Angela Carter's Lizzie Borden: A Retelling in the Present.

Stories organize and transmit human events and experiences into meaningful units and suggest an intricate relationship between the past, present and future. A story is a work of fiction that is usually written in prose, often in narrative form. Short stories are highly suggestive since they are restricted to a certain length and tend to be less complex than novels. They foster a sense of right and wrong in the reader and have the power to influence the complete personality of an individual. During the mid-twentieth century, Angela Carter (1940-92) emerged as a staunchly feminist writer who gave a voice to women who had traditionally been assigned a secondary position in the patriarchal society. Many of Carter's stories focus on female protagonists and their conflict with the patriarchal culture and ideologies. The present paper focuses on two stories of Carter: "The Fall River Axe Murders" and "Lizzie's Tiger." The story "The Fall River Axe Murders" highlights the historical figure of Lizzie Borden (1860-1927), who was charged with murdering her parents in 1892. Lizzie was a controversial figure, as the fact that she had committed the murders had not been proved, and since then people have speculated about the incident. The second story "Lizzie's Tiger" describes the earlier days of Lizzie's life. The story is a fictional piece and centres on a day when Lizzie was a child. The events portrayed in this story help the readers to correlate the younger Lizzie with the older one. The paper discusses Carter's use of historiographic metafiction in these stories as a tool for retelling Lizzie Borden's past. Through these stories the writer brings the character of Lizzie Borden back to life, and recreates the situations, the setting, and the surrounding milieu which influenced Lizzie and directed her choices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]