Critical approaches for The Bloody Chamber

Marina Warner- “Fairy tales were reviled in the first stirrings of post-war feminist liberation movements as part and parcel of the propaganda that kept women down.”
-“ She warns of the greater danger of wolves who are “hairy on the inside”, but the knowledge of what it is like to be there, be on the inside, was her goal and her achievement, and it has enthralled her readers, discovering themselves to themselves.”
-“ In this counterblast to the virtuous claims of feminism, Carter identifies the Marquis de Sade as an honest witness to the conditions of bourgeois marriage, the economics of sexual relations, and the collusion of women with their own enslavement and subjugation”
-“[Carter], like her own Red Riding Hood, she was nobody’s meat.”

Helen Simpson- “The Bloody Chamber is like a multifaceted glittering diamond reflecting and refracting a variety of portraits of desire and sexuality”
Helen Simpson- “The heroines of these [Beauty and the Beast based] stories are struggling out of the straitjackets of history and ideology and biological essentialism”

Patricia Duncker- “She could never imagine Cinderella in bed with the Fairy God-mother,"
-'Carter envisages women's sensuality simply as a response to male arousal.'
-[Carter’s ide that de Sade 'put *********** in the service of women' is] 'utter nonsense'

Andrea Dworkin- '[Carter is a] pseudo-feminist'

Nanette - argues in Carter's defence that fairy tales perpetuate 'contempt for women' and that Carter's stories explore 'the current relations between the sexes' and challenge the convention that sexual freedom is the preserve of men only.

Mariana Warner- “In this counterblast to the virtuous claims of feminism, Carter identifies the Marquis de Sade as an honest witness to the conditions of bourgeois marriage, the economics of sexual relations, and the collusion of women with their own enslavement and subjugation”

Patricia Duncker -'Carter envisages women's sensuality simply as a response to male arousal.'
-[Carter’s ide that de Sade 'put *********** in the service of women' is] 'utter nonsense'

Nanette - argues in Carter's defence that fairy tales perpetuate 'contempt for women' and that Carter's stories explore 'the current relations between the sexes' and challenge the convention that sexual freedom is the preserve of men only.

Andrea Dworkin- '[Carter is a] pseudo-feminist'

Mariana Warner- “In this counterblast to the virtuous claims of feminism, Carter identifies the Marquis de Sade as an honest witness to the conditions of bourgeois marriage, the economics of sexual relations, and the collusion of women with their own enslavement and subjugation”

Helen Simpson- “The Bloody Chamber is like a multifaceted glittering diamond reflecting and refracting a variety of portraits of desire and sexuality”

Patricia Duncker- 'Carter envisages women's sensuality simply as a response to male arousal.'
--[Carter’s ide that de Sade 'put *********** in the service of women' is] 'utter nonsense'

Nanette - argues in Carter's defence that fairy tales perpetuate 'contempt for women' and that Carter's stories explore 'the current relations between the sexes' and challenge the convention that sexual freedom is the preserve of men only

Marian Warner- “She warns of the greater danger of wolves who are “hairy on the inside”, but the knowledge of what it is like to be there, be on the inside, was her goal and her achievement, and it has enthralled her readers, discovering themselves to themselves.”
-“[Carter], like her own Red Riding Hood, she was nobody’s meat.”

Helen Simpson- “The heroines of these [Beauty and the Beast based] stories are struggling out of the straitjackets of history and ideology and biological essentialism”

Marina Warner- “Fairy tales were reviled in the first stirrings of post-war feminist liberation movements as part and parcel of the propaganda that kept women down.”
-“[Carter] refused to join in rejecting or denouncing fairy tales, but instead embraced the whole stigmatised genre, its stock characters and well-known plots, and with wonderful verve and invention, perverse grace and wicked fun, soaked them in a new fiery liquor that brought them leaping back to life.”
-“ She warns of the greater danger of wolves who are “hairy on the inside”, but the knowledge of what it is like to be there, be on the inside, was her goal and her achievement, and it has enthralled her readers, discovering themselves to themselves.”
-“ In this counterblast to the virtuous claims of feminism, Carter identifies the Marquis de Sade as an honest witness to the conditions of bourgeois marriage, the economics of sexual relations, and the collusion of women with their own enslavement and subjugation”
-“[Carter], like her own Red Riding Hood, she was nobody’s meat.”

