SOURCE: Benson, Stephen. “Angela Carter and the Literary Märchen: A Review Essay.” Marvels and Tales: Journal of Fairy Tale Studies 12, no. 1 (1998): 23-51.

[In the following essay, Benson explores the perception in literary criticism of Carter's use of fairy tales.]

ANGELA CARTER AND THE LITERARY MäRCHEN: A REVIEW ESSAY

It is perhaps fitting, given Angela Carter's interest in all aspects of folklore, that her work has itself become the subject of a modern legend, albeit one whose truth is very much ascertainable. This is the legend of the “Carter effect,” identified by The British Academy Humanities Research Board, which distributes postgraduate studentships. Lorna Sage states the facts, as reported by the President of the Academy: in the year 1992-93, “there were more than forty applicants wanting to do doctorates on Carter, making her by far the most fashionable twentieth-century topic” (Flesh and the Mirror 3). Paul Barker, editor of the magazine New Society, which published the bulk of Carter's essays from the late 1960s to the early 1980s, recounts a more detailed version, given at an academic conference devoted to Carter's work: the Academy received “[f]orty proposals for doctorates on her writing in 1992-93 … more than for the entire eighteenth century.”¹ Barker thus nominates Carter as “the most read contemporary author on English university campuses” (14), an assumption made in similar fashion by Jan Dalley, who, after rehearsing the facts, canonizes “St Angela of the Campus” (29); and finally, in Tom Shippey's further expanded version, we have the makings of a genuinely legendary aura: more English students are writing these on Carter “than on any author or area from anywhere in the seventeenth or eighteenth century”; or so “it is said.” Like Barker and Dalley, Shippey can thus extrapolate: postmodernism “wouldn't make sense without her” (20).

Whichever way you choose to tell it, Carter's work appears ensconced in the pantheon of the contemporary, indicative of all things modern, or postmodern (albeit for the seemingly contradictory reasons of being both symptomatic [Bayley, “Fighting for the Crown”], and prescient [Barker; Sage, Flesh and the Mirror 1]). Essential to this fixing is the extraction of a quintessence, a central facet or facets, that can pass into common circulation. Hence the legend of the “Carter effect,” which can be invoked to fix Carter's work as academically correct, having given rise to “[t]he burgeoning academic industry of Carterology” (Barker 16). Critics refer to “[t]ypical Carter territory”;² an English pop singer is described as “covering the territory of Angela Carter's ‘Company of Wolves’”;³ and, as I write, a newspaper article on the use among female columnists of details from friends' personal lives is titled “The Company of Wolves.”

As these non-academic examples suggest, the facet of Carter's work that seems to have made the transition into the mainstream is its association with the fairy tale, which runs as a seam through her output from the early novels to one of her last published volumes, The Second Virago Book of Fairy Tales. The majority of her work as editor and translator revolved around the fairy tale, and the two film adaptations of her writing are based on her own fairy-tale inventions. As Merja Makinen points out, the obituaries that followed Carter's death already proved the extent to which the author had been indelibly marked by this association (3); indeed, the mythologizing of a “benevolent witch-queen” (Rushdie, “Angela Carter” 5), the “Faerie Queene” (Warner, Introduction xii) whose life reads like a “fairy-tale” (Barker 14), has itself already been the subject of demythologizing comment (Makinen 2-3; Lee 311). Nevertheless, there is a strong case for upholding this popular conception of Carter as an author to whom the fairy tale and, more broadly, folklore were pivotal: literally, if we concur with Lorna Sage's periodization of Carter's output in terms of “Beginnings,” “Middles” and “Ends,” whereby The Bloody Chamber acts as the pivot between the works of the middle and late periods (Angela Carter), or if we follow Makinen in seeing The Bloody Chamber as pivoting “between the disquietingly savage analyses of patriarchy of the 1960s and 1970s … and the exuberant novels of the 1980s and early 1990s” (3; compare Palmer, “From ‘Coded Mannequin’ to Bird Woman” 196). Carmen Callil nominates The Bloody Chamber as “the first of her [Carter's] masterpieces” (6), while Salman Rushdie refers to it as her “masterwork … the most likely of her works to endure” (Introduction xi); even Dalley, disagreeing with Rushdie, believes the title story of the collection to be “perhaps the one that most fiercely polarizes the reactions of Carter's readers” (29). If we accept that Carter is, in whatever sense, a quintessential contemporary writer, it would thus appear that her relationship with the fairy tale lies at the core of her contemporaneity.

The purpose of this essay is to review the various ways in which Carter's use of the fairy tale has been read in English-language criticism, and I have chosen to preface this survey with the above thumbnail sketch of more general assessments, not in order to justify the endeavour but rather to pose a series of questions based on these assessments. In what ways do the many critical readings of Carter's fairy tales affirm or contest their status, within her work and as defining texts of postmodernity? What are suggested as the characteristics of these texts, including their relation to their source material, and how do they affect our notions of the contemporary, of the literary canon, and of conceptions of authorship? And have these texts been neutralized in the process of being defined as representative or do they retain a distance from their categorization?

In part, it is via the various narratives or methodologies that readers have brought to the subject that we can locate its contemporaneity, and a reading of this criticism provides a snapshot of the most prominent critical debates of the past twenty years, given that gender and feminism have played a large part in defining these debates, albeit at times antagonistically, in a manner analogous to the definition of Carter's writing in terms of the fairy tale. Yet this question of definition should not be taken as suggestive of singularity, despite the journalistic need for quick fixes that is one of the pitfalls of crossover recognition. The publication of The Bloody Chamber as a collection in 1979 was contemporaneous with that of two influential but contentious essays which, in their different ways, argue for a pluralist feminism: Julia Kristeva's “Le temps de femmes” (“Women's Time”) and Annette Kolodny's “Dancing Through the Minefield.” While the former theorizes a third stage of feminism in which a variety of feminist projects co-exist, the latter argues for a plurality of feminist literary theories and readings rather than a single, overarching hermeneutic model, the possibility of which was much discussed at the time. Given that readings of The Bloody Chamber can be partly contextualized in terms of these contemporaneous speculative essays, and while there is undoubtedly a broadly definable critical consensus regarding the collection, critical writing about The Bloody Chamber and about questions relating to its narrative models demonstrates a multiplicity of approaches that would seem to affirm Kristeva's and Kolodny's suggestions, in terms of the variety of critical methods and the range of ways in which Carter's relation to the fairy tale is made to signify.⁴ It is my hope that a thematic review of the literature will not overly tame this heterogeneity.⁵

REVIEWS

Continuing to use journalistic accounts as a means of entry, and as a first indication of conflicting opinions, we can turn back to look at reviews of the Carter works in question. These reviews reveal an interesting divergence between those readers for whom The Bloody Chamber is complex and those for whom it is transparent: a split between a reading of the collection as “elaborate and fanciful … too rich and heady for casual consumption” (Craig, “Gory” 762;⁶ compare Kennedy), and a weary recognition that we are “too far along in history, too knowing nowadays, for the old fairy tale frisson” (Friedman 15; in direct contradiction, Selina Hastings sees The Bloody Chamber as a collection of “beautiful and ornate” fairy tales, “the introduction of modernity [into which] gives an extra frisson” [15]). One reviewer comments that “it's not always easy to tell when she's [Carter's] giving new meaning to her basic theme of sexual potency, or merely embroidering on it” (Bannon 55), and this seemingly contradictory sense of innovation and strangeness versus mere repetition continues in more recent reviews—of the collected edition of Carter's stories, for example—which have the added benefit of hindsight. The most notorious instance of a reviewer's reading of Carter is that by John Bayley, for whom her various fairy-tale narratives are patently self-explanatory, “wholly explicit”; he believes Carter's fairy tales “lack the secret style of independence”: “[t]old by Grimm [sic] or Perrault, or even Andrew Lang in his ‘Fairy Books,’ blue, green, and red, these old tales remain free and enigmatic. Retold by Angela Carter … they become committed to the preoccupations and to the fashions of our moment” (“Fighting for the Crown” 10-11). Like Friedman before him, Bayley thus sees Carter's fairy tales as predicated on “an art of mutual knowingness” (“Stand the Baby on its Head” 19).⁷ Yet contrary to this seeming transparency of intent—Dalley plays devil's advocate in suggesting that the “40-odd over-scented pages [of “The Bloody Chamber”] are scarcely worth the single, feminist, final twist” (29)—Shippey and Hastings see the elusive nature of fairy tales retained in Carter's versions in the feeling they evoke of “deep meaning forever receding just out of reach” (Shippey 20) and, in direct opposition to Bayley, in their “lightness of touch”: “[T]here remains the distancing effect of a vision. … For it is magic, it is strange … the characters are not of this world” (Hastings 15).

What appears from scanning the reviews is a general desire to contextualize Carter's writing and the centrality to that writing of her concern for the fairy tale as a particular narrative model, with conflicting opinions arising out of the extent to which the texts are seen to be of, or ahead of, their variously conceived historical moment. Bayley thus grants Carter's importance for the same reason that Friedman is bored by her (or at least by some of her work), and this dialectic of prescience and datedness can serve as a bridge to the academic critiques that seek to explicate The Bloody Chamber, in which the charge of enthralment to old models is countered by what others see as essentially speculative, with Carter actively renewing Peter and Iona Opie's definition of fairy tales as “the space fiction of the past” (18).

