New Wine in Old Bottles

Write about an author famous for their fairy tale retellings.

New Wine in Old Bottles 

Angela Carter was born in Eastbourne in 1940. She has been described as one of the most brilliant and innovative writers of the 20^th century. In 1979, she published The Bloody Chamber which was a collection of subversive fairy tales. She said that, ’I am all for putting new wine in old bottles, especially if the pressure of the new wine makes the old bottles explode’. She wanted to tell the stories from a feminist point-of-view.

Charles Perrault (1628-1703) published Stories or Tales from Times Past, with Morals, and one of the stories was Bluebeard. His version of ‘Bluebeard’, is told in the first person. These are the opening lines:

There was a man who had fine houses, both in town and country, a deal of silver and gold plate, embroidered furniture, and coaches gilded all over with gold. But this man had the misfortune to have a blue beard, which made him so frightfully ugly, that all the women and girls ran away from him. 

In Angela Carter’s version, ‘The Bloody Chamber’, the story is told in the first person. This is the opening paragraph:

I remember how, that night, I lay awake on 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. 

Carter said that she wanted to draw out the latent content of the fairy tales. Her aim was to interpret the stories in terms of the social realism of the unconscious.

Bertil Romberg, stresses the importance of the ‘I’ point of view as it ‘binds the reader more tightly to the fiction’. He added that, ‘there is a sort of two-man partnership between reader and narrator, and here we glimpse the primeval epic situation, where someone who has had some experience or other relates this experience to someone else’. So in the Carter version we can identify with the young narrator who feels ‘an ecstasy of excitement’ as she leaves Paris and heads to ‘the unguessable country of marriage’. 

In the Perrault tale, the moral was that the women’s curiosity got them into trouble and put their lives in danger. 

“Here,” said he, “are the keys of the the two great wardrobes, wherein I have my best furniture…..but for this little one here, it is the key of the closet at the end of the great gallery on the ground floor. Open them all; go into all and every one of them; except that little closet which I forbid you, and forbid it in such a manner that, if you happen to open it, there will be no bounds to my just anger and resentment”. 

Also in Perrault’s version, it is the brothers who rescue the poor wife who has disobeyed her husband’s order not to go into a particular room:

The gate was opened, and two horsemen entered. Drawing their swords, they ran directly to Blue Beard.  He knew them to be his wife’s brothers, one a dragoon, the other a musketeer; so that he ran away immediately to save himself…then they ran their swords through his body and left him dead.  

However, in Carter’s version, it is the mother who rescues her daughter:

On her eighteenth birthday, my mother had disposed of a man-eating tiger that had ravaged the villages in the hills north of Hanoi. Now, without a moment’s hesitation, she raised my father’s gun, took aim and put a single, irreproachable bullet through my husband’s head. 

Then we find out that the widow, Jean-Yves and her mother turn the castle into a school for the blind. The three of them live outside Paris and run a music school. 

In Perrault’s tale, the widow is assumed into the patriarchal order by marrying again. But in Carter’s tale, the widow asserts her independence by running a music school. She does not have to depend on a man.  

Carter also retold the tale of ‘Beauty and the Beast’. Charles Perrault’s version opens as follows:

A long time ago, in a faraway land, a merchant was returning home after a long journey. As night fell, he entered a deep forest. His head was full of thoughts of his six daughters. He had left home in summer, and now he was returning in deep winter.

In ‘The Courtship of Mr Lyon’, Carter also writes in the third person:

Outside her kitchen window, the hedgerow glistened as if the snow possessed a light of its own; when the sky darkened towards evening, an unearthly, reflected pallor remained behind upon the winter’s landscape, while the soft flakes floated down. 

In the Perrault version, the story opens with the description of the merchant, returning home after a long journey whereas in the Carter version we get the perspective of the daughter who describes the wintry scene outside. 

Paul Magrs writes that ‘third-person perspective has the most variations: 

This is the overarching voice; the one that is the least embodied. The third person narrator can be anywhere within the text; it can know everything, like Charles Dickens’ narrators seem to do, and visit every home and hide out of the characters.  

It has also been argued that: 

The narrator never misses a trick, and can search every nook and cranny of the head and every nook and cranny of the heart, every nook and cranny of the house.  The narrator leaves no stone unturned, or leaves no unsolved clues or any loose ends or unfinished business. He doesn’t play fast and loose and lead you up a blind alley. No he’s always in charge of his characters. 

Carter’s retelling and reshaping of Perrault’s tales gives them a new lease of life and explores their latent content.