The Heroine with 1001 Faces

by Maria Tatar

  Mary Lefkowitz tells us that the Greeks’ most important legacy is not, “as we would like to think, democracy; it is their mythology.” That mythology has been instrumental in perpetuating myths about femininity and naturalizing patriarchal discourses that position women as suffering in silence and lacking any form of real agency unless they weaponize their looks to bewitch and bewilder. The same holds true for folklore, with fairy tales doing the same cultural work of perpetuating myths—which is exactly why some writers decided, in the late twentieth century, to “demythify” them.52

  Stories about women dancing to death in red-hot iron shoes, about girls forced to labor in kitchens as scullery maids, and about the myriad wicked stepmothers and witches who feast on their children and grandchildren are meant to shock and startle, and no one will dispute that high coefficients of weirdness and brutality are part and parcel of the genre. The symbolic language of fairy tales sets off alarm bells, but it has also given them a certain staying power and profundity. All the more reason to interrogate the never-ending affiliation of women with cannibalism and curses—all the evil that fuels the plots of fairy tales—and to look under the hood, as Angela Carter put it. She and others made it their mission to revive tales that had vanished and to take the old stories apart, breaking them up into their constituent parts and reassembling them, all the while mending, repairing, and making new.

  Rebels Writing with a Cause: Anne Sexton, Angela Carter, Margaret Atwood, and Toni Morrison

  If anyone lived a fairy-tale life in the most harrowing sense of that metaphor, it was the poet Anne Sexton. A likely victim of incest who was guilty of abusing her own children, Sexton’s life ended when she committed suicide on a sunny autumn day in New England. After having lunch with the poet Maxine Kumin, she returned home, poured herself a glass of vodka, removed the rings from her fingers, dropped them into her handbag, and put on a fur coat that had belonged to her mother. She then went into the garage, carefully closing the door behind her. Climbing into her 1967 red Mercury Cougar, she turned on the ignition, switched on the radio, and sipped the drink she had made for herself as the exhaust from the engine did its slow work.

  In his introduction to Transformations (1971), Sexton’s collection of seventeen poems that rewrite the Grimms’ canon, Kurt Vonnegut Jr. tells us that he once asked a friend to contemplate what it is that poets do. “They extend the language,” was the reply. Anne Sexton does us a “deeper favor,” he added. “She domesticates my terror.”53 What did Vonnegut mean by that phrase? That Sexton was transplanting horror into the home? That the poet was naturalizing dread? Or that she was taming fear? Perhaps all of the above, for Sexton was determined to show that the terror of fairy tales was not just the product of imaginations gone wild. The stories may feel over the top, extravagant, baroque, and full of excess, but that does not mean that they are not true.

  How did Sexton, writing in 1970, hit upon the idea of using the Grimms’ fairy tales to domesticate terror? For the origins of Transformations, we have to turn to Linda Gray Sexton’s memoir: Searching for Mercy Street: My Journey Back to My Mother. What did Linda do after school while her mother was busy in her home office? She fixed herself something to eat and propped a book on the table to read while sipping a bowl of soup. One day, “Mother” comes into the kitchen and asks, “What are you reading, honey?” Linda’s answer: Grimms’. “You never get tired of those stories, do you?” Anne Sexton observed. And the adult Linda muses on how often she “read and reread” those fairy tales.54 Sexton reappropriated the stories, moving them back from the culture of childhood reading into her own poetry studio, taking the tales her daughter loved best and then repurposing them for grown-ups. The real-life episode enacts a process of reappropriation that began in the 1970s, picked up speed in the next two decades, and has now become an unstoppable cultural force.

  At Houghton Mifflin, Sexton’s editor, Paul Brooks, worried that the poems in Transformations lacked the “terrific force and directness” of her “more serious poetry.”55 The dark humor of the poems must have masked—at least for him—their seriousness, for it is hard to miss the gut punch delivered by Transformations. In that slim volume, Anne Sexton embodies fairy-tale villains and victims alike. She is the witch who terrorizes young and old. She is Briar Rose, not slumbering serenely in the castle but lying in bed “still as a bar of iron” with her father “drunkenly bent over [her] bed.” And in her version of “Little Red Riding Hood,” secrets creep, “like gas,” into the house she inhabits. The folkloric becomes personal as she welcomes the horrors of fairy tales, not just embracing them but inviting them in to stay.

