Angela Carter's Book Of Fairy Tales

by Angela Carter

  The next morning, the binbai picked out of the ashes a few of her daughter’s bones that had not been consumed by the fire. She dug a hole in the ground and buried them, holding back her tears.

  Afterwards, she declared, ‘My elder daughter! This is all because of your greed!’ With these words, she went off into the dense jungle, and deep into the mountains, to look for her second daughter and her son-in-law, the king of the snakes.

  SPREADING THE FINGERS

  (SURINAMESE)

  n the early times Ba Yau was a plantation overseer. He had two wives in the city. But as he found provisions on the plantation, he brought them to his wives. But when he brought things, then he said to them, ‘When you eat, you must spread your fingers.’ But when he said this, the first one did not understand very well what that meant to say. He told the second wife the same thing, and that one understood. What he meant was that when he brought them things, they were not to eat them alone, they were to give others half.

  Now the one who did not understand what that said, in the afternoon when she cooked, she ate. Then she went outside, and spread her fingers, and said, ‘Ba Yau said when I eat I must spread my fingers.’ Ba Yau brought her much bacon and salt fish. She alone ate it. But when Ba Yau brought the things for the other one she shared half with other people, because she had understood what the proverb had said.

  Not long afterwards Ba Yau died. But when Ba Yau was dead, nobody brought anything to the wife who had spread her fingers for the air. She sat alone. But to the other one who had shared things with other people, many people brought things. One brought her a cow, one brought her sugar, one brought her coffee. So she received many things from others.

  Now one day, the one wife went to the other, and she said, ‘Yes, sister, ever since Ba Yau died, I have suffered hunger. No one brought me anything. But look, how is it that so many people have brought things to you?’

  Then the other one asked her, ‘Well, when Ba Yau had brought you things, what did you do with them?’

  She said, ‘I alone ate them.’

  Then the other one said again, ‘When Ba Yau said to you, “You must spread your fingers”, what did you do?’

  She said, ‘When I ate, I spread my fingers in the air.’

  The other one said, ‘So . . . Well then, the air must bring you things, because you spread your fingers for the air. As for myself, the same people to whom I gave things, bring me things in return.’

  The proverb, when you eat you must spread fingers, means, when you eat, you must eat with people, you must not keep all for yourself. Otherwise, when you have nothing, nobody else is going to give you, because you had not given people what was yours.

  AFTERWORD

  Italo Calvino, the Italian writer and fabulist and collector of fairy tales, believed strongly in the connection between fantasy and reality: ‘I am accustomed to consider literature a search for knowledge,’ he wrote. ‘Faced with [the] precarious existence of tribal life, the shaman responded by ridding his body of weight and flying to another world, another level of perception, where he could find the strength to change the face of reality.’1 Angela Carter would not have made the same wish with quite such a straight face, but her combination of fantasy and revolutionary longings corresponds to the flight of Calvino’s shaman. She possessed the enchanter’s lightness of mind and wit – it’s interesting that she explored, in her last two novels, images of winged women. Fevvers, her aërialiste heroine of Nights at the Circus, may have hatched like a bird, and in Wise Children, the twin Chance sisters play various fairies or feathered creatures, from their first foot on the stage as child stars to their dalliance in Hollywood for a spectacular extravaganza of A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

  Fairy tales also offered her a means of flying – of finding and telling an alternative story, of shifting something in the mind, just as so many fairy tale characters shift something in their shape. She wrote her own – the dazzling, erotic variations on Perrault’s Mother Goose Tales and other familiar stories. In The Bloody Chamber she lifted Beauty and Red Riding Hood and Bluebeard’s last wife out of the pastel nursery into the labyrinth of female desire.

