Metamorphosis and Human-Animal Relationships in Angela Carter’s Fairy Tales: Liminal Subjectivities in The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories

TESE DE DOUTORAMENTO METAMORPHOSIS AND HUMAN-ANIMAL RELATIONSHIPS IN ANGELA CARTER’S FAIRY TALES: LIMINAL SUBJECTIVITIES IN THE BLOODY CHAMBER AND OTHER STORIES Nerea Riobó Pérez ESCOLA DE DOUTORAMENTO INTERNACIONAL PROGRAMA DE DOUTORAMENTO EN ESTUDOS INGLESES AVANZADOS: LINGÜÍSTICA, LITERATURA E CULTURA SANTIAGO DE COMPOSTELA 2019 DECLARACIÓN DO AUTOR/A DA TESE Metamorphosis and Human-Animal Relationships in Angela Carter’s Fairy Tales: Liminal Subjectivities in The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories D./Dna. Nerea Riobó Pérez Presento a miña tese, seguindo o procedemento axeitado ao Regulamento, e declaro que: 1) A tese abarca os resultados da elaboración do meu traballo. 2) De selo caso, na tese faise referencia ás colaboracións que tivo este traballo. 3) A tese é a versión definitiva presentada para a súa defensa e coincide coa versión enviada en formato electrónico. 4) Confirmo que a tese non incorre en ningún tipo de plaxio doutros autores nin de traballos presentados por min para a obtención doutros títulos. En Santiago de Compostela, 15 de Outubro de 2019. Asdo. Nerea Riobó Pérez AUTORIZACIÓN DA DIRECTORA DA TESE Metamorphosis and Human-Animal Relationships in Angela Carter’s Fairy Tales: Liminal Subjectivities in The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories D./Dna. Laura María Lojo Rodríguez INFORMA: Que a presente tese, correspóndese co traballo realizado por Dna. Nerea Riobó Pérez, baixo a miña dirección, e a utorizo a súa presentación , considerando que reúne os r equisitos esixidos no R egulamento de Estudos de Doutoramento da USC, e que como directora desta non incorre nas causas de abstención establecidas na Lei 40/2015. En Santiago de Compostela., 15 de Outubro de 2019 Asdo. Laura María Lojo Rodríguez 1 ABSTRACT This dissertation focuses on the analysis of the female characters and human-animal relationships in Angela Carter collection of fairy tales The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories (1979) and examines how Carter’s reassessments of traditional fairy tales address the construction of women’s identity in its full complexity, thus departing from reductionist, binary oppositions by offering a satisfactory communion between animality and humanity. Hence, I here argue that the use of liminal metamorphosis and animal transformation in Carter’s narratives serve the purpose of deconstructing the traditional gender roles present in literary fairy tales in order to create an idiosyncratic conception of female subjectivity and sexuality. As such, the different formal and ideological possibilities of the short story genre are explored in connection to Carter’s postmodern rewritings. I here look into the characteristics of the genre which allow Carter to create a feminist, transgressive, deconstructive project, departing from Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of “minor literature” (1986), and Achilles and Bergmann (2015) and Drewery’s (2011) reassessment of the anthropological concept of “liminality”. The brevity and hybridity of the short story allow Carter to explore the construction of the fluid and liminal self. I here contend that the use of animal metamorphosis in Carter’s stories functions as a vehicle of hybridization and animalization, questioning Western patriarchal boundaries between human and non-human animals. This dissertation is also informed by significant findings in the fields of animal studies and posthumanism Specifically, Kenneth Saphiro and Marion Copeland’s three-fold analysis (2005) serves as the basic structure for my analysis of Carter’s narratives. Thus, in order to critically examine the stories, I draw on short story criticism, fairy tale approaches, literary human-animal studies, Gothic criticism and gender studies, as well as on specific critical works on Angela Carter. Keywords: Angela Carter, fairy tales, metamorphosis, literary human-animal studies, short story, liminality, feminism, monsters. 3 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would first like to express my sincere gratitude to my supervisor, Dr. Laura María Lojo Rodríguez for her continuous support, her commitment with my research, her patience, motivation and help. Her invaluable advice and guidance made this dissertation possible. Secondly, I am also grateful to Dr Jorge Sacido Romero for his insightful recommendations and suggestions. I would also like to acknowledge the assistant of the Competitive Reference Research Group DISCOURSE AND IDENTITY (GRC2015/002, ED431C 2019/001, GI-1924, Xunta de Galicia) for its financial and scientific support. This dissertation has also been written within the framework of the research project “Intersections: Gender and Identity in the Short Fiction of Contemporary Women Writers” (FEM2017, 83084P), funded by the Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness (AEI, FEDER). I would also like to express my gratitude to all the members of the Department of English and German Philology at the Faculty of Philology (USC) and, by extension, to the University of Santiago de Compostela. This dissertation would not have been possible without the constant help and support of my whole family. My most sincere gratitude to my parents David, Paula and Andrés for all their love and for supporting me in everything I do and in encouraging me to continue with my research. They are always there when I need them. Thank you for your positivity, for motivating me to follow my dreams and believing in me. I would also like to thank my grandparents; for their affection and education, most especially, my grandfather Gonzalo, who unfortunately passed away before the culmination of this dissertation. Finally, I would like to dedicate this work to my closest friends who stand by me in good and bad moments. Thanks to Chave, Regina, Daniela, Iván, Cecilia, Noelia, Cristina, Martha, Fernando, Noa, Miguel, Lúa, Sara, Nerea, María, Milagros, Javier, Asun, and Alex for their positive attitude and confidence. They were the moral force that helped me to finish this work and face the difficulties of these years. 10 NEREA RIOBÓ PÉREZ and pornography as shown in, among others, The Sadeian Woman (1979), significantly written alongside the stories of The Bloody Chamber and published in the same year. Carter’s rewritings of traditional fairy tales in The Bloody Chamber unveil a conjunction of her own interest in the short story form, psychoanalysis (especially through Bruno Bettelheim’s readings of folk narratives), fairy tales—as shown in her fairy tales translations, articles on the genre and children’s literature prior to the publication of The Bloody Chamber—and the connection between Gothic and pornography, in whose reassessments the author payed especial attention to monsters and women’s sexuality. Carter’s particular use of the short story form, Gothic imagery and metamorphosis to explore gender and identitarian issues entails an expression of resistance within the dominant system, questioning patriarchal assumptions by exposing a daring conception of female subjectivity. For these reasons, The Bloody Chamber has been discussed from a variety of perspectives since its publication, in such a way that there seems to be, indeed, little to say about it which has not been suggested so far. However, the departing point of this dissertation springs from the need to re-examine The Bloody Chamber against the backdrop of contemporary critical outlooks, such as short story criticism, posthumanism and literary human-animal studies, intersecting those with the concept of “liminality” as understood, most notably, by Jochen Achilles and Ina Bergmann (2015). Furthermore, some critical readings of Carter’s oeuvre have pointed at the presence of metamorphosis in her work, as is the case of the studies published by, among others, Anna Kerchy, Rebecca Munford, Marina Warner, Cristina Bacchilega, Alison Easton, Kimberly Lau and Laura Mulvey. However, the presence of metamorphic bodies received superficial attention and had been rarely examined in detail in Carter’s short stories, with the exception of Ana Pasolini’s Bodies That Bleed: Metamorphosis in Angela Carter’s Fairy Tales (2016), the only extensive critical work which focuses on this specific topic to this date. Nevertheless, while Pasolini primarily focuses on the question of the body by intertwining Judith Butler’s concept of “performativity” with Rosi Braidotti’s “cartographic approach”, my dissertation adds to Pasolini’s approach other critical reflections which are the outcome of intersecting short story criticism and literary human-animal studies. Thus, by paying especial attention to the connections between gender and genre and to how the origins of literary fairy tales and the symbolism of animals helped Carter to use shapeshifting and metamorphosis with a political intention, I here argue that the 11 Introduction author created different identitarian possibilities by questioning Western patriarchal boundaries between human and non-human animals, presenting animalistic, liminal and/or monstrous subjectivities in tune with the writer’s postmodern taste, which best crystallize in her particular use of the short story form and the literary fairy tale tradition. Carter’s tendency to use fantastic genres which challenge more conventional representations of reality eventually questions boundaries between “popular” and “high culture”—exemplified in the collection in her conglomeration of Gothic tropes and atmospheres, the pervasive presence of folklore, oral traditions and fairy tales—in an ideologically transgressive attitude which, formally speaking, comfortably sits with her particular conception of the “tale”, as famously explained in the “Afterword” to Fireworks. Here, the writer established a distinction between what she considered the inherent poetics of the “short story”—in Carter’s view, a manifestation of realistic modes of daily life and representation as exemplified in the modernist prose of James Joyce or Virginia Woolf—and the “tale”—which she connected with the oral, folkloric tradition of fantasy and supernatural phenomena, heir to Edgar Allan Poe’s short story poetics (Carter 1996, 449). By aligning herself with the “tale”, Carter engaged with a literary tradition of fantastic and Gothic fictional modes, folklore and orality, distancing from what she termed the “realistic” modes of the modernist short story. Nevertheless, despite of the author’s own proclaimed detachment, I argue in this dissertation that her collection is a representation of the postmodern short story cycle which both draws and deviates from the oral fairy tale tradition, constructing an inspiring tension where postmodern refinement, pastiche, fragmentation and intertextuality intertwine with both “high” and “popular” culture. I here contend that the use of metamorphosis in Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories functions as a vehicle of hybridization and animalization with a double goal: on the one hand, to deconstruct the articulation of traditional gender roles as present in traditional fairy tales and, on the other, to create alternative identitarian possibilities which defy heteropatriarchal constructions and binary oppositions separating human from non-human animals. By creating a physical, mental and emotional connection between women and non-human animals, Carter suggests strategies of female empowerment: in so doing, she not only reaches back to the oral tradition of fairy tales but also elaborates on a radical conception of subjectivity. Her postmodern fairy tale rewritings put forward an empowering discourse for women 12 NEREA RIOBÓ PÉREZ located at “a threshold in which our preconceptions of the world are questioned, augmented, and often changed with lasting effects” (Achilles and Bergmann 78). It is precisely this in-betweenness of the short story—and, more specifically, of Carter’s “tales”—which allows for the emergence of a feminist, emancipatory discourse of aesthetic and ideological resistance within the social structure. This dissertation is primarily informed by Carter’s own views on these questions as articulated in her journalist articles, interviews and essays—such as the quintessential The Sadeian Woman (1979), the “Introduction” to the Angela Carter’s Book of Fairy Tales (2005) or her “Afterword” to Fireworks (1974), among others. There she addressed topics such as human-animal relationships, fairy tales and their compilers or Gothic literature and its tropes, all of which is overtly conditioned by Carter’s radical feminist agenda. These different sources are core to understand the interdisciplinary work on the fairy tale which the author was undertaking during the same period, such as her translations of Perrault and Madame de Beaumont, her journalism on Andersen, Perrault and the Brothers Grimm, her work as editor of fairy tales for Virago, the publication of The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories or her radio plays and the subsequent film The Company of Wolves (1984), whose script she herself wrote. In addition to these sources, I have also closely examined the only existing biography on the author to this date, which sheds light on essential data regarding the stories’ writing process. In this respect, Edmund Gordon’s testimonies and his experience as editor of Carter’s work have illuminated my understanding of The Bloody Chamber as a short story cycle, which unveils not only a complex network of intertextual references, motifs and themes that produce a unity of global meaning, but also a progression towards a continuum of women’s identity. In addition to this, the dissertation is informed by an eclectic intersection of theoretical concepts which I apply to my reading of Carter’s short stories: Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s concept of “minor literature” and Achilles and Bergmann and Claire Drewery’s reassessments of the term “liminality” were essential to examine the intersections between orality and the written tradition, as well as the tensions between “high” and “low” forms of culture. Likewise, Carter’s consistent exploration of women’s voices within the dominant system required the use of feminist literary theory and gender studies to 13 Introduction theoretically approach the author’s feminist commitment and her deconstructive project, which denounces patriarchal binary systems which oppress, objectify and vilify women and animals alike. In tune with this idea, she also re-evaluated the Gothic tradition in order to examine gender issues, sexual freedom and patriarchal hegemony by means of the use of the supernatural and the fantastic. This conjunction between gender and genre will be also informed by some key concepts in Gothic and monster studies—Fred Botting, Xavier Antich and Manuel Asensi and Asa S. Mittman have been essential—which relate Carter’s characters with concepts such as liminality and monstrosity, here used by the writer to offer multiple identitarian possibilities that escape reductionist, heteropatriarchal binary systems of gender roles and identities by suggesting the possibility of fluent and nomadic subjectivities. As a collection of fairy tales, The Bloody Chamber establishes an important intertextual dialogue with the fairy tale tradition, which required the examination of key critical studies on the genre, as is the case of the work of Bruno Bettelheim, Cristina Bacchilega, Marina Warner, Jack Zipes or Maria Tatar, to name a few. Carter’s fairy tales provide a liminal space to explore the non-human and human-animal relationships, serving the purpose of deconstructing traditional gender roles and the phallocentric discourse present in traditional fairy-tale narratives. In this sense, her use of metamorphosis and shapeshifting as aesthetic devices connects with classical strategies present in the fairy tale tradition: for this reason, I here draw from, among others, Francisco Vaz da Silva’s chromatic study of the natural components of “Snow White”, Kimberley McMahon-Coleman and Roslyn Weaver’s study of the werewolf, Erik Butler’s approximation to the vampire and Ingo Gildenhard and Andrew Zissos’s general studies on metamorphosis and shapeshifting, combined with Pasolini’s examination of metamorphosis in The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories. Finally, this dissertation is also informed by significant findings in the field of animal studies in order to deal with the symbolic and empirical treatment of animals and women through anthropomorphism and zoomorphism, which bring to the fore questions relating to agency, empathy and the predator/prey dichotomy. To do so, I here rely on David Aftandilian, Roman Bartosch, Susan McHugh and Cary Wolfe, among many. Specifically, Kenneth Saphiro and Marion Copeland’s three-fold analysis (2005) serve as the basic structure for my critical reading of Carter’s short stories, 14 NEREA RIOBÓ PÉREZ allowing me to approach her treatment of the subject as a hybrid, liminal, animalistic, nomadic being. Different animals are chosen by Carter in these stories to question the traditional boundaries that divide human and non-human animals: felines like tigers, lions or cats; birds, and canines, such as wolves. In The Bloody Chamber the author offers the possibility of producing hybrid identities whose animality connects with corporeity. By focusing on women’s metamorphic bodies, Carter re-examines the dynamics of sexual relationships and gender categories, testing the extent to which metamorphic bodies affect both male and female identity. In this sense, the examination of human and nonhuman relationships inspired the structure of this dissertation, which analyses eight of the narratives collected in The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories, leaving aside “The Bloody Chamber” and “Puss-in-Boots”, where no metamorphic elements are present. As a result, this dissertation is divided into six different chapters, which move from a general overview of theoretical concepts and their relevance to a critical examination of the eight selected short stories. Chapter one, “Angela Carter and the Short Story”, explores the different formal and ideological possibilities of the short story genre in connection to the author’s aesthetic motivation and the narratives themselves. I here inspect the characteristics of the genre which allow Carter to create a transgressive enterprise, departing from Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of “minor literature” as articulated in Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature (1986). The three characteristics which Deleuze and Guattari assign to minor literature—deterritorialization, political dimension and collective importance— bring to the fore the nature of Carter’s collection as a formulation of resistance within the dominant system. Likewise, Achilles and Bergmann’s (2015) and Drewery’s (2011) reassessment of the anthropological concept of “liminality” unveils how the brevity, flexibility and hybridity of the short story allow her to articulate the mentioned feminist project and to explore the construction of a fluid and liminal self. The second chapter, “Angela Carter and the Fairy Tale”, focuses on the development of the fairy tale as a liminal literary genre, tracing its historical evolution and discussing the innovations and changes introduced by major anthologists from the seventeenth to the twentieth century. I here explore the writer’s relationship to the genre and her position regarding gender roles, as well as the fairy tale’s connection to 15 Introduction psychoanalysis, most notably through Bruno Bettelheim’s The Uses of Enchantment (1976), with which Carter confessed to have quarrelled when writing The Bloody Chamber. Furthermore, this chapter also examines the didactic nature of literary fairy tales, connecting this with her opinions on the relationship between humanity and animality: in this sense, Carter’s exploration of the relationship between species was here informed by literary animal studies, which allowed sharp focus on the symbolic treatment of non-human animals as well as on their empirical representation, agency and subjectivity. Chapter three, “Angela Carter and The Bloody Chamber”, focuses on the author, her work and her connection to the fairy tale genre in every possible aspect. Critical examination of Carter’s preference for the short story form after her years in Japan unveils the relevance of her feminist pursuit, which is here read against the backdrop of The Sadeian Woman and of her interest in the fairy tale tradition and its ideological repercussions for the construction of women’s subjectivity. Chapter three thus functions as a bridge between the previous methodological chapters and my critical discussion of the corpus, whose structure here responds to her classification of female characters metamorphosing into different animal categories. For my examination of the eight short stories I follow Saphiro and Copeland’s three levels of analysis (2005): as such, the first level searches for the deconstructive portrayal of non-human animals and women in heteropatriarchal societies by looking into agency and voice, empathy and the presence or absence of feelings. The second level centres its attention on the empirical and symbolical portrayal of both animals and women through the use of anthropomorphism and zoomorphism. Finally, the last level of analysis deals with the relationships between human and non-human animals by the evaluation of the classical dichotomies of predator/prey, the importance of the gaze and sexuality and animalization. Chapter four, “Felines”, encompasses Carter’s two rewritings of “Beauty and the Beast”, “The Courtship of Mr Lyon” and “The Tiger’s Bride”, marked by the presence of animal metamorphoses from humans to different felines. The importance of the “Beauty and the Beast” oral folktales and their cultural predicament in sexual behaviour is here examined in terms of women’s internalization of the tales’ meanings, largely responsible for female education, morality and socialization as entailed in Madame Villeneuve and Madame Beaumont’s versions of the tale. Felines are found in different works by Angela Carter, but these animals are the protagonists of her two rewritings of 16 NEREA RIOBÓ PÉREZ “Beauty and the Beast”, which present an overt intertextual connection with these fairy tales, in which Carter distances herself from them to create her own. The fifth chapter, “Birds”, gathers three short stories—“The Erl-King”, The Snow Child” and “The Lady of the House of Love”—with different folk and fairy tale traditions, whose origins and significance I here explore in terms of the presence of birds, which metaphorically relate to women’s subjectivity. This chapter also focuses on the trope of the vampire, being the protagonist of “The Lady of the House of Love” an intersectional creature between Sleeping Beauty—symbolically represented as a bird— and a vampire. The vampire trope—widely used by Carter in her journalism, short fiction and in her radio play Vampirella, the genesis of her short story “The Lady of the House of Love”—metaphorically tackles the impossibility of escaping patriarchal gender roles, resulting in the imprisonment of women as objects of the male gaze, who are either symbolically or empirically transformed into birds. Finally, chapter six, “Wolves”, analyses “The Werewolf”, “The Company of Wolves” and “Wolf-Alice” and examines the historical evolution of the fairy tale “Little Red Riding Hood” and its various meanings in its different versions, while also providing an analysis of female identity from a psychoanalytical perspective. The chapter also looks into the origins of the oral fairy tale “Red Riding Hood” as both an erotic narrative and as a rite of passage from childhood to adulthood. To these wellknown connotations Carter adds her psychoanalytically inspired reflections—most notably after her reading of Bettelheim—to connect psychoanalysis, sexuality and the figure of the wolf. Paying attention to the wolf’s empirical and symbolical representations—especially to the portrayal of the monstrous werewolf and its connotations—the chapter offers a connection with the author’s thoughts and ideas about this non-human animal and its impact on history and culture. This chapter closes with critical considerations on the female protagonists in these narratives, which function both as independent texts and as a sample of a network of references in which the complexity of the female protagonists progressively increases as the collection advances towards its closure. 17 1. ANGELA CARTER AND THE SHORT STORY This dissertation aims to explore the formal and ideological possibilities of Carter’s short stories. To do so, in this chapter I will examine how the brevity and condensation inherent to the short form allowed Carter to explore different options and meanings, suggesting a variety of alternatives that enabled her to leave behind realist narratives in order to position herself at an intersection between orality and the written form, folklore and the most innovative literary techniques, tradition and subversion. Carter used the transgressive power of the short story to deal with issues of identity, sexuality and gender roles from a variety of points of view, suggesting the creation of a metamorphic, fluid and animalistic subjectivity. I will approach Carter’s famous distinction between short story and tale, the existent connection between gender and genre and I will use Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of “minor literature” as well as Achilles and Bergmann’s and Drewery’s concept of “liminality” in relation to the short story applied to Carter’s stories. Furthermore, I will establish how the presence of Gothic imagery and monsters in Carter’s short fiction as a means of creating new possibilities of female identity. Angela Carter wrote four collections of short stories: Fireworks: Nine Profane Pieces (1974), based on her experiences in Japan; The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories (1979), a reassessment of the fairy-tale tradition; Black Venus (1985), in which Carter reimagined some literary and historical figures and American Ghosts and Old World Wonders (published posthumously in 1993), which deals with both American and European folklore. In 1995 Carter’s collected short stories were published under the title Burning Your Boats: The Collected Short Stories. Before the publication of Fireworks Carter was already a reputed writer, having won the Maugham Somerset Award in 1969 with her novel Several Perceptions (1968). However, Carter’s experience in Japan triggered her development as a short story writer in detriment of her production of longer narratives: “Significantly, before Fireworks Carter had published 18 NEREA RIOBÓ PÉREZ half a dozen novels […], whereas from 1974 onwards she produced four short story collections, edited three anthologies for Virago […] and published her translations of Charles Perrault’s fairy tales, while her novelistic output decreased dramatically” (Sacido-Romero and Lojo-Rodríguez 7). In her “Afterword” to Fireworks Carter overtly pointed at her discovery of the aesthetic and ideological possibilities of the short story as a genre, whose condensation she relates to the physical space she inhabited while living in Japan: I started to write short pieces when I as living in a room too small to write a novel in. So the size of my room modified what I did inside it and it was the same with the pieces themselves. The limited trajectory of the short narrative concentrates its meaning. Sign and sense can fuse to an extent impossible to achieve among the multiplying ambiguities of an extended narrative. (Carter 1996, 449) Carter’s collections of short fiction—and, most notably, The Bloody Chamber—have been examined from a variety of perspectives and critical slants. However, relatively little attention has been given to Carter’s assessment of the short story genre as such, as Adrian Hunter has perceptively suggested: As one might expect of so celebrated a work, The Bloody Chamber draws with it a now lengthy comet’s tail of scholarly criticism and commentary, ranging from narratological and anthropological studies to readings conducted through the lenses of feminist, Gothic and psychoanalytic theory. By a curious critical oversight, however, the book is rarely, if ever, considered in the context of short story writing in the twentieth century. Given that Carter’s text makes so much of its own intertextual dependencies and departures, it is surprising to find it cut off in this way from the history of literary form. (Hunter 125) 1.1. SHORT STORIES OR TALES? Carter manifested her opinion about what she defined as a “short story” and how this differed from a “tale” in the “Afterword” to Fireworks. For her, the short story reflects aspects of daily life and, as such, relates to realism, while the tale clearly implies a connection to orality, folklore and fantasy: Formally the tale differs from the short story in that it makes few pretences at the imitation of life. The tale does not log everyday experience, as the short story does; it interprets everyday experience through a system of imagery derived from subterranean areas behind everyday experience, and therefore the tale cannot betray its readers in false knowledge of everyday experience. (Carter 1996, 449) 19 1. Angela Carter and the Short Story By drawing such a distinction, Carter engages in a debate pertaining the representation of reality in short fiction that had begun with Edgar Allan Poe,1 relating to the distinction between the literary short story and oral tales, which combined “the suspenseful intrigue and plot-based intricacy of the traditional tale with the elliptical austerity of a modern realist narrative technique” (Hunter 23). The connection between the tale and the fantastic, the Gothic and other supernatural phenomena, and folklore, present in Poe’s short fiction, is what Angela Carter rescued and nurtured, distancing her tales from what she termed the “realistic” modes of the modernist short story. On the other hand, the literary short story, due to its formal freedom and elasticity, became an apt vehicle to convey new approaches to fiction at the turn of the twentieth century, as was the case of the short stories by James Joyce, Virginia Woolf or Katherine Mansfield, who explored and experimented with the form, the “which distinguished the short story proper from the mass-market popular tale”, thus paving the way “for its absorption into modernism in the early decades of the twentieth century” (Hunter 8-9). Nevertheless, authors such as Thomas Hardy or Charles Dickens “retained the appearance of a direct connection to oral narrative traditions” (Hunter 27). In affirming that “I was writing, therefore, tales” (Carter 1996, 449), Carter positioned herself in a particular narrative tradition which aligned itself with fantasy, non-realist fictional modes, folklore and orality: “The tale has relations with subliterary forms of pornography, ballad and dream, and it has not been dealt with kindly by literati” (Carter 1996, 449). However, and despite Carter’s emphasis on the distinction between “short story” and “tale”, a clear-cut distinction between the two is difficult to draw, especially if taking into account how postmodern narratives often incorporate formal strategies from popular culture and other artistic expressions which often blur boundaries between high and popular culture. And that is the case of Angela Carter’s short stories in The Bloody Chamber. As Paul MarchRussell has suggested, both the tale and the short story are to be regarded as mutually complementary since both short forms are interconnected: if we trace the origins of the short story, it is possible to see the oral tale as its prehistoric form (March-Russell 2009, 2). 1 Poe’s review of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Twice-Told Tales published in 1842 opened a discussion about what characteristics the short story should have and “[it] was certainly at the forefront of the first wave of scholarly debate on the short story” (Young and Bailey 1). 26 NEREA RIOBÓ PÉREZ Additionally, the liminal status of the short story as a genre—with its potential to address complex issues with an immediacy of response, coupled by its formal freedom and elasticity—has been consistently used by women to explore identitary concerns out of tune with hegemonic, patriarchal thought, thus articulating a position of aesthetic and ideological resistance: “Liminality differs in that it exists within social structure itself, but in its interstices; the cracks falling between pre-existing social norms, classifications, and conventions” (Drewery 3). Regarding characters in the collection, Carter rescues Gothic liminal tropes such as werewolves, vampires and animal monsters. This teratological repertoire helps to reinforce the connection between liminality and identity in the writer’s intention to blur opposites and cross borders: in fact, The Bloody Chamber is inhabited by feline and birdie women, female vampires and she-wolves. Carter uses Gothic tropes and liminal figures as well as animal metamorphosis to deconstruct the heteropatriarchal values of female identity and to create the possibility of the apparition of a hybrid, fluid, nomadic individual. Consequently, reading Carter’s short fiction through the lens of minor literature and liminality allows to depart from a traditional understanding of the short story as the expression of marginalization and, instead, to argue for a literary expression within a major literary tradition which is, however, critical with and resistant to dominant ideological discourses. Carter’s subversive short stories defy and deconstruct patriarchal ideals of femininity while creating a revolutionary discourse about identity. Carter uses the short story form in order to explore spaces that are liminal ones, both physically and psychologically speaking. In Carter’s tales, characters are in a limbo between childhood and adulthood, humanity and animality, and this in-betweenness leads to the suggestion of a fluid, metamorphic liminal subjectivity. 1.3 GOTHIC LITERATURE, WOMEN WRITERS AND THE SHORT STORY Gothic imagery in Angela Carter’s oeuvre is ever present, marked by gloomy atmospheres and monstrous, metamorphic characters. Gothic impregnates every aspect of her tales, as Fred Botting has suggested: Angela Carter’s fiction, self-consciously mixing different forms, including fairytale, legend, science fiction and Gothic, shows the interplay of narratives 27 1. Angela Carter and the Short Story shaping reality and identity, particularly in relation to the production of meanings for sexuality. […] “The Bloody Chamber” (1979), like other stories in the collection of the same name, plays with the ways fairytales, legends and Gothic fictions construct identities, fantasies, fears and desires, particularly in terms of female sexuality and desire. (Botting 1996, 169) In particular, Carter was inspired by Edgar Allan Poe’s figures and images (Munford 180), as well as by Gothic imagery and atmosphere in general. In the Fireworks’ “Afterword”, she famously postulated that “we live in Gothic times” (Carter 1996, 460), alluding not only at the permanence of the genre in present times, but also to its flexibility and capacity of adaptation, both formally and ideologically speaking, from its origins at the end of the eighteenth century to the decade of 1970s, which witnessed an important revival of the Gothic. By so doing, Carter aligns herself with a whole tradition of women writers in this fashion, who used Gothic narratives to portray particular views of femininity and female sexuality: Gothic modernity turns on the question of femininity, feminism turns on modern gothic. It is a critical commonplace to note how women in gothic fictions are represented as objects of pursuit, imprisonment, violation […]. At the same time, […] gothic fictions allow a greater space for female authorship […]. These are the contours of “female Gothic”. (Botting 2008, 153) Peach clarifies that Carter’s writings are completely different from the early Gothic texts by women writers, in which the female protagonists are essentially portrayed as passive individuals. On the contrary, her works “present a critique of Gothic in a form which is not so much feminist Gothic as […] “post-feminist Gothic” (2009, 183). Taking into account Carter’s interest in the body and in sexuality—even though she belonged to the second wave of feminism during the decade of 1970s—the author was ahead of her time, presenting female protagonists who struggle with sexual and identitary issues and, by means of Gothic conventions, they fight for an active role as sexual subjects and for assertiveness. Carter’s intersection between female sexuality, the Gothic and animalistic behaviour may anticipate the “third wave of feminism” of the 1990s, and even what is termed today as “postfeminism”, as Peach mentions. Carter’s thoughts on gender issues should be contextualized in the feminist framework and the many different critical positions that took place within the movement since the last thirty years. Carter’s work is located “‘in contrapuntal relationship’ with feminism’s constantly evolving and internally conflicted history” (Easton 3). 