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. One of these tales, “Mr Simonelli and the Fairy Widower”, was shortlisted for the
World Fantasy Award of 2001. Further she received several awards for her greater work
Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell. (“Susanna Clarke”) Unlike Carter’s The Bloody
Chamber, only one of the short stories in The Ladies of Grace Adieu was actually based on De Swaef 7 an existing fairy tale, namely “On Lickerish Hill”. All of Clarke’s tales are a curious mix of historical facts and folklore. Two stories have a historical figure featuring as the protagonist of the tale. In The Duke of Wellington Misplaces His Horse, said Duke clashes with the inhabitants of Wall who, to punish him for his proud and conceited conduct, allow his horse to wonder into Faerie. In Antickes and Frets, Mary Queen of Scots tries to discover the secret of how to kill people with embroidery. All stories have a historical setting, usually somewhere in the nineteenth century, which gives a very realistic feel to the stories. This realistic depiction clashes rather harshly with the supernatural events that are narrated in the tales, which has an unsettling effect on the reader.
In my discussion of The Bloody Chamber and The Ladies of Grace Adieu I will group certain tales together according to a specific theme or motive. I will start with comparing a tale of Carter with one of Clarke’s in which the protagonist discovers that the man she married for wealth and position turns out to have violent and even murderous tendencies. Secondly, I will look into a number of stories featuring a strong heroine. In the following chapter I will examine the discrepancy between the two types of men in Carter’s fiction and to which extent these can also be found in Clarke’s work. And finally I will discuss the more humorous stories in these collections and consider to what extent they were inspired by comical folk tales. But before I can do all this, I will have to give a brief introduction on fairies and fairy tales in general.
2. Faeries and Fairy Tales
When you read The Bloody Chamber and The Ladies of Grace Adieu, you will notice a difference between these two books. Though both sets of stories deal with the fantastic, the inspiration for these stories is not quite the same. Angela Carter mostly based De Swaef 8 her tales on well-known fairy tales like “Bluebeard” and “Beauty and the Beast”, while
Clarke’s stories are “heavily dipped into the magic and wonder of the fairy tales of the
British Isles” (“The Ladies of Grace Adieu”). Fairy tales is meant literally here, as in tales about fairies. Only one of the stories in The Ladies of Grace Adieu follows the plot line of an existing fairy tale, namely of “Rumpelstiltskin”. The other stories, though they may still have the structure of a fairy tale, are rooted in fairy lore, which is not quite the same thing.
Accounts of fairy sightings and meetings with fairies were widespread in Britain. Actually, these types of tales, just as the fairy tales, were spread all over Europe, as Martin Koomen makes clear. But the stories are best preserved in rural areas where few people live, such as
Wales, Cornwall, Scotland and Ireland. Remarkable is that Koomen refers to these tales as fairy tales, too. Of course, it is rather difficult to distinguish between different types of folk tales, because there is no clear division between the different types of stories. They fade into one another. What makes a clear classification even more difficult is that fairy lore occurs in different types of folk tales. These stories of fairy sightings are indeed very hard to place, since they take place in a magical realm, just as the fairy tales; they deal with powerful, magical creatures that were believed to be real, like the myths; and they happen to existing people in the real world, as in the legends. I certainly would not call them myths. Myths are “stories that a particular culture believes to be true and that use the supernatural to interpret natural events and to explain the nature of the universe and humanity” (“Mythology”). Fairy stories do answer to this description, since the existence of fairies is often used to explain many natural occurrences. For instance, the bowing of a blade of grass was said to be a fairy walking on it. But they miss one crucial feature to be counted as myth. Though some types of fairies are indeed so powerful that they come close to gods, they have never been worshipped. And a defining characteristic of myths is that they are “linked to the spiritual or religious life of a community, endorsed by rulers or De Swaef 9
priests” (“Mythology” ch.2). “Once this link to the spiritual leadership of society is broken, they lose their mythological qualities and become folktales or fairy tales” (“Mythology” ch.2). Yet, I would not classify these stories as fairy tales either as Koomen does. I have two reasons for this. First of all, fairy tales have a specific structure, which was first thoroughly researched by Vladimir Propp. This structure is easy to recognize, and the stories about fairy sightings do not fulfil the requirements, though they do use certain elements also used in fairy tales, such as the magical number three. Secondly, the fairy lore is believed to be real, while even the people who first told fairy tales hundreds of years ago knew that these were mere stories. The words ‘Once upon a time, in a kingdom far, far away’ already signal to the audience that the story does not take place in the real world.
Further, it is always about fictional characters, while the fairy lore stories also happen to real people and usually to someone who is somehow connected to the person telling the story, like a neighbour, a distant relation, a friend of a friend…. Throughout history there are several accounts of sightings of fairies, even by famous writers such as Oscar Wilde and his family and Yeats. And exactly because they were believed to be real, I would rather call these stories legends. “A legend is a narrative of human actions that are perceived both by teller and listeners to take place within human history and to possess certain qualities that give the tale verisimilitude” (“Legend”). Now, the accounts of fairy sightings do not at first sight appear to fall under this category, since there are many supernatural occurrences in these narratives. But the description that Wikipedia gives of these folk tales states that legends are “defined by a highly flexible set of parameters, which may include miracles that are perceived as actually having happened” (“Legend”).
And if we look at the well-known Arthurian legends we see that these tales also include many supernatural occurrences and even mention fairies, the most famous ones being
Viviane, the Lady of the Lake who gave Excalibur to King Arthur, and Morgan le Fay. For De Swaef 10 the reasons mentioned above, I will refer to the stories that were the main inspiration for
The Ladies of Grace Adieu as fairy legends or, in case of more general information concerning fairies, as fairy lore. Now that I have made my distinction between different types of folk tales clear, I will give an introduction on fairy tales and fairy lore.
2.1. Fairy Tales
Fairy tales have existed for thousands of years and can be found all over the world.
Since only their literary forms survived, the history of the fairy tale is exceedingly difficult to trace. One thing that is certain is that all fairy tales from all over the world deal with the same basic motives in infinite variations. Schuurman states that “the occurrence of identical complexes of motives in European fairy tales does prove that they originated mostly from one source” (14 my translation). The oldest written fairy tale was found on a papyrus scroll in Egypt dating back to 1300 BC (Schuurman 14). Since then, many other fairy tales have been written down. But the moment these oral stories are written down, they change their nature. The oral character of fairy tales implies that they continuously changed. Every retelling of a fairy tale was different since the narrator adapted his story to the preferences and situation of his audience. Further, fairy tales were usually told by women. And not just at the fire place on a cold winter’s night as is popularly believed, but also during many tedious household chores like spinning and weaving, as Lily Clercx expounds (23). This explains why so many fairy tales feature a spinning wheel as one of the main attributes of the story. But once they were written down, the fairy tales were adapted to the preferences of the scribes. “And since women in most cases were not allowed to be scribes, the tales were scripted according to male dictates or fantasies”
(Zipes Dreams 7). When narratives are written down, they become a fixed text which is no longer so easily changed. These written versions only change when one literary writer decides to adapt the story for his own purposes. Jack Zipes claims that “once the folk tale De Swaef 11 began to be interpreted and transmitted through literary texts its original ideology and narrative perspective were diminished, lost or replaced” (Breaking the Magic Spell 12).
Yet Schuurman discovers that “no matter how many metamorphoses a fairy tale has been through, no matter how much it may have been altered by the lively participation of the persons interested, there can be found in many variants a sacrosanct core which was respected by all and which was the carrier of the actual content” (19 my translation). So, no matter how many writers have adapted fairy tales for their own purposes, the heart of the story always survives. And this is exactly what Angela Carter meant when she said that she wanted to “extract the latent content from the traditional stories” (Vandermeer).
Remember that Carter travelled all around the world to collect fairy tales. She did not only know the familiar bed time stories from Perrault or Grimm, but was also familiar with the more obscure versions of the tales which were probably closer to those of oral tradition.
The use of fairy tales in adult literature may appear strange, nowadays. But fairy tales have not always been considered children’s literature. In fact, that fairy tales have come to be exclusively associated with children is a very recent development. Only from the eighteenth century “it became more acceptable to write and publish fairy tales for children just as long as they indoctrinated children according to gender-specific roles and class codes in the civilizing process” (Zipes Dreams 15). Before then, fairy tales were told by adults to adults as entertainment, and these stories often contained cruelty, horror and sex. An example of this are the original versions of “Little Red Riding Hood”, in which the young girl is made to eat her grandmother’s meat and told to strip before she gets in bed with the wolf. It is also notable that the girl needs no aid to escape the wolf, but uses her own cunning to get away. Many seventeenth and eighteenth century scholars strictly censored the fairy tales that they collected in their books. Even the brothers Grimm, though unlike many of their contemporaries they had much respect for the form of the fairy tale, De Swaef 12 omitted every sexual allusion they encountered in the tales they recorded. Yet, they did not mind leaving in the cruelty. In their Cinderella story the stepsisters cut off a toe or a heel to make their foot fit into the glass slipper. And at the end of the tale, they are punished by two turtle-doves who peck out their eyes. Perrault on the other hand, liberally changed the fairy tales he included in his Fairy Tales of Mother Goose to fit his own personal style and taste. He even gave the stories a more explicit moral ending, as is the case with his version of “Little Red Riding Hood”.
Children, especially young girls, pretty, well bred, and genteel, are wrong
to listen to just anyone, and it’s not at all strange, if a wolf ends up eating
them. I say a wolf, but not all wolves are exactly the same. Some are
perfectly charming, not loud, brutal, or angry, but tame, pleasant, and
gentle, following young ladies right into their homes, into their chambers,
but watch out if you haven’t learned that tame wolves are the most
dangerous of all. (Tatar Annotated 373)
By adding this explicit moral, Perrault is really forcing an open door. Since he left the sexual allusions in his version, this meaning of the tale seems fairly obvious. Note also that he seems to place the blame more with the trusting young woman than with the wolf who eats her. The tone of this story is very different from those tales that are closer to oral tradition in which the young girl recognises the wolf for what he is, claims to need to go outside to relieve herself and escapes.
How fairy tales should be interpreted is something that has been under discussion for many years now. These short, simple tales carry a world of meaning in them. “Little
Red Riding Hood” is not just a warning to young women not to be too trusting to strange men, it can also be a warning not to trust strangers in general or a summons to children to obey their elders and to heed their warnings. This latter meaning was added by the Grimms De Swaef 13 who made the mother warn her daughter not to stray from the path. But as Maria Tatar points out: “the lecture on manners embedded in the narrative is not only alien to the spirit of fairy tales ... but also misfires in its lack of logic” (Classic FT 5). After all, the girl only strays from the path after she has met the wolf. Fairy tales can be interpreted in many different ways: sociologically, psychoanalytically, historically … According to Bruno
Bettelheim, fairy tales can help children give meaning to the world and their lives. He knows very well that “it destroys the value of a fairy tale for the child if someone details its meaning for him” (169) as Perrault does. Many scholars have attempted to interpret the fairy tale, but some have made the – in Tatar’s eyes – fatal mistake of focussing on one specific version of a tale and ignoring all other variants. Erich Fromm, for instance, interprets the bottle that Little Red Riding Hood takes to her grandmother as a symbol of her virginity, forgetting that the Grimms’ tale is the only one in which this bottle occurs.
“Any attempt to unearth the hidden meaning of fairy tales is bound to fail unless it is preceded by a rigorous, if not exhaustive, analysis of a tale type and its variants” (Tatar
Hard Facts 43). The reason why fairy tales can be interpreted in so many different ways, has most likely something to do with its imagery language. Mellie Uyldert describes the fairy tale as “a story that expresses and represents an eternal truth through symbols” (7 my translation). Through images, the fairy tale speaks immediately to “the unconscious inner life, where the mind has no power” (11). It is especially this latter characteristic that makes fairy tales such a powerful tool for authors.
Carter and Clarke are certainly not the first to use fairy tales in their writings.
“Allusions to fairy tales appear plentifully in Geoffrey Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales,
Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene, and the plays of William Shakespeare” (“Fairy
Tale” ch.1.2). From the sixteenth century onwards entire fairy tales were appropriated by aristocratic and bourgeois writers to spread their own values and morals. They are changed De Swaef 14 into a didactic story, sometimes even with an explicit moral at the end “which totally corrupt the original meanings of the folk-tale motifs and seek to legitimize the aristocratic standard of living” (Zipes Breaking the Magic Spell 8). Jack Zipes uses as example the story of “Beauty and the Beast” which tells the story of an arrogant bourgeois family who lose their fortune. The two older daughters remain haughty and refuse to help their father when he is imprisoned by the beast. Only the youngest daughter shows true virtue and, as a reward, gets to marry the prince. According to Zipes, this was surely “a warning to all those bourgeois upstarts who forgot their place in society” (9). Zipes also claims that all fairy tales, even the mass-mediated ones, have an “emancipatory potential” (18). “Many of them raise the question of individual autonomy versus state domination, creativity versus repression, and just the raising of this question is enough to stimulate critical and free thinking” (18). So the use of fairy tales to make people think about their own situation is certainly nothing new. Quite the contrary, Carter and Clarke are part of a long tradition.
2.2. Faeries
Nowadays, most people associate the word fairy with “frail winged missies dressed in green” (Koomen 11 my translation). This image of the fairy has been spread by children’s literature, and especially by the Disney Corporation and their famous fairy
Tinker Bell. But these “innocent and pleasant creatures” (12) are a far cry from the fairies in folklore. These powerful magical beings often appear vicious and cruel, but that is not because they are evil. As Koomen explains, these are fundamentally different beings that have nothing whatsoever to do with our notions of good and evil (12). There are many different types of fairies: selkies, kelpies, brownies, gnomes, sylphs... Even leprechauns and mermaids may be considered a type of fairy. But generally, we can distinguish two main groups in this complex family of fairies: “country-people” and “aristocracy” (Feeën en Elfen 11 my translation). In Feeën en Elfen, these ‘country-fairies’ are described as De Swaef 15
“solitary sprites who are probably descendants from the spirits that have animated nature since the beginning of time” (11). They are the guardians of woods and fields, lakes and rivers and only rarely come into contact with humans. They are usually invisible “but their presence was evident from for instance the bending of grass-blades on which they walked, the rustling sounds in trees, or the magnificent frost flowers on windows” (11). According to Koomen, this type of fairies “resulted from the inclination of primitive tribes to attribute a soul to all elements in nature – animals, flowers, water, rocks, and plants” (139 my translation). Considering that these fairies were mostly used to explain natural phenomena such as the ripening of wheat, wind and storms (Feeën en Elfen 48-50), this theory certainly seems to make sense.
The second group, the fairy aristocracy, is quite different. These fairies are not small like the nature sprites, but human sized. Neither do they concern themselves with natural forces as their smaller cousins. These are the kind of fairies you can see passing in a fairy cortege, or find dancing in a fairy circle. But if you chance upon such a group of dancing and music making fairies, this is not without danger. It is very likely, Koomen explains, that you will be entranced by the compelling music and be forced to dance all night (115). The difference between these two categories of fairies can be explained by their different origin. These aristocratic fairies are not the materialization of natural phenomena, but the remnants of ancient gods: the Tuatha de Danann, the People of the goddess Dana. According to legend, the Tuatha de Danann arrived on the beautiful island of Erin on an enchanted cloud. They fought the original inhabitants, the Firbolgs, another mythological tribe, and won. There would follow many other glorious victories, but their success would not last. For another tribe would soon claim the Emerald Island.
Remarkably, it was a mortal tribe that would drive these powerful, magical beings to the outskirts of the island: the Celts. “The Tuatha found refuge in invisibility. Some founded De Swaef 16 kingdoms in hollow hills or beneath the lakes of Ireland, Scotland and Wales. Others settled on islands far away in the western ocean” (Feeën en elfen 12 my translation). “From now on they would be called the daoine sidhe, the fairies from the hills” (Koomen 32 my translation), or simply sidhe1. According to Koomen, this driving away of the Dananns can be explained by the converting of the Celts to Christianity (32). But the Dananns would never be truly gone. Their power diminished, and in time the Dananns would even physically shrink, but they still lived on in popular belief. It is thanks to their diminished size that “the Church could afford not to pay attention to these persistent remnants of popular beliefs that far surpassed her in age” (21). This last type of fairies has lately resurfaced in modern fantastic literature. One of the first writers to restore the fairies to their former glory was J.R.R. Tolkien. In The Lord of the Rings the elves are described as alluring, powerful creatures who posses great knowledge and skill and who are very fond of beauty. But, just as the Tuatha de Danann, they are a dying race. Clark too will be dealing with these sidhe in her work. Many of the characteristics attributed to them in folklore can be found in her stories. Therefore it is best to discuss these features beforehand.
First of all, the sidhe have a passion “for glitter and glamour, for music and dance, for anything that is elegant and graceful and that gives pleasure” (Koomen 33 my translation). Further they have an “uninhibited amorous disposition” (35). There are many fairy legends in which a fairy seduces a human or tries to steal someone’s lover. In
“Connla and the fairy maiden”, a fairy girl persuades Connla to leave home and family behind to live with her. An important motive in this story is the apple that the fairy gives to
Connla, before she is chased off by his father’s magician. For a month, Connla ate or drunk nothing except that apple, which magically restored itself and which made Connla desire
1 Pronounced ‘shee’ De Swaef 17 the fairy girl even more (Houtzager 9-12). This motive often returns in fairy lore. It is considered unwise to eat or drink anything that a fairy offers you. After all, fairy food is enchanted; it binds the eater to the fairy world and he will no longer be capable of leaving.
Koomen mentions that abducted women can only be saved from the fairy hills if they have abstained from eating any of the offered food: “By accepting fairy food or drinks, they forfeit their last chance of returning to the human world” (97). Another story like this is the one of “Tam Lin”, which is told in Feeën en elfen. In this story a young woman falls in love with a man who has fallen into the power of the Fairy Queen. She saves him by holding on to him, while the Fairy Queen turns him in all sorts of beasts to make her let go.
