From the Bookshelf of Once Upon a Time...…

The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories

Angela Carter

Start date: February 1, 2025

Finish date: February 28, 2025

Discussion: 2025 Group Reads

Why we're reading this: February 2025 Group Reads
11/18/24 nominated by Fiona
[close] February 2025 Group Reads
11/18/24 nominated by Fiona

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2025 Group Reads

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What Members Thought

Jun 28, 2012 Jessica Andersen rated it really liked it

Shelves: vampires, shifters

This collection of short, fairytale-based stories was a really great read. Carter's sentences are complex, and image-evoking. "The Erl-King" especially reads like a poem, rather than a story. My favorites in the book were "The Bloody Chamber," a version of Bluebeard, and "The Lady of the House of Love." The latter was like Sleeping Beauty if she were a vampire instead of sleeping.

I would recommend this book. It is one that I am reading as part of my Great Female Fantasy/Sci-Fi authors series.

I ...more

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Jul 19, 2012 Parvathy rated it really liked it

Shelves: fairy-tale-retellings, strong-females, broken-characters, vampires-werewolves-shifters-etc, short-story-collections, thought-provoking

Fairy tales tend to draw on a small collection of basic themes. These themes include family relationships, succeeding materially, and finding a mate; Carter confirm, fairy tales are also embedded with sexual anxieties. Fairy tales tend to revolve around the protagonist's adventure, "quest," or problem at home. In the course of his or her story, the protagonist must conquer or escape evil, usually with the help of magic, in order to "live happily ever after." In its basic structure, the fairy tal
Fairy tales tend to draw on a small collection of basic themes. These themes include family relationships, succeeding materially, and finding a mate; Carter confirm, fairy tales are also embedded with sexual anxieties. Fairy tales tend to revolve around the protagonist's adventure, "quest," or problem at home. In the course of his or her story, the protagonist must conquer or escape evil, usually with the help of magic, in order to "live happily ever after." In its basic structure, the fairy tale reflects the human wish for knowledge, excitement, and eventual contentment. It also sympathizes with people's everyday experiences of evil or negativity, and their consequent wish that they could make these experiences disappear 'by magic.' As a whole, fairy tales confirm righteousness and condemn unfairness, thereby comforting readers with a sense that there is justice in the world.

The book was a bit slow and a trifle difficult to understand. At first it felt like one of the reading assignments you get at school to find the inner meaning and the hidden messages within the story. But the aspect that drew me to it was that the book contained fairy tale retelling. But a much more though provoking and darker version. The book did deliver what was expected from it. The first story was a retelling of the "Blue Beard". The story with its bold theme has always surprised me whenever I have seen it categorized as "Fairy Tale". A husband who has a room full of dead wives is not consistent with the squeaky clean stories that are read to us as bed time stories. But the story does take us back to the roots, the darker, original version of these tales that cannot be
cleaned up into the Disney mold.

A "bloody chamber" is present in some form in each of the ten stories, which is perhaps why Carter chose to name the collection The Bloody Chamber. The bloody chamber takes different forms throughout the book, but serves the same symbolic purpose. It is a room where violence and enlightenment occur simultaneously.
In "The Bloody Chamber," the bloody chamber is the Marquis's chamber of torture and death.
In "The Courtship of Mr. Lyon," the bloody chamber is the Beast's room.
In "The Tiger's Bride," the bloody chamber is also The Beast's room.
In "Puss-in-Boots," it is the heroine's room
In "The Snow Child," the bloody chamber can be the hole in the snow that the Count and Countess ride past where at the end , the Countess realizes that the rose "bites"; that the price of being a man's object is the pain of subservience and loss of identity.
In "The Lady of the House of Love," the bloody chamber is the Countess's room.
In "The Werewolf" and "The Company of Wolves," the bloody chamber is grandmother's house.
In "Wolf-Alice," the bloody chamber is the Duke's castle.
Carter experiments with mirror images as well as actual mirrors throughout the book. In her versions of fairy tales, Carter calls to attention the mirroring in her sources, where good and evil, human and animal, Beauty and Beast, are irreconcilable opposites. She then takes pains to confound these dichotomies in order to suggest that morality is not so clear-cut as we might like to think.
The major theme explored in the book include the objectification of women. Drawing parallels of these tales with real life emotions Carter has managed to reproduce a haunting book that leaves a lasting impression ...more

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