‘All the better to see you with’: Gendered Gaze in Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber Molly Garnett 12th Grade

Angela Carter’s short story ‘The Bloody Chamber’ embraces the conventions of the fairy-tale genre in order to destabilize its underlying power structures. The manipulation of the archetypes of the virgin and her ‘Prince Charming’ in the story therefore reveal the alarming sexual power imbalance centered on assumptions of female passivity through the “male gaze”, a term first outlined by Laura Mulvey in ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’. [1]

The objectification of women is not just examined as a social condition, but as an undetected consequence of the fairy-tale literary model. The initial namelessness of the narrator encourages a universal representation of this ‘fairy-tale’ woman, constantly in relation to the Marquis. She is a female protagonist, but seen through a violent male gaze: his “assessing eye of a connoisseur inspecting horseflesh” extends the reiteration of her “flesh” beyond a human form towards that which requires examination, and, that which requires slaughter. Here Carter threatens the trope of the ‘male lover’s affectionate look’ akin to fairy-tale stories such as ‘Sleeping Beauty’ or ‘Snow White’, in which the prince admires the beauty of the displayed female. Display is instead sadistically fetishized...