Abstract
This article illustrates Angela Carter’s literary practice through her utilization of “ Sleeping Beauty ” in the radio play Vampirella and its prose variation The Lady of the House of Love. It argues that Carter vampirised European culture as she transfused old stories into new bodies to give them new life and bite. Her experiments with forms, genres and mediums in her vampire fiction capture the inherent hybridity of the fairy tale as it sheds new light on her main source, Charles Perrault’s La Belle au bois dormant, bringing to the fore the horror and terror as well as the textual ambiguities of the French conte that were gradually obscured in favor of the romance element. Carter’s vampire stories thus trace the “ dark ” underside of the reception of the tale in Gothic fiction and in the subculture of comic books and Hammer films so popular in the 1970s, where the Sleeping Beauty figure is revived as a femme fatale or vamp who takes her fate in her own hands.
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