“THE BLOODY CHAMBER” AND INTERTEXTUALITY

Critics of any of Carter's works are faced with the issue of intertextuality, and with the fact that these intertexts are always “already read”; thus, another reason for viewing The Bloody Chamber as paradigmatic is that it stages the processes of intertextuality in distilled form. Readings of the narratives must be based, albeit implicitly, on an attitude to the folk- and fairy-tale source material, which can act either as the main focus of attention, as in Cristina Bacchilega's several pieces on the collection, and in essays by Donald Haase and Mary Kaiser; as a summarized “given” which acts as merely one aspect, as in readings of “The Bloody Chamber” by Lisa Jacobson and Kari Lokke; or as a productive absence, giving rise to readings which deliberately concentrate their attention elsewhere, as in Becky McLaughlin's Lacanian reading of the title story, Lucie Armitt's tendentious concentration on The Bloody Chamber's navigation of the spaces and frames of the Gothic, and Harriet Kramer Linkin's detailed account of “The Erl-King” in terms of its recasting of some of the literary tropes of English Romantic poetry. Indeed, the possibility of readings such as these last three demonstrates the extent to which the folk- and fairy-tale material in Carter's work has nearly always passed through a series of filters, making a folkloristic account of the narratives, of the “detective” kind that at one time characterized folklorically-oriented readings of literary texts, problematic at best. However, folkloristically naive readings, as opposed to those which productively look elsewhere, are liable to be less successful, and I will return below to the question of the easy seductiveness of this form of intertextuality.

Referred to by Mary Kaiser as “the paradigmatic story of the collection” (31), the title story in The Bloody Chamber is fittingly placed and has certainly engendered the most critical comment.⁸ For Rushdie it acts as the “overture” (Introduction xi), announcing the thematic material to be played out in what follows (although in not quite as mannered a fashion as this description might suggest), while both Bacchilega and Elaine Jordan see a deliberate ploy at work in the placing of an extended narrative which frames the more thematically concise tales that follow, serving as both context (Bacchilega, Postmodern Fairy Tales 183n39) and justification (Jordan, “Dangers” 127-28).

Bacchilega's reading of “The Bloody Chamber,” as part of her Postmodern Fairy Tales, is by far the most aware of folkloric intertexts. This book-length study, which includes a reading of tales from The Bloody Chamber in each of its chapters, represents the first and so far only large-scale attempt to approach the collection via an informed assessment and understanding of the tale types which lie behind Carter's rewritings. Carter's own work on this source material is ample justification, if it were needed, for such an approach, and Bacchilega successfully uses folk narratives as the starting point from which to navigate what she terms Carter's “metafolkloric or archeological project” (124). Each of the chapters in the book is concerned with a specific tale type, with the readings of literary texts prefaced by a wide-ranging survey of recorded versions. In terms of “The Bloody Chamber,” this approach allows for a reading, which draws on related work by Maria Tatar and Catherine Velay-Vallantin, that demonstrates the literary origins of views of “Bluebeard” as primarily concerned with female culpability and waywardness, as opposed to a folklorically sanctioned reading which sees rather the positive aspects of curiosity and “a process of initiation which requires entering the forbidden chamber” (107).⁹ In addition, the contentious depiction of the venal heroine in “The Bloody Chamber” can be read as a deliberate avoidance of the far more cunning models offered by the tale types related to “Bluebeard” (AT 311 and AT 955), allusions to which appear in Carter's narrative: thus, for Bacchilega, “not using them is symptomatic of Carter's strategic focus on the victim role, pointing to a ‘lack’ in the resolution of ‘The Bloody Chamber’ itself” (185n43).

While this depth of awareness of folkloric intertexts is largely absent from other readings of “The Bloody Chamber,” Robin Ann Sheets offers a thorough overview of literary versions of “Bluebeard” (including the popularity of the tale in decadent and symbolist literature, which certainly provides much of the material for Carter's narrative), similarly drawing on Tatar to indicate the historical provenance of the sanctioned moral of the tale; while Patricia Duncker (“Re-Imagining”) and Mary Kaiser introduce their readings by drawing on the work of Jack Zipes, with summaries of the history of the fairy tale as a literary narrative which appropriates folkloric material for quite specific purposes. Duncker, Sheets and Kaiser each makes much of the more overt changes introduced by Carter as part of her adaptation, namely the complex depiction of the heroine-narrator and the characters of Jean-Yves and the avenging mother. While Jordan is rightly critical of readings which overly concentrate on these more explicit pivot points—“[t]o stop short at particular sensational instances is to reproduce the titillating censoriousness of newspapers” (“Dangers” 130)—this focus nevertheless serves my purpose in introducing the theme of intertextuality, to the extent that those readings which are less concerned to go beyond the more obvious Perrault/Bettelheim avenue of folkloristic inquiry tend to view these changes as both wholly original and wholly successful. Jacobson identifies the three changes listed above with an “alternative, matriarchal, world view” (83), while Lokke believes Carter's tale “ends as a feminist fairy tale should, with the rescue of the daughter by her strong and heroic mother” (10).

While these readings raise interesting topics—Jacobson's references to the Freudian “uncanny” and Lokke's interest in the Bakhtinian “grotesque”—the unquestioned acceptance of these elements of the tale as wholly Carteresque illustrates how a lack of folkloristic insight can lead to readings which are prone to rather general judgements of Carter's source material. By locating the primary focus of the narrative at these points, such readings play into the hands of the likes of Bayley, for whom Carter's retellings are little more than waves of a feminist magic wand, and are thus liable to give rise to a conception of these narratives as paradigmatic because reflective of their historical moment—which is, of course, only one step away from datedness. As Bacchilega comments with reference to the tale types closely related to “Bluebeard,” “[o]nly readers who believe that fairy-tale heroines are hopelessly entangled in patriarchal values will be surprised that the mother's eccentricity is the key to her success” (Postmodern Fairy Tales 127). Thus Kaiser, who is concerned with the intrinsic intertextuality of the fairy tale as a literary genre, sees “The Bloody Chamber” as a retelling of “Bluebeard” deliberately staged in a fin de siècle environment which historically contextualizes Carter's depiction of the “woman-as-victim” and “woman-as-avenger” (31-33), while both Jordan (“Dangers” 122) and McLaughlin (412), from very different perspectives, are willing to see the blind piano-tuner as an ambivalent figure rather than a wholesale alternative to male sadism: “pretty dull fare,” to quote McLaughlin.¹⁰

It is not a question of “deep” as opposed to “surface” readings but rather of how we approach Carter's intertextual strategies. Jordan and McLaughlin do not make their judgements in the light of folklorically-informed insight alone (McLaughlin largely ignores this aspect) but rather through close attention to the symbolic and intertextual economy of the narrative—a close attention which may seem at odds with a popular conception of postmodernist fictions as actively seeking to prevent such dissection as well as with contemporary critical practice, but which in fact demonstrates the extent to which Carter's work exemplifies one particular mode of feminist textual strategy. Yet running counter to this is the possibility of a negative judgement of Carter's reliance on folkloric intertexts which are indicative, indeed constitutive, of a traditional conception of gender as the fixed relation between aggressive masculinity and passive princesses. This is to introduce what constitutes the second major strand in readings of this seam of Carter's work—the issue of pornography and its relation to conceptions of female sexuality—and at the risk of shifting away from a survey of the theorizing of intertextuality within criticism of Carter and the fairy tale, to which I will return, it is necessary to admit this parallel theme.

PORNOGRAPHY AND THE FAIRY TALE

Although I refer above to the usefulness of a knowledge of folk and fairy tales as a means of avoiding unmediated readings of the more overt elements of Carter's rewritings, Duncker views this tradition as inherently and insuperably restrictive, a structural “strait-jacket” confining Carter to a depiction of gender relations which mimics the set pieces of the pornographic encounter: “The realities of male desire, aggression, force; the reality of women, compliant and submissive” (“Re-Imagining” 8).¹¹ While Duncker's reading is strangely contradictory—aware of historical continuities and discontinuities within the history of folkloric material but unwilling to admit Carter's negotiation of the strands of tradition—its repeated reference to Andrea Dworkin, including the latter's scathing critique of the fairy tale in Woman Hating, represents how The Bloody Chamber has been contextualized, to varying effect, within the debate surrounding pornography.

It was around this subject that conflicting camps of feminist thought arranged themselves in the late 1970s and 1980s, as part of a debate that crystallized broader issues relating to types of feminist politics and the question of the status of representation. In short, while it was accepted that pornography reflected a sort of distilled essence of the entrenched binaries of patriarchal gender relations, the conflict revolved around the extent to which pornographic representations could be appropriated as a critique of the status quo and as a medium for the speculative imagining of alternatives. Thus the debate was, and to an extent still is, a test case for a conception of feminism and feminist cultural production, and, given that fairy tales underwent a concerted feminist critique in the 1970s, the parallels are self-evident: can fairy tales as, traditionally, miniature carriers of a conservative ideology of gender be appropriated to critique, and imagine alternatives to, traditional conceptions of gender and its construction, given the history of their role in the installation of these very traditions?

It was Angela Carter's direct intervention in this debate, with the publication of The Sadeian Woman in the same year as The Bloody Chamber, that sealed the link between her conception of fairy tales and of pornography, a link which constitutes the prime historical and critical context within which the tale collection has subsequently been read. The Sadeian Woman refers to the genre of the fairy tale on several occasions—Justine is described as “a black, inverted fairy-tale” (39), and Carter characterizes the writings of de Sade as directly related to “the black and white ethical world of fairy tale and fable” (82)—and has been used by critics as a parallel text, or polemical preface, to The Bloody Chamber. Margaret Atwood thus reads the latter as “a ‘writing against’ de Sade, a talking-back to him”: the collection “can be understood much better as an exploration of the narrative possibilities of de Sade's lamb-and-tiger dichotomy than as a ‘standard’ work of early seventies to-the-barricades feminism” (120-21). Atwood goes on to provide her own summary of the main conflicting camps in the feminist debate, a summary which is given in much more detail, and with further reference to the specific dynamics of the issues raised by pornography, in the essays by Sheets and Michele Grossman, each of whom reads “The Bloody Chamber” via this historical and conceptual context (an interpretative relationship which is reversed by Sally Keenan, who uses The Bloody Chamber as one means of approach to The Sadeian Woman, referring to the two texts as “contrasting sides of the same genre” [136]). Sheets's is an impressive and invaluably detailed overview of the dynamics of the debate, beginning in the late seventies with the anti-pornography movement, which characterized pornography as the eroticization of male dominance, encouraging sadomasochism “by placing the male viewer/reader in the sadist's active position while assigning the masochist's passive role to the female viewer/reader” (339). This was countered by those groups for whom sadomasochism was reflective of the unavoidable role of power in sexual relations and thus a route to the exploration of an eroticism untainted by the proscriptions of (heterosexual) ideology (340-41).

