BEAUTY AND THE BEAST
‘Midnight; and the clock strikes. It is Christmas Day, the werewolves’ birthday, the door of the solstice stands wide open; let them all sink through.’ So wrote Angela Carter in The Company of Wolves, one of her wondrous stories that remind us of the power of fairy tales and fables, and why these should not be dismissed, even in times that seem also to call for sober realism. I’ve been thinking about Angela Carter a great deal in the last few weeks – sparked by Erica Wagner’s piece on her in this issue (page 112) – and how her subversive, intensely visual imagination remains as potent today as during her (all-too-short) lifetime.
It was Angela Carter who first made me aware of the ways in which the language of fashion – like fairy tales – might suggest the depths beneath beautiful surfaces. And as we enter into a troubling new era of demagogic politicians, I wish she were still alive today, to continue creating her allegories of power and desire; to return again to her retellings of Beauty and the Beast. (Carter died in 1992, at the age of 51; one can only imagine her seditious response to the election of Donald Trump.) Yet her influence is apparent on our latest issue of Bazaar, with its celebration of the magical and fantastical; of owls and foxes and daemons; of unearthly Northern Lights in the darkest nights of the year.
Welcome, then, to the otherworldly; to a landscape of freedom and transformation, where anything is possible, and a fox may sleep peacefully beside a girl in a fairy-tale gown. In this land, there may be werewolves, but so, too, is the hope that we will vanquish them, or at least see them vanish into the shadows, when dawn rises again…