Backlisted - The Bloody Chamber by Angela Carter

Episode Date: June 10, 2018

For a special episode recorded at the Bath Festival, we discuss Angela Carter's astonishing collection The Bloody Chamber (1979), much of which was conceived while Carter lived in Bath. Andy and John are joined by novelist Rachel Heath, Boundless editor and critic Arifa Akbar, and journalist and artistic director of words and literature at the Bath Festival, Alex Clark. This episode also includes the panel's thoughts on Philip Roth, whose death had been announced that morning.Timings: (may differ due to variable advert length)11'25 - The Bloody Chamber by Angela Carter* To purchase any of the books mentioned in this episode please visit our bookshop at uk.bookshop.org/shop/backlisted where all profits help to sustain this podcast and UK independent bookshops.* For information about everything mentioned in this episode visit www.backlisted.fm*If you'd like to support the show, listen without adverts, receive the show early and with extra bonus fortnightly episodes, become a Patreon at www.patreon.com/backlisted Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Let's go seize the night. That's the powerful backing of American Express. Visit amex.ca slash yamex. Benefits vary by car and other conditions apply. Hello and welcome to Backlisted, the podcast that gives new life to old books. Today you find us in the impeccable georgian neoclassical elegance of the assembly rooms in bath as part of the wonderful two-week riot of words and music that is the bath festival i'm john mitchinson the publisher of unbound the platform where readers crowdfund books they want to read and i'm andy miller author of the Year of Reading Dangerously. Thanks for coming, everyone, today.

Joining us today, we have a panel of three experts. The public are allegedly tired of experts, but we don't believe that's the case, and we've got absolute top-of-the-shop experts for you today. First of all, we are joined by Rachel Heath. Rachel Heath is a novelist whose book The The Finest Type of English Womanhood, was shortlisted for the Costa novel. Since then, you have published a second novel, which is called Part of the Spell. And also, Rachel, and you'll want to show your appreciation

in the traditional manner, lives in Bath. Yes! Yay! Also joining us today is Arefa Akbar. Arefa is a journalist and critic. She is head of content at Unbound and editor of the literary magazine Boundless. She is a returning guest to Backlisted, having joined us earlier this year to talk about Hilary Mantel's Beyond Black. And our final guest,

she's the mascot of this festival in Bath. Alex Clark. She is a literary journalist, editor and broadcaster and artistic director of words and literature at the Bath Festival, so this is her fault. She too is a returning guest, having joined us two years ago

for a discussion of Jill Tweedy's Letters from a Fainthearted Feminist. Having to borrow my copy because she just interviewed Don DeLillo and given it to him or something. That's about right. That's fairly accurate isn't it? That is fairly fair yeah. So John what are we talking about today? The book that this powerhouse panel is going to discuss today is Angela Carter's popular hugely influential collection of stories, The Bloody Chamber, first published in 1979 by Victor Galant,

and a book I think that she largely wrote while living in Bath. Some of the stories are written in Bath, aren't they? And we would normally, at this point in the podcast, I would normally ask Andy what he'd been reading, but we thought it might be more appropriate, given the news last night of the death of Philip Roth, arguably at the very least one of the great and most influential modern novelists. It seemed like a good opportunity for us to touch on and reflect on the astonishing legacy,

31 books, I think, that he left behind him. I know you're a fan, Andy. Yes. Myself, Andy Miller, a writer, as a creative individual, who, as he approaches senescence, begins to feel that the pointlessness of it is really crashing in. I look at Philip Roth and I think, well, Philip Roth, you probably wrote your four best books in the decade between your 65th birthday and your 75th.

He has that great line, doesn't he? That old age isn't a battle, it's a massacre. But presumably, sorry I interrupted, you were going to say. Well no, I just, the ones I'm going to mention are probably the ones which are most widely talked about as the masterpieces of that era. Those are Sabbath Theatre, American Pastoral, The Human Stain and The Plot Against America. And one of the things that's so remarkable about those four books is that they do four different things. They're all recognizably by Philip Roth.

They have that incredible... I was saying to somebody this morning about American Pastoral. I remember the first time I read American Pastoral. And I kept thinking, how is he doing this? How is he maintaining the intensity of the prose? How is he able to turn out one career-best sentence after another for page after page after page? So I think he was operating at the peak of his powers

comparatively late in his life, which is something that a lot of writers probably don't do. In fact, they might have done their best work by the time they're in their mid to late 50s. Yeah, that's usually the thought, isn't it? That there's a middle period where they produce their best work and then it tails off. But there are other artists in other...

I mean, you know, late paintings, thinking of music, Beethoven and his late quartets. But those books in particular, they are... After that sort of 60s period he's published what I hadn't realised until I was looking at obituaries this morning, he's published five novels since the last

one that I read which is The Plot Against America which was 2004 I think I mean it's pretty astonishing to be producing books at that rate let's say he had a 60-year kind of career. He's produced a book every two years. And not just kind of, you know, these are not sagas.

I mean, these are seriously considered. He announced his retirement, didn't he? And you wonder almost as he's saying it to himself. You know, I can stop and stop. Which is quite an unusual thing to do. When did he retire, Rachel? Can you remember? No. Was it long ago? Two, three years? And he did actually retire.