In the end the Fairy Queen even changes him into a burning coal and the woman throws him into a nearby well. The man returns to his original form and is freed from the power of the Fairy Queen. In other versions of this story, the man and woman were engaged before the Fairy Queen steals the man away. The reason why fairies are so interested in human partners may have something to do with the fact that they are a dying race that is trying to get some fresh blood into their race. They certainly seem to rely on human aid for fairy births. “Usually, but not always, they will make use of the services of a midwife” (Koomen
92 my translation). Koomen here tells the story of a servant girl who is asked by a fairy to come help his wife who is in labour. She agrees and he brings her to his home, which in her eyes seems to be a farm. When the child is born, she is told to rub an ointment onto the child’s eyes. She does as she is told, but accidently gets some of the ointment on her own eye. From then on she can see the fairy world through this eye. When she later meets the fairy man again and goes to ask him about his wife and child, he rubs the ointment from her eye and the fairy world is again hidden from her. In many other stories this motive of acquiring the capability to see the fairy world with one eye returns. “But usually the required skill is punished by a fairy … blinding this eye with one merciless gesture” (94). De Swaef 18
Koomen tells another story of a girl “abducted by fairies and forced to work in their hills”
(95):
She is struck by the luxury and beauty of the fairy residence. But she also notices
that the residents occasionally rub their eyes with an ointment. Though this
ointment is well guarded, she manages to rub some into her own eyes. Now she
sees how the interior of the hill really looks like: a cold, damp and filthy hole in the
ground. (95)
These motives of a hidden fairy world that can be revealed by means of a special ointment and of the sidhe’s need for human midwifes and wet-nurses also occurs in Clarke’s tales.
Indeed, fairies are often said to do bad things, such as abducting young girls and playing tricks on people. Yet the sidhe are never described by folklore as being actually evil. As already mentioned before, they often seem cruel and uncaring because they are fundamentally different from us and they do not think and feel as we do. Besides the many stories in which fairies are said to be cruel, there are also many accounts of people who have been helped by fairies. Koomen for instance mentions the story of a farmer and his son who meet five gnomes in a field. The fairies just pass them by without saying a word.
But the farmer knows that fairies do not just appear for any reason and he realizes that there must be danger ahead. When he and his son come to a river, he first checks the bridge, which is merely the trunk of a tree, and discovers that the other side had come loose. Thanks to the fairies who put him on his guard, he and his son safely return home again (84). Koomen also says that fairies always pay someone in kind. “Kindness and willingness to help” is always repaid; pride and greed are punished (81).
De Swaef 19
3. The Dangers of Marriage and the Importance of Social Connections
After giving some general information on fairy tales and fairies, I will now start analysing Carter’s and Clarke’s stories. The two tales I will be discussing in this chapter,
“The Bloody Chamber” and “On Lickerish Hill”, start where most fairy tales end: with marriage. There exists one tale type in which a young woman discovers that the man she is engaged or married to is a cold-blooded killer or even a cannibal. The well-known fairy tale “Bluebeard” belongs to this tale type and by extension so does “The Bloody
Chamber”, which is a rewriting of this story. This tale type shows that marriage does not necessarily imply a happy ending. It reveals the potential dangers that lie within marriage for women. After all, for a long time complete obedience was demanded of a wife and the fate of women rested entirely in the hands of their husbands. This culminated in the nineteenth century, when laws were fabricated that actually prevented women from participating in politics or anything else having to do with the public sphere. They had no rights and no “legal identity” (French 627 my translation). In other words, men could do with their wives whatever they wanted, even beat them. As many tales of the Bluebeard- type suggest, women could rely on their social connections to save them from marital violence. Both in the Grimm’s “The Robber Bridegroom” and in Jacobs’ “Mr Fox”, the bride-to-be tells her wedding guests about the bloody chamber she discovered in her fiancé’s house, upon which her friends and relatives lynch the killer groom. Though
Clarke’s story concerns the same theme, it was not based on a fairy tale from this tale type, but on a variant of “Rumpelstiltskin”. By using the heroine of the tale as first person narrator and focalizer of the narrative, both Carter and Clarke reveal the more problematic sides of respectively Perrault’s “Bluebeard” and the folk tale “Tom Tit Tot”.
De Swaef 20
3.1. “The Bloody Chamber”: Married to Bluebeard
The title story of Angela Carter’s work is a rewriting of
Perrault’s “Bluebeard”. Just as in Perrault’s stylistic reworking
of the folktale, the main character is enticed to marry out of
purely materialistic reasons to a man that is described as not
quite human. While Bluebeard throws party after party to
persuade his chosen one, the Marquis in Carter’s tale showers
Fig. 1 "Bluebeard" Gustave the main character with expansive gifts and takes her to the Doré opera. Yet Carter is much more subtle in hinting at the husband’s demonic side. In stead of giving her murderous character the distinctive, but repulsive blue beard, she gives him a mask-like face that hides all his emotions.
But his strange, heavy, almost waxen face was not lined by experience.
Rather, experience seemed to have washed it perfectly smooth, like a stone
on a beach whose fissures have been eroded by successive tides. And
sometimes that face … with the heavy eyelids folded over eyes that always
disturbed me by their absence of light, seemed to me like a mask. (Carter 8-
9)
In fact, the “absence of light” from his eyes makes the reader doubt he has any emotions at all. Further, the description of this man likens him to a lion: the “leonine shape of his head”
(8), “his dark mane” (8) and the way he moves noiselessly, sneaking up on his loved one like a predator on his prey. Yet, she is not left without her devices, either. He never manages to surprise her, since she smells him the moment he enters the room. This depiction of the Marquis as a wild beast is an important aspect of the story. He is a sexual predator who only sees women as pieces of meat. Carter describes this quite literally when she compares his watching his bride-to-be to “a housewife in the market, inspecting cuts De Swaef 21 on the slab” (11). When the Marquis first undresses her in their wedding night, his young wife is said to be “bare as a lamb chop” (15). This comparing of the protagonist to literal pieces of meat not only stresses the Marquis’s objectifying of women, but already hints that his “male sexuality is death-oriented” (Sheets 642) and that the protagonist may not survive their union. There are many other references in the text that suggest that the
Marquis is a murderer, or even Death itself. His “waxen face” is very much like a death mask (Carter 8) and his eyes are compared to “those eyes the ancient Egyptians painted upon their sarcophagi” (12). His voice is “like the tolling of a bell” (12), a reference to
John Donne’s “Meditation 17”, that announces her death. When the narrator first describes the Marquis, she compares him to a lily, “possessed of that strange, ominous calm of a sentient vegetable, like one of those cobra-headed, funereal lilies” (9). This lily becomes a motive in the story. The Marquis filled the entire bedroom with them “until it looked like an embalming parlour” (18). Their presence becomes just as oppressive as the Marquis’s and their physical appearance seems to foreshadow what is yet to come. On the morning of the day that the protagonist will make her gruesome discovery, their stems look “like arms, dismembered arms, drifting drowned in greenish water” (22). And when her husband tells her she must die for her curiosity, “the mass of lilies that surrounded me exhaled, now, the odour of their withering”: “They looked like the trumpets of the angels of death” (37). That the Marquis’s sexuality is death-oriented can also be seen in his aesthetic taste. He is a great fan of the opera Tristan and Isolde, who’s Liebestod almost naturally links love to death. He prefers the cigar brand ‘Romeo y Julieta’, again a reference to a couple that dies for love. He arranges that the disrobing of the bride, “a ritual from the brothel” (15), resembles a pornographic etching of Rops. When the protagonist browses through her husband’s library, she discovers just how sadistic his sexual taste is. The first picture in the nineteenth-century collection of pornography that she finds, shows a “girl with tears De Swaef 22 hanging on her cheeks like stuck pearls, her cunt a split fig below the great globes of her buttocks on which the knotted tails of the cat were about to descend, while a man in a black mask fingered with his free hand his prick, that curved upwards like the scimitar he held” (16-17). The caption of this picture, ‘reproof of curiosity’, “links the flagellation scene … to the Bluebeard tale” (Sheets 646), while the scimitar places the picture in the nineteenth century tradition of casting “Bluebeard in the role of oriental tyrant” (Tatar
Annotated 145). The next engraving of this pornographic collection that is described continues this association with the orient. It is entitled “Immolation of the wives of the
Sultan”, and it refers back to something the Marquis had said previously in the book. He had decorated his entire bedroom with mirrors so that it would appear as if he had
“acquired a whole harem” for himself (Carter 14). The Marquis’s elaborate pornographic collection is not the only hint in the story that his sadism and objectification of women have a cultural foundation. Robin Ann Sheets demonstrates in her article on pornography in “The Bloody Chamber” that Carter’s Marquis is not only based on Perrault’s Bluebeard.
His interest in the opera, his collection of books and paintings and his admiration of
Baudelaire link him to Gilles de Rais, “companion-in-arms to Joan of Arc, Marshal of
France under Charles VII, refined patron of the arts, and child-murderer” (Sheets 645).
That Perrault’s Bluebeard was based on Gilles de Rais, as has often been claimed, remains doubtful. As Maria Tatar argues in The Classic Fairy Tales, Bluebeard remains a construction of collective fantasy, a figure firmly anchored in the realm of folklore” (138).
Considering that the serial killers portrayed in other folkloric versions of this tale come from all classes of society, it is doubtful that they were based on one specific historical figure. Yet Carter could not make more clear that her Marquis is at least partly based on
Gilles de Rais since a copy of Huysmans’s Là-bas, in which Gilles de Rais plays a prominent role, is “lavishly displayed in the Marquis’s library” as if it were a bible (Sheets De Swaef 23
645). While the Marquis’s aesthetic preferences link him to Gilles de Rais, “his title, his sexual practices, and the furnishings in his forbidden room link him to de Sade” (647).
Sheets explains that the bloody chamber resembles several rooms in Justine, but the
Marquis shows the most resemblance with the Comte de Gernande. “Both the Marquis and
Gernande have already killed three wives; both have a lust for blood” (648). These links to both literature and history show that the abuse of women within marriage is not a problem that only lies within the individual, but that it is also rooted within the culture of a society that tolerates such practices. It shows that eliminating the individual that abuses his wife does not solve the problem. If society does not change, this problem will reoccur again and again.
Another problem that Carter addresses is the tendency to place the blame on the victim. The history of the Bluebeard tale is actually a perfect example of this. Under the influence of Perrault’s version many authors and critics started to stress curiosity as the main theme of the story from the eighteenth century onwards, thus turning a folk tale about a cunning woman escaping a serial killer into a warning tale that depicts curiosity in women as a sin. According to Maria Tatar, some even went as far as to “blame the victim for the crimes of the villain” (159), claiming that none of it would have happened if the wife had curbed her curiosity and stubbornly ignoring the seven corpses hanging in
Bluebeard’s forbidden room. Bruno Bettelheim for instance interpreted the stained key as a symbol for the wife’s sexual infidelity. But when he mildly states that men should not get
“carried away by your anger” he is clearly ignoring the seven other wives that lay butchered in Bluebeard’s bloody chamber (301-302). That this identifying of curiosity as the cause of the wife’s problems is a literary invention can easily be proven by looking at some other variants of this fairy tale such as “The Robber Bridegroom” and “Mr. Fox”, which do not even mention curiosity. Despite Perrault’s alterations and his explicit moral De Swaef 24 that suggest the opposite, there are still elements in his “Bluebeard” that proof that curiosity is not the cause of the wife’s problems. When Bluebeard hands over his keys to his wife, he formulates his prohibition in such a way that it becomes impossible to resist the temptation. If you think about this scene logically, it soon becomes clear that Bluebeard does not want his wife to obey him. After all, if he really did not want her to go into that room, he would not have given her the key. In other words, it is a set-up, a conclusion that is only confirmed by his “speedy return” (Tatar Classic FT 146). Maria Tatar points out that the prohibition/violation sequence in Propp’s theory fulfils the same function as the command/fulfilment sequence, which is even more clear in the way in which the formulation of the interdiction “comes perilously close to a tantalizing proposal” ( Hard
Facts 166). Tatar states that “what originally functioned as a motor of the plot and as a means of introducing villainy becomes a general behavioral guideline” (166). Angela
Carter seems to have understood this aspect of the story. She stresses far more than
Perrault does that the Marquis intends to arouse his young wife’s curiosity. He dangles the key of the forbidden room tantalizingly above her head before he gives it to her and the way in which he lengthily formulates his prohibition is clearly intended to arouse curiosity, which it does of course, though not quite in the way that he intended. Unlike Perrault’s wife, the protagonist does not rush off to discover the contents of the forbidden chamber.
Instead she whiles away the hours, the keys and the forbidden room already forgotten.
When she remembers the keys the next day, she decides to take a look around in the castle that she is now mistress of, not out of curiosity but as a way to pass the time. She visits her husband’s office hoping to find some clue of his “true nature” (Carter 24). Completely by accident, she discovers a secret drawer which contains a file marked ‘Personal’. “I had the brief notion that his heart, pressed flat as a flower, crimson and thin as tissue paper, lay in this file” (26). And that is indeed what she finds. She discovers three very peculiar love De Swaef 25 letters, one of each of his previous wives. The first ‘letter’ is merely one sentence scribbled on a napkin: “My darling, I cannot wait for the moment when you may make me yours completely” (26). His second wife, the diva, sent him a copy of the Liebestod from the opera Tristan and Isolde. And the Romanian countess, who claimed to be a descendant of
Dracula, sent him a postcard depicting “a village graveyard … where some black-coated ghoul enthusiastically dug at a grave” (26). Together, these three very cryptic messages tell the fate of the Marquis’s wives: one passionate night, death and an untimely grave. But his latest wife is still not satisfied with this discovery; she wants to learn more about her husband. When she drops the keys entrusted to her and the first key she picks up happens to be the one of the forbidden chamber, the thought occurs to her that “if I had found some traces of his heart in a file marked: Personal, perhaps, here, in his subterranean privacy, I might find a little of his soul” (27). By stressing that the protagonist merely wants to know her husband better, Angela Carter downplays the element of curiosity and returns the
Bluebeard tale to its original meaning.
That Angela Carter places the blame with the murderous husband and not with the curious wife is further stressed by the imagery of saints and devils that is worked into the story. The protagonist is linked to the Saint Cecilia, a painting of whom hangs in her music room. This patron saint of musicians was decapitated for her belief. The reference to this saint and her martyrdom at the moment the protagonist awaits the same fate suggests that the heroine is indeed innocent. The Marquis on the other hand is likened to the devil.
As I already mentioned, the Marquis shows a great taste for pornography and sadism. The over-exquisite copy of Huysmans’s Là-bas that “had been bound like a missal” (16) and which is displayed on a lectern in his library suggests that this man worships decadence.
The Marquis is further likened to a devil when the bloody chamber is referred to as a hell.
When he entrusts his key ring to his young wife when he leaves for his business trip, he De Swaef 26 calls the key of the forbidden chamber “the key to my enfer” (21). The short walk to this room is described like a descent into hell. There is no electricity, no light in this corridor.
The tapestry on the walls depicts the Rape of the Sabines. The corridor winds downwards with “an almost imperceptible ramp” (27) and is the only place in the castle where the sound of the sea could no longer be heard, suggesting that the forbidden room is located far underground. When “for some reason, it grew very warm”, the suggestion that the heroine is descending into some inferno is intensified (27). As the heroine flees from the bloody chamber and her horrid discovery, the door slams behind her “with a juddering reverberation, like the door of hell” (30). A final way in which Carter makes sure that the sympathies of her audience will lie with the wife and not with the husband is her depiction of the bloody chamber itself. As Maria Tatar notices, “Bluebeard’s wife gets a good look at the roomful of corpses, but readers are generally spared the sight of the carnage” (Hard
Facts 162). Perrault quickly describes a room full of blood and “dead women hung up on the walls” (Classic FT 145). Carter, on the other hand, elaborately describes every gruesome detail of every body in that room. In this way, she focuses the attention of the reader on the coldblooded cruelty of the Marquis, in stead of on the curiosity of his wife.
