Some have called Carter's works re-envisioning, but this suggests that she somehow sees something new or other in our fairy tale "classics," that she is updating them for modern mores. I don't think so. Carter's magic is more a re-discovering or an uncovering, an exposing of what we have always known but perhaps were anxious about saying quite so baldly. And she does more, still.

Voluptuous, sensual, misogynistic, violent, Carter's tale nevertheless offer a powerfully feminine opening of traditional sublimation. Now, the historical and developmental order of how we understand this may largely depend upon the angle of your glance. Was Little Red Riding Hood once an older adult tale that had over time been reduced to a children's admonition? Then Carter helps us see again what it always has been, no matter how well censored?  Did Beauty and the Beast always have Jungian resonance, aspects of our psychological unconscious lying beneath, from which Carter tears the cloaking skin? And is the seductive power of these enduring tales only in their hinted allure, their enticing suggestibility, and not their lewd exposure?  

However you reason it, the "suggestions" beneath are primally sensuous, physical, and self-absorbed. And Carter not only draws these meanings up to visibility, she also re-cloaks them in new story, themselves lush with ambiguity and suggestive in their own right. Most powerful of all, these indulgences, just as the reader's in immersing, push against our modern mentality, revise our framing, demand we question.

There is so little space between beauty and vulgarity in Carter's work: the labyrinthian style poses questions all its own. For whom are these stories? Always for us.