The Bloody Chamber Critics

‘‘narrative development in all the stories subverts...[the way] both femininity and masculinity is constructed’’

Seago

The grotesque in The Bloody Chamber functions as an unsettling vehicle for exposing... the brutality of traditional patriarchal attitudes towards women

Kari E Lokke

the ending of "The Bloody Chamber" as carrying "an uncompromisingly feminist message" while all of the other tales in the collection, she feels, merely recapitulate patriarchal patterns of behaviour

Patricia Dunker

‘‘every single tale the protagonist gains an understanding of how violently restrictive their 'nature' as women is constructed and rejects this’’

Karen Seago

‘‘ women are liminal beings, tormented by their lack of separate identity and objectification’’

‘‘true contentedness can only be achieved through the acknowledgement one's true identity’’

Braman Thillanathan

• "some critics have been disturbed and repelled by the seductive descriptions of masochism"

some critics

‘‘a lush celebration of the heroine's vitality, sensuality, eagerness for adventure, and love of experience’’

Kari E Lokke

Carter has absorbed Sade's misogyny and can therefore have '‘no conception of women's sexuality as autonomous’’

Clark

‘‘blurring of boundaries between animal and human qualities... to overtly direct readers towards a destination concerning identity’’

Braman Thillanathan

‘‘beasts that are supposed to disgust, they also offer their apparent victims the hope of transformation’’

Thomas

‘‘blurs the boundary between fancy and reality and covers the novel in magic colour through using the means of mysterious foretokens and absurdity’’

Han Jing

By blending magic and reality Carter creates strong magic aesthetic effects and deepens the novel's reflection of reality.

Han Jing

Bed time stories configured as tales of sex and violence.

Helen Simpson

Carter removes and distances the reader from the controversial issues through the use of the unrealistic and unlimited supernatural world.

Thomson

The belief and pleasure found in the supernatural in gothic texts would have challenged religion, perhaps for Angela Carter writing in the 1980s, the supernatural would have challenged the growth of ideas in science and technology.

some critics

‘‘celebration of Woman as Other are both masculinist strategies within patriarchal cultures, whereby Man secures his hegemony (power) over the places of enunciation’’

Sally Robinson