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Ghent University Faculty of Arts and Philosophy the Use of Faeries And Ghent University Faculty of Arts and Philosophy The Use of Faeries and Fairy Tales in Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber and Susanna Clarke’s The Ladies of Grace Adieu Supervisor: Paper submitted in partial fulfilment of the Prof. Dr. Ingo Berensmeyer requirements for the degree of “Master in de Taal- en Letterkunde: Engels - Nederlands” by Elien De Swaef 2008 De Swaef 2 Table of Contents 1. Introduction 3 2. Faeries and Fairy Tales 7 2.1. Fairy Tales 10 2.2. Faeries 14 3. The Dangers of Marriage and the Importance of Social Connections 19 3.1. “The Bloody Chamber”: Married to Bluebeard 20 3.2. “On Lickerish Hill”: Spinning Golden Tales 31 4. Strong, Independent Women 39 4.1. Women, Wolves and Full Moons 40 4.2. Flowers and Whores 50 4.3. Bewitching Women and Austen heroines 55 5. Predatory Men and Gentle Beasts 61 5.1. Faeries: Good and Evil as a Matter of Perception 62 5.2. Beasts: Looking past Appearances 73 6. Victory of the Underdog 76 6.1. “Puss-in-Boots”: from Rags to Riches in three Simple Tricks 77 6.2. How to Bring the Rich and Famous down a Peg 82 7. Conclusion 85 Works Cited 87 De Swaef 3 The Use of Faeries and Fairy Tales in Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber and Susanna Clarke’s The Ladies of Grace Adieu 1. Introduction Storytelling has always been inherent to mankind. Telling fairy tales was a way to pass the time, but also a way to teach, to put across certain values, to maintain hope during hard times. These tales have been with us through the centuries and have still a strong pull on us today. They have been the inspiration of many authors like Boccaccio, Shakespeare, Voltaire, Rousseau, Goethe …Two of such present-day English authors are Angela Carter and Susanna Clarke. Their works, The Bloody Chamber and The Ladies of Grace Adieu, seem to have a lot in common. Clarke’s book was even called “an unholy alliance of Austen and Angela Carter” by the Daily Mail (qtd. in Clarke back cover). Both of them focus on the female role in their stories. By diverting from the conventional place of women in “the old tales and legends of the patriarchal world”, as Joyce Carol Oates who is quoted on the back cover of The Bloody Chamber puts it, they make their readers think about women’s place in society, then and now. This paper will be discussing the way in which these two writers use familiar tales to create new stories and new messages, and just how much they are alike. But first, I will give a little background information on both authors and the works in question. Angela Carter was born Angela Olive Stalker in 1940 in Eastbourne. Due to the war, she was evacuated to Yorkshire where she spent her childhood with her maternal grandmother. This working-class, domineering, matriarchal, feminist granny was not the only influence on the young Angela Carter. “All of her immediate female relatives were strong women of striking candor and pragmatism” (Vandermeer). At age nineteen, Carter De Swaef 4 started working as a journalist for the Croydon Advertiser, just like her father. Shortly after, she met Paul Carter, who she would marry in 1960. Thanks to her mother, she had developed a great taste for literature. Therefore it is not surprising that she went to study English Literature at the University of Bristol. She chose to focus her study on medieval literature, which was at the time “definitely uncanonical” (Warner xiii). The list of English authors who influenced Carter’s work is immense, going from Chaucer and Shakespeare to Blake, Carroll and Woolf. Writing was her life. Once she started writing fiction in 1966, she published a book almost every year. In 1969, she won the Somerset Maugham Award for her novel Several Perceptions. She used the five hundred pound prize to run away from her husband to Japan, where she stayed for two years. Three years after leaving him, Carter finally got the divorce she wanted. She travelled around the world, from the States to Asia and then back to Europe. Angela Carter finally settled down again in 1977 when she married Mark Pearce. She became a mother when she was in her forties. She died of cancer at the early age of 51. Her friend Marina Warner attests for her great strength in the Introduction she wrote for Angela Carter’s The Second Virago Book of Fairy Tales: “Her [Carter’s] own heroic optimism never failed her – like the spirited heroine of one of her tales, she was resourceful and brave and even funny during the illness which brought about her death. Few writers possess the best qualities of their work; she did, in spades” (xii). Warner was not the only