Mixing Myth and Polemic

...Outside her kitchen window, the hedgerow glistened as if the snow possessed a light of its own, when the sky darkened toward evening, an unearthly, reflected pallor remained behind upon the winter's landscape, while still the soft flakes floated down The lovely girl, whose skin possesses that same inner light so you would have thought she, too, was made all of snow, pauses in her chores in the mean kitchen to look out at the country road Nothing has passed that way all day, the road is white and unmarked as a spilled bolt of bridal satin ". In a scene between Beauty and Mr Lyon one gets a stronger feeling for the undercurrent of sexuality in Carter's writing Remarkable, too, is the way she chronicles the transmutations of Beauty's fear of her suitor's bestial masculinity into a compassion that eventually grows into love...

...A good example of the difficulties of adapting myths is Angela Carter's latest work, The Bloody Chamber, a collection of her own versions of familiar Grimm fairy tales as well as of "Beauty and the Beast," Dracula, and "Bluebeard " Occasionally the original stones find a deep resonance in her imagination, but as often they are belabored by an implicit polemic...

...Carter, in contrast, substitutes a mushy, chched romanticism for the emerging self-awareness of myth This devolution into an animal world signals nothing but retreat It is a flight from the problems and complexities of being human, and from the development of a mature sexual identity In this respect, most of the stones repeat the escape back into infancy of the heroine of "The Bloody Chamber ' "Puss in Boots" is an unalloyed pleasure We encounter the swashbuckling, braggart Puss and his ingenious efforts to set up his adopted master with the young, cloistered bride the master lusts after Scaling a house-front in the service of romance, Puss describes his progress...

...He drew back his head and gazed at her with his green, inscrutable eyes, in which she saw her face repeated twice, as small as if it were in bud Then, without another word, he sprang from the room and she saw, with an indescribable shock, he went on all fours ". Carter is a master at evoking a dream-like reality, while at the same time filtering in a suspicion that all is not quite as it should be In "The Tiger's Bride," the Beast conceals his hairy snout beneath a mask painted with a human face "Oh, yes, a beautiful face, but one with too much formal symmetry of feature to be entirely human One profile of his mask is the mirror image of the other, too perfect, uncanny ". Carter's "Beauty and the Beast" stones are the most interesting in this collection For although "The Tiger's Bride" shares with the other stones a self-conscious manipulation of the plot to prove a point, "The Courtship of Mr Lyon" follows the original fairly closely yet shows a more fruitful wedding of Mme Beaumont's tale to the author's imagination Here Beauty's love tames the wild beast, changes the bestial into the human "The Tiger's Bride" reverses this pattern Beauty sheds her human skin to join the Beast in a liberated animal kingdom...

...Much more than the exercise in tired old surrealism that the American title suggests, this novel is a lyrical journey of love and desire through the unconscious, containing strikingly original images wrought with the finest intelligence Dr Hoffman, a blind, besotted ex-physics professor, runs a traveling circus Among its acts is a peep-show consisting of antique viewing machines, painted photographic plates and moving china dolls A drama is acted out where, as Freud is quoted as saying, "nothing is created and nothing destroyed," only rearranged The mad doctor is a kind of Levi-Straussian bricoleur, a pictographer of human destiny The novel is leavened throughout with humor-Dr Hoffman's infernal machines run on an "eroto-energy" fueled by an assembly-line reproduction of Reich's orgone box -but that never diminishes the poignancy of the central theme, the irreconciliability of conscious and unconscious lives...

...Myths have never responded well to the moralist Like dreams they are essentially amoral and not at all amenable to the conscious distortions of people who would shape the world in their own two-dimensional image...

...Mixing Myth and Polemic The Bloody Chamber By Angela Carter Harper & Row 164 pp $8 95 Reviewed by Joshua Gilder Myths are the most fragile and the most durable of fictions Fragile because their delicate magic can only be grasped intuitively, and is lost in the hands of the overly self-conscious interpreter, durable because, stripped of the personal and idiosyncratic and honed by succeeding generations of storytellers to a bedrock of truth, they bear, as Jung suggested, the accumulated wisdom of mankind...