  She had always read very widely in folklore from all over the world and found the stories collected here in sources ranging from Siberia to Suriname. There are few fairies, in the sense of sprites, but the stories move in fairyland – not the prettified, kitschified, Victorians’ elfland – but the darker, dream realm of spirits and tricks, magical, talking animals, riddles and spells. In ‘The Twelve Wild Ducks’, the heroine vows not to speak or to laugh or to cry until she has rescued her brothers from their enchanted animal forms. The issue of women’s speech, of women’s noise, of their/our clamour and laughter and weeping and shouting and hooting runs through all Angela Carter’s writings, and informed her love of the folk tale. In The Magic Toyshop the lovely Aunt Margaret cannot speak because she is strangled by the silver torque which the malign puppet-master her husband has made her as a bridal gift. Folklore, by contrast, speaks, and speaks volumes about women’s experience; women are often the storytellers, as in one of the dashingly comic and highly Carteresque tales in this collection (‘Reason to Beat Your Wife’).

  Angela Carter’s partisan feeling for women, which burns in all her work, never led her to any conventional form of feminism; but she continues here one of her original and effective strategies, snatching out of the jaws of misogyny itself ‘useful stories’ for women. Her essay The Sadeian Woman (1979) found in Sade a liberating teacher of the male–female status quo and made him illuminate the far reaches of women’s polymorphous desires; here she turns topsy-turvy some cautionary folk tales and shakes out the fear and dislike of women they once expressed to create a new set of values, about strong, outspoken, zestful, sexual women who can’t be kept down (see ‘The Old Woman Against the Stream’; ‘The Letter Trick’). In Wise Children she created a heroine, Dora Chance, who’s a showgirl, a soubrette, a vaudeville dancer, one of the low, the despised, the invisible poor, an old woman who was illegitimate and never married (born the wrong side of the blanket, the wrong side of the tracks), and each of these stigmas is taken up with exuberant relish and scattered in the air like so much wedding confetti.

  The last story here, ‘Spreading the Fingers’, a tough morality tale from Suriname about sharing what one has been given with others, also discloses the high value Angela Carter placed on generosity. She gave herself – her ideas, her wit, her incisive, no-bullshit mind – with open but never sentimental prodigality. One of her favourite fairy tales here was a Russian riddle story ‘The Wise Little Girl’, in which the tsar asks her heroine for the impossible, and she delivers it without batting an eyelid. Angela liked it because it was as satisfying as ‘The Emperor’s New Clothes’, but ‘no one was humiliated and everybody gets the prizes’. The story comes in the section called ‘Clever Women, Resourceful Girls and Desperate Stratagems’, and its heroine is an essential Carter figure, never abashed, nothing daunted, sharp-eared as a vixen and possessed of dry good sense. It is entirely characteristic of Angela’s spirit that she should delight in the tsar’s confounding, and yet not want him to be humiliated.

  She did not have the strength, before she died, to write the Introduction she had planned to The Second Virago Book of Fairytales, which makes up the latter part of this volume. She did, however, leave four cryptic notes among her papers:

  ‘every real story contains something useful’, says Walter Benjamin

  the unperplexedness of the story

  “No one dies so poor that he does not leave something behind,” said Pascal.

  fairy tales – cunning and high spirits’.

  Fragmentary as they are, these phrases convey the Carter philosophy. She was scathing about the contempt the ‘educated’ can show, when two-thirds of the literature of the world – perhaps more – has been created by the illiterate. She liked the solid common sense of folk tales, the straightforward aims of their protagonists, the simple mor
al distinctions, and the wily stratagems they suggest. They are tales of the underdog, about cunning and high spirits winning through in the end, they are practical, and they are not high-flown. For a fantasist with wings, Angela kept her eyes on the ground, with reality firmly in her sights. She once remarked, ‘A fairy tale is a story where one king goes to another king to borrow a cup of sugar.’

  Feminist critics of the genre – especially in the 1970s – jibbed at the socially conventional ‘happy endings’ of so many stories (for example, ‘When she grew up he married her and she became the tsar-ina’). But Angela knew about satisfaction and pleasure; and at the same time she believed that the goal of fairy tales was not ‘a conservative one, but a utopian one, indeed a form of heroic optimism – as if to say: One day, we might be happy, even if it won’t last.’ Her own heroic optimism never failed her – like the spirited heroine of one of her tales, she was resourceful and brave and even funny during the illness which brought about her death. Few writers possess the best qualities of their work; she did, in spades.

