The Bloody Chamber (1979)
...essay "Angela Carter's The Bloody Chamber and the Decolonization of Feminine Sexuality", that it came to mould the way in which Carter herself was regarded in the popular imagination. As Carter herself argued strongly in the Sadeian Woman, "if women allow themselves to be consoled for their culturally determined lack of access to the modes of intellectual debate by the invocation of hypothetical great goddesses, they are simply flattering themselves into submisiion (a technique often used on them by men)". "The Bloody Chamber" continues to be one of her most widely-debated works. For although the short stories in "The Bloody Chamber" exploit a familiar narrative form, and hence might be considered rather more acessible than her earlier work, they are nevertheless equally unsettling in their apparent eroticising of sexual violence and victimisation. Carter wanted to draw the reader's attention to the often unpalatable realities t...