| Ever Dundas. Angela Carter. (2012) [online image] available from: http://blogs.chi.ac.uk/shortstoryforum/lick-my-words/ [accessed 28th april 2015] |
She first married in 1960 but in 1969 she used the proceeds of her Somerset Maugham Award to leave her husband and relocate for two years to Tokyo. Here she is said to find what it is to be and woman and become radicalized. She wrote about her experiences in articles for the New Society and a collection of short stories - Fireworks: Nine Profane Pieces. She then explored the United States, Asia and Europe before spending much of the late 1970s and 1980s as a writer in residence at universities including the University of Sheffield, Brown University, University of Adelaide and the University of East Anglia. In 1977 she married her second husband and had one son. In 1979 she released both The Bloody Chamber and her influential essay, The Sadeian Woman and the Ideology of Pornography. The essay seems to deconstruct the arguments that underlie The Bloody Chamber, her most famous work.
The Bloody Chamber is a collection of ten short fiction stories that are all based on fairy and folk tales. Carter was most probably inspired by Charles Perrault whose fairy tales she had translated shortly beforehand. All the stories challenge the way women are represented in fairy tales yet retain some traditional factors in the prose style. Carter always shows strong female heroines of her stories which contrast to the women of classic Gothic fiction who are usually weak and helpless, in this way she creates sexually liberated females characters. The stories deal with the themes of women's roles in relationships, marriage, their sexuality, coming of age and corruption.
