Revisiting Angela Carter's timeless, devastating The Bloody Chamber on the writer's 80th birth anniversary

In her memoir Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? Jeanette Winterson wrote about the idea of the book as a home. “Books don’t make a home — they are one, in the sense that just as you do with a door, you open a book, and you go inside,” she said, in a chapter that moved me in that profound and particular way that great writing moves us — when we encounter a truth we had nursed and deeply cherished inside of us for a long time, our loneliness erased by witnessing it so exactly expressed by a complete stranger.

Equally, another truth about reading is that a fierce and ferocious love can be found in particular books far more than others. One may love many different books, but one does not love them in the same way. Some loves are fond and affectionate, while others short-lived and soon forgotten entirely. A chosen few, however, hit you in the solar plexus with a feeling that is both recognition and yearning. This kind of love feels personal in a way that a lover does. Communing with such a book is like holding a beloved.

Ten years ago, I encountered just such a book. The first time I read the lush, sensuous, vivid prose of the title story of The Bloody Chamber, I got gooseflesh. In the decade since, in the many times I have revisited them, the tales have remained as devastating.

Published in 1979, these are dark and luscious fairy tales, at once stark and ornate in their depiction of horror, violence and sexuality, which is the “latent content” that their writer, Angela Carter, wanted to extract from the original fairy tales of the Western canon (before they were famously sanitised by the Brothers Grimm).

Revisiting them now, I am struck by what feels like a curious timelessness that the stories share. This is the magical quality of the tale, which exists outside of the clock-time that governs our reality. Although the tales are diverse, and some are easily situated in the early 20th century (with references to World War I, for example, in the vampire tale The Lady of the House of Love), they share this characteristic. Carter’s rococo prose intensifies this; reference points are not to particular years or days, but to seasons and lunations, to midwinter, the solstice, and the equinox.

Within this magical time exist many familiar archetypes: the ingenue of the title story, which is based on Bluebeard, is one such character. She is the young woman who must make the Fool’s journey from innocence to experience. She is curiously mirrored in the very last story, Wolf Alice, where a child raised by wolves (and who, therefore, exists always in the present, inhabiting the same timelessness that Carter evokes) learns to recognise and befriend herself.

Some children don’t survive the cruelties and degradations of the world, as Carter shows in The Snow Child, the shortest and most brutally gutting tale in the collection. Some, like the girls in the first of Carter’s three tellings of the Little Red Riding Hood tale, find that they thrive when they stick to the oppressive status quo. But another equally powerful archetype is that of the wise child – a resourceful young girl with agency who knows exactly what she wants and how to get it, or knows how to set her terms even in an unfavourable situation, like Beauty in The Tiger’s Bride, who her father loses to the Beast at cards. Like the young girl in The Erl-King, who is discerning enough to know the difference, like the poet Adrienne Rich said, “between love and death” — and chooses to kill before she is killed. Or like the girl in The Company of Wolves, who laughs full in the face of the wolf, knowing that “she was nobody’s meat”.

There is also the relationship between animals and humans — and, crucially, between what is ‘animal’ and what is ‘human’. In two mirrored tales based on Beauty and the Beast, the couple is transformed twice over — in the first tale, the Beast is transformed, and in the second, Beauty is. The vampire and the werewolf in The Lady of the House of Love and Wolf Alice display, viscerally, the animal nature of our lives (which we are unwise to think of as base, as Carter hints), while in a commedia dell’arte Puss in Boots, the dashing ginger tom-cat is the facilitator of a delightful rendezvous between his human and a woman the latter is besotted by.

The maiden is very well, but in my latest revisiting of the collection, what struck me most powerfully was Carter’s depiction of the two older figures of the Triple Goddess archetype. The Triple Goddess recurs in myth, folklore and legend in cultures across the world, and features a triad usually called the Maiden, the Mother, and the Crone. Carter’s treatment of the middle-aged and the old woman is one of the things that keeps this book almost entirely as fresh as it was the day it was published, despite some dated language.

The mother in the title story is not-this not-this, and not-that not-that — she fits no motherly cliches, patriarchal or otherwise. She is what the original tale doesn’t allow her to be, reserving the role for the young heroine’s brothers — the literal hero, the person who comes riding on the back of the horse to save the day. In The Courtship of Mr Lyon and The Tiger’s Bride (the two Beauty and the Beast tales), the older woman is conspicuous by her absence, leading the ingenue to be led into the Beast’s home because of a father’s folly.

In Puss in Boots, the character of the “hag” is what is coming between the young woman and her paramour — but it is clear that the old woman is doing exactly what every other character in the story is interested in doing — self-preservation and self-actualisation. In The Lady of the House of Love, it is the crone who brings the vampire maiden her prey, and it is the crone who mourns her when she is lost. But it is the crone of The Werewolf that meets the cruellest fate, mirroring The Snow Child — because she is a wise woman, she is destroyed. “It is perhaps the Crone’s power that represents the greatest threat to the patriarchal system, else why would it be the most suppressed?” wrote Shekinah Mountainwater. “She is as necessary and integral to our lives as the Maiden and the Mother, and her loss is bitter…” It is this loss that reverberates through so many of Carter’s tales of women doing what they can to chart their paths through a ruthless and often unknowable world.

Carter herself would have been 80 today — a Crone. Writers like her — those who are remembered — experience the same timelessness enjoyed by the characters that populate her tales. Through her baroque, intricate and courageous storytelling, she continues to invite us to look into the absence or desecration of the figure of the old woman — how it shapes us, what it says about us, and what it does to us. At the same time she sings of the crone’s enduring power and resilience, and we would do well to listen.