Purity, Puberty and Rewriting the Sadeian Fairy Tale: The Bloody Chamber, Wolf-Alice and The Company of Wolves by Angela Carter

This essay was originally submitted as my undergraduate dissertation in English Literature, originally titled ’the new skin that had been born… of her bleeding: Purity, Puberty and Rewriting the Sadeian Fairy Tale in Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories’, achieving a 70/100 mark. I decided I wanted to share it on my blog because it is my absolute baby: I put my heart and soul into this essay, and I was super happy to get a First on it. It definitely has its flaws; my main piece of feedback, that the second chapter on ‘Wolf-Alice’ doesn’t fit very well with the rest of my argument, is definitely true. However, since the ‘Wolf-Alice’ chapter was my favourite to write, I’ve left it in. I hope you enjoy reading it!

This essay discusses sexual violence.

Introduction

Throughout The Sadeian Woman, Angela Carter’s controversial analysis of the works of the Marquis de Sade, Carter persistently draws parallels between fairy tales and the way Sade portrays women. Carter writes that Sade’s Justine, alongside ‘her literary granddaughters’, is

a beautiful and penniless orphan, the living image of a fairy-tale princess in disguise but a Cinderella for whom the ashes with which she is covered have become part of the skin.¹

Sade’s pornography, Carter argues, employs a ‘straitjacket psychology [of vice and virtue that] relates his fiction directly to the black and white ethical world of fairy tale and fable’.² His libertines derive sexual pleasure from degrading the virtuous because to engage in sexual activity at all is, to them and to Sade, to be innately corrupt. Sade’s portrayal of sexuality betrays him to Carter as ‘a great puritan’.³ Sarah M. Henstra points to this description as evidence of Carter’s ‘performative reading’ of Sade: ‘Sade would roll in his grave at being called puritanical’.⁴ In this way, The Sadeian Woman shows Carter, not complicit with Sade as many of her contemporaries argued, but ‘actively participating in the construction of meaning as the story unfolds’: Carter ‘rereads’ Sade in order to reframe the underlying ideas that produced his work.⁵

The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories continues this work, moving Carter’s reading of Sade directly onto the literary fairy tale form. What makes a “fairy tale” is ill-defined. While it has its roots in oral tradition (Carter herself used it in the title of her collection of tales from oral tradition for Virago) by 1979, its origins had been commodified by Perrault, Grimm, and, in the twentieth century, Disney. Perrault repackaged the trope of fairy tales as educational stories told by mothers to their children in his ‘Mother Goose’ tales, appending overt morals to each tale. ‘Bluebeard’, for example, as translated by Carter, declares:

Curiosity is the most fleeting of pleasures; the moment it is satisfied, it ceases to exist and it always proves very, very expensive.⁶

This opposes the moral of fairy tales wherein curiosity proves a powerful tool: the English folktale ‘Mr. Fox’ sees a young woman discovering her fiancé is a murderer before she marries him, confronting him, and in doing so, saving herself.⁷ Perrault’s moral suggests the reader ought instead to ignore any suspicions about her husband’s behaviour and preserve the peace of her upper-class marriage. Disney’s early adaptations of fairy tales reiterated these ideas about class and gender. Disney’s female protagonists rarely wield the radical potential of fantasy; their virtue alone merits their rescue from poverty, while female agency is villainised and masculinised.⁸ Similarly, in The Sadeian Woman, Carter finds, Juliette’s sadism and sexual agency masculinise her: ‘by the force of her will, she will become… a woman who has transcended her gender but not the contradictions within it’.⁹ While Sade’s overt portrayal of gender non-conformity, including lesbianism, is ostensibly at odds with Disney’s repressive heteronormativity, Carter’s argument that Sade associates the masculinised with vice indicates both works engage with a binary attitude to gender which villainises female gender transgression.

Catherine Orenstein argues that fairy tales and pornography go hand-in-hand: ‘fairy tales are at their core about sexuality’ because they establish what ‘society deems desirable’ in men and women ‘at the most basic level’.¹⁰ ‘Porn merely uncovers the fairy tale’s continuing central preoccupation, which still lurks under the veneer of children’s literature’, Orenstein writes.¹¹ Similarly, Bruno Bettelheim argues in The Uses of Enchantment that the lack of complexity within fairy tales equips children with images they can use to interpret own lives.¹² His approach to the gendered elements of fairy tales is functionalist: ‘Snow White’, he argues, teaches the female reader ‘she need not despair’ if her mother struggles to meet her needs, as she will be ‘saved by males’.¹³ Although Bettelheim privileges a male perspective throughout the book, referring to the reader as ‘he’ by default, this approach suggests that binaries within fairy tales facilitate the reproduction of traditional gender roles.

