Abstract
Although Angela Carter ostensibly left behind the fairy tales of The Bloody Chamber for other narrative forms in her later works, she uses fairy-tale fragments in her two stories about Lizzie Borden—the woman who may or may not have killed her father and stepmother in Fall River, Massachusetts in 1892—to intricately explore a daughter’s drive to parricide and to meditate on shifting narrative forms. For their intertextual force, the two published versions of “The Fall River Axe Murders” draw particularly on Carter’s rewrites of “Little Red Riding Hood,” while “Lizzie’s Tiger” (in American Ghosts & Old World Wonders) draws on “Hansel and Gretel” and Carter’s “The Tiger’s Bride,” a version of “Beauty and the Beast.” Space theory and issues of gender and narrative production underlie this analysis.
Recommended Citation
Langlois, Janet L.. "Andrew Borden’s Little Girl: Fairy-Tale Fragments in Angela Carter’s “The Fall River Axe Murders” and “Lizzie’s Tiger”." Marvels & Tales 12.1 (1998). Web. <https://digitalcommons.wayne.edu/marvels/vol12/iss1/12>.
