The Bloody Chamber Critics Quotes

Atwood

Youth and Role Reversals

'Lambhood and tigerishness may be found in either gender and in the same individual at different times.'

Makinen

Youth and Women

'They are not fearful of sex just their sexual partners on them.'

Day

Women

'Carter's fiction is a bit extreme.'

Mantel

Beauty and Duality

'Fairytales hold up a distorting mirror that enhances our petty guilts.'

Vandermeer

Fairytales

'Fairytales clothe themselves in stereotypes and archetypes.'

Jeff Vandermeer

Power and Gender

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

Angela Carter

Context

'I was taking the latent content of those traditional stories and using that; and the latent content is violently sexual.'

Helen simpson

Women, Power and Gender

'The heroines of these stories are struggling out of the straitjackets of history and ideology and biological essentialism.'

Sarah Gamble

Context

'Pleasing her audience by providing them with a comfortably reassuring read did not feature on her list of priorities.'

Makinen

Youth and Women

'They are not fearful of sex just their sexual partners designs on them.'

Atwood

Youth and Role Reversal

'Lambhood and tigerishness may be found in either gender and in the same individual at different times.'

Carter

The Influence of Old Texts

'Most intellectual development depends upon new readings of all texts. I am all for putting new wine in old bottles, especially if the pressure of the new wine makes the old bottles explode.'

Robin Ann Sheets

The Marquis in the Bloody Chamber

'Carter's voyeuristic Marquis is...a sadist in terms of his sexual practises and...his control of narrative.'

Kari E. Lokke

Myths and Folklore in Angela Carter's Stories

'Carter takes myth and folklore, the world of collective subjectivity as her inspiration.'

Kari E. Lokke

Carter's Style

'the fluidity of Carter's style draws one into her fictional world.'

Kari E. Lokke

Grotesque Realism

'Carter is more akin to the original, emancipatory Renaissance grotesque called 'grotesque realism' by Bakhtin.'

Kari E Lokke

The Ugly and Aesthetics

'The grotesque often reveals that the seemingly ugly can be aesthetically fascinating, but Carter's perverse craft shows that the beautiful can in fact be extraordinarily ugly.'

Kari E Lokke

Heroines in the Bloody Chamber

'The Bloody Chamber is a lush celebration of the heroine's vitality, sensuality, eagerness for adventure and love of experience.'

Kari E Lokke

The Grotesque in the Bloody Chamber as a Vehicle

'The grotesque in The Bloody Chamber functions as an unsettling vehicle for exposing through exaggeration, dark humour and irony, the brutality of traditional patriarchal attitudes towards women.'

Kari E Lokke

Carter's Voice

'Carter's voice is a voice of self-assertion. Carter offers a wry expression of faith in the human ear.'

Mary Kaiser

The Snow Child

'The Snow Child is a stark, two page version of Snow White, reducing the fiary tale to its skeletal outlines as a fable of incest.'

Duncker

The Ending of Bloody Chamber

'Carrying an uncompromisingly feminist message, while all of the other tales in the collection, she feels, merely recapitulate patriarchal patterns of behaviour.'

Drayson

Misogyny

'As Marina Warner states: 'Carter snatches out of the jaws of misogyny itself 'useful stories' for women.''

Seago

Carter and Self Image

'Both Lorna Sarge and Marina Warner have pointed out that Carter 'took the voice of the yarn spinning grandmother' as a disguise and strategy for the 'construction of self in image and language.''

Seago

Female Sexuality as Liberation

'Other critics have also found the inclusion of violence as part of female sexuality as liberating, praising Carter for her complex view of female desire which explodes the stereotype of women as passive and demure cyphers.'

Helen Simpson

Imagination in the Bloody Chamber

'The stories in The Bloody Chamber reverberate with deep and unmistakable imaginative pleasure. There is an astonishing extravivid materiality to this alternative world she invented, down to the last sensuous detail.'

Carter

Attitudes to Pornography

'I really can't see what's wrong with finding out about what the great male fantasies about women are.'

Carter

Her Style

'I wanted a lush fin-de-siecle decor for the story...and a style that...utilises the heightened diction of the novelette, to half-seduce the reader into this wicked, glamorous, fatal world.'

Sage

Carter's Writing and Retelling of Stories

Carter was 'deliberately drawing them out of shape...The monsters and the princesses lose their places in the old script, and cross forbidden boundary lines.'

Power

Beauty in The Courtship of Mr Lyon

'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.'

Power

The Snow Child

'Carter's depiction of transactional sexual relations is starkest in 'The Snow Child', which boils down 'Snow White' to a harsh Freudian reading.'

Power

The Snow Child's Message

'It is the closest fairy tale in its matter of fact presentation of a magical reality'

Power

Shock Factor

'It is a shocking, inedible moment; one of several in the book the near-constant atmosphere of menace erupts.'

Carter

Myths

'I'm interested in myths...because they are extraordinary lies designed to make people unfree.'