He's not like the rock stars who say, I'm retiring, then they have a comeback concert. I think he really meant it. There may be a reason for that. They do get to Phil Hyde Park, the writers, even when they're Philip Roth. But in a way, everyone doubted him and sort of said, oh, he's just doing this because then he's going to come back and say oh. But he actually, no, it was a formal

requirement he obviously made of himself. But if you're that prolific, perhaps you would. You're talking about his great books and his late style. I haven't mentioned the book that is actually his most famous book, Point and His Complaint. You can mention all these books and you still haven't mentioned Point and His Complaint. Which I have read for a long time ago.

That shows just how much stuff there is. Do you think, I mean it's hard to know isn't it, certainly had he died 20 years ago, he would be known for Portnoy's Complaint as one of the most important novels of the second half of the 20th century in America. And it would be

real nerds like you and me who'd be going well actually you should read Goodbye Columbus. Goodbye Columbus. We'd all be quibbling about the best of the rest. But then as I say he has this incredible you know purple patch and I didn't

there's other books as well. I Married a Communist is another which I haven't read. Have you read The Human Stain? How many people on this panel have read The Human Stain? I think it's probably my favourite and I love. Have you read The Human Stain? How many people on this panel have read The Human Stain? I think it's probably my favourite, and I love American Pastoral, but The Human Stain really, it was the first book I came across.

It was about, he published it in 2000, didn't he? I was in a book group filled with gender theorists, mainly women of colour, mainly, you know, gay studies women. So these are all sort of academics, and they're really hot on gender. And I don't know who dared to suggest the human state, but someone did. And I thought, this is going to be savage, and I thought I'm going to be savaging it too, because we'd obviously heard about his much disputed, reputed misogyny,

or his portrayal of women, his interesting portrayal of women, to keep it diplomatic. And I read it, and I was mesmerized by the actual writing, and then I became mesmerized by the fact, I mean, he always takes the American dream, doesn't he, and he dismantles it in some way or other. But I thought he... I was astonished by the fact that he dared to take the American dream and look at black American masculinity because it could have gone so wrong

for a Jewish American writer to be taking that on, to be taking on race, re-alleged racism that Coleman Silk is fighting and that that was one thing and I thought he did that magnificently and then this 70 year old man male professor of classics is you know has an affair with a cleaner half his age and she's dancing in front of him and I thought here it goes here it is and there are those scenes where you think yeah you know he's doing male desire

beautifully but look at the way these women are but I kind of read a lot of the other stuff after the human stand and I thought you don't go to Philip Roth to examine women's desire what he does is he explores male desire so beautifully exquisitely

with all its ego and its vulnerabilities and its frailties. So I think I fell in love with him through The Human Stain. He's a high-risk writer. The scene that I always think of, I've got friends who dislike intensely, is the deathbed scene in Sabbath Theatre. They're remembering the affair and them going into a stream and pissing on each other

he talks about this is the wrong right subject you know he said i don't think i could write a better deathbed scene than that it's the wrong the wrong right subject and that's the thing about roth there are you know there's a woman dying in the bed and there's a man and they're talking about some sort of odd and but the brilliant thing is he said he kind of figures through the retelling of the story if you haven't read sabbath theater mickey sabbath he's right up there with the the worst characters in literature and he kind of concedes that she was rather better at it than he was this mutual piss-a-thon and it is completely wrong and bad and awful and terrible. But it is also an incredibly moving scene.

The genius of someone like Rothenberg, he can take you to a place like that and have you still weirdly on his side. There will be, I mean, you know, famously Carmen Khalil walked out of the panel when he was going to be awarded the International Man Booker Prize, saying that, you know,

none of his work... It was so disfigured by his attitude to women that he shouldn't get any awards. Our late friend David Miller had a theory about... Alex is laughing. I don't know if you know... Not the theory, but she published Claire Bloom's autobiography, so she would say that, wouldn't she? Yeah. He had a theory about the misapprehension

of what Roth... the root of Roth's perceived misogyny was, which I'm not actually going to say. You can't do that! What, 50 years after you're dead, you'll see a number? If you press the red button now,

you can hear me say it. I'm going to say it. Do you know what, you can hear me say it. I'm going to say it. Do you know what? I'm going to say it when we finish recording, just to make everyone at home feel bad. I think that's the most pitting encomium Philip Roth could have wished for, hearing us. I'm just pleased that so many people have come out

and have said what an extraordinarily important writer he is. I think it's impossible to not admire him. I don't think you can read him and not... It's like not liking Bergman or not liking Shakespeare, in my view. Let's pick this up again shortly. So, Rachel, we are... You were saying something really interesting earlier about the thing that Roth is writing about

in relation to the things that Angela Carter is writing about. So why don't we use that as our way into talking about the Bloody Chamber? Yeah, so which is desire. And which is exactly right. And what she undertakes to do, I think, is to write some fairy stories, to reimagine them,

and to fuel them with a new kind of with a female desire and a lot of the stories in the whole collection are about really I think trying to examine ideas around desire and agency and the idea I think underpins a lot of it is that a lot of the women are imperiled when they're passive. And so what she's beginning to open up and resolve and find a new myth to break the myth of passivity and is to say, well, let's become more active. Let's discover our sexual selves and to write fables and archetypes and stories in which this engine has been lit and it's going to cause some chaos and some joy and some excitement and some dread and I think that's

