In this essay I will be comparing and contrasting the treatment of metamorphosis in the short story collection The Bloody Chamber by Angela Carter and the film The Company of Wolves by Neil Jordan. I will be focusing on the technical aspects as well as looking at how Carter has transformed the original tales with her modern collection.
Carter was a collector of fairy tales. Her two volumes of fairy1 tale compilations is testament to this. The introduction by Marina Warner in the second volume tells us that ‘Fairy tales also offered her a means of flying- of finding and telling an alternative story, of shifting something in the mind, just as so many fairy tale characters shift something in their shape.’ She wrote her own fairy tales but was more interested in interpretations than adaptations because she brings her own motives into the re-telling. She takes the tales ‘out of the pastel nursery into the labyrinth of female desire.’1 Thereby transforming the original tales into something modern and different. Or as she puts it ‘putting new wine in old bottles’.2
According to Italo Calvino there are two types social transformation presented in folktales, ‘both with a happy ending: either riches to rags then back to riches again; or simply from rags to riches’ he goes on to say that in the first kind ‘the extraordinary fortunes…reflect merely a consolatory miracle or dream’ but in the second ‘ the misfortunes of the prince or queen connect the idea of poverty with the idea of rights that have been trampled on’3 one could argue that Angela Carter would see most folktales as trampling on the rights of a woman with the further argument that she is attempting to right these wrongs. However she is more interested in the development and metamorphosis of girls into women than the social transformation of class. Her stories are about women dealing with men’s and their own animal selves, which here represent the human sex drive; the libido. Her transformations are that of weak, defenseless girls to cunning, bold women laughing at wolves. David Luke writes in the introduction to Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm’s Selected Tales about The Frog-Prince:
‘Many might think that it makes more sense of more elements in the tale to see in this particular example of the “animal bridegroom” motif the story, among other things no doubt, of an immature girl overcoming the disgust she has hitherto felt about “nasty” male sexuality.’ 4 What we see in these stories is that ‘for girls the critical metamorphosis into adulthood is sexual’.5
Have the tales only been transformed from a masculine tone to a feminine one? Some critics are happy with this reading but some have their doubts. Some critics think that what Carter is actually trying to do is to depict males in the way females have been depicted in fairytales. Not necessarily righting the wrongs but giving the patriarch a taste of his own medicine. Of course the problem with giving Carter one interpretation is that any one interpretation must leave out significant factors of her fiction. Say that one wishes to interpret her fairytales as feminist in her portrayal of males; that is easy enough. But it is not enough to say that Carter was just a feminist when one takes into her account of her politics. When she writes about a woman being treating as a commodity is she writing about feminists or, bearing in mind The Bloody Chamber was published in 1979, about an aggressively consumer and market led society? Can you read one without the other or do they integrate hand in hand? One of the qualities that make her fiction so engaging is that she writes with definite ideas in mind and with a strong will but it sometimes gets overlooked that she was also provocative. The best fiction she writes is provocative fiction, which often asks difficult and sometimes disturbing questions. Questions mainly about gender, about what it means to be a woman, the different ways to be one and the politics that are conducted between men and women. She may have written myths but she was ‘in the de-mytholising business’. I believe she didn’t want to give readers an all contained interpretation but to give them a debate.
