5 Likewise, Carter’s interest in the visual arts (predominantly painting and cinema) has been examined in relation to the author’s concern for the impact of visual culture on women’s self-representations and social roles, and to her intervention in the debate on the ‘male gaze’ and pornography that animated feminist circles in the late 1970s and 1980s.
The palimpsest quality of Carter’s richly allusive fiction has been well documented.
In this sense, they prefigure The Bloody Chamber, which re-envisions the traditional stories of Bluebeard, Little Red Riding Hood, and Beauty and the Beast through the prism of Western art, literature and culture. By contrast, the illustrations are aimed at an adult audience and they self-consciously foreground the formal and visual dimensions of the tales. 4 Ware’s images depart from the conventionalized reception of the fairy tale even more radically than Carter’s translations, which are still governed by the assumption that Perrault’s tales were written for children (she refers to them as ‘nursery stories’). Significantly, Martin Ware’s artwork for The Fairy Tales of Charles Perrault (1977), Carter’s translation of Perrault’s tales published two years earlier, already modernizes them and goes against the Disneyfied reception of the genre. Angela Carter played an important role in the development of this parallel tradition through her collection of fairytale-inspired stories, The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories (1979), which started a veritable fashion that lasts to this day. But it is significant that in the last decades of the twentieth century, the fairy tale was also revived as a genre for adults in the English-speaking world. I discuss the influence of ‘horrorz (.)ĢMost people today, including children, become familiar with Perrault’s contes through illustrated books or animated films.
Il démontre que les illustrations originales de Ware ne mettent pas seulement en question l’assimilation des contes à la littérature de jeunesse (qui est encore la perspective adoptée par la traductrice dans ce livre), mais permettent aussi de saisir un aspect essentiel mais jusque-là ignoré du procession de création dans l’oeuvre de Carter, à savoir la dynamique qui lie la traduction, l’illustration et la réécriture des contes classiques. Cet article s’attache à l’interaction du texte et de l’image dans les contes de Perrault traduits par Angela Carter et illustrés par Martin Ware (The Fairy Tales of Charles Perrault, 1977), comme une forme de dialogue intersémiotique particulièrement productif.