what the function of desire in these stories I think you're right but I think she complicated I think she's trickier than just saying you know here's women's desire and here's emancipating it I think she's quite tricksy so she's sort of playing a little bit so in the the the title story the the bloody chamber you get a lot about her desires she's this 17 year old and you know she's marrying this far older billionaire man and the blue bit uh story and and um. And she sees herself through a lot of mirrors and she's constantly seeing how much he desires her. She's defining her own desire by how much a man wants her and tells her he loves her. And I think she's interrogating what female desire is. She's saying, is the sum total of our desire how we relate to the man who loves us and lusts after us? Or is

there something else beyond the mirrors? There's something really kind of clear in her desire, which is that it's not entirely sexual desire. I mean, she wants to be wealthy. She has a very impoverished upbringing. She goes away from the mother who loves her. Her father is dead. Pushed by the nurse. Absolutely, absolutely entranced by the wealth. It's such a

sensual story. I mean, there's every bit of material and jewels. There's a really important bit about it as well. Can I? Yes. You can, but I want to ask the audience something first. Go. How many people here have read The Bloody Chamber by Angela Carter? Everyone. Actually, no, most of you have read it.

And how many people here think The Bloody Chamber is Angela Carter's best book? That's interesting. And how many people here think The Bloody Chamber is Angela Carter's best book? Ooh. That's interesting. Oh, gosh. Well, sort of one and a half, that was. How many people think it's not her best book? Do you know what I'm saying?

That made my brain hurt. How many people think it's her worst book is what Alex was trying to say? I wasn't. Actually, no, I wasn't. I was saying it's not something, because I think you go to the novels, don't you? When you say what's the best book is what Alex was trying to say? I wasn't. Actually, no, I wasn't. I was saying it's not something... Because I think you go to the novels, don't you? When you say what's the best book, you go to the novels. And I don't think...

I'd be surprised if anybody or very many readers thought it was her worst book. It was, I mean, it was certainly the book, I think, that established her reputation beyond all. I mean, she had published Innal desire machine she'd published the magic toy shop at the end of the 60s but it got uniformly ecstatic reviews including one from obron war who thought that the the very very funny story puss in boots was one of the great comic triumphs of prose in the 20th century which is you know unlooked for praise from a from a strange quarter but it did it did cement.

And I think it's hard to... I was talking about this with my wife this morning. It's hard to remember a time when fairy tales weren't part of the mainstream in fiction. You know, you're coming out of the 70s and a lot of social realism. And we hadn't all been reading Italo Calvino. You know, we hadn't had Midnight's Children. We hadn't... A lot of people, even at that stage, hadn't read been reading Italo Calvino. We hadn't had Midnight's Children. A lot of people, even at that stage, hadn't read much Marquez.

It came out at the end of the punk era. I see the book as a punk cover album of fairy tales. I want to just read the blurb, because if anybody hasn't read this or doesn't know what the set-up for the Bloody Chamber is, this is a very short blurb on the Vintage Classics edition. It says, From familiar fairy tales and legends,

Red Riding Hood, Bluebeard, Puss in Boots, Beauty and the Beast, Vampires and Werewolves, Angela Carter has created an absorbing collection of dark, sensual, fantastic stories. I'd never read The Bloody Chamber until January or February this year. I thought I knew what it was. I could have probably written that blurb myself without having read it. It's not that at all. I'm not saying that blurb is wrong, but the depth of it and the range of it and the the the extent to which it and she refuse to be pigeonholed when she is one of the most

egregiously pigeonholed writers of the last 50 years i think that's exactly fascinating right can i ask rachel yes where and when did you first encounter The Bloody Chamber or Angela Carter? I first encountered 1980s, obviously, sort of young teenager. The Magic Toy Shop, I think, was the first one I read. And I found it quite horrifying and overwhelming. And she was too on point to read Angela Carter as an adolescent. It was quite a stimulating. And I actually found it slightly overwhelming and thought, no, I need to go back to read much more formal

things. She's out of control, which is a feature of me as an adolescent. And then my next thing was, in fact, a very Angela Carter experience, which is why I feel this kinship with her. As I was living in a boarding house in Cambridge, and I was doing my A-levels there and I walked past a theatre and there was a sign-up saying, Auditioning Today, The Company of Wolves. And I thought, I'll do that. So in I walked and went in and I said, Hey, I'd like to be in your play.

I am one of Andrew Carter's bold girls, apparently. This orphan who's walked in and said, I'd like to be in a play and I got a part I didn't think this is a university production why would I be in it in I went and I got the part and then I wandered around did a shift covered in blood looking like a sort of you know adolescent I they must have thought oh great we'll have her. Her and Angela Carter. And then I thought, what am I doing wandering around in a shift covered in blood? And I went

back and then I read the collection. Do you think there's any adaptation of an Angela Carter piece of work that wouldn't be okay if you were wearing a shift covered in blood? This is the liberation. I'm not sure. I think that would go for everybody. if you were wearing a shift covered in blood. This is the liberation, Alex.

I'm not sure. I think that would go for everybody, wouldn't it? Alex, can you remember a time in your reading life before Angela Carter? Andy, I know you're brigging me. This is because you said before, I'm going to ask you when you first encountered Angela Carter, and I went, God, I don't know. And you said, just say the 80s,

because that's what people of our august age, recently milestone age... We're from the 80s. We're from the 80s, but actually I think it's true. I think I was a student, and I think it was Love, which is a very slender novel, about four or five in, I suppose, and it's a very kind of gothic tale of a couple.

