"But marriage itself is no party": Angela Carter's

Translation of Charles Perrault's "La Belle au bois

dormant"; or, Pitting the Politics of Experience against the
Sleeping Beauty Myth

Martine Hennard Dutheil de la Rochère

Marvels & Tales, Volume 24, Number 1, 2010, pp. 131-151 (Article)

Published by Wayne State University Press

For additional information about this article

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/384535

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M A RT I N E H E N N A R D D U T H E I L DE LA ROCHÈRE 1
2
3
4
5
“But marriage itself is no party”: Angela 6
Carter’s Translation of Charles Perrault’s 7
8
“La Belle au bois dormant”; or, Pitting 9
the Politics of Experience against the 10
Sleeping Beauty Myth 11
12
13
14
Except, I assure you, I did not await the kiss of a magic prince, sir! With my two 15
eyes, I nightly saw how such a kiss would seal me up in my appearance forever! 16
—Fevvers in Angela Carter’s Nights at the Circus 17
18
19
20
21
When we think of Sleeping Beauty, what immediately comes to mind is the 22
magical kiss given by the Prince Charming to the eponymous heroine, often 23
filtered through Walt Disney’s animated movie of 1959. A central icon of the 24
Disney fairy-tale industry, the pink, gold, and light blue Sleeping Beauty Cas- 25
tle used to feature a Barbie-doll reproduction of the scene as the highlight of 26
Disneyland’s walk-through attraction before being replaced by the original 27
Eyvind Earle artwork. The emblematic scene was also represented in promi- 28
nent Disney advertising campaigns on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary 29
of the film. In 2009 the kiss was reenacted by Hollywood movie stars Zac 30
Efron and girlfriend Vanessa Hudgens (themselves Disney Channel products), 31
photographed in a glamorous mise-en-scène by Annie Leibowitz.1 To counter- 32
point Efron and Hudgens’s American romance, newlywed model Mariya Yamada 33
and husband/actor Toru Kusano posed in front of the original poster to pro- 34
mote the release of Disney’s Sleeping Beauty on Blu-ray and DVD. Both pictures 35
testify to the ongoing appeal and global dimension of one of the most powerful 36
myths exploiting the confusion between life and fiction.2 37
38
39
Marvels & Tales: Journal of Fairy-Tale Studies, Vol. 24, No. 1 (2010), pp. 131–151. Copyright © 2010 by
40 S
Wayne State University Press, Detroit, MI 48201. 41 R

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1 No wonder, then, that Charles Perrault’s literary version of “La Belle au

2 bois dormant” (“The Sleeping Beauty in the Wood”) has been rejected by
3 second-wave feminist critics on the grounds of its alleged reinforcement of pa-
4 triarchal structures and values.3 In 1973 Marcia Lieberman condemned fairy
5 tales for serving “to acculturate women to traditional social roles” (187) by
6 shaping their behavior and aspirations. Taking Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty
7 as paradigmatic examples, she observes that Andrew Lang’s “Blue Fairy Book is
8 filled with weddings, but it shows little of married life” (198), as most of the
9 tales “literally end with the wedding” (199). A few years later, Karen Rowe pur-
10 sued the same argument as she indicted fairy tales for romanticizing marriage
11 to the point of undermining the sociocultural changes promoted by the feminist
12 movement.4
13 And yet, surprising though it may be, there is no kiss between the Prince
14 and the Princess in Perrault’s conte, neither is there one in the English transla-
15 tion published in Lang’s Blue Fairy Book. Upon the arrival of the Prince in the
16 bedchamber, it is simply said that the Princess wakes up now that the hundred
17 years have elapsed: “Alors comme la fin de l’enchantement était venue, la
18 Princesse s’éveilla” (136) (“And now, as the enchantment was at an end, the
19 Princess awaked” [Blue Fairy Book 59]). What is more, far from concluding the
20 tale, the marriage takes place roughly midway through the narrative, and
21 rather than marital bliss, it leads to the horrific persecution of the bride and
22 her two children by an ogress mother-in-law while the new King is away battling
23 with his neighbor.
24 Surely this must have struck Angela Carter when in 1976 she read Perrault’s
25 Histoires ou contes du temps passé, avec des Moralités (1697) (Stories or Tales of
26 Past Times, with Morals) in French and went on to translate them into modern
27 English. The disparity between popular perceptions of the story and the reality
28 of Perrault’s text must have alerted Carter to the fact that the fairy tale was a
29 more complex document than most critics of the story were suggesting. For
30 many feminists the story was representative of a genre inherently inimical to
31 women. The lack of a romantic kiss in the source text, however, and the fact
32 that the eventual marriage of Sleeping Beauty to the Prince is not without its
33 trials seem to have suggested to Carter that this narrative was not simply an
34 endorsement of saccharine patriarchal romance. In an article titled “The Better
35 to Eat You With,” she relates her experience as follows:
36
37 The notion of the fairy-tale as a vehicle for moral instruction is not a
38 fashionable one. I sweated out the heatwave browsing through Perrault’s
39 Contes du temps passé on the pretext of improving my French. What
S 40 an unexpected treat to find that in this great Ur-collection—whence
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ANGELA CARTER AND CHARLES PERRAULT

sprang the Sleeping Beauty, Puss in Boots, Little Red Riding Hood, 1
Cinderella, Tom Thumb, all the heroes of pantomime—all these nurs- 2
ery tales are purposely dressed up as fables of the politics of experi- 3
ence. The seventeenth century regarded children, quite rightly, as ap- 4
prentice adults. Charles Perrault, academician, folklorist, pedant, but 5
clearly neither nutter nor regressive, takes a healthily abrasive attitude 6
to his material. Cut the crap about richly nurturing the imagination. 7
This world is all that is to the point. (452–53) 8
9
Carter’s translations have attracted little critical attention in spite of their im- 10
portant role in the development of her subsequent literary career and her un- 11
derstanding of the creative process. In his timely reedition of The Fairy Tales of 12
Charles Perrault (1977) as Little Red Riding Hood, Cinderella, and Other Classic 13
Fairy Tales of Charles Perrault (2008), Jack Zipes claims that translating Perrault 14
had a profound influence on Carter’s writing, and I would further argue that a 15
close examination of these translations sheds new light on her understanding 16
of and engagement with the French author’s contes.5 17
Carter participated in the debate about fairy tales that animated feminist 18
scholars and writers in the 1970s and 1980s, but her work cannot be reduced 19
to any easy and fixed ideological position. A declared feminist, she contributed 20
to rescuing the genre from mainstream feminist critics who rejected fairy tales 21
as inherently conservative and sexist, and renewed creative and critical activity 22
in the field. But Carter not only gave a new impetus and relevance to the genre 23
in her own fiction; she also rehabilitated Perrault as a progressive writer 24
against feminist indictments of the male-authored (Western, privileged, white) 25
fairy-tale canon. Rather than subverting Perrault’s tales, I wish to argue that 26
Carter reclaimed them for feminism as she recognized a common aim to familiar- 27
ize children with the politics of experience, to borrow her own phrase. While 28
the translated text negotiates between the constraints of the fairy-tale genre 29
and a critique of the institution of marriage already present in “La Belle au bois 30
dormant,” the Moral articulates a message that is consistent with Carter’s femi- 31
nist convictions and practical politics as it anchors its meaning in present-day 32
reality. 33
Carter’s translations of Perrault’s contes were published by Victor Gollancz 34
in The Fairy Tales of Charles Perrault (1977) with etchings by Martin Ware, and 35
in Sleeping Beauty and Other Favourite Fairy Tales (1982), illustrated by Michael 36
Foreman. As the title of the second edition makes clear, Sleeping Beauty has a 37
privileged status as a fairy-tale romance, which partly explains its popular- 38
ity. In what follows, I suggest that Carter adapts the significance of the story 39
to accommodate a feminist agenda by restating the original text against the 40 S
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1 twentieth-century reception of the tale and its exploitation as a conservative myth.

