Angela Carter  The Bloody Chamber. 1940-1992 Angela Carter  Demythologising  Amongst the postmodern writers, she is was the more daring, more inventive,

Angela Carter  The Bloody Chamber

1940-1992

Angela Carter  Demythologising  Amongst the postmodern writers, she is was the more daring, more inventive, and more incisively critical of social injustices in our contemporary society.  From her first novels in the mid to late 1960s, which boldly confronted the pervasiveness of androcentrism traditional ideas about gender roles, and the roots of female masochism, Carter distinguished herself as a stylistic and thematic innovator.

Angela Carter  (Greek: ανδρο, andro-, "man, male", χεντρον, kentron, "center") is the practice, conscious or otherwise, of placing male human beings or the masculine point of view at the center of one's view of the world and its culture and history)  In retrospect, it is clear that as she matured she was at the cutting edge of a new movement of writing which, while retaining the discontentedness of the "angry young woman" crowd, led the British novel out of its regressive and male-dominated social realist trend.

Angela Carter  When one compares the ideas and stylistic methods of Carter to successors such as Rushdie, Barnes, Winterson, and many others, it is evident that she was tremendously influential in shaping contemporary British literature and women writing in general.  Carter's death in 1992 was followed by numerous encomiums of her life and work.  Though most praised her for her visionary contributions to world literature, not all the reviews were entirely favorable.

Angela Carter  John Bayley's appraisal of her work for the New York Review of Books bears particular attention.  Bayley implied that Carter's works would not endure the test of time because they were too embroiled in articulating the politically correct fashions of the present.  Because of his underlying conservative belief that postmodern art is always in service of the most simplistically conceived notions of political correctness, Bayley undervalues the work of an important contemporary writer.

Angela Carter  Postmodern writing does rethink conventional ideological positions, but fictions such as Carter's are inquiries into and critiques of social values rather than literal prescriptions for how things should be.  Carter's work is self-consciously connected to the fleeting liberatory spirit of the sixties, an era in which, to reiterate Carter's assessment, "all that was holy was in the process of being profaned" ("Notes" 70).  Carter herself articulates this "profanity" through a variety of registers. She skips gaily and deviously among science fiction, dystopian fiction, pornography, the gothic, magic realism, fairy tale, burlesque, tragedy, and myth.

Angela Carter  Carter was not only an important precursor for Winterson, but was arguably the most influential figure in British women's writing since World War II.

Angela Carter  Many of the "postmodern" strategies of contemporary women's writing (e.g. rewriting androcentric, socially conservative genres and male- authored texts from a feminist viewpoint; self- consciously analyzing how gender structures social relations; using fantasy to imagine worlds where androcentrism and traditional gender roles have come undone) were brought to a new prominence by Carter during the height of the feminist movement, marking a break with the conservative social realist traditions of the immediately postwar period.  Carter’s ongoing project was to investigate and debunk “the social fictions that regulate our lives” (“notes” 70).

Angela Carter  She viewed religion, psychoanalysis, capitalism, patriarchy, and even certain kinds of feminism as responsible for perpetuating damaging myths:  "I'm in the demythologising business. [... ] I'm interested in myths [...1 because they are extraordinary lies designed to make people unfree" ("Notes" 71).  The myths that occupy Carter's attention throughout her fiction and essays are the ones related to gender, especially femininity.

Angela Carter  She mocks, debunks, and revises myths that have contributed to androcentric sexual gender roles.  Carter uses and revises the conventions at fairy tale, pornography, speculative-fiction, and the gothic to critique myths which perpetuate out-moded values about gender.

Angela Carter  The burgeoning women's liberation movement in the 1960s and 70s sought to correct the myths associated with femininity which have accrued through depictions of women in various influential discourses: myths, for example, that linked virtue to virginity (as in the Christian archetype of the Virgin Mary), charm and attractiveness to suffering (as in the Marilyn Monroe– style Hollywood icon), femaleness to "lack" (as in psychoanalysis' Oedipus Complex), and sexual agency to whorishness (as in pornography).

Angela Carter  But whereas the women's movement was able to unite behind the project of demythologizing the majority of such representations, pornography has proved an ongoing source of division among feminists.  Since the late seventies, the most publicly visible forms of feminist action in both the U.S. and Britain have centered on pornography.  More than just a convenient focus for all the injustices that women suffer, pornography is a political rallying point that can be identified as vivid evidence of those injustices.

Angela Carter  Andrea Dworkin and Catherine MacKinnon—the most prominent feminist anti-pornography campaigners— argue that pornography is the primary cause and manifestation of male dominance, misogyny, and women's victimization and objectification.

Angela Carter  In her essay "Feminist Fundamentalism: The Shifting Politics of Sex and Censorship," Elizabeth Wilson goes a step further, suggesting that the antiporn movement is a new manifestation of fundamentalism: "To have made pornography both the main cause of women's oppression and its main form of expression is to have wiped out almost the whole of the feminist agenda, and to have created a new moral purity movement for our new (authoritarian) times" (Segal and McIntosh 15–28: 28).

Angela Carter  At roughly the same historical moment as the antiporn campaign was beginning to dominate the feminist agenda, Angela Carter published The Sadeian Woman (1978).  In it, Carter proposed the radical idea of the "moral pornographer": an artist who "might use pornography as a critique of current relations between the sexes" (19).

Angela Carter  Today, despite wide-ranging critiques of the anti- pornography dominance of feminist agendas, the false equation of feminism, antiporn agendas, and "male- bashing" is so common that Carter's early proposal of pornography's potential to be critical of gender relations seems even more radical than when it was first published.

Angela Carter  Carter derived her idea of the "moral pornographer" from her reading of Sade.  She values his unrestricted disclosure of sexual power dynamics and reads him as a satirist who "describes sexual relations in the context of an unfree society as the expression of pure tyranny, usually by men upon women" (SW 24).

Angela Carter  In contrast to Sade's pornography, Carter critiques quotidian pornography as a genre which depicts and perpetuates "mythic" versions of femininity (and masculinity):  Since all pornography derives directly from myth, it follows that its heroes and heroines [...] are mythic abstractions. [...] Any glimpse of a real man or a real woman is absent from these representations of the archetypal male and female. [...] [P]ornography reinforces the archetype of [women's] negativity and [...] it does so simply because most pornography remains in the service of the status quo [6, 16-17].

