Summary
Summary The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories, revision poster
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This poster discusses key themes and context used for the evaluation and analysis of The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories by Angela Carter.
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texts in contextBeauty and
the Beast by
Walter Crane
(1845–1915)
Introduction
The Bloody Chamber is a collection of ten short stories,
first published in 1979. It opens with the title story, the
longest and most complex, which introduces many of
the key themes and concerns of the rest: love, marriage,
gender roles, sexuality and violence. The title story is set
in Brittany in northern France, introducing a European
flavour that becomes central to the stories, some of which
are set in colder northern European countries, while others
take place in warmer southern climates. Each story is
related to a fairy tale or folk tale, and familiar names and
character types populate the stories — Beauty, the Beast,
Puss in Boots, the virgin bride — alongside less familiar
characters.
Cultural contexts
Fairy tales, Freud and political correctness
The stories in The Bloody Chamber are new versions, or retellings,
The Bloody C hamber
of folk tales and fairy tales. Carter maintained that fairy tales ‘make
sense of events and certain occurrences in a particular imaginative
way’ (Gamble 2001, p. 112). Two years before the publication of
The Bloody Chamber, she had made a new translation of fairy tales
by Angela Carter Literary c
collected and written down by Charles Perrault in late seventeenth-
century France, including ‘Sleeping Beauty’, ‘Little Red Riding Hood’
The Gothic, p
and ‘Puss in Boots’. She was particularly interested in the way in Several Gothic el
which such stories had ‘gone into the bourgeois nursery and therefore young bride of th
lost their origins…’, pointing out that ‘many folk tales were… passed husband’s torture
down from generation to generation by people who were mostly Marquis’ previou
illiterate’. We could therefore read The Bloody Chamber as Carter’s fingers…’. The na
way of returning these well-known stories to their less refined, more woods enclose…
brutal origins, the violence and horror of some of the tales reflecting case these Gothic
the difficult lives of our ancestors: ‘the ordinary men and women who Gothic female pro
created our world’ (Carter 1990). House of Love’, th
Psychoanalysts have also recognised the importance of fairy tales ‘The Company of
for understanding ourselves in their ‘vernacular of motifs that could was nobody’s me
disclose latent and hitherto unacknowledged preoccupations and The challenge p
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