Little Red Riding Hood” and Angela Carter’S “The Company of Wolves” 117

Metamorphoses in and between Charles Perrault’s “Little Red Riding Hood” and Angela Carter’s “The Company of Wolves” 117 Feminist Studies in English Literature Vol.20, No. 1 (2012) Metamorphoses in and between Charles Perrault’s “Little Red Riding Hood” and Angela Carter’s “The Company of Wolves” Sun-Jin Lee (Pusan National University) I. From Perrault to Carter Metamorphosis, with its stress upon the instability of natural forms, plays a crucial part in fairy tales. Men transforming into women, children changing into birds or beasts, animals interchanging with plants, and magical shifts of shape, size, or color, have constituted one of the primary pleasures of the genre. Fairy tales are filled with characters undergoing metamorphosis either by curses or by their own magical power. The Beast and the Frog Prince are men transformed into animals by curses. Cinderella in a sense is metamorphosed with the help of the godmother, who also metamorphoses a pumpkin and rats into a coach and coachmen, respectively. The queen in “Snow White” has a magic power to transform herself into an old woman. The Little Mermaid asks a witch to transform her into a human girl at the cost of her voice. The 118 Sun-Jin Lee genre itself is also susceptible to changes. The fact that the fairy tale as a genre started as a literary adaptation of wonder folklore orally circulated in peasant communities implies considerable transformations during the process of transcriptions and adaptations.1 Angela Carter’s “The Company of Wolves,” a retelling of Charles Perrault’s “Little Red Riding Hood,” not only participates in the ever-shifting history of the fairy tale genre itself but also employs metamorphosis as an important motif in her recharacterization of the two main characters of “Little Red Riding Hood.” Based on the assumption that textual metamorphosis informs thematic metamorphosis, this essay aims at examining the metamorphoses occurring in and between Carter’s story and Perrault’s version and the transformational impact of her retelling on Perrault’s sexual and gender ideologies. Since its beginning as a warning tale about attacks by animals as well as by human predators in peasant communities during the late Middle Ages (Zipes, “Texts and Contexts” 339), “Little Red Riding Hood” has gone through numerous metamorphoses. In the 1690s’ France, where aristocratic and bourgeois women and men gathered at salons and played a parlor game in which they demonstrated their eloquence, wit, and individuality by rewriting oral folk tales into tales about manners and social mores, Perrault transformed oral folk tales of “Little Red Riding Hood” into a literary tale catering to the tastes of a largely female audience of the upper class (Zipes, “Fairy 1 According to Jack Zipes, the aristocratic or upper-class writers who adapted the oral wonder tales altered motifs and topoi of the oral tradition to mirror their interests (“Fairy Tales” 176). Metamorphoses in and between Charles Perrault’s “Little Red Riding Hood” and Angela Carter’s “The Company of Wolves” 119 Tales” 176-77).2 As the first literary version of “Little Red Riding Hood,” Perrault’s story has enjoyed its canonical status for three centuries since it began to be translated into many different languages, including English in the eighteenth century, and constantly reprinted and circulated in chapbooks, broadsheets, and collections of children’s tales in Europe and America (Zipes, “Texts and Contexts” 341). Perrault’s tale, however, was not free from adaptations and alterations. 3 Among the most experimental, rebellious retellings of “Little Red Riding Hood” that became conspicuous after 1945 is Carter’s version of 1979, “The Company of 2 It is also worth noting that women also wrote literary fairy tales -- the English translation of the French term contes de fees, which refers to narratives with fairies as characters (Roemer and Bacchilega 8) -- at that time. Women writers including Marie-Catherine d’Aulnoy, Catherine Bernard, and Marie-Jeanne Lhéritier wrote and published collections of fairy tales. Their contes were “serious commentaries on court life and cultural struggles . in Versailles and Paris” (Zipes, Why Fairy Tales Stick 68). Perrault’s fairy tales were different from those by his female contemporaries in their morals. 3 One of its nineteenth-century retellings is the Brothers Grimm version, in which they eliminated Perrault’s sexual innuendos and added a happy ending in which the girl is saved from the wolf by a hunter so that the tale might “ideologically satisfy the morals and ethics of the emerging bourgeoisie in the 19th century” (Zipes, Trials and Tribulations 37). As the fairy tale genre became more tuned for children readers, “Little Red Riding Hood” became more sanitized in ways that its sexual undertones and violence were removed. According to Zipes, this sanitization of the tale continued up until the early twentieth century. Various prose and dramatic adaptations of Perrault’s version emphasized “obedience” as the central moral of the tale: “if she were not gullible and disobedient, she could prevent the rapacious wolf from carrying out his designs” (Zipes, Trials and Tribulations 39). 