Special Issue on "Angela Carter and the Literary Märchen"
Guest Editors: Cristina Bacchilega and Danielle M. Roemer
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Preface to the Special Issue on "Angela Carter and the Literary Märchen"
Cristina Bacchilega and Danielle M. Roemer
ARTICLES
Jacques Barchilon
This brief essay concerns the epistolary relationship between Jacques Barchilon and Angela Carter. She was a good translator of Charles Perrault as well as a most imaginative and witty/whimsical modern adaptor of the French storyteller's texts. Her collection of stories, The Bloody Chamber, according to Barchilon, is probably Carter's "master" book, with Salman Rushdie concurring in this opinion. A few quotations from Carter's letters to Barchilon attest to her critical judgment as well as to her brave battle against the cancer that prematurely ended her life.
Angela Carter and the Literary Märchen: A Review Essay
Stephen Benson
The relation between Angela Carter and the fairy tale has attracted an ever-increasing number of writers, each seeking to account for the nature of the relation, its various aspects, and its distinct contemporaneity. Beginning with a survey of general comments and reactions, this review essay is organized around three broad areas: intertextuality, both as a writerly strategy central to The Bloody Chamber, and, as practiced by Carter, as a particularly feminist mode of textual practice; pornography, including the connection between The Bloody Chamber and The Sadeian Woman, and the possible contextualization of Carter's fairy-tale narratives within the pornography debates of the late 1970s and 1980s; and finally, the more general question of Carter's attitude to the fairy tale as a literary descendant of the folktale, and to the notion of the anonymous oral narrator.
Lorna Sage
This essay describes the cerebral pleasure and liberation Angela Carter found in the fairy tale, and its transformational effect on her oeuvre, by drawing a comparison (as she did) with the form's significance for Italo Calvino. Carter's Bloody Chamber tales were written while she was re-reading Sade, and they are read here in that light, as a cruelly self-conscious anatomy of the spell cast on women, including women writers, by the enchantment of passivity. Fairy tales have served this bad magic, but (Carter finds) they can help break the spell. They illuminate a whole English literary landscape, which becomes readable and rewritable in new ways.
The Woman in Process in Angela Carter's "The Bloody Chamber"
Kathleen E. B. Manley
Some readers of Angela Carter's "The Bloody Chamber" have seen its narrator-protagonist as a passive young woman who makes little attempt to avoid her apparent fate. Several features of the text, however, suggest that the protagonist is rather a woman in process, a person who oscillates between passivity and action. The features that suggest a woman in process are Carter's engagement with ideas also appearing in Susan Gubar's essay on Isak Dinesen's short story "The Blank Page"; Carter's use of mirrors to show the protagonist's emerging sense of subjectivity; and references to Richard Wagner's opera Tristan and Isolde. In addition, the protagonist's comments at the end of the story indicate that she continues to be a woman in process, relating her story as an attempt to expiate her shame.
Initiation and Disobedience: Liminal Experience in Angela Carter's "The Bloody Chamber"
Cheryl Renfroe
This essay examines the different levels and meanings of liminal experience in Angela Carter's "The Bloody Chamber." Framed by an anthropological understanding of "rites of passage," the analysis focuses on similarities between the traditional misogynistic take on the Bluebeard heroine's motivations and dominant negative interpretations of the disobedience of Eve in the biblical story of the fall. The result of Carter's vindication of Bluebeard's wife marks the possibility for sympathetic identification with Eve through an individual reader's "initiation" into new ways of seeing the disobedience of women.
The Contextualization of the Marquis in Angela Carter's "The Bloody Chamber"
Danielle M. Roemer
As a tale teller, Angela Carter recognizes that indeed no story is ever the whole story. This essay explores the metonymic capacity of allusion in Carter's tale "The Bloody Chamber," her contribution to the oral/literary repertoire of "Bluebeard" stories. Acknowledging the tendency of previous tellers to depict the "Bluebeard" antagonist as an Oriental despot, the essay focuses for the most part on her references to Europe's other: the legendary East of mystery, luxury, and barbarity. When the status of Carter's Marquis is considered within an alluded-to gallery of "Oriental" tyrants, the Marquis becomes associated with obsessive desire but also with the monologic, authoritarian processing of experience in terms of a "mythical" core of meaning. Allusion, in all its associative adventurings, intervenes in such centripetalism.
The Logic of the Same and Différance: "The Courtship of Mr Lyon"
Anny Crunelle-Vanrigh
By re-writing popular fairy tales, a genre already based on retelling, Angela Carter places repetition and difference at the core of her writing in The Bloody Chamber. Inscribed within the frame of feminism, texts like "The Courtship of Mr Lyon," "The Tiger's Bride," and "Peter and the Wolf" also consider the question of sexual, not just textual difference. With specific reference to "Courtship," this essay examines the tension between repetition and difference within several frameworks: as imitation and variation from a narratological viewpoint, as différance from a deconstructive perspective, and as the dialectic of Same and Other from a feminist stance.