Not only does Angela Carter break with the tradition of emphasizing the wife’s curiosity, she also makes her female characters much stronger and more active than their fairy tale counterparts. Of course, not all heroines of the Bluebeard tales undergo their tribulations quite as passively as Perrault’s. Robin Ann Sheets explains that there are two types of Bluebeard-tales, each featuring a different type of heroine. On the one hand there is the “cautionary fairy tale about the hazards of curiosity” (643), like Perrault’s
“Bluebeard”. In these tales the heroine passively waits for rescue after her husband has threatened her with death for her curiosity. On the other hand there are the fairy tales that depict “the triumph of a clever young woman over a bloodthirsty villain” (644). In De Swaef 27
“Fowler’s Fowl”, the heroine uses her cunning to outwit the wizard who first married and murdered her sisters and who has now tricked her into marriage. By a clever ruse she manages to restore her sisters back to life and escape his house, after which she sends her relatives to kill him. In “Mr Fox” and “The Robber Bridegroom” the heroine actively brings about the death of her groom by revealing his cannibalistic tastes to her wedding guests. Angela Carter joins this tradition of strong women by letting the young wife be saved, not by her brothers as in Perrault’s tale, but by her “eagle-featured, indomitable mother” (7) who is described as a very adventurous, unconventional, strong woman. She
“outfaced a junkful of Chinese pirates, nursed a village through a visitation of the plague, shot a man-eating tiger with her own hand” (7) and she had “gladly, scandalously, defiantly beggared herself for love” (7-8). When the Marquis intends to kill his wife, he tries to make her completely powerless by isolating her from any social connection. He has her trapped in a remote castle, the telephone has been cut off and all servants are sent home. Even the protagonist’s connection to her mother seems lost, since she feels that she
“ceased to be her child in becoming his wife” (7). Yet, through what Carter calls “maternal telepathy” (40), the heroine’s mother had already deduced from a previous phone call that something was amiss, which makes her run to her daughter’s aid. Indeed, Carter’s heroine undergoes the terrible events just as passively as Perrault’s, yet the daughter of this strong woman is not quite as powerless and passive as she may at first seem. After all, she is the first person narrator of this story which, as Robin Ann Sheets points out, gives her a voice and the right to give her view of things. Sheets refers to Barthes to show that “the protagonist’s control of language” constitutes a “shift in power” (649). The person who speaks is in control, while the one who is silent is the object of the story. The narrator turns her murderous husband into an object even more effectively at the end of the story, when the Marquis freezes when he sees her mother bursting through the gate. De Swaef 28
And my husband stood stock-still, as if she had been Medusa, the sword
still raised over his head as in those clockwork tableaux of Bluebeard that
you see in glass cases at fairs.” (Carter 40)
Sheets argues further that “the young woman not only escapes from silence; she also avoids the dichotomized treatment of female characters in fairy tales and pornographic fiction” (649). Fairy tales usually have only two types of women: good and bad, the princess and the witch. In the Sadeian stories Sheets distinguishes the aggressor and the helpless martyr. These sorts of characters are types, unable to change. Carter’s protagonist on the other hand is a much more complex character. “She has the right to act, to experience the consequences of her decisions, to learn from error” (Sheets 650). By the end of the story she has become a different person. After the Marquis’s death she inherits his enormous wealth, which was why she married him in the first place, but she gives most of it away to charity and only keeps a small amount for herself to start a music school. Unlike
Perrault’s wife who keeps everything for herself and remarries, she breaks with the strict social structure that would have limited her to the domestic sphere and gains a place in the public sphere so she will never again be completely dependent on her husband. Another difference with the Perrault tale is that this widow keeps a permanent “heart-shaped stain” on her forehead from the bloody key (Carter 36). Sheets interprets this stain as the brand of shame: “The narrator feels ashamed of the materialism that drove her to marry the Marquis and of her complicity in sadomasochism” (650). Though the mark may indeed stand for her shame, it is also a constant reminder of her experiences as the Marquis’s wife. It is a sign of her trauma which does not die together with her murderous husband. With this red mark Carter shows that it is impossible to simply “banish the memory of the terrible days she had spent with Bluebeard” as Perrault’s heroine does (Tatar Annotated 156). De Swaef 29
A final aspect of the story that deserves our attention is the narrator’s new husband
Jean-Yves. Apart from seeing him as an example of masculinity no longer based on domination but on partnership, Sheets interprets this character rather negatively. His blindness is regarded as a “symbolic castration” (654), in stead of as a symbolic way to break the male gaze that objectifies women. Unlike the Marquis who is obsessed with outer looks, which is clearly illustrated by the way he constantly tells his wife what to wear, Jean-Yves is only concerned with her as a person. The Marquis chose her as his next wife because of her innocence and almost child-like appearance. He clearly wants to turn her into a type, while Jean-Yves sees her as she really is. As the narrator says herself: “he sees me clearly with his heart” (41). Just like the other two characters, Jean-Yves is given an animal-like quality. He comes up to the music room in hope of hearing the protagonist play, because he had heard her walking about. But his room is at the bottom of the tower, while hers is at the top. So he would need superhuman hearing to be able to hear that.
Similar to sister Anne in Perrault, he comforts the protagonist in her hour of need. He may not have the power to save her, but he lends her all the strength he has and gives her courage. And just as in the fairy tale, they look out of the window, but with no hope of seeing help on its way. While they wait for the dreaded phone call that will summon her into the courtyard where her husband awaits her with his sword, they have a short conversation that is rather ambiguous.
‘You do not deserve this,’ he said.
‘Who can say what I deserve or no?’ I said. ‘I’ve done nothing; but that may
be sufficient reason for condemning me.’
‘You disobeyed him,’ he said. ‘That is sufficient reason for him to punish
you.’
‘I only did what he knew I would.’ De Swaef 30
‘Like Eve,’ he said. (37-38)
Sheets interprets this conversation as Jean-Yves condemning her for her curiosity. But I disagree. Jean-Yves starts the conversation by stating that she does not deserve this fate.
When he says that her disobedience is enough reason for the Marquis to punish her, he implies that for him it is not. He represents the new man who sees women as persons, not as objects and who no longer expects blind obedience from a wife. The reference to Eve and the reference to Pandora earlier in the story are very appropriate, since these are also stories about a woman with an “excess desire for knowledge” (Tatar Annotated 146). Plus, the name of Eve calls to mind the long discussion about original sin that started in medieval times. Many men have used the story of Genesis to condemn women, saying that
Eve’s disobedience lead to the fall of men. But the same story has also been used to defend women. Rachel Speght for instance, states that since Eve was made out of Adam’s rib, she was meant to be at his side as his equal (1548). Like Eve was tricked by the snake, so the protagonist was tricked by her husband. He stresses how important that forbidden room is to him, knowing that she would not be able to resist her curiosity thus stimulated. She, believing she holds the key to his heart, indeed uses the key to the forbidden chamber.
Jean-Yves does not appear to blame her for her curiosity. He stays by her side till the very end, supporting her. He is also the one to announce the approach of the mother, as sister
Anne does in Perrault’s tale, and to unlock the gate for her. The protagonist does not stand by idly as rescue is on its way, but rushes to her lover’s aid to open the gate. At what is supposed to be the height of suspense in the story, Carter interjects a comical note and thus effectively breaks the tension that she maintained throughout the story:
The Marquis stood transfixed, utterly dazed, at a loss. It must have been as
if he had been watching his beloved Tristan for the twelfth, the thirteenth
time and Tristan stirred, then leapt from his bier in the last act, announced in De Swaef 31
a jaunty aria interposed from Verdi that bygones were bygones, crying over
spilt milk did nobody any good and, as for himself, he proposed to live
happily ever after. The puppet master, open-mouthed, wide-eyed, impotent
at the last, saw his dolls break free of their strings, abandon the rituals he
had ordained for them since time began and start to live for themselves; the
king, aghast, witnesses the revolt of his pawns. (39)
And indeed the story has been rewritten; the stereotypical gender patterns that had been imposed on this fairy tale since the eighteenth century have been broken. Man is no longer a violent, dominant oppressor but a gentle, caring partner. Woman is no longer the obedient, passive victim but a strong, active person with a mind of her own. This trend of strong heroines and breaking of stereotypical characterization is continued in Carter’s other tales. That Clarke’s heroines also tend to have a mind of their own can be seen in her version of “Rumpelstiltskin”, which I will discuss next.
3.2. “On Lickerish Hill”: Spinning Golden Tales
This is the only story in Clarke’s collection that was based on an actual fairy tale.
The author names her source at the end of the story: “Tom Tit Tot”, a Suffolk variant of the better-known “Rumpelstiltskin”. Just as Carter did for “The Bloody Chamber”, Clarke follows the plot line of “Tom Tit Tot” very closely. This tale type is part of a whole cycle of so-called spinning tales, which probably found their origin in the work of its narrators, namely spinning. In medieval times spinning and weaving was part of women’s daily work. To make their job easier and less tedious, the women of one village would gather to do their work together and tell each other stories to entertain themselves. It is no surprise that the labour they were doing found its way into the stories they were telling. “Tom Tit
Tot” resembles the better known “Rumpelstiltskin” closely, but there are a few crucial differences. In “Rumpelstiltskin” a father boasts that his daughter can turn flax into gold, De Swaef 32 after which she has to proof this marvellous ability to the king. If she succeeds, he will marry her; if she does not, she will be killed. A fairy agrees to do the work for her for a certain fee. The first night she gives him her necklace, on the second her ring, on the third she agrees to give him her firstborn child. The fairy does give her the chance to get out of this deal: he gives her three days to guess his name. Thanks to a messenger she had sent out to find names and who chanced upon the fairy in the forest, she can tell him his name and is freed of him. In “Tom Tit Tot”, the king immediately marries the girl, but on the condition that in the last month of the first year of their marriage she must spin three skeins of flax a day. If she fails to comply, he will kill her. The fairy also offers to help her for a price. He gives her three guesses every day and if she has not guessed his name by the end of the month, she will be his. In this version, it is her husband who tells her the fairy’s name that sets her free. When you read this fairy tale critically, you will note that there are a few dubious elements in this tale. First of all, the fairy plays the part of both the magical helper and the villain. He first appears when he hears the girl’s crying. Pitying her, he agrees to help, but nothing is for nothing. Yet, we cannot help but feel that he demands quite a lot for his service. On the other hand, he is the one suggesting playing the name- game, giving the girl the chance to get out of their deal. It is hard to say whether he is good or bad, something that Clarke noted too. When her heroine first meets the fairy, she actually asks him if he is good or bad. He considers this question a long time before answering: “Never you minde” (Clarke 53). This suggests that the fairy himself does not even know. It is indeed very hard to place judgement on this creature, especially in the
Rumpelstiltskin-version. After all, he and the girl had a closed deal, but when he sees her grieve at losing her child, he offers her the opportunity to get out of it. Maria Tatar observes that there are many critics who think it unfair that the fairy gets punished, while the parent and the king go free. “It is not the miller who boastingly vaunts his daughter into De Swaef 33 peril, or the avaricious, cruel king who marries her, but the little man who helps her and wants only a child for himself who is singled out for punishment” (Hard Facts 127). You could of course also argue that the fairy only offers his help because he wants to take advantage of the girl’s desperate situation, in which she would agree to anything. And furthermore he does not believe her capable of guessing his real name. Clarke chooses to suggest that the fairy is not the nice little helper he pretends to be. She depicts him as a small, black thing with a long, black tale; a description that associates him more with a devil than a fairy. The three dogs guarding Miranda, whose real names are Wicked, Worse and Worst-of-all, immediately take a liking to this black creature. And after he tested
Miranda’s naming-abilities, he starts gloating over his victory before they even started their game. All in all, the reader does not really get a favourable impression of this helper- villain. The second rather dubious part of this fairy tale is its ending. The poor girl marries the king (or stays married in “Tom Tit Tot”) and lives happily ever after. But does she?
After all, “it is not clear that the burden of spinning will be banished from her life forever”, as Maria Tatar rightly noted (Hard Facts 128). If the king ever asks his wife to spin for him again, her life will be forfeit. The only reason she succeeded the first time was because the fairy helped her and he has now been vanquished. And this new husband of hers did threaten her with death, so you can hardly call being married to him a reward. Maria Tatar mentions that some folklorists have suggested that the tale “The Three Spinners” might be a sequel to “Rumpelstiltskin”. Indeed, this story, that is very similar to “Rumpelstiltskin”, has a much more conclusive ending. The beginning is the same as that of the other two fairy tales discussed. But in stead of a fairy, three deformed women come to the girl’s aid.
One with a broad foot, another with a drooping, enlarged lip and the third with a huge thumb. The only reward they ask for their help is to be invited to the wedding as the girl’s cousins. And this request turns out to be another blessing for the girl. When her new De Swaef 34 husband wants to know how her cousins got their deformities, they explain they got them from spinning too much. The king immediately orders his new queen to never touch a spinning wheel again. Though spliced texts that once formed one whole do exist, it is highly unlikely that this is the case with “Rumpelstiltskin” and “The Three Spinners” because each belongs to a different kind of folk tale. “The Three Spinners” is clearly a comic tale, while “Rumpelstiltskin” narrates “repeated narrow brushes with tragedy” and therefore belongs to the melodramatic (Tatar Hard Facts 130). Though they are two separate stories, it is important to be aware of this sister tale with its happy ending to show that the changes that Clarke made to “Tom Tit Tot” are also part of a long tradition.
Clarke’s heroine summons the fairy herself and comes up with a ruse to discover his name.
Since she has proven that she is clever enough to outwit her husband, this ending is no longer dubious. Of course, Miranda’s husband might still ask her to spin in the future, but she has already proven that she is more than capable to protect herself. Miranda actually resembles the sly heroine from a version of “The Three Spinners” who “outfoxes her husband by hiring three women with precisely the deformities that could be attributed to too many hours at the spinning wheel but are not” (130). Clearly, Miranda belongs to the ranks of trickster figures that can be found in fairy tales and not to the damsels in distress that wait to be rescued like the heroines from “Tom Tit Tot” and “Rumpelstiltskin”.
Clarke treats “Tom Tit Tot” in very much the same way as Carter treated the
“Bluebeard”. The basic plot of the story stays exactly the same, but it is no longer written in the seemingly objective third person that is typical of fairy tales. Instead it is written in the first person and Miranda, the heroine of the story, is the narrator and focalizer of the tale. As I have already mentioned in my discussion of “The Bloody Chamber”, this narrative change turns the passive heroine of the fairy tale into an active one. After all, this character is now in control of the story, giving her view of events. The heroine of “Tom Tit De Swaef 35
Tot” could not have been more passive. Everything just happens to her. She eats five pies, because she takes her mother literally when she tells her that the pies will “come again”
(“Tom Tit Tot”). Her mother’s bragging brings about her marriage and her troubles. When the king orders her to spin five skeins of flax, all she does is cry. And she discovers the fairy’s name wholly by accident. Clarke’s heroine is very different from this lazy, stupid girl. Miranda simply admits that she ate the pies “to witt a Great and Sudden Hunger”
(Clarke 39). Miranda does not know how to spin either, but not because she is lazy like her fairy tale counterpart. She just never had the time to learn since she spent her youth studying Latin, Greek and the Antiquities. And it is her own slyness that will save her from her husband. But, just as in “The Bloody Chamber”, she would not have been able to save herself without her social contacts. She uses the four scholars, who live with them to cure her husband of his melancholy and who have become her friends, to conjure up a fairy and to discover his name. She uses the spell she learns from her learned friends to summon a common fairy to her side to spin the flax for her. Whether the fairy came in answer of her spell or because he heard her cry, as he claims himself, is unclear. The narrator certainly does not mention that she was crying. But he did come and agrees to do the spinning for her. If Miranda cannot guess his name before the month is up, she will be his. Certain that she will manage to discover his name, Miranda agrees to this. This name-guessing game refers to the ancient belief that when you know someone’s name, you hold power over that person. The fairy shows that the guessing of his true name will proof exceedingly difficult by pointing out that Miranda does not know the real names of the three dogs guarding her, or even her own true name for that matter. When the last day of the month arrives, she still has not guessed his name and she thinks of a plan to discover it. She suggests to her husband when he brings her food and the flax for that day, that he should go hunting on
Lickerish Hill, the place where the fairies live. She tells him to take the three dogs with De Swaef 36 him, so they can have some fresh air. The real reason why she wants the dogs to go with him is because these dogs are simply crazy about the fairy and might lead her husband to him. She also sends the scholars with him. As Miranda had already foreseen, the dogs lead the hunting party straight to the fairy and when they return the scholars tell her all about it, including the fairy’s true name. Clearly, Clarke’s heroine is a strong, independent woman who is perfectly capable of looking after herself.
This story has something else in common with “The Bloody Chamber”: a murderous husband. The fairy tale does not really draw much attention to the fact that the king threatens to kill his new wife if she does not fulfil his impossible demand. It is mentioned merely as a part of the story, a mere obstacle on the road to marital bliss the heroine needs to overcome. In her rewriting of this tale, Clarke will highlight the husband’s aggressiveness just as Carter does in “The Bloody Chamber”, thus pointing out that any violence of a husband against his wife should never be treated as something ordinary. Sir
John Sowreston is described as a man who rarely smiles and who is “afflicted with a Great
Sadnesse and Fitts of Black Anger” (Clarke 40). The narrator describes how he drowned a puppy that was greatly attached to him because it befouled his coat. To cure him of his
‘melancholy’ they go visit a famous physician, who prays to the angel Raphael for answers. Immediately, said angel appears in Dr Blackswann’s closet and tells him the remedy for Sir John’s melancholy, “as commonly happens when ever this doctor prays”
(Clarke 41). It is very typical of Clarke’s style to treat something extraordinary as an everyday event. But there is only one other story in this book in which Clarke combines folkloric tales and superstitions with religious beliefs. In “John Uskglass and the Cumbrian
Charcoal Burner” there is a full-out clash between religion and magic which is settled in the favour of religion. In this tale, however, both saint and fairy are needed to save
Miranda. Saint Raphael advises to take in some scholars to divert him. And it are these De Swaef 37 scholars that will teach Miranda how to summon a fairy and tell her the true name of the fairy. But the fairy is still needed to fulfil the impossible task set by Sir John. Yet the remedy of the saint does not cure Sir John of his melancholy. After a few months, Sir John is already annoyed with the scholars who are meant to divert him. And when the final month of the first year of his marriage arrives, he still locks Miranda in a small room, threatening to kill her if it turns out that she has deceived him.
I hope, Miranda, that you have not lyed. A wife, Miranda, haz her husband’s
conscience in her keeping and muste so order her actions that they tempt not
her husband to sinne. It is a wicked thinge to tempt others to sinne. To kille
someone in anger is a sinne. (Clarke 50)
Sir John seems to think that it will be Miranda’s own fault if he kills her. Just as many rewriters of Perrault’s “Bluebeard”, he is more than willing to “blame the victim for the crimes of the villain” (Tatar Hard Facts 159). Not only is he unwilling to take responsibility for his own actions, but he is also incredibly self-centred.
He wept a little to thinke on’t, but it waz not for me he wept but for his
owne Unhappy Spirit, thinking that when he murdered me ‘twould be all
his owne Misfortune and none of mine. (Clarke 50)
Unlike the fairy tale, Clarke makes very clear that Sir John is a ‘bad guy’. He is depicted as a selfish, unstable person who poses a threat to everyone around him, including his wife.
