The Bloody Chamber by Angela Carter

From familiar fairy tales and legends – Red Riding Hood, Bluebeard, Puss in Boots, Beauty and the Beast, vampires and werewolves – Angela Carter has created an absorbing collection of dark, sensual, fantastic stories.

This collection of short stories is deliberately gory. All of the sugar-coating of children’s fairytales has been stripped out, leaving Carter to explore freely the more disturbing details of each plotline.

The stories vary in length, the longer ones being over 20 pages and the shortest being just a page and a half. As a reading experience, I tend to find collections of short stories less easy to become absorbed in than a longer book, largely because new characters and new contexts are always being introduced, but that is entirely a personal preference.

Carter’s writing style is exquisite. Every word is meaningful and has been carefully selected to convey exactly the right scene or tone. The language she chooses enables her easily to vary the mood – at times it is almost poetic, evoking sweeping landscapes and swirling seas, and at other times it is more interactive by virtue of her onomatopoeias and rhetorical questions, reflecting the unfiltered thoughts of her characters.

Anyone who has ready any commentary on The Bloody Chamber will know that a key theme running through this book is feminism. The clearest manifestation of this is that many of Carter’s women contradict the stereotypical fairytale female protagonists. Although central to the plot and often eponymous, fairytale women are often passive, reliant on male characters to capture, rescue or propose to them, or otherwise to move the plot along. They are always physically and psychologically clean, never going near a hint of impurity. Many of Carter’s women defy this stereotype entirely. Most of them dictate the narrative by relating their stories in the first person. Many of them are lustful and sexual. Many are decisive, unafraid to put themselves in the thick of the action. They control the plot; they do not wait for the plot to be controlled by men.

That said, Carter sometimes takes the ‘lustful’ theme in an uncomfortable direction. Some of the stories involve teenage girls on the cusp of womanhood whose innocence is exploited by more powerful characters. This power imbalance is almost disturbingly fetishised, with the girls understandably too unworldly to realise that they are being taken advantage of, and appearing willingly to engage in the corrupting acts. Carter fearlessly juxtaposes the workings of a young mind against the manipulative and more experienced powers that trap it into feeling flattered at the attention or, much worse, into unimaginable danger and dehumanisation.

Each of these stories is in itself an impressive piece of literature, and even more so as a collection.