1. The Tiger’s Bride Themes explored: The role of men and women
Objectification
Female sexuality
Criticism of Patriarchy
Metamorphosis/ transformation
The Other
Masks and the imitative life

2. Recap
The idea is that the two sides must be opposites that what is beastly cannot be beautiful and what is beautiful cannot be beastly. There’s a binary opposition which can be associated to others, such as male and female, tame and wild, prey and predator, innocence and experience, body and soul. Those pairs are always presented as being completely dissociated.
… and Angela Carter aims to assimilate them
into one, into a life which isn’t ‘imitative’.

3. Similarly to ‘Courtship’, the ‘Tiger’ opens with a criticism of patriarchy.
How is the father depicted?
How does the criticism presented in this story contrast to that in the preceding one?

4. Intertextuality: the role of the fairy tale
… if on the one hand, fairy-tales contribute to perpetuate the patriarchal ideology and status quo by making female subordination an inescapable fate, on the other hand they give Carter the opportunity to explore the theme of psychic transformation, liberating her protagonists from conventional gender roles. Prof. M.A. Meyre Ivone Santana da Silva p.62: the narrator remembers the fairy tales her Nurse used to tell her. 1.How are the two genders presented in these tales? 2. And how does society use these tales?

5. Objectification of women
How does Carter emphasise the objectification of women in the opening pages?
On p. 61 the father refers to the narrator as his ‘pearl’ whereas the beast describes her as ‘treasure’. What is the significance of the beast and the narrator’s father using similar language?
3. On p.62 how does the narrator see the wager
between her father and the beast?

6. How does Carter depict the Beast?
Pay particular attention to p.58 and p. 64

7. What is the significance of the mask?
Task for home: re-read the story underlining every mention of masks

8. ‘Desnuda’:
Why is the narrator so repelled by the Beast’s request?
Read p

9. The Male Gaze
Understanding the role of women as defined by the male gaze is central to understanding women’s position in society … Simone de Beauvoir claims that women are defined as “others” or as “not male.” This differentiation would not be possible if women were not recognizable by sight as not male. Considering this, it is logical to look to film, a major form of visual popular culture, and its associations with visual representations and the gaze. The gaze in film is basically the outlook of the camera. Because the outlook of the camera fosters identification with the audience, the gaze can be used as a powerful discourse. Beginning with the Laura Mulvey article “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” the representation of women in culture, and popular culture in particular, has been dissected. In her opening paragraph, Mulvey outlines, “...the way film reflects, reveals and even plays on the straight, socially established interpretation of sexual difference which controls images, erotic ways of looking and spectacle” (Mulvey 57) ... According to Mulvey, women are always the objects of the gaze, never the possessors of the gaze. In the case of film, control of the camera and therefore the control of the gaze is almost always firmly settled in the male sphere. However, as Mulvey understands, the camera, not just cinematic technology, can be thought of as a symbol and applied to patriarchal control in society at large. It is in this light that the camera can be considered an instrument of patriarchal subjugation. For example, many aspects of life that women accept without thought (high heels for instance) are actually part of, or results of, very definite stereotypes about and concerning women … Mulvey writes, “...unchallenged mainstream film coded the erotic into the language of the dominant patriarchal order… Consciously or not, as Mulvey and her followers assert, a standard of normalcy and acceptability is presented and perpetuated through these mainstream manifestations of popular culture. Therefore, who controls the popular discourse and what they have to gain from its perpetuation become important.

10. ‘Desnuda’: two interpretations
Repelled by being objectified; anger at being subjected to ‘the male gaze’
Interpretation 2:
fear of being unmasked
Clothes are, of course, a form of covering up. How does Beauty respond to the idea of having to ‘unmask herself’? Look elsewhere in the story.
With this interpretation we are forced to see the beast as embodying ‘the male gaze’
How does this impact on your understanding of the beast?
How does this affect your interpretation of the narrator (consider the ending)?
How can this interpretation be challenged?

