Centre for Academic Language and Development

Literature: Exploring Short Stories

The Short Story – Postmodernism and Feminism (I)
This sequence of work aims to help you:
 trace the development of the short story, towards ways of being feminist in a postmodern paradigm
 identify salient features of theme, tone, and style of writing in their work, as appropriate, and
 situate the work against a historico-cultural backdrop and in a literary context

1 Intro / Set up - Preliminary to discussion

Each member of the class will bring a question to facilitate our exploration of Angela Carter’s The Company
of Wolves. Have any documents or notes from your preparatory work for this session to hand to refer to.
1.1 Engage with the questions and contributions on The Company of Wolves.
You may find some of the ideas in Appendix 1 and 2 useful in promoting further appreciation of the story.

2 Reading Carter – A Different Kind of Feminist Voice?

“The Company of Wolves” is the best known story in Carter’s The Bloody
Chamber—a collection of retellings of folk tales and fairy tales. Carter
maintained that fairy tales ‘make sense of events and certain occurrences
in a particular imaginative way’ (Gamble 2001, p. 112). Two years before
its publication, she had made a new translation of fairy tales collected and
written down by Charles Perrault in late 17th-century France, including
‘Sleeping Beauty’, ‘Little Red Riding Hood’ and ‘Puss in Boots’. She was
particularly interested in the way in which such stories had ‘gone into the
bourgeois nursery and therefore lost their origins…,’ pointing out ‘many
folk tales were… passed down from generation to generation by people
who were mostly illiterate.’ We could therefore read The Bloody Chamber
as Carter’s way of returning these well-known stories to their less refined,
more brutal origins, the violence and horror of some of the tales reflecting
the difficult lives of our ancestors: ‘the ordinary men and women who
created our world.’ (Carter 1990).
Psychoanalysts have also recognised the importance of fairy tales for understanding ourselves in their
‘vernacular of motifs that could disclose latent and hitherto unacknowledged preoccupations and desires…’
(Warner 2014, p. 117). In his influential book The Uses of Enchantment (1976), Bruno Bettelheim applied a
psychoanalytical approach to a detailed analysis of well-known fairy tales. Reading this book alongside The
Bloody Chamber reveals how Carter responds forcefully to Freudian concepts, foregrounding female
identity and boldly depicting a range of female experiences and destinies. Her boldness can be unsettling
for contemporary readers; one critic has described how she ‘resolutely refused to conform to any kind of
what we would now term “political correctness”’. This has led to accusations from some readers that in the
process of depicting problematic behaviours and attitudes towards women—particularly rape and
predatory male sexuality—Carter has ‘fallen into the trap of perpetuating them.’ (Gamble 2001, p. 11).
2.1 Why are fairy tales identified as being important for us as (post-)modern readers?
2.2 Are there any aspects of The Company of Wolves that you find of interest in this respect?

3 Get Carter? – Not Everybody Does!

Carter’s work has been a subject of some debate. Read this introduction to an academic paper on her work,
and answer the following question:
3.1 What contending critical views have emerged in the debate on Carter’s 70s/80s re-contextualisations?
Centre for Academic Language and Development
Deconstructed Masculine Evil in Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber Stories
Aytül Özüm
Fairy-tales are thought to form the major segment of the literature of consolation, but what if these
stories resist re-presenting the consoling demarcation of the fairy-tale and fabricate a subverted form
of the monstrous and the evil? In some of the stories of The Bloody Chamber, Angela Carter is
concerned not only with the shortcomings of conventional representations of gender, but also with
different models of deconstructed masculine evil which take various shapes in evil and wicked female
format. In the stories, the image of the female which is mostly associated with the good, the decent, the
innocent and naive in most of the traditional fairy-tales is rendered either to have inclinations towards
pervert sexual practices or to be violently harmful for the opposite sex. In re-telling such well-known
fairy-tales as “Bluebeard,” “Puss in Boots,” “Snow White” and “Sleeping Beauty” respectively in the
stories entitled “Bloody Chamber,” “Puss in Boots,” “Snow Child” and “The Lady of the House of Love,”
Carter, in an interview, claims to have used “the latent content of those traditional stories” and “that
latent content is violently sexual.” It is impossible to evaluate these stories in The Bloody Chamber
independently from Carter’s The Sadeian Woman which was published in the same year, in 1979. The
latter work received antithetical criticism from feminist critics of pornography; Susanne Kappeler
accuses Carter of valuing the pornographic – in the name of equal rights and opportunities – by
employing the literary. However, what Carter depicts in The Sadeian Woman is not the mere
objectification of the female to the pervert male world, but reinforcing the idea of separation of
women’s sexuality from their reproductive function. She also asserts that Sade “put pornography in
the service of women, or, perhaps, allowed it to be invaded by an ideology not inimical to women ...” In
the stories selected from The Bloody Chamber, Carter not only deconstructs but also discloses the fixity
of the frame that encloses the motif of the masculine evil to one single referent by playing with the
slippery ground where content and form of the fairy tales are fabricated. Hence, in the stories the
representation of the female evil in the reappropriation of the fairy tales saves the woman subject
from being victimized in the traditionally acknowledged frameworks.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/238659798_Deconstructed_Masculine_Evil_in_Angela_Carter's_The_Bloody_Chamber_Stories

