She opens an old story for us, like an egg, and finds the new story, the no-story we want to hear, within.
Salman Rushdie (xiv)

1Angela Carter’s interest in foreign languages, literatures and cultures played a prominent role in her development as a writer, manifest in her life-long fascination with the fairy-tale tradition. Edmund Gordon points out that “The first books she loved were also works of fantasy: she read her brother’s copies of the Grimms’ fairy tales and Lewis Carroll’s Alice books, as well as The Three Royal Monkeys by Walter de la Mare and The Princess and the Goblin by George MacDonald. These tales found a place in her heart; they were still among her possessions when she died” (The Invention of Angela Carter 20). Carter’s personal library, journals and notebooks amply confirm her love of folklore and fantasy which nourished her fiction and fed into the two books of fairy tales she edited for Virago during the last years of her life. While the presence of the Grimms’ tales in The Bloody Chamber (1979) has been well documented (Sage; Bacchilega and Roemer; Hennard Dutheil, Reading; Lau, Erotic; among others), the present article focuses on the impact of Carter’s childhood edition of Grimms’ tales on her perception of the genre and its resonances in her fiction beyond the famous collection of “stories about fairy stories” (Carter, Shaking a Leg 38).

3Carter’s life-long study of the fairy-tale genre made her keenly aware that each version of the familiar story of Bluebeard is unique, shaped by the storyteller’s voice and signature style, and by individual authorial and editorial projects inflected by specific historical, linguistic, national, literary and cultural contexts: this was notably brought home to her when she rediscovered, translated and reclaimed Charles Perrault’s Histoires ou Contes du temps passé (1697) as “fables of the politics of experience,” which she contrasts with the Grimms’ Kinder- und Hausmärchen in her introduction to The Fairy Tales of Charles Perrault, both of which provided her with a wealth of material, images, motifs, plot elements, and ideas for her own fiction.

Fantastic Beasts and Where they Come From: Grimm’s Tales in Angela Carter’s Journal for 1960

5Carter’s cherished edition of Grimm’s tales also sheds light on her association of the fairy-tale genre with Gothic fiction and Dark Romanticism. We recall that the Grimms’ collection was freely translated into English by Edgar Taylor and David Jardine, and published with illustrations by George Cruikshank in German Popular Stories (1823-1826). This first selection of heavily adapted and softened stories lightened up by Cruikshank’s lively, sentimental or whimsical pictures was so successful that it prompted the Grimms to produce the Kleine Ausgabe (small edition) in 1825. Taylor and Jardine’s book was also published as Grimm’s Goblins: German Popular Stories in 1877. Subsequent retranslations were often based on a different selection of tales and translation method to distinguish them from this landmark edition. Mrs. H. B. Paull and Mr. L. A. Wheatley’s Grimms’ Goblins and Wonder Tales (London: Frederick Warne and Co., c. 1890), for instance, purports to be a “very careful and close” translation from the original German, and it foregrounds the darker and more sinister aspects of the Grimms’ collection by selecting tales “full of wonderful incidents” that uphold “courage and truth” against “wickedness and falsehood, even when united with the power of goblins” (Preface viii). The word “goblin” thus became associated with Grimm’s tales in England, and it is also found in George MacDonald’s 1871 fantasy novel The Princess and the Goblin, another favourite book of Carter’s childhood.

6In his landmark study documenting the circulation and editorial success of Grimm’s tales in England, Telling Tales, the Impact of Germany on English Children’s Books 1780-1918, David Blamires explains how these tales were freely translated, adapted, and retitled to produce a sense of novelty, eschew copyright matters, and distinguish new translations from existing ones for marketing and commercial purposes. Mrs Paull’s translation, which heavily censors, moralises and adapts its sources despite her claims to fidelity, for instance, became very popular in England in the last decades of the nineteenth century, followed by illustrated editions by Arthur Rackham and others. As she aspires to become a writer and looks for inspiration by reading widely across periods, genres and cultures, a young Angela Carter returns to Grimm’s collection, possibly in Mrs Paull’s translation, which follows the order of the KHM and includes “Fitcher’s Bird.” A few pages into her journal for 1960, Carter jots down notes about several tales from Grimm’s collection:

