Y’know how some people claim music makes their world go around/ they couldn’t survive without music/etc etc? Well, I’m like that with comedy, especially comedy by women, especially comedy by women that knocks the tired, old stereotype that “women just aren’t funny” straight out of the patriarchal pool of life.

Well, I’ve got my chicken sizzling in the oven, I’ve applied the final fudge flourish to the chocolate cake, and the 70’s throw back prawn cocktail is ready and waiting on the table. All I need now is a prime comedy guestlist of my favourite funny women to turn this evening into my ultimate fantasy night…

Jennifer Saunders

I try and live my life without putting a load of over-glorified idolisation on any one person (or thing) – but my rule just seems to break whenever I come across Jennifer Saunders. Since my table is limited, I had to choose between French and Saunders, but Jen made the cut for a few reasons.

I can’t talk about Saunders without talking about Absolutely Fabulous. Beyond the fact that it’s just genuinely funny, I think there are several important messages to be found in the programme. Joanna Lumley stated in an interview for French television that she accepted the role of Patsy because she had finally been offered a role where she didn’t have to be the soulless goody two shoes. Saunders has created characters that reflect real life – albeit a twisted form of it – much more closely than many other roles created for women. Because she has a ‘posh’ accent, Lumley is often cast in roles that reflect the character society wishes her to have, but in AbFab she fits perfectly as botoxed, pilled up, fashion obsessed Patsy, far better than anyone could imagine. At a human level, Saunders reminds her audience not to judge a book by its clipped accent or laughter lines; it’s a reversal of the stereotypes that just won’t go away – oh you’re old, so you can’t enjoy a drink, oh you’re a mother so you can’t have a personality away from the child. Then there’s the whole exposure of the fashion scene as the temperamental, judgemental, fat-shaming sham of an industry that it is.

She was amazing on Bad News and More Bad News, the music spoof by the people behind The Young Ones, in which she played a punk journalist that I ignorantly hoped to replicate “when I’m all grown up” (and still kinda secretly do). She’s written a Spice Girls musical which, as a 90s child, I couldn’t be happier about, and of course, I can’t round off this section without mentioning her stint as the fairy godmother on Shrek 2 and her a-maz-ing cover of Holding Out For A Hero.

Tina Fey

Tina Fey changed the face of high school comedy with Mean Girls. High school-based comedy was always full of what I’d call ‘lad-laugh’ humour; the hunt for beer, the quest for tits, the montage of vomit. Very little high school comedy ever actually showed anything within the actual school, until Mean Girls. Adapting material from the sociological study-fuelled Queen-Bees and Wannabes, Fey produced a film that wasn’t only funny, but provided an actual critique of many people’s experiences and perceptions of high school. An unflinchingly look at bitching, cliques and passive aggressive bullying that can relentlessly curse students on a daily basis, the film provided insight for those that had already left school, and a beam of hope for those currently in school. Plus it made a legend of Glen Coco and gave me one of my all time favourite lines involving wide set vaginas and heavy flows.

Fey is an unashamed feminist, which I love, and she’s effin’ hilarious about it. I have always maintained that you should use humour to show the bastards that they can’t get you down, and Fey mixes important feminist messages without ever sounding preachy or obtuse. Bossypants is an amazing autobiography where she talks not just about her infinitely interesting life but discusses truly interesting topics. The Time I Was a Bit Skinny and The Time I Was a Bit Fat are two short chapters that discuss body image; her responses to anonymous online commentators are hilarious and powerful; and her discussion of Photoshopped images of women is refreshing, honest, and completely different from anything you’ll find elsewhere on the subject.

Sophie Kinsella

You might not necessarily associate Kinsella straight away as a woman of comedy since she’s best known as a chick-lit author. On For Books’ Sake you’ll often find me arguing the merits of chick-lit as comedy aimed at women and the importance of not being put off by ridiculous flowery covers and storylines about heterosexual thirtysomething romances. I often cite Kinsella’s Shopaholic series when discussing chick-lit as comedy for women for more than the fact that I just find them funny. The subject matter of the novel could easily turn a light story into a gritty social warning – the curse of debt and addiction, the crushing demoralisation of being stuck in a career you hate in order to pay the bills, the social anguish of being judged and criticised by those you can’t help but think are better than you. However, Kinsella approaches these subjects with the character of Becky Bloomwood/Brandon and makes them funny, and while I acknowledge that it’s a tired old trope that all women like shopping, there’s plenty of subject matter to relate to.

