SOURCE: Zipes, Jack. “Crossing Boundaries with Wise Girls: Angela Carter's Fairy Tales for Children.” Marvels and Tales: Journal of Fairy Tale Studies 12, no. 1 (1998): 147-54.

[In the following essay, Zipes examines Carter's early fairy tales for children for elements she would use later in her postmodern revisionist tales.]

Long before Angela Carter had conceived the tales for her remarkable collection The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories (1979), she had begun experimenting with the fairy-tale genre in two highly sophisticated picture books for children, Miss Z, the Dark Young Lady (1970) and The Donkey Prince (1970), both illustrated by Eros Keith. Neglected by critics and unknown to most readers, these two tales actually laid the groundwork for Carter's future work and reveal some of her basic concepts with regard to the revisionist fairy-tale tradition. All this makes Carter's stories worth reconsidering. But even more than shedding light on her development as an innovative fairy-tale writer, they also indicate how much she esteemed children, and how much the child in her gave expression to a mischievous humor that stamps the “postmodern” quality of her fairy tales.

Carter was a sly writer in the best sense of the word. Perhaps cunning might be an even more apt description, and she passed on this cunning quality to the heroines in her two fairy tales for children. Since these narratives are not well known, I want to briefly summarize their plots before analyzing how they prefigured her later fairy tales for adults.

In Miss Z, the Dark Young Lady, we are told that Miss Z lives in a Parrot Jungle on a farm with her father, who is greatly annoyed by the parrots because they make such a racket with their comic songs. He uses a catapult to chase them away, and the King Parrot decides to kill him but is killed instead. Miss Z, who has been busy making a magic dress, is convinced that her father acted too rashly, and sure enough, once the parrots depart for an unknown land, everything goes haywire because of a magic spell the revengeful parrots have cast: “Miss Z returned to her sewing machine. But the needle refused to go in and out of the fabric, and she had to finish the magic dress by hand. And the well refused to give water; the cow refused to give milk; the plow refused to turn the soil; and the fire refused to light. Even the rocking chair refused to rock” (7-8).

Miss Z's father is remorseful and promises that he would laugh at the antics of the parrots if they returned. He would even give them marmalade. So, Miss Z goes to a wise woman, who informs her that the parrots have gone to the place where the green lions live, and they plan to return with the lions to force Miss Z and her father off their farm and back to Human Town. Since her father has become sick from eating poison fruit, Miss Z decides to go to the country of the green lions by herself to undermine the parrots' plan. She takes her magic dress and a paper bag full of cheese sandwiches. Along the way she meets a small hairless and toothless animal with a red moustache named Odd, a dragon named Sandworm, and a vain unicorn, who help her find the land of the green lions. Once there she discovers that the lions are irked by the parrots who mock them with songs about their cowardice. When Miss Z tells the Lion Prince that her father is very sorry for killing the Parrot King and that they love the Parrot Jungle because “the air is so sweet and the earth is so rich” (28), the parrots decide to return in a flying rainbow to the jungle and lift the magic spell off the farm. Miss Z follows them by foot, and when she arrives, she finds her father well and listening to the sweet music of the parrots with Odd sucking barley sugar at his feet. Odd promises to scare mice to death if Miss Z will only feed him cheese sandwiches to mumble and chumble. The narrative concludes with Miss Z agreeing to this good bargain and very glad to be home.

Carter's other fairy tale, The Donkey Prince, concerns a queen who was given a magic apple as a wedding present by her father. This powerful king told his daughter to keep the apple safe and she would never lose her beautiful looks or fall ill. When she comes across a donkey, who asks for the apple, she tells him that she cannot give away such a valuable gift, but she would be willing to give him as much fruit as he wants at her castle. He is saddened by this reply and explains to the queen why he is so distressed: “Madam, though you see us in the shapes of donkeys, my company and I are, in fact, Brown Men of the Hills. Your father transformed us into this shape by a cruel enchantment after my son accidentally transfixed him with an arrow while he was out hunting. If you had given your father's apple to me of your own free will, because of my need, we should have returned to our natural forms at the very first bite I took from it” (9).