28 NEREA RIOBÓ PÉREZ Gothic literature in the United Kingdom started in the eighteenth century with the novels of Horace Walpole, Ann Radcliffe and Matthew Lewis. Since the genre’s inception, there was a clear connection between the Gothic and women, being predominantly women both major consumers and prominent authors of the genre: names such as Clara Reeve, Mary Shelley or the Brontë sisters are well-known examples of women writers of the Gothic. Their works, frequently referred to as “female gothic” since Ellen Moers coined the term in Literary Women (1976), dealt with women’s anxieties and fears, often depicting a social situation relegated to the domestic sphere and confined within the house walls. This reaction against patriarchal hierarchies, together with fear of bodily female experiences such as the loss of virginity or death by childbirth and passive, powerless gender roles in society led to the use of the Gothic and its tropes—being the ghost one of the most relevant ones—to represent women’s fears, concerns and anxieties. However, the Gothic tradition settled down as well with the short story format. The rise and establishment of the short story form in the British literary tradition was connected to the social phenomenon of the periodical press, which offered a way out of censorship and allowed a progressive path for social dialogues through literature: “The short story’s contemporary written form did not emerge alongside the establishment of the novel, but rather flourished through the medium of the periodical, it is this serial structure that most clearly impacted the development of the short story” (Krueger 11). Women writers of the short story, such as Elizabeth Gaskell, Mary Elizabeth Braddon and Rhoda Broughton, “produced formally unique fiction; all of them also crucially penned gendered narratives of transgression” (Krueger 11). Ghost stories belong to the oral tradition and folklore and have been present throughout history in many different forms. Nevertheless, it was during the nineteenth century when they began to be associated with both the Gothic and the short story genre: “It is no coincidence that the ghost story, like science fiction, was a product of the early nineteenth century and the impact of industrial capitalism. […] Although descriptions of ghostly visitations occur in many cultures, the ghost story did not emerge as a distinct literary genre until the 1820s” (March-Russell 2009, 179). This association was marked by an increasing interest during the Victorian period in the supernatural and the occult, as well as by the above mentioned rise of periodicals and magazines, which favoured the expansion of the short story, particularly by women writers: “A spike in interest in a variety of supernatural phenomena in 29 1. Angela Carter and the Short Story the Victorian period, including mesmerism, spiritualism, and communication with the dead via a variety of media, contributed to the rise of the spectral as ‘one of the most popular topics in short fiction’ which were read as ‘narratives of the paranormal tinged with fact’” (Krueger 64-65). British modernist women writers adapted the nineteenth-century Gothic ghost story to the new environment of the twentieth century and modified this subgenre to engage with a feminist agenda: Women writers explored the transformative potential of these transitions while taking a more sceptical approach to other changes, exploiting the story’s Gothic heritage, for example, to dramatise tensions between “progress” in the shape of advances in science and technology and the persistence of the past (often represented by spectral hauntings). The short story was also used to map the new modalities of gender and sexuality associated with the energies of the Suffrage movement and to map the sensorium of modernity from a gendered perspective. (Hanson 194) Writers such as May Sinclair, Elizabeth Gaskell, Elizabeth Bowen or Daphne du Maurier rewrote the traditional ghost story by using liminal female narrators to “explore gendered reactions to uncanny manifestations of modernity. […] Sinclair’s work is revealing of the ways in which she deploys the dead wife narrative to comment on women’s erotic desire, and the exclusion within the domestic space” (Liggins 33). Both the Gothic and the ghost story specifically became a space for female freedom which encouraged women writers to express themselves, discussing patriarchal hegemony, identity problems, traditional gender roles and sexuality by using the supernatural and the fantastic. Formally, the brevity and condensation of the short form was the perfect vehicle not only for these British female writers but also for women writers all over the world, most notably in what is often referred to as “Southern Gothic”, of particular interest to Carter.2 2 Despite the fact that Washington Irving and Edgar Allan Poe are often claimed to be the founders of the Gothic tale in the United States during the nineteenth century, the genre was consolidated due to the female tradition. American women writers also engaged with the Gothic short-story tradition in the twentieth century and their contribution was so relevant that critics often refer to “Southern Gothic” as a subgenre of Gothic literature, as is the case of Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Eudora Welty and Flannery O’Connor, among others. The great majority of these authors used Gothic elements to write about the Southern situation after the American Civil War and the changes experienced by the traditional Southern society, focalising on women’s experiences. Problems of identity, idealization of the past and impossibility of adaptation in the new established order are core to these texts, in which the key element is often the grotesque. The big family houses or mansion becomes the perfect scenario for these settings portraying the uncanny non-familiar within the familiar. Postmodernist writers such as Margaret Atwood, Angela Carter, Alice Munro or Joyce Carol Oates absorbed the Gothic substratum and rewrote this literary tradition in a pastiche of feminist ideology, fairy tales, short fiction and intertextuality to deal with, parody or deconstruct heteropatriarchal preconceived ideas about female subjectivity. 30 NEREA RIOBÓ PÉREZ Even though Carter did not belong to the tradition of the “Southern Gothic” for obvious reasons, we can find some traces of it in her collection of short stories American Ghosts and Old World Wonders (1993). Besides, in the “Afterword” to Fireworks, the author herself connected her ruminations on the difference between “tales” and “short stories” with the Gothic tradition that comes from Edgar Allan Poe: Though it took me a long time to realise why I liked them, I’d always been fond of Poe, and Hoffman—Gothic tales, cruel tales, tales of wonder, tales of terror, fabulous narratives that deal directly with the imagery of the unconscious— mirrors; the externalised self; forsaken castles; haunted forests; forbidden sexual objects. (Carter 1996, 459) Carter here declares her intention to write forms linked to folklore and the oral tradition, to be interspersed with Gothic elements which will provide her oeuvre with the moral function and ethical dimension she seeks to convey, namely, provoking a sense of unease in her readers: The Gothic tradition in which Poe writes grandly ignores the value of systems of our institutions; it deals entirely with the profane. Its great themes are incest and cannibalism. Character and events are exaggerated beyond reality, to become symbols, ideas, passions. Its style will tend to be ornate, unnatural – and thus operate against the perennial human desire to believe the world as fact. (Carter 1996, 459) As Carter explains, she particularly values Poe’s disregard of established moral systems and institutions—what she calls the “profane”, which are “unnaturally” exaggerated beyond reality in the Gothic mode, a genre which questions verisimilar and factual experience. The Bloody Chamber thus entails an appropriation of the grotesque style of the Gothic, its “unnatural” surfaces and its powerful symbolism to deconstruct received ideas of female subjectivity. The very title Carter chose for the collection emphasises the gothic inheritance of these narratives: the evil aristocratic characters and vampires in “The Bloody Chamber” and “The Lady of the House of Love”, the metamorphic women and werewolves in “The Tiger’s Bride”, “The Werewolf”, “The Company of Wolves” and “Wolf-Alice”, all set in gloomy, decadent scenarios (such as dark, enchanted forests) where supernatural events and phantasmagorical appearances often occur. In this collection, Carter also used the Gothic tradition to suggest how traditional fairy tales have perpetuated traditional gender roles, which the author questions by presenting alternatives in the Gothic mode. Indeed, and as Fred Botting has convincingly argued, Gothic “excess” dramatizes a “fascination with 31 1. Angela Carter and the Short Story transgression and the anxiety over cultural limits and boundaries” (Botting 1996, 2). The Gothic, a proteic genre, adapts itself to the different concerns over time and constitutes the site where fears and anxieties return to the present. Carter reiterates the proximity between the Gothic tale and pornography—first expressed in the “Afterword” to Fireworks—in her article dedicated to H.P. Lovecraft titled “The Hidden Child”, where she also discusses the adaptability and persistence of the Gothic tales: “So the ‘tale of terror’, like pornography, with which it has much in common, represents a carefree holiday from ethics. That is the source of its enduring charm. The tale of terror, horror movie, the horror comic, are genres which show positively vampiric longevity” (Carter 2013, 544). As Carter herself suggests, Gothic literature (inasmuch as pornography) is characterised by a “carefree holiday from ethics” or by the persisting presence of what she defined as the “profane”, which entails an utter disregard for conventional morals, received ideas and institutions in an “unnatural” discursive mode ultimately aiming to dismantle binary oppositions by offering different liminal, in-between possibilities: Embracing liminality in short fiction […] is particularly pertinent to the relish for the unexplained supernatural in women’s ghost stories, as the ambiguity of the endings, and the “threshold states” occupied by liminal female narrators, can enable more liberating accounts of female social and sexual identity that in realist fiction. (Liggins 34) Angela Carter’s short stories present a diversity of possibilities of female subjectivity by using Gothic liminal devices and tropes. Carter’s reassessments of the classic fairy tales in The Bloody Chamber address the construction of women’s identity in its full complexity, thus departing from reductionist binary oppositions by offering a satisfactory communion between the female body and mind, creating new possibilities of identity: liminal, animal, hybrid, fluid and metamorphic beings. In this endeavour, Carter places special emphasis on monstrous figures as examples of an interstitial body and a fluid subjectivity which defy traditional categorizations. The monster, one of the Gothic’s principal elements, is connected to metamorphosis, and is virtually present in many different cultures. The monster embodied the fears that humanity had about itself and also posed questions relating to “normality” and what deviated from the norm: “También el monstruo, como lo animal, ha sido un dispositivo de alterización durante siglos. Y es que la cuestión de lo monstruoso, junto con la cuestión de lo animal, 32 NEREA RIOBÓ PÉREZ constituye el marco liminal frente al que, desde Aristóteles, se ha pretendido la definición de lo humano” (Antich 17). Monsters, located in a threshold position regarding humanity, animality and technology, are traditionally regarded as “failed subjects” and, as such, they have an “ideal and intimate relationship with the concept of posthuman”, which ultimately questions “humanity” as a social construction (MacCormack 293-4) by emphasising its uncanny nature: “The monster is neither a total stranger nor completely familiar; s/he exists in an in-between zone. I would express this as a paradox: the monstrous other is both liminal and structurally central to our perception of normal human subjectivity” (Lykke and Braidotti 141). Female monstrosity has been used by patriarchal societies to exemplify what deviates from the patriarchal codes of behaviour for women. Transformed into revulsive and grotesque creatures, she-monsters often fulfil a role of villains in folklore and literature—in mythologies, medieval epic, fairy tales or gothic and science fiction—punished, hunted and eventually killed by the male hero. Their grotesque female body, exemplified in a mixture of fragmented human and animal bodily parts, connects them to sexual and corporal aspects: Monstrosity is taking into consideration in the milieu of English literature, mainly in the various forms that it assumes in Gothic fiction. Gothic is the realm of the uncanny, expressing itself […] via figurations of monstrosity, and subsequently with latent links to sexual themes. (Castagna 58) Women writers have consistently re-worked monstrosity by “deconstructing the dominant gaze at the woman-monster” (Castagna 59), and the use of the carnivalesque and the grotesque opens up the path for new identitary possibilities, rather than representing the expression of vulnerability (Castagna 59). By producing such hybrid identities and interstitial women characters, Carter establishes a powerful connection between women, corporeality and gender, probing the extent to which these affect identity. Carter draws on traditional patriarchal images of liminal, monstrous, animalistic women in a transgressive manner, serving the purpose of destabilising binary inherited from folklore and fairy tales, which are ultimately a source of women’s empowerment. 33 2. ANGELA CARTER AND THE FAIRY TALE The aim of this chapter is to focus on the fairy tale as a liminal genre, to trace its historical evolution and to briefly mention different critical approaches to such a genre, which are preliminary steps to move on to Carter’s own position regarding the controversy about gender roles and sexuality that had characterised classical fairy tales. The second part of the chapter is dedicated to the concept of metamorphosis as a liminal literary device, connected with mythology, folklore and fairy tales, core to debates on human-animal relationships and philosophical questions of subjectivity from Descartes to present posthuman approaches. Twentieth-century writers of fantasy, Gothic or magical realism have consistently used shapeshifting and animal metamorphosis as a strategy to deconstruct pre-existing ideas of gender roles, nationality, identity and sexuality, and Carter is no exception. The fairy tale has its origins in the oral tradition as part of the human folklore at large, but fairy tales were especially relevant in Europe, where the oral folk tales and stories were part of the lives of the “ordinary men and women whose labour created our world” (Carter 2005, xi). Fairy tales were generated from these folk oral stories that “contained popular motifs, which were thousands of years old” (Koshy 37). It is important to bear in mind that fairy tales were not originally meant for children but for an audience both adults and children alike, and the major aim of these tales was entertainment, as Carter points out in her introduction to the Angela Carter’s Book of Fairy Tales: “Fairy tales are dedicated to the pleasure principle, although since there is no such thing as pure pleasure, there is always more going on that meets the eye” (2005, xiv). Its orality implies a sense of collectivity, a communal act in which tellers and listeners participated together in the creation of entertainment. In their enlightening approach to the liminal nature of the short story, Achilles and Bergmann (2015) define liminality as “a concept of both demarcation and mediation between different processual stages, spatial complexes, and inner state” 34 NEREA RIOBÓ PÉREZ (2015, 3), thus applicable to numerous topics and literary genres. The fairy tale is a liminal genre per excellence due to its inherent in-betweenness: it is situated in between the oral and written traditions, it can be found in terms of popular and highbrow culture, it addresses both the individual and the community and it is itself a mixture of genres with threshold moments and rites of passage for its characters. In Bacchilega’s words, “as a hybrid or transitional genre, the fairy tale also magically grants writers/tellers and readers/listeners access to the collective […], an access that allows for an apparent limitless, highly idiosyncratic re-creation of that ‘once there was’” (1997, 5). Fantasy is an integral element to these narratives, often dealing with settings placed in far away, imaginary countries, depicting characters like fairies, magicians, beasts, animals and metamorphic creatures: “Animal metamorphosis and changeable bodies on the one hand, and the binding power of promises and curses on the other, govern the logic of the plots” (Warner 2014, 31). Core to fantasy genres, shapeshifting, or metamorphosis, has been a resource that can be traced back to the earliest mythologies of humankind and is present in legends, folktales and fairy tales: “Metamorphosis in fairy tales has a clear relation with myth, and fairytale variants spin twists on the tradition: for example, the ‘witch duels’, or battle sequences of everchanging metamorphoses […] pick up the struggle of shape-shifters like Thetis against Peleus” (Warner 2014, 34). In this sense, it is important to bear in mind that the fairy tale is a complex genre, used in many different ways throughout history with opposite ends in view, both to emphasise and reinforce heteronormative patriarchal values and to deconstruct them: “El cuento de hadas es un subgénero complejo, pues funciona como un discurso oficial y como un texto subversivo. […] Ha sido utilizado con fines éticos, políticos, sociales y sexistas […]. En esta segunda mitad del siglo XX, los elementos feministas no han podido ser menos que esperados en el cuento de hadas” (Pérez Gil 120). These oral and anonymous narratives began to be collected and written down at the end of the Renaissance by Italian writers such as Straparola and Basile: Bottingheimer provides instead a book-based history that traces the canon of Perrault and Grimm back to the sixteenthand seventeenth – century Italian authors Giambattista Basile and Giovan Francesco Staparola. […] Most fairy-tale scholars now taking the view that fairy tales are a provocative and confusing mixture of oral and literary tradition […]. (Kidd 29) 35 2. Angela Carter and the Fairy Tale This process of the creation of the literary fairy tale—the written form—was accelerated thanks to the invention of the printing press, as Carter herself notes: “Since the introduction of cheap printing processes in the seventeenth century, stories have moved in and out of the printed world” (2005, xvii). The fusion of oral traits like repetition or formulaic expressions on the one hand, and literary written forms on the other, has established the fairy tale as a liminal, hybrid literary genre: “The ‘classic’ fairy tale is a literary appropriation of the older folk tale, an appropriation which nevertheless continues to exhibit and reproduce some folkloric features. As a ‘borderline’ or transitional genre, it bears the traces of orality, folkloric tradition and socio-cultural performance” (Bacchilega 1997, 3). After having its written beginnings in Italy, the fairy tale moved to France and became extremely popular. In this process of production of literary fairy tales and their subsequent compilations, the characterization of women suffered a substantial transformation, as along with the genre itself: The fairy tale has always been associated with women […] and as such they are connected to the notion of “women’s persuasive speech” […]. However, feminist criticism has repeatedly characterized the depiction of women in fairy tales as clichéd […]. Although initially spread orally and shaped my matriarchal culture and their peasant origin, […] most of the folktales were adapted to the zeitgeist on their time once they were written down. The French fairy-tale tradition of the contes des fees, which preceded Charles Perrault’s collection Histoires ou contes du temps passé (1697), and originated in the salons of the 1630s, was predominantly female. (Gruss 195) A number of French women writers of the fairy tale, like Madame d’Aulnoy, continued to address female concerns through the tales in their literary salons: “Although there is much debate over the oral roots of the fairy tale, […] its communal origins are undeniable. The literary fairy tale […] with the tradition of the contes des fees, the tales of the fairies, […] addressed the issues which were of primary concerned to women” (Kerchy 18). The oral fairy tales were full of sexual and scatological references due to their function as an act of entertainment. However, from Perrault to the French literary salons, the tales suffered a series of transformations to fit in the manners of the nobility and high class of the French court. In this respect, the domestication of the genre pertained a process of refinement of those elements that were not suitable for young female noble readers, thus becoming a moral guide for their audience. 42 NEREA RIOBÓ PÉREZ Atwood and Suniti Namjoshi: A Study in Feminism and Fairy Tales (2010) also positions herself in favour of a broader audience: “The origin of the literary fairy tale in the tenth century by aristocratic women as a type of parlour game where both men and women participated clearly reveals that fairy tales are not intended exclusively for children” (143). Bettelheim’s psychoanalytical approach to fairy tales will be a major point of departure for contemporary critics on the fairy tale, such as Jack Zipes, who agrees with Bettleheim in regarding fairy tales as primarily children’s literature, yet disagrees on other major questions: “Bettelheim’s book disseminates false notions about the original intent of Freudian psychoanalytic theory and about the literary quality of fairy tales and leaves the reader in a state of mystification” (2002, 181). Zipes’s seminal Breaking the Magic Spell: Radical Theories of Folk and Fairy Tales—published in 1979, coinciding with Carter’s The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories and Susan Gubar and Sandra Gilbert’s The Madwoman in the Attic—articulates major points of departure from Bettelheim: “When I first wrote the following essay in 1977, I was greatly angered by what I felt to be the authoritarian tone and fallacious arguments of Bruno Bettelheim’s The Uses of Enchantment” (Zipes 2002, 179). Kidd establishes an apt connection between the protagonists of the fairy tales and the importance of rites of passage from childhood to adulthood, which, in his view, justifies the need to contemplate the fairy tale as targeted to a wider audience: In writing for adolescents, gender demands and assumptions about sexuality are intimately bound up with the interiorist tendencies of the protagonist. […] the adolescent character’s struggle of selfhood, often symbolized by creativity, though, and other ostensibly psychological and private activities, is often staged around or against expectations about gender and sexuality. (158) Adolescence, in itself a liminal moment in the life of human beings, is a remarkable element present in fairy tales through the coming-of-age factor. The stories present young characters that throughout the narrative become adults through a series of events that function as rites of passage, since the young protagonists leave their childhood behind to become mature individuals in a liminal experience of the individual to join the collective as a new member: “In ritual passages, liminality is followed by reintegration rituals that re-establish the order of the new personality as a part of the social order that 43 2. Angela Carter and the Fairy Tale he or she re-enters with a new role, stamped by the formative experience. This is a critical passage, but without reintegration liminality is pure danger” (Thomassen 22). As argued above, the fairy tale is considered a liminal genre for reasons which extend to various levels: formal aspects, especially in what concerns the intersections between orality and written narratives, the dialogue between the writer/teller and the reader/listener, the existing debate concerning its target audience, the spaces and the characters involved in the narrative and the maturation processes they suffered, and the ambiguity of its ideology, as both reinforcement or deconstruction of Western patriarchal thought: Expanding Arnold van Gennep’s theories, Victor Turner’s The Ritual Process (1969) specifically identifies a kind of liminal experience undergone by audience/participants when engaged in the brief liminality provided by carnival, drama, and film. […] the literary Märchen in particular hold the capacity to provide liminal spaces for scrutinizing social process through the reader’s exposure to new information contained within the narrative. Thus, the act of reading a story can become a small initiation […]. Typically, a fairy tale revolves around the protagonist’s journey outward beyond the limen, or threshold […]. Besides […], the literary Märchen, or the written version of a fairy tale […] encompasses a further liminal dimension. Roemer sees the particular intertextuality inherent in the narrative form of the literary Märchen as necessarily liminal. (Roemer and Bacchilega 95) 2.2. GENDER ROLES AND SEXUALITY In the process of fairy-tale rewriting, some collectors from different countries and at different historical moments presented similar ideologies underlying the tales (Zipes 1991, 31). This genre progressively became a useful tool to reproduce models of behaviour for courtly men and women first and for those related to upper-class and bourgeois readers later, especially with Perrault and the Brothers Grimm’s compilations. In their narratives, the male character is invariably presented as the brave, wealthy hero, the king or prince who leads the action, while the female protagonist’s only goal in life is gaining social status by marrying him: Todas las heroínas se contentan con regalos […] y con la tranquilidad que confiere la protección de ese héroe unas veces fuerte y guapo, otras valeroso, pero, indefectiblemente, rico o poderoso. Atraparlo garantiza el ascenso y la consideración social de las protagonistas, cuya suerte dependerá de quien las salve. (Bengoechea 41) These fictional female protagonists are passively waiting to be discovered, chosen and asked to accept marriage by men, as would be expected from women in 44 NEREA RIOBÓ PÉREZ society in the real world (Bengoechea 40). Through the tales, male and female identities, as well as family relationships, are constructed as a model to be followed. Thus, we find the female in need of masculine protection; the male hero who saves her; the punishment of female curiosity; marriage as the ultimate goal for women in life and maternity as the only possibility for women’s happiness (Bengoechea 40). Fairy tales were thus regarded as a good vehicle to expand ideas pertaining to proper female behaviour and, as a result, their female protagonists evidence two particular models of femininity in terms of either their departure from or adherence to such models: the witch and the princess. The representation of women as monsters is a recurrent construction in patriarchal societies since Ancient History: different mythological traditions have constructed she-monsters—as animal hybrids—in the role of villains who fought against male heroes, such as Medusa, the Sphinx, the sirens, Harpy, selkie or Lamia, to name just a few: “Queens of the night demand our obedience; ogres threaten; witches infest the woods. […] evil-doers also occupy the heart of the home: the wicked mother, the queen, and the fabled stepmother return again and again, in one story after another, as the agents of potent and lethal spells […]. Females dominate fairy tale evil” (Warner 2014, 24). These female villains are punished because they do not comply with patriarchal standards, and, curiously enough, they present some metamorphic characteristics inherited from mythology: The enchanters and enchantresses of fairy tales […] also have recognizable mythic counterparts. Circe, who changes men into beasts in both Homer ad in Ovid, and her niece Medea, are the precursors of many fascinating sorceresses, such as the Queen of the Serpents [...] or the many evil queens and stepmothers who are equally skilled at poisons and potions and transmogrifying their victims. (Warner 2014, 34-36) The second type of female characters is represented by those princesses fulfilling the role of beloved wives and mothers: “Las niñas de los cuentos de hadas suelen ser víctimas inocentes, personitas dependientes, sumisas, ingenuas, jóvenes, domésticas y sacrificadas; pero básicamente su hermosura es el capital más valioso” (Bengoechea 4041). This dichotomy, based on Western patriarchal duality, divides women in terms of beauty and power: “The good women, usually the heroines are invariably beautiful, passive and powerless, while the bad ones usually witches or stepmothers are very often ugly, bad-tempered and powerful” (Koshy 80). 45 2. Angela Carter and the Fairy Tale In this way, women began to be confined to this passive role and their sexuality was denied, as it was regarded as sinful and dangerous for them. Perrault and the Brothers Grimm helped to change the way in which sexuality was seen: from a natural and accepted view of it in the oral tales to “restriction and revulsion” (Zipes 2002, 33). If sexual behaviour was more or less directly mentioned in Perrault’s fairy tales, he did so with a moral intention of warning: “Human sexuality has not been static and, […] there was an important shift in European attitudes in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries so that the open display of sex and bodily functions gradually became curtailed” (Zipes 1991, 33). During the twentieth century, both male and female writers showed an interest in the fairy tale genre and started to rewrite the well-known stories from different perspectives, often with a feminist and deconstructive slant: En este último cuarto de siglo docenas de mujeres y hombres se han afanado en deconstruir los cuentos tradicionales. Sin embargo, el cuento de hadas parece formar parte más indisoluble del sustrato del pensamiento colectivo femenino que del masculino. Lo prueba la enorme y variadísima cantidad de menciones, alusiones y reescrituras que de ellos encontramos en la literatura femenina. (Bengoechea 42) In the case of women writers, there is a clear connection between the urge to deconstruct fairy tales and feminism: “Las mujeres escriben en general, y aún sin quererlo, desde una perspectiva feminista. Parecen ser infinitamente más conscientes (y críticas) de las repercusiones de los cuentos en la configuración de los roles de género” (Bengoechea 42). Such rewritings offer different options and open endings which resist traditional readings of the tales: “Today, the ‘happy ending’ no longer ends in marriage. Instead, a largely female group of writers are examining alternatives, community first and foremost in fact as well as in fiction” (Kerchy 23). One of the most substantial changes in these modern reassessments pertain to the presentation of women characters, often more complex and with a deeper personality than their folktale equivalents: “Contemporary fairy tales complicate the interconnections between skin and other fairytale themes further by the fact that they are conscious revisions, and thus the authors, audiences, and sometimes even the characters display a metanarrative awareness of the genre’s features” (Kerchy 279). Many of these women writers also recovered and approached the connection between women and nature and the body from varied perspectives: Angela Carter is, of course, a prominent example, in her use of fantastic and grotesque elements (Palmer 26). 46 NEREA RIOBÓ PÉREZ Angela Carter’s reassessment of traditional fairy tales has become a landmark both in postmodernist approaches to the genre and in challenging received assumptions of female propriety and sexuality. Significantly, Carter draws from traditional patriarchal images of liminal, animalistic women in a transgressive manner, serving the purpose of destabilising binary oppositions related to gender, sexual orientation or identity. The feminist use of this subversive imagery is a source of female empowerment that provides Carter’s characters with strength, complexity and unity. In order to do so, Carter uses Gothic monstrosity and grotesque, liminal figures, threshold states and animal metamorphosis to deconstruct the heteropatriarchal values of female identity and to create the possibility of the apparition of a hybrid, fluid, nomadic individual. 2.3. METAMORPHOSIS In constructing literary possibilities for the existence of a fluid, nomadic subjectivity, Carter heavily draws on the formal and ideological possibilities which the metamorphic body may convey, especially in what relates to the opposition nature versus culture and the female body. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the term “metamorphosis” refers to “the action or process of changing in form, shape, or substance; especially transformation by supernatural means” (cf. OED s.v. metamorphosis, n.), which may also entail a transformation of personality, aspect or circumstances of a person, and thus becoming a “protean term or principle” (Gildenhard and Zissos 4). Metamorphosis is intrinsically related to physical and psychological threshold and liminal states, since it implies a transformation from one state to another and creates a compound of both, a proper hybrid; its changeability permits to invert the transformation, thus creating a sense of fluidity and it is used to defy established orders, identities and conceptions by destabilising notions of boundaries and fixed identities (McMahon-Coleman and Weaver 108). As previously mentioned, shape-shifting and gender appear closely related in classical mythology and folk narratives, and she-monsters or metamorphic female characters are most often presented in negative terms. Deprived of a voice of their own, 47 2. Angela Carter and the Fairy Tale these female creatures overtly represent non-normative female behaviour in patriarchal societies and shape-shifting was often the outcome of female transgression. By using monstrosity and animalization, heteronormative patriarchal discourses distorted female identity to maintain their status quo. However, a number of contemporary women writers—such as Angela Carter, Margaret Atwood or Michèle Roberts—have reassessed the relationship between monstrosity and women’s bodies by presenting it as a source of female empowerment by deconstructing “the dominant gaze at the womanmonster” (Castagna 59). Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber is a perfect example of the writer’s appropriation of animal metamorphosis and monstrous female figurations as a source for female empowerment. Carter’s unique blend of Gothic elements, the fairy tale and metamorphic creatures from folklore serves the purpose of transgressing and subverting patriarchal ideals of femininity firmly rooted in in those literary traditions, in such a way that “monstrosity might be considered not so much as an expression of the vulnerability of the subject, rather as an instrument of self-affirmation and acquiring of autonomy of women, as in the case of Angela carter’s short stories with the recurring, vampire-like, Gothic vein” (Castagna 59). Shapeshifting, or metamorphosis, has been a resource that can be traced back to the earliest mythological accounts and it is present in legends, folktales and fairy tales from all over the world: “Of course, the figure of the shapeshifter is an international one, present in many cultures: the fox in Japan, tiger and crocodile in China, various jungle animals in tropical regions, and the bear in Canada and northern Japan” (McMahon-Coleman and Weaver 6). In its origins, metamorphosis is linked to totems, deities and creation myths, being one of its most important attributes the character’s fluidity (McMahon-Coleman and Weaver 85). In the Western tradition, the metamorphosis of human beings into animals or plants comes to us through “ancient Greek myths of metamorphosis (and their Near Eastern antecedents), including the occasional instance recorded in the Old Testament; and it continues today in science fiction and other genres that explore such topical issues as gene mutation and hybridization” (Gildenhard and Zissos 2-3). During the Greek period, writers created a sense of animal-human continuum in the universe, where gods transformed themselves into animals and hybrid fantastic creatures coexisted with humans and anthropomorphised animals (Gildenhard and Zissos ch. ‘Introduction to part I’). Western thought has inherited the division between body and 48 NEREA RIOBÓ PÉREZ mind, which often relates women or animals to the body and men to the intellectual sphere (Gildenhard and Zissos ch. “Introduction to part I”). As a result, the body becomes the focus of attention, it “is the site of transformation and we find issues of control and discipline at work” (McMahon-Coleman and Weaver 120). In this sense, Ovid’s Metamorphoses uses shapeshifting as a unifying thematic element, thus establishing transformation and reshaping at the basis of a flexible, nomadic relationship between humans and animals, as its opening lines suggest: “In nova fert animus mutatas dicere formas / corpora” (My intention is to tell of bodies changed/ To different forms” (Ovid 2-3). Many of the stories are sexual encounters between different characters, which sometimes transform themselves in order to consummate their love, or just the opposite, characters who are transformed to avoid sexual encounter, thus establishing an explicit connection between the body and sexuality. Unlike Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Apuleius’s The Golden Ass (c. 124 c.170 AD) rather focuses in the reversible effects of metamorphic change, which establishes a difference between permanent transformations and temporal ones, which will be present in future references. Generally speaking, in Christian and Judaic thought metamorphosis is often relegated to the “pagan” folklore and engaged with shapeshifting in ways less connected to the natural world (Gildenhard and Zissos ch. “Introduction to part II”). During the Middle Ages, Christianity reduced shapeshifting to the condition of demonic figures at the service of the devil: “The scandalous behaviour of the deathless but nevertheless superseded gods cast a long shadow on the Christian iconography of good and bad behaviour; their protean energies of transformation and sexuality were translated into hellish imagery. In medieval eschatology, metamorphosis by almost any process belongs to the devil’s part” (Warner 2002, 35). The Renaissance’s renewed interest in classical mythology brought about a change pertaining to the use of metamorphosis, from being an instrument for explaining the world to a means of dealing with human subjectivity: The second domain in which metamorphosis has continued to resonate in what could be labelled the modern ‘post-metamorphic’ age of disenchanted nature is ‘the self’. Petrarch’s use of Ovid to explore a proto-modern subjectivity in the pursuit of worldly fame […], heralded a shift from the divine to the human as the (self-) transformer par excellence. (Gildenhard and Zissos ch. “Introduction to part II”) 49 2. Angela Carter and the Fairy Tale As earlier mentioned, at the end of the Renaissance the literary fairy tale appeared due to the work of Basile and Straparola. The liminal literary fairy tale nurtured from the oral tradition, myths and metamorphosis, and dealt with bodily issues, transformations and shapeshifting characters to the point of becoming a “connective tissue of communications between cultures” (Warner 2002, 17). The end of the early and beginning of the Modern period testifies to the apparition of French literary fairy tales, such as those produced by Madame d’Aulnoy (1690s), Charles Perrault (1697), Madame de Villeneuve (1740) and Madame de Leprince du Beaumont (1770). Metamorphosis is a recurrent literary device in a large proportion of the tales, both as a real event or symbolically (Warner 2014, 31), and goes down the line of Apuleius in the eventual restoration of humanity. In the case of the “animal groom” or “animal husband” cycle tales, a beautiful young woman has a beast as a future husband, who finally metamorphoses into a beautiful man. The most wellknown of these tales is “Beauty and the Beast”, written by both Villeneuve and Leprince du Beaumont. In these fairy tales, the male hero is transformed into a beast or monster, sometimes an animal-hybrid creature, which eventually concludes with the reversal transformation from beast to prince: By contrast with animal fables, where something of an animal’s observable, actual character helps make the point […], the beast of fairy tale romance comes in fantasy shape – mythological creatures such as a dragon, a snake, a yellow dwarf […] and they belong in a wold of romance and psychology rather than satire and practical wisdom. Monster bridegrooms can also take the form of animals that used to pose a very real threat – wolves and bears and pigs and warthogs. (Warner 2014, 28) Around 1800, however, metamorphosis had already become established as a “key concept in two spheres of endeavour: science and conceptions of the human self” (Gildenhard and Zissos ch. “Introduction to part II”). In this enlightened world, tales of shapeshifting flourished in popular literature, conforming “bubbling spate of fables, dramas, romances, fantasies, and harlequinades in which animals turn into human beings and vice versa” (Warner 2002, 26), which consolidated in the nineteenth century as a literary tradition of romances and gothic narratives which questioned an exclusively rational approach to experience by offering alternative understandings of the world through the presence of shapeshifting creatures and metamorphic monsters, threatening to dissolve in their liminality ontological boundaries. 50 NEREA RIOBÓ PÉREZ Although metamorphosis is a consistent element in Carter’s oeuvre, it acquires specific relevance in her famous collection of short stories The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories (1979), which is the major focus of this doctoral dissertation. It is my contention that the use of metamorphosis works in Carter as a vehicle of hybridization and “becoming-animal” in Deleuzian terms, serving the purpose of, on the one hand, deconstructing the traditional gender roles present in fairy tales and, on the other, putting forward a new sense of subjectivity. By virtue of the use of metamorphosis as a liminal literary device and by mixing hybrid literary genres like fairy tales or gothic narratives, Carter blurs the traditional opposition between animal and human aiming at female empowerment and at a radical conception of subjectivity. 2.4. ANGELA CARTER AND ANIMALS Angela Carter also reflected upon the relation between humans and animals in her journalistic articles, in some of her interviews and in her fiction. She openly spoke about the relation of dominance between the species and the question of beastliness and monstrosity. Her interest in animals was clearly reflected in her work; in an interview for Marxism Today in 1985, Carter declared herself to be a “follower of Darwin’s theories” in relation to our biological condition as animals and our erroneous moral superiority as human beings over the rest of the animalia: Well, we are animals, after all. […] I realise I’m sentimental about furred and feathered beings but they’re never dull. I have a minor but quite passionate interest in natural history, I’m a Darwinian. I like animals and I’m interested in animals. I’m also interested in human beings’ projections upon animals of negative qualities, which very often the animals don’t have. (1985, 21) Her article “Animals in the Nursery”, published in New Society in 1976, is a thoughtful reflection on the connection between animals and children and how adults use and explore that link to the human benefit with questionable didactic purposes: “All fictional animals are imaginary animals. Adult writers take an unfair advantage of child/beast solidarity to perpetuate animal fables that are really systems of moral instruction” (2013, 367). In a similar vein, Carter’s article entitled “Little Lamb, Get Lost” (1978) draws on Blake’s trope of the tiger to deal with the question of bestiality, the difference between animals depending on the level of jeopardy and what humans think of them. 51 2. Angela Carter and the Fairy Tale Blake’s famous collections Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience (1789) articulates the lamb figure as the epitome of innocence in opposition to the tiger, emphasising animality, exoticism, danger and experience, which Carter would famously reassess in “The Tiger’s Bridge”, in which she moves from a representation of the tiger as with a dangerous carnivore beast to the harmless herbivorous lamb (2013, 374). According to Carter, Western thought has traditionally used bestiality to symbolically deal with the darkest aspects of humanity, such as corporeity and sexuality while, conversely, transferring human characteristics and adequate behavior and conduct to some animals, thus anthropomorphizing them: It is one of the more insinuatingly baleful effects of Judaeo-Christianity that we can’t treat beasts as, in any sense, equals, but persist in projecting on them either our own beastliness or our fantasies of innocence. In other cultures, beasts may have to bear a heavy burden of myth. But they are not forced to be exemplary. (2013, 374-375) Carter cleverly pointed at the negative effects of this supposed male human superiority, denouncing the power structures inherent to the relationships established among humans, who disregard animals as “inferiors” and “others” together with women: “People treat animals they have in their power according to their expectations of their treatment by people who have power over them. (As, indeed, men do their wives)” (2013, 375). She was also well aware of how the Western world has created a division between human and non-human animals, thus engaging in the binary system that has dominated Western philosophical thought since Plato: I’m interested in the division that Judo-Christianity has made between human nature and animal nature. None of the other great faiths in the world have got quite that division between us and them. None of the others has made this enormous division between birds and beasts who, as Darwin said, would have developed consciences if they’d had the chance, and us. I think it’s one of the scars in Western Europe. I think it’s one of the scars in our culture that we have too high an opinion of ourselves. We align ourselves with the angels instead of the higher primates. (1985, 21-22) Carter here criticises the animal/human divide as a clear outcome of the JudoChristian tradition, which has erected artificial barriers—“scars”—and hierarchical structures which have been recently questioned by animal studies and posthumanism. In a sense, Carter’s reflections on the relationships of dominance between humans, animals and the natural world anticipate the focus of these two interconnected disciplines, which 58 NEREA RIOBÓ PÉREZ In this dissertation, the exploration of Carter’s use of metamorphosis as a vehicle for hybridization in The Bloody Chamber to deconstruct traditional gender roles in fairy tales and to create a new sense of subjectivity which offers the readers different identity options is informed by some concepts relating to the field of animal studies, among others. For the purposes of this dissertation, animal studies prove to be a useful tool to look into Carter’s portrayal of the relationship between human and non-human animals, since the latter have traditionally been regarded as the Other, as mere objects or products to human consumerism. Literary depictions of such relationships have often been addressed by animal studies, thus becoming “a special target of concern for scholars in animal studies” (McHugh 2009, 32). As such, literary human-animal studies focus on how animals are portrayed in literature, being mainly treated as mere symbols, metaphors or allegories for human subjectivity through anthropomorphism, but hardly ever addressed as actual animals, as the work of prominent scholars such as Bartosch (2016a; 2016b; 2017), Dominik Ohrem and Roman Bartosch (2017), Susan McHugh (2009; 2011), Philip Armstrong (2008), Kenneth Saphiro and Marion Copeland (2005) or Catherine Parry (2017), among others, have shown. In this way, a large number of biologists, ethologists and some ecocritics have positioned themselves in a radical position as to the damage caused by anthropomorphism to non-human animals, which often stems from a desire to project human attributes onto animals, thus radically altering their representation and displacing them as mere objects, denying agency and voice in favour of humans: “The allegation of anthropomorphism itself derives from an anthropocentric and ethnocentric understanding about what agency is. A reconceptualization of agency […] might facilitate a mode of analysis that does not reduce the animal to a blank screen for the projection of human meaning” (Armstrong 3). Some scholars—such as Bartosch, McHugh or Saphiro and Copeland—are more open to the possibility of analysing animals in literature from both a symbolical and a realist perspective, which, in their view, offers the possibility of breaking boundaries between humans and animals in order to create a space for animal agency: When employed as a strategy or motif in literary writing, it was seen as exactly that by critics and theorists: A strategy or motif that must point to some meaning other than literal likeness: Animals became anthropomorphized so that they could be domesticated as symbols or standins for humans. However, if anthropomorphism “provides us with a unique 59 2. Angela Carter and the Fairy Tale opportunity to bridge the conceptual and moral gulf that separates humans from other animals” (Serpell 2005, 132), it works, I would like to argue, as a story rather than a strategy or motif, and it is from the totality of the story— its coherence, narrative trajectory, and aesthetic qualities—that we may judge the pertinence of anthropomorphic thinking. (Bartosch 2017, 155) As Bartosch mentions, it is in the narrative, its formal construction as well as in its wholeness, where the relevance of anthropomorphism relies. And it is precisely that analysing the “totality of the story” which permits to see whether the text—and consequently the author—present anthropomorphism as a means for animal agency. The necessity to acknowledge the different strategies of anthropomorphic thought in its totality is central to its process of deconstruction. The text as a whole creates a space for dialogue between species and hybrid identities, in which anthropomorphism and zoomorphism are used to deconstruct preconceived ideas of identity and subjectivity, both human and animal. My argument, in tune with Bartosch’s ideas, is the creation of such a space throughout Angela Carter’s collection of short stories The Bloody Chamber, in which metamorphosis from animal to human and vice versa functions as a coherent and unifying thread in the texts. In this dissertation, I will analyse Carter’s texts in search for the symbolic treatment of animals (intrinsically connected with psychoanalysis) as well as for the representation of animals as such, as Bartosch suggests. By means of metamorphosis, I argue, Carter blurs the physical and imaginary borders which divide humans from animals and creates a space for hybrid identities where human and animal alterities can coexist as equals. Carter’s short stories empower both women and animals and exhort them to embrace their real nature. Thus, Carter not only uses animalistic characteristics to create different possibilities of subjectivity but also gives agency and voice both to women and animals in a predominantly patriarchal tradition which treated women and animals as objects, as is the case of classic fairy tales. Between these two factions— both represented as the Other—there is a question of empathy, being both women and animals treated as commodities to be used, exploited, hunted or consumed as meat by patriarchal Western societies which consider bodies as flesh: “Humans treat bodies as valuable, and value bodily flesh, whether of humans or of other animals, according to a complex of metaphysical, political, economic, cultural or social calculations, all of which participate in the qualification of relationships among humans, animals and objects” (Parry 112). Empathy, as understood by Lorraine Daston in Daston and Mittman’s Thinking with Animals: New Perspectives on Anthropomorphism (2005), 60 NEREA RIOBÓ PÉREZ refers to the “precondition for emotional and moral sympathy. Either we understand other minds subjectively or we do not understand them at all” (54). Thinking about how humans treat animals as objects and deny their subject position allows us to sympathise with their situation and create a bridge which blurs part of the borders which separates the two categories, creating “emotional and affective engagements between humans and other animals” (Armstrong 2). In order to break the borders and frontiers of the great divide which separates animals from humans, Carter uses liminal times and spaces, hybrids from the Gothic imaginary and metamorphosis to reach the physical and imaginary frontiers that prevent them from developing subject positions. In Carter’s narrative, liminality appears related both to animals, supernatural monstrous creatures and humans, especially women. Borderline supernatural figures which are in a permanent state of in-betweenness (Aftandilian 10), as suggested by Gothic tropes such as the werewolf or the vampire, are, in Carter’s short stories, liberated from their static condition and are able to move across borders and states. In order to explore Carter’s subversive strategies in questioning traditional borders, I will follow Saphiro and Copeland’s three-folded analysis proposal. Their analysis of a literary work from a perspective need to have three parts: 1.Deconstruct reductive, disrespectful ways of presenting nonhuman animals; and 2. Evaluate the degree to which the author presents the animal “in itself,” both as an experiencing individual and as a species-typical way of living in the world. We add a third approach: that the critique includes an analysis of human-animal relationships in the work at hand. (2005, 345) By doing so, I will exemplify the ways in which Carter’s texts deconstruct received ideas relating to both animals and women by empowering her characters through sexuality and bodily aspects. I will also examine how Carter—who expressed her own ideas about the connection between psychoanalysis and the symbolic meanings of some animals like the wolf, as mentioned earlier—deals with Bartosch’s two possibilities of representing animals in her fiction, namely, as symbols for human self-conception and as actual animals. Finally, I will explore the connections between Carter’s female characters and animals and how they relate to each other, searching for a common empathy between both, being the animal in equal terms, “the fruit of which is a common project, a shared world” (Saphiro and Copeland 345). 61 3. ANGELA CARTER AND THE BLOODY CHAMBER 3.1 ANGELA CARTER English writer Angela Carter (1940-1992) occupies a prominent place in twentiethcentury British literature due to her unique and exuberant style and her feminist commitment, and her oeuvre, a quite extensive one despite her untimely death, has been extensively analysed by literary critics. Carter worked as a journalist throughout her whole life, an activity which she combined with fiction-writing and University lecturing in Creative Writing. As a fiction-writer, Carter published nine novels, being the most well-known The Magic Toyshop (1967), Heroes and Villains (1969), The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman (1972), The Passion of New Eve (1977) and Nights at the Circus (1984). Regarding short fiction, Carter wrote four collections of short stories—previously mentioned in chapter one—collected posthumously in a volume titled Burning Your Boats: The Collected Short Stories. Carter also wrote a number of essays, such as the controversial The Sadeian Woman: An Exercise in Cultural History (1979), five radio plays,4 participated in two television programmes,5 and collaborated in the scripts of the two films based on her work, The Company of Wolves (Neil Jordan, 1984) and The Magic Toyshop (David Wheatly, 1987) and her incursions in poetry were posthumously compiled as Unicorn: The Poetry of Angela Carter in 2015 by Rosemary Hill. However, there are some aspects of her literary activity that are less known: she was also an editor, a translator and a writer of children’s literature. As previously argued, Carter’s own experiences in Japan from 1969 to 1972 marked a turning point both in her writing career and in her life. There she could appreciate Japanese culture and its sociological order, which she described as a rigid patriarchal society characterized by cultural constraint, as shown in both her fictional 4 Vampirella (1976), Come Unto These Yellow Sands (1979), The Company of Wolves (1980), Puss-in-Boots (1982) and A Self-Made Man (1984). 5 The Holy Family Album (1991) and Omnibus: Angela Carter’s Curious Room (1992). 62 NEREA RIOBÓ PÉREZ and non-fictional writing. Her experiences as a British woman in Japan affected her ideas about feminism to the point of becoming a central topic in her writing, as the author confirmed in Nothing Sacred: Selected Writing (Carter 1982, 28), a collection of journalist articles which reflected her impressions during her stay in Tokyo. Her literary works influenced by her experiences in Japan are mainly her well-known novel The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman and her first collection of short stories Fireworks: Nine Profane Pieces. As mentioned before in chapter one, Carter’s literary production after Japan turned towards the short story in detriment of the novel. Attracted by the condensation of brief forms, she not only produced but also edited and translated several collections of short stories. From Japanese culture Carter borrowed a number of images, such as mirrors and dolls—taken from the theatrical traditions of Noh and Bunraku—which function as key literary elements in her work and whose relevance in The Bloody Chamber will be analysed in subsequent chapters. Despite the relevance of Carter’s experience in Japan, the writer’s s feminist agenda had already begun before her experiences in the Nippon country, as she mentioned in “Notes from the Front Line”: I can date to the time and to some of those debates and to that sense of heightened awareness of the society around me in the summer of 1968, my own questioning of the nature of my reality as a woman. How that social fiction of my “femininity” was created, by means outside my control, and palmed off on me as the real thing. (2013, 46-47) Although Carter was already influenced by second-wave feminist thought at the time, her “sense of femininity” became “radicalised” in Japan when confronting gender roles and expectations in that country, which triggered her critical analysis of gender in Western societies too: “Carter’s fictional and non-fictional works on Japan represent Japan as the exact mirror image of the West” (Murai 9). Such a process of reflexivity will fuel Carter’s deconstruction and subversion of Western traditions and imagery and how these affected the construction of gender. Carter’s personal quarrel with this forethought of feminist ideas and sexuality, together with her fascination with Marquis de Sade’s work, led to the publication of her famous essay The Sadeian Woman—significantly published the same year as The Bloody Chamber—in which she defended some elements regarded as controversial for secondwave feminists, such as pornography and free sexuality for women, famously postulating that 63 3. Angela Carter and The Bloody Chamber the moral pornographer would be an artist who uses pornographic material as part of the acceptance of the logic of a world of absolute sexual license for all the genders […]. A moral pornographer might use pornography as a critique of current relations between sexes. (Carter 1979, 22) In an interview with Anna Katsavos, “A Conversation with Angela Carter”, Carter discussed Sade’s figure as a “moral pornographer”, while also being conscious of the controversy which her views may have for other feminists: It’s not very pleasant for women to find out about how they are represented in the world. They find out much more about what their real existential status is from pornography, and it’s very unpleasant. […] One of the things about Sade is that he did know he was a pervert […] and I think that he was upset about it. […] He proselytizes a little bit for his perversion, and suddenly he realizes he’s doing something dreadful. But moral pornographer was a phrase that got me into a lot of trouble with the sisters, some of the sisters. (Katsavos 17) Carter’s equation of the term “moral” with Sade’s pornography originated a heated debate among a large number of feminists. In the middle of the nineteen seventies, second-wave feminists were immersed in discussions about how women where portrayed in the world and how they were seen through the male gaze and, consequently, objectified. For many feminists, pornography was an obvious exemplification of such masculine appropriations of the female body, used as an object of male desire, as Carter expressed in her essay: “This is true for woman also, perhaps, especially so, as soon as we realise the way pornography reinforces the archetypes of her negativity and that it does so simply because most pornography remains in the service of the status quo” (1979, 19). A large number of second-wave feminists were divided regarding this issue, being one faction against pornography—such as Andrea Dworkin, Catharine MacKinnon, Adrienne Rich and Susan Griffin—while the other demanded a change in women’s role and portrayal inside the pornographic world—like Ellen Willis or Gayle Rubin. Carter’s defence of Sade and of his role as a “moral pornographer” placed her in the spotlight of this debate, since she positioned herself in the pro-pornography side, which provoked some furious reactions in some of her contemporaries. Carter’s demands of equal rights for both sexes to enjoy sexuality by changing the passive role of women and by allowing them to actively engage in the sexual act changed the perspective of the male objectification of women, as she appreciated in Sade’s female characters: “Sade […] urges women to fuck as actively as they are able, so that powered by their enormous and hitherto untapped sexual energy 64 NEREA RIOBÓ PÉREZ they will then be able to fuck their way into history and, in doing so, change it” (1979, 31). Numerous references to female sexual empowerment and to the erotic play of gazes are found in The Bloody Chamber: “The fairy tales collected in The Bloody Chamber […] powerfully fictionalise the theoretical stances expressed in the critical essay The Sadeian Woman […] and because they introduce experiments with metamorphic themes, which will be expanded upon in Carter’s following work” (Pasolini 13). Carter’s Beauties and Red Riding Hoods, for example, reject their position as mere objects of male sexual desire and take control of their own sexual impulses, accepting their bodies and exploring their sexual identity. As mentioned before, Japan was crucial not only in triggering Carter’s radicalisation as a feminist, but also in permeating her imagination with a wide store of images that she would use in the short stories she wrote afterwards. Carter showed an interest in fairy tales since her childhood, as the author herself reveals in her journalistic articles “The Better to Eat You With” (1976), “The German Legends of the Brothers Grimm” (1981) and “Milorad Pavic: Dictionary of the Kazars” (1989). As a child, she was thrilled by Andersen: “Please, God, make it stop, I used to say when they read Hans Christian Andersen’s stories to me at bedtime. Is there no end to human suffering?” (Carter 2013, 553). Carter was also fond of Andrew Lang’s collections of folk tales and admired Italo Calvino’s work, as previously mentioned in chapter two, and as an adult she used Perrault’s fairy tales to practise her French: I sweated out the heatwave browsing through Perrault’s Contes du temps passé on the pretext of improving my French. What an unexpected treat to find that in this great Ur-collection […] all these nursery tales are purposely dressed up as fables of the politics of experience. The seventeenth century regarded children, quite rightly, as apprentice adults. (2013, 554) Carter translated Charles Perrault’s Histoires ou Contes du Temps Passé avec des Moralités (1697) under the title The Fairy Tales of Charles Perrault (1977) and “found the experience revelatory” (Gordon 266). The tales published there are not straight translations, since Carter modernises language and allusions and subtly distorts Perrault’s original morals. Revealingly, Carter underwent these translations while simultaneously drafting The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories. Her second volume of fairy-tale translations was titled Sleeping Beauty and Other Favourite Fairy Tales (1982), an anthology of twelve French fairy tales—ten from the ones she has translated 65 3. Angela Carter and The Bloody Chamber before in her previous book and the other two by Madame Leprince de Beaumont. The book includes Carter’s own reflections about both Perrault and Madame de Beaumont in a short essay at the end of the anthology: Perrault added an ad hoc collection of morals to his tales, from which his readers could choose the one they liked best. He applauded the ingenuity of a quick-witted con man like Puss in Boots. The boy who ran away from school admired inventiveness. Madame de Beaumont is not like that. In her lovely stories, we see the fairy tale melting into both a magical art, and also into the kind of abstract moralising that would dominate nineteenth century stories for children. (1982, 128) Carter was particularly appealed by the fairy tale, which she used herself as a genre in The Bloody Chamber in an overt manner and in a more subliminal way in novels such as in The Magic Toyshop (1967). Carter’s own interest in the fairy tale also coincided with a critical revival of the genre, as entailed by Bruno Bettelheim or Jack Zipes’ seminal studies, and it is no coincidence that most of her articles on the genre, her translation of Perrault and her masterpiece collection were written at the end of the nineteen seventies and early nineteen eighties, when Bettleheim and Zipes’s critical works were also published. Moreover, the author herself participated as an editor of two volumes of fairy tales from all over the world for the Publishing House Virago, The Virago Book of Fairy Tales (1990) and The Second Virago Book of Fairy Tales (1992). These two collections of less-known stories compile tales from Europe, Africa, Latin America, Asia and the Middle East. Despite their varied provenance, all these tales emphasise the connection between the genre, female characters and folklore. Both volumes were posthumously compiled by Virago in 2005 under the title Angela Carter’s Book of Fairy Tales. The fairy tale is also present in Carter’s children’s literature: The Donkey Prince (1970), based on the fairy tale The Donkey by the Brothers Grimm; Miss Z, the Dark and Young Lady (1970), where a strong female protagonist finds herself in a fairytale quest; Moonshadow (1980), in which a boy follows his shadow to a place with magic creatures; and Sea-Cat and Dragon King, published posthumously in 2000. A common element of Carter’s fairy-tale work is her focus on strong female protagonists, portrayed as active, witty, independent, resourceful characters. Carter’s feminist agenda can also be appreciated in her role as editor of fairy tales, as translator and as a writer, which encourages readers to consider the genre from a different 66 NEREA RIOBÓ PÉREZ perspective. Yet the fairy tale’s subversive potential is nowhere more conspicuous than in The Bloody Chamber, which presents liminal identities in interstitial places through the liminal genre per excellence, the short story. 3.2. THE BLOODY CHAMBER AND OTHER STORIES Carter’s research for her translation of Perrault’s fairy tales, together with Bettelheim’s 1976 seminal study on the genre, led her to her own production of fairy tales, initially entitled “The New Mother Goose”: This was the first flash of The Bloody Chamber. The finished book would also include versions of “Bluebeard” […], “Snow White” and “Puss-inBoots”, as well as “The Erl-King” and “The Lady of the House of Love”, both of which Angela redrafted to echo more sharply the collection’s themes. The “Cinderella” material was eventually absorbed into “WolfAlice”, which also draws on “Red Riding Hood” and “Beauty and the Beast”. Most of the stories feature young girls discovering their sexuality, and there’s no shortage of erotic and menstrual imagery, but Angela never thought of The Bloody Chamber as a crusading feminist book in the manner of The Passion of New Eve or The Sadeian Woman. (Gordon 267-268) Alongside her own reassessment of traditional fairy tales, Carter also considered introducing in her stories her lifelong interest in vampires which—thanks to her friendship with Christopher Frayling (Gordon 231)—took the form of a radio play named Vampirella in 1975. This play was later to be used for “The Lady of the House of Love”, thus eliminating references to literary vampirism and exaggerating Gothic elements, as Carter herself pointed out: “‘The Lady of the House of Love” is a Gothic tale about a reluctant vampire; the radio play, Vampirella, is about vampirism as a metaphor’” (Gordon 256). “The Lady of the House of Love”, together with “The ErlKing”, were the first stories to be written for The Bloody Chamber. The latter was based on German and Scandinavian folklore, namely the Erlkönig legend, but also on Goethe’s related poem “Der Erlkönig”, thus emphasising Carter’s urge to combine high culture with folklore and oral narratives. Carter’s research at the University of Sheffield Library was the point of inception of her tales pivoting on “Red Riding Hood” (Gordon 272), written between 1976 and 1977, being “The Werewolf” the first of them, and followed by “The Company of Wolves” and “Wolf-Alice”. On the other hand, “The Courtship of Mr Lyon” and “The Tiger’s Bride” were based on “Beauty and the Beast”: “By the spring 67 3. Angela Carter and The Bloody Chamber of 1977 Angela had begun writing the ‘Beauty and the Beast’ sequence for her New Mother Goose tales. ‘Man & beast: benevolence & strangeness of the beasts,’ she wrote in her journal. ‘Beasts as other.’ She looked at Madame Leprince de Beaumont’s version of the tale” (Gordon 278). “The Bloody Chamber”, Carter’s reassessment of “Bluebeard”, was the longest of all the stories and the one which would give its title to the collection: “She [Carter] spent the beginning of the summer working on a long story inspired by ‘Bluebeard’. She felt that Perrault’s original tale had a ‘curious flavour’” (Gordon 279). Carter’s “The Snow Child” is a tale which derives from an obscure Germanic variant of “Snow White” in which “a count and countess are riding through a wintry landscape, the count wishing for a girl, who soon appears, only to be murdered by the countess, and then have her corpse defiled by the count” (Gordon 293-294). Finally, Carter wrote a story based on a mixture between the fairy tale “Puss in Boots” and Pierre Beaumarchais’ play The Barber of Seville: “Angela gave Figaro’s personality to her Puss—he’s ‘a cat of the world, cosmopolitan, sophisticated’—in a story whose plot is much closer to that of Beaumarchais’ play than that of Perrault’s fairy tale, and which has the bawdy, buoyant mood of opera buffa” (Gordon 281). As such, the stories are intertextually connected, among themselves and with other narratives, and appear intertwined as a Russian matryoshka doll: “Her [Carter’s] intertextual parading […] extends to her own work, especially her early stories and title heroes: ‘The Erl-King’ and ‘The Werewolf’, or ‘The Courtship of Mr Lyon’, ‘The Tiger’s Bride’ and ‘Wolf-Alice’, all from The Bloody Chamber. By establishing such relations, the story-teller appears to be also the reader of her own stories […]” (Kerchy 245). The author herself asked her literary agent Deborah Rogers to place the stories in a specific order regarding the evolution between the human and animal relationship: She hurriedly sent it off to Deborah, with the instructions that it [Puss-inBoots] was to go in between COURTSHIP OF MR LYON and THE ERLKING. (The logic of this being, a lion-man, a superhuman cat and a non-human genius loci, juxtaposed in a collection that is about metarelations between humans and animals. No, honestly. The stories are planned as a whole & echo & reflect each other all the time). (Gordon 281-282) Some of the short stories of the collection were published individually “in magazines, to build up momentum, before she [Carter] sent them out to publishers. ‘The Courtship of Mr Lyon’ appeared in Vogue in April 1978, and ‘Wolf-Alice’ appeared in Stand that winter” (Gordon 282). Besides, a radio version of the “The Company of Wolves” was 74 75 4. FELINES: “THE COURTSHIP OF MR LYON” AND “THE TIGER’S BRIDE” This chapter deals with Angela Carter’s two rewritings of “Beauty and the Beast” in The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories: “The Courtship of Mr Lyon” and “The Tiger’s Bride”, placed respectively in the second and third position within the collection. My decision to examine them alongside is motivated not only by the stories’ debt to “Beauty and the Beast”, but also by the presence of animal metamorphoses from humans to felines, and vice versa. In this chapter I will briefly explore the origins of this fairy tale and its most important versions, as well as the psychoanalytical connotations which the tale presents in relation to femininity. Furthermore, I will track the importance of felines in literature and culture and in Carter’s stories, which will be examined against the theoretical backdrop of animal studies. 4.1. “BEAUTY AND THE BEAST” “Beauty and the Beast” has been classified by Bruno Bettelheim as belonging to the “animal groom” or “animal husband” cycle (1976, 282) in which a beautiful young woman has to marry a beast whom she falls in love with, and after going through some adversities, her love metamorphoses the monster into a man whom the maid eventually marries, thus living “happily ever after”. As such, this plot is present in many different narratives which go back to Greek mythology in “Eros and Psyche” or the Rumanian oral fairy tale “The Enchanted Pig”, which became a source of inspiration for Straparola’s “The Pig King”. These traditional tales examine female reactions towards sexual arousal and use literary fantasy creatures like monstrous beasts as the symbolic element to exemplify the unexperienced maid’s fear of sexual encounters: “Tales which—without any reference to repression which causes a negative attitude to sex—simply teach that for love, a radical change in previously held attitudes about sex is absolutely necessary” (Bettelheim 282). The importance of the “beauty and the beast” folktales is its cultural predicament in sexual behaviour through the internalization of the tales’ meanings, especially for women, largely 76 4. Felines: “The Courtship of Mr Lyon” and “The Tiger’s Bride” responsible of education, morality and socialization: “The symbolical cultural pattern of matriarchy, which designated the female as initiator of human action and integration, experienced constant changes over the course of centuries in both the oral and literary tradition” (Zipes 1991, 34). However, the symbolic meanings of the “Beauty and the Beast” folktales began to change from the seventeenth century onwards due to their transition from oral forms to written narratives in France. The tales became very popular among the French noblewomen in King Louis XIV and King Louis XV’s courts which adapted the oral folktales to their times: If we compare those oral folk tales about the animal bridegroom, which stem for matriarchal societies, with those literary fairy tales about “beauty and the beast” at the end of the seventeenth century, it becomes evident that the transformations in the portrayal of sexual configurations and cultural patterns were connected to significant changes within the civilization process itself. (Zipes 1991, 33) As a result of such sexual configurations, the new female protagonist of “Beauty and the Beast” sacrifices herself “to a man in his house or castle, symbolical of submission to patriarchal rule” (Zipes 1991, 34) because of her filial love and obedience to her father (Bettelheim 283). Two good examples of this are the versions of the fairy tale Beauty and the Beast written by Madame de Villeneuve in 1740 and Madame Leprince de Beaumont in 1756, two “didactic discourses on manners, morals, and social class” that try to validate the aristocracy over the bourgeoisie (Zipes 1991, 38). In Beaumont’s tale, Beauty, the youngest daughter of a rich merchant, saves her father by accepting to live with the Beast and, in so doing, she accepts that her role is a domestic one, whereas her sisters are punished “for forming their own desires as well as for rejecting the obligation of feminine altruism” (Kerchy 450). Beauty progressively falls in love with the Beast to eventually realize that “she is willing to marry him. Suddenly he is transformed into a handsome prince” (Zipes 1991, 38). In this version of the tale, the two male characters— Beauty’s father and the Beast—represent the economic and political power upon which the female protagonist depends. The tale targets young women “who fully expected to be given away by their fathers to men who might well strike them as monsters” (Warner 1994, 278), thus becoming a reward-story for women, compensating qualities like dependence, submission and filial duty with promises of love and a happy marriage: The mark of beauty for a female is to be found in her submission, obedience, humility, industry, and patience; the mark of manliness is to be found in his selfcontrol, politeness, reason and perseverance. […] It became clear that the female NEREA RIOBÓ PÉREZ character could only assume her “civil” form if she were willing to sacrifice herself to a beastlike male. By denying herself, she could obtain what all women supposedly wanted and want – namely marriage in the form of male domination. (Zipes 1991, 41) Interestingly, Bettleheim explains how the “animal groom” cycle tales depart from an immature view which posits the individual as divided between animal and mind which, however, in “process of maturation, these artificially isolated aspects of our humanity must become unified” (1991, 308). However, the tale’s original emphasis on sexuality and maturation was transformed by the French courtly ideology that portrayed sexuality as restricted to marriage, which “made sex permissible [and] changed it from something animallike into a bond sanctified by the sacrament of marriage” (Bettelheim 283). As a result, both Madame Villeneuve and Beaumont’s versions of the tale contemplate a vision of sexuality as a consequence of marriage, while also encouraging women not to fear an arranged marriage. Significantly, metamorphosis is at the core of the tales, symbolically expressed for the female character, who changes into an “ideal of virtue and graces”, and in more literal terms for the male character, transformed into an ideal husband as a result of the heroine’s love and submission (Saxena 194). Both Villeneuve and Beaumont draw on the rose symbol as an objectification of Beauty as a possession which passes from the father to the husband-to-be: In “Beauty and the Beast”, the fateful events are brought about by a father’s haven stolen a rose to bring to his best-loved youngest daughter. His doing so symbolizes both his love for her and also an anticipation of her losing her maidenhood, as the broken flower—particularly the broke rose—is a symbol for the loss of virginity. This may seem of both father and daughter as if she would have to suffer some “beastly” experience. (Bettelheim 306) In this sense, Bettelheim reads “Beauty and the Beast” as an instrument to confront childhood fears, such as “the creations of his [the child’s] anxious sexual fantasies; and what while sex may at first seem beastlike, in reality love between woman and man is the most satisfying of all emotions” (306). Unlike Bettelheim, Zipes (1991, 33) reads “Beauty and the Beast” as a prescriptive tale which sets the standards for sexual and social conduct. Carter’s particular deconstruction of this traditional fairy tale brings to the foreground the connection between womanhood and monstrosity (Saxena 194), and her choice of felines to depict the Beast—which relates to a savage and magnificent power outside humanity (Easton 29)—as well as other animal allusions such as the lamb, evidences controversial 77 NEREA RIOBÓ PÉREZ character could only assume her “civil” form if she were willing to sacrifice herself to a beastlike male. By denying herself, she could obtain what all women supposedly wanted and want – namely marriage in the form of male domination. (Zipes 1991, 41) Interestingly, Bettleheim explains how the “animal groom” cycle tales depart from an immature view which posits the individual as divided between animal and mind which, however, in “process of maturation, these artificially isolated aspects of our humanity must become unified” (1991, 308). However, the tale’s original emphasis on sexuality and maturation was transformed by the French courtly ideology that portrayed sexuality as restricted to marriage, which “made sex permissible [and] changed it from something animallike into a bond sanctified by the sacrament of marriage” (Bettelheim 283). As a result, both Madame Villeneuve and Beaumont’s versions of the tale contemplate a vision of sexuality as a consequence of marriage, while also encouraging women not to fear an arranged marriage. Significantly, metamorphosis is at the core of the tales, symbolically expressed for the female character, who changes into an “ideal of virtue and graces”, and in more literal terms for the male character, transformed into an ideal husband as a result of the heroine’s love and submission (Saxena 194). Both Villeneuve and Beaumont draw on the rose symbol as an objectification of Beauty as a possession which passes from the father to the husband-to-be: In “Beauty and the Beast”, the fateful events are brought about by a father’s haven stolen a rose to bring to his best-loved youngest daughter. His doing so symbolizes both his love for her and also an anticipation of her losing her maidenhood, as the broken flower—particularly the broke rose—is a symbol for the loss of virginity. This may seem of both father and daughter as if she would have to suffer some “beastly” experience. (Bettelheim 306) In this sense, Bettelheim reads “Beauty and the Beast” as an instrument to confront childhood fears, such as “the creations of his [the child’s] anxious sexual fantasies; and what while sex may at first seem beastlike, in reality love between woman and man is the most satisfying of all emotions” (306). Unlike Bettelheim, Zipes (1991, 33) reads “Beauty and the Beast” as a prescriptive tale which sets the standards for sexual and social conduct. Carter’s particular deconstruction of this traditional fairy tale brings to the foreground the connection between womanhood and monstrosity (Saxena 194), and her choice of felines to depict the Beast—which relates to a savage and magnificent power outside humanity (Easton 29)—as well as other animal allusions such as the lamb, evidences controversial 4. Felines: “The Courtship of Mr Lyon” and “The Tiger’s Bride” responsible of education, morality and socialization: “The symbolical cultural pattern of matriarchy, which designated the female as initiator of human action and integration, experienced constant changes over the course of centuries in both the oral and literary tradition” (Zipes 1991, 34). However, the symbolic meanings of the “Beauty and the Beast” folktales began to change from the seventeenth century onwards due to their transition from oral forms to written narratives in France. The tales became very popular among the French noblewomen in King Louis XIV and King Louis XV’s courts which adapted the oral folktales to their times: If we compare those oral folk tales about the animal bridegroom, which stem for matriarchal societies, with those literary fairy tales about “beauty and the beast” at the end of the seventeenth century, it becomes evident that the transformations in the portrayal of sexual configurations and cultural patterns were connected to significant changes within the civilization process itself. (Zipes 1991, 33) As a result of such sexual configurations, the new female protagonist of “Beauty and the Beast” sacrifices herself “to a man in his house or castle, symbolical of submission to patriarchal rule” (Zipes 1991, 34) because of her filial love and obedience to her father (Bettelheim 283). Two good examples of this are the versions of the fairy tale Beauty and the Beast written by Madame de Villeneuve in 1740 and Madame Leprince de Beaumont in 1756, two “didactic discourses on manners, morals, and social class” that try to validate the aristocracy over the bourgeoisie (Zipes 1991, 38). In Beaumont’s tale, Beauty, the youngest daughter of a rich merchant, saves her father by accepting to live with the Beast and, in so doing, she accepts that her role is a domestic one, whereas her sisters are punished “for forming their own desires as well as for rejecting the obligation of feminine altruism” (Kerchy 450). Beauty progressively falls in love with the Beast to eventually realize that “she is willing to marry him. Suddenly he is transformed into a handsome prince” (Zipes 1991, 38). In this version of the tale, the two male characters— Beauty’s father and the Beast—represent the economic and political power upon which the female protagonist depends. The tale targets young women “who fully expected to be given away by their fathers to men who might well strike them as monsters” (Warner 1994, 278), thus becoming a reward-story for women, compensating qualities like dependence, submission and filial duty with promises of love and a happy marriage: The mark of beauty for a female is to be found in her submission, obedience, humility, industry, and patience; the mark of manliness is to be found in his selfcontrol, politeness, reason and perseverance. […] It became clear that the female 78 4. Felines: “The Courtship of Mr Lyon” and “The Tiger’s Bride” debates about the position of animals and women as others in patriarchal societies. Carter’s short stories based on “Beauty and the Beast” are a powerful deconstruction of the humananimal divide, reinserting the human into the natural world. 4.2. ANGELA CARTER AND FELINES The lion and the tiger are powerful cultural icons, which appear in numerous literary works, such as Aesop’s fables, Ovid’s Metamorphoses and in Asiatic folklore—loosely connected with the European literary tradition of “Little Red Riding Hood” in tales such as “The Tiger Grandmother” or “Grandaunt Tiger” (Orenstein 251)—where the “weretiger” is the equivalent shapeshifting figure for the European “werewolf”. Furthermore, felines are found in Medieval European heraldry, being a symbol of courage, dignity and magnificent, a fact that Carter uses in one of her stories as evidence of the male protagonist’s identity. In English literature, these non-human animals immediately recall, in the case of the lion, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900) by L. Frank Baum and The Chronicles of Narnia saga (1950-1956) by C.S. Lewis, while Blake’s poem “The Tyger” in Songs of Experience (1794), along with Kipling’s The Jungle Book (1894) or Milne’s Winnie the Pooh (1926) regarding the tiger. Argentinian author Jorge Luis Borges—who also drew on tigers as one of his main obsessions—is one of Carter’s most significant influences regarding this feline as a symbol. Borges’s work on tigers comprise a wide range of poems and short stories, such as poems like “El Otro Tigre” (El Hacedor, 1960), “El Oro de los Tigres” (El Oro de los Tigres, 1972) or “El Tigre” (Historia de la Noche, 1977) and the short story titled “Tigres Azules” in La Memoria de Shakespeare (1983). Carter’s acquaintance with some Latin American authors, especially Gabriel García Márquez and Jorge Luis Borges, consolidated in Japan, and their influence can be appreciated both in Fireworks and The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman: García Márquez is widely seen as the father, and Borges as the grandfather, of “magical realism” […]. The term has often been used to describe Angela Carter’s work, and The Infernal Desire Machines of Dr Hoffman is perhaps the book of hers that it most comfortably fits. (Gordon 176) Carter met Borges at the James Joyce centenary celebration in Dublin in an event with many different writers that gathered on Bloomsday, 1982. Such an event signalled an important moment in Carter’s life, since in 1989 “she gave the Jorge Luis Borges Memorial Lecture of NEREA RIOBÓ PÉREZ character could only assume her “civil” form if she were willing to sacrifice herself to a beastlike male. By denying herself, she could obtain what all women supposedly wanted and want – namely marriage in the form of male domination. (Zipes 1991, 41) Interestingly, Bettleheim explains how the “animal groom” cycle tales depart from an immature view which posits the individual as divided between animal and mind which, however, in “process of maturation, these artificially isolated aspects of our humanity must become unified” (1991, 308). However, the tale’s original emphasis on sexuality and maturation was transformed by the French courtly ideology that portrayed sexuality as restricted to marriage, which “made sex permissible [and] changed it from something animallike into a bond sanctified by the sacrament of marriage” (Bettelheim 283). As a result, both Madame Villeneuve and Beaumont’s versions of the tale contemplate a vision of sexuality as a consequence of marriage, while also encouraging women not to fear an arranged marriage. Significantly, metamorphosis is at the core of the tales, symbolically expressed for the female character, who changes into an “ideal of virtue and graces”, and in more literal terms for the male character, transformed into an ideal husband as a result of the heroine’s love and submission (Saxena 194). Both Villeneuve and Beaumont draw on the rose symbol as an objectification of Beauty as a possession which passes from the father to the husband-to-be: In “Beauty and the Beast”, the fateful events are brought about by a father’s haven stolen a rose to bring to his best-loved youngest daughter. His doing so symbolizes both his love for her and also an anticipation of her losing her maidenhood, as the broken flower—particularly the broke rose—is a symbol for the loss of virginity. This may seem of both father and daughter as if she would have to suffer some “beastly” experience. (Bettelheim 306) In this sense, Bettelheim reads “Beauty and the Beast” as an instrument to confront childhood fears, such as “the creations of his [the child’s] anxious sexual fantasies; and what while sex may at first seem beastlike, in reality love between woman and man is the most satisfying of all emotions” (306). Unlike Bettelheim, Zipes (1991, 33) reads “Beauty and the Beast” as a prescriptive tale which sets the standards for sexual and social conduct. Carter’s particular deconstruction of this traditional fairy tale brings to the foreground the connection between womanhood and monstrosity (Saxena 194), and her choice of felines to depict the Beast—which relates to a savage and magnificent power outside humanity (Easton 29)—as well as other animal allusions such as the lamb, evidences controversial 79 NEREA RIOBÓ PÉREZ the Anglo-Argentine Society at the Royal Society of Arts. Focussing mainly on The Book of Imaginary Beings, Borges’s vivid and eccentric bestiary of fictional creatures” (Gordon 392). Carter’s journalism also witnessed her attraction to these Latin American authors, as can be appreciated in her two of her articles on the topic. In “Jorge Luis Borges: An Introduction to English Literature” (1974) Carter reviewed Borges’s approach and in “Latin Rhythms” (1979) she dealt with Borges’s The Book of Sand and Márquez’s Innocent Erendira and Other Stories. Towards the end of her life, Carter worked on Expletives Deleted and asked her editorial assistant Mark Bell to “remove from the selection a negative review she’d written in 1974 of Borges’s Introduction to English Literature ‘[…] because ‘I don’t think it’s fair to the grand old man to whom I owe so much” (Gordon 407). Carter’s journalistic articles about non-human animals—some of them previously mentioned in chapter two—also deal with some of the writers above named. In “Animals in the Nursery” (1976) Carter reflected upon Kipling’s feral animals: “The animals in Kipling’s Jungle Books, who are allowed uncommon amounts of magnificence, ferocity, maturity, law, justice and sensibility, nevertheless conspire to bolster the esteem of the human child” (2013, 366). Carter’s awareness of the problematic relationship between human and non-human animals and the great divide that separated them positioned herself at the centre of a debate that a few decades later animal studies and posthumanist thinkers would address: “Yet the arbitrary division between man and beast obliterates the fact that man himself is only another animal with particularly complex social institutions” (Carter 2013, 367). Carter’s “In the Bear Garden” (1977) comments on different bears of the British imaginary, from Paddington Bear to A.A Milne’ Winnie the Pooh, while in “At the Zoo” (1976) she wrote about zoo treatment of wild animals such as monkeys and tigers. Carter was impressed by one zoo in particular, which awkwardly presented the animals’ perspective regarding human behaviour: There was a lovely zoo in Verona, though, that seemed to have been designed by people who saw the beasts’ side of things almost completely. At the entrance was a notice: “Attention -- this is the only chance most animals have to observe the behaviour of human beings. Make sure they receive a good impression” […] Next to a somnolent tiger, another notice announced didactically: “When a man kills a tiger, we call it sport; when a tiger kills a man, we call it ferocity”. (2013, 363) Significantly, Carter’s thoughtful insights on “Little Lamb, Get Lost” (1978) began with Blake’s tiger and psychoanalysis: 4. Felines: “The Courtship of Mr Lyon” and “The Tiger’s Bride” responsible of education, morality and socialization: “The symbolical cultural pattern of matriarchy, which designated the female as initiator of human action and integration, experienced constant changes over the course of centuries in both the oral and literary tradition” (Zipes 1991, 34). However, the symbolic meanings of the “Beauty and the Beast” folktales began to change from the seventeenth century onwards due to their transition from oral forms to written narratives in France. The tales became very popular among the French noblewomen in King Louis XIV and King Louis XV’s courts which adapted the oral folktales to their times: If we compare those oral folk tales about the animal bridegroom, which stem for matriarchal societies, with those literary fairy tales about “beauty and the beast” at the end of the seventeenth century, it becomes evident that the transformations in the portrayal of sexual configurations and cultural patterns were connected to significant changes within the civilization process itself. (Zipes 1991, 33) As a result of such sexual configurations, the new female protagonist of “Beauty and the Beast” sacrifices herself “to a man in his house or castle, symbolical of submission to patriarchal rule” (Zipes 1991, 34) because of her filial love and obedience to her father (Bettelheim 283). Two good examples of this are the versions of the fairy tale Beauty and the Beast written by Madame de Villeneuve in 1740 and Madame Leprince de Beaumont in 1756, two “didactic discourses on manners, morals, and social class” that try to validate the aristocracy over the bourgeoisie (Zipes 1991, 38). In Beaumont’s tale, Beauty, the youngest daughter of a rich merchant, saves her father by accepting to live with the Beast and, in so doing, she accepts that her role is a domestic one, whereas her sisters are punished “for forming their own desires as well as for rejecting the obligation of feminine altruism” (Kerchy 450). Beauty progressively falls in love with the Beast to eventually realize that “she is willing to marry him. Suddenly he is transformed into a handsome prince” (Zipes 1991, 38). In this version of the tale, the two male characters— Beauty’s father and the Beast—represent the economic and political power upon which the female protagonist depends. The tale targets young women “who fully expected to be given away by their fathers to men who might well strike them as monsters” (Warner 1994, 278), thus becoming a reward-story for women, compensating qualities like dependence, submission and filial duty with promises of love and a happy marriage: The mark of beauty for a female is to be found in her submission, obedience, humility, industry, and patience; the mark of manliness is to be found in his selfcontrol, politeness, reason and perseverance. […] It became clear that the female 80 4. Felines: “The Courtship of Mr Lyon” and “The Tiger’s Bride” Also, I wonder if Blake had ever actually seen a live tiger. The fubsy beast that illustrates “Tyger, Tyger” in the Songs of Experience looks as if he should have a zipper down his back and a pair of pyjamas inside him. […] But of course, he is not talking about tigers at all. He is talking about something blind, furious, instinctual, intuitive, savage and right. If Blake’s placid and didactic horses are delegates from the Fabian Society of the superego, his tiger is the representative of the unrepressed subconscious, even the id. (2013, 373) Carter used Blake’s iconographic duality to explain human behaviour towards different animals, thus fearing and demonising carnivores such as the tiger and condescending herbivores like the lamb: “‘Little lamb, who made thee?’ It is a sufficiently fatuous question to ask a lamb. But would Blake, who (however intermittently) possessed a sense of the ridiculous, have dared submit this poser to a grown sheep?” (Carter 2013, 374). Felines are found in different works of Angela Carter: in her novel Heroes and Villains (1969), in “Lizzi’s Tiger” in her collection of short stories American Ghosts and Old World Wonders (1993), Nights at the Circus (1984) and in her translation of Perrault and Beaumont’s fairy tales Sleeping Beauty and Other Favourite Fairy Tales (1982). Apart from lions and tigers, Carter has a special preference for cats, as her children’s literature demonstrates.6 However, felines are the absolute protagonists of her short stories about “Beauty and the Beast”, which nurtured from the tradition of the representation of felines (the lion and the tiger in particular) and the lamb in relation to them, as well as from folklore and oral traditions. 4.3. ANGELA CARTER’S “FELINE” SHORT STORIES Angela Carter’s two reassessments of the traditional “Beauty and the Beast” fairy tale, “The Courtship of Mr Lyon” and “The Tiger’s Bride”, are both to be understood as part of a sequence, in which their order within the collection becomes especially significant, as Carter herself stated (Gordon 281-282). Despite the apparent differences between these two stories in terms of narrative strategies, there is a clear connection between them that also links them to the rest of the stories in The Bloody Chamber, being both directly concerned with issues of monstrosity and identity: “The first story […] parodies Beaumont’s story and fairy-tale 6 See, for instance, Moonshadow (1980), Sea-Cat and Dragon King (2000) and Comic and Curious Cats (1979). NEREA RIOBÓ PÉREZ character could only assume her “civil” form if she were willing to sacrifice herself to a beastlike male. By denying herself, she could obtain what all women supposedly wanted and want – namely marriage in the form of male domination. (Zipes 1991, 41) Interestingly, Bettleheim explains how the “animal groom” cycle tales depart from an immature view which posits the individual as divided between animal and mind which, however, in “process of maturation, these artificially isolated aspects of our humanity must become unified” (1991, 308). However, the tale’s original emphasis on sexuality and maturation was transformed by the French courtly ideology that portrayed sexuality as restricted to marriage, which “made sex permissible [and] changed it from something animallike into a bond sanctified by the sacrament of marriage” (Bettelheim 283). As a result, both Madame Villeneuve and Beaumont’s versions of the tale contemplate a vision of sexuality as a consequence of marriage, while also encouraging women not to fear an arranged marriage. Significantly, metamorphosis is at the core of the tales, symbolically expressed for the female character, who changes into an “ideal of virtue and graces”, and in more literal terms for the male character, transformed into an ideal husband as a result of the heroine’s love and submission (Saxena 194). Both Villeneuve and Beaumont draw on the rose symbol as an objectification of Beauty as a possession which passes from the father to the husband-to-be: In “Beauty and the Beast”, the fateful events are brought about by a father’s haven stolen a rose to bring to his best-loved youngest daughter. His doing so symbolizes both his love for her and also an anticipation of her losing her maidenhood, as the broken flower—particularly the broke rose—is a symbol for the loss of virginity. This may seem of both father and daughter as if she would have to suffer some “beastly” experience. (Bettelheim 306) In this sense, Bettelheim reads “Beauty and the Beast” as an instrument to confront childhood fears, such as “the creations of his [the child’s] anxious sexual fantasies; and what while sex may at first seem beastlike, in reality love between woman and man is the most satisfying of all emotions” (306). Unlike Bettelheim, Zipes (1991, 33) reads “Beauty and the Beast” as a prescriptive tale which sets the standards for sexual and social conduct. Carter’s particular deconstruction of this traditional fairy tale brings to the foreground the connection between womanhood and monstrosity (Saxena 194), and her choice of felines to depict the Beast—which relates to a savage and magnificent power outside humanity (Easton 29)—as well as other animal allusions such as the lamb, evidences controversial 81 NEREA RIOBÓ PÉREZ conventions by its ironic and self-conscious references to gender and matrimony. It needs to be read along with ‘The Tiger’s Bride,’ the darker version that follows it” (Saxena 198). The purpose of having two or more stories based on the same fairy tale—as is the case of these two stories as well as of the three rewritings of Red Riding Hood at the end of the collection—is due to, as Aidan Day (1998) explains, a double purpose of deconstruction on the one hand, and the creation of different subjectivities on the other: Angela Carter in The Bloody Chamber is concerned not simply to point out what is wrong with conventional representations of gender; she is concerned at once to offer different representations, different models. These two concerns may be apparent simultaneously in a single tale. Sometimes the two concerns emerge most clearly in the counterpointing between two different tellings of the same tale. This is the case, for example, with Carter’s two Beauty and the Beast tales. (134) Carter’s stories present an overt intertextual connection with both Madame de Villeneuve and Madame de Beaumont’s fairy tales, but at the same time Carter distances herself from them and creates her own versions by producing “a double textuality”, relying on both imitation and insistent differentiation (Gruss 224-225). On the other hand, Carter also questions in her work major academic readings of traditional fairy tales, such as Bruno Bettelheim’s psychoanalytically inspired interpretations, which regarded these stories as a “natural” dramatization of a young woman’s love transference from father to husband. However, Carter thought that the way in which the Beast manipulates Beauty’s feelings “was anything but healthy, and that her sudden interest in him at this stage suggested deep reserves of masochism” (Gordon 278). In her interview with Haffenden (1985), Carter further exposed the latent blackmail in this fairy tale: It seems to me important that “Beauty and the Beast” does not come out of oral tradition […] and it was intended as a perfectly tuned moral talc. Actually it’s an advertisement for moral blackmail: when the Beast says that he is dying because of Beauty, the only morally correct thing for her to have said at that point would be “Die, then”. (83) As mentioned before, both tales are interconnected by relying on a process of gradual deconstruction, to the extent that that the two “distinct worlds of Beauty and the Beast are gradually contaminated by each other, as are the protagonist themselves up until the final metamorphosis” (Crunelle-Vanrigh 132). In both of them the protagonists suffer a process of metamorphosis into a feline: in the first tale, Carter’s Beast is shapeshifted into a man and Beauty suffers a symbolic transformation, while in the second one the unnamed female protagonist physically becomes a tiger. Non-human animals and their Otherness are an 4. Felines: “The Courtship of Mr Lyon” and “The Tiger’s Bride” responsible of education, morality and socialization: “The symbolical cultural pattern of matriarchy, which designated the female as initiator of human action and integration, experienced constant changes over the course of centuries in both the oral and literary tradition” (Zipes 1991, 34). However, the symbolic meanings of the “Beauty and the Beast” folktales began to change from the seventeenth century onwards due to their transition from oral forms to written narratives in France. The tales became very popular among the French noblewomen in King Louis XIV and King Louis XV’s courts which adapted the oral folktales to their times: If we compare those oral folk tales about the animal bridegroom, which stem for matriarchal societies, with those literary fairy tales about “beauty and the beast” at the end of the seventeenth century, it becomes evident that the transformations in the portrayal of sexual configurations and cultural patterns were connected to significant changes within the civilization process itself. (Zipes 1991, 33) As a result of such sexual configurations, the new female protagonist of “Beauty and the Beast” sacrifices herself “to a man in his house or castle, symbolical of submission to patriarchal rule” (Zipes 1991, 34) because of her filial love and obedience to her father (Bettelheim 283). Two good examples of this are the versions of the fairy tale Beauty and the Beast written by Madame de Villeneuve in 1740 and Madame Leprince de Beaumont in 1756, two “didactic discourses on manners, morals, and social class” that try to validate the aristocracy over the bourgeoisie (Zipes 1991, 38). In Beaumont’s tale, Beauty, the youngest daughter of a rich merchant, saves her father by accepting to live with the Beast and, in so doing, she accepts that her role is a domestic one, whereas her sisters are punished “for forming their own desires as well as for rejecting the obligation of feminine altruism” (Kerchy 450). Beauty progressively falls in love with the Beast to eventually realize that “she is willing to marry him. Suddenly he is transformed into a handsome prince” (Zipes 1991, 38). In this version of the tale, the two male characters— Beauty’s father and the