I also love her quiet acknowledgement of the ridiculous suggestion that to read or write chick-lit you must be stupid. In an interview with the Guardian Kinsella wryly brushes off the hideous suggestion by the interviewer that somewhere her life must have gone wrong if she has an Oxbridge degree in business and finance yet chooses to write chick-lit. Her calm attitude towards suggestions that would leave me chucking plates against the wall shows professionalism and class that many would not associate with the genre.

Caitlin Moran

On a basic level, Caitlin Moran is on my list because I want so desperately to get her in a room and demand that she tells me how I can become just like her. When someone asks me what I want to do with my life, my response is always “to become a combination of Charlie Brooker and Caitlin Moran”.

I became aware of her work with How to Be a Woman. The fact that such an overtly feminist book became a bestseller is fabulously encouraging for all modern feminists, and the manner in which she writes her personal feminist agendas is inspiring. While I’m not a huge fan OF WRITING IN CAPITALS TO EMPHASISE EVERY POINT I MAKE, I am a fan of the messages she writes so simply and beautifully. Encouraging every woman to stand on a chair and shout “I AM A FEMINIST” without ever patronising those who may not automatically associate themselves with feminism is an attitude that I feel is necessary if we’re to get more young people to identify as feminists. Her statement that “you’re not fat if you can find a dress you look nice in and run up three flights of stairs” has become something of a mantra for me when I’m having a down day/week/month, and her unflinchingly honest approach to unfortunately controversial issues such as female masturbation and abortion is helping many women to finally be able to talk about them without any false shame or embarrassment. Plus, y’know, she’s piss funny and she went out drinking with Lady Gaga. Caitlin, on the off-chance that you’re reading this, STOP TELLING ME HOW TO BE A WOMAN AND JUST TELL ME HOW TO BE YOU. (End unnecessary capitals.)

Angela Carter

Okay, so this is maybe the least obvious choice for my guestlist, but let me explain. While the early works of Carter may be the epitome of darkness, towards the end of her writing career and her life, her work began to pick up elements of obscure, magical humour. Wise Children, her final novel, brings together her developing interest in the lightness of human behaviour with the eye-popping spectacle of magic realism, all of which results in a beautifully hilarious final novel with heartbreaking undertones.

I don’t just want to invite Carter because she’s funny, though. I want to invite her because she is my ultimate feminist icon. Her (at the time) unique approach to feminism and sexuality, constant refusal to change her opinions and beliefs just because she didn’t fit in with current trends, and her skills as a writer (not only of fiction, but of intelligent and
persuasive feminist essays and arguments) make her one of my all time heroines. From what I’ve read from biographies she was really, really funny in real life too, making her the perfect final addition to my table.

So there it is, my funny women party guestlist. But which women of comedy would you invite? Do you love my choices, or is my sense of humour enough to make you laugh in disgust?

• Gina Kershaw is the Features Editor on literary website For Books’ Sake. She has a fortnightly column there, Gina Goes Pop, where she rants about all things pop culture. She has a degree in English Literature and hopes one day to turn her penchant for sitting around the house in her pajamas eating custard creams and writing into a career. You can follow her on twitter – @gmkershaw91 – or check out her blog.

Having as I do firsthand experience of the impact of Thatcher’s thirteen years, her government’s break with prevailing consensus and bloody-minded devotion to neoliberal orthodoxies, an objective and rational evaluation of the woman is probably beyond me. That said, her presumably impending death – although I do have a longstanding appointment at a pub in King’s Cross to dutifully raise a glass – is something to which I’ll be largely indifferent. It won’t matter. Thatcher as a person has far less bearing on the current world than what she represents. The damage has been done, the battle lost, and much as I might appreciate a Truth and Reconciliation Commission into the 1980s, Thatcher and her co-conspirators are by now too old and whiskey-soaked to be held to any meaningful account.

