From familiar fairy tales and legends – Red Riding Hood, Bluebeard, Puss-in-Boots, Beauty and the Beast, vampires, werewolves – Angela Carter has created an absorbing collection of dark, sensual, fantastic stories.
The Bloody Chamber: And Other Stories
By angelacarter
One of my favourite short story collections.
I became an instant and devoted fan of Angela’s after reading The Bloody Chamber. The genius of her writing is in the way she adorns her unique fables with velvety prose and ambiguity. Each one is evocative and thought provoking without denying a single word of color and beauty.
The gothic atmosphere was sensual and dreamlike and savored of quiet feminism. Here the monsters are fascinating and obscure, their shadowy forms animated with quiet eroticism and gorgeous prose. Something wicked and irresistible lurks on every page. And in each tale some beautiful, tragic, and thrilling photo negative of the fairytales and proverbs we were taught as children—too innocent to delve deeper and uncover the nectar between the petals. Here there are no fairies—the rabbit holes are fraught with Iron Maiden’s and enticing carnal whispers. It’s an explorative and sometimes bizarre and surreal foray into the dark facets of human nature as well as the earthy and infinite power of the feminine.
Carter’s fables are so like the fairytales of old that remind us Red Riding Hood WAS indeed devoured by the wolf in the end (a cautionary tale about female naïvety and the carnal appetites of man?) and that our modern sanitized versions seem so much more myopic by comparison. Ahh, yes *sigh* this collection was so reminiscent of all those old fairytales that were nothing like their modern Disney-fied counterparts. Simply provocative and divine writing!
Where to begin? I stumbled upon this book when nosing around my sister’s bookshelf. She had studied it during her A-Levels and spoke highly of it; I promptly stole it from her shelf and have been obsessing over it since. Although I am fairly certain the book states not to read the introduction first (a contradictory phrase unto itself) I am a not one to shy away from spoilers and couldn’t help myself. Before I had even read one word of Angela Carter’s work, I was hooked. It must’ve been marvellous to inspire such an eloquent passage. And so I read on. Past the titular chapter, past the horror, and the beauty, and the amazement that is Angela Carter. It was not a quick read for me at first, and so the very day I finished ‘Wolf-Alice’, I turned back to the introduction (with a newfound understanding) and read through the book again. And again. And again.
I am unsure if anyone can sum up the pure excellence and depravity that is The Bloody Chamber, but if you want to understand what it is to read Angela Carter, look no further than her obituary: “She loved nothing so much as cussed – but also blithe – nonconformity. Her books unshackle us, toppling the statues of the pompous, demolishing the temples and commissariats of righteousness. They draw their strength, their vitality, from all that is unrighteous, illegitimate, low. They are without equal, without rival.”
This read felt very seasonally appropriate indeed. The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories is a collection of short stories by Angela Carter, in which she takes the dark and creepy undercurrents that are present in so many traditional fairy tales and brings them to the forefront. The overarching feeling you get while reading this collection is that of walking through a familiar forest in the dead of night, knowing that something is creeping up behind you. All of the tropes of traditional fairy tales are there but magnified to an uncomfortable and unfamiliar extent that leaves the reader is a sense of perpetual suspense as they await the unexpected twist in the tale. A perfect Halloween read.
Carter was a brilliant writer; if you like Gothic-style fantasies and intelligent horror, she was one of the best.
When I lived in Ireland, I took a module called Contemporary Women’s Writing, and the first book we covered was this one – perhaps Angela Carter’s best known work. The Bloody Chamber is a very straightforward idea, really: it takes popular fairy tales and twists them around, giving them a new focus and a new background. Some of the stories, even if not actually popular fairy tales, are written in a way that suggests the fantasy and spectacle of fairy tales, but they’re just a little bit darker than they usually would be.
There are ten short stories within the collection, varying in length but holding the same amount of strangeness to them. Some of them aren’t as directly based on fairy tales as others are, like The Lady of the House of Love, which is more of a vampire story than anything else. But some of them, like The Company of Wolves, are a direct retelling of Red Riding Hood with the feminist twist towards the end.
These stories are important because they give a new perspective, as I mentioned earlier. Most of these stories choose to focus on the woman and her intelligence, her skills and abilities, rather than the people who are trying to save her or do the right thing around her. The Bloody Chamber, for example, is based on the story of Bluebeard, and takes place in the mid-twentieth century, with the woman not only cheating on her husband and then finding out about his cruel past, but also having her mother save her in the end, rather than her brothers who get suspicious of her not answering their messages.
In Puss in Boots, the story is told by the cat, who helps his master bed a beautiful young bride of a cruel old Duke, and then helps them run away together. The cat is a wonderful narrator – this is probably one of my favourite stories in the collection – and he provides a unique perspective, especially on human emotions. Below, in the Quotes I Liked section, you’ll see one of the quotes that I most liked from the collection is from the cat’s perspective.
The story The Company of Wolves is one I not only had to study, but also write an in-depth language analysis on in my second year at university. This short story implies that the wolf in question is actually a lycanthrope, and that they are targeting the young girl for their meal. She, however, is a young woman who has only recently come to realize what it means to have any kind of sexual feelings, and therefore uses these to her own advantage against the wolf. While you can argue that this is rather sexist – trust the woman to use sex to get her way – it is also showing how empowering it can be to claim your body back from a situation that could easily turn into rape, and take control of that situation.
This is a wonderful collection of short stories for those who are feminists, interested in literature written by women, or even really interested in fairy tales. Carter really did put a lot into this work, and a lot of research that any literature student can definitely appreciate.
Final rating: 4.5/5 – Not all the stories in the collection are winners, but most of them are!