What themes and tropes of the Gothic does Tim Burton's 1982 film, 'Vincent' pick up on?
What do fairytales offer us...... or why might Carter want to rewrite them?
Robert Clark saw her fairytale reworkings as '[o]ld chauvinism, new clothing' and her writing as 'a feminism in male chauvenist drag'
Patricia Duncker argued that the stories 'reiterate the 'classical pornographic model if sexuality, which has a definite meaning and endorses a particular kind of fantasy, that of male sexual tyranny within a marriage that is grossly unequal' (Duncker, 1984)
Reading Literature: The Gothic Short Story
What is the short story?
REcap
Some definitions of the short story
Gustav Freytag's diagram for story structure
Short story
- Defined by length or content?
- Up until C19th treated as a condensed novel (cf. Dickens).
- Does it have a beginning, a middle, and an end? (cf. Aristotle on plot)
length or content; intensity; an idea you can 'hold'; a 'glimpse'; connected to developments in the marketplace and technology and magazine culture; Poe and Hawthorne - connection to the gothic.
A (very) brief history
Gothic
story of terror and suspense with numerous recognisable conventions and tropes.
Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849)
- to be read in one sitting
- 'unity of impression'
- 'twist in the tale'
Henry James (1843-1916)
- the ss allows one to 'do the complicated thing with a strong brevity and lucidity - to arrive, on behalf of the multiplicity, at a certain science of control'
V.S. Pritchett (1900-1997)
'The novel tends to tell us everything whereas the short story tells us only one thing, and that, intensely.... It is, as some have said, a "glimpse through," resembling a painting or even a song which we can take in at once, yet bring the recesses and contours of larger experience to the mind,'
Nadine Gordimer (1923-2014)
'whether it sprawls or neatly bites its own tail, a short story is a concept that the writer can 'hold', fully realised, in his imagination, at one time. A novel is, by comparison, staked out, and must be taken possessions of stage by stage; it is impossible to contain, all at once.'
Carter
- interested in gothic's ability to challenge value systems of society.
- fairytales as representative of society's 'lies'
- interest in rewriting old forms/genres from feminist perspective
- problematic use of sex and violence - de Sade
Overview of today's lecture
Qs.
- Short narratives are one of the oldest literary forms: Ancient Greek and Roman fables (animals with human qualities) and Biblical stories or parables (analogy).
- SS becomes identifiable in early C19th. Magazines and periodicals play an important part in this (Nathaniel Hawthorne; Washington Irving; Edgar Allan Poe).
- Writers soon begin to revolutionise the SS by trying to make it more artful and implicit.
- Becomes very popular in late C19th (more so in America)
- Modernist stories – epiphany
- Minimalism – Hemingway and Carver
- Science fiction – Bradbury, Dick and Asimov
- 1980s micro, flash and sudden fiction (short short stories)
Can we really change the meanings inherent in older forms or genres?
What is the gothic novel?
Linked to gothic revival in architecture in mid C18th.
1. The short story: its definition and history
2. The gothic genre
3. Angela Carter's 'The Bloody Chamber'
- Ruined/imposing architecture (castle etc)
- Wild landscapes
- Fragmented manuscripts – authority and authenticity in question
- Monks, evil aristocrats, innocent women/victims, ghosts, supernatural, corpses etc.
- The Sublime
- Romance
- Anxiety about the family
- Transgression
- Secrets and enigmas
- Repression and control
- Origins and social structures
- Excess and the unnatural
- Blurred boundaries - reason and emotion, fantasy and reality, natural and supernatural, past and present.
- Mary Shelley, Horace Walpole, Ann Radcliffe, Matthew Lewis.
‘A story of terror and suspense, usually set in a gloomy old castle or monastery (hence ‘Gothic’, a term applied to medieval architecture and thus associated in the 18th century with superstition). […] In an extended sense, many novels that do not have a medievalized setting, but which share a comparably sinister, grotesque, or claustrophobic atmosphere, have been classed as Gothic’
Baldick, C. (2008). Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms. Oxford: OUP, p. 144.
