Instead of rejecting the old fairy tales for their objectification of women and sexual violence, Carter retells them from a female point of view, giving the stories’ heroines greater agency in their fates. While in these situations (and throughout the old versions of the fairy tales) the women seem totally objectified and powerless, in Carter’s stories they can also gain an agency of their own, like the heroine killing the Erl-King and escaping his power. In a similar vein to the pornographic image is the Erl-King’s hypnotic whistle and Signor Panteleone (of “Puss-in-Boots”) viewing his young wife as another possession to hoard. The stories share a theme of being closely based upon fairytalesor folk tales. It was first published in the United Kingdom in 1979 by Gollancz1and won the Cheltenham Festival Literary Prize. So in “The Tiger’s Bride” The Beast wants to see the heroine naked, and the Erl-King strips the heroine like “skinning a rabbit.” This pornographic image, like the sadistic pictures the Marquis collects in “The Bloody Chamber,” is the ultimate example of the woman as object and the man as powerful manipulator. The Bloody Chamber(or The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories) is a collection of short fictionby English writer Angela Carter. These archetypes of victim and victimizer lead many of the stories to the stark objectification of a woman, usually through a scene where the woman is naked and the man/beast is clothed.

In “The Bloody Chamber” and “The Courtship of Mr Lyon” the heroines are indebted to bestial men for lifting them out of poverty, and so they must endure their desires. In most of the original stories there is already a divide between a poor, virginal heroine and a wealthy, powerful man/monster, but in Carter’s versions this divide also leads to sexual oppression.

This is part of the “latent content” that Carter tried to expose in the old fairy tales. The book’s sexual violence and Carter’s feminist worldview create a theme of manipulative power and the objectification of women.

The bloody chamber book