The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories complicates the lessons of the fairy tale, developing the violent and gendered imagery at the heart of the stories to explore and upset the patriarchal viewpoints the stories reflect. The collection’s protagonists are, for the most part, teenage girls who overcome an emotional obstacle in order to become women. This dissertation will explore how ‘The Bloody Chamber’, ‘Wolf-Alice’ and ‘The Company of Wolves’ use blood imagery to explore these rites of passage from girlhood to womanhood, with particular focus on how Carter uses fairy-tale forms to put into practise ideas she put forward in The Sadeian Woman. I apply Carter’s analyses of Justine and Juliette in The Sadeian Woman to these stories, exploring how she breaks the either/or moulds of virtue and vice they provide. Justine is a static, unchanging sexual fantasy: she is a virgin who will always be a virgin no matter how many times she is ‘ruined’. While the libertine is drawn to her naivety, Justine’s denial of her sexual potential allows that naivety to be exploited over and over again. Justine ‘is most arousing as a memory or as a masturbatory fantasy… [otherwise] the contradictions of her situation will destroy her’.¹⁴ Thus, as an archetype, she can only exist within the realm of pornography or the fairy tale, where her virginity can be played out over and over again. If ‘Justine is the thesis, Juliette is the antithesis’: where Justine epitomises feminine virtue, Juliette represents the rejection of this gender role in favour of masculinised vice.¹⁵ Justine’s virtue is heightened in opposition to Juliette’s vice. For Carter, reading Juliette as Justine’s binary opposite illuminates the limiting nature of gendered cultural mythology: women are sexual or they are virginal, they are predator or they are prey. Carter’s tales blur these binaries in complex ways that are hard to categorise as subversive or normative.

Carter famously wrote that she was ‘in the demythologising business’, a quote often separated from what she wrote to follow: Carter reads myths as ‘extraordinary lies designed to make people unfree’, compared to folklore, which is ‘a much more straightforward set of devices for making real life more exciting and is much easier to infiltrate with different kinds of consciousness’.¹⁶ I use these definitions of mythology and folklore in this dissertation: using the set of devices provided by folklore, Carter explores the mythology the tales acquired in becoming ‘literary’. Additionally, I refer to the stories analysed in this dissertation as ‘tales’. In the afterword to Carter’s first short story collection, Fireworks, Carter argues that ‘the tale does not log everyday experience, as the short story does; it interprets everyday experience through a system of imagery derived from subterranean areas behind everyday experience’.¹⁷ Not only is this process of symbolism at work in the fairy tales Carter draws upon, but in the tales that she writes. Rewriting Sade’s women and the fairy tale in tandem, the Sadeian fairy tales in The Bloody Chamber demythologise the portrayals of virginity that drive the two.

i. Demythologising Justine: ‘The Bloody Chamber’

The collection’s eponymous tale is its most overtly Sadeian. The protagonist of ‘The Bloody Chamber’ parallels the Justine of The Sadeian Woman: an innocent heroine, seduced by wealth, who can’t help the fate that befalls her. Although she escapes becoming the Marquis’ ‘masturbatory fantasy’, she is nevertheless passive to the fate that befalls her.

‘The Bloody Chamber’ reworks ‘Bluebeard’, the folktale formalised into literary fairy-tale tradition by Charles Perrault. In ‘Pornography, Fairy Tales and Feminism’, Robin Ann Sheets finds that before Perrault, two versions of ‘Bluebeard’ circulated in oral tradition: one where the protagonist outwitted her murderous husband, and one where she passively waited to be saved from him by her brothers. While ‘tales of female triumph abound in the folk tradition’, in versions of ‘Bluebeard’ following in Perrault’s literary footsteps, the heroine’s curiosity is her fatal flaw rather than her saving grace.¹⁸ Perrault’s fairy tales were undoubtedly the product of his social situation and political interests. Orenstein argues that Perrault’s literary tales, while part of the ‘salon vogue’ among the French elites, ‘were in fact carefully crafted allegories… part of a raging debate about the times, the Court, its men and its women’.¹⁹ Perrault’s tale demonises a poor girl marrying above her social class due to the promise of her husband’s wealth; he suggests that obeying one’s husband is part of the social contract of upper-class femininity. This echoes Carter’s analysis of Justine’s class:

The rich can afford to be virtuous; the poor must shift as best they can. Justine’s femininity is a mode of behaviour open only to those who can afford it and the price she has to pay for resolutely, indeed heroically maintaining her role of bourgeois virgin against all odds is a solitary confinement in the prison of her own femininity, a solitude alleviated only by the frequent visits of her torturers.²⁰

Justine idolises the protagonist of a literary fairy tale, the poor woman whose virtue is rewarded by a rich prince. Her reality is, however, that the rich will only exploit her poverty and virtue to their own sadistic gain. The protagonist of ‘Bluebeard’ suffers the same fate: seduced by riches and victim to the sadistic reality of the man who bought her virtue.

In ‘The Bloody Chamber’, Carter unites the ‘Bluebeard’ tale with the stock characters of Justine and the Sadeian libertine. Rich as the traditional fairy-tale suitor, the Marquis’ appeal lies in his wealth inasmuch as the protagonist’s lies in her innocence. Through jewellery, clothes, theatre tickets, and his library, art is the display of wealth that the Marquis uses ‘from courtship to consummation… to aid in his seduction’.²¹ The protagonist describes her sexual appeal to the Marquis as a ‘taste’, akin to his interest in arts and culture.²² Sheets argues that Carter employs what Linda Williams terms ‘aesthetic sadomasochism’, the use of high art in dictating sexual fantasy, in particular when the Marquis undresses the protagonist to resemble an etching that he showed her during their courtship.²³ This ‘most pornographic of all confrontations’ abruptly ends: ‘he closed my legs like a book’.²⁴ Through re-enacting this scene, the narrator has become one of the pornographic objects that her husband collects. Defining his sexuality through pornography and art, the Marquis’ sexual tastes are determined by what his wealth and class grant him permission to purchase.

