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Black Venus
An alternate cover edition can be found here.
Black Venus (also published as Saints and Strangers), is an anthology of short fiction. Angela Carter takes real people and literary legends - most often women - who have been mythologized or marginalized and recasts them in a new light. In a style that is sensual, cerebral, almost hypnotic, "The Fall River Axe-Murders" portrays the last hours before Lizzie Borden's infamous act: the sweltering heat, the weight of flannel and corsets, the clanging of the factory bells, the food reheated and reserved despite the lack of adequate refrigeration, the house "full of locked doors that open only into other rooms with other locked doors." In "Our Lady of the Massacre" the no-nonsense voice of an eighteenth-century prostitute/runaway slave questions who is civilized - the Indians or the white men? "Black Venus" gives voice to Charles Baudelaire's Creole mistress, Jeanne Duval: "you could say, not so much that Jeanne did not understand the lapidary, troubled serenity of her lover's poetry but, that it was a perpetual affront to her. He recited it to her by the hour and she ached, raged and chafed under it because his eloquence denied her language." "The Kiss" takes the traditional story of Tamburlaine's wife and gives it a new and refreshing ending. Sometimes disquieting, sometimes funny, always thought-provoking, Angela Carter's stories offer a feminist revision of images that lie deep in the public psyche.
Black Venus (also published as Saints and Strangers), is an anthology of short fiction. Angela Carter takes real people and literary legends - most often women - who have been mythologized or marginalized and recasts them in a new light. In a style that is sensual, cerebral, almost hypnotic, "The Fall River Axe-Murders" portrays the last hours before Lizzie Borden's infamous act: the sweltering heat, the weight of flannel and corsets, the clanging of the factory bells, the food reheated and reserved despite the lack of adequate refrigeration, the house "full of locked doors that open only into other rooms with other locked doors." In "Our Lady of the Massacre" the no-nonsense voice of an eighteenth-century prostitute/runaway slave questions who is civilized - the Indians or the white men? "Black Venus" gives voice to Charles Baudelaire's Creole mistress, Jeanne Duval: "you could say, not so much that Jeanne did not understand the lapidary, troubled serenity of her lover's poetry but, that it was a perpetual affront to her. He recited it to her by the hour and she ached, raged and chafed under it because his eloquence denied her language." "The Kiss" takes the traditional story of Tamburlaine's wife and gives it a new and refreshing ending. Sometimes disquieting, sometimes funny, always thought-provoking, Angela Carter's stories offer a feminist revision of images that lie deep in the public psyche.
128 pages, Paperback
First published October 1, 1985
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October 15, 2020
Angela Carter depicts a range of women (and one fluidly-sexed hermaphrodite) striving to be - or just simply being - fully themselves. Sometimes that self is passionate and loving, other times murderous, animalistic. Sometimes men are important to them, sometimes not so much. These women have little in common with each other, outside of their disinterest in conforming to conventional notions of femininity. Atypical examples of strength. The feminism is not subtext, it's the whole point. But this is not friendly or easy feminism: no saints are in sight.
Mostly fabulous, with some eh. 3.5 stars, rounded up. Even when the stories aren't top notch, the writing always impresses. Favorites are in bold.
"The Fall River Ax Murders" - Lizzie Borden is a woman with problems; she solves those problems with 40 whacks, and then 41 more. This is a portrait of misery: a miserable family, a miserable town. Rather a miserable read as well.
"The Kiss" - The women of Samarkand are a dreamy lot, as was Tamburlaine's wife. This is a slim, elegant trifle. I'm not sure why it needed to be written, but it's quite pleasant.
"Our Lady of the Massacre" - A Lancashire whore finds acceptance and a new life within an Algonquin village. But the English will do as they did: the tribe is massacred, and so a third life must begin. This was a marvelous tale: the redoubtable, no-nonsense heroine was impressive and Carter's portrait of the Indian community was sensitive and real. I wanted this story to go on much longer.
"Peter and the Wolf" - A girl raised by wolves causes different sorts of feelings to arise in a cousin aiming himself towards priesthood. An absorbing tale that ends with a strange epiphany. Carter touches lightly on the natural world vs. the civilized world, sexuality, faith, and how we turn our memories into stories.
"The Cabinet of Edgar Allan Poe" - Carter muses at length on the unconscious influences Poe's actress mother and later his child-bride may have had on him. This is a very meta story and the creativity is often dazzling. Unfortunately, it is all rather... unconvincing.
"Overture and Incidental Music for A Midsummer Night's Dream" - More musing by Carter, this time on grouchy Oberon, maternal Titania, a surprisingly shaggy, horny Puck, and the unnamed changeling in Shakespeare's play who is at the root of the Oberon-Titania quarrel. The changeling is given an identity here: the Golden Herm, a hermaphrodite, and much of this exceedingly postmodern anti-story is about how the Golden Herm enchants all. This was a fascinating plunge into gender deconstruction. I love how Carter takes ostensibly loveable faerie characters and makes them fearsome, alien. The story also features an enjoyable mini-treatise on the contrast in fairy tales between enchanting English woodland and forbidding German forest.
"The Kitchen Child" - And so life is created in the kitchen of a great English manor: someone has poked the rotund cook while she prepared her lobster soufflé! Nine months later: a child! But who was this secretive poker, who is the kitchen child's father? Perhaps it was the just as rotund visiting Duc who enjoyed not just the soufflé, but its maker... Man oh man, I loved this one! Not since the author's equally cheeky, witty, and life-affirming version of Puss 'n Boots have I smiled so much during one of her stories. Smiles and good cheer from beginning to end. Thank you, Angela Carter!
"Black Venus" - Carter imagines the life of Jeanne Duval, Creole mistress to the transgressive poet Baudelaire, and provides it a refreshingly upbeat albeit still syphilitic ending. This is perhaps the author's most well-known short story. Gender and race collide, a crash made all the more disturbing due to sexuality and colonialism, and because of paternalism, all the more inevitable. Never has a woman calling her man "Daddy" made me twitch more. The author's prose is at its most gorgeously purple and overripe; her points remain carefully aimed and deadly sharp.
Mostly fabulous, with some eh. 3.5 stars, rounded up. Even when the stories aren't top notch, the writing always impresses. Favorites are in bold.
"The Fall River Ax Murders" - Lizzie Borden is a woman with problems; she solves those problems with 40 whacks, and then 41 more. This is a portrait of misery: a miserable family, a miserable town. Rather a miserable read as well.
"The Kiss" - The women of Samarkand are a dreamy lot, as was Tamburlaine's wife. This is a slim, elegant trifle. I'm not sure why it needed to be written, but it's quite pleasant.
"Our Lady of the Massacre" - A Lancashire whore finds acceptance and a new life within an Algonquin village. But the English will do as they did: the tribe is massacred, and so a third life must begin. This was a marvelous tale: the redoubtable, no-nonsense heroine was impressive and Carter's portrait of the Indian community was sensitive and real. I wanted this story to go on much longer.
"Peter and the Wolf" - A girl raised by wolves causes different sorts of feelings to arise in a cousin aiming himself towards priesthood. An absorbing tale that ends with a strange epiphany. Carter touches lightly on the natural world vs. the civilized world, sexuality, faith, and how we turn our memories into stories.
"The Cabinet of Edgar Allan Poe" - Carter muses at length on the unconscious influences Poe's actress mother and later his child-bride may have had on him. This is a very meta story and the creativity is often dazzling. Unfortunately, it is all rather... unconvincing.