Duncker's critique of The Bloody Chamber is predicated on a disagreement with Carter as to the possibility of a constructive use of pornography—she describes Carter's notion of the “moral pornographer” as “utter nonsense”—and a reading of Carter's putative exploration and deconstruction of the subject positions of sadist and masochist as merely a reproduction of pornographic archetypes: “Carter envisages women's sensuality simply as a response to male arousal. She has no conception of women's sexuality as autonomous desire” (“Re-Imagining” 7). Hence the reconceived transformations that are described in “The Tiger's Bride” and “The Company of Wolves” merely replay the “meeting of sexual aggression and the cliché of female erotic ingenuity” alongside a vision of female sexuality as merely “the mirror image of his [the wolf's] feline predatory sexuality” (“Re-Imagining” 7). As one of the first published essays devoted to The Bloody Chamber, Duncker's has been an influential reading, acting as a reference point for those who are made similarly uneasy by what is taken as a tautological amalgamation of fairy tale and the structures of pornography. Thus Avis Lewallen, although more open to the play of irony in Carter's narratives, is disturbed by what she sees as a vision of female sexuality still operating within a Sadeian framework, still responding only within prescribed encounters; and a similar judgement is made by Robert Clark, for whom “The Company of Wolves” offers only “the standard patriarchal opposition between the feral domineering male and the gentle submissive female” (149).

To an extent, narratives such as “The Tiger's Bride” and “The Company of Wolves” present readers with an either/or scenario: either we see the representation of some form of alternative to or merely the replication of traditionally sanctioned roles. Thus Sylvia Bryant reads “The Tiger's Bride” as ultimately utopian, offering “an alternative model for the female subject's desire,” in which the heroine's refusal to be objectified leads to a “reciprocal relationship of desire and trust” (448-50), and Melinda Fowl reads “a narrative where a sense of ‘strangeness’ or ‘otherness’ shapes experiences of fear, desire and self-understanding in a mutually preserving relationship” (76). Yet in the same way that it is possible to read the more overt interpolations Carter introduces into “The Bloody Chamber” as constructively ambivalent, so it is that readings which opt to explore the either/or scenario, rather than wholeheartedly espouse one side of the equation, tend to find a more complex depiction of the pornographic encounter.

Although largely negative, Lewallen's reading does grant that in some of the tales at least, Carter is depicting the social and economic underpinnings of sexual relations, “the historically determined nature of desire” (156), and it is this sense of an active grappling with gender roles as they have been played-out in history that characterizes the readings of Grossman, Sheets and Bacchilega. Sheets is one of the few critics to differentiate between Carter's attitude to pornography in The Sadeian Woman and The Bloody Chamber, rather than to take the argument of the former as directly enacted in the latter, for better or worse. Thus “The Bloody Chamber” “continues—but also qualifies” The Sadeian Woman, more critical of pornography than the latter in its detailed depiction of “‘aesthetic sado-masochism’” (347, Sheets quoting Linda Williams) but equally concerned to represent, in the ambivalent figure of the narrator-heroine, the fact that “complicated economic, social, and psychological forces contribute to the objectification, fetishization, and violation of women” (357). Along the same lines, Bacchilega reads the narrator's “double-voiced confessional mode” (Postmodern Fairy Tales 126) as fluctuating between “the religiously sanctioned subject position of ‘virtuous victim,’” which not only “fosters her passivity … but also lets the narrator justify that passivity” (125), and “a painful recognition from within of masochism's presence in sexual and economic exploitation” (123).

These attempts at a more supple reading of the subject positions of sado-masochism as depicted by Carter are of a piece with the frequent reference to feminist film theory in readings of these narratives, an obvious route of inquiry given the stress on vision in Carter's most prominent fairy tale sources—“Bluebeard,” “Beauty and the Beast,” “Red Riding Hood”—and, of course, given the film of The Company of Wolves. Sheets provides an overview of the theory and criticism that arose, at least in part, as a direct response to the shift in the anti-pornography movement towards a more general critique of “the pornography of representation” (to quote the title of a book by Susanne Kappeler), a pornography predicated on a rigid conception of the “male gaze”—a shift which exacerbated an already “generalized and ahistorical” bias shaping work in this area (341-42). The response involved, on the one hand, a study of specific representations and the possibility of “multiple and fluid cross-gender identification” (342) and, on the other, a theorizing of possible alternatives that would relativize the primacy accorded to vision in philosophical and psychoanalytic accounts of the subject and of subjectivity. The influence, both general and specific, of this field of inquiry is evident in a range of criticism on The Bloody Chamber and related texts by Carter, three particular instances of which I have chosen to highlight.

In the first case, an attention to the shifting play of looks in Carter's narratives—the looks that pass between the Marquis and his wife, the tiger and his bride, and the multiple encounters of wolf and young girl—allows for an avoidance of dichotomous critical judgements which wholly espouse or censure the basic tenor of the narrative. One of the pitfalls of such judgements is demonstrated in Bryant's reading of the denouement of “The Tiger's Bride,” where a recognition of the “inherently voyeuristic” nature of “Beauty and the Beast” leads her to resolve the transformation by positing a “primal and natural state” for the girl's desires, “one that is pre-Oedipal, almost pre-ideological” (448). Such utopianism is problematic, not the least because it replays the historically potent association of female sexuality with timelessness and nature, against which Carter writes elsewhere. Rather than seeking to do away with voyeurism, it is possible to read “The Tiger's Bride” as an exploration, on several levels, of the gaze, as Bacchilega demonstrates by concentrating on the narratological concept of focalization (Postmodern Fairy Tales 95-102). Read against “The Courtship of Mr Lyon” which uses “shifting focalization” to chart the process by which Beauty's view of herself is constructed and naturalized (90-95), “The Tiger's Bride,” like “The Bloody Chamber,” presents “the heroine's confused perception”: “an external, but not impartial or ‘natural’ focalization, the humanistic, patriarchal gaze, conditions her responses, even though she realizes that this order victimizes her” (98). While we are witness to the heroine's ultimate refusal to comply with a conditioning that requires the tiger's look to be read as pornographic objectification, it is precisely this “visual-education component” that undercuts the “somewhat Marcusean liberation of the pleasure principle” (100). Focalization is used to highlight and frame the workings of the transformation, thus “mak[ing] its own enchantment suspect by constructing it so conspicuously” (101).

In accounts of the film adaptation of The Company of Wolves, the more supple reading of the gaze demonstrated by Bacchilega has also been allied to readings concerned with how the fairy tale can provide a critique of, and allow for speculation about alternatives to, the primacy accorded to vision in psychoanalytic accounts of the subject and related theories of individuation. Both Catherine Lappas and Donald Haase follow the path of “seeing” as it figures in the film and as it is gradually challenged by the possibility of a relationship based on touch. By concentrating closely on the use of proverbial language in the speech of particular characters, namely Rosaleen's father and her Granny, Haase demonstrates how a web of references is used, not, as in the Grimms' tales, to “suggest the language and atmosphere of the fairy tale” but conversely to “demystify its [the fairy tale's] proverbial language and the conventional wisdom that it expounds” (91). Following in the spirit of her mother, whose speech is largely proverb-free, Rosaleen questions popular, received wisdom, including her father's assertion that “[s]eeing is believing” to which she responds with the question: “What about touching?” Haase identifies the proverb “Seeing is believing” as a “leitmotif that marks for us the progress of Rosaleen's maturation,” and the possibility that “touching might reveal truths unknown to those limited by seeing (such as her bespectacled grandmother)” (95).

This attention to and critique of seeing not only connects with what Guido Almansi identifies as Carter's “specific curiosity about the functioning and range of our five senses” (217), and with Sheet's speculation regarding the role of Jean-Yves in “The Bloody Chamber”—“[p]erhaps if Carter were to continue the story, she would develop a male sexuality centred on smell, touch, and sound” (357);¹² it also ties in with attempts by feminist theorists to reconceptualize the successful relationship of daughter and mother in terms not based on renunciation. Alongside the nascent alternative to aggressive male sexuality conceived as objectification that is hinted at in the figure of Jean-Yves, Sheets views the representation of the mother in “The Bloody Chamber” as “challenging Oedipal models of development which privilege separation over dependence,” and thus as concurring with theorists such as Jessica Benjamin and E. Ann Kaplan regarding the possibility that “recognizing the mother as sexual subject might provide a solution to the representation of desire” (356). This view is shared in part by Bacchilega within the context of her comments on the folkloric antecedents of the mother character (Postmodern Fairy Tales 127). Similarly, Ellen Cronan Rose, despite beginning by concurring with Bettelheim's orthodox Freudianism, concludes her reading of The Bloody Chamber by commenting that one purpose of the feminist retelling of fairy tales lies in the possibility of an account of “female development … grounded in the mother-daughter matrix” (227).