The protagonist, therefore, slots neatly into his pornographic fantasy of Justine. Her allure to the Marquis lies in her ‘potentiality for corruption’, in the libertine’s desire to bring the virtuous virgin down to his impure, sexual level. Red and white are juxtaposed throughout the tale, pitting purity against sexuality and violence. After the Marquis takes the protagonist’s virginity:

He… made me change into that chaste little Poiret shift of white muslin; he seemed especially fond of it, my breasts showed through the flimsy stuff, he said, like little soft white doves that sleep, each one, with a pink eye open. But he would not take off my ruby choker, although it was growing very uncomfortable, nor fasten up my descending hair, the sign of a virginity so recently ruptured that still remained a wounded presence between us.²⁵

The ‘flimsy’ ‘white’ dress is explicitly ‘chaste’, yet revealing, allowing the Marquis to sexualise both the protagonist’s body and sexual purity; it imitates her humiliation. The red necklace, in contrast, marks the blood of ‘ruptured’ ‘virginity’; the colour contrast mimics the ‘blood on the sheets’ the Marquis references earlier in the story.²⁶ He fetishises not only her virginity, but the violence of taking it. The choker, the visible sign of the Marquis’ ownership of the protagonist and her sexuality, is literally suffocating. The protagonist describes her lost virginity as a ‘wound’ both here and after the Marquis leaves the castle: ‘now that my female wound had healed, there had awoken a certain queasy craving…’²⁷ This description references the psychoanalytic idea of a bleeding (typically menstruating) vagina representing a castration wound in the eyes of a male viewer. To apply Laura Mulvey’s theory of the male gaze, the Marquis’ desire to turn the protagonist into a pornographic object for him to take voyeuristic pleasure from looking at negates his male fear of castration.²⁸ Having metaphorically “castrated” the protagonist’s virginity, she becomes the Marquis’ perfect ‘masturbatory fantasy’, and as a Justine, she is humiliated, helpless and dependent on his whims.

In murdering his Justines, the Marquis affirms his ownership over his pornographic fantasy of their innocence. Carter writes that Justine ‘must die an emotional, if not a physical virgin, like… the little girls who died in the angelic state of pre-pubescence… because they are too good to live’: she remains girlishly innocent, never becoming a woman. For the Marquis to fulfil this fantasy, he cannot let his wives grow up. On entering the bloody chamber, the protagonist finds one of the Marquis’ wives ‘embalmed’ in order to preserve her ‘white breast’, her purity.²⁹ This oxymoronic parallel between white purity and red violence is taken to its violent extreme: the chamber’s corpses are ‘white’ because they are bloodless; the violence committed against them preserves their virginity. The protagonist ‘will always associate’ ‘undertakers’ lilies’ with the Marquis, ironically emphasising this connection between white virginity and death: while also commonly used as a funeral flower, the white lily symbolises the purity of the Virgin Mary in Christian tradition.³⁰

Christian mythology around innocence and purity parallels the ‘Bluebeard’ tale. In the Garden of Eden, Adam and Eve’s shame derives not from their nakedness but from their knowledge of it. Similarly, ‘The Bloody Chamber’s protagonist is humiliated first when the Marquis takes her virginity, thus through sexual “knowledge”, and then through her discovery of the bloody chamber. Each time she illuminates something in the room, ‘a garment of that innocence of mine for which he had lusted fell away’: her loss of innocence leaves her naked and exposed.³¹ Bettelheim reads ‘Bluebeard’ as an analogy for the sexual curiosity that leads to lost virginity:

The key that opens the door to a secret room suggests associations to the male sexual organ, particularly in first intercourse when the hymen is broken and blood gets on it. If this is one of the hidden meanings, then it makes sense that the blood cannot be washed away: defloration is an irreversible effect.³²

The protagonist’s curiosity means she is punished ‘like Eve’, the first woman tempted by knowledge according to Christian myth.³³ Here, Carter reads ‘Bluebeard’ as allegorical for “Eve’s curse”: menstruation. While this idea ‘never… appeared in the Bible’, it has proven influential.³⁴ Sophie Laws found a strong connection between social beliefs about menstruation and impurity: one of the men she interviewed believed that ‘some women have heavier periods because they’re trying to get rid of more impurities’.³⁵ This view represents ‘the notion that a pure/purified woman would hardly menstruate.³⁶ In the social mythology Carter engages with, the bloods of both menstruation and lost virginity represent bodily corruption and impurity. These rites of passage suggest the violent death and corruption of girlhood by the sadistic realities of womanhood.

