“She knew she was nobody’s meat.”
The above self-observation is courtesy of that of the Red Riding Hood figure in one of Carter’s most famous story, “The Company of Wolves.” The quote is emblematic of a signature theme that permeates throughout Carter’s short fiction. Her heroines from fairy tales like this young lady staring down the ravenous maw of the wolf is representative of the dominating subject matter of Beauty coming up against Beast (including at least two reworkings of that particular tale) are twisted through the postmodern lends of the writer from distressed damsels into empowered women at times every bit as sexually depraved, morally corrupted and predatory as the male figures by whom they were victimized or objectified in their original versions. Carter does not truck with her female characters being mere meat in the ongoing history of the patriarchy.
“both bane and terrible enlightenment”
The title character of the story “The Loves of Lady Purple” is said to visit men like a plague, simultaneously as a miserable curse and agent of awakening. This duality is a theme that is played out in Carter’s works through sexuality in which her heroines gain enlightenment through an open sexuality that is consistent with the violent nature of the world of fairy tales. Her Red Riding Hood turns the table on the wolf by seducing him and—one way or another—consuming him. The very title of the collection (and the story) The Bloody Chamber speaks to the concept of the woman’s body as the transformative location in which the violence of sexuality becomes the agent of metamorphosis. Beauty transforms the Beast back into a handsome prince in one story but becomes a primal beast herself at the end of another. “The Snow Child” is a particularly disturbing manifestation of the transformative nature of violent sexuality climaxing in an act of necrophilia in which rape even has the power to transcend the body in its transformation of the female psyche.
“The world was the same, yet absolutely altered.”
The world of Angela Carter is a postmodern hall of mirrors. The truth (at least as we have come to know them) of stories we have become familiar with are in there somewhere, but with so many mirrors reflecting back with slight distortions, how to know which is the real face and which the reflection? In one story about Lizzie Borden, truth as it is known is prevalent; in other it is almost entirely absent. And yet, upon reading both, some may well feel as though they have come to know the notorious accused, but acquitted axe murderer more authentically in the story that is metaphorical rather than the one that his more factual. In one of her novels, Carter has a character musing “Am I fact? Or am I fiction? Am I what I know I am? Or am I what he thinks I am?” Those words could well be applied to any one short story or the entirety as a collective unit. By choosing so often to write stories that come with preconceived ideas about their meanings already hardwired into the average read since childhood, Carter’s fiction is one that offers the rare opportunity to walk into a room one knows well but suddenly become disoriented because things are just slightly enough off that it is no longer quite so familiar. In doing so, the fundamental lesson provided is one of the oldest in literature: context is everything.
