Angela Carter is one of my all-time favourite writers, but, I shamefully admit, I had never read perhaps her greatest work – The Bloody Chamber, a collection of short stories. But, this past week, as the climax of a summer where I read only novels about women written by women, I changed that. And it was well worth the wait.
In The Bloody Chamber, Carter expertly employs a feminist viewpoint to adapt and renew a host of familiar fairy-tales. The greatest of these, in my humble opinion, was “The Company of Wolves,”, a story that I loved so much I just had to write about it. In its relatively short length, Carter succeeds in providing a point-by-point rebuttal of the myths and tropes embedded in modern child-friendly versions of “Little Red Riding Hood.”, a story whose earlier tellings were primarily oral and far, far more dark and risqué; originally, one passage had the wolf telling Red Riding Hood to throw her clothes, one by one, slowly, into a fire, with Red Riding Hood saving herself by pretending that she needs to go outside to relieve herself. In these original versions, Red Riding Hood outwits the fox with her feminine wiles, and the sexual overtones are explicit.
By the time Charles Perrault wrote his version in 1697, the story had been sanitized into a lesson on young girls’ moral fortitude, with an emphasis on enduring purity. In Perrault’s retelling, the story plays as a metaphor to warn young girls about the threat older men pose to their inherent sexual innocence, and even goes as far as to end his tale with an overt moral warning: Young ladies—in particular, well-bred and attractive young ladies—should not be beguiled by men’s wolfish charm. The Brothers Grimm version – the most enduring among American and British audiences – casts Little Red Riding Hood not as a teenager on the cusp of sexual adulthood, but as an even younger girl, and therefore even more vulnerable and naïve. Of course, being so young and naïve, this Little Red Riding Hood forgets her mother’s sage warning to stay on the path and gets “deeper and deeper into the wood.”, where she encounters the wolf. Ultimately, an ultra-masculine hunter, who just happens to be passing by, saves her life – and, most importantly, her purity.
Of prominent significance here is the obvious shift the fairy tale has undergone through time. In those overt original versions, Red Riding Hood saves herself and is never fooled by the wolf. In versions dating from the seventeenth century onward, the girl strays from the “path”, and actually falls for the wolf’s granny ruse and needs saving by a huntsman. Further, Red Riding Hood makes it clear to her peer-age readers that she has learned her metaphorical lesson, by commenting: “As long as I live, I will never by myself leave the path, to run into the wood, when my mother has forbidden me to do so.” In this way, a seemingly innocent fairy tale has sent a debilitating message to young women for centuries: we are weak things, easily distracted and inherently disobedient; we are not safe alone off the beaten path; we are fairly stupid and end up getting ourselves in trouble and we need to be rescued by a man.
In contrast, Carter’s “The Company of Wolves,” restores the tale’s original themes—such as the real sexuality and a heroine who is cunning and resourceful herself rather than helpless—but adds a distinctly feminist perspective. Carter’s Red Riding Hood is not so ‘little’: she is strong willed, packs a carving knife in her basket of goodies, and is powerful because of her virginity, not in spite of it:
“She stands and moves within the invisible pentacle of her own virginity. She is an unbroken egg; she is a sealed vessel; she has inside her a magic space…she is a closed system; she does not know how to shiver. She has her knife and she is afraid of nothing.”
Furthermore, this Red Riding Hood does not just protect herself, but actually controls the broader “game.” To me, reading it alone at night in the pitch dark, the seduction scene almost played out like a modern slasher movie. As Riding Hood—at the wolf’s bidding—slowly removes each item of clothing and ostensibly becomes more vulnerable, she suddenly responds to the wolf’s famous “All the better to eat you with,” by bursting into laughter: “She knew she was nobody’s meat.” Even given the background Carter built into the story’s beginning, the scene shocked me. We knew Carter’s Red Riding Hood was strong, independent, and armed. However, the pattern of woman-alone-traveling-alone-helpless-alone-victim is so embedded in our consciousness that even I – a cynically minded and battle-hardened left wing thinker – was totally caught off-guard.
But that was precisely Carter’s point.
If you’re interested in reading Carter’s works yourself then pop into the library, where we have a huge collection of her works including the excellent Nights at the Circus, the magical Fireworks and, of course, Bloody Chamber and Other Stories.
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