Rejection of stereotype and mythologizing of women characters in the magic toyshop by Angela Carter

Abstract EN

This paper aims at proving Angela Carter's Rejection of stereotype and Mythologizing of Women characters.

Her point of view is that women characters are limited to certain strains presented in myths and fairy tales.

These strains portrait women as repeated weak and naïve and have nothing to do with developing themselves but instead they dream of someone who comes to save them from their miserable situations, just like the Knight on the back of the white horse as a savior.

Carter refuses the idea of treating women as a thing at the house or a lovely portrait that adds more beauty to the decor and furniture, as this is no more than a limiting power and fairy tale dreams.

The analysis of this paper concentrates on her second novel The Magic Toyshop (1967) to demonstrate the writer's intense representation of women identity.

As a postmodern writer, Carter has a precise method of writing where she relies on the substantial characteristics of Magic realism, as a part of postmodernism.

This kind of realism is employed in the novel but according to her specific notion.

She insists on depicting the notion of “trueness ” to be the core of women's ability to develop and change.

Carter starts from the point that women are able to eagerly change the realities surrounding them and go far of the determined parts they were given and forced to accept.

Carter is against the notion of Simone De Beauvoir which ratifies that myth fixes the roles of women in society and solidifies women's lives as stationary and static.

Carter's point of view depend on the idea that demythologizing the characters of women is the base to build on her novel as it is the reflection of the reality of the woman and not a kind of fiction or myth.