addition to including references to the oral fairy-tale tradition within her story, Carter embeds another type of fiction within her text, that of the Gothic novel. Gothic novels, which typically include remote castles and damsels in distress, were the popular literature of the nineteenth-century. The narrator goes into the Marquis's library looking for an escape, wanting ''to curl up on the rug before the blazing fire, lose myself in a cheap novel, munch on sticky liqueur chocolates.’’ But instead of reading such a novel, she finds herself living a version of it.

Consider for a moment the stylistic and structural similarities between Carter's story, which is set in turn-of-the-century France, and a Gothic nineteenth-century novel, Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre. This comparison will help illustrate the general characteristics of the Gothic tale and how they compare to ‘‘The Bloody Chamber.’’ Bronte's protagonist, like Carter's, is an inexperienced, poor young virgin who finds herself alone in a remote estate house with a dark, brooding, and rich owner, Mr. Rochester. As in Carter's story, Mr. Rochester's huge house contains a room which the heroine is forbidden to enter, and which contains a secret of the owner's past. But in Jane Eyre the discovery is not half so grisly as that in The Bloody Chamber: the room houses Mr. Rochester's insane Caribbean wife. The elements of an isolated, cold house; an agitated owner; an innocent visitor; and a horrible mystery all constitute the main attributes of the Gothic novel, a form of literature that flourished in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. That the secret in Jane Eyre is not half so grisly perhaps proves that Bronte's novel is not half so Gothic as Carter's story. Another difference is that, although Jane Eyre is curious, she obeys Mr. Rochester's edict and never goes into the room forbidden to her. A true Gothic heroine, like Carter's, goes where she should not.

In the afterword to her first volume of short stories, Fireworks, Carter positions her tales in the tradition of Edgar Allan Poe and E. T. A. Hoffmann, rather than with Bronte and her eighteenth-century predecessor, Ann Radcliffe, who is best known for The Mysteries of Udolpho. In that same afterword, Carter writes that the Gothic tale's ‘‘great themes are incest and cannibalism.’’ Jane Eyre addresses neither of these themes; Poe's ‘‘The Fall of the House of Usher’’ embraces one, that of incest; Carter's story arguably has a hint of both—in the Marquis' fondness for pornography and brutality.

More than one commentator has noted, like Mario Praz, that ‘‘Radcliffe and Sade belong to the same mental climate, the climate which produced so many incarnations of the theme of the persecuted maiden.’’ Sade is the eighteenth-century French pornographer whose name is the root of our word "sadistic" and whose fictions established the whips-and-chains practices of "sado-masochism." Indeed, Carter herself writes that ‘‘the tale has relations with the subliterary forms of pornography.’’ The Marquis de Sade, like Bluebeard and Mr. Rochester, is a forefather of Carter's Marquis.

It is this connection between folklore, Gothic, and pornography that allows Carter, as Patricia Duncker writes, to make ‘‘the mystery sexually explicit.’’ Duncker refers directly to the mystery at the center of the fairy tale, but it can be applied to the Gothic novel, for example, Radcliffe's Udolpho, as well. Both Bluebeard and Jane Eyre imply the sexual awakening of the heroines in the presence of their dark, brooding lovers. Behind locked doors, the former wives bear the marks of their violated virginity.

In making the sexuality of the tale's mystery explicit, Carter makes the curiosity explicit as well. When her narrator looks for a cheap novel in the library, she instead finds the Marquis's pornography collection. Among these volumes, she finds a detailed picture of a sado-masochistic scene entitled ‘‘Reproof of Curiosity.’’ The Marquis's tortures and murders can be read as more extreme versions of these reproofs. Other titles in this collection, ‘‘The Key of Mysteries’’ and ‘‘The Secret of Pandora's Box,’’ link the mysteries of the castle with the secrets of female sexuality. The presence of these volumes in his library add sexual innuendo to the narrator's observation that the Marquis hands her the keyring "as if he were giving a child a great, mysterious treat.'' And when he comes back to kill her, she says that ''I must pay the price of my new knowledge. The secret of Pandora's box; but he had given me the box.'' As the Marquis awakens in her a ''dark newborn curiosity,’’ the desire to know more about her sexuality, he hands her the keys to his house and to the bloody chamber. The secret that the heroine discovers is the sado-masochistic paradigm, her husband's position as torturer and hers as victim, which lies behind her newly awakened sexuality.

