Postmodern Fairy Tales: Gender and Narrative Strategies

Epilogue. Peopling the Bloody Chambers: "Once upon Many Times" and "Once upon One Time"

EPILOGUE PEOPLING THE BLOODY CHAMBERS "ONCE UPON MANY TIMES" AND "ONCE UPON ONETIME" THE R E V I S E D MAGIC OF POSTMODERN FAIRY TALES overtly problemati/,es mimetic narratives, gender identities, and humanistic conceptualizations of the subject, calling into question the naturalized yet normative artifice of the tale of magic. These antimythic narratives, however, are not all performatively the same. While exploring how variables such as narrative frames, voice, localization, and agency intersect and reflect on one another , my aim has been to make visible—in the fairy tales and in their postmodern performances—gendered patterns of complicity and resistance, differing socio-economic and historical dynamics of gender representations, the making or unmaking of a heterosexual project, and the varying impulse to enact fleshed knowledge in narrative. And yet my effort to distinguish among these postmodern wonders is not directed at classifying per se. When I first began this project, the identification and definition of "postmodern" fairytales seemed a significant goal in itself; then, I worked towards atypology of contemporary and, more specifically, postmodern revisions of fairy tales. But as I pursued my research in the magic forest of classic fairy tales, I became less fearful of losing myself there and more interested in the intricacies and intersectionsof its many ways. At that point, I re-conceived of my project as the exploration of a small area of that intertextual forest, with an eye to the proliferation of its creative paths and branches; to the tricks played by its mirrors strategically placed in it to reflect, refract, and frame me and other women; and to the signs that other women had left in their ownjourneys through this wonder-ful and pseudo-natural funhouse. This is not to say that I gave up entirely on my initial quest to map postmodern fair)7 tales. I distinguish "postmodern" retellings from other contemporary fairy tales on the grounds of narrative Epilogue 141 strategies (doubling as both deconstructive and reconstructive mimicry) and subject representations (self-contradictor)' versions of the self in performance). Arid I discuss the effects of this postmodern self-reflcxivity on the images of "story" and "woman" as projected by classic fairy tales: destructive in Coover's and Carter's re-visions of "Snow White"; re-constructive in Carter's short stories "The Tiger's Bride" and "The Company of Wolves"; subversive in Atwood's "Alien Territory" and Carter's "The Bloody Chamber." But these distinctions are hardly the point. Throughout this book, for instance, Angela Carter's demythologizing narratives have exemplified the transformative powers of postmodern magic and its interpellation of women. I have focused on selected stories, but her entire 1979 collection can be seen as a sustained re-vision of the fairy tale. The Bloody Chamber performs the multiple meanings of its title: Bluebeard's forbidden room, a high-class bedroom, a windowlesscell, the grandmother's house, a castle's vault; but also the legislative assembly which—as village, family , "man "kind, or Lacanian mirror—sets developmental and social norms for Carter's heroines to follow; the body's cavities, most metaphorically the womb, then the orbit of the eye, the chambers of the heart, the interstices of the brain; and the space for holding charge in an explosive book, for holding narrative fire in the destructive war of the sexes. In and out of these lords' and ladies' chambers, women's blood is spilled; at times, Carter arrests its theft, at others, she re-values its flow. The encounter of beast and beauty, human and other, woman arid man is enacted in every room: as the masks peeled off in one scenario are refracted differently in another, suspicion lingers but dynamics shift. In the mirror of such contained intertextuality, the stories I have discussed reflect on each other through the work of repetition against itself. If we read the collection ideologically, almost in linear progression towards some sexual and narrative liberation, the transformation of the mirror in the bloody chamber is positively magic: from inorganic speculum sewing the masculine gaze in "The Bloody Chamber," to dream-like but porous matter in which to envision our futures, in "Wolf-Alice." But these images still hinge on the "Snow Child," disembodied at the center of the book. If we read the stories in juxtaposition to one another, talking back at each other, Bluebeard's mirror has transformed but not shattered: the 142 Epilogue ending of "Wolf...