The heroine´s Sexual MAturity in Angel Carter´s The Bloody Chamber.

Abstract

Writer Angela Carter is one of the precursors of the present-day trend of rewriting fairy tales. In “The Bloody Chamber” she retells the popular tale of Bluebeard. This article focuses on the way Carter uses sexuality in order to break the patriarchal canon established by male writers such as Charles Perrault. Tradition sets heroines as naïve, passive and unsubstantial characters whose roles are almost reduced to being saved by their male counterparts. Aslong asthey keep their naïveté, theirsexual innocence, they will be rewarded with a happy marriage and true love. However, Carter creates a different heroine who grows in sexual knowledge throughout the story; she enjoys sexual perversions and pornography and, eventually, she finds her true love in a piano tuner with whom she forms a new family in which she becomes the strongest member, not the weak one.