Lacan as a Reader of Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber

In her modern classic Bloody Chamber Angela Carter has reworked many classic tales of western culture, covering tales from Charles Perrault to Grimm brothers. In her rewriting of these tale Carter does not merely reproduce these texts for a modern audience but she adds a political, sexual, and psychological edge to them. This article looks at three selected tales from this collection (The Tiger’s Bride, The Bloody Chamber, and The Lady of the House of Love) through the lens of Lacanian psychoanalytic theory in order to unveil their hidden psychological significance. By drawing on Lacanian key concepts such as “symbolic castration” and “dimension of ate” this paper aims to shed light on the disavowed and unconscious beliefs that constitute the psychological subtext of these narratives and regulate the actions of their characters.