Abstract:

For centuries, the body has stood at the very center of the body/mind dualism which associates men with the mind and women with the body. As a realm of estrangement, the body has been used to redefine the borders of womanhood by the patriarchy that is the reason why theorizing the body from a feminist philosophical approach has become one of the maverick proponents of contemporary feminist theory. As it is a fruitful source for the feminist scholars to reach knowledge about the subjectivity of the feminine body, in contemporary feminist theory, the body plays an important role. This study aims to propose a new reading of Giuseppe Pitré’s Catarina the Wise (1875), focusing on the comparative analysis of the tale with Jeanne Marie Le Prince De Beaumont’s Beauty and the Beast (1756) within the light of feminist perspectives of Foucault’s notion of “docile bodies.” The comparative reading of the tales intends to illuminate how the dominant ideology of traditional fairy tale culture, exemplified by Beauty and the Beast, shapes and transforms the female body therefore, identity into a docile body and how Catarina subverts the power relations and certain disciplinary practices of fairy tale culture through her resistant body. Catarina as an independent, bold, self-reliant, economically strong woman subverts the construction of the female body as a cultural archive in fairy tales which are coded plastic mannequins.

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