turn me on or off

Among Angela Carter's assortment of essays, novels, and short stories, critics have heralded The Bloody Chamber as a collection that is often resistant to patriarchal power while also indulging in both the macabre, and the opulent. Furthermore, the collection itself is often described as a space that, "deliberately defeats the reader's expectations by emancipating women's bodies from attributions of cultural shame, empowering women characters with independence and agency, and bitterly denouncing the arrogant cruelty of human predators" (Henke 48). Despite being touted as a feminist, Carter also received heavy backlash, as she eventually confessed that her short stories were often riddled with too much violence. In 1969, Carter won the Somerset Maugham award, and afterwards, lived in Japan for three years. As an expatriate, she studied Japanese manga and anime, with a focus on the masochism and sadism embedded within the comics (Barker 2). These observations and themes of masochism and sadism eventually threaded into her own fiction, and have roused interest and critique within several feminist communities.