Final essay question for feminism

'Angela Carter presents and emphasises the intense desire of women to become liberated through sexual acts in her collection of short stories The Bloody Chamber'


Using the critical anthology to support your argument, how far do these texts support or undermine this view?




-The Tiger's Bride

• female gaze
• male gaze
• liberated together
• innocence vs experience
• she takes control and almost liberates herself

1. Faraway castles
2. happy endings
3. dutiful daughter
4. sexually promiscuous
5. Beast like male

-'white rose'- symbol of virginity

-'one profile of his mask is the mirror image of the other, too perfect, uncanny.'- attracted & repulsed at the same time- female gaze

-'I prick my finger and so he gets his all smeared with blood'- impure and tainted

-'scare me into good behaviour'- the story from her nurse of the 'tiger man' was used to frighten her- in her childhood he was used to scare her, now he becomes her liberation

-'the day my childhood ended'- innocence vs experience

-'my frail rose, already faded'- 'faded' like her purity

-'you should give me only the same amount of money that you would give to any other woman'- offers prostitution- allows herself to be used as a sex object

-'The sight of a young lady's skin that no man has seen before'- the beast longs for visual sexual pleasure

-'prepare yourself for the sight of my master, naked'- allowing the female gaze

-'I felt my breasts ripped apart as if I suffered a marvellous wound'- she gains sexual pleasure and liberation through the sight of the beast undressed

-'unfastened my jacket'- allowing the beast his sexual pleasure as she's had hers

-'pride it was, not shame'- she isn't embarrassed, she wants to impress him

-'I felt I was at liberty for the first time in my life'- liberated herself through allowing herself to subside to her own sexual desire

-'fear of devourment'- metaphor for sex

-'I, white, shaking, raw, approaching him as if offering, in myself, the key to a peaceable kingdom in which his appetite need not be my extinction'- lamb to the slaughter- but she wants to

-'He snuffed the air, as if to smell my fear; he could not'- she isn't scared- she's embracing desire

-The Erl King

• has sex with the erl king
• innocence vs experience
• liberates herself through killing him when she is experienced
• saves herself from getting trapped by him- liberation

1. Beast like male
2. sexually promiscuous
3. isolated setting

-'He lays upon me his irrevocable hand'- first contact

-'I lie at the mercy of his huge hands'- she is almost his sex slave- he can do with her as he pleases

-'I lie down on the Erl-King's creaking paillasse of straw'- again lay down for him

-'I go back and back to him'- she can't help but going back to him

-'consumed by you'- metaphor for sex- similar to the Tiger's Bride

-'I shall strangle him'- kills the person she gained sex from

-'let the birds free'- liberated through setting the other birds free and killing him 

-The Snow Child

• subjugated
• objectified
• not liberated
• raped
• subjected to male domination
• taken advantage of

1. damsel in distress
2. the evil matriarch

-'I wish I had a girl as white as snow' 'as red as blood' 'as black as that bird's feather'- his idyllic view of a woman

-'stark naked; she was a child of his desire'- his desire not hers

-'unfastened his breaches and thrust his virile member into the dead girl'- rape, she didn't want it, she isn't liberated

message- underlying material of fairy tales is that the women are sexually objectified

Carter said 'I was taking... the latent content of those traditional stories and using that; and the latent content is violently sexual.'

The Snow Child questions

In what ways does the tale allude to (link to) other stories or fairy tales?
The Snow Child links to other short stories from the prose 'The Bloody Chamber' by Angela Carter, as it contains a dominant male figure who is wealthy and who obtains a powerful stance in society, alongside a young, vulnerable female character as in the other short stories like 'The Bloody Chamber' and 'The Courtship of Mr Lyon'. In this story, the count longs for a young girl with 'white skin, red mouth, black hair' which also relates to the fairy tale of 'Snow White', in which the appearance of the young princess in the tale, mirrors that of the pure, young girl in 'The Snow Child'. There is also a malevolent, devilish female character in most fairy tales, which wish to do harm to the young, innocent female character. 'The Snow Child' directly mirrors this, as the Countess seeks to find any way possible to get rid of the young girl and finally succeeds in her desire when the snow child 'pricks her finger on a thorn' and dies.


How does this story link to the other stories in The Bloody Chamber collection?
The short story of 'The Snow Child' links to many other stories in Angela Carter's book of short stories, 'The Bloody Chamber'. It links to 'The Tiger's Bride' as the male character in both of the stories, look upon the young girl's based on their own sexual desire. In the Tiger's Bride, 'the beast' wants to 'see the pretty young lady unclothed nude without her dress' to satisfy his own desire of visual pleasure, similarly in The Snow Child, the Count views the young girl as his sole desire, the female he has longed for and lusts for, yet, unlike in The Tiger's Bride, the Count gains desire from 'thrusting his virile member into the dead girl' (raping the girl) instead of looking at her. The Snow Child also links to 'The Erl King' because again, both male characters sexualise the young females; The Erl King uses the girl as almost a sex slave when the Erl King 'lays her down on his bed of rustling straw where she lies at the mercy of his huge hands', likewise the Count in The Snow Child has sex with the naïve, innocent female.


The girl melts at the end.  Why do you think this is the case?  What do you think Carter could be trying to communicate?
In 'The Snow Child', Carter presents the young girl as a symbol of purity due to her skin that is 'white as snow'. At the end the child 'began to melt', this could be to represent the washing away of her purity, innocence and virginity and as she's a symbol of purity 'there was nothing left of her' by the end of the prose, once she had been violated by the Count when he 'unfastened his breeches and thrust his virile member into the dead girl' all innocence that she ever possessed is crushed. Alternatively, she could be melting back into the snow, the place in which she was created based upon the dream of the Count to have a girl 'as white as snow', therefore she would not have been real, either a figure of imagination, illusion or sorcery.


What do you think it means when the Countess says "It bites!" at the end?  What is "it"?
 Despite getting her wish of regaining the Count's attention, the Countess is 'bitten' by the rose when it pricks her finger. The rose is a symbolises femininity or the vaginal area, so when the Countess thinks 'it bites' it represents the suffering of every woman in every social class, as the elite cannot escape natural happenings.