In The Bloody Chamber, Carter uses traditional fairy tales as a model for discussing gender and sexual politics. Thus, although his tales contain conventional forms of transformation - men transform into wolves in The Company of Wolves, at the end of The Courtship of Mr. Lyon Mr. Lyon becomes a man again, and at the conclusion of The Tiger's Bride the protagonist also changes into a beast: they also include a deeper and more metaphorical notion of change. At the time of writing, the second-wave feminism movement had reached its peak; this change in attitudes may have influenced Carter's frequent use of symbolic imagery to denote a character's emotional and psychological transformation. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an original essay Carter advocates an agreement between the tiger and lamb binary opposites of human nature as a means to achieve wholeness. The titles of both The Courtship of Mr Lyon (TCoML) and The Tiger's Bride (TTB) have a clear male emphasis; the fact that the protagonist is described as "The Tiger's Bride" suggests that he is the owner, an obviously unequal power dynamic. However, by the end of the stories (both involve a physical metamorphosis) the relationship between the male and female figures has also changed, conveying Carter's desire to abandon socially constructed notions of gender. The final line of TCoML - "Mr. and Mrs. Lyon walk in the garden..." - symbolizes the two opposing forces conforming to satisfy each other's needs. This links to key concepts of the 1970s feminist movement, which advanced ideas about gender as a social construct. This notion was presented in the book by Simone de Beauvoir, the famous French feminist, The Second Sex (1949); the author famously wrote: "One is not born a woman, but rather one becomes." This reflects both de Beauvoir's and Carter's belief that femininity does not arise from biological differences, but that it is a construct of civilization; someone's situation determines their character. People are gradually shaped by their upbringing, and biology does not determine what makes a woman a woman: women learn their roles (or are imposed on them) by the male-dominated society in which they live. They are not born passive, secondary and inessential, just as men are not born dominant, superior and authoritative, but external forces have conspired to make them so. Lawrence Phillips, on Carter, wrote: "change, [his work] seems to suggest, is an extremely difficult feat to achieve." These forces are difficult to overcome and will inevitably take a long time, but this is within reach. Glimpses of this optimistic attitude are evident throughout The Bloody Chamber (TBC) stories, but especially in The Company of Wolves (TCoW), the last line of which reads: "Look!" sweet and healthy she sleeps in her grandmother's bed, between the paws of the tender wolf. This highly symbolic physical adaptation not only recalls the biblical image of the lamb lying down with the lion, but also reinforces Carter's statement that "I am all for putting new wine into old wineskins," where the "new wine" in this case is the completeness achieved by the fusion of two previously contrasting halves, and the "old bottle" is the "grandmother's bed", which is a symbol of patriarchy: old, irrelevant and obsolete. Carter's use of allegorical symbolism as a means of promoting his visions of equality and unity goes hand in hand with his goal of transforming classic fairy tales from a form ofliterature that intrinsically reinforces the socially constructed nature of female identity and sexuality, to a feminist political rewriting. of the kind. Carter's stories address the objectification of women in a phallocentric order and the way traditional fairy tales reinforce the perception of women as mere objects. For example, in The Snow Child (TSC), the woman's defining characteristic is that she is the Count's wife, and her appearance reflects this; “Wrapped in the glittering skins of black foxes” and other glamorous objects, her identity is based entirely on materiality. Even the Count himself considers women as objects, the repetition of "I wish" is a symbol of the patriarchy that shapes and molds women to satisfy male desires and expectations. The nature of these expectations is intrinsically linked to the treatment of women as disposable commodities; the Count's desire for "a girl as white as snow" and "red as blood" brings to mind images of corpses, suggesting that women are more attractive when dead, and therefore completely subservient to male figures. Helen Simpson wrote: "The threat is not found in the darker side of heterosexuality, in sadomasochism and the idea of ​​fatal passion." This notion is reinforced when the count “plunges his virile member into the dead girl”; it is not necessary for her to be autonomous for the Count to consider her a sexual object, in fact he, a symbol of patriarchy, prefers her in a state in which she is absolutely passive. The rivalry between the two female figures is also evidence of the materiality with which women are appreciated: when the Count rejects the Countess' requests, "the furs leaped from [her] shoulders and twisted around the naked girl", symbolizing the displacement of the count's affection. The Countess's dependence on the Count is made evident by the fact that she is "left naked as a bone", her nakedness a metaphor for her vulnerability and helplessness in a male-dominated society. The treatment of women as mere objects is prevalent throughout the story of TBC's title; the Marquis cheerfully asserts his dominance over the nameless protagonist as he seeks, like the Count in TSC, to transform her from an autonomous, free-thinking individual into a submissive sexual object. The Marquis strips the heroine of her clothes (recalling once again the connotations of helplessness that accompany nudity) "as if he were stripping the leaves from an artichoke" - Carter's choice to compare the narrator to a vegetable underlines the desire of the marquis for her to enter a vegetative state, passive and without resistance. When the Marquis is about to execute her he observes: "What a beautiful neck, [...] A neck like the stem of a young plant". Rosemary Moore wrote: «At the end of the 17th century it was considered natural that husbands should dominate their wives. The Marquis is the paradigmatic Western man whose attitude towards sexuality is feudal and who believes that woman is his slave. However, it seems that it aims to reduce the protagonist beyond the state of slavery, to the point of reducing her to a simple piece of meat, considering her a "lamb chop". Carter's relentless and visceral treatment of objectification demonstrates patriarchal society's goals of deprecating and undermining women's autonomy in order to maintain the unequal power dynamics already in place and prevent any transgression or transformation. Carter's use of settings highlights the repressive nature and imbalance of power in patriarchal society. The harsh, unforgiving landscapes in which many stories take place reflect the vulnerability of female characters: in TSC, the first line reads "Midwinter - invincible, immaculate". The terse phrase evokes an atmosphere of hostility, which.