A CRITIQUE OF THE SNOW CHILD, TAKEN FROM ANGELA CARTER’S THE BLOODY CHA

A CRITIQUE OF THE SNOW CHILD, TAKEN FROM ANGELA CARTER’S THE BLOODY CHAMBER. Throughout ’The Bloody Chamber’, Angela Carter takes the highly successful conventions that belong to once innocent fairy tales, and rips them unremorsefully from their seemingly sound foundations to create a variety of dark, seductive, sensual stories, altering the landscapes beyond all recognition and rewarding the heroines with the freedom of speech thus giving them license to grab hold of the reigns of the story. The Snow Child is one such story by Carter, where connotations seen in fairytales such as ‘Sleeping Beauty’ and ‘Little Red Riding Hood’ are in evidence and are fused together accompanied by the emergence of feminism to the foreground of the story, numerous examples of rich and highly effective and evocative symbolism and a certain element of sexuality. In essence, The Snow Child tells of a Count and his Countess who are riding on horseback when the Count suddenly expresses his desire for a girl with ‘skin as white as snow’, ‘lips as red as blood’ and ‘hair as black as a raven’. She then materialises before their very eyes, after which, the Count lifts her up, and sits her in front of him on his saddle. The jealousy oozes from the Countess, who after seeing this, has only one train of thought - how can she rid herself of The Snow Child? The Countess’s place is usurped by the child as is symbolised by the transfer of the Countess's clothes onto her, leaving the Countess naked. Eventually the child dies and the Count gets off his horse and rapes her before the dead body of the girl melts away and consequently, the Countess is re-clothed. This narrative clearly exposes how the heroines of fairy tales are the const... ...s she who demands the girl to ‘Pick me one’ when passing a ‘bush of roses’ - the rose that she picks eventually kills her as she ‘pricks her finger on the thorn’. As a result she ‘bleeds; screams; falls.’ Bizarrely, the ‘weeping’ Count gets off his horse and proceeds to rape the corpse in a horrific act of necrophilia - all the while, the Countess ‘watched him narrowly’, hinting at a spiteful evil glare. ‘He was soon finished’. In my opinion, it is at this point where the Count loses the little respect the reader would have had for him and suggests a certain degree of incapability on his part. Finally, the Countess ‘stroked her fur’ with ‘her long hands’ whilst the Count ‘picked up the rose, bowed and handed it to his wife’, suggesting a transfer of power at this late stage in the story. She drops the rose after touching it, declaring, ‘It bites!’.