Nevertheless, Carter’s ‘Bluebeard’ retelling does ‘demythologise’ the passivity of the Justine archetype. Kathleen E. B. Manley writes that ‘she is a woman in process, someone who is exploring her subject position and beginning to tell her own story’.³⁷ Manley explores the role that mirrors play in the tale to ‘indicate not only the protagonist’s dependence on her sense of innocence but also a lack of a sense of herself as subject’.³⁸ At the beginning of the tale, the protagonist tells us, in the mirror, ‘I saw myself, suddenly, as he saw me’: a ‘frail child’ who is ‘innocent and confined’.³⁹ Here, she becomes aware of her fragility in relation to the Marquis, while wholly accepting his view of her. Conversely, when the Marquis confronts her about the bloody chamber, the protagonist says, ‘I forced myself to be seductive. I saw myself, pale, pliant as a plant that begs to be trampled underfoot, a dozen vulnerable, appealing girls reflected in as many mirrors, and I saw how he almost failed to resist me’.⁴⁰ In gaining awareness of her subjectivity, ‘she now thinks of herself capable of changing his determination of her story’, using her sexual appeal to her advantage to self-determine as an adult.⁴¹ She is ‘oscillating between girlhood and womanhood, between a patriarchal view and her own definition of herself’.⁴²

The question of whether she has agency by the end of the story, however, remains unclear. Where, in ‘Bluebeard’, the protagonist is saved by her brothers, in ‘The Bloody Chamber’, she is saved by her mother. Sheets writes that in this change, Carter ‘restores to prominence a figure who is strikingly, ominously, absent from fairy tales, from pornographic fiction, and from the Freudian theory of female development’.⁴³ It is debatable whether the mother figure is truly absent from fairy tales: Sheets’ argument is most relevant when applied specifically to the literary fairy tale. If, folklorically, the fairy tale functions as an educational tool from mothers to their children, the protagonist’s rescue moves the literary fairy tale written by men back to its maternal origins. Indeed, Manley notes that the protagonist’s mother provides her with ‘material to draw upon’ to tell her own story.⁴⁴ The protagonist’s mother serves as a reminder to her daughter of the importance of recognising one’s subjectivity. However, the tale ends with the protagonist’s ‘red mark’ of ‘shame’: her unease, and her corruption by the Marquis.⁴⁵ Her narrative functions as ‘a way of expatiating shame’.⁴⁶ Her suffering defines her characterisation. Within her narrative, she is an archetypal Justine:

When she suffers, she exists. She will embrace her newly discovered masochism with all her heart because she has found a sense of being through suffering.⁴⁷

Although the protagonist’s developing subjectivity complicates her relationship to her masochism, Carter does not straightforwardly subvert this model of femininity. Instead, Carter develops the archetype of Justine to lay the bloody mechanisms that subjugate women bare.

ii. Demythologising Binaries: ‘Wolf-Alice’

Unlike the fairy-tale princess of ‘The Bloody Chamber’, the young girl we see in ‘Wolf-Alice’ was literally raised by wolves. Weaving a story from a plethora of folktales about feral children, Carter blurs the boundaries of human and animal to explore adolescent gender non-conformity: what does it mean to become a woman when you were never taught what a woman was? Wolf-Alice falls outside the Sadeian binary of Justine and Juliette, but her coming-of-age is nevertheless defined in bloody, bodily imagery. Her self-discovery is solitary and genderqueer, paralleled by the equally genderqueer figure of the Duke. The queering of binaries in ‘Wolf-Alice’, and her relationship (or lack thereof) to the Duke complicates the role of violence, sexuality and heterosexual gender relations in the collection.

Exploring werewolf myth, Christian gender roles, evolutionary psychology and psychoanalysis in tandem, Carter ‘demythologises’ multiple, ostensibly contradictory angles of the cultural mythology around the transition from girlhood and womanhood.⁴⁸ Puberty and monstrosity are paralleled throughout the horror genre. Exploring how the changes undergone by monsters in horror movies reflects fears adolescents experience in their changing bodies, Walter Evans writes,

The adolescent finds himself trapped in an unwilled change from a comparatively comprehensible and secure childhood to some mysterious new state which he does not understand, cannot control and has some reason to fear. Mysterious feelings and urges begin to develop and he finds himself strangely fascinated with disturbing new physical characteristics – emerging hair, budding breasts, and others – which, given the forbidden texture of the X-rated American mentality, he associates with mystery, darkness, secrecy and evil. […] stirred from innocence and purity… by the full moon which has variously symbolized chastity, change and romance for millenia, the wolfman guiltily wakes to the mystery of horrible alterations in his body, his mind and his physical desires – alterations which are completely at odds with the formal strictures of his society.⁴⁹

While Evans briefly suggests in this article that male monsters’ predation of women could analogise an adolescent girl’s experience of her menstrual cycle, his argument centres male monsters and adolescent boys. Heather Schell links Evans’ article to female experiences noting that ‘the tragic wolf man resonated with the coming of age of not just men but also women, with his loss of control, his recurring monthly “curse”, and suddenly hairy body.’⁵⁰ Nevertheless, for the adolescent girl to relate to the experiences of the ‘wolfman’, she must relate to ‘his’ curse, a masculine body rather than a feminine one. Indeed, although its violence and animalism render the werewolf a masculinised stock figure, lycanthropy and its marginalisation present a clear menstrual analogy. A werewolf’s violent and uncontrollable urges parallel the false mythology surrounding irrational emotional changes during menstruation, which are also misunderstood and ostracised by mainstream society. The phases of the moon and of the menstrual cycle both, generally speaking, repeat monthly; indeed, Wolf-Alice’s menstrual cycle follows the phases of the moon, as the full moon ‘surprise[s] [her] into bleeding again’.⁵¹ The moon, ‘the governess of transformations’, that the werewolf obeys is described in the feminine throughout literary and cultural mythology, a tradition which ‘Wolf-Alice’ follows.⁵²

