A consideration of Edgar Allan Poe's “Berenice” and “Ligeia” and Angela Carter's “The Bloody Chamber” and “The Lady of the House of Love” through the lens of the grotesque

Date

2026-5-20

Author

Büyükbekçi, İpek

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This study explores in what ways the female characters in the short stories of Edgar Allan Poe and Angela Carter embody the grotesque tradition and to what end the grotesque is employed by the authors. As an aesthetic and literary tradition, the grotesque commonly employs imagery which ranges from excessiveness, exaggeration, hybridization of features, and estrangement to transgression, degradation, or distortion of conventional limits, foregrounding a critical dimension. In its unease with what is deemed normativity within the dominant ideology of its time, the grotesque is widely employed by Poe and Carter, especially in their short stories centering on female characters. This study specifically focuses on Edgar Allan Poe’s short stories “Berenice” and “Ligeia”, and Angela Carter’s “The Bloody Chamber” and “The Lady of the House of Love” to explore how and why the grotesque is employed in relation to the settings and female characters in these works. The analysis of these short stories is conducted using a conceptual framework established through the work of scholars like Mikhail Bakhtin, Wolfgang Kayser, and Mary Russo, who have all written on the grotesque. This study claims that through the use of fundamental attributes of the grotesque style, the selected stories of Edgar Allan Poe and Angela Carter challenge traditional gender roles and confront patriarchal power structures around love and marriage, which govern female bodily and social norms. It further suggests that, with their exploration of the complexities of female identity and desire, these short stories display a quintessentially feminist strategy in their envisioning of grotesque female characters capable of agency, desire, and resistance.

Subject Keywords

Angela Carter, Edgar Allan Poe, the grotesque, short story, female characters

URI

https://hdl.handle.net/11511/119138

Collections

Graduate School of Social Sciences, Thesis