Angela Carter 1940 - 1992
Born Angela Olive Stalker in Eastbourne, in 1940.
Worked as a journalist on the Croydon Advertiser.
Married twice, leaving her first husband using the proceeds of the Somerset Maugham Award for literature and spending two years living in Tokyo where she ‘learnt what it is to be a woman and became radicalised’ (Carter 1992: 28).
She then explored the United States, Asia and Europe.
Spent much of the late 1970s and 1980s as a writer in residence at universities.
Two of her works of fiction have been adapted for the screen; ‘The Company of Wolves’ (1984) and ‘The Magic Toyshop’ (1987).
Angela Carter died on the 16th of February 1992 at the age of 51 from cancer. Margaret Atwood said of her in the obituary published in The Observer Newspaper one week later:
‘She was the opposite of parochial. Nothing, for her, was outside the pale: she wanted to know about everything and everyone, and every place and every word. She relished life and language hugely, and revelled in the diverse’ (Margret Atwood 1992).
- SS more than just a short narrative.
- Brevity
- Lucidity
- Control
- Singular effect or idea
- An idea the author can 'hold'
- Artful
- Strategic
- Connected to developments in marketplace/commerce as well as technological advances.
- More popular in America than Britain
Angela Carter
and the gothic
Gothic important for the development of SS - Hawthorne and Poe used genre and were two of main writers of SS.
But.... gothic begins much earlier than this with 1764 Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto - first gothic novel.
- Influenced by the gothic and specifically Edgar Allan Poe: ‘I’ve used him a lot decoratively, but never structurally. I don’t know if that makes sense. […] I’ve used a lot of the imagery of my own’ in Bedford, L. (1977), 'Angela Carter: An Interview', University of Sheffield Television
- Carter interested in gothic's tendency towards ambiguity and contradiction, the way it challenges boundaries.
- Carter believes that gothic writing ‘grandly ignores the value systems of our institutions; it deals entirely with the profane. […] Its style will tend to be ornate, unnatural – and thus operates against the perennial human desire to believe the word as fact.’ Afterword to Fireworks: Nine Profane Pieces (1974), Quartet Books, p. 459.
Carter's Writing Technique
Preparation for the Seminar:
Exponent of Short Story form
'I am all for putting new wine in old bottles, especially if the new wine makes the old bottles explode' (Carter 1983, p. 69)
A brief history of the term “Gothic”
- Goths: a Germanic people who settled in much of Europe – 2nd-6th centuries AD
- Gothic architecture: 12th-15th centuries A.D. – pointed arches, stained-glass panels, narrow spires, turrets, gargoyles
- Connotations: paganism, Catholicism, embellishment to the point of excess, fear of eternal damnation
A marginalised form?
- Not considered as serious as the novel.
- Apprenticeship for 'proper' writing.
- J. G. Ballard called the form 'the loose change in the treasury of fiction' (Ballard 2001, p. iv)
A brief history of the term “Gothic”
The Fairytale
Little girls, this seems to say,
Never stop upon your way.
Never trust a stranger-friend;
No one knows how it will end.
As you're pretty, so be wise;
Wolves may lurk in every guise.
Handsome they may be, and kind,
Gay, or charming- never mind!
Now as then, 'tis simple truth -
Sweetest tongue has sharpest tooth!
Perrault
What do you think?
Little
Red
Riding Hood
- Enlightenment: 17th-18th centuries – the “Age of Reason”
- By the 18th century “Gothic” had become synonymous to “medieval”
- Romanticism – period in literature that emphasises imagination, wonder, and emotion. Draws on positive aspects of the gothic
- Gothic revival in architecture: early 18th-late 19th centuries – houses of Parliament – St. Pancras Station
- Often: “according to their own taste, and shaped and reshaped in a form that corresponded to their concept of an ideal folk tale” (Zipes, J. (2002), The Brothers Grimm: From Enchanted Forests to the Modern World. New York: Palgrave, p. 159.
- Not originally for children as “children and childhood did not exist until recent centuries” (Sale 1978, p. 26)
- Beyond the everyday experience of the short story but with obvious similarities in technique.