INTERTEXTUALITY REVISITED

Such readings and contextualizations of Carter's fairy-tale narratives, which suggest links with the writings of, among others, Nancy Chodorow and Hélène Cixous, need to be treated with care, given the tendency to mythologize in considerations of the maternal body—a tendency which Carter is at pains to avoid in The Sadeian Woman and in The Passion of New Eve. One of the problems of reading Carter's work in this way is that she is rarely wholly speculative at the expense of a representation of the social and cultural realities within which her characters function, and this is perhaps the root cause of discontent for those who find in her fiction merely a reproduction of fairy-tale sanctioned norms; as Rose comments, comparing The Bloody Chamber to the work of two of Carter's fellow rewriters: “Sexton is an analyst of fairy tales and their cultural implications, while Broumas is an improviser, using the tales as a base for imaginative speculation. Carter is both” (222).

Yet it is exactly this sense of simultaneity, of narratives unwilling whole-heartedly to accept or evade the discourses they represent, that allows me to reconnect with my temporarily diverted review of readings of Carter's intertextual strategies. One notable instance of a more flexible conceptualization of spectatorship in particular film genres (specifically the “paranoid Gothic films” of the 1940s) occurs in the work of Mary Ann Doane, which acts as a reference point in the essays by McLaughlin (406-08), Lappas (118; 129), and Sheets (342; 354), and in a reading of Nights at the Circus by Sally Robinson (118-32).¹³ While Sheets draws a parallel between the heroine of “The Bloody Chamber” and the heroines of the gothic films Doane discusses, in terms of how their “‘active investigating gaze’” undermines rigid theories of viewer identification and of woman as passive spectacle (342; thus concurring with Mulvey's speculative attempt to appropriate the trope of female curiosity [“Pandora”]), Lappas and Robinson focus on Doane's notion of the masquerade, which is conceptually related to Judith Butler's notion of gender as performance and Luce Irigaray's theorizing of female mimicry. In short, and at the risk of my simplifying her argument, what Doane suggests is a theory of the self-conscious enactment of femininity as a means of deconstructing its traditional status as self-evident image; by actively simulating this normative image, the masquerade “‘holds it at a distance,’” thus denaturalizing it: “If one can both take it and leave it, then gender becomes a performance rather than an essence” (Robinson 119-20).¹⁴

Lappas uses this notion to explain the representation of Rosaleen in The Company of Wolves (129), and in so doing her account represents one of the ways in which Carter's relation to the folkloric material she uses has been read in terms of a variously conceived postmodernist intertextuality. Carter is a materialist, concerned with the efficacy within history of particular representations, including those of the fairy tale, and it is via the simultaneous inscription and subversion of these representations in her work that she depicts history as process, both determining our conceptions of ourselves and allowing for the possibility of change. Hence we find Sage's reluctance to label Carter as “postmodern,” in the sense of an implied “terminal reflexiveness,” preferring instead Linda Hutcheon's concept of “historiographic metafiction” and Christine Brooke-Rose's “palimpsest history,” “since they put the time dimension back in” (Angela Carter 58).

Anne Cranny-Francis discusses the manner in which feminist revisions of the fairy tale present “the text on the page and its absent referent” (89), with the difference between the two revealing “the discourses encoded in the traditional tales, which are shown as ideologically determined” (94). Taking this a step further, Makinen continues to avoid the either/or scenario by positing the play of an “ironic deconstructive technique”—“an oscillation that is itself deconstructive”—within the narratives of The Bloody Chamber: “Carter's tales do not simply ‘rewrite’ the old tales by fixing roles of active sexuality for their female protagonists—they ‘re-write’ them by playing with and upon (if not preying upon) the earlier misogynistic version” (5). Makinen is responding to Duncker's reading of The Bloody Chamber as a doomed project based on intractable material, a criticism which is developed in Robert Clark's sustained attack on Carter's alleged inability to provide an account of, or see beyond, the social structures she ostensibly critiques. For Clark, part of the problem is what he sees as Carter's “transvestite style”: “her primary allegiance … to a postmodern aesthetics” which precludes the possibility of “feminist definitions based upon a radical deconstruction and reconstruction of women's history” (158). Yet it is exactly this play of deconstruction and reconstruction that lies at the heart of Carter's project as it is interpreted by, among others, Lappas, who finds in The Company of Wolves a “call for a feminist irony which simultaneously rejects misogynist assumptions and inscribes a new set of assumptions” (119), and Danielle Roemer, for whom the tales in The Bloody Chamber “both embrace the past and scrutinize its claims to authority” (9) by using a “doubled voice” via which “[t]he past is referenced, reframed, and rethought” (2).¹⁵ Again, responding directly to Duncker and Clark, Bacchilega conceives of the rewriting of fairy tales as precisely a “two-fold” process, “seeking to expose, make visible, the fairy tale's complicity with ‘exhausted’ narrative and gender ideologies, and, by working from the fairy tale's multiple visions, seeking to expose, bring out, what the institutionalization of such tales for children has forgotten or left unexploited” (Postmodern Fairy Tales 50; in her introduction Bacchilega specifically discusses the “performative” in relation to postmodern fairy tales as “meta-folklore” [19-24]).

This process of institutionalization has drained the fairy tale of its history, allowing it to appear as self-apparent truth, and part of the effect of the intertextual strategies of The Bloody Chamber is to denaturalize the mythic pretensions of its source texts. McLaughlin's Freudian reading of this act of repetition with a difference—a circular “renunciation of the old narrative” that finds its meaning in the “uncanny return” of what has been repressed in the original (419-20)—can thus be placed alongside those readings in which what has been repressed is precisely identified as history, or histories.¹⁶ Kaiser draws on the work of Julia Kristeva to characterize the “embedded” intertextuality of the fairy tale as a narrative form with a history (an introductory point also made by Geoffroy-Menoux [249-50]), but rather than turn away from this history, as in Duncker's critique, Kaiser identifies Carter's reaffirmation or “heightening” of it as a means of exploring the “culturally determined” nature of its representations: a use of intertextuality which “moves the tales from the mythic timelessness of the fairy tale to specific cultural moments, each of which presents a different problem in gender relations and sexuality” (31). Hence “The Bloody Chamber” acts as “a symbolist version of the battle of the sexes,” a decadent version of “Bluebeard” which “brings the sadomasochistic subtext of the original to the foreground by giving its murderous episodes the lush refinement of Beardsley's illustrations of Salome” (32), and likewise “The Snow Child” can be seen, at least in part, as a portrayal of “the sexual consequences of a feudal system of absolute power” (34).¹⁷ Similarly, Robert Rawdon Wilson finds “The Lady of the House of Love” to be indicative of tales “powerful in their historicity” (115), and he reads it against the grain of a postmodernism viewed as decontextualized pastiche. For Wilson, the tale offers a layered depiction of decaying traditions on the brink of collapse, set during the uneasy calm of summer 1914, while Geoffroy-Menoux, as well as suggesting a host of folkloric parallels for this narrative, reads it primarily as a struggle between “[t]he automaton of Eternity” and “the puppet of History” (258). To slightly different effect, Grossman reads the various forms of allusion that Carter builds around her source tale in “The Bloody Chamber” as part of a negotiation “between the mythologically suggestive and the historically conditioned”; a deliberate fusion of the “familiar and magical, tangible and indecipherable,” to suggest that “it is precisely such overlapping which can obscure the historical particulars that shape and sustain a culture's knowledge of itself” (153-54).

The “historical particulars” that litter The Bloody Chamber include the multiple intertexts that Carter places alongside her fairy-tale narratives, through and against which the reader experiences the at least partly familiar story. To acknowledge the fairy tale's inherent intertextuality is to acknowledge the variety of its literariness—the distinctive style of Perrault, de Beaumont or Lang—and part of Carter's continuation of the “unnatural” style of literary taletelling lies precisely in the literature she brings to her renditions, the “mixing of modes” which disrupts any suggestion of generic purity (Fowl 71).¹⁸ Hence Elaine Jordan, demonstrating that Carter's tales “offer three for the price of one” (“Enthralment” 24), reads “The Bloody Chamber” as, in part, a sustained “quarrel” with the fiction and biography of Colette concerning “the ways in which women can be complicit with what captivates and victimizes them” (“Dangers” 130).

Jordan uses her retrospective identification of this intertext as an example of the need for close readings of Carter's work—“you have to go through it, and along the line of Carter's narrative arguments to evaluate them properly” (“Dangers” 130)—a fact recognized by the author herself as stemming from an interest in medieval allegorical literature (Interview, Novelists in Interview 86). One sustained and extremely impressive example of such a close reading is Linkin's account of “The Erl-King” as “a reimagining of the subject's position in Romantic poetics and ideology” (306). Drawing on a carefully identified range of “canonical nineteenth-century lyric poetry” (307), Linkin follows the twists and turns of a narrative voice aware of itself as coded to enact the part of silent muse or embodiment of nature, indeed partly seduced by this role, but who uses language “to perform a sort of verbal exorcism” (317; Jordan refers to “[t]he shifting of tense and of grammatical subject” in “The Erl-King” as “twistings and turnings” which seek “to escape the transparent, unambiguous world of experience” [“Dangers” 126]). The narrator's intertextually dense versions of her story, which Linkin suggests can in one sense be read as self-justifying, posit several outcomes, but “lacking a cultural model,” the narrator, as an “increasingly resistant reader,” succeeds only in “substitut[ing] female for male in the constituent master plot of nineteenth-century lyric poetry” (16): a plot which requires “the subjugation of the other” as part of “an epistemology that insists on the culturally gendered dualism of subject/object or presence/absence distinctions” (17).