Thus, the werewolf blurs masculine and feminine imagery, lending it to a genderqueer interpretation. Queering not only the gender binary but the human/non-human binary, Phillip A. Bernhardt-House writes that the werewolf ‘might be seen as a natural signifier for queerness’: the werewolf ‘actively disrupts normativity, transgresses the boundaries of propriety and interferes with the status quo in closed social and sexual systems’.⁵³ Neither human nor animal, the werewolf can be neither man nor woman, because these gendered concepts and their associated social codes are innately human. Carter plays with this resistance to binary categorisation in her representation of gender in ‘Wolf-Alice’. Kristine Jennings explores ‘Wolf-Alice’ through Julia Kristeva’s theory of the abject: that which disturbs and horrifies society’s social order. Jennings argues that Carter employs a tone of abjection towards Wolf-Alice at the beginning of the tale: she is removed from ‘the inclusive “we” of the reader’ and narrator: ‘Her pace is not our pace.’⁵⁴ Kristeva’s theory of abjection builds upon Jacques Lacan’s idea of the symbolic order. For Lacan, language cannot accurately represent material reality, because words are symbols that represent concepts.⁵⁵ Wolf-Alice’s existence outside language ‘seems quite consciously and explicitly to engage with Lacanian psychoanalytic theory’; Jennings writes:

“Wolf-Alice” depicts an experience of body to a large extent undetermined by linguistic, that is, symbolic, constructions and repressions of the gendered subject and thus reveals the possibilities of a subject for which self is not merely a reflection in the eyes of others […] Wolf-Alice, unyielding to human language and its sexed ideologies, gains a sense of self through the “real” and material relationship to her body, and in doing so, she establishes a subject-object relation to the world.⁵⁶

Wolf-Alice is genderqueer because she exists outside the symbolic order that created human binaries in the first place. As in historical cases of “feral” children, the nuns see her as ‘having the potential for humanity while simultaneously… not fully human’.⁵⁷ In order to make her adequately human within the symbolic order, she must first be adequately feminine: the nuns teach Wolf-Alice the traditionally feminine yet undervalued role of housewife or maid. Animalism, nevertheless, remains Wolf-Alice’s ‘natural state’.⁵⁸ The nuns are equally offended by the ‘natural state’ of her body, attempting to ‘cover up her bold nakedness’ as part of her humanisation.⁵⁹ For religion to ‘purif[y] the abject’, it must first teach the abject shame.⁶⁰ Indeed, later in the tale, Wolf-Alice covers up her menstruation out of ‘not fastidiousness but shame’, evoking, as in ‘The Bloody Chamber’, the Garden of Eden.⁶¹ However, Carter meshes the story of Adam and Eve with the mythology of evolutionary psychology:

If you could transport her, in her filth, rags and feral disorder, to the Eden of our first beginnings were Eve and grunting Adam squat on a daisy bank, picking the lice from one another’s pelts, then she might prove to be the wise child who leads them all and her silence and her howling a language as authentic as any language of nature. In a world of talking beasts and flowers, she would be the bud of flesh in the kind lion’s mouth: but how can the bitten apple flesh out its scar again?⁶²

It is Adam who is ‘grunting’ before he has evolved into humanity, not Eve. Schell explores the impact of evolutionary psychology upon gender roles in popular mythology, wherein ‘today’s gender role behaviour [is considered] a relic from the days when men were hunters’, rendering women, by proxy, their ‘prey’.⁶³ In this context, women become both more “civilised” and more vulnerable than men. This quote treats Wolf-Alice as both more evolved than her “perfect” ancestors, and less evolved than her human counterparts. Carter’s paradoxical meshing of these evolution myths highlights how both gendered perspectives render Wolf-Alice ‘other’.

Carter’s engagement with Lacan in ‘Wolf-Alice’ goes further: in recognising her reflection in the mirror, Wolf-Alice enters the symbolic order. For Lacan, ‘the child for the first time becomes aware, through seeing its image in the mirror, that his/her body has a total form’; prior to this, their experience of their body is fragmentary.⁶⁴ Initially, children view their whole reflection as separate from themselves, thus their ‘image… is mediated by the gaze of the other’.⁶⁵ Wolf-Alice initially perceives her reflection as a ‘friend’ whose appearance marks the onset of her menarche: she ‘wondered whether there she saw the beast who came to bite her [vulva] in the night’.⁶⁶ Entering the Lacanian stage of development in the mirror, Wolf-Alice enters a stage of development into humanity. ‘Not wolf nor woman’, Wolf-Alice is in the process of moving from wolfhood to womanhood, childhood to adulthood. Manley’s analysis of mirrors in ‘The Bloody Chamber’ equally applies to ‘Wolf-Alice’: Wolf-Alice’s initial lack of identification with herself in the mirror indicates a lack of awareness of her subjectivity, of her existence within the symbolic order, but, like the protagonist of ‘The Bloody Chamber’, she becomes aware of the meanings her body conveys over the course of the tale. As her body changes in puberty, she ‘perceived an essential difference between herself and her surroundings’; while previously she felt fully integrated into nature, she grows to understand that ‘she projects meaning onto the world around her’, and onto herself in return.⁶⁷ She thinks of the changes she undergoes in puberty as a ‘new skin that had been born… of her bleeding’: in her bodily coming-of-age, she recognises her subjectivity and is reborn within her human exterior. For Wolf-Alice, blood marks not the violence of lost innocence, but the establishment of her identity outside social boundaries that would confine her in a gendered norm. Her changing body is framed in the language of discovery. Where, while living with the nuns, she appeared totally unaware of her body, now she ‘examined her new breasts’ and pubic hair ‘with curiosity’.⁶⁸ She forms a ‘theory’ about the cause of her menarche; by the end of the tale, her knowledge of both wolves and her humanity lends her an ‘educated voice’ among both groups.⁶⁹ Although, like Adam and Eve, she ‘put on the visible sign of her difference from’ the wolves, Wolf-Alice’s recognition of her reflection does not make her more intelligent than the wolves: ‘had not she and the rest of the litter tussled and romped with their shadows long ago?’⁷⁰ The wolves have their own mirror stage; Wolf-Alice has merely undergone the human one as well. She is no longer outside the binary of human and non-human, but inhabits both roles at once.

