- Title
- The language of the senses: Angela Carter's "The bloody chamber" and the seduction of the reader
- Creator
- Webb, Caroline
- Relation
- Literature and Sensation p. 194-203
- Relation
- http://www.cambridgescholars.com/literature-and-sensation-16
- Publisher
- Cambridge Scholars Publishing
- Resource Type
- book chapter
- Date
- 2009
- Description
- Angela Carter's subversive rewriting of traditional European fairy tales in The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories (1979) has been extensively studied for its radical treatment of gender and sexuality. Most such scholarly comment focuses on the plots of the stories and, in the case of the title story - a rewrite of "Bluebeard" - on its powerful visual imagery, to support arguments about the implications of Carter's work. But Carter's language evokes other senses beside the visual in order to seduce the reader into confronting the experience of sexuality in the patriarchal tradition. For most critics, somewhat surprisingly, that richness and sensuality appear to be associated primarily with evocation of the visual. Yet not only the adjectival density of Carter's prose, in which almost every object, action and experience is described through parallel phrases, but also its quasi-poetic deployment of a range of linguistic techniques demands a more detailed attention to its sensory power. Her language has an extraordinarily sensuous quality that is reflected in its continual appeals to the senses of sound, smell, taste and especially touch, as well as sight, and, as I shall demonstrate, is also manifested through the immediate aural and tactile effects of particular words and phrases.
- Subject
- Angela Carter; The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories (1979); fairy tales; use of language; visual imagery
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/918623
- Identifier
- uon:8669
- Identifier
- ISBN:9781443801164
- Language
- eng
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