CARTER AND FOLKTALE TRADITIONS

We are thus back in the thick of the “structural strait-jacket” debate, but rather than read this as a failure on Carter's part to imagine a genuine alternative, Linkin draws attention to the status of “The Erl-King” as one tale within a collection: while its companion narratives may offer “alternate solutions to the problematic nature of desire … none offers so self-conscious an analysis of the problematics of high Romantic aesthetic theory and nineteenth-century ideology for both men and women” (322). This raises two points. Firstly, the proliferation of intertexts throughout The Bloody Chamber can be read as a deliberately excessive strategy that serves both to heighten the implicit constructedness of the fairy tale as a literary genre and to draw attention to the particularity of each retelling as requiring inspection on its own terms. For Jordan, part of the problem with the critiques of Clark and Duncker lies in their attempt to “lay a grid across her [Carter's] work and read off meanings from it, according to a law of the same” (“Dangers” 122; in saying “the law of the same,” Jordan seems to allude to monolithic definitions of the fairy tale and of femininity) rather than attending to the interactive manner in which the web of meaningful allusions draws the reader in—or, in Bacchilega's words, acts as “an explosive charge which will go off at different points for different readers upon one or more readings” (Postmodern Fairy Tales 184-40).¹⁹ As Makinen suggests, this “space for the reader's activity” may tacitly posit a reader at least capable of realizing some of the clues (6), but, again, the myth of universality is not one to which Carter's fiction subscribes.

Secondly, this notion of discrete narratives intersecting within, and beyond the confines of, a collection can be conceived as one of the ways in which The Bloody Chamber relates to the folkloric tradition of which its source material is a part: a tradition of versions and variants which play off and against one another, despite the implicit or deliberate attempts of literary tellers and collectors to fix authoritative texts. Speaking of her own fictions, Carter commented that “they're never really finished” (Interview, by Goldsworthy 7). Her constructive avoidance of closure is attested in what can be recognized as her adoption of the model of folkloric narration as an ongoing process.²⁰ Thus Makinen discusses the manner in which each tale in The Bloody Chamber “takes up the theme of the earlier one and comments on a different aspect of it, to present a complex variation of female desire and sexuality” (10); Fowl considers the “structural” aspect of the collection as “a shared reservoir of signs,” whereby each tale “mixes and meshes with the other tales” (72), while Bacchilega writes of the tales' “talking back at each other,” a process in which “the masks peeled off in one scenario are refracted differently in another” (Postmodern Fairy Tales 141); similarly, Armitt, although not concerned with folkloric parallels, discusses “the narrative form of the collection” in terms of a “kaleidoscope,” with its “evershifting, compulsive repetitions of interconnecting images” (98).

While the majority of criticism on The Bloody Chamber and its related texts is primarily concerned with the multiple ways in which Carter questions and provokes her fairy-tale sources, the collection, along with Carter's fiction as a whole, can thus also be read as constructively related, in general terms, to the folk tradition. Sage comments on how, during the 1970s, Carter became “more explicitly and systematically interested in narrative models that pre-date the novel: fairy tales, folk tales, and other forms that develop by accretion and retelling” (“Angela Carter” 173), and while this interest formed part of a broader fascination on Carter's part with non-canonical modes of writing (and can thus be viewed within the context of those feminist studies published contemporaneously with The Bloody Chamber which sought to establish alternative histories of women's writing, based around genre), the specific import of the folk tradition is twofold.²¹

Just as this tradition can be read as providing Carter with a model of serial narration—as well as with the store of less famous narrative materials that lies beyond the strictly limited canon of the literary fairy tale (as discussed in Bacchilega's book)—so Sage discusses it as offering a conception of the role of the author markedly at odds with the historically determined “modern” Western version: “She could experiment with her own writer's role, ally herself in imagination with the countless, anonymous narrators who stood behind literary redactors like Perrault or … the brothers Grimm” (Angela Carter 40). Sage places such experimentation within the context of “the old 1960s utopian dream of ‘The Death of the Author,’” and while making this link avoids a reading of Carter's interest in the anonymous narrator in terms of some form of primitive ideal, Sage herself is also quick to distance it from any suggestion of avant-gardism (Angela Carter 43).²² Carter had a highly personal “nostalgia for anonymity, for the archaic powers of the narrator whose authority rests precisely on disclaiming individual authority” (Sage, Flesh and the Mirror 2), which included a profound dismissal of Romantic notions of the writer as an isolated, individual genius. Carter's semi-adoption of the role of the oral narrator was exactly that: a deliberate performance, staged in part to deflate the myth of paternal authority, hence her own repeated reference to mainstream European literature as “a kind of folklore … a folklore of the intelligentsia” (Interview, Novelists in Interview 82).

If the adoption of the role of Mother Goose was in part a deliberate siding with the non-Bloomian territories of literature (and with a distinctly un-Bloomian conception of literary tradition and influence) and, concomitantly, with a performative, even pantomimic notion of authorship, it was also an unequivocally feminist strategy, demonstrated in Carter's editing of the two Virago books of fairy tales (in a glintingly provocative sideswipe, she once commented, regarding the first Virago volume: “That sorted out the men from the boys. Can you see Martin Amis allowing himself to be observed leafing through something called The Virago Book of Fairy Tales? He'd rather be seen reading Guns and Ammunition” [“Angela Carter Interviewed by Lorna Sage” 187]).²³ Marina Warner argues for the identification of a shift in Carter's “sensibility” from the early works, including The Bloody Chamber, to Nights at the Circus: a shift “bound up with her change of attitude to fairy tales,” which was influenced by Zipes's work (a fact which reminds us that the latter's first major book on the fairy tale was published in the same year as The Bloody Chamber). For Warner, the outcome of this shift can be seen in Carter's introduction to the first Virago collection (“Angela Carter” 244). In short, “[f]airy tales came to represent the literature of the illiterate: the divine Marquis yielded pride of place to the illiterate peasant” (“Angela Carter” 245), and while Warner charts this influence in Carter's fictions in terms of their increasing concern for Walter Benjamin's “cunning and high spirits,” it also signals the seriously tendentious nature of her editorship. Amply aware, like Warner, of the impossibility of identifying a purely female narrative tradition lying behind the figure of Mother Goose and of the use of just such a putative tradition as a means of dismissing particular types of storytelling (Carter, Virago Book of Fairy Tales xi), Carter nevertheless set about documenting “the richness and diversity with which femininity, in practice, is represented in ‘unofficial’ culture: its strategies, its plots, its hard work” (Carter, Virago Book of Fairy Tales xiv). Reviewing the second volume of Virago tales, Warner comments that while Carter has “sifted” the tales “from a variety of folklorists and ethnographers … her choice bears throughout the stamp of her mind” (“That Which is Spoken” 21). Unlike the seemingly contradictory fusion of homogenization and authenticity aimed at by previous transcribers and editors, Carter takes her tales, wholly and without alteration, from existing written collections. As Bacchilega says, Carter “overtly participates in the chain of transmission by explicitly making her selection on the basis of specific class and gender considerations,” presenting fairy tales as the carriers of “unofficial, cross-culturally varied, and entertaining knowledge” (Postmodern Fairy Tales 20-21; see also Philip, “Unvarnished Tales”). This tendentiousness has a productively double-edged relation to tradition, to the extent that while Carter returns to the lesser known regions of folkloric narratives, she also continues the tradition of didacticism that was taken up so energetically by literary fairy-tale tellers and commentators, albeit to different effect than their anonymous sources. Carter's chosen tales, like her own versions and like her work in general, have a job, or jobs, to do (Sage, Angela Carter 37).

As the latter paragraphs of this review demonstrated, Carter's fairy tales are divisive, demanding that the reader have an opinion, take a side, and the simple fact that this essay is being written within the context of a volume devoted to “Angela Carter and the Literary Märchen” makes the tenor of my particular bias virtually unavoidable.²⁴ Yet, to an extent, this reflects another aspect of the critical literature. The folkloric intertextuality of Carter's tales makes them superficially “easy” to write about, provides an obvious means of approach, but one the very obviousness of which has led not only to a degree of repetition in the criticism—“Carter rewrites fairy tales from a feminist perspective”—but also to a degree of misinterpretation (for want of a less prescriptive word): for example, a distinction between “oral” and “literary” versions of “Bluebeard” which is really a distinction between folkloric tale types (Jacobson); readings, already mentioned, which identify the denouement of “The Bloody Chamber” as “strongly feminist,” despite the many folktales that offer instances of just such female agency; and a judgement of “Beauty and the Beast” which bizarrely refers to the “trite, story-book ending” as “perhaps the most unsatisfying and unrealistic aspect of this, and any, fairy tale” (Bryant 445). Moreover, some readings suffer from a failure to distinguish between Carter's narrative and its primary folkloric intertext, giving rise to comment on the former which could equally be read as wholly concerned with the latter (a potentially revealing critical stance, but one which, to be constructive, needs to be explicitly or implicitly acknowledged and worked through). Grossman and McLaughlin, both of whom largely ignore the fairy tale element, are prone to this misalignment, despite the undoubted efficacy of their readings. Indeed, McLaughlin's Lacanian account of “The Bloody Chamber,” like Linkin's reading of “The Erl-King,” stands out from the main body of criticism by dint of its singular focus, although it does offer another demonstration of the sheer interpretability of these narratives. While Lacan overtakes “Bluebeard” as the primary intertext in McLaughlin's essay, the discussion of a clinically perverted Marquis and a paranoid heroine nevertheless relates directly and illuminatingly to the mainstreams of criticism on this tale. However, if readings of Carter's tales can suffer from a lack of attention to the folkloric aspect—and from the tendency to be redundant which is an ever-present possibility in writing about such metafictional texts (Sage, Flesh and the Mirror 19)—it is equally true that purely folkloristic readings will suffer from their own drawbacks. It is ultimately the dialectical relationship between the fairy tale and The Bloody Chamber that helps to keep both sides of the equation fermenting.

