angela carter the bloody chamber short story

In The Company of Wolves, Red Riding Hood uses sexual pleasure – hers and his – to tame the wolf.Īlongside these inversions are stories in which the hidden content of fairytales is made explicit. In the 1970s, myth and folklore was coming under fresh scrutiny in numerous ways – Bruno Bettelheim's Freudian reading in The Uses of Enchantment, Ann Sexton's poetry cycle Transformations, the incisive critiques of Jack Zipes – but nowhere is the strange, warped power of the originals harnessed so strikingly as in Carter's work.īy retelling these tales, wrote Lorna Sage, Carter was 'deliberately drawing them out of shape … The monsters and the princesses lose their places in the old script, and cross forbidden boundary lines.' In The Tiger's Bride, the beauty sheds her skin to reveal 'beautiful fur'. The book is a supremely well-achieved critique and reformulation of stories that have been shaped by our society, and which shape it in turn. In 1979, two years after translating a selection of Perrault's fairytales, Carter published The Bloody Chamber, a series of 'revisionings' of some of the best-known fairytales, including Bluebeard, Red Riding Hood and Beauty and the Beast.

The Executioner's Beautiful Daughter is a savage piece of incest-themed gothic in the Ballardian Penetrating to the Heart of the Forest, a menacing magic begins to unfold after a girl is pricked (in fact, bitten) by a flower in Reflections, a rambler arrives at 'a short, crumbling flight of steps that led to a weathered front door, ajar like the door of a witch's house'. In her first collection, Fireworks (1974), the seam thickens discernibly.

A fragment of fairytale glimmers in Carter's earliest work, The Man Who Loved a Double Bass (1962), where an inanimate object is treated as though alive, and helmets tucked beneath motorbikes gleam 'whitely, like mushrooms or new laid eggs'.

Angela carter the bloody chamber short story