I finally read the entire Bloody Chamber collection, and I can claim I sucked the words like honey, though I can barely state I have fully grasped their meaning. Carter’s symbolism is obscure and rich: she tries to speak directly to the subconscious instead of letting the reader logically digest the stories.
The gallery of emotions I displayed while reading Carter was impressive. I was moved merely by a phrase, the description of scenery, an object, a person. My favourite part in the collection, The Erl King, made me burst into uncontrollable tears at the last phrase, for apparently no obvious reason. Her tales are so rich in female experience (a primal, sexual, menstrual kind of experience) and I wondered, would a man feel the same while reading it? If they feel something new, isn’t this great? Isn’t a tale the best way to talk about things that can’t be spoken?
Carter enjoyed toying with tales instead of lengthy books. The short, symbolic nature of a fairy tale was perfectly right for her. The feminist revisions of classic fairy tales in The Bloody Chamber are closer to some original versions, like the Red Riding Hood for example: in Angela’s the girl and the wolf “merge”, reminding us of the (slightly known) first version of the story as a folk tale, in which the girl explores her sexuality during the mini trip in the forest and then hastily returns home.
In the Virago Book of Fairy Tales I & II, Carter has done a remarkable job in collecting tales with women protagonists. They offer a stunning view of the feminine by various viewpoints, some pro-feminist, some less women friendly, but all of them alive and true.
The bourgeois fairy tale as we know it has lost a tale’s greatest power: speaking to the subconscious. Now it’s merely a tool for moral preaching, instead of a remembrance of kinds of wisdom long lost. Exploring the story might open new windows: the whole scenery of a fairy tale might change dramatically. Angela Carter does this with exceptional subtlety.
