Another clear demonstration of the Elektra complex is the fact that the daughter still fears being separated from her father. The daughter is conscious of her annihilation in the patriarchal society but she doesn’t have independence to overcome it. “... That it would be so and her visit to the beast must be, on some magically reciprocal scale, the price of her father’s fortune”.
Carter then poses the question that perhaps the daughter’s marriage was for convenience. The narrator adds “Do not think she had no will of her own; she was possessed by a sense of obligation to an unusual degree”. Carter also makes apparent the female’s “sense of obligation,” an urgent need for the patriarchal society. The daughter is presented as an ambiguous character that is between the knowledge and the purity. When she sees the spaniel, wearing a choker of turquoises, it represents to her, somehow a feeling of impotence, she feels a victim, a prey, being in a suffocating situation “...today the spaniel wore a choker of turquoises.” This shows the female confusion about their role and identity in society.
“The Tiger’s Bride” begins with the idea of desire as well but this time for financial gain through marriage. Beauty means to her father the money he needs to pay his debts -“My father lost me to the Beast at cards.” This shows the female to almost be a male possession. She feels she has to be though, because otherwise she is of less value than males and is disillusioned with her role in society. This is the idea of phallocentricity.
In The Tiger’s Bride, the beast decides to unveil himself and is exposed to the female’s gaze, taking off his clothes and mask. He reveals his true self as the beast. He no longer hides behind the social construction and shows his animal side to the bride that was previously hidden. In return the bride identifies herself by taking off her clothes and her mask of feminine construction. Both therefore give into their ‘Id’. This duality between fear and desire can also be linked to Freud’s theories on female sexuality. The women should really be afraid of the beast and his desire for her, but instead she has the same feelings of desire for the beast. Their feelings for each other are reciprocated.
This point leads me onto the artificiality of society’s pre-conceptions of females in society. The Tiger’s Bride provides clear evidence for this by the presence of the mechanical maid. Her artificiality is strongly emphasised in terms of her being a mechanical object, “...with glossy, nut-brown curls, rosy cheeks, blue, rolling eyes.... her little cap, white stockings, her frilled petticoats. She carries a looking glass in one hand and a powder puff in the other.” These descriptions clearly show her to be superficial and present the typical idea of women. The mirror represents her constant need for her identity. It provides a visual image for her. The powder puff on the other hand, is a representation of feminine construction. The female is therefore seen as a social construct only there to meet needs of males. So from this, one can see that this is very much linked to the theories of Freud.
So, to conclude, both ‘The Courtship of Mr Lyon’ and ‘The Tiger’s Bride’ deconstruct the masculine and feminine gender by comparing them to each other. Such comparisons that are made are the idea of the male and the female, the human and the not-human, and nature versus culture. Therefore the genders are binaries in the sense that they are always opposite to one another with their separate characteristics like women are more emotional than men, and men are stronger the women. However these are just notions that have been going on since the beginning of time. So, Carter as a feminist tries to show in fact women are not victims of men. They have sexual desire as well and they shouldn’t have to succumb to the demands of society. It is the idea that if women show that they are “up for it” i.e want sex then they are no longer victims and hence go against the theories of Freud. This leads on to my final point that because Carter as a feminist, has elevated women so much and made them no longer victims, there is the idea that the higher they get on the pedestal the lower they will fall into the depths of impurity and evil.