And I didn't like it at all. I don't understand what's going on here, and I don't like it. I'm going back to Iris Murdoch immediately. And then, luckily enough, a bit later, somebody gave me a copy of Wise Children, and that was all right. It's funny, isn't it? Because apparently I was reading Edmund Gordon's excellent bio, brilliant, brilliant, of Angela Carter,

which was published a couple of years ago, called The Invention of Angela Carter. And there was beef between Angela Carter and Iris Murdoch. And yet that's quite strange in a way because one of the writers who Carter most reminds me of is Iris Murdoch. And actually, John, when you were saying, you know, that fairy tales hadn't been in the mainstream,

one exception might be to think of Murdoch because it's more sort of sublimated in a way. I just think there's now a kind of... You can't really... Everyone on the block knows that the original Cinderella was incredibly violent. Everybody's gone back to the original versions and that Sleeping Beauty's a sort of a rape.

But I think the key book that came out in around about 1676-1777 was Bruno Bettelheim's The Uses of Enchantment. And Angela Carter hated that book. And in fact, Bettelheim's reputation, as I think, has not fared well. But it was about the idea that fairy tales were a way of offering comfort and succour for troubled children. And of course, her view was not that at all. She was a good hater, wasn't she?

Very good at hating. Aretha, where did you... Can you remember the first cast that you read? Yeah, the first book I read was The Bloody Chamber, and I was in my late teens, I was about 18. And ever since about 13 or 14, I'd been reading a lot of second-wave feminist novels. So I didn't recognize this as such. And I took against it immediately, even though I was very, I was very, I was excited,

but troubled. I was excited because I really found this unsettling and beautiful writing and subversive. But then there was another part of me who thought, hang on, this reads in quite a pornographic way to me, there's a lot of sadomasochism, and I don't quite know what her position is on this. I liked the alternative endings, the fact that women appear passive, and suddenly they show an iron will from nowhere.

So I liked the subversions, but I didn't like a lot of the things I didn't recognize. So while I secretly loved these stories, I had to tell myself, this is not feminism as I've known and recognize it. And I read all the other stuff. I was sort of mesmerized by it. And I read Wise Children and Magic Toy Shop, and I didn't like any of them. I thought I didn't like, I didn't buy into the magic realism. I just thought they were really too baroque for me and not

for me. So really I went back to these stories and I thought why do they trouble me so much? And I think the reason they trouble me so much is because she was so ahead of her time that she was playing and I think she did this in life as well, this idea of masquerade.

I think in the Gordon, in the Gordon biography, she said she wasn't even the most reliable witness of her own life. There was a sort of masquerade going on in her own life. And I think the women in these stories have this sense of picking up gender, like being playful with it, putting it on, like gender isn't something essential. It's something that you can put on and take off like a dress. And that's quite radical. And that's very ahead of its time. It's the sort of time that we're dealing with gender fluidity now. Aretha, there's a thing Edmund Gordon says in the book where he says, this was one downside of Angela's rapidly expanding reputation.

We're talking about approximately the time that The Bloody Chamber was published. The people she met from now on would often have a preconceived image of her in which they were passionately invested, and she wouldn't always correspond to the way they'd invented her for themselves. We've got a clip of Angela Carter in, I think, this is in the late 1980s, talking about her favourite TV programme and the role of women in art and women as artists.

It's very important in art, it's very important for women to retain their humanity. It's very, very important that women should always be this, isn't it? It's always. One of my favorite television cop series is Cagney and Lacey, where the women very, very definitely are the upholders of ethics there, the personification of certain kinds of ethics. But I don't mind being regarded as the reservoir of ethical truth, but I would like to think it was because of me, not because of my gender. And I would also like to think that people took seriously what I said,

if you do regard me as a... Because the other thing, you're always true and you're never believed, like Cassandra. It's really eerie to sit here and have Angela Carter's voice echoing round the room. You're always true and you're never believed. The sense of, as you were saying, fluidity, which she hints at there, that gender wasn't that important to her, that these characters moved between,

in the same way that they move between human and animal and also between animal and mechanical and artificial so I mean there's so much that she's packing into these Rachel could you read us something from the bloody chamber please yes I need to read bit which exactly is what John's talking about this transgression and it's the end of the tiger's bride he will gobble you up nursery fears made flesh and sinew earliest and most archaic affairs fear of devourment the beast in his carnivorous bed of bone and I white shaking raw approaching him as if offering in myself the key to a peaceable kingdom in which his appetite need not be my extinction.

He went still as stone. He was far more frightened of me than I was of him. I squatted on the wet straw and stretched out my hand. I was now within the field of force of his golden eyes. He growled at the back of his throat, lowered his head, sank onto his forepaws, snarled, showed me his red gullet, his yellow teeth. I never moved. He snuffed the air as if to smell my fear.