"Overture and Incidental Music for A Midsummer Night's Dream" - More musing by Carter, this time on grouchy Oberon, maternal Titania, a surprisingly shaggy, horny Puck, and the unnamed changeling in Shakespeare's play who is at the root of the Oberon-Titania quarrel. The changeling is given an identity here: the Golden Herm, a hermaphrodite, and much of this exceedingly postmodern anti-story is about how the Golden Herm enchants all. This was a fascinating plunge into gender deconstruction. I love how Carter takes ostensibly loveable faerie characters and makes them fearsome, alien. The story also features an enjoyable mini-treatise on the contrast in fairy tales between enchanting English woodland and forbidding German forest.
"The Kitchen Child" - And so life is created in the kitchen of a great English manor: someone has poked the rotund cook while she prepared her lobster soufflé! Nine months later: a child! But who was this secretive poker, who is the kitchen child's father? Perhaps it was the just as rotund visiting Duc who enjoyed not just the soufflé, but its maker... Man oh man, I loved this one! Not since the author's equally cheeky, witty, and life-affirming version of Puss 'n Boots have I smiled so much during one of her stories. Smiles and good cheer from beginning to end. Thank you, Angela Carter!
"Black Venus" - Carter imagines the life of Jeanne Duval, Creole mistress to the transgressive poet Baudelaire, and provides it a refreshingly upbeat albeit still syphilitic ending. This is perhaps the author's most well-known short story. Gender and race collide, a crash made all the more disturbing due to sexuality and colonialism, and because of paternalism, all the more inevitable. Never has a woman calling her man "Daddy" made me twitch more. The author's prose is at its most gorgeously purple and overripe; her points remain carefully aimed and deadly sharp.
November 20, 2021
I have now known Angie for several years, but being the fickle book lover that I am I was never quite certain whether I was truly in love. Always hesitant, afraid of being disappointed perhaps, I was nevertheless charmed by her personal history--her years in Japan, her mentoring of Kazuo Ishiguro, her death of lung cancer at 51--as well as her taste for the lowbrow and her bawdy sense of humor. I found her short stories enchanting, if sometimes perplexing, and in this instance I prefered these flirtations over something more substantial. I wanted to commit but found myself unable to do so, finding the sustained linguistic acrobatics of her novels exhausting. Did we have enough in common? Could I really commit myself to her based on brief flirtations alone? And then Saints and Strangers came along, and I'm not sure I could ever do without it. Angie, you have my heart and unyielding devotion and admiration.
The Fall River Axe Murders - 5
The Kiss - 3
Our Lady of the Massacre - 4
Peter and the Wolf - 5
The Cabinet of Edgar Allan Poe - 5
Overture and Incidental Music for A Midsummer Night's Dream - 5
The Kitchen Child - 4
Black Venus - 5
The Fall River Axe Murders - 5
The Kiss - 3
Our Lady of the Massacre - 4
Peter and the Wolf - 5
The Cabinet of Edgar Allan Poe - 5
Overture and Incidental Music for A Midsummer Night's Dream - 5
The Kitchen Child - 4
Black Venus - 5
October 29, 2018
States of Abjection
“Black Venus” was Angela Carter’s third collection of short stories in 11 years.
During this period, she pursued various writing strategies that built on a foundation of fairy tales.
In this collection, she progressed beyond the fairy tale, and wrote both more realistically and more metaphorically about the different states of exile, oppression, captivity, imprisonment, enslavement, disconnectedness, helplessness, domesticity, nostalgia, enchantment, piousness and solitude in which her mostly female characters and narrators (women and girls alike) found themselves. Each of these states could be construed as a state of abjection.
The victim is usually a real person (such as Baudelaire's muse Jeanne Duval in the title story) or a pre-existing fictitious or mythical character (the wife of Tamburlaine in “The Kiss”). However, sometimes, the oppressor was a male, sometimes a female, sometimes an institution (whether marriage, religion or the Church).
As with the previous collections, these themes are spread across the various stories. Overall, the collection is the sum of its parts, in the case of "Overture and Beginners" (a story about a golden hermaphrodite), it's even more than the sum of its body parts.
The Protracted Childhood of Lizzie Borden
Lizzie Borden, the focus of the story “The Fall River Axe Murders’, is “a motherless child, orphaned at two years old, poor thing.”
Lizzie’s natural father, Old Borden, remarried, though Lizzie and her stepmother did not get on:
“This stepmother oppressed her like a spell.”
Not even her father could protect her from such a spell, despite his material generosity:
“He would give his Lizzie anything, anything in the world that lives under the green sign of the dollar.”
Though a devout Christian, her father was an undertaker, a capitalist, a slum landlord, a materialist, dedicated to the Protestant (work) ethic:
“Morose and gaunt, this self-made man is one of few pleasures. His vocation is capital accumulation.”
He was motivated by money rather than love.
Following a burglary, Old Borden feels disconcerted, stunned, violated, raped. “It took away his hitherto unshakable confidence in the integrity inherent in things.” Everybody in the household must now lock their room, whether they are inside or outside. Isolation and privacy are imposed on Lizzie and her sister, Emma. Lizzie still lives with her father, stepmother and sister at age 32. Emma is well into her forties:
“The girls live in a fictive, protracted childhood.”
“She loves her privacy, she loves her room, she locks herself up in it all day.”
She and Emma have “resigned themselves to the thin condition of New England spinsterhood.” Her photos don’t reveal what would become of her and her parents:
“…in those early photographs of her young womanhood, she herself does not look so much like a crazed assassin as somebody in extreme solitude, oblivious of that camera in whose direction she obscurely smiles, so that it would not surprise you to learn that she is blind…She is a girl of Sargasso calm.”
Overture and Beginners for the Children's Theatre of the Abject (1.)
The narrator in “The Kitchen Child” comes from more modest stock: his mother is a cook. He is “conceived upon a kitchen table, born upon a kitchen floor.”
The narrator searches for a description that is analogous to the expression “born in a trunk” (which relates to a child who is born into the environment of theatre and “sups grease-paint with mother’s milk”). Interestingly, Angela Carter used this very expression in relation to Edgar Allan Poe’s mother in the earlier story, “The Cabinet of Edgar Allan Poe” (2.) (whom he describes as “born in a trunk, grease-paint in her bloodstream.”
The Kitchen Child says of his mother:
“My mother, wreathed in smiles, enthroned on a sack of spuds with, at her breast, her babe, all neatly swaddled in a new-boiled pudding cloth and the entire kitchen brigade arranged around her in attitudes of adoration, each brandishing a utensil and giving out therewith that merry rattle of ladles, yours truly’s first lullaby.”
At three years old, “I being too little to manage the [rolling] pin, she hoists me on her shoulders to watch her as she rolls out the dough upon the marble slab, then sets me to stamp out the tartlets for myself, tears of joy at my precocity trickling down her cheeks, lets me dollop on the damson jam and lick the spoon for my reward…So I became her acolyte.”
For the child, at least, the mother provided some relief from abjection.
In the earlier story, Poe easily transferred his adoration of his mother to his cousin, Virginia Clemm, who unfortunately died of consumption at the age of 24:
Goodnight, Sweet Prince
[In the Words of Angela Carter]
On his brow her rouged lips
Left the mark of Cain.
He grows up
Under the black stars
Of the slave states.
He flinches from that part
Of women the sheet hid.
He becomes a man.
He was not put out
By the tender years
Of this young girl
Whom he soon married.
Was she not just Juliet’s age,
Just thirteen summers?
Did she not come to him
Stiffly armoured in taboos?
But didn’t she always look
Like a pretty walking corpse?
Her pupils contain
In each a flame.
Her eyes go out. She sleeps.
All silent. All still.
And his dust, too, blows
Away on the wind.
Goodnight, sweet prince.
Footnotes:
1. The preparatory warning 'Overture and Beginners' used in theatre is a signal for the orchestra to start the introductory music and the 'beginners' (the actors in the first scene) to get into their opening positions on stage.
