Angela Carter`s The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories is firmly grounded in the tradition of the European popular imagination of the fairy tale, which originates in the oral tradition of peasant folk tales and is institutionalized as a modern literary genre from the late eighteenth century on. In her rewriting of popular fairy tales such as "Bluebeard," "Beauty and the Beast," "Snow White" and "Little Red Riding Hood," Carter boldly combines fairy tales, gothicism, eroticism and pornography to explore the complicated nexus between sexuality and power, eroticism and violence. Carter`s unrelenting exploration of the links between eroticism and violence has generated both critical fascination and controversy centering on the issue of female sexuality and desire. Given the problematic place that Carter holds in literary debates over her revision of fairy tales, I propose to analyze Carter`s work as a feminist practice of scrutinizing the genealogy of sexuality articulated and/or disarticulated, reinforced and/or concealed, disciplined and/or unruled in the process of the institutionalization of folk tales into the modern literary genre of the fairy tale. In The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories, Carter both repeats and departs from, negates and restores the inherited tradition of the fairy tale. Central to what she restores from the oral and literary tradition of the tales is the female body and its adventurous, unruly sexual desire that is susceptible to eroticism as it embarks upon a course of unfinished metamorphosis. Carter`s writing presents a girl whose grotesque body and grotesque laughter hover on the boundary between historical reality and utopian fantasy, on the edge of terror and humor.