The actual transformations could not be more different in the two mediums. In The Bloody Chamber transformation scenes do not last more than a short paragraph or two at the most and though she is a descriptive writer she’s not a detailed one as the fairytale mode dictates. In the short story The Company of Wolves Carter deals with one transformation simply with the word ‘instantly’. Whereas in The Company of Wolves great detail has been put in to how a werewolf actually transforms that is surprisingly gratuitous, more so than the book suggests. The transformation in the film takes one minuet and fifty seconds adapting the word ‘instantly’ loosely. There is one easy reason for this and that is because of new technology. Films differ from fiction mainly because there are more factors involved in the creation of a film, e.g.; actors, lighting, special effects. Audiences have got used to special effects spectaculars such as E.T and Ghost Busters the likes audiences had never seen before. What CGI is today animatronics were yesterday. It follows that the transformation sequences were not necessarily vital to be so gratuitous but that directors where excited to show off their new abilities. Both The Howling and An American Werewolf in London to a lesser extent, released a few years before Company of Wolves, also suffer from this. While it makes the aging of the film harder going it’s hard not to blame them for trying. The question then should be: if Neil Jordan was to make this film now would the transformation sequences be the same? It’s hard to say how Neil Jordan would shoot these scenes again but one could speculate that Jordan probably would. It is not solely because he would be more interested in special effects than story but that film is at a disadvantage in description next to fiction. Novelists can do what they like, change from one scene to the next, from one character to the next and deploy various style and tone relatively painlessly; screenwriters, though, have to carefully set up each scenario only through action and dialogue. Harder still for them is the finical constrictions novelists pay less heed to. Novelists can edit in whole new scenes; screenwriters must look at the bank balance before they do such thing. It can be said then that film adaptations as a whole are harder to create than most other films, (but not impossible; Russell Banks commented that Atom Egoyan’s adaptation of his book The Sweet Hereafter was the superior work). Having said that filmmakers have often found the maxim ‘less is more’ a generally useful one for creating a suspension of suggesting rather than showing outright; Hitchcock being a perfect example of this. To ask a slightly different question; should have Angela Carter been more descriptive about the transformations? Although description does play its part in these stories it is normally used by Carter for a very practical reason and it is rarely decorative. She uses description to set a scene and to create an atmosphere of suspense. Action is then dealt with quickly and directly. This works very well as the two styles of writing offset each other; one draws the reader in comfort and the other quickly disrupts this comfort giving excitement and surprise to the reader. To write at length about the transformations would be unnecessary since it would detract the power and essence of the tale. What is important here is that the man has transformed not how. As Anthony Burgess writes in the essay ‘ Snow White and Rose Red’ in Urgent Copy:
‘The stories are all very firm, confident, sure of themselves. Once started they travel to the end by the shortest route, wasting no time on decorative fripperies, Jamesian qualifications, or depth psychology. “There was a man who had three sons…” We’re off, and we stay till the finish. If anybody cavils at the improbable, grumbles about too much magic, laughs in the wrong place, he will be told to hold his tongue or to receive a salutary slap.’ (p270)
In this way Carter is much like Perrault who
‘adopted the stance of an urbane, witty, common sense realist; they reflect the fashions of the day rather than a kind of timeless past. Irony is a conspicuous in them as a sense of mystery is by its absence.’ (David Luke, p18)
As she once remarked: “A fairy tale is a story where one king goes to another king to borrow a cup of sugar”6
Bibliography:
Burgess Anthony, ‘Snow White and Rose Red’ from Urgent Copy, (Penguin Books: Richard Clay Ltd, 1968)
Calvino Italo, ‘Ovid and Universal Contiguity’ and ‘The Odysseys in The Odyssey’ from Why Read the Classics?, (Vintage: Cox & Wyman Ltd, 1999)
Carter Angela, The Bloody Chamber, (Vintage:CPI Cox & Wyman, 1979)
Day Aidan, The Rational Glass, (Manchester University Press: Bell & Bain Ltd, 1998)
Grimm Jacob and Wilhelm, Selected Tales, (Penguin Books: Richard Clay Ltd, 1982)
Peach Linden, Angela Carter, (Macmillan Press Ltd: Malaysia, 1998)
Warner Marina, The Second Virago Book of Fairy Tales, ed. by Angela Carter, (Virago Press: Clays Ltd, 1992)
Wright Kate, Angela Carter: The Bloody Chamber, (unpublished lecture, Aberwstwyth University, October 12th 2009)
1 Marina Warner, The Second Virago Book of Fairy Tales, ed. by Angela Carter, (Virago Press: Clays Ltd, 1992) pix
2Kate Wright, Angela Carter: The Bloody Chamber, (unpublished lecture, Aberwstwyth University, October 12th 2009)
1 Marina Warner, The Second Virago Book of Fairy Tales, ed. by Angela Carter, (Virago Press: Clays Ltd, 1992) pix
2Kate Wright, Angela Carter: The Bloody Chamber, (unpublished lecture, Aberwstwyth University, October 12th 2009)
3 Italo Calvino, ‘The Odysseys in The Odyssey’ from Why Read the Classics?, (Vintage: Cox & Wyman Ltd, 1999) p14
4 Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, Selected Tales, (Penguin Books: Richard Clay Ltd, 1982) p35
5Wright
6 Marina Warner, pxi
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