  Her imagination was dazzling, and through her daring, vertiginous plots, her precise yet wild imagery, her gallery of wonderful bad-good girls, beasts, rogues and other creatures, she causes readers to hold their breath as a mood of heroic optimism forms against the odds. She had the true writer’s gift of remaking the world for her readers.

  She was a wise child herself, with a mobile face, a mouth which sometimes pursed with irony, and, behind the glasses, a wryness, at times a twinkle, at times a certain dreaminess; with her long, silvery hair and ethereal delivery, she had something of the Faerie Queene about her, except that she was never wispy or fey. And though the narcissism of youth was one of the great themes in her early fiction, she was herself exceptionally unnarcissistic. Her voice was soft, with a storyteller’s confidingness, and lively with humour; she spoke with a certain syncopation, as she stopped to think – her thoughts made her the most exhilarating companion, a wonderful talker, who wore her learning and wide reading with lightness, who could express a mischievous insight or a tough judgment with scalpel precision and produce new ideas by the dozen without effort, weaving allusion, quotation, parody and original invention, in a way that echoed her prose style. ‘I’ve got a theory that . . .’ she would say, self-deprecatorily, and then would follow something that no one else had thought of, some sally, some rich paradox that would encapsulate a trend, a moment. She could be Wildean in her quickness and the glancing drollery of her wit. And then she would pass on, sometimes leaving her listeners astonished and stumbling.

  Angela Carter was born in May 1940, the daughter of Hugh Stalker, a journalist for the Press Association, who was a Highlander by birth, had served the whole term of the First World War, and had come south to Balham to work. He used to take her to the cinema, to the Tooting Granada, where the glamour of the building (Alhambra-style) and of the movie stars (Jean Simmons in The Blue Lagoon) made an impression which lasted – Angela has written some of the most gaudy, stylish, sexy passages about seduction and female beauty on record, and ‘snappy’ and ‘glamorous’ are key words of pleasure and praise in her vocabulary. Her mother was from South Yorkshire, on her own mother’s side; this grandmother was tremendously important to her: ‘every word and gesture of hers displayed a natural dominance, a native savagery, and I am very grateful for all that, now, though the core of steel was a bit inconvenient when I was looking for boyfriends in the South’. Angela’s mother was a scholarship girl, and ‘liked things to be nice’; she worked as a cashier in Selfridges in the 1920s, and had passed exams and wanted the same for her daughter. Angela went to Streatham Grammar School, and for a time entertained a fancy of becoming an Egyptologist, but left school to take up an apprenticeship on the Croydon Advertiser arranged by her father.

  As a reporter on the news desk, she had trouble with her imagination (she used to like the Russian storyteller’s formula, ‘The story is over, I can’t lie any more’) and switched to writing a record column as well as features. She got married for the first time when she was twenty-one, to a chemistry teacher at Bristol technical college, and began studying English at Bristol University in the same year, choosing to concentrate on medieval literature, which was then definitely uncanonical. Its forms – from allegory to tales – as well as its heterogeneity of tone – from bawdy to romance – can be found everywhere in her own œuvre; Chaucer and Boccaccio remained among her favourite writers. She also remembered those days, in a recent interview with her great friend Susannah Clapp, for the talking in cafés ‘to situationists and anarchists . . . It was the Sixties . . . I was very very unhappy but I was perfectly happy at the same time.’

  During this period, she first began developing her interest in folklore, discovering with her husband the folk and jazz music scenes of the 1960s. (At a more recent, staid, meeting of the Folklore Society, she fondly recalled those countercultural days when a member would attend with a pet raven on one shoulder.) She began writing fiction: in her twenties she published four novels (Shadow Dance, 1966; The Magic Toyshop, 1967; Several Perceptions, 1968; Heroes and Villains, 1969; as well as a story for children, Miss Z, the Dark Young Lady, 1970). She was heaped with praise and prizes; one of them – the Somerset Maugham – stipulated travel, and she obeyed, using the money to run away from her husband (‘I think Maugham would have approved’). She chose Japan, because she revered the films of Kurosawa.

