Stylistic and generic influences in her writing include magical realism, the marvelous, the Gothic, surrealism, science fiction, and cinema. There is also a strong thread of folklore and fairy tale in her work. Her writing is characterized by rich, sumptuous textures, linguistic and symbolic excess, and a maverick political sensibility that generates narratives in a continual state of flux. Her shifting indeterminacy shares techniques and sensibilities with postmodernism. She is at all times a self-aware feminist with particular interests in female subjectivity and power, but her unabashed interest in heterosexuality and the sensuous, expressed as it is with her earthy vitality, humor, and irreverence, led her to run afoul of some feminist critics. Her interest in genre narratives, particularly, is a fruitful ground for investigation of the inextricability of female desire from patriarchal processes.
She is always provocative, never definitive, in her political explorations. Folklore and fairy tale are both explicit and implicit in much of Carter's writing. Early works include two children's fairy tales, “Miss Z The Dark Young Lady” and “The Donkey Prince” (both 1970). These are playful pieces that self-consciously render traditional animal motifs with humor and vividness, and which feature tough, self-reliant heroines. Sea Cat and Dragon King (2000) is a similarly fantastic undersea fable. Another children's picture book, Comic and Curious Cats (1979), brings together her recurring themes of elaborate, mischievous language and magical beasts. Later, she published her own translation of Charles Perrault's fairy tales (The Fairy Tales of Charles Perrault, 1977), giving them a warm, down-to-earth voice that stresses Perrault's qualities of social awareness and practicality. She also edited several collections of folklore and modern short stories, including the two volumes of the Virago Book of Fairy Tales (1990 and 1992) and Wayward Girls and Wicked Women (1986). The Virago collections are more folkloric in tone, whereas Wayward Girls features literary tales that have a marvelous, fablelike edge despite their realism; all three, however, are deliberate and gleeful assemblages that celebrate female power and wit across a variety of cultural scenarios.
Carter's 1979 collection, The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories, establishes the fairy-tale form as her richest arena for subversion, exploration, and play. Its ten tales are mostly retellings of Perrault, although with some excursions into other sources. They include versions of highly recognizable classics such as “Bluebeard,” “Beauty and the Beast,” “Sleeping Beauty,” and “Little Red Riding Hood.” Carter's tales use the symbols and scenarios of the classic fairy tales to explore different approaches to women's subjectivity and desire, with a weighting toward marvelous beasts as a symbolic exploration of sexuality. This political project is particularly interesting when considered in conjunction with Carter's polemical work, The Sadeian Woman: An Exercise in Cultural History (1979). In this response to the Marquis de Sade, she demonstrates a powerfully demythologizing vision of sexuality divorced from its social and reproductive functions. The Bloody Chamber's tales grope for a similar vision, attempting to transgress and restate the culturally defined parameters of sexuality. In particular, two “Beauty and the Beast” narratives exist as inverted images, “The Courtship of Mr. Lyon” presenting the complete eradication of desire versus its complete validation, although outside the confines of culture, in “The Tiger's Bride.”
The collection's strong use of intertextuality is consequently important: elements of erotic romance, the Gothic, Romanticism, and other textual traditions provide powerful stereotypes of female identity that illuminate and intersect with those of the fairy tale itself. Thus “The Bloody Chamber” presents a sadomasochistic relationship that explores, through a deliberately nineteenth-century erotic narrative, women's submission to male sexual experience.
A comic version of legitimized desire is found in “Puss-in-Boots,” whose trickster cat enables a baroque, operatic version of sexual gratification divorced from emotional or social consequence. The red, white, and black motifs of “Snow White” are updated to a chill Freudian parable in “The Snow Child,” while “The Lady of the House of Love” explores the static and doomed entrapment of the Sleeping Beauty as brooding gothic vampire, the ultimately devouring feminine, equally lost whether her prince is rescuer or victim. The collection's final three stories are variations on the Red Riding Hood theme, the wolf becoming both threatening male sexuality and an image of female power in a series of complex, shifting visions that return to a more earthy folkloric expression, in sharp contrast to the deliberate artifice of the literary in earlier stories. The werewolf motif becomes the centerpiece in Carter's film script for Neil Jordan's The Company of Wolves (1984), a sumptuous visual realization both of Carter's fantastic vision and of her gender interests.
While The Bloody Chamber is Carter's most sustained engagement with fairy-tale forms, the familiar motifs and structures resonate throughout her writing, both as symbolic underpinnings to novels and in the fablelike, essentialist structure of her short stories. Explicit fairytale rewrites occur in other collections, notably the horribly enlivened puppet in “The Loves of Lady Purple” (Fireworks: Nine Profane Pieces, 1974) and the female rivalries and mutilated girls of “Ashputtle, or The Mother's Ghost” in American Ghosts and Old World Wonders (1993). Carter's novels, with their tendency toward magical realism, feature more generalized images of the marvelous, often the symbolic literally embodied: the winged woman of Nights at the Circus (1984), the nightmarish, mythical, and science-fictional dreamscapes of The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman (1972). An awareness of structured narrative, genre, and tradition can be found in disparate elements such as the dystopian melodrama of Heroes and Villains (1969) or the fantastic cinematic of The Passion of New Eve (1977). Carter's writing returns again and again to dreams, transformations, quests, monsters-the toolbox of symbolic fable.
