The Bloody Chamber Whole Book CRITICS

Carter

- ‘I’m quite appalled by the violence of my imagination’

Rose

- approved of the reversal of stereotypical gender roles as ‘a critique of the idea of adult womanhood sanctioned by patriarchy and a suggested alternative to it’

Duncker

- believed that Carter had attempted an impossible and ultimately pointless task in that the form of the fairy tale cannot be used without the new version being contaminated by the ideas and values of the original tale

Makinen

- ‘Carter’s work has consistently dealt with representations of the physical abuse of women …, of women alienated from themselves within the male gaze,and conversely of women who grab their sexuality and fight back, of women troubled by and even empowered by their own violence’

Day

- ‘Carter’s fiction is a bit extreme’

- ‘difficult ground … for a male critic’

- by remvoing himself from critiquing this, Day fails to see the irony in his attitude, it is men’s refusal to understand women that Carter seeks to overthrow in her stories

Marquis Criticism

- Carter’s representation of the Marquis as an unemployed voyeur is a simple recycling of gender stereotypes:

• men are visually orientated

• women are more tactile and orientated to sense of touch

Puss In Boots Criticism

- tale of female empowerment, in which the young wife and the tabby cat achieve their own ends through ingenuity

- it could also be argued that it is a comedy of male arrogance and the lengths to which lust can drive men

Lokke

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

Thillanathan

- Carter uses the blurring of boundaries between animal and human qualities... to overtly direct readers towards a destination concerning identity

Power

- 'It is significant here that Beauty, whose name diminishes her to a single attribute of male-determined value, doesn't tell her own story: Carter's use of the third person robs her of agency’ (The Courtship of Mr Lyon)

Vandermeer

- 'Carter's characters are forever escaping socially, mentally and physically, the traps laid by men’