Friendly demon mother in Grimm: the 3 Golden Hairs.
Painbringer, the handless maiden’s son.
This recurring motif of the faked murder.
Viridiana. Surrealist “The Godfather”
Flitcher’s Bird (sic)
The Singing Skylark: fantastic multiplicity of heraldic beasts, etc., & all sorts of odd symbolism, lions, doves, griffins, Sun, Moon Stars, seven year guests, the Cupid & Psyche no light bit.
The 3 Little Birds
Hans the Hedgehog; ever so Freudian
The Wonderful Plant, Apuleius
(“Journal for 1960”: Add MS 88899/1/100)

The first tale that draws her attention is “The Three Golden Hairs,” about the persecuted son of a poor woman who marries a king’s daughter but must collect three hairs from the Devil’s head: the young man is helped by the Devil’s own grandmother, who enables him to meet trials imposed by the king and to eventually get rid of him. Apart from its darkly humorous side, Carter is intrigued by the presence of a supernatural motherly figure, a motif she will explore in “The Bloody Chamber” and in her threefold rewriting of “Ashputtle or The Mother’s Ghost.” The next tale she mentions is “The Maiden Without Hands,” about a father who cruelly mutilates his daughter in exchange for his soul. She flees home and is rescued by a king who marries her, but the Demon intervenes again, so she is only reunited with her husband and son, called Painbringer, after further trials. “The Wedding of Widow Fox” features an old fox that pretends to be dead to trick his wife and test her fidelity, and he turns her out of their house when the widow decides to remarry. “The Godfather” is about a man who, after a dream, meets an enigmatic stranger in the street who agrees to be his child’s godfather, and gifts him with the capacity to tell whether a sick person will live or die; after a while, the man goes to visit the godfather who lives in a multi-storied house where he sees bizarre scenes such as a mop and a broom quarrelling, dead fingers speaking, a heap of human heads, fishes cooking themselves, and finally he spies the godfather wearing big horns through the keyhole. The godfather tries to hide under the covers, denies wearing horns, and shouts to scare the man away, who disappears forever. Carter tellingly qualifies the tale as surrealist, and she seems to associate is specifically with Luis Buñuel’s transgressive surrealist film Viridiana (1961), co-winner of the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Festival.

9Tellingly, Carter singles out “Fitcher’s Bird” (a first version of which was published in 1812), even though she does not comment on it at this point (she even misspells the title as “Flitcher’s Bird,” possibly due to a confusion with the Middle English [northern dialect]/Scottish word “flitcheren” [from “flitch, flight”], meaning “flying clumsily, fluttering”). In the extensive notes that she took in preparation for The Bloody Chamber, which would in turn feed into her course notes (gathered under “Roots of Narrative”), however, she elaborates on various versions of the story of Bluebeard in a section entitled “The Wise Virgin” where she makes a passing reference to the edition of her childhood.

The Wise Virgin
I’m going to look at a story, or, rather the constellation of stories and ballads that assemble themselves around the story, Fitcher’s Bird . . . in the edition of my childhood and try to extract some of what I believe to be the latent meaning out of a story that is already so haunting and so explicitly about itself—a young girl falls in with some kind of sex maniac and triumphantly turns the tables on him.
(“Miscellaneous Fairy Tale Material”: Add MS 88899/1/82)

I’m going to talk about the story called “Fowler’s Fowl” in Ralph Manheim’s translation—it’s called “Fitcher’s Fowl” in the edition of my childhood.

She underlines that it is a bloody story in which “a very large number of women have not outwitted their cruel husband.” Contrasting Perrault’s “La Barbe bleue” with Grimm’s tale, she observes that “the less it has to do with the supernatural, the more genuinely horrible it becomes”:

Because in Perrault’s “Bluebeard”—his version has been almost completely purged of supernatural elements—the husband is a psychopathic murderer, a type who rarely intrudes into fairy tales. But if the husband is an ogrish wizard, as he is in “Fowler’s Fowl,” then his activities are normalised; comfortingly, he is only behaving in a way which is natural to him. He is not a psychopath. He is acting according to types. . . .