Examining the elements of folklore, Gothicism, and pornography in Carter's ‘‘The Bloody Chamber’’ helps give the heroine's predicament a historical perspective. The narrator bears the weight of centuries of literary history when she describes her position, ''I had played the game in which every move was governed by a destiny as oppressive and omnipotent as himself, since that destiny was himself; and I had lost.’’ The narrator feels that her "destiny" is written in the stories told before she writes her own. But Carter's story implies that writing within predetermined genres does not mean submitting to a destiny that is already written. Perhaps Carter's answer appears to be too simple when she revises the end of the fairy tale so that the mother instead of the brothers rescue the narrator; when she creates a Gothic heroine who has an involved and rich relationship with a mother; and when she has her Sadeian heroine survive and open a music school. But Carter's fiction is predetermined. It critiques and revises the thematic similarities of three types of writing with one ingenious narrative: a truly "Carterian" feat.

Source: Rebecca Laroche, "Overview of 'The Bloody Chamber'," in Short Stories for Students, Gale, 1998.
Laroche has taught literature and writing at Bates College, Albertus Magnus College, and Yale University.

As Carter suggests in her introduction to The Old Wives' Fairy Tale Book, intertextuality was embedded into the history of the fairy tale when Charles Perrault, the Grimm Brothers, and other compilers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries transposed oral folk tales into fairy tales. This transfer involved what [Julia] Kristeva refers to as ‘‘a new articulation of the thetic,’’ as the politics, economics, fashions, and prejudices of a sophisticated culture replaced the values of rural culture that form the context of oral folklore [Revolution in Poetic Language, 1990]. Part of this transfer, Carter argues, was the transposing of an essentially feminine form, the ‘‘old wives' tale,’’ onto a masculine one, the published text. Referring to the tradition of ‘‘Mother Goose,’’ Carter asserts that oral folktales record the ‘‘strategies, plots, and hard work’’ with which women have coped with the conditions of their lives but that in their oral form these narratives are considered ‘‘Old wives' tales—that is, worthless stories, untruths, trivial gossip, a derisive label that allots the art of storytelling to women at the exact same time as it takes all value from it’’ [The Old Wives' Fairy Tale Book, 1990]. In her 1979 collection of retold fairy tales, The Bloody Chamber, Carter shows an acute awareness of the changes that result from an oral to written transposition and calls attention to them by heightening the intertexuality of her narratives, making them into allegories that explore how sexual behavior and gender roles are not universal, but are, like other forms of social interaction, culturally determined. This theme is closely related to that of Carter's 1978 study of the writings of the Marquis de Sade, The Sadeian Woman, where she attacks what she calls the false universalizing of sexuality, which, tending to enforce the archetype of male aggression and female passivity, merely confuses ''the main issue, that relationships between the sexes are determined by history and by the historical fact of the economic dependence of women upon men.''

