The Bloody Chamber: Critical views

Lucy Armitt (1997)

“the stories … are both a metamorphoses of each other and fairy tales” - the importance of understanding the structure and form of the tales

“they are Gothic tales that prey on the restrictive enclosures of the fairy story formulae in a manner that threatens to become ‘masochistically’ self-destructive”

Duncker on Carter

“re-writing the tales within the strait-jacket of their original structures”

Reproduces the “rigidly sexist psychology of the erotic”

Patricia Duncker on the men in Carter’s tales

“all men are beasts to women”

Maggie Anwell on The Company of Wolves

“Not only does the material world shift its laws; we experience our own capacity for abnormal behaviour”

Barbara on Carter in the foreword of the Italian translation

“within the small number of women who dared to speak of the unspeakable, giving voice to women’s thinking about sexuality and women’s bodies”

Barbara A. Bannon on The Bloody Chamber short story

“The Bluebeard tale reworked as Gothic romance”