and analysis to unlock the hidden springs of traditional fairytales, (think Bruno Bettelheim’s “The Uses of Enchantment”, 1976, Or Jack Zipes’ “Don’t bet on the Prince”, 1987) but when a collection of her short stories appeared in 1979 under the provocatively laden title “The Bloody Chamber”, it hit a nerve that has been twanging ever since.

Carter didn’t (though plenty of other people have succumbed to the temptation) simply invent modern versions of traditional stories, reinforcing comforting familiarity with some overt new twist. Instead she took the raw materials of the tales and re-made them, so they emerged with their sense of age-old, tribal resonance intact but were now her stories, laced with all the narrative echoes you’d expect from an author whose first non-fiction book was “The Sadeian Woman and the Ideology of Pornography”. That’s the compulsive thing about Carter’s writing – behind it there’s an intellect keen as a whip, but the words themselves swirl like some rich, lavish dessert, teasing and enticing you into a world as engrossing as any folk tale. She creates a visual universe that is opulent, decadent and deeply worrying. The labels don’t ever quite contain it, but her writing has been tagged as Magic Realism, Neo-Gothic and Surreal. There’s a clear connection to all these modes, but Carter’s own response to Surrealism (which she ultimately rejected as it cast her as a Muse rather than a maker) comes as close as anything to describing what you get from “The Bloody Chamber”: “Surrealist beauty is convulsive. That is, you feel it, you don't see it - it exists as an excitation of the nerves. The experience of the beautiful is, like the experience of desire, an abandonment to vertigo, yet the beautiful does not exist as such. What do exist are images or objects that are enigmatic, marvellously erotic – or juxtapositions of objects, or people, or ideas, that arbitrarily extend our notion of the connections it is possible to make. In a way, the beautiful is put at the service of liberty.”

The ten stories included in the anthology weave new variants around Puss in Boots, Sleeping Beauty, Red Riding Hood, Beauty and the Beast, The Erl King, Snow White and, in the title tale, Bluebeard’s Castle. Unlike other fairy stories this one was never overtly supernatural (just one ominously stubborn blood stain on the key to a forbidden chamber) and in all its forms reads more like a folk tale about – what? Feminine curiosity, our curse since Eve, Pandora, Psyche, Lot’s wife and the rest of the chorus line - give us a simple instruction about what not to do and we instantly can’t resist doing it. Perverse creatures, eh? But even in its oldest form, the story also has something to say about power and the culpability of people who set meaningless conditions. Yup – Bluebeard wants his young wife to get it wrong so he can indulge his long-term passion for the serial killing of spouses. It’s all a set-up, and while it may warn young female readers not to stick their noses into hubby’s private affairs, it’s also a story about who oversteps which mark when, whether the risks you take can be avoided and incidentally about maintaining a good support system for moments of dire peril. By re-titling the tale, Carter signalled deeper meanings – the bloody chamber is the sexuality of the bride herself, traversing a rite of passage which interrogates her own desires and proffers more than one kind of temptation.

Not exactly pantomime stuff, then – and even less so if you think there might have been a real-life prototype (favourite candidate is aristocratic 15th century murderer Gilles de Rais, though his favoured victims were boys and his only wife survived unscathed.) The story was first collected by Perrault in 1697, with no clue as to its setting. Later illustrators tend towards an exotic, Arabian Nights style (ironic, since in the closest story from “The Arabian Nights’ Entertainments”, it’s a chap who can’t resist the forbidden room.) Carter’s idiosyncratic take on the tale includes cars and telephones, evoking the early 20th century but never quite pinning it down. So as you’ll guess, it takes a brave soul to consider a live performance, but that’s what Northern Stage is all about. In 2001 they produced a stupefying sensual dramatization of another tale from this anthology, “The Tiger’s Bride”. Now the same designer/director Neil Murray is collaborating with playwright Bryony Lavery and choreographer Liv Lorent of balletLORENT to recreate “The Bloody Chamber” for the stage. His key image of a Madonna lily elegantly seeping a bloody tear hits the Carter note of perfumed Gothic perversity, a world of laden symbols that still remains visceral and raw, a seduction of characters and audience alike. Don’t expect good clean nursery fun, but remember that it’s the dark places which draw you in and change you forever.
Gail-Nina Anderson

“The Bloody Chamber”, Northern Stage, Newcastle, September 26-October 11. £5.50-£10.50. www.northernstage.co.uk

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