2. This story had all of the various stylistic appeal of "Moby Dick", except that it was achieved within a mere 13 pages. Perhaps this is the nature of the theatrical illusion?
SOUNDTRACK:
The Dubliners - "The Unquiet Grave"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pfgwx...
Chad Mitchell Trio - "Lizzie Borden"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_co...
“Black Venus” was Angela Carter’s third collection of short stories in 11 years.
During this period, she pursued various writing strategies that built on a foundation of fairy tales.
In this collection, she progressed beyond the fairy tale, and wrote both more realistically and more metaphorically about the different states of exile, oppression, captivity, imprisonment, enslavement, disconnectedness, helplessness, domesticity, nostalgia, enchantment, piousness and solitude in which her mostly female characters and narrators (women and girls alike) found themselves. Each of these states could be construed as a state of abjection.
The victim is usually a real person (such as Baudelaire's muse Jeanne Duval in the title story) or a pre-existing fictitious or mythical character (the wife of Tamburlaine in “The Kiss”). However, sometimes, the oppressor was a male, sometimes a female, sometimes an institution (whether marriage, religion or the Church).
As with the previous collections, these themes are spread across the various stories. Overall, the collection is the sum of its parts, in the case of "Overture and Beginners" (a story about a golden hermaphrodite), it's even more than the sum of its body parts.
The Protracted Childhood of Lizzie Borden
Lizzie Borden, the focus of the story “The Fall River Axe Murders’, is “a motherless child, orphaned at two years old, poor thing.”
Lizzie’s natural father, Old Borden, remarried, though Lizzie and her stepmother did not get on:
“This stepmother oppressed her like a spell.”
Not even her father could protect her from such a spell, despite his material generosity:
“He would give his Lizzie anything, anything in the world that lives under the green sign of the dollar.”
Though a devout Christian, her father was an undertaker, a capitalist, a slum landlord, a materialist, dedicated to the Protestant (work) ethic:
“Morose and gaunt, this self-made man is one of few pleasures. His vocation is capital accumulation.”
He was motivated by money rather than love.
Following a burglary, Old Borden feels disconcerted, stunned, violated, raped. “It took away his hitherto unshakable confidence in the integrity inherent in things.” Everybody in the household must now lock their room, whether they are inside or outside. Isolation and privacy are imposed on Lizzie and her sister, Emma. Lizzie still lives with her father, stepmother and sister at age 32. Emma is well into her forties:
“The girls live in a fictive, protracted childhood.”
“She loves her privacy, she loves her room, she locks herself up in it all day.”
She and Emma have “resigned themselves to the thin condition of New England spinsterhood.” Her photos don’t reveal what would become of her and her parents:
“…in those early photographs of her young womanhood, she herself does not look so much like a crazed assassin as somebody in extreme solitude, oblivious of that camera in whose direction she obscurely smiles, so that it would not surprise you to learn that she is blind…She is a girl of Sargasso calm.”
Overture and Beginners for the Children's Theatre of the Abject (1.)
The narrator in “The Kitchen Child” comes from more modest stock: his mother is a cook. He is “conceived upon a kitchen table, born upon a kitchen floor.”
The narrator searches for a description that is analogous to the expression “born in a trunk” (which relates to a child who is born into the environment of theatre and “sups grease-paint with mother’s milk”). Interestingly, Angela Carter used this very expression in relation to Edgar Allan Poe’s mother in the earlier story, “The Cabinet of Edgar Allan Poe” (2.) (whom he describes as “born in a trunk, grease-paint in her bloodstream.”
The Kitchen Child says of his mother:
“My mother, wreathed in smiles, enthroned on a sack of spuds with, at her breast, her babe, all neatly swaddled in a new-boiled pudding cloth and the entire kitchen brigade arranged around her in attitudes of adoration, each brandishing a utensil and giving out therewith that merry rattle of ladles, yours truly’s first lullaby.”
At three years old, “I being too little to manage the [rolling] pin, she hoists me on her shoulders to watch her as she rolls out the dough upon the marble slab, then sets me to stamp out the tartlets for myself, tears of joy at my precocity trickling down her cheeks, lets me dollop on the damson jam and lick the spoon for my reward…So I became her acolyte.”
For the child, at least, the mother provided some relief from abjection.
In the earlier story, Poe easily transferred his adoration of his mother to his cousin, Virginia Clemm, who unfortunately died of consumption at the age of 24:
Goodnight, Sweet Prince
[In the Words of Angela Carter]
On his brow her rouged lips
Left the mark of Cain.
He grows up
Under the black stars
Of the slave states.
He flinches from that part
Of women the sheet hid.
He becomes a man.
He was not put out
By the tender years
Of this young girl
Whom he soon married.
Was she not just Juliet’s age,
Just thirteen summers?
Did she not come to him
Stiffly armoured in taboos?
But didn’t she always look
Like a pretty walking corpse?
Her pupils contain
In each a flame.
Her eyes go out. She sleeps.
All silent. All still.
And his dust, too, blows
Away on the wind.
Goodnight, sweet prince.
Footnotes:
1. The preparatory warning 'Overture and Beginners' used in theatre is a signal for the orchestra to start the introductory music and the 'beginners' (the actors in the first scene) to get into their opening positions on stage.
2. This story had all of the various stylistic appeal of "Moby Dick", except that it was achieved within a mere 13 pages. Perhaps this is the nature of the theatrical illusion?
SOUNDTRACK:
The Dubliners - "The Unquiet Grave"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pfgwx...
Chad Mitchell Trio - "Lizzie Borden"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_co...
November 27, 2019
These eight inventive, sometimes bizarre, and fairy tale-ish stories were like nothing I've read in a long time. Although I'm left with mixed feeling overall, there is no doubt that in terms of writing short stories, Angela Carter had in her possession the ability to achieve maximum effect in a minimum amount of space. Carter might borrow most of her plots either from history, legend, or folklore, but what she did with the material is indisputably original, so I give her kudos for that.
There is the exploration and psychological states of Puck and the rest of the fairies just before the opening of Shakespeare's play in 'Overture and Incidental Music for A Midsummer Night's Dream'. American history provides the material for 'The Fall River Axe Murders' which was a sympathetic portrait of the nineteenth century murderess Lizzie Borden, and the 'The Cabinet of Edgar Allan Poe' was a similarly fictional/historical fable. Other stories 'The Kiss', 'Our Lady of the Massacre' and 'Peter and the Wolf' were OK, while 'The Kitchen Child' which I quite liked, sees a cook in an Edwardian country house being suddenly made love to by a mysterious stranger just as she is finishing a lobster souffle. My pick of the bunch though was 'Black Venus', which dealt with Jeanne Duval, the black mistress of the nineteenth century French poet Charles Baudelaire.
Stuff like this I wouldn't normally read, and I can't see myself going crazy for Carter books after this, but a little change from the norm every now and then can certainly be a good thing.
There is the exploration and psychological states of Puck and the rest of the fairies just before the opening of Shakespeare's play in 'Overture and Incidental Music for A Midsummer Night's Dream'. American history provides the material for 'The Fall River Axe Murders' which was a sympathetic portrait of the nineteenth century murderess Lizzie Borden, and the 'The Cabinet of Edgar Allan Poe' was a similarly fictional/historical fable. Other stories 'The Kiss', 'Our Lady of the Massacre' and 'Peter and the Wolf' were OK, while 'The Kitchen Child' which I quite liked, sees a cook in an Edwardian country house being suddenly made love to by a mysterious stranger just as she is finishing a lobster souffle. My pick of the bunch though was 'Black Venus', which dealt with Jeanne Duval, the black mistress of the nineteenth century French poet Charles Baudelaire.
