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Angela Carter
2 classic books for the price of 1: Vintage Fear is a limited edition gift pack which consists of beautifully designed separate volumes of The Complete Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm and Angela Carter’s groundbreaking reworking of these stories, The Bloody Chamber . Vintage Fear is just one of ten Vintage Classic Twins to collect. Each twin consists of two books: a specially designed limited edition of one modern classic title and one established classic work. The books in each pair have been carefully selected to provide a thought-provoking combination. The Complete Fairy Tales : The…
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Angela Carter was born in 1940 and read English at Bristol University, before spending two years living in Japan. She lived and worked extensively in the United States and Australia. Her first novel, Shadow Dance , was published in 1965, followed by the Magic Toyshop in 1967, which went on to win the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize. She wrote a further four novels, together with three collections of Short Stories, two works of non-fiction and a volume of collected writings. Angela Carter died in 1992.
topAbout the Book
2 classic books for the price of 1: Vintage Fear is a limited edition gift pack which consists of beautifully designed separate volumes of The Complete Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm and Angela Carter’s groundbreaking reworking of these stories, The Bloody Chamber . Vintage Fear is just one of ten Vintage Classic Twins to collect. Each twin consists of two books: a specially designed limited edition of one modern classic title and one established classic work. The books in each pair have been carefully selected to provide a thought-provoking combination. The Complete Fairy Tales : The folk tales collected by the Grimm brothers created an astonishingly influential imaginative world loved by millions of readers from their childhoods. However, it is also a world where a woman serves her stepson up in a stew and an evil queen dances to death in a pair of burning shoes. Violent, funny, wise and beautiful, these stories have intrigued children, adults, scholars, psychologists and artists for centuries. This is the only complete edition of the tales available featuring the 279 stories in an acclaimed, modern, unexpurgated translation. The Bloody Chamber : From familiar fairy tales and legends Red Riding Hood, Bluebeard, Puss in Boots, Beauty and the Beast, vampires and werewolves Angela Carter has created an absorbing collection of dark, sensual, fantastic stories.
topAngela Carter interview/review
The Grimms’ collection, Children’s and Household Tales , was not an immediate success in Germany – a collection by one of the country’s leading writers, Ludwig Bechstein, called Deutsches Märchenbuch ( The German Book of Fairy Tales ) was more popular. But by the 1870s the Grimms’ tales has been incorporated into the teaching curriculum in Prussia and other German principalities, and they were also included in primers and anthologies for children throughout the Western world.
By the beginning of the twentieth century, Children’s and Household Tales was second only to the Bible as a best-seller in Germany, and it has continued to hold this position. The tales have been equally popular among academics, and various schools of thought have sought to analyse and interpret the success of the Grimms’ tales while teachers have often been drawn, not to the motifs, but to the moral lessons and the role models portrayed in the stories.
‘One of my favourite books as a child was Grimms’ Fair y Tales, the unexpurgated version – the one with the red-hot shoes’ Margaret Atwood
The Bloody Chamber won the Cheltenham Festival Literary Prize and proved to be Carter’s most successful work, igniting interest in the previously oblivious United States where she then went on to lecture, and ultimately to teach at Brown University between 1980 and 1981. Thirteen years after its publication there were more requests for PhD funding on Angela Carter than on the whole of the eighteenth century.
‘Magnificent set pieces of fastidious sensuality’ Ian McEwan
‘Demonstrates Angela Carter’s narrative gift at its most mocking and seductive’ Observer
‘She can glide from ancient to modern, from darkness to luminosity, from depravity to comedy without any hint of strain and without losing the elusive power of the original tales’ The Times
AUTHOR INTERVIEWS
Grimm Brothers
Nearly all my labours have been devoted, either directly or indirectly, to the investigation of our earlier language, poetry and laws. These studies may have appeared to many, and may still appear, useless; to me they have always seemed a noble and earnest task, definitely and inseparably connected with our common fatherland, and calculated to foster the love of it. My principle has always been in these investigations to under-value nothing, but to utilize the small for the illustration of the great, the popular tradition for the elucidation of the written monuments.