Important questions to address:
'The Bloody Chamber' as short story
Snow white, Sleeping Beauty, Rapunzel, the Little Mermaid
Angela Carter's The Bloody Chamber
1. Read Angela Carter’s ‘The Bloody Chamber’ and J. Sheridan Le Fanu’s ‘Carmilla’ (both available on Blackboard)
2. Read chapter ‘The End’ from Bennett and Royle’s An Introduction to Literature (hard copy in the library or e-book – see above link).
3. Make notes on the seminar questions provided on Blackboard.
Has anything changed?
1. Can a reactionary/conservative genre every really be rewritten?
2. Sex and violence
- Problematic use of the Marquis de Sade (Sadism)
- Carter wrote The Sadeian Woman: An Exercise in Cultural History in 1979 (same year as BC)
- She saw de Sade as the father of the gothic mode.
1 story on Bluebeard - 'The Bloody Chamber'
3 stories on Beauty and the Beast/cats – ‘The Courtship of Mr Lyon’, ‘The Tiger’s Bride’, ‘Puss-in-Boots’
3 stories on supernatural beings/vampires– ‘The Erl-King’, ‘The Snow Child’, ‘The Lady of the House of Love’
3 stories on wolves – ‘The Werewolf’, ‘The Company of Wolves’, ‘Wolf-Alice’
- Based on folktale of Bluebeard and Perrault's fairytale 'La Barbe Bleue' (1697) - cautionary tale for women. Real Bluebeard was Gilles de Rais C15th nobleman who abused and murdered children.
- Specifically French location - reference to gothic and fairytale tradition.
- Gothic conventions – house, rakish older aristocratic husband, innocence and corruption, journey to an unknown land/space, comingling of fear and desire, Marquis as animalistic (beast or cat), choker of rubies/blood ominous portent of beheading, his previous wife was called Carmilla.
- Women are denigrated objects to be bought.
- Beast as a projection of the girl’s own desire? Uncanny doubling?
- Femininity is active, sensual, desiring, unruly – she can be corrupted.
- Does she enjoy the fear - 'he sensed in her a rare talent for corruption'
- The stain of sexual passion (Eve). Shame?
- Blind, useless lover and active mother who rescues her (not her brothers, as in original)
- “To exist in the passive case is to die in the passive case- that is to be killed. This is the moral of the fairy tale about the perfect woman” (Carter 1998, p. 77).
- Narrated in the first person
Why?
- Intention to make us feel uneasy - use of gothic and fairytale to do this?
- Acknowledges the existence of a range of desires for women?
The Bloody Chamber as a collection
- Her aim was “to combat traditional myths about the nature of woman, she constructs other, more subversive ones” (Atwood, in Sage 1994, p. 122).
- Female protagonists are rewarded not punished, sexually active not passive
- Complex range of desires which aren't always heteronormative
- They are a match for the villains - women as aggressors as well as their own 'rescuers'
- Deconstructs cultural gender stereotypes
- Plays with the previous versions, makes changes
- Doesn't provide easy answers
- Equality between the sexes (in some instances!)
- Questions essentialist definitions of gender and sexuality
- Carter translated two editions of fairytales, which included the work of Perrault, in 1977 and 1982.
- Carter edited the Virago Book of Fairy Tales in 1990 and the Second Virago Book of Fairy Tales in 1992
- Carter saw fairy tales as encoding the dark and mysterious elements of the psyche.
- Carter argued that both literature and folklore are Carter quoted in Makinen, 1992, p. 22‘vast repositories of outmoded lies, where you can check out what lies used to be a la mode and find the old lies on which the new lies are based’
- Carter argued that TBC is a book of stories about fairytales.
- Carter is interested in narrative versions or what she called 'reformulations’ (Preface to Come Unto These Yellow Sands)
- Rewriting to change the meaning and deconstruct the original folktales from a feminist angle.
- 'My intention was not to do 'versions' or, as the American edition of the book said, horribly, 'adult' fairy tales, but to extract the latent content from the traditional stories and to use it as the beginnings of new stories.'
http://www.theguardian.com/books/2006/jun/24/classics.angelacarter
See you next week!