Miranda is depicted as the innocent victim of the story. It was her mother who got her into trouble by telling Sir John that her daughter could spin five skeins of flax a day, when he overheard her sing that her daughter had eaten five pies. She does not only tell him this lie because she was embarrassed about her daughter’s gluttony, but also because she hoped that he would marry her, which indeed he does. The moment he hears of Miranda’s remarkable talent, he announces he will marry her. Yet, this arranged marriage was not De Swaef 38 undesired by Miranda. She did not mind at all marrying such a wealthy man. So, just as in
“The Bloody Chamber”, the heroine married for money, not for love. Both tales show the dangers of such an alliance. A woman in such a position delivers herself wholly into the power of a man who does not love her. But Carter and Clarke’s heroines are no helpless fairy tale princesses who simply wait in their turret room for someone to rescue them.
Unlike her fairy tale counterpart, Miranda does not burst out in tears when she is faced with the impossible task of spinning five skeins of flax a day. No matter how desperate her situation may seem, she always keeps her head and thinks of a way to get herself out of trouble. Miranda’s cunning makes this ending somewhat less dubious than the fairy tale ending. Both as narrator and as character she is completely in control. She manipulates others to do what she wants them to do. By the end of the tale, she has proven that no matter what dangers come her way, she will be able to rise to the occasion and save herself.
From this analysis, it has become evident that these two tales are very similar. “On
Lickerish Hill” may not be based on a fairy tale belonging to the Bluebeard-type, but by underlining the husband’s violent tendencies Clarke has made clear that the
Rumpelstiltskin tales deal with basically the same thing: how to outwit a murderous husband. Just as with the Bluebeard tales, we can distinguish two different types in the
Rumpelstiltskin-tales according to the heroine featuring in it. “Rumpelstiltskin” and “Tom
Tit Tot” are rather melodramatic, with a passive heroine who simply lets everything happen to her and desperately waits for rescue. “The Three Spinners” is an example of the comical tale type and features a more undertaking and cunning heroine. Clarke mixes these two very different tale types as Carter did in “The Bloody Chamber” by taking the cunning heroine and comedy from the latter type and the melodramatic plot of the first and thus giving it a more conclusive ending. Both authors also adapt the narrative structure in the De Swaef 39 same way. Instead of using the seemingly objective third person typical of fairy tales, both opt for a first person narrator that is also the focalizer of the tale. This is not merely an aesthetic change, but a strategic move really. Only through this introspective view into her character’s life could Clarke bring across so plainly that things did not turn out the way they did by accident, but because Miranda planned it to be so. And in Carter’s case it stresses the growth of the main character, who refused to be an object to the Marquis’s gaze and his plot any longer and has become the subject of her own story. These two heroines have proven to possess a strong will and a great independence. And this brings me to my next chapter in which I will discuss the other strong women that can be found in
Carter’s and Clarke’s collection.
4. Strong, Independent Women
In the previous chapter, we have met two women who outlive their murderous husbands. But they are not the only strong women in these collections of short stories.
Angela Carter ends her book with three ‘girl meets wolf’ stories. The first two, “The
Werewolf” and “The Company of Wolves”, show Little Red Riding Hood as she once was before Perrault and the Grimms turned her into a helpless victim. The third one, “Wolf-
Alice”, deals with a young girl who was raised by wolves discovering her own identity.
“The Lady of the House of Love”, the short story that precedes these ‘girl meets wolf’ tales, breathes the same gothic atmosphere of decay, darkness and death but lacks their happy ending. Clarke depicts two very different images of a strong woman. In “The Ladies of Grace Adieu”, the heroine of the story and her two friends decide to break with the convention of their time that dictates that any single woman must be in want of a husband. De Swaef 40
The heroine featuring in “Mrs Mabb”, on the other hand, battles a fairy to win back her fiancé and shows that marrying does not need to mean a loss of control.
4.1. Women, Wolves and Full Moons
I will start my discussion of strong women by analyzing Carter’s three Red Riding
Hood tales. There are many different versions of the Red Riding Hood tale and even more
interpretations of these stories. Angela Carter was clearly aware
of this. In her own three rewritings of this well-known fairy
tale, she freely mixes elements from these different versions
with the folkloric belief in werewolves. This may appear
strange, but some folklorists believe that the fairy tale may be
“based on actual accounts of werewolves attacking and Fig. 2 "Little Red Riding Hood" Gustave Doré devouring children” (Tatar Hard Facts 39). Another popular interpretation reads “Red Riding Hood” as a cautionary tale that warns young girls against the seductive powers of men. This interpretation is the most wide-spread, probably thanks to Perrault’s “Little Red Riding Hood”. There are elements in other versions that support this reading of the tale. In “The Story of Grandmother”, for instance, the young girl performs a striptease before she gets into bed with the wolf. But what makes Perrault’s literary adaptation very different from this peasant folktale is that his is the only Red
Riding Hood that actually gets eaten by the wolf. Once again, he blames the woman for the crimes of the man when he states in his moral that young girls “are wrong to listen to just anyone, and it’s not at all strange, if a wolf ends up eating them” (Tatar Classic FT 13).
That the Grimms’ little Red Cap gets eaten by the wolf too is no coincidence. The oral tale they used as source was actually a retelling of the already well-known Perrault’s tale, which is made evident by the red cap their heroine wears. After all, the red hood that has now become the icon of Red Riding Hood was actually an invention of Perrault’s. Yet the De Swaef 41
Grimms did not like that their heroine got eaten, which is why they added the hunter to save her. Carter’s heroines do not get eaten by the wolf, nor do they need a hunter to rescue them. They are quite capable of looking after themselves. Though she clearly refers to
Grimm and Perrault, Carter based her stories mostly on the more obscure versions of the tale that have been recorded and which are probably more like the original oral fairy tale than the Grimms’ and Perrault’s literary stories. In these versions a girl – who does not wear a red hood of any kind – encounters some kind of predator (a wolf, a bear or an ogress) pretending to be her grandmother. Soon the girl discovers that this is not her grandmother at all and asks to be allowed to go outside to relieve herself. Once outside, she runs home as fast as she can. In “Goldflower and the Bear”, an Asian version of the tale, the girl does not flee, but climbs into a tree which she first covered with grease so the bear cannot get in. When the bear discovers her in the tree, she offers him the pears that are in it. The bear gives her a spear so she can reach them, but she uses it to kill the bear instead.
Clearly, the heroines of these tales belong to the “ranks of trickster figures” who know how to outwit their opponent and which often occur in fairy tales (Tatar Classic FT 3). But apparently Perrault did not like such a strong, independent woman, since he turned his heroine into a helpless victim. By trying to add a moral message to the tale, he made “the heroine responsible for the violence to which she is subjected” (6). In her tales Carter will return to this tradition of cunning women who are more than capable to fend for themselves.
The first Red Riding Hood tale bears the title “The Werewolf”, thus referring us
“immediately to the myth, to the duality of human nature, to the animal element in us, the dark side we are not aware of, unknown and potentially dangerous” (Klonowska 149).
Carter starts of with a description of the harsh conditions of peasant life. The “crude icon of the virgin behind a guttering candle” proves that these people believe in God (Carter De Swaef 42
108). But they believe in the devil even more: “To these upland woodsmen, the Devil is as real as you or I” (108). The depiction of the different types of evil that loom about the village vastly outweighs this one icon of religion. Ruled by fear, the villagers are quick to pass out death in judgement. They “kill to gain some control over what they do not understand” (Bacchilega 60):
When they discover a witch – some old woman whose cheeses ripen when her
neighbours’ do not, another old woman whose black cat, oh, sinister! follows her
about all the time, they strip the crone, search for her marks, for the supernumerary
nipple her familiar sucks. They soon find it. Then they stone her to death. (Carter
108)
This short fragment brings to mind the witch-hunts of medieval times in which many innocent women found a cruel and often fiery death. This excerpt reveals the “dark side” that Klonowska mentioned, the cruelty that we are all capable of. The witches, vampires and graveyard picnics mentioned in the description of this harsh, northern country create a distinct gothic atmosphere. Klonowska explains that through the horizon of expectations that is thus created the reader is prepared for a gothic story. It is therefore not surprising that the “immediately familiar words of mother to daughter come almost as shock”
(Bacchilega 60): “Go and visit grandmother, who has been sick. Take her the oatcakes I’ve baked for her on the hearthstone and a little pot of butter” (Carter 109). These words are taken almost literally out of Perrault’s fairy tale. The following warning not to leave the path on the other hand, is taken out of the Grimms’ tale. But unlike the fairy tale versions, we are given a reason why a mother would allow her daughter to travel through a forest teeming with starving wild beasts. She is given her father’s hunting knife with the words
“you know how to use it” (109). Obviously, this mountaineer’s child knows how to defend herself. Instead of a red hood, this girl wears “a scabby coat of sheepskin”, again a signal De Swaef 43 that we are not dealing with the helpless girl from the literary fairy tales, but with the cunning trickster from oral tradition (109). These signals make it less surprising that when her path is crossed by a wolf, she does not cower in fear but wounds the animal and puts it to flight. Far more disturbing is her calm, imperturbable reaction to this violent event.
Coolly, she “wiped the blade of her knife clean on her apron” and “wrapped up the wolf’s paw in the cloth in which her mother had packed the oatcakes” (109). You would expect a young girl who just survived an encounter with a wolf to be a little more shaken. When she arrives at her grandmother’s house, she discovers that her grandmother was the wolf she wounded in the forest and cries out for help. The neighbours rush in and recognise the wart on the severed hand for a witch’s nipple.
“They drove the old woman, in her shift as she was, out into the snow with sticks,
beating her old carcass as far as the edge of the forest, and pelted her with stones
until she fell down dead.” (110)
This description is more moving than any of the girl’s descriptions, which are devoid of emotions. Klonowska notes that in this way Carter appears to direct the reader’s sympathy towards the werewolf-grandmother rather than towards the girl. This troubles the clear-cut distinction between good and bad that is typical of fairy tales. In the forest the girl clearly acted out of self-defence. In the grandmother’s house this is no longer so obvious. After all, she no longer faces a ferocious wolf, but a sickly old woman. Her cruel death makes the reader pity this old woman. Even more so because her death is exactly the same as that of the so-called witches described in the beginning of the tale. In this way an association is made with the innocent women who were burnt as witches. The final line of the story makes things even more complicated: “Now the child lived in her grandmother’s house; she prospered” (110). We cannot help but wonder if this girl is really as innocent as she seems. Though this tale ends in very much the same way as most Red Riding Hood tales – De Swaef 44 with both the wolf and the grandmother dead and the little girl alive – this is not quite the happily ever after we are used to. With this ending Carter has worked out another interpretation of this fairy tale: the struggle between generations. The young girl gets her old grandmother out of the way, so she can take her place. Bacchilega argues that economics are at the heart of the story. They are focussed on during the lengthy description of the setting of the story and again at the end, when the girl prospers after taking over her grandmother’s house. Economics can after all turn “sheep into wolves – the grandmother into a witch, the young girl into a killer” (Bacchilega 61). In other words, people will do anything to survive. The girl no longer drinks her grandmother’s blood in a symbolic ritual of matriarchal transition of knowledge as in the peasant versions, but “spills that blood in a scapegoating ritual ... that reproduces the wolf’s ferocity” (61). As Bacchilega said, “the ambiguous implications of the girl’s possession of her grandmother’s house allow for no easy moral judgment or unmediated explanation” (61).
The second story also starts of with a very gothic description of the forest teeming with starving wolves which will eat you the moment you stray from the path. And again, the children living near those woods are no longer defenceless, since they are given knives for their protection, suggesting that the heroine of this story will also be a hardy survivor.
The gothic atmosphere is further enhanced by a few folktales dealing with werewolves and such. One story in particular, about the disappearance of a man during his wedding night and his unexpected return years later, shows that danger not only lurks in the woods but can also be found closer to home. Yet in the middle of these fear-inspiring tales, the reader is asked to pity these creatures that were just described as the most terrifying of all monsters.
There is a vast melancholy in the canticles of the wolves, melancholy infinite as the
forest, endless as these long nights of winter and yet that ghastly sadness, that De Swaef 45
mourning for their own, irremediable appetites, can never move the heart for not
one phrase in it hints at the possibility of redemption; grace could not come to the
wolf from its own despair, only through some external mediator, so that,
sometimes, the beast will look as if he half welcomes the knife that despatches him.
(Carter 112)
This unexpected intermezzo already suggests that this tale will have a different ending than its preceding sister-tale. Just like the previous story, this Red Riding Hood adaption contains many references to Perrault. The red shawl, for instance, reminds us of the red hood Perrault added to the tale. Further, the narrator draws much attention to the fact that this young girl has just become a woman, thus pointing out to us that this will be an initiation tale. He especially stresses the fact that she is still a virgin:
She is an unbroken egg; she is a sealed vessel; she has inside her a magic space the
entrance to which is shut tight with a plug of membrane; she is a closed system; she
does not know how to shiver. (114)
This depiction of her virginity, using terms that go as far back as the Renaissance, shows how important virginity is in this period. In the Renaissance female bodies were considered leaky vessels that lost all sorts of fluids, like menstrual blood. The ideal woman was a closed system that is only open to her husband, since the main threat to the male domination of the dynasty was an illegitimate child (Berensmeyer). The red shawl and the many violent images in the text suggest that, just as in Perrault’s tale, the girl’s journey will end in rape.
The red shawl ... has the ominous if brilliant look of blood on snow. (113)
The forest closed upon her like a pair of jaws. (114)
When she meets a dashing young hunter in the forest who flirts with her, it is obvious that he is the “tame wolf” that Perrault warns against. Yet she does not mind being seduced. De Swaef 46
When he wagers her a kiss that he will be able to reach grandmother’s house before she does, she is in no hurry to get there. She “wanted to dawdle on her way to make sure the handsome gentleman would win his wager”, despite the fact that she was now walking unarmed through the forest by night (115). As the reader has already guessed by the many suggestive details, such as the spittle clinging to his teeth and his hairy knuckles, the young man turns out to be a werewolf. Granny immediately recognizes him for what he is, but she cannot escape him. Neither the Bible nor the apron that she throws at him and which are supposed to be “a sure prophylactic against these infernal vermin” (116), can protect her from him. Yet we do not feel sad about her death. After all, the text makes very clear that it was her time to go: “granny is three-quarters succumbed to the mortality the ache in her bones promises her and almost ready to give in entirely” (115). By the time the girl arrives, the werewolf has removed all traces from his murder, but still she notices that something is wrong. She “saw there was not even the indentation of a head on the smooth cheek of the pillow and how, for the first time she’d seen it so, the Bible lay closed on the table” (116-
117). Just as in the folktales, the girl realizes in time she is dealing with a wolf. As if she cannot help herself, she starts the question-answer sequence using the exact same words as
Perrault’s Little Red Riding Hood. For a moment, it appears that this tale will also end with the heroine’s death: “she knew the worst wolves are hairy on the inside and she shivered, in spite of the scarlet shawl she pulled more closely round herself as if it could protect her although it was as red as the blood she must spill” (117). But, as the knife in her basket makes plain, she is not a defenceless victim. “Since her fear did her no good, she ceased to be afraid” and she changes from the naive, spoiled child from Perrault into the cunning young woman from oral tradition (117). The girl now starts to perform a striptease, using words similar to those in “The Story of Grandmother”:
What shall I do with my shawl? De Swaef 47
Throw it on the fire, dear one. You won’t need it again. (117)
Unlike “The Story of Grandmother”, the wolf did not ask her to take her clothes off, which proves it is part of her plan to save herself. She intends to turn the tables and seduce him.
Her sexuality is no longer what makes her a victim, but becomes a weapon. She freely gives him the kiss she owes him. But she is not out of the woods yet, since the question- answer sequence was not finished. When the werewolf tells her his big teeth are “all the better to eat you with”, she responds like neither the literary nor the traditional Red Riding
Hood (118). In stead of cowering in fear or requesting to go outside, she laughs at him and tears of his shirt. Now she is the one taking the initiative and determining what their relationship will be. “Sweet and sound she sleeps in granny’s bed, between the paws of the tender wolf” (118). The girl is not the only one that is saved. Like her folkloric counterparts, she could have chosen to run. In stead she decides to stay and act out her new discovered desire, despite the potential danger. She accepts the hunter-wolf for what he is.
Bacchilega explains that “just as the girl has slipped out of her overdetermined and victimizing propriety, so now is the wolf, that excluded and demonized other, allowed to slip in” (64). Despite the claim in the beginning of the tale that the only way to release a werewolf from its curse is with a knife, this werewolf seems to have found redemption. Of course, this tale has not always had a positive reception. Patricia Duncker believes that
“Carter is rewriting the tales within the strait-jacket of their original structures” (Bristow
12):
Red Riding Hood sees that rape is inevitable ... and decides to strip off, lie back and
enjoy it. She wants it really. They all do. The message spelt out. (12)
But, as I hope I have already made clear by now, this is far from true. Carter does not only rewrite Perrault’s fairy tale, which is what I suppose Duncker meant by ‘original structures’, but mixes elements from this tale with parts of other variants of this tale. By De Swaef 48 doing so, Carter makes clear that her heroine has a choice. She could choose to flee like the heroine from “The Story of Grandmother”, but instead she decides to stay and she does this on her own terms. She does not lay back and let it happen as Duncker puts it, but she pounces upon the werewolf-hunter and rips off his shirt. Carter’s protagonists do not
“choose the worst imaginable option by remaining erotically attracted to the patriarchal enemy” as Duncker claims (12). Carter tries to show that women are just as much sexual beings as men are and that there is nothing wrong with that. Further, she tries to break down the black-and-white thinking of fairy tales. None of her villains are completely evil – except perhaps the Marquis – and all of them can be redeemed if someone bothers to show a little compassion and understanding. Carter takes this motive of redemption even further in her third Red Riding Hood tale.