To an interesting degree, Carter has colonized the conception of the fairy tale among a large number of Western readers. Indeed, if the reading of fairy tales among children is on the wane, the circulation of tales in academic papers represents one alternative avenue of continued dissemination. Yet part of this broadly benign colonization has involved the espousal of a pluralist, heterogeneous conception of the tradition, both literary and folkloric: an espousal of impurity, and the basic fact that, as Carter herself wrote, a tale's “whole meaning is altered now that I am telling it to you” (Virago Book of Fairy Tales xiv). Thus what Carter's fairy-tale narratives still require is a reading of their timeliness in all its aspects: a detailed contextual overview or genealogy, along the lines of Sheets's account of the pornography debate, of the role of The Bloody Chamber in the renaissance of interest in the fairy tale that has occurred over the past three decades, a genealogy which could include the fiction of Robert Coover, Tanith Lee, and Margaret Atwood, as well as the critical work of Zipes, Alison Lurie, Kay Stone, and work on the Grimms' tales by Ruth B. Bottigheimer and Maria Tatar (to choose merely a selection of the most prominent names). Beyond this, other possibilities include a consideration of folk and fairy tales as they figure in the novels, a starting point for which could be Carter's repeated recourse to the “Sleeping Beauty” tale type, from The Magic Toyshop and The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman through to Nights at the Circus; an extended discussion of the role of the folkloric in Carter's work, following Warner's identification of a shift in the author's attitude to folklore over her writing career; and a reading of the reconceptualization of the techniques and ideological significance of fantasy in the contemporaneous work of writers influenced, to various effect, by folk narrative, which would place Carter alongside Rushdie, Calvino, and Coover. The possibilities are manifold.²⁵

Warner writes of how easy it is “in the case of a great writer … to lose sight of the pleasure they give, as critics search for meaning and value, influence and importance” (Introduction xvi), and this is particularly apposite in the case of Carter and the fairy tale. While criticism on such knowing material can appear redundant, even repetitively “celebratory” (Britzolakis 44), it also runs the risk of obfuscation in the face of the enticingly uncluttered surfaces of the fairy tale. None of the critical methodologies or contextualizations can hope fully to account for the relationship or for the seeping of one into the other—fairy tale into Carter and Carter into fairy tale—which is one reason why The Bloody Chamber has not been swamped beneath the weight of critical comment it has generated.²⁶ As Shippey speculates, regarding the sense of thematic variation that pervades The Bloody Chamber, “[I]f one could decide what the theme was, and how it varied from the master- or mistress-theme of the traditional tales in which these tales are rooted, well, one would then know a good deal about contemporary literature, contemporary gender and contemporary society” (20). Yet while such a possibility may be true in theory, it is specious in practice, and it is the taking part, not the critical “winning,” that is important in seeking to account for Carter's idiosyncratic blend of tradition and (post)modernity.

Notes

1. Essays based on papers given at the conference referred to by Barker—held at the University of York, England, in 1994—have now been published as The Infernal Desires of Angela Carter: Fiction, Femininity, Feminism, edited by Joseph Bristow and Trev Lynn Broughton.

2. From a review of The Company of Wolves in the Guardian, quoted in Anwell (76).

3. The singer described is Kate Bush, who, according to Michael Bracewell, “was covering the territory of Angela Carter's Company of Wolves in the guise of a Pre-Raphaelite raised on Jackie: folkloric fable and disturbed dreams, focusing on the rites of passage between girlishness and womanhood” (160-61).

4. For readings of Carter's work which espouse this notion of critical pluralism, see Elaine Jordan (“Enthralment” 37), Laura Mulvey (“Pandora” 70-71), and Cristina Bacchilega (“Folk and Literary Narrative” 303).

5. It is nevertheless expedient, in reviewing a body of critical literature of this size, for individual nuances to be sacrificed in order amply to address the main thematic strands, for which I apologize in advance.

6. It is strange, given Patricia Craig's initial reaction to The Bloody Chamber, that in a more recent review of other works by Carter she refers to the collection as “simply mak[ing] explicit the harsh or carnal import of certain folk tales” (“Angela and the Beast” 24).

7. For a rejoinder to Bayley's faint praise, see Lee.

8. That the collection has become somehow synonymous with an essential Carter is indicated by the number of times the title story has been used as a shorthand index of all things Carteresque: thus Robert Coover ends his short remembrance by praising Carter as “a true witness of her times, an artist in the here and now of both life and art, Bloody Chamber though it may be” (10), while Gina Wisker feels that “[r]eading a new Angela Carter novel resembles the experience of Bluebeard's wife in ‘The Bloody Chamber’” (“Winged Woman and Werewolves” 89).

9. This fits with Mulvey's highly suggestive reading of the trope of female curiosity, in which she draws on the Freudian account of woman as enigma, along with the myth of Pandora, to recast what becomes “a self-reflexive desire to investigate femininity itself”—a femininity culturally constructed as a variously threatening riddle. While Mulvey only mentions “The Bloody Chamber” in passing, in terms of its awareness of the Pandora analogue, her suggestion of a “transformed and deciphered” motif corresponds with the readings of Tatar and Bacchilega (Mulvey, “Pandora” 64-66); Peter Brooks concurs with Mulvey regarding “the plot of female curiosity,” which he discusses with reference to “The Bloody Chamber,” as part of a reading of Daniel Deronda (250-52).

10. According to Jordan, Carter gave “seven explanations” for the significance of this character, a fact which certainly calls Bayley's easy categorizations into question (“The Dangerous Edge” 334-17).

11. Ironically, it is this intransigent conception of the history of the fairy tale that leads to Duncker's approval of Carter's portrayal of the mother in “The Bloody Chamber” as one of the only ideologically “significant” elements (“Re-Imagining” 11-12); a constructive account of this character within the fairy-tale genre is impossible given Duncker's reading of the tradition. In a more recent survey of other feminist rewritings, however, Duncker appears to have become more amenable to the possibilities offered by this material, praising Margaret Atwood and Tanith Lee in particular, for re-imagining, “in radical literary ways, characters and themes which are already central concerns in the traditional stories” (“Fables, Myths, Mythologies” 156).

12. Bacchilega refers to the three “women-in-the-company-of-wolves” stories in The Bloody Chamber as “imag(in)ing a different kind of self-reflexivity, one pouring out of touch, voice, and blood” (Postmodern Fairy Tales 66). The idea of music, in this case of the voice, as the basis for an alternative relationship of mutuality is explored further in the depiction of Mignon and the Princess in Nights at the Circus.

13. Full references to the work of Mary Ann Doane, along with the various other feminist theorists I have alluded to, are included in Sheets and Lappas.

14. As my passing allusion to Butler and Irigaray suggests, the various notions of the performative in relation to gender constitute a major strand in recent feminist theory, confronting and unpicking Freud's literally puzzling allusions to femininity. Given Carter's interest in the various connotations of theatricality, it is not surprising that a number of readings of her work draw on Butler and Irigaray: indeed, Bristow and Broughton refer to an “after-the-fact ‘Butlerification’ of Carter,” with the caveat that, at least as far as the theories of Butler are concerned, Carter's texts are anticipatory (19); Jordan concurs on this point, suggesting that Carter's work “could just as well be used to explicate Butler” (Afterword 219). For readings of Carter which concentrate specifically on this area, including its potential shortcomings, see Britzolakis, Palmer (“Gender as Performance”), and Fernihough, each of whom cite Joan Riviere's seminal 1929 essay, “Womanliness as Masquerade”; in addition, Paul Magrs offers a highly suggestive account of the performance of masculinity in Carter, including, of course, “The Bloody Chamber.”

15. This reference to a “doubled voice”—which need not imply a secret, “true” story, but rather an oscillation between narratives—has several analogues in feminist literary criticism and theory from the late 1970s and 1980s, including Elaine Showalter's suggestion that “women's fiction can be read as a double-voiced discourse, containing a ‘dominant’ and a ‘muted’ story” (266).

16. The conclusion of Robinson's chapter on Carter can be appropriated here as a rejoinder to Clark's accusations: “To assume the doubled perspective of feminist theory, simultaneously inside and outside gender as ideological representation, means to question the construction of Woman without ignoring the cultural productions of women, or the material effects of that representation” (133); for a direct response to Clark, see Jordan (“Enthralment”).

17. Similarly, Bacchilega refers to “The Werewolf” as “a quasi-ethnographic sketch of early modern upland peasant life” (Postmodern Fairy Tales 60). Carter herself spoke of how she “reinvented” specific localities in certain of The Bloody Chamber tales (Interview, by Katsavos 14), although she tacitly warned off any future biographical detection by also suggesting that the source of such “cold, wintry stories” lay in the fact of their having been composed in Sheffield (Interview, Novelists in Interview 84).

18. Lappas remarks that Carter is “troubled by remaining within the strictures of any one genre, for narrative determinism has its potential dangers” (128). Taking this idea a step further, we can see the tales within The Bloody Chamber as deliberately troubling the genre of the fairy tale on two fronts: via the rash of literary intertexts that jostle for attention throughout, and, in a post-structuralist mode, precisely by proclaiming excessively their status as fairy tales: in the knowing allusions, in the intratextual cross-references, and in their use of analogous folkloric tale types. For Armitt, arguing from a different but related standpoint, attempts to define The Bloody Chamber in terms of its possible fairy-tale source material are not only restrictive—“[W]e must start to loosen our grip on the formulaic fairy-tale structures and open this collection up to the vagaries of narrative free play”—but also misleading: “Quite clearly, 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 …” (89-90; compare Wisker on Carter and horror writing in “At Home All Was Blood and Feathers” and “Revenge of the Living Doll”). Nevertheless, it is Carter's awareness of the “layered” nature of fictional genres—the fact that generic norms develop by accretion over time—that generates the allusive density of her narratives, along with their historicism; in Carter, modes are always already mixed. On the subject of Carter's negotiation of generic strands, in this case those of the popular romance, see Benson.

