Discuss Angela Carter’s Treatment of Innocence and Sexuality In ‘the Bloody Chamber and Other Stories’.

These are themes Carter is keen to reason and portray to her reading audience. Her attitudes towards sexuality are evident in these collected short stories of heavy and rich description. In them she redefines the idea of fairy tales as stories solely for children. In the Bloody Chamber she proves these fantasy stories can also be for adults. These short yet influential collection of her works, told in her own recognisable, sumptuous and often convoluted prose, have a rich and compelling force of writing which effectively suspends our disbelief of the subject matter.

It could even be said that her short stories are, on the whole, traditional fairy tales retold from the perspective of female characters to emphasize macabre and violent aspects of passionate relationships. Her Little Red Riding Hood enjoys sleeping with the wolf; the mother of the bride shoots her new son-in-law, Bluebeard, between the eyes. Carter not only switches her narrative into the wholly explicit but turns the passive predicament of the heroine into one in which the convention of female role-playing seems to have no part, only brisk and derisive common sense, the best feminine tactic in a tight corner.

Innocence is an important theme in virtually all the stories of 'Bloody Chamber'.

In her short stories Angela Carter uses 'Magic Realism' in order to achieve surprise and shock among the readers. She carefully builds elements of fantasy into realistic stories. By doing so, she creates a strange and mythic situation. The activities of her heroines are intensified by this touch of magic. Carter emphasises her messages and points out the emotions of her characters by using this fusion of the realistic and the fantastic. The sudden appearance of these fantastic and supernatural inserts also helps her to create amusing stories.

traditional fairy tales retold from the perspective of female characters to emphasize macabre and violent aspects of passionate relationships

stories have starting-points in a fairy tale or legend but from this point it expands into a new, more elaborate and fanciful sexual allegory. "Nothing," as Angela Carter is known to have remarked "exercises such power over the imagination as the nature of sexual relationships."