Reading, Translating, Rewriting: Angela Carter's Translational Poetics

6. Recovering a Female Tradition: From “La Belle et la Bête” to “Beauty and the Beast” and “The Tiger’s Bride”

Taming or Turning into the Beast? From “Sweetheart” and “Beauty and the Beast” to “The Courtship of Mr. Lyon” and “The Tiger’s Bride” Beast conquers Beauty & bestializes her. —ANGELA CARTER, 1977 JOURNAL Angela Carter also translated two contes by Jeanne-Marie Leprince de Beaumont: “Le Prince Chéri” and “La Belle et la Bête.” The tales were published alongside her translations of Perrault in Sleeping Beauty and Other Favourite Fairy Tales (1982).1 “Beauty and the Beast” inspired two stories included in The Bloody Chamber (“The Courtship of Mr. Lyon” and “The Tiger’s Bride”) that resolve the conflict between the female heroine and the male beast in radically different ways. Carter’s rewritings revisit the literary and the rich visual tradition of the tale. Marina Warner notes in From the Beast to the Blonde that Jean Cocteau’s film La belle et la bête (1945) had a profound impact on Angela Carter, “who specially remembered the way the Beast smouldered—literally—after a kill” (296). She also observes that Cocteau’s film reflects a “masculine sympathy” that “divert[s] the story from the female subject to stress male erotic hunger for beauty as the stimulus for creativity” (296).2 Although the surreal atmosphere of Cocteau’s film and its preoccupation with instinct are perceptible in “The Tiger’s Bride,” Carter explores the female side of the story when she retells it from the perspective of Beauty. Recovering a Female Tradition from “la belle et la bête” to “beauty and the beast” and “the tiger’s bride” 6 228 c hapter 6 Beaumont co-opted the fairy tale for her educational project, and she adapted it to serve the moral education of girls, who were encouraged to draw its lessons through her fictional alter ego, Melle Bonne. In the frame narrative the governess comments that an ugly face is soon forgotten when the person has a good heart and that duty is always rewarded. Carter admired Beaumont’s “Beauty and the Beast” for its artfulness and melancholy , but she made sure to tone down its pious sentimentality and heavyhanded moralizing in her translation. In “About the Stories” (in Sleeping Beauty and Other Favourite Fairy Tales) she praises the French governess for accommodating the fairy tale as children’s literature in England, and she goes on to subtly reorient the message of the translated tales for modernday readers. In her own retellings, however, Carter enhances the literary refinement, sensuousness, and psychological depth of Beaumont’s tales of enchantment for an adult audience. “The Courtship of Mr. Lyon” and “The Tiger’s Bride” explore the potential of Beaumont’s contes for alternative retellings by taking the story in two different directions. Carter thus draws our attention to Beaumont’s own doubling of the story in Le Magasin des enfants and to ambiguities within the texts themselves; in her turn, she uses the tale to explore the relationship between self and other and the possibility of bridging social, cultural, gender, and even deeper ontological or epistemological divides. As an emblematic beast-marriage story, “Beauty and the Beast” revolves around the conflict between nature and culture, humanity and beastliness. Carter sees the fairy tale as an occasion to reappraise and deconstruct these rigid oppositions with a feminist and ecological sensibility, based on elements that already make them problematic in the source text, starting with the contrast of inner self and external appearance that characterizes the Beast. As such, Carter’s own Beauty and the Beast stories can be seen as part of a broader investigation of beings who are not what they seem. The Bloody Chamber is peopled with beastly men and manly beasts, starting with the perverse Marquis as a beast in disguise in “The Bloody Chamber,” the manly werewolf in “The Company of Wolves,” and even (in a different key) the lusty booted cat in “Puss-in-Boots.”3 In one way or another, all the stories explore women’s complex relations with various forms of beastliness (from the recognition of inhumanity at the heart of human civilization to the tenderness of wild animals) that culminate in “Wolf-Alice,” the hybrid Recovering a Female Tradition 229 wolf-girl who ministers to the monstrous Count when he is wounded by villagers. In both her afterword to Sleeping Beauty and Other Fairy Tales and her interview with John Haffenden, Carter insists on the literariness...