Beast—represent the economic and political power upon which the female protagonist depends. The tale targets young women “who fully expected to be given away by their fathers to men who might well strike them as monsters” (Warner 1994, 278), thus becoming a reward-story for women, compensating qualities like dependence, submission and filial duty with promises of love and a happy marriage: The mark of beauty for a female is to be found in her submission, obedience, humility, industry, and patience; the mark of manliness is to be found in his selfcontrol, politeness, reason and perseverance. […] It became clear that the female 82 4. Felines: “The Courtship of Mr Lyon” and “The Tiger’s Bride” important element in the stories, both as symbols and empirical animals, offering the space between human and non-human animal worlds where both can be subjects with an agency of their own. Angela Carter’s Beauties and Beasts acknowledge both similarities and differences between species and it is a mutual understanding what enables them to coexist in a liminal space in the margins of humanity and animality. In this sense, the titles of both texts present a continuum, beginning with “The Courtship of Mr Lyon”—in which Carter laid the foundations for what she presented in her next tale—and ending with “The Tiger’s Bride”: What “Courtship” merely adumbrates, “Bride” brings to the fore. There the female narrator’s father is no good old man plagued by ill-luck, but a drunkard “in the last stages of debauchery” who plays –and loses – his daughter at cards. Carter reverses the child’s willingness to sacrifice all, child and wife, to his mad egotism and childish pleasure-seeking. Whereas Beauty accepted, […] the narrator of “The Tiger’s Bride” recalls how her own mother was “bartered for her dowry to such a fleckless sprig of the Russian nobility that she soon died of his gaming, his whoring, his agonizing repentances. (Crunelle-Vanrigh 138) Carter here erases moral instruction, and, by doing so, frees her characters from social conventions. By making Beauty accept her animal side—sometimes in symbolical terms, sometimes becoming a true animal—Carter blurs binary oppositions and creates a state of fluidity that questions the static patriarchal system by posing forward alternatives to constructed gender roles by advocating equality, both in social and sexual terms. By representing both women and animals as the Other in patriarchal societies, Carter subverts and deconstructs Cartersian dualistic thought, breaks the barriers between human and non-human animals and locates them in a subject position, thus recognising in them agency and voice: “Thus the other—either the woman as object of the gaze or the beast as animal—is no longer perceived as ‘object’, and both characters are allowed to become subjects of the gaze” (Pasolini 52). In fact, it could be argued that Carter’s whole collection entails a reconsideration of the Other from different angles; first, in regarding animals, monsters and women in opposition to the category of men; secondly, in regarding Cartesian divisions of the rational versus the emotional or the corporeal: The image of the animal “Beast” signifies not just Otherness but specifically the Otherness of the instinctual human body, repressed and feared by its Enlightenment opposite, the rational mind. The volume interrogates, among other things, a cultural vision in which animals and the body are not merely useful but commodified and consumed. (Webb and Hopcroft 32) NEREA RIOBÓ PÉREZ character could only assume her “civil” form if she were willing to sacrifice herself to a beastlike male. By denying herself, she could obtain what all women supposedly wanted and want – namely marriage in the form of male domination. (Zipes 1991, 41) Interestingly, Bettleheim explains how the “animal groom” cycle tales depart from an immature view which posits the individual as divided between animal and mind which, however, in “process of maturation, these artificially isolated aspects of our humanity must become unified” (1991, 308). However, the tale’s original emphasis on sexuality and maturation was transformed by the French courtly ideology that portrayed sexuality as restricted to marriage, which “made sex permissible [and] changed it from something animallike into a bond sanctified by the sacrament of marriage” (Bettelheim 283). As a result, both Madame Villeneuve and Beaumont’s versions of the tale contemplate a vision of sexuality as a consequence of marriage, while also encouraging women not to fear an arranged marriage. Significantly, metamorphosis is at the core of the tales, symbolically expressed for the female character, who changes into an “ideal of virtue and graces”, and in more literal terms for the male character, transformed into an ideal husband as a result of the heroine’s love and submission (Saxena 194). Both Villeneuve and Beaumont draw on the rose symbol as an objectification of Beauty as a possession which passes from the father to the husband-to-be: In “Beauty and the Beast”, the fateful events are brought about by a father’s haven stolen a rose to bring to his best-loved youngest daughter. His doing so symbolizes both his love for her and also an anticipation of her losing her maidenhood, as the broken flower—particularly the broke rose—is a symbol for the loss of virginity. This may seem of both father and daughter as if she would have to suffer some “beastly” experience. (Bettelheim 306) In this sense, Bettelheim reads “Beauty and the Beast” as an instrument to confront childhood fears, such as “the creations of his [the child’s] anxious sexual fantasies; and what while sex may at first seem beastlike, in reality love between woman and man is the most satisfying of all emotions” (306). Unlike Bettelheim, Zipes (1991, 33) reads “Beauty and the Beast” as a prescriptive tale which sets the standards for sexual and social conduct. Carter’s particular deconstruction of this traditional fairy tale brings to the foreground the connection between womanhood and monstrosity (Saxena 194), and her choice of felines to depict the Beast—which relates to a savage and magnificent power outside humanity (Easton 29)—as well as other animal allusions such as the lamb, evidences controversial 83 NEREA RIOBÓ PÉREZ As previously mentioned, she-monsters were traditionally constructed as hybrid figures whose monstrosity derives from their grotesque, liminal bodies and in their roles as violent, powerful sexual entities. Unlike Beaumont or Villeneuve’s “Beauty and the Beast”, Carter’s short stories empower Beauty with a degree of monstrosity and sexual appetite, whereas “The Courtship of Mr Lyon” and “The Tiger’s Bride” dramatize Carter’s treatment of the subject as a hybrid being. My examination of Carter’s short stories will follow Saphiro and Copeland’s (2005) three steps of analysis in the field of literary human-animal studies. The first level looks into the ways in which Carter’s texts deconstruct traditional portrayals of non-human animals and women in patriarchal societies, paying attention to questions such as empathy, animal and female subjectivity, agency and voice and how the narratives lead towards eventual female empowerment. In the second level of analysis, I will focus on how Carter portrays animals as symbols, on the one hand, and as animals per se on the other—empirical animals— and even as hybrids with both a symbolic and real dimension. To do so, I will draw from major psychoanalytic readings of fairy tales as well as from Carter’s connection with Bettelheim’s theories, which use animals as the representation of human desires and sexualities. The last level of analysis focuses on the relationship between humans and animals, and in this chapter I will pay special attention to how the characters of Beauty and the Beast, respectively, interact with each other in Carter’s two rewritings of the tale, breaking established boundaries and dualisms by forging a space for mutual understanding. 4.3.1 “The Courtship of Mr Lyon” This tale, the second one within the collection and the first of the two reassessments of “Beauty and the Beast”, establishes significant parallels with Beaumont’s version of the fairy tale. The story opens up with a description of Beauty’s father at the Beast’s mansion, who steals a rose and is punished for it. Despite the obvious parallels with Beaumont’s story in terms of plot, Carter’s narrative technique in the opening lines already hints at her deconstruction of the traditional fairy tale. The narrated events are alternatively focalised through the vision of the story’s major characters, whose reflections are intertwined in free indirect speech, thus offering a composite of varying reflections and perspectives which radically transform the traditional fairy tale. The 4. Felines: “The Courtship of Mr Lyon” and “The Tiger’s Bride” responsible of education, morality and socialization: “The symbolical cultural pattern of matriarchy, which designated the female as initiator of human action and integration, experienced constant changes over the course of centuries in both the oral and literary tradition” (Zipes 1991, 34). However, the symbolic meanings of the “Beauty and the Beast” folktales began to change from the seventeenth century onwards due to their transition from oral forms to written narratives in France. The tales became very popular among the French noblewomen in King Louis XIV and King Louis XV’s courts which adapted the oral folktales to their times: If we compare those oral folk tales about the animal bridegroom, which stem for matriarchal societies, with those literary fairy tales about “beauty and the beast” at the end of the seventeenth century, it becomes evident that the transformations in the portrayal of sexual configurations and cultural patterns were connected to significant changes within the civilization process itself. (Zipes 1991, 33) As a result of such sexual configurations, the new female protagonist of “Beauty and the Beast” sacrifices herself “to a man in his house or castle, symbolical of submission to patriarchal rule” (Zipes 1991, 34) because of her filial love and obedience to her father (Bettelheim 283). Two good examples of this are the versions of the fairy tale Beauty and the Beast written by Madame de Villeneuve in 1740 and Madame Leprince de Beaumont in 1756, two “didactic discourses on manners, morals, and social class” that try to validate the aristocracy over the bourgeoisie (Zipes 1991, 38). In Beaumont’s tale, Beauty, the youngest daughter of a rich merchant, saves her father by accepting to live with the Beast and, in so doing, she accepts that her role is a domestic one, whereas her sisters are punished “for forming their own desires as well as for rejecting the obligation of feminine altruism” (Kerchy 450). Beauty progressively falls in love with the Beast to eventually realize that “she is willing to marry him. Suddenly he is transformed into a handsome prince” (Zipes 1991, 38). In this version of the tale, the two male characters— Beauty’s father and the Beast—represent the economic and political power upon which the female protagonist depends. The tale targets young women “who fully expected to be given away by their fathers to men who might well strike them as monsters” (Warner 1994, 278), thus becoming a reward-story for women, compensating qualities like dependence, submission and filial duty with promises of love and a happy marriage: The mark of beauty for a female is to be found in her submission, obedience, humility, industry, and patience; the mark of manliness is to be found in his selfcontrol, politeness, reason and perseverance. […] It became clear that the female 90 4. Felines: “The Courtship of Mr Lyon” and “The Tiger’s Bride” subjectivity, a nomadic and animalistic one. However, this hesitating moment is quite ephemeral: soon she becomes accustomed to this wealthy social life to the point of forgetting her promise to the Beast by flinging herself into “a mad whirl of pleasure with her father” (Crunelle-Vanrigh 131), thus becoming vain, superficial and whimsical: “She smiled at herself with satisfaction. She was learning, at the end of her adolescence, how to be a spoiled child and that pearly skin of hers was plumping out, a little, with high living and compliments” (Carter 1996, 151). By doing so, Carter actually replaces old stereotypes of femininity, present in traditional fairy tales, by new ones in tune with the pleasures and evils of a consumerist society. Beauty’s experience at the castle ignites in the character a process of symbolic animal metamorphosis, from the “spotless, sacrificial” Miss Lamb (148) and the girl who buys herself expensive furs (151) to the more mature woman whose “face was acquiring, instead of beauty, a lacquer of the invincible prettiness that characterizes certain pampered, exquisite expensive cats” (151). Significantly, such a process of transformation and metamorphosis is triggered by Beauty’s sexual awakening, thus casting aside her passive role as a martyr. By means of zoomorphism and animalization, Carter gives this female human character agency: Beauty’s new sense of self springs from her rejection of traditional women’s roles as a sacrificial daughter or wife, signalled in her symbolic metamorphosis into a feline. The last level of my analysis focuses on the human-animal relationship and, as such, it deals with the interactions between the main characters regarding previous issues, such as the recognition of the other’s agency and voice, which reinforces the notion that “animal agents are recognizable as such only when they are presented as deeply integrated with human forms or presences, and vice versa” (Marvin and McHugh 6). It is by acknowledging the existence of the other that both characters are recognised as an entity, with a subjectivity of their own. Carter’s use of the carnivore/herbivore dichotomy overtly reaches back to Blake’s work, but it also appears in her journal article “Little Lamb, Get Lost” (1978), as previously analysed. Carter’s animalistic characterization in this story opens up the path for what is developed in the next tale, namely; the interrogation of boundaries and the construction of a liminal space for both species to coexist and develop at the same level. Miss Lamb is sacrificed to her father’s fortune, objectified and converted into a transaction between two men, father and husband-to-be, a topic which runs through the whole collection: NEREA RIOBÓ PÉREZ character could only assume her “civil” form if she were willing to sacrifice herself to a beastlike male. By denying herself, she could obtain what all women supposedly wanted and want – namely marriage in the form of male domination. (Zipes 1991, 41) Interestingly, Bettleheim explains how the “animal groom” cycle tales depart from an immature view which posits the individual as divided between animal and mind which, however, in “process of maturation, these artificially isolated aspects of our humanity must become unified” (1991, 308). However, the tale’s original emphasis on sexuality and maturation was transformed by the French courtly ideology that portrayed sexuality as restricted to marriage, which “made sex permissible [and] changed it from something animallike into a bond sanctified by the sacrament of marriage” (Bettelheim 283). As a result, both Madame Villeneuve and Beaumont’s versions of the tale contemplate a vision of sexuality as a consequence of marriage, while also encouraging women not to fear an arranged marriage. Significantly, metamorphosis is at the core of the tales, symbolically expressed for the female character, who changes into an “ideal of virtue and graces”, and in more literal terms for the male character, transformed into an ideal husband as a result of the heroine’s love and submission (Saxena 194). Both Villeneuve and Beaumont draw on the rose symbol as an objectification of Beauty as a possession which passes from the father to the husband-to-be: In “Beauty and the Beast”, the fateful events are brought about by a father’s haven stolen a rose to bring to his best-loved youngest daughter. His doing so symbolizes both his love for her and also an anticipation of her losing her maidenhood, as the broken flower—particularly the broke rose—is a symbol for the loss of virginity. This may seem of both father and daughter as if she would have to suffer some “beastly” experience. (Bettelheim 306) In this sense, Bettelheim reads “Beauty and the Beast” as an instrument to confront childhood fears, such as “the creations of his [the child’s] anxious sexual fantasies; and what while sex may at first seem beastlike, in reality love between woman and man is the most satisfying of all emotions” (306). Unlike Bettelheim, Zipes (1991, 33) reads “Beauty and the Beast” as a prescriptive tale which sets the standards for sexual and social conduct. Carter’s particular deconstruction of this traditional fairy tale brings to the foreground the connection between womanhood and monstrosity (Saxena 194), and her choice of felines to depict the Beast—which relates to a savage and magnificent power outside humanity (Easton 29)—as well as other animal allusions such as the lamb, evidences controversial 91 NEREA RIOBÓ PÉREZ Specifically, the patriarchal institutions openly addressed and contested by Carter in both texts are marriage (particularly in “The Bloody Chamber” and “Puss in Boots”), the commodification of women through bargains between fathers and husbands (in “The Courtship of Mr Lyon” and “The Tiger’s Bride”), rape and sexual violence (which are hinted at—more or less overtly—in most of the stories). (Pasolini 43) However, the narrative suggests that, despite their apparent opposition, Beauty and Beast are individuals “intertwined through cultural discourse on femininity and its close association with monstrosity” (Saxena 195), which explains the tension between the fascination and abhorrence which Beauty feels towards the Beast: “Fascinated, almost awed, she watched the firelight play on the gold fringes of his mane; he was irradiated, as if with a kind of halo, and she thought of the first great beast of the Apocalypse, the winged lion with his paw upon the Gospel, Saint Mark” (Carter 1996, 149). In turn, the Beast’s monstrosity is also questioned when the ponderous animal is, as a matter of fact, frightened of the girl (148), and has to “forced himself to master his shyness, which was that of a wild creature, and so, she contrived to master her own” (149). It is Beauty who eventually becomes the dominant agent, ultimately revealing an awareness of her own sexuality that transforms her from the timid girl at the story’s opening to the “mistress of the sexual game” (Crunelle-Vanrigh, 131): “She felt his hot breath on her fingers, the stiff bristles of his muzzle grazing her skin, the rough lapping of his tongue and then, with a flood of compassion, understood: all he is doing is kissing my hands” (Carter 1996, 149). As previously mentioned, animality and sexuality go hand in hand in Carter’s fairy tales: in fact, when Beauty’s perception of the Beast’s monstrosity is exchanged for compassion, she “found herself yawning: she discovered she was bored” (Saxena 199) and goes back to her father, who has just recovered his fortune and lives in London. Beauty’s sacrifice initiates a physical transformation in the Beast, which springs from Beauty’s intense gaze: “His eyelids flickered. How was it she had never noticed before that his agate eyes were equipped with lids, like those of a man? Was it because she had only looked at her own face, reflected there?” (Carter 1996, 152). For the first time, Beauty recognises humanity in the agonising eyes of the lion and the necessity of the other’s gaze for self-recognition is so important that it marks the beginning of the Beast’s metamorphosis (Pasolini 53). 4. Felines: “The Courtship of Mr Lyon” and “The Tiger’s Bride” responsible of education, morality and socialization: “The symbolical cultural pattern of matriarchy, which designated the female as initiator of human action and integration, experienced constant changes over the course of centuries in both the oral and literary tradition” (Zipes 1991, 34). However, the symbolic meanings of the “Beauty and the Beast” folktales began to change from the seventeenth century onwards due to their transition from oral forms to written narratives in France. The tales became very popular among the French noblewomen in King Louis XIV and King Louis XV’s courts which adapted the oral folktales to their times: If we compare those oral folk tales about the animal bridegroom, which stem for matriarchal societies, with those literary fairy tales about “beauty and the beast” at the end of the seventeenth century, it becomes evident that the transformations in the portrayal of sexual configurations and cultural patterns were connected to significant changes within the civilization process itself. (Zipes 1991, 33) As a result of such sexual configurations, the new female protagonist of “Beauty and the Beast” sacrifices herself “to a man in his house or castle, symbolical of submission to patriarchal rule” (Zipes 1991, 34) because of her filial love and obedience to her father (Bettelheim 283). Two good examples of this are the versions of the fairy tale Beauty and the Beast written by Madame de Villeneuve in 1740 and Madame Leprince de Beaumont in 1756, two “didactic discourses on manners, morals, and social class” that try to validate the aristocracy over the bourgeoisie (Zipes 1991, 38). In Beaumont’s tale, Beauty, the youngest daughter of a rich merchant, saves her father by accepting to live with the Beast and, in so doing, she accepts that her role is a domestic one, whereas her sisters are punished “for forming their own desires as well as for rejecting the obligation of feminine altruism” (Kerchy 450). Beauty progressively falls in love with the Beast to eventually realize that “she is willing to marry him. Suddenly he is transformed into a handsome prince” (Zipes 1991, 38). In this version of the tale, the two male characters— Beauty’s father and the Beast—represent the economic and political power upon which the female protagonist depends. The tale targets young women “who fully expected to be given away by their fathers to men who might well strike them as monsters” (Warner 1994, 278), thus becoming a reward-story for women, compensating qualities like dependence, submission and filial duty with promises of love and a happy marriage: The mark of beauty for a female is to be found in her submission, obedience, humility, industry, and patience; the mark of manliness is to be found in his selfcontrol, politeness, reason and perseverance. […] It became clear that the female 92 4. Felines: “The Courtship of Mr Lyon” and “The Tiger’s Bride” As in the traditional fairy tale, Beauty’s kiss and her tears break the spell, thus transforming the Beast into a man: “Her tears fell on his face like snow, and under their soft transformation […] it was no longer a lion in her arms but a man, a man with […] a broken nose […] that gave him a distant, heroic resemblance to the handsomest of all the beasts” (Carter 1996, 153). Despite the fact that humanity is restored to the Beast, Carter retains in him a “heroic resemblance” to the lion, which emphasises his hybrid nature. By choosing a half human-half animal identity, Beauty accepts the animal side of humanity, both for herself and for her husband. Beauty and the Beast become Mr and Mrs Lyon in an ending which parodies the “happy ever after” fairy tale closure, while simultaneously departing from it by virtue of the characters’ animal transformations: Beauty is as much a “lion as he is but where he wears his past on his body, she wears it in words. His skin becomes her name” (Kerchy, 208), thus deconstructing the fable of “virtue rewarded and humanity restored” (Saxena 200) and anticipating Beauty’s radical metamorphosis in the next story. “The Courtship of Mr Lyon”, one of the first narratives in Carter’s collection, entails a first step towards the deconstruction of the human-animal divide. 4.3.2. “The Tiger’s Bride” Whereas “The Courtship of Mr Lyon” remains close to Beaumont’s fairy tale, “The Tiger’s Bride” deviates from it in search for a different approach, thus being a story about the objectification of women and changing the focus of the traditional tale towards the creation of a liminal space for human and non-human animals to coexist as equal partners. Following Saphiro and Copeland (2005) analysis, it is possible to see how agency and voice are important elements in this short story to the eventual deconstruction of simplistic treatment of both animals and women. Whereas “The Courtship of Mr Lyon” is mostly narrated in the third person, “The Tiger’s Bride” purposely shifts to the partial first-person experience of the unnamed female protagonist, thus contributing to provide female characters in classic fairy tales with a voice of their own and a space for them in history and literature. The narrative radically opens with this Beauty’s crude affirmation of her objectification: “My father lost me to The Beast at cards” (Carter 1996, 154). The narrative’s opening represents a drastic departure from Villeneuve and Beaumont’s plot. NEREA RIOBÓ PÉREZ character could only assume her “civil” form if she were willing to sacrifice herself to a beastlike male. By denying herself, she could obtain what all women supposedly wanted and want – namely marriage in the form of male domination. (Zipes 1991, 41) Interestingly, Bettleheim explains how the “animal groom” cycle tales depart from an immature view which posits the individual as divided between animal and mind which, however, in “process of maturation, these artificially isolated aspects of our humanity must become unified” (1991, 308). However, the tale’s original emphasis on sexuality and maturation was transformed by the French courtly ideology that portrayed sexuality as restricted to marriage, which “made sex permissible [and] changed it from something animallike into a bond sanctified by the sacrament of marriage” (Bettelheim 283). As a result, both Madame Villeneuve and Beaumont’s versions of the tale contemplate a vision of sexuality as a consequence of marriage, while also encouraging women not to fear an arranged marriage. Significantly, metamorphosis is at the core of the tales, symbolically expressed for the female character, who changes into an “ideal of virtue and graces”, and in more literal terms for the male character, transformed into an ideal husband as a result of the heroine’s love and submission (Saxena 194). Both Villeneuve and Beaumont draw on the rose symbol as an objectification of Beauty as a possession which passes from the father to the husband-to-be: In “Beauty and the Beast”, the fateful events are brought about by a father’s haven stolen a rose to bring to his best-loved youngest daughter. His doing so symbolizes both his love for her and also an anticipation of her losing her maidenhood, as the broken flower—particularly the broke rose—is a symbol for the loss of virginity. This may seem of both father and daughter as if she would have to suffer some “beastly” experience. (Bettelheim 306) In this sense, Bettelheim reads “Beauty and the Beast” as an instrument to confront childhood fears, such as “the creations of his [the child’s] anxious sexual fantasies; and what while sex may at first seem beastlike, in reality love between woman and man is the most satisfying of all emotions” (306). Unlike Bettelheim, Zipes (1991, 33) reads “Beauty and the Beast” as a prescriptive tale which sets the standards for sexual and social conduct. Carter’s particular deconstruction of this traditional fairy tale brings to the foreground the connection between womanhood and monstrosity (Saxena 194), and her choice of felines to depict the Beast—which relates to a savage and magnificent power outside humanity (Easton 29)—as well as other animal allusions such as the lamb, evidences controversial 93 NEREA RIOBÓ PÉREZ The unnamed narrator also affirms to come from the North, from “countries of cold weather” arrived at the “blessed plot where the lion lies down with the lamb” (154) which, according to Carter herself, is identified with Mantua, Italy (Gordon 278). More significantly, the “blessed plot” reaches back to the Bible (Isaiah 11:6-7), which has been often read as a prophetic description of the Messianic Age after Apocalypse, in which the wolf and the lion will live with the lamb in harmony. In a sense, the opening scene already anticipates the character’s transformation and her radical hybridization. Unlike Carter’s Beauty in the previous narrative, the unnamed narrator is unseduced by luxury or glamour, pitying “women whom circumstances force mutely to witness folly”, which recalls her own mother, a victim of her husband amoral and ruinous life: “My mother did not blossom long; bartered for her dowry to such a feckless sprig of the Russian nobility that she soon died of his gaming, his whoring, his agonising repentances” (Carter 1996, 155). Rather than quietly accepting her father’s wishes, the narrator openly expresses her disgust and indignation for her father’s weakness and lack of self-control, which leads her to become a bargain in the Beast’s possessions: “Gambling is a sickness. My father said he loved me yet he staked his daughter on a hand of cards” (156). This narrator is, as was Miss Lamb in the previous tale, aware of the “patriarchal power that objectifies her beauty and her body into a commodity” (Laskoski 34): “‘Che bella!’ Since I could toddle, always the pretty one, with my glossy, nut-brown curls, my rosy cheeks. And born on Christmas Day – her ‘Christmas rose,’ my English nurse called me” (Carter 1996, 155). Beauty is also called “my pearl” by her father when he loses her at cards (157). Cynically, Beauty understands her entrance in adulthood as the moment in which she envisages her body “as my sole capital in the world and today I’d make my first investment” (159). Apart from Beauty’s firs-person narration, the other characters of the story express their agency in different manners. The Beast’s voice, so imperceptible for the narrator, needs the translation of the valet, who transmits his wishes: “His masked voice echoes as from a great distance as he stoops over his hand and he has such a growling impediment in his speech that only his valet, who understands him, can interpret for him, as if his master were the clumsy doll and he the ventriloquist” (156). Even though the narrator is unable to understand that she is in front of a real animal which does not speak, the reader decodes the different clues that Carter exposes, for example the tiger’s animal’s sounds: “the Beast bayed; laid down all three remaining aces” (157). 4. Felines: “The Courtship of Mr Lyon” and “The Tiger’s Bride” responsible of education, morality and socialization: “The symbolical cultural pattern of matriarchy, which designated the female as initiator of human action and integration, experienced constant changes over the course of centuries in both the oral and literary tradition” (Zipes 1991, 34). However, the symbolic meanings of the “Beauty and the Beast” folktales began to change from the seventeenth century onwards due to their transition from oral forms to written narratives in France. The tales became very popular among the French noblewomen in King Louis XIV and King Louis XV’s courts which adapted the oral folktales to their times: If we compare those oral folk tales about the animal bridegroom, which stem for matriarchal societies, with those literary fairy tales about “beauty and the beast” at the end of the seventeenth century, it becomes evident that the transformations in the portrayal of sexual configurations and cultural patterns were connected to significant changes within the civilization process itself. (Zipes 1991, 33) As a result of such sexual configurations, the new female protagonist of “Beauty and the Beast” sacrifices herself “to a man in his house or castle, symbolical of submission to patriarchal rule” (Zipes 1991, 34) because of her filial love and obedience to her father (Bettelheim 283). Two good examples of this are the versions of the fairy tale Beauty and the Beast written by Madame de Villeneuve in 1740 and Madame Leprince de Beaumont in 1756, two “didactic discourses on manners, morals, and social class” that try to validate the aristocracy over the bourgeoisie (Zipes 1991, 38). In Beaumont’s tale, Beauty, the youngest daughter of a rich merchant, saves her father by accepting to live with the Beast and, in so doing, she accepts that her role is a domestic one, whereas her sisters are punished “for forming their own desires as well as for rejecting the obligation of feminine altruism” (Kerchy 450). Beauty progressively falls in love with the Beast to eventually realize that “she is willing to marry him. Suddenly he is transformed into a handsome prince” (Zipes 1991, 38). In this version of the tale, the two male characters— Beauty’s father and the Beast—represent the economic and political power upon which the female protagonist depends. The tale targets young women “who fully expected to be given away by their fathers to men who might well strike them as monsters” (Warner 1994, 278), thus becoming a reward-story for women, compensating qualities like dependence, submission and filial duty with promises of love and a happy marriage: The mark of beauty for a female is to be found in her submission, obedience, humility, industry, and patience; the mark of manliness is to be found in his selfcontrol, politeness, reason and perseverance. […] It became clear that the female 94 4. Felines: “The Courtship of Mr Lyon” and “The Tiger’s Bride” Inversely, the valet reproduces human speech and the reader has access to his words. The valet, speaking for himself and for his master, is the one which interact the most with Beauty. He is in charge of taking care of her and convincing her of fulfilling the Beast’s desire. He exchanges with Beauty two similar dialogues—repetition inherited from the fairy tale tradition—in which she threatens to commit suicide or escaping and the valet appeals to her sense of honour: “‘Oh no,’ said the valet, fixing upon me a wide and suddenly melancholy eyes. ‘Oh, no, you will not. You are a woman of honour’” (161). The unnamed valet is presented as a liminal uncanny Other, characterised by his mutter: “The valet, ticking and clucking to himself, hastily ushered me out of the room” (161) and nervousness, as a representative of the Beast’s commands. With respect to empathy, the recognition of animals’ feelings and emotional and affective connections between non-human and human animals (Armstrong 2) is also present in Carter’s tale. The non-human animal’s feelings are a constant throughout the text. Starting with the horses as empirical animals, their function is to lead the carriage or serve as mount for the protagonists. Since the first scene in which they appear—when the valet takes Beauty to the Beast’s palazzo—the female narrator establishes an empathic relationship between the animals and herself, mentioning Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels and the intellectual superiority of the horses: The Beast’s carriage, of an elegant if antique design, was black as a hearse and it was drawn by a dashing black gelding who blew smoke from his nostrils and stamped upon the packed snow with enough sprightly appearance of life to give me some hope that not all the world was locked in ice, as I was. I had always held a little towards Gulliver’s opinion, that horses are better than we are, and, that day, I would have been glad to depart with him to the kingdom of horses, if I’d been given the chance. (Carter 1996, 157) Her condition as a commodified object in a patriarchal society leads her coalition with nonhuman animals, especially with horses, to which she reclaims reason as is the case in Swift’s narrative. Beauty’s search for rationality—an attribute reserved only for men and excluded from women—aligns herself with categories such as animals or monstrous liminal creatures, the traditional objectified Others in Western patriarchal traditions (Webb and Hopcroft 315). This understanding between her and the black horse is also clearly appreciated when she goes for a ride in the woods: “I always adored horses, noblest of creatures, such wounded sensitivity in their wise eyes, such rational restraint of energy at their high-strung NEREA RIOBÓ PÉREZ character could only assume her “civil” form if she were willing to sacrifice herself to a beastlike male. By denying herself, she could obtain what all women supposedly