Rorschachs

By Paul Gray

THE BLOODY CHAMBER by Angela Carter Harper & Row; 164 pages; $8.95

The most enduring stories carry the heaviest freight. Commentators as disparate as O.K. Chesterton, W.H. Auden and Bruno Bettelheim have recognized Mother Goose rhymes and fairy and folk tales for what they are: Rorschach tests for the fears of childhood. Cruel stepmothers, tyrannical taskmasters, the sudden wolf on the path, all stand vividly for the capricious powers that prey on the powerless, for the nightmare of helplessness that growing up fails to outgrow.

Such fundamental tales can be made to mean almost anything; every retelling is inevitably an interpretation. This game is one of diminished returns, but in The Bloody Chamber, Author Angela Carter, 39, plays it winningly. Her notion that Little Red Ridinghood, Beauty and the Beast and Puss in Boots are all feminist parables could start a lively argument, but the stories she writes to prove her point are usually too much fun to fight over.

The heroines of these ten tales are virgins who are accosted or somehow threatened by males. The young bride in The Bloody Chamber discovers that her husband the Marquis not only has Sadean tastes but a real torture chamber in his castle. The heroine of The Tiger's Bride is gambled away by her dissolute father into the possession of an oddly feline gentleman, who demands that she take off her clothes. In The Company of Wolves, a young woman reaches Granny's house and finds a wolf whose intentions toward her are not honorable.

In spite of such premises, none of the stories suggests that men are beasts or vice versa. They are, rather, pussycats in the hands of pure young things they set out to victimize. The Marquis is destroyed by emale outrage, the owner of the girl is forced to strip to his fur. When the wolf gives the standard explanation for the size-of his teeth ("All the better to eat you with"), he gets his comeuppance: "The girl burst out laughing; she knew she was nobody's meat. She laughed at him full in the face, she ripped off his shirt for lim and flung it into the fire, in the fiery wake of her own discarded clothing." If James Thurber had translated the Brothers Grimm he could not have created a more ineffectual set of villains.

Carter dresses these unequal battles of the sexes with handsome sets: Breton castles, spacious rooms cloyingly stuffed with flowers, dark woods filled with the eerie sound of wolves. She writes: "That long-drawn, wavering howl has, for all its fearful resonance, some inherent sadness in it, as if the beasts would love to be less beastly if only they knew how."

When the language turns gothic, it does so with tongue in cheek: "And there lay the grand, hereditary matrimonial bed, itself the size, almost, of my little room at home, with the gargoyles carved on its surfaces of ebony, vermilion lacquer, gold leaf; and its white gauze curtains, billowing in the sea breeze."

The author of seven novels and a feminist study of pornography, Carter has a growing following in her native England. The Bloody Chamber may draw more U.S. readers into the fold; tales that both titillate and amuse are rare enough to cause a stir anywhere. In the end, though, the stories are a bit too calculated and playful to do justice to the dangerous materials they raise. They tick perfectly well, but they do not explode. --Paul Gray

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