It is Carters genius, in this colle, to make the fable of Beauty and the Beast a metaphor for all the myriad yearnings and dangers of sexual relations. Now it is the Beauty who is the stronger, now the Beast. In "The Courtship of Mr Lyon" it is for the Beauty to save the Beasts life, while in "The Tigers Bride", Beauty will be erotically transformed into an exquisite animal herself: ". . . each stroke of his tongue ripped off skin after skin, all the skins of a life in the world, a behind a patina of hairs. My earrings turned back to water. . . I shrugged the drops off my beautiful fur." As though her whole body were being deflowered and so metamorphosing into a new instrument of desire, allowing her admission to a new ("animal" in the sense of spiritual as well as tigerish) world. In "The Erl-King", however, Beauty and the Beast will not be reciled. Here there is her healing, nor submission, but revenge.
The colle expands to take in many other fabulous old tales; blood and love, alroximate, underlie and unify them all. In "The Lady of the House of Love" love and blood unite in the person of a vampire: Beauty grown monstrous, Beastly. In "The Snow Child" we are in the fairy-tale territory of white snow, red blood, black bird, and a girl, white, red and black, born of a ts wishes; but Carters modern imagination knows that for every t there is a tess, who will not tolerate her fantasy-rival. The battle of the sexes is fought between women, too.
The arrival of Red Riding Hood pletes and perfects Carters brilliant, reiing synthesis of Kinderund Hausm?r. Now we are offered the radical, shog suggestion that Grandmht actually be the Wolf ("The Werewolf"); or equally radical, equally shog, the thought that the girl (Red Riding Hood, Beauty) might easily be as amoral, as savage as the Wolf/Beast; that she might quer the Wolf by the power of her owory sexuality, her erotic wolfishness. This is the theme of "The pany of Wolves", and to watch The pany of Wolves, the film Angela Carter made with Neil Jordan, weaving together several of her wolf-narratives, is to long for the full-scale wolf-novel she never wrote.
"Wolf-Alice" offers final metamorphoses. Now there is y, only two Beasts: a ibal Duke, and a girl reared by wolves, who thinks of herself as a wolf, and who, arriving at womanhood, is drawn towards self-knowledge by the mystery of her own bloody chamber; that is, her menstrual flow. By blood, and by what she sees in mirrors, that make a house uncosy.
At length the grandeur of the mountains bees
monotonous. . . He turned and stared at the mountain
for a long time. He had lived in it for fourteen years
but he had never seen it before as it might look
to someone who had not known it as almost a part
of the self. . . As he said goodbye to it, he saw it turn into
so much sery, into the wonderful backcloth for
an old try tale, tale of a child suckled by
wolves, perhaps, or of wolves nursed by a woman.
Carters farewell to her mountain-try, at the end of her last wolf-story, "Peter and the Wolf" in Black Venus, signals that, like her hero, she has "tramped onwards, into a different story".
There is oher out-and-out fantasy in this third colle, a meditation on A Midsummer Nights Dream that prefigures (and is better than) a passage in Wise Children. In this story Carters linguistic exoticism is in full flight -- here are "breezes, juicy as mahat mythopoeically ca