Innocence, Intelligence, and Acceptance in Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories
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Authors
Daenzer, Darcy
Issue Date
2024-04-04
Type
Language
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Abstract
The English novelist, short story writer, essayist, and journalist Angela Carter (1940- 1992), known for such works as Nights at the Circus and Wise Children, was a radical for her time. As a Second-Wave feminist, Carter’s work focused on exposing the gendered concepts we have come to blindly accept. One of her
works, The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories, provides retellings of well-known fairytales such as Snow White, Little Red Riding Hood, Beauty and the Beast, and Bluebeard. However, unlike traditional retellings as seen by the Brothers Grimm or Charles Perrault, Carter’s stories focus on unpacking the “latent content” of the fairytale, that which is “violently sexual.” Fairytales, as a subgenre, have a well-known history of portraying men as the knights in shining armor and women as the damsel in the distress, men as the predator and women as the prey, men as a threat to purity and women as sexually pure, men as the beast in need of changing and women as the beings capable of changing and domesticating them, men as intelligent and willing to teach what women do not know and women as naïve and
ignorant. In this project, my senior thesis, I will examine three stories “The Bloody Chamber,” “The Tiger’s Bride,” and “The Company of Wolves” and analyze how they
subvert these gendered binaries that define women’s role in the fairy tale as powerless, naïve, and lacking in agency.