More thoughts on The Velvet Chamber

• The Velvet Chamber wants stories that reinscribe the classic texts with a sharp feminist twist.  The heroine in traditional bodice rippers, fairy tales and even myth is always being saved or rejected or taken to new heights of ecstasy by her male lover.

• The above are conventional paradigms; female protagonists created by men. The Velvet Chamber invites the creation of female protagonists written by women or like-minded men, free from the hegemony of patriarchal discourse,  free from the male gaze.

• In The Velvet Chamber, the reader will meet the image of woman, an archetypal woman, written and revisioned from a feminine perspective. Fantasy, as a genre, appeals to this process because it has irreverence and a freedom in content and structure; it has the power to render social norms obsolete, as well as permission to create new ones. Female protagonists will be free to wander across time, space, as well as gender constraints.

• Angela Carter in The Bloody Chamber successfully negotiates the tricky landscape around the retelling of  fairy tales and avoids the obvious traps. She does not merely reverse the terms. The cumulative effect of reading The Bloody Chamber is to see the same virginal archetype, pushed beyond its restrictive forms and it into something transgressive--- a powerful, sexual being who is also fallible, malleable, flexible, capable of change. A woman who is human.  The Velvet Chamber aims for the same in its stories.

• Image: Ajax and Cassandra, Solomon Joseph Solomon, 1886