Angela Carter

Carter, Angela (1940–92), British fiction writer whose most acclaimed work, The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories (1979), rewrites classic fairy tales for adults in a woman‐centred and erotically charged way.

Born in London, Carter worked as a journalist, studied medieval literature in Bristol, and in her late twenties became an award‐winning novelist. After ending her first marriage, she lived in Japan, where her 1960s radicalism became informed by a strong feminist consciousness. Carter also taught in the United States and travelled to Australia, but remained rooted in a south London sensibility fortified by her grandmother's Yorkshire spirit. At the age of 51 and at the height of her creative powers, she died of lung cancer, survived by her second husband and young son. She published four collections of short stories, nine novels (Shadow Dance was her first in 1966 and Wise Children her last in 1991), and three works of non‐fiction (The Sadeian Woman in 1979; Nothing Sacred, revised in 1992; and Expletives Deleted in 1992); she edited two collections of fairy tales and wrote two screenplays, a number of radio plays, and even an opera, Lulu, which was produced posthumously; she continued throughout her life to write for New Society and other magazines, including Vogue, about literature, fashion, recipes, films, and other aspects of everyday culture.

Strongly enmeshed in the English medieval and Gothic narrative traditions, Carter was also affected by experimentation with the visual imagination (from Blake to the surrealist poets and, significantly, fairy‐tale and science‐fiction films). She explicitly aligned herself with magic realism and post‐colonial writers whose concerns necessarily involve transforming both fictional forms and political awareness. Feminist critics have given mixed reviews to her work, but she perceived herself as a socialist feminist and strongly argued for rejecting the identification of women with innocent victims, focusing instead on an effort to transform psychosexual politics by exploring the wide‐ranging desires and strategies of women. A provocative, linguistically dazzling, and intellectually daring writer, she gained extraordinary fame after her death (even in the United Kingdom where the literary establishment had acknowledged her bravura but not warmed to her unsettling tricks) and her magic has been celebrated by fellow fiction‐makers Margaret Atwood, Robert Coover, Salman Rushdie, and Marina Warner.

Carter's writing articulates a consistent and yet varied involvement with fairy tales. Her novels include recurring fairy‐tale themes or images: the Sleeping Beauty, especially in The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman; the two sisters in Wise Children; the damsel in the tower in Heroes and Villains; and everywhere it would seem the enchanting powers of the mirror and the large‐looming figure of Bluebeard. Building on the utopian structure and extreme vision of the fairy tale, her novel The Magic Toyshop (1967) is an early example of Carter's complex relationship to the fairy tale: Melanie is first lured by the mystifying image of the ‘princess‐to‐be‐married’; then, as a powerless orphan, she is oppressed by her Uncle Philip's autocratic and dehumanizing patriarchy; and finally she is transformed by the music‐filled and grittily passionate embrace of her acquired Irish family. The end of the novel represents Melanie and her young lover Finn facing, as if in the garden of Eden, a world of possibilities.

But the form of the tale itself paradoxically offers Carter more room for experimenting. Her fairy tales for children, ‘Miss Z, the Dark Young Lady’ and ‘The Donkey Prince’ (both published in 1970), and her translation of The Fairy Tales of Charles Perrault in 1977 show some of the tongue‐in‐cheek and reworking‐from‐the‐inside strategies that inform her 1979 collection. The Bloody Chamber's ten stories retell well‐known tales like ‘Bluebeard’ (‘The Bloody Chamber’), ‘Beauty and the Beast’ (‘The Courtship of Mr Lyon’ and ‘The Tiger's Bride’ explicitly, but thematically all ten), ‘Puss‐in‐Boots’ (her homonymous exuberantly ‘naughty’ text), ‘Snow White’ (‘The Snow Child’), ‘Sleeping Beauty’ (‘The Lady of the House of Love’), and ‘Little Red Riding Hood’ (‘The Werewolf’, ‘The Company of Wolves’, ‘Wolf‐Alice’). The fifth story in the collection, ‘The Erl‐King’, eerily explores the connection between romanticism and fairy tale more generally. Adopting a variety of narrative strategies (first‐person narration, reflective self‐perception of the protagonist, multiple tellings of one story, replotting to change the ending, updating and definitely dating the ‘once upon a time’ framework), Carter's stories conspire to transform the dreamlike imagery of fairy tales. She illustrates their misogynistic uses and exposes the dangerous appeal of their suggestiveness; and she simultaneously retraces, and gives substance to the courage and multiple desires of her heroines, who struggle in specific cultural and historical contexts. ‘The Bloody Chamber’, the first story in this collection and acclaimed by most critics as her richest and most provocative story, unflinchingly explores the young bride's collusion with Bluebeard's objectifying plot and also proposes a mother–daughter model of development based on conviction, search for knowledge, and integrity.

