The Bloody Chamber

Question 1

The spirit of the bloody chamber is not escapist but …

Answer 1

ironic and critical

Question 2

Carter is concerned not simply to point out what is wrong with conventional representations of gender..

Answer 2

she is concerned at once to offer different representations and different models

Question 3

What is the outline of the Bloody Chamber

Answer 3

A young bride travels through the night with her much older husband to a new home,a large castle
She describes her intro to a world of luxury and pleasure
her honeymoon folds out in ways she had not expected
She is rescued from her villainous husband by the timely and heroic arrival of her mother,who shoots him dead
Now a wealthy widow the narrator and the blind piano tuner begin a new life together

Question 4

How does Bruno Bettelheim read beauty and the beast

Answer 4

as a a tale imagining a healthy and positive transfer of a girls affection for her father to a man who is to be her sexual partner
describes successful sexual maturation

Question 5

The tale of beatuty and the beast is a key example where Carters reading disagreed markedly with Bettelheim.How does Carter see the tale?

Answer 5

In the courtship of Mr Lyon, Carter sees the story as summarising the male conspiracy to deny women the chance of ever reaching autonomous self responsible adulthood

Question 6

Carter commomted that Beauty and the beast fairytale is an advertisement for what?

Answer 6

moral blackmail

“since you left me I have been sick”

Question 7

What is lycanthropy?

Answer 7

The belief that men and wolves have the ablity to transform into one another.E.g of lycanthropy are common throughout folk tales throughout the world and Carter herself deals with this in the last 3 stories in the bloody chamver

Question 8

What are the key themes of the bloody chamber

Answer 8

sexuality and violence
virginity 
metamorphosis
power and objectification
entrapment

Question 9

What is one way in which Carter re writes the fairy tale?

Answer 9

fairy tales are commonly informed by a closure of their plots-a movement of change to that of closure or permanence
however Carter stubbornly moves it the other way round,from stability to instability undermining the closed binary logic of the fairytale

Question 10

What is special about the Erl King’s narrative form

Answer 10

it is the most initiative and experimental in the collection