angela carter the bloody chamber short story

The element of magic – the blood – does not take the reader from one world to another as might happen in a true fairy story. In that sense, ‘The Bloody Chamber’ is not truly a fairy story, strictly speaking, since it takes place in a supposedly ‘real world’ – or more precisely in a literary world, modelled, according to Carter, upon the work of the turn of the century French author, Colette. Tolkien refers to as faerie or the ‘perilous realm’ – is deliberately suppressed.

A broad, more generalised, sense of this is reproduced in ‘The Bloody Chamber’, but the specific idea of another reality – one that J.R.R. By posing as part of the normal, everyday world, holding a fine party and feast for the family he hopes to marry into, Bluebeard succeeds in drawing his prey into his other world: one filled with untold wealth and hidden horror. The impossibility of this, and the fact that it is introduced so matter-of-factly in the opening to Perrault’s story alerts the reader to the presence of an alternate reality – albeit one uncomfortably close to the actual world of seventeenth century marriage alliances and social events. But there are significant pointers towards a more magical world, the most important being the colour of the antagonist’s beard. Every other ‘fairy-tale’ element in the original is toned down (so that there are only three murdered wives, rather than a whole roomful of them hanging on meat hooks), or is put into a more familiar ‘realistic’ context, so that the vaguely aristocratic and faintly magical Bluebeard becomes a specific Marquis living in a specific castle in Brittany, presumably alluding to the Marquis de Sade who may or may not have been guilty of similar atrocities.Ĭompared to some fairy stories, there is not a great deal that is obviously supernatural in ‘Bluebeard’. These instances of the supernatural are the only ones included by Carter.

Angela carter the bloody chamber short story