Fascinating fairy tales

Tags

Angela Carter, beauty and the beasts, cultural values, fairy tales, Gothic tales, magical realism, Puss in Boots, sexual awakening, the female condition

Most children love fairy tales when they were young. I didn’t.

I was busy reading other types of books. By the time I learned to read, children my age were no longer reading fairy tales. So I skipped that part and went straight to Nancy Drew, Famous Five, Malory Towers, every Enid Blyton book I could find and Shakespeare.

My next stop was romance novels. It was a short stop. I went back to Shakespeare and expanded my reading list to include innovative literary writers and the more fantastic versions of fairy tales.

Literary pursuit

When I decided to pursue a degree in English Literature, it was out of sheer love for reading. And I had thought the course was just about reading, so how hard  could it be? It was much more challenging that I had expected, of course.

Strangely, I was drawn to fairy tales during my undergraduate days. We had literary discourses on nursery rhymes and fairy tales in a few of our classes. I found the never before heard interpretations both bizarre and fascinating.

Humpty Dumpty and London Bridge is falling down were some of the nursery rhymes we dissected. After the classes, I had an entirely new perspective on nursery rhymes. They functioned very much like Capoeira, the Brazillian martial art. Both were used as a form of disguise of issues that were so much deeper.

The revelations from the nursery rhymes were not as disconcerting as Angela Carter’s interpretation of fairy tales.

The fairy tales of Angela Carter

She was a British novelist, journalist and feminist known for her magical realism style. She had stated that:

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.

She was best known for The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories. This collection of short fiction containing 10 stories won the Cheltenham Festival Literary Prize. Fairy tales or folk tales was the common theme for all the stories.

The Bloody Chamber

The Bloody Chamber is based on Bluebeard. It’s a story about a loveless marriage between a young talented pianist to a much older wealthy French Marquis who turns out to be a sadistic murderer. He enjoys sadistic pornography. There is a silver lining though – a young blind piano tuner falls in love with talented girl.

The Marquis’ former wives were all beheaded by him. One day, while the Marquis was away on a business trip, the talented young wife stumbles upon one of the rooms in the castle where the husband stores his dead wives. Of all days, the Marquis choses this one to come  back early and realises that his latest wife has found out his dark secret.

There is a happy ending to this story. The young wife’s mother saves her daughter in the nick of time by shooting the Marquis. After the death of her husband, the young pianist, her mother and the blind piano tuner live together in the castle. She uses her fortune and converts the castle into a school for the blind.

Beasts and beauties

Two of the stories in this anthology were based on Beauty and the Beast – The Courtship of Mr Lyon and The Tiger’s Bride. The ending of these stories are quite different. They twist inside out and back again but with the traditional ‘they lived happily ever after’ ending.

The lion transforms into a human being but the tiger remains so and it is ‘Beauty’ that transforms into a glorious tiger to be better suited for the Beast. I believe the latter resonates closer to the Asian values of matrimonial bliss.

In most Asian cultures, the wife would naturally change or adapt her values to suit that of the husband’s. These two stories show Angela Carter’s feminist views that I find realistic and believable.

The girl in red and the wolves

Three other stories based on Little Red Riding Hood were more sinister and the imagery scream of non conformity and skepticism. If you’re into Gothic and the grotesque, you’ll love her versions of this classic.

In The Werewolf, the girl’s grandmother is the werewolf, and she is stoned to death. ‘Little red riding hood’ inherits all of her grandmother’s possessions.

The Witch and the wolves

The Company of Wolves contains two mini stories. One is about a witch who turns everyone at a wedding ceremony into werewolves.

She finds comfort when they howl at her in misery because of their current form. The other mini story tells about a young lady and a man about to consummate on their wedding night.

The girl in red and Alice

Wolf-Alice is based on both Little Red Riding Hood and loosely on the character of Alice in Through the Looking-Glass. Angela Carter projects her views on conformity and womanhood through a feral child.

The nuns whom she lives with, attempt to civilise her and she is left in the house of a monstrous Duke when they fail to do so by their standards. She grows into a young woman and develops compassion for the Duke.

The famous cat who wore boots

Angela Carter’s version of the ever popular Puss in Boots follows a cat called Figaro. In Puss-in-Boots, Figaro moves in with a young man who lives a debauched life.

Although the title may suggest that it is based on Charles Perrault’s famous fairy tale, the plot is more similar to Rossini’s comic opera The Barber of Seville (adapted from a play by Beaumarchais).

The story examines the objectification and subjugation of women. A beautiful virgin is trapped in a tower in the middle of a busy town. The townspeople are oblivious to her ‘plight’ because they find it acceptable for the man to control his wife. The girl is literally a prisoner as well as a figurative prisoner of chauvinism.

Living in exacting values

Decades later today, many women are still living under such chauvinism disguised as traditional and cultural values that must be protected, practised and prolonged into ever after.

There are three more stories in this anthology which I will write about in my next blog.

In the meantime, let’s think about how we have changed as a society since the publication of these stories. It would seem as though we are still living in 1979 in many ways…