By discussing closely the opening 20 pages of 'The Bloody Chamber', how effective is Carters use of the fairy tale in your opinion?

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By discussing closely the opening 20 pages of ‘The Bloody Chamber’, how effective is Carters use of the fairy tale in your opinion?

        In each of her short stories Angela Carter subverts the idea of the Fairy Tale, writing in the tradition of the Carnavalesque focusing on the excesses of life and rejoicing in the physical through her rich and opulent language.   A fairy tale always involves a series of seven elements around which the story is formed, these elements being: a prohibition, the breaking of this prohibition, the consequence, an alteration of state, quest, and reinstatement of order and then a moral.  In her story ‘The Bloody Chamber’ carter takes the fairy tale of ‘Bluebeard’, which adheres to these elements, and bases her account around this.  However, she inverts the archetypal idiom and circumstances often seen in fairy tales, especially ‘Bluebeard’, using overly prurient descriptions of bodily functions creating a more shocking narrative and a new and more modern outcome.  Through this subversion Carter creates new imagery and themes such as the Carnavalesque, satire, post-modernism and feminism.  In the opening 20 pages of ‘The Bloody Chamber’ we can see these elements become apparent in Carters use of language.

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        The first two words of the story, ‘I remember’, immediately present us with an inversion of the conventional fairy tale.  The reader is not meant to know who in the story is punished, Carter inverts this as these two first words tell the reader that it is retrospective narrative and therefore we know that she (the speaker) is involved in the story and more importantly will survive.

In the original story of Bluebeard (around which Carters story is based) one of the main themes is curiosity.  Traditionally in fairy tales and particularly in Bluebeard curiosity is seen as a female ...

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