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The Magic Toyshop Research Paper

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The Magic Toyshop is a British novel written by Angela Carter in 1967. It is about an adolescent female protagonist growing up in a patriarchal system where she began to experiences the discovery of her ripening sexuality. From the novel’s opening paragraph, it began with Melanie going through the moment of discovering her body in a sexual way, where it could be viewed as a representation of a rite of passage from childhood to adulthood.
Two oldest literary genres that Carter uses in The Magic Toyshop are often connected with mythology and fairy tales. In many of her novels, she often embeds elements and motifs of fairy tale into her writing where it represents the harsh reality into fantasy, but at the same time there’s romance in the text. …show more content…

In this novel, Carter uses terms in a way to describe Melanie’s self-development of her own identity and described how a young protagonist girl tries different ideas of femininity. It also shows that Carter wrote The Magic Toyshop in a narrative form such in a feminine perspective, instead of a masculine viewpoint, is to give the audience a stronger approach toward feminism. ‘For months, she stared at herself, naked, in the mirror of her wardrobe; she would follow with her finger the elegant structure of her ribcage where her heart fluttered under the flesh like a bird under the blanket’ (1). With the paragraph continuing with the description of Melanie’s self exploration of her physique by using terms like Pre-Raphaelite to describe her long black hair and her captivation with the idea of posing for the famous artist such of Toulouse Lautrec – who is known for his alluring painting of harlots and courtesans – ‘She was too thin for Titian or a Renoir but she contrived a pale, smug Cranach Venus with […]. After she reads Lady Chatterley’s Lover, she secretly picked forget-me-nots and stuck them in her pubic hair’ (2), This shows that Melanie believe she is what she perceive as she gaze

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