I wish to argue that Carter's use of intertextuality in The Bloody Chamber moves the tales from the mythic timelessness of the fairy tale to specific cultural moments, each of which presents a different problem in gender relations and sexuality. Although she recounts the plots of the same fairy tales—‘‘Beauty and the Beast’’ twice, ‘‘Little Red Riding Hood’’ three times—Carter changes the cultural context from tale to tale, and, as a result, each retelling generates a different narrative. The outcomes for her protagonists can be tragic or triumphant, the tone can be serious or farcical, depending on the historic and cultural circumstances. To demonstrate the range of the collection, I will consider two tales with the same scenario, a young, powerless woman underthe domination of an older, powerful male figure who is not only a threat to her virginity but a threat to her life. ‘‘The Bloody Chamber,'' a retelling of' 'Bluebeard,'' is set in the world of decadent turn-of-the-century French culture, among the operas of Wagner and the fashions of Paul Poiret. ‘‘The Snow Child’’ is set in medieval Europe, deep in a forest, and is based much more closely on its original, a version of ‘‘Snow White." "The Bloody Chamber’’ is a tale of feminine courage triumphant, while ' 'The Snow Child,’’ as its chilling title suggests, is a stark, uncompromising tale of sexuality as a function of overwhelming male power.

The lengthiest and perhaps the paradigmatic story of the collection, ‘‘The Bloody Chamber’’ explores the sexual symbolism of the secret room, making explicit the Freudian interpretation given by Bruno Bettelheim in The Uses of Enchantment that the ‘‘bloody chamber’’ is the womb. In addition to making the tale's latent sexual symbolism manifest, Carter also addresses in this story what she calls in The Sadeian Woman the "mystification" associated with the womb. The ''bankrupt enchantments of the womb’’ led, she writes, to the segregation and punishment of women; in ''The Bloody Chamber,'' Bluebeard, the connoisseur of women, makes his womblike secret chamber into a museum of tortured and murdered women.

Following the tradition recorded by Iona and Peter Opie [in The Classical Fairy Tales, 1974], that the original of Bluebeard was a notorious Breton nobleman, Carter places her version of the tale in a castle on the coast of Brittany but makes its owner a wealthy aesthete who is as much at home at a performance of Tristan at the Paris Opera as he is within his ancestral hall. If the secret room containing the corpses of his dead wives is likened to a womb, Bluebeard's castle is a metaphor for his sexuality. A phallic tower, it floats upon the ‘‘amniotic salinity of the ocean,’’ reminding Bluebeard's bride of an ''anchored, castellated ocean liner,’’ and becomes the stage for a symbolist version of the battle of the sexes. The fin de siècle time period is critical to Carter's interpretation of "Bluebeard," because she sees the bride's fate as possible only at the moment in history when images of female victimization and of female aggression converged.

Combining, like J. K. Huysmans, a taste for Catholic ritual and for sensual experimentation, Carter's Bluebeard displays an edition of Huysmans's La-bas ‘‘bound like a missal’’ among an extensive collection of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century pornography. Like Huysmans also, Bluebeard has discovered a group of symbolist painters whose imagery accords with his temperament. Among these images of young, attenuated, passive women, Carter includes some imaginary symbolist paint ings, such as Moreau's ‘‘famous Sacrificial Victim with the imprint of the lacelike chains on her pellucid skin'' and' 'Two or three late Gauguins, his special favourite the one of the tranced brown girl in the deserted house.’’ A willowy young music student, living in poverty with her widowed mother, the bride becomes a vehicle for Bluebeard's attempt to realize the decadent image of the dependent, virginal child-woman, ripe for tragedy.

Avis Lewallen has commented that she finds ‘‘The Bloody Chamber’’ the most disturbing of the tales in the collection, because of its lush, seductive descriptions of sexual exploitation and victimization. Carter, however, uses the language of the story not to lull the reader into ignoring the dangers posed by Bluebeard but instead to heighten the reader's awareness of the threat posed by the sadomasochistic underpinnings of much of decadent culture, which created a dangerously passive and readily victimized feminine ideal. In The Sadeian Woman, describing the ideal presented by Sade's victimized Justine, she writes, ‘‘She is obscene to the extent to which she is beautiful. Her beauty, her submissive-ness and false expectations that these qualities will do her some good are what make her obscene.'' The decadent sign system that surrounds this version of Bluebeard brings the sadomasochistic subtext of the original to the foreground by giving its murderous episodes the lush refinement of Beardsley' s illustrations of Salome.

