SOURCE: Wyatt, Jean. “The Violence of Gendering: Castration Images in Angela Carter's The Magic Toyshop, The Passion of New Eve, and “Peter and the Wolf.” Women's Studies 25, no. 6 (1996): 549-70.

In the following essay, Wyatt argues that Carter rewrites Freud's theories on female sexuality in The Magic Toyshop, The Passion of New Eve, and “Peter and the Wolf.”

In an essay on life in the '60s, Angela Carter describes how she became committed to “demythologising” “the social fictions that regulate our lives”: “I began to question … the nature of my reality as a woman. How that social fiction of my ‘femininity’ was created, by means outside my control, and palmed off on me as the real thing” (“Notes,” [“Notes from the Frontline”]71;70). Her novels and short stories take on some of the master narratives that continue to construct femininity in Western culture—giving us, for instance, in The...