2 Although she simplifies and modernizes its language, her translation remains
3 close to Perrault’s text, and it serves to communicate a cautionary message
4 about marriage that opposes the dominant ideology and the trend in children’s
5 literature encouraging imagination and escapism (see Carter, “Better to Eat”).
6 In her foreword to The Fairy Tales of Charles Perrault, Carter celebrates
7 Perrault’s intervention in children’s literature (as she saw it) as follows:
8
Especially in the moral tags at the end of each tale he seems con-
9
cerned in turning the fairy tales into little parables of experience from
10
which children can learn, without half the pain that Cinderella or Red
11
Riding Hood endured, the way of the world and how to come to no
12
harm in it. The book is intended for children but these children are
13
seen as apprentice adults and the succinct brutality of the traditional
14
tale is modified by the application of rationality. (17)
15
16 Believing in the need for children to be told stories that serve a practical pur-
17 pose (i.e., learning the ways of the world to avoid pain and harm), she con-
18 cludes approvingly: “We must learn to cope with the world before we can in-
19 terpret it” (18). This twofold aim is exemplified in the poetics and politics of
20 Carter’s translations and rewritings, each representing a stage in the reader’s in-
21 tellectual development. Because she wishes to foreground Perrault’s “scheme of
22 good sense” in her translation of “La Belle au bois dormant,” Carter plays down
23 the ambiguities, ironies, and complexities of the text, as well as the adult
24 humor and gruesome aspects that she exploits in “The Lady of the House of
25 Love” (collected in The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories [1979]).6 Instead she
26 sees herself as pursuing Perrault’s pedagogical project for a modern audience,
27 and therefore uses the tale to caution her young readers (implicitly constructed
28 as female in the text and explicitly so in the Moral) against the seductions of
29 the Sleeping Beauty myth by updating the critique of marriage implicit in “La
30 Belle au bois dormant.” As Carter realized when reading Perrault in the origi-
31 nal French, the text easily lends itself to a feminist reading that mocks the in-
32 fluence of sentimental stories that fool girls into marrying young.
33 In “The Better to Eat You With,” Carter praises the directness of Perrault’s
34 tales, which she strives to emulate in her translation by adopting a familiar
35 tone and a simple syntax and vocabulary to convey a message colored by her
36 feminist standpoint. Like Perrault, Carter chooses to “favour reason, irony and
37 realism” (17), and this effect is reinforced by Martin Ware’s original illustra-
38 tions to the first edition.7 In the same essay, she explicitly reads Perrault against
39 the grain of psychosexual interpretations of the tale prevalent in the late 1970s
S 40 (first and foremost in Bruno Bettelheim’s influential study The Uses of Enchant-
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ment, but also apparent in Anne Sexton’s utilization of Sleeping Beauty to confront 1
the taboo of incest in Transformations): 2
3
The story of Sleeping Beauty is a perfect parable of sexual trauma and
4
awakening. But Perrault resolutely eschews making any such connec-
5
tions; and quite right, too. Never a hint that a girl’s first encounter
6
with a phallic object might shock her into a death-like trance. She’s
7
the victim of a power struggle among the heavy female fairy mafia.
8
We’re dealing with the real world, not the phantasia of the uncon-
9
scious. Children get quite enough of that in the privacy of their own
10
homes. (“Better to Eat” 453–54)
11
To emphasize the worldliness of the story, Carter resorts to familiar expres- 12
sions. For instance, she uses the phrase “put right any harm” (Fairy Tales 58) to 13
convey “réparer le mal” [to repair the harm] (Perrault, Contes 132).8 She also 14
opts for active verbs and dynamic movement (“on vit entrer une vieille Fée” 15
[an old fairy was seen entering] [Contes 131] becomes “an uninvited guest 16
came storming into the palace” [Fairy Tales 58]) and eliminates what she con- 17
siders to be superfluous details and redundancies. Thus, the description of the 18
enchanted castle—“on ne voyait plus que le haut des Tours du Château, encore 19
n’était-ce que de bien loin” (Contes 134, emphasis mine) (“nothing could be seen 20
but the very top of the towers of the palace; and that, too, not unless it was a 21
good way off” [Lang 57])—is simply conveyed by “This hedge grew so tall that 22
you could see only the topmost turrets of the castle” (Fairy Tales 62). The jux- 23
taposed subordinate clause here is turned into a consecutive clause, which 24
clarifies logic and sequence, presumably to suit the reading abilities of her 25
young audience. The construction of a child reader is also perceptible in the 26
emphasis placed on the fairy’s efforts to make “a safe, magic place where the 27
princess could sleep her sleep out free from prying eyes” (Fairy Tales 63, em- 28
phasis mine), a sentence in which diction, rhythm, and sound patterns evoke 29
lullabies. Significantly, this contrasts with Perrault’s text, which emphasizes the 30
art of the fairy, and alludes to the erotic topos of the belle endormie: “On ne 31
douta point que la Fée n’eût encore fait là un tour de son métier, afin que la 32
Princesse, pendant qu’elle dormirait, n’eût rien à craindre des Curieux” (Contes 33
134) (“Nobody doubted but the Fairy gave herein a very extraordinary sample 34
of her art, that the Princess, while she continued sleeping, might have nothing 35
to fear from any curious people” [Lang 57]).9 36
As Ute Heidmann and Jean-Michel Adam have shown with respect to 37
“Bluebeard” and “The Fairies,” Carter carries out a generic reorientation of 38
Perrault’s contes into modern favorite fairy tales as she “creates a homogeneous 39
voice and a fluent narration which clearly differs from Perrault’s narrator” 40 S
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1 (“Text Linguistics” 190). The fussy, intrusive, and ironic narrator of Perrault’s
2 text is changed into a more neutral voice that takes the fairy-tale world for
3 granted, and the explanatory parentheses and asides that deliberately disrupt
4 the flow of narrative are integrated as mere descriptive details (if they are re-
5 tained at all). Perrault’s narrator’s visible efforts to provide additional informa-
6 tion produce incongruous and paradoxical effets de réel (to borrow Barthes’s
7 term) in a story explicitly designated as a conte in the subtitle. For example,
8 when the fairies are introduced, the narrator explains that “on donna pour
9 Marraines à la petite Princesse toutes les Fées qu’on pût trouver dans le Pays (il
10 s’en trouva sept), afin que chacune d’elles lui faisant un don, comme c’était la
11 coutume des Fées en ce temps-là, la Princesse eût par ce moyen toutes les per-
12 fections imaginables” (Contes 131) (“and the Princess had for her god-mothers
13 all the fairies they could find in the whole kingdom [they found seven], that
14 everyone of them might give her a gift, as was the custom of fairies in those
15 days. By this means the Princess had all the perfections imaginable” [Lang 54,
16 bracketed words are parenthetical in original]). Carter’s translation, by con-
17 trast, normalizes Perrault’s writing style as it integrates the parenthetical infor-
18 mation in a separate sentence placed at the end of the first paragraph: “After a
19 long search, they managed to trace seven suitable fairies” (Fairy Tales 57).
20 Apart from giving more weight to the number of fairies, the adjective “suitable”
21 implies that the fairies were selected from among others, which situates the
22 story even more firmly in the realm of fantasy. It also suggests that the curse is
23 the consequence of the royal couple’s snobbery, which leads to the revenge of
24 the old fairy deliberately excluded from the invitation, while in Perrault’s text
25 her anger is motivated by a breach of étiquette, which ties in with Perrault’s
26 mocking of the strict social hierarchies, rigid codes, and vanities of his own
27 times and milieu. In contrast to Perrault’s conte, where the tension between
28 fantasy and the world of the salons is a source of social comedy and subtle
29 satire, the ironing out of ironic asides and parentheses in Carter’s translation
30 contributes to a naturalization of magic required by the genre of the “favorite
31 fairy tale” (see Heidmann and Adam).10
32 The presence of the narrator in Perrault’s “La Belle au bois dormant” is also
33 felt in his subtly ironic references to people’s beliefs in magic within the story,
34 which simultaneously make fun of the suspension of disbelief required by the
35 genre of the conte itself, as in the passage quoted above, where he observes that
36 nobody doubts the power of the good fairy. Carter’s translation, however, shifts
37 attention from the collective perception of the magic to the fairy’s efficient
38 (and, to a young reader, reassuring) measures to protect the princess’s long
39 sleep in the absence of her parents: “for the fairy had made a safe, magic place
S 40 where the princess could sleep her sleep out free from prying eyes” (Fairy Tales
R 41 63). Similarly, the passage “car il y a apparence (l’Histoire n’en dit pourtant rien)