Stuff like this I wouldn't normally read, and I can't see myself going crazy for Carter books after this, but a little change from the norm every now and then can certainly be a good thing.
June 4, 2022
I could not have read this at a better time. I’m contentedly becalmed in Guy Davenport’s Da Vinci’s Bicycle, constantly re-reading the Victor Hugo-in-exile story and marveling at Davenport’s dramatically piquant retelling of the record. (If I were master of a dream-of-history style I would write “General Grant Goes Around the World.”) I love it when books coincide and I loved Angela Carter’s gallery of Lizzie Borden (“The Fall River Axe Murders”), Edgar Allan Poe (“The Cabinet of…”), and the Adam and Eve of modern alienation, Charles Baudelaire and Jeanne Duval (“Black Venus”). Carter and Davenport have magic time-piercing eyes, and pungent erotic styles. Davenport seems generally homoerotic - lots of Puckish fauns with “piss-burnt” drawers and uncontrollable erections. Carter ranges everywhere: Baudelairan voyeurism and interracial fetishism; physically chaste but mentally morbid Romantic idealism; the “whorled flesh” of a feral wolf-girl’s unconsciously exposed sex (Dr. Itard and Victor “the wolf-boy of Aveyron” loom behind the professor-and-ward couple in Davenport’s “The Death of Picasso”); and the changeling child from A Midsummer-Night's Dream imagined as a glimmering hermaphrodite yogi holding a tree pose behind Titania’s force field, “provoking desire on all sides yet myself transcendent, the unmoved mover, the still eye of the tempest, exemplary and self-sufficient, the beginning and the end.”
March 1, 2022
…warm weather, as intended, is a sweet, sensual, horizontal thing.
Focused on the females of even male-dominated true accounts, these stories are also about place: the Old World juxtaposed with the New; the forest versus the woods; the summer heat leading to serious ailments; the bitter cold causing families to shelter danger on the hearth.
Patriarchal repression intensifies physical ills. In one of her delightful authorial intrusions, Carter says at least the Native Americans took off their clothes when the humidity was unbearable, unlike 19th-c. women encased in corsets and petticoats.
Carter's women find ways to escape, even if it’s in their minds, or through inertia. Motherhood changes a “bad” woman, ties her down with loving bonds; another with an “unseemly” profession has her death hastened by overworking and nursing; all while men disappear in front of the children’s eyes. The story about Edgar Allan Poe, with the mother who repeatedly “leaves” and its effect on toddlers into their adulthoods, reminded me of Pia Z. Ehrhardt’s Famous Fathers and Other Stories.
'Peter and the Wolf,' which has basically nothing to do with the Prokofiev, could easily have a place in Carter’s The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories. While arguably the least realistic of the eight, it’s the boldest, the most disturbing, and the one that’s stayed with me the most. Its extreme ‘Id-ness," which is how I’d describe all the Carter works I’ve read, reminded me of the feeling I got from The Bloody Chamber story 'The Snow Child.'
Carter is both disturbing and delightful, which for me is often the same thing. My only criticism is I wanted more.
Focused on the females of even male-dominated true accounts, these stories are also about place: the Old World juxtaposed with the New; the forest versus the woods; the summer heat leading to serious ailments; the bitter cold causing families to shelter danger on the hearth.
Patriarchal repression intensifies physical ills. In one of her delightful authorial intrusions, Carter says at least the Native Americans took off their clothes when the humidity was unbearable, unlike 19th-c. women encased in corsets and petticoats.
Carter's women find ways to escape, even if it’s in their minds, or through inertia. Motherhood changes a “bad” woman, ties her down with loving bonds; another with an “unseemly” profession has her death hastened by overworking and nursing; all while men disappear in front of the children’s eyes. The story about Edgar Allan Poe, with the mother who repeatedly “leaves” and its effect on toddlers into their adulthoods, reminded me of Pia Z. Ehrhardt’s Famous Fathers and Other Stories.
'Peter and the Wolf,' which has basically nothing to do with the Prokofiev, could easily have a place in Carter’s The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories. While arguably the least realistic of the eight, it’s the boldest, the most disturbing, and the one that’s stayed with me the most. Its extreme ‘Id-ness," which is how I’d describe all the Carter works I’ve read, reminded me of the feeling I got from The Bloody Chamber story 'The Snow Child.'
Carter is both disturbing and delightful, which for me is often the same thing. My only criticism is I wanted more.
December 28, 2008
HA! I have not actually read this book, but one particularly angst-filled mid-90's summer of my adolescence I found myself next to a bonfire after, I believe, a particularly angst-filled mid-90's community production of "Little Shop of Horrors." Some girl or something was around the party somewhere, and I could only assume at the time that she was french-kissing madly with some lucky schmuck who (of course) was probably getting to touch her boobs.
(Tangent: what I would not give to have touched those boobs.)
Point is, they were dark and dangerous times, and for some reason that I really (unironically) cannot explain, I found myself next to that bonfire with a copy of this book in my pocket, along with a pencil. I have no idea where I'd gotten it, but (of course) that yellowed paperback instantly became a sponge for all the bitterness I could muster. I spent an hour or so scribbling horrible poetry in its margins, talking on life, love, nine inch nails lyrics, and metaphors for the value of human life based on touching girls' boobs.
So I salute you, Saints and Strangers. Your undeniable existence as a block of paper with middling amounts of white space in the margins enabled me to vent my boob-hungry torment in a therapeutic manner, escaping the consequences of public masturbation or stabbing some unassuming seventh grader in the neck with a sharp No. 2. On behalf of that seventh grader, and all the boobs I have touched (hell, even those I haven't) since that fateful night -- my thanks.
(Tangent: what I would not give to have touched those boobs.)
Point is, they were dark and dangerous times, and for some reason that I really (unironically) cannot explain, I found myself next to that bonfire with a copy of this book in my pocket, along with a pencil. I have no idea where I'd gotten it, but (of course) that yellowed paperback instantly became a sponge for all the bitterness I could muster. I spent an hour or so scribbling horrible poetry in its margins, talking on life, love, nine inch nails lyrics, and metaphors for the value of human life based on touching girls' boobs.
So I salute you, Saints and Strangers. Your undeniable existence as a block of paper with middling amounts of white space in the margins enabled me to vent my boob-hungry torment in a therapeutic manner, escaping the consequences of public masturbation or stabbing some unassuming seventh grader in the neck with a sharp No. 2. On behalf of that seventh grader, and all the boobs I have touched (hell, even those I haven't) since that fateful night -- my thanks.
November 4, 2018
The title character of the short story Black Venus is a Creole woman called Jeanne Duval, Charles Baudelaire's mistress and muse.
Jeanne Duval is not well known, but Angela Carter did her tales so much justice (at least in my opinion)!
As much as I enjoy this book, I am not going to claim it is for everyone because I know some people aren't going to like Ms. Carter's story telling and her symbolism, etc.
Obviously, Black Venus is my most favorite story among the bunch, I like how it tells the tale of a Creole woman struggling through her harsh life (first as a slave, then a lowly actress/dancer/kept woman) in the 19th century Paris and her stormy romance with Charles Baudelaire, a famous/infamous poet struggling with money problem, health problem and a share of his own instability.
This story is clearly only loosely based on historical details, but I think it's good that Ms. Carter never sugarcoated the relationship between Duval and Baudelaire, there is no doubt that Duval was Baudelaire's muse and a handful of beautiful, highly seductive poems are based on her, he even referred her as 'mistress of mistresses' and spent 20 years in a 'on again, off again' relationship with her. But...as you can imagine, if things can be difficult even between a man and a woman from similar cultural background and society status, then things can definitely be messy and violent, between a moody poet who probably didn't understand (or was insensitive about) the situation of his Creole's mistress. Especially at that time, the poet's relationship with his brown skinned mistress itself had already been considered scandalous.
