Towering castles where secrets lurk; fragile souls ripe for corruption; beasts made men, and men made beasts. These elements have populated our collective imaginations for centuries, across continents and generations. And for so many of these years, the stories remained the same. They served as warnings, cautionary tales against losing innocence and purity—morally-centered escapism. Only in the last fifty years, it seems, have we begun to deconstruct these stories. Some have watered them down for happier digestion; others amplify their sexuality and luridness. Few have been able to accomplish what Angela Carter did with her collection, The Bloody Chamber.
Focusing mainly on the tales of Charles Perrault, Carter began a trend that we have seen many times since—she brought classic stories into a modern context. A surface read shows obvious themes of feminism and sexuality. Traditional tales were meant to warn against sex (and sin, going hand in hand) and encourage wholesome unions, even at the cost of basic human rights. Like many other re-tellers, Carter inverts these themes. Red Riding Hood embraces the provocative color of her cloak; Beauty becomes the Beast; and Bluebeard’s ill-fated bride conquers the masculine control of her husband. These stories found their audience in the 1970s, when such themes were provocative and almost fashionable in fiction. Angela Carter, however, is not interested in fashion.
Lying beneath or beside the sex and power are deep, painful emotions. There is loneliness, otherness, and a desire for freedom, whatever that means to each protagonist. And these emotions often contradict each other. Carter’s Beasts (there are two) exhibit all the shame, horror, and disgust of a human made a monster. Her vampiric Countess in “The Lady of the House of Love” despises herself, but cannot fight the urge to kill. Red Riding Hood is not just afraid of sex or inversely longing for it—she displays both emotions equally. The Erl-King exhibits tender qualities at odds with his malicious, child-eating origins; but also entraps and destroys.
Of course, Carter does not shy away from her fantastic and Gothic origins. Her language is gorgeously intricate, evoking settings of deep color and texture, the worlds of dark dreams. She pays loving, painstaking homage to the stories she recreates. She does not necessarily refresh plot or imagery, though these elements are unique and vibrant in their own right; there is an emotional core at the base of her tales. Classic Gothic fiction, though marvelous, often distills its characters. Perrault does not bother with dichotomies; M.R. James is not interested in his characters’ flaws, aside from curiosity. This is where Carter brings her genius. Her characters are just as vivid and complex as the worlds they inhabit.
At the conclusion of The Bloody Chamber, then, the reader feels as if they have witnessed an evisceration. Carter lays the entrails of these tropes and figures of myth in all their hideousness and tenderness. She imagines creatures of pure fiction with very real and poignant emotions. Few authors that I have encountered have even attempted this. Fantasy and Gothic fiction are meant to be just that, fiction, and are often approached with an angle of escapism. These stories are meant to entertain and transport. Carter knows this, and crafts stories that brim with suspense, sensuality, and luxuriant worlds. But the populations of these worlds behave in flawed, confused, and realistic ways.
Bringing emotional realism into a fantastical plot may even contradict the purpose of these genres. Yet, I disagree. As an adolescent, when I craved an escape from reality, I wanted to encounter nothing less than depictions of loneliness, self-dislike, and existential dread. These emotions were latent in me and I had no desire to discover them. But they didn’t stay quiet for long, and once I recognized them, nothing comforted me more than fictitious characters that exhibited the same emotions.
I will always have a love for the fantastic and the macabre, but those elements alone give nothing but a passing satisfaction. Stories like Angela Carter’s not only evoke delicious environments that escape the mundane; they also provide the poetry of insight, a wholly honest exploration of those emotions that many wish to ignore. They are both other and supremely close to reality—to the inner reality. Her fairy tales have no need for morals because they embrace the complexity of the human mind even as they destroy and transform it. Both our inner child and our inner torment owe thanks to writers like her.
Daily Dead's Official Podcast! Daily Dead's Official Podcast!
