Angela Carter “The Bloody Chamber” (Story Based on Bluebeard) a Teenage Girl Marries an Older, Wealthy French Marquis, Whom She Does Not Love

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Angela Carter “The Bloody Chamber” (story based on Bluebeard) A teenage girl marries an older, wealthy French Marquis, whom she does not love. When he takes her to his castle, she learns that he enjoys sadistic pornography and takes pleasure in her embarrassment. She is a talented pianist, and a young man, a blind piano tuner, hears her music and falls in love with her. The woman's husband tells her that he must leave on a business trip to New York and forbids her to enter one particular room while he is away. When he leaves, she feels sad and lonely and telephones her mother. Afterwards, she starts going through the Marquis's things in order to learn more about him. She enters the forbidden room in his absence and realizes the full extent of his perverse and murderous tendencies when she discovers the bodies of his previous wives. She confides the newly discovered secret to the piano tuner when suddenly the Marquis returns home for his business trip was canceled. He discovers that she has entered the room and proceeds to try to add her to his collection of corpses through beheading. The brave piano tuner is willing to stay with her even though he knows he will not be able to save her. She is saved at the last moment at the end of the story by her mother, who shoots the Marquis just as he is about to murder the girl. The girl, her mother and the piano tuner go on to live together and the young widow opens a little music school on the outskirts of Paris. Most of the money she inherited is given away to various charities and the castle is turned into a school for the blind. .

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The Quest for Female Empowerment in Angela Carter's Wise Children
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