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

2. Updating the Politics of Experience: From “Le Petit Chaperon rouge” to “Little Red Riding Hood” and “The Company of Wolves”

Updating the Politics of Experience from “le petit chaperon rouge” to “little red riding hood” and “the company of wolves” 2 Old Wine in New Bottles: Blood Connections in “Little Red Riding Hood” For me, writing for radio involves a kind of three-dimensional storytelling. —ANGELA CARTER, PREFACE TO COME UNTO THESE YELLOW SANDS, 7 “Little Red Riding Hood,” Angela Carter’s translation of Charles Perrault ’s “Le Petit Chaperon rouge,” is given pride of place in The Fairy Tales of Charles Perrault. This reflects both the preeminence of the story in the modern fairy-tale canon and its central role in Carter’s body of work. Sandra Beckett has extensively documented how, from Perrault onward, the story of the little girl in red has become a paradigmatic crossover text that appeals to children and adults alike.1 Carter was very much aware of this double audience, and she returned to the story repeatedly to explore how its basic conflict, dramatic plot, memorable dialogue, and striking images can be reconfigured anew for different purposes. Mostly known through Perrault’s and the Grimms’ classic—and distinct—versions of the story, “Little Red Riding Hood” is also a palimpsest text with ramifications in folklore and werewolf stories, and a rich cultural legacy in different genres and media. Carter took the familiar tale as the basis for three short stories, a radio play, and a film script, which enabled her to experiment with different styles, settings, endings, generic combinations, and narrative perspectives . The Bloody Chamber contains three stories grouped at the end of the 72 c hapter 2 volume. Carter’s initial plan was to place them immediately after the title story, starting with “The Werewolf” in folktale fashion, then the “rococo ” “Wolf-Alice,” and finally the manifold retellings of “The Company of Wolves.”2 The tale is linked to the title of Carter’s collection through the color red associated with blood, and the encounter between a beast (or beastlike) character and a nubile girl constitutes a major structuring device that unifies the volume as a whole.3 In this sense Carter’s variations on Little Red Riding Hood form a continuum with her Bluebeard and Beauty and the Beast stories, and they further complicate the opposition between the two protagonists.4 The articulation of Carter’s translation of Perrault to the multiple retellings therefore hinges on the shift from a two-dimensional text to a multidimensional one: from a short, compact tale presenting a basic conflict, linear story line and straightforward cautionary message to retellings that explore alternative narrative paths, thicken the plot, and make meaning increasingly unstable through proliferating possibilities. The creative dynamic even extends beyond The Bloody Chamber collection to encompass a radio play and a screenplay. Carter would indeed transpose the Chinese box narrative structure of the short story “The Company of Wolves” into a “three-dimensional” radio play bearing the same title, which reframes the bouquet of stories through the paradigmatic scene of storytelling whereby a grandmother tells stories to a Red Riding Hood figure while she is knitting a warm red shawl for her. Eventually, Carter evolved a screenplay from the radio play with help from the director Neil Jordan, expanding it and adding a new layer through the dream sequence of Rosaleen, who plays the Red Riding Hood figure. The first draft was completed by July 1983, and The Company of Wolves was released in 1984. Transposing and adapting the radio play into a predominantly visual medium obviously involved further transformations and new possibilities. To quote Jordan: “The visual design was an integral part of the script. It was written and imagined with a heightened sense of reality in mind.” He added that Carter “was thrilled with the process, because she loved films.”5 Jordan and Carter were even considering adapting another radio play, Vampirella , for the screen when she fell ill. The embedded narratives and interlocking frames of the various adaptations of “The Company of Wolves” as text, sound, and image turn a linear story into a multifaceted object that can be experienced and understood on many levels. Its complex structure creates an effect of perspective or depth Updating the Politics of Experience 73 that also brings to the fore the palimpsestic history of the tale and its shifting meaning. In other words, whereas in her translation of Perrault’s tale Carter seeks to warn children...