Teaching Improprieties: The Bloody Chamber and the Reverent Classroom
Elise Bruhl and Michael Gamer
This essay outlines several of the difficulties that Carter's short fiction presents in the classroom, and locates them in Carter's narrative practice and in her determination to stage conflicts between multiple ideological positions within single tales. In attempting to answer the question of why The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories produces such varied and visceral responses in a variety of classroom settings, we examine several of the book's recurring themes and strategies, and link them to various student responses. The essay then proposes that these moments of student discomfort or hostility often provide instructive starting points for improving student writing and critical thinking, and outlines a number of strategies for instructors regarding how to accomplish these goals.
Crossing Boundaries: Angela Carter's Fairy Tales for Children
Jack Zipes
Angela Carter published two fairy tales for children in 1970: "Miss Z, the Dark Young Lady" and "The Donkey Prince." Both stories have been neglected by critics, and yet they are highly significant because they laid the groundwork for Carter's future work and reveal some of her basic concepts with regard to the revisionist fairy-tale tradition. This essay summarizes and analyzes these tales in light of "cross writing" in children's literature and Carter's tendency to cross boundaries in her own writing.
The Hoffman(n) Effect and the Sleeping Prince: Fairy Tales in Angela Carter's The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman
Kai Mikkonen
This article explores three narrative devices that affect the reading of fairy tales in Carter's novel: the treatment of characters as figures of speech; the narrator's unreliability and doubling into a "narrating" and "experiencing" self; and polygenetic intertextuality, or the multiplication of textual allusions within single units. These devices enable critical and parodic readings of time, gender, and desire in the quest narrative tradition of the German literary Märchen, as the article shows by examining the novel's relation to E.T.A. Hoffmann's tales and the Grimms' "Sleeping Beauty."
Desire and the Female Grotesque in Angela Carter's "Peter and the Wolf"
Betty Moss
This essay contends that Angela Carter's wonder tale "Peter and the Wolf" participates in the aesthetic of the grotesque with its recounting of Peter's encounters with his female cousin, who has been raised by wolves, and that the story inflects the grotesque in a specifically feminine and feminist way, maximizing its potential as an instrument of social and personal transformation. In Carter's "Peter and the Wolf," the female grotesque, as a representation of otherness or difference, profoundly confuses Peter, ultimately propelling him, and the story, into the potential of an other desire, a repudiation of his community's value system. Preceding this discussion is a foundational account of relevant matters: Carter's insistence on the need for re-visioning; her feminist position regarding desire and sexuality; her critical regard for the tale as genre; and an integration of Mikhail Bakhtin's and Hélène Cixous's theories.
Andrew Borden's Little Girl: Fairy Tale Fragments in Angela Carter's "The Fall River Axe Murders" and "Lizzie's Tiger"
Janet L. Langlois
Although Angela Carter ostensibly left behind the fairy tales of The Bloody Chamber for other narrative forms in her later works, she uses fairy-tale fragments in her two stories about Lizzie Borden--the woman who may or may not have killed her father and step-mother in Fall River, Massachusetts in 1892--to intricately explore a daughter's drive to parricide and to meditate on shifting narrative forms. For their intertextual force, the two published versions of "The Fall River Axe Murders" draw particularly on Carter's rewrites of "Little Red Riding Hood," while "Lizzie's Tiger" (in American Ghosts & Old World Wonders) draws on "Hansel and Gretel" and Carter's "The Tiger's Bride," a version of "Beauty and the Beast." Space theory and issues of gender and narrative production underlie this analysis.
In the Eye of the Fairy Tale: Corinna Sargood and David Wheatley Talk about Working with Angela Carter
Cristina Bacchilega
Corinna Sargood and David Wheatley worked with Carter intensively on image-centered adaptations of her work: Sargood illustrated the two Virago books of fairy tales edited by Carter; and Wheatley directed the film The Magic Toyshop, adapted from Carter's 1967 novel. Both interviews focus on the process of collaboration between the writer and the illustrator or director; Sargood's and Wheatley's understanding of and involvement with fairy tales, independent of Carter; and these visual artists' fascination with Carter's work as well as their knowledge of Carter's "luggage" of images. In this collage of inter-views, Kate Webb's observations contribute to place Carter's fascination with film in a larger context of image and word re-production.
TEXTS
Robert Coover
Coover introduces excerpts from a work in progress with an exploration of the tale as fictional landscape or vocabulary that he and Angela Carter shared.
Ballerina: The Belled Girl Sends a Tape to an Impresario
Marina Warner
The author prefaces her short story with a reflection on the impact that Angela Carter and fairy tales have had on Warner's fiction.
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