ABSTRACT
In 1992, the Jungian analyst and professional storyteller Clarissa Pinkola Estes published her spiritual self-help book, Women Who Run with the Wolves. The success of Estes's book attested to the enduring popular identification of women's sexual desires with animal imagery, given a further modern makeover by Neil Jordan's film adaptation of Angela Carter's The Company of Wolves in 1984. The Bloody Chamber then is not, as the short story writer Helen Simpson has observed, "a group of traditional fairy tales given a subversive feminist twist". Such a designation not only caricatures the complexity of Carter's project, it also raises questions as to what is meant by a "traditional fairy tale", a "subversive" act and a "feminist" text. In 1982, Carter compared her lapse into obscurity in the early 1970s with what happens "when people [try] to get out of genre into mainstream" literature since the writer no longer fits with the pre-designed label.