11. Treats her with respect
Objectifies her
Gives her diamond earrings (p.60)
Treats her with respect
Refuses her offer: needs to see her face, more than just the body
One single tear swelled
Desires to be seen, accepted by her
p.58: “My Master’s sole desire is to see the pretty young lady unclothed nude without her dress and that only for the one time after which she will be returned to her father undamaged with bankers’ orders for the sum which he lost at cards”

12. How is beauty depicted at the opening of the story?
To what extent does she fulfil the role of the female?
Remember the binary oppositions:
Beauty
Beast
Female
Male
Tame
Wild
Prey
Predator
innocence
experience
passive
active

13. The girl defies the role of victim (p.63)
Language is often crude, colloquial:
“I wished I had rolled in the hay with every lad on my father’s farm”
Recognises and criticises patriarchy / objectification:
“I had been bought and sold, passed from hand to hand”
Criticises her father as being ‘feckless’, exposes his ‘whoring’ in brutal, direct language
Defiance:
“I let out a raucous guffaw. No young lady laughs like that! … But I did. And do.”
But
Has the conventional prettiness

14. The Soubrette: A stock character in theatre:
vain, girlish, coy, light hearted, flirtatious

15. Reread p. 66, p.70, p.73

16. … a soubrette from the opera with glossy nut-brown curls, rosy cheeks, blue, rolling eyes; it takes me a moment to recognise her …. She carries a looking glass in one hand and a powder puff in the other and there is a musical box where her heart should be …
‘Nothing human lives here,’ said the valet …
‘We have dispensed with servants,’ the valet said. ‘We surround ourselves instead, for utility and pleasure, with simulacra and find it no less convenient than do most gentleman.

17. … I was a young girl, a virgin, and therefore men denied me rationality, just as they denied it to all those who were not exactly like themselves, in all their unreason. If I could not see not one single soul in that wilderness of desolation all around me, then the six of us – mounts and riders, both – could boast amongst us not one soul, either, since all the best religions in the world state categorically that not beasts nor women were equipped with the flimsy, insubstantial things when the good Lord opened the gates of Eden and let Eve and her familiars tumble out … Understand then, that though I would not privately say that I privately engaged in metaphysical speculation as we rode through the reedy approaches to the river, I certainly meditated on the nature of my own state, how I had been bought and sold, passed from hand to hand. That clockword girl who powdered my cheeks for me; had I not been allotted only the same kind of imitative life amongst men that the doll-maker had given her?
Yet as to the true nature of the being of this clawed magus who rode his pale horse … of that I had no notion.
p.70

18. You think you’ve come to the blest plot where the lion lies down with the lamb. P. 56.
The tiger will never lie down with the lamb: he acknowledges no pact which is not reciprocal. The lamb must learn to run with the tigers. P.71
It is Carter’s contention that a certain amount of tigerishness may be necessary if women are to achieve an independent as opposed to a dependent existence; if they are to avoid – at the extreme end of passivity – becoming meat But their change from lamb to tiger need not be a divesting of all ‘femine’ qualities ... Although society may slant things so that women appear to be better candidates for meat-eating, the nature of men is not fixed by Carter as inevitably predatory, with females as their ‘natural prey’. Lambhood and tigerishness may be found in either gender, and in the same individual at different times ...
Margaret Atwood

19. … while my maid, whose face was no longer the spit of my own, continued bonnily to beam. I will dress her up in my own clothes, wind her up, send her back to perform the part of my father’s daughter.

20. Focus on A02
p. 55 ‘A bunch of his master’s damned white roses as if a gift of flowers would reconcile a woman to any humiliation … My tear-beslobbered father wants a rose to show that I forgive him. When I break off a stem, I prick my finger and so he gets his rose all smeared with blood.

21. Homework: Read the essay. Reread ‘The Wolf-Alice’
Answer the questions below. Make sure that you explore them in detail and justify your argument with close attention to the text.
How does Carter present the Beast and the narrator as both living the ‘imitative life’?
How does Carter suggest that both genders suffer if they are constructed as binary oppositions?
What is the significance of the soubrette? How does Carter develop the symbol?
c) Which ending is the most satisfying: Courtship or Tiger? Your answer needs to include a close analysis of the language. You need to look at Carter’s techniques and use appropriate terminology.