Burn, swan, burn

The destruction of Angela Carter's magic toyshop

Résumé

Patriarchy has not only set parameters to the behavior of women, but also acceptable – and therefore deviant – forms of masculine performance. In her essay The Sadeian Woman, Angela Carter develops her argument that patriarchy is an oppressive system by excellence that sustains the idea of a dominant one over a submissive other. Although those positions are usually respectively occupied by men and women, that is not a systematic demand. And even so, the dominant figure is also controlled by the strings of performative expectations. Her script The Magic Toyshop fictionalizes those ideas and opens up a possibility of disruption of these paradigms.