A Scopophiliac Fairy Tale: Deconstructing Normative Gender in Angela Carter’s “The Bloody Chamber”

Abstract

Angela Carter’s short story collection The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories is a reworking of traditional fairy tales, or as she suggested “stories about fairy stories.” Carter takes up the flexible structure of the fairy story in order to communicate the experiences of being a woman in a patriarchal society, subjected to certain ways of seeing and being seen. In this article, I explore the economy of vision in the title story of Carter’s collection, arguing that she deconstructs the violent structure of seeing embodied in the two main characters in the story. I conclude by looking at two alternatives that appear in the story, both of which move beyond the violence and seductiveness of ways of seeing within a patriarchal society.