She found happiness with Mark Pearce, who was training to become a primary schoolteacher when she became ill. She often spoke of the radiance of children, their unutterable beauty and their love; their son Alexander was born in 1983.
Sometimes, in the case of a great writer, it is easy to lose sight of the pleasure they give, as critics search for meaning and value, influence and importance; Angela Carter loved cinema and vaudeville and songs and the circus, and she herself could entertain like no other. She included a story from Kenya in this collection about a sultana who is withering away while a poor man’s wife is kept happy because her husband feeds her ‘meat of the tongue’ – stories, jokes, ballads. These are what make women thrive, the story says; they are also what Angela Carter gave so generously to make others thrive. Wise Children ends with the words, ‘What a joy it is to dance and sing!’ That she should not have thrived herself is sad beyond words.
Since her death, tributes have filled the papers and the airwaves. She would have been astonished by the attention, and pleased. It did not come to her in her lifetime, not with such wholeheartedness. It’s partly a tribute to her potency that while she was alive people felt discomfited by her, that her wit and witchiness and subversiveness made her hard to handle, like some wonderful beast of the kind she enjoyed in fairy tales. Her friends were lucky knowing her, and her readers too. We have been left a feast and she laid it out with ‘spread fingers’ for us to share.
Marina Warner
1992
1. Italo Calvino, Six Memos for the Next Millennium, trans. William Weaver (London, 1992), p. 26.
2. Angela Carter, Expletives Deleted (London, 1992), p. 5.
3. Susan Rubin Suleiman, Subversive Intent: Gender, Politics and the Avant-Garde (Harvard, 1990), pp. 136–40.
This introduction contains material from Marina Warner’s obituary of Angela Carter which appeared in the Independent, 18 February 1992.
NOTES ON PARTS 1 – 7
These notes are not so much scholarly as idiosyncratic. I have included my sources and what I could find out about the various sources; sometimes it wasn’t much, sometimes a lot. Sometimes the stories were self-explanatory and didn’t need any notes. Sometimes they opened up into other stories, sometimes they seemed complete in themselves.
1. Sermerssuaq
‘Told as a joke at a birthday party, Innuit Point, Northwest Territories.’ Arctic Canada. A Kayak Full of Ghosts, Innuit tales ‘Gathered and Retold’ by Lawrence Millman (California, 1987), p. 140.
PART ONE: BRAVE, BOLD AND WILFUL
2. The Search for Luck
This text comes from Pontos, in eastern Greece, reprinted from Modern Greek Folktales, chosen and translated by R.M. Dawkins (Oxford, 1953), p. 459. The story is widely told throughout Greece and Bulgaria, says Dawkins, although usually it is a man who goes off to find his luck, or fate – or, rather, who goes off in search of the reason for his bad luck or miserable fate.
3. Mr Fox
‘The wind blew high, my heart did ache
To see the hole the fox did make,’
says the girl in the version of ‘Mr Fox’ told to Vance Randolph in the Ozark mountains in Arkansas in the early 1940s.
‘After that, poor Elsie wouldn’t go with nobody, because she figured men were all son-of-a-bitches. And so she never did get married at all, but just stayed around with the kinfolks. They was glad to have her, of course.’
The Arkansas storytelling manner is relaxed, easy, confidential; this storyteller is attempting to massage you into the suspension of disbelief. The fairy tale is changing, almost imperceptibly, into the tall tale, the outrageous lie imparted with an utterly straight face for the pure pleasure of it.
But this story was already ancient when the first English settlers took their invisible cargo of stories and songs across the Atlantic in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; Benedick, in Much Ado About Nothing, refers to Mr Fox’s hypocritical denial: ‘Like the old tale my Lord, “it is not so, nor ’twas not so, but, indeed, God forbid it should be so” (Act. 1, sc. i). This Mr Fox was originally contributed to Malone’s variorum edition of Shakespeare in 1821 to elucidate that very speech, which probably accounts for the text’s ‘literary’ flavour.
Cunning, greed and cowardice make the fox’s name a universal byword in popular lore, although in China and Japan they believe that foxes can take the form of beautiful women (cf. current US slang use of ‘fox’ and ‘vixen’ to denote an attractive woman). The fox’s incarnation as psychopathic murderer in this story and its relations gives an added frisson to veterans of British childhoods who recall the ‘foxy gentleman’ who wanted to eat Jemima Puddleduck. (Joseph Jacobs, English Fairy Tales [London, 1895].)