author to speak highly of her. Salman Rushdie wrote: “With Angela’s death English literature has lost its high sorceress, its benevolent witch queen, a burlesque artist of genius and antic grace” (qtd. in Warner xii). It is obvious that Angela Carter would be greatly missed. She left behind a diverse array of writings including articles written for The Guardian, The Independent and New Statesman, a few non- fictional works, several collections of fairy tales and a whole host of fiction, including not just short fiction and novels but also poetry and children’s books. She adapted some of her De Swaef 5 short stories for radio and she was closely involved in creating the film adaptation of The Magic Toyshop and the film The Company of Wolves, which was based on the werewolf stories in The Bloody Chamber. (“Angela Carter”) The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories was first published in 1979 and received the Cheltenham Festival Literary Prize. Most of the short stories in this collection had previously appeared in magazines or on the radio. Carter probably got her inspiration for these tales when she translated Perrault’s fairy tales in 1977, seeing that most of her short tales are based on Perrault’s version of the fairy tale. Marina Warner describes this work in her Introduction to The Second Virago Book of Fairy Tales as “the dazzling, erotic variations on Perrault’s Mother Goose Tales and other familiar stories in The Bloody Chamber – where she lifted Beauty and Red Riding Hood and Bluebeard’s last wife out of the pastel nursery into the labyrinth of female desire” (ix). Carter herself did not like the term ‘versions’, though her stories clearly are the rewritings of well-known fairy tales. She says in an interview: “My intention was not to do ‘versions’ or, as the American edition of the book said, horribly, "adult" fairy tales, but to extract the latent content from the traditional stories” (Vandermeer). Indeed, much of the matriarchal visions and ideology in fairy tales must have been left out when they were first written down by male scribes, who adapted these oral tales to their own taste. Yet, some traces of female strength and independence still remains. Zipes notices that “the early writers of fairy tales placed the power of metamorphosis in the hands of women – the redoubtable fairies” (Dreams 13). And even though the literary fairy tales, like Perrault’s, were much changed, the heart of the story remains unaltered. Carter used the possibilities present in the classic fairy tales to bring out new meanings and raise questions about the position of women and their relationships with men. She starts her book with a rewriting of “Bluebeard”, followed by two Beauty-and-the-Beast-stories. Next is “Puss-in-Boots”, the only tale in this book that De Swaef 6 kept its original fairy tale title. “The Erl-King” is the only narrative that does not directly stem from a fairy tale. It is inspired by a poem from William Blake, dealing with the folkloric belief in the fairy king. “The Snow Child” invokes by using certain well-known images the story of “Snow White”, which makes the rape of the wished for Snow Child that is narrated in this tale even more disturbing. “The Lady of the House of Love” is a vampire story that, in a way similar to the previous tale, calls to mind “Sleeping Beauty” not by its plot line, but by using certain images. Carter ends her book with three stories dealing with the Little Red Riding Hood material and mixing these elements with the folkloric belief in werewolves. So, only the first four narratives stay rather close to the plot of the fairy tale on which they were based. For the rest of her book, Angela Carter creates new plot lines in which she playfully mixes familiar fairy tale elements with other folkloric material or in which she opposes different versions of the same fairy tale. Susanna Clarke was born in 1959 in Nottingham. She had no literary education like Carter had, but studied philosophy, politics and economics. After working eight years in publishing and two years teaching English abroad, she started working on Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell, her main and best-known work. Since she had no experience whatsoever, she decided that a formal education in fiction writing might be useful. After applying to the Arvon Foundation, a charity for writers in Britain, she received an intensified education during a five day course with Colin Greenland and Geoff Ryman. During the ten years that she worked on her novel, she published several short stories. These were gathered in 2006 in the collection The Ladies of Grace Adieu and Other Stories.
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