120 Sun-Jin Lee Wolves.” 4 Carter’s tale provides a radical feminist perspective on gender relations and female sexuality in an elaborate and ornate Gothic style. “The Company of Wolves,” included in The Bloody Chamber (1979), the collection of Carter’s rewritings of classic fairy tales such as “Bluebeard” and “Beauty and the Beast,” is part of Carter’s “demythologizing business” (“Notes” 70) to investigate and debunk what she calls “the mythic versions of women” in The Sadeian Woman, the essay collection which she had been working on along with The Bloody Chamber (5). For Carter, “the mythic versions of women” ranging from “the myth of the redeeming purity of the virgin to that of the healing, reconciling mother” are “consolatory nonsenses” that blind women’s real conditions and give them “emotional satisfaction” (The Sadeian Woman 5). The reason why Carter reworks classical fairy tales is that many heroines of classic fairy tales belong to these 4 Discussing the history of the adaptations and revisions of “Little Red Riding Hood” in The Trials and Tribulations of Little Red Riding Hood, Zipes states that the radical retellings of the tale from 1945 to 1993 are based on the critical ideas of “[pointing to] the necessity for changing our social views of sexuality and domination” (58). He divides the radical Riding Hood tales into three major currents: First, many narratives portray Little Red Riding Hood coming into her own, developing a sense of independence without help from males. Second, certain tales and poems seek to rehabilitate the wolf. Third, there are stories that are unusual aesthetic experiments, debunking traditional narrative forms and seeking to free readers and listeners so that they can question the conventional cultural patterns. All of these radical currents overlap or merge to form critical statements about the way we view sexuality on the basis of the Riding Hood pattern (59). Metamorphoses in and between Charles Perrault’s “Little Red Riding Hood” and Angela Carter’s “The Company of Wolves” 121 “mythic versions of women.” Carter’s demythologization of the fairy tale is based upon her conception of the fairy tale as a double-edged sword: it has played a role in producing gender stereotypes, such as passive female victims and active male aggressors or rescuers, and ideologically sustaining the asymmetries of power between the sexes; however, it also has potential to subversive appropriation deriving from its mutability. In her introduction to The Virago Book of Fairy Tales (1991), Carter characterizes the fairy tale as “the great mass of infinitely various . stories with no known originators that can be remade again and again by every person who tells them, the perennially refreshed entertainment of the poor” (ix). It is this flexibility of the fairy tale that Carter takes advantage of for her project to challenge the cultural inscription of femininity into weakness, chastity, and submissiveness and to reclaim repressed female sexual agency. “The Company of Wolves” thus marks a shift in the characterization of Carter’s heroines from “coded mannequins” who are “exploited, mutilated, and victimized,” as shown in her earlier works, such as Shadow Dance (1966), The Magic Toyshop (1967), and Love (1971), to the figure of the triumphant “bird woman” -- embodied by Fevvers, the fantastic winged protagonist of Nights at the Circus (1984) (Palmer 180) -- who defies the traps of socially sanctioned femininity and the objectifying male gaze and acts upon her reclaimed agency. Furthermore, this story marks Carter’s critical intervention into the tension between victimization and agency within feminist discourses through her provocative study of pornography and the politics of female sexual selfhood. In The 122 Sun-Jin Lee Sadeian Woman, Carter proposes that pornography can be used “as a critique of current relations between the sexes” by a “moral pornographer” whose “business would be the total demystification of the flesh and the subsequent revelation, through the infinite modulations of the sexual act, of the real relations of man and his kind” (19-20).5 Although debates surrounding issues of victimization and female agency became more visible as postfeminist discourse set up a binarized distinction between “victim feminism” and “power feminism” in the mid-1990s, 6 Carter’s story problematizes this 5 Carter’s argument needs to be understood in the context of the pornography debates among feminists in the late 1970s and 1980s. Carter’s falls in line with a libertarianism that goes against the anti-pornography campaigns for the censorship of pornographic material and the legislation of sexual behavior. Anti-pornography scholars (generally labeled as second wave feminists), such as Andrea Dworkin and Katherine MacKinnon, accused pornography of encoding “the ideology of male domination[, which] posits that men are superior to women by virtue of their penises .

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