4. Kakuarshuk
Collected from Severin Lunge, Rittenback, West Greenland (Millman, p. 47).
5. The Promise
Reprinted from a manuscript collection of ancient stories illustrating the finer points of legal practice in old Burma: Maung Htin Aung, Burmese Law Tales (Oxford, 1962), p. 9.
6. Kate Crackernuts
Joseph Jacobs printed this in English Fairy Tales, taking it from an edition of Folk-Lore, September 1890, contributed by Andrew Lang, of Red, Blue, Green, Violet, etc., Fairy Book fame. ‘It is very corrupt,’ complained Jacobs, ‘both girls being called Kate, and I have had largely to rewrite.’
This is an authentic fairy tale. Those interested in the origin of the fairies may look up the appropriate reference in Katharine Briggs’s A Dictionary of Fairies [1976]. Are they spirits of the dead or fallen angels – or, as J.F. Campbell (Popular Tales of the West Highlands, edited and translated by J.F. Campbell [London, 1890]) thought, race memories of the Picts, the swarthy and diminutive Stone Age inhabitants of North Britain? Be that as it may, the fairy life cycle closely mimics the human one, with births (that fairy baby!), marriages and deaths. The poet William Blake claimed to have seen a fairy funeral. These fairies do not have spangled wings; traditionally, they ride through the air on ragwort stems, or twigs, astride like witches on broomsticks, levitating themselves by means of magic passwords. John Aubrey (Miscellanies) heard one, once: ‘Horse and hattock.’ These beings, of a brusque and unromantic nature, are, literally, earthy – they prefer to live inside hills, or earthen mounds, and are rarely benign.
7. The Fisher-Girl and the Crab
A story from Chitrakot, Bastar State, from the Kuruk, one of the tribal peoples of middle India: Verrier Elwin, Folk-Tales of Mahakoshal (Oxford, 1944), p. 134.
‘The crab is generally regarded as monogamous and a model of domestic fidelity,’ assures Elwin. ‘The affection and care shown by the male crab when the female is moulting has been noted in the case of swimming crabs, as also the fact that among burrowing crabs a burrow is occupied by only one male and one female.’
PART TWO: CLEVER WOMEN, RESOURCEFUL GIRLS AND DESPERATE STRATAGEMS
1. Maol a Chliobain
This is a collation, from Western Scotland – mainly from the Gaelic of Ann McGilbray, Islay – translated by J.F. Campbell, with additional passages interpolated from versions by Flora Maclntyre, of Islay, and by an unnamed young girl, ‘nursemaid to Mr Robertson, Chamberlain of Argyll’, at Inverary. This girl’s version ended with the drowning of the giant. ‘“And what became of Maol a Chliobain?” asked Campbell. “Did she marry the farmer’s youngest son?” “Oh, no; she did not marry at all.”’
This is a variant of ‘Hop O’ My Thumb’, with a full-sized heroine instead of a pint-sized hero (Campbell, vol. 1, p. 259).
2. The Wise Little Girl
From the collection made by Aleksandr Nikolayevich Afanas’ev (1826–71), the Russian counterpart of the Grimms, who published his collection from 1866 onwards. Federal Russia was an extraordinarily rich source of oral literature at this time, owing to widespread illiteracy among the rural poor. As late as the close of the eighteenth century, Russian newspapers still carried advertisements from blind men applying for work in the homes of the gent
ry as tellers of tales, recalling how, two hundred years before, three blind ancients had followed one another in rotation at the bedside of Ivan the Terrible, telling the insomniac monarch fairy tales until at last he managed to sleep.
This story is a battle of wits in three rounds. There is something purely satisfactory about the spectacle of the child taking on the judge, and winning; the story is as satisfying as Hans Andersen’s ‘The Emperor’s New Clothes’, but better, because nobody is humiliated and everybody gets prizes. This is my favourite of all the stories in this book.
But there is more to it than meets the eye. The anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss says that a close relationship exists between riddles and incest because a riddle unites two irreconcilable terms and incest unites two irreconcilable people.
