Carter – AO3 Literary Context

Carter’s transformative retelling of fairy tales

 In 1977 she published her own translation of Charles Perrault’s fairy tales –
‘deliberately drawing them out of shape … The monsters and the princesses lose their
places in the old script, and cross forbidden boundary lines’ (Lorna Sage, 1994).

 Carter described them as her ‘reformulations’

 Carter, ‘wanted to draw the reader’s attention to the often unpalatable realities that
underpinned the familiar nursery rhymes’. (Gamble, 2001)

 Carter on fairy tales:-

- ‘I’m in the demythologising business’ (1983).

- Myths ‘extraordinary lies designed to make people unfree’

- ‘I am all for putting new wine in old bottles, especially if the pressure of
the new wine makes the old bottles explode’

- “My intention was not to do ‘versions’ or, as the American edition of the
book said, horribly, ‘adult’ fairy tales, but to extract the latent content from
the traditional stories.”

 Also inspired by the Marquis de Sade and his novels Justine (1791) and Juliette
(1797). In the former, a virtuous woman is continually taken advantage of by men and
ultimately dies in despair, while in the latter an amoral nymphomaniac achieves
considerable influence, success and happiness by exploiting her sexuality – both
novels thus show that passivity in a heroine would often result in her death.

 ‘The Sadeian Woman’ (essay on the Marquis de Sade, 1740 - 1814) –

- ‘problems he raises about the culturally determined nature of women and of
the relations between men and women that result from it’

- ‘His refusal to see female sexuality in relation to its reproductive function’

- ‘He was unusual in his period for claiming rights of free sexuality for women,
and in installing women as beings of power in his imaginary worlds’

- Critical reception, especially from feminists, but Carter used The Bloody
Chamber to reach the same conclusions in a more palatable/acceptable form.

- Sade himself said the Gothic was written during times of ‘revolutionary
shock’ – i.e. when conventional ideologies were being questioned. Could
argue Carter is in line with this, writing during second wave of feminism to
engage in a revolutionary questioning of patriarchy.
 Carter’s Transformation of Fairytales to reveal/critique their patriarchal
‘latent content’

1) ‘Bluebeard’ to ‘The Bloody Chamber’

 Bluebeard, French folktale, 1697 (Charles Perrault)
 Brothers of the wife and sister arrive and kill Bluebeard.
 The wife inherits his fortune and castle, and has the dead wives buried. She uses the
money to buy officer commissions in the military for her brothers and for marriage
dowries for her sisters and herself.

Carter’s Transformation
 At end, she has the mother, as an active woman, rescue her daughter – ‘she raised my
father’s gun’ – active appropriation of patriarchal power/role. Money given to
charities and used to start music school – i.e. undermines patriarchal tradition of
dowries that objectifies women as a commodity to be traded/exchanged (see critique
of this also in Courtship and Tiger’s Bride.)

2) Beauty and the Beast to The Courtship of Mr Lyon, Tiger’s Bride and Wolf-Alice
 Traditional French fairytale: Villeneuve, 1740; Beamont 1756
 Beauty as passive counter of exchange between father and Beast. Beauty as passive
carer of father. Beauty as life-giver to Beast through marriage, transforming him to
handsome prince. They live happily ever after.

Carter’s Transformations
 Courtship of Mr Lyons
Beauty not a naïve innocent – her ‘sweetness’ is combined with a wise ‘gravity’. She
is aware of being exchanged. Beast is complex mix of aggression and melancholy.
Both presented as entering into a new, strange, unconventional relationship. Beauty
on return to father falls into patriarchal trap of ‘Beauty’, becoming increasingly
superficial/materialistic. Her return to the Beast is her breaking out of this construct;
her feminine sexuality releases him from the patriarchal construct of his Beast
identity.

 Tiger’s Bride
Female protagonist even more liberated, active, wise: not named ‘Beauty’; is given
first-person narrative, fully aware of being exchanged by father; of old wives tales of
Nurse as complicit, patriarchal constructs to terrify; of clockwork maid as parody of
female trapped by patriarchy; of how patriarchy denies her ‘rationality’ and
demonises her as Eve (p.70), source of original sin. Her final going to him is primal,
undomesticated – earrings melt and she becomes animal as both enter a precivilised
world beyond patriarchal traps.

 Wolf-Alice
Female protagonist undomesticated, primal from the start – extreme contrast to
original ‘Beauty’. Handed to Duke/Beast by nuns who fail to domesticate her. She is
‘the wise child’ (p.143) (thus also an echo of the ‘The Wise Little Girl’ – Carter’s
favourite fairytale – from Russia – ‘the tsar asks the heroine for the impossible and
she delivers it without batting an eyelid’ – Marina Warner). Her active female
 sexuality finally releases the Duke/Beast from his patriarchal construct role of
violence/aggression.

3) Puss in Boots to ‘Puss In Boots’

 Perrault, 1697 after Straparola, 1550
 Crafty and deceptive cat tricks the king and his daughter into marrying his master, the
fictional Marquis de Carabas. King gives his daughter in marriage (she has no
choice).

Carter’s Transformation
 Retells story as outrageous, fast-paced farce, directed by Puss as all-knowing, wild
go-between between his Master and trapped wife of patriarchal Signor Panteolone,
catalysing their wild sexual romp that transgresses all hypocritical patriarchal
proprieties upheld by the complicit hag-governess who imprisons the wife but is
ultimately tricked, leaving cat, Master and wife ‘happy as pigs in plunk’.