I’m tempted to suggest that the mysterious egg in “Fitcher’s Fowl” is the one which eventually hatches out the heroine in her new career as a bird.

Furthermore, she stresses that it is curiosity that paradoxically sets the young woman free and, in the Grimms’ tale at least, saves her sisters:

CURIOSITY—a curiosity that saves the heroine’s life; it is a secret she must know or else she’ll become an undifferentiated corpse.

She draws attention to the related legends of Gilles de Rais and Countess Bathory and the motif of the decorated skull also retains her attention:

Back to “Fitcher’s Bird” whose heroine leaves behind her a skull, dressed in a bridal wreath, watching for her husband out of the window—something like one of those extraordinary memento mori from a Mexican festival.

She has become a magic bird, as if hatched out of the mysterious egg her husband gave her.

Carter also mentions “Lady Isabel and the Elf Knight,” from Francis J. Child’s collection The English and Scottish Popular Ballads (1860), which inspired “The Erl-King.” She argues that whereas Perrault’s tale usefully cautions against domestic violence, “Fitcher’s Bird” is about female sexual awakening:

My hypothesis is that stories of the “Fowler’s Fowl” type, the “Bluebeard” genre are not about female fear of sexual initiation as they are about male fears of female sexuality. . . . The price of gratified curiosity is knowledge. She grows wings & flies home, singing her little song.

Along those lines, she mentions elf-knights whose musical ability is a “euphemism for sexual expertise.” This idea is at the core of her own take on “The Erl-King,” and she even stresses in her journal that “Mark is der erlkönig” (qtd. in Gordon, Invention 257).

11Accordingly, the motif of the bird-woman and the bird-catcher was to resonate in her fiction, from the early novels to Nights at the Circus (1984), not to mention “The Bloody Chamber,” her brilliant retelling of the Perrault-based tale and its companion piece, “The Erl-King,” which references Goethe’s (and Child’s) ballad as well as the Grimms’ version of the Bluebeard story. In Shadow Dance (1966) already, the dangerous anti-hero Honeybuzzard is a monstrous bird of prey, half-wicked magician, half-handsome Elf-man luring men and women alike to their destruction during the hippie sexual revolution gone to seeds in the Bristol underworld. The passage on garden gnomes “grasping in a cruel fist a plaster butterfly and laughing with sadistic relish” (24) captures the goblin spirit of the novel.

12In her interview with John Haffenden, Carter mentions that her main intertextual source for The Magic Toyshop (1967) was the fairy tale, and she describes her own novel as a “malign fairy tale” (Haffenden 80), complete with an evil Drosselmeyer figure. Several Perceptions (1968) also revolves around a sinister figure, Joseph Harker, a university student drop-out, drifter and self-proclaimed nihilist, the novel referencing snow-related tales including “Snow White” (47, 75, 122) and “Mother Holle” (145), as well as H. C. Andersen’s “The Snow Queen.” In the archeo-futuristic novel Heroes and Villains (1969), the supernatural figure is split between the handsome barbarian Jewel and the crazy tribe leader Donally, who looks like “a grotesque bird” (78), with his mask “painted with blue, green, purple and black blotches, dark red spots and scarlet streaks” and his robe “woven from the plumage of birds” (78), complete with “a plastic and wire cage of the kind in which budgerigars had been kept before the war” (78). In the perverse sexual trio of Love (1971), Buzz can be seen as a variation on Honeybuzzard. In her early novels, Carter thus reworks the bird-catcher figure as a dangerous/sinister but fascinating/attractive bird-like man out to trap/luring girls (and boys) into his bed, half-hippie dandy, half-cult leader, before exploring more ambivalent figures (half prey-half-predator) during her stay in Japan and in “The Erl-King” in The Bloody Chamber (1979). A few years later the female heroine is recast as Fevvers, a triumphant and larger-than-life bird-woman in Nights at the Circus, who would become her most famous/beloved heroine.

