ABSTRACT

When Alphonse Daudet wrote his ironic play about Little Red Riding Hood’s “accident,” which many writers and critics have been explicitly referring to as rape for many years now, he had no idea how many “fortunate” writers would continue the tradition of writing other versions about her fate. Certainly, he could not have anticipated Angela Carter, who not only wrote one unusual rendition, “The Company of Wolves,” but also two others, “The Werewolf” and “Wolf-Alice,” all three published in The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories (1979), a tantalizing book that was intended not only to subvert the classical patriarchal fairy tale but also to subvert standard notions of sexuality, archetypes, and stereotypes. As was her wont, Carter often wrote two or three experimental versions of one classical fairy tale to explore its peculiarities from different perspectives and to demonstrate how the plots and characters might be fleshed out and deployed to make discoveries about social relations in the present. Thus, her “Beauty and Beast” tales probe father/ daughter relations and the bartering that constitutes marital relationships. Her “Cinderella” triad of short pithy tales delves into the mother/daughter relations of dependency and projection. At the bottom of her profound interest in fairy tales was a fierce ideological commitment to overcome false dichotomies that separated the sexes and led to male dominance in all spheres of life, public and private.