4) Erl-King to Erl-King
 von Herder – Sir Olaf entranced by Erl-King’s daughter – he spurns offer of a dance;
she strikes him. Next day, the morning of the wedding, he is found dead.
 Goethe – Erl-King is ‘king of the fairies’ – ensnaring little children to satisfy his lust
 Robert Browning’s Porphyria’s Lover – a male lover strangles Porphyria with her
own hair.

Carter’s Transformations
 Makes Goethe’s Erl-King an ensnarer/murderer of women in order to represent
predatory patriarchal male sexuality.
 She inverts Browning’s male lover to female who strangles patriarchal Erl-King with
hiw own hair to present a woman liberating herself from passive patriarchal
complicity to strong, independent woman.

5) Snow White, and Dracula, to The Snow-Child

 1812 Brothers’ Grimm fairytale
 Snow White the wish of her mother, the queen, who later dies> King remarries - the
evil stepmother queen plans to have Snow White killed out of jealousy – mirror says
she is now the fairest. Snow White nearly dies from poisoned apple but is rescued by
the prince and they are married.

Carter’s Transformation
 Takes patriarchal aspect of original narrative:- hero-prince rescuing Snow White and
extends it in the most extreme, grotesque way, (implying the ‘rescue’ was only ever
further entrapment in patriarchy) whereby Snow White becomes the ‘girl’ -
objectified as the idealised patriarchal sexual fantasy of The Count who engages in
necrophilic, paedaphilic rape. Carter takes ‘latent’ patriarchal ‘content’ to its most
extreme in order to implicitly satirise it, while also showing pragmatic sense of deeply
embedded nature of patriarchy in society.
 Countess is in turn the extreme form of the evil stepmother queen, now presented as
trapped by embedded patriarchy in role of vicious complicity. Her role as been
supplanted by the dominant male Count.
  Could also read Count as from Stoker’s Dracula, suggesting Carter reads Dracula
character as embodiment of patriarchy.

6) Sleeping Beauty to Lady of the House of Love

 1697 Charles Perrault fairytale
 Princess cursed by evil fairy re. if pricks her finger she dies; good seventh fairy
salvages it to 100yr sleep and rescued by prince. Princess tricked into pricking her
finger on old woman’s (evil fairy’s) spinning wheel, and sleeps for 100yrs until
woken by kiss of prince. They marry.
 Other literary echoes:- Dracula, Miss Haversham in Great Expectations.

Carter’s Transformation
 Takes patriarchal ‘latent content’ of original to greater extreme to represent in critical
but pragmatic way, ongoing, embedded patriarchy.
 Woman as predatory sexual vampire; young man as virgin/victim. Lady trapped in
castle, gazed down on by male ancestors. Inversion of patriarchal idealised ‘Beauty’
identity but only to its obverse - trapped in patriarchal construct of demonised female
sexuality. Her death, and that of male ‘hero’ in WWI shows neither escape patriarchal
identities except in death.

7) Little Red Riding Hood to The Werewolf and Company of Wolves

 Perrault, 1697; Brother’ Grimm, 1812
 Girl walks through the woods to deliver food to her sick grandmother. Big Bad Wolf
wants to eat the girl and the food in her basket – he stalks her and when he approaches
her she tells him where she is going. He goes to the grandmother’s house, and eats
her, then lies in wait for the girl. He then eats the girl when she arrives.
 In the Perrault version a woodcutter, in the Grimm, a hunter, comes to the rescue and
cuts open the sleeping wolf and Red Riding Hood and her grandmother emerge
unharmed. They fill the wolf’s body with stones and when he wakes and tries to
escape the stones cause him to collapse and die.

Carter’s Transformations
 The Werewolf
The girl attacks the wolf in the wood with her father’s knife; wolf then retreats
‘sobbing’. Later holds down wolf in the house and it transforms into the grandmother
and the girl’s cries alert the townspeople who come and stone her to death as a witch,
after which the girl stays in the house and ‘prospers’.
 Carter again takes original patriarchal ‘latent content’ – vulnerable girl; male
woodcutter as rescuer – and makes it more extreme: the girl is no longer vulnerable
but her actions are wholly in line with patriarchy, rendering her fully complicit with it,
just as her grandmother had been (wedding ring as symbol of entrapment). She is
complicit with the patriarchal stoning of the grandmother; and her prospering in her
house simply represents a continuing cycle of women existing within a patriarchal
world that remains unchallenged. Carter again showing pragmatic awareness of
embedded nature of patriarchy.

 The Company of Wolves

Carter satirises conventional predatory/horrifying presentation of wolf, taking it to a
ludicrous, cliched extreme ‘The wolf is carnivore incarnate’ (!!!) to critique portrayal
 as a patriarchal construct of male identity that is entrapping.
 At the expected/cliched ‘All the better to eat you with’, the girl, naked and already
having kissed the wolf, laughs in his face and they have sex to the sound of ‘the
terrible clattering’ of the grandmother’s ‘old bones’ under the bed, and sleeps in the
paws of the now ‘tender wolf’.
 Carter thus replaces patriarchal male rescue story with presentation of an
undomesticated, fearless, sexually active female identity that liberates both the girl
and the male wolf from patriarchal constructs of passive and aggressive into an equal
empowerment.