Bluebeard, like his historical precursor the Marquis de Sade, is a producer of theatrical effects. His rooms are deliberately planned as stages for symbolic action, the bloody chamber a kind of wax museum of his previous wives, preserved in their last moments of agony, the mirrored bedroom with its ''grand, hereditary, matrimonial bed'' a set for "a formal disrobing of the bride." Clothing, in this theatrical context, becomes costume, in which, as in theater and religious ritual, the individual is subsumed by a role. The bride's dress (designed by Poiret, the inventor of the "hobble" skirt) and her wedding gift, "A choker of rubies, two inches wide, like an extraordinarily precious slit throat," not only situate her in fin de siècle France but also reflect the image of innocence, vulnerability, and victimization that Bluebeard desires. Nakedness becomes a kind of costume as well, in the overdetermined imagery of Bluebeard's bedroom. Watching herself being disrobed by him, the bride perceives herself as a pornographic object: ‘‘He in his London tailoring; she, bare as a lamb chop. Most pornographic of all confrontations.’’ In this scene the bride has been reduced to an unaccommodated body, while Bluebeard retains all the accoutrements of power, wealth, and taste.

However, Bluebeard has conveniently excised from his collection of fin de siècle imagery the era's complement to the woman-as-victim, the avatar of the New Woman, "She-who-must-be-obeyed." Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar point out that these complementary images appeared almost simultaneously in the late 1880s, when the harrowing mutilations and murders of women by Jack the Ripper took place at the same time as Rider Haggard's enormously popular novel She introduced a heroine who, by combining virtue with authority, represented ‘‘an entirely New Woman.’’ Gilbert and Gubar suggest that the emergence of female aggression in the suffrage movement generated a backlash of images of suffering, victimized women. Carter, in The Sadeian Woman, shares this interpretation when she argues that the real threat posed by the emancipation of women was the removal of ' 'the fraudulent magic from the idea of women.'' If Bluebeard's murders mirror those of Jack the Ripper, who was also obsessed with the womb, then Bluebeard's murders are avenged by a figure who also seems to have stepped out of the zeitgeist of the 1880s. The bride's mother rides onto the scene just as Bluebeard is preparing to dispatch his latest wife and kills him with a single shot from her dead husband's service revolver. Like Haggard's fearsome heroine, she is woman-as-avenger on a grand scale. At the tale's opening the bride calls her mother ‘‘eagle-featured, indomitable,’’ recalling that she ' 'had outfaced a junkful of Chinese pirates, nursed a village through a visitation of the plague, shot a man-eating tiger with her own hand and all before she was as old as I.’’ Appropriately, she reappears at the conclusion as a complement to her daughter's masochistic passivity, just at the point when the bride herself has begun to act in her own behalf and emancipate herself from Bluebeard's pornographic scenario.

Patricia Duncker reads the ending of ‘‘The Bloody Chamber’’ as carrying ‘‘an uncompromisingly feminist message’’ [Literature and History, Vol. 10, 1984], while all of the other tales in the collection, she feels, merely recapitulate patriarchal patterns of behavior. What Duncker perceives as an inconsistent application of feminist principles is, I believe, merely a reflection of Carter's project in this collection, to portray sexuality as a culturally relative phenomenon. The feminism, as well as the masochism of "The Bloody Chamber," is a feature of its turn-of-the-century setting. . . .

In The Sadeian Woman Carter writes, ‘‘the notion of a universality of female experience is a clever confidence trick,’’ a statement that neatly sums up her deuniversalizing of fairy tale plots in The Bloody Chamber. Situating her tales within carefully defined cultural moments, Carter employs a wide-ranging intertextuality to link each tale to the zeitgeist of its moment and to call attention to the literary fairy tale as a product, not of a collective unconscious but of specific cultural, political, and economic positions. In addition, focusing on the '' strategies, plots, and hard work'' of women allows Carter to reappropriate the ‘‘old wives' tale’’ as feminine narrative. In The Bloody Chamber, then, Carter deconstructs the underlying assumptions of the "official" fairy tale: that fairy tales are universal, timeless myths, that fairy tales are meant exclusively for an audience of children, and that fairy tales present an idealized, fantastic world unrelated to the contingencies of real life. Instead, Carter pushes Bruno Bettelheim's reading of fairy tales as Freudian fables even further and presents them as studies in the history of imagining sexuality and gender.

