Shape-Shifting Tales. Michèle Roberts's Monstrous Women

Abstract

The book provides an analysis of the representation of women’s bodies and their monstrous metamorphoses in selected short stories by contemporary English writer Michèle Roberts. The author explores the relationship between traditional fairy tales such as the Grimm Brothers’ and Charles Perrault’s, the lives of female saints and Roberts’s counter-narratives, focussing on the analysis of images of sublimed fleshliness and of acts of monstrous violence on the body. The book takes into account relevant Women’s Studies criticism regarding the mother-daughter relationship, as Roberts’s stories question the role of mother figures in traditional fairy tales and hagiography and at the same time rework the concept of motherhood itself.