Angela Carter  For Carter, Sade certainly portrays mythic notions of femininity, but he does so in large part to satirize the ideological assumptions underlying them.  She argues that Sade's Justine—the archetypical suffering woman—suffers principally because of her "virtuous" insistence on the preservation of her virginity despite her multiple brutal rapes.  Qbviously, Carter's reading is problematic in that it at times seems to suggest that Justine should enjoy the abuse she suffers, but what she reads as important in Sade's representation of Justine is his satire of the male- authored myth which insists that a woman's value is dependent on her virginity.

Angela Carter  Even more importantly for Carter, Sade challenges archetypical models of femaleness by portraying antithetical mythic models, that is, "Sadeian Women," or "women as beings of power" (SW 36) like Juliette and Durand.  Such transgressive women, Carter interprets, wield power by actively "fucking" and thereby overturning the "normal" dynamic of sexual relations:

Angela Carter  Women do not normally fuck in the active sense. They are fucked in the passive tense and hence automatically fucked-up, done over, undone. Whatever else he says or does not say, Sade declares himself unequivocally for the right of women to fuck. [...] [Sade] urges women to fuck as actively as they are able, so that powered by their enormous and hitherto untapped sexual energy they will then be able to fuck their way into history and, in doing so, change it [27].  These are provocative claims, but Carter admires Sade for his uncompromised flouting of so many of the institutions, virtues, ideals, and taboos of a theistic, androcentric world.

Angela Carter  She reads Sade's libertines as desacralizing crusaders who "turn the Blessed Virgin over on her belly and sodomise her" and debunk the notion that "sex is sanctified only in the service of reproduction" (76).  Carter celebrates their desacralization bourgeois sexual ideals of chastity and purity.  Similarly, the libertines the ideal of feminine physical beauty by taking pleasure in its opposite excessive ugliness. "[N]onsense! cry the libertines" (76) and this m considered Carter's rallying cry as well.

Angela Carter  The language, also, of the above passage emphasizes Carter's irreverence towards androcentric social conventions.  "Fuck," she implies, is a masculine word about masculine activity—sexual or otherwise.  It functions as a pervasive social metaphor for action, and in an androcentric world it is inevitably women who are the implied recipients of the word and all of its connotations.

Angela Carter  With her aggressive appropriation of this masculine discourse, Carter upsets the bourgeois ideal of women as demure drawing-room objects and asserts their right to be part of the culture of "fucking"—the society of activity—and shape history in the active sense.  As might be expected, Carter's interpretation of Sade has been a major source of contention for antiporn feminists such as Susanne Kappeler, Susan Brownmiller, Susan Griffin, and Andrea Dworkin, whose writings on pornography are implicitly, and occasionally explicitly, in dialogue with Carter.

Angela Carter  Nevertheless, Carter's relationship with them is complex, full of curiously overlapping sympathies which neither Carter nor her interlocutors would be (or would have been) likely to recognize or admit.  Carter clearly abhors the predominance of the "woman as victim" archetype which Dworkin and Catherine MacKinnon purposefully perpetuate; however, there are a few striking similarities in their ideas.  For example, Andrea Dworkin, whose Pornography: Men Possessing Women is an implicit denunciation of Carter's Sadeian Woman, shares her anti-mythologizing agenda and concerns about the trend among some feminists to want to replace patriarchy with matriarchy (Dworkin, Letters 110-116).

Angela Carter  And, like Carter, Dworkin views sex in terms of a power struggle between the sexes: "Fucking is the means by which the male colonializes [sic] the female. [...] [I]t is regarded as an act of possession" (119).  Carter's fiction and her discussion of pornography in The Sadeian Woman supports this notion.  The points of contention for the antiporn camp, then, are Carter's propositions that pornography, even in its most violent and misogynistic forms, always has something to teach us about sexual power relations and the cultural construction of gender; and that pornography can be used to present alternative images of sexual empowerment for women.

Angela Carter  Despite some similarities between Carter and the antiporn feminists, then, one ought not underestimate their differences.  Catherine MacKinnon, who views pornography as "constructing and performative rather than merely referential or connotative" (Only Words 21), takes it as a given that the use of pornography leads directly to the forceful re-enactment of the scenarios it presents.  Carter too views pornography as "constructing and performative," but sees in that the potential to revise the traditional message of male dominance which pornographic scenarios often convey.

Angela Carter  Carter doesn't want a simplistic inversion of the current power disparity between men and women.  Rather, she wants to protest the naturalization—through genres like pornography—of sexual inequalities. If women can achieve autonomy with their sexuality and their sexual relations, Carter suggests, then equality can be achieved in economic and other spheres of society.  To understand Carter's concept of a moral pornographer, then, one has to be willing to see pornography as having the potential to criticize as well as reinforce sexist ideals.

Angela Carter  However, their focus on pornography as the principal cause and manifestation of women's oppression is misguided (see Strossen, Ellis, Williams, and Segal and McIntosh).  There are many genres, including pornography, that subordinate and demean women through their representations.  But since gender roles are naturalized in artistic, literary, and other representational genres, critical reading and rewritings of genre present the opportunity to challenge those to show their androcentrism.

Angela Carter  A "moral pornographer," then, would use pornographic forms, language, and other conventions to "denaturalize" (3) commonly held values about sex and gender.  Gender Archetypes  Carter's interest in pornography can partly be understood by the fact that, similar to fairy tales, pornography offers archetypes for sexual behavior and sexual "ideals," especially with regards to women.  For Luce Irigaray, there are three central female archetypes which define and limit women's social behavior:

Angela Carter  Mother, virgin, prostitute: these are the social roles imposed on women. The characteristics of (so-called) feminine sexuality derive from them: the valorization of reproduction and nursing; faithfulness; modesty, igno rance of and even lack of interest in sexual pleasure; a passive acceptance of man's "activity"; seductiveness [186-871.  In The Sadeian Woman, Carter forcefully announces that archetypal depictions of femininity are the target of her critique as well: "All the mythic versions of women, from the myth of the redeeming purity of the virgin to that of the healing, reconciling mother, are consolatory nonsenses" (5).

Angela Carter  In Sade's Justine, Carter sees a re-manifestation of the "holy virgin," while Juliette is the "profane whore" (101).  It is this Justine archetype that Carter is most critical of in her analysis of Sade, suggesting that women mustn't give in to the idea of themselves as victims.  While Justine embodies victimhood—the archetype which the antiporn feminists actively encourage— Juliette, in Carter's opinion, does not simply act out the role of the archetypical prostitute; rather, she is a "blasphemous guerilla of demystification" (105).