wanted and want – namely marriage in the form of male domination. (Zipes 1991, 41) Interestingly, Bettleheim explains how the “animal groom” cycle tales depart from an immature view which posits the individual as divided between animal and mind which, however, in “process of maturation, these artificially isolated aspects of our humanity must become unified” (1991, 308). However, the tale’s original emphasis on sexuality and maturation was transformed by the French courtly ideology that portrayed sexuality as restricted to marriage, which “made sex permissible [and] changed it from something animallike into a bond sanctified by the sacrament of marriage” (Bettelheim 283). As a result, both Madame Villeneuve and Beaumont’s versions of the tale contemplate a vision of sexuality as a consequence of marriage, while also encouraging women not to fear an arranged marriage. Significantly, metamorphosis is at the core of the tales, symbolically expressed for the female character, who changes into an “ideal of virtue and graces”, and in more literal terms for the male character, transformed into an ideal husband as a result of the heroine’s love and submission (Saxena 194). Both Villeneuve and Beaumont draw on the rose symbol as an objectification of Beauty as a possession which passes from the father to the husband-to-be: In “Beauty and the Beast”, the fateful events are brought about by a father’s haven stolen a rose to bring to his best-loved youngest daughter. His doing so symbolizes both his love for her and also an anticipation of her losing her maidenhood, as the broken flower—particularly the broke rose—is a symbol for the loss of virginity. This may seem of both father and daughter as if she would have to suffer some “beastly” experience. (Bettelheim 306) In this sense, Bettelheim reads “Beauty and the Beast” as an instrument to confront childhood fears, such as “the creations of his [the child’s] anxious sexual fantasies; and what while sex may at first seem beastlike, in reality love between woman and man is the most satisfying of all emotions” (306). Unlike Bettelheim, Zipes (1991, 33) reads “Beauty and the Beast” as a prescriptive tale which sets the standards for sexual and social conduct. Carter’s particular deconstruction of this traditional fairy tale brings to the foreground the connection between womanhood and monstrosity (Saxena 194), and her choice of felines to depict the Beast—which relates to a savage and magnificent power outside humanity (Easton 29)—as well as other animal allusions such as the lamb, evidences controversial 95 NEREA RIOBÓ PÉREZ hindquarters. I lirruped and hurrumphed to my shining black companion and he acknowledged my greeting with a kiss on the forehead from his soft lips” (Carter 1996, 164). The non-verbal communication between horses and Beauty helps to reinforce the connection among them, an interspecies relationship of mutual understanding: “The mare raised her dripping muzzle and looked at me keenly, as if urging me” (166). Apart from the importance of Beauty’s empathic inclination towards these animals, they are given an important location to stay by the Beast and, instead of occupying the stables, the horses remain inside the abandoned house in a space normally used for human gatherings: The little black horse trotted smartly through the figured bronze doors that stood open to the weather like those of a barn and the valet handed me out of the carriage on to the scarred tiles of the great hall itself, into the odorous warmth of a stable, sweet with hay, acrid with horse dung. An equine chorus of neighings and soft drummings of hooves broke out beneath the tall roof, where the beams were scabbed with last summer's swallows' nests; a dozen gracile muzzles lifted from their mangers and turned towards us, ears erect. The Beast had given his horses the use of the dining room. The walls were painted, aptly enough, with a fresco of horses, dogs and men in a wood where fruit and blossom grew on the bough together. (159) The valet, an ambiguous animalistic individual, expresses his feelings in multiple occasions. The narrator appreciates his indecorous behaviour as a servant and his attitude towards her: “The valet darted me a reassuring glance from his brown, eloquent eyes, yet a glance with so much queer superciliousness in it that it did not comfort me, and went bounding ahead of me on his bandy legs, softly chattering to himself” (160). His arrogance is transformed into shame and perturbation when he expresses the Beast’s desire: Now, in the face of my impassivity, the valet twittered, his ironic composure gone, for the desire of a master, however trivial, may yet sound unbearably insolent in the mouth of a servant and his role of go-between clearly caused him a good deal of embarrassment. He gulped; he swallowed, at last contrived to unleash an unpunctuated flood. (160) Thus, his relationship with Beauty will change from disdain at the beginning of the narrative to mutual appreciation towards the end, when the three main protagonists reveal their natural selves in front of the others. As for the Beast, he expresses his annoyance with the lament of Beauty’s father’s regarding animal sounds, decoded by the valet: “At that, The Beast made a sudden, dreadful noise, halfway between a growl and a roar; the candles flared. The quick valet, the prim hypocrite, interpreted unblinkingly: ‘My master says: If you are so careless of your treasures, 4. Felines: “The Courtship of Mr Lyon” and “The Tiger’s Bride” responsible of education, morality and socialization: “The symbolical cultural pattern of matriarchy, which designated the female as initiator of human action and integration, experienced constant changes over the course of centuries in both the oral and literary tradition” (Zipes 1991, 34). However, the symbolic meanings of the “Beauty and the Beast” folktales began to change from the seventeenth century onwards due to their transition from oral forms to written narratives in France. The tales became very popular among the French noblewomen in King Louis XIV and King Louis XV’s courts which adapted the oral folktales to their times: If we compare those oral folk tales about the animal bridegroom, which stem for matriarchal societies, with those literary fairy tales about “beauty and the beast” at the end of the seventeenth century, it becomes evident that the transformations in the portrayal of sexual configurations and cultural patterns were connected to significant changes within the civilization process itself. (Zipes 1991, 33) As a result of such sexual configurations, the new female protagonist of “Beauty and the Beast” sacrifices herself “to a man in his house or castle, symbolical of submission to patriarchal rule” (Zipes 1991, 34) because of her filial love and obedience to her father (Bettelheim 283). Two good examples of this are the versions of the fairy tale Beauty and the Beast written by Madame de Villeneuve in 1740 and Madame Leprince de Beaumont in 1756, two “didactic discourses on manners, morals, and social class” that try to validate the aristocracy over the bourgeoisie (Zipes 1991, 38). In Beaumont’s tale, Beauty, the youngest daughter of a rich merchant, saves her father by accepting to live with the Beast and, in so doing, she accepts that her role is a domestic one, whereas her sisters are punished “for forming their own desires as well as for rejecting the obligation of feminine altruism” (Kerchy 450). Beauty progressively falls in love with the Beast to eventually realize that “she is willing to marry him. Suddenly he is transformed into a handsome prince” (Zipes 1991, 38). In this version of the tale, the two male characters— Beauty’s father and the Beast—represent the economic and political power upon which the female protagonist depends. The tale targets young women “who fully expected to be given away by their fathers to men who might well strike them as monsters” (Warner 1994, 278), thus becoming a reward-story for women, compensating qualities like dependence, submission and filial duty with promises of love and a happy marriage: The mark of beauty for a female is to be found in her submission, obedience, humility, industry, and patience; the mark of manliness is to be found in his selfcontrol, politeness, reason and perseverance. […] It became clear that the female 96 4. Felines: “The Courtship of Mr Lyon” and “The Tiger’s Bride” you should expect them to be taken from you’” (157). His shame—as the narrator understands it, it is important to bear in mind that this Beauty does not comprehend the Beast’s animal subjectivity and due to his disguise she thinks of him as a man—is shown by his avoiding eye-contact (161) and hiding his head in his arms: “And then he moved; he buried his cardboard carnival head with its ribboned weight of false hair in, I would say, his arms” (163). At the end, after revealing himself being a tiger, he actually is afraid of her: “He went still as stone. He was far more frightened of me than I was of him” (169). When the Beast shows his true nature, the narrator has to come to terms not only with his alterity but to with her own as well. Carter deconstructs preconceived ideas of humanity and animality at this point through the ruminations of Beauty. Regarding the second aspect of this analysis, Carter presents animals both as empirical and symbolic as in the previous short story, but in a more obscure manner. In this tale, the symbolic aspect is more oblique and it is connected with the division of the artificial-natural binomial present in the modern Western world: “A profound separation between humanity and the natural world was instituted, resulting in the alienation of modern citizens from a working engagement with nature, […] the artificiality of contemporary relations to animals, and the degradation of the non-human world by industrial technologies” (Armstrong 2). Anthropomorphism is also a relevant element of the story, but to a different degree, when compared with the previous text. The horses and the tiger represent the animals “by themselves”, especially the first ones, as previously mentioned. They function as companion species and act as “real” horses, emitting animal sounds. There are different scenes in which the horses appear, first leading the carriage which brings Beauty to the Beast’s palazzo and then the riding moment through the woods: Our horses, saddled and bridled, beasts in bondage, were waiting for us, striking sparks from the tiles with their impatient hooves while their stablemates lolled at ease among the straw, conversing with one another in the mute speech of horses. […] The little black gelding who had brought me here greeted me with a ringing neigh that resonated inside the mist roof as in a sounding box and I knew he was meant for me to ride. (Carter 1996, 164) Nevertheless, the Beast is a more complex character. He is, on the one hand, a real tiger which makes animal sounds—it roars and purrs—unable to produce human speech; his smell corresponds to an animal and naturally walks in four legs: “He was pacing backwards and forwards, backwards and forwards, the tip of his heavy tail twitching as he paced out the NEREA RIOBÓ PÉREZ character could only assume her “civil” form if she were willing to sacrifice herself to a beastlike male. By denying herself, she could obtain what all women supposedly wanted and want – namely marriage in the form of male domination. (Zipes 1991, 41) Interestingly, Bettleheim explains how the “animal groom” cycle tales depart from an immature view which posits the individual as divided between animal and mind which, however, in “process of maturation, these artificially isolated aspects of our humanity must become unified” (1991, 308). However, the tale’s original emphasis on sexuality and maturation was transformed by the French courtly ideology that portrayed sexuality as restricted to marriage, which “made sex permissible [and] changed it from something animallike into a bond sanctified by the sacrament of marriage” (Bettelheim 283). As a result, both Madame Villeneuve and Beaumont’s versions of the tale contemplate a vision of sexuality as a consequence of marriage, while also encouraging women not to fear an arranged marriage. Significantly, metamorphosis is at the core of the tales, symbolically expressed for the female character, who changes into an “ideal of virtue and graces”, and in more literal terms for the male character, transformed into an ideal husband as a result of the heroine’s love and submission (Saxena 194). Both Villeneuve and Beaumont draw on the rose symbol as an objectification of Beauty as a possession which passes from the father to the husband-to-be: In “Beauty and the Beast”, the fateful events are brought about by a father’s haven stolen a rose to bring to his best-loved youngest daughter. His doing so symbolizes both his love for her and also an anticipation of her losing her maidenhood, as the broken flower—particularly the broke rose—is a symbol for the loss of virginity. This may seem of both father and daughter as if she would have to suffer some “beastly” experience. (Bettelheim 306) In this sense, Bettelheim reads “Beauty and the Beast” as an instrument to confront childhood fears, such as “the creations of his [the child’s] anxious sexual fantasies; and what while sex may at first seem beastlike, in reality love between woman and man is the most satisfying of all emotions” (306). Unlike Bettelheim, Zipes (1991, 33) reads “Beauty and the Beast” as a prescriptive tale which sets the standards for sexual and social conduct. Carter’s particular deconstruction of this traditional fairy tale brings to the foreground the connection between womanhood and monstrosity (Saxena 194), and her choice of felines to depict the Beast—which relates to a savage and magnificent power outside humanity (Easton 29)—as well as other animal allusions such as the lamb, evidences controversial 97 NEREA RIOBÓ PÉREZ length and breadth of his imprisonment between the gnawed and bloody bones” (168). On the other hand, Carter uses anthropomorphism in his characterization as a human being. The Beast, a real tiger, is performing the role of a human animal and he is perceived as such by Beauty, who describes him as a peculiar man “so big look so two-dimensional, in spite of the quaint elegance of The Beast, in the old-fashioned tailcoat that might, from its looks, have been bought in those distant years before he imposed seclusion on himself” (155). Since the narrative’s opening, the Beast’ connection with the tiger appears in his heraldic emblem—“La Bestia”—was it to do with the heraldic signature” (155)— perceived as extravagant by the narrator, who emphasises his animality which a mask on his face cannot fully disguise: “He throws our human aspirations to the godlike sadly awry, poor fellow; only from a distance would you think The Beast not much different from any other man, although he wears a mask with a man’s face painted most beautifully on it. Oh, yes, a beautiful face” (156). The mask, used to hide his animal nature, provides the Beast with an “uncanny” appearance, due to the “formal symmetry of feature to be entirely human: one profile of his mask is the mirror image of the other, too perfect, uncanny” (156), which recalls the tiger’s “fearful symmetry” in Blake’s poem “The Tyger” in Songs of Innocence and of Experience (1794), yet perceiving him as “a deformed human rather than an animal” (Webb and Hopcroft 327). The Beast’s artificiality is further emphasised by his wig, gloves and by the fact that he uses his valet as an interpreter, thus encouraging a sense of otherness and alienation (Laskoski 46), as well as his difficulty to stand in two legs: “He has an odd air of self-imposed restraint, as if fighting a battle with himself to remain upright when he would far rather drop down on all fours” (Carter 1996, 156). The unnamed protagonist reflects upon the monstrous condition of her host: “Lost to The Beast! And what, I wondered, might be the exact nature of his ‘beastliness’?” (158). Without knowing his true self as a tiger, Beauty remembers her nurse’s advice—which she considered “old wives’ tales” and superstitions—about weretigers, hybrid creatures that were half-man and half-tiger, and unconsciously connects them with the Beast’s nature: My English nurse once told me about a tiger-man she saw in London, when she was a little girl, to scare me into good behaviour […]. If you don't stop plaguing the nursemaids, my beauty, the tiger-man will come and take you away. They'd brought him from Sumatra, in the Indies, she said; his hinder parts were all hairy and only from the head downwards did he resemble a man. And yet The Beast goes always masked; it cannot be his face that looks like mine. But the tiger-man, in spite of his hairiness, could take a glass of ale in his hand like a good Christian and drink it down. (158) 4. Felines: “The Courtship of Mr Lyon” and “The Tiger’s Bride” responsible of education, morality and socialization: “The symbolical cultural pattern of matriarchy, which designated the female as initiator of human action and integration, experienced constant changes over the course of centuries in both the oral and literary tradition” (Zipes 1991, 34). However, the symbolic meanings of the “Beauty and the Beast” folktales began to change from the seventeenth century onwards due to their transition from oral forms to written narratives in France. The tales became very popular among the French noblewomen in King Louis XIV and King Louis XV’s courts which adapted the oral folktales to their times: If we compare those oral folk tales about the animal bridegroom, which stem for matriarchal societies, with those literary fairy tales about “beauty and the beast” at the end of the seventeenth century, it becomes evident that the transformations in the portrayal of sexual configurations and cultural patterns were connected to significant changes within the civilization process itself. (Zipes 1991, 33) As a result of such sexual configurations, the new female protagonist of “Beauty and the Beast” sacrifices herself “to a man in his house or castle, symbolical of submission to patriarchal rule” (Zipes 1991, 34) because of her filial love and obedience to her father (Bettelheim 283). Two good examples of this are the versions of the fairy tale Beauty and the Beast written by Madame de Villeneuve in 1740 and Madame Leprince de Beaumont in 1756, two “didactic discourses on manners, morals, and social class” that try to validate the aristocracy over the bourgeoisie (Zipes 1991, 38). In Beaumont’s tale, Beauty, the youngest daughter of a rich merchant, saves her father by accepting to live with the Beast and, in so doing, she accepts that her role is a domestic one, whereas her sisters are punished “for forming their own desires as well as for rejecting the obligation of feminine altruism” (Kerchy 450). Beauty progressively falls in love with the Beast to eventually realize that “she is willing to marry him. Suddenly he is transformed into a handsome prince” (Zipes 1991, 38). In this version of the tale, the two male characters— Beauty’s father and the Beast—represent the economic and political power upon which the female protagonist depends. The tale targets young women “who fully expected to be given away by their fathers to men who might well strike them as monsters” (Warner 1994, 278), thus becoming a reward-story for women, compensating qualities like dependence, submission and filial duty with promises of love and a happy marriage: The mark of beauty for a female is to be found in her submission, obedience, humility, industry, and patience; the mark of manliness is to be found in his selfcontrol, politeness, reason and perseverance. […] It became clear that the female 98 4. Felines: “The Courtship of Mr Lyon” and “The Tiger’s Bride” Carter’s play of references and connections among the different stories in the collection are numerous. In this story the narrator mentions another monstrous liminal character in relation to the weretiger, the Erl-King, a mythical creature which causes fear in children, also the male protagonist of the next story in the collection, “The Erl-King”—analysed in chapter five—: “Then the tiger-man would […] hire the Erl-King’s galloper of wind and ride through the night straight to the nursery and—Yes, my beauty! GOBBLE YOU UP!” (158). It is possible to consider this characterization as symbolic anthropomorphism if we compare the two Beasts in Carter’s short stories: while in “The Courtship of Mr Lyon” the leonine Beast behaves and speaks like a human animal as a real anthropomorphic creature, his counterpart in “The Tiger’s Bride” imitates human life but does not present human features. The valet, on the contrary, reveals himself an animalistic creature camouflaged as a human servant with clothing proper of his condition, who is characterised by sharp intelligence: The valet […] forgot his station sufficiently to scratch busily beneath his white periwig with an over-supple index finger as he offered me what my old nurse would have called an “old-fashioned look”, ironic, sly, a smidgen of disdain in it. And pity? No pity. His eyes were moist and brown, his face seamed with the innocent cunning of an ancient baby. He had an irritating habit of chattering to himself under his breath all the time as he packed up his master’s winnings. (158) His functions vary from translator to housekeeper, being in charge of Beauty. After the climax of the story, when both Beauty and the Beast cast aside artificiality in favour of their true nature by accepting both themselves and the other’s bodies, the valet also engages the deconstruction of patriarchal artificial demands by revealing his own body: Then the wind blew the valet whirling along the passage. He must have decided that, if one should go naked, then all should go naked; without his livery, he revealed himself, as I had suspected, a delicate creature, covered with silken mothgrey fur, brown fingers supple as leather, chocolate muzzle, the gentlest creature in the world. (168) Carter introduces a liminal animalistic individual, an anthropomorphic animal which wears human clothes, speaks and acts like a human. His description, however, does not reproduce any non-human animal in particular, just animal traits in general; nevertheless, together with the narrator’s reflections of his behaviour and his way of walking throughout the text, it may be possible to see a slightly resemblance with an ape. Clearly, the valet exhibits symbolic meaning, becoming a metaphor for the margins of humanity and animality conveyed in this character, a monstrous liminal creature, half human but also half animal. He represents a NEREA RIOBÓ PÉREZ character could only assume her “civil” form if she were willing to sacrifice herself to a beastlike male. By denying herself, she could obtain what all women supposedly wanted and want – namely marriage in the form of male domination. (Zipes 1991, 41) Interestingly, Bettleheim explains how the “animal groom” cycle tales depart from an immature view which posits the individual as divided between animal and mind which, however, in “process of maturation, these artificially isolated aspects of our humanity must become unified” (1991, 308). However, the tale’s original emphasis on sexuality and maturation was transformed by the French courtly ideology that portrayed sexuality as restricted to marriage, which “made sex permissible [and] changed it from something animallike into a bond sanctified by the sacrament of marriage” (Bettelheim 283). As a result, both Madame Villeneuve and Beaumont’s versions of the tale contemplate a vision of sexuality as a consequence of marriage, while also encouraging women not to fear an arranged marriage. Significantly, metamorphosis is at the core of the tales, symbolically expressed for the female character, who changes into an “ideal of virtue and graces”, and in more literal terms for the male character, transformed into an ideal husband as a result of the heroine’s love and submission (Saxena 194). Both Villeneuve and Beaumont draw on the rose symbol as an objectification of Beauty as a possession which passes from the father to the husband-to-be: In “Beauty and the Beast”, the fateful events are brought about by a father’s haven stolen a rose to bring to his best-loved youngest daughter. His doing so symbolizes both his love for her and also an anticipation of her losing her maidenhood, as the broken flower—particularly the broke rose—is a symbol for the loss of virginity. This may seem of both father and daughter as if she would have to suffer some “beastly” experience. (Bettelheim 306) In this sense, Bettelheim reads “Beauty and the Beast” as an instrument to confront childhood fears, such as “the creations of his [the child’s] anxious sexual fantasies; and what while sex may at first seem beastlike, in reality love between woman and man is the most satisfying of all emotions” (306). Unlike Bettelheim, Zipes (1991, 33) reads “Beauty and the Beast” as a prescriptive tale which sets the standards for sexual and social conduct. Carter’s particular deconstruction of this traditional fairy tale brings to the foreground the connection between womanhood and monstrosity (Saxena 194), and her choice of felines to depict the Beast—which relates to a savage and magnificent power outside humanity (Easton 29)—as well as other animal allusions such as the lamb, evidences controversial 99 NEREA RIOBÓ PÉREZ connection between the two worlds—humanity represented by Beauty and animality by the Beast—a bridge which reaches Western dualities. In turn, Beauty is a woman character who is metamorphosed into a real tiger at the end of the story. Beauty is seen both as real and an allegory, a woman who frees from the patriarchal society’s restrains and artificiality and embraces her sexuality. Carter’s subtle subversion of the tradition of classical fairy tale presented at the end of the previous short story reaches its full expression on this one by the deconstruction of the fairy tale ending of humanity restored, thus inverting the metamorphosis and transforming the woman into a tiger. As a woman, Beauty not only is conscious of what is expected from her but also expresses her disconformity with her assigned role. However, the binary structure which has constructed her world prevents her from liberating herself from restrains and, consequently, she fails to recognise the Beast and the valet’s alterity until the end. The whole story deconstructs Western Cartersian dualisms and the static vision which affects Beauty’s understanding of the world, incapable of coming to terms with the hybrid aspects of subjectivity. Beauty is surrounded by a consumerist society of artifice which produces rigid strictures for women, reflected in the narrative through Carter’s reference to the construction of artifice from natural elements, which eventually produces the tiger’s “fearful symmetry”. For this reason, the Beast’s tears, transformed into diamond earrings, recover their original shape when both Beauty and Beast accept their true selves: “My earrings turned back to water and trickled down my shoulders” (169). However, one of the most prominent examples of this Western dichotomy is embodied in the figure of the doll at the Beast’s palace, which reduplicates the narrator’s personal appearance as a recreation of the gothic Doppelgänger. She is an artificial mechanism which imitates human life and fulfils the role of the lady’s maid which helps Beauty to be prepared: A knocking and clattering behind the door of the cupboard; the door swings open and out glides a soubrette from an operetta, with glossy, nut-brown curls, rosy cheeks, blue, rolling eyes; it takes me a moment to recognise her, in her little cap, her white stockings, her frilled petticoats. She carries a looking glass in one hand and a powder puffin the other and there is a musical box where her heart should be; she tinkles as she rolls towards me on her tiny wheels. ‘Nothing human lives here,’ said the valet. My maid halted, bowed; from a split seam at the side of her bodice protrudes the handle of a key. She is a marvellous machine, the most delicately balanced system of cords and pulleys in the world. (162) 4. Felines: “The Courtship of Mr Lyon” and “The Tiger’s Bride” responsible of education, morality and socialization: “The symbolical cultural pattern of matriarchy, which designated the female as initiator of human action and integration, experienced constant changes over the course of centuries in both the oral and literary tradition” (Zipes 1991, 34). However, the symbolic meanings of the “Beauty and the Beast” folktales began to change from the seventeenth century onwards due to their transition from oral forms to written narratives in France. The tales became very popular among the French noblewomen in King Louis XIV and King Louis XV’s courts which adapted the oral folktales to their times: If we compare those oral folk tales about the animal bridegroom, which stem for matriarchal societies, with those literary fairy tales about “beauty and the beast” at the end of the seventeenth century, it becomes evident that the transformations in the portrayal of sexual configurations and cultural patterns were connected to significant changes within the civilization process itself. (Zipes 1991, 33) As a result of such sexual configurations, the new female protagonist of “Beauty and the Beast” sacrifices herself “to a man in his house or castle, symbolical of submission to patriarchal rule” (Zipes 1991, 34) because of her filial love and obedience to her father (Bettelheim 283). Two good examples of this are the versions of the fairy tale Beauty and the Beast written by Madame de Villeneuve in 1740 and Madame Leprince de Beaumont in 1756, two “didactic discourses on manners, morals, and social class” that try to validate the aristocracy over the bourgeoisie (Zipes 1991, 38). In Beaumont’s tale, Beauty, the youngest daughter of a rich merchant, saves her father by accepting to live with the Beast and, in so doing, she accepts that her role is a domestic one, whereas her sisters are punished “for forming their own desires as well as for rejecting the obligation of feminine altruism” (Kerchy 450). Beauty progressively falls in love with the Beast to eventually realize that “she is willing to marry him. Suddenly he is transformed into a handsome prince” (Zipes 1991, 38). In this version of the tale, the two male characters— Beauty’s father and the Beast—represent the economic and political power upon which the female protagonist depends. The tale targets young women “who fully expected to be given away by their fathers to men who might well strike them as monsters” (Warner 1994, 278), thus becoming a reward-story for women, compensating qualities like dependence, submission and filial duty with promises of love and a happy marriage: The mark of beauty for a female is to be found in her submission, obedience, humility, industry, and patience; the mark of manliness is to be found in his selfcontrol, politeness, reason and perseverance. […] It became clear that the female 106 107 5. BIRDS: “THE ERL-KING”, “THE SNOW CHILD” AND “THE LADY OF THE HOUSE OF LOVE” This chapter focuses on the three short stories of Carter’s collection in which the presence of birds is entangled with human female subjectivity. Each one of the stories belongs to a different rewriting, being “The Erl-King” the only text in the collection which is based on a medieval Germanic folktale with an eponymous name. “The Snow Child”, the shortest of them all, is a reassessment of a dark Germanic variant of “Snow White” and, finally, “The Lady of the House of Love” is a Gothic vampiric subversion of “The Sleeping Beauty”. These three stories, placed exactly in this position and in between the feline and wolf trilogy, are marked by the presence of different birds and human-animal metamorphosis. The first two stories introduce metamorphic women who are transformed into birds, while the last one addresses an important difference: “The Lady of the House of Love” presents no birdy transformations but a female vampire instead. Even though the Countess is a beastly animalistic monster with claws, her description does not correspond to any animal in concrete. My choice to examine the text in the framework of this chapter is justified by the analogies between an empirical bird and the vampiric Countess: the character’s symbolic situation is reflected through the bird’s confinement, as will be subsequently analysed. I will briefly examine the origins and variants of the three tales to see the connection with Carter’s short stories, paying especial attention to issues pertaining to female identity and sexuality. I will also explore the connections between Angela Carter’s works in general with birds, vampires and their cultural and literary representation. Finally, the analysis of the three stories based on Saphiro and Copeland’s guidelines will occupy the major focus of attention. 5.1. “THE ERLKING” Angela Carter’s short story “The Erl-King” is the only text in the whole collection of The Bloody Chamber which is based on a figure from folklore, legends and folktales instead of the fairy tale realm. In the Scandinavian folklore, the Erlking represents the king of the elves. 108 NEREA RIOBÓ PÉREZ This trope—or one of its female variants—is also found in Swedish, Norwegian and Icelandic traditions, being one of the earliest texts a Danish ballad from the sixteenth century in which the character of an elf maid appears as a female evil monster. From the Scandinavian countries, these legends permeate the Germanic oral stratum in the form of folktales, Medieval German romances and ballads: an evil elf or goblin torments passengers, villagers and children who go through the Black Forest. These folktales became very popular in the German Romantic tradition, exemplified in Johann Gottfried von Herder’s ballad “The Erlking’s Daughter” (1778), based on a Danish poem about the elf maid and transformed it into a story about the elves’ king’s daughter, a female evil spirit who takes revenge on a groom—a man who refused to dance with her—by killing him. Gottfried von Herder’s version also influenced a Goethe’s poem “The Erlking” (1782). However, Goethe’s ballad goes back to the male trope of the Erlking in detriment of the female characters, who are almost absent. In his poem, a father is riding a horse with his child and the boy is haunted by the evil Erlking, who causes his death at the end. Goethe’s ballad also influenced Franz Schubert who, in turn, created his lied “Erlköning” in 1815 with the same infanticidal plot: Los originales más conocidos de la historia del encuentro con el rey elfo son la ballada de Goethe, “El rey elfo” (“Der Erlkönig”), la adaptación musical de Schubert y la traducción de Johann Gottfried von Herder de un poema danés, “La hija del rey de los elfos” (“Erlkönigs Tochter”), en la que se basara Goethe. En todas estas versiones la figura femenina queda al margen de la historia principal relatada de un modo u otro. (García Domínguez 62) As such, the figure of the Erlking is considered an omen of death in line with other folkloric counterparts, taking into account that both in Goethe and Schubert’s works it is only the child who sees the Erlking, not his father. In the seventh edition of The Oxford Companion to English Literature edited by Dinah Birch (2009), there is an entry about the Erlking and how this folklore figure appeared in the British literary context during the Romantic period: Erl-King, the German Erlkönig, subject of a famous ballad by *Goethe (1782). The name derives from a Danish word meaning king of the elves, but Goethe may have associated the word with Erle or alder tree. In the ballad, introduced into England by Matthew *Lewis’s translation, he is a sinister figure who lures a child to his death. Lewis brought it to the notice of Walter *Scott, who also produced a translation. Goethe's ballad was the basis of one of Franz *Schubert’s best-known 109 5. Birds: “The Erl-King”, “The Snow Child” and “The Lady of the House of Love” settings (1816). Erl-King is also the subject of a *‘ghost’ story by the Dublin writer John Connolly which was broadcast by the BBC in 2000. (347) Carter used these different approximations as hypotexts in her short story “The Erl-King” but presenting an important change: the woman is the clear protagonist and narrator of the events. Carter’s claiming for women’s voice and identity, present in the whole collection, acquires in this particular story more strength and importance due to the narrator’s struggle for subjectivity (Rodríguez Salas 2010, 225). 