Angela Carter rewrites a number of fairy tales and folk stories in her Gothic inspired short story collection The Bloody Chamber. In her retelling of these famous tales, Carter exposes the antiquated gender dynamics that inform beloved fairy tales and upsets these patriarchal texts by imbuing them with her own singular prosaic style. The opening tale, "The Bloody Chamber," is a direct feminist retelling of the legend of Bluebeard. "The Bloody Chamber" has many...
Angela Carter rewrites a number of fairy tales and folk stories in her Gothic inspired short story collection The Bloody Chamber. In her retelling of these famous tales, Carter exposes the antiquated gender dynamics that inform beloved fairy tales and upsets these patriarchal texts by imbuing them with her own singular prosaic style. The opening tale, "The Bloody Chamber," is a direct feminist retelling of the legend of Bluebeard. "The Bloody Chamber" has many of the same elements of Bluebeard; specifically, both stories follow a young wife and her discovery that her new wealthy aristocrat husband has a room full of his previous wives' corpses.
However, Carter cleverly subverts the text in two key ways. First, she places the tale in the young bride's first-person perspective. By doing this, she immediately grants the young woman more agency than the traditional folk tale. Next, rather than having a male or group of men rescue the young wife as is what is customarily presented, Carter instead presents the young protagonist's mother as the saving grace in the text. It is a woman who defeats the murderous aristocrat and saves her daughter.
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