Now to continue with our revision of The Bloody Chamber and to ensure that you are able to
fulfil the requirements of AO3, ( Explore connections and comparisons between different literary texts, informed by interpretations of other readers) re-read The Lady of the House of Love, look at the critical interpretations below and answer the following questions:
Think about the extract and discuss whether it -
1. Gives you any new knowledge/ideas that might be useful in reading the story.
2. Does it confirm or does it challenge your own interpretation.
Highlight one or two short phrases which you might use in an essay to develop your argument or viewpoint. Write a paragraph in which you incorporate a part of the quotation into an essay either for Section A or Section B.
In her late twentieth century fiction, Carter powerfully, and often critically, demonstrates the reversal of values and identifications that occurs via the Gothic genre. Otherness takes centre stage: sexual transgression, dark desire, and fantastic deviance wonderfully subvert the restrictive orders or reason, utility and paternal morality . . . In Gothic times margins may become the norm and occupy a more central cultural place.
Fred Botting, 'Aftergothic: consumption machines and black holes,' in The Cambridge Companion to Gothic Fiction (Cambridge UP, 2002).
Carter has. . . been seen critically as part of the new wave of contemporary women writers of the Gothic for her use of paradox, irony, myth, fairy tale and horror tropes to critique the contemporary world. One of her favourite sublects for Gothic and horror writing is the gendered construction and representations of power which render women as automata, puppets and femmes fatale. Carter's rewriting of cerain fairy tales and horror scenarios, including the female vampire and the werewolf, celebrate sexuality . . . or critique family tyrannies and patriarchal power.
Gina Wisker Angela Carter, A Beginner's Guide.' ( Hodder & Stoughton, 2003.)
. . . her characters are forever escaping, socially, mentally or physically, the traps laid by men. If she deals with established stereotypes in 'The Bloody Chamber' rather than fully fleshed out characters, then this is becasue fairy tales clothe themselves in stereotypes and archetypes.
Jeff Vendermeer, The Scriptorium.
http://www.themodernword.com/scriptorium/carter.html
In gothic fiction, Angela Carter wrote in 1974, 'characters and events are exaggerated beyond reality, to become symbols, ideas, passions. . . style will tend to become ornate and unnatural - and thus operate against the perennial human desire to believe the word as fact...(the Gothic) retains a singular moral function - that of provoking unease.'
Christopher Frayling, 'Introduction' in The Gothic Reader - A Critical Anthology. (Tate, 2006.)
Perhaps we either need to accept that these stories are not fairy tales at all, or radically re-think what a fairy tale is. After all, while Carter's two 'Virago Book(s) of Fairy Tales' (1991 + 1993) are self-evidently collections of revisionary fairy stories, can the same so easily be said of a collection called 'The Bloody Chamber'? Quite clearly, rather than being fairy-tales which contain a few Gothic elements, these are actually Gothic tales that prey upon the restrictibe enclosures of fairty-tale formulae in a manner that threatens to become 'masochistically' self-destructive.
Lucie Armitt 'The Fragile Frames of The Bloody Chamber' quoted in Sarah Gamble, The Fiction of Angela Carter - AReader's Guide to Essential Criticism. (Palgrave, Macmillan, 2001.)
The heroines of these stories are struggling out of the straitjackets of history and ideology and biological essentialism. "There is a story in The Bloody Chamber called 'The Lady of the House of Love' " said Carter "part of which derives from a movie version that I saw of a story by Dostoevsky. And in the movie. . . the woman, who is a very passive person and is very much in distress, asks herself the question, 'can a bird sing only the song it knows, or can it learn a new song?' " Have we got the capacity at all of singing new songs? It's very important that if we haven't , we might as well stop now.
Helen Simpson, review of The Bloody Chamber. (The Guardian June 24 2006.)
For more critical interpretations, including one by Margaret Atwood then look at Lorna Sage's brilliant Flesh and the Mirror: Essays on the Art of Angela Carter. Virago, 1994.