The changes in her pubescent body parallel the Duke’s lycanthropy. Just as Wolf-Alice is ‘not wolf nor woman’ within the social order, the Duke considers himself ‘both less and more than a man’ as a result of his changing body. His lycanthropy depends on the feminine moon, as Wolf-Alice’s menstrual cycle does. At the end of the tale, degendered as a ‘poor, wounded thing’, he ‘howls like a wolf with his foot in a trap or a woman in labour’.⁷¹ The final form of both the Duke and Wolf-Alice is as wolf and woman. The white wedding dress that ‘simultaneously signif[ies] purity and sexual readiness’ marks Wolf-Alice’s status as a young woman to the reader, yet she cleans the Duke’s wounds with her tongue as her wolf-mother did to her.⁷² Where the two characters previously failed to form a pack, they unite in the Duke’s rescue causing the Duke to cast a reflection, to realise his subjectivity in relation to someone who inhabits the same abject gender role to him. Though the two characters cannot integrate into human gender norms, they can become a pack outside social mythologies. Jennings writes that, because Wolf-Alice wears a wedding dress when she saves the Duke, the tale’s ending ‘ironically enact[s] the prototypical, heterosexual fairy-tale ending’.⁷³ The Duke’s prior, violent interruption of a traditional heterosexual union underpins this marriage scene, an animalistic insult to heteronormativity.

To a degree, the Duke’s solitude and violent response towards conventional heteronormative desire can be read as Sadeian. Indeed, the narrator tells us that he was born ‘to bite his mother’s nipple off and weep’, a violent and sexualised insult to the sanctity of motherhood.⁷⁴ The Duke’s pride in his gender non-conformity perhaps parallels Carter’s description of the gender-bending marriage of Noirceuil and Juliette in The Sadeian Woman. Like the ending of ‘Wolf-Alice’, it is, Carter writes, ‘a gross parody of marriage’ and a ‘demonstration of the relative mutability of gender’.⁷⁵ However, in Sade’s gender-bending, the male character still pulls the strings: Juliette’s ‘final act of defeminisation is prompted and approved by’ Noirceul.⁷⁶ Wolf-Alice, conversely, chooses to put on the wedding dress ‘because to do so delighted her adolescent skin’; she engages in heterosexual symbolism not because of Christian gendered ideals, Sadeian male desire or even an awareness of what the wedding dress represents, but as part of her own process of self-realisation.⁷⁷ She removes the Duke from his Sadeian solitude to form a genderqueer unity that subverts a masculine definition of female bodies. She presents the Duke with a queer answer to the binary symbolic order that rendered him abject: casting a reflection, he, too, has the opportunity to self-realise.

It would be limiting to read the ‘Wolf-Alice’s genderqueer themes only in relation to Carter’s rereading of Sade. Nevertheless, it is useful to highlight how Carter rewrites the template of femininity she identifies in The Sadeian Woman. With ‘The Bloody Chamber’ and ‘Wolf-Alice’ bookending the collection, they present dialectically opposed responses to the Justine archetype. Where ‘The Bloody Chamber’ uses feminine symbolism to illuminate the horror underlying Justine’s identity, Wolf-Alice’s existence outside the cultural context of gender makes clear that the relationship of this symbolism to womanhood is not innate. Linking Carter’s demythologisation of Justine to her demythologisation of Lacan, Christianity and evolutionary psychology exemplifies how ‘Wolf-Alice’ continues the ‘performative reading’ Carter began in The Sadeian Woman: in both texts, she engages with cultural mythology to untangle and reframe the gendered ideas they present.

iii. Demythologising Meat: ‘The Company of Wolves’

Carter employs both of these responses to Justine in ‘The Company of Wolves’. Carter’s Red Riding Hood (who I will refer to as ‘Red’) begins as a Justine and ends as a wolf-woman. Though her love interest is ostensibly Sadeian, Red plays the narrative expectations around her to her advantage: she remains ‘nobody’s meat’.⁷⁸ Subverting the tradition of ‘Red Riding Hood’ as a tale that teaches children to fear predatory men, Carter embraces the idea that female desire is rarely safe or sanitised: the werewolf’s appeal is that he is a “bad boy” with a voracious appetite for blood.⁷⁹

