I recently decided to re-read The Bloody Chamber by Angela Carter (it was my choice for my book group). It was as fun as I remembered. Carter’s sexy takes on traditional fairy tales like “Little Red Riding Hood,” “Sleeping Beauty” and “Puss in Boots” is at times over-the-top in its prose, humor, and horror – which suits her feminist takes on damsels in all sorts of distress perfectly.
She delivers a great vampire tale, “The Lady of the House of Love,” too. But I think my favorites of these stories are two very different takes on Red Riding Hood – “Wolf Alice” and “The Company of Wolves.” The latter is a novelette and the longest of the stories in the collection. It was also made into an entertaining fantasy film by Neil Jordan in 1984 (starring Angela Lansbury, David Warner, Steven Rea and Terence Stamp) and is still worth a look.
The title story, “The Bloody Chamber,” is based on the tale of the murderous Bluebeard, and is positively cinematic in its imagery. Carter’s young and naive heroine, a talented pianist, soon discovers her very rich and very strange older husband has his own grisly art form – but can she escape in time to avoid becoming the subject of his next opus?
“Even when he asked me to marry him, and I said: ‘Yes,’ still he did not lose that heavy, fleshy composure
of his. I know it must seem a curious analogy, a man with a flower, but sometimes he seemed to me like a
lily. Yes. A lily. Possessed of that strange, ominous calm of a sentient vegetable, like one of those cobra-
headed, funereal lilies whose white sheaths are curled out of a flesh as thick and tensely yielding to the
touch as vellum. When I said that I would marry him, not one muscle in his face stirred, but he let out a
long, extinguished sigh. I thought: Oh! how he must want me! And it was as though the imponderable
weight of his desire was a force I might not withstand, not by virtue of its violence but because of its very
gravity.”
To paraphrase Whoopi in Ghost, “You’re in danger girl…”
