The `Bloody Chamber Critics

Lucie Armitt

Story cycle : says it is a mistake to read each story in isolation: each story is in effect the retelling of the same story.
Tries to recombine stories to achieve the outcome she is happy with
Motifs + characters reappear
Tests limits of ingenue character, but remains the ingenue character

Patricia Dunker

Attacks Carter for not being feminist enough: female characters don't escape the nets of patriarchy

she says form of fairytale is inherently patriarchal and therefore misogynistic, and because carter uses some of that fairytale form she cant help but repeat some of that misogyny even though she doesn’t mean to

Helen Simpson

Takes idea of straitjacket + uses this to argue against Dunker
Says text shows female characters struggling out of straitjackets of history, ideology and biological essentialism

Merja Makinen

Argues against dunker

Carter's stories are not fairytales: argues that they are gothic stories

Dunker is misclassyfiying

The stories prey on the original fairytales: and are not constrained by the fairytales

Margaret Atwood

says reading carter through gender is a misreading - says that there is a dynamic in stories between predator and prey: but not straightforwardly as men as predators and women as prey: can be the other way round

Helen Stolart

the lady of the house of love: she says female vampire and young man have sex and this is what leads the monster into being humanised and then dying. But it is at the very least ambiguous. The evidence for sex is the blood the next day and the female vampire gives young man a rose which she plucks from between her thighs which could be read as a symbol of deflowerment.

Lecan (French psychologist)

wolf alice she looks at mirror and develops sense of self - carter using lacanian ideas of looking at mirror to developing selfhood: realising that mirror self is separate