The queen regrets her act and learns that the only way she can help the Brown Men turned donkeys is by adopting a foal named Bruno and raising it as her son. She agrees, and Bruno is raised as a prince. When he is full grown, the queen loses her magic apple and becomes gravely ill. It turns out that a Wild Man from the Savage Mountain had found it and taken it with him. Bruno bravely decides to go off by himself to recover the magic apple so that his mother will recover from her illness. Along the way he meets Daisy, a young working girl, who knows a trick or two, and it is this working girl who now becomes the major protagonist of the story. She guides the donkey to the Savage Mountain, where they encounter an enormous Wild Man named Hlajki, who befriends them and tells them that the magic apple is in the possession of Terror, the leader of the Wild Men, who would rather kill them than return the apple to Bruno. Thereupon the practical Daisy responds: “We shall have to acquire the apple by guile. … I shall think of a way. A working girl knows how to use her wits” (26). So, she takes Bruno's golden saddle cloth and decorates herself so that she looks like a beautiful princess. Then she enters the village of the Wild Men with Bruno and Hlajki and tells Terror that she is a magician. At first, Terror is not impressed by her magic tricks, and he tells her that he will give her anything if she manages to really astonish him. So Daisy charms him and the Wild People with music from a little wooden whistle. Terror gives her the magic apple, but then tries to kill her and her companions as they descend the mountain. They all go through fire and water to save each other and the apple, and they themselves are rescued by the King of the West, who started everything in the first place, and he allows them to see their future in a magic mirror. Bruno is changed back into a prince, and Daisy's resourcefulness is rewarded. She and Bruno marry, and the Brown Men, also transformed, return to their native hills where they take up market gardening instead of hunting. From then on they always treat donkeys, the beasts of burden, as their equals. Meanwhile, there is a revolution on the Savage Mountain, and Terror is chased away. “Hlajki became their new leader, and under his influence, they became gentler by degrees, built themselves houses of wood and thatch, and started eating with knives and forks, which they had never done before. But all this happened long ago, in another country, and nothing is the same now, of course” (40).

Carter wrote both these ironic fairy tales in 1969-70, just as the feminist movement was about to gather storm and just as she was about to embark for Japan and claim more autonomy for herself. It was almost as if the tales were prefiguring her own life. Certainly, they anticipate the fairy tales that she was going to write in The Bloody Chamber (1979) and to collect later in her two anthologies The Virago Book of Fairy Tales (1990) and The Second Virago Book of Fairy Tales (1992). Marina Warner has remarked that “Carter liked the solid common sense of folk tales, the straightforward aims of their protagonists, the simple moral distinctions, and the wily stratagems they suggest. They're tales of the underdog, about cunning and high spirits winning through in the end; they're practical, and they're not high flown” (xi). In Miss Z and The Donkey Prince, Carter not only captures the down-to-earth quality of the oral folktale tradition, she endows the tales with a sophisticated understanding of the world, a strategy for survival, that was in keeping with her radical and feminist viewpoint.

Miss Z has a kafkaesque quality to it, but unlike Kafka's fables and fairy tales, this narrative is optimistic. It begins: “A dark young lady named Miss Z lived in a Parrot Jungle” (5). Immediately, this simple statement strikes our attention because of the strange situation. Like the Kafka protagonists, Joseph K. and K., Miss Z lives in a bizarre world and is thrown into an absurd situation. Her world is turned upside down by her father's misdeed, and she must seek to set it right so that “paradise” can be restored. But who is Miss Z? Why is she called dark? What is the Parrot Jungle? Perhaps Carter chose Z because this young woman is the last of her kind. Since she can make magic dresses and is associated with darkness, she may be the last of the mysterious witches. She is never described. Her actions, however, lead us to see a resourceful, clever, and persistet young woman. No matter how strange the characters are that she meets on her journey to the green lions and no matter how threatening the situation, Miss Z remains calm. In fact, she seems to like incongruities, just as Carter is fond of inserting modern objects into archaic settings and mixing the quaint folk narrative style with contemporary jargon and references. There are no logical and causal connections in Carter's narrative, and each scene has its hilarious aspect. For instance, when Miss Z goes to the wise woman for some advice, Carter describes the scene as follows: “The wise woman sat in a shed made of cardboard boxes and played solitaire. She wore a little snake with red eyes around her wrist instead of a bracelet; this snake told her secrets, so she knew where the parrots had gone” (8-9).

Gone is the traditional topos of the old omniscient woman, who is generally cooking or inventing something in a hut in the woods. Nor does she seem particularly wise herself, but her advice is practical: Miss Z had better catch the green lions before they catch her. And the practicality of this advice is what Miss Z comes to represent as she goes off on a journey that has aspects of Alice in Wonderland and The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. Miss Z never questions the fantastic and weird characters that she meets. Like Alice and Dorothy, she strides forth to create her own home, for home can only be reached through struggle and realizing one's talents.

