Juliane Stratz

Horribly sexy. How sexuality becomes gothic in Angela Carters The Bloody Chamber Juliane Stratz

Scientific Essay from the year 2011 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Literature, grade: 1,7, University of Potsdam (Institut für Anglistik und Amerikanistik), language: English, abstract: The British writer Angela Carter got famous for her short stories and her examination of "The Sadeian Woman". In her writing she often deals with sexuality and power. The story "The Bloody Chamber" is one of ten short stories in Angela Carter's collection "The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories", which was published in 1979. In this particular story she reworks the fairy tale of Blue Beard and transforms it into a feminist retelling by combining it with results from "The Sadeian Woman". With this work she wants "not simply to point out what is wrong with conventional representations of gender; she is concerned at once to offer different representations, different models" (Day 134). Thus her short stories are full of variety and different topics and take place in a Gothic atmosphere. Carter herself claimed that she followed a realism because she wanted to fulfill the desire of the people to believe the word as fact (Day 134). Therefore she uses topics which are familiar to everybody. Sexuality in a wider sense is one of the predominant ones in her stories. It shows a "sexuality that is situated beyond cultural borders and might therefore be more 'natural' than the conventional notions of sexual identity" (Gruss 212). However, the sexuality in "The Bloody Chamber" often seems strange, abhorrent and even disgusting. Thus, especially the sexuality serves to create a Gothic atmosphere by the help of different means. In the following paper I want to examine how this is done by use of three Gothic concepts: The haunting, abject and grotesque, and the uncanny.