5.2. “SNOW WHITE” The origins of the “Snow White” fairy tale are found mainly in Europe but also in America, Africa and Asia Minor. However, the different tales and stories do not present common features until Giambattista Basile’s work, an Italian poet and folktale collector who lived in different Italian courts during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Basile’s fairy-tale compilation, initially entitled Lo Cunto de li Cunti overo lo Trattenemiento de Peccerille— The Tale of Tales, or Entertainment for Little Ones—and also known as Il Pentamerone later on, was published posthumously in 1634. His tale “La Schiavottella” (“The Young Slave”) is considered the early literary retelling of this fairy tale and entails reminiscences of “Sleeping Beauty”, “Cinderella” and “Snow White” (Shojaei Kawan 327). Basile’s “The Young Slave” introduces a magical conception of a child, Lisa, the blessings of the fairies she receives and the final curse which leads to the girl’s death. Lisa’s childish body is placed in seven glass coffins while time passes and her body grows up. Years later, she is awakened and finally marries her uncle (Bacchilega 1997, 30). Even though Basile’s fairy tale differs from the main plot of the Brothers Grimm’s tale—the most popular one nowadays—the main common points relate the “Snow White” tradition with an apparently dead innocent girl lying in a glass coffin and the female rivalry theme for the male figure’s affection between a more mature woman and the younger girl. The fairy tale of “Snow White” became very popular in its oral versions, especially in Germany where, centuries later, the Brothers Grimm dug into folklore to select some renderings for their Household Tales. Bettelheim collects some of the German folk versions which the Grimms finally dismissed. In one of them, the protagonists are a count and a countess riding through the woods while the count expresses his desire of having a girl “white 110 NEREA RIOBÓ PÉREZ as snow, red as blood and black as a raven’s feather”, while in the Grimm’s version, it is the mother’s desire to conceive a girl in such terms: As they drove on, they encounter a girl as white as snow, as red as blood, and with hair as black as the raven; and she was Snow White. The count immediately made her sit in the coach and loved her, but the countess did not like it and though only about how she could get rid of her. Finally, she dropped her glove and ordered Snow White to look for it; in the meantime the coachman had to drive on with great speed. […] A parallel version differs only in the detail that the couple drive through a forest and Snow White is asked to descend to gather a bunch of beautiful roses. (Bettelheim 200) Interestingly, Angela Carter based her short story “The Snow Child” in these actual retellings rather than in the main well-known plot of the Brothers Grimm with the stepmother, the mirror and the dwarves. As previously mentioned, Carter meant to use the core of the fairy tales to create her short stories with a deconstructive purpose and, as such, these two dark accounts concentrate the sexual violent aspects essential for Carter’s subversion. However, the fairy tale “Little Snow White” or “Snow Drop” is well-known today for the Brothers Grimm’s story, collected in Children’s and Household Tales (1812). The Grimms rewrote the fairy tale in different occasions modifying the content replacing “the mother for the stepmother in the second edition after having already substituted, in the first (1812), the motif of the compassionate hunter for the mother leaving her daughter behind during a ride in the forest” (Shojaei Kawan 334). In their final version, after pricking her finger, the Queen sees her drops of blood in the snow and wishes to have a daughter “as white as snow, as red as blood, and as black as ebony” (Vaz da Silva 243) and dies at childbirth. The importance of the three colours—black, red and white—of the fairy tale are found in literature in different works throughout many centuries. This is one of the most indispensable features of the “Snow White” tale in its many variables due to the influence of Basile’s tale “The Crow”: Twelfth-century Chrétien de Troyes has famously let us know that the sight of three drops of blood on snow reminds Perceval of his sweetheart […]. Five centuries later, the complete chromatic trio surfaced in a fairy tale. Giambattista Basile’s tale 4.9, “The Crow” […]: ‘Would that I could have a wife as red and white as this stone, and with hair and eyebrows as black as the feathers of this crow’. (Vaz da Silva 242) 111 5. Birds: “The Erl-King”, “The Snow Child” and “The Lady of the House of Love” As such, the trinomial is essential for the Grimm’s retellings of the “Snow White” and, consequently, for the subsequent versions, including Angela Carter’s short story. Nevertheless, the Grimms—who found the tricolour reference in the second version of their tale material—changed the reference of black as a raven’s feather considered “an image of very ill omen, a foreboding of death, which they also knew from Basile’s Cuorvo […] and medieval Celtic literature” (Shojaei Kawan 335) for a dark wood such as ebony. Francisco Vaz da Silva (2007) has pointed out the importance of the chromatic aspects of the tale and their symbolic representation regarding sexuality. While white represents the purity and innocence of the immature girl, red symbolises her sexual maturation: The whole point of Snow White’s sleep in the glass coffin is that she still has “pretty red cheeks […]. In sum, the purity of whiteness is there to be tinted. […] this is a theme of passage from the purity of infancy (white) to the mature realm of procreation (red). In both perspectives, the red-on-white stain embodies a threshold. (245-246) Black is contrasted with the two previous colours, meaning death and enchantment “primarily in the shape of an otherworldly bird (crow, raven) that has been killed” (Vaz da Silva 246). Da Silva also mentions N. J. Girardot’s comments of the importance of the three-colour symbolism of the tale that frames the female protagonist, who represents “the idea of a union of the red (menstrual blood) and white (semen) through the agency of the black (the ritual ‘death’ involved in the initiation and marriage union)” (247). This is in tune with Bettelheim’s approach on the psychoanalytic aspects of the fairy tale, who establishes how “sexual innocence, whiteness, is contrasted with sexual desire, symbolized by the red blood. Fairy tales prepare the child to accept what is otherwise a most upsetting event: sexual bleeding, as in menstruation and later in intercourse when the hymen is broken” (202). Bettelheim’s view of this fairy tale concerns the oedipal conflict between the mother and the daughter: the competition for the father’s affection and the jealousy plot between the (step)mother and the girl (Bettelheim 202) and the girl’s successful resolution of the conflict. However, other literary critics such as Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar focus on the patriarchal role models that the fairy tale establishes through the girl as the “angelwoman” opposite to the Evil Queen the “monster-woman” (Bacchilega 1997, 31). This binary code for female behaviour in patriarchal societies is present in the majority of the literary fairy tales, as earlier observed. The passive, beautiful Snow White is compensated with marriage for all the suffering she has to endure, while the evil Queen is cruelly punished to dance at 112 NEREA RIOBÓ PÉREZ Snow White’s wedding with a pair of red-hot iron slippers until she dies. While the evil antagonist represents a powerful role, the princess remains speechless: “Snow White rarely has a voice of her own, and when she does speak, she merely accepts things as they are” (Bacchilega 1997, 35). It is important to remark the creation of the girl following the mother’s desire as a representation of the ideal of womanhood, mimicking the role model the mother adopted for herself: the mother’s acceptance of her passive role as an “angel” is passed to her child, exemplified in the three-colour symbolism. “Snow White” became one of the most popular fairy tales all over the world, also due to Walt Disney’s film Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937), as Tatar (1999) points out: “Disney Studios bears the responsibility for turning Snow White into a cultural icon, making her the best known fairy-tale character in this country” (77). The film reinforced gender roles in a male-dominated culture portraying the naïve passive girl mainly doing the chores at the dwarves’ house or singing waiting for her prince. In contrasts with the Grimms’ fairy tale and Disney’s sugary version, Angela Carter’s short story, “The Snow Child”, goes back to the darkest and violent retellings to deal brutally with female rivalry in an exaggerated patriarchal society which not only objectifies women but also creates the fantasy of the ideal of womanhood. 5.3. “THE SLEEPING BEAUTY” The basic elements of “The Sleeping Beauty” can be traced back to Ancient times. Its common features were found in Greek mythology, in Indian tales, and were very popular in Europe during the Middle Ages, in connection to the chivalry literary tradition. All these versions share points in common as regards to the plot: a man—a god, a rajah, a king, a prince or a hero—is captivated by a sleeping maid’s beauty and rapes her. In most of the versions there is another female character next to the man—the evil wife or mother—who feels envy and tries to kill the young woman and her children. The Sleeping Beauty remains passive until the man restores peace and punishes the envious woman, rewarding the young one. Critics like Ester Zago asserted the origins of the fairy tale in an Indian oral tale titled “Surya Bai”, collected and published by a British woman called Mary Frere in 1868. The 113 5. Birds: “The Erl-King”, “The Snow Child” and “The Lady of the House of Love” sleeping Surya Bai is found by the rajah who wakes her up after raping her, then he marries her, and both have children. At palace, his first wife feels envy of Surya Bai and kills her. The story presents a happy ending in which the protagonists is resurrected, the first wife is killed and Surya Bai lives happily with her husband and children (Fernández Rodríguez 21). Since the earliest versions, we find the theme of the female rivalry, a fact that will be present until the twenty-first century adaptations of the tale. Greek mythology figures such as Persephone, Leto or Thalia—from Aeschylus’s lost tragedy Women of Aetna—are also connected with the Sleeping Beauty theme: Las Etneas, en las que se cuenta el modo en el que Zeus, casado con Hera, conquistó a Talía […] y tuvo con ella dos hijos. […] Es indudable que existen puntos en común entre este mito […] y posteriores versiones de “La bella durmiente”; en concreto, la proximidad mayor se da con respecto al cuento de Basile, cuya protagonista se llama asimismo Talía. Pero, además, el motivo del rapto y la heroína que engendra dos gemelos, permaneciendo escondida hasta el nacimiento de sus hijos, se repite en los relatos de Basile y Perrault. (Fernández Rodríguez 26) The theme of the sleeping woman is also representative of the Icelandic mythology in the thirteenth century through the Volsunga Saga, from which the Middle High German epic poem The Song of the Nibelungs was created. This poem, in turn, was the basis for Richard Wagner’s opera The Ring of the Nibelung (1848-1874). Wagner dealt with this plot in his second part, The Valkyrie, where Brünnhilde interprets the role of the Sleeping Beauty, being surrounded by a ring of fire until the hero comes to wake her up. Regarding the medieval European tradition of the fairy tale, the sleeping maid tales were very popular, being one of the most representatives a French prose romance titled Perceforest, published in 1528 and characterised for its humoristic tone. However, the three most important accounts of the fairy tale are from Giambattista Basile, Charles Perrault and the Brothers Grimm. Basile’s fairy tale is based on the motif of “Sleeping Beauty”, and is called “Sun, Moon, and Talia”. Talia, the daughter of a nobleman, is destined to be killed by a splinter of flax. This sleeping maiden is found by a king who, engaging with the tradition of the tale, reproduces the raping, marrying and punishing plot. The typical fairy tale division between good and evil female characters is also found in Basile’s tale: Talia, as a passive woman who accepts her horrible fate with resignation and the evil King’s wife, a Machiavellian woman who plans to kill Talia and her children. The King embodies the traditional hero, the saviour who rescues the sleeping maid and, thanks to him, 114 NEREA RIOBÓ PÉREZ she can fulfil her role as a mother and a wife. He can enjoy his sexuality to the point that he abuses and rapes a sleeping woman lacking her will to decide: Son ellos los que disfrutan de la libertad sexual absoluta […] y, también en relación con ellos, aparece una tendencia de carácter necrófilo […]. Por otra parte, el episodio de la violación de Talía ofrece un ejemplo más de la violencia sexual que construye […] uno de los rasgos característicos de los cuentos de hadas. (Fernández Rodríguez 35) Female identity in “The Sleeping Beauty” is seen in binary, opposite terms of good and evil, as previously mentioned. The evil female antagonist is the powerful one, while the protagonist is a beautiful foolish naïve young woman lacking any power. It is precisely her lack of power what seduces men: “‘La bella durmiente’ […] se rodea de un aura de atractivo en el momento en el que se halla completamente desposeída de toda fuerza y de cualquier poder: cuanto más desvalida y más a merced de los abusos y las crueldades de otros seres, tanta más fascinación ejerce a los ojos del hombre” (Fernández Rodríguez 57). The meaning of the tale implied a model of behaviour in the patriarchal order for women as patient, uncomplaining, passive and quiet in order to get a reward: marriage and motherhood. No matter how hard life treats women and the many miseries they experience, they should remain silent to be rewarded. Basile’s version of the “Sleeping Beauty” will inspire Perrault and the Brothers Grimm in the following centuries (Bettelheim 227). Perrault included a version of this fairy tale, entitled “The Sleeping Beauty in the Wood” in his collection Histoires ou Contes du Temps Passé. Perrault modified Basile’s story plot but maintains its main symbolism. He begins his tale in a kingdom in which the monarchs cannot have a child. After a long time, the queen gives birth to a child and they invite seven fairies to the girl’s baptism, but an uninvited, jealous fairy appears and curses the girl: she will prick her finger with a spindle and she will die. The seventh fairy softens the curse with her gift; the girl will not die but sleep deeply for a hundred years and will be awakened by a prince. After the awakening, the princess marries her rescuer and they have two children, Dawn and Day. In the second part of the story, Perrault changed the male figure’s wife for a mother, an evil ogress who does not like her daughter-in-law but maintained the “happily ever after” ending. Regarding female characterization and identity, it is important to bear in mind Basile’s division of good and evil women, which Perrault continues: 115 5. Birds: “The Erl-King”, “The Snow Child” and “The Lady of the House of Love” En el plano arquetípico las narraciones de Basile y Perrault apenas se distinguen entre sí. […] La mujer es ángel o demonio: la primera está caracterizada por una belleza sin igual y por ser joven, pasiva y virgen al llegar al matrimonio […]; la segunda, en cambio, es una mujer mayor […] que tiene poder […]. Se ha cambiado el parentesco que une a ambas mujeres con el monarca, pero el arquetipo de la rivalidad femenina permanece intacto. (Fernández Rodríguez 40) The Brothers Grimm incorporate the “Sleeping Beauty” fairy tale titled “Little Briar Rose” in their collection Children’s and Household Tales in 1812 and they modified the tale in the many revisions they did (Tatar 2014, 147). They based their tale mainly in Perrault’s version but they introduced a few important changes: they present twelve fairies instead of seven; the curse affects to everybody at the princess’s fifteenth birthday; the spell is broken by the prince’s kiss; and the biggest change was eliminating the whole second part of Basile and Perrault’s tales in order to portray the prince as a virtuous man, the perfect chivalric Prince Charming. The Brothers Grimm’s Sleeping Beauty is again a silent, inactive, lifeless woman whose reward is a married life with the perfect prince. During the nineteenth and twentieth century, many different adaptations of the story have been made taken from both Perrault and Brother Grimm tales, such as poems, ballets, retellings, and some Disney’s films. In Tchaikovsky’s ballet (1890) the Sleeping Beauty is called Aurora—in Perrault’s version, however, Aurora was her daughter whereas she remained unnamed—and from that moment until now, the different adaptations named her as such. In his psychoanalytically inspired reading of the tale, Bettelheim places the emphasis on the protagonist’s sexual awakening due to its symbolism. The maid is often locked in a room waiting for a man who will break the curse which, in Bettelheim’s view, represents in dreams the female sexual organs and a key turning it its lock could symbolise sexual intercourse (Bettelheim 233). Furthermore, the young woman from Perrault and the Brothers Grimm’s versions bleeds when she pricks her finger with the spindle which signals her not being prepared for sexuality: “Bleeding, as in menstruation, is for the young girl […] an overwhelming experience if she is not emotionally ready for it” (233). However, Bettelheim’s theory is based on a “period of passivity” in which the child or adolescent is inactive until she is mature enough for sexual intercourse. The kiss in the fairy tale is what triggers this sexual awakening, being the female character able to abandon her inactive narcissist period to join a man in a relationship that allows her complete female fulfilment. However, as Fernández 122 NEREA RIOBÓ PÉREZ became the genesis of her short story “The Lady of the House of Love”. In an interview with Anna Katsavos, Carter connected both short stories with the debate of a predestined behaviour or free will, an idea present in the puppet’s repetition of patterns and in the Countess’s predatory impulses: How do we know what is authentic behavior and what is inauthentic behavior? It’s about the complex interrelation of reality and its representations […] There’s a story in The Bloody Chamber called “The Lady and the House of Love,” part of which derives from a movie version that I saw of a story by Dostoyevsky. And in the movie, which is very good, the woman, who is a very passive person and is very much in distress, asks herself the question, “Can a bird sing only the song it knows, or can it learn a new song?” Have we got the capacity at all of singing new songs? It’s very important that if we haven’t, we might as well stop now. Can the marionette in that story behave in a way that she’s not programmed to behave? Is it possible? (Katsavos 17) The established connection between the representation of women as either a puppet or a femme fatale, as well as the parallelism with the bird in relation to the repetition of patterns of behaviour will be central for my analysis of the text. As previously mentioned in chapter three, Angela Carter erased the references to literary vampirism in the radio play for her short story, thus deviating from conventional vampiric narratives and, in doing so, producing an exaggerated parody of Gothic conventions (Gordon 256). Carter’s short story “The Lady of the House of Love”, published in the collection The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories, presents a female vampire descendant of both Nosferatu, the protagonist of Murnau’s 1922 eponymous film, and Vlad, the historical Romanian prince that inspired Stoker into writing Dracula. 5.6. ANGELA CARTER’S “BIRD” SHORT STORIES The three short stories here categorised as “bird” narratives mark the equinox of Carter’s collection, and the three are brought together by virtue of the symbolical meaning attached to birds. “The Erl-King”, “The Snow Child” and “The Lady of the House of Love”, however, present common features, such as the characters’ impossibility of escaping traditional gender roles in patriarchal societies and the imprisonment of women as objects of desire of the male gaze, who are either symbolically or empirically transformed into birds. 123 5. Birds: “The Erl-King”, “The Snow Child” and “The Lady of the House of Love” “The Erl-King” opens this trilogy, presenting a young woman who struggles to maintain her own identity, which implies control of her sexual desire and rejection of her confinement, both physically and metaphorically speaking. The character’s inability to escape the dichotomic patriarchal representation of women as either the passive object or the active monster is evident in her replacement of categories, assuming the predator role and placing her lover in the prey/object position: “Psychologically unable to conceive a manner of preserving identity intact while merging with the Erl-King, lacking a cultural model that offers a means of matching his androgyny or constructing a complementary self, she fears her own complicity in falling subject to his enthralling gaze” (Linkin 316). The second story, “The Snow Child”, moves a step further in the critique of women as objects. The girl, literally the outcome of the Count’s male desire, is deprived of a voice and identity of her own, and once her role is fulfilled, she is dissolved into the main elements which compose her. Carter’s ironic tone reveals the cruellest aspects of the traditional fairy tale by highlighting female rivalry for men’s desire and, as such, the unequal social and economic power structures between genders in patriarchal societies: “The presence of the female evil in the story is not offered as a challenge against the male evil, they are not involved in a power struggle. They are hand in hand to destroy the innocence through the pervert practice of necrophilia” (Aytül Özüm 7). The third short story of this chapter, “The Lady of the House of Love”, represents the ambivalence of women’s fate in both representations of patriarchal female roles. The Countess, clearly symbolising the powerful femme fatale and the monstrous Other who defies the status quo of the heteropatriarchal order, wishes to become the embodiment of the accepted, exemplary women’s role as the passive heroine or the Angel in the House through romantic love. What the story’s conclusion reveals—which applies to the three narratives examined in this chapter— is the impossibility of fulfilling an identity of one’s own inside the patterns of behaviour and gender roles established by Western traditions, organised in terms of binary oppositions such as human/non-human animal, men/women, predator/prey or lover/beloved. 124 NEREA RIOBÓ PÉREZ 5.6.1. “The Erl-King” This short story follows Carter’s two reassessments of “Beauty and the Beast”, being the first of the three tales about birds and located in the middle point in linear reading experience of the collection. As previously mentioned, Carter’s story is a rewriting of the Germanic folktales and legends about the “Erlking”, also establishing a dialogue with Gottfried von Herder’s ballad, Goethe’s poem and Franz Schubert’s lied. Departing from the Germanic Romantic versions of the tale, Carter questions the traditional emphasis on the male voice in order to focus on women’s situation. Thus, the protagonist of Carter’s story is a woman with a voice and a sexuality of her own, who finds herself, however, trapped by the Erl-King. Carter’s tale transforms the Germanic victim from child to young woman and the infanticidal haunting of the Erlking into the female protagonist’s desire of projection, since she is unable to escape the binary scheme of patriarchal role models. As if eager to match different narrative traditions and compelling narrative modes, “The Erl-King” combines several narratological strategies, departing from an unknown female first-person narrator who changes into second and third person: “El rey elfo” se inicia, como todo relato del encuentro con el depredador, en lo más profundo del insondable bosque. Allí, la narradora comienza su relato debatiéndose constantemente entre la primera, segunda y tercera persona del singular. Tras la descripción de un fondo otoñal, decadente y opresivo, la narración adopta la primera persona y relata cómo un día la joven inocente encontró al rey de los elfos sentado a la entrada de su rústica morada, rodeado de todos los animales que acudían a su amorosa llamada, proveniente de un humilde flautín de saúco, y cómo se inició así un apasionado idilio entre ellos. (García Domínguez 61) These changes in the narrator reveal the female protagonist’s problematics of maintaining her own identity and her struggle for a subject position in a patriarchal society which encapsulates her in the role of the desired one. The narrative’s shift of narrators thus signals women’s search for a voice. Furthermore, Carter’s contextualization of the story in the autumnal forest recalls the lyrical Romantic tradition of nature and the poet. However, being women characters often silent objects of desire in Romantic poetry, Carter’s protagonist tries to resists objectification: “Rewriting the text of nineteenth-century poetry by substituting female for male in the family romance to ensure her passage into maternal voice, the protagonist of ‘The Erl-King’ imagines the fiercest of defences against the devouring consummation the male canon inscribes” (Linkin 309). 125 5. Birds: “The Erl-King”, “The Snow Child” and “The Lady of the House of Love” However, the shifts in the narrator’s positions also reveal her unreliability, since the reader’s knowledge of the events comes through her lenses (Pasolini 37). At the beginning of the story, the narrator addresses the audience by using the vocative “you”, which introduces the reader o the uncanny and oppressive atmosphere of the woods, a metaphorical sign of the character’s entrapment: The woods enclose. You step between the fir trees and then you are no longer in the open air; the wood swallows you up. There isno way through the wood any more, this wood has reverted to its original privacy. Once you are inside it, you must stay there until it lets you out again for there is no clue to guide you through in perfect safety. (Carter 1996, 186) The liminal condition of the woods and the transitional moment between autumn and winter in which the narrative is set create an atmosphere of entrapment, a claustrophobic space which mirrors the narrator’s emotional states. In the midst of this oppressive setting, the narrator refers to herself in the first person to describe her encounters with the Erl-King in the woods, tinged by her ambivalence between her emotions towards him and her inability to balance her individuality with her role as the beloved: Una vez consciente del peligro que corre, la narradora se detiene y vuelve a comenzar el relato de los eventos antes referidos, sólo que la protagonista se erige como víctima involuntaria y pasiva del destino. […] Aterrorizada, teme las consecuencias de haberse convertido en el objeto de la mirada del rey elfo y decide invertir esta dinámica: si ha de liberarse de su influencia, debe matarlo, aunque lo ame profundamente. (García Domínguez 61-62). However, by retelling the story from a different perspective at the heart of the narration, the female protagonist distances herself from the previous events—in which she freely chooses to stay with the Erl-King and to enjoy their relationship—to explain her situation as a conjunction of ill fate and the Erlking’s allure through his music: “How sweet I roamed, or rather, used to roam; once I was the perfect child of the meadows of summer, but then the year turned, the light clarified and I saw the gaunt Erl-King, […] and he drew me towards him on his magic lasso of inhuman music” (Carter 1996, 190). It is in this second version of her story when the narrator addresses the Erl-King not only in the third person but also, and more directly, by using the second person: “I feel your sharp teeth in the subaqueous depths of your kisses” (190). When she finally decides not to be trapped in the patriarchal representation of object of desire, her narration uses the future tense, eventually closing the narrative in the third person: “The narrator (unusually shifty, even for Carter) vacillates between speaking of herself in the third person and owning her story in the first, speaking of 126 NEREA RIOBÓ PÉREZ the Erlking in the third person and apostrophizing him in the second, rhetorically involving the reader and self-absorption, present and future tenses” (Pollock 49-50). The whole text dramatizes the narrator’s inner debate to maintain her subjectivity, as well as her “refusal to enact one of the constituent master plots of nineteenth-century masculinist poetry, which relegates women to the silence” (Linkin 307). On the contrary, the Erl-King has no voice of his own and the text does not offer his inner thoughts either; the reader only knows what the female narrator says about him and his opinions through indirect speech: “He said the owl was a baker’s daughter; then he smiled at me” (Carter 1996, 188). He is portrayed as the King of the Woods who acts both as a housewife and as a sexual predator. Additionally, the narrative presents other main agents, most notably, the birds of the woods which interact with both protagonists. The lack of voice is also present in the bird’s singing while being jailed, as well as in the female narrator’s changing perception of them as the narrative progressed towards a metaphor, in a dialogue with the mentioned myths, such as Ovid’s Tereus and Philomela transformed into birds. The birds answer the Erl-King’s call— he uses the flute to produce a particular sound which attracts both birds and the female protagonist (Carter 1996, 191)—and obey him, losing their will and being encaged: “His kitchen shakes and shivers with birdsong from cage upon cage of singing birds, larks and linnets, which he piles up one on another against the wall, a wall of trapped birds” (188). The birds’ resulting lack of freedom and imprisonment is seen as a metaphor for the narrator, who positions herself in a parallel situation with respect to the male figure. As such, the narrator believes that the bird’s choirs correspond to the crying of other girls like her, who were transformed into birds and locked up in cages when they lost their way out of the forest: “I don’t know what kind of tunes you might play on it, if it were strung again; lullabies for foolish virgins, perhaps, and now I know the birds don’t sing, they only cry because they can’t find their way out of the wood, have lost their flesh when they are dipped in the corrosive pools of his regard and now must live in cages” (192). Animals, in contrast, are fascinated by the Erl-King and his music: he is the indisputable king of the forest and the animals act according to that premise. Particularly, the Erl-King attracts many different types of birds with his tune: “He makes his whistles out of an 127 5. Birds: “The Erl-King”, “The Snow Child” and “The Lady of the House of Love” elder twig and that is what he uses to call the birds out of the air – all the birds come; and the sweetest singers he will keep in cages” (189). Initially, and like those birds, the female narrator feels an irresistible attraction towards the male figure. However, after realising her role in the relationship, her erotic desire mixes with desolation and despair—“his touch both consoles and devastates me” (190)—developing a sense of fear of the significance of her relationship: “When I realised what the Erl-King meant to do with me, I was shaken with a terrible fear and I did not know what to do for I loved him with all my heart and yet I had no wish to join the whistling congregation he kept in his cages although he looked after them very affectionately, gave them fresh water every day and fed them well” (191). As such, the narrator uses the symbolic meaning of the birds to refer to that “vertigo”: But I am not afraid of him; only afraid of vertigo, of the vertigo which seizes me. Afraid of falling down. Falling as a bird would fall through the air if the Erl-King tied up the winds in his handkerchief and knotted the ends together so they could not get out. Then the moving currents of the air would no longer sustain them and all the birds would fall at the imperative of gravity, as I fall down for him, and I know it is only because he is kind to me that I do not fall still further. The earth with its fragile fleece of last summer’s dying leaves and grasses supports me only out of complicity with him, because his flesh is of the same substance as those leaves that are slowly turning into earth. (189) The whole narration is mediated by the female narrator’s partial vision and perspective, which implies a sense of detachment from the Erl-king and sympathy for his victims, which include both the narrator and the caged birds: “How cruel it is, to keep wild birds in cages! But he laughs at me when I say that; laughs, and shows his white, pointed teeth with the spittle gleaming on them” (188). The second level of Saphiro and Copeland’s analysis is marked by the representation of empirical and symbolical animals. “The Erl-King” is the short story which offers the largest variety of wild animals in the whole collection: being the woods the setting of the tale, the first pages are full of animal references which interact with the Erl-King. Their function as vassals and companions emphasise the natural atmosphere and the connection between the Erl-king and nature. By so doing, Carter reverses the Romantic tradition, especially in what relates to the relationship between women and nature: in this story, the Erlking is more closely related to nature and also is also portrayed as an “excellent housewife” (188). Symbolically, Carter’s Erl-King acts like the ruler of the woods, thus reminiscent of the character in the Scandinavian and Germanic folklore. This ambiguous, animalistic being is 128 NEREA RIOBÓ PÉREZ characterised as spirit from the natural world, a liminal hybrid between human, non-human animal and plant: “His skin is the tint and texture of sour cream, he has stiff, russet nipples ripe as berries. Like a tree that bears blossom and fruit on the same bough together, how pleasing, how lovely” (190). He is the godly creature who governs the Edenic yet claustrophobic forest, as well as the flora and fauna which lives there: “He seemed so much the spirit of the place I saw without surprise how the fox laid its muzzle fearlessly upon his knee” (189-190). The narration—full of Biblical references—pays especial attention to his hair—“When he combs his hair that is the colour of dead leaves, dead leaves fall out of it; they rustle and drift to the ground as though he were a tree and he can stand as still as a tree” (189)—which will be an important element in the final development of the female narrator’s plan, being the homicide weapon for killing him and thus alluding to Samson and Delilah’s story (Rodríguez Salas 2010, 229). In an intertextual reference to the wolf trilogy stories—I will analyse the importance of the green phosphorescence eyes as a mark of lycanthropy in the next chapter—Carter emphasises the alterity and monstrosity of the Erl-King through his green eyes: “His eyes are quite green, as if from too much looking at the wood. There are some eyes can eat you” (Carter 1996, 187). His gaze will be important to the power dynamics of his relationship with the female narrator. The Erl-King’s ambiguity is partly produced by the narrator’s subjective view of the character, in such a way that her portrayal oscillates between a benevolent housewife who lives peacefully in the woods and the sexual predator he becomes. This animalistic character also presents vampiric tendencies, specifically connected with his role as a sexual predator; he is the master of seduction who introduces the female protagonist into sexuality and who bites her with his peculiar vampire-like teeth, which, in turn, connect the character with Eros and Thanatos (Rodríguez Salas 2010, 227): “And now – ach! I feel your sharp teeth in the subaqueous depths of your kisses. […] you sink your teeth into my throat and make me scream” (Carter 1996, 190). However, apart from his role as lover, the reader cannot distinguish danger or peril in his acts, as the narrator suggests. This ambiguity, connected with the narrator’s unreliability, questions the whole story: “There is no proof in the story that the larks and linnets are not enchanted girls, but there is also no proof that they are. The Erlking may be a sexual predator, he may be an innocent, or he may be an innocent predator; there is no way for the narrator to know, and the reader is no wiser, like the other stories in the collection” (Pollock 51). 