He could not. Slowly, slowly he began to drag his heavy gleaming weight across the floor towards me. Tiles came crashing down from the roof. I heard them fall into the courtyard far below. The reverberations of his purring rocked the foundations of the house. The walls began to dance. I thought, it will all fall. Everything will disintegrate. And he dragged himself closer and closer to me until I felt the harsh velvet of his head against my hand, then a tongue, a brace of a sandpaper. He will lick the skin off me. And each stroke of his tongue ripped off skin after successive skin, all the skins of a life

in the world, and left behind a nascent patina of shining hairs. My earrings turned back to water and trickled down my shoulders. I shrugged the drops of my beautiful fur. Yes, Angela. People don't talk enough about her language. I mean, it is so, not having read it for 20 years, going back to it, there is nothing quite like Angela Carter's language. The way that she addresses you directly in that sort of folk tale, fairy tale way. And the words, I mean, extraordinary kind of vocabulary. And the sense of, because I hadn't read Huisman, and we've only done it recently on the podcast,

but certainly the early stories, that intense, sensual, heady thing reminded me a lot of Against Nature. She was a great... And fan is not the right word, but she found Huisman's work very interesting indeed because, of course, it's sensualism at the expense of everything else, to all intents and purposes.

But she's also playing, as we were saying earlier, around seduction too. So to read her, it's quite interesting to me that when we all read her as adolescents, we went, oh, no, I don't think so. Yeah, it's too hard. But she's, again, in that debunking way, she's seeking to seduce us.

She's casting magic. She's creating illusions and play. And then she'll debunk it too then there'll be this sort of cynical glamorous moment or she'll say something quite bawdy won't you and you'll hear a roar with laughter and so it's constantly this carnival is always in play i think but seduction is a big part of it too and it's in the language it's like you say potent the phrase that she uses about the latent content of fairy tales I like, but she also said something which I think is sort of more helpful,

which is she tried to tell them as though she had dreamed them herself, that she wasn't self-consciously in any scholarly way trying to retell these stories. It was as if this was the stuff of her own subconscious. This is exactly the question I wanted to ask, because I'm puzzled by it. She did say, I don't want these stories to seem like versions or cover stories. I want to take out the latent content.

And I thought, well, OK, if you take her at her word, which is quite a sort of bold thing to do sometimes with Angela Carter, but what is the latent content in the stories that she's drawing out what does she want us to know about them I mean I think in the bloody chamber it's that the apparent victim who does escape the fate that has been destined for all the women before her is not as innocent as she seems and still gets away with it i think but what that kind of tells you i'm not sure i think it's even darker than that for me

this is why i felt it was illegitimate i couldn't like it it's that it's sort of 50 shades but with real teeth because i think what she what the what the 17 year old here is doing is she's almost getting some sort of weird voluptuous pleasure yeah from being with a sadist and she secretly knows this man is a sadist because she describes him as having this great bulk as being a sarcophagus you know leading even before she sees room of torture implements she has this knowledge that he is bad and evil and he is a bit of a monster and he is a sadist but she's like the terrible woman from you know the the vanilla anastasia from um it was really weird reading this again with 50 shades it can't because he's like don't go into my red room yeah i mean it's, you can't not read it with that.

You can't not read it. But here, you're sort of seeing that women, because second wave feminism didn't really go into sexual desire. It was all about equality and getting equality in the workplace, you know, wasn't it? The basics.

So here, she's delving into, she's gone one stage further by saying, what about our sexual desire? Are we not feminists? Are we terrible if we have a rape fantasy, for example? You know, can we go there? Is that a dreadful thing for any feminist? I mean, these were radical questions. This is my favorite part of the Bloody Chamber, is that moment, and it's quite fleeting, I think, when she arrives and she begins to understand

something around his erotic dominance and her response is, oh, this is not uninteresting. Right? And to me, that's a Carter moment because it's so nuanced and nobody's prescribing anything. Nobody's saying, oh, you can't do this and you've got to respond this way. It's all possible.

But it's scary. It's all potential. It's almost a scary thing. And she goes and looks at a dirty book in the library and thinks, this is quite... He is interesting to me. She basically started to have sex and he sort of said, actually I'm a bit busy

right now and left her kind of but not with the terrible fear that her kind of... Before she realised it's blue bearded then suddenly she's like, oh god, you want to kill kill me i think the thing that's so interesting about the stories i don't know what i was expecting but the thing that i wasn't expecting is for me the stories are about the exchange of power yeah yes and even within each story power will shift as it

does in all humor interactions between women and women or men and women or men and men. That those stories are constantly shifting. Now, you told me how to pronounce it earlier, the Sadian women. Sadian women. So the same year The Bloody Chamber was published, she writes a feminist reappraisal called The Sadian

Women, which is a consideration of the women. Which had a mixed review, let's say. I mean, it was an ambitious idea, let's do a feminist rewriting. Right. But the central idea between it is around, it's also about desire. And it's about

saying, it's the lamb and the tiger. Yes. It's, you can't, the lamb's got to run with the tiger. And that's what her women do, they run with the tigers. But the women, her women do. They run with the tigers. But the women, so as in Marquis de Sade, you know, with Marquis de Sade, really the man's in control and has the ultimate power.

But here she's saying we can be the masochists, but actually we can then have this exchange of power where suddenly we're dominant. So in your story that you've just read out, the woman becomes animal. There's the animal urge in her that he's unleashed. But in the bloody chamber, there's an alternative

happy ending with the non-nuclear family. She runs off. Her mother comes to rescue her on a white charger, and she goes off with a piano tuner, and she has a three... You know, a piano tuner and mother. One of the very few examples of family doing good in an Angela Carter universe. You know, usually the family are there, the grandmothers in particular.