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ANGELA CARTER AND CHARLES PERRAULT

que la bonne Fée, pendant un si long sommeil, lui avait procuré le plaisir des 1
songes agréables” (Contes 136, emphasis mine) (“for it is very probable 2
[though history mentions nothing of it] that the good Fairy during so long a 3
sleep, had given her very agreeable dreams” [Lang 59, bracketed words are 4
parenthetical in original]) is shortened and further disambiguated as follows: 5
“her good fairy had made sure she had sweet dreams during her long sleep” 6
(Fairy Tales 66, emphasis mine).11 Instead of the erotic undertones of Perrault’s 7
text, the locution sweet dreams echoes the familiar formula that parents recite 8
to children after reading them a bedtime story and kissing them good night. 9
This draws the reader’s attention to the scene where the king and queen kiss 10
their sleeping child good-bye before leaving the castle forever in Perrault’s text: 11
“Alors le Roi et la Reine, après avoir baisé leur chère enfant sans qu’elle s’éveil- 12
lât, sortirent du château” (Contes 134) (“And now the King and the Queen, 13
having kissed their dear child without waking her, went out of the palace” 14
[Lang 57]). Carter’s translation of this passage builds on Perrault’s alternative 15
to the romantic kiss, which is consistent with her reorientation of the tale for 16
a young audience. It stresses the pathos of the tender and moving gesture 17
of the royal couple toward their beloved child, from whom they part “forever” 18
(Fairy Tales 62), and implicitly relates it to the circumstances of the telling 19
of the tale: “The king and queen kissed their darling child but she did not 20
stir” (62). In this way, Carter’s “Sleeping Beauty in the Wood” marks a signifi- 21
cant shift in the audience, reception, and transmission of the fairy tale in the 22
late twentieth century, which identifies the young readers as the new “sleeping 23
beauties.”12 24
Carter’s translation also modernizes the world projected by Perrault’s “La 25
Belle au bois dormant.” To bridge the historical gap between the source text 26
and its new audience, and also perhaps to imitate her predecessor’s playful 27
anachronisms, the cures against infertility change from curative waters (“Ils al- 28
lèrent à toutes les eaux du monde” [Contes 131]; “They went to all the waters 29
in the world” [Lang 54]) to “clinics” and “specialists” (“They visited all the clin- 30
ics, all the specialists” [Fairy Tales 57]).13 Furthermore, to avoid overt cultural 31
and historical references that have become opaque to a modern reader, the 32
“étui d’or massif” (Contes 131) (a medieval “hanap” that The Blue Fairy Book 33
conveys as “a case of massive gold” [Lang 54]) becomes a “great dish of gold” 34
(Fairy Tales 58), and the “eau de la Reine de Hongrie” (Contes 133) (“Hungary- 35
water” [Lang 56]) is replaced by the more common “eau-de-cologne” (Fairy 36
Tales 61). 37
What “Sleeping Beauty” is most memorable for, apart from the romantic 38
kiss introduced by the Grimms, is the magical possibility of suspended time. In 39
addition to the hundred-year-long sleep, references to age, duration, and tim- 40 S
ing abound in Perrault’s “La Belle au bois dormant.” The narrator, for instance, 41 R

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1 takes pains to give precise chronological indications about the unfolding of

