The journey of the White Witch to the Beast’s Garden is a fraught and perilous trek through the beginnings of the realm of Faery, starting out at the dawn of humanity, with the first feminist fairy tale, that of the Animal Bride/Groom, in which, according to noted folklorist Terri Windling, “a human man or woman is married to an animal, or an animal-like monster” and “the animal spouse might be a shape-shifter, or an ordinary mortal under a curse, or a creature of mixed blood from the animal, human, and/or divine realms.”
Join us on our trek through the recording of Faery, culminating with the arrival of the White Witch (Angela Carter) in the Beast’s garden.
From the beginning of time, humanity has told stories. We’ve painted them on caves to flicker by fire, we’ve passed them down through family lines, and etched them on stone tablets. When groups of us met, we’ve traded them along with furs and grains. Fairyland has been with us since we became us.
Many eons later, the written versions started to occur, when two Italians got very excited about recording the oral traditions during the Italian Renaissance. Giovanni Francesco Straparola published the first (Western) collection of fairy tales in two volumes starting in 1551, known as The Facetious Nights or The Pleasant Nights. Giambattista Basile, another Italian fairy tale collector, wrote a collection of Neapolitan fairy tales The Tale of Tales, or Entertainment for Little Ones published after his death in 1634 and 1636. He included the oldest known version of Rapunzel and Cinderella.
But the first usage of the words “fairy tales” originated in 1697, with Baronne d’Aulnoy (Marie-Catherine Le Jumel de Barneville) with her collection of tales, Les Contes des fées. Her writings, original tales based on folk lore, included worlds of beasts and their loves and heroines overcoming significant obstacles to achieve their happily ever afters.
The same year, Frenchman Charles Perrault collected his own versions of the tales of the trips to fairy in his collection, Histoires ou Contes du temps passé avec des moralité, published in 1697. He included versions of Puss in Boots, Sleeping Beauty, and Bluebeard, among others.
150 (or so) years after Countess d’Aulnoy and Perrault, the Brothers Grimm also produced a collection, (giving their spin to the stories) Kinder und Hausmarchen, published in 1812. Their first edition was comprised of 86 stories, but by the seventh edition (1857), had 211 unique fairy tales based on folk lore and oral traditions.
And then, we have our heroine, the White Witch Angela Carter, who started her adventures in the realm of Faery with a translation of Charles Perrault’s Histoires. “Each century tends to create or re-create fairy tales after its own taste,” Carter writes in the foreword. And, much in the matter of Countess d’Aulnoy, she also at the same time was starting to write her own versions, which became The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories, published in 1977. Unsurprisingly, she drew heavily from Perrault. “Little Red Riding Hood” became “The Company of Wolves.” “The History of Blue Beard” became the title story of the collection, “The Bloody Chamber.”
Also much like Countess d’Aulnoy, these are not stories for the faint of heart or children. In “The Tiger’s Bride,” her take on Beauty and the Beast, her protagonist is given to the Tiger groom after her father loses her in a game of cards and ends with her accepting the beast into her virgin bed, where the great tiger licks her flesh away to reveal her own beast within.
With this, Angela Carter returned us back to the dawn of time, reworking one of the oldest tales in existence — the animal groom, which is one of the four oldest known tales, according to a recent paper examining linguistic analysis in fairy tales, “Comparative phylogenetic analyses uncover the ancient roots of Indo-European folktales” by Sara Graça da Silva and Jamshid J. Tehrani, published in 2016.
(For the record, according to the paper, the four oldest are, “The Boy Steals Ogre’s Treasure,” “The Smith and the Devil,” “The Animal Bride/Groom,” and “The Grateful Animals,” with the oldest of the four being “The Smith and the Devil.”)
If you haven’t read The Bloody Chamber, this is a situation you should remedy, if you like short stories, exquisite writing, and more than your fair share of erotically charged moist horror. Angela Carter’s work would go on to inspire modern feminist speculative writers, such as Margaret Atwood:
“Second, Angela Carter. What an inexhaustible source of strange details and worldly wisdom she was. How instructive, how fundamentally helpful. How like the white-haired fairy godmother you always wished you had.”
And Neil Gaiman:
”The Bloody Chamber is such an important book to me,” he says. “Angela Carter, for me, is still the one who said: ‘You see these fairy stories, these things that are sitting at the back of the nursery shelves? Actually, each one of them is a loaded gun. Each of them is a bomb. Watch: if you turn it right it will blow up.’ And we all went: ‘Oh my gosh, she’s right — you can blow things up with these!'”
One of Chris Riddell’s beautiful illustrations from Gaiman’s own fairy tale collection, The Sleeper and The Spindle
You can see her heritage as well in authors like Robin McKinley, Patricia McKillip, and Tanith Lee.
Unfortunately for the worlds of literary and speculative fiction, Angela Carter (born in 1940) died fairly young, at the age of 52, in 1992. Along with The Bloody Chamber, she was also a journalist, feminist, and historian.
If you truly want “a tale as old as time,” then her versions of the old tales, the ones that have been around since the dawn of stories themselves, are a land well worth visiting.
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