Angela Carter  Carter characterizes Juliette as empowered but also as another source of tyranny. "I do not think I want Juliette to renew my world," Carter writes, "but, her work of destruction complete, she will [...] have removed a repressive and authoritarian superstructure that has prevented a good deal of the work of renewal" (111).  Revealing the Artifice of Femininity  Carter's fictional society makes explicit the radically unequal distribution of power among men and women.  Luce Irigaray suggests that access (or lack thereof) to language—the means of signification—is a key factor in the social gender power imbalance:

Angela Carter  "Women, animals endowed with speech like men, assure the possibility of the use and circulation of the symbolic without being recipients of it. Their nonaccess to the symbolic is what has established the social order" (189).  Irigaray's comments suggest that men's power is predicated on his ability to exclude his harem from speech.

Angela Carter  Without language, there can be no autonomy of thought or action: they remain enslaved and utterly dependent on him.  In her essay "Notes From the Front Line," Carter suggests that language itself is androcentric and leads women, including herself, to unconsciously "posit a male point of view as a general one" (71).  Language, she writes, "is power, life and the instrument of culture, the instrument of domination and liberation" (77).

Angela Carter  It is for this reason, she asserts, that "it is so enormously important for women to write fiction as women—it is part of the slow process of decolonialising our language and our basic habits of thought" (75).

Angela Carter  Seventies' feminism, like feminism today, was in part divided by the debate over whether gender is the product of "nature" or "nurture."  Carter is careful in the above passage not to completely dismiss a possible connection between the gender and innate, biological factors, but it is clear that she repudiates the once-dominant notion that biology is entirely responsible for how gender is expressed in human society.

Angela Carter  This matter requires further investigation on a number of disciplinary fronts, but one of Carter's main objectives with her "moral pornography" is to promote the idea that a variety of social and cultural factors contribute significantly, and perhaps entirely, to the determination of gender traits: gender is a learned behavior and an artifice.  The goddess, if not dead, as Carter wishes in The Sadeian Woman, is at least in hibernation.  Desacralizing myths of deities, heaven, and eternity is fundamental to Carter's objectives:

Angela Carter  with the imaginary construct of the goddess, dies the notion of eternity, whose place on this earth was her womb. [... ] There is no way out of time. We must learn to live in this world [...] because it is the only world we will ever know. [...1 I think this is why so many people find the idea of the emancipation of women frightening. It represents the final secularisation of mankind [SW 110].  Whereas Rushdie, Barnes, and Winterson are, like Carter, deeply critical of religion in their fiction, only Carter boldly announces her desire to see an atheistic world.  To entirely give up our religious myths, Carter suggests, would mean giving up once and for all the institutions that uphold male social dominance.

Angela Carter  It is for this reason that Carter is relentless in her attack on religious and pseudo-religious figures.  The Uses of Pornography  “Moral Pornography” represents a conceptual change in pornography as a genre.  It is not a fantasy depiction of women performing sex for the titillation of male viewers and readers; instead, it is aimed at demonstrating the real problems of life as a woman in a male-dominated society and culture.

Angela Carter  Speculative-Fiction and the Gothic  Angela Carter took a genre that was traditionally dominated by male writers and characterized by sexist tropes, and made it work for feminist ends.  Carter was one of the pioneers in this feminist adoption of speculative-fiction; her work in this genre, which helped pave the way for these other writers, is primarily dystopian.

Angela Carter  The Bloody Chamber: Postmodern Fairy Tales and Pornography  Because written literary traditions historically have been shaped and institutionalized by men, women writers have had to respond to literary forms that carry an androcentric bias—forms that have traditionally, often subtly, helped subordinate women to men.  Portraying new social values about gender, then, requires new representational conventions.

Angela Carter  A popular strategy of postmodern writers has been to rewrite stories from scripture, mythology, folk literature, and classic literature to parody, invert, or otherwise alter their traditional conventions and so draw attention to their ideological messages.

Angela Carter  Angela Carter's rewriting of classic fairy tales in The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories is an example of revising generic form for feminist purposes.  Because fairy tales have played an important role in teaching androcentric values to children, they have been frequently revised by women writers.  With The Magic Toyshop and The Bloody Chamber, Carter was one of the first of a number of contemporary women writers who have put fairy tales to unconventional uses.

Angela Carter  In addressing the issue of fairy tales and their social influence, Carter and others have suggested an alternative starting point for social critique—in the home and child- rearing, rather than just in public policy.  Changing society to promote gender equality is a difficult task, but, since gender roles are learned in early childhood, identifying and changing some of the sources of learned behavior (such as fairy tales) is an important step towards that goal.  Historically, folk and fairy tales have served numerous functions besides acculturating children.

Angela Carter  Fairy tales, Carter implies here, are socially important because they provide a set of common cultural scripts—a collective mythology which naturalizes certain types of behavior.  Genres are tied to different ideological trends at different points in history.  Carter's selection of fairy tales for the Virago collection, for example, is in part meant to demonstrate an alternative tradition of folk literature—one which exhibits "the richness and diversity with which femininity, in practice, is represented in `unofficial' culture: its strategies, its plots, its hard work" (xiv).

Angela Carter  Nevertheless, in certain historical and cultural eras there is a tradition of fairy tales being appropriated for the purposes of defining "proper" and "improper" conduct.  The Bloody Chamber returns the fairy tale genre to the more physiologically explicit and individualistic themes commonly expressed in its preliterary folk origins, while also transforming the tales so that they speak to contemporary feminist concerns.  The stories in The Bloody Chamber revise the pedagogical subtexts of several classic fairy tales, especially Perrault's versions of "Bluebeard," "Little Red Riding Hood," "Beauty and the Beast," and "Snow White."

Angela Carter  Instead of passively accepting punishment for their transgressive behavior, Carter's female protagonists remain resolute and actively defy their male- determined fates.   Carter enables readers of received genres like the fairy tale to re-read them from a more critical stance, and this new process of reading sets in motion further challenges to the traditional identity of the old genres.  Carter took for granted that writing necessitates recycling and that fairy tales in particular are formed "out of all sorts of bits of other stories long ago and far away, and [have] been tinkered with, had bits added [...] lost other bits, got mixed up with other stories" all in an "endless recycling process" (Virago Book x–xi)."

Angela Carter  She was also conscious of the fact that her own writing followed this model.  In one interview, she stated that her work "indulged in a sort of intellectual bricolage [...] revisiting and reutilizing our cultural heritage, as though it were a big junk shop, a gigantic scrapyard" (Bono 43).

Angela Carter  Carter's critique of pornography is as much a part of her work as her advocacy of the progressive or liberatory potential of pornography.  Many commentaries on Carter's approach to pornography oversimplify her position.  Like any genre, pornography can serve different interests, including feminist ones.  It is the uses to which pornography is put and the contexts in which it is read or received that can prove either liberatory or confining.