What I like the most is how Ms. Carter created a story about Baudelaire's Black Venus with such a dreamlike, sensual lyricism and colorful imaginary.
PS: 'The Kitchen Child' and 'Peter and the Wolf' are also my favorite stories!
Jeanne Duval is not well known, but Angela Carter did her tales so much justice (at least in my opinion)!
As much as I enjoy this book, I am not going to claim it is for everyone because I know some people aren't going to like Ms. Carter's story telling and her symbolism, etc.
Obviously, Black Venus is my most favorite story among the bunch, I like how it tells the tale of a Creole woman struggling through her harsh life (first as a slave, then a lowly actress/dancer/kept woman) in the 19th century Paris and her stormy romance with Charles Baudelaire, a famous/infamous poet struggling with money problem, health problem and a share of his own instability.
This story is clearly only loosely based on historical details, but I think it's good that Ms. Carter never sugarcoated the relationship between Duval and Baudelaire, there is no doubt that Duval was Baudelaire's muse and a handful of beautiful, highly seductive poems are based on her, he even referred her as 'mistress of mistresses' and spent 20 years in a 'on again, off again' relationship with her. But...as you can imagine, if things can be difficult even between a man and a woman from similar cultural background and society status, then things can definitely be messy and violent, between a moody poet who probably didn't understand (or was insensitive about) the situation of his Creole's mistress. Especially at that time, the poet's relationship with his brown skinned mistress itself had already been considered scandalous.
What I like the most is how Ms. Carter created a story about Baudelaire's Black Venus with such a dreamlike, sensual lyricism and colorful imaginary.
PS: 'The Kitchen Child' and 'Peter and the Wolf' are also my favorite stories!
June 14, 2013
Angela Carter's prose is mesmerising... an absolute pleasure to read. She straddles the dreamworld between myth and reality, and her writing matches her imagination. Apart from that, all the eight "pieces" (one cannot call them stories, I think) in this slim volume are delightfully unconventional: subversive, if you like.
The title story, written from the POV of Baudelier's mistress, portrays her as a simple girl, out to make a living on the mean streets. Whatever persona the poet imposes on her is his fantasy, a typical male fantasy which objectifies the female for the satisfaction of his desire. Similarly, in "Our Lady of the Massacre", a "victim" of Indian captivity provides a captivity narrative significantly different from the conventional ones.
But I think the gem of the collection is the last story, which delves into the mind of Lizzie Borden. It is almost like a script, and the story unfolds like a movie in the reader's mind.
If you love the English language, this is the book for you.
The title story, written from the POV of Baudelier's mistress, portrays her as a simple girl, out to make a living on the mean streets. Whatever persona the poet imposes on her is his fantasy, a typical male fantasy which objectifies the female for the satisfaction of his desire. Similarly, in "Our Lady of the Massacre", a "victim" of Indian captivity provides a captivity narrative significantly different from the conventional ones.
But I think the gem of the collection is the last story, which delves into the mind of Lizzie Borden. It is almost like a script, and the story unfolds like a movie in the reader's mind.
If you love the English language, this is the book for you.
November 17, 2022
5 stars for The Kitchen Child short story though!
August 9, 2019
It's always a little bittersweet when the first story in a short story collection ends up being your favourite overall. The first story in my edition was "The Fall River Axe Murders" (I know that that differs from the Black Venus edition and I actually wonder how it would��ve affected my overall feelings of the collection if the first story had been a different one). This first story is Carter's re-imagining of Lizzie Borden, and boy, did I love that one! It was atmospheric and evocative, gory, yet dreamy and pretty much perfect in my opinion. All the other stories in this collection are also based on Carter's interpretation of different historical or fictional figures with a focus on the female characters that are often cast to the sidelines of the narratives they're a part of. I love that concept (and still do) and the themes Angela Carter discusses in this are so valuable and interesting, but I just didn't find the process of actually reading some of these stories very enjoyable. Angela Carter has a way of writing that can be quite hard to get into and often feels very jumbled and chaotic to me. Plus, her writing is so full of allusions and references that are entirely lost on you if you read these stories without lots of knowledge on whatever they're based on. So, yeah, while I loved the first story (and enjoyed some of the later ones, such as "Peter and the Wolf" and "The Kitchen Child") this was a bit of a mixed bag for me overall.
December 6, 2020
There's this pervasive orientalist tone in her stories that bugged me even in stories that were about white people. I think it is safe to call it racist. Most apparent was in the the first story, the namesake Black Venus and the third story, Our Lady of Massacre. The latter is about an enslaved woman of unknown race (probably Black?) who escaped her enslavers to go to the Indians but then got captured back again by the white people.
And honestly what is the point of it all? It feels like a gratuitous exhibitionism, covered in prose. It reeks of "Oh i can write tragedies about women of the world too, yay me!" that kind of self-righteous, self-assured attitude that so many white women writers have these days. The last story in the collection is the most salvageable of them all, it was quite alright. Good even.
Maybe miss Angela Carter should just stick to writing about white women and their life. The only good thing about this though, it managed to make me hate Baudelaire.
And honestly what is the point of it all? It feels like a gratuitous exhibitionism, covered in prose. It reeks of "Oh i can write tragedies about women of the world too, yay me!" that kind of self-righteous, self-assured attitude that so many white women writers have these days. The last story in the collection is the most salvageable of them all, it was quite alright. Good even.
Maybe miss Angela Carter should just stick to writing about white women and their life. The only good thing about this though, it managed to make me hate Baudelaire.
October 23, 2016
In his introduction to Burning Your Boats, the collected stories of Angela Carter, Salman Rushdie says just about everything I would write here if I hadn't read his intro. I've long been an enthusiastic fan of Carter's neo-Gothic/fairy tale collection The Bloody Chamber and I'd browsed through some of her other short stories as well, always finding them fascinating. Although I've heard good things about some of Carter's novels, I've only actually read one (The Infernal Desire Machines of Dr. Hoffman) and I wasn't much sure what to make of it. I guess it was memorable more for my puzzlement rather than anything I enjoyed or garnered from the reading. Perhaps, as Rushdie claims, Carter shines brightest in the short form. I'd even go so far as to say that reading the stories through in groups, they make semi- or quasi-novels, such are her returning themes, images, sources, and even occasionally associations and turns of phrase.
The tales of Black Venus are indeed a worthy follow-up to The Bloody Chamber. "Peter and the Wolf" and maybe even the "Overture..." could have been inserted into the previous collection (with the feral child/werewolf motif explored via the "Little Red Riding-hood" tales of the previous collection), while the Poe and "Black Venus" stories trod other postmodern fields, constructing fictions behind the lives of the authors of some of Carter's model tales. Like the literary fictions, the Lizzie Borden story constructs a pseudo fiction out of a historical character, a portrait, really, of the day and the woman in question. I loved the alternating focuses/techniques, Carter's trademark flourishes of style and linguistic prowess, and the ever-present attention to women's experience and all that that entails. Despite the Po-Mo techniques and obvious sociopolitical significance of Carter's voice as a woman writer, however, the heart of her tales, for me, lies deeper, in her individual imagination and ability to conjure up tales from whatever materials--fairy tales, Gothic, her favorite authors' lives, famous murderers, or even Prokofiev's little ditty about a boy not afraid of wolves. She's a mistressful writer who mines whatever ore she can from as many sources as she can, transforming them into wholly new forms that always make me marvel. A true inspiration, she's one of my favorites.
