Perversity, Art, and Suicide as Forms of Performing Power: Staging a Drama of Resistance to Female Oppression with Annabel's Eccentricities in Angela Carter's Love

Date

2023-3-4

Author

Günday, Merve

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Angela Carter’s overlooked novel Love (1971) portrays the complicated relationship of three subjects, Lee, Buzz, and Annabel who are stuck in the physical boundaries of the same house. Though located in the same house, each of these characters lives in a separate world as drowned in emotional detachment, thus leaving unanswered the question of what brought them together under the same roof. One of the victims of this emotional barrenness, Annabel is most of the time narrated as being within the boundaries of the flat’s interior surroundings and suffering the tyranny of her reckless husband’s infidelities and sexual violence. However, she achieves crossing gendered borders by voicing herself in ways other than verbal: re-writing a moi fiction and imagining her husband, Lee, as one of her objects to play with in this cunning drama guised under her fits of madness, she poses a challenge to established narratives trivializing her as the repressed of Lee. Although she is depicted as a mentally unstable woman, what she does actually by speaking through either (self)violence, suicide, or art is unveiled to be her novel strategies of resisting the silencing of her corporeality or agency. This study focuses on the novel’s female character, Annabel, and argues that though sounding eccentric to ears with her unorthodox ways of speaking, Annabel puts on the stage a drama of recognition outside the dialectics of self/other and of resistance to her repression with her attachment to imaginary fictions and perversities. With the aim of elucidating that embedded in Annabel’s speaking in ways unfamiliar is the desire to voice herself and play down gendered hierarchies, the study consults Butlerian and Lacanian ideas.

URI

https://hdl.handle.net/11511/103033

Conference Name

"Power, Performance, and Play" Virtual Symposium, Purdue University Literary, Interdisciplinary, Theory, and Culture Organization Symposium

Collections

Department of Foreign Language Education, Conference / Seminar

Citation Formats

M. Günday, “Perversity, Art, and Suicide as Forms of Performing Power: Staging a Drama of Resistance to Female Oppression with Annabel’s Eccentricities in Angela Carter’s Love,” presented at the “Power, Performance, and Play” Virtual Symposium, Purdue University Literary, Interdisciplinary, Theory, and Culture Organization Symposium, 2023, Accessed: 00, 2023. [Online]. Available: https://hdl.handle.net/11511/103033.