Efforts to humanise Thatcher, even when they enlist Meryl Streep, seem discomfiting and deeply bizarre. What she means has transcended what she was, is and will be. The purpose of this post, therefore, apart from being an exercise in detachment for me, is to look briefly at some aspects of Thatcher’s image in political and pop culture, and to consider the effect of her gender on her role as a woman in power. Quick, before the next bus goes past.

The Icon Lady

Meanings of all kinds flow through the figures of women, and they often do not include who she herself is.

– Marina Warner, Monuments and Maidens

Thatcher’s visual staying power in political and pop culture is as great as her impact on oppositional music. The face of Thatcher most often called to mind is that of what Angela Carter termed her ‘balefully iconic’ post-1983 premiership: encased in true-blue power suits, wielding a handbag, her hair lacquered into immobile submission, her earlier style solidified into a heavily stylized femininity bordering on drag. Paul Flynn, in a fairly tortured discussion of Thatcher’s status as a gay icon, put it down to her ‘ability to carry a strong, identifiable, signature look… an intrinsic and steely power to self-transform’, and a ‘camp, easily cartooned presence’. The startling evocative power of this look, its ability to summon up its host of contemporary social, cultural and political associations, is why I jump when Streep’s replication of it intrudes into my vision. It’s like being repeatedly sideswiped by the 1980s, which is something the last UK election had already made me thoroughly sick of.

The iconic capacity of Thatcher’s image has been compared in articles and actual mash-ups with that of Marilyn Monroe and Che Guevara. The artist Alison Jackson observes that all three ‘had what it takes to become a modern icon: big hair, high foreheads and a face that would allow you to project your own fears and desires on to it.’ Conversely, subsequent political leaders – including both Blair and Cameron – have had their own faces conflated with Thatcher’s, usually as part of left-wing critiques meant to signify the closeness of their policies to hers. Thatcher’s image is here used as an instantly recognisable political signifier, communicating a set of ideological ideas in a single package, as well as a self-contained political warning sign.

Although the kind of passive objectification associated with Monroe might seem at odds with the idea of Thatcher as a great historical actor with narrative agency in her own right, the images of both women are used in a cultural tradition in which the female figure in particular becomes a canvas for the expression of abstract ideas (think justice, liberty, victory). The abstract embodiment of multiple meanings, and the strategic performance of traditional ideas of femininity, constitute sources of power which Thatcher and her political and media allies exploited to the hilt in their harnessing of support for the policies she promoted.

Iron Maidens

Thatcher’s image, rather than appealing solely to a particular aspect of femininity, was a tense mixture of conflicting and mutually reinforcing signifiers. Angela Carter identified it as a composite of feminine archetypes, including Dynasty’s Alexis Carrington, Elizabeth I as Gloriana, Countess Dracula, and one of PG Wodehouse’s aunts – tropes sharing a certain type of burlesqued and grotesque dragon-femininity. The 1981 Falklands conflict allowed the discourse around Thatcher to reference the precedents of both Queen Victoria and Churchill, and she was photographed on a tank in an image that the Daily Telegraph described as ‘a cross between Isadora Duncan and Lawrence of Arabia’.

Justine Picardie, in a grimly fascinating read, roots Thatcher’s style in the rigid grooming of well-turned-out 1950s femininity in general and her sartorially plain Methodist upbringing in particular:

Interviewed by Dr Miriam Stoppard for Yorkshire Television in 1985, she gave a glimpse of a childhood desire for the luxury of colour, and shop-bought extravagance, whether a new dress or sofa cover: ‘that was a great expenditure and a great event. So you went out to choose them, and you chose something that looked really rather lovely, something light with flowers on it. My mother: “That’s not serviceable.” And how I longed for the time when I could buy things that were not serviceable.’

Even at the height of her political power, she chose to retain the ‘pretty’ and ‘softening’ effects of her trademark horrible bows. Alongside this tendency towards aspirational frivolity, she cultivated connotations of the provincial housewife – a ‘Housewife Superstar’ – wearing an apron while on the campaign trail and being shown washing dishes while contesting the party leadership.

Her ‘Iron Lady’ speech distinctly echoed the ‘body of a weak and feeble woman… heart and stomach of a king’ construction associated with Elizabeth I in its drawing on the tension between conflicting signifiers:

I stand before you tonight in my Red Star chiffon evening gown, my face softly made up and my fair hair gently waved, the Iron Lady of the Western World. A cold war warrior, an Amazon philistine, even a Peking plotter. Well, am I any of those things? Yes… Yes, I am an iron lady, after all it wasn’t a bad thing to be an iron duke.