Angela Carter  So The Bloody Chamber is not about the "evils" of pornography (or fairy tales) as such.  It is a critique of one tradition of ideological conventions in these genres—conventions which assume and even valorize female passivity, especially with regards to sexuality and desire.

Angela Carter  Moral Pornography" and the Anti-Pornography Movement  The Bloody Chamber is Carter's final fiction to prominently thematize pornography and incorporate its generic features.  In combination with The Sadeian Woman, it is the culmination of her fascination with the genre that dominated her work in the 1970s.  Carter's ideas about pornography made her relationship with other prominent feminists a vexed one.

Angela Carter  Perspectives on Pornography  The Bloody Chamber is mostly a collection of fairy tales rewritten to incorporate props of the Gothic and elements of a style designated 'magic realism', in which a realistic consciousness operates within a surrealistic context.  The characters are at once both abstractions and 'real'.  The heroine in 'The Tiger's Bride', for example, bemused by surreal events, comments, 'what democracy of magic held this palace and fir forest in common?

Angela Carter  Or, should I be prepared to accept it as proof of the axiom my father had drummed into me: that, if ‘you have enough money, anything is possible?' (p. 62).  Symbolism is prevalent: white roses for sexual purity; lilies for sex and death; lions, tigers and wolves for male sexual aggression.  Throughout the collection, specific attention is often drawn to the meaning of fairy tales themselves, and this has implications for the reading of Carter's stories.

Angela Carter  Most of The Bloody Chamber tales' have a direct ancestor in the folk and fairy tales of Charles Perrault, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Madame Leprince de Beaumont.  A rewriting of `Bluebeard' is the first story in the collection. The second and third tales are based on `Beauty and the Beast'. `Puss-in-Boots' and `The Erl- King' are next.  `Snow White', `Sleeping Beauty' and `Little Red Riding Hood' follow (two tales on this), with `Alice in Wonderland' (possibly) as the last story.

Angela Carter  The twists and expansions in Carter's tales, however, rely on new modes of representation—gothic, vampiric, pantomime and romance.  For instance, one critic identifies `The Bloody Chamber' story in the collection as the Bluebeard tale reworked as gothic romance.'  This process of reworking tales provides readers with new contexts that can liberate signs and patterns for contemporary purposes.

Angela Carter  Angela Carter appears to be most interested in Perrault's "Bluebeard," which was first published in his Histoires ou contes du temps passé, in 1697. Her own version, "The Bloody Chamber," in the book of the same name, is her best known reworking of the tale.  The tale weaves in and out of other works by Carter, where the forbidden chamber is motif for hidden desire' and Bluebeard's castle is motif for the soul.  In The Magic Toyshop, and the shorter tale, "The Fall River Axe Murders," in Black Venus Carter constructs a landscape of locked doors and endless corridors, through which her heroines….

Angela Carter  In Perrault's "Bluebeard" the castle is also a microcosm of patriarchy, and in "The Bloody Chamber" Carter shows this patriarchal power in its most extreme form.  The world inside this castle is one in which men rule, and women are looked' upon as children or pets.  The husband goes travelling on business while his wife stays home ordering icecream for dinner and switching on every light in the castle.

Angela Carter  It is also a world in which male oppressor and female victim are inextricably intertwined, reinforcing, as Dworkin puts it, the "normal and natural sadism of the male, happily complemented by the normal and natural masochism of the female."  The wife is the unequal partner in a grossly oppressive marriage.  The violence which the husband perpetrates is a kind of marriage ritual; the repeated performance of a particular act in which the usual power relations between man and woman have been extremely deformed.

Angela Carter  After their marriage is consummated, for instance, the heroine clings to her husband "as though only the one who inflicted the pain could comfort me for suffering it."'  Carter, however, offers no such comfort. Rather, she constructs a metanarrative which draws our attention to the reticence of the "Bluebeard" fairy tale about its own topos.  In "The Bloody Chamber," the husband's capacity for violence, both psychological and physical, is very real.

Angela Carter  He is the typical patriarch; he regards himself as king of his own home, his own tiny kingdom in which he can rule over the female body.  The enlargement of the husband's acts of domestic violence in the tale into acts of brutal murder are simply fantastic events that impinge upon a recognisable world.  The husband Carter has constructed would fit with verisimilitude into the sex/ crime genre prevalent in current American realist cinema.

Angela Carter  "Stereotypes," as Angela Carter writes, "only become stereotypes, after all, because they correspond to certain kinds of real behaviour."  If the home represented by the castle is the husband's domestic kingdom, then the chamber is his throne-room.  This is the place that he visits, as he tells his wife in Carter's version, "when the yoke of marriage seems to weigh too heavily on my shoulders.  There I can go, you understand, to savour the rare pleasure of imagining myself wifeless.'

Angela Carter  This is not surprising, since the negation of the woman, her metamorphosis from equal partner into a tiny manipulable figure, is one of the characteristic features of acts of domestic violence.  It is significant, too, that the acts of atrocity which the husband performs upon women take place in private, within the home that is the castle.  In The Sadeian Woman, Carter writes:

Angela Carter  to show, in art, erotic violence committed by men upon women cuts too near to the bone, and will be condemned out of hand...It is a great shame we can forbid these bleedings in art but not in life, for the beatings, the rapes and the woundings take place in a privacy beyond the reach of official censorship.  The kind of world in which men inflict pain on women is, of course, never endorsed in Carter's tale.  Rather, the suffering and oppression of women function as consistent counterbalances.

Angela Carter  Furthermore, the patriarchal order of the fairy tale world itself is persistently invaded by an alternative, matriarchal, world view.  This is the appropriation of text as political instrument, and it is done in three ways.  First of all, the tale is narrated in the first person, so that the heroine tells her own story, from her own point of view.  This is an appropriate move, since the narrative has always been less about Bluebeard than about Bluebeard's wife.

Angela Carter  Secondly, Carter replaces the heroine's sister Anne who, in Perrault's version, watches for the rescue party, with the blind piano-tuner, Jean-Yves.  This is the man with whom the heroine will live at the end of the tale (we are not told if they actually marry), and who "sees her clearly with his heart " Carter's heroine here is downwardly mobile, as if the trade off for capital gain is the absence of identity, and the annihilation of the soul.  She does not use her inherited wealth to buy herself another husband, as in Perrault's version.