“Wolf-Alice” is very different from the other two tales of this wolf-trilogy. In fact, there are few similarities with “Red Riding Hood” left. The heroine of this story is a young girl that was fostered by wolves. Here, the wolves are no longer the ferocious man-eating beasts they were in the two preceding tales. Quite the contrary, they are shown to be kinder and more tolerant than humans. They accepted Wolf-Alice into their pack, raised and loved her even though she was different. The nuns from the convent that took her in after she was
‘saved’ from the wolves simply cast her out again when they fail to teach her some basic human skills, such as dressing oneself and praying. They are embarrassed by this child because she does not behave like everyone else. “The wolves had tended her because they knew she was an imperfect wolf; we secluded her in animal privacy out of fear of her imperfection because it showed us what we might have been” (Carter 122). This child is like Adam and Eve before their fall; she only lives in the present, she does not judge anyone but simply accept things the way they are. De Swaef 49
If you could transport her, in her filth, rags and feral disorder, to the Eden of our
first beginnings where Eve and grunting Adam squat on a daisy bank, picking the
lice from one another’s pelts, then she might prove to be the wise child who leads
them all and her silence and her howling a language as authentic as any language of
nature. In a world of talking beasts and flowers, she would be the bud of flesh in the
kind lion’s mouth: but how can the bitten apple flesh out its scar again? (121)
Precisely because Wolf-Alice lacks the knowledge that normal people possess, she can accept and show kindness to people that would seem revolting to us. After the nuns have lost their patience with her, they sent her to the Duke, another outcast who believes he is a werewolf. He lives on corpses and has long “ceased to cast an image in the mirror” (120).
This quality is usually attributed to vampires rather than werewolves. Vampires possess no reflection since they have no soul and since they are not part of our world. In this story, it mostly symbolizes the fact that other people no longer see the Duke as a human being, but as a monster. They no longer tolerate his defiling of the dead and have started to hunt him down. In fact, the Duke does not see himself as human any more either. After all, this mirror is also a symbol of self-awareness. It plays an important role in Wolf-Alice’s life as she develops her own identity. Slowly she starts to realize that the other in the mirror is merely an image of herself. When the Duke gets shot, she remembers the compassion of
“her gaunt grey mother” and tends to his wound (126). Slowly but certainly, the face of the
Duke appears in the mirror, “as if brought into being by her soft, moist, gentle tongue”
(126). Her tender care and kindness save the Duke and restore his humanity. Humans thought they had to save Wolf-Alice, but “she proves to be the savior” (Bacchilega 65).
Bacchilega remarks that, while man judges and spills blood, “her brave acceptance of difference revalues life” and redefines what is human (65). De Swaef 50
We need to link this story back to the previous two tales. In the first tale the werewolf, a symbol of the duality of man and the evil in ourselves, is destroyed at the end, but we now doubt the goodness of the girl who destroyed this evil. It seems the evil is also in her, that she simply takes her grandmother-werewolf’s place. In “The Company of
Wolves” the girl and the werewolf are united. She “recognizes the beast in herself and the man in the beast”, which saves them both (Bristow 125). In “Wolf-Alice” the werewolf is no longer a scapegoat as in “The Werewolf”, and the girl is no longer a potential victim as in “The Company of Wolves”. “By recognizing the Other and the abject as part of ourselves, we can ... overcome the need to find victims, scapegoats and enemies” (126).
With these three very different rewritings, Angela Carter frees Red Riding Hood from the
“gendered and constricting chamber” in which she was locked by literary tradition
(Bacchilega 58). Her “postmodern rewritings are acts of fairy-tale archaeology that release this story’s many voices” (59).
4.2. Flowers and Whores
As the three very different Red Riding Hood tales have shown, Angela Carter likes to play with the archetypes typical of fairy tales and gothic fiction. She changed the defenceless victim of Perrault and Grimm back to the cunning trickster of folkloric tradition. In “The Lady of the House of Love” she brings together two opposite female
archetypes in the Countess by creating a vampire-
version of “Sleeping Beauty”. As a vampire the
Countess belongs to the evil women from fairy tales:
the witches, wicked stepmothers and evil mother-in-
laws. But she is also likened to Sleeping Beauty,
Fig. 3 "Sleeping Beauty" Gustave Doré classifying her as one of the perfect princesses that await their knight in shining armour. These two archetypes not only occur in fairy tales, De Swaef 51 but also appear in gothic fiction in the form of “femme fatales or idealized, doll-like icons”
(Bristow 116). “Horror writing”, as Gina Wisker also puts it “makes women into either bloodthirsty vampires or quaking violets” (116). The Countess is both and neither. She may be a bloodthirsty vampire, but a very reluctant one at that. Just like fairy tale princesses as Cinderella or Snow White, she would like to have some animal friends to keep her company, but every time she catches a rabbit her hunger overcomes her and she sucks it dry. The same goes for the boys who cross her path. She cannot help but play the part her ancestors designed for her, but afterwards her cheeks are stained with both blood and tears. But just as with the werewolves in “The Company of Wolves”, her despair cannot redeem her. She is very much like the doll to which the English bicyclist compares her, “powered by some slow energy of which she was not in control” (Carter 102). She is merely a puppet to her ancestors who sometimes “peer out of the windows of her eyes”
(103). Right before he died, her father cried: “Nosferatu is dead: long live Nosferatu!” a clear reference to the Renaissance theory of the king’s two bodies. The king was believed to have a mortal body natural and an immortal body politic that passed on to the next in line to the throne. In very much the same way, the Nosferatu spirit takes over his next descendant. This is why the Countess has no control over herself. She is locked inside a body she cannot control like her pet bird is locked inside its cage. She hopes to one day wake from this nightmare and become human. She voices this desire in a singular way: “A single kiss woke up the Sleeping Beauty in the Wood” (Carter 97). Hope speaks from this sentence, which cites Perrault’s title of this tale. But this hope remains slim, since her Tarot cards not only predict a love that might save her from the shadows, but link this love to death. And further, she may be given a voice of her own, but the moment she is confronted with a potential victim the voices of her ancestors drown hers out.
Fee fie fo fum De Swaef 52
I smell the blood of an Englishman.
... Be he alive or be he dead
I’ll grind his bones to make my bread. (Carter 96-97)
This rhyme, which breaks up the text, indirectly refers to Perrault’s second part of
“Sleeping Beauty” in which the cannibalistic mother-in-law tries to eat Sleeping Beauty and her two children. The words are taken from Jacobs’s “Jack the Giant Killer”. Linked to the Sleeping Beauty tale, the words suggest that the Countess will not be able to suppress her predatory impulses anymore than the Queen-mother in “Sleeping Beauty”. Prisoner of her own vampiric impulses, she plays the role of both victim and villain. That Carter chose a vampire for this ambiguous role is not at all strange since these creatures of the night are themselves of a contradictory essence, confusing the roles of victim and predator as Sarah
Sceats explains. “The vampire is entirely dependent: s/he can only exist in relation to the victim/host” (Bristow 108). Further, since Victorian times the vampire has been a symbol of “unbridled sexuality” and the fear thereof (108). Contrasting with this icon of the depraved seductress is the image of Sleeping Beauty as the chaste virgin who passively awaits her kiss. In Basile’s version, “Sun, Moon, and Talia”, it goes much further than a kiss. The king takes advantage of Talia’s comatose state, has his way with her and then leaves her again. We find this fantasy of the absolute passive sexual partner also in “The
Lady of the House of Love”, when the English bicyclist tells how:
His colonel, an old goat with jaded appetites, had given him the visiting card of a
brothel in Paris where, the satyr assured him, ten Louis would buy just such a
lugubrious bedroom, with a naked girl upon a coffin; offstage, the brothel pianist
played the Dies Irae on a harmonium and, amidst all the perfumes of the
embalming parlour, the customer took his necrophiliac pleasure of a pretended
corpse. (Carter 105) De Swaef 53
In this light the Countess can both be seen as an active and a passive woman. As a vampire she actively engages in seducing her prey, but at the same time the morbid setting of her bedroom and the fact that she is a living dead suggests that she will be as passive as “a pretended corpse” or a sleeping beauty (105). In the end, both vampire and sleeping beauty represent the same thing: the desire of some men that women are completely passive and submissive. The hero of this story certainly does not belong to this group. He rejects his colonel’s sexual appetites and has no intention of taking advantage of “the disordered girl”, like Basile’s king did with Talia (105). Instead, his tender care and kindness transform her into a human and mortal, “so that her moment of wholeness and completion becomes her moment of obliteration” (Bristow 112). And since she represents both, the archetype of the saint and the whore die with her.
The female archetype is not the only one that has been tampered with. Carter also does away with the male-rescuer archetype. Rodriguez mentions two alternatives that occur in Carter’s tales: “female cooperation” and “self-liberation” (57). The first happens in “The Bloody Chamber” in the form of the strong mother-daughter relationship which makes the mother dash to her daughter’s aid. She replaces Perrault’s male-rescuers who charge Bluebeard on horseback, swords drawn. The second substitute, self-liberation, occurs in the werewolf-stories where each Red Riding Hood saves herself. In this story there still is a male-rescuer, but he is very different from the hero we might imagine when we think of the prince in “Sleeping Beauty”. Under the influence of Disney, most people will remember a handsome prince who, sword in hand, charges the dragon on his horse. In fact, this type of hero is very atypical of fairy tales. They are part of the courtly love tradition and more commonly appear in stories about King Arthur and his knights. The princes in Basile’s, the Grimms’ or Perrault’s fairy tale do not save Sleeping Beauty thanks to any military prowess, but by chance, thanks to their impeccable timing or because they De Swaef 54 were part of the good fairy’s counter spell. Just as in Perrault’s tale, Carter’s hero is the chosen one who is meant to save the Countess from her nightmarish existence as the Tarot cards suggest. But he is far from the heroic knight or the noble prince from fairy tales. He is a rational soldier who hardly believes in ghost stories anymore. And it is exactly “this lack of imagination” which “gives his heroism to the hero” (Carter 104). Further, he is protected by a characteristic that is usually attributed to the heroines in folklore: his virginity. Whether or not he does right by the Countess is disputable. Several critics seem to think that he cannot escape “patriarchal constructions of women” (Bristow 127). Indeed, he does compare her to dolls and whores. But I think that Wisker takes it too far when she claims that he is aroused by “her marionette-like demeanour” (127). When he says that
“the idea she might be an automaton ... deeply moved his heart”, he expresses not love, but pity with this girl that seems to have no control over herself. He does not respond to her attempt to seduce him, but to the immense sadness that she emits. He sees her not as a tempting seductress, as a lust-object as did his predecessors before him, but as a child with a nervous disorder, an orphan that has been neglected for too long. “He would like to take her into his arms and protect her from the ancestors who leer down from the walls” (Carter
105). His kindness and his refusal to take advantage of this young girl is what will save them both. The kiss he gives her and that breaks the curse has nothing sexual in it. When she cuts her hand, he brings “into that vile and murderous room ... the innocent remedies of the nursery” by kissing “it better for her, as her mother, had she lived, would have done”
(106). Just as in “Wolf-Alice”, it is tender care and kindness that restores the demonized other to humanity. Rodriguez believes that by turning her human he means to “make her a passive and powerless woman with no character of her own” (53). I tend to disagree. First of all, she was already powerless since she was incapable to resist the voices of her ancestors that made her into an evil seductress and cold-blooded killer. And further, how De Swaef 55 can the bicyclist intend to render her harmless if he did not believe her dangerous to begin with. He merely sees her as a neglected girl who is in high need of a dentist and a manicurist. And though his kiss unintentionally brings about her death, it does set her free.
As the freeing of her pet lark that soars away into the clear blue sky suggests, her spirit has finally been freed of the tyranny of her ancestors. Her death brings her peace. Unlike in fairy tales, the hero of this story does not await a happily ever after but a pointless death in the trenches.
4.3. Bewitching Women and Austen heroines
After fully discussing the strong women that can be found in “The Bloody
Chamber”, I now turn to Clarke’s bewitching characters: “Mrs Mabb” and “The Ladies of
Grace Adieu”. Susanna Clarke integrates folktales in her short stories in a way very similar to Carter’s dealing with the fairy tales discussed above. Both create, what Iser called, a horizon of expectation which is then abruptly shattered. Carter created for her three wolf- tales a distinct gothic setting making her reader expect a horror story, after which the familiar fairy tale phrases and plots come as a complete surprise. Now, Clarke’s setting and style immediately bring to mind Jane Austen’s writing, creating the expectancy of a romantic tale. And indeed, the story of “Mrs Mabb” deals with a jilted woman who tries her hardest to get her man back. But unlike Austen’s novels, it is not secrets, misunderstandings or pride that separates these lovers. It is made immediately clear that there is something far more mysterious about Mr Fox’s sudden interest in Mrs Mabb.
When Mr Fox’s servant, Lucas finally gives up waiting for his master, who joined Mrs
Mabb for a game of cards, and returns to Kissingland, he discovers that he “had been standing in Mrs Mabb’s little stone room for three days and three nights” (Clarke 71).
Venetia senses that something is off and is determined to see for herself if Mr Fox is happy. Three times Venetia tries to reach Mrs Mabb’s house, which is each time in a very De Swaef 56 different location, and every time Venetia is prevented from approaching the house by what can only be magical means. Staged in such a realistic setting, the sudden appearance of magic into the tale is quite unexpected. “The Ladies of Grace Adieu” is also written in an Austenesque style and setting. The story is situated around the beginning of the nineteenth century and seems to start off from the general principle that a single woman must be in want of a husband. Yet Clarke shows a far more realistic image of marriage in the eighteenth and nineteenth century than Austen’s romantic novels. She makes very plain that women in those days did not marry for love, but for wealth and position. Mrs Field married a man of more than twice her age because she “had no money and must either marry Mr Field or go and be a teacher in a school” (Clarke 8). After giving a general setting, the story starts with the three friends discussing whether or not Cassandra should marry Mr Woodhope. The only reason why she considers marriage is because it is expected of her by society, and the only merit of this particular candidate is that he lives near her two friends. But, strangely enough, this is not what the story will be about. It will deal with the girls’ discovery and first use of magic. This breach with the expectations raised in the opening of the tale is not quite as sudden as in the previous story – though the contrast between realistic setting and supernatural events still has an unsettling effect – since the text was preceded by an excerpt from “The Book of the Lady Catherine of
Winchester”, translated by Jane Tobias (one of the characters), which already indicated that the story would deal with magic.
Though both stories are in fact quite new, they still have something very familiar about them. This is not only thanks to the Austenesque style and setting, which lends the tales a familiar tone, but also because of the tale’s topic. The majority of Clarke’s tales deal with fairies in one way or other and everything that she writes about them, she derives directly from folklore and existing fairy legends. “Mrs Mabb” clearly resembles “Tam De Swaef 57
Lin” and similar fairy legends in which a fairy queen casts a spell on a man. To win him back, the heroine will have to find him in the fairy procession and then hold on to him till daybreak while the fairy queen changes him in all sorts of animals to make her let go. Of course, the tests that Venetia is put through are quite different, but they are also tests of perseverance. They are meant to scare her off and make her let go. Although the trials are different from that in the folktale, they still originated from fairy lore. When she tries to reach the house the first time, Venetia is attacked by what can only be a fairy procession.
When she comes to, she hardly remembers a thing accept the sound of hooves and bells.
Mrs Purvis says the slashes in her gown could only have been made by swords and sabres and therefore believes that Captain Fox “must have set on some of his men to frighten her off” (82). Until this point, most events still have a possible realistic explanation – accept perhaps Lucas waiting in Mrs Mabb’s anteroom for three days without realizing that so much time had passed. But it will soon become clear to the reader that everything is Mrs
Mabb’s doing and that she must have sent a fairy cortege to scare Venetia off. As I have already explained in the introduction, these fairy corteges commonly occur in folklore. The second time Venetia tries to reach Mrs Mabb’s house, she is “entranced by the compelling music and forced to dance all night” as always happens in fairy legends when someone chances on a fairy circle (Koomen 115 my translation). The third time, as is typical of folktales, has a very different outcome. Venetia finally has the chance to fight back when she is attacked by what the children say are only butterflies. Venetia sends the shredded butterfly wings to Mrs Mabb who, upon receiving the two bloody corpses, decides that
“the game was not worth the candle” and lets Mr Fox go (Clarke 98). Thanks to her strong- minded perseverance Venetia manages to get her beloved back.
Though the story certainly has an Austenesque feel to it, Venetia Moore is not the
Austen heroine she at first seems. Typical of Austen’s heroines is that they must learn De Swaef 58 something before they are united with their loved-one. In Pride and Prejudice, for instance,
Lizzy realizes that she was prejudiced against Mr Darcy because of her pride. Venetia, however, has not changed by the end of the story. She may come across as a typical romantic character at first, but she will proof that she is no fragile flower. Even after they realized their feelings, the Austen heroines have to stay at home and wait for the man to come to them. Venetia, on the other hand, ventures out on a quest to get her man back.
Even when everyone around her starts to think she is losing her mind, she stands her ground against Mrs Mabb and refuses to give up. At the end of the story, she is even shown to be stronger than Mr Fox. He is a passive character who simply waited until he was asked to go home. He even slept through some of the commotion that went on during Venetia’s attempts to reach the house. And when two bloody corpses were carried into the room, all he has to remark is that it was “a little odd” that they were wrapped in paper, showing how indifferent he is. Further, he stubbornly wants to be put in the right, even when there is all the evidence to the contrary. He refuses to believe that he had been in Mrs Mabb’s house for longer than a few hours. Eventually, Venetia gives in:
“I dare say you are right – you always are – but perhaps you will explain to me how
the trees in this wood got so heavy with leaves and blossoms and buds? I know they
were bare when I went away. And where did all these roses come from? And all
this sweet fresh grass?” (Clarke 97)
When he cannot explain this, Captain Fox quickly drops the subject. For Venetia, it is enough that she knows what really happened. She does not need his confirmation that she is right. She gives him the consolidation that he needs, allowing him to think that he is the dominant one in their relationship, while she is really the one in control. This point is best put across with one of the final images of the story. While Captain Fox chats away about the army, “Venetia took his arm and led him back to Kissingland” (99). She is leading him, De Swaef 59 not the other way around. The three ladies from Grace Adieu have even less of the Austen heroine about them. Just as Venetia, they need not be taught a lesson, though Mr Strange, a character of Clarke’s larger work “Mr Norrel and Mr Strange”, clearly thinks that they do.
