The Bloody Chamber (1979)

Angela Carter takes your average fairy tales and brings a twist. In fairytales you expect happy endings, with the female being madly in love with prince charming who will make a happily ever after.

Carter's tales are not what you would typically expect of fairy tales. In this book there are unique versions of the stories we grew up with. Her goal for this book is to empower women and to give a voice to the female characters who would usually be the damsels in distress.

The language in this book helps the reader get a lifelike experience with the characters and settings. For example we can see this In the tale "The Lady of the House of Love", " a girl with the fragility of the skeleton of a moth, so thin, so frail, that her dress seemed to him to hang suspended, as if untenanted in the dark air, a fabulous lending, a self-articulated garnet in which she lived like a ghost in a machine".

The author gives a variety of different versions on Red Riding Hood with "Wolf Alice" , "The Werewolf" and "The Company of Wolves". These tales really focus on the characters' strength to not wander from the path, and the consequences are not usually what we would expect of fairy tales. In "The Werewolf", the girl kills a werewolf on her way to grandmothers house. "The Company of Wolves" , riding hood and a handsome man challenge each other on who will arrive to grandmothers house first, the man is who arrives first. "Wolf Alice" is a tale where a girl was raised with wild beasts and she finds who she really is in the end.

"The Bloody Chamber" and "The Lady of the House of Love" are the two best tales in this book. "The Bloody Chamber" is the main story. This tale is about women who do not depend on men in life threatening situations. The women in this story holds all the authority to make her own decisions rather than be under control of her husband. "The Lady of the House" is about a female vampire and a young soldier. The vampire is a strong girl who is willing to make sacrifices.

The Bloody Chamber and other stories are readings that represent women in a positive and powerful way, rather than the typical characters that rely on men when trouble is close.

As amazing as I'd remembered, but...much darker & more sex-saturated. Yikes, I picked this for bookclub! : /
( )

There's the indulgence of the mind, and there's the pleasure of the senses. One can fill oneself up on the former to the brim, hold firmly to one's breast its lack of ignorance, its sophisticated patterns of thought, its know-how translating to into a delightful net of endless know-whens and know-whats and whatever know-wherefore's your precious neurons may desire. There's a unique satisfaction to be had in those sorts of theoretical acrobatics, that complex weave of states of mind that are fully aware and fairly smug about their enlightened existence. But my god, there's also something to be said for the sensual things in life. Revel all you want in the theory of evolution, but don't forget to take advantage of what this millenia long build up of exquisite physicality has gifted you with.

A simple thing to do, that last part, wouldn't you think? This book certainly had no trouble with spilling out in a languorously lurid display its myriad charms and carnal glory, many if not all of the stories focused on the well earned pleasures of females taking charge of their own. And yet, look at the society of today, a heterosexually dominated rape culture complete with the most hypocritical set of double standards to ever exist, where every boy is a Casanova and every girl is either an easy slut or a virginal saint. Never both. That's a physical impossibility, didn't you know, since the very word 'virginity' implies that a cock has the power to change the inherent dichotomy of whatever it fucks. Boys can be virgins too, but the lack of it never seemed to compromise their intrinsic value in the history of cultures worldwide. Quite the opposite, in fact. And on the other hand, you get the dowry. Unicorns. Virginal white caked in contextual definitions of simpering innocence and shining perfection, ideological imperatives that soak the fairy tales choked down at the cradle and continue forever on in trash à la Fifty Shades of Gray.

Spare me of this puritanical rot seeping into society, enough to make a biological imperative a sin in some situations and a shameful state in all cases female. Deliver me from erotica that claims to pander to anything besides the patriarchy, and is subsumed by it all the more. Give me a heady mix of whirling words that seduce the senses without sacrificing the self on an altar of supreme obedience and abused devotion, offering pleasure with no sense of whatever guilt the world attempts to infuse it with. Keep your knights in shining armor who think the nub between their legs makes them a god over everything that lacks it. I'll take the man who sees the woman as an equal in all things in the bedroom and without, the woman who will kiss you if you treat her right and spill your throat out in a righteous flow if you treat her otherwise.

You have your body. You have your dignity. You know that others have these, and that you must respect them. You don't need anything else. ( )

The short stories in Angela Carter's The Bloody Chamber are all based on fairy-tales, all more or less familiar -- although I couldn't call one of them to mind until I looked it up. She modernised them in places, tugged them and twisted them a bit, but they're still basically recognisable. Some of them she had more than one go at -- Beauty and the Beast, Little Red Riding Hood.

The writing is amazing, rich and intricate. Sometimes a little too much so, I think, like the beginning of The Erl-King. There was hardly room to figure out what was going on between description. A lot of the imagery was bright, startling, brilliant, but it was very tightly packed.

The stories themselves... I'm not sure I really liked them. I found them interesting, and I liked the way they played with the original stories, but they weren't comfortable, weren't something I really wanted to read, I guess. Still, I'm glad I read it -- the little twists on the stories, the ways she brought women to the foreground -- that's interesting, and important. ( )

This is my desert island book. I have read it countless times. It is the text I consult in my head when I feel that life is without meaning. It always redeems. ( )