THE HEROINE’S JOURNEY IN ANGELA CARTER’S THE BLOO DY CHAMBER AND OT HER STORIES

Abstract

Over the past decades, cis-women have obtained opportunities to demonstrate their
skills and voice their opinion in what had predominantly been male-dominated settings, establishing
that there is no such environment unbefitting of their presence. However, this development
in gender equality carries the question whether people of all genders are conditioned to
change their innermost self in order to feel welcomed in Western societies which are predicated
on masculine principles. In The Heroine’s Journey: Woman’s Quest for Wholeness Maureen Murdock
utilizes Jungian archetypes to examine the methods in which collective and one’s individual
femininity keeps being suppressed in favor of traditionally established masculine traits. Outlining
each stage of the heroine’s journey, a psychoanalytic model of her own making, Murdock
asserts that each individual must strike the balance between masculinity and femininity within
themselves in order to complete their own, and others’, quest for wholeness. Considering that in
The Bloody Chamber Angela Carter transforms masculine-driven fairy-tales into those celebrating
the aforementioned quest for balance, the purpose of the paper is to provide a detailed examination
of how Carter’s anthology follows the heroine’s journey. The paper establishes that each
story corresponds to a stage in the heroine’s mythic quest, and that Murdock’s interpretation of
Jungian archetypes echoes the character arcs of Carter’s heroes and heroines.