Stuck in the big postmodern muddy of the 21st century, it can be difficult for some to remember and for others to understand that deep into the latter quarter of the previous century, fairy tales had been confined almost exclusively to the brilliantly colored pages liberally endowed with white space sprinkled with text printed in oversized fonts. The genre’s transition to the small typeface of adult books devoid of illustration is—within the world of the fairy tale—a very recent addition. Angela Carter can be rightfully identified as one of the fairy godmothers who waved her wand and transformed this overlooked Cinderella into the belle of the ball.
How influential is Carter as a short story writer? The landscape of 21st century fiction (and fiction stated as fact) would look significantly different without her. Carter is most closely identified with her stories which take familiar characters—from myth, legend and history—and transform their meaning by suggesting that a different narrator means a different story. In one of her earliest published stories, the narrator ponders a question that proves to serve as the controlling thematic inquiry into the meaning of her stories:
“How far does a pretence of feeling, maintained with absolute conviction, become authentic?”
This fundamental question is explored throughout Carter’s short stories that during her lifetime were infamously relegated to the status of a cult outsider, but which have subsequently proven to be the blueprint for an extraordinary burst of imagination (often creative, sometimes much less) that has defined much of the millennium’s entertainment. If authenticity is based on conviction of feeling whether that feeling is authentic or a pretense, then what is real and what is fake? The question as applied to the story of Red Riding Hood in two stories by Carter suggests that the authenticity of the fairy tale may exist only as the result of familiarity. It was the original narrator who staked the claim for the story’s meaning and not the characters. But what if there were another narrator with an alternative meaning? Can the lesson being taught by Red Riding Hood’s adventure in the woods be considered authentic if it is based on a pretense of the character? What if Red Riding Hood was not the innocent little girl at all, but a smart young woman who recognized her own predatory instincts as the only means of avoiding the horrible fate which befell her grandmother?
It is not buy accident that Carter’s collections of stories contain more than one revision of Red Riding Hood and Beauty and the Beast any more than it is a case of creative exhaustion that she penned two different stories appearing in two different collections about Lizzie Borden. Carter’s revisions of fairy tales and her stories that imagine the lives of borderline figures living off the grid of historical fact like Borden, the wife of Tamburlaine, the mistress of French poet Charles Baudelaire and Mary Magadalene are not intent on asserting that “here is the real story; the true story.” Carter is the master of the alternative narrative; the suggestion of what might be if the story had been told by someone else. At all times in her short fiction, Carter is addressing not just the story itself, but the means by which the story is told. The essential conviction at work here the reminder to the reader that any meaning that may be derived from the plot of a story is equally dependent upon who is telling the story. The story and the storyteller cannot be separated because, in an expression of Carter’s essential postmodern philosophy, there is no such thing as absolute, objective truth.
By focusing on stories that had been in the sole domain of children’s storybooks, puppets, vampires, notorious historical outliers and other “non-serious” topics, Carter was treated as exactly the type of outsider worthy of cult interest that she wrote about. The tragic irony is that Carter died just as the tide had begun to turn. What she and a few other hardy souls worked hard at on the fringes of the mainstream very quickly came to dominate that very mainstream without a decade of her succumbing to lung cancer.
Carter’s Red Riding Hood who strips herself naked and becomes the predatory seductress of the Big Bad Wolf is progenitor of Gregory Maguire’s Wicked Witch of the West who is really a beaten down freedom fighter overwhelmed by the propaganda machine of an evil Wizard of Oz. The influence of Carter’s short stories ranges from the sublimity of Guillermo Del Toro turning the Creature from the Black Lagoon into a romantic hero to the ridiculousness the Twilight series throwing every single convention of the vampire myth into the garbage. From the popular television series Once Upon a Time to White House press conferences, Carter’s insistence that the authenticity of any story is inextricably linked to the storyteller and the conviction of the audience is one that dominates all 21st century discourse, whether entirely fictional or fiction harboring a pretension toward fact.