Angela Carter  Instead, she gives most of it to charity and transforms the castle into a school for the blind.  Thirdly, it is the heroine's mother, and not her brothers (as in Perrault's version) who rescues her.  When men rescue women in fairy tales they are rewarded with money or marriage which, in the aristocratic economy of the genre, usually amount to the same thing.  This is one way in which fairy tales present the dispensation of punishment and reward as the privilege of masculinity, and physical and psychological power as a masculine acquisition.

Angela Carter  When the mother in "The Bloody Chamber" rescues her daughter, the reward she receives is very different: the safety and happiness of her own child.  Furthermore, the gun which she uses to kill her daughter's husband provides the close of the tale with a neat symbol: brute force is destroyed by the instrument of patriarchy itself; male violence turns in on itself:  On her eighteenth birthday, my mother had disposed of a man-eating tiger that had ravaged the villages in the hills north of Hanoi.

Angela Carter  Now, without a moment's hesitation, she raised my father's gun, took aim and put a single, irreproachable bullet through my husband's head."  But "The Bloody Chamber" is not only a matriarchal narrative, it is also a narrative of desire.  As such, it draws upon a particular myth which has permeated (some would say contaminated) the entire system of Western and Western European discourse, namely, Eve's temptation in the Garden of Eden.  The parallels between the heroine in Carter's tale and the biblical heroine are drawn with precision.