Source: Mary Kaiser, ‘‘Fairy Tale as Sexual Allegory: Intertextuality in Angela Carter's 'The Bloody Chamber',’’ in The Review of Contemporary Fiction, Vol. 14, no. 3, Fall, 1994, pp. 30-6.
Kaiser teaches English at Jefferson State Community College in Birmingham, Alabama.

The Bloody Chamber is mostly a collection of fairy tales rewritten to incorporate props of the Gothic and elements of a style designated "magic realism," in which a realistic consciousness operates within a surrealistic context. The characters are at once both abstractions and "real." The heroine in "The Tiger's Bride," for example, bemused by surreal events, comments, "what democracy of magic held this palace and fir forest in common? Or, should I be prepared to accept it as proof of the axiom my father had drummed into me: that, if you have enough money, anything is possible?" Symbolism is prevalent: white roses for sexual purity; lilies for sex and death; lions, tigers and wolves for male sexual aggression. Throughout the collection, specific attention is often drawn to the meaning of fairy tales themselves, and this has implications for the reading of Carter's stories.

In a perceptive but highly critical essay Patricia Duncker argues that the form of the fairy tale, along with all its ideological ramifications, proves intractable to attempted revision:

Carter is rewriting the tales within the strait-jacket of their original structures. The characters she re-creates must, to some extent, continue to exist as abstractions. Identity continues to be defined by role, so that shifting the perspective from the impersonal voice to the inner confessional narrative, as she does in several of the tales, merely explains, amplifies and reproduces rather than alters the original, deeply, rigidly sexist psychology of the erotic. [Literature and History, Spring 1984]

While I agree with Duncker's overall analysis, I think she significantly overlooks the use of irony, particularly the effect produced by the "inner confessional narrative," which both acknowledges patriarchal structure and provides a form of critique against it. The ultimate position taken up may be politically untenable, but at the same time the ironic voice does not wholeheartedly endorse the patriarchal view ... The question of choice, or lack of it, is echoed throughout the tales ... As Patricia Duncker puts it, "we are watching ... the ritual disrobing of the willing victim of pornography."

This comment is particularly applicable to the tale "The Bloody Chamber," which begins,

I remember how, that night, I lay awake in the wagon—lit in a tender, delicious ecstasy of excitement, my burning cheek pressed against the impeccable linen of the pillow and the pounding of my heart mimicking that of the great pistons ceaselessly thrusting the train that bore me through the night, away from Paris, away from girlhood, away from the white enclosed quietude of my mother's apartment, into the unguessable country of marriage.

The rhythm and language of this long sentence directly associates the movement of the train with the sexual anticipation of the adolescent heroine, with an imagination perhaps bred on Gothic horror stories. It is a tale full of Gothic motifs, and it plays with desire and danger, placing the reader, through the first-person narrative, in the heroine-victim position. This is the tale of one of Bluebeard's wives, and the heroine, seduced by wealth, power and mystery, skirts death in the quest for sexual knowledge. The narrative strategy, therefore, puts us the readers imaginatively within this ambivalent willing-victim position, and the tale attempts to illustrate not only the dangers of seduction, but also the workings of pleasure and danger seemingly implicit in sexuality for women. Again the narrative draws attention to the connection between material wealth and marriage. The heroine's mother has "beggared herself for love" and thus tries to ensure her daughter's economic security by getting her a musical education. The heroine's corruption is threefold: material, as she is seduced by wealth; sexual, as she discovers her own sexual appetite; and moral, in the sense that "like Eve" she disobeys her master-husband's command.

