"In an age where you were supposed to be writing plainsong, she wrote baroque. So anyone who might have said to her, why don’t you write a novel about London slums, a la Zola, she would have just said no, that’s not what I do. And guess what, they still don’t know what to call it. Margaret Atwood observes that Carter suffered for not writing realism: “She was writing a different kind of thing that people didn’t know what to call. Anyone who reads that now would see the application of that story to some of the monsters who have been recently outed.” “The title story of The Bloody Chamber is about Bluebeard, a real monstrous individual if ever there was one. She knew very well what men were capable of. So the monstrosity of men was always the subject for her. Salman Rushdie compares the monstrous men of her fairy tales to modern-day allegations against sexual predators: “Angela was very interested in ogres. These fairy tales have lasted so long because they’re talking to us at a psychological level.” Winterson says: “This isn’t about things that women and children do on a wet afternoon, this is about the deepest desires and appetites, the springs of human nature. In The Company of Wolves the heroine seduces the wolf that ate her grandmother before he can eat her. In The Erl-King, when the heroine learns the birds in the King’s cages used to be girls, she strangles him and sets the birds free.Ĭarter also embraced the erotic element of fairy tales, using them to explore female sexuality. In The Bloody Chamber (based on the story of Bluebeard) the heroine’s mother shoots the murderous Marquis and they inherit his fortune. Take the components that were familiar and make them into something that gave women back the power.”Ĭarter put women at the centre of the stories and gave them agency over their fate.
Jeanette Winterson says: “What Angela Carter did with fairy tales was to take the stories that we all know like Bluebeard or Beauty and the Beast and turn them inside out. Angela Carter’s approach was completely different. Over time they have become sanitised to suit the tastes of younger audiences or adapted by film companies into sweeter stories with a leading princess, a strong hero and a ‘happily-ever-after’ ending.
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