The Writing Experiment by Hazel Smith

Writing as recycling 79

Throughout, the rewriting is imbued with a psychological depth missing
from the original. For example, when Bluebeard returns, the girl, instead of
experiencing only fear, as she does in the fairytale, is filled with a mixture
of fear and pity. Carter increases the story’s capacity for psychoanalytic inter-
pretation: the girl’s ambivalent relationship with Bluebeard can be read as an
Oedipal one, the locked room might be the unconscious or the womb. A
plethora of further possible meanings are accentuated by the transmutation
of the magical aspect of the fairytale into allegory and symbol. The husband
smells of arum lilies which are symbols of death, and the girl constructs her
own identity through the multiple mirrors in her husband’s bedroom.
‘The Bloody Chamber’, then, alerts us to perspectives which are
repressed in the fairytale, subverts many of its values and expands its
psychoanalytic and political horizons. Carter sticks to the story form of
the fairytale, and this helps to highlight other changes in the narrative.
However, a rewriting can be in a completely different genre: for example a
classic novel might be transformed into a long poem.

How can I rewrite?

For Exercise 3 the actual choice of text is important. Your rewriting is likely
to work more effectively if you choose a well-known narrative: if you pick one
that is not known to your audience they will not be able to appreciate what
has been changed in the rewrite, unless you can somehow juxtapose the two.
Once you have chosen your source, there are also a number of issues
which you will want to consider:

• Which elements are missing, suppressed or minimised in the original
  text?


• How can the story be politicised? Which moral, ethical or cultural
  assumptions can be challenged?


• Who is speaking/narrating and from what perspective? Can the
  hero/villain roles be reversed or problematised?


• Can the location and era be changed or modified?


• How much of the original content should be retained? How divergent
  is the rewriting going to be?


• What will be the style, form or genre of the rewritten text (e.g. a poem
  or a parody)?


• What will be the language style? If, for example, the original language
  is nineteenth century, part of modernising the piece could be to change
  it to a 21st-century idiom.


• Can you transmute features of the original text into metaphor and
  symbol in the rewritten one?