  The opening poem in Transformations is the title of the final story in the Grimms’ collection: “The Gold Key.” In it, Sexton positions herself as “speaker,” not as “writer” or “poet.” She is the new bard or inspired rhapsode who has inherited the oral tradition, taking up where the two German brothers left off. The poems may have found their way into a book, but they were reinvigorated by her voice (“my mouth open wide”), using the speech register of what her social world calls “a middle-aged witch.” She is “ready to tell you a story or two.”56 That she does, and she also transforms the Brothers Grimm in ways that turn the ordinary and quotidian into exactly what Vonnegut found in the collection: domesticated terror. The poems fuse fairy-tale fantasies from “once upon a time” with the “here and now” to take us into the dark world of the nuclear family as the crucible of domestic violence, with all its disturbing conflicts and traumas.

  Both a part of the fairy tale and also its teller, Sexton gives us a split consciousness that transforms, as it were, the tale from times past into the living present. Fearlessly acknowledging the dark side to family life and her own sinister role in it, the poet performs her own act of heroism in confessional verse that positions her as victim and villain. It is no accident that she was drawn to fairy tales, for they gave her an opportunity to become a literalist of the imagination (to speak with Yeats)—to turn make-believe into something very real. If Sexton failed to become the heroine of her own life story, she succeeded in transforming herself into a heroine for the literary world by acknowledging the harsh truths in ancestral wisdom.

  Just two years after Anne Sexton’s suicide, Angela Carter rediscovered fairy tales (she had read them with her grandmother as a child) and was shocked by the toxic mix of death and desire in them. During the summer months of 1976, she was commissioned by the venerable British publishing firm of Victor Gollancz to translate into English the famed French collection of fairy tales published in 1697 by Charles Perrault. “What an unexpected treat,” she wrote, “to find that in this great Ur-collection—whence sprang the Sleeping Beauty, Puss in Boots, Little Red Riding Hood, Cinderella, Tom Thumb, all the heroes of pantomime—all these nursery tales are purposely dressed up as fables of the politics of experience.” But as she read more deeply in what is known as children’s lore, she began to understand the perversity of the fables. All those “destructive animals” in the fairy tales—what else were they but stand-ins for our own animal nature, “the untamed id . . . in all its dangerous energy.”57

  Not that Angela Carter was against the id. But she planted herself firmly in the camp that worried about how the wolves, beasts, and Bluebeards of fairy tales give us sexual ferocity trained on women as prey. “Old wives’ tales, nursery fears!” From childhood onward, women learn about the beasts out there who will “GOBBLE YOU UP.” And they collude in their own victimization by giving in to “delighted terror” or trepidation, “cozily titillated with superstitious marvels.” “Desirous dread”—that’s what the heroine of “The Bloody Chamber” feels for the “mysterious being” who has made it his mission to tame, master, and eventually murder her. The cult of love and death, Eros and Thanatos, requires joint effort. And though it may be co-created by husband and wife, it is the wife alone who is imperiled.58

  Angela Carter was determined to change the narratives from times past, and that meant g
oing beyond the task of translating French fairy tales and putting together collections of fairy tales like her Wayward Girls and Wicked Women (1986). At the top of Carter’s notes to Perrault’s tales are written the words: “Code Name: The New Mother Goose.”59 This was the first inkling of The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories (1979), a collection of refashioned fairy tales that uncovers not just the “repressed sexuality” of the tales but also reveals our kinship with beasts, a connection that becomes nowhere more clear than in “human” sexuality. By retelling the stories, Carter aimed to point the way to accepting our animal nature even as we discover how to make peace with the animal kingdom and the beastliness in us.

