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 fault, Carter uses this tradition very effectively in her story. We first see the idea about the girls curiosity come into play when she is looking at her husbands books. She says she ‘knew by some tingling of the fingertips’ what she would find inside the books. The word ‘tingling’ tells us that she knows somehow that to look in these books is forbidden but her curiosity gets the better of her and she looks anyway. Not only does is this a reuse of the traditional fairy tale idea but it also foreshadows what happens later in the story. In Bluebeard the woman is punished or is meant to be punished because she gives into her curiosity and breaks the Prohibition. Carter subtly lets us know that her story will be taking this traditional route through the title of the image that the girl sees in her husbands book: ‘Reproof of Curiosity’. According to the traditional fairy tale this is exactly what is meant to happen later in the story, the girl is meant to be reprimanded for giving into her curiosity. However Carter uses the fairy tale to give the story another edge by inverting the ending so that the girl does not get punished for her crime but in fact gets away. Carter is constantly doing this- switching from the traditional course of the fairy tale and inversions of the traditional. The idea of the fairy tale is also used in the inclusion of the essential seven elements. The introduction of the prohibition is used to full effect when her husband tells her that she must not go into the room, and she, realising the temptation involved describes how he ‘dangled the key tantalizingly above her head’. Carter uses this key element to the fairy tale by letting us know that the way in which the husband introduces the prohibition is deliberately ‘tantalizing’. He does not just give her the keys telling her not to go into a certain room, he goes through each key one by one, slowly in order to build up the suspense and therefore her curiosity. He then goes on to seemingly inadvertently but actually very deliberately tell her where the forbidden room actually is, showing the reader that he actually wants her to break the prohibition so that he can punish her. He makes it almost impossible for her not to give into her curiosity. We have seen Carter use the key elements of the fairy tale slightly earlier in the story. The titles of the books that the girl finds in the library are said to be ‘The Initiation, The Key of Mysteries and The Secret of Pandora’s Box’. These are the elements of the fairy tale hidden inside his fantasies. She has already been through the initiation, and is just about to be given the key of mysteries and late on that key will lead her to the secrets of Pandora’s Box or in other words- the Bloody Chamber.
Throughout the story Carter creates inversions of the typical fairy tale through her use of the Carnavalesque genre. The Carnavalesque is all about excess, sexuality and luxury which Carter expresses through her opulent language. This in itself is an inversion of the traditional fairy tale because it is not traditionally meant to be written with this type of language. Even at the very beginning of the story we see this come into play when the girl is introduced as lying in a ‘tender delicious ecstasy of excitement’. This type of language is seen throughout the story with the girls description of her nightdress saying, ‘it teasingly caressed me, egregious, insinuating, nudging between my thighs’. This kind of excessively sexual and voluptuous language is a complete inversion of the conventional kind seen in a fairy tale. This inversion of the typical language is further seen in the inclusion of the Freudian ideas. Again this is introduced almost immediately into the story when the girl is said to be travelling on a train- a phallic Freudian metaphor. This is extended in the inclusion of the ‘antique service revolver’ of her fathers which in another twist to the classic fairy tale is used to kill her husband not by a knight in shinning armour but by her mother.
Carter, in my opinion, uses the Fairy Tale very effectively by creating an effective balance between using traditional elements and inversions of these elements. She does this not only through the events that occur in the story but also through the language which she uses to depict these events.