Shattering Bluebeard's Castle: Analysing Angela Carter's "The Bloody Chamber" By Employing Jacques Derrida's Concept of Deconstruction Boglarka Toth College

Literary fairy tales have always possessed some features that enabled them to convey and reinforce specific binary oppositions more easily than other types of written media. They are extremely well-known by children and adults; they became highly commercialised during the last century, which extended their reach to a larger audience; and they own a special appeal for making mundane crises of simple people into magical quests that promise ultimate happiness. As much as we love to read – and watch – these stories however, one should realise that, in certain aspects, they are really in need of a serious modernisation so that they can lose their outdated ideals and become more compatible to the twenty-first century. Since they still uphold mostly conservative moral teachings and values that favour men over women, rewritings of popular tales were mostly orchestrated by women authors, like the English novelist and short story writer, Angela Carter. Deconstructing binary oppositions by criticising male-centred thinking is characteristic of Carter's updated fairy tales that not only shatter obsolete notions of gender roles and female stereotypes but also create a livelier, more radical and yet more realistic surrounding for narrating...