Bodies, Masks and Biopolitics: Clothing as “Second Skin” and Skin as “First Clothing” in “The Tiger’s Bride”

Abstract

This essay aims at analysing the contemporary revision of the fairy tale Beauty and the Beast re-told by Angela Carter in “The Tiger’s Bride.” In my critical approach I will intertwine two distinct theoretical strands: one focused on the concept of ‘skin’ and its role as idiom of personhood and identity and the other focused on the notion of the dressed/undressed body, its political power and the manner in which clothing acts as a form of embodiment. I will be focusing on the idea of both body/skin and the dressed body as telling traces of the cultural negotiations of identity and difference by analysing the transformation of Beauty into an animal and the figure of The Beast, as a strange being in a dimension between human and animal. It is precisely the movement of these bodies- naked, clothed and masked- in a liminal zone, an area of exclusion, that makes them the powerful destroyers of the rules of normalcy and allows them to deconstruct the normative perspectives of biopolitics, defined by Michel Foucault as the extension of state control over both the physical and political bodies of a population.