FEEDING ON OLD MYTHS: ANGELA CARTER’S VAMPIRE TEXTS
FEEDING ON OLD MYTHS: ANGELA CARTER’S VAMPIRE TEXTS

Summary/Abstract: This paper aims at identifying the mechanisms of deconstruction, re-construction and subversion used by Angela Carter in her feminist re-writing of patriarchy’s key discourses (fairy-tales and myths) as well as at explaining the notion of literary vampirism as a stronger version of intertextuality, relying on the similarity between the literal and the literary dimensions of vampirism as a subversive, destroying and re-enacting cultural phenomenon. Literary vampirism as it is used by the British writer Angela Carter is a subversive fictional device meant to undermine the legitimacy of patriarchal normative discourses and eventually that of the patriarchal norm itself, exposing them as human constructs which confine and define experience. Carter’s postmodern fiction launches a violent critique of these normative patterns through her interrogation of their legitimacy and at the same time challenges the traditional polar binary which stands at the core of the patriarchal discourse in favour of an approach which reads difference as diversity. In this sense, Angela Carter’s feminism is a more progressive one, as it does not foreground definitions and categorization. On the contrary, it looks at definitions and categories, those related to woman included, as exclusionary and restrictive, unable to grasp the ungraspable or to define the indefinite.

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