Of Feminists and Fairy Tales

Bluebeard's Egg

By Margaret Atwod

Houghton Mifflin; 281 pages.

Saints and Strangers

By Angela Carter

Viking; 126 pages.

WOMEN WRITERS have certainly done well for themselves since the days of the 19th century novel. Jane Austen, George Eliot and the Bronte sisters worked their own powerful personalities into their fiction. But they struggled against a male-dominated society that saw writing as a recreation for women only if they were recognizable freaks like the Brontes, spinsters like Austen or "immoral" rebels like Eliot, who shocked London society by living with a man who was not her husband.

Even after those novelists had made a name for themselves in the genre, their writing continued to be preoccupied with the society-imposed issue of marriage--seen as a sort of economic transaction and always, especially for the female protagonists, a survival tactic.

Today women writers have broken free and are describing relationships between the sexes on their own terms. Often their writing involves complaints about the constraints of these relationships and about the history of sexual serfdom that may not have ended.

Critics charge that this complaining has become complaisant, excessively feminist, predictable. Bluebeard's Egg, the most recent collection of fiction by the Canadian, Margaret Atwood, may be a case in point.

Best known for The Handmaid's Tale--her best-selling "visionary" novel in the style of 1984 and Brave New World--Atwood always writes about women struggling against or attempting to survive the oppression of men. The titles of her novels, The Edible Woman, Surfacing, Lady Oracle, Life Before Man, Bodily Harm, bear this out.

A story like "The Sunrise" typifies the problem with all the stories in Bluebeard's Egg. The women all, somehow, behave with condescension. The men all, somehow, are satisfied with these truncated relationships. After a while the women meld together into one composite character; you forget all her temporary names as soon as you've finished the last story. She is simply the Atwood bitch.

ATWOOD'S WRITING was much vaunted 15 years ago when her novel Surfacing was hailed as one of the best books of the '70s. One of the deficiencies of The Handmaid's Tale--and maybe the Atwood genre in general--is that its prediction of a society where a woman's best function is to reproduce is quite unbelievable.

Atwood derives the notion of the "handmaid" from the passage in Genesis where Rachel--in order to compensate for her sterility--gives Jacob her handmaid to bear him children. Atwood's notions need updating. Biblical times have passed and so have the outraged '70s.

Men were weak, she says of the past. They will be weak, she predicts of the future. Her blurred view is a symptom of her pessimism. However, it not only weakens her credibility as a chronicler of our times; it tires her readers.

SAINTS AND Strangers bears up writer Angela Carter as not only a vibrant defender of her gender's claims and qualities but as a flagrantly original voice.

Carter loves to recreate old stories. That is her hallmark, despite the fact that she is often marketed as a feminist. A previous collection of her short stories, The Bloody Chamber, includes Carter's elaborate versions of Little Red Riding Hood, Bluebeard, Beauty and the Beast, and Puss in Boots.

Vampires, werewolves and other monsters, the stuff of legends, fascinate her. That is because these creatures represent an already well-developed mythology. Carter's references to these symbols accomplish what fairy tales usually accomplish--a disturbance of the unconscious through manipulation of imagery with which readers already have strong associations.

The stories in Saints and Strangers--like the ones in The Bloody Chamber and her other collection, Fireworks--cannot really be considered short stories, either structurally or psychologically. They are vignettish in quality, always descriptive, poetically introspective, featuring lots of big words. Carter, like Jorge Luis Borges, whom she has claimed as her major influence, has an exhausting vocabulary--more unknown words per story than in most other collections of short fiction in English.

BUT CARTER'S fiction is far funnier than any fairy tale or erudite vignette. The first story in Saints and Strangers, "The Fall River Axe Murders," recreates some of the events and personalities involved in Lizzie Borden's murder of her parents. Since the events of the story are already preordained--as they are in fairy tales--Carter's weapons are atmosphere, humor and meticulous research:

Nobody could call the New England summer a lovable thing; the inhabitants of New England have never made friends with it. More than the heat, it is the humidity that makes it scarcely tolerable. The weather clings, like a low fever you cannot shake off. The Indians who first lived here had the sense to take off their buckskins as soon as things hotted up and sit, thereafter, up to their necks in ponds. This behavior is no longer permissible in the "City of Spindles."

A story like "Our Lady of the Massacre" shows why some people like to call Carter a feminist. The story traces the life of another Moll Flanders, but focuses on her career in the New World as an indentured servant, rather than on her bawdy past. Carter avoids the literal picaresque by making the protagonist ironically self-aware of the conventions of 18th century narrative: "...my name is no clue as to my person nor my life as to my nature." Stripped of a name, the voice could be that of any period picaresque character, Moll Flanders or--Tom Jones.

This hint at sexlessness is further developed in another piece. Featuring yet another unique style, "Overture and Incidental Music for a `Midsummer Night's Dream'" develops a name in Shakespeare's play into a character, the Herm. This creature is simultaneously the source of desire and puzzlement to all the denizens of the forest--from Puck, who is a hairy, horny little bugger in Carter's fantasy, to Oberon and Titania.

Carter has turned the little Indian boy who catalyzes the action in Shakespeare's play into a hermaphrodite. Everybody wants him. The Herm, however, is different: "What does the Herm want? The Herm wants to know what `want' means."

In each story Carter, like the Herm, seems to take on two natures, historian and psychologist, or antiquarian and storyteller, or feminist and philosopher. Although she might be called one or all of these things, in the end she defies any rubric. She tantalizes, she informs, she delights. She may occasionally mystify, but good writers do that too.