Hiding Amidst Fire Flowers: Grimms’ Tales in Fireworks (1974)

13Carter’s first collection of short fiction in Fireworks blends semi-autobiographical stories with darkly goblinesque tales in various settings, organized according to the principle of the counterpoint, but united by the self-conscious adoption of the key principles of the fantastic tale. The tale, she observes in the afterword, has a unique ability to concentrate meaning, so that “sign and sense can fuse” (121). She aspires to write “Gothic tales, cruel tales, tales of wonder, tales of terror” (121) in the manner of Poe and Hoffmann, which flaunt their rejection of mimetic realism in favour of “the imagery of the unconscious” and where motifs “exaggerated beyond reality” “become symbols, ideas, passions” (122); moreover, their style is deliberately “ornate, unnatural,” their tone is that of “black humour” and their “singular moral function” is to provoke “unease” (122). She thus seeks to reclaim a genre which was despised by the ‘literati’ in Britain at the time, possibly because “The tale has relations with sub-literary forms of pornography, ballad and dream” (122). And so she turned to the French conte de fées (Perrault, Beaumont, Gautier…) and the German Kunstmärchen (Hoffmann) and Volksmärchen (Grimm), as well as to non-European traditions.

14Tellingly, the word “goblin” appears in the first story composed in Japan, anthologized in Fireworks as “A Souvenir of Japan,” a melancholic evocation of the hana-bi Summer festival symbolizing the short-lived happiness with a Japanese lover who “seemed to possess a curiously unearthly quality when he perched upon the mattress with his knees drawn up beneath his chin in the attitude of a pixy on a door-knocker. . . . There was a subtle lack of alignment between face and body and he seemed almost goblin, as if he might have borrowed another person’s head, as Japanese goblins do, in order to perform some devious trick” (Fireworks 6). The connection between East and West is made through the figure of the goblin, which captures both the mysterious nature of the lover (a fictionalized Sozo Araki) and, despite his powerful attraction as an elfish being, his baleful influence on the narrator.

There is a story in the Brothers’ Grimm called “Godfather Death”; but is Death not so much the common godfather of us all, but, indeed, the midwife of the world, attendant at every birth.
(“Journal Japan years”: MS 88899/1/93-4)

The German-sounding name of the heroine, the northern setting and the motif of the severed head lovingly kept and buried by a loving sister also evoke the particularly grim and cruel tale of “The Juniper Tree.” Even though the tone of Carter’s own collection oscillates between lyrical-melancholic, sinister-grotesque and bizarre-surreal, its style from delicately and exquisitely wrought to blunt, hallucinatory and coldly matter-of-fact, the presence of death is widespread, either directly thematized (“The Executioner’s Daughter,” “The Loves of Lady Purple,” “Master,” “Elegy for a Freelance”…) or threaded through the collection in a more oblique and subdued fashion, as in the longing for love lost in “A Souvenir of Japan” and “The Smile of Winter,” the shift from Spring to Winter, youthful enthusiasm to disillusionment with politics, innocence to experience, the exuberance of nature to the cold and inhuman urban landscapes of Tokyo or London. Other echoes to fairy tales in this early collection include a reference to a “wise toad” which, Emile speculates in “Penetrating to the Heart of the Forest,” might have “a jewel in his head” (69), the narrator commenting that the children had read about it “in old books but never seen it before” (69). Overall, the tale evokes “Hansel and Gretel” blended with the biblical Fall from an exotic Eden, complete with exuberant flowers, squirrels and rabbits in an “enchanted forest” (74). “Reflections” references the Carrollian mirror as well as malevolent woods inhabited by a witch in her bizarre, out-of-time, dwelling (109). The last tale, “Elegy for a Freelance,” is set in a dystopian revolutionary London, but the messy hanging of a blood-thirsty terrorist takes place under a “russet-coloured moon” (150), his body being “thr[own] in the undergrowth” and covered in leaves “like the robins in Babes in the Wood” (150), complete with a few German words (Walpurgisnacht 127; Liebestod 138). The return to the Grimms’ tales seems to have been motivated by the discovery of Japanese folklore, as Carter suggests in her notes on animal groom tales.

