He snuffed the air, as if to smell my fear he could not. He growled at the back of his throat, lowered his head, sank on to his forepaws, snarled, showed me his red gullet, his yellow teeth. I was now within the field of force of his golden eyes. I squatted on the wet straw and stretched out my hand. At the end of the tale, the heroine is ushered, naked, into the beast’s chamber. The beauty is changed into a beast, a beautiful one, by means of one of the more memorable sex acts in twentieth-century fiction. In Carter’s version of “Beauty and the Beast,” retitled “The Tiger’s Bride,” the beast doesn’t change into a beauty.
This does not mean that Carter’s Little Red Riding Hood chews gum or rides a motorcycle but that the strange things in those tales-the werewolves and snow maidens, the cobwebbed caves and liquefying mirrors-are made to live again by means of a prose informed by psychoanalysis and cinema and Symbolist poetry. The English novelist Angela Carter is best known for her 1979 book “The Bloody Chamber,” which is a kind of updating of the classic European fairy tales. Illustration by Oliver Munday / Photograph courtesy Andrew Travers Carter’s taste for folklore, psychoanalysis, and luridness enabled her to take the fairy tale in new and shocking directions.
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