A Level English Literature - The Bloody
Chamber and Other Stories critics 2023
Update
What does Merja Makinen say in her essay "Angela Carter's "The
... [Show More] Bloody Chamber" and
the Decolonization of Feminine Sexuality"? - ANS-- Angela Carter texts are violent,
excessive, and assertive; they also enable expression of female sexual perversity
- the book of stories about fairy stories and this irony enables it to deconstruct the form
and challenges binary, traditional thinking
- Carter engages with feminist discourse to remain a feminist writer, not just someone
who writes about women
- Carter's later texts are more popular, partially because of a slight softening in textual
aggression, but also because magical realism was becoming more popular in Britain
- people are interested in buying books that have sex in them and engage in eroticism;
Carter uses things to represent sexual desires, like animals, as well as talking about it
more explicitly - this is empowering for women because they can own their sexuality
and sometimes sexual perversity as well
- the collection as a whole looks at the different presentations of female desire and
sexuality
- she references an interesting argument from Patricia Duncker that all the beasts are
really just men, not just projections of feminine sexual desire
What are a few quotes from the most difficult to understand essay ever: Merja
Makinen's "Angela Carter's "The Bloody Chamber" and the Decolonization of Feminine
Sexuality"? :') - ANS-- Folk tales have 'encoded the dark and mysterious elements of
the psyche' / 're-written...where the curiosity of the women protagonists is rewarded
(rather than punished) and their sexuality is active (rather than passive or suppressed
altogether)'
- 'Carter's strength is precisely in exploding the stereotypes of women as passive,
demure cyphers'
- 'Until we can take on board the disturbing and even violent elements of female
sexuality, we will not be able to decode the full feminist agenda of these fairy-tales'
- 'The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories, published in 1979, is also midway between
the disquietingly savage analyses of patriarchy of the 1960s and 1970s ... and the
exuberant novels of the 1980s and early 1990s' (that's also a lovely bit of context)
- 'the focus is on mocking and exploding the contrictive cultural stereotypes and in
celebrating the sheer ability of the female protagonists to survive, unscathed by the
sexist ideologies'
- 'textual uses of violence as a feminist strategy'
- 'I want to argue that Carter's tales do not simply 'rewrite' the old tales by fixing roles of
active sexuality for their female protagonists - they 're-write' them by playing with and
upon (if not preying upon) the earlier misogynistic version'
- 'beasts can easily stand for the projected desires, the drive for pleasure of women'
- 'Each tale takes up the theme of the earlier one and comments on a different aspect of
it, to present a complex variation of female desire and sexuality'
- 'motif of skin and flesh as signifying pleasure, and of meat as signifying economic
objectification, recurs throughout the ten tales' / 'The other recurring motif is that of the
gaze, but it is not always simply the objectification of the woman by male desire'
What does Patricia Duncker say about Angela Carter's use of beasts? - ANS-The
beasts in the tales represent men; they're not just projections of feminine sexual desire
What's one quote from Kathleen E. B. Manley's essay "The Woman in Process in
Angela Carter's "The Bloody Chamber"" that I can remember? - ANS-Readers 'often
see the protagonist as doing little, for the most part, to avoid the fate her husband
planned for her'
What is the single quote I know from Clare Middleton's piece in the English review "The
Bloody Chamber by Angela Carter"? - ANS-'However, in each case these Gothic
elements are ultimately subverted by Carter, who rejects the stereotypical helpless
Gothic female protagonist in favour of women who take matters into their own hands'
What does Cemre Mimoza Bartu say in their essay "The lambs that lie down with the
tigers: Angela Carter's feline tales as parodic rewritings of Madame Leprince De
Beaumont's: 'Beauty and the Beast'"? - ANS-- the commodification of women is
problematised in both 'The Courtship of Mr Lyon' and 'The Tiger's Bride' - the girl is
exchanged for a rose or money in a card bet and objectified → she's used as a trade
material in a male-dominated world
- Beauty in Courtship is more passive
- the males being animals is a callback to the expression of their base (potentially
sexual) instincts
What are two neat quotes from Cemre Mimoza Bartu's essay "The lambs that lie down
with the tigers..."? - .... [Show Less]