Angela Carter  God's tree of knowledge and the husband's chamber are, after all, both forbidden precisely because of the corporeal and, implicitly, carnal knowledge they contain.  And Carter uses these parallels in order to exploit the contradictory messages about women which narratives of temptation convey.  First of all, like Eve, it is the heroine's capacity for temptation in "The Bloody Chamber" which instigates her search for that which is forbidden her.  But Carter makes it clear that it is the forbidden chamber itself which has been deliberately constructed to catch her out.  Taboo is a powerful piece of psychological equipment.  What better form of seduction is there than to make an extravagant offer and then place restrictions on it? "I only did what he knew I would," she later tells Jean-Yves. "Like Eve," he replies."  Carter's heroine is told precisely where she must not go; the husband carefully maps out for her the way to the chamber, forbidden and yet indelibly imprinted on her mind:  “All is yours, everywhere is open to you— except the lock that this single key fits. Yet all it is is the key to a little room at the foot of the west tower, behind the still- room, at the end of a dark little corridor full of horrid cobwebs”.  Secondly, the wife in "The Bloody Chamber" is threatened with severe punishment for her transgressions.  In Perrault's version of the tale, the only way in which she may be absolved from these transgressions is by performing, like Eve, the very rituals expected of a sinner — forgiveness and prayer.“  As Margaret Olofson Thickstun writes in her feminist study of Puritan doctrine, "Eve's...recognition of her own guilt, her repentance, and her submission to her husband's rule become the model for female virtue.  However, the wife in Carter's tale does no such thing, as if the very substance of female desire itself cannot be contained by catechisms or theological rule books.  The fairy tale genre, with its stable of untouched, unmarried women, has never allowed much room for explicit, actualised desire.  That the heroine in the "Bluebeard" narratives is married at all makes the tale an anomaly in its genre.  Marriage precludes any possibility of "innocence;" sexual knowledge is something which the conventional function of marriage, with its insistence on procreation, demands.  As Thickstun writes, "In a system of metaphor in which sexuality stands for sinfulness, the contemplation of conception leads inevitably to conviction of sin.""  As a generic rule, most fairy tales end, as do most comedies, with the convention of the wedding.  As Carter writes in an essay in Nothing Sacred, 'The narratives stop short at the altar, as if they cannot bear to go on.."  She continues:  All such fictional narratives of women that end in marriage could just as well end with a death, because marriage means the death of the virgin, that is, the termination of her narrative as an individual, however hedged about with prohibitions that individualism might be.  In Carter's tale, however, female desire is treated as complex, contradictory state in which a plurality of needs converge.  The wife's perception of her own desire, for instance, is one of ambivalence.  As the eve of her wedding night approaches, she tells how she felt a both a strange, impersonal arousal at the thought of love and at the same time a repugnance “I could not stifle for his white heavy, flesh that had too much in common with the armfuls of arum lilies that filled my bedroom.“  When the marriage is consummated, the wife feels "a certain queasy craving like the cravings of pregnant women for the taste of coal or chalk...I longed for him. And he disgusted me."  Furthermore, the desire which motivates her to enter the forbidden chamber is also marked by a similar ambivalence.  It is in this place that female bodies are shown in their most desolate forms — as the decaying corpses of the husband's previous wives.  These corpses are the chambers within the chamber itself, their gaping wounds are its inner doors.  They represent the ultimate site of the abject, and the wife is both fascinated and horrified by them.  As Kristeva has commented, the corpse itself is "death infecting life...Imaginary uncanniness and real threat, it beckons to us and ends up engulfing us." It shows us, quite literally, what is inside of ourselves.  She continues:  Corpses show me what I permanently thrust aside in order to live. These bodily fluids, this defilement, this shit are what life withstands, hardly and with difficulty, on the part of death. There, I am at the border of my condition as a living being. My body extricates itself, as being alive, from that border. Such wastes drop so that I might live, until, from loss to loss, nothing remains in me and my entire body falls beyond the limit — cadere, cadaver...the corpse, the most sickening of wastes, is an order that has encroached upon everything.  Carter's heroine examines these corpses in great detail: the opera singer, on whose throat "I could see the blue imprint of his strangler's fingers;" the artist's model, her skull "crowned with a wreath of white roses, and a veil of lace;" the Romanian countess, "pierced, not by one but by a hundred spikes."'  The wife's examination of the bodies is motivated by dual needs: for pleasure and pain, love and hate, life and death.  For the chamber itself is, incidentally, signifier not only for death, but also for life, for are not the womb and heart bloody chambers too? It is appropriate, then, that as the door creaks open, we are offered a quotation from the Marquis de Sade on the "striking resemblance between the act of love and the ministrations of a torturer."  For the forbidden chamber is also the place in which the softer fantasies of eroticism flip over into hard core, sadomasochistic porn.  At this point we are entering classic Carterian territory, where a variety of female representations are flamboyantly displayed.  If some of them (such as the one which suggests there is something pleasurable about forced sexual domination of the female by the male) may seem ideologically at odds with the notion of a feminist project; what is important is that we are constantly reminded that the ideologies Carter offers in her work are all, in the end, arbitrary constructs.  David Punter's comments on her representation of women in The Sadeian Woman are applicable here:  It is pointless to say in response to Sadeian Woman, as has been said,that the claim that women are "impregnated"with a will to submisson leads into a stance of political defeatism; according to Carter there is no eventual, Platonic essence of femininity which is done disservice by this claim, for the concept and stereotype of feminity [sic] is itself constructed within the overarching web of ideological forces which shape the substance of subjectivity?“  Carter made known her interest in the critique of pornography when she published The Sadeian Woman, her study of the writings of the Marquis de Sade.  In her introductory 'Polemical Essay' she argues for a revision of the function of pornography, rather than its dispensation, to be carried out by what she calls a 'moral pornographer':  A moral pornographer might use pornography as a critique of current relations between the sexes. His business would be the total demystification of the flesh and the subsequent revelation, through the infinite modulations of the sexual act, of the real relations of man and his kind.  Precisely what these tasks would entail is never really clarified. Carter's blueprint for a pornography which is moral is clearly a theoretical model for a time which has yet to come.  However, in "The Bloody Chamber," Carter certainly articulates the paradox contained within the term, "moral pornographer," by appropriating aspects of pornography and then offering a critique of them.  Like pornography, "The Bloody Chamber" is preoccupied with those paradigms of oppression which pornographic fantasies require to operate.  But at the same time it is also preoccupied, most subversively, with the pleasure of pornography, and the pleasure of pain.  The tale, as Duncker suggests, "creates the classical pornographic model of sexuality.“  The wife looks at the pornographic tableaux in her husband's book with that same mixture of apprehension and curiosity with which she will later open the forbidden chamber:  I knew by some tingling of the fingertips...what I should find inside it...Yet I had not bargained for this, the girl with the tears hanging on her cheeks like stuck pearls, her cunt a split fig below the great globes of her buttocks on which the knotted tails of a cat were about to descend like pornography, too, there is a strong element of voyeurism in the tale.  The wife is always looking at herself, voyeur of her own erotic/pornographic postures.  When the husband inspects his new bride by stripping her naked, she looks in the mirror and is reminded of an etching by Rops in which an old lecher examines a young girl, "Hein his London tailoring; she, bare as a lamb chop. Most pornographic of all confrontations."  And when their marriage is being consummated, she looks in the mirror once again as "a dozen husbands impaled a dozen brides while the mewing gulls swung on invisible trapezes in the empty air outside."  Pornography, however, "remains in the service of the status quo... Libidinal fantasy in a vacuum is the purest, but most affectless, form of day-dreaming."  As Carter argues, it is only when:  pornography abandons its quality of existential solitude and moves out of the kitsch area of timeless, placeless fantasy and into the real world, then it loses it function of safety valve. I t begins to comment on real relations in the real world...The text that had heretofore opened up creamily to him, in a dream, will gather itself together and harshly expel him into the anguish of actuality.  In contrast, the commentary upon her husband that the wife offers politicises the tale. It is a critical or moral commentary.  It reminds us of those acts of domestic violence in which a man forces a woman to submit to psychological and physical pain.  As Carter argues in TheSadeian Woman,this is something that the pornographic text (and, I would add, the conventional fairy tale) can never successfully achieve because its heroes and heroines "are mythic abstractions...Any glimpse of a real man or a real woman is absent from these representations of the archetypal male and female."  The wife's commentary in Carter's tale also reminds us of our own fascination with the way in which sadomasochistic fantasies may be played out upon the body.  The husband watches his wife, the wife watches herself in the mirror, and we, as readers, watch it all.  "The Bloody Chamber" catches us off guard in the act of our own sexual/textual arousal and perhaps, like the wife, we are "aghast to feel [ourselves] stirring."'  Charles Perrault's "Bluebeard" is thought to be the earliest literary version of the tale, but there are earlier, oral, legends of "La Barbe Bleue," based on the murderer Gilles de Rais (1404-1440), who apparently killed at least 140 young boys. See Jean Benedetti, Cilles de Rais (New York: Stein & Day, 1972) 191-95 and A L Vincent dz Clare Binns, Cilles de Rais: The Original Bluebeard (London: A M Philpot, 1926) 210-14. Patricia Duncker, in "Re-Imagining the Fairy Tales: Angela Carter's Bloody Chambers," Literature and History 10.1 (Spring, 1984) 10, nominates another candidate, Gomorre the Cursed (500AD), a native of Brittany who murdered his wives when they fell pregnant.  Other tales which contain a prohibition on entering a secret or bloody chamber include "Mr Fox" (Anon, English), 'he Enchanted Pig," "Fitcher s Bird," "The Golden Key" and "Our Lady's Child" (Brothers Grimm), "Tale of the Third Calendar" (The Arabian Nights' Entertainments) and "The Sixth Diversion of the Fourth Day" (Giambattista Basile's Pentamerone). See Bruno Bettelheim, The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales (London: Penguin/Peregrine, 1978) 229-303.  Andrea Dworkin, Pornography: Men Possessing Women(London: The Women's Press, 1982) 109. Cited in Patricia Duncker, "Re-Imagining the Fairy Tales," 10.  Charles Perrault, "Bluebeard," The Fairy Tales of Charles Perrault, ed Angela Carter, Histoires ou Contes duTemps Passé aoec des Moralités (1697) 41.  Angela Carter,The Sadeian Woman and the Ideology of Pornography (New York: Pantheon, 1988)223. The forbidden chamber is also an inversion of domesticity and that ultimate symbol of the an tefeminist home—the housewife. Bluebeard is clearly no tidy housewife; he shoves the throwaway bodies of his wives, literally, behind the door and leaves his floor unscrubbed. The chamber is a mess; any wife who would dean it up can no longer do so, since she has become the mess itself. And the wife who makes an attempt at cleanliness does so in vain — Bluebeard's wife, for instance, scrubs and scrubs at the bloodstained key in a nightmarish ritual of domesticity gone awry. In Powers of Horror: An Esssay on Abjection (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), 158, Julia Kristeva writes, 'This kind of motherhood, the masochistic mother who never stops working is repulsive and fascinating, abject.  " Angela Carter, The Bloody Chamber, 40.  " "Little Red Riding Hood" is also a temptation narrative, to which "Bluebeard" may be compared. Like Red Riding Hood, Bluebeard's wife travels a path from which she is not permitted to stray; this time an internal path, comprised of dark corridors instead of forest tracks, its edges flanked by wooden doorways instead of trees. The forbidden chamber, like the forest, is dearly off limits. The acts of atrocity which Bluebeard performs upon his wives within it, and those which the wolf performs upon Little Red Riding Hood are instigated for similar reasons. Neither th e girl in the woods, nor Bluebeard's wives, can contain their (sexual) curiosity.  " Angela Carter,The Bloody Chamber, 37-8. There is a remarkable similarity, too, between Bluebeard's command to his wife in Perrault's "Bluebeard," The Fairy Tales of Charles Perrault, 33, "Open everything, go everywhere, but I absolutely forbid you to go into that little room and, if you so much as open the

