Angela Carter essay

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Critics have often disagreed about whether The Bloody Chmaber and Other Stories is a rewriting of the Gothic with fairy-tale elements or a rewriting of the Fairy Tale with Gothic elements. In contrast to the French tradition, Carter’s attitude towards defining the fairy-tale is inclusive, recalling the Grimm’s practice. Her position is stated explicitly in the introduction to her first edited volume of tales, the Old Wives’ Fairy Tale Book. There she defuses terminologyby labelling ‘fairy tale’ as a ‘figure of speech’ , and thus allowing her to the bri

Carter is widely known for her feminist rewriting of fairy tales; the Bloody Chamber can be viewed as a midway between the disquietingly savage analyses of Gothicism and patriarchy and the revolutionary novels of the 1980’s and 1990’s. The violence in the events of earlier Gothic novel, for instance (the rapes, the physical and mental abuse of women) are used to mock and explode the constrictive cultural stereotypes, and in celebrating the sheer ability of the female protagonist to survive, unscathed by the sexist ideologies. The tales in the Bloody Chamber contain a great deal of what is means to be Gothic; the hidden themes of excess, social transgression , taboo, and forbidden sexualities,  but the narrative itself provides a rewriting of the fairy tales that actively engages the reader in a feminist deconstruction.

Gothic texts written during the late 18th and Early 19th centuries share a number of typical features: they have mysterious, subliminal landscapes, they are set in a past ‘medieval’ time when superstition reigned, they feature some fearsome predator, often in the form of a monster, that is threatening an innocent, virginal young women and the atmosphere evokes images of terror and horror. They often abound with the colours of extreme – black for villainy, white for innocence and lashings of red for blood. Morals seem pretty straight forward: one character is the evil pursuer, the other the virginal prey.

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Clearly at least three of the stories in Carter’s collection easily fit these descriptions. The ‘Bloody Chamber’, the ‘Lady of the House of Love’ and the ‘Company of Wolves  can be read as ‘external horror stories’; texts with ‘bloody corpses and bones strewn around’. The entrance to the bloodstained room in the ‘Bloody Chamber’ is pure ancient horror with its flickering tapers and worm holed wooden door ‘barred with black iron’, as are the instruments of torture. The ‘Lady of the House of Love’s’ gloomy bedroom too evokes foreboding with its ‘ancient catafalque’ and ‘trapped porcelain vases’. The horror inherent ...

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