Re-projecting the princess: linguistic and narrative strategies in selected works by Sylvia Fraser

This thesis analyzes Sylvia Fraser's modern re-projections of the fairy-tale princess of folktales and popular culture. This re- projection is accomplished in two of her texts; her novel, Pandora, and her autobiography, My Father's House: A Memoir of Incest and of Healing. In these texts, Fraser establishes the fairy-tale princess as an idealized image of desired feminine sexuality in both social and textual environments. The Princess, the embodiment of virginity and docility, represents one aspect of a three-fold archetypal paradigm of the feminine, based on polarized sexual and expressive concepts of female sexuality and identity. The counterparts of the Princess are the Mother and the Whore. Julia Kristeva's research on linguistics and the female presence within language and text, and Luce Irigaray's studies on female sexuality, provide a means by which we can understand how Fraser attempts to first deconstruct, and then to re-project a more appropriate account of female sexuality and identity. Fraser's work shows that what we revere as perfect femininity is often a negation or distortion of female intellectual and sexual energies. In fact, this "perfect femininity," embodied by the fairy-tale princess in popular culture, is shown to be a mask for sexual exploitation and abuse within a patriarchal and capitalistic culture.