2 events in the otherwise ageless world of the conte: “Mais quand le Roi fut mort,
3 ce qui arriva au bout de deux ans” (Contes 137, emphasis mine) (“But when the
4 King was dead, which happened about two years afterwards” [Lang 60]). In
5 Carter’s translation, the temporal indication is dropped (“But when the king
6 died and the prince himself became king” [Fairy Tales 67]), which is more con-
7 sistent with the idea of the timelessness of fairy tales. Similarly, the old queen
8 “commande dès le lendemain au matin, avec une voix épouvantable qui faisait
9 trembler tout le monde, qu’on apportât au milieu de la cour une grande cuve”
10 (Contes 139, emphasis mine) is conveyed more directly and without further
11 delay by “She ordered a huge vat to be brought into the middle of the court-
12 yard” (Fairy Tales 70), instead of the more literal “she commanded next morn-
13 ing, by break of day (with a most horrible voice, which made everybody trem-
14 ble), that they should bring into the middle of the great court a large tub”
15 (Lang 62–63).
16 The magical power of the fairies, in particular, lies in their ability to master
17 time, an ability that is apparent in the old fairy’s curse and in the young fairy’s
18 putting the entire castle to sleep “en un moment” (Contes 134) (“All this took
19 only a moment” [Fairy Tales 62]). But as the narrator himself humorously points
20 out, playing with time creates paradoxes. Thus, the Princess’s real age contrasts
21 with her youthful appearance: “La jeune Reine avait vingt ans passés, sans
22 compter les cent ans qu’elle avait dormi: sa peau était un peu dure, quoique
23 belle et blanche” (Contes 138). The Blue Fairy Book conveys the point about the
24 young queen’s actual age (“The young queen was turned of twenty, not reckon-
25 ing the hundred years she had been asleep” [Lang 62]), but not the humorous
26 (and no doubt tasteless from a Victorian point of view) observation that while
27 miraculously preserved, the heroine’s skin is nevertheless “a bit hard.” In con-
28 trast, Carter has “The queen was twenty, now, if you did not count the hundred
29 years she had been asleep; her skin was white and lovely but it was a little
30 tough” (Fairy Tales 69). The casual “now” creates an effect of orality and pres-
31 ence in a tale otherwise told in the past tense. In keeping with the genre of the
32 conte du temps passé, “La Belle au bois dormant” emphasizes time past by resort-
33 ing to the simple past, imperfect, and pluperfect. And yet it also dramatizes the
34 idea of suspended time in the use of the présent de narration at particularly sus-
35 penseful moments. For example, when the heroine pricks her finger and time
36 literally stops for her, Perrault writes “La bonne vieille, bien embarrassée, crie au
37 secours” (Contes 133), which is conveyed by a past tense in both English trans-
38 lations (“The old lady cried for help” [Fairy Tales 61]). Later on, when the Prince
39 progresses toward the bedchamber, “il marche vers le château,” “passe une
S 40 grande cour pavée . . . monte, . . . entre. . . . traverse, . . . entre” (Contes 135)
R 41 (“He saw the castle . . . walked towards it . . . went through a marble courtyard;

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he climbed a staircase; he went into a guardroom. . . . He found several 1

rooms. . . . At last he arrived . . .” [Fairy Tales 64]). Finally, in the climactic scene 2
that follows the discovery of the Princess and her children, the Ogress “com- 3
mande” (Contes 139) (“She ordered” [Fairy Tales 70]) a vat to be filled with toads 4
and snakes before the family is saved in the nick of time by the unexpected ar- 5
rival of the young king. All of these instances are in the simple past in Carter’s 6
translation, partly because the present of narration doesn’t exist as such in En- 7
glish and partly because the actuality of the tale is conveyed by other means. In 8
their own way, then, both writers foreground the magic of storytelling that 9
abolishes the distinction between past and present, fantasy and reality.14 10
Carter’s translation also reflects modern conceptions of the fairy tale as 11
distinct from the late seventeenth-century conte, and accordingly includes the 12
traditional ingredients of “a castle in the country” (Fairy Tales 60) (“une de 13
leurs Maisons de plaisance” [Contes 132], “one of their houses of pleasure” 14
[Lang 55–56]); a “tower” (Fairy Tales 60) (“un donjon” [Contes 132], [a dun- 15
geon]); a “quest” (Fairy Tales 64) (“son chemin” [Contes 135], “his way” [Lang 16
58]), and common knowledge about fairies: instead of the more specific “les 17
Fées n’étaient pas longues à leur besogne” (Contes 134, emphasis mine), which 18
is already naturalized in The Blue Fairy Book as “fairies are not long in doing 19
their business” (Lang 57), Carter has “fairies are fast workers” (Fairy Tales 62). 20
The presence of the word happy in the last line of Carter’s translation, in partic- 21
ular, reflects the pressure of the conventional “happily ever after” formula asso- 22
ciated with fairy tales. Perrault’s text, in this instance, reads only “mais il s’en 23
consola bientôt avec sa belle femme et ses enfants” (Contes 140) (“but he soon 24
comforted himself with his beautiful wife and his pretty children” [Lang 63]), 25
and in Carter’s hands this becomes, “But his beautiful wife and children soon 26
made him happy again” (Fairy Tales 71, emphasis mine). The insistence on the 27
happy ending, it may be argued, contributes to neutralizing the sinister and 28
frightening aspects of the text for her young readers. 29
Another difference between Carter’s translation and Perrault’s text that 30
prepares the reader for the point made in the Moral is perceptible in the hu- 31
morous description of the official ceremonies and grand celebrations that 32
bring serious trouble, starting with the doomed baptism of the baby girl, fol- 33
lowed 120 years later by her marriage to a not-so-charming Prince. When at 34
the beginning of the tale, the young Princess is born at last, it is simply stated 35
that “on fit un beau Baptême” (Contes 131) (“There was a very fine christening” 36
[Lang 54]). In Carter’s translation, however, the parents “were both wild with 37
joy” (Fairy Tales 57, emphasis mine) at the birth of the baby, and in a separate 38
sentence the occasion is elaborated on as follows: “Obviously, this baby’s chris- 39
tening must be the grandest of all possible christenings” (Fairy Tales 57, empha- 40 S
sis mine). Carter thus presents the ceremony and ensuing dinner in emphatic, 41 R

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1 almost hyperbolic, terms. While the religious connotations of the event ex-
2 plain the presence of fairy godmothers, her reference to the feast as a “party” re-
3 inforces its familiar and festive aspect: “After the ceremony at the church, the
4 guests went back to the royal palace for a party in honour of the fairy god-
5 mothers” (Fairy Tales 58, emphasis mine) (“Après les cérémonies du Baptême
6 toute la compagnie revint au Palais du Roi, où il y avait un grand festin pour les
7 Fées” [Contes 131, emphasis mine]; “After the ceremonies of the christening
8 were over, all the company returned to the King’s palace, where was prepared
9 a great feast for the fairies” [Lang, 54, emphasis mine]). This tellingly echoes
10 Carter’s translation of Perrault’s “La Barbe bleue” as well as her interpretation of
11 the tale in “The Better to Eat You With,” in which she writes: “The primitive
12 terror a young girl feels when she sees Bluebeard is soon soothed when he
13 takes her out and shows her a good time, parties, trips to the country and so
14 on. But marriage itself is no party. Better learn that right away” (453, emphasis
15 mine). The textual and thematic connections that are thus established between
16 “Sleeping Beauty” and “Bluebeard” draw attention to the dubious motivations
17 women may have in getting married, which include cheap dreams of romance
18 and hopes of social elevation or material advantage (as Carter’s variation on
19 “Bluebeard,” “The Bloody Chamber,” would confirm). In contrast to The Blue
20 Fairy Book, Carter’s “The Sleeping Beauty in the Wood” conveys almost system-
21 atically the magical “don” (“gift”) of the fairies by the more material “present”
22 (“magic present,” “presents,” “very unpleasant present,” “time for present giv-
23 ing”), which prefigures the modern moral cautioning against early marriages
24 motivated by the glamour of a grand church wedding and the prospect of re-
25 ceiving presents. Carter’s translation of this passage thus subtly expresses her
26 critique of marriage on which empty and naïve dreams of fame, glory, prosperity,
27 happiness, and babies are projected.15
28 While it reflects modern conceptions of the genre associated with fantasy
29 and children, Carter’s translation simultaneously expresses a desire to recover
30 the worldly and practical purpose of Perrault’s contes. This becomes manifest
31 in her translation of the Moralité, which adapts the social critique to her own
32 times. Perrault’s Moralité “La Belle au bois dormant” already comments on
33 women’s attitudes toward marriage:
34
35 Moralité
36 Attendre quelque temps pour avoir un Epoux,
37
Riche, bien fait, gallant et doux,
38
39 La chose est assez naturelle,
S 40 Mais l’attendre cent ans, et toujours en dormant,
R 41 On ne trouve plus de femelle,