  “I was taking . . . the latent content of those traditional stories,” she explains, “and using that; and the latent content is violently sexual. And because I am a woman, I read it that way.”60 “The Company of Wolves,” her version of “Little Red Riding Hood,” does not end with the wolf devouring the girl (as Perrault’s French version did) but with reconciliation and reciprocity. When the jaws of the wolf begin to “slaver” and the room is invaded by the forest’s seductive blend of love and death (Liebestod) what does the girl do but burst out laughing and declare that she is “nobody’s meat.” In a twist that no one had ever thought to give the tale (either the girl outwits the wolf or the wolf gobbles her up), Carter offers a final tableau of the two living happily ever after in a tale where sexual appetite does not imply the annihilation of one of the two partners: “See! sweet and sound she sleeps in granny’s bed, between the paws of the tender wolf.”

  “Beauty and the Beast,” another story about the beastliness of male predators, becomes “The Tiger’s Bride,” a tale in which “nursery fears made flesh and sinew” modulate into another scene of tenderness, with white light from a “snowy moon” shining down on a purring beast: “And each stroke of his tongue ripped off skin after successive skin . . . and left behind a nascent patina of shining hairs. My earrings turned back to water and trickled down my shoulders; I shrugged the drops off my beautiful fur.” “The Courtship of Mr. Lyon” takes a less dramatic turn, but here too the heroine takes the initiative, flinging herself on Beast to bring about a “soft transformation” from beast to man. Turning the tales on their heads, setting them in modern times, exploring the consciousness of the characters, and reversing the roles of hero and villain, Carter reimagines the mythical past and makes good on the promise to undo the toxic effects of repressed sexuality.

  The cultural perversion of desire becomes evident in the title story of the collection, “The Bloody Chamber.” On the face of things, the tale is a literary recycling of “Bluebeard,” with a heroine who is both attracted to and repulsed by her lascivious husband: “I longed for him. And he disgusted me.”61 She is tricked into her own betrayal by enacting a “charade of innocence and vice” and playing a “game of love and death,” which leads to a sentence of decapitation, whispered “voluptuously” in her ear.62 The plot takes an unexpected swerve into mythical territory, with a Demeter-like mother swooping down like a dea ex machina to rescue her daughter from the blade about to descend on her neck. On horseback and armed with a service revolver, she does what no other fairy-tale mother manages to accomplish, becoming the heroine of her daughter’s story.

  “I’m in the demythologizing business,” Angela Carter once declared. “I’m interested in myths—though I’m much more interested in folklore—just because they are extraordinary lies designed to make people unfree.”63 Like the French literary theorist Roland Barthes, Carter saw myth as an ideologically charged construct, an effort to naturalize man-made concepts and beliefs. We take certain ideas, images, and stories “on trust” without really reflecting on what they communicate, she tells us. Religious parables, nationalist slogans, mythical narratives all come under suspicion. We should uncompromisingly interrogate their terms. Think of Danaë, who is described as “no longer lonesome” and as the “happy bride” of Zeus, after the god visits her in the sealed chamber in which her father Danaüs locked her up.64 Or how Beauty is required to feel passion for a wild boar, a lion, or a snake in the many versions of her story. Angela Carter was determined to rewrite stories that have been enshrined as sacred and that assert how things “have been and always will be.” Disavowing the moral and spiritual authority of tales from times past, she was determined to tinker with them, creating the shock of the new as a reminder that it must not always be as it was “once upon a time.”

  In a final stroke of genius, Angela Carter sought to conclusively break the magic spell that has taken us all in ever since Charles Perrault and the Brothers Grimm codified the story of Sleeping Beauty and Disney made sure that the story would remain fixed in one single, stable version. “In a faraway land long ago”: Disney’s Sleeping Beauty begins with those words, reminding us of the drive to preserve the mythical power of tales from times past, to perpetuate the cult of what Angela Carter will turn into a beautiful corpse in “The Lady of the House of Love”—the fairy-tale canon in the form told once upon a time.

