Context

1 · Angela Carter and the demythologising project

Angela Carter was born Angela Stalker in Eastbourne in 1940 and died of cancer in 1992, by which time she was one of the boldest voices in post-war British fiction. She worked as a journalist, wrote acerbic essays for New Society for two decades, and spent formative years in Japan, where, she said, her experience of working in hostess bars sharpened her feminism. The Bloody Chamber (1979) was her ninth book. Her stated purpose gives you a ready AO3 lens: ‘I’m in the demythologising business’, she wrote, ‘because I’m interested in myths … they are extraordinary lies designed to make people unfree’. Her method was not to soften the old tales but to ‘extract the latent content’ and build new stories from it. Helen Simpson insists ‘these are new stories, not re-tellings’, and Marina Warner traces the line from Carter to the fabulism of Salman Rushdie and Jeanette Winterson.

2 · Second-wave feminism and The Sadeian Woman

The Bloody Chamber belongs to the women’s liberation moment of the 1970s and to its arguments about desire, power and the female body, which is why its frankness about heterosexual female sexuality felt, and still feels, radical. In the same year, 1979, Carter published The Sadeian Woman, a polemical essay on the pornography of the Marquis de Sade that Chris Power calls ‘a parallel text, or polemical preface’ to the stories, and Marina Warner a ‘diptych’ with them. In it Carter argues, provocatively, that Sade was right to treat ‘all sexual reality as political reality’, and she contrasts his two heroines, the passive victim Justine and the dominating Juliette, as ‘a pair of mirrors’. Her governing conviction, that passivity is never a virtue and that ‘to be the object of desire is to be defined in the passive case’, runs straight through the collection. Note the debate this provoked: Patricia Duncker attacked Carter for writing within the ‘straight-jacket’ of the fairy tale, while Hannah Wardle and others defend the tales as a deliberate critique. That argument is AO3 and AO5 at once.

3 · The fairy-tale tradition: Perrault, the Grimms, Beaumont

Fairy tales began as an oral folk form, retold and reshaped by every teller, before they were fixed in print as a literary and often moralising genre. Carter reworks named sources. Charles Perrault (1628–1703) published his Histoires ou Contes du Temps Passé in 1697, and Carter translated him in 1977 while drafting this collection, so his ‘Bluebeard’, ‘Puss in Boots’ and ‘Little Red Riding Hood’ sit directly behind her tales; his moral, that female curiosity brings retribution, is the very idea she overturns. The Brothers Grimm, Jacob (1785–1863) and Wilhelm (1786–1859), collected German folklore in the Romantic revival, and Wilhelm progressively sanitised later editions, removing sexual elements and adding Christian morals: it is a suppressed Grimm variant, in which a father rather than a mother wishes the child into being, that lies behind the incest of ‘The Snow Child’. Jeanne-Marie Leprince de Beaumont gave Carter the ‘Beauty and the Beast’ she reworks twice. Mary Kaiser argues that Carter’s intertextual method moves each tale from ‘the mythic timelessness of the fairy tale to specific cultural moments’.

4 · The Gothic and the uncanny

Carter preferred the ‘tale’ to the realist story precisely because it could carry ‘the imagery of the unconscious’, and the Gothic supplies the collection’s ruined castles, forbidden rooms, vampires and werewolves, its dread and its thresholds. She acknowledged the Danish writer Isak Dinesen’s Seven Gothic Tales as a direct model for these ‘highly structured’ stories. The uncanny, the familiar made strange, is her sharpest tool: the bedtime story turned sinister, the grandmother who is the wolf. Marina Warner describes how the ‘aristocratic fairy-tale tradition’ and the Gothic are fused in the book, so that read the Gothic as Carter’s apparatus for staging, and then contesting, female fear.

5 · Aestheticism and decadence

The title story is drenched in the aestheticism and decadence of the late nineteenth century, and this is context for AO2 style as much as for AO3. Carter builds a fin-de-siècle French world of Baudelaire and the Symbolist poets, of Huysmans and Gustave Moreau, of Wagner’s ‘Liebestod’, and she called the story a deliberate ‘hommage’ to Colette, dressing her heroine like a Claudine schoolgirl. The Marquis is a parodic decadent aesthete, a collector and voluptuary, and Carter’s own prose luxuriates in surfaces, in what Simpson calls its ‘extravivid materiality’. Carter said the short story for her was not minimalist but ‘rococo’, and the decadent register is doing moral work: the lush description half-seduces the reader into the Marquis’s world before turning on it.

6 · 1979 and 1970s Britain

The collection is stamped by its moment. It appeared in 1979, the year Margaret Thatcher became Britain’s first woman prime minister, and, as Simpson observes, at a time when a woman writing openly about heterosexual female desire was still unusual. The historian Hera Cook notes that before the 1970s it was widely assumed that women were ‘passive in relation to physical sexual activity’, which is exactly the assumption Carter writes to explode. The decade’s feminist arguments about pornography and power, into which The Sadeian Woman intervened and which Andrea Dworkin sharpened, are the live context for the collection’s treatment of sex as politics. Carter used fantasy, she told Robert Coover, with ‘conscious radical intent’, believing fiction could ‘help to transform reality itself’.