Can we come back to mothers? Yeah. When you've read your book a bit. Just to give you that idea of how she reverses things, this is one paragraph at the end of the shortest story in the book, The Snow Child. So the girl picks a rose, pricks her finger on a thorn, bleeds, screams, falls.

Weeping, the count got off his horse, unfastened his breeches, and thrust his virile member into the dead girl. The countess reined in her stamping mare and watched him narrowly. He was soon finished. Then the girl began to melt. Soon there was nothing left of her but a feather a bird might have dropped, a bloodstain, like the trace of a fox's keel on the snow, and the rose she had pulled off the bush. Now the countess had all her clothes on again. With her long hand she stroked her furs. The count picked up the rose, bowed, and handed it to his wife.

When she touched it, she dropped it. It bites, she said. I was actually, I re-read that on the train here and I was actually really shocked by it so you've got death, sex with a dead girl, transformation and then the girl winning because actually the rose bites it's kind of the whole collection

Carter is always very interested in looking at it seems to me, looking at the constituent parts of the thing that you think you know and saying, what would happen if I put these in a different order? What would happen if I turn this upside down, put it in a different direction? This is a recording of Carter talking about

the film adaptation of The Company of Wolves, which we'll talk about a little in a minute, but let's just hear her now talking about how she feels about grandmothers. When my grandmother used to tell me the story of Red Riding Hood when I was a very little girl, a very, very little girl, she used to tell it me with actions,

and she had no truck with all the consoling versions of it where the woodcutter comes and opens the wolf up. She believed in ending it on the wolf eating Red Riding Hood and when she came to the bit where it says, and then he leapt upon her and gobbled her all up, she used to leap upon me and pretend to gobble me all up. And I thought this was wonderful. I thought this was quite ecstatic.

I used to squeak and shiver and say oh granny, granny do it again and very often to please me she would and therefore though I may have I personally may have an image of grandmothers as very aggressive people I tend not to think of wolves in the same way Case for the prosecution I tend not to think of wolves in the same way.

Case for the prosecution, yeah. I was saying to you, we were saying earlier, Alex, weren't we, about being from the 80s. Yeah. And Aretha, when you were saying that you didn't like Carter at first, I had read very little Carter before the start of this year, but knowing that when we record an episode of Batlisted, especially one in public, it's like doing the worst viva of all time you know i'm not i've ever done a viva but you're

you're you want to be on top of the subject so i've been working my way through the fear of having a person say you know nothing of my work but what i want to say is so when and when i started reading my way through them i read the The Magic Toy Shop first, and then I read Knights of the Circus. And I, while reading Knights of the Circus, I tweeted the following on March the 10th.

And I'm going to read what I tweeted. I'm reporting, with a slight sense of shame and pride, into Mingle. I am reading a famous novel of the 1980s which, 150 pages in, feels like a string of creative writing assignments from a precocious student who had been interviewed uncomfortably on Blue Peter, aged 12, just before going up to Cambridge, leaving many viewers vaguely disturbed. I had literally dozens of people saying who is it is it Salman Rushdie is it Ian McEwan

is it Angela Carter and then Richard Kelly our former guest Richard Kelly said brilliantly well it could be anyone because what you've described is the dominant mode of British fiction in the early 1980s that's so true true. And coming to her now, it actually reminded me why I struggled with making the jump to literary fiction in my late teens, because magical realism, which we could see this as magical realism, it's tremendously evocative

of what was considered ambitious fiction at that time. And this was a core text. And yet the more I read, the more I thought, well, of course, she didn't want to be called a magical realist. She's not really a magical realist. She can't be called anything, though, did she? No. I mean, she really didn't.

And also part of the bit, almost, maybe she, again, set something up and debunks it, was the thing that John was saying about something like wise children. Yes. The demotic voice is so strong, isn't it? And it's totally different. I guess you could see with the kind of the reversals.

It's my favourite of her books. But that just beat my taste in fiction. Although I do love The Bloody Chamber and I sort of loved it more going back to it than I remember loving it at the time. We'll go on to The Company of Wolves, but I still have a very heavy memory of the movie that slightly occludes my, or had occluded until he re-read it.

But no, I think you're right. I think Knights of the Circus, although I think that is a sort of cruel but fair assessment of the book. Just how I felt while I was reading it, I have revised my opinion. I am prepared to tweet something repentant, if that will make it alright. You haven't read, you haven't tweeted. Now I would say, Nights at the Circus

is the novel which is most, most plays into the hands of Carter's detractors. Which is that it is narratively negligent but full of ideas that

seem to exist only within other books which was a criticism that I'm not meant to I think the narrative negligence is not there in Wise Children which I think is beautifully structured also makes you think what might she have gone on to write?