Not a Man to Match Her?

Thatcher’s courting of various feminine roles did not prevent the assigning of masculine attributes to her – notably in oppositional parodies and satire. Her iconic Spitting Image puppet was shown wearing a suit and tie and smoking a cigar, addressed as ‘Sir’, and given a more or less explicit emasculating effect upon male colleagues and political opponents:

Outside satire, the 1984 Miners’ Strike has been conceptualised both as a mass emasculation of ordinary male miners and an overt bout of cock-duelling between Thatcher and miners’ leader Arthur Scargill, each of whom were criticised for an absolutist and stubbornly Napoleonic approach to the conflict rather than a more ‘feminine’ openness to negotiation and compromise.

As Dawn Fowler notes in her consideration of dramatic treatments of the Falklands War, a problem with such portrayals of Thatcher is that she ‘can be represented as simply denying her true feminine self in favour of a crazed fascist agenda.’ The Comic Strip’s satirical take on Thatcher’s battles with Ken Livingstone and the Greater London Council presented her as the victim of alien or demonic possession, the ending of which left her soft and passive – restored to her presumably appropriate, natural form. Both applauding Thatcher for her ability to overcome ‘traditional’ feminine weakness and irrationality and behave symbolically as a man, and castigating her for her failure or suppression of a ‘true’ soft and accommodating female nature, are equally dubious in the qualities they seek to assign to ‘real’ women.

Thatcher was repeatedly likened to a female impersonator, a man in blue dresses. The reason for this is simple, and apparently shatterproof: we have so firmly linked power and masculinity that we think a powerful woman is a category error. Instead of changing our ideas about power, we change the sex of a powerful woman.

– Sarah Churchwell

No Job for a Lady?

While Thatcher’s election to Prime Minister was of course a landmark for women in politics, her much-vaunted ‘grocer’s daughter’ outsider status was mediated through an Oxford education and marriage into wealth. The number of prominent women serving as MPs and Cabinet ministers prior to or alongside Thatcher – Nancy Astor, Margaret Bondfield, Betty Harvie Anderson, Jenny Lee, Barbara Castle to name a few – make her ascension exceptional but not unique. Nor should Thatcher’s progress in the male-dominated world of British politics obscure how little she actually did for women once in office: the lack of women appointed to ministerial positions; her disparaging of ‘strident Women’s Libbers’; her invariably male ideological protégés. Historian Helen Castor, discussing the ‘extraordinary’ parallels between the iconography of Thatcher and that of Elizabeth I, points out that both women emphasised themselves as the exception to a rule:

…what those two women both did was not say, Women can rule, women can hold power. They both said, Yes, OK, most women are pretty feeble, but I am a special woman.

At a point where Thatcher’s chosen ideology is resulting in falling standards of living for women – and men – across Britain; where the dim and insubstantial Louise Mensch can manage to position herself as a rising star, and where the Home Secretary’s political decisions make fewer headlines than her choice of shoe, I’m relieved to see that attempts to rehabilitate Thatcher as any kind of feminist icon are largely being resisted. It remains to be seen whether The Iron Lady, and its fallout in the form of frankly offensive Thatcher-inspired fashion shoots, means that her image is now undergoing a further transcendence into the realms of irony and kitsch (as has happened with both Marilyn and Che), or whether this is part of a conscious revival of the political associations her image originally carried and to which we are being returned – conditions profoundly unfriendly to female independence and agency despite the women occasionally employed as their shock troops.

She sez:

• “Christina Rossetti for In the Bleak Midwinter, one of the only Christmas carols I can stand ’cause the lyrics rhyme and scan and crazy shit like that.
• Patti Smith ’cause she’s the village wise-woman of my head and I love her.
• Cordelia Fine’s Delusions of Gender is one of the best books I’ve read and should be required reading for, y’know, everyone.
• I love Margaret Atwood. That is all.
• Angela Carter invokes lots of pastoral snowscapes in The Bloody Chamber. That’s kind of Christmassy, right?
• The Second Sex is on my good intentions list. I absolutely will read it next year.
• Introducing Post-Feminism is, I think, pretty flawed in its definitions, but it does do a good run-through of a lot of history.
• And Herland by Charlotte Perkins Gilman is a book I initially loved, which gets creepier on every re-read, but hey – it’s a 1915 SF pacifist gynotopia.”

