Fairy tales are hardly a new genre.  For centuries, they have been used to scare children, particularly young girls, into submission, thus making fairy tales an excellent tool of the patriarchy.  If young women were cowered by tales of Baba Yaga and her hut on chicken legs that could come and chase them, then they wouldn’t think of questioning what was truly going on in their life. In Fairy Tales and the Art of Subversion, Jack Zipes says, "the fairy tale is the most important cultural and social event in most children's lives." Essentially, at that time fairy tales were a child’s iPad.  They provided entertainment, a form of moral education, and kept them in touch with the adults wanted them to know about.
Today, Disney and their ilk replace the parents sitting at a fire.  Instead of utilizing them to terrify children, Disney took fairy tales and wrapped them in candy floss and glitter to pacify them.  Now, the damsel in distress is always saved by a handsome, rugged prince that knows better than she does and can provide for her much better than she ever could on her own.  These principles tried to teach young girls that they were nothing more than helpless damsels, just waiting dependently for their Prince Charming, or “carnivore incarnate” to come along so that their life could begin, instead of teaching them that they could rescue themselves.  The rescuing might be difficult work, but it is always satisfactory in the end.
Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber subverts fairy tales from their current sanitized state.  The stories I examined are filled with strong violence towards both family and strangers, sexual content that the Brothers Grimm probably didn’t have in mind, along with an example of a father selling his daughter and a woman being guilted into relationships with a “nice beast”. These stories are a way to shock the shiny pink façade off of modern fairy tales.  For feminism to take root in certain places it often must take an unconventional route, as seen in this book.  “Liberal feminism conceives of freedom as personal autonomy—living a life of one's own choosing—and political autonomy—being co-author of the conditions under which one lives.” An analysis of the liberal feminism that Carter displays in her writing challenges the preconceived notions about fairytales, the Big Bad Wolf, damsels in distress, and beastly men and changes them into stories fit for a modern woman.
Angela Carter is most famous for her ability to re-write fairy tales, full of violence and sex with a decidedly feminist take.  “Carter saw fairy-tales as the oral literature of the poor, a literature that spanned Europe and one that encoded the dark and mysterious elements of the psyche”. Many critics, especially female critics, were harsh on Carter and The Bloody Chamber, often saying that she was just being violent and pornographic to be reactionary, thereby entirely missing the point she was trying to make.  Carter attempts to correct the misogyny that is so rampant in “Little Red Riding Hood” and “Beauty and the Beast” by giving Red and Belle healthy sexual appetites and their own claws, so to speak.  The Bloody Chamber is an unusual book, but not for the subject matter.  It is an unusual book because so many critics and other authors were critical of it at first.  “Reading in this perspective is transitive: reading a text changes it”.  Every single person who picks up The Bloody Chamber and reads it is putting some of themselves into the ethereal matter of the story, and that changes the ending just a bit for us all.