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Qui dormît si tranquillement. 1

La Fable semble encore vouloir nous faire entendre, 2
Que souvent de l’Hymen les agréables noeuds, 3
4
Pour être différés, n’en sont pas moins heureux,
5
Et qu’on ne perd rien pour attendre; 6
Mais le sexe avec tant d’ardeur, 7
Aspire à la foi conjugale, 8
Que je n’ai pas la force ni le coeur, 9
De lui prêcher cette morale. 10
11
(Contes 140)
12
13
In Robert Samber’s Histories, or Tales of Past Times (1729), the Moral is trans-
14
lated as follows:
15
16
The Moral. 17
I. 18
To get a husband rich, genteel and gay, 19
Of humour sweet, some time to stay, 20
Is natural enough, ’tis true. 21
22
But then to wait an hundred years,
23
And all that while asleep, appears
24
A thing intirely [sic] new. 25
Now at this time of day, 26
Not one of all the sex we see 27
To sleep with such profound tranquillity. 28
29
II.
30
But yet this Fable seems to let us know
31
That very often Hymen’s blisses sweet, 32
Altho’ some tedious obstacles they meet, 33
Which make us for them a long while to stay, 34
Are not less happy for approaching slow: 35
And that we nothing lose by such delay. 36
37
III.
38
But warm’d by nature’s lambent fires, 39
The sex so ardently aspires 40 S
Of this bless’d state the sacred joy t’embrace, 41 R

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1 And with such earnest heart pursus [sic] ’em:

2 I’ve not the will, I must confess,
3 Nor yet the power, nor fine address,
4
To preach this moral to ’em.
5
(Barchilon and Pettit 57–58)
6
7
8 There are no Morals in The Blue Fairy Book, as in most popular editions of
9 Perrault’s translations. Carter, however, realizes the importance of translating
10 them, and she condenses Perrault’s twofold Moralité as follows:
11
12 Moral
13 A brave, rich, handsome husband is a prize well worth waiting for;
14 but no modern woman would think it was worth waiting for a hun-
15 dred years. The tale of the Sleeping Beauty shows how long engage-
16
ments make for happy marriages, but young girls these days want so
17
18 much to be married I do not have the heart to press the moral.
19 (Fairy Tales 28, emphasis mine)
20
21 Even though Carter follows the source text closely, we notice subtle and signif-
22 icant differences. The shift from verse to prose and the adoption of a terse style
23 match her prosaic, unsentimental, and matter-of-fact message. Carter in this
24 way adopts, but also extends, Perrault’s explicit project of communicating, as
25 he puts it in the epistle dedicatory to “Mademoiselle,” a “Morale très sensée” [a
26 very sensible moral] addressed to young women whom he wanted to alert to
27 the bitter realities of marriage (see Heidmann, “La Barbe bleue”). As in her “Lit-
28 tle Red Riding Hood,” the wise “modern woman” prepared to wait for a suit-
29 able husband is opposed to the foolish “young girls” impatient to marry and
30 live out their empty (and self-centered) dream. The authorial voice ironizes
31 their quest for a “brave, rich, handsome” husband, himself commodified as a
32 “prize,” and cautions against the attitudes encouraged by the Sleeping Beauty
33 myth (but certainly not by Perrault’s “La Belle au bois dormant”)—namely, the
34 desire to marry young because of the appeal of a fairy-tale marriage. What is
35 remarkable about Perrault’s text is that it lends itself to a feminist appropria-
36 tion, down to the benevolent (if mildly ironic) tone expressed by the authorial
37 voice in the concluding lines.
38 To an adult reader alert to the galanterie of Perrault’s tale, the amused ob-
39 servation that his female contemporaries no longer sleep quietly as they wait
S 40 for a suitable husband resonates in the erotic undertones of Carter’s “long en-
R 41 gagements”—a potential euphemism for premarital relationships in the after-

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math of the sexual revolution. Female desire, we remember, is already hinted 1

at in “La Belle au bois dormant” when the narrator speculates that the Princess, 2
upon awakening from her long sleep, looks at the Prince tenderly and ex- 3
claims, “Est-ce vous, mon Prince? . . . vous vous êtes fait bien attendre” (“Is it 4
you, my Prince?” . . . You have kept me waiting for a long time” [Fairy Tales 5
64]), because “elle avait eu le temps de songer à ce qu’elle aurait à lui dire, car 6
il a apparence . . . que la bonne Fée . . . lui avait procuré le plaisir des songes 7
agréables” (Contes 136, emphasis mine). The Blue Fairy Book turns the Princess’s 8
witty (and flirtatious) line into the Prince-centered “You have waited a long 9
while,” and “she had time to think on what to say to him; for it is probable . . . 10
that the good Fairy . . . had given her very agreeable dreams” (Lang 59), avoid- 11
ing the word “pleasure.” The subtle allusion to female dreams and erotic fan- 12
tasies in Perrault’s text is nevertheless important because it is taken up again in 13
the Moral. Although Carter, like Lang, neutralizes it in her translation (“her 14
good fairy had made sure she had sweet dreams during her long sleep” [Fairy 15
Tales 66]), she would elaborate on the sexual subtext of the tale in “The Lady 16
of the House of Love” and other fairy-tale inspired stories. 17
Perrault’s conte, it should be noted, already contains a critique of marriage. 18
Indeed, what brings on the persecution of the bride is not the love story be- 19
tween the Prince and the Princess but the official announcement of their mar- 20
riage when they move to the King’s castle two years later. The happy couple are 21
hurriedly married almost immediately after the Princess’s awakening, literally 22
between supper and going to bed, and in the same sentence: “sans perdre de 23
temps, le grand Aumônier les maria dans la Chapelle du Château, et la dame 24
d’honneur leur tira le Rideau” (Contes 136) (“After supper, the chaplain mar- 25
ried them in the castle chapel and the chief lady-in-waiting drew the curtains 26
round their bed for them” [Fairy Tales 66]). The emphasis in Perrault’s text is 27
on the wedding night: “ils dormirent peu, la Princesse n’en avait pas grand be- 28
soin” (Contes 136) (“They had but very little sleep—the Princess had no occa- 29
sion” [Lang 60]; “They did not sleep much, that night; the princess did not feel 30
in the least drowsy” [Fairy Tales 66]). Two children are soon born of their 31
union, and it is only when the marriage is officially proclaimed and the new 32
King brings his wife to his own castle in great pomp that trouble begins: “il 33
déclara publiquement son Mariage, et alla en grande cérémonie quérir la Reine sa 34
femme dans son Château. On lui fit une entrée magnifique dans la Ville Capi- 35
tale, où elle entra au milieu de ses deux enfants” (Contes 137, emphasis mine) 36
(“he felt confident enough to publically announce his marriage and install the 37
new queen, his wife, in his royal palace with a great deal of ceremony” [Fairy 38
Tales 67–68, emphasis mine]). Marital happiness is therefore associated, both 39
in Perrault’s text and Carter’s translation, with the intimacy and privacy of the 40 S
bedchamber, and is threatened by officialdom (and mothers-in-law). 41 R