Hopefully we’ll have some more Team Christmas Trees up before we close for the holiday season, but either way have a great week!

Weird tales, well told

For one thing, her stories are more original, imaginative and accomplished than much of what is served up to young fantasy readers. The reason I reached for Red Spikes a few nights ago is because I wanted to be transported. I wanted a way out of my worries, and in her short stories Lanagan places you in an (often unnervingly) immediate, vivid and visceral other place.

She’s economical with the detail she gives you, winding her descriptions around dialogue or a protagonist’s thoughts rather than self-consciously setting the scene. The situations and societies she presents feel solid, brutally so at times, without you needing to be told what colour the sky is. The story is about the situation, not the setting, if you see what I mean.

And those situations are genuinely unusual, strange and surprising. You can set your story on the third moon of Azkablam and still make it clichéd, formulaic and dull as ditchwater (famed for its dullness). In Red Spikes and another collection, Black Juice, a girl watches her sister killed in a tar-pit as punishment for murdering her husband, while elsewhere in a circus-y dystopia two anti-clown vigilantes carry out a hit. A girl in a paper dress graduates from Bride School, and a boy finds some tiny figures of a bear and a heavily pregnant armoured queen who grow and come to life in the night. Naturally, he is enlisted as midwife.

Lanagan’s stories are bizarre, and even when you’re in more familiar terrain they’re often told from an unusual point of view. In Black Juice a village is periodically attacked by terrifying underground ‘yowlinin’ monsters. So far, so Tremors. But the tale is told by an ‘untouchable’ outcast, treated as a monster herself, who saves the life of the boy she loves only to be rejected. However, UNLIKE the Little Mermaid, she doesn’t wimpily dissolve into seafoam, but sees him for the coward he is and strides away into her future.

These synopses have probably given you a clue that as well as being strange, Lanagan’s stories are often pretty dark. And if you think Harry Potter is ‘dark’ you may be in for a shock: the first few chapters of her novel Tender Morsels include child abuse, incest, forced abortion and gang rape.

Tender Morsels

Here’s a review that describes why I think it’s a remarkable work. But it is distressing. Briefly: 14-year-old Liga lives in the usual cottage-on-the-edge-of-the-dark-forest with her father, who repeatedly rapes her. When she becomes pregnant, he forces her to have an abortion. He dies, but she discovers she has become pregnant again. She has her baby and lives alone in relative peace in the cottage until some boys from the nearby town come to find her and sexually assault her. Liga despairs, takes her baby daughter to a ravine in the forest and tries to kill them both, but they are magically saved and wake in what seems to be a parallel world in which she is at last safe. The townspeople have been replaced with kind, two-dimensional versions of themselves, and in this world there are no men. It seems to be a heaven that Liga has created to protect herself and her daughters (she has another baby). But as her daughter grows up the membrane between their protected world and the world Liga left behind starts to grow thin, and the story becomes a reimagining of the traditional fairytale of Snow White and Rose Red.

Of course, when it was published Tender Morsels met with a fair amount of controversy, but I agree with Lanagan when she says “I guess I’m not a big fan of corralling sex, death and war into the adult world and then giving children a terrible shock when they realise their existence.” Besides, there is nothing graphic, titillating or exploitative about the descriptions of the abuse suffered by Liga in the novel. One of the things the book is about is how people take refuge and heal from trauma.

Women in fairytales

It’s also about fairytales, and women’s lot in them. Asked in this interview why she was drawn to the Snow White and Rose Red story, Lanagan said:

Mainly I was annoyed by what the Grimm Brothers had done with Caroline Stahl’s story, that is, rewritten it to deliver a very oppressive message to girls and women: At all costs, however beastly your menfolk’s behaviour, remain nice, kind and always willing to come to their aid. This kind of message is not uncommon in the collections of transcribed and revised folktales of the 18th and 19th century, and it’s distressing that those versions are often mistaken for the root stories – although they still sometimes contain the germs of the originals, they are very much products of their times and societies.

