Reading Order
The Bloody Chamber Reading Order
Angela Carter's The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories (1979) is a collection of ten stories — retellings of fairy tales including Bluebeard, Little Red Riding Hood, Beauty and the Beast, and Puss in Boots — that transform the source material from the inside, using the tales' structures to expose the sexual politics embedded in them and to imagine what female desire and power might look like outside the constraints those politics impose. The founding text of feminist fairy tale fiction and one of the most influential British story collections of the twentieth century.
Where to start
The Bloody Chamber
Complete The Bloody Chamber Book List
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The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories
Angela Carter·1979·The complete standalone collection; each story works independently. Read in any order, though the title story is the best entry point. - Buy
The Passion of New Eve
OptionalAngela Carter·1977·Carter's hallucinatory novel about a man who is surgically transformed into a woman in a dystopian future America — the most sustained fictional treatment of gender as construction from the work that surrounds The Bloody Chamber.
The Bloody Chamber — Frequently Asked Questions
What fairy tales does The Bloody Chamber retell?
The Bloody Chamber retells ten fairy tales across the collection. 'The Bloody Chamber' (the title story) retells Bluebeard — the aristocrat who murders his wives and hides their bodies in a locked chamber. 'The Courtship of Mr Lyon' and 'The Tiger's Bride' both retell Beauty and the Beast from different angles and with different conclusions. 'Puss-in-Boots' retells the Perrault tale as an erotic comedy. 'The Erl-King' retells a Germanic folk tale about a forest spirit who lures women. 'The Snow Child' is a compressed and disturbing retelling of Snow White. 'The Lady of the House of Love' is a Gothic vampire story using the sleeping beauty tale. 'The Werewolf,' 'The Company of Wolves,' and 'Wolf-Alice' are three variations on Little Red Riding Hood, each approaching the same material from a different angle; 'The Company of Wolves' is the most famous and was later adapted by Carter herself into a film by Neil Jordan.
What is Carter's feminist project in The Bloody Chamber?
Carter's stated project in The Bloody Chamber — articulated in her nonfiction work The Sadeian Woman (1979), published the same year — is to use the fairy tale not to reinforce its sexual ideology but to expose and transform it. The fairy tales Carter works with are explicitly sexual in ways that the sanitized versions read to children obscure: Bluebeard is about a man who murders women who discover his secrets; Little Red Riding Hood is about a girl whose journey through the forest is a journey into sexual danger; Beauty and the Beast is about a woman learning to love a monster. Carter's retellings make this sexuality explicit and then transform the power dynamics: in 'The Bloody Chamber,' the wife's mother arrives on horseback to kill Bluebeard; in 'The Company of Wolves,' Red Riding Hood seduces the wolf. The female characters in Carter's versions are not passive victims of male power but agents who inhabit, negotiate, and sometimes subvert it.
How has The Bloody Chamber influenced subsequent writers?
The Bloody Chamber is one of the most influential British story collections of the last century and has directly shaped the feminist horror and fairy tale retelling tradition that includes Salman Rushdie (who called Carter 'one of the most important writers' of his generation), Sarah Waters, A.S. Byatt, Neil Gaiman, and more recently Carmen Maria Machado — whose 'The Husband Stitch' in Her Body and Other Parties is explicitly in dialogue with Carter's project of transforming the sexual politics of horror's source material. Carter also influenced the academic field of fairy tale studies, which underwent a feminist reorientation in the 1980s and 1990s partly in response to her work. 'The Company of Wolves' was adapted into a film by Neil Jordan in 1984, with a screenplay by Carter herself; the film is itself an important work of feminist horror cinema.
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