The female characters in Gothic novels are usually the representatives of fear or even the persecuted, while Female Gothic literature aims to establish the standard of female own value. The heroines achieve self-salvation through their own wisdom and calm attitude, and finally awaken their self-consciousness to form female subjectivity. This is a challenge to the gender hierarchy and the culture of male control.The style of Female Gothic runs through Angela Carter’s life of writing. She pays attention to the sufferings of female, delving into areas where other female writers have not or dare not explore, boldly and frankly addressing topics such as incest, sexual abuse, and pornography. From her point of view, female’s body and desire are subjects that cannot be bypassed in feminist writing and research. Through analyzing Carter’s work, The Company of Wolves, this paper focuses on the power of female as subversive to the established value system and the guiding role they play as constructors of a new order and has a deep thinking of female in deconstructing patriarchal centralism to construct harmonious relations between male and female.In The Company of Wolves, the author also creates a new Little Red Riding Hood with a rebellious spirit, but here, the little girl is more about exploiting the fighting potential contained in the female “sexual energy”. The seduction of Little Red Riding Hood by a Wolf disguised as a hunter can also be directly interpreted as a sexual seduction. Carter’s rewriting is to release the repressed potential desire of the female subject in the traditional fairy tale, so as to break the traditional pattern of gender relations. For a long time, female have grown up under the discipline of male power, in a position of oppression and constraint, being taught to restrain their desires, learn to protect themselves and be a good girl, and being instilled with the idea that “it is their natural duty to bear and raise children and do a good job at home”. Female are bound by the “feminine virtues” of self-sacrifice, obedience and docility, while their individual needs and desires are denied and hidden. Carter’s new Red Riding Hood is not bound by moral norms, but boldly follows her own desires, using “sex” as a tool to gain a new life, so that sexual liberation is achieved and sexual reconciliation with men is completed. Female’s self-consciousness and subjectivity are realized in this process.