Women of stone and ice in A. S. byatt's tales of the unreal

Abstract

A. S. Byatt's work contains a number of examples of what can be called the postmodern rewriting of the fairy tale. This essay aims to analyse some of the short stories by A. S. Byatt, in order to understand the way(s) whereby they use the fairytale to question acquired notions of womanhood that underlie the fairytale tradition. We will focus, particularly, on stories where women are the locus of a struggle to transcend what seems to be represented as the prison of their own female bodies, seeking a life outside the constraining condition of marriage and motherhood into a world of rationality and of creativity. Stories like “Cold”, “A Stone Woman”, or “The Glass Coffin”, among others, take us to a fantasy world where women long to free themselves from an incarcerating cycle of marriage and childbearing by way of metamorphoses, which, paradoxically, may turn them into ice or stone. On the other hand, the essay seeks to address these metamorphoses from the point of view of the fairytale traditions from which they derive.