She was 51 when she died. You need to save that tweet to draft, Sandy. And also, there's a wisdom in it, too. And there's an understatement. Also, it's funny, funny, funny. Yes, it is so funny. I heard Dora Bryan read the audiobook ages ago, and they're very early, and it was the book that made me think,

maybe there is something in audiobooks after all. Actually, the audiobook ages ago and very early and it was the book that made me think, maybe there is something in audiobooks after all. Actually, the audiobook of The Bloody Chamber is brilliant. Is it? Yeah, with Amelia Fox Reid. She lends herself to the spoken word, don't you think? Yeah, I do. It doesn't seem strange to me that she'd write fairy tales

or folk songs or any of those things because she writes for the spoken word, I think. That makes her alive. It's liberating. Would you be kind enough, I know you brought along another little thing to read us. As I said at the top, you are a resident of the city of Bath

in Avon. A Barthonian. So Angela Carter was living in Bath when she was at least writing some of the stories in the Bloody Chamber and formulating some of the stories in the Bloody Chamber. Andulating some of the stories in the Bloody Chamber. And she wrote an essay about Bath, didn't she? She did write an essay about Bath. And it's published in the collection of her journalism,

which is called Nothing Sacred, and is published by Virago, as all of her work is, I think, isn't it? Published in New Society in 1975. And I found a little bit to read about Bath and what I quite like about it. And what we haven't really discussed, because there's so much to discuss, is I think what Carter's always interested in, and it's related to power, actually, is paradox. So that's everything is paradoxical, everything is dual. And that's partly what I love about her. And she brings that shrewd assessment to our own

dear city. The haunting silences of Bath are those with which the English compose intimacies. The uselessness of the city contributes both to its charm and to its poignancy, which is part of its charm. It was not built to assert the preeminence of a particular family or the power of a certain region. It had no major industry in the 18th century except tourism. The gentleman whose tastes this city was built, speculatively, to satisfy, had no interest in labor as such. Only in his profits from a labor he hoped would take place as far away from his pleasures as is possible. Bath was built to be happy in,

which accounts for its innocence and its ineradicable melancholy. Bath in its romantic, melancholy. Bath in its romantic, disheveled loveliness is no longer the city the woods built. 200 years of the history of taste have modified the crisp outlines of its rational harmony, and this has changed its appearance far more than time itself has done. Our perceptions of the city are modified by those of everybody else who has ever been here and thought that it was beautiful. It is more than the sum of its parts. Now, for you, Carter is synonymous with bath. But for me, and backlisted listeners will appreciate why this is a special moment, she is synonymous with Croydon. Of course. I try and make mentions of Croydon in every single one

of these podcasts. Hooray, I've succeeded. Her first job after she left school was as a reporter on the Croydon Advertiser. And that was in the late 1950s and early 1960s. And one of the wonderful things in Edmund Gordon's biography is he's gone through back issues of the Croydon Advertiser to find the sort of things that Andrew Carter was writing about then. And he says even at the age of 19, she starts... She's there for a year, and at the start, it's all quite formal. And even by the end of that year, she's beginning to push at the form

of what you would find in a local newspaper in 1960, in Croydon. But Alex, you were saying she is also synonymous, we've mentioned Bath, we've mentioned Croydon, she's synonymous with? Journalism. Is that what you want to be? No, you're both...

Eastbourne. Eastbourne, she was born in Eastbourne. On my birthday. We'd share a birthday. 7th of May. And she was born in Eastbourne. Yeah. And one of the things about her is she travelled.

It seems to me, anyway, she travelled incredibly widely once she could. Yeah. But she's bringing in influences, not just literary influences, which is the thing she was sometimes criticised for, but she travels around the world. She spends a lot of time when she's young in Japan. She travels across the States. She runs away all the time. That's part of it, isn't it?

She runs away all the time. So when you're saying it, there she is in Croydon, she's 19. And why I earlier mentioned mothers, because the mother is such an important and, as you say, John, such a triumphantly brilliant figure in the Bluebeard story, in The Bloody Chamber.

But actually in life, I found that part of Edmund's biography absolutely horrifying because she'd had this intense, close relationship with her mother. Her mother had had great hopes for her, but it wasn't simply a sort of question of a mother pushing a reluctant daughter forward. She was sort of question of a mother pushing a reluctant daughter forward she was sort of in cahoots with it as well she was intrusive but she was very much loved back by angela who at some point just kind of thought no can't do this anymore and ran away ran away to croydon got married intrusive husband ran away to japan

left her wedding ring. She did something crazy with her wedding ring. She sort of left it on a cafe table in the airport, that sort of stuff. She likes itinerants too, doesn't she? That rolling, even in the language, that rolling festival of her language. You get caught up all the time in this travelling circus. That's what she is, I think, don't you? So I've got a copy here of, I said it was like taking a Bible. what she is, I think, don't you? So I've got a copy here of, I said it was like taking a vibe, but look

everyone, I've got a copy of the York Notes for the Bloody Tanks. And this was published about ten years ago and I was flicking through it on the train on the way up to dazzle you with my What are the themes? Tell us what the themes are. Well, here's the thing, and this is the final major point I want

to make. The final major point I want to make, I'll ask you about. So these notes were written ten years ago, and in the introduction, the introduction basically says, Angela Carter was writing in a period where issues facing feminism were very much in the newspapers and in society. But you young people won't realize that because you're not bothered about those issues anymore because they've sort of gone away.

Is that accurate? Maybe it was accurate in 2005. It's a bit like reading The Rough Guide to Syria, where it says, you know, where I was reading just yesterday that the top holiday, you know, if you want a nice place to hang out, Homs is a great city for Western people to... But she would be quite complicated.