  Japan marks an important transition; she stayed for two years, from 1971. Her fiction till then, including the ferocious, taut elegy Love (1971; revised 1987), showed her baroque powers of invention, and her fearless confrontation of erotic violence, arising from female as well as male sexuality: she marked out her territory early, and men and women clash on it, often bloodily, and the humour is mostly of the gallows variety. From the beginning, her prose was magnificently rich, intoxicated with words – a vivid and sensual lexicon of bodily attributes, minerals, flora and fauna – and she dealt in strangeness. But Japan gave her a way of looking at her own culture which intensified her capacity to conjure strangeness out of the familiar. She also deepened her contact with the Surrealist movement at this time, through French exiles from les évènements of 1968 who had fetched up in Japan.

  Two novels arose from her time in Japan, though they do not deal with Japan directly: The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman (1972) and The Passion of New Eve (1977), in which contemporary conflicts are transmuted into bizarre, multiple, picaresque allegories. Though she never won the bestseller fortunes of some of her contemporaries (she would reflect ruefully that it was still a Boys’ Club out there, and did not really mind much), and was never selected for one of the major prizes, she enjoyed greater international esteem: her name tells from Denmark to Australia, and she was repeatedly invited to teach – accepting invitations from Sheffield (1976–8), Brown University, Providence (1980–1), the University of Adelaide (1984), and the University of East Anglia (1984–7). She helped change the course of postwar writing in English – her influence reaches from Salman Rushdie to Jeanette Winterson to American fabulists like Robert Coover.

  Distance from England helped her lay bare women’s collusion with their own subjection. In a collection of her criticism, Expletives Deleted, she remembers, ‘I spent a good many years being told what I ought to think, and how I ought to behave . . . because I was a woman . . . but then I stopped listening to them [men] and . . . I started answering back.’2 On her return from Japan, she examined in her wonderfully pungent articles (collected as Nothing Sacred in 1982) various sacred cows as well as the style of the times (from scarlet lipstick to stockings in D.H. Lawrence). Angela was never someone to offer an easy answer, and in her frankness she was important to the feminist movement: she liked to quote, semi-ironically, ‘Dirty Work – but someone has to do it’ when talking about facing hard truths, and she would say of someone, in a spirit of approval, ‘S/He doesn’t temper the wind to the new-shorn lamb.’ Her publisher and friend Carmen Callil p
ublished her at Virago and her presence there since the start of the house helped establish a woman’s voice in literature as special, as parti pris, as a crucial instrument in the forging of an identity for post-imperial, hypocritical, fossilized Britain. For in spite of her keen-eyed, even cynical grasp of reality, Angela Carter always believed in change: she would refer to her ‘naive leftie-ism’, but she never let go of it.

  The American critic Susan Suleiman has celebrated Angela Carter’s fiction as truly breaking new ground for women by occupying the male voice of narrative authority and at the same time impersonating it to the point of parody, so that the rules are changed and the dreams become unruly, transformed, open to ‘the multiplication of narrative possibilities’, themselves a promise of a possibly different future; the novels also ‘expand our notions of what it is possible to dream in the domain of sexuality, criticizing all dreams that are too narrow’.3 Angela’s favourite icon of the feminine was Lulu, in Wedekind’s play, and her favourite star was Louise Brooks who played her in Pandora’s Box; Louise/Lulu was hardly someone who rejected traditional femaleness, but rather took it to such extremes that its nature was transformed. ‘Lulu’s character is very attractive to me,’ she would say drily, and she borrowed from it to create her wanton, rumbustious and feisty heroines of the boards in Wise Children. Lulu never ingratiated herself, never sought fame, or fortune, and suffered neither guilt nor remorse. According to Angela, ‘her particular quality is, she makes being polymorphously perverse look like the only way to be’. If she had had a daughter, she once said, she would have called her Lulu.

  She liked to refer to her opinions as ‘classic GLC’ but in spite of these demurrals she was an original and committed political thinker too. Wise Children (1989) was born out of her democratic and socialist utopianism, her affirmation of ‘low’ culture, of the rude health of popular language and humour as a long-lasting, effective means of survival: her Shakespeare (the novel contains almost all his characters and their plots in one form or another) does not compose for the elite, but roots his imagination springing out of folklore, with energy and know-how.