But unlike Venetia and the Austen heroine, they have no romantic expectations about marriage. Though they may not be romantic girls in search of a husband, the three heroines of this tale do have one thing in common with the Austen heroines. They are intelligent, witty, strong-minded girls who possess moral integrity. When they suspect that Captain
Winbright might harm his little cousins to get his hands on their fortune, they start spending the night at Winter’s Realm to guard the girls. On her way home, Cassandra gets lost in the dark corridors and comes across Captain Winbright and his friend, who are both drunk. Just as Carter’s Red Riding Hood in “The Company of Wolves”, she is initially afraid and pulls her shawl closer around her as if it could protect her. But then she remembers her own power that will protect her. Both her friends appear at her side and she and Mrs Field change into owls and eat the two men, who are transformed into mice. Mr
Strange, who is visiting the area, discovers what they have done and confronts them with it in a very superior and haughty way. He seems to think that he will get them to confess their crime, but they point out to him that he has no right to lecture them about how they use their magic since he allows others to tell him what to think in spite of what he believes in his heart to be true. Cassandra tells him: “You are no match for us, for we three are quite united, while you, sir, for all your cleverness, are at war, even with yourself” (Clarke 34).
This seems indeed to be quite true, for all Mr Strange can do about them is prevent Mr
Woodhope from marrying Cassandra by arranging a better living for him elsewhere, which quite pleases Cassandra. With her new-found strength and her two friends at her side, she no longer needs the conventional protection of marriage, which was often no protection at all. After all, eighteenth and nineteenth century husbands were allowed to beat their wives, De Swaef 60
lock them up and take their children away from them. These
three women have broken free from the confining domestic
sphere to which their time limited them. Before they killed the
two men, they were always depicted inside, in a closed room.
Afterwards, they are mostly shown outside, enjoying a moonlit
night or a walk on the high hills, as can be seen in figure 4. This
change of setting symbolizes their breaking free from the Fig. 4 "The Ladies of Grace Adieu" Charles Vess conventions of their time.
Though Carter and Clarke’s stories are very different, one breathing a very dark, gothic atmosphere, the other with a romantic, Austenesque setting; they all display strong, independent heroines. Carter’s Red Riding Hoods not only save themselves, but also redeem the werewolves they face. The lady of the House of Love proves stronger than her saviour. At least she knew what fate had in store for her: Love and Death. She must have known that to become human would be the death of her. And still she chose that fate over her accursed half-existence. Her English soldier, on the other hand, blindly obeys the voices of his superiors that tell him to spill blood for his country, whether that blood is of his enemy or his own. Venetia, the heroine of “Mrs Mabb”, may indeed marry her Captain
Fox but she still holds control, just as the protagonist of “On Lickerish Hill”. Yet there is an important difference between these two endings. Miranda married for wealth and position, in other words a conventional eighteenth century marriage, while Venetia obviously marries for love. In “The Ladies of Grace Adieu”, the possibility of marriage is discussed, but in the end Cassandra needs not comply with the conventions of her time since she has the protection and support of her two friends. Though all these heroines have proven that they can not just defend themselves, but even beat their antagonists, there is a distinct difference between the relationship between man and woman depicted in both De Swaef 61 books. Whether they choose to marry or not, Clarke’s heroines always retain the upper hand. In Carter’s “The Bloody Chamber” and “In the Company of Wolves”, man and woman have become equals. Now that I said all that I wanted about the female characters in these works, it is time to look further into the male characters of these texts.
5. Predatory Men and Gentle Beasts
Carter’s male characters are often not what they seem. The generous, gentlemanlike
Marquis from “The Bloody Chamber” turns out to be a notorious serial killer, while the ferocious-looking werewolf in “The Company of Wolves” is really a tender lover. Note, however, that he too is described in a way that Carter usually reserves for her sexual predators: with white, pointed teeth on which spittle glistens. He only becomes a “tender wolf” after he takes his wolf shape (Carter 118). By the end of the book, wolves are no longer an image of (sexual) violence and death, but an image of gentle care and kindness, as is best shown in “Wolf-Alice”. Predatory men also emerge in Clarke’s stories. Sir John
Sowreston, the husband in “On Lickerish Hill”, shows many resemblances to the
Bluebeard-figure. He too resorts to violence for the smallest offence and blames his victims for his crimes. Captain Winbright, in “The Ladies of Grace Adieu”, preys upon the fortune of his young cousins and even seems willing to kill for it. Clarke also suggests that he may be a sexual predator, who took advantage of Miss Pye, the young woman he brought with him. Captain Fox, on the other hand, is not as tough or controlling as his military rank might suggest, but is in fact very meek and compliant. So, to a lesser extent, these same types can also be found in Clarke’s tales. I will first deal with the final predatory man left in Carter’s work, namely “The Erl-King”, and then compare his De Swaef 62 qualities to those of the male faeries in Clarke’s tales. Then I will look further into the gentle beast characters in the two Beauty-and-the-Beast-tales of Angela Carter.
5.1. Faeries: Good and Evil as a Matter of Perception
Linkin points out that “Carter examines not only the ways in which male desire defines and confines the female, but also the ways in which female desire colludes in erecting the bars of the golden cage” (306). And this is indeed true, as the heroine of “The
Erl-King” also makes plain. “I am not afraid of him; only, afraid of vertigo, of the vertigo with which he seizes me” (Carter 87). What she means with this is that she is not afraid of the man himself, but of the power he has over her which stems from the power of her love for him. The Erl-King himself shows her that “the price of flesh is love” (87). Because she loves him, she allows him to objectify her, to turn her into meat and to confine her like he cages his birds. Linkin explains further that though the heroine/narrator of this story desperately tries to break with the Romantic tradition that “at best confines and at worst silences the female voice” (308), she cannot escape “cultural encoding” (311). Her entire narrative is filled with typically Romantic descriptions and references to celebrated
Romantic poets such as Blake, Wordsworth and Shelley. Carter makes it her business to show that no one can escape cultural encoding, be they man or woman. Men are just as much defined and confined by literary stereotypes as women. Already at the opening description of the forest, the narrator evokes the images of women who have lost themselves in the wood and of Red Riding Hood on her way to grandmother, suggesting that she sees herself as a potential victim and in this way she immediately classifies men as antagonists. Even before she meets him, she already warns that “Erl-King will do you grievous harm”, thus making her audience prejudiced against him (Carter 85). The very suggestive way in which she describes him immediately marks him out as a predator. His green eyes that “can eat you” indicate the same objectifying gaze that I already discussed De Swaef 63 in relation to “The Bloody Chamber” (86). And he indeed seems to reduce her to a piece of meat, just as the Marquis did with his wife. When the heroine goes to him “he lays me down on his bed of rustling straw where I lie at the mercy of his huge hands” (87). This clearly shows that in their sexual relationship she passively undergoes his attentions. The narrator uses the same butcher-meat imagery that occurred in “The Bloody Chamber” to further stress that his interest in her is a purely carnal one. The Erl-King is “the tender butcher who showed me how the price of flesh is love” (87). This phrase suggests another reason why women would collude in their own entrapment then the one already suggested in “The Bloody Chamber”. In the title story, the heroine enters a loveless marriage out of material motives. Just as many women in the past, she married for wealth and position. But in more recent times, women put up with a lot of things out of love, as is the case in this tale. The heroine of this tale does not fear the Erl-King himself, but her love for him that makes her accept the cage he builds around her. “Your green eye is a reducing chamber. If
I look into it long enough, I will become as small as my own reflection, I will diminish to a point and vanish. I will be drawn down into that black whirlpool and be consumed by you.” (90) What she fears most is that she will start seeing herself as he sees her, that she will loose herself in her relationship with him and that she will cease to be an independent being, but that she will only exist because of him. Yet, despite this fear, she cannot help answering his call and going to him. She sees this stifling control he has over her as a disease: “thirsty, cankered, goblin-ridden, I go back and back to him” (89). Linkin explains that “she acknowledges her susceptibility to his seductive song; she does not trust him, but she does not yet know how to resist his call” (316). To protect herself from the immense influence he holds over her, she likens him to the big, bad wolf of the Red Riding Hood tale. Just as the werewolves in the three wolf-tales, the Erl-King has “white, pointed teeth with the spittle gleaming on them” (Carter 87) and “eyes of an incomparable luminosity, De Swaef 64 the numinous phosphorescence of the eyes of lycanthropes” (90). She draws the comparison even further by quoting one of the best-known phrases from that fairy tale:
“What big eyes you have” (90). That her fear of being encaged is not ungrounded is suggested by the many birds that are trapped by the Erl-King.
His kitchen shakes and shivers with birdsong from cage upon cage of singing birds,
larks and linnets, which he piles up one on another against the wall, a wall of
trapped birds. How cruel it is, to keep wild birds in cages! But he laughs at me
when I say that. (Carter 87)
Just as in “The Lady of the House of Love”, a parallel is made between a caged bird and a woman. The heroine of this story certainly is confined, but whether this is because the Erl-
King is suffocating her is not so obvious. After all, the highly suggestive descriptions that represent the Erl-King as a predator are sharply contrasted with the peaceful scenes in which he is depicted. When she first meets him, he is sitting in the wood surrounded by woodland creatures. A rusty fox has even laid its head upon his knee. He lives of everything he can find in the woods: mushrooms, flowers, herbs. And he is “an excellent housewife” who keeps his house “spick and spam” (87). In this light he no longer seems threatening. In fact, many of the activities he performs, such as collecting mushrooms, cooking soup and stews or weaving baskets, are the domestic tasks usually assigned to women. At the end of the story, the narrator confirms that the Erl-King had no real ill intentions towards her by stating that “in his innocence he never knew he might be the death of me” (90). He may have been kind and gentle, but he also treated her as he was raised to treat a lady without realizing that he was suffocating her. Neither can escape cultural encoding, as his final exclamation suggests: “Mother, mother, you have murdered me!” (91). He means her no harm, and yet the narrator finds it necessary to depict him as the big, bad wolf. “In the struggle for control,” Linkin explains, “she turns him into an De Swaef 65 image of nature, encasing him in her language just as she believes he would have entrapped her” (317). After all, protagonist and narrator are the same, which means she can manipulate the story to condone her actions. She even admits this herself in the beginning of the story: “she will be trapped in her own illusion because everything in the wood is exactly as it seems” (Carter 85). This not only implies that the Erl-King is indeed as harmless as he seems when he is first described fulfilling those domestic chores, but also that any predatory quality that is later ascribed to him all comes from the heroine/narrator’s imagination. Before she jumps to any drastic actions to rid herself of his suppressive influence, the narrator contemplates three alternative endings. She first considers if they could not “waltz together”, join in an equal partnership (89). Then she imagines what it would be like if he could swallow her and bear her, not only “like those queens in fairy tales who conceive when they swallow a grain of corn or a sesame seed” but also like the wolf in the Grimms’ tale who swallows Red Cap whole (89). This image suggests a nurturing, loving relationship in which she would be able to grow. But soon her claustrophobic anxieties of repression overwhelm her again and she starts seeing him again as the lycanthrope, the reducing chamber. If she has to be locked in a cage, she decides that she “shall be dumb, for spite” (90). As I have already made clear, there is no factual evidence that the Erl-King will harm her, or even that the caged birds are unwilling prisoners. After all, they come to him out of their own free will for shelter and food.
Nevertheless, the protagonist’s “astute analysis of nineteenth-century literature” – which subjugates the female – “so codes her understanding that she cannot see the erl-king in any other framework, despite his potentiality for plenitude” (Linkin 320). And this drives her to her final conclusion: “if there is to be no collaboration and no nurturing, she will not inhabit a resentful silence but will gain her own voice by silencing his” (319). Because she fails to “envision male and female roles in any new way”, she turns “from victim to De Swaef 66 victimizer” (321), killing him in a way that is remarkably reminiscent of Samson and
Delilah, which of course suggests that she is the one who betrays his love and trust.
Carter’s protagonist/narrator depicts the Erl-King as some great evil that needs to be destroyed, but, for all the reasons mentioned above, the reader cannot help but feel that this description is not really correct. In a similar way, Clarke casts the fairy once in the role of antagonist and once as protagonist, respectively in “Mr Simonelli or The Fairy
Widower” and “Tom Brightwind or How the Fairy Bridge Was Built at Thoresby”, without portraying them as either good or evil, but simply as fundamentally different. In this way, both authors return to the original fairy lore. One main characteristic which Koomen mentions and which all three fairies possess, is their “uninhibited amorous disposition” (35 my translation). Fairies do not only look for a partner within their own kind, but also often turn to humans as a means to bring new blood into their dying race. And, as already became clear in “Mrs Mabb”, fairies do not care whether their chosen partner is already engaged or married. Just as Carter displays her immense knowledge of fairy tales in her short stories, so Clarke shows off her great familiarity with fairy lore in these two tales.
In “Mr Simonelli”, she narrates the folkloric beliefs regarding fairy births. When his wife is in labour, Mr Hollyshoes goes to the neighbouring village to look for a human midwife. For want of a better alternative, he takes Mr Simonelli with him who he meets on the road and who says he studied medicine. When his wife dies in childbirth, he goes back to the village and abducts a young mother to be his son’s dry-nurse. Just as the many women abducted by fairies in folklore, Dido Puddifer does not see the great neglect and filth of the fairy home she is brought to. In stead, she sees a “heavenly place” with golden chairs, crystal pillars and velvet curtains where she dines on a banquet and sleeps in a bed with six feather mattresses. Mr Simonelli feels sorry for her and cleans the blood from her eye with his spittle. Just as the fairy ointment in folklore, this seems to break the spell. De Swaef 67
From then on Dido is able to see the immense luxury with one eye and the real decay of the place with the other. It does not only break the illusion, but it also gives her back her own free will. While before she could not imagine doing anything but suckling the fairy infant, she now cannot wait to get home. This is not because she is unsettled by the two very different worlds she is now seeing, for as she says “whichever it is I no longer care”
(Clarke 152), she just wants to go back to her family and her own baby. Within this tale another story is embedded, namely that of Mr Simonelli’s father, that shows some resemblance to Carter’s “Erl-King”. Thomas Fairwood is described as a licentious womanizer, but never seems to mean any harm. Indeed, he seduces women and abandons them again, but he never forces them to do anything they do not want to do. His cruel and watery death seems rather disproportioned to his crimes. Then again, John Hollyshoes, as
Fairwood’s cousin, is not exactly an unbiased witness, so it may very well be that he is not giving us all the facts.
Underneath this rich fairy tale facade Clarke hides a sharp criticism on the treatment of women in the nineteenth century. The first hint to such a reading can be found in Mr Hollyshoes’s home. Fairies are usually said to live in hills in a, what Koomen calls,
“cold, damp and filthy hole in the ground” or in fairy palaces (95 my translation), not in a decayed, ancient-looking house. This run-down mansion rather seems to be the understaffed home of an impoverished aristocrat. To fatten their bank accounts, these poor aristocrats had to marry, what they slightingly called, ‘new money’. They looked down upon this new middle class that had gained their new social position through work. Long before the nineteenth century, marriage in the upper classes was not a union of two people who are very much in love, but a social contract between two high-standing families. And though, as both Clarke’s and Carter’s stories have pointed out, such a loveless marriage may hold a certain risk for women, that risk became far greater when a woman was sold De Swaef 68 off to a man who looked down on her for her lack of so-called ‘blue blood’. The cold- hearted indifference of John Hollyshoes for his wife’s death may seem shocking to the modern reader, but would in the nineteenth century not have been regarded as anything out of the ordinary. After all, it was not expected that a husband loved his wife – certainly not in the higher classes – though he had absolute control over her. Further, the description of
Thomas Fairwood does not have anything fairy-like about it, but rather seems to describe the activities typical of a young aristocrat: horse races, cock-fighting, and seducing women. When Simonelli describes female conversation as “a discourse upon the merits of a bonnet trimmed with coquelicot ribbons” (Clarke 114), he merely puts into words the ideology of his time. As Marilyn French explains, female judgement was only considered suited for details and trivialities. That Susanna Clarke is indeed criticising the nineteenth century representation of women can be further proven by taking a quick look at her website, on which she has her two most famous characters, Mr Norrel and Mr Strange, describe her. Mr Norrel has the following to say on his spiritual mother:
First, may I say that I have the greatest dislike to Females aspiring to become
professional persons of any sort, but a novelist seems particularly bad. I dare say
novel-writing might be forgiven in a woman if she were driven to such an extremity
by poverty, or widowhood, or having numerous children or relations to support -
but I cannot discover that this woman has any such excuse for her behaviour. ... I
am persuaded it must be possible to frame a law preventing such a thing ever
occurring again, and I intend to take the first opportunity of speaking to the Prime
Minister about it. (“Mr Norrel”)
This short extract shows not only Clarke’s great sense of humour, but her thorough understanding of what went on in the nineteenth century, which is described by Marilyn
French as being, juridically speaking, “the historical low for women” (French 635 my De Swaef 69 translation). For the first time in history, laws were constructed to actually exclude women.
Before this time, women with the necessary lands and goods were allowed to vote, but in
1832 the qualification male was added to the suffrage law.
