Hatched Out of Fitcher’s Bird’s Bloody Egg: Angela Carter and Grimm’s Tales

To a great degree, Angela Carter’s conception of the fairy tale was informed by her childhood reading of cherished books inherited from her older brother “Hughie,” among which a copy of Grimms’ tales. This article shows how she took notes on several stories in her 1960 Journal, including “Fitcher’s Bird.” She returned to this dark material during her stay in Japan, and it filters through her first collection of self-styled tales in Fireworks (1974) alongside Japanese folklore. Carter went on to revisit the European fairy-tale tradition in The Bloody Chamber (1979), including lesser-known variants from the Grimms’ collection. The motif of the bird-woman reappears in the novel Nights at the Circus (1984), this time with Siberian and Other Folktales. As her course notes confirm, Carter’s life-long study of the genre made her keenly aware that each version of the Bluebeard story is unique, inflected by the personality and signature style of the storyteller, collector, author and editor, the nature and purpose of the book project, and the broader historical, linguistic, literary and cultural context: this was notably brought home to her when the British writer rediscovered, translated and reclaimed Charles Perrault’s Contes du temps passé as “fables of the politics of experience,” which she contrasts with the “dark poetry” of the Grimms’ Kinder- und Hausmärchen in her preface to The Fairy Tales of Charles Perrault. Both collections provided her with an endless source of material, images and motifs, plot elements and characters, ideas and inspiration for her own fiction, before compiling stories from around the world as an editor for Virago in the last years of her life.