Diary: (1) Marina Warner on “The Books That Made Me”
Book Post Special
As part of the project, “Folkore Reimagined,” the British Academy asked Marina Warner to join their “Books That Made Me” series by selecting some books that have shaped her life and work and talking about them with broadcaster Ritula Shah. This post is adapted from their conversation.
I loved fairy tales as a little girl. My father was a bookseller, so I had extraordinary access to books, and in fact he was very indulgent father, so whenever my sister and I expressed an interest in anything, if we noticed a caterpillar, we would have a book about caterpillars come back from the shop the next day. So I was very spoiled in that way. Also there was absolutely no censorship, so I read my way through my grandparents’ library, which was full of derring-do and I’m afraid the most awful sort of imperial adventure stories, C. S. Forester, G. A. Henty, etc. I do think one has to remember that we’re also able to resist books—we can be made by them but we can also be in command of them to some extent. It’s quite important; I don’t think we should censor reading too much for children. I think we should let them make up their minds. I still have a great love of Kipling, for example, who is much criticized ideologically now. I was recently rereading the Just So Stories which of course are animal fables, a very long tradition in folklore, one of the most ancient, going back in India to the Panchatantra, which is full of these tales of animals passing down wisdom, which Kipling adapted with such imagination and vitality and humor.
Fairy tales stayed with me in a sort of guilty-secret way—I knew that they were considered feminine, in fact not even feminine, they were considered girly, there hung around them a sort of miasma of suspicion, as if they were like pink dolls. I was of course a child before Barbie, I was spared Barbie, but there was a kind of feeling that fairy tales were in that genre. And then Angela Carter came along and she really released my generation from this sense of shame, so we can now love these stories. When she first broke into our imaginations with The Bloody Chamber she was a feminist, and it was a very feminist book, because she uncovered the latent erotic content and the kind of subversive and eerie quality of fairy tales. Then, the same year, she published her essay on desire, The Sadeian Woman, a very powerful essay, a very polemical, furious piece, and she became controversial for appearing to be sort of pro-pornography, considering pornography as revelatory of the transactional nature of marriage. The book came out of a period when she was very involved in French culture and surrealism, and surrealism was very interested in the sort of revolutionary power of violence, de Sade was one of their heroes. It’s a difficult essay now and also created difficulties for her during her lifetime. I’ve always stood up for her. I don’t think she’s colluding at all. I think she’s definitely on the side of the angels. She saw the difficulties herself: later she changed and a kind of Mother Goose figure takes over, the garrulous narrator in Nights at the Circus for example. She also put together a collection that was published originally as the Virago Book of Fairy Tales. I think it was two volumes originally but now it’s in one, called Angela Carter’s Book of Fairy Tales. It’s a very interesting collection because she selected without rewriting the stories and she shows a lot of the positive sides of this kind of material, the strength of girls and so on.