Like later tales, such as ‘Peter and the Wolf’ in Black Venus (1985) and ‘Ashputtle or The Mother's Ghost’ in American Ghosts and Old World Wonders (1993), The Bloody Chamber re‐envisions fairy tales in a proliferation of intertextual possibilities: remembering oral versions that talk back at the authoritative Perrault or Brothers Grimm texts; juxtaposing the pornographic with the mystic and the Gothic in an ironic mode; destabilizing interpretation by presenting versions that are to be read with and against each other; training readers in ‘intersensuality’, a curiosity for and awareness of all five senses; reappropriating storytelling, as the imaginative performance of options, for women; engaged in a productive dialogue with critics Jack Zipes and Marina Warner, themselves in turn tellers of the cultural history of the fairy tale.

When Carter revised the ‘Little Red Riding Hood’ tales into a screenplay for The Company of Wolves (directed by Neil Jordan in 1984), and then the novel The Magic Toyshop for the homonymous film (directed by David Wheatley in 1987), she continued to transform fairy‐tale images of women, historicize the genre itself, localize its images, and sensitize audiences to the limitations of ‘seeing is believing’, all the while exuberantly playing up to the visual possibilities of dream and magic tricks allowed by the cinematic apparatus.

The two volumes of fairy tales she edited (The Virago Book of Fairy Tales in 1990, retitled Old Wives' Fairy Tale Book in the American edition; and The Second Virago Book of Fairy Tales or Strange Things Sometimes Still Happen: Fairy Tales from around the World, published posthumously in 1993; both illustrated by her artist friend Corinna Sargood) constituted her final contribution to a women‐centred and culturally diversified approach to fairy tales. Defined as ‘the perennially refreshed entertainment of the poor’, fairy tales are here presented in terms of the ‘domestic arts’ and are exemplary of women's many different ‘strategies’ and ‘plots’, their ‘hard work’ and resourcefulness, never ‘their passive subordination’. As the ‘Brave, Bold, and Wilful’ meet the ‘Sillies’ and hear about the ‘Good Girls and Where It Gets Them’ (these are some of the headings under which Carter groups her tales), today's readers participate in an invigorating women's show of romance, bawdy jokes, defiant curiosity: the mundane and the magic intertwined to a sparkle.

Bibliography

• Bacchilega, Cristina, Postmodern Fairy Tales: Gender and Narrative Strategies (1997).
• ——and Roemer, Danielle (eds.), ‘Angela Carter and the Literary Märchen’, spec. issue of Marvels and Tales, 12.1 (1998).
• Grossman, Michele, ‘“Born to Bleed”: Myth, Pornography and Romance in Angela Carter's “The Bloody Chamber”’, Minnesota Review, 30/31 (1988).
• Jordan, Elaine, “‘Enthralment: Angela Carter's Speculative Fictions’”, in Linda Anderson (ed.), Plotting Change: Contemporary Women's Fiction (1990).
• Rushdie, Salman, Introduction to Burning Your Boats. The Collected Short Stories of Angela Carter (1995).
• Sage, Lorna (ed.), Flesh and the Mirror: Essays on the Art of Angela Carter (1994).
• Sheets, Robin Ann, ‘Pornography, Fairy Tales, and Feminism: Angela Carter's “The Bloody Chamber”’, Journal of the History of Sexuality, 1 (1991).
• Warner, Marina, Introduction to The Second Virago Book of Fairy Tales (1992).

— Cristina Bacchilega