The tales of Black Venus are indeed a worthy follow-up to The Bloody Chamber. "Peter and the Wolf" and maybe even the "Overture..." could have been inserted into the previous collection (with the feral child/werewolf motif explored via the "Little Red Riding-hood" tales of the previous collection), while the Poe and "Black Venus" stories trod other postmodern fields, constructing fictions behind the lives of the authors of some of Carter's model tales. Like the literary fictions, the Lizzie Borden story constructs a pseudo fiction out of a historical character, a portrait, really, of the day and the woman in question. I loved the alternating focuses/techniques, Carter's trademark flourishes of style and linguistic prowess, and the ever-present attention to women's experience and all that that entails. Despite the Po-Mo techniques and obvious sociopolitical significance of Carter's voice as a woman writer, however, the heart of her tales, for me, lies deeper, in her individual imagination and ability to conjure up tales from whatever materials--fairy tales, Gothic, her favorite authors' lives, famous murderers, or even Prokofiev's little ditty about a boy not afraid of wolves. She's a mistressful writer who mines whatever ore she can from as many sources as she can, transforming them into wholly new forms that always make me marvel. A true inspiration, she's one of my favorites.
January 31, 2024
Not as consistently good as her first two collections but still better than average as far as collections go.
(Read in Burning Your Boats: The Collected Short Stories)
(Read in Burning Your Boats: The Collected Short Stories)
October 15, 2007
Darling Angela,
Where have you been all my life? This is the short story collection I would have written were I British, white, blonde, and (sadly) dead. Carter is a so-called postmodern writer, but with a very traditionally sick way of writing, who takes on fairytales and historical oddities with a candid delicacy. Absolutely lovely.
Her version of Lizzie Borden and her world is so tactical I was stuck in soot-filled New England for a night, hardly able to breath and looking over my shoulder. And I can smell the desire in Shakespeare's forest.
I forced time into my un-giving schedule to read this short collection. Put it on your reading list!
Where have you been all my life? This is the short story collection I would have written were I British, white, blonde, and (sadly) dead. Carter is a so-called postmodern writer, but with a very traditionally sick way of writing, who takes on fairytales and historical oddities with a candid delicacy. Absolutely lovely.
Her version of Lizzie Borden and her world is so tactical I was stuck in soot-filled New England for a night, hardly able to breath and looking over my shoulder. And I can smell the desire in Shakespeare's forest.
I forced time into my un-giving schedule to read this short collection. Put it on your reading list!
October 27, 2012
Ocho historias absorbentes. Resiliencia, carácter, orgullo y obsesión, narrados de forma magistral.
July 7, 2017
Strange selection of stories. My favourite was the reimagining of Lizzie Borden and the days leading up to the Axe Murders. The other stories were too odd. Angela Carter is quite a controversial writer and I'm not sure if I liked this as much as I had dearly hoped.
October 24, 2018
Well, after reading the first story and then losing the book, only to find it a few weeks later in a coat pocket (that I don't wear very often), I have finally finished.
I've come to the conclusion that I have a mixed relationship with Angela's stories. She writes beautifully but sometimes I find the stylistic tones she employs somewhat jarring. She explores interesting themes and writes fascinating stories but often I find they end abruptly and I am left wondering what she was trying to do. Sometimes I am just not in the mood for them.
Consequently I have had mixed feelings about the stories in this collection. "The Kiss" was a great, parable like tale and I also found much to enjoy in "Our Lady of the Massacre", "Peter and the Wold" and "The Fall River Axe Murders". Others I struggled to engage with as strongly.
Overall I think I enjoyed 'The Bloody Chamber' more and I'm not sure if I will pursue any of her other works.
I've come to the conclusion that I have a mixed relationship with Angela's stories. She writes beautifully but sometimes I find the stylistic tones she employs somewhat jarring. She explores interesting themes and writes fascinating stories but often I find they end abruptly and I am left wondering what she was trying to do. Sometimes I am just not in the mood for them.
Consequently I have had mixed feelings about the stories in this collection. "The Kiss" was a great, parable like tale and I also found much to enjoy in "Our Lady of the Massacre", "Peter and the Wold" and "The Fall River Axe Murders". Others I struggled to engage with as strongly.
Overall I think I enjoyed 'The Bloody Chamber' more and I'm not sure if I will pursue any of her other works.
June 25, 2020
En la prosa de Ángela Carter he encontrado la voz de los detalles y las precisiones que animan algo, que lo hacen ser y destacar. Me imagino que sí le dieran a dirigir una vida, ella estaría en lo voluptuoso, en el temperamento para el amor y la locura, su pluma es para la pasión, lo que exalta. Volveré a leerla pronto.
October 15, 2022
“Sad; so sad, those smoky-rose, smoky-mauve evenings of late autumn, sad enough to pierce the heart. The sun departs the sky in winding sheets of gaudy cloud; anguish enters the city, a sense of the bitterest regret, a nostalgia for things we never knew, anguish of the turn of the year, the time of impotent yearning, the inconsolable season.”
All the marks of peak Angela Carter are present in this book. Women breaking free of patriarchy and expressing themselves in outrageous, animalistic, societally unacceptable ways. The constructs of what constitutes 'societal decency' doesn't bind them. Lush, beautiful descriptions of everything from the weather to graphically depicted murders. The sinister lurking in every page. Sometimes feeling like a sensual, magical dream; sometimes like a nauseating nightmare.
Yet, in ways I cannot exactly pinpoint, there seems to be something missing. I missed the cathartic release of reading her collection, The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories. That feeling of all the emotions - rage, hatred, disgust - pouring out the pages and into the reader. While I did enjoy this collection quite a bit, it didn't put me into that mad frenzy that The Bloody Chamber evoked. Having said that, read Angela Carter, if you haven't.
All the marks of peak Angela Carter are present in this book. Women breaking free of patriarchy and expressing themselves in outrageous, animalistic, societally unacceptable ways. The constructs of what constitutes 'societal decency' doesn't bind them. Lush, beautiful descriptions of everything from the weather to graphically depicted murders. The sinister lurking in every page. Sometimes feeling like a sensual, magical dream; sometimes like a nauseating nightmare.
Yet, in ways I cannot exactly pinpoint, there seems to be something missing. I missed the cathartic release of reading her collection, The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories. That feeling of all the emotions - rage, hatred, disgust - pouring out the pages and into the reader. While I did enjoy this collection quite a bit, it didn't put me into that mad frenzy that The Bloody Chamber evoked. Having said that, read Angela Carter, if you haven't.
July 27, 2024
This was a bit of a mixed bag, to be honest. I wasn't particularly impressed by some of the stories, finding them rather too opaque and wordy. However, the quality of Angela Carter's writing in several of them more than compensates for these disappointments. The title story is a fascinating, sordid account of the life of Charles Baudelaire's muse, whereas 'Peter and the wolf' leaves one with much to ponder, particularly with the hint at cross breeding at the end of this disturbing tale. However, my favourite is 'Our lady of the massacre', a picaresque tale of the eventful life of Mary, a resourceful and fatalistic force of nature who tells her tale in a world-weary, matter of fact way.
August 21, 2023
She was like a piano in a country where everybody has had their hands cut off.
A delightfully morbid blend of nostalgia, grit, and horror. Been a while since I read something so shocking and evocative. Carter brilliantly integrates criticism and observation into her reimaginings.
Fave stories, in order:
1. The Fall River Axe Murders (Shirley Jackson vibes!!)
2. Black Venus (Delicious Eve imagery)
3. The Cabinet of Edgar Allan Poe (Nineteenth-century grit)
4. Overture and Incidental Music for A Midsummer Night's Dream (How do you know if you're in the woods or a forest?)
4.35 - I absolutely loved what I loved.
A delightfully morbid blend of nostalgia, grit, and horror. Been a while since I read something so shocking and evocative. Carter brilliantly integrates criticism and observation into her reimaginings.