How to Combine the Politics of Experience with Dark Poetry? From The Fairy Tales of Charles Perrault (1977) to The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories (1979)

16In her foreword to The Fairy Tales of Charles Perrault (1977), published two years before The Bloody Chamber, Carter pits Perrault’s modern tales upholding ideas of civility, reason and progress against “the savagery and wonder and dark poetry of Grimms’ ‘Household Tales’” (16). Because “Each century tends to create or re-create fairy tales after its own taste” (17), she observes that the fairy-tale genre was reconceptualized by the Grimms, marking a radical shift from early Enlightenment France to German Romanticism, so that Perrault’s worldly tales couched in an “elegant, witty and sensible” (17) language gave way to the recovery and, to some degree, (re)invention of an older tradition of folk tales characterised by vivid imagery and the “excesses of the imagination” (17). Significantly, while Carter approved of Perrault’s worldly-wise, humorous, artful and misleadingly simple stories, stressing their pedagogical value as “fables of the politics of experience,” Grimms’ collection appealed to her taste for folklore, anthropology and “antiquities,” the fantastic and Gothic tales of horror, mystery and excess that she emulated in her own fiction. The tales retain an enigmatic quality that stimulates the reader’s imagination and resists single and simple interpretations; they capture fundamental truths about human nature and relations, trials and conflicts, while openly flaunting their fictional status—which is why Carter saw them as doors to the subconscious and anthropological documents. Furthermore, as Nick Cave put it, “Metaphor can create a merciful sense of distance from the cruel idea, or the unspeakable truth, and allow it to exist within us as a kind of poetic radiance, as a work of art” (Nick Cave on songwriting).

Birds of a Feather Sing Together: The Magic of Voice and the Power of Flight in Nights at the Circus (1984)

18The striking motif of the bird-woman who rescues herself and her sisters appealed to Carter to the point that she kept returning to it until late in her writing career. It centrally features in Nights at the Circus (1984), the memory of the Grimm’s tale possibly reactivated by her discovery of the ‘Story of a Bird Woman’ in Siberian and Other Folktales, anthologized in Angela Carter’s Book of Fairy Tales (391-93). Identified as a ‘Siberian Tribal: Chukchi’ tale, she notes in the manner of the Grimms that “Stories of bird-women occur among the Yakuts, the Lapps and the Samoyedes” (477), which may explain why Fevvers and the travelling circus get side-tracked in Siberia before eventually returning to London. Whereas Perrault’s “Bluebeard” is a cautionary tale, Grimm’s “Fitcher’s Bird” is a wish-fulfilment fantasy, and so each one has its own value. The latter arguably gives more agency to the youngest sister who magically resurrects the bodies of her sisters when she disguises herself as a bird to escape the evil sorcerer. Based on Carter’s notes, Fevvers hatched out of Fitcher’s bloody egg, expletives included. To reconcile the useful teachings of Perrault’s tale with the poetry of the Grimms, the novel centrally explores the tension between fact and fiction, encapsulated in the motto “Is she fact or is she fiction?” which characterizes the two-sided tradition of the tale as a cautionary story and tale of wisdom, as well as a poetic, fantastic story about courage and talent rewarded, and survival and happiness against all odds. The twin legacy of Perrault and Grimm thus captures the writer’s own brand of ‘magic realism’ combining an acute awareness of the hard-nosed facts of life with a love of the tall tale and wild flights of imagination. In this sense, Carter pays homage to and weaves together both traditions (and more), while also revisiting her own fiction, so that each new text borrows from older texts and reworks them into something new, in keeping with the mutable nature of the tale and its central character. The result is an elaborate, picaresque and expanded, worldly-wise and extravagant version of “Fitcher’s Bird” for the twentieth century hatched by the author and gifted to her readers.

