Review: April Bernard on Angela Carter
Detail: Cover image by James Marsh for Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber
Revisiting the writing of this old friend—I mean literarily, but not literally because alas I never met Angela Carter—I am struck by how wildly various this wild writer can be. And also by how close she comes, in her best work, to the very edge of what the reader can bear; and how when she goes over that edge the results are a disaster.
In this way, reading her work in the exemplary volume Everyman Library has recently collected is indeed like having an old friend come to stay: the heady, hilarious conversations over dinner; the long, contemplative walks where the world is sorted out; the late-night crying jags of self-pity, recrimination, and prompts to “get some help”; the relief that floods the sad hug at parting.
Carter’s fiction made a difference in the lives of many of us for her bold rewriting of classic fairy tales in The Bloody Chamber, published in 1979 and reprinted in full in this volume. This was by no means her first work—she had already published novels, stories, and journalism for some years—but it was what made her an international writing sensation. Simultaneously an aesthetic and political earthquake, these stories seemed to announce something wholly new in women’s writing. Other writers (Sexton, Plath, and Rich in poetry, Gilbert & Gubar in criticism) had interrogated the masculine presumptions of our cultural treasure-chest; but Carter consistently refused to accept the bad news of female subjugation. Instead, she rewrote the stories—Bluebeard, Little Red Riding Hood, Beauty & the Beast—with the female characters finding a way to be in charge, bent on sexual and material fulfillment, with a serving of revenge on the side.