Helen Simpson –“The Bloody Chamber is often wrongly described as a group of traditional fairy tales given a subversive feminist twist. In fact, these are new stories, not re-tellings.”
- “The Bloody Chamber is like a multifaceted glittering diamond reflecting and refracting a variety of portraits of desire and sexuality”
Helen Simpson- “The heroines of these [Beauty and the Beast based] stories are struggling out of the straitjackets of history and ideology and biological essentialism”

Carter -“[On The Sadeian Women] I really can't see what's wrong with finding out about what the great male fantasies about women are”

Patricia Duncker -'Carter envisages women's sensuality simply as a response to male arousal.'
-[Carter’s ide that de Sade 'put *********** in the service of women' is] 'utter nonsense'

Nanette - argues in Carter's defence that fairy tales perpetuate 'contempt for women' and that Carter's stories explore 'the current relations between the sexes' and challenge the convention that sexual freedom is the preserve of men only.

Andrea Dworkin- '[Carter is a] pseudo-feminist'

Marina Warner- “The American poet Anne Sexton, in a caustic sequence of poems called Transformations (1971), scathingly evokes the corpselike helplessness of Sleeping Beauty and Snow White, and scorns, with fine irony, the Cinderella dream of bourgeois marriage and living happily ever after: boredom, torment, incest, death to the soul followed.”
-“ In this counterblast to the virtuous claims of feminism, Carter identifies the Marquis de Sade as an honest witness to the conditions of bourgeois marriage, the economics of sexual relations, and the collusion of women with their own enslavement and subjugation”

Helen Simpson- “The trappings of luxury”

Mariana Warner –“ She warns of the greater danger of wolves who are “hairy on the inside”, but the knowledge of what it is like to be there, be on the inside, was her goal and her achievement, and it has enthralled her readers, discovering themselves to themselves.”

Helen Simpson- “The Bloody Chamber is like a multifaceted glittering diamond reflecting and refracting a variety of portraits of desire and sexuality”
- “The stories in The Bloody Chamberare fired by the conviction that human nature is not immutable, that human beings are capable of change.”
Helen Simpson- “The heroines of these [Beauty and the Beast based] stories are struggling out of the straitjackets of history and ideology and biological essentialism”

Carter-“[On The Sadeian Women] I really can't see what's wrong with finding out about what the great male fantasies about women are”

Pankejeff- "Freud himself emplained his love for archaeology in that the psychoanalyst, like like archaeologiat in his evacuations, musr uncover layer after layer of the patient's psyche, before coming to the deepest, most valuable treasures"

Marina Warner- “Fairy tales were reviled in the first stirrings of post-war feminist liberation movements as part and parcel of the propaganda that kept women down.”
-“[Carter] refused to join in rejecting or denouncing fairy tales, but instead embraced the whole stigmatised genre, its stock characters and well-known plots, and with wonderful verve and invention, perverse grace and wicked fun, soaked them in a new fiery liquor that brought them leaping back to life.”
-“ she was to become fairy tale’s rescuer”
- “Carter’s fairy-tale heroines reclaim the night. She rewrites the conventional script formed over centuries of acclimatising girls – and their lovers – to a status quo of captivity and repression, and issues a manifesto for alternative ways of loving, thinking and feeling.”

Helen Simpson- “The Bloody Chamber is often wrongly described as a group of traditional fairy tales given a subversive feminist twist. In fact, these are new stories, not re-tellings.”

Carter- "My intention was not to do 'versions' or, as the American edition of the book said, horribly, 'adult' fairy tales, but to extract the latent content from the traditional stories and to use it as the beginnings of new stories."

Nanette - argues in Carter's defence that fairy tales perpetuate 'contempt for women' and that Carter's stories explore 'the current relations between the sexes' and challenge the convention that sexual freedom is the preserve of men only

Mariana Warner- “Carter sharpened the laconic chill of the Brothers’ cruel fairy tales like “Snow White” with her splintering fable of jealousy and incest, “The Snow Child”.”

BBC3 radio play Vampirella (Later LotHoL) 1976- Gave lots of background info on vampires and literary history

Carter- “For me, a narrative is an argument stated in fictional terms,”
-"My intention was not to do 'versions' or, as the American edition of the book said, horribly, 'adult' fairy tales, but to extract the latent content from the traditional stories and to use it as the beginnings of new stories."
-“I am the pure product of an advanced industrialised, post imperialist country in decline”
-“[On The Sadeian Women] I really can't see what's wrong with finding out about what the great male fantasies about women are”

Mariana Warner-“[Carter], like her own Red Riding Hood, she was nobody’s meat.”
-Storytelling for Angela Carter was an island full of noises and sweet airs, and like Caliban, who heard a thousand twangling instruments hum about his ears, she was tuned to an ethereal universe packed with sensations, to which she was alive with every organ.”

Andrea Dworkin- '[Carter is a] pseudo-feminist'