So, the irritation was the main thing, but then I couldn’t resist a story that had such a great character as the ungrateful dwarf, the kindly bear and the three bemused women, trying to make good lives for themselves in an ever stranger world.

Like Angela Carter, Lanagan seems to be interested in the rawer, messier, less moral incarnations of our familiar fairytales, but where they differ is that Lanagan’s story fully inhabits the folkloric style where Carter’s versions are self-conscious and ironic.

The final thing I love about Lanagan’s stories is that they’re full of GIRLS and WOMEN! All kinds of different ones! With different personalities! And they do things! In Tender Morsels there are two witches, both distinct and full-developed characters, with powers and flaws and everything. The novel deals with violence against women, but also with women’s sexuality and desires.

I can’t say I’d recommend them to help you get to sleep, but Margo Lanagan’s stories offer strange worlds to be explored.

The tiger will never lie down with the lamb; he acknowledges no pact that is not reciprocal. The lamb must learn to run with the tigers.

– Angela Carter, The Tiger’s Bride

Fairy tales weren’t always Disney cartoons. Once upon a time, they were part of an oral tradition passed down from mother to child, cautionary tales about the horrors that lurked in the woods, and the dangers of going off the path. They were much bloodier back then, much scarier, and with a lot more impact. Then along came the Brothers Grimm and Hans Anderson, and other men who liked writing things down and only wrote down what they liked. The fairy tales got sillier from there, cautionary tales without any of the blood and violence that made them worth paying heed to in the first place. They only got worse with Disney (though some of us love Disney movies, occasionally even with good reason).

Fortunately, it doesn’t end with a happily ever after. Modern authors have taken the sanitised narratives we were all told as kids, and twisted them, into something we recognise but appreciate in a very different way. They’re still the stories we know, but not only has the blood and gore reappeared, they’ve grown up in much the same way as our society has grown up. Rather than warning our children that they should stick to the route life’s prepared for them, walk the road to happy marriage and 2.4 kids, they instead encourag stepping away from the traditional routes, rebelling against authority, and reclaiming traditional feminine roles which are often painted in a negative light. Or they tell grown-up stories about characters traditionally relegated to the most sanitised view of childhood. There are countless modern fables which also play much the same roles as traditional folk tales, from the insanely popular wizard kids of Harry Potter to fables shrouded in mystery and played on a concept album.

Through all of this, there’s one book which, in my opinion, has succeeded in reclaiming stories once used to repress and control women (and by extension everyone else) to a far greater extent than any other: Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber. As Carter herself asserted, the stories therein are not simply updated or “adult” versions of the traditional stories (she really hated this idea). Rather, they build on the essence of the originals; not those set down by the likes of Perrault, but the original stories, those told in the oral tradition. From a linguistic or anthropological point of view, it’s a fascinating experiment: how would those stories have evolved and changed over the years if the game of Chinese whispers that is oral storytelling hadn’t been brought to a stop?

The result, updated versions of Bluebeard, Beauty and the Beast (twice), Puss In Boots, Snow White (kinda), Red Riding Hood (two or three times), plus a vampire story and a sort of
Red Riding Hood/Alice Through The Looking Glass amalgam, is a brilliantly charged piece of work. Charged emotionally, through our strongly forged connection to these stories; charged sexually, through the transition of the stories from cautionary tales to fables of teenage awakening; and crammed with ideas and themes, many of which it’s fair to say would be beyond the young minds to which these stories were once told. Instead of telling children how to behave themselves, they tell adults how not to behave themselves.

As I mentioned above, the traditional versions of these stories are very often about staying “on the path”, the course society sets for an individual based on their gender and circumstances. Nowhere is this more evident than in the traditional Red Riding Hood story; a little girl follows a shortcut through the woods, deviating from the way she’s been told to go, and as a result she and a matriarchal figure are murdered by a vicious beast, or rescued by a male hero who is otherwise absent from the story. In Carter’s versions, the little girl leaves the path, and the rewards, while terrifying, are great. In The Company of Wolves, the wolf becomes an image of feral sexuality, with the adolescent Red Riding Hood sleeping with him at the end. In The Werewolf, Granny herself is the wolf; a certain metaphor for how traditional ideas of the feminine role are monstrous – Red Riding Hood kills her, and inherits all her stuff. In Wolf Alice, which merges a variant of the story with elements of Through The Looking Glass, the titular character emerges from a feral childhood, not into the socialised womanhood which the nuns taking care of her demand, but instead redeeming the vampiric Duke in whose care she is left by the power of her sexual awakening.