The traditional fairy-tale quest in which the protagonist is aided by magical gifts and friendly animals is embellished by the incongruous language and situations. What is most significant in Carter's tale is that Miss Z keeps her wits about her and her integrity as she brings about a reconciliation between her father and the parrots. Her goal is not marriage, nor is there closure to the story. She simply wants to stay in the Parrot Jungle because the earth is rich and the air is so sweet. Implicit in such a statement is that Human Town cannot provide this kind of environment, and though the Parrot Jungle is not described as a perfect paradise, it is different from civilization. Difference is important to Carter, and Miss Z, whoever she is, takes a stand for difference, is different, and is intended to incite readers, young and old, to claim their difference.

In The Donkey Prince, Daisy, too, is representative of difference, and she, too, is a wily young woman, who takes charge of a quest and brings it to a successful end. When Bruno first meets her on the road, Carter describes the encounter as follows: “The child bit on a straw and stared, but not rudely, only out of curiosity. Bruno realized that he was no common sight, with his hairy ears and coat of cloth of gold, so he did not take offense. It was a girl child, but she was so dirty and her rags so nondescript that it was difficult, at first, to tell” (16). In this narrative Carter recalls the beast-bridegroom tradition of folktales. She may have read Apuleius's The Golden Ass, which is the forerunner to “Beauty and the Beast,” or any other number of folktales in which men have been turned into pigs, hedgehogs, lions, or bears and must be saved by women. She is surely alluding to Perrault's “Donkey Skin,” a tale which she later translated, one in which a young woman must disguise herself and appear besmirched and disheveled to escape the incestuous desires of her father. Daisy is also somewhat like Cinderella, albeit much more rebellious and independent. The folk- and fairy-tale motifs are ample in Carter's narrative, but it is her portrayal of the working girl Daisy that livens up this story and gives it a contemporary flavor. Daisy runs away from an old woman who exploits her. It is her common sense that continually saves the day for Bruno and Hlajki. Her goal is not to marry Bruno, but to assist him. It is Carter's emphasis on mutual respect, cooperation, and fortitude that transforms the traditional beast-bridegroom tale from one that focuses on marriage and the restitution of male power into a narrative that celebrates difference and harmonious co-existence of difference. Daisy the working girl, Bruno the donkey, and Hlajki the wild man depend on one another and seek to help one another, not because there will be some personal gain, but because Bruno's mother is dying. As in Miss Z, the protagonists want to cure a “sick” situation and restore harmony to a world out of joint. Here, too, Carter keeps the end open by suggesting that the “utopian” resolution happened long ago and in another country, and “nothing is the same now, of course” (40).

Cynical? No, that was not Carter's style. Provocative? Of course. Carter's fairy tales were always intended, from the very first, to compel readers to change their minds and feelings and to transform the very nature of the fairy tales themselves. Miss Z and Daisy become the models for some of her most memorable heroines in The Bloody Chamber, and their force of will (not unlike Carter's herself) alters the narrative structure and outcomes of many a traditional story. The best example is “The Company of Wolves.” Carter's initial description of the heroine is most striking and indicative:

Children do not stay young for long in this savage country. There are no toys for them to play with so they work hard and grow wise but this one, so pretty and the youngest of her family, a little latecomer, had been indulged by her mother and the grandmother who'd knitted her the red shawl that, today, has the ominous if brilliant look of blood on snow. Her breasts have just begun to swell; her hair is like lint, so fair it hardly makes a shadow on her pale forehead; her cheeks are an emblematic scarlet and white and she has just started her woman's bleeding, the clock inside that will strike, henceforward, once a month.

(147)

This wise young girl is about to take charge of her sexuality. She has her own knife and is afraid of nothing. She charts her own way through the woods without a compass, and in the end she tames the wolf. Carter's fairy tales are filled with women like this: fearless, erotic, cunning, hilarious, and with a gargantuan capacity for taking delight in all aspects of life. Even in the haunting rendition of the fable “Peter and the Wolf,” Carter depicted a young girl as wild and savage, at home in the mountains with other wolves. The girl is not like the composite Jungian heroine of Clarissa Pinkola Estés's Women Who Run with the Wolves (1993). Carter never dabbled in ethereal archetypes, nor was she didactic in her feminism. Her heroines are not all strong and courageous. Many succumb to the wiles of men or to their own passions. But for the most part they do resemble the protagonist in “The Wise Little Girl” in her collection The Virago Book of Fairy Tales.

Marina Warner said that this tale was Carter's most favorite, and indeed, “its heroine is an essential Carter figure, never abashed, nothing daunted, sharp-eared as a vixen and possessed of a dry good sense” (xi). Certainly, if we recall Miss Z and Daisy, these are the heroines that Carter preferred and set in different plots to see how they might survive. It is thus in cultivating her narrative strategies that she appeals to the wisdom and humor of young readers in her two tales written specifically for children. Moreover, she demonstrates her respect for children by playing with the traditional plot of fairy tales and with language that calls for careful attention to detail. Critical of the way that fairy tales were dumbed down for children, Carter's writing exhorts young readers to free themselves of the traditional luggage of outdated fairy tales, the hackneyed motifs of passive princess and daring prince, and to see the world differently, to blend colors and characters in exciting original ways, much in the same way that she did for adult readers.