129 5. Birds: “The Erl-King”, “The Snow Child” and “The Lady of the House of Love” The birds of the narrative, on the other hand, are hybrid characters both used as empirical animals and as symbols. They appear since the beginning of the story, attracted by the music played by Erl-King, who chooses the best singers and encages them, metaphorically suggesting women as “publicly silenced, transmuted into caged birds whose voices sing out for the private pleasures of their owners” (Linkin 309-310). Here the narrator’s observation of the Erl-King’s locked birds, together with her fear of losing her identity, leads her to the conclusion of the metamorphic transformation of his previous female lovers into the birds: La joven observa cómo su amado teje unas bonitas jaulas de mimbre con las que adorna su cabaña y en las que encierra a los mejores cantores de entre los pájaros que acuden a su llamada en busca de su afecto y su cuidado. Ansiosa por identificar la amenaza que presiente en el rey elfo, la narradora concluye que en esas jaulas están encerradas sus antiguas amantes y que, del mismo modo, está fabricando una jaula para ella. Esta nueva idea marca el ecuador de la narración. (García Domínguez 61) However, and as suggested above, there is no textual evidence (other than the narrator’s biased perceptions) of the Erl-King’s malevolent transformations. Carter’s use of the Romantic setting and the intertextual references to Goethe, could be interpreted as a critique of the abusive use of birds in literature—particularly singing birds—as simply metaphors for human conditions, as literary human-animal critics such as McHugh suggest: “Reading animals as metaphors, always as figures of and for the human, is a process that likewise ends with the human alone on the stage” (2009, 24). Connected with the idea of shapeshifting women, the unknown female protagonist presents symbolical zoomorphism by representing a human who is convinced of her future metamorphosis into a singing bird. Her knowledge of the limited roles for women in Western societies as a commodified (sexual) object leads to her vision of herself as a future passive bird in a cage. Since the beginning of the story, the female narrator establishes a series of similarities and differences with the fairy tale “Little Red Riding Hood” by representing herself as a “young girl would go into the wood as trustingly as Red Riding Hood to her Granny’s house” (Carter 1996, 186) and having patriarchal cultural assumptions from the fairy tale’s morals and warnings against the dangers of the woods. However, the text warns the reader about the character’s unreliability as a narrator: “She will be trapped in her own illusion because everything in the wood is exactly as it seems” (186). The narrator’s unreliability connects with her ambivalent feelings towards the Erl-King, who arouses sexual 130 NEREA RIOBÓ PÉREZ desire in her and, by doing so, represents the rite of passage from childhood to adulthood through sexuality. However, her fears of the consequences of sexual desire and the encapsulation of women’s behaviour into patriarchal binaries prevent her from enjoying her relationship freely: El aleccionamiento cultural de la protagonista parece ser demasiado profundo, demasiado completo para que pueda liberarse de sus temores. Esta cultura, con sus historias de la mujer perdida por el deseo, tomada, devastada y abandonada por el hombre, se ha asegurado de que las incursiones femeninas sean tentativas fallidas. Es la pérdida de la autonomía como sujeto, la disolución de la entidad propia subsumida bajo la figura del sujeto deseante y, por tanto, la pérdida absoluta de poder, lo que la joven teme […]. En una sociedad que no concibe las relaciones humanas como simbióticas, sino como desiguales relaciones de poder, una mujer apenas consciente de estas estructuras que han ido apoderándose de su pensamiento hasta el punto de darles forma jamás será capaz de liberarse de sus invisibles ataduras, o concebir final mejor que el de invertir el rígido patrón patriarcal y destruir al Otro en el intento de erigirse en sujeto, en la voz recuperada del silencio. (García Domínguez 63-64) Taking into account the analysis of human-animal relationships, the Erl-King represents the sexual predator who encages birds and tames all different type of herbivores and, in the narrator’s opinion, also women: “He is therefore presented as the predator, while women perform the role of perfect bird-like victims” (Rodríguez Salas 2010, 227). Carter’s Erl-King establishes a dialogue with the three last stories of the collection, representing the “carnivore incarnate” characterization of the wolf that I will analyse in the last chapter of this dissertation. His parallelism with the werewolves relies on the power of the gaze, mentioned several times in the story: “Eyes green as apples. Green as dead sea fruit. […] What big eyes you have, Eyes of an incomparable luminosity, the numinous phosphorescence of the eyes of lycanthropes” (Carter 1996, 191). The narrator is captivated by his persona, and especially by his powerful predator eyes which evidence his animalistic identity. However, she acknowledges the dissolution of her own identity by succumbing to his gaze and becoming the object of his desire: “Eat me, drink me; thirsty, cankered, goblinridden, I go back and back to him to have his fingers strip the tattered skin away and clothe me in his dress of water, this garment that drenches me, its slithering odour, its capacity for drowning” (191). Instead of being the gaze the means to assert individuality and subjectivity to accept the other’s alterity—as was the case in the previous stories—for the narrator the Erl-King’s 131 5. Birds: “The Erl-King”, “The Snow Child” and “The Lady of the House of Love” his gaze is so powerful that it also means her annihilation, her dissilience into his, her loss of subjectivity and individuality: I am afraid I will be trapped in it for ever […]. Your green eye is a reducing chamber. If I look into it long enough, I will become as small as my own reflection; I will diminish to a point and vanish […] I shall become so small you can keep me in once of your osier cages and mock my loss of liberty. I have seen the cage you are waving for me; it is a very pretty one and I shall sit, hereafter, in my cage among the other singing birds. (191) In opposition, the female narrator is here portrayed as prey to his sexual desire and aligns herself with the passive singing birds which live at his mercy, or with the rabbits he hunts: “I always go to the Erl-King and he lays me down on his bed of rustling straw where I lie at the mercy of his huge hands. He is the tender butcher who showed me how the price of flesh is love; skin the rabbit, he says! Off come all my clothes” (189). By assigning the Erlking the villain role, the narrator justifies her fears and her actions, while also engaging with the warning tradition of the dangerous male carnivores in the woods—from the literary fairy tale of “Red Riding Hood” and other warning tales for women—mentioned at the beginning of the short story:—“Erl-king will do you grievous harm” (187)—and repeated at the end by the narrator in the first person: “But in his innocence he never knew he might be the death of me, although I knew from the first moment I saw him how the Erl-King would do me grievous harm” (191-192). Unable to find a satisfactory answer to the binomial victim/victimizer, the narrator eventually becomes herself the active carnivore by killing the Erlking: “My hands shake. I shall take two huge handfuls of his rustling hair as he lies half dreaming, half waking, and wind them into ropes, very softly, so he will not wake up, and softly, with hands gentle as rain, I will strangle him with them” (192). By doing so, the narrator is able to preserve her “self” intact, unable to imagine any way out of “the binary opposition of gender that shapes the entire feminist project” (Linkin 321). With the excuse of discovering her master’s plan to transform her into a bird and encage her with the rest of the singing birds—which the narrator believes being metamorphosed women—Carter’s female protagonist resists this confinement in the object of desire and takes an active role by planning to murder her captor and liberate the other birdie women: “Then she will open all the cages and let the bids free; they will 138 NEREA RIOBÓ PÉREZ After fulfilling her role, the animalistic girl dissolves into the three natural elements: “Then the girl began to melt. Soon there was nothing left of her but a feather a bird might have dropped; a blood stain, like the trace of a fox’s kill on the snow; and the rose she had pulled off the bush” (Carter 1996, 193). Carter here uses metamorphosis to shift the focus of the traditional fairy tale by drawing attention to male desire and power over women and their bodies. His daughter’s transformation through the raven’s feathers further reinforces the motifs introduced in “The Erl-King” relating to the symbolic use of birds as the representation of women’s situation under patriarchal control. On the other hand, the presence of blood is associated with the symbolic use of the rose and the sexual implications taken from the literary tradition of the fairy tale: On the side of fairy tales this implies two things. First, Briar-Rose—or, rather, the thorny rose she impersonates—expresses the ambivalence of feminine blood. The bloom metaphor of womb blood affirms this medium is fruitful, whereas the use of pricking thorns to designate a blood condition implies marital unavailability. (Vaz da Silva 245) As such, when the girl pricks her finger with the rose—intertextually addressing other fairy tales like “The Sleeping Beauty” and Carter’s own short stories “The Courtship of Mr Lyon”, “The Tiger’s Bride” and “The Lady of the House of Love”—symbolically becomes sexually mature, yet her menstrual blood “fulfils her function as passive object of the Count’s desire. In this case, however, the shallowness of this initiation which amounts to her death, rape, and fetishizing becomes painfully visible” (Bacchilega 1997, 37-38). Carter ends the tale by offering the restoration of the initial status quo and the Countess’s recovering of her position as a consort through the symbolism of her clothes: “Now the Countess had all her clothes on again. With her long hand, she stroked her furs” (Carter 1996, 193-194). After the brutal use of the girl’s body and her dissolution, the Count’s attention returns to his wife, to whom he offers the thorny rose: “The Count picked up the rose, bowed and handled it to his wife; when she touched it, she dropped it. ‘It bites!’ she said” (194). The rose, a token connected with femininity, sexuality and beauty, is used by Carter as the embodiment of the vagina dentata which “bites” the Countess, thus establishing a connection with the following short story of the collection, “The Lady of the House of Love”: In multiplying the possible meanings of the biting rose, Carter plays with the traditional fairy-tale motif and the common Romantic trope that associates rose and 139 5. Birds: “The Erl-King”, “The Snow Child” and “The Lady of the House of Love” girl, transforming Blake’s sick rose into nature’s mouthy assault. Resisting closure and containment, Carter’s enchanted rose is also the vagina dentata, a paranoid male fantasy of women’s supposed anger at their castration and an image Carter returns to in “The Lady of the House of Love.” In both stories the biting and fanged rose outlives the girl it seems to signify, implying that the patriarchal fantasies through which she is constituted endure well beyond her living, material being. (Lau 2015, 99) 5.6.3. “The Lady of the House of Love” Angela Carter used some of the major elements of “The Sleeping Beauty” for her tale “The Lady of the House of Love” and intertwined it with Gothic imagery. The seventh story in the collection has an intermediate position which bridges the bird narratives and Carter’s wolf trilogy of the “Red Riding Hood” tales. The short story, based on Carter’s radio play Vampirella (1975), owes its creation to Carter’s friend Christopher Frayling, who introduced the author into the vampire folklore (Gordon 231-232). In this case, the Sleeping Beauty is transformed into a female vampire, Countess Nosferatu, who lives in her chateau in Romania and feeds on animals and men, to her own uneasiness. Her existence is troubled by the arrival of a young and handsome British army officer, who comes in his bicycle to town and her servant brings him to her. However, a drastic change in the events prevents the Countess from killing the soldier and, in a reversal of her Gothic role, he sucks her blood and breaks the “immortality spell” transforming the Countess into a human, mortal woman in an opaque reminiscence of the fairy tale: “For the Countess in this story is not only a vampire but there are several motifs that point to similarities with Sleeping Beauty: the Countess is a somnambulist, the castle where she lives has a rose bush in the garden, and the Countess also pricks her finger in the end of the story, however, not on a spindle but on broken glass” (Karjalainen 5). As earlier mentioned, my choice of locating “The Lady of the House of Love” under the analysis of birds is marked by the particular metaphorical use of the singing lark in relation to the vampiric Countess. In opposition to the two previous short stories, the female protagonist is not here presented as an encaged woman who will be metamorphically transformed into a bird as in “The Erl-King”, nor is she created from the bird’s feathers as “The Snow Child”. However, even though the Countess is here represented both physically and psychologically as a predator and as a carnivorous animal, it is possible to identify her with her own encaged herbivorous bird, as will be shown. 140 NEREA RIOBÓ PÉREZ The story presents three interconnected narrative modes, predominantly narrated in the third person: “The bridegroom is come, he will go into the chamber which has been prepared for him” (Carter 1996, 204) but alternating its focalisation according to the two main characters—the Countess and the British soldier—who offer their vision, reflections and inner thoughts in free indirect speech. As such, the Countess, by using first person, offers her perspective about her own situation through her ruminations, sometimes using the vocative “you” as to refer to the soldier: I do not mean to hurt you. I shall wait for you in my bride’s dress in the dark […]. I am condemned to solitude and dark; I do not mean to hurt you. I will be very gentle. […] See, how I'm ready for you. I’ve always been ready for you; I’ve been waiting for you in my wedding dress, why have you delayed for so long. . . it will all be over very quickly. You will feel no pain, my darling. (204) This paragraph, which reproduces the Countess’s thoughts in the first person, dramatizes the character’s inner struggle with, on the one hand, her seductive predator role and, on the other, her wish for a romantic relationship in which she will be the beloved. The countess’s thoughts ironically contrast with her actual words in her dialogue with the soldier: ‘Welcome to my chateau. I rarely receive visitors and that's a misfortune since nothing animates me half as much as the presence of a stranger…This place is so lonely, now the village is deserted, and my one companion, alas, she cannot speak. Often I am so silent that I think I, too, will soon forget how to do so and nobody here will ever talk any more.’ (203-204) As opposed to this, the focalization of the British solider is intertwined with the Countess’s, which unveils the soldier’s naïve rationality which, he believes, will protect him against superstition and danger: To ride a bicycle is in itself some protection against superstitious fear, since the bicycle is the product of pure reason applied to motion. Geometry at the service of man! Give me two spheres and a straight line and I will show you how far I can take them. Voltaire himself might have invented the bicycle, since it contributes much to man’s welfare and nothing at all to his bane. (199) Carter’s ironic parody emphasises the inefficaciousness of the soldier’s rational mind, while simultaneously questioning dichotomies which normally align women with sentimentality against men and rationality, being, in this case, the soldier’s rational mind insufficient to understand the complex liminal and animalistic subjectivity of the Countess. 141 5. Birds: “The Erl-King”, “The Snow Child” and “The Lady of the House of Love” The narrative presents the Countess as the “beautiful queen of the vampires” who, using her mother’s wedding dress, “sits all alone in her dark, high house under the eyes of the portraits of her demented and atrocious ancestors, each one of whom, through her, projects a baleful posthumous existence” (195). As such, her vampiric, liminal status obliges her to live as a predator, hiding from the sunlight and hunting at night. However, the Countess is trapped in her condition as a vampire, which she refuses but cannot avoid, since “nothing can console her for the ghastliness of her condition, nothing” (197). In fact, the Countess’s only wish is “to be human” (197). The narrator explains her origins as a descendant from a vampiric male lineage—from Vlad de Impaler to her father, Count Nosferatu—to which her fate is bond: “The only survivor of an aristocratic family, Countess Nosferatu still suffers from the imposition of sexist social rules instead of being able to live according to her free will” (Sousa 5). The Countess’s submission to her male inheritance is symbolically signalled by her daily use of Tarot cards, which introduce “the concept of determinism to show that women’s fate in patriarchy is pre-set” (Rodríguez Salas 2008, 122). The Countess’s subjugation is also mirrored in the presence of her caged singing lark, condemned to repeat the same song and deprived from its freedom: “She draws her long, sharp fingernail across the bars of the cage in which her pet lark sings, striking a plangent twang like that of the plucked heartstrings of a woman of metal” (Carter 1996, 195). The narrative clearly establishes a parallel between the empirical bird, locked up in a cage inside the walls of the Countess’s chateau, and Countess’s own jail, deprived of their individuality, both are doomed to endlessly repeat their function which separates them from humanity: The bird and the vampire are trapped not only by their animal nature but also by a concept of time that only permits cyclical repetition. […] The paradox of Carter’s story, however, is that in revisiting the vampire tale she writes it afresh: Gothic, it seems, is not doomed to cyclical repetition, but perfectly capable of change and variation. (Spooner 2007, 43) As such, the Countess questions her own free will by using the metaphor of the bird, which constantly repeats the same tune: “‘Can a bird sing only the song it knows or can it learn a new song?’” (Carter 1996, 195) and through her inner debate about killing or sparing the soldier: “(And could love free me from the shadows? Can a bird sing only the song it knows, or can it learn a new song?)” (204). In this sense, Carter aligns the Countess with the nonhuman animal in detriment of humanity that appears in the two previous short stories, 142 NEREA RIOBÓ PÉREZ expressed through the “immobility of her condition, the impossibility of changing, which is the reason why she strives for becoming human and persists in staging her identity even if she is doomed to fail” (Pasolini 83). In opposition, the soldier’s focalization unveils a scientific mind wishing to change the Countess’ nature to fit in the role of the passive, beautiful heroine of the fairy tale in order to eliminate her predator aspect: The young man - and potential romantic hero or fairy tale prince of the tale – is not able to acknowledge her otherness and the potential threat she represents. […] Comparing her to flowers and prostitutes, he proves that he can only see and assess her and her condition through the inner-mediary lens of patriarchal constructions of femininity in which women are either saint or whore – but never both at the same time. (Gruss 207208) The soldier’s vision of the Countess falls into the dual depiction of women in patriarchal societies: on the one hand, he sees a sweet innocent young woman who needs to be rescued and, on the other, he is able to appreciate her as the embodiment of sexuality. His incomprehension towards her liminal animal subjectivity creates an attempt to locate her in the two patriarchal female roles, the passive heroine or the prostitute (Carter 1996, 202). Nevertheless, the unexperienced soldier feels uneasy when approaching the Countess’s chateau, which the cloying of the roses and the gloomy decadent Gothic atmosphere enhance: “The sense of strangeness that had been growing in him since he buried his head under the streaming water in the village, since he entered the dark portals of the fatal castle, now fully overcame him. Had he been a cat, he would have bounced backwards from her hands on four fear-stiffened legs, but he is not a cat: he is a hero” (205). Despite his instinctive sense of alarm, the soldier’s rational mind dismisses the danger and blinds him again. Such a sense of Otherness and uncanny feelings is in the narrative reflected in the reaction of different animals, such as the cat’s fear, which “bounces away from an intangible on four fear-stiffened legs” (195) or the alignment of a particular typology of animals with the figure of the vampire, which Carter rescues from the literary and folkloric traditions: She is the hereditary commandant of the army of shadows who camp in the village below her chateau, who penetrate the woods in the form of owls, bats and foxes, who make the milk curdle and butter refuse to come, who ride the horses all night in a wild hunt so they are sacks of skin and bone in the morning, who milk the cows dry and, especially, torment pubescent girls with fainting fits, disorders of the blood, diseases of the imagination. (197) 143 5. Birds: “The Erl-King”, “The Snow Child” and “The Lady of the House of Love” The animalistic Countess feels lonely and struggles between what she would like to be—and how she would like to react towards her preys, both animals and men—and her vampiric murderous instincts which demand to be satiated: “She loathes the food she eats; she would have liked to take the rabbits home with her, feed them on lettuce, pet them and make them a nest in her red-and-black chinoiserie escritoire, but hunger always overcomes her” (198). Her carnivorous identity cannot come to terms with her herbivorous victims, towards which she develops and empathic connection, until her craving for food is too powerful to overcome. This also occurs with the British soldier, but her hunger is increased by the man’s beauty and his role as saviour and lover. However, her sympathy does not apply to her lark, even sharing a parallel destiny. She not only encages the bird but also makes it sing and takes delight on assuring how the bird is also resigned to its imprisonment (196). The soldier’s lack of empathy for the Countess’s monstrous condition contrasts with his sympathy for the bird’s confinement and decides to set it free: He got to his feet, coaxed the lark on to his wrist and took it to the window. At first, it exhibited the reluctance for the sky of a long-caged thing, but, when he tossed it up on to the currents of the air, it spread its wings and was up and away into the clear blue bowl of the heavens; he watched its trajectory with a lift of joy in his heart. (208) The bird’s liberation can be seen as a metaphor for the Countess, who at the same time was released from the patriarchal subjugation of the vampire male tradition and flew away, but only to end in the inevitable consequences of humanity, death, thus, suggesting the impossibility of escaping the binarism of patriarchy. The second level of Saphiro and Copeland’s analysis points to the treatment of symbolical and empirical animals. In this short story, the female servant and the British soldier represent humanity, while the Countess incarnates symbolical zoomorphism—the intersection between an animalistic liminal creature and a woman—and the bird is presented as the conjunction of the empirical non-human animal embedded with strong symbolic meaning, a metaphor for the Countess’s situation. Carter subverted the traditional gender roles of fairy tales in the characterization of her protagonists. In this tale, the narrator presents the male protagonist as “a young officer of the British army, blond, blue-eyed, heavy-muscled […]. He has the special quality of virginity, most and least ambiguous of states: ignorance, yet at the same time, power in potentia, and, furthermore, unknowingness, which is not the same as ignorance. He is more than he knows […]. Although so young, he is also rational” 144 NEREA RIOBÓ PÉREZ (198-199). By bestowing him with the original attributes of the traditional Sleeping Beauty in Basile, Perrault and Brothers Grimm tales, Carter subverts the roles of the tale, conferring the male character innocence while transforming the female one into the predator. At the same time, the characterization of the soldier is intertwined with traditional representations of Prince Charming, who breaks the spell by, in this case, sucking the Countess’s blood in a reversal of her gothic vampiric role. His function as the fairy tale hero is emphasised through the intertextual references in the narrative to the traditional fairy tale of “Sleeping Beauty”—“A single kiss woke up the Sleeping Beauty in the Wood” (199) and “(One kiss, however, and only one, woke up the Sleeping beauty in the Wood)” (205)—both anticipating the denouement of her vampiric identity. It is very important the emphasis that Carter makes in pointing out the male character’s rationality as a hero, his arrival on a bike and his incompetence to understand the situation, thus becoming the “ambassador of a rationalistic age, who enters the stage of gothic romance quite prosaically on a bicycle instead of a horse. Carter’s tale is also the depiction of a gender-clash, a clash of a gothic […] and a rationalistic […] discourse in which the female vampire becomes the symbol of a declining age” (Gruss 208). The Countess, on the contrary, is the realization of the identitarian possibility between and animalistic being and a woman, representing symbolical zoomorphism. Carter here significantly departs from traditional portrayals of Sleeping Beauty by transforming the Countess into a vampire, a monstrous character inherited from the Gothic tradition, a liminal creature, the monstrous Other—neither human nor animal, neither alive nor dead. The monstrous condition of Carter’s Sleeping Beauty aligns her with other monstrous female characters from the literary tradition of the fairy tale, as the ogress in Perrault’s account. As such, Carter’s text creates a dialogue with the tradition of the fairy tale incorporating Gothic motifs, elements and tropes to highlight her interest in subverting and deconstructing Western dichotomies and binaries. The Countess’s monstrosity is also connected with the idea of a corpse without a soul, being a marionette which reproduces pre-established patterns of behaviour and, as such, characterised by a “double abjection: that associated with the female body and its reproductive functions and that linked to the corpse and the body without soul” (Pasolini 105). Carter mixes the figure of the vampire with the marionette, as she previously had done with “The Loves of Lady Purple”, emphasising the lack of will and the predestined 145 5. Birds: “The Erl-King”, “The Snow Child” and “The Lady of the House of Love” role the Countess fulfil. The soldier compares her to a doll, in an intertextual reference with “The Tiger’s Bride” cyborg-machine: She is like a doll, he thought, a ventriloquist’s doll, or, more, like a great ingenious piece of clockwork. For she seemed inadequately powered by some slow energy of which she was not in control; as if she had been wound up years ago, when she was born, and now the mechanism was inexorably running down and would leave her lifeless. This idea that she might be an automaton, made of white velvet and black fur, that could not move of its own accord, never quite deserted him; indeed, it deeply moved his heart. (Carter 1996, 204) The vampiric condition of Carter’s Countess, who possesses “the mysterious solitude of ambiguous states; she hovers in a no-man’s land between life and death, sleeping and waking, behind the hedge of spiked flowers, Nosferatu’s sanguinary rosebud” (205) is also presented with the typical physical appearance of a vampire: The white hands of the tenebrous belle deal the hand of destiny. Her fingernails are longer than those of the mandarins of ancient China and each is pared to a fine point. These and teeth as fine and white as spikes of spun sugar are the visible signs of the destiny she wistfully attempts to evade via the arcana; her claws and teeth have been sharpened on centuries of corpses, she is the last bud of the poison tree that sprang from the loins of Vlad the Impaler who picnicked on corpses in the forests of Transylvania. (196) Countess Nosferatu, described as the beautiful queen of vampires, shares with her fairy-tale counterpart her beauty, rendered by the narrator as uncanny, a demonstration of her monstrosity: “She is so beautiful she is unnatural; her beauty is an abnormality, a deformity, for none of her features exhibit any of those touching imperfections that reconcile us to the imperfection of the human condition. Her beauty is a symptom of her disorder, of her soullessness” (196). In addition to this, this female vampire is depicted in animalistic terms, “catlike even, and is on several instances in the text referred to as not human” (Karjalainen 13). Her animalistic features are more obviously represented in her claws and her teeth, as well as in her instincts when she hunts at night: “The Countess will sniff the air and howl. She drops, now, on all fours. Crouching, quivering, she catches the scent of her prey. Delicious crunch of the fragile bones of rabbits and small, furry things she pursues with fleet, four-footed speed; she will creep home, whimpering, with blood smeared on her cheeks” (Carter 1996, 197). Sharing some characteristics with the Duke in “Wolf-Alice”—as will be analysed in the next chapter—her eyes glow with a reminiscence of the werewolves: “The eyes of this nocturnal 146 NEREA RIOBÓ PÉREZ creature enlarge and glow. All claws and teeth, she strikes, she gorges” (197). The Countess represents a continuum between the human and the animalistic self, breaking the barriers of patriarchal static identities, and “despite her human appearance, “her ravenous hunger and her hunting instincts being beastly” (Pasolini 107). The Countess’s monstrous condition relates to her description as a femme fatale, a sexual depredator chained to her fate as an undead. She is the seductress, the predator carnivorous woman both sexually and bodily, feeding on human meat. As argued above, the Countess represents one of the two categorical gender roles for women from patriarchal societies (the whore/lover, the powerful, monstrous femme fatale) and wishes to become the other (the passive, innocent, the wife, the object of desire, the beloved). As such, this reassessment is the culmination of the three bird short stories regarding the negative effects of such binary role system for female subjectivity: in “The ErlKing” the female protagonist fears to become entrapped in the role of the beloved and, instead, becomes the predator; in “The Snow Child”, however, the girl is created to fulfil the role of the object/commodity, whereas in “The Lady of the House of Love” the Countess shifts her role from predator to prey, thus inverting the trajectory of the “Erl-King”. Finally, the bird represents the hybrid possibility of treating animals both as “real” birds and symbols at the same time. The lark is an empirical animal which functions as a pet and as a metaphor for the Countess. Although Carter does not anthropomorphise the bird, she also continues with the literary fairy tale traditions of animals as the princess’s pets (Herzog and Galvin 80). In this case, the bird’s song allegorically represents the repetition of patterns of behaviour which the figure of the Countess represents. Both destinies are intertwined in the intermediation of the soldier, who puts an end to the immortality of the countess and sets the bird free. Regarding the relationships between human and non-human animals, the animalistic Countess is the master of the singing lark, the metaphorical representation of her confinement, until the double liberation of the soldier, who sets the bird free and confers the eager Countess her mortality. Her connection with birds is also emphasised by the soldier’s fascination and awe with her claws, which he compares with a bird of prey, strengthening the similarities between the Countess and these non-human animals: “He was struck, once again, by the birdlike, predatory claws which tipped her marvellous hands” (Carter 1996, 205). 147 5. Birds: “The Erl-King”, “The Snow Child” and “The Lady of the House of Love” The Countess embodies the carnivore and sexually predator—in line with other characters of the collection such wolves or “The Erl-King”—and her preys are herbivore animals (rabbits) or men (compared with the herbivores): “When she was a little girl, she was like a fox and contented herself entirely with baby rabbits […]. But now she is a woman, she must have men” (198). Despite being sexually active, the Countess cannot enjoy her sexuality or a reciprocal positive relationship with men. Her affirmation of her active role immediately subjugates the other, reduced to the victim position. However, her predator condition is going to be reversed when the Countess finally acquires mortality. Thus, the Countess’s predator nature is also revealed in her gaze. However, Carter ironically introduces the glasses with the pretext of her affliction to the light, “an enormous pair of dark green glasses, such as blind beggars wear” (203) in which the soldier sees himself reflected: “Her blind spectacles gave him his handsome face back to himself twice over; if he resented himself to her naked face, he would dazzle her like the sun she is forbidden to look at because it would shrivel her up at once, poor night bird, poor butcher bird” (204). Such a reflection mirrors “The Courtship of Mr Lyon”, when Beauty sees her reflection twice in the Beast’s eyes before acknowledging her own identity and, in a different way, “The Company of Wolves”, when Granny recognises the huntsman as a werewolf through his eyes, as will be analysed in the following chapter. Ironically, the soldier’s identity is reflected on the vampire’s glasses who, in turn, does not possess a reflection in the mirror (197). With respect to sexuality and animality, in the Countess’s construction as a femme fatale, the symbolic use of the roses stands prominently in the story. Carter creates a wall of rose bushes surrounding the chateau, intertextually addressing the “Beauty and the Beast” fairy tales. The soldier is both asphyxiated and overwhelmed by the roses’ odour, which creates a gloomy atmosphere and anticipates the fatal destiny of those men who expose themselves to the Countess’s voracious appetites: A great, intoxicated surge of the heavy scent of red roses blew into his face as soon as they left the village, inducing a sensuous vertigo; a blast of rich, faintly corrupt sweetness strong enough, almost, to fell [sic] him, Too many roses. Too many roses bloomed on enormous thickets that lined the path, thickets bristling with thorns, and the flowers themselves were almost too luxuriant, their huge congregations of plush petals somehow obscene in their excess, their whorled, tightly budded cores outrageous in their implications. (200)