in “The Smile of Winter,” another unnamed narrator admonishes us: “Do not think I do not realize what I am doing,” and then analyzes her story with a perspicacity that rescues—brings to life—what might otherwise have been a static piece of mood music. Carter’s cold-water douches of intelligence often come to the rescue of her fancy when it runs too wild.)
In the non-Japanese stories Carter enters, for the first time, the fable-world which she will make her own. A brother and sister are lost in a sensual, malevolent forest whose trees have breasts, and bite. Here the apple tree of knowledge teaches not good and evil but incestuous sexuality. Incest—a recurring Carter subject—crops up again in “The Executioner’s Beautiful Daughter,” a tale set in a bleak upland village, the quintessential Carter location, where, as she says in the
Bloody Chamber
story “The Werewolf,” “they have cold weather, they have cold hearts.” Wolves howl around these Carter-country villages, and there are many metamorphoses.
Carter’s other country is the fairground, the world of the gimcrack showman, the hypnotist, the trickster, the puppeteer. “The Loves of Lady Purple” takes her closed circus-world to yet another mountainous, Middle European village where suicides are treated like vampires (wreaths of garlic, stakes through the heart) while real warlocks “practised rites of immemorial beastliness in the forests.” As in all Carter’s fairground stories, “the grotesque is the order of the day.” Lady Purple, the dominatrix marionette, is a moralist’s warning—beginning as a whore, she turns into a puppet because she is “pulled only by the strings of Lust.” She is a female, sexy, and lethal rewrite of Pinocchio, and, along with the metamorphic cat-woman in “Master,” one of the many dark (and fair) ladies with “unappeasable appetites” to whom Angela Carter is so partial.
In her second collection,
The Bloody Chamber,
these riot ladies inherit her fictional earth.
The Bloody Chamber
is Carter’s masterwork: the book in which her high, perfervid mode is perfectly married to her stories’ needs. (For the best of the low, demotic Carter, read
Wise Children;
but in spite of all the oo-er-guv, brush-up-your-Shakespeare comedy of that last novel,
The Bloody Chamber
is the likeliest of her works to endure.)
The novella-length title story begins as classic Grand Guignol: an innocent bride, a much-married millionaire husband, a lonely Castle stood upon a melting shore, a secret room containing horrors. The helpless girl and the civilized, decadent, murderous man: Carter’s first variation on the theme of Beauty and the Beast. There is a feminist twist: instead of the weak father to save whom, in the fairy tale, Beauty agrees to go to the Beast, we are given, here, an indomitable mother rushing to her daughter’s rescue. It is Carter’s genius, in this collection, to make the fable of Beauty and the Beast a metaphor for all the myriad yearnings and dangers of sexual relations. Now it is the Beauty who is the stronger, now the Beast. In “The Courtship of Mr. Lyon,” it is for the Beauty to save the Beast’s life; while in “The Tiger’s Eye,” Beauty will be erotically transformed into an exquisite animal herself: “each stroke of his tongue ripped off skin after skin, all the skins of a life in the world, and left behind a nascent patina of hairs. My earrings turned back to water. . . . I shrugged the drops off my beautiful fur.” As though her whole body were being deflowered and so metamorphosing into a new instrument of desire, allowing her admission to a new (“animal” in the sense of
spiritual
as well as
tigerish
) world. In “The Erl-King,” however, Beauty and the Beast will not be reconciled. Here there is neither healing nor submission but revenge.
The collection expands to take in many other fabulous old tales; blood and love, always proximate, underlie and unify them all. In
In the non-Japanese stories Carter enters, for the first time, the fable-world which she will make her own. A brother and sister are lost in a sensual, malevolent forest whose trees have breasts, and bite. Here the apple tree of knowledge teaches not good and evil but incestuous sexuality. Incest—a recurring Carter subject—crops up again in “The Executioner’s Beautiful Daughter,” a tale set in a bleak upland village, the quintessential Carter location, where, as she says in the
Bloody Chamber
story “The Werewolf,” “they have cold weather, they have cold hearts.” Wolves howl around these Carter-country villages, and there are many metamorphoses.
Carter’s other country is the fairground, the world of the gimcrack showman, the hypnotist, the trickster, the puppeteer. “The Loves of Lady Purple” takes her closed circus-world to yet another mountainous, Middle European village where suicides are treated like vampires (wreaths of garlic, stakes through the heart) while real warlocks “practised rites of immemorial beastliness in the forests.” As in all Carter’s fairground stories, “the grotesque is the order of the day.” Lady Purple, the dominatrix marionette, is a moralist’s warning—beginning as a whore, she turns into a puppet because she is “pulled only by the strings of Lust.” She is a female, sexy, and lethal rewrite of Pinocchio, and, along with the metamorphic cat-woman in “Master,” one of the many dark (and fair) ladies with “unappeasable appetites” to whom Angela Carter is so partial.
In her second collection,
The Bloody Chamber,
these riot ladies inherit her fictional earth.
The Bloody Chamber
is Carter’s masterwork: the book in which her high, perfervid mode is perfectly married to her stories’ needs. (For the best of the low, demotic Carter, read
Wise Children;
but in spite of all the oo-er-guv, brush-up-your-Shakespeare comedy of that last novel,
The Bloody Chamber
is the likeliest of her works to endure.)
The novella-length title story begins as classic Grand Guignol: an innocent bride, a much-married millionaire husband, a lonely Castle stood upon a melting shore, a secret room containing horrors. The helpless girl and the civilized, decadent, murderous man: Carter’s first variation on the theme of Beauty and the Beast. There is a feminist twist: instead of the weak father to save whom, in the fairy tale, Beauty agrees to go to the Beast, we are given, here, an indomitable mother rushing to her daughter’s rescue. It is Carter’s genius, in this collection, to make the fable of Beauty and the Beast a metaphor for all the myriad yearnings and dangers of sexual relations. Now it is the Beauty who is the stronger, now the Beast. In “The Courtship of Mr. Lyon,” it is for the Beauty to save the Beast’s life; while in “The Tiger’s Eye,” Beauty will be erotically transformed into an exquisite animal herself: “each stroke of his tongue ripped off skin after skin, all the skins of a life in the world, and left behind a nascent patina of hairs. My earrings turned back to water. . . . I shrugged the drops off my beautiful fur.” As though her whole body were being deflowered and so metamorphosing into a new instrument of desire, allowing her admission to a new (“animal” in the sense of
spiritual
as well as
tigerish
) world. In “The Erl-King,” however, Beauty and the Beast will not be reconciled. Here there is neither healing nor submission but revenge.
The collection expands to take in many other fabulous old tales; blood and love, always proximate, underlie and unify them all. In
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