The Tiger's Bride: Postmodern Fairy Tale by Angela Carter (Essay Sample)

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"The Tiger's Bride": The Thrilling, Dark and Daring Postmodern Fairy Tale by Angela Carter
Through her underlying feminist messages, erotic descriptions and other, unconventional
elements, Angela Carter both provokes thought for all readers and basically defines the postmodern fairy tale in her short story "The Tiger's Bride." It is a new twist on the "Beauty and the Beast" fairy tale, and is one in which the protagonist (the 'beauty') actually becomes an animal (a 'beast') like the main male character in the story. Beyond that, the protagonist finds herself aroused by the beast, which most certainly contrasts with other types of fairy tales. If one examines the culture in which Angela Carter grew up and spent her prime adult years, that person will see that post-modernism was always the literary genre for which Carter was destined to write. The aforementioned elements all allude to the classification of this short story within the postmodern realm while simultaneously entertaining readers by indulging them in a gothic literary fantasy.
"The Tiger's Bride," a short story in Angela Carter's collection of fairy tales entitled "The
Bloody Chamber," is a new twist on the classic "Beauty and the Beast" fairy tale, and is one in which the protagonist (the 'beauty') actually becomes an animal (a 'beast') herself, like the main male character in this tale. Besides this extraordinary transformation in the story, the protagonist finds herself aroused by the beast, which also certainly contrasts with other types of fairy tales. All of these elements allude to the classification of this story within the postmodern realm while simultaneously entertaining readers and indulging them in a gothic literary fantasy. Looking at the culture Angela Carter grew up in, as well as the one in which her prime adult years were spent, it becomes clear that postmodernism was ultimately the genre for which Carter was destined to write.
Angela Carter once said to her friend, "I exaggerate terribly … I'm a born fabulist”
(Hill). Born in 1940, she would have lived her prime adult years (her twenties and thirties) in the 1960s and 1970s. The 1960s were full of questioning, not only authority, but social norms as well, so this could be what first directed her toward feminist ideas in her writing. The 1970s were all about the unusual and unordinary. Punk style emerged, and everybody wore colorful clothing, crazy hairstyles and even spikes in their hair. The 1970sWas also a big decade for feminism in England, when ch is where Carter grew up. For instance, the Equal Pay Act was passed and later implemented in the '70s. In addition, "Women made strides … with contraception becoming free of charge in 1974. Additionally, the Sex Discrimination Act was passed in 1975, making it illegal for employers to discriminate based on perspective employees’ gender" (British Life During the 1970s). When she attended the University of Bristol, Carter indulged in Medieval Studies, and she also learned about Freud here. This is where Carter "gained support for the world of shock, dream, and eros that she now saw as the realm of art" (Acocella). A source on Carter's life says that "A little later, she discovered the Surrealists, and learned from them that the goal of art was not truth … but the marvellous—indeed, that the marvellous was the truth" (Acocella). The source comments that "All of this fed into her developing feminism," yet the writer of this source acknowledges that "Her concern was not with justice; she hated the idea of put-upon, suffering women, and implied that they had it coming, by being such weaklings. She wanted women to seize what they needed—power, freedom, sex—and she saw no fundamental difference between the sexes that could prevent that" (Acocella). Later, Carter travelled to Japan, where her feminism evolved even more: "The young women of Tokyo, she wrote, acted as though they had “become their own dolls”" (Acocella). Her culture, therefore, influenced Angela Carter's writing to a great extent, making it the postmodern spectacle it has become. A 2020 peer-reviewed journal article states that contemporary, reinvented fairy tales "have provided invaluable insight into interpreting the cultural currency of the tale type and its continued popularity among revisionist and postmodern writers … who subvert its underlying ideology" (Dula 198). The group of fairy tale-like stories which "A Tiger's Bride" is taken from, collectively called "The Bloody Chamber," is classified as postmodern due to a few different characteristics it possesses.
One major postmodern element to the story "The Tiger's Bride" is its hidden feminist
messages. Political messages, including feminist undertones, are often considered either aspects of postmodernism or an extension of it. A source which discusses postmodern elements of literature states that "... as time moved on and Postmodernism developed as an accepted area of discussion, the basic ideas of Postmodernism were branching off into many facets of contemporary life. Among these variations are feminism…" (Postmodernism). Evidence of feminism can be identified throughout the story: The narrator and protagonist describes herself, saying, "Since I could toddle, always the pretty one, with my glossy, nut-brown curls, my rosy cheeks. And born on Christmas day" (Carter 34). Another example is how Milord (the beast) calls the narrator his "beauty," yet she and the valet in the tale are expected to refer to him as "master" (Carter 36-38). Finally, feminism is detectable in the beast's purpose for her. She is objectified sexually, evident in the fact that she is wanted for her ability to fulfill Milord's physical desires. The valet tells the narrator that the beast's "sole desire is to see the pretty young lady unclothed nude without her dress" (Carter 38). At one point in the story, the protagonist says, "my own skin was my sole capital in the world and today I'd make my first investment" (Carter 37). Other elements of "The Tiger's Bride" which fall perfectly into the category of Postmodernism are the surreal and fantastic aspects of the story, as well as its categorization of being a pastiche that is based upon the earlier, original version of "Beauty and the Beast."
A couple of lesser-known parts of "The Tiger's Bride" which challenge the boundaries of
reality occur when the protagonist/narrator sees her father and a distorted version of herself in the maid's mirror. She narrates, saying, "I saw within [the mirror] not my own face but that of my father, as if I had put on his face when I arrived at The Beast's palace as the discharge of his debt" (Carter 39). However, the narrator would later say that she sees in the mirror "... a pale, hollow-eyed girl whom I scarcely recognized" (Carter 43). Another fantasy-based element to "The Tiger's Bride" is that Milord is a sort of half-beast, half-human creature. This is described by the story's narrator as she states, "The Beast goes always masked; it cannot be his face that looks like mine" (Carter 36). Milord has "A beautiful face; but one with too much formal symmetry of feature to be entirely human" (Carter 34). Furthermore, the valet in the story once tells the narrator that "Nothing human lives here" in the house of Milord, the Beast (Carter 39). His beastly characteristics are illuminated near the story's conclusion, when they reader is told that Milord "Growled at the back of his throat, lowered his head, sank on to his forepaws, snarled, showed me his red gullet, his yellow teeth" (Carter 44). Lastly, there is the fact that the protagonist/narrator transforms into a beast herself at the end of the story. An article on modern-day fairy tales says that "In "The Tiger’s Bride” the narrator demonstrates a gradual abandonment of conventional rationality; her move toward acceptance of the animal Other as “natural” inverts the implicit movement of [the original] version of the Beauty and the Beast story" (Webb 315). Indeed, the narrator says that she "felt the harsh velvet of his head against my hand, then a tongue, abrasive as sandpaper … each stroke of his tongue ripped off skin after successive skin, all the skins of a life in the world" (Carter 44-45). The protagonist says that, underneath all her "skins," there is "... a nascent patina of shining hairs. My earrings turned back to water and trickled down my shoulders" (Carter 45). In this moment, the narrator says she "shrugged the drops off my beautiful fur," which is the statement that informs readers she has now fully transformed into an animal, or a 'beast' (Carter 45). The fact that this short story is a pastiche written from the original "Beauty and the Beast" fairy tale is also an element which makes this work unmistakably postmodern in nature.
A writer on the topic of postmodern literature says that a "Pastiche … can be seen as a
representatio