But this is a victim who is not only willing but also recognises that she has been bought:

This ring, the bloody bandage of rubies, the wardrobe of clothes from Poiret and Worth, his scent of Russian leather—all had conspired to seduce me so utterly that I could not say I felt one single twinge of regret for the world of tartines and maman that now receded from me as if drawn away on string, like a child's toy...

And, when she comes to pay the price, "I guessed it might be so—that we should have a formal disrobing of the bride, a ritual from the brothels ... my purchaser unwrapped his bargain." Her slow recognition of the real essence of the bargain she has struck is ironically underlined by the associations with death: "A choker of rubies, two inches wide, like an extraordinarily precious slit throat;" "funereal lilies;" and a husband with eyes "dark and motionless as those eyes the ancient Egyptians painted upon their sarcophagi."

Her own sexual potential is another form of corruption. Again this is conveyed through contradictory impulses, and there is a sensual, physical detail in the writing:

The perfume of the lilies weighed on my senses; when I thought that, henceforth, I would always share these sheets with a man whose skin, as theirs did, contained that toad-like, clammy hint of moisture, I felt a vague desolation that within me, now my female wound had healed, there had awoken a certain queasy craving like the cravings of pregnant women for the taste of coal or chalk or tainted food, for the renewal of his caresses ... I lay in bed alone. And I longed for him. And he disgusted me.

The intermingling of disgust and desire is not so much fear of the husband as for the sexuality in herself:

I seemed reborn in his unreflective eyes, reborn in unfamiliar shapes. I hardly recognised myself from his descriptions of me and yet, and yet—might there not be a grain of beastly truth in them? And, in the red firelight, I blushed again, unnoticed, to think he might have chosen me because, in my innocence, he sensed a rare talent for corruption.

The "talent for corruption" is not only a willingness to be bought but also perhaps a willingness to participate in "the thousand, thousand baroque intersections of flesh upon flesh," amply detailed in a connoisseur's collection of sado-masochistic volumes found in the library.

Of all the tales in the volume I found "The Bloody Chamber" most troubling in terms of female sexuality, largely because of the very seductive quality of the writing itself. As readers we are asked to place ourselves imaginatively as masochistic victims in a pornographic scenario and to sympathise in some way with the ambivalent feelings this produces. The heroine's own subsequent recognition of total manipulation does not allay my unease at being manipulated by the narrative to sympathise with masochism. The writing playfully equivocates between explanation of the victims position and condemnation of the sadistic perpetrator of atrocities.

The husband puts the heroine to the test. He ostensibly goes away on business leaving her the keys to the castle with strict instructions not to enter his private room, which of course she does. There she discovers not only the mutilated bodies of his three former wives, but also the fate that awaits her. It seems, however, that the moral of the tale—that wives should not disobey their husbands—gets lost on the way, since as this quotation shows she had no choice in the matter anyway:

The secret of Pandora's box; but he had given the box, himself, knowing I must learn the secret. I had played a game in which every move was governed by a destiny as oppressive and omnipotent as himself, since that destiny was himself; and I had lost. Lost at that charade of innocence and vice in which he had engaged me. Lost, as the victim loses to the executioner.

The husband promptly returns to claim his victim and what saves her is not the presence of the blind piano-tuner—he is merely a comfort—but her mother's prescience. Puzzled at her newly-wed daughter crying during a telephone call, she has intuitively recognised danger and flown to her rescue. Thus the denouement gives us female revenge against male tyranny, but the heroine must wear the mark of her "shame" on her forehead forever. To be branded as guilty, despite recognition of the manipulation to which she has been subject, seems somewhat unfair. This is the only tale where the mother figure plays an important and positive role. In the others, as in their fairy-tale originals, mothers are either absent, insignificant or bad....

