New Book: Erotic Infidelities: Love and Enchantment in Angela Carter's The Bloody Chamber by Kimberly J. Lau

Erotic Infidelities: Love and Enchantment in Angela Carter's The Bloody Chamber by Kimberly J. Lau was released last month. It is the most recent offering in the excellent Series in Fairy-Tale Studies from Wayne State University Press.

From the subtitle, you can see that the book is about Angela Carter, the hands down favorite in literary fairy tale studies. She provides much scope for discussion in her slim volume of stories, The Bloody Chamber: And Other Stories. Lau's book provides an excellent discussion of Carter's tales. So once again, if you are not familiar with Carter's work, you should be. It's not comfortable reading and is certainly provocative, but it resonates decades later.

Book description:

In the thirty-five years since the publication of The Bloody Chamber, Angela Carter’s reimagined fairy tales have inspired an impressive body of criticism. Yet none has addressed the ways her fairy tales grapple with and seek to overcome the near impossibility of heterosexual love and desire under patriarchy. In Erotic Infidelities: Love and Enchantment in Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber, author Kimberly J. Lau argues that the strangeness of Carter’s fairy-tale enchantments—the moments when love or erotic desire escape the deeply familiar, habitual structures and ideologies that contain them—show the momentary, fleeting possibilities for heterosexual love and desire.

Lau begins by situating her reading of The Bloody Chamber—as individual stories and as a collection—within and against the critical literature, especially that which addresses Carter’s relationship to psychoanalytic theory and issues of language and desire. In chapter 2, she illustrates Carter’s construction of gender and language as labyrinthine structures—complex cultural edifices constructed and augmented over time. She moves on to consider Carter’s "feline stories" in chapter 3—"The Courtship of Mr. Lyon," "The Tiger’s Bride," and "Puss-in-Boots"—as an initial move away from the labyrinthine structures and toward an alternate erotics. In chapter 4, she reads "The Erl-King" and "The Snow Child" as another pair of mirrored tales, while chapter 5 elaborates on the pedophilic and necrophiliac fantasies of a pornographic culture, introduced in the previous chapter with the Count’s desire for the Snow Child. In chapter 6, Lau situates Carter’s three concluding stories—the wolf trilogy—within the context of feminist psychoanalytic understandings of infidelity as that which destabilizes patriarchal hegemonies and constructs.

Lau argues that Carter’s "erotic infidelities" work against our culturally determined expectations and longings and usher us into welcome new enchantments. Situated at the intersection of feminist, psychoanalytic, literary, and fairy-tale studies, readers interested in a variety of scholarly disciplines as well as scholars of Carter’s tales will enjoy Lau’s look at enduring questions of gender, sexuality, and desire.

Kimberly J. Lau is professor of literature at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She is the author of New Age Capitalism: Making Money East of Eden and Body Language: Sisters in Shape, Black Women’s Fitness, and Feminist Identity Politics.

New Book: Reading, Translating, Rewriting: Angela Carter's Translational Poetics by Martine Hennard Dutheil de la Rochère

Reading, Translating, Rewriting: Angela Carter's Translational Poetics (Series in Fairy-Tale Studies) by Martine Hennard Dutheil de la Rochère is the third November release from Wayne State University Press in their Series in Fairy-Tale Studies. As anyone knows who has been reading about fairy tales for a while, Angela Carter is one of the most popular subjects for modern literary fairy tale scholarship. Carter both translated and rewrote fairy tales and is embraced, deservedly so, by the literary realm of academia as well as folklorists. Carter's The Bloody Chamber is essential fairy tale reading once you reach an acceptable age for it. It is not literature suitable for the preteen and below set, perhaps not even some teenagers I know.

If you read this book, you will want to be familiar with both The Bloody Chamber: And Other Stories (Penguin Ink) and Little Red Riding Hood, Cinderella, and Other Classic Fairy Tales of Charles Perrault (Penguin Classics). I also recommend Angela Carter's Book of Fairy Tales while we are here, but it's not as much of a companion to this study as the other two books. The Book of Fairy Tales is out of print in the US but is easily found used in this edition or earlier ones usually under the Virago Fairy Tales title. I've owned a few editions of it over the years.

It is not out of print in the UK, by the way, where Carter's books are usually nurtured by their publishers longer than in the US, since she is dear to them. Here are UK covers with links and they are fascinatingly different from the US ones, especially the Perrault:

Book description:

In translating Charles Perrault's seventeenth-century Histoires ou contes du temps passé, avec des Moralités into English, Angela Carter worked to modernize the language and message of the tales before rewriting many of them for her own famous collection of fairy tales for adults, The Bloody Chamber, published two years later. In Reading, Translating, Rewriting: Angela Carter's Translational Poetics, author Martine Hennard Dutheil de la Rochère delves into Carter's The Fairy Tales of Charles Perrault (1977) to illustrate that this translation project had a significant impact on Carter's own writing practice. Hennard combines close analyses of both texts with an attention to Carter's active role in the translation and composition process to explore this previously unstudied aspect of Carter's work. She further uncovers the role of female fairy-tale writers and folktales associated with the Grimms' Kinder- und Hausmärchen in the rewriting process, unlocking new doors to The Bloody Chamber.

