Angela Carter’s Feminist Mythology

The English novelist Angela Carter is best known for her 1979 book “The Bloody Chamber,” which is a kind of updating of the classic European fairy tales. This does not mean that Carter’s Little Red Riding Hood chews gum or rides a motorcycle but that the strange things in those tales-the werewolves and snow maidens, the cobwebbed caves and liquefying mirrors-are made to live again by means of a prose informed by psychoanalysis and cinema and Symbolist poetry.