The problem with Carter's attempts to foreground the relationship between fairy tales and reality, a productive exercise, is that the action for the heroines is contained within the same ideological parameters. So the actual constructedness of reality and the ideological premises of fairy tales remain intact. The tiger's bride, like the other heroines, realises the "truth" of the "nursery fears" and chooses a non-materialistic, animal sexuality, but she does not have the option of not choosing it. Within the framework of the tale her choice appears to be a liberating one, but in reality it is not, despite Carter's Sadean proposition that misogyny can be undermined by women's refusal to be sexual victims and by their adoption of a more sexually aggressive role.

Although there are dangers in comparing theoretical and fictional writing, I feel it is perfectly justifiable to argue that many of the ideas in The Bloody Chamber rest on Carter's interpretation of Sade, even if they do not fulfil her own analysis of the mechanisms of the historical process. It is possible to say that some of the tales "render explicit the nature of social relations" as outlined in Carter's definition of the "moral pornographer," but explanation is not always enough. Indeed, "The Bloody Chamber" tale, through its equivocation, borders on the reactionary. We do have to address questions of binary thinking as it affects gender and sexuality, but Carter's prescribed action for her heroines within stereotypical options is ultimately politically untenable. Her use of irony might blur the boundaries at times but it does not significantly attack deep-rooted ways of thinking or feeling.

Source: Avis Lewallen, ''Wayward Girls but Wicked Women? Female Sexuality in Angela Carter's 'The Bloody Chamber',’’ in Perspectives in Pornography: Sexuality in Film and Literature, edited by Gary Day and Clive Bloom, Macmillan Press, 1988, pp. 144-57.

When we turn to the fairy tales we are most familiar with, preserved and transmitted by Perrault and the Grimm brothers, what we see is that in our culture there are different developmental paradigms for boys and girls. In fairy tales, boys are clever, resourceful, and brave. They leave home to slay giants, outwit ogres, solve riddles, find fortunes. Girls, on the other hand, stay home and sweep hearths, are patient, enduring, self-sacrificing. They are picked on by wicked step-mothers, enchanted by evil fairies. If they go out, they get lost in the woods. They are rescued from their plights by kind woodsmen, good fairies, and handsome princes. They marry and live happily ever after...

What Adrienne Rich calls ''the great unwritten story’’ of the ''cathexis between mother and daughter’’ [Of Woman Born, 1976] can be written many ways ... [A] mother is not only her daughter's first love object. She is also her first and therefore most impressive image of adult womanhood. It is this aspect of the mother/daughter relationship that Angela Carter emphasizes in her retelling of ''Bluebeard,'' the first and title story of The Bloody Chamber. Here the strong bond between mother and daughter figures as a kind of "maternal telepathy’’ that sends not her brothers (as in the original) but her mother to the curious bride's rescue. As Bluebeard's sword ascends for the fatal blow, his young bride's mother bursts through the gate like a Valkyrie—or an Amazon—and fires ‘‘a single, irreproachable bullet'' through his head.

It is significant that this fighting mother appears in the first story of The Bloody Chamber. ‘‘What do we mean by the nurture of daughters?’’ Adrienne Rich asks. Since ''women growing into a world so hostile to us need a very profound kind of loving in order to learn to love ourselves,’’ she concludes that ''the most important thing one woman [a mother] can do for another [her daughter] is to illuminate and expand her sense of actual possibilities.’’ A mother ‘‘who is a fighter’’ gives her daughter a sense of life's possibilities. Following her example, Bluebeard's widow and her "sisters" in the stories that follow are enabled to explore life's possibilities, to develop into adult women by learning to love themselves.

Source: Ellen Cronan Rose, ‘‘Through the Looking Glass: When Women Tell Fairy Tales,’’ in The Voyage In: Fictions of Female Development, edited by Elizabeth Abel, Marianne Hirsch, Elizabeth Langland, eds., University Press of New England, 1983, pp. 209-27.