Traditional and yet non traditional fairy tale

I found myself fascinated with The Bloody Chamber. I enjoy that whole genre of rewrites of fairy tales. The original fairy tales as written by the Grimm Brothers are not really pleasant stories that we because of Disney tend to think of when the term fairy tale comes to mind. Angela Carter’s version of the Bloody Chamber in many ways bridged the gap between the two styles to me. There was still a lot of negative non fairy tale elements. The reason that she wanted to marry Bluebeard was never because she loved him. She completely avoided that question when her mom asked her before she was married. There was the discovery of the horrible chamber with all the dead corpses of his past brides. Yet there was the piano turner that was basically her prince. He loved her, but was unable to do anything to protect her. He was completely helpless to do anything but to sit back and let her die. Yet a very traditional fairy tale element is evident – the happy ending. She gets to live comfortably with the man that she loves ---happily ever after. I really like that the one to save her is her mother. There was no male that had to come in to save the day, it was another woman. She was still very much helpless which is the thing that is most annoying about fairy tale princesses, the fact that they are unable to anything for themselves; they sit around and wait for their prince to rescue them. I really enjoyed this story.