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! ;)

Begin the Béguinage

In the late middle ages (and please note that I am by no means suggesting the late middle ages were a good time to be in, I’m just covering some things that would become unavailable in later centuries) there were several avenues by which a woman might live independently. Béguinages offered something akin to the male guild systems, a community by which women might live collectively and pursue a trade, functioning much like convents but without the whole “retiring from the world to pursue a life of spirituality” element.

Many small industries were dominated by female crafters at the time, particularly the production of votive candles, and the brewing of beer (which, prior to increases in production scales in the 1500s was mostly a home industry).

Lastly, at the opposite end of the scale to the beguinages, there was the sex industry. (This is not to suggest that independent woman meant prostitute in the late middle ages, as some people often imply. See above for counter-examples.) Disclaimers aside, municipally sanctioned prostitution was both common and acceptable in the latter part of the 15th century, and provided one route to an independent life.

…the courtesan was not a phenomenon on the margin of society, but one of its essential components… and constituted an important stage in the diversification of social roles and of labour.

-Achillo Olivieri, Eroticism and Social Groups in Sixteenth-Century Venice

By the mid-16th century, much of this had changed. Economic conditions had all but eradicated the béguinage; the production of goods had switched to a male-dominated large scale industry; the rise of Protestantism had seen the closure of many convents; and socially acceptable sex-work was done away with by changing religious mores and the increasing prevalence of syphilis (the “French evil”) and other STDs as public health threats from 1493 onwards. The Renaissance may have improved overall quality of life, but in many ways it proved a step backwards for the opportunities of Western European women.

Meanwhile, in the world of fiction…

So, that’s how society changed; what do we see happening in fiction over the same time period? In pre-16th century work we find heroines taking on roles the Grimms would later depict as “bad for a girl but bold for a boy”. We see, in an early Catalan variant of The Waters of Life, an adventurous princess succeeding where here brothers have failed, winning out through bravery and compassion to restore her home. In the fabliaux of France and Italy we see female characters taking the lead in stories that range from the bawdy to the obscene, which reflect the assumption that of course women will sometimes take the initiative.
Even moving away from the fantastic and magical tales we find similar characterisations in more serious works such as that of Madonna Lisetta in Boccaccio’s Decameron.

By the mid-16th century the characters were beginning to take the forms that would be most recognisable to most modern readers. Here we see the shift from the active, protagonistic female character to the passive, receptive object to whom fairy tales happen.

Straparola’s magic tales, dating to 1553, deliver a mixed message on sex and gender. The older tales in the collection stay fairly true to their roots, but the newer ones show female characters who must fear men, who must fear the consequences of associating with them. No longer do they take the lead, instead they are there to be won, as with the story of three brothers who rescue a princess and fall to arguing over who should wed her. She doesn’t get a say in the matter.

If Straparola’s collection shows the transition, Giambattista Basile’s Pentamerone (1636) gives us the conclusion. By this point all the stories reflect the new order of things. Female characters are there now almost entirely to receive the actions of the male leads, without much choice in things themselves. A large portion of Basile’s tales revolve around unwanted and involuntary pregnancies. This tone continues all the way through to at least the early 19th century, and provides the link to the next point of this post.

And now, speculation!

Right, this next bit is somewhat more speculative: There is some research suggesting that up until around the start of the 16th century women had a good deal of control over their fertility (check the further reading section at the end here for more details). Between 1500 and 1700 this ability substantially declined, leaving women far more susceptible to the consequences of sex. We can suggest a few reasons for this decline: Firstly, there was the publication of the Malleus Maleficarum in 1487, which branded midwifes who provided abortifacients as witches, and lead to witch-hunt panics through Western Europe. At the same time there was the rising tension caused by the Protestant Reformation, which saw increased conflict between Reformers and Counter-Reformers, and lead to both the Protestant and Catholic churches being increasingly zealous in order to demonstrate their own faithfulness.

There are arguments (see particularly Ruth Bottigheimer’s essay Fertility Control and the Modern European Fairy-Tale Heroine available in this anthology) that the change in the role of the fictional woman and the change in real life control over fertility are utterly bound together. The real dangers of sex became the over-arching dangers of the fairy-tale plot, the imprisonment in towers, the kidnappings, captivity, and general disempowerment. Thus the tales of the Grimms, in which “men act, women are acted upon.”

…old concepts took on a new force and came to dominate… Women in tale collections no longer survived by their wits… Instead, their bodies became vehicles of “honour” and “dishonour”.
– Ruth Bottigheimer

So yes, the overall point here is that considering the representations of gender in fairy tales is not quite so simple as just going “Cor, Disney/Grimm/Perrault were a bit crap at gender, eh?” There are myriad other factors that go into the formation of a story, as hopefully this (incredibly brief) overview of some has demonstrated.

Other stuff on vaguely related notes that’s worth reading:

• John Riddle’s Eve’s Herbs: A History of Contraception and Abortion in the West
• Vladimir Propp’s Morphology of the Folktale
• Patricia Hannon’s Fabulous Identities: Women’s Fairytales in Seventeenth Century France