The Bloody Chamber And Other Stories:Rewriting The Fairy Tale In A Gothic Way

Angela Carter is an English writer who is famous for her varied writing style and controversial content. She is a novelist, journalist, dramatist, short story writer and the author of children’s books. However, it is her short stories that won her the world wide reputation. The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories is a collection of short stories by her, whose ultimate death in 1992 brought her work extensive critical attention. The book was first published in 1979, at which time it won the Cheltenham Festival of Literature prize.Carter published The Bloody Chamber two years after translating the fairy tales of Charles Perrault into English, but she also added some new ideas. In some, the heroine herself claims a voice by acting as narrator. Carter based the book’s title and longest story, "The Bloody Chamber," on the legend of Bluebeard. "The Courtship of Mr. Lyon" and "The Tiger’s Bride" both originates from Beauty and the Beast. "The Snow Child" is based on a somewhat obscure version of Snow White, but it has been changed dramatically. "The Werewolf" "The Company of Wolves," and "Wolf-Alice" all draw on versions of Red Riding Hood and these stories will interpret the classic one from different angles.It is not hard to find that all these stories are based on traditional stories but they are quite subversive and with lots of gothic elements which is quite different from the conventional fairy tales. Carter combines these two different genres together into a gothic fairy tales to subvert some conventional ideas on women in the patriarchal society.The body part of this thesis can be totally divided into three parts. The first part of the thesis will explain what is the Gothic, including characterize the Gothic genre, introduce the development of this genre, and try to find some Gothic elements, motifs in The Bloody Chamber to support the argument that Carter resorts to the Gothic elements to rewrite the fairy tales in order to subvert the typical patriarchal structure and express her own radical feminist views.In the second part, by comparing the similarities and differences between the two genres, the thesis will analyze how Carter tries to put these two traditions together.In the final part, the thesis will discuss the effects of this Gothic and fairy tale hybrid genre so that to argue the purpose of Angela Carter’s writing techniques.