19How, then, does Angela Carter revive “Fitcher’s Bird” as the bird-woman Fevvers? Are there other resonances of the tale in Nights at the Circus? Do Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm serve as fairy godfathers to Carter’s work? It is a common misconception that the female characters originating from the Grimms’ pen are passive, silent women (e.g. Lieberman in Don’t Bet on the Prince, etc.). In fact, “Fitcher’s Bird” is a tale where female agency is central, as the youngest sister manages to trick a powerful sorcerer (Lau 211). He is even reduced to the role of a servant carrying his own treasure back to the girl’s home. Moreover, the striking motif of the decorated skull hints at the girl’s resourcefulness and her artful disposition as a fictional double of the storyteller herself.

20One of the main differences between Perrault’s “Bluebeard” and Grimm’s version of the tale is the presence of the tell-tale bloody key giving way to the untouched egg: tellingly, Fevvers is said to have been hatched from an egg (a motif that dates back from Antiquity, with Léda’s children Helen and Pollux being born from an egg), while her flying capacities hark back to the youngest sister’s cunning tricks and gift of the gab, though set in the context of a travelling circus at the beginning of the twentieth century. Fevvers’ capacity for self-fashioning, her miraculous performance and her compelling way of telling the story of her life as a wondrous ‘tall tale’ maintains the illusion to the point that her admirer falls in love with her heads over heels (a recurring motif in Carter’s fiction). As the star of Colonel Kearney’s circus, she stands up for herself and fights back when Madame Schreck tries to cheat her: when recounting the episode to American journalist Jack Walser, she describes herself as a mythical figure: “I’m the avenging angel now, and she can’t escape me” (82). Obviously, Madame Schreck, whose name means “fear” in German and is associated with children’s folklore (and sinister, scary, haunting figures like E. T. A. Hoffmann’s “Der Sandmann”), is a clue to her identity as another ‘larger than life’ female character. Despite her origins in myth and folklore, Fevvers is also a modern heroine characterised by an insatiable appetite (for food, fame, love), as a true star (half Mae West-half Marilyn Monroe), “She was feeling supernatural tonight. She wanted to eat diamonds” (213). As soon as they meet, she wins Walser over: “It was as if Walser had become a prisoner of her voice, her cavernous, sombre voice” (47). Because Fevvers knows how to spin a tale, “he felt more and more like a kitten tangling up in a ball of wool it had never intended to unravel in the first place” (43). The metaphor is used later when “It was as though she had taken him as far as she could go on the brazen trajectory of her voice, yarned him in knots, and then—stopped short. Dropped him” (103). This unique ability to weave a tall tale is a life-saving gift, as well as a metafictional motif celebrating the author’s own status as a master/mistress-storyteller.

21This idea of the female voice as a means of tricking a powerful enemy is already found in “Fitcher’s Bird”:

He sat down and thought he’d rest awhile, but one of the girls in the basket cried out: “I’m looking out of my little window, and I can see you resting. Get a move on!” He thought it was his bride calling and started off. After a while he thought he’d sit down again, but again the cry came: “I’m looking out of my little window, and I can see you resting. Get a move on!” Every time he tried to sit down the cry came and he had to start off again, until finally, groaning and breathless, he carried the basket with the gold and the two girls in it into their parents’ house. (Manheim 160-61)

The performative power of the youngest sister’s voice, relayed by her sisters, drives the wicked magician forward. In Carter’s novel, her friend Toussaint admits that when Fevvers is abducted by Mr. Rosencreutz (another semi-legendary figure) “we could do nothing except pray that Fevvers’ wit and ingenuity would keep her from harm” (Carter 98). This echoes the way the youngest daughter is introduced in Grimm’s tale: “Then he went back and took the third, but she was clever and sly” (Manheim 160), emphasizing the female protagonist’s intelligence, although Fevvers will lose a few feathers during her adventures.

