What is it about Angela Carter?

After deciding on our chosen stories The Bloody Chamber and The Snow Child, there was a small dispute over how we were going to portray certain scenes in our new devised performance. There are what are considered ‘adult’ scenes in both stories, meaning there was a worry as to how we would overcome the issue of portraying them in a tasteful way. For rights purposes, the group decided to merge the two stories together to create a new story with brief similarities. Although we decided to merge the stories, these ‘adult’ themes were still an issue. However, as any professional theatre company would, we sat down and allowed our director, script writers and producer to explain their ideas on how these scenes would be tackled. Eventually we came to a mutual understanding and concluded that none of our performance would be offensive to watch. Due to our heavy technical aspects, we will be able to show the ‘taboo’ in a much more tasteful way, allowing our performance to provoke high emotions as was talked about in the beginning stages.

Taking all of this into consideration, I thought I would take a brief look at Angela Carter, her stories and the criticism that came along with her work and how she tackled it, if she did at all.

An article written by Helen Simpson in The Guardian talks about The Bloody Chamber and what Angela herself had in mind for the book. It states: “[Angela] knew from the start that she was drawn to ‘Gothic tales, cruel tales, tales of wonder, tales of terror, fabulous narratives that deal directly with the imagery of the unconscious’”(2006). This is the essence that she wanted to get across in her stories. Although her book may have shocked readers (and still shocks readers now), her focus was not on the disturbing scenes she used. Simpson tells her readers that Carter’s idea “was not to do ‘versions’ or, as the American edition of the book said, horribly, ‘adult’ fairy tales, but to extract the latent content from the traditional stories and to use it as the beginnings of new stories.” (2006). By touching upon this new way of writing, this new style, she wanted to reach out to a wider audience. She did not want to offend or disgust anybody, which is what our group also aims to avoid. Because these types of stories were so new to Carter’s audience, they soon wanted more, and she got criticised for not writing about more taboo subjects. She was, in so many words, breaking the mould of society.

She had very vivid ideas of what she wanted to write and how she wanted to portray them. Her love for science fiction and fantasy played a big part in her writing, allowing her create a new world full of issues and themes that were never thought about until the book was published.

Angela Carter is such an inspiration to our group because she knew exactly what she wanted. We love her ideas of the gothic and the tales of wonder. Our aim is to tell a tale all about love and relationships with no real focus on the ‘adult’ aspects. Overall, we want our story to be mysterious and spooky so it can catch the attention of our audience. We want it to provoke high emotion with help from our actors and technical spectacle, rather than shock them with the ‘mature’ attributes.

 

Francesca

Word count: 574
Works cited: Simpson, H (2006) ‘Femme Fatale’. The Guardian. Online: http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2006/jun/24/classics.angelacarter (accessed: 16th February 2013)