A FEMINIST READING OF SALMAN RUSHDIE’S USE OF BEAUTY AND THE BEAST MOTIF IN 'SHAME' (Pages 16-23) by Ms. Mridusmita Boro in THE ENGLISH RESEARCH EXPRESS / ISSN:2321-1164 (Online); 2347-2642 (Print)

Over the years patriarchal gender roles have been applied to most of the children’s fairy tales. It glamorizes female helplessness, beauty and submission; self-aware and non- conformist women are depicted as unkindly. They invariably have to pay for their rebellion by being either ostracized or killed. This creates an image of a patriarchal man who controls and manipulates his ways into a woman’s life. Women centered responses to fairytales focuses on the presence of women in fairytale scholarship and in particular their participation in the editing of folktale and fairytale anthologies. This feminist agenda led to an examination of editorial policies that contribute to perpetrating sexist and misogynist stereotypes of women. The central plotline of Shame involves the literal transformation of the beautiful Sufiya Zenobia Hyder into a beast who hypnotizes and seduces young men, then rips off their heads with superhuman strength. Her resistance to patriarchy comes in the form of retardation being the driving force which makes her able to metamorphose into a beast. This paper explores the extent to which Salman Rushdie’s interpretation of The Beauty and the Beast fairy tale motif can be treated as a postmodern feminist subversion of the master narrative of Euro- American andocentric culture. Keywords: Feminism, folktale, shame, beauty and the beast.