In Little Red Riding Hood Uncloaked, Orenstein explores the various manifestations of the sexual subtext of the ‘Red Riding Hood’ tale in literature and popular culture. As with ‘Bluebeard’, Orenstein writes, Perrault rewrote ‘Red Riding Hood’ from folk tradition to parody the sexual politics of the French courts. Orenstein notes that ‘in the common slang of the day, even in the scholarly works of Charles Perrault, when a girl lost her virginity it was said that elle avoit vû le loup – “she’d seen the wolf”’; Perrault intended the tale as a deliberate sexual allegory.⁸⁰ Sexual predation thus underpins the ‘Red Riding Hood’ tale: Red loses her virginity because of deception and cannibalistic violence. Bettelheim’s psychoanalytic reading of the tale consolidates this view. He sees an intrinsic link between symbols of violence and symbols of sexuality: ‘red is the color symbolizing violent emotions, very much including sexual ones’.⁸¹ He continues,

The red velvet cap given by Grandmother to Little Red Cap thus can be viewed as a premature transfer of sexual attractiveness, which is further accentuated by the grandmother’s being old and sick, too weak to even open a door. The name “Little Red Cap”… suggests that not only is the red cap little but also the girl. She is too little, not for wearing the cap, but for managing what this red cap symbolizes, and what danger her wearing it invites.⁸²

Carter’s play on the latent sexuality of the tale subverts the sexual fear that underlies other versions. The wolf is established as a Sadeian character that Red, a virginal Justine, is taught to fear. The tale’s opening lays out superstitious beliefs about the wolf: ‘carnivore incarnate… as cunning as he is ferocious; once he’s had a taste of flesh then nothing else will do’.⁸³ His biology justifies his violence:

Those slavering jaws; the lolling tongue; the rime of saliva on the grizzled chops – of all the teeming perils of the night and the forest… the wolf is the worst for he cannot listen to reason.⁸⁴

Evolutionary psychology states the wolf is driven by instincts alone. It is no mistake that in this description, the wolf is a ‘he’: his wolfishness is intrinsically linked to his violent, predatory masculinity. The wolf’s urges are figured in the language of flesh and meat, paralleling how Carter describes Sade’s portrayals of desire at the end of The Sadeian Woman:

In the English language, we make a fine distinction between flesh, which is usually alive and, typically, human, and meat, which is dead, inert, animal and intended for consumption […] Sade explores the inhuman sexual possibilities of meat; it is a mistake to think that the substance of which his actors are made is flesh. There is nothing alive or sensual about them.⁸⁵

The wolf’s appetite is Sadeian: sexual, predatory and devoid of sensuality or ‘reason’. Indeed, contradicting the tale’s introduction, the wolf derives as much pleasure from misleading an innocent Red as he does from eating her. Disguising himself as a human, he seduces Red in fairy-tale terms: ‘a fine fellow’, any promise of sexuality is limited to ‘a kiss’.⁸⁶ Not only do these descriptors establish a sanitised sexuality to subvert, they emphasise Red’s sexual inexperience and youth. Indeed, Red’s virginity is central to her characterisation. Her red shawl is compared to ‘blood on snow’, mirroring the image of blood on white sheets in lost virginity.⁸⁷ She is in the early stages of puberty, having ‘just started her woman’s bleeding’:

She stands and moves within the invisible pentacle of her own virginity. She is an unbroken egg; she is a sealed vessel; she has inside her a magic space the entrance to which is shut tight with the plug of a membrane; she is a closed system…⁸⁸

In The Sadeian Woman, Carter writes that patriarchal myth considers the womb ‘the most sacred of all places’.⁸⁹ Here, she takes this idea further: Red’s womb is sacred because she is ‘a sealed vessel’. For her womb to be opened up, her hymen must be ‘broken’; her virginity must be degraded. An ‘egg’, she is not only young, but implicitly ovulating, and by extension, menstrual. Her youth, therefore, is defined by her womb’s potential for corruption by bloody rites of passage into womanhood. This paragraph ends, ‘she does not know how to shiver. She has her knife and she is afraid of nothing.’⁹⁰ An allusion to the tale popularised by the Brothers Grimm, Carter’s Red is brave but naïve. She is determined to establish her independence, but, like ‘The Bloody Chamber’s protagonist, she must experience fear in self-determine. That she ‘does not know how to shiver’ also suggests sexual naivety. Her erotic appeal is like Justine’s: she is attractive precisely because she is naïve and can be hurt.

Nevertheless, Red is revealed to be a cannier character than the narrator anticipates. Writing on Carter’s ‘wolf trilogy’, Kimberly J. Lau argues that in ‘The Company of Wolves’, Carter creates the ‘moral pornography’ she writes of in The Sadeian Woman, one which ‘accounts for the power relations and material realities implicit in every sexual act’.⁹¹ In Carter’s ‘pornographic’ retelling of ‘Red Riding Hood’, both the male and female characters are eroticised, contrasting ‘The Bloody Chamber’ where only the protagonist is pornographic object. For Lau, Red is ‘both innocent and knowing’: she follows a pornographic script, asking what the wolf wants from her ‘disingenuously’ and understanding the ‘commonplaces of a rustic seduction’.⁹² While Lau argues that Carter’s Red is ‘the typical male fantasy’, this indicates that she is deliberately engaging with a courtship ritual favoured by heteronormative gender roles, indicating a self-awareness the narrator fails to recognise. In Carter’s tale, Red is not deceived by a Sadeian trap, but establishes herself as a Justine in order to express her sexuality.