Sexual power is a primary theme in many of the stories. Carter refutes the view of female sexuality as passive and submissive; such sex is presented as a sterile, pleasureless experience. The titular story, and also the longest, goes into this in detail with a version of the Bluebeard story set in the 1930s. The narrator, also the heroine, marries the familiar murderer. Rather than merely dying, as in some versions of the fairy tale, or being rescued by a male saviour, it is her mother, a badass world-travelling tiger hunter, who comes to the rescue. The “saviour male” is replaced with a blind piano tuner who ultimately becomes the heroine’s lover, taking the sexual emphasis away from the visual with which Bluebeard is so obsessed, and placing it firmly where it belongs: in the realm of the sensual.

For Carter, the beasts are not terrifying, but liberating; in one of her takes on Beauty and the Beast, The Tiger’s Bride, Beauty herself becomes a beast, instead of bringing the Beast back to humanity. I have to say this is probably my favourite story in the collection, with its beautiful emphasis on primal power and strength rather than civilised control. Beauty is at first an object, a thing given to the Beast to repay a gambling debt. It’s through her own acknowledgement and understanding of her bestial side that she claims freedom, and achieves her transformation, which in a reversal of the traditional fairy tale beast transformation is not a horrifying punishment, but a liberating reward.

In many ways, these stories aren’t for children. They’re complex narratives which many adults would struggle with. On the other hand, these stories, which challenge the expected ideas and cautionary tales of behaving like good girls and boys, are in a way exactly what we should be telling our kids: there are terrible things out there, and some of them are you. It’s no longer worth staying on the path. It’s time to explore the woods.

New to Carter? Other things to try:

• The Company of Wolves was turned into a film, although it’s more based on Carter’s radio version of the story. Contains more fairy tales, and is a better werewolf movie than some recent films.
• For more Angela Carter, there’s The Magic Toyshop
• For more modified, subversive fairy tales, you could do worse than check out Neil Gaiman. His short story Snow, Glass, Apples, which is available in Smoke and Mirrors, recasts Snow White as a vampire. He’s also tackled a number of other fairy tales from various cultures in his numerous different works, and written a few fables of his own that aren’t too far removed.

In his time, Russell has worked both on and off stage in theatre, and is currently working on the fringes of the legal profession. In his spare time, he can usually be found hanging round the comments on BadRep like a bad smell.<---- his words, not ours! ;)

I hasten to add that I’m not a furry.

Werewolves are the greatest thing ever. They’re great, big, vicious monsters that will pull a person to shreds with their claws, and yet can disguise themselves very effectively as the thing they prey on to hide amongst them. There’s lots of story potential lurking in the legend of the lycanthrope. They’re transformation, liberation, sexuality, secrets, puberty, forbidden passion, rage, hunger and loneliness all at once. The idea of a human that can literally turn into a terrifying predator and go on a rampage has been inherent in legends and folklore since before we could write, probably because of the storytelling and thematic potential in such a creature. What can’t you do with a werewolf? (Still not a furry.)

So I went to see Red Riding Hood because, well, it’s a werewolf film and I have this biological imperative when it comes to werewolf films, and also because I was interested to see what they’d do with them. It’s directed by Catherine Hardwicke, also responsible for the heinous pile of shite that was Twilight, which made me cautious – but I still wanted to see what threads of the werewolf myth would be re-spun for the Twilight generation. I’m all for innovative takes. And, you know, with all that potential behind the werewolf, surely they’d find something fun to run with, right?

Wrong.

Wrong, wrong, wrong, oh god, wrong. I didn’t set my bar particularly high in the first place because, you know, Twilight (do I really need to go into why I don’t like that franchise? Really?) but Red Riding Hood neatly limboed right underneath.