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1 Carter gives her own opinion on the subject of early marriages, which
2 Perrault’s Moralité already cautions against, in “An I for Truth” (1977), an arti-
3 cle for New Society written at about the same time as her translations, in which
4 she stigmatizes the conservative ideology of the confession magazines targeted
5 at women, observing with characteristic sharpness that “[t]he ideology behind
6 the romances and the confessions stinks” (1998, 456). Noting how these mag-
7 azines, which “derive from Sunday School literature” (456), extol marriage and
8 repress sexuality, Carter exclaims:
9
They get married so young, these girls! Seventeen, eighteen, nineteen;
10
and the babies come, to complete their happiness, except one girl
11
miscarries and takes to the bottle, another miscarries and becomes
12
frigid. . . . Yet the straightforward populist celebrations of marital
13
love and family life are interspersed with downbeat narratives by
14
people, often in their late thirties or older, coming to terms with di-
15
vorce. . . . Yet marriage remains the principal obsession, even here. It
16
is as if marriage functions as the sexuality of women. It occupies the
17
imagination of these magazines to the same obsessive extent that
18
sexuality itself does in the tit mags. (458)
19
20 Carter concludes with a thought-provoking redefinition of pornography di-
21 rected against the moral majority as well as puritanical feminist thinkers:
22 “They have the false universality of any other mythic places and the value sys-
23 tem has the same false universality, too. And what is really pornographic is the tit-
24 illatory exploitation of the human heart, which is a lot worse than the titillatory
25 exploitation of human flesh” (459, emphasis mine).
26 Thus, it is significant that Perrault’s tales and their (notoriously ambigu-
27 ous) Morals can be bent to accommodate Carter’s feminist beliefs, which sug-
28 gests that they contain a genuine potential for women’s emancipation that
29 Carter brings out in her translations. Echoing Perrault’s plea for a modern lit-
30 erature that would speak to his contemporaries, Carter significantly uses the
31 word “modern” in her Moral, which of course resonates differently in the wake
32 of the feminist movement and Anne Sexton’s critique of the exploitation of
33 fairy-tale patterns in the women’s press and popular culture. For both Perrault
34 and Carter, then, fairy tales serve to carry useful and empowering knowledge
35 for girls and women distinct from conventional morality, and as a modern
36 genre par excellence, they can be (re)made to reflect ever-changing realities
37 and concerns.16
38 Carter, who in her translations sought to caution her young readers, saw
39 herself as a worldly-wise, wry, but sympathetic fairy godmother. In her foreword
S 40 to The Fairy Tales of Charles Perrault, she perceptively observes that:
R 41

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Even Perrault’s specifically magical beings, the Lilac Fairy, Cinderella’s 1

godmother and the guests at the Sleeping Beauty’s christening, have 2
rather less the air of supernatural beings derived from pagan leg- 3
end about them than that of women of independent means who’ve 4
done quite well for themselves, one way and another, and are pre- 5
pared to help along a little sister who finds herself in difficulties, 6
personages as worldly-wise and self-confident as Mae West. (18–19, 7
emphasis mine)17 8
9
As a modern-day equivalent of Perrault’s fées marraines, Carter seeks to break 10
the spell of the Sleeping Beauty myth, and more generally of mainstream cul- 11
ture, which has co-opted fairy tales in the service of conservative values and 12
ideas. Seeing herself as a benevolent “fairy godmother” ready “to help out a lit- 13
tle sister,” Carter could share her experience as an older woman (who married 14
early, and not too happily either, and found later in life a younger and loving 15
partner) and use the fairy tale to articulate a critique of marriage in her trans- 16
lations. But she was nevertheless aware of the limitations of her own powers. 17
As Iona and Peter Opie note about Perrault: 18
In these deeply-penetrating tales, fairy godmothers do not suddenly 19
materialize, waving wands that make everything come right. The 20
power of the godmothers is limited. Sometimes all they are able to 21
offer is advice. They are never able, it seems, to change a worldly situ- 22
ation, or alter a wicked heart. What they can do, on occasion, is assist 23
in the breaking of a spell or in the alleviation of its ill effect. (Classic 24
Fairy Tales 13–14, emphasis mine) 25
26
The storyteller as fairy godmother therefore paradoxically mocks the belief in 27
magical transformations and wish-fulfilling fantasies encouraged by the Sleeping 28
Beauty myth in favor of a worldly wisdom shared by Perrault. 29
In her programmatic essay “Notes from the Front Line” (1983), Carter 30
presented her work as a critique of myth, which she saw, after Barthes, as a 31
form of discourse encoding conservative values and patriarchal interests: “I be- 32
lieve that all myths are products of the human mind and reflect only aspects of 33
material human practice. I’m in the demythologising business. I’m interested 34
in myths—though I’m much more interested in folklore—just because they 35
are extraordinary lies designed to make people unfree” (38). Carter opposed to 36
the mythologies of her times a vision of art seen as a vehicle for practical wis- 37
dom, primarily if not exclusively addressed to women. She thus borrowed 38
from Perrault the idea of the tale as a carrier of a useful message adapted to her 39
own public concerns and values. 40 S
41 R

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1 Sharing with Perrault a strong belief in the usefulness of art (encapsulated