A married woman did not exist for the law ...: she could not conclude contracts, nor
possess goods and had no say about her children. A woman was the slave of her
husband, the absolute lord and master of her body, possessions and children. (634)
Concerning literature, Marilyn French tells us that it were women who introduced the social novel, with which they tried to raise sympathy for the poor and wretched. Gradually, they started to realize that they too belonged to the extensive group of oppressed and feminist authors like Charlotte Brönte, Elizabeth Gaskell and George Eliot began to describe the male oppression of women besides the economical oppression. But little by little women were removed from the literary establishment. The novel was claimed as art form by men and female writing was degraded to being suited only for “the general public, passive and superficial entertainment” (645). With Mr Strange’s description of herself,
Clarke has a smack at what were generally considered required accomplishments for young women.
Miss Clarke’s accomplishments are, I am sorry to say, paltry. She does not play any
instrument - or sing much. She does not dance. She cannot draw at all. She has only
a few words of German. Her Italian is halting and muddled, and entirely
incomprehensible to a native of that country. She thinks she would like to
embroider, but has never actually tried. (“Jonathan Strange”)
Austen fans will recognise this enumeration of accomplishments from a certain scene in
Pride and Prejudice in which Mr Darcy gives his definition of the word ‘accomplished’: “A woman must have a thorough knowledge of music, singing, drawing, dancing, and the modern languages, to deserve the word” (Austen 257). A final argument for this reading of De Swaef 70
Clarke’s tales can be found in Vess’s illustration for “Tom
Brightwind”, in which the depicted fairy princesses do not look like fairies at all, but more like women from high society dressed in late eighteenth century fashion. Clarke further mocks the opinion of nineteenth century men on women and their accomplishments in “Tom Brightwind” when Tom and his friend David Montefiore discuss the proper up-bringing of Fig. 5 "Tom Brightwind" Charles Vess young women. Tom explains why he dislikes the presence of women in his house:
I tell you, those girls talk constantly. Obviously I talk a great deal too. But then I
am always doing things. ... So naturally I have a great deal to say. But those girls do
nothing. Absolutely nothing! A little embroidery, a few music lessons. Oh! And
they read English novels! (Clarke 174)
Basically, Brightwind accuses his grand-daughters of doing only the things they were allowed to do. All the things he mentions that he occupies himself with, like being a patron or dealing with politics, were off-limits for young women. The total lack of physical exercise or mental challenges are enough to drive anyone up the wall. David points this out to Tom, saying that without “proper occupation” it is no wonder that “they will find some mischief to get up to” (174). Yet, he only feels this way about fairy women for whom “the interval between schoolroom and marriage” stretches into centuries (175). When it comes to mortal women, he agrees with Tom that “young women must stay at home quietly until they marry” (174). What David fails to see, is that for many upper-class women this lethargic existence continued after they were married. Women were supposed to look after the household and children, but in the upper classes this merely meant that the wife had to give her instructions to the servants and leave her children in the care of their governess.
So again, they had nothing to do all day long. Marilyn French mentions that many women De Swaef 71 suffered from letting their skills, talents and energy go to waste and many were afflicted with mysterious, wasting diseases. Two perfect examples of this are Alice James and
Florence Nightingale. Passages from James’ journal show that she had made the connection between her bad health and the suppression of her rage. Nightingale’s writings proof that her restricted place in society as a woman was really suffocating her. Initially, she was torn apart by guilt and self-loathing, but at the age of thirty two she turned against the society that encaged her: “Why do women have passion, intellect, moral vigour – these three qualities – and a position in society where neither of these three can be exploited”
(French 646 my translation). Besides showing how women were prevented from having any sort of purpose in their lives, Clarke also exposes the nineteenth century’s double standards. In the beginning of “Tom Brightwind” some fairy princesses relate the story of how their cousins were banished by Tom because one of them got married in secret with a
Christian man. Yet Tom, or any other fairy in both Clarke’s tales and folklore for that matter, are said to spend most of their time seducing mortal women. In fact, in folklore there is no distinction between the morals of male or female fairies and fairy princesses do not appear to need anyone’s permission to take a man. So, the double standard found in this tale was derived not from folklore, but from nineteenth century reality. Indeed, in that period the behaviour of men and women was judged very differently. A man, for instance, could leave his wife and even divorce her on grounds of adultery. A woman who left her adulterous husband, on the other hand, could be prosecuted by her husband for doing so.
So, in these tales Clarke not only informs her audience about the folkloric fairy, but at the same time exposes the smothering, strait-jacket moral of the nineteenth century. Yet, she does not picture these fairies, who use women as wives, sex-toys and living incubators and who represent the oppressive male, as the big, bad wolf of the tale. On the contrary, even John Hollyshoes, who does not appear to care that his wife died in childbirth, who De Swaef 72 chains Dido Puddifer to a chair to use her as wet-nurse for his son and who has no scruples about killing a man because he failed to obey his orders, comes across as congenial in his dealings with Mr Simonelli (which is the only perspective we get). Of course, he considers
Mr Simonelli, who is discovered to be his relative, to be his equal and therefore treats him with the proper regard, whereas he does not hesitate to threaten and beat his servant, which reveals his true nature. Despite the fact that we know all the evil he has done, the reader still cannot help but liking him. This puts the reader on his guard when he starts reading the following story “Tom Brightwind”, in which we again meet a charming, cordial and very likeable fairy who turns out to be no better than Hollyshoes. When he finally allows his banished grand-daughters to return and one of them seems to have disappeared, he simply does not care. And further, he kills Mr Winstanley since he still neglects to improve the town and stands in the way of Brightwind’s son. By doing this, Clarke joins folkloric tradition which never represented fairies as being either good or evil, but as just being different. Still, their link with the nineteenth century is pretty obvious, so it is safe to say that these fairy characters can be interpreted in very much the same way as Carter’s Erl-
King. Both sets of tales show that men are just as much culturally encoded as women. With her stories, Clarke is not targeting individual men, or even men in general, but the 19th century ideology that pictured women as perfect mothers and housewives who are only good to serve. And the same is true for Carter, whose “Erl-King” shows that as long as an ideology that makes women inferior to men exists; both men and women will behave accordingly. After discussing how predatory men are just as much a product of the society that they live in as the women they victimize, I will now take a closer look at Carter’s two
Beast-characters in “The Courtship of Mr Lyon” and “The Tiger’s Bride”.
De Swaef 73
5.2. Beasts: Looking past Appearances
It is remarkable that the two Beauty-and-the-Beast-tales should follow Carter’s opening story “The Bloody Chamber” which demonstrates the potential dangers of an arranged marriage that reduces women to objects, pieces of meat to be bought “with a handful of coloured stones and the pelts of dead beasts” (Carter 18), since the main source for these tales, the story of Madame de Beaumont which is best known to Anglo-American audiences, clearly tries to still the fears of young girls faced with such an arranged marriage. “Madame de Beaumont’s tale endorses obedience, self-denial, and a form of love based on gratitude rather than passion for women” (Tatar Annotated 60). Beauty comes to realize that “character, virtue, and kindness” are far more important than intelligence or good looks, and that love is not important in marriage, but “respect, friendship, and gratitude” is (75). When Beauty at the end of the story expresses her love for Beast, he is returned to his human form. In this way, Madame de Beaumont shows that a relationship solidly built on respect and friendship may still grow out to something more and that good behaviour is always rewarded. “Yet something is amiss” (79), notes
Christina Bacchilega who cannot help but remark on the sharp contrast between Beauty’s passionate declaration of love to the dying Beast and her lukewarm reception of the handsome prince whom she not immediately recognizes as her Beast.
Carter’s first Beauty-and-the-Beast-tale, “The Courtship of Mr Lyon”, is actually a rewriting of Madame de Beaumont’s story that sticks quite close to the original. Yet there are some crucial differences. First of all, unlike his fairy tale counterpart, Beauty’s father does not put up a fight for his daughter. He does not appear to mind that she is part of the pact that will restore his wealth. Beauty stays with the Beast “because her father wanted her to do so” (Carter 45). Though Beauty is not averse to the Beast, since she feels that
“lions are more beautiful by far than we are”, she dreads him with the instinctual fear of De Swaef 74 the lamb for the predator. Yet she decides to stay anyway, not because “she had no will of her own; only, she was possessed by a sense of obligation to an unusual degree” (45). In this manner, Carter makes one of the motives of Beaumont’s fairy tale explicit, namely filial love and obedience. This unconditional, and even sacrificial, obedience for a father who may not have his daughter’s best interests at heart, will be further questioned in “The
Tiger’s Bride” in which a father gambles away his own daughter. Another difference with the source text is that Carter’s first Beauty, unlike her fairy tale counterpart who is kept from fulfilling her promise to Beast by her two spiteful sisters, simply forgets to return when the promised time has passed because she is having too much fun. “High living and compliments” have changed her from the simple girl she was into a “pampered, exquisite, expensive” being (49). Yet, she seems always to have had a selfish streak about her. After she hears of Beast’s illness and rushes to his side, she notices for the first time that “his agate eyes were equipped with lids, like those of a man” (50) and wonders why she never noticed this before: “Was it because she had only looked at her own face, reflected there?”
(50). A final great difference is the transformation scene. Here no fireworks and music to celebrate the sudden metamorphosis, but a “soft transformation” put in motion by Beauty’s tears into a man that still retains “a distant, heroic resemblance to the handsomest of all the beasts” (51). Neither is Beauty surprised at this change in her loved one, suggesting more clearly than the original fairy tale that what really changed is not Beast’s physical appearance, but Beauty’s perception of him. This puts the stress of the story not on the transformative power of love, but on the “warning not to judge by appearances”, a moral of the story that is more appreciated in recent years (Bacchilega 74). Though both
Beaumont’s and Carter’s Beauty is an active character that “turns her victimization into heroism”, she is still inscribed with the “patriarchal norms, the subordination of female desire to male desire, and a glorification of filial duty and self-sacrifice” (Tatar Classic FT De Swaef 75
27). Yet Carter manages to demystify these values by “subjecting them to grotesque exaggeration” (27). The “heroine’s self-sacrifice and devotion to the male” is questioned even further in “The Tiger’s Bride” when a self-absorbed father gambles away his only daughter to La Bestia (Bacchilega 76). The protagonist is painfully aware of the fact that women were considered objects that could be traded with. An object of immense value, but an object none the less: “You must not think my father valued me at less than a king’s ransom: but, at no more than a king’s ransom” (Carter 54). Yet, though these words seem to condemn her father’s view of her, she herself is also deeply indoctrinated by society’s values. When the Beast asks to see her naked just once, she spurns the idea and thinks it is better to be raped, “the beastly act everything she knows has prepared her for”, than to
“serve as a visual object of desire” (Bacchilega 98). She fails to see that his request is not
“abominable” (Carter 66), but that it has become unnatural for humans to go naked since they have learned to hide their bodies with clothes and their true thoughts and feelings behind a mask of civilised manners. Remember, she sat as calm and indifferent as a marble statue while her father gambled her away. But she is not the only one affected by “the familiar tabu against looking” (Bacchilega 96). The Beast also hides himself from the outer world behind his mask and clouds of perfume. When both of them disrobe during the hunt, this is a reciprocal pact. “The tiger will never lie down with the lamb.... The lamb must learn to run with the tigers.” (Carter 64). In other words, both must make an effort to make their relationship work. Yet, Beauty seems to have been changed the most by their meeting. She comes to realize that she has been exactly like her mechanized twin, that the
Beast had given her as a servant, reduced to an object, a doll. Her entire life she “had passed under the indifferent gaze of eyes” that watch you but “take no account of your existence” (66). Since she is no longer part of this world – nor wants to be – she decides to send her mechanized maid “to perform the part of my father’s daughter” (65). She herself De Swaef 76 goes to the Beast’s den, where he will lick off “skin after successive skin, all the skins of a life in the world, and left behind a nascent patina of shining hairs” (67). Considering that
“Beauty and the Beast” is first and foremost a tale of initiation, it is clear that Carter means to make an appeal for a more natural representation of sexuality that no longer shows men as ferocious predators and that accepts that women are just as much sexual beings as men.
After fully discussing the gender aspects of Carter’s and Clarke’s fairy tales, I will finish my dissertation by taking a closer look at the comical tales in their works which were clearly inspired by the many humorous folktales in which a nobody who dangles at the bottom of the social hierarchy outdoes a rich and powerful man.
6. Victory of the Underdog
Both Carter and Clarke make use of the folk humour typical of fairy tales. In
Carter’s case this is certainly to a lesser extent, since she focuses more on the dark side of the fairy tales: its man-eating monsters, dark woods and life-threatening situations. Yet, sometimes she relieves the built up tension with a comic note. In “The Bloody Chamber” she breaks the suspense at the climax of the story when the Bluebeard-figure has his sword raised to strike off his wife’s head by reducing this arch-nemesis of women into nothing more than a “clockwork tableaux of Bluebeard” (Carter 40). Her great sense of humour is best demonstrated in what is by far the funniest tale in this collection: “Puss-in-Boots”. In
Clarke’s case, all stories included in this collection are funny, but not all of them display the same sort of humour. For “The Ladies of Grace Adieu”, for example, she has taken a leaf out of Austen’s book by using a sort of irony typical of Jane Austen’s writing. The narrator pokes fun at some of the characters that she describes: “He did not think that he was at all changed from what he had been and Cassandra was entirely of his opinion, for De Swaef 77
(she thought to herself) I am sure, sir, that you were every bit as tedious at twenty-one as you are at forty-nine” (Clarke 8). But, as I just mentioned, this is not the only type of humour that can be found in Clarke’s stories. Several of her tales mirror a folk humour typical of a certain type of fairy tale. I will discuss this humour by taking a closer look at
“John Uskglass and the Cumbrian Charcoal Burner” and “The Duke of Wellington
Misplaces His Horse”.
6.1. “Puss-in-Boots”: from Rags to Riches in three Simple Tricks
As I have already mentioned in my discussion of “The Lady of the House of Love”, the fairy tale hero is no heroic knight who “slays the dragon” and “battles giants” on his quest for his princess (Tatar Hard Facts 85). He is either a “happy-go-lucky simpleton” or a
“roguish trickster” (86), both of which can be found in Perrault’s
“Master Cat, or Puss in Boots”. The youngest miller’s son to whom
we are introduced in the beginning of the tale is a perfect example of
the first. He is a completely passive character who does not lift a
finger to win his fortune, but who relies completely on luck and his Fig. 6 "Puss in Boots" Gustave Doré animal helper Puss, who is a perfect example of the roguish trickster type. A fairy tale hero usually acquires an animal’s aid by showing compassion, which in this case means that the youngest son agrees not to eat the cat while the cat in return does all the work to turn him into a rich man and the king’s son-in-law. Though the miller’s son is clearly the hero of the story and the cat is the helper, to use Proppian terms, it is the cat who is the protagonist of this tale. Maria Tatar explains that in a fairy tale “the fate of only a single, central character is at stake” and that “that pivotal figure stands so firmly rooted at the centre of events that all other characters are defined solely by their relationship to him and consequently lack an autonomous sphere of action” (92). The first two qualities are indeed true: the story concerns the fate of the miller’s youngest son and the other De Swaef 78 characters are defined by their relationship to him. But the third characteristic is not fulfilled. As soon as the miller’s son agrees to giving the cat a pouch and a pair of boots as demanded – and which makes this hero also a donor, which is very atypical – the focalization shifts from the miller’s son to the cat and describes only his actions, while the miller’s son disappears into the background. Now, this cat is clearly the second type of hero, the roguish trickster who uses cunning to outwit his superiors. And this is another popular trait of folktales: a lowly villager climbs the social ladder by tricking those on top of the social hierarchy.
So when Carter uses Puss-in-boots as focalizer of her tale, she does nothing new.
What is new is the fact that Puss is also the narrator of the story. Carter uses the main plot lines of the fairy tale as a basis for her story, but changes everything else. The young officer has little in common with his fairy tale counterpart, except for his passivity. When he falls in love, he makes no attempt to reach his lady, but settles for worshipping her from afar. It is up to Puss to make sure these two lovers are united. Note though, that he does not do this completely out of the goodness of his heart like other fairy tale helpers. He knows very well that what bodes well for his master bodes well for him. He does not decide to help out this officer because he passed some test of compassion, but because Puss himself is also better off with a human accomplice. Together they cheat in the gaming salons to make a living. Once he has fallen in love, the officer idles away his days dreaming of his beloved and refuses to go to the tables. Puss reasons that “one, he is in a fair way to ruining us both by neglecting his business; two, love is desire sustained by unfulfilment” and decides to help his master to get to his beloved. Puss does not act alone, but forms a very productive partnership (in more ways than one) with Signor Panteleone’s kitchen cat. Each plays an equal part in the plotting. First, they pass letters between the lovers and bring them into contact. Then, Tabby comes up with the first con that will bring the lovers De Swaef 79
together. She will fill the young lady’s bedroom with rats while Puss has his master
dressed up as a rat-catcher. And finally, Puss comes up with a plan to kill the old miser that
keeps his wife locked up. Tabby will trip him up so he falls down the stairs and Puss will
make sure his master is present in the outfit of a doctor. With the old miser out of the way,
all four of them can live happy ever after.
The young lady in question also takes actively part in the plots. Being “a young
woman of no small grasp” (Carter 77), as Puss describes her, she immediately realizes
what is going on when her new-found love enters her room disguised as rat-catcher, and
she manoeuvres her governess out of the room and locks the door on her. She is also the
one that stills her wardress’s suspicion when she finds the bed in disorder upon her return:
Puss had a mighty battle with the biggest beast you ever saw upon this very bed;
can’t you see the bloodstains on the sheets? And now, what do we owe you, Signor
Furioso, for this singular service? (79)
In one go, she appeases her wardress and makes sure that her lover gets royally paid for
cuckolding her husband. After Puss and Tabs successfully kill off her old husband, she
makes sure to stay in control of the situation:
(Meanwhile, I note that sensible young woman, mother-naked as she is, has yet the
presence of mind to catch hold of her husband’s keyring and sharply tug it from his
sere, cold grip. Once she’s got the keys secure, she’s in charge of all.)
