In "The Bloody Chamber," her feminist retelling of Charles Perrault's "Bluebeard," Angela Carter plays with the conventions of canonical fairy tales; rather than the heroine being rescued by the stereotypical male hero, she is rescued by her mother. Instead of the heroine living out her days in luxury, she marries a blind piano tuner, gives away her inherited fortune, and lives with her mother and husband on the edge of town. Carter's version of the story appears in her 1979 anthology of the same name. "Bluebeard" was already a folktale by the time Charles Perrault wrote it down and published it in 1697. The stories he published were originally "peasant tales" that he reworked until they were more suited for his contemporaries of the aristocratic class of 17th-century France. Perrault customized the stories, often making a point of showcasing the challenges and humor of the time; "gone was much of the violence, but added was the subtle sexual innuendo expected in the popular culture of the period" (Abler). Carter is known for her feminist retellings; her short stories challenge the way women are represented in fairy tales, yet retain an air of tradition through her extensively detailed and descriptive prose. The stories in The Bloody Chamber deal with themes of women's roles in relationships and marriage, their sexuality, coming of age, and corruption. Her feminist themes contrast traditional elements of Gothic fiction, which usually depict women as weak and helpless, with strong female protagonists. "Carter repeatedly declared her interest in the myth of woman and the construction of sexuality" (Moore) and wrote to appeal largely to a feminist audience. Right away, Carter distances her "The Bloody Chamber" from the traditional fairy tale by allowing the heroine to tell her own story. In doing so, she empowers the figure of a woman by putting her in the traditionally male-dominated role of storyteller and survivor instead of relegating her to the role of helpless princess. The narrator of "The Bloody Chamber" tells her story in retrospect. At the time of the story, she is a seventeen year old girl who has just married an older, wealthy Marquis whom she does not love. She begins her tale by describing the night she traveled from her childhood home to her husband's castle. She imagines her mother back at her home and is struck by a sense of loss; feeling as though she has "in some way, ceased to be her [mother's] child in becoming his wife" (Carter, 7). When she arrives at the castle, she discovers that her husband enjoys sadistic pornography and seems to take pleasure in her embarrassment. He gives her a ring of keys and tells her that he must leave on a business trip and that she is free to use the keys to explore any room in the house save the one that leads to a private chamber. He calls it, "the key to my enfer [French for "hell"] ... There I can go, you understand, to savour the rare pleasure of imagining myself wifeless" (21). Convinced the room holds the key to her mysterious husband's identity, the heroine seeks it out and realizes the full extent of his perverse and murderous tendencies when she discovers the bodies of his three previous wives. The Marquis returns prem