Ten years is a long time. Yeah, but she would be quite complicated in the current conversation because it's too prescriptive. Oh, she could sound people telling her what to do. All that, and she'd fall into the, oh, you know, sort of be, stop being such a victim, get up, take him on, have him yourself.

Seduce him. Do you know what I mean? Her whole energy is around saying, let's upend that i don't know whether there was that period of time where these things weren't relevant there might have been in about year 2000 we all thought the battles are done but do you think she her voice now aretha in the light of what we were saying earlier about how she fits in some ways and in other ways she doesn't fit and she wouldn't want to fit, what is there... Sorry, it's a big question to ask,

but what is there in her writing now which speaks loud and clear in 2018 to issues that women have to deal with? Well, I think I touched on this a bit earlier. All of us have to deal with. I think I touched on all of us have to deal with i think i touched a bit earlier but i really see it in her in in this book of short stories is the the thing she was thinking then the sort of things that we're thinking about now about women women playing with gender also i saw when i reread this our selfie culture quite a lot, our obsessive, almost narcissistic...

Lots of mirrors. Yeah, narcissistic need to see our own reflections on social media. And I know that narcissistic thing has been there ever since Narcissus, but this book is a really weird summation of some... Or part of it has got to do with selfie culture and seeing yourself reflected in other people also puberty don't you think that come at the moment of become of adulthood of making that transition from childhood to adulthood where you're where you're fat you become particularly

interested in in how you're seen and how you see yeah but also the biggest thing is this idea that gender might be separate from biology. Now, that is an idea of today. It's not an idea of 1979 at all. That really is today's idea. So much so that, you know, feminists such as Germaine Greer having a really difficult time getting their head, not just Germaine Greer, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Jenny Murray, there's a whole...

I can't call them an entire generation. There's many feminists that I admire that are having a difficult time around this concept of gender not being tied completely together. There's anybody who was more to grips than Carter with the idea of mutation and morphing and play and pleasure. In the way that older feminists were looking at her work, Andrea Dworkin really didn't like her work

because she thought that fairy tales were all the childcare wing of patriarchy and that they were used to suppress and to reduce the woman's role and their ability to imagine themselves. And also, she's not politically prescriptive, Carter, particularly in The Bloody Chamber. You're not going to mount a barricade waving The Bloody Chamber because you're going to have to sit down and say, actually, it's quite complicated.

Alex, we've got time for one more extract from Angela Carter's work. Well, so the reason I said what she's synonymous with journalism is because you'd asked us to bring something that wasn't from the bloody chamber. And I thought, well, I just love her journalism very much. And I found this thing which I knew she'd written about and I looked it up and here it is from the LRB in 1985, a review of three books about food. And it's just the thought that you could write this now, the amazingly ruthless piece of snobbery at the end. So I'm just going to quickly read this. Piggery triumphant has invaded even the pages of The Guardian, hitherto synonymous with nonconformist sobriety. Instead of its previous modest column of recipes and restaurant reviews,

the paper now boasts an entire page devoted to food and wine once a week. Which, I mean, can you imagine? Now there's a whole magazine. Anyway, more space than it gives to movies, as much as it customarily gives to books. Piggery has spawned a glossy bimonthly a la carte, a gastronomic penthouse devoted to glamour photography, the subject of which is not the female body imaged as if it were good enough to eat, but the food photographed according to the conventions of the pin-up. Oh, that coconut kirsch roulade in the first issue. If, as Lévi-Strauss once opined,

to eat is to fuck, then that coconut roulade is just asking for it. Even if the true foodie knows, there is not something, something not quite, not quite about a coconut kirsch roulade as a concept. It's just a bit, just a bit Streatham. just a bit Streatham. Its vowels are subtly wrong. It is probably related to a Black Forest gatto. She's a genius.

She's a genius. You wouldn't write that now, would you? Because you'd get below the line from Streatham. But it's funny. I'm quite right. One of my favourite essays of hers is where she outs D.H. Lawrence as a cross-dresser. but it's funny quite right quite right one of my one of my favourite essays

of hers is where she she outs D.H. Lawrence as a cross dresser she goes through his obsession with women's clothes

and the details of women's clothes it's just it's one of the most it's both a very very funny piece of but also a brilliant

bit of forensic criticism because you cannot read Lawrence's novels I know you wouldn't you don't choose to anyway, Andy, but you can't read them again without noticing how much there is about women's clothing in them.

Anyway, unfortunately, I think that is where we're going to have to leave it. Huge thanks to Aretha and to Rachel and to Alex, to Nikki, our producer. You'll be able to download the podcast, plus follow up all the links, clips and suggestions further reading on our website, backlisted.fm and of course you can still contact

us on Twitter, Facebook and Boundless. We'd like to thank the audience here in Bath who have smiled and laughed and only one of them looks angry and that's always a good result.

So we hope you've enjoyed it as much as we have. If so, please consider leaving us a review on iTunes or wherever you get your podcasts. Yes, thank you all for coming. We'll be recording another one of these, not in Bath, in a fortnight's time. Until then, thank you. Good night. Get Carter, everyone! APPLAUSE If you prefer to listen to Backlisted without adverts, you can sign up to our Patreon.

It's www.patreon.com forward slash backlisted. As well as getting the show early, you get a whole two extra episodes of what we call Locklisted, which is Andy, me and Nicky talking about the books, music and films we've enjoyed in the previous fortnight.