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Article Excerpt
The erotic always carries with it a certain discontent. Circumscribed by the hegemonic, it can only ever be a profound disappointment so long as it remains mired in heternormative gender conventions, limited by, or to, phallocentric fantasy. Audre Lorde calls this patriarchal erotic "the confused, the trivial, the psychotic, the plasticized sensation" (53) and, even in her perhaps overly romantic redefinition in terms of women's "lifeforce," reminds us of the social, political, and sexual confines of the dominant erotic. Such is the erotic implicit in one sense of an erotic infidelity, an infidelity to the erotic. But I also mean to invoke a second erotic infidelity, an erotic infidelity, an alternative erotics located in the very infidelities to the usual, enchained erotic. In this second sense, then, the very acts of betrayal are themselves sites for an emergent other erotics. Of course, the two are not entirely distinct but rather double up on each other, one erotic derived of a betrayal to the other.
In this context, infidelity is powerful, subversive, transgressive, and--most significantly--gendered. Jane Gallup's incisive rendering of Lacan's twining of the biological (the paternal) and the linguistic (the patronym) in the authorized, the Name-of-the-Father, makes clear the feminist underpinnings of any such infidelity: "Infidelity then is a feminist practice of undermining the Name-of-the-Father. The unfaithful reading strays from the author, the authorized, produces that which does not hold as a reproduction, as a representation. Infidelity is not outside the system of marriage, the symbolic, patriarchy, but hollows it out, ruins it, from within" (48).
Unfaithful readings, a ruination from within: here, then, is the connection to what I'm calling Angela Carter's wolf trilogy--"The Werewolf," "The Company of Wolves," and "Wolf-Alice." While these final three stories in Carter's fairy-tale collection The Bloody Chamber are not explicitly framed as a trilogy, I refer to them as such in order to hold them together as necessarily conjoined, intertextually inseparable, a slightly more insistent naming than what Cristina Bacchilega terms the "'women-in-the-company-of-wolves' stories" (59) in her own intertextual reading of the three tales. I want to argue that the wolf trilogy is a set of Little Red Riding Hood (ATU 333) stories borne of unfaithful readings, marked by multiple rewritings, full of intricate and intimate betrayals, not only of Charles Perrault's patriarchal "Little Red Riding Hood" but also of the feminist desire to "eroticize" the classic tales, of Carter's own restagings even--infidelities upon infidelities, a luxurious promiscuity
Angela Carter knew her fairy tales. In 1977, two years before publishing The Bloody Chamber, she translated the collected tales of Charles Perrault, whose fairy tales have for centuries insinuated themselves into both vernacular and popular contexts and often come to represent the most familiar, and thus most authoritative, versions we know. Perrault's fairy tales surface in the tales of Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm's Kinder- und Hausmarchen (1812-1815), for instance, while also providing the basis for many of Walt Disney's animated film versions--a patriarchal legacy of sorts, even when passed on by women. In order to translate Perrault's collection, Carter had to make him a familiar, had to inhabit his language, wrap herself in his elocutions, feel the very texture of his tales. Translation is the ultimate fantasy of fidelity, a fantasy that seeks to obscure the arbitrary nature of signification, an arbitrariness made explicit when the inevitable excesses and failures of language reveal the necessary slippage between two systems. Ironically, however, the act of translation (that ultimate fantasy of fidelity) may itself be the prelude to infidelity. First there is a translation, then a reimagining. Surely this was not lost on Carter, and her intimate knowledge of Perrault's collection and her translation of The Fairy Tales of Charles Perrault only accentuate the erotic infidelities of her wolf trilogy and The Bloody Chamber as a whole.
Not only does Carter write away from Perrault--restoring Little Red Riding Hood's sexual agency in the tale's seduction, overturning the bourgeois morality of his coda in verse--but she also writes and rewrites her own versions throughout the trilogy in an attempt to author differently As layered and intertextual versions of "Little Red Riding Hood," the tales in Carter's wolf trilogy resist foreclosure, beckoning instead to their companion tales and, in the process, gesturing toward an important instability that works to "hollow out" (to use Gallup's phrase) Perrault's voice and the authority of the traditional tales. In part, the wolf trilogy is important as trilogy precisely because of its recursive power; rather than replace Perrault's "Little Red Riding Hood" with a feminist version, a different authority, Carter implies an infinite chain of infidelities beginning with infidelities to her own tales.
Carter's desire to voice instability, to tell tales with a multivocal tongue, distinguishes the wolf trilogy, and The Bloody Chamber generally, from the more recent trend of women rewriting fairy tales in an explicitly "erotic" register. Carter's fairy tales covet and create tensions with the hegemonic erotic, challenge readers to find an other erotic in a dramatically different, often disturbing, sexual imagination. They are, as Bacchilega contends, "doubling and double: both affirmative and questioning, without necessarily being recuperative or politically subversive" (22), more invested in the hollowing out, the ruining from within than in any simple reversals--infidelity over recuperation. Women's "erotic" fairy tales, on the other hand, are premised on the very idea of such a recuperation and seek to recast the dominant erotic in a feminine voice. I situate Carter's wolf trilogy as counterpoint to these feminine and feminist erotic rewritings because their very preponderance attests to a certain feminist desire in and for the fairy tale as a potentially transformative genre, (1) a desire I want to ascribe to Carter but in a radically different way. Below, I read Carter's tales against this feminist yearning for an alternative erotics, suggesting instead that her stories undermine, complicate, and defy this feminist longing even as they approach the pleasures of an other erotic.
The sheer number of erotic fairy-tale collections written and edited by women is a statement in itself. Among these collections are Mitzi Szereto's Erotic Fairy Tales: A Romp through the Classics, Alison Tyler's Naughty Fairy Tales from A to Z, Hillary Rollins's The Empress's New Lingerie and Other Erotic Fairy Tales, Cecilia Tan's Of Princes and Beauties: Adult Erotic Fairy Tales, Isabelle Rose's Naughty Fairy Tales (e-book, 2 volumes), Nancy Madore's Enchanted: Erotic Bedtime Stories for Women, Joan Elizabeth Lloyd's Naughty Bedtime Stories, and, of course, Anne Rice's erotic Sleeping Beauty trilogy published under the name A. N. Roquelaure. The only erotic tale collections I could find that were written or edited by and/or for men happened to be by the same person, Michael Ford, who has two relevant collections, Once Upon a Time: Erotic Fairy Tales for Women and Happily Ever After: Erotic Fairy Tales for Queer Men. Importantly, neither of these collections is intended for heterosexual men, a point that underscores all of these collections' interest in rewriting the dominant, patriarchal erotic at the heart of the traditional tales.
Along these lines, women writers seem to have found in fairy tales a means of rearticulating women's sexual agency by calling attention to their/our positioning within a culture that fetishizes young girls as objects of sexual desire. The cultural fascination with Lolita-like girls and the related sexualization of adult women through tropes and markers of this fantasy have been well documented by psychologists like Valerie Walkerdine and, more recently, by the American Psychological Association's Task Force on the Sexualization of Girls as well as by media scholars like Debra Merskin and Jean Kilbourne. Heterosexual male fantasies as expressed in pornography, strip clubs, and even mainstream media often revolve around Lolita's appeal whether she is in pajamas, schoolgirl uniform, or cheerleader getup....
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