19. As Jordan illustrates with reference to the character of Jean-Yves in “The Bloody Chamber,” an acceptance of Carter's narratives as localized projects avoids the sometimes tortuous attempts to read individual elements as aesthetic or sexual manifestos rather than as being “produced by the needs of the story's argument” (“Dangers” 122).

20. Another example of Carter's interest in narrative versions is her work in other media, the majority of which involves stories from The Bloody Chamber. Along with Neil Jordan's film of The Company of Wolves (1984), the radio play Vampirella (1976) was significantly altered to form “The Lady of the House of Love,” a shift of format reversed in the case of the stories “Puss in Boots” and “The Company of Wolves,” the radio-play versions of which, first broadcast in 1980 and 1982 respectively, Carter referred to as “reformulations” (Carter, Preface to Come unto These Yellow Sands, The Curious Room 500).

21. Discussing Italo Calvino, another writer heavily influenced by the folktale, Carter herself commented on how “[h]is fairy tale book had a transformational effect on his entire career … made him write and think in a completely different way” (“Angela Carter Interviewed by Lorna Sage” 187).

22. Carter's interest in radio and film has also been interpreted in terms of a preoccupation with oral culture: Sage quotes Carter's reference to the radio dramatist as retaining “some of the authority of the most antique tellers of tales” (Carter, Preface to Come unto These Yellow Sands, The Curious Room 502), a conception picked up by Almansi (225-26), while Mulvey, drawing on Marina Warner's argument for film as “essentially an oral medium,” discusses Carter's relationship with the cinema as drawing on subterranean links between film and oral narration (“Cinema Magic and Old Monsters”).

23. Warner writes about Carter in terms of the link between Mother Goose and pantomime, and of the themes of the masquerade of identity and a distinctly English transvestism—themes which connect with the more recherché theories of gender as performance discussed above (“Angela Carter”). Warner has also written at length on the history of the Mother Goose figure and the elusive possibility of a tradition of “ancient female narrative” (“Speaking with Double Tongue”).

24. For an account of The Bloody Chamber which explicitly seeks to work against, and move away from, those readings which concentrate on fairy-tale sources, and which can thus be offered as the dissenting voice in this review, see Armitt.

25. Other suggestions for future avenues of inquiry, not directly related to the fairy tale, are made by Jordan (Afterword), while Bristow and Brougton speculate on the possibility of “the emergence of a ‘queer’ (as distinct from a feminist) Carter,” given “current theoretical traffic between feminism and queer politics” (18). While Carter's fairy-tale narratives deal with heterosexual relations—leading Duncker to comment that Carter “still leaves the central taboos unspoken. … She could never imagine Cinderella in bed with the Fairy Godmother” (“Re-Imagining” 8; for a response to this charge, see Jordan [“Dangers” 127-29])—it would be interesting, in the light of Bristow and Broughton's suggestion, to consider The Bloody Chamber in relation to lesbian rewritings such as those by Olga Broumas, Suniti Namjoshi, and Emma Donoghue.

26. I have not focused on those few tales written by Carter that have appeared elsewhere than in The Bloody Chamber, for example “Peter and the Wolf” and, most notably, “Ashputtle or the Mother's Ghost: Three Versions of One Story.” For a reading of the former, see Wyatt, and for discussion of the latter, see Atwood (132-35) and Bacchilega (Postmodern Fairy Tales 142-43).

Bibliography

Carter and the Fairy Tale

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Almansi, Guido. “In the Alchemist's Cave: Radio Plays.” Sage, Flesh and the Mirror 216-29.

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———. “Folk and Literary Narrative in a Postmodern Context: The Case of the Märchen.” Fabula 26 (1988): 302-16.

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

Bannon, Barbara A. Rev. of The Bloody Chamber, by Angela Carter. Publisher's Weekly 10 (Dec. 1979): 55.

Barker, Paul. “The Return of the Magic Story-Teller.” Independent on Sunday 8 Jan. 1995, Sunday Review: 14-16.

Bayley, John. “Fighting for the Crown.” Rev. of several books by Angela Carter. New York Review of Books 23 Apr. 1992: 9-11.

———. “Stand the Baby on Its Head.” Rev. of The Second Virago Book of Fairy Tales, ed. Angela Carter. London Review of Books 22 July 1993: 19-20.

Benson, Stephen. “Stories of Love and Death: Reading and Writing the Fairy Tale Romance.” Image and Power: Women in Fiction in the Twentieth Century. Ed. Sarah Sceats and Gail Cunningham. London: Longman, 1996. 103-13.

Blackburn, H.J. “Modern Fantasy.” The Fable as Literature. London: Athlone, 1985. 168-74.

Bradfield, Scott. “Remembering Angela Carter.” Review of Contemporary Fiction 14.3 (1994): 90-93.

Bristow, Joseph, and Trev Lynn Broughton, eds. The Infernal Desires of Angela Carter: Fiction, Femininity, Feminism. Studies in Twentieth-Century Literature. London: Longman, 1997.

Brooks, Peter. Body Work: Objects of Desire in Modern Narrative. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1993.

Bryant, Sylvia. “Re-Constructing Oedipus Through ‘Beauty and the Beast.’” Criticism 31 (1989): 439-53.

Callil, Carmen. “Flying Jewellery.” Sunday Times 23 Feb. 1992, sec. 8: 6.

Carter, Angela. “Angela Carter Interviewed by Lorna Sage.” New Writing. Ed. Malcolm Bradbury and Judy Cooke. London: Minerva, 1992. 185-93.

———. The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories. London: Gollancz, 1979. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1981.

———. Burning Your Boats: Collected Short Stories. Introd. Salman Rushdie. London: Chatto & Windus, 1995.

———. The Curious Room: Plays, Film Scripts and an Opera. Ed. with Production Notes by Mark Bell. Introd. Susannah Clapp. London: Chatto & Windus, 1996.

———. Expletives Deleted: Selected Writings. London: Chatto & Windus, 1992. London: Vintage, 1993.

———, trans. and fwd. The Fairy Tales of Charles Perrault. London: Gollancz, 1977.

———. Interview. By Kerryn Goldsworthy. meanjin 44.1 (1985): 4-13.

———. Interview. By Anna Katsavos. Review of Contemporary Fiction 14.3 (1994): 11-17.

———. Interview. Novelists in Interview. By John Haffenden. London: Methuen, 1985. 76-96.

———. Interview. “Pulp Novels and Television Soaps Are Today's Fairy Tales.” By Paul Mansfield. Guardian 25 Oct. 1990: 32.

———. Nothing Sacred: Selected Writings. Rev. ed. London: Virago, 1992.

———. The Sadeian Woman: An Exercise in Cultural History. London: Virago, 1979. London: Virago, 1993.

———, ed. The Second Virago Book of Fairy Tales. London: Virago, 1992.

———, ed. and trans. Sleeping Beauty and Other Favourite Fairy Tales. London: Gollancz, 1982.

———, ed. The Virago Book of Fairy Tales. London: Virago, 1990.

Christensen, Peter. “The Hoffman Connection: Demystification in Angela Carter's The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman.” Review of Contemporary Fiction 14.3 (1994): 63-70.

Clapp, Susannah. “On Madness, Men and Fairy-Tales.” Independent on Sunday 9 June 1991, Sunday Review: 26.

Clark, Robert. “Angela Carter's Desire Machine.” Women's Studies 14 (1987) 147-61.

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Coover, Robert. “A Passionate Remembrance.” Review of Contemporary Fiction 14.3 (1994): 9-10.

Craig, Patricia. “Angela and the Beast.” Rev. of Black Venus and Come unto These Yellow Sands: Four Radio Plays, by Angela Carter. London Review of Books 5 Dec. 1985: 24.

———. “Gory.” Rev. of The Bloody Chamber, by Angela Carter. New Statesman 25 May 1979: 762.

Cranny-Francis, Anne. “Fairy-Tale Reworked.” Feminist Fictions: Feminist Uses of Generic Fiction. London: Polity, 1990. 85-94.

Dalley, Jan. “A Saint More Beastly than Beautiful.” Rev. of Burning Your Boats: Collected Short Stories, by Angela Carter. Independent on Sunday 30 July 1995, Sunday Review: 29.

Duncker, Patricia. “Re-Imagining the Fairy Tale: Angela Carter's Bloody Chambers.” Literature and History 10 (1984): 3-14.

Fowl, Melinda G. “Angela Carter's The Bloody Chamber Revisited.” Critical Survey 3.1 (1991): 71-79.

Friedman, Alan. “Pleasure and Pain.” Rev. of The Bloody Chamber, by Angela Carter. New York Times Book Review 17 Feb. 1980: 14-15.

Geoffroy-Menoux, Sophie. “Angela Carter's The Bloody Chamber: Twice Harnessed Folk-Tales.” Paradoxa 2 (1996): 249-62.

Grossman, Michele. “‘Born to Bleed’: Myth, Pornography and Romance in Angela Carter's ‘The Bloody Chamber.’” Minnesota Review 30/31 (1988): 148-60.

Haase, Donald P. “Is Seeing Believing? Proverbs and the Film Adaptation of a Fairy Tale.” Proverbium 7 (1990): 89-104.

Hastings, Selina. “Recent Fiction.” Rev. of The Bloody Chamber, by Angela Carter. The Times 14 June 1979: 15.

Jacobson, Lisa. “Tales of Violence and Desire: Angela Carter's ‘The Bloody Chamber.’” Antithesis 6.2 (1993): 81-90.

Jordan, Elaine. “The Dangerous Edge.” Sage, Flesh and the Mirror 189-215.

———. “The Dangers of Angela Carter.” New Feminist Discourses: Critical Essays on Theories and Texts. Ed. Isobel Armstrong. London: Routledge, 1992. 119-31.

———. “Enthralment: Angela Carter's Speculative Fictions.” Plotting Change: Contemporary Women's Fiction. Ed. Linda Anderson. London: Edward Arnold, 1990. 19-40.