...After disposing of the Marquis, mother and daughter set up a sort of menage a trots with a blind piano-tuner who has been lolling about the shadows The daughter, who has married him, exclaims, "But I do believe my mother loves [the piano tuner] as much as I do " What would Nancy Friday say7 Our young bride has been unable to separate herself from an obviously domineering mother and forge her own sexual identity In the process a pall of malignity has been cast over the male sex, turning deflowering into decapitation And our heroine has regressed into her mother's arms as well as those of her blind (castrated7) husband...

...Again like dreams, the "purpose" of myth is closely involved with its structure If one tampers with the ending or mixes up the essential elements the entire effect is destroyed and the tale signifies nothing...

...This reversal is repeated in "Wolf Alice" and other stones in the book If Carter's intention is to recapture a more vital role for her heroines, the net effect feet is to neuter the myths The mythic process has usually marked a movement toward humanity In Hesiod's Theogeny, for example, the monstrous Titans are succeeded by the more human Olympians...

...Carter seems content with this ending, apparently unaware of the personal failure it represents Interestingly, a feminist reviewer in a major newspaper has found this her favorite story in the whole collection...

...I swing succinctly up the facade, forepaws on a curly cherub's pate, hindpaws on a stucco wreath, bring them up to meet your forepaws while, first paw foreward, hup1 onto the stone nymph's tit, left paw up a bit, the satyr's bum should do the trick Nothing to it, once you know how, rococo's no problem " This sort of unashamed bawdiness is Angela Carter's saving grace She is a passionate woman and can write about sex with a power not common today One suspects this is the reason she is given such short shrift by critics in this country, where the lizard-like copulations of Margaret At wood's fiction are considered serious literature It must also explain why, when Carter is reviewed, almost exclusive attention is paid to her feminism Thus The Sadeian Woman is probably her best known work in this country In that case the focus on feminism is at least understandable, even if the book finally shows an uncomfortable affinity to Sadeian sexuality in extremis But all in all Carter's feminism is her least interesting aspect-one, at any rate, that she shares with a thousand less talented writers I hope in the future she will follow her instincts-as in her best tales here-and leave sexual politics behind...

...But there is a conflict in Carter between the intuitive, responsive novelist and the ideologue who would deny her best qualities, and this produces uneven results in The Bloody Chamber The title piece is the least successful A virgin bride, on her honeymoon in the ancestral castle of her Bluebeard-like husband, is threatened with the same murderous fate that befell his three previous wives Just in the nick of time her mother-a superwoman who in her youth had "outfaced a junkful of Chinese pirates, nursed a village through a visitation of the plague, [and] shot a man-eating tiger with her own hand"-gallops up to the castle on her horse, breaches the ramparts, and arrests in mid-swing the descent of the Marquis' blade upon her daughter's virgin neck...

...As she was about to rise, he flung himself at her feet and buried his head in her lap She stayed stock-still, transfixed, she felt his hot breath of her fingers, the stiff bristles of his muzzle grazing her skin, the rough lapping of his tongue, and then, m a flood of compassion, understood All he is doing is kissing my hands...

...Even before reading them, one might feel some trepidation for these retellings by an author who, in The Sadeian Woman, described myths as "consolatory nonsense," and demonstrated in that work an appalling ignorance of classical and other mythologies Carter is, however, also the author of a novel I very much admire, The Infernal Desire Machines of Dr Hoffman (unfortunately renamed The War of Dreams when published in this country), which augured well for her treatment of fables...

...Yet if "The Bloody Chamber" shows Angela Carter at her most frustrating and irritating, she is at the height of her talents in the next three stones-The Courtship of Mr Lyon," "The Tiger's Bride" (two different treatments of "Beauty and the Beast"), and a Boccaccian "Puss in Boots " "The Courtship of Mr Lyon" opens with the following lyrical description...