The Bloody Chamber - Angela Carter

Angela Carter was one of the boldest writers of the 20th century. Championed by feminists, Carter is not the usual PC promoting puritan that became a cliché in her time. Instead she strengthened female role models through her own imaginative ideas and often sourced through real evidence. She did this without diminishing other male characters in fiction. Her research into gothic fiction and, in particular, folk stories reveals this best. Her short collection of stories The Bloody Chamber served as the source for the screenplay she wrote, A Company of Wolves, one of the most startlingly original films of the 1980s. In Carter's works, characters familiar like Red Riding ...  Read the complete review

Vintage have a reputation for publishing cutting edge fiction, and Angela Carter's 1979 'The Bloody Chamber' was no exception. Continuing the feminist themes found in the earlier 'Magic Toyshop' and 'Passion of New Eve' novels, Carter uses the uncanny atmosphere inherent in most familiar fairy tales to expose deep-lying patriarchal assumptions and exploitations built into the stories. At the same time, the stories have been restored to the graphic nastiness which would have been more common in the oral traditions from which the later cleaned-up children's classics were derived. One thing these stories definitely achieve in rewritting the tales in this way is ...  Read the complete review

Angela Carter’s Bloody Chamber – Book Review The Bloody Chamber published first in the UK in 1979, is a compilation of short stories written by Angela Carter. These pieces of short fiction are mainly Carter’s own versions of fairytales – transformed from the patriarchal tales they once were. Her aim was to uncover the unconscious patriarchal themes repeatedly found in folklores and fairytales, and to subvert these in order to shed light on the post-feminist perspective. She draws the reader into the mind of the protagonist, who is usually female, with the personal, private feel of the first person narrative. Themes such as the suppression of ...  Read the complete review