Angela Carter  Taboo is a powerful piece of psychological equipment.  What better form of seduction is there than to make an extravagant offer and then place restrictions on it? "I only did what he knew I would," she later tells Jean-Yves. "Like Eve," he replies."  Carter's heroine is told precisely where she must not go; the husband carefully maps out for her the way to the chamber, forbidden and yet indelibly imprinted on her mind:

Angela Carter  “All is yours, everywhere is open to you— except the lock that this single key fits. Yet all it is is the key to a little room at the foot of the west tower, behind the still- room, at the end of a dark little corridor full of horrid cobwebs”.  Secondly, the wife in "The Bloody Chamber" is threatened with severe punishment for her transgressions.  In Perrault's version of the tale, the only way in which she may be absolved from these transgressions is by performing, like Eve, the very rituals expected of a sinner — forgiveness and prayer.“

Angela Carter  As Margaret Olofson Thickstun writes in her feminist study of Puritan doctrine, "Eve's...recognition of her own guilt, her repentance, and her submission to her husband's rule become the model for female virtue.  However, the wife in Carter's tale does no such thing, as if the very substance of female desire itself cannot be contained by catechisms or theological rule books.  The fairy tale genre, with its stable of untouched, unmarried women, has never allowed much room for explicit, actualised desire.

Angela Carter  That the heroine in the "Bluebeard" narratives is married at all makes the tale an anomaly in its genre.  Marriage precludes any possibility of "innocence;" sexual knowledge is something which the conventional function of marriage, with its insistence on procreation, demands.  As Thickstun writes, "In a system of metaphor in which sexuality stands for sinfulness, the contemplation of conception leads inevitably to conviction of sin.""  As a generic rule, most fairy tales end, as do most comedies, with the convention of the wedding.

Angela Carter  As Carter writes in an essay in Nothing Sacred, 'The narratives stop short at the altar, as if they cannot bear to go on.."  She continues:  All such fictional narratives of women that end in marriage could just as well end with a death, because marriage means the death of the virgin, that is, the termination of her narrative as an individual, however hedged about with prohibitions that individualism might be.

Angela Carter  In Carter's tale, however, female desire is treated as complex, contradictory state in which a plurality of needs converge.  The wife's perception of her own desire, for instance, is one of ambivalence.  As the eve of her wedding night approaches, she tells how she felt a both a strange, impersonal arousal at the thought of love and at the same time a repugnance “I could not stifle for his white heavy, flesh that had too much in common with the armfuls of arum lilies that filled my bedroom.“

Angela Carter  When the marriage is consummated, the wife feels "a certain queasy craving like the cravings of pregnant women for the taste of coal or chalk...I longed for him. And he disgusted me."  Furthermore, the desire which motivates her to enter the forbidden chamber is also marked by a similar ambivalence.  It is in this place that female bodies are shown in their most desolate forms — as the decaying corpses of the husband's previous wives.

Angela Carter  These corpses are the chambers within the chamber itself, their gaping wounds are its inner doors.  They represent the ultimate site of the abject, and the wife is both fascinated and horrified by them.  As Kristeva has commented, the corpse itself is "death infecting life...Imaginary uncanniness and real threat, it beckons to us and ends up engulfing us." It shows us, quite literally, what is inside of ourselves.

Angela Carter  She continues:  Corpses show me what I permanently thrust aside in order to live. These bodily fluids, this defilement, this shit are what life withstands, hardly and with difficulty, on the part of death. There, I am at the border of my condition as a living being. My body extricates itself, as being alive, from that border. Such wastes drop so that I might live, until, from loss to loss, nothing remains in me and my entire body falls beyond the limit — cadere, cadaver...the corpse, the most sickening of wastes, is an order that has encroached upon everything.

Angela Carter  Carter's heroine examines these corpses in great detail: the opera singer, on whose throat "I could see the blue imprint of his strangler's fingers;" the artist's model, her skull "crowned with a wreath of white roses, and a veil of lace;" the Romanian countess, "pierced, not by one but by a hundred spikes."'  The wife's examination of the bodies is motivated by dual needs: for pleasure and pain, love and hate, life and death.

Angela Carter  For the chamber itself is, incidentally, signifier not only for death, but also for life, for are not the womb and heart bloody chambers too? It is appropriate, then, that as the door creaks open, we are offered a quotation from the Marquis de Sade on the "striking resemblance between the act of love and the ministrations of a torturer."  For the forbidden chamber is also the place in which the softer fantasies of eroticism flip over into hard core, sadomasochistic porn.  At this point we are entering classic Carterian territory, where a variety of female representations are flamboyantly displayed.

Angela Carter  If some of them (such as the one which suggests there is something pleasurable about forced sexual domination of the female by the male) may seem ideologically at odds with the notion of a feminist project; what is important is that we are constantly reminded that the ideologies Carter offers in her work are all, in the end, arbitrary constructs.

Angela Carter  David Punter's comments on her representation of women in The Sadeian Woman are applicable here:  It is pointless to say in response to Sadeian Woman, as has been said,that the claim that women are "impregnated"with a will to submisson leads into a stance of political defeatism; according to Carter there is no eventual, Platonic essence of femininity which is done disservice by this claim, for the concept and stereotype of feminity [sic] is itself constructed within the overarching web of ideological forces which shape the substance of subjectivity?“

Angela Carter  Carter made known her interest in the critique of pornography when she published The Sadeian Woman, her study of the writings of the Marquis de Sade.  In her introductory 'Polemical Essay' she argues for a revision of the function of pornography, rather than its dispensation, to be carried out by what she calls a 'moral pornographer':

Angela Carter  A moral pornographer might use pornography as a critique of current relations between the sexes. His business would be the total demystification of the flesh and the subsequent revelation, through the infinite modulations of the sexual act, of the real relations of man and his kind.  Precisely what these tasks would entail is never really clarified. Carter's blueprint for a pornography which is moral is clearly a theoretical model for a time which has yet to come.

Angela Carter  However, in "The Bloody Chamber," Carter certainly articulates the paradox contained within the term, "moral pornographer," by appropriating aspects of pornography and then offering a critique of them.  Like pornography, "The Bloody Chamber" is preoccupied with those paradigms of oppression which pornographic fantasies require to operate.  But at the same time it is also preoccupied, most subversively, with the pleasure of pornography, and the pleasure of pain.

