The Bloody Chamber (1979)
Angela Carter's collection of revised fairy tales, "The Bloody Chamber" was the book that finally brought Carter to wider public attention. Carter had already translated Charles Perrault's fairy tales into English in 1977, and went on to edit two collections of fairy tales for Virago Press- The Virago Book of Fairy Tales(1990) and The Second Virargo Book of Fairy Tales(1992). Indeed, so pervasive did her association with the form become, argues Merja Makinen in her essay "Angela Carter's The Bloody Chamber and the Decolonization of Feminine Sexuality", that it came to mould the way in which Carter herself was regarded in the popular imagination. As Carter herself argued strongly in the Sadeian Woman, "if women allow themselves to be consoled for their culturally determined lack of access to the modes of intellectual debate by the invocation of hypothetical great goddesses, they are simply flattering themselves into submisiion (a technique often used on them by men)". "The Bloody Chamber" continues to be one of her most widely-debated works. For although the short stories in "The Bloody Chamber" exploit a familiar narrative form, and hence might be considered rather more acessible than her earlier work, they are nevertheless equally unsettling in their apparent eroticising of sexual violence and victimisation. Carter wanted to draw the reader's attention to the often unpalatable realities that underpinned the familiar nursery stories. The origins of "The Bloody Chamber" lies in Carter's materialism; her desire to bring fairy tale back down to earth in order to demonstrate how it could be used to explore the real conditions of everyday life. Her writing in "The Bloody Chamber" has a certain characteristic feature: an intention to provoke questions rather than to provide answers, to engage with contradictions without seeking necessarily to resolve them.
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