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Advances in Linguistics Research
ISSN Print:2707-2622
ISSN Online:2707-2630
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Becoming and Lines of Flight: Angela Carter’s Rewriting of the “Sleeping Beauty” Narrative in The Lady of the House of Love
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Information:
Shandong University of Science and Technology, Qingdao, China
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Keywords:
Angela Carter; The Lady of the House of Love; Sleeping Beauty; Becoming; Line of Flight
- Abstract: Angela Carter’s The Lady of the House of Love rewrites the “Sleeping Beauty” pattern by transforming its central functions—female suspension, enclosure, masculine intervention, awakening, and redemptive closure—into mechanisms that unsettle rather than stabilize feminine identity. Drawing selectively on Deleuze and Guattari’s concepts of becoming and line of flight, this article argues that Carter’s tale does not simply reverse familiar fairy-tale roles but reworks the narrative mechanism through which feminine identity and closure are produced. The Countess is not a passive princess awaiting rescue, nor simply an empowered vampire, but an unstable figure suspended among victim, predator, aristocratic lady, desiring woman, and living corpse. Her castle externalizes this suspended becoming as a Gothic space of decay, repetition, and undead duration rather than a protective site of preservation. The soldier’s arrival further unsettles the rescue plot: his kiss is not a heroic or erotic act that restores the heroine to life, but a contingent act of care that interrupts the vampiric and fairytale script without producing romantic resolution. The Countess’s death and the afterlife of the rose, therefore, mark a tragic break in the inherited pattern, opening onto what may be read as a fragile line of flight rather than a completed liberation. Carter’s rewriting reveals fairy-tale salvation itself as a narrative mechanism that fixes feminine identity in passivity and completion. Her tale leaves behind an unresolved remainder—a fragile, troubling residue—through which the “Sleeping Beauty” pattern becomes open to new and disturbing meanings.
- DOI: 10.35534/lin.0802021 (registering DOI)
- Cite: Li, H. L. (2026). Becoming and Lines of Flight: Angela Carter’s Rewriting of the “Sleeping Beauty” Narrative in The Lady of the House of Love. Advances in Linguistics Research, 8(2), 251-257.
