Before authors like Perrault or the Grimm brothers, fairy tales were transmitted orally and every time they were told, new details were added, changing the narration, like little pieces conforming an imaginary mosaic.
The creation of symbolic stories is a mechanism of the human psyche that allows us to approach the elusive reality we are forced to live in, and a narrative framework to transgress the roles of society. Angela Carter, in her evocative The bloody chamber, reformulates fantastic tales apparently full of innocence.
Her tales are inspired by legends and myths with an underlying erotic pulse, along the borders of horror. Influences from authors such as William Shakespeare, John Keats, William Blake, Bram Stoker or Lewis Carroll can be intuited, in a delicate gothic aesthethics with the awe-inspiring illustrations of Alejandra Acosta.
Red nipples and red roses. Red lips, and also red blood drops.
The women of these fairy tales surrender and fight back, experience violence and perversion, uncover the mask of excess in all their feminity and dangerous beauty. Sometimes, destruction is the only way.
The whole narrative focuses on the search of pleasure and death, where the limits of existence are intermingled. Part of human nature, all these unspeakable desires and uncontainable passions cast long shadows and terrifiy us.
Photography by When Audrey Met Darcy