[The
above video is mostly a reading of the text below, with an occasional aside
thrown in for good measure as they strike me as relevant. I
welcome questions, comments, or concerns about the material contained in this
video.]
I usually don’t prefer the short story as a literary form, but I was in the mood for something whimsical and mercurial, so I thought these self-described fairy tales would do the trick. And they did. “The Bloody Chamber” is a collection of ten stories, all based around the fairy tales that we read (or should have read) as a child, including Bluebeard, Beauty and the Beast, Puss-in-Boots, Snow White, and Little Red Riding Hood. Most of them are very short, while one (the eponymous story) is about forty pages long. All of these are taken from the original source in the seventeenth-century writer Charles Perrault, whom Carter translated from the French.
Of course, it can be magical to go back and read stories that you haven’t read in decades, and that is a small part of this book’s charm. But for me, the greatest part of the book was the language. It is grandiloquent, rococo, big, and coruscating. It’s the kind of language that is right at home in fairy tales, and I felt this from the first sentence of the first story: “I remember how, that night, I lay awake in the wagon-lit in a tender, delicious ecstasy of excitement, my burning cheek pressed against the impeccable linen of the pillow and the pounding of my heart mimicking that of the great pistons ceaselessly thrusting the train that bore me through the night, away from Paris, away from girlhood, away from the white, enclosed quietude of my mother's apartment, into the unguessable country of marriage.”
And the thunderously operatic opening that describes the swashbuckling Puss-in-Boots: “Figaro here; Figaro, there, I tell you! Figaro upstairs, Figaro downstairs and – oh, my goodness me, this little Figaro can slip into my lady’s chamber smart as you like at any time whatsoever that he takes the fancy for, don’t you know, he’s a cat of the world, cosmopolitan, sophisticated; he can tell when a furry friend is the Missus’ best company. For what lady in all the world could say ‘no’ to the passionate yet toujours advances of a fine marmalade cat?” How can you read sentences like that and not be sucked in with a naïve child-like sense of expectation?
Two things to note: as other reviewers have said, even though I read most of these back-to-back, they might be best spread out over several days. The next time I read them, I’ll know to savor them instead; they’re simply too full of imagination to read all at one sitting. Also, several people have mentioned (sometimes approvingly, sometimes not) Carter’s “feminism.” This isn’t the postmodern French feminism that I could understand someone disliking. It is only a smart, humorous, introspective look at the inner lives and concerns of girls and young women. I thought it a much-wanted counterpoint to the inner lives of boys that we see in a lot of similar literature. In fact, I think many of them would make fantastic bedtime stories. To read these stories is to love them.
Of course, it can be magical to go back and read stories that you haven’t read in decades, and that is a small part of this book’s charm. But for me, the greatest part of the book was the language. It is grandiloquent, rococo, big, and coruscating. It’s the kind of language that is right at home in fairy tales, and I felt this from the first sentence of the first story: “I remember how, that night, I lay awake in the wagon-lit in a tender, delicious ecstasy of excitement, my burning cheek pressed against the impeccable linen of the pillow and the pounding of my heart mimicking that of the great pistons ceaselessly thrusting the train that bore me through the night, away from Paris, away from girlhood, away from the white, enclosed quietude of my mother's apartment, into the unguessable country of marriage.”
And the thunderously operatic opening that describes the swashbuckling Puss-in-Boots: “Figaro here; Figaro, there, I tell you! Figaro upstairs, Figaro downstairs and – oh, my goodness me, this little Figaro can slip into my lady’s chamber smart as you like at any time whatsoever that he takes the fancy for, don’t you know, he’s a cat of the world, cosmopolitan, sophisticated; he can tell when a furry friend is the Missus’ best company. For what lady in all the world could say ‘no’ to the passionate yet toujours advances of a fine marmalade cat?” How can you read sentences like that and not be sucked in with a naïve child-like sense of expectation?
Two things to note: as other reviewers have said, even though I read most of these back-to-back, they might be best spread out over several days. The next time I read them, I’ll know to savor them instead; they’re simply too full of imagination to read all at one sitting. Also, several people have mentioned (sometimes approvingly, sometimes not) Carter’s “feminism.” This isn’t the postmodern French feminism that I could understand someone disliking. It is only a smart, humorous, introspective look at the inner lives and concerns of girls and young women. I thought it a much-wanted counterpoint to the inner lives of boys that we see in a lot of similar literature. In fact, I think many of them would make fantastic bedtime stories. To read these stories is to love them.
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