Tracy Ann Berson 
University of New Hampshire - Manchester
Major: English
Mentor: Melody Graulich, Ph.D. - Professor of English
Castles, Moats, Roses, and Thorns: A Study of Angela Carter's The Bloody Chamber and the Fairy Tale Tradition of Bluebeard
"Re-vision - the act of looking back, of seeing with fresh eyes, of entering an old text from a new critical direction - is for women more than a chapter in cultural history: it is an act of survival." - Adrienne Rich
The chapter headings of Angela Carter's Old Wives Fairy Tale Book (1990) suggest her approach to retelling fairy tales; she sees her heroines - her Goldilocks, her Cinderella, her Snow White - threatened by such deleterious figures as The Big Bad Wolf and Bluebeard, as "Resourceful Girls" who escape through "Desperate Stratagems". For Carter and other women writers who re-write fairy tales, there are three options: they can adopt the cultural myths already established, embracing the traditional tales; they can write new tales, creating new cultural myths, or they can subvert traditional myths. Carter's choice to subvert tales is a controversial one. Re-writing the fairy tale forces her to stay within the paradigm, and thus, she must address the inconsistency of "fairy tale logic". My focus on Angela Carter's revision of Charles Perrault's classic fairy tale Bluebeard (1697), entitled The Bloody Chamber (1979), uses feminist literary theory with particular attention paid to the criticism of Joanna Russ and Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar. Beginning with the question of whether Carter successfully subverts the fairy tale paradigm to benefit women and women writers, I find after careful analysis that The Bloody Chamber, embellished with grotesque, overwrought imagery, is a facetious fairy tale, simultaneously advocating and parodying women's curiosity, sexual desires, and cravings to break the rules. With biting wit, exaggeration, and manipulation of metafiction, Carter successfully subverts Bluebeard, to liberate the fairy tale genre and women writers from patriarchal cultural myths that pervade fiction and limit women's creativity.