Kaiser, Mary. “Fairy Tale as Sexual Allegory: Intertextuality in Angela Carter's The Bloody Chamber.” Review of Contemporary Fiction 14.3 (1994): 30-36.

Keenan, Sally. “Angela Carter's The Sadeian Woman: Feminism as Treason.” Bristow and Broughton 132-48.

Kennedy, Susan. “Man and Beast.” Rev. of The Bloody Chamber, by Angela Carter. Times Literary Supplement 8 Feb. 1980: 146.

Krailsheimer, A. J. “Red Riding Hood Rides Again.” Rev. of The Fairy Tales of Charles Perrault, trans. Angela Carter. Times Literary Supplement 28 Oct. 1977: 1273.

Lappas, Catherine. “‘Seeing is believing, but touching is the truth’: Female Spectatorship and Sexuality in The Company of Wolves. ” Women's Studies 25 (1996): 115-35.

Lee, Hermione. “‘A Room of One's Own, or a Bloody Chamber?’: Angela Carter and Political Correctness.” Sage, Flesh and the Mirror 308-20.

Lewallen, Avis. “Wayward Girls but Wicked Women? Female Sexuality in Angela Carter's The Bloody Chamber.” Perspectives on Pornography: Sexuality in Film and Literature. Ed. Gary Day and Clive Bloom. New York: St. Martin's, 1988. 144-57.

Linkin, Harriet Kramer. “Isn't It Romantic? Angela Carter's Bloody Revision of the Romantic Aesthetic in ‘The Erl-King.’” Contemporary Literature 35 (1994): 305-23.

Lokke, Kari E. “Bluebeard and The Bloody Chamber: The Grotesque of Self-Parody and Self-Assertion.” Frontiers 10 (1988): 7-12.

McLaughlin, Becky. “Perverse Pleasure and Fetishized Text: The Deathly Erotics of Carter's ‘The Bloody Chamber.’” Style 29 (1995): 404-22.

Magrs, Paul. “Boys Keep Swinging: Angela Carter and the Subject of Men.” Bristow and Broughton 184-97.

Makinen, Merja. “Angela Carter's The Bloody Chamber and the Decolonization of Feminine Sexuality.” Feminist Review 42 (1992): 2-15.

Mulvey, Laura. “Cinema Magic and the Old Monsters: Angela Carter's Cinema.” Sage, Flesh and the Mirror 230-42.

———. “Pandora: Topographies of the Mask and Curiosity.” Sexuality and Space. Ed. Beatriz Colomina. Princeton Papers on Architecture. New York: Princeton Architectural P, 1992. 53-71.

Palmer, Paulina. “From ‘Coded Mannequin’ to Bird Woman: Angela Carter's Magic Flight.” Women Reading Women's Writing. Ed. Sue Roe. Brighton: Harvester, 1987. 179-205.

Perrick, Penny. “Men Beware Women.” Rev. of The Virago Book of Fairy Tales, ed. Angela Carter. Sunday Times 2 Dec. 1990, sec. 8: 4.

Philip, Neil. “Fantastic Images.” Rev. of The Second Virago Book of Fairy Tales, ed. Angela Carter. Times Educational Supplement 27 Aug. 1993: 17.

———. “Unvarnished Tales.” Rev. of The Virago Book of Fairy Tales, ed. Angela Carter. Times Educational Supplement 9 Nov. 1990, Reviews section: 3.

Roemer, Danielle M. “Angela Carter's ‘The Bloody Chamber’: Liminality and Reflexivity.” Unpublished paper. American Folklore Society Meeting, Jacksonville, Florida. Oct. 1992.

Rose, Ellen Cronan. “Through the Looking Glass: When Women Tell Fairy Tales.” The Voyage In: Fictions of Female Development. Ed. Elizabeth Abel, Marianne Hirsch, and Elizabeth Langland. Hanover, NH: UP of New England, 1983. 209-27.

Rushdie, Salman. “Angela Carter, 1940-92: A Very Good Wizard, a Very Dear Friend.” New York Times Book Review 8 Mar. 1992: 5.

———. Introduction. Burning Your Boats: Collected Short Stories. By Angela Carter. London: Chatto & Windus, 1995. ix-xiv.

Sage, Lorna. Angela Carter. Writers and their Work. Plymouth: Northcote House in association with The British Council, 1994.

———. “Angela Carter.” Women in the House of Fiction: Post-War Women Novelists. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1992. 168-77.

———, ed. Flesh and the Mirror: Essays on the Art of Angela Carter. London: Virago, 1994.

———. “The Savage Sideshow: A Profile of Angela Carter.” New Review 4.39/40 (1977): 51-57.

———. “The Soaring Imagination.” Guardian 17 Feb. 1992: 37.

Sheets, Robin Ann. “Pornography, Fairy Tales, and Feminism: Angela Carter's ‘The Bloody Chamber.’” Journal of the History of Sexuality 1 (1991): 633-57. Rpt. in Forbidden History: The State, Society, and the Regulation of Sexuality in Modern Europe: Essays from the “Journal of the History of Sexuality.” Ed. John C. Fout. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1992. 335-59.

Shippey, Tom. “Tales for the Literati.” Rev. of Burning Your Boats: Collected Short Stories, by Angela Carter. Times Literary Supplement 4 Aug. 1995: 20.

Warner, Marina. “Angela Carter: Bottle Blonde, Double Drag.” Sage, Flesh and the Mirror 243-56.

———. From the Beast to the Blonde: On Fairy Tales and Their Tellers. London: Chatto & Windus, 1994.

———. Introduction. Carter, The Second Virago Book of Fairy Tales ix-xvii.

———. “That Which is Spoken.” Rev. of The Virago Book of Fairy Tales, ed. Angela Carter. London Review of Books 8 Nov. 1990: 21-22.

Wilson, Robert Rawdon. “SLIP PAGE: Angela Carter, In/Out/In the Post-Modern Nexus.” Past the Last Post: Theorizing Post-Colonialism and Post-Modernism. Ed. Ian Adam and Helen Tiffin. Hertfordshire: Harvester, 1993. 109-23.

Wisker, Gina. “At Home All Was Blood and Feathers: The Werewolf in the Kitchen—Angela Carter and Horror.” Creepers: British Horror and Fantasy in the Twentieth Century. Ed. Clive Bloom. London: Pluto, 1993. 161-75.

———. “Revenge of the Living Doll: Angela Carter's Horror Writing.” Bristow and Broughton 116-31.

———. “Winged Woman and Werewolves: How Do We Read Angela Carter?” Ideas and Production 4 (1985): 87-98.

Wyatt, Jean. “The Violence of Gendering: Castration Images in Angela Carter's The Magic Toyshop, The Passion of New Eve, and ‘Peter and the Wolf.’” Women's Studies 25 (1996): 549-70.

Zipes, Jack, ed. Don't Bet on the Prince: Contemporary Feminist Fairy Tales in North America and England. New York: Methuen, 1986. Aldershot: Scolar, 1993.

Other Aspects of Carter's Writing: Selected Works

Britzolakis, Christina. “Angela Carter's Fetishism.” Textual Practice 9 (1995): 459-76. Rpt. in Bristow and Broughton 43-58.

Fernihough, Anne. “‘Is she fact or fiction?’: Angela Carter and the Enigma of Woman.” Textual Practice 11 (1997): 89-107.

Jordan, Elaine. Afterword. Bristow and Broughton 216-20.

Kendrick, Walter. “The Real Magic of Angela Carter.” Contemporary British Women Writers: Texts and Strategies. Ed. Robert E. Hosmer Jr. London: Macmillan, 1993. 66-84.

Lee, Alison. Angela Carter. Twayne English Authors Ser. 540. New York: Twayne, 1997.

Palmer, Paulina. “Gender as Performance in the Fiction of Angela Carter and Margaret Atwood.” Bristow and Broughton 24-42.

Robinson, Sally. “Angela Carter and the Circus of Theory: Writing Woman and Women's Writing.” Engendering the Subject: Gender and Self-Representation in Contemporary Women's Fiction. Albany: State U of New York P, 1991. 77-134.

Schmidt, Ricarda. “The Journey of the Subject in Angela Carter's Fiction.” Textual Practice 3 (1989): 56-75.

Suleiman, Susan Rubin. “The Politics and Poetics of Female Eroticism.” Subversive Intent: Gender, Politics, and the Avant-Garde. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1990. 119-40.

Other Relevant Works Cited

Bracewell, Michael. England is Mine: Pop Life in Albion from Wilde to Goldie. London: HarperCollins, 1997.

Duncker, Patricia. “Fables, Myths, Mythologies.” Sisters and Strangers: An Introduction to Contemporary Feminist Fiction. Oxford: Blackwell, 1992. 133-66.

Kolodny, Annette. “Dancing Through the Minefield: Some Observations on the Theory, Practice, and Politics of a Feminist Literary Criticism.” 1980. Showalter, The New Feminist Criticism 144-67.

Kristeva, Julia. “Women's Time.” 1979. Trans. Alice Jardine and Harry Blake. The Kristeva Reader. Ed. Toril Moi. 1986. Oxford: Blackwell, 1992. 187-213.

Opie, Iona, and Peter Opie, eds. The Classic Fairy Tales. 1974. London: Paladin, 1980.

Showalter, Elaine. “Feminist Criticism in the Wilderness.” 1979. Showalter, The New Feminist Criticism 125-43.

———, ed. The New Feminist Literary Criticism: Essays on Women, Literature, and Theory. 1985. London: Virago, 1992.

Warner, Marina. “Speaking with Double Tongue: Mother Goose and the Old Wives' Tale.” Myths of the English. Ed. Roy Porter. Cambridge: Polity, 1992. 33-67.