Taken from Jacob Grimm’s autobiography, which he wrote towards the end of his life Angela Carter The stories in The Bloody Chamber are very firmly grounded in the Indo-European popular tradition, even in the way they look.
A friend of mine has just done a collection of literary fairy tales from seventeenth- and eighteenth-century France, things like the original Beauty and the Beast’, which is in fact from the oral tradition.
There’s this long history in Europe of taking elements from the oral tradition and making them into very elaborate literary conventions, but all the elements in that particular piece, The Bloody Chamber , are very lush. I was looking at it again last week. I read from it for the first time in ages the other night, and I thought, this is pretty cholesterol-rich because of the fact that they all take place in invented landscapes. Some of the landscapes are reinvented ones.
‘The Bloody Chamber’ story itself is set quite firmly in the Mont Saint Michel, which is this castle on an island off the coast of Brittany; and a lot of the most exotic landscapes in it, the Italian landscapes, were quite legit. ‘The Tiger’s Bride’ landscape, admittedly, is touristic, but it’s one of the palaces in Mantua that has the most wonderful jewels, and that city is set in the Po Valley, which is very flat and very far out, so in the summer you can imagine the mist rolling over. The landscapes there [in The Bloody Chamber ] are quite real. Even the werewolf stories are set in some horror-filled invented landscapes, but there’s more a kind of down-to-earthness in those stories. Taken from the Review of Contemporary Fiction , Vol. XIV, no. 3. interview by Anna Katsavos
topStarting Points for Discussion
- The Bloody Chamber includes two reworkings of both ‘Beauty and the Beast’ and ‘Little Red Riding Hood’. Discuss the differences between Carter’s and the Grimms’ tales, and between Carter’s two versions. Why do you think she twice chose to do two adaptations of the same tale?
- Discuss the different portrayals of women and sexuality in both sets of tales: is it true to say that Carter is more sympathetic towards women and their desires? Do the Grimms acknowledge female desire?
- Carter’s modern retellings are, with the exception of ‘The Snow Child’ , substantially longer than the original Grimm versions – how has she chosen to lengthen each tale, and what effect has this had upon the story? Why do you think ‘The Snow Child’ is so much shorter than the other tales in her collection?
- Many of the Grimms’ tales appear to have clear moral messages for their audience – do you think that Carter’s tales have messages for their readers? What personal qualities do the Grimm brothers most appear to revere?
- In her reworking of ‘Bluebeard’ why does Carter choose to have her heroine rescued by her mother, rather than her brothers as in the original Grimm tale? What difference does this make to the tale and to your perception of the heroine?
- Discuss the symbolism of flowers in the tales, with particular reference to Carter’s ‘The Snow Child’ and the Grimms’ ‘The Rose’.
- ‘Puss-in-Boots’ and ‘Bluebeard’ were both excluded from the Grimms’ original edition but they have become two of the most well-known fairy tales – why do you think they were originally excluded, and what qualities have led to them becoming so popular?
- In the Grimms’ tales animals are often turned back into humans once a spell has been broken, while in Carter’s tales it is often humans that are transformed into beasts. Discuss the reasons for this reversal – w hat is Carter implying about human nature? How different are the beasts in each set of stories?
- Discuss the nature of fear in these tales – are the women in Carter’s tales in fear of those around them, or of their own natures? What do the characters in the Grimms’ tales fear most?
- Consider the role of religion in each of the tales, with particular reference to ‘The Pink Flower’, ‘The Jew in the Thornbush’ and ‘Wolf-Alice’.
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Suggested Further Reading
- Good Bones and Simple Murders ~ Margaret Atwood
- The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye ~ A.S Byatt
- The Book of Blood ~ Vicki Feaver
- Don’t Tell the Grown-Ups: Subversive Children’s Literature ~ Alison Lurie
- Flesh and the Mirror: Essays on the Art of Angela Carter ~ ed. Lorna Sage
- A Midsummer Night’s Dream ~ William Shakespeare
- The Brothers Grimm: From Enchanted Forests to the Modern World ~ Jack Zipes
- The Brothers Grimm (film)
- The Company of Wolves (film)