***I suppose there’d better be a spoiler warning here.***

The setting is what you’d expect: pseudo-Medieval village in the middle of an unrealistically spiky forest, with an insulting gender dimorphic, binary society. The characters are nothing more than pages from TV Tropes printed off and pasted onto cardboard cut-outs. The dialogue is emotionless tedious drivel that I’ve seen beaten in artistry by ten-year-olds writing about their lunchboxes and the plot wouldn’t know what “innovation” meant if the OED definition was carved into the side of its face with a screwdriver.

I don’t know about you, but I am hopeless – absolutely hopeless – at being bored. I get violent. It’s a dreadful personality flaw, and really I should be more patient, but if I find myself stuck doing, watching or listening to something that bores me, I get enraged to the point of being pugnacious.

Half an hour in, and I was seriously considering starting a fight in the auditorium.

It’s as simplistic and colourful as a child’s toy. I know it’s aimed at the prepubescent, hormonal tweenagers that take Twilight as seriously as people take their religious texts, but it’s so monodimensional that I found myself Photoshopping in new, imaginary dimensions just to keep myself from falling asleep.

When can we all get as bored as I am of this heterocentric one-girl-two-guys trope? The story, instead of revolving around something interesting and mutable (like, say, werewolves), revolved around the personality vacuum that passed as the lead character (Amanda Seyfried being fought over by HER ONE TRUE LOVE and HER FINANCIALLY VIABLE FIANCÉ (Shiloh Fernadez and Max Irons). Neither of whom was a werewolf. And neither was she. It was like the bloody werewolf was an inconvenient distraction from the real “meat” of the Fisher Price plot.

It did, however, keep me guessing, if just because I couldn’t believe how intellect-insultingly bland it was. “Ooh, the werewolf is going to be her One True Love boy,” I thought, initially. “It’ll be an exploration of forbidden passion and how lust can turn you into a monster.” A well-trodden, predictable and dreadfully slut-shaming path, but at least it was werewolf-centric.

But it wasn’t.

Disappointed, I then thought, “Okay, it’ll be her grandmother, and it’ll be a sisters-doing-it-for-themselves female sexuality tribal-loyalties thing. Look, they’ve even colour-coded her, her mum and her grandma in transcendental Virgin Mary blue!” But no. No, nothing that complex or potentially interesting from a feminist perspective.

It was, in fact, neither of these. The werewolf part of the plot – and I have no idea why I’m being so careful not to spoil it for you – chose the most boring, incidental and lazy option that it could possibly find, and didn’t even bother meshing it into the love-triangle schtick. It was Scotch-taped on like an afterthought, as if just to get a bit of mileage out of the “STAY AWAY FROM ME I AM BAD FOR YOU” unattainable-boy routine that made bloody Twilight so popular.

And after all that, there was only one rampage! It was a good rampage, however, because there was lots of the werewolf smashing stuff, biting people’s arms off and leaping across rooftops – but there was no blood. In fact, this was the most bloodless werewolf film I have ever seen. It was about as horrific and monstrous as a Mr Men book. I felt betrayed. But more than betrayal, I felt pity. Perhaps they didn’t know how to make fake blood? I considered writing to the director and sending her my tried-and-tested recipe for realistic fake blood, but then realised that this might encourage her to make more films and no-one needs that.

Pretty werewolf, though, if a bit plasticine-y. And there was Gary Oldman being a fiendish, villainous priest, and that’s definitely something I can get behind in an extremely visceral sense.

The artist would like to apologise for the lack of illustrations accompanying this review. The reasons for this are twofold: firstly, he is going on holiday tomorrow morning. Secondly, he doesn’t think Miranda would ever forgive him for just filling an entire article with werewolves doing random things, like ironing.

YOU SHOULD SEE THIS FILM BECAUSE:

• It has a nice werewolf in
• Gary Oldman is on Level 5 Ham and god help me but I’d do him lopsided
• The soundtrack is pretty lush

YOU SHOULD NOT SEE THIS FILM BECAUSE:

• You could make a better, more engaging story with a set of MegaBlocks dragons
• Angela Carter already did the Red Riding Hood theme a thousand times better with The Company Of Wolves
• It makes Twilight look like a seminal feminist masterpiece
• Watch Dog Soldiers instead

Right! That’s it for us until after Easter and the bloody Royal Wedding. We’re taking a quick holiday breather, but we’ll be back after the Bank Holidays, following on from this review, with a week of fairytale-themed posts! See you on the other side…