Carter was no doubt inspired by the works of author and fairytale collector Charles Perrault, whose fairy tales she had translated shortly beforehand. The stories within The Bloody Chamber are explicitly based on fairy tales. The collection's contents are also reprinted in Carter's Burning Your Boats. 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 collection 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'. 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 stories share a theme of being closely based upon fairytales or folk tales. It was first published in the United Kingdom in 1979 by Gollancz and won the Cheltenham Festival Literary Prize. The Bloody Chamber (or The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories) is a collection of short fiction by English writer Angela Carter.

What Carter lays bare are the damaging tropes that were always there in these narratives -you just didn’t see them until now.0-09-958811-0 ( ISBN 978-0-09-958811-5 from January 2007) It’s less a subversion of childhood favorites than it is the proffering of “adult” eyeglasses. Whereas the traditional forms tend to portray female characters as objects whose sexuality is passive and unspoken-a thing to be won by the prince, but always repressed-Carter’s stories insist on an active and visceral feminine sexuality. Angela Carter addressed this issue in 1979 when she published The Bloody Chamber, a collection of short stories that reimagines many of these texts from a feminist perspective. The problem is that nearly everything in the European fairy tale canon is either obviously or ambiguously misogynistic.

You know the ones-Little Red Riding Hood, Sleeping Beauty, Rapunzel and so on.

Whether we choose to blame Disney or the broader hegemonic influence of northern and western Europe on culture, there is a set of fairy tales that nearly every American knows by heart despite their issues.

The bloody chamber book cover