for a hundred years, being locked in towers, wearing rags and scrubbing floors. In a post-Walt Disney world, it is easy to lose sight of the brutality and violence of fairy tales. Furthermore, the tales are notably silent on what happens
after
marriage to the Prince. Is he unfaithful, boring, abusive? And if Red Riding Hood escapes from the wolf (as, in some versions, she does), what becomes of her?
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These questions and others have intrigued women writers, especially since the 1960s. Two of the most thoroughgoing reworkings of these fairy tales are Anne Sexton's
Transformations
(1971) and Angela Carter's
The Bloody Chamber
(1979). Sexton's alterations of the tales occur primarily in style and context, rather than in the plots of the stories themselves. Her slangy, breezy, crisp style modernizes the tales, while highlighting their horrific elements, and she prefaces and concludes them with analogous stories in order to suggest that they represent just one version of a common human plot. Carter, in contrast, embellishes the tales, making lush and suggestive what was originally formulaic. Other authors, such as Margaret Atwood in "Bluebeard's Egg" (1986) and Jill McCorkle in "Sleeping Beauty, Revised" (1992), tell clearly contemporary stories whose titles compel us to see them as palimpsests for traditional fairy tales.
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Fay Weldon uses all of these methods and more. Her characters inhabit contemporary urban centersprimarily Londonbut also inhabit the tales they have been told, so that life and fiction blur and become indistinguishable, as do past and present. Weldon's female characters and narrators are obsessive storytellers, modern Mother Geese who spin tales compounded of truth and lies, and then revise these stories in much the same way as fairy tales have undergone revision over time. At times, Weldon invokes actual fairy tales, as she does most overtly in
Words of Advice
(1977); at other times, the invocation is more subtle, emerging in a trope or an image, or in the narrator's voice or the structure of the story. Always, though, there is the clear sense that her characters are immersed in a sea of talesfairy tales, old wives' tales, cultural mythologies, lies they tell themselves and othersin which drowning usually seems a distinct possibility. In short, in an important sense for Witch Weldon,
all
narratives are fairy tales, including those she writes, and because they are fairy tales they are also cautionary tales.
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Today's folklorists agree that the fairy tales with which we are familiar did not originate as mere entertainments, but arose in largely preliterate cultures as ways of expressing common people's aspirations, needs, and relations to nature and the social order. They served, in other words, as cultural and sociopolitical oral documents that reflected values, fears, and hopes and that were readily altered as circumstances changed. By the time
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