When Angela Carter died in 1992, Salman Rushdie said that “English literature has lost its high sorceress, its benevolent witch-queen,” Margaret Atwood called her “the Fairy Godmother,” BBC Late Show presenter “white witch of English literature,” and J.G. Ballard a “friendly witch.” Thus, due to her interest in fairy tales and folklore, the praises and compliments she received were mainly about her rewriting of fairy tales. As Stephen Benson suggests, “the facet of Carter’s work that seems to have made the transition into the mainstream is its association with the fairy tale,” since “[t]he majority of her work as editor and translator revolved around the fairy tale.” In fact, she is preoccupied with fairy tales in most of her fiction works, …show more content…
Carter’s choice of the tale derives from both ideological and aesthetic concerns. It is a way of reconnecting with the margins and challenging grand narratives, Folktales represent: “So fairy tales, folk tales, stories from the oral tradition, are all of them the most vital connection we have with the imaginations of the ordinary men and women whose labour created our world.”
“Having affinities with pornography and dream, a vehicle for the surfacing unconscious, the tale is, for Carter, a form in which she can also explore most fully her interest in the Gothic.” that encoded the dark and mysterious elements of the psyche (Makinen, 4)
Angela Carter herself says about the undermining effects of rewriting: “I am all for putting new wine into old bottles, especially if the pressure of the new wine makes the old bottles explode” (qtd in Makinen