22Both heroines are also compassionate and good to others. The youngest daughter from “Fitcher’s Bird” saves her sisters by resurrecting them from the dead. As a result, “the two girls opened their eyes and came alive again. They hugged and kissed and were all very happy” (160), while Fevvers helps the people around her: she takes in Mignon (after Goethe’s heroine), a circus performer victim of domestic violence, and feeds her with a box of chocolates, bread and milk (Carter 149, 167). She makes the operation possible that gives Toussaint a mouth (67), and Walser even compares her to a merciful Virgin/Mother Goose figure when he describes the other circus performers on a poster being “sheltered by Fevvers’ outspread wings in the same way that the poor people of the world are protected under the cloak of the Madonna of Misericordia” (145). We recall that in her working notes, Carter significantly makes a connection between “Fitcher’s Bird” and “The Wise Virgin,” fused in Fevvers, whose virginity is repeatedly stressed, signalling Carter’s attempt to combine elements from religious myths and ancient tales to create a new being that will speak to the present.

23Marina Warner reminds us that more than “the presence of fairies, the moral function, . . . and the happy ending . . . , metamorphosis defines the fairy tale” (xix-xx). The two female figures’ bird-like appearance, helper function, and capacity for disguise and metamorphosis make them fictional doubles of the author herself. When Walser first meets Fevvers, she is wearing “a towering headdress of dyed ostrich plumes” and a “robe of red and purple feathers” with fringes that shiver in the draught (Carter 11-12). Her clothes and accessories are reminiscent of the dress that the Grimms’ protagonist crafts out of honey and feathers: “When everything was ready, she plunged herself in a barrel of honey, cut open a featherbed and rolled in the feathers. Then, looking like a strange bird that no one could have recognized, she left the house” (Manheim 161). A striking difference, however, is the purpose of their bird-like appearance: Fevvers makes use of the “airy burden of furled plumage as gaudy as that of a Brazilian cockatoo” (Carter 12-13) to enhance her “public career on the trapeze, in order to simulate . . . the tropic bird” (24-25) and she enjoys being looked at and admired: “Look at me! With a grand, proud, ironic grace, she exhibited herself before the eyes of the audience as if she were a marvellous present too good to be played with” (13). For the heroine of “Fitcher’s Bird,” on the other hand, the feathery garment is a life-saving device, not an accessory for show. Fevvers’ bird costume, however, is less in the service of beauty than a self-fashioning device to make a living and win a heart.

25Like the Grimms’ sorcerer who “barely touched” the girls to make them jump into his basket (Manheim 159), Fevvers’ opponent is defined by an almost supernatural power. He has “quite exceptional physical strength, sufficient to pin even her to the ground” (Carter 224) and is “still on his feet!” (219) after thirty-five glasses of vodka. He’s a predator, a Bluebeard-like villain in a castle full of traps for his female victims. His books are fake, and the bookcases move at the touch of a button: “He pressed a button at the side of the stove and a section of the bookcase with which the walls were lined flew up” (220); “The glided leather spines were only so much painted trompe l’oeil all the time!” (220). The fake musicians that come out of the wall are partly made from “plumage of birds” (220), Carter transposing into the twentieth century the Grimms’ sorcerer’s warning that “something terrible will happen” (Manheim 159).

26Furthermore, the egg is a powerful symbol in both texts. The egg in “Fitcher’s Bird” is the magician’s proof of the girls’ disobedience: cleverly, the heroine outwits the sorcerer as she makes sure to “put the egg in a safe place,” and she handles it so well that it plays in her favour, and so the visible proof of her discovery of her husband’s bloody secret is transformed into a symbol of her own craftiness. In the Duke’s palace, Carter’s protagonist fears the Fabergé egg and its contents and sees danger in the toy that resembles her: “Fevvers found this tree and its bird exceedingly troubling and turned away from it with a sense of imminent and deadly danger” (Carter 224). Fevvers’ reaction of innate fear possibly stems from the death and suffering that the egg brought upon her sisters in the Grimms’ tale. Fevvers is almost literally turned into a “bird in a gilded cage” (224), like the girls trapped in cages in “The Erlking,” and like the sorcerer arranges for his female victims to be stored away in the “forbidden room,” so has Carter’s Grand Duke prepared a place to entrap the bird-woman.