Over the course of the tale, Red seems to embody a non-typical sense of aging, not just in her pubescent body but in her attitude and confidence, changing rapidly from naive to sexually confident. Bettelheim writes that ‘throughout fairy-tale literature, death of the hero… symbolizes his failure’; in ‘Red Riding Hood’, Red’s death and ‘rebirth’ symbolizes a process of maturation: the death of her childhood and her rebirth as an adult.⁹³ Carter, however, replaces Red’s death and rebirth by the metaphorical “death” of girlhood, loss of virginity. Unlike ‘The Bloody Chamber’s protagonist, Red is not passive to this process. When she meets the wolf in her grandmother’s house, she ‘shiver[s]’, learning fear, and ‘pull[s] [her shawl] more closely round herself’, attempting to cover up her body which suddenly feels exposed.⁹⁴ The shawl, the narrator tells us, is ‘as red as the blood she must spill’, foreshadowing implicitly sexual violence.⁹⁵ However, Red subverts this prediction:

She closed the window on the wolves’ threnody and took off her scarlet shawl, the colour of poppies, the colour of sacrifices, the colour of her menses, and, since her fear did her no good, she ceased to be afraid.⁹⁶

Red stops playing the Justine, the ‘holy’ virgin ‘capable of being desecrated’.⁹⁷ In undressing herself, she removes herself from the language of blood: the shed blood of her lost virginity is only metaphorical in her removal of the red shawl. Red’s ‘untouched’, ‘immaculate flesh’ remains part of her appeal to the wolf, but she gives her virginity eagerly, ‘ripp[ing] off his shirt’ and initiating all touch.⁹⁸ Carter’s distinction between ‘flesh’ and ‘meat’ is its most overt at the end of this tale: Red ‘knew she was nobody’s meat’.⁹⁹ Lau writes that this proclamation ‘removes her from the dominant patriarchal realm of pornography’: not ‘meat’, a pornographic object, but flesh capable of experiencing sensuality.¹⁰⁰

Syntactically, the tale’s ending loses coherence: Red exits the symbolic order to become a wolf herself. Ostensibly, read alongside ‘Wolf-Alice’, Red’s wolfishness suggests that embracing her sexuality defeminises her. In rejecting the role of a Justine to pursue a mutually erotic sexuality, she rejects the gendered expectations of her virginity and her femininity, becoming closer to the animalistic man. However, through animalistic imagery, the two tales celebrate self-realisation outside the social mythology of womanhood. Red and Wolf-Alice come-of-age into a wolf-and-womanhood: both human and animal, both masculine and feminine, gendered and sexual norms flipped inside out and redefined.

Conclusion

In her exploration of Juliette, Carter argues that Sade presents womanhood similarly to how he presents poverty:

To be a woman is to be automatically at a disadvantage in a man’s world, just like being poor, but to be a woman is a more easily remedied condition. If she abandons the praxis of femininity, then it is easy enough to enter the class of the rich, the men, provided one enters it on the terms of that class.¹⁰¹

Like ‘The Bloody Chamber’s Marquis, Sade’s men are a wealthy elite whose sexuality is defined by a social dominance that women lack. While Juliette can reject femininity to obtain wealth, her marriage to Noirceuil necessitates a gendered hierarchy that renders her lesser. If Juliette is Sade’s answer to female gender non-conformity, his model of gender rejects the possibility of female emancipation from patriarchy.

Carter highlights Sade’s ‘fairy tale’ logic and flips it on its head in The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories. Neither the Sadeian binary of vice and virtue, nor the fairy-tale binary of gender apply to her bestial women. Embracing her sexuality renders Red outside womanhood and thus humanity in the eyes of her narrator; the dual wolf-and-woman identities of Wolf-Alice and the Duke suggest genderqueerness. If pornography and fairy tales exist in a ‘black and white’ gendered logic, Carter rewrites both genres to suggest complex ideas about gender beyond their parameters.

Nevertheless, Carter writes within the context of cultural mythologies of femininity. If ‘The Bloody Chamber’s protagonist is a Justine, then she also fulfils ideas about femininity espoused by Christianity, evolutionary psychology and the horror film. The feminine virtue of Justine and her ‘literary granddaughters’ cannot exist without masculine vice asserting its dominance over the feminine, be this through violence or marginalisation. In ‘The Bloody Chamber’, ‘Wolf-Alice’ and ‘The Company of Wolves’, Carter brings the blood of purity and puberty to the surface, illuminating how female experiences of adolescence were, traditionally, marginalised by the literary fairy tale. Carter’s tales do not provide a straightforward model for womanhood, and do not serve to teach the reader a lesson about coming-of-age. Instead, Carter ‘performatively reads’ gendered hierarchies throughout the collection. The Sadeian Woman is a vital intertext to this ‘demythologisation’: in both texts, Carter ‘reads into’ cultural mythologies and rewrites their ideas about innate feminine virtue, in often contradictory ways. While her protagonists learn about themselves in their stories, Carter only complicates questions of gendered subjectivity.

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