  Carter’s “Lady of the House of Love” becomes an allegory of the fairy tale, an enactment of the fate of fairy tales in an age of print culture. Her Sleeping Beauty in that story repeats “ancestral crimes,” just as the fairy tale as a genre enables us to lose ourselves in a mindless cycle of repetition compulsion that reproduces and reinforces social norms. The house of fairy tales, like the House of Love, can degenerate into ruins—“cobwebs, worm-eaten beams, crumbling plaster”—when left to its own devices, visited only by sycophantic suitors, driven more by the lure of beauty than the desire to reanimate. Without the right suitor, Carter’s somnambulant beauty becomes “a cave full of echoes,” “a system of repetitions,” “a closed circuit.” Leading a “baleful posthumous” existence, she feeds on humans to sustain her dark existence.65

  What is at stake in Carter’s rewritings of fairy tales? Nothing less than a focused protest, an unrepentant rebuke, and a powerful retort to stories that once duped us, taking us in with their cozy bedside manner. Carter’s heroines, bent on self-actualization and reconciliation—the word “peace” recurs mantra-like in The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories—repudiate the cult of self-effacement and self-immolation in fairy tales that continues to perpetuate itself through films like Disney’s Beauty and the Beast (1991). That film did not look to Angela Carter for inspiration, but rather followed the advice of Christopher Vogler, author of The Writer’s Journey: Mythic Structure for Storytellers and Screenwriters. As noted earlier, that was the book that famously used Campbell’s Hero’s Journey to produce what has been called a CliffsNotes for Hollywood. Belle hears the call to adventure, refuses it at first, crosses a threshold, and so on. It took another ten years for DreamWorks to come up with the kind of surprise twist to “Beauty and the Beast” that would have met with Angela Carter’s approval. In DreamWorks’ Shrek, the male lead discredits fairy-tale romance by flushing its scripts down the toilet, and the film’s heroine embraces alterity to live happily ever after as a green monster.

  If Angela Carter sends a powerful message about repudiating the emotional terrorism built into old wives’ tales when they moved into the culture of childhood and promoted “nursery fears,” Margaret Atwood finds much to be admired in the tales once told by our ancestors, seeing in them a form of transformative energy or consciousness-raising, as feminists from the 1960s and 1970s put it. Fairy tales, Atwood recognized early on, are not at all as culturally repressive as some critics have made them out to be. There was much to admire in the Grimms’ collection, which was far superior in ideological terms to the French tales that Angela Carter had been translating into English.

  The unexpurgated Grimm’s Fairy Tales contain a number of fairy tales in which women are not only the central characters but win by using their own intelligence. Some people feel fairy tales are bad for women. This is true if the only ones they’re referring to are those tarted-up French versions of “Cinderella” and “Bluebeard,” in w
hich the female protagonist gets rescued by her brothers. But in many of them, women rather than men have the magic powers.66

  Margaret Atwood’s observation about the need to go from “now” to “once upon a time” remains more relevant than ever. But it is not just writers who are duty bound to undertake the journey to that site. “All must commit acts of larceny, or else of reclamation, depending on how you look at it. The dead may guard the treasure, but it’s useless treasure unless it can be brought back into the land of the living and allowed to enter time once more—which means to enter the realm of the audience, the realm of readers, the realm of change.”67 In other words, we have to take those stories from times past and make them our own.

  Atwood, who weaves fairy-tale motifs throughout her narratives with almost unprecedented creative energy, translated theory into practice when she wrote a new version of “Bluebeard.” “Bluebeard’s Egg,” in the short-story collection of that title, is told in the third person, but from the point of view of a woman named Sally, an aspiring writer struggling with her social identity and also with her “puzzle” of a husband. Ed is a heart surgeon, a man who avoids intimacy and is notoriously difficult to read.68 The instructor of Sally’s creative writing class assigns the students an exercise in point of view. In class, the creative writing guru, in an effort to replicate how stories were transmitted in times past, dims the lights and tells her students the story “Fitcher’s Bird.” In this version of the Bluebeard story, as noted earlier, the heroine reassembles the bodies of her dead sisters, engineers their escape, and arranges the incineration of the wizard Fitcher in his own house. In true Bluebeard fashion, Fitcher is a serial murderer who has slain all his “disobedient” wives, one after the other.