Hennard begins by considering the editorial evolution of The Fairy Tales of Charles Perrault from 1977 to the present day, as Perrault's tales have been rediscovered and repurposed. In the chapters that follow, she examines specific linkages between Carter's Perrault translation and The Bloody Chamber, including targeted analysis of the stories of Red Riding Hood, Bluebeard, Puss-in-Boots, Beauty and the Beast, Sleeping Beauty, and Cinderella. Hennard demonstrates how, even before The Bloody Chamber, Carter intervened in the fairy-tale debate of the late 1970s by reclaiming Perrault for feminist readers when she discovered that the morals of his worldly tales lent themselves to her own materialist and feminist goals. Hennard argues that The Bloody Chamber can therefore be seen as the continuation of and counterpoint to The Fairy Tales of Charles Perrault, as it explores the potential of the familiar stories for alternative retellings.

While the critical consensus reads into Carter an imperative to subvert classic fairy tales, the book shows that Carter valued in Perrault a practical educator as well as a proto-folklorist and went on to respond to more hidden aspects of his texts in her rewritings. Reading, Translating, Rewriting is informative reading for students and teachers of fairy-tale studies and translation studies.

Martine Hennard Dutheil de la Rochère is professor of English and comparative literature at the University of Lausanne, Switzerland. Her most recent book is Des Fata aux fées: regards croisés de l'Antiquité à nos jours.

I received a review copy of this book, but I haven't had time to do more than crack it open briefly. Each chapter is devoted to a different fairy tale that Carter both translated and rewrote from Perrault, so it is useful for those wanting to write a paper on a single Carter story, such as The Company of Wolves or The Tiger's Bride, two common favorites for analysis, along with The Bloody Chamber itself.

Videos: Marina Warner Discusses Angela Carter

 

So SurLaLune reader Francisco Rodriguez commented on my post with Marina Warner's article about Angela Carter with a link to a video of Warner discussing Carter's work with Johanna Geary, editor with The Folio Society. There are three videos of the interview and one of Warner reading from Carter's work, specifically Company of Wolves.

So, of course, I must share. Enjoy!

Marina Warner on why Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber still bites

 

From Marina Warner on why Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber still bites at The Scotsman:

Fairy tales were reviled in the first stirrings of post-war feminist liberation movements as part and parcel of the propaganda that kept women down.

The American poet Anne Sexton, in a caustic sequence of poems called Transformations (1971), scathingly evokes the corpselike helplessness of Sleeping Beauty and Snow White, and scorns, with fine irony, the Cinderella dream of bourgeois marriage and living happily ever after: boredom, torment, incest, death to the soul followed.

Literary and social theorists joined in the battle against the Disney vision of female virtue (and desirability); Cinderella became a darker villain than her sisters, and for Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, in their landmark study The Madwoman in the Attic (1979), the evil stepmother in Snow White at least possesses mobility, will and power – for which she is loathed and condemned. In the late Sixties and early Seventies, it wasn’t enough to rebel, and young writers and artists were dreaming of reshaping the world in the image of their desires. Simone de Beauvoir and Betty Friedan had done the work of analysis and exposure, but action – creative energy – was as necessary to build on the demolition site 
of the traditional values and definitions of gender.

In this context, Angela Carter made an inspired, marvellous move, for which so many other writers as well as readers will always be indebted to her: she refused to join in rejecting or denouncing fairy tales, but instead embraced the whole stigmatised genre, its stock characters and well-known plots, and with wonderful verve and invention, perverse grace and wicked fun, soaked them in a new fiery liquor that brought them leaping back to life.

From her childhood, through her English degree at the University of Bristol where she specialised in medieval literature, and her experiences as a young woman on the folk-music circuit in the West Country, Angela Carter was steeped in English and Celtic faerie, in romances of chivalry and the grail, Chaucerian storytelling and Spenserian allegory, and she was to become fairy tale’s rescuer. Her first collection of tales, Fireworks: Nine Profane Pieces (1974), was followed, five years later, by The Bloody Chamber, which has now become a classic of English literature, far beyond the moment and historical circumstances of its origins.

The article "is an edited extract of Marina Warner’s introduction to the Folio Society edition of Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber and other Stories, available from foliosociety.com." I just quoted the first few paragraphs, but the article is quite long and an excellent read.

Carter's works change titles depending on the country where an edition is published. These days, in the US, it's easiest to Burning Your Boats: The Collected Short Stories to have a collection of her works if you want more than The Bloody Chamber.