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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