2 in his notion of the “morale utile”), Carter wrote in The Sadeian Woman: An Ex-
3 ercise in Cultural History (1979), on which she was also working at the time:
4 “Fine art, that exists for itself alone, is art in a final state of impotence. If no-
5 body, including the artist, acknowledges art as a means of knowing the world,
6 then art is relegated to a kind of rumpus room of the mind and the irresponsi-
7 bility of the artist and the irrelevance of art to actual living becomes part and
8 parcel of the practice of art” (13). Some feminist critics have notoriously ob-
9 jected to Carter’s use of the fairy tale in The Bloody Chamber, arguing that the
10 author merely reproduces the narrative structures and patriarchal models that
11 they see as inherent in classic tales. But this is to ignore the sexual politics of
12 Perrault’s texts as well as their reworking in Carter’s translations and rewritings,
13 where the idea of “intellectual development” through the active reading of old
14 texts is thematized and enacted. Carter’s productive dialogue with Perrault
15 thus confirms the transmission of unofficial, empowering, as well as entertaining
16 knowledge against the mainstream recuperation and exploitation of fairy tales.
17 While it is no doubt tempting to argue that Carter’s translations seek to
18 contest the cultural authority and alleged conservatism of her source, a com-
19 parative analysis reveals a common intention to caution and empower young
20 women. Indeed, Perrault’s “La Belle au bois dormant” should not be confused
21 with the Sleeping Beauty myth, which evacuates the Moral and completely
22 neutralizes its critique of marriage. Instead of kissing Sleeping Beauty good-
23 bye (to borrow the title of a feminist manifesto), Carter’s translations and
24 rewritings testify to the capacity of Perrault’s tale to accommodate an alterna-
25 tive feminist agenda. Carter, then, was not so much breaking away from Perrault
26 as following his plea for a modern literature as she transposed his “project of
27 worldly instruction” (“Better to Eat” 453) to the late twentieth century. After
28 Perrault, she strove to warn women against the falsity of cultural myths, romantic
29 or otherwise.
30
31
32 Notes
33 This essay is dedicated to my goddaughter Anaïs.
34 1. The picture, shot by famed photographer Annie Leibovitz, is titled “Where Ro-
35 mance Is Celebrated” and is part of Disney Parks’ “What Will You Celebrate?”
36 campaign. See http://extratv.warnerbros.com/2009/03/zac_and_vanessas_disney
_romanc.php. Accessed 17 Sept. 2009.
37 2. See “Mariya Yamada and Toru Kusano Promote Disney’s ‘Sleeping Beauty’ Blu-ray
38 and DVD.” 28 Oct. 2008. www.nt2099.com/J-ENT/news/asian-entertainment/
39 japanese-entertainment-news/mariya-yamada-and-toru-kusano-promote-disneys
S 40 -sleeping-beauty-blu-ray-and-dvd/. Accessed 17 Sept. 2009. On Disney movies
R 41 and culture in relation to the fairy-tale tradition, see Kay Stone’s early essay

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“Things Walt Disney Never Told Us” and the more elaborate “Fairytales for 1
Adults”; see also Jack Zipes’s critical assessment of Disney’s appropriations of the 2
genre in “Breaking the Disney Spell” and “Once Upon a Time beyond Disney.” 3
3. Carter has “wood” in the singular, like Robert Samber’s early English translation
(1729). Samber’s “The Sleeping Beauty in the Wood” is reproduced in Iona and
4
Peter Opie’s The Classic Fairy Tales, which Carter lists in the bibliography to The 5
Fairy Tales of Charles Perrault (1977). 6
4. See Marcia Lieberman’s “ ‘Some Day My Prince Will Come’ ” and Karen R. Rowe’s 7
“Feminism and Fairy Tales.” See also Madonna Kolbenschlag’s Kiss Sleeping Beauty 8
Good-Bye, a feminist study rejecting feminine myths and models identified with
9
Sleeping Beauty.
5. For a discussion of Carter’s translation of Perrault’s contes into English, see Heidmann 10
and Adam’s pioneering essay “Text Linguistics and Comparative Literature,” 11
Zipes’s “The Remaking of Charles Perrault and His Fairy Tales,” Hennard and 12
Heidmann’s “New Wine in Old Bottles,” and Hennard’s “Updating the Politics of 13
Experience.” This work in progress seeks to document Carter’s view of the inter- 14
relationship between reading, translating, and fiction writing as continuous and
inseparable activities. According to Jack Zipes, “As she began her work on Perrault,
15
[Carter] also started writing her own original stories that formed the basis of The 16
Bloody Chamber” (“Remaking” ix). While the critical consensus reads into Carter a 17
feminist imperative to subvert Perrault, translating and rewriting were rather a 18
means for Carter to develop a complex and productive dialogue with his famous 19
contes (see Heidmann and Adam).
20
6. See Hennard’s “Conjuring Curses.” In “The Better to Eat You With,” Carter com-
ments on the dark side of fairy tales, and especially the “dreadful stories” of 21
Andersen, which she read as a child (452). Carter’s reworking of “Sleeping 22
Beauty” as a gothic tale in “The Lady of the House of Love” develops the more dis- 23
turbing aspects of Perrault’s conte and the Grimms’ Märchen. The idea to fuse the 24
fairy tale and vampire fiction may have been inspired by the sense of threat and 25
transgression of boundaries of Perrault’s “La Belle au bois dormant” (which fea-
tures a doomed marriage reminiscent of “La Barbe bleue,” as well as temporal dis-
26
tortions and transgressive fantasies), which becomes an occasion to reflect on the 27
constraints as well as the potential for reinvention of highly coded (sub)genres (a 28
self-conscious dimension already present in Perrault’s conte). 29
7. Martin Ware’s remarkable artwork is an important (and neglected) aspect of the 30
reception of Perrault’s tales in the late twentieth century and of Carter’s transla-
31
tions in particular. His black-and-white etchings contribute to highlighting the
realistic dimension of the tales against the colorful imagery of Disney’s films. His 32
two full-page illustrations of “The Sleeping Beauty in the Wood” depict realisti- 33
cally portrayed people cast in the role of fairy-tale characters and placed in artifi- 34
cial, almost abstract, settings evoking a stylized stage. The first represents the 35
spinner in the tower as an old crone whose head and shoulders emerge from a 36
cardboardlike tower; dressed in black, she sports flylike wings (Perrault, Fairy
Tales 59). The second presents the emblematic scene of the encounter between
37
the Princess and the Prince in an equally unconventional way (65). Framed by 38
drawn curtains, the white horizontal rectangle on which the heroine is laid out is 39
opposed to the vertical black backdrop on which the masculine figure, standing 40 S
still and facing the viewer/audience, detaches himself; the girl is wearing a plain 41 R

