‘The Courtship of Mr. Lyon’: The Logic of the Same and Différance
Résumé
Angela Carter chooses fairy tales, the genre par excellence of iteration (re-telling) for her game of replication (re-writing) in The Bloody Chamber collection, placing issues of repetition and difference, same and other at the core of her enterprise. Carter’s strategies of imitation and otherness in "The Courtship of Mr Lyon” are first examined in the field of writing and genre as pitting the demands of Beaumont’s hypotext vs. what Cristine Bacchilega and Daniele Roemer term the pleasure economy of words. They are then explored in the field of discourse and gender, contrasting Beaumont’s replication of patriarchal structures with Carter’s pleasure economy of feminine Otherness.