Once more. I know I have mentioned Angela Carter's collection, Saints and Strangers, several days running now. This time around, however, I have actually finished reading it. It may be a slim little volume, but it really is better to read these stories slowly! I feel like I have taken them at a bit of a whirlwind pace and probably missed details and passages I should have spent more time on. Carter's prose is really astounding. What she does with words is impressive! If I read this book too quickly, I still have the comfort of knowing I can and will read more of her work (including some of the stories in this collection again). The New York Times reviewer (Charles Newman) wrote that "her writing transcends nationality and critical labels, genre and gender." I wholeheartedly agree.
This is the book I chose to read for Carl's challenge that falls under the category of "folk tale". She takes legends--based on real people as well as literary references and reworks the stories in her own inimitable fashion.
"The narrative owes a great deal to the structure of fairy tales - that authoritative voice out of the blue, avoiding dialogue whenever possible, embroidering seemingly opaque events with illuminating prologues and postludes, playing off the tales struck by rote in the reader's head, fantasies achieved in the guise of historical meditations." (NYT review).
I can see where these can be read in from a feminist perspective--oftentimes they revolve around or are told from the woman's point of view. And more often than not there is a sense of overt sexuality within the stories that was at times a little surprising.
I found the most recognizable story to be "The Fall River Axe Murders". I would imagine that most Americans are familiar with the legend of Lizzie Borden who purportedly murdered her father and stepmother. This was also one of my favorite stories in the collection. She doesn't spend much time on the actual murders. It's the setting of the scene, building up of the characters and the motivations where she works her magic. You get a vivid sense of people and place. I am only going to share one short passage, but this will give you a sense of Carter's writing (it was a particularly hot and humid summer, and the Borden family had been eating mutton several days running, not that that curbed the appetite of the gluttonous Mrs. Borden):
"There is nothing like cold mutton. The sinewy, grey, lean meat amidst the veined lumps of congealed fat, varicosed with clotted blood; it must be the sheep's pyrrhic vengeance on the carnivore! Considering that which lay upon her plate, Mrs. Borden's habitual gluttony takes on almost an heroic quality. Undeterred by the vileness of the table, still she pigs valiantly away while the girls look on, push their own plates away, wince to see the grease on her chin."
Can't you just see that? It's almost nauseous even thinking about it!
"The Kiss" was an unfamiliar tale to me--a retelling of the myth of Tamburlaine, but it had a great twist at the end! In "Our Lady of the Massacre", another favorite story, an 18th-century prostitute/runaway slave takes up with the natives in Virginia. It's an interesting take on who exactly is civilized and who is savage. "Peter and the Wolf" was not what I thought it would be--a story of a human raised by wolves. I had a hard time with "The Cabinet of Edgar Allen Poe"--I need to reread this one more slowly, but the story was told from the perspective of his mother and wife. I'm afraid I didn't like "Overture and Incidental Music for A Midsummer Night's Dream". I think I would have appreciated it more had I read MND first. I get the feeling it was meant to be very playful and frolicsome, but it felt a bit over my head. "The Kitchen Child" was a fun and quite a different look at an Edwardian country house cook. Asked to make a lobster souffle, the cook is "subtly made love to". The result being the 'kitchen child'. Each subsequent year she will make another souffle, but with different results, until fifteen years later...The last story, "Black Venus" is about syphilitic Charles Baudelaire and his Creole mistress Jeanne Duval. It is another very rich story that needs to be reread.
I'm glad that I finally have read Angela Carter. I do want to read more of her work--it's quite unlike most books that I read. Her stories have a sort of dream-like (actually in some cases nightmarish might be a better characterization) quality to them. You can read The Guardian's obituary of her here.
"She interpreted the times for us with unrivalled penetration: her branching and many-layered narratives mirrored our shifting world of identities lost and found, insiders versus outsiders, alternative histories and utopias postponed. In her stories there's a magical democracy - no class distinction between probable people and improbable (even impossible) ones, or between humans and animals and allegories. All of her writing was at odds with conventional realism, yet she mapped with great precision the history and topography of our fantasies. She was miraculously 'at home' in this epoch where people and their 'images', facts and their shadows, co-exist so closely and menacingly."
She died in 1992 at the age of 51 of lung cancer. It's sad to think of what wonderful things she would have written had she lived longer.