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Erotic Infidelities: Love and Enchantment in Angela Carter’s “The Bloody Chamber” by Kimberly J. Lau (review)

While Angela Carter’s short story collection The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories (1979) has never really been out of the critical debate regarding its fairy tale genre, Kimberly J. Lau’s complex, scholarly exploration of Carter’s preoccupation with sexuality and desire is a welcome addition to the discussion. The Bloody Chamber, as an acknowledged major literary text, repays such a lengthy focus on its content and context. As Lau argues, despite the collection’s patriarchal baggage, Carter never gives up on her exploratory and challenging renditions of heterosexual love. The utilization of the animal and the monstrous allows for alternate “marvelous sexual couplings and imaginative hybridities,” which enable Carter to escape not only phallocentric but also, more controversially, feminist expectations in a textual recuperation of heterosexual desire, love, and companionship (p. 11). (The “feminists” here refer to a narrow range of early radical readings that refuted Carter’s assertion that she was a feminist writer, albeit of a more postmodern persuasion.) Erotic Infidelities: Love and Enchantment in Angela Carter’s “The Bloody Chamber” delights in the short stories’ eclectic intertextuality and multiplicity of meaning: