Perrault's The Bloody Chamber

Dead women, entombed women, threatened women: many have argued that a fear of the feminine is at the root of much Gothic fiction. Outline how this fear of the feminine is present in, or perhaps challenged by, 2 of the gothic fictions we’ve looked at this semester.

The fear of the feminine is a constant in gothic fiction, especially during its infancy; women were the unknown; the world of the maternal and feminine was engulfed by male paranoia, ignorance, and fear. This universal trepidation is a defining connection between the tale of Bluebeard and its female-centred 1979 retelling The Bloody Chamber, written by Charles Perrault and Angela Carter respectively.

The blatant distrust and fickle representation of women is conveyed to the reader

Perrault, for example, recites his tale in a traditional and classic manner, beginning with the cliché “Once upon a time. . .”(104) allowing the reader to anticipate the direction of the story, based on their own knowledge of the ‘fairy tale morphology’ devised by Vladimir Propp (Cardell, 2017). The remainder of the story is told in a very simplistic, unambiguous, third-person-omniscient fashion. This lack of embellishment advertises the treatment of the female characters openly,

In Perrault’s telling of the tale, it was the “two brothers [who] went after him. . . they caught him. . . they cut him open with their swords, and left him dead” (Perrault 113). The bride’s champions who safeguard her against her murderous husband are men, therefore reinforcing the gender stereotype that a ‘woman needs a man to save her’. In Carter’s the Bloody Chamber, however, she offers and alternative conclusion to the tale with this role of saviour being placed upon the young girl’s mother, as “she raised my father’s gun, took aim and put a single, irreproachable bullet through my husband’s head” (Carter 142) and thus gives immense power to the otherwise ‘weak and submissive’ woman, shattering the stereotypical