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Date: Wednesday, April 1st

Session two will be discussing and analysing Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber and optional short stories. (linked below). You may remember it from your English Literature class, but this is an opportunity to unpack the feminism and language in these short stories completely unfiltered. So prepare your hottest takes (and maybe a martini) and join us

Click to access Thebloodychamber_1979.pdf

Questions

1. Carter makes the husband a Marquis in reference to the Marquis de Sade. In The Sadeian Woman: The Ideology of Pornography, also published in 1979, Carter states: “I really can’t see what’s wrong with finding out about what the great male fantasies about women are.” The preface of the book is subtitled ‘Pornography in the Service of Women’. Why does Carter want to ‘find out’ about stereotypical male fantasies and could the subtitle of The Sadeian Woman be applied to ‘The Bloody Chamber’? Perhaps Carter wants to ‘find out’ about male fantasies because it’s not very commonly mentioned in several stories. Or maybe even it’s about having both the perspectives of women and men in terms of sexuality.

2. In the Sadiean Woman” refers to Carter expresses equal concern with myth and fairy tale. She suggests that the negative stereotypes of women constructed in pornography derive from myth. She later wrote The Bloody Chamber which combined both myth and pornography to create an erotic sort of “fairytale.”

3. Helene Cixous writes that ‘woman must put herself into the text – as into the world and into history – by her own movement. Does Carter achieve this in ‘The Bloody Chamber’, and indeed is she trying to? “to put oneself” could suggest being honest about how you feel which I think that Carter does in the Bloody Chamber as the narrator is a female character, hence we as readers understand the narrator’s feelings about every situation she is in. I think that Carter intended to have “put a woman out” as having a woman narrator was important to highlight the opinions that women may have as well and it gives importance to that in this book which may be the opposite of what it was when this book was written.