Fave stories, in order:
1. The Fall River Axe Murders (Shirley Jackson vibes!!)
2. Black Venus (Delicious Eve imagery)
3. The Cabinet of Edgar Allan Poe (Nineteenth-century grit)
4. Overture and Incidental Music for A Midsummer Night's Dream (How do you know if you're in the woods or a forest?)
4.35 - I absolutely loved what I loved.
July 30, 2022
3 ⭐️ What can I say. This was immeasurably weird, witchy, nightmare-ish, yet dreamlike and poetic at the same time. I picked up this collection to get a feel on Carter’s writing, and it’s definitely unique. I’ve underlined some beautiful prose, yet my enjoyment of the different stories varied widely. My favourites were “The Kiss”, “Overture and incidental music for A Midsummer Night’s dream” and “Peter and the Wolf”. All of the stories have a darkly sensual undertone that seems to be a thread throughout this collection. I’m definitely curious enough to pick up more of her work but am unsure if this was the best starting point.
July 21, 2019
Angela Carter never disappoints. As one of my favourite novelists, it was so enjoyable to return to her short stories in all of their bittingly dark, lipstick-stained witty narratives. The story of Lizzy Borden has forever fascinated me, and Carter adds such a suffocating heat, an unbearable heaviness and nausea to this gruesome historical incident. Also her tale about Edgar Allen Poe was haunting as the raven crows.
Read
November 29, 2015More when I have time, but for now, I loved this book. I see much more Angela Carter in my near future. While all of the stories are very good, her "Black Venus" just blew me away, along with "The Cabinet of Edgar Allan Poe," and "The Fall River Axe Murders."
February 27, 2022
No words. My favourite book of 2018.
September 4, 2020
“Si el señorito fuese como un pingüino, seríamos mucho más felices que ahora; en esta casa no hay sitio para dos albatros”
Basado en la amante negra de Baudelaire
Basado en la amante negra de Baudelaire
June 6, 2016
Let it be known that I love Angela Carter.
I love her writing. I love her grotesque sense of humor. I love her gall, her "up-theirs vulgarity," as Margaret Atwood put it. And I have yet to come across a story of Carter's where I don't have to refer to the dictionary at least once. Carter's writing has accrued a reputation, though. She's either a "feminist" writer or a "fairy-tale writer" writer to some. In truth, Carter was a feminist writer, in that she depicted both male and female characters who were able to outwit life through their own sense of self, rather than allowing the constraints of gender define who they are. Though they may exist in times where they are certainly constrained by gender definitions, as is prominently seen in Saints and Strangers.
I have the unfortunate mishap in life to have seen myself entirely in male characters. I don't know what it is, it's not as if I'm eschewing my femininity. In fact, it's the opposite. I think I've come more to terms with my femininity through relating to male characters. And one of those male characters would have to be Desiderio. From the broken record title I have referenced many a time on this blog, which is named after a line from said book (for those who are new, it is The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman). You see, for as much as people will quote from The Bloody Chamber and insist that Carter was a "feminist writer," they will forget that from Carter also came Desire Machines and Love. What Carter possessed in her writing was a very complex version.
And certainly, we can't ignore The Passion of a New Eve.
I can't help but feel as though Carter was well aware of her position as a writer who obviously had something to say on the female condition. At times, it seems as though she lampoons this fact. But never was it a joke. In that way, Carter is both a feminist and a non-feminist writer to me; she was an original and, like all writers, composed of countless references.
We are all made up of the stories were are told, the stories we read, and the words that will brand our brains with electrifying heat. When we tell them, we reappropriate those words. We make them our own and fill those stories with every single inherited and experienced memory we have stored. And it is in that way that all stories become our own. Carter took those fairy tales and transformed them into an Angela Carter work. They were no longer "fairy tales" when she owned them. Edgar Allen Poe's "Annabel Lee" became Carter's in Love and was transformed.
Saints and Strangers, a collection of short stories, is Carter's way of reinventing (mostly American) mythology. Edgar Allan Poe is transformed by his past in "The Cabinet of Edgar Allan Poe"; a young boy finds a woman running around with a pack of wolves in a retelling of "Peter and the Wolf"; Charles Baudelaire's lover Jeanne is regarded with an entirely different set of eyes in "Black Venus." Some of these stories are entirely engrossing, such as "Our Lady of the Massacre" which follows a woman kidnapped by Native Americans and how civilized an "uncivilized" culture can truly be. But if there is one story that is truly the mythology of America, it is the tale of Lizzie Borden. This is my favorite Angela Carter short story. In fact, there are times when I forget how much I love it, only to come back and feel as though I have been satisfied in some way. "The Fall River Axe Murders" is the most unapologetically gruesome story I have ever read. I am not kidding you. Try reading it without gagging.
If you have ever romanticized life in the 1890's, this is not the story for you. We often gloss over the facts of technology. Take for granted what it is we have. If you don't know what life was like in the 1890's, don't worry. Angela Carter will provide the facts: "The white-enameled refrigerator is the genius of every home, the friendly chill of whose breath has banished summer sickness and the runs for good! How often, nowadays, in summer does your milk turn into a sour jelly, or your butter separate itself out into the liquid fat and the corrupt-smelling whey? When did you last see the waxy clusters of the seed-pearl eggs of the blowfly materialize disgustingly on the left-over joint? Perhaps, perfect child of the Frigidaire, you've known none of all this!" One does not eat after reading "The Fall River Axe Murders." But perhaps that is a point of Carter's, that there is so much eating in this short story, of food that is utterly vile.
It is Carter's description of mutton that gets to me every time, though. "The sinewy, grey lean meat amidst the veined lumps of congealed fat, varicosed with clotted blood; it must be the sheep's Pyrrhic vengeance on the carnivore!" To imagine the Borden family eating mutton for four days straight. To imagine them in their layers of prude clothing during the blistering heat. Or that there was no center to their house, that the doors were all locked, all one behind the other behind the other, that Lizzie could only escape her room into her parents' room. You begin to understand how one could go insane in these circumstances.
Of course, Carter's story is not about whether Lizzie did it or not. Everyone knows whether Lizzie did it or not. Ask any American if they think Lizzie Borden killed her parents. They will tell you. Yes or No. And then, they will tell you why. About a murder case when forensics didn't exist. About a case that occurred before they were born, before their parents were born, before perhaps their grandparents were born. About a person they never knew, but simply by reading facts about them, they believe they know by heart. Lizzie Borden is American folklore. And we know this because we cared enough to make a song about it.
Think about all the Lizzie Bordens you have known. The cold-blooded killer who was out for her father's money. The saint who was a victim of her time, lost in what Carter describes as, "protracted childhood." The psychotic Lizzie, who was prone to epilepsy fits in which she lost track of time. And, as I recently saw in a horrible film this year, the avenging angel, the killer with Freudian reasoning. In Carter's story, her Lizzie contains every single Lizzie you may have met. The fact that the narrator is questioning each version adds more to this, though.
To say that Carter's "The Fall River Axe Murders" is about Lizzie Borden is incorrect. It is not about Lizzie Borden at all. It is about the narrator and what facts the narrator purposefully chooses to state and take out. Much like we, upon telling our own versions of Lizzie Borden's story, would pick and choose for our desired outcomes. In the most memorable passage of the story, Carter writes:
"The other man is some kind of kin of Borden's. He doesn't belong, here; he is a chance bystander, he is irrelevant.
Write him out of the script.
Even though his presence in the doomed house is historically unimpeachable, the colouring of this domestic apocalypse must be crude and the design profoundly simplified for the maximum emblematic effect.
Write John Vinnicum Morse out of the script."
