SOURCE: Moss, Betty. “Desire and the Female Grotesque in Angela Carter's ‘Peter and the Wolf’.” Marvels and Tales: Journal of Fairy Tale Studies 12, no. 1 (1998): 175-91.

In the following essay, Moss analyzes female desire in Carter's wolf tales.

Angela Carter's artistic evolution moves toward the realization of an alternative vision of creative desire as positive and productive rather than driven by Lack—as in the dominant traditions of Western thought since Plato; Carter develops a fictional idiom adequate to the expression of such desire. This distinctly Carterian idiom participates in the aesthetic of the grotesque and inflects the grotesque in a specifically feminine and feminist way, maximizing its potential as an instrument of social and personal transformation. Integrating the feminist discourse of Hélène Cixous, French writer and critic, with the theory of the grotesque advanced by Mikhail Bakhtin, renowned Russian literary and cultural critic, opens a useful...