{"id":5327,"date":"2011-05-06T13:00:37","date_gmt":"2011-05-06T12:00:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.badreputation.org.uk\/?p=5327"},"modified":"2011-05-06T13:00:37","modified_gmt":"2011-05-06T12:00:37","slug":"fairy-tale-fest-fairy-tales-blood-and-the-oral-tradition","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/badreputation.org.uk\/2011\/05\/06\/fairy-tale-fest-fairy-tales-blood-and-the-oral-tradition\/","title":{"rendered":"Fairy Tale Fest: Fairy Tales, Blood, and the Oral Tradition"},"content":{"rendered":"

Guest post time again: regular reader Russell reminds us why Angela Carter should still be on your Essential Reading list, or if you’ve never read her, why you should start…<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

– Angela Carter, The Tiger\u2019s Bride<\/strong><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Fairy tales weren\u2019t 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<\/a>).<\/p>\n

\"Photo<\/a>Fortunately, it doesn\u2019t 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\u2019re still the stories we know, but not only has the blood and gore reappeared, they\u2019ve 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\u2019s 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<\/strong> to fables shrouded in mystery and played on a concept album.<\/p>\n

Through all of this, there\u2019s 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\u2019s The Bloody Chamber<\/strong>. As Carter herself asserted, the stories therein are not simply updated or \u201cadult\u201d 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<\/em> stories, those told in the oral tradition. From a linguistic or anthropological point of view, it\u2019s 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\u2019t been brought to a stop?<\/p>\n

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
\nRed 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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

As I mentioned above, the traditional versions of these stories are very often about staying \u201con the path\u201d, 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\u2019s 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\u2019s versions, the little girl leaves the path, and the rewards, while terrifying, are great. In The Company of Wolves<\/strong>, the wolf becomes an image of feral sexuality, with the adolescent Red Riding Hood sleeping with him at the end. In The Werewolf<\/strong>, 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<\/strong>, which merges a variant of the story with elements of Through The Looking Glass<\/strong>, 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.<\/p>\n

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 \u201csaviour male\u201d is replaced with a blind piano tuner who ultimately becomes the heroine\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

\"Photo<\/a>For Carter, the beasts are not terrifying, but liberating; in one of her takes on Beauty and the Beast, The Tiger\u2019s Bride<\/strong>, 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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

In many ways, these stories aren\u2019t for children. They\u2019re 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.<\/em> It\u2019s no longer worth staying on the path. It\u2019s time to explore the woods.
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\nNew to Carter? Other things to try: <\/strong><\/p>\n