Document Type
Article
Abstract
[First paragraph]
Byatt's short fiction, from her first collection Sugar and Other Stories (1987) to Elementals (1998) is marked by a continuous preoccupation with the body: the body as the product of social signifying practices, the body as the site of desires, fears, and anxieties, the body as the source of experience, the body as creator and created. In brief, the body is treated as the centre of existence, consciousness and identity. Yet, these are constantly called into doubt in Byatt's stories, which depict heroines trapped between asserting their identity and submitting to cultural dictates of beauty and behavior. In order to cope with this conflict, they pursue strategies that point beyond the normal context of their lives. The central aim of this paper is to explore these strategies and to demonstrate how Byatt uses the fantastic as a means of confronting cultural practices of body formation. For this purpose I shall first address the nexus between fact and fantasy in Byatt's short fiction and then explore individual instances of fantastic transgression in the stories.
Repository Citation
Coelsch-Foisner, Sabine. "A Body of Her Own: Cultural Constructions of the Female Body in A.S. Byatt's Strange Stories." Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture vol. 3, no. 4, 2003, pp. 1. https://digitalcommons.odu.edu/reconstruction/vol3/iss4/4
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