4 Fairytales and Carter’s Retold Tales

Listen to a presentation on Angela Carter and the Fairytale; see if it adds to your appreciation of her story.
Further questions:
4.1 Comment on the significance of Carter’s work in the context of the then developing feminist debate.
4.2 How does she compare with other writers we have seen writing within a postmodernist paradigm?
4.3 How do such postmodernist short stories compare with more conventional short stories?

5 Homework
The reading for next session is: Margaret Atwood – Happy Endings
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Centre for Academic Language and Development
Appendix 1
CARNIVORE INCARNATE: ANGELA CARTER’S ‘THE COMPANY OF WOLVES’
One of the most gripping reinventions of the ‘Little Red Riding Hood’ tale, Angela Carter’s ‘The Company Of
Wolves’ is an extraordinarily beautiful story of female sexual awakening and transformation.
Each of the stories in the renowned collection The Bloody Chamber is a reinvention of a classic fairy tale or
folk story. In Carter’s hands, they grow rich in symbolism and seductive, with her typically poetic use of
language and her often intricate patterns of imagery. The collection includes a moving depiction of ‘Beauty
and the Beast’, an urban Puss In Boots, and the title story is a reworking of the old ‘Bluebeard’ folk tale. Even
as they seduce us, Carter’s stories reveal the primal and bloody core of old tales that were once designed to
frighten children into doing what they were told. They take us into the dark corners of the human psyche and
explore that which is often taboo. She confronts convention and gender stereotypes in a no-holds-barred
verbal fistfight, and emerges clutching this alluring yet unsettling collection in an undeniable victory.
By taking the Red Riding Hood myth and modernising it, Carter turns traditional gender roles on their heads.
The first part of her story sets the scene in an unnamed settlement; the phrase ‘one beast and only one
howls in the woods by night’ is a chilling opening. The reader is instantly bombarded with line after line of
powerfully evocative imagery. She piles metaphor upon simile until we almost begin to buckle under the
weight, but the picture painted in our minds is vivid and unequivocal. In this world, the wolves are ‘grey
members of a congregation of nightmare’; they belong to the night and to terror. The werewolf is even worse.
Carter’s wolf-man is symbolic of sexual appetite, of danger and desire; he is something against which
women have been ‘sheltered’ in one form or another for centuries.
In the second part of Carter’s narrative, we follow the footsteps of an unnamed girl who travels through the
forest to visit her ailing grandmother. As in the fairy tale, she is wearing a red hooded cloak that ‘has the
ominous if brilliant look of blood on snow’. However, we quickly become aware that this is a more mature
heroine than the fairy story offers us; she is described as being in that period of limbo when a girl becomes a
woman, with pale cheeks and flaxen hair. She is innocent and virginal, but she is also armed with a knife and
unafraid. En route to her grandmother’s cottage, the wolf appears to her disguised as a handsome huntsman
bedecked in the green of the forest — symbolic of course of life and of rebirth. After accompanying her part
of the way through the wood, the wolf-man makes a bet with Little Red: that by using his compass he can
navigate the perilous forest and arrive at the cottage before her. His prize, should he win, will be a kiss. She
agrees, and the seduction begins.
But in the final dramatic encounter between Little Red and the wolf, the girl displays a maturity and wisdom
unknown to his previous victims. By abandoning the ‘safe’ preconceptions taught to her in childhood, she
saves her own life and turns the tables on the ravenous carnivore. Here, the wolf-man is the forest, he is the
night, he is all that people are supposed to fear. But she gives him the kiss she owes him, and more. They
are opposites, dark and light, man and woman, beast and innocent, yet the seduction has been reversed, the
power has shifted, and the young girl-turned-woman trusts in her own powerful sexuality for protection.
Through her use of the wolf myth, Carter was able to show that a girl who took her power into her own hands
and used it without shame or fear was the only one to tame the savage beast and survive. It is a story of
female empowerment, one that enthralls the mind and engages the senses, and for that reason that ‘The
Company Of Wolves’ is a compelling read.
http://thresholds.chi.ac.uk/carnivore-incarnate-angela-carters-the-company-of-wolves/

Appendix 2
A very interesting article, Angela Carter’s wolf tales (‘The Werewolf’, ‘The Company of Wolves’ and ‘Wolf-
Alice’), which looks at some aspects of the wolf stories from The Bloody Chamber, of which The Company of
Wolves, is one is at: https://www.bl.uk/20th-century-literature/articles/angela-carters-wolf-tales