The Bloody Chamber
First edition
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| Author | Angela Carter |
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| Cover artist | Malcolm Ashman |
| Country | United Kingdom |
| Language | English |
| Genre | Magical realism, short story anthology |
| Publisher | Gollancz |
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Publication date
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1979 |
| Media type | Print (Paperback) |
| ISBN | ( from January 2007) |
| OCLC | 409990414 |
The Bloody Chamber (or The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories) is a collection of short fiction by Angela Carter. It was first published in the United Kingdom in 1979 by Gollancz and won the Cheltenham Festival Literary Prize. All of the stories share a common theme of being closely based upon fairytales or folk tales. However, Angela Carter has stated:
My intention was not to do 'versions' or, as the American edition of the book said, horribly, 'adult' fairy tales, but to extract the latent content from the traditional stories.
The anthology contains ten stories: "The Bloody Chamber", "The Courtship of Mr Lyon", "The Tiger's Bride", "Puss-in-Boots", "The Erl-King", "The Snow Child", "The Lady of the House of Love", "The Werewolf", "The Company of Wolves" and "Wolf-Alice".
The tales vary greatly in length, with the novelette "The Bloody Chamber" being "more than twice the length of any of the other stories, and more than thirty times the length of the shortest [the vignette "The Snow Child"]."
The anthology's contents are also reprinted in Carter's Burning Your Boats.
The stories within "The Bloody Chamber" are explicitly based on fairy tales. Carter was no doubt inspired by the works of author and fairytale collector Charles Perrault, whose fairy tales she had translated shortly beforehand.
(based on Bluebeard)
A teenage girl marries an older, wealthy French Marquis, whom she does not love. When he takes her to his castle, she learns that he enjoys sadistic pornography and takes pleasure in her embarrassment. She is a talented pianist, and a young man, a blind piano tuner, hears her music and falls in love with her. The woman's husband tells her that he must leave on a business trip to New York and forbids her to enter one particular room while he is away. When he leaves she feels sad and lonely and telephones her mother. Afterwards, she starts going through the Marquis's things in order to learn more about him. She enters the forbidden room in his absence and realizes the full extent of his perverse and murderous tendencies when she discovers the bodies of his previous wives. She confides the newly discovered secret to the piano tuner when suddenly the Marquis returns home for his business trip was canceled. He discovers that she has entered the room and proceeds to try to add her to his collection of corpses through beheading. The brave piano tuner is willing to stay with her even though he knows he will not be able to save her. She is saved at the last moment at the end of the story by her mother, who shoots the Marquis just as he is about to murder the girl. The girl, her mother and the piano tuner go on to live together and the young widow opens a little music school on the outskirts of Paris. Most of the money she inherited is given away to various charities and the castle is turned into a school for the blind.
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