GO TO LINKS for Fairy Tale
Readings
The Bloody Chamber
(or The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories)
is an anthology of short fiction by Angela Carter. It was first published
in the United Kingdom in 1979 by Vintage and won the Cheltenham Festival
Literary Prize. All of the stories share a common theme of being closely based
upon fairytales or folk tales. However, Angela Carter has stated: “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.”
[1] (See Wikipedia Entry on TheBloodyChamber) Carter was no doubt
inspired by the works of author and fairytale collector Charles Perrault, whose
fairytales she had translated shortly beforehand.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bloody_Chamber (source for all information
herein – except fairy tale links)
The Bloody Chamber
(based on
Bluebeard)
A
teenaged girl marries an older, wealthy French Marquis, whom she does not love.
When he takes her to his castle, she learns that he enjoys sadistic pornography
and takes pleasure in her embarrassment. She is a talented pianist, and a young
man, a blind piano tuner, hears her music and falls in love with her. The
woman's husband tells her that he must leave on a business trip and forbids her
to enter one particular room while he is away. She enters the room in his
absence and discovers the full extent of his perverse and murderous tendencies
when she discovers the bodies of his previous wives. The brave piano tuner is
willing to stay with her even though he knows he will not be able to save her.
She is saved at the end of the story by her mother, who arrives and shoots the
Marquis just as he is about to murder the girl.
The Courtship of Mr
Lyon(based
on Beauty and the Beast
— the
concept of the Beast as a lion-like figure is a popular one, most notably in the
French film version of 1946)
Beauty's father, after experiencing car trouble, takes advantage of a stranger's
hospitality. However, his benefactor — the Beast — takes umbrage when he steals
a miraculous white rose for his beloved daughter. Beauty becomes the guest of
the leonine Beast, and the Beast aids her father in getting his fortune back.
Beauty later joins her father in London, where she almost forgets the Beast,
causing him to whither away from heartache. When Beauty learns that he is dying,
she returns, saving him. Beauty and the Beast disclose their love for one
another and the Beast's humanity is revealed.
The Tiger's
Bride
(also
based on Beauty and the Beast)
A
woman moves in with a mysterious, masked "Milord," the Beast, after her father
loses her to him in a game of cards. Milord is eventually revealed to be a
tiger. In a reversal of the ending of "The Courtship of Mr Lyon", the heroine
transforms at the end into a glorious tiger who is the proper mate to the Beast,
who will from now on be true to his own nature and not disguise himself as a
human.
Puss-in-Boots
(based on
Puss in Boots)
Figaro, a cat, moves in with a rakish young man who lives a happily debauched
life. They live a carefree existence, with the cat helping him to make money by
cheating at cards, until the young man actually falls in love (to the cat's
disgust) with a young woman kept in a tower by a miserly, older husband who
treats her only as property. The cat, hoping his friend will tire of the woman
if he has her, helps the young man into the bed of his sweetheart by playing
tricks on the old husband and the young woman's keeper. Figaro himself finds
love with the young woman's cat, and the two cats arrange the fortunes of both
themselves and the young man and woman by arranging to trip the old man so that
he will fall to his death.
The Erl-King
(an adaptation of the
Erlking in folklore; a sort of goblin or spirit of the woodlands)
A
maiden wanders into the woods and is seduced by the sinister Erl-King, a seeming
personification of the forest itself. However, she eventually realises that he
plans to imprison her and so she murders him.
The Snow Child
(based on an obscure
variant of Snow White.
[3])
A
Count and Countess go riding in midwinter. The Count sees snow on the ground and
wishes for a child "as white as snow". Similar wishes are made when the Count
sees a hole in the snow containing a pool of blood, and a raven. As soon as he
made his final wish a child of the exact description appears at the side of the
road. The Count pays immediate attention to the child, much to the chagrin of
the Countess. At the Countess' command, the girl picks a rose but is pricked by
a thorn and dies, after which the Count rapes her corpse. After this, her corpse
melts into the snow, leaving nothing but a bloodstain on the snow, a black
feather and the rose that she had picked.
The Lady of the
House of Love
(loosely based upon
Sleeping Beauty)
A
virginal English soldier, travelling through Romania by bicycle, comes across a
mansion inhabited by a vampiress. She intends to feed on him, but his purity and
virginity have a curious effect on her.
The Werewolf
(based on Little Red
Riding Hood)
A
girl goes to visit her grandmother, but encounters a werewolf on the way, whose
paw she cuts off with a knife. When she reaches her grandmother's house, the paw
has turned into a hand with the grandmother's ring on it, and the grandmother is
both delirious and missing her hand. This reveals the girl's grandmother as the
werewolf, and she is stoned to death. The girl then inherits all of her
grandmother's possessions.
The Company of
Wolves
(closer adaptation of Little Red Riding Hood) A
girl meets an apparently charming young man whilst wandering through the forest
towards her grandmother's house. She arrives at her grandmother's home, unaware
that the same young man has got there before her and killed her grandmother. The
young man, who is really a wolf in disguise, instructs her to remove and burn
her garments one by one as she makes remarks reminiscent of those in the classic
fairy tale, such as "What big teeth you have!" When he replies, "All the better
to eat you with," she laughs at him fearlessly. The story ends with "See! sweet
and sound she sleeps in granny's bed, between the paws of the tender wolf."
Wolf-Alice
(based on an obscure
variant of Little Red Riding Hood
[4] and with reference to Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice
Found There, this tale explores the journey towards subjectivity and
self-awareness from the perspective of a feral child)
A
feral child, whom some nuns have attempted to civilize, is left in the house of
a monstrous, vampiric Duke when she does not develop the appropriate social
graces. She gradually comes to realise her own identity as a young woman and
even displays compassion for the Duke.
NOTE: Angela Carter’s book, The Bloody
Chamber is available online at
http://www.angelfire.com/crazy4/lesadoreyl/carter_bloody_chamber.html
READINGS FOR OUR
CLASS (Print out and read all of the following fairy tales)
Versions of Bluebeard
http://www.pitt.edu/~dash/type0312.html#perrault (by Charles Perrault)
http://www.surlalunefairytales.com/bluebeard/index.html (by Andrew Lang)
http://www.pitt.edu/~dash/type0312.html#india (Indian version: “The Brahmin
Girl that Married a Tiger”)
Essay on Bluebeard
http://www.endicott-studio.com/rdrm/forblue.html
Beauty and the Beast
http://www.pitt.edu/~dash/beauty.html (classic French version from 1757)
Puss ‘n Boots:
http://www.surlalunefairytales.com/pussboots/
Fitcher’s Bird (Erl-King) – Grimm
brothers, Germany
http://www.pitt.edu/~dash/type0311.html#fitcher
Snow White
http://www.pitt.edu/~dash/type0709.html#snowwhite (Grimm’s version)
Sleeping Beauty (Little Brier-Rose)
http://www.pitt.edu/~dash/type0410.html#grimm (Grimm’s German version)
Little Red Riding Hood
http://www.pitt.edu/~dash/type0333.html#perrault (Perrault’s French Version)
East of the Sun and West of the Moon
(from Norway)
http://www.pitt.edu/~dash/norway034.html
The Cat Who Became a Queen (from
India)
http://www.pitt.edu/~dash/type0402.html#knowles
Back to Folklore and Literature Page
GO TO MARY MAGOULICK's HOMEPAGE