The contemporary writers such as Margaret Atwood and Angela Carter have their own attitude towards fairy tales. In fact, I should mention that in her early works of Angela Carter the psychoanalytic view to fairy tales still echoes in some extent; in the first edition of ‘Fireworks’ she wrote: ‘[tales are] <…> fabulous narratives that deal directly with the imagery of the unconscious – mirrors; the externalized self, <…>, forbidden sexual objects. <…>. The tale does not log everyday experience through a system of imagery derived from subterranean areas behind everyday experience, and therefore the tale cannot betray its readers into a false knowledge of everyday experience…[1] But some years later she became very interested in what relation fairy tales have up to reality. The writer changed her mind, ‘became very interested in the way they conveyed the materiality of their tellers’ and inventors’ lives. Fairy tales came to represent the literature of the illiterate.’[2] She thought about that that the fairy tales came from the oral tradition and this is the very source of the imagination of the ordinary people who, in fact, created nowadays world. Further on she notices that the characteristics of fairy tales she used to explore (imagery, symbolism, fantasy) ‘relate to the social function of romancing’[3]. This allows M. Warner to start her essay on Angela’s Carter’s fiction with a statement – ‘fairy tales explore the mysteries of love’[4].
It is necessary to point out that Jack Zipes, who is a leading scholar of fairy tales, had already studied fairy tales ‘in that kind of light’ and was ‘attacking the materialism and coercive conformism he had found inherent to the genre. / Zipes has argued with hot-headed eloquence, from a huge range of scholarship, against the narrow psychoanalytic (largely Jungian) view that fairy tale are deep pools in which eternal wisdom lies like some wonderful fish that will bring about everything one desires’[5].
Interpreting fairy tales as some kind of conveyance of meanings, statements and rules, which through centuries have reached our culture, contemporary writers – in our case Angela Carter and Margaret Atwood – read them very closely and transform, rewrite them.
[1] Cited from Marina Warner ‘Angela Carter: Bottle Blonde, Double Drag’, ‘Flesh and the Mirror: Essays on the Art of Angela Carter’, Ed. Lorna Sage, London: Virago, 1994.
[2] Ibid.
[3] Ibid.
[4] Ibid.
[5] Ibid.
Žymos: Angela Carter, bluebeard, fairy tales, Margaret Atwood