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1 dress, and her light hair is neatly arranged in a bun while a blank-eyed youth
2 dressed up as a Prince is staring at her reclining body. The two faces are lit from
3 below, as if by a spotlight. The treatment of the scene foregrounds the theatrical-
ity of Perrault’s text, but shed of its wonder and splendor: “il entre dans une
4 chambre toute dorée, et il vit sur un lit, dont les rideaux étaient ouverts de tous
5 côtés, le plus beau spectacle qu’il eût jamais vu” (Contes 135). Carter’s translation
6 (“At last he arrived in a room that was entirely covered in gilding and, there on a
7 bed with the curtains drawn back so that he could see her clearly, lay a princess”
8 [Fairy Tales 64]) is thus set in contrast with Ware’s drab rendering of the scene as
a downbeat version of the English pantomime tradition.
9
8. All quotations of Perrault’s French contes are from the modern Folio Classique
10 edition edited by Jean-Pierre Collinet and their English equivalent from Carter’s
11 The Fairy Tales of Charles Perrault (1977). Whenever relevant, the translation in-
12 cluded in The Blue Fairy Book (1889), which Lang claims in the preface to be
13 “printed from the old English version of the eighteenth century,” is given. The
14 translation of the Moral is from Samber’s Histories, or Tales of Past Times (1729),
reproduced in Barchilon and Pettit’s The Authentic Mother Goose Fairy Tales and
15 Nursery Rhymes. Occasionally, my own English translation is provided in square
16 brackets.
17 9. The guardian dogs (“les gros mâtins de basse-cour” [Contes 134]) disappear from
18 the long list of the people, animals, and things put to sleep by the fairy. Likewise,
19 the narrator’s wry comment about the King’s unnecessary measures to publish
bans to protect his daughter’s sleep (“Ces défenses n’étaient pas nécessaires”
20
[Contes 134] [These precautions were not necessary]) is eliminated. Apart from
21 avoiding redundant information (the word “défenses” is repeated twice in two
22 consecutive sentences), Carter’s translation tones down the King’s ineffectual ef-
23 forts to protect his daughter, which, as Jean-Pierre van Elslande aptly argues in
24 “Parole d’enfant,” turns “La Belle au bois dormant” into an allegory of the fragility
25 of monarchic power.
10. Likewise, the parenthetical gloss on the magical boots of the dwarf who helps the
26 good fairy (“c’était des bottes avec lesquelles on faisait sept lieues d’une seule en-
27 jambée” [Contes 133] [these were the boots with which one could do seven
28 leagues in one stride]) is eliminated, possibly because the explanation has be-
29 come unnecessary for modern children familiar with “Puss in Boots.” Further, the
30 narrator’s appreciative comment on the old pieces of music played at dinner after
the Princess’s awakening is changed to “the court orchestra played old tunes on
31
violins and oboes they had not touched for a hundred years” (Fairy Tales 66). As
32 a result, Perrault’s narrator’s humorous comment on art and fashion (which is
33 similar to that made previously about the heroine’s high-collared dress similar to
34 the one worn by his grandmother) is eliminated, presumably because these asides
35 are directed at the leisurely and sophisticated members of the salons. In a more
36 cryptic way, the discourse on art may allude to Perrault’s position in the famous
Quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns.
37 11. By eliminating the speculations of Perrault’s narrator on the princess’s sleep and
38 actions, Carter’s translation also tends to reduce the discrepancy between story
39 and telling, seeming and being, appearances and reality, make-believe and truth
S 40 that is central to Perrault’s text. Cutting the humorous metatextual parenthesis
R 41 that raises the issue of the generic status of the text as well as its source exempli-

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fies the simplification of the text for a new audience. In “The Lady of the House of 1
Love,” Carter (like Anne Sexton, Joyce Carol Oates, and Francesca Lia Block 2
among others) will explore the possibility of a nightmarish or traumatic sleep. 3
12. Likewise, the set phrase “dinner [is] ready” (Fairy Tales 66) (“la viande était
servie” [Contes 136]) is reminiscent of family life, which emphasizes the familiar-
4
ity and hominess of the story. 5
13. The idea of the ineffectual cure will be taken up again in “The Lady of the House 6
of Love” when the naïve young man visiting Dracula country plans to take the 7
lady vampire he encounters to the ophthalmologist to cure her oversensitivity to 8
light and to the dentist’s to arrange her teeth.
9
14. The disgruntled fairy had stayed in her tower for “cinquante ans” [fifty years] (Contes
131), but only “fifteen years” (Fairy Tales 58) in Carter’s translation, which suggests 10
that the old fairy is in fact the old woman in the tower, an idea that is reflected in 11
Ware’s illustration of the old spinner as a winged being. As in her “Cinderella; or, 12
the Little Glass Slipper,” Carter (mis)translates the young fairy’s “baguette” [magic 13
wand] (Contes 134) as “magic ring” (Fairy Tales 62), perhaps because the French 14
word indeed contains another “bague” (i.e., ring) in it. In the light of the Moral, the
“magic ring” of the fairy reinforces the ironic association of magic transformation
15
with marriage in Carter’s translation. It may also reflect the influence of folktales 16
and Norse mythology, as well as Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen (which features a 17
sleeping virgin, Brunnhilde, awoken by a courageous knight, Siegfried), W. M. 18
Thackeray’s The Rose and the Ring, and J. R. R. Tolkien’s epic fantasy The Lord of the 19
Rings, which was very popular between the 1960s and 1980s (before being revived
20
by Peter Jackson’s film trilogy in 2001, 2002, and 2003).
15. The softening of the curse is visible in Carter’s translation of “terrible don” (Contes 21
132 [terrible gift]) to “unpleasant present” (Fairy Tales 58). The double aspect of 22
the alleviated curse retains only its positive side in Carter’s truncated translation: 23
“La bonne Fée qui lui avait sauvé la vie, en la condamnant à dormir cent ans” (Contes 24
133, emphasis mine; [The good fairy who saved her life by condemning her to 25
sleep one hundred years]) becomes “the good fairy who saved her life” (Fairy
Tales 61). While the king’s measures to protect his daughter are inspired by fear of
26
the old fairy’s curse (“le malheur annoncé par la vieille” [Contes 132, emphasis mine]; 27
[the misfortune announced by the old fairy]), Carter’s translation stresses the 28
“comfort” (Fairy Tales 60) brought by the intervention of the good fairy. The stress 29
on happiness at the end of Carter’s translation confirms the positive inflection 30
given to the tale.
31
16. For a reassessment of the sexual politics of Perrault’s contes, see Heidmann’s “La
Barbe bleue palimpseste” and “Le Petit Chaperon rouge palimpseste.” Against the 32
dominant critical reception of Perrault as a misogynistic writer, especially in the 33
Anglophone world, Heidmann demonstrates through a comparative analysis of 34
their classical (Ovid, Apuleius) and modern (Boileau, Fénelon, Lhéritier) intertexts 35
that his contes and ironic Moralités are in fact favorable to women. 36
17. Carter mistakenly attributes the Lilac Fairy to Perrault when in fact she is the in-
vention of the anonymous author of the apocryphal version of Donkey Skin pub-
37
lished in the eighteenth century, which Carter used instead of Perrault’s conte en 38
vers. Her association of Perrault’s fairies with Mae West is reflected in Martin 39
Ware’s etching of the Lilac Fairy as modeled on the sexy and emancipated actress, 40 S
down to the design of her dress. 41 R

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5 Nursery Rhymes. Denver: Alan Swallow, 1960.
6 Carter, Angela. “An I for Truth.” 1977. Shaking a Leg. 455–59.
———. “The Better to Eat You With.” 1976. Shaking a Leg. 451–55.
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———. The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories. London: Penguin, 1979.
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11 Heidmann, Ute. “ ‘La Barbe bleue’ palimpseste.” Poétique 154 (2008): 161–82.
12 ———. “Comment faire un conte moderne avec un conte ancien? Perrault en dialogue
avec Apulée et La Fontaine.” Littérature 153 (2009): 19–36.
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15 française des Contes de Perrault. Ed. Claire Badiou-Monferran, 2010.
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34 Opie, Iona, and Peter Opie. The Classic Fairy Tales. London: Oxford UP, 1974.
Perrault, Charles. Contes. 1697. Ed. Jean-Pierre Collinet. Paris: Gallimard, 1981.
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