‘Now, no more of your nonsense!’ she snaps to hag. ‘If I hereby give you the sack,
you’ll get a handsome gift to go along with you for now’ – flourishing the keys – ‘I
am a rich widow and here’ – indicating to all my bare yet blissful master – ‘is the
young man who’ll be my second husband.’ (83)
So, unlike in the fairy tale where only Puss undertakes actions, all four characters involved work together to get what they want. The two cats do the plotting, but their masters carry out De Swaef 80 the plan. The fact that he takes part in the action does not change that the officer is in fact a passive character. If he were left to himself, he would never have approached his loved one.
He never acts on his own accord, but follows Puss’s orders. The young lady, on the other hand, is never informed in advance of the plans, but she is always quick to grasp what is going on and does what she can to help out and to cover up the scam. Obviously, she is far more active than her young officer, since she acts completely on her own accord. This princess does not lie around waiting for someone to rescue her from her tower, but distracts the guards and opens the door to welcome her rescuers.
Carter did not only use “Master Puss” as an inspiration for her story. Some of the characters are types that often occur in folktales and literature. Both Puss and his master are picaros who survive at the margins of society by cheating and stealing. This type first appeared in literature in the so-called picaresque novel, but must have existed already in folktales. Further, the young officer and his cat show some resemblances to Don Quichote and his servant Sancho Panza. Just like Don Quichote, the officer is very idealistic, at least when it comes to love. He compares his loved one to “a princess in a tower. Remote and shining as Aldebaran. Chained to a dolt and dragon-guarded.” (70) She is his unreachable lady whom he worships from afar like dictated by the courtly love tradition from medieval times which lived on in the Renaissance sonnets with their Petrarchan conceits. But Puss, who just as Sancho Panza is far more down to earth, will help his master get over his highly idealized view of love. He is a true cynic for who “love is desire sustained by unfulfilment”
(72). He decides to cure his master of his love sickness by leading him into his lady’s bedchamber. Yet, getting his master laid does not immediately cure him from his foolish idealization. The officer no longer settles for worshipping from afar, but he is still not being very rational about it either:
‘How can I live without her?’ De Swaef 81
You did so for twenty-seven years, sir, and never missed her for a moment.
‘I’m burning with the fever of love!’
Then we’re spared the expense of fires.
‘I shall steal her away from her husband to live with me.’
‘What do you propose to live on, sir?’
‘Kisses,’ he said distractedly. ‘Embraces.’
‘Well, you won’t grow fat on that, sir; though she will. And then, more mouths to
feed.’ (80)
Though he still remains painfully practical, Puss no longer is the cynic he was before.
Recognising the “foolish rhetoric of love” (80), he takes pity on his master and comes up with a scheme that will bring not one, but two loving couples together. For Puss, and his opinion of love, have also been changed by his meeting with Tabby, “that charming she who’s wormed her way directly into my own hitherto-untrammelled heart with her sharp wits and her pretty ways” (80). The tale shows that neither the officer’s idealized view of love nor Puss’ cynical equation of love to lust will do. Slowly both characters move towards a romantic love that is linked to a certain practicality that will ensure the happiness of all. A third and final familiar type in this tale is that of the miser. The young lady’s husband shows all the characteristics of the miser type that often occurs in literature. He spends all his days counting money and every evening he spends an entire hour looking at his treasures, which he keeps safely hidden and locked behind bolts and bars. What makes him different from the misers that appear in other texts such as Dickens’s “Christmas
Carol” or the medieval “Warenar”, is that he does not get taught a lesson and than changes his ways, but that he is killed so that the young couples can live happily (and wealthily) ever after.
De Swaef 82
6.2. How to Bring the Rich and Famous down a Peg
Clarke’s “John Uskglass and the Cumbrian Charcoal Burner” also closely resembles a folktale, though it was not based on one. It deals with the lowly charcoal burner from the title who tries to bring the self-absorbed Raven King who destroys his home down a notch. It is very typical of fairy tales that a humble subject manages to outdo a king, but what is atypical of this tale is that “the conditions prevailing at the start” are not reversed (Tatar Hard Facts 100). Usually, the humble hero of the tale ends up making his fortune or marrying a princess, but in this case the hero, who could have demanded anything he wanted, settles for having his home restored and another pig. He is perfectly satisfied with the little he has. So, in the end, the status quo is maintained. The Raven King may have been humbled, but it does not appear that he has learned his lesson. He stays clear of the charcoal burner’s forest, but nothing shows that he has altered his behaviour, which lay at the root of their quarrel and which was the reason why the three saints agreed to help the charcoal burner. This may not be exactly the fairy tale ending we are used to, but it certainly is far more realistic. The simple people who told these tales on a cold winter’s night or during some tedious labour may have hoped that just like their fairy tale heroes their fortunes may improve, but none of them would ever have expected to become rich. All they could hope for is that the rich and powerful would leave them in peace and that they would have enough food to live and be as happy as this charcoal burner. But this is no tale with a moral, like “Red Riding Hood” which tells young women to be cautious.
Just like many other fairy and folk tales, its main purpose is to entertain. It makes fun of the high and mighty that usually walk all over simple people like the charcoal burner. In this tale, this is even taken literally when the Raven King and his hunting party trample the charcoal burner’s home and livelihood. Left with absolutely nothing, the charcoal burner turns to the Church for aid. When he learns that there are saints who might be able to help De Swaef 83 him, he seeks them out not to ask for help, but to demand revenge. Of course, the saint does not approve of this and tells him that one “ought to forgive one’s enemies” (Clarke
226). Yet, he cannot let the Raven King get away with it either since poor and wretched people are his “special care” (225), so he agrees to teach him a lesson. He makes the Raven
King fall into a cleft and keeps him there for twenty four hours. When the Raven King discovers the charcoal burner was behind this, he goes to see him, but finds he is not at home when he arrives. What he does find is some toasted cheese that is meant to be the charcoal burner’s dinner and eats it. Furious at this new injury, the charcoal burner again turns to a saint to demand revenge. Again the Raven King tries to discover who this man is that dares to torment him and destroys the clearing where the charcoal burner lives in the
process. For the third time, the charcoal burner seeks revenge
through a saint and, as it goes in fairy tales, third time is a charm.
The Raven King finally admits defeat. As you can see, there is a little
war going on here between Christianity, represented by the saints,
and the old beliefs, represented by the Raven King, a powerful
magician and fairy. This ‘war’ actually has a basis in reality. When Fig. 7 "John Uskglass" Charles Vess the British people were converted to Christianity, they had to give up their old beliefs. The new faith did not tolerate the belief in fairies and other superstitions.
And just as in this tale, it is the new faith that has the upper hand. Yet the belief in fairies survived thanks to the fact that the fairies diminished not only in importance, but also in physical appearance. The human-sized fairies that descended from the Tuatha de Danann shrunk to the minuscule women with dragonfly wings that we still know today. Though no one actually believes in their existence any more, they still live on in fiction and literature.
So, just as the Raven King in this story, they manage to avoid problems with the Church by simply staying out of view. De Swaef 84
In “The Duke of Wellington Misplaces His Horse”, Clarke pokes fun at the historical figure who defeated Napoleon Bonaparte in a way that is again very typical of folktales. Just as in the previous tale, a powerful man is thought to be in need of a lesson in humility. As Clarke informs her readers at the beginning of the tale, this story takes place in a village called Wall that was created by Neil Gaiman and Charles Vess in Stardust and
“where there is an actual wall that divides our world and Faerie” (Clarke 103). As a punishment for his haughty and condescending behaviour, Mr Pumphrey has the Duke’s
horse put into the meadow beyond this wall. The next day, the
Duke tries to retrieve his horse and strays too far into Faerie. He
comes across a young woman who is working on an enormous
quantity of embroidery. He soon discovers that this is no normal
piece of embroidery, since the images represent his entire life up
Fig. 8 "The Duke of until that moment and beyond. It is immediately clear to him that Wellington Misplaces His Horse" Charles Vess she can only “have embroidered those scenes before the events happened” (107). This young woman is clearly Clarke’s nineteenth century version of the
Classical three Fates who spun, measured and cut the threat of life of every human being on earth. When the Duke sees that she has embroidered his death and refuses to give him any weapons, she merely “shrugged as if that were no concern of hers” (107). The Duke decides not to argue with the knight that is to kill him, but immediately discards this plan of action on account of the knight’s conceited expression: “who could help but quarrel with such a ninny” (108). Clearly, he has not yet learned to be a little more respectful towards others. The Duke solves his problem by undoing the girl’s needlework which depicts his death and by embroidering a new image in which he escapes Faerie. Since he is not really good at embroidery, he represents himself as a stick figure. This plan indeed seems to work since all comes to pass as he had depicted it: as soon as he leaves the girl’s house, he finds De Swaef 85 his horse and together they manage to return to Wall safely. Only at the end of his life, the
Duke realizes what harm he has done himself.
“On the battlefields of Europe I was master of my own destiny, but as a politician
there are so many other people I must please, so many compromises I must make,
that I am at best a stick figure.” (110)
So this tale turns out to be one big joke, ending with a pun on the double meaning of the word stick figure.
7. Conclusion
It is evident now that The Bloody Chamber and The Ladies of Grace Adieu are more alike then they would seem at first sight. Both Clarke’s and Carter’s tales tend to unsettle the reader by creating certain expectations with familiar plots and settings and then shattering this horizon of expectations by shifting to a very different tale type. Clarke opens her stories with a style and setting reminiscent of the nineteenth century novel in general and of Austen’s novels in particular, making her readers expect a realistic and romantic story set in a world not unlike our own. The sudden introduction of magic and a plot based on fairy legends unbalances the reader. This odd, yet strangely fitting mixture of history and folklore lodges a sharp criticism on the nineteenth century society and the way in which it was represented in its romanticised novels. Carter’s tales usually contain a dark, gothic atmosphere and setting that sharply contrast with its fairy tale plot. By creating a dialogue between the well-known literary fairy tales and their more obscure versions that stick closer to the original oral folktales, Carter criticizes the way in which both women and men have been represented in popular tales. What Carter very successfully shows with her gothic fairy tales is that the world is not as black and white as it is shown in many tales, De Swaef 86 but filled with many shades of grey, a concept that not everyone in her time seemed to grasp. Some feminist critics like Patricia Duncker really did have a radical view of the world, which they expressed by using such terms as “patriarchal enemy” (Bristow 12), thus reducing all men to victimizing villains. Blinded by her black-and-white thinking, Duncker fails to see that Carter did not only draw from the male texts of these tales, but freely mixes them with their matriarchal roots. Carter stresses in her stories that we need to stop the demonizing and scapegoating of others and start seeing our own potential for corruption.
Only then will we be able to accept the differences of others and not be too quick in our judgement. So both authors wrap their criticism in a fairy tale, bringing out the violence that occurs in it more clearly. Not because fairy tales are unfamiliar with violence – far from it, but because the violence is more stressed and detailed than it would have been in a fairy tale, showing that abuse of women should never be treated as something ordinary, not even in a tale. By integrating their criticism into newly constructed fairy tales, these authors also display their thorough knowledge of folklore and their understanding of how folktales work, and at the same time show their familiarity with diverse literary works. De Swaef 87
Works Cited
“Angela Carter.” Wikipedia. 22 April 2008. Wikimedia Foundation Inc. 15 May 2008
Austen, Jane. The Complete Novels of Jane Austen. Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Editions
Limited, 2004.
Bacchilega, Cristina. Postmodern Fairy Tales. Gender and Narrative Strategies.
Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997.
Berensmeyer, Ingo. “Leaky Vessels: Female Bodies.” Unruly Bodies. Poetics of
Corporeality in the English Renaissance. Course English Literature, UGent. Rozier,
Gent. 21 Nov. 2007.
Bettelheim, Bruno. The Uses of Enchantment. London: Penguin Books, 1991.
“The Bloody Chamber.” Wikipedia. 23 Jan. 2008. Wikimedia Foundation Inc. 2 Feb. 2008
Bristow, Joseph, and Trev Lynn Broughton, ed. The Infernal Desires of Angela Carter.
Fiction, Femininity, Feminism. New York: Longman, 1997.
Carter, Angela. The Bloody Chamber. New York: Penguin Books, 1993.
Clarke, Susanna. The Ladies of Grace Adieu. London: Bloomsbury, 2007.
---. “Jonathan Strange describes Miss Clarke.” Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrel. 2004. 15
May 2008 < http://www.jonathanstrange.com/copy.asp?s=1&id=8>.
---. “Mr Norrell describes Miss Clarke.” Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrel. 2004. 15 May
2008 < http://www.jonathanstrange.com/copy.asp?s=1&id=9>. De Swaef 88
Clerkx, Lily E. En ze leefden nog lang en gelukkig. Familieleven in sprookjes. Een
historisch-sociologische benadering. Amsterdam: Uitgeverij Bert Bakker, 1992.
Donne, John. “Meditation 17.” The Norton Anthology of English Literature. The Sixteenth
Century. The Early Seventeenth Century. Ed. Stephen Greenblatt and M. H.
Abrams. 8th ed. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2006. 1305-1306.
Erb, Cynthia. “Another World or the World of an Other? The Space of Romance in Recent
Versions of ‘Beauty and the Beast’.” Cinema Journal 34 (1995): 50-70. JSTOR.
2008. 30 Jan. 2008 < http://www.jstor.org/view/00097101/ap040084/04a00050/0>.
“Fairy Tale.” Wikipedia. 14 May 2008. Wikimedia Foundation Inc. 15 May 2008
French, Marilyn. Een vrouwelijke geschiedenis van de wereld. Vert. Vivian Franken.
Amsterdam: Meulenhoff, 1995.
Gamble, Sarah. Angela Carter. Writing from the Front Line. Edinburgh: Edinburgh
University Press, 1997.
Houtzager, Guus, ed. De Mooiste Keltische Mythen en Sagen. Hoevelaken: Verba, 2000.
Jacobs, Joseph. “Tom Tit Tot.” English Fairy Tales. London: David Nutt, 1890.
SurLaLune Fairy Tales. 7 Sept. 2007. Ed. Heidi Anne Heiner. 15 May 2008.
Koomen, Martin. Het koninkrijk van de nacht. Over dwergen, elfen en andere geesten van
aarde, lucht, water en vuur. Amsterdam: Wetenschapperlijke Uitgeverij, 1978.
“The Ladies of Grace Adieu and Other Stories by Susanna Clarke.” Adventures in
Reading. 29 October 2007. 15 May 2008. De Swaef 89
other-stories-by-susanna-clarke/>. “Legend.” Wikipedia. 11 May 2008. Wikimedia Foundation Inc. 15 May 2008. Linkin, Harriet Kramer. “Isn't It Romantic?: Angela Carter's Bloody Revision of the Romantic Aesthetic in ‘The Erl-King’.” Contemporary Literature 35 (1994): 305- 323. JSTOR. 2008. 30 Jan. 2008 Lokke , Kari E. “‘Bluebeard’ and ‘The Bloody Chamber’: The Grotesque of Self-Parody and Self-Assertion.” Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies 10 (1988): 7-12. JSTOR 2008. 30 Jan. 2008 Milne, Andrew. “Biography.” Unofficial Angela Carter Site. 2006. 15 May 2008 Meyer, Rudolf. Sprookjeswijsheid. De motieven in de sprookjes. Zeist: Christofoor, 1991. “Mythology.” Wikipedia. 13 May 2008. Wikimedia Foundation Inc. 15 May 2008 Het rijk der fabelen. Feeën en Elfen. Vert. Jory v. d. Broeke. Antwerpen: Time-Life Books, 1984. Het rijk der fabelen. Sprookjesfiguren. Vert. Babet Mossel. Amsterdam: Time-Life Boeken, 1986. Rodríguez, Carolina Fernández. “The Deconstruction of the Male-Rescuer Archetype in Contemporary Feminist Revisions of ‘The Sleeping Beauty’.” Marvels & Tales 16 De Swaef 90 (2002): 51-70. MUSE. 30 Jan. 2008 Sceats, Sarah. “Oral Sex: Vampiric Transgression and the Writing of Angela Carter.” Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature 20 (2001): 107-121. JSTOR. 2008. 30 Jan. 2008 < http://www.jstor.org/view/07327730/ap020040/02a00070/0>. Schuurman, Dr. C. J. Er was eens... er is nog. De symbolische betekenis van sprookjes. Deventer: Ankh-Hermes, 1991. Sheets, Robin Ann. “Pornography, Fairy Tales, and Feminism: Angela Carter's ‘The Bloody Chamber’.” Journal of the History of Sexuality 1 (1991): 633-657. JSTOR 2008. 30 Jan. 2008 < http://www.jstor.org/view/10434070/ap060004/06a00060/0>. Speght, Rachel. “A Muzzle for Melastomus.” The Norton Anthology of English Literature. The Sixteenth Century. The Early Seventeenth Century. Ed. Stephen Greenblatt and M. H. Abrams. 8th ed. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2006. 1546-1549. “Susanna Clarke.” Wikipedia. 12 May 2008. Wikimedia Foundation Inc. 15 May 2008. Tatar, Maria, ed. The Annotated Classic Fairy Tales. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2002. ---, ed. The Classic Fairy Tales. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1999. ---. The Hard Facts of the Grimms’ Fairy Tales. 2nd ed. New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2003. Uyldert, Mellie. Verborgen wijsheid van het sprookje. 3e ed. Amsterdam: De Driehoek, 1991. De Swaef 91 Vandermeer, Jef. “Angela Carter.” The Scriptorium. 26 Oct. 2001. 15 May 2008 Warner, Marina. “Introduction”. The Second Virago Book of Fairy Tales. Ed. Angela Carter. London: Virago Press, 1993. Zipes, Jack. Breaking the Magic Spell. Radical Theories of Folk and Fairy Tales. London: Heinemann, 1979. ---. When Dreams Came True. Classical Fairy Tales and Their Tradition. New York: Routledge, 1999.