The narrator knows what kind of story it is going to tell. One that is simplified, one that answers with either a Yes or a No. And yet, it is not that kind of story because Carter reveals the machinery behind her work.
This is what we do to people: we create out of them what we want. We rewrite their stories when presented with the facts. We choose what to include and exclude. In the end, we speak in words of fiction. When we recount memories, we are choosing the words to describe those events. We are directing the reader in a way we have chosen. This is how non-fiction becomes a paradox. Unless we are recounting only the cold, hard facts, it is not non-fiction. But how can we even depend on the cold, hard facts?
What I do know from "The Fall River Axe Murders" is that it cemented my love for Angela Carter's work. And even now, when I fall into depressive reveries that last a week, I can always count on Carter's work to yank me out of that state and remind me: my life is in words.
My life is in understanding your words, Angela Carter.
I love her writing. I love her grotesque sense of humor. I love her gall, her "up-theirs vulgarity," as Margaret Atwood put it. And I have yet to come across a story of Carter's where I don't have to refer to the dictionary at least once. Carter's writing has accrued a reputation, though. She's either a "feminist" writer or a "fairy-tale writer" writer to some. In truth, Carter was a feminist writer, in that she depicted both male and female characters who were able to outwit life through their own sense of self, rather than allowing the constraints of gender define who they are. Though they may exist in times where they are certainly constrained by gender definitions, as is prominently seen in Saints and Strangers.
I have the unfortunate mishap in life to have seen myself entirely in male characters. I don't know what it is, it's not as if I'm eschewing my femininity. In fact, it's the opposite. I think I've come more to terms with my femininity through relating to male characters. And one of those male characters would have to be Desiderio. From the broken record title I have referenced many a time on this blog, which is named after a line from said book (for those who are new, it is The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman). You see, for as much as people will quote from The Bloody Chamber and insist that Carter was a "feminist writer," they will forget that from Carter also came Desire Machines and Love. What Carter possessed in her writing was a very complex version.
And certainly, we can't ignore The Passion of a New Eve.
I can't help but feel as though Carter was well aware of her position as a writer who obviously had something to say on the female condition. At times, it seems as though she lampoons this fact. But never was it a joke. In that way, Carter is both a feminist and a non-feminist writer to me; she was an original and, like all writers, composed of countless references.
We are all made up of the stories were are told, the stories we read, and the words that will brand our brains with electrifying heat. When we tell them, we reappropriate those words. We make them our own and fill those stories with every single inherited and experienced memory we have stored. And it is in that way that all stories become our own. Carter took those fairy tales and transformed them into an Angela Carter work. They were no longer "fairy tales" when she owned them. Edgar Allen Poe's "Annabel Lee" became Carter's in Love and was transformed.
Saints and Strangers, a collection of short stories, is Carter's way of reinventing (mostly American) mythology. Edgar Allan Poe is transformed by his past in "The Cabinet of Edgar Allan Poe"; a young boy finds a woman running around with a pack of wolves in a retelling of "Peter and the Wolf"; Charles Baudelaire's lover Jeanne is regarded with an entirely different set of eyes in "Black Venus." Some of these stories are entirely engrossing, such as "Our Lady of the Massacre" which follows a woman kidnapped by Native Americans and how civilized an "uncivilized" culture can truly be. But if there is one story that is truly the mythology of America, it is the tale of Lizzie Borden. This is my favorite Angela Carter short story. In fact, there are times when I forget how much I love it, only to come back and feel as though I have been satisfied in some way. "The Fall River Axe Murders" is the most unapologetically gruesome story I have ever read. I am not kidding you. Try reading it without gagging.
If you have ever romanticized life in the 1890's, this is not the story for you. We often gloss over the facts of technology. Take for granted what it is we have. If you don't know what life was like in the 1890's, don't worry. Angela Carter will provide the facts: "The white-enameled refrigerator is the genius of every home, the friendly chill of whose breath has banished summer sickness and the runs for good! How often, nowadays, in summer does your milk turn into a sour jelly, or your butter separate itself out into the liquid fat and the corrupt-smelling whey? When did you last see the waxy clusters of the seed-pearl eggs of the blowfly materialize disgustingly on the left-over joint? Perhaps, perfect child of the Frigidaire, you've known none of all this!" One does not eat after reading "The Fall River Axe Murders." But perhaps that is a point of Carter's, that there is so much eating in this short story, of food that is utterly vile.
It is Carter's description of mutton that gets to me every time, though. "The sinewy, grey lean meat amidst the veined lumps of congealed fat, varicosed with clotted blood; it must be the sheep's Pyrrhic vengeance on the carnivore!" To imagine the Borden family eating mutton for four days straight. To imagine them in their layers of prude clothing during the blistering heat. Or that there was no center to their house, that the doors were all locked, all one behind the other behind the other, that Lizzie could only escape her room into her parents' room. You begin to understand how one could go insane in these circumstances.
Of course, Carter's story is not about whether Lizzie did it or not. Everyone knows whether Lizzie did it or not. Ask any American if they think Lizzie Borden killed her parents. They will tell you. Yes or No. And then, they will tell you why. About a murder case when forensics didn't exist. About a case that occurred before they were born, before their parents were born, before perhaps their grandparents were born. About a person they never knew, but simply by reading facts about them, they believe they know by heart. Lizzie Borden is American folklore. And we know this because we cared enough to make a song about it.
Think about all the Lizzie Bordens you have known. The cold-blooded killer who was out for her father's money. The saint who was a victim of her time, lost in what Carter describes as, "protracted childhood." The psychotic Lizzie, who was prone to epilepsy fits in which she lost track of time. And, as I recently saw in a horrible film this year, the avenging angel, the killer with Freudian reasoning. In Carter's story, her Lizzie contains every single Lizzie you may have met. The fact that the narrator is questioning each version adds more to this, though.
To say that Carter's "The Fall River Axe Murders" is about Lizzie Borden is incorrect. It is not about Lizzie Borden at all. It is about the narrator and what facts the narrator purposefully chooses to state and take out. Much like we, upon telling our own versions of Lizzie Borden's story, would pick and choose for our desired outcomes. In the most memorable passage of the story, Carter writes:
"The other man is some kind of kin of Borden's. He doesn't belong, here; he is a chance bystander, he is irrelevant.
Write him out of the script.
Even though his presence in the doomed house is historically unimpeachable, the colouring of this domestic apocalypse must be crude and the design profoundly simplified for the maximum emblematic effect.
Write John Vinnicum Morse out of the script."
The narrator knows what kind of story it is going to tell. One that is simplified, one that answers with either a Yes or a No. And yet, it is not that kind of story because Carter reveals the machinery behind her work.
This is what we do to people: we create out of them what we want. We rewrite their stories when presented with the facts. We choose what to include and exclude. In the end, we speak in words of fiction. When we recount memories, we are choosing the words to describe those events. We are directing the reader in a way we have chosen. This is how non-fiction becomes a paradox. Unless we are recounting only the cold, hard facts, it is not non-fiction. But how can we even depend on the cold, hard facts?
What I do know from "The Fall River Axe Murders" is that it cemented my love for Angela Carter's work. And even now, when I fall into depressive reveries that last a week, I can always count on Carter's work to yank me out of that state and remind me: my life is in words.
My life is in understanding your words, Angela Carter.
April 30, 2019
A lovely collection of short stories, all of which are redolent of legend and fairy tales. My only problem: in six months, there is no chance I'll be able to differentiate this slim volume from A.S. Byatt's equally magical (and I use that word advisedly) collection, Elementals: Stories of Fire and Ice.
December 30, 2018
Reteling klasycznych baśni doprawiony bardzo zmysłową erotyką znajdującą się pomiędzy wierszami w klimatach realizmu magicznego. Bardzo smakowita rzecz.
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