Angela Carter  The tale, as Duncker suggests, "creates the classical pornographic model of sexuality.“  The wife looks at the pornographic tableaux in her husband's book with that same mixture of apprehension and curiosity with which she will later open the forbidden chamber:  I knew by some tingling of the fingertips...what I should find inside it...Yet I had not bargained for this, the girl with the tears hanging on her cheeks like stuck pearls, her cunt a split fig below the great globes of her buttocks on which the knotted tails of a cat were about to descend like pornography, too, there is a strong element of voyeurism in the tale.

Angela Carter  I knew by some tingling of the fingertips...what I should find inside it...Yet I had not bargained for this, the girl with the tears hanging on her cheeks like stuck pearls, her cunt a split fig below the great globes of her buttocks on which the knotted tails of a cat were about to descend like pornography, too, there is a strong element of voyeurism in the tale.  The wife is always looking at herself, voyeur of her own erotic/pornographic postures.

Angela Carter  When the husband inspects his new bride by stripping her naked, she looks in the mirror and is reminded of an etching by Rops in which an old lecher examines a young girl, "Hein his London tailoring; she, bare as a lamb chop. Most pornographic of all confrontations."  And when their marriage is being consummated, she looks in the mirror once again as "a dozen husbands impaled a dozen brides while the mewing gulls swung on invisible trapezes in the empty air outside."  Pornography, however, "remains in the service of the status quo... Libidinal fantasy in a vacuum is the purest, but most affectless, form of day-dreaming."

Angela Carter  As Carter argues, it is only when:  pornography abandons its quality of existential solitude and moves out of the kitsch area of timeless, placeless fantasy and into the real world, then it loses it function of safety valve. I t begins to comment on real relations in the real world...The text that had heretofore opened up creamily to him, in a dream, will gather itself together and harshly expel him into the anguish of actuality.  In contrast, the commentary upon her husband that the wife offers politicises the tale. It is a critical or moral commentary.

Angela Carter  It reminds us of those acts of domestic violence in which a man forces a woman to submit to psychological and physical pain.  As Carter argues in TheSadeian Woman,this is something that the pornographic text (and, I would add, the conventional fairy tale) can never successfully achieve because its heroes and heroines "are mythic abstractions...Any glimpse of a real man or a real woman is absent from these representations of the archetypal male and female."

Angela Carter  The wife's commentary in Carter's tale also reminds us of our own fascination with the way in which sadomasochistic fantasies may be played out upon the body.  The husband watches his wife, the wife watches herself in the mirror, and we, as readers, watch it all.  "The Bloody Chamber" catches us off guard in the act of our own sexual/textual arousal and perhaps, like the wife, we are "aghast to feel [ourselves] stirring."'

Angela Carter  Charles Perrault's "Bluebeard" is thought to be the earliest literary version of the tale, but there are earlier, oral, legends of "La Barbe Bleue," based on the murderer Gilles de Rais (1404-1440), who apparently killed at least 140 young boys. See Jean Benedetti, Cilles de Rais (New York: Stein & Day, 1972) 191-95 and A L Vincent dz Clare Binns, Cilles de Rais: The Original Bluebeard (London: A M Philpot, 1926) 210-14. Patricia Duncker, in "Re-Imagining the Fairy Tales: Angela Carter's Bloody Chambers," Literature and History 10.1 (Spring, 1984) 10, nominates another candidate, Gomorre the Cursed (500AD), a native of Brittany who murdered his wives when they fell pregnant.

Angela Carter  Other tales which contain a prohibition on entering a secret or bloody chamber include "Mr Fox" (Anon, English), 'he Enchanted Pig," "Fitcher s Bird," "The Golden Key" and "Our Lady's Child" (Brothers Grimm), "Tale of the Third Calendar" (The Arabian Nights' Entertainments) and "The Sixth Diversion of the Fourth Day" (Giambattista Basile's Pentamerone). See Bruno Bettelheim, The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales (London: Penguin/Peregrine, 1978) 229-303.=

Angela Carter  Andrea Dworkin, Pornography: Men Possessing Women(London: The Women's Press, 1982) 109. Cited in Patricia Duncker, "Re-Imagining the Fairy Tales," 10.  Charles Perrault, "Bluebeard," The Fairy Tales of Charles Perrault, ed Angela Carter, Histoires ou Contes duTemps Passé aoec des Moralités (1697) 41.  Angela Carter,The Sadeian Woman and the Ideology of Pornography (New York: Pantheon, 1988)223.  The forbidden chamber is also an inversion of domesticity and that ultimate symbol of the an tefeminist home—the housewife.  Bluebeard is clearly no tidy housewife; he shoves the throwaway bodies of his wives, literally, behind the door and leaves his floor unscrubbed.  The chamber is a mess; any wife who would dean it up can no longer do so, since she has become the mess itself.  And the wife who makes an attempt at cleanliness does so in vain — Bluebeard's wife, for instance, scrubs and scrubs at the bloodstained key in a nightmarish ritual of domesticity gone awry.  In Powers of Horror: An Esssay on Abjection (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), 158, Julia Kristeva writes, 'This kind of motherhood, the masochistic mother who never stops working is repulsive and fascinating, abject.  " Angela Carter, The Bloody Chamber, 40.  " "Little Red Riding Hood" is also a temptation narrative, to which "Bluebeard" may be compared. Like Red Riding Hood, Bluebeard's wife travels a path from which she is not permitted to stray; this time an internal path, comprised of dark corridors instead of forest tracks, its edges flanked by wooden doorways instead of trees. The forbidden chamber, like the forest, is dearly off limits. The acts of atrocity which Bluebeard performs upon his wives within it, and those which the wolf performs upon Little Red Riding Hood are instigated for similar reasons. Neither th e girl in the woods, nor Bluebeard's wives, can contain their (sexual) curiosity.  " Angela Carter,The Bloody Chamber, 37-8. There is a remarkable similarity, too, between Bluebeard's command to his wife in Perrault's "Bluebeard," The Fairy Tales of Charles Perrault, 33, "Open everything, go everywhere, but I absolutely forbid you to go into that little room and, if you so much as open the

Angela Carter  The Bloody Chamber. 1940-1992 Angela Carter  Demythologising  Amongst the postmodern writers, she is was the more daring, more inventive,

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Angela Carter  The Bloody Chamber. 1940-1992 Angela Carter  Demythologising  Amongst the postmodern writers, she is was the more daring, more inventive,

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Presentation on theme: "Angela Carter  The Bloody Chamber. 1940-1992 Angela Carter  Demythologising  Amongst the postmodern writers, she is was the more daring, more inventive,"— Presentation transcript:

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