27While Fevver’s fear is to become an object when she “contemplated life as a toy” (225-26), the makeshift bird in “Fitcher’s Bird” signifies escape from a bloody fate. The encounter with the Grand Duke weakens Fevvers and causes her to lose some of her power and her good luck charm, her “magic sword” (226) that the Grand Duke snaps in two (224-25). Consequently, “her feeling of invulnerability was gone” (323), she breaks her wing (241), and her looks are fading (“the tropic bird looked more and more like the London sparrow as which it had started out in life, as if a spell were unravelling” [321]). One could argue that the Grimms’ protagonist gains strength from her dealings with the male villain as it brings out her resourcefulness. She ultimately triumphs over him by putting her sisters back together and then flies away from “patriarchy,” transformed, into her own story. While Fevvers is literally able to take ‘flight’ from entrapment, Carter’s protagonist doesn’t come out of it unharmed, possibly because Carter wanted her ‘tall tale’ to be more realistic in her reconfiguration of fairy-tale elements. In short, Fevvers, in a literalisation of the French idiom, has lost a few feathers in her battle with the Duke.

28Raised by prostitutes, Fevvers unsurprisingly distances herself from the concepts of marriage and motherhood. Nevertheless, she ends up falling in love, seducing and marrying Jack Walser at the end of her long journey. Even though Lizzie warns her: “I raised you up to fly to the heavens, not to brood over a clutch of eggs!” (335), Fevvers chooses to embrace the conventional happy ending of the fairy tale. When she “felt herself diminishing” (323), she needs Walser to see herself through him: “She longed for him to tell her she was true. She longed to see herself reflected in all her remembered splendour in his grey eyes” (324). Fevvers needs Walser to feel complete, and to be reminded of who she is.

29In this sense, Walser becomes a Grimm-like figure when, towards the end of the novel, Fevvers asks Lizzie to think of Walser as a “scribe,” an “amanuensis” (Carter 338), “as one who carries the evidence” (339) of those “wonder tales we’ve yet to tell him, the histories of those women who would otherwise go down nameless and forgotten, erased from history as if they had never been, so that he, too, will . . . help to give the world a little turn into the new era that begins tomorrow” (338). Walser thus represents a modern-day version of the two brothers as a collector of female wisdom in the new century, just like the German brothers who have served their audience and given delight to so many generations.

30First encountered in the edition of her childhood, “Fitcher’s Bird” was the egg that enabled Carter to hatch her own tale, complete with wicked antagonists (male and female), (self-)transformation, bird-like protagonists able to take flight from serious trouble features a female figure who rescues both herself and her sisters through her artfulness and ingenuity as she disguises herself into a bird and fashions a double to trick the sorcerer. Like other versions of the Bluebeard story familiar to Carter, she is also a master storyteller who outwits a powerful opponent. Carter’s take is not so much a feminist re-visioning as an homage to “Fitcher’s Bird” as a tale that is already celebrating female agency, survival and solidarity. Carter’s heroine starts out as a dazzling trapeze artist and by the end of the novel, she chooses a more conventional route to roost with her Grimm-like lover. This ending can be read as an homage to the fruitful collaboration of the Grimm Brothers with their neighbours and female informants, so that Dortchen and Wilhelm even got married in 1825 (we recall that Dortchen is the source of “Fitcher’s Bird” among other stories). Carter’s happy ending may also nod at Perrault’s own tale, where the surviving bride inherits Bluebeard’s wealth, chooses a husband for herself, and helps her sister marry for love. Returning to the texts in context, as Carter herself did, thus turned out to be a never-ending source of wonder against received ideas and critical commonplaces. The fairy-tale legacy is thus “never-ending” (Zipes, Grimm Legacies 126), and so is the hard wisdom, beauty and hope it carries.