The Bloody Chamber - Context PDF

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Context around 'The Bloody Chamber'...

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The Bloody Chamber – context: Fairy-tales: - Argued that fairy tales had ‘gone into the bourgeois nursery and therefore lost their origins’ - The Bloody Chamber is Carter’s way of returning these well-known stories to their less refined, more brutal origins - Carter’s main purpose is to ‘extract the latent content from the traditional stories’ - Reveals how fairy tales portray the darker side of human desire - Influence of Perrault and Grimm brothers, etc. - Many have their origins in folklore and myth - A fairy tale’s basis in folklore provides a traditional framework upon which modern fears can be explored - Just as Stoker had taken Eastern European folk tales about vampirism and used them in Dracula to highlight the anxieties that troubled the Victorian era, Carter takes fairy tales and uses them as a framework to address modern issues - Carter utilised fairy tales as a basis from which to explore contemporary attitudes towards sex and gender in what was still a largely patriarchal society Influences: Marquis de Sade: - Illustrates the idea that sex and violence are often linked - Carter’s exploration of how women can take part in the sexual violence that oppresses them Edgar Allen Poe: - Gothic - frequently embraced the grotesque and bizarre - Poe’s The Oval Portrait – in which a male artist’s painting of his female model becomes increasingly lifelike as the model herself fades towards death - Could be seen as influencing TBC – collection of tales in which any woman who remains passive under the ‘male gaze’ invariably finds herself in peril Feminism: - Part of ‘second wave feminism’ - The Sadeian Women – met with criticism from other feminists, unsurprisingly given the sexually exploitative nature of de Sade’s work, and Carter’s refusal to vilify him (similar reaction to TBC) The Gothic: - Features: virginal maidens, castles, torture chamber, fear of the unknown - These gothic elements are ultimately subverted by Carter, who rejects the stereotypical helpless gothic female archetype

Postmodernism: Freudianism: - The Snow Child boils down to a harsh Freudian reading – jealous hatred of mother for daughter / lust of father for daughter...