Contemporary Fiction and the Fairy Tale

1. Penetrating to the Heart of the Bloody Chamber: Angela Carter and the Fairy Tale

Penetrating to the Heart of the Bloody Chamber Angela Carter and the Fairy Tale   Angela Carter was a writer whose dedication to the appropriation, recycling, and combining of often antithetical literary forms led to the formulation of a unique and often inflammatory style, and nowhere is this better illustrated than in The Bloody Chamber, her collection of short stories published in . Of all the books that she produced, this slim collection of what could sweepingly be termed “modernized fairy tales” is undoubtedly one of the most controversial. Not only did it generate an enormous amount of debate among critics of her work, but it has also come to play a crucial role in the formation of her posthumous reputation. It is in the criticism surrounding The Bloody Chamber that the divide between Carter’s supporters and detractors is most clearly marked, for the latter—most notably Robert Clark, Patricia Duncker, and Suzanne Keppeler —have been vociferous in their condemnation of what they regard as her entrapment in inherently misogynistic narrative structures. But a survey of the debates concerning Carter’s use of fairy tale reveals them to be very much in the minority, for most critics have been willing to engage in a sym1 pathetic reading of this aspect of Carter’s work. Particularly significant contributions have been made by Merja Makinen, Cristina Bacchilega, and Danielle M. Roemer, whose arguments I will refer to within my own discussion .1 Broadly speaking, such critics acknowledge that while Carter may skirt perilously close to becoming ensnared within the very limited opportunities offered by the narrative resolution of “happily ever after,” she also triumphantlywritesherwayoutof themwith“adultwitandglitteringstyle” (Roemer and Bacchilega ). The result, say Roemer and Bacchilega, is the production of “a counterdiscourse to enclosure, always mindful though that a recognition of boundaries must precede their modification and dissolution ” (). This latter point is particularly appropriate to my reading of Carter’s utilization of the fairy-tale form. I am, for the most part, in agreement with Bacchilega’s contention that when Carter seizes—and also sexualizes—the fairy tale, she is largely successful in “escap[ing] identification with heterosexual seduction or rape.” Instead, argues Bacchilega, in the process of evolving a “woman-reciprocal dynamics of storytelling,” her narrative “explodes into voices” (). On the other hand, I would counsel against loading Carter’s adaptations of fairy stories with too many utopian associations, thus underplaying the genuinely unsettling aspects of these tales. What I particularly wish to trace in this essay is the kind of voices that “explode” into being in these narratives, including those of the pornographer, the libertine, and the vampire—voices that surely exist outside the kind of “woman-reciprocal dynamics” mentioned by Bacchilega. The fact that they are very often female does not alter this; indeed, such a tactic carries the distressing implication that reciprocity between women may itself be nothing more than a fairy tale. Moreover, these are voices that issue from outside the fairy-tale realm, thus demonstrating Carter’s tendency not just to rewrite or adapt such traditional narratives but to combine them with other outlawed, disreputable, or “minor” literary forms. So interwoven are they that it seems to me impossible to talk about Carter’s use of fairy tale in isolation. Of particular relevance here are vampire narratives, folk tales, and pornographic texts, since for Carter fairy tale was only one part of an ongoing interest in genre fiction of all kinds. As Lorna Sage has said in “Angela Carter: The Fairy Tale,” “the profile of the passive heroine” that is such a central feature of fairy tales can also be found in other genres such as Gothic and science fiction, forms that Carter “had always played with” (). Indeed, Lucie Armitt goes so far as Angela Carter and the Fairy Tale  to question whether these stories are fairy tales at all, arguing that “rather than being fairy-tales which contain a few Gothic elements, these are actually Gothic tales that prey upon the restrictive enclosures of fairy-story formulae ” (). Thus, in order to understand not only The Bloody Chamber but also all the othernarrativesCarterwroteduringhercareerthatdrewonfairy-taleforms and motifs, it is necessary to also appreciate what Carter understood “fairy tale” to be. She dismissed out of hand the conventional view of the mode as constituting comforting nursery stories for children, and she took issue with the godfather of fairy-tale criticism, Bruno Bettelheim. In...