In this regard, Miss Z and The Donkey Prince can be considered “crossover” tales. In a recent special issue of Children's Literature, U. C. Knoepflmacher and Mitzi Meyers introduce the term “cross-writing,” which is linked to what I mean by crossover: “We believe that a dialogic mix of older and younger voices occurs in texts too often read as univocal. Authors who write for children inevitably create a colloquy between past and present selves. Yet such conversations are neither unconscious nor necessarily riven by strife” (vii). Knoepflmacher and Meyers stress the manner in which certain narrators of children's literature bring about a cooperation and integration of conflicting voices that appeal to both children and adult readers, and certainly their point is well taken. Carter accomplishes this fusion in her two fairy tales for children. Yet, I would argue that she does even more with a postmodern technique of crossing over.

If we begin with the premise that children's literature has never really been written for children but primarily for the author herself or himself and then for adult editors with children as implicit readers, the notion of crossing over can be better grasped. The best writers of children's literature seek to bring out the child in themselves, to cross back and forth in memory and emotion and to regain what they imagine childhood was and is. Crossing boundaries of time and sound to achieve a mix of voice and style, writers do not set limits on who their audience will be. Nor do they designate audiences. Their writings cross over market categories that are socially constructed. Crossover tales such as Carter's expose false differentiation: they break down accepted definitions, norms, values, types, and forms to create an open space in which the child and adult reader can wander to reflect upon the representations of the author and to make sense of those representations in ways that will be new to the reader and unknown to the author.

In her book, Postmodern Fairy Tales, Cristina Bacchilega makes the following point related to my notion of Carter's “crossover tales”: “In its multiple retellings, the fairy tale is that variable and ‘in-between’ image where folklore and literature, community and individual, consensus and enterprise, children and adults, Woman and women, face and reflect (on) each other. As I see it, the tale of magic's controlling metaphor is the magic mirror, because it conflates mimesis (reflection), refraction (varying desires), and framing (artifice)” (10). As Bacchilega suggests, reading Carter's tales is like holding up a mirror to our faces, but it is a magic mirror in which everything is cross-dressed. Of course, it is dangerous to generalize about Carter's tales, that is, to maintain that she continually used the same techniques and sought the same effects in all her fairy tales.

Miss Z and The Donkey Prince stand at the beginning of Carter's fairy-tale production. They do not have the density and complexity of her later tales. They do not have the stunning metaphors and lust for sexual imagery. But these tales are zestful because they initiate “crossing over” into new realms for her female protagonists, exploring dangerous territory, and returning home fully confident in their abilities. Carter combined the simple folk style, baroque elements of the literary fairy tale, and contemporary jargon to create unorthodox narratives that suggest the potential of women and men to change their destinies and to take full control of their lives. These tales ran counter to traditional expectations. These tales were harbingers of even more radical fairy tales to come from Carter's pen. Her last novel was fittingly titled Wise Children (1991), and her fascinatingly zany heroine Dora Chance is certainly related to Miss Z and Daisy. She is the wise girl grown up, not straight, but like Carter preferred, prodigiously crooked on the wrong side of the tracks and all the more admirable in her frank and cunning approach to life.

Works Cited

Bacchilega, Cristina. Postmodern Fairy Tales: Gender and Narrative Strategies. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1997.

Carter, Angela. The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories. London: Gollancz, 1979.

———. The Donkey Prince. Illus. Eros Keith. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1970.

———. Miss Z, the Dark Young Lady. Illus. Eros Keith. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1970.

———, ed. The Second Virago Book of Fairy Tales. Illus. Corinna Sargood. London: Virago, 1992. Rpt. as Strange Things Sometimes Still Happen: Fairy Tales from Around the World. Boston and London: Faber and Faber, 1993.

———, ed. The Virago Book of Fairy Tales. Illus. Corinna Sargood. London: Virago, 1990. Rpt. as The Old Wives' Fairy Tale Book. New York: Pantheon, 1990.

———. Wise Children. London: Chatto & Windus, 1991.

Knoepflmacher, U. C., and Mitzi Meyers. “‘Cross-Writing’ and the Reconceptualizing of Children's Literary Studies.” Children's Literature 23 (1997): vii-xvii.

Warner, Marina. Introduction. Carter, Strange Things Sometimes Still Happen ix-xvii.