Bloody Chamber Research Articles

The Rose and the Beast: Fairy Tales Retold (review)

Readers who admire Francesca Lia Block's series of five stunning contemporary fairy-tale novels, beginning with Weetzie Bat (1989) and which have been subsequently collected under the cumulative title of Dangerous Angels (1998), will probably be disappointed with this most recent collection of short stories. While these nine fairy tales have some of the magic realism and quirky poetic language that have made Block's slender novels so popular with adolescents and adult readers, they are surprisingly flat and much less inspired or innovative than her previous work. The nine tales that Block chooses to revise are the Grimms' "Snow White," "Little Red Riding Hood," and "Snow White and Rose Red"; Andersen's "Thumbelina" and "The Snow Queen"; Perrault's "Cinderella," "Sleeping Beauty," and "Bluebeard"; and de Beaumont's "Beauty and the Beast." As she has done with her previous novels, Block blends the landscape and culture of contemporary Los Angeles with fairy-tale motifs. One of the chief problems with this collection is that, while these stories are clearly fairy tales retold, they are the most literal reworkings of fairy tales that Block has published to date. The structure and characters of the original tales tend to overpower Block's attempt to revise them and give them new life and meaning. This sort of thing has been done before and better by Angela Carter in The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories (1979), and by Emma Donoghue in Kissing the Witch: Old Tales in New Skins (1997).

Angela Carter's "The Bloody Chamber" and the Decolonization of Feminine Sexuality

Angela Carter's "The Bloody Chamber" and the Decolonization of Feminine Sexuality

"Bluebeard" and "The Bloody Chamber": The Grotesque of Self-Parody and Self-Assertion

Like many fairy tale motifs, the Bluebeard legend is grotesque in essence. This tale of the wealthy, seemingly chivalrous aristocrat who murders seven young brides and inters them in his cellar brings together violence and love, perversion and innocence, death and marriage in an unsettling combination. The intermingling of seemingly incongruous elements and the juxtaposition of opposites challenge audience expectation and habits of thinking in a manner typical of the grotesque as defined by theorists as varied as Wolfgang Kayser and Mikhail Bakhtin. 1