The Tiger's Bride Gender

While traditional gender and sexuality expression are challenged in both works, it comes at a painful price in “The Tiger’s Bride” and more easily in connection to identity in Orlando. Angela Carter is known for her feminist twists on classic tales, subverting tropes and adding new twists. “The Tiger’s Bride” is a model example, characterized as “a tale of a woman’s self-discovery and rejection of female objectification” (Bhatt and Pareek 76). The story begins with the heroine Beauty character being gambled away as a thing rather than a person: “[m]y father lost me to The Beast at cards” (Carter 33). The heroine tells her own story and claims control over how she tells it, already diverging from the traditional third-person narration of fairy

Rognstad points out how, in the second half of the novel when Orlando has lived as both sexes, Woolf presents Orlando’s personality traits in conflicting ways both “typically male and typically female: ‘if Orlando was a woman, how did she never take more than ten minutes to dress?’ and at the same time ‘she could drink with the best and liked games of hazard’ (133). Orlando was tender-hearted, but she detested household matters, she rode well, but she would burst into tears on slight provocation, (133) signalizing a personality made up of stereotypical traits of both femininity and masculinity” (Rognstad 31). These conflicting traits existing simultaneously show Woolf poking fun at gender conventions, challenging the very idea of why people think of these traits as belonging to one gender or another. The character of Orlando cannot be placed into any category, a deliberate effort by Woolf to show how freedom can be found by not being limited with a specific gender

At the end of the novel, Orlando finishes the poem “The Oak Tree,” “completed only in the twentieth century when he/she has experienced an androgynous ideal through marriage [to Shelmerdine] in which Orlando escapes from the prison of gender” (Bhaat and Pareek 6). There is a balance between the two since they are both non-conforming. Woolf shows that like clothing, gender is a construct that can be broken or ignored. Orlando enjoys expression of gender and sexuality through fluidity and consistent