Robert Graves, in his half-crazed but well-annotated study of pagan anthropology The White Goddess, quotes the following story from Saxo Grammaticus’s late-twelfth-century History of Denmark:
Aslog, the last of the Volsungs, Brynhild’s daughter by Sigurd, was living on a farm at Spangerejd in Norway, disguised as a sooty-faced kitchenmaid . . . Even so, her beauty made such an impression on the followers of the hero Ragnar Lodbrog that he thought of marrying her, and as a test of her worthiness told her to come to him neither on foot nor riding, neither dressed nor naked, neither fasting nor feasting, neither attended nor alone. She arrived on goatback, one foot trailing on the ground, clothed only in her hair and a fishing-net, holding an onion to her lips, a hound by her side.
(The White Goddess, p. 401)
Graves also describes a miserere seat in Coventry Cathedral (presumably the building destroyed in the Second World War), which the guidebook he refers to calls ‘a figure emblematic of lechery’; it is ‘a long-haired woman wrapped in a net, riding sideways on a goat and preceded by a hare’.
Which reminds me that Louise Brooks, the great silent-movie actress, proposed to title her tell-all autobiography ‘Naked on My Goat’, a quotation from Goethe’s Faust, the Walpurgisnacht scene, where the young witch says: ‘Naked on my goat, I display my fine young body.’ (‘You’ll rot,’ the old witch tells her.)
The main function of riddles is to show us how a logical structure can be made up entirely of words.
3. Blubber Boy
Collected throughout the Arctic and Greenland. Compare with the Armenian story ‘Nature’s Ways’ (p. 232) (Millman, p. 100).
4. The Girl Who Stayed in the Fork of a Tree
This story comes from the Bena Mukini people, who inhabit what is now Zambia. (African Folktales and Sculpture, ed. Paul Radin [New York, 1952], p. 181.)
5. The Princess in the Suit of Leather
This Egyptian story comes from Arab Folktales, translated and edited from a variety of – mostly – written sources by Inea Bushnaq (New York, 1986), p. 193. Here is the ‘She Stoops to Conquer’ theme; princesses disguise themselves in all manner of ways – in donkey skins, in wooden barrels, even as boxes – and bedaub themselves with cinders, pitch, etc.
6. The Hare
Jan Knappert writes:
The Swahili lived at the crossroads of two worlds. An unknown number of African peoples have settled along the east coast of Africa . . . An equally unknown number of Oriental peoples, sailors and traders, with or without their families, have settled on the same coast, blown towards it from Arabia, Persia, India or Madagascar.
The result is a people combining African (Bantu) language with an Islamic culture, spread out along a thousand miles of coast between Mogadishu and Mozambique. Swahili storytellers believe that women are incorrigibly wicked, diabolically cunning and sexually insatiable; I hope this is true, for the sake of the women. (Jan Knappert, Myths and Legend of the Swahili, [London, 1970], p. 142.)
7. Mossycoat
The gypsy Cinderella. Collected from the gypsy – Taimie Boswell – at Oswaldwhistle, Northumberland, England, in 1915. Reprinted from Folktales of England, ed. Katharine M. Briggs and Ruth L. Tongue (London, 1965), p. 16.
‘It is the technique of gypsies and tinkers to go to the front door, and try to see the mistress of the house,’ say the editors of Folktales of England. ‘They have a rooted distrust of servants and underlings. In many versions of the tale, it is the young master who ill-treats the heroine and not the servants.
8. Vasilisa the Priest’s Daughter
Afanas’ev, p. 131.
9. The Pupil
Knappert, p. 142.
10. The Rich Farmer’s Wife
In the nineteenth century Norway, like many other European countries hitherto dominated by greater powers, began to seek a form of expression uniquely its own. Peter Christen Asbjørnsen and Jørgen Moe modelled their procedures on those of the Brothers Grimm and were moved by the same nationalistic impulse; their collection of tales was published in 1841. This translation was made by Helen and John Gade for the American-Scandinavian Foundation in 1924 (Norwegian Fairy Tales, p. 185).
11. Keep Your Secrets
From what is now Ghana, told by A.W. Cardinall, once district commissioner of the Gold Coast, in Tales Told in Togoland (Oxford, 1931), p. 213.
The witch duel, or duel of transformations, commemorated in the European children’s game ‘Scissors, paper, stone’, is a recurring phenomenon among supernatural beings. Compare the contest between the afreet and the princess in the tale of the Second Calendar in the Arabian Nights; the pursuit of the pygmy, Gwion, by the goddess, Kerridgwen, in the Welsh mythological cycle the Mabinogion; the Scots ballad ‘The Twa Magicians’: ‘Then she became a gay grey mare,/And stood in younder slack,/And he became a gilt saddle/And sat upon her back,’ etc. (English and Scottish Popular Ballads, ed. F.J. Child [Boston, 1882], vol. 1, no. 44.)
At her trial in 1662, Isobel Gowdie of Auldearne, Scotland, gave the witch formula for turning oneself into a hare: ‘I shall go into a hare/With sorrow and sighing and mickle care/And I shall go in the Devil’s name/Aye, till I come home again.’
This is the best of all ‘Mother knows best’ stories.
12. The Three Measures of Salt
Dawkins, p. 292; from the island of Naxos. ‘This story is a novel on a small scale,’ says Dawkins, and indeed it is the pure stuff of soap opera, with its misunderstandings, its lost children, its deserted wives, and its casual wealth – ‘in those days everyone was a king’.
13. The Resourceful Wife
Elwin, p. 314.
14. Aunt Kate’s Goomer-Dust
Collected in the Ozark mountains in Arkansas, USA, by Vance Randolph; included in The Devil’s Pretty Daughter and Other Ozark Folk Tales, collected by Vance Randolph with notes by Herbert Halpert (New York, 1955).
15. The Battle of the Birds
J.F. Campbell did not edit this story, so neither did I, although the interestingly self-mutilated heroine does not enter the picture until the second part of this discursive tale. It was told by John Mackenzie, in April 1859; Mackenzie lived near Inverary, on the estate of the Duke of Argyll. He had known the story from his youth, and ‘has been in the habit of repeating it to his friends on winter nights, as a pastime’. He was about sixty at that time and could read English, play the bagpipes, and had ‘a memory like Oliver and Boyd’s Almanac’. (Campbell, vol. 1, p. 25.)
16. Parsley-girl
Collected by Daniela Almansi, aged six, from her babysitter, in Cortona, near Arezzo, Tuscany, Italy, and contributed to the editor by Daniela’s mother, Claude Beguin. Claude Beguin adds the information that parsley is a popular abortifacient in Italy. A Dictionary of Superstitions, ed. Iona Opie and Moira Tatem (Oxford, 1989), contains two English recipes for this purpose, but also examples of the widespread belief that babies were found in the parsley bed.
17. Clever Gretel
Jacob Ludwig Grimm (1785–1863) and Wilhelm Carl Grimm (1786–1859) were instrumental in the creation of our idea of what a fairy tale is, transforming it from rustic entertainment to reading matter directed primarily, though not exclusively, at children, for both dida
ctic and romantic reasons – to instruct them in the German genius, in morality and justice, certainly, but also in wonder, terror and magic. The Grimms were scholars, grammarians, lexicographers, philologists, antiquarians, but also poets. Indeed, the poet Brentano had first suggested they collect fairy tales from oral sources.
The Grimms’ Kinder und Hausmärchen [Children and Household Tales], first published in 1812 and continually revised and, indeed, rewritten in an increasingly ‘literary’ manner until the final edition in 1857, is one of the key volumes to the sensibility of nineteenth-century Romanticism in Europe, and the stories remain indelibly marked on the imaginations of children who read them, helping to shape our consciousness of the world. But as well as the blood-spattered, mysterious, ferociously romantic, enigmatic stories that appealed to the poets in the souls of the Grimms, they could not forbear to publish such genial tales as this one, about sassy Gretel with her red-heeled shoes and her gourmandise, a direct reflection of middle-class fears of what the servants get up to down there in the kitchen.
From The Complete Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm, translated and with an introduction by Jack Zipes (New York, 1987), p. 75.
18. The Furburger
Those familiar with Chaucer or Boccaccio will recognize this story as a ‘merry tale’, or exercise in broad humour applied to human relations. The ‘merry tale’ is an area relatively unexplored by folklorists, although ancient in origin, ubiquitous in distribution, endless in variety, easy to remember, and flourishing today as bravely as ever, wherever two or three people of any gender are gathered in informal circumstances. The sexual joke is easily the most widespread form of folk tale in advanced, industrialized societies, and even when told among women it is often marked by a profound misogyny; it is the reservoir for a vast amount of sexual anxiety and surmise.
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