Angela Carter's The Bloody Chamber, published in London in 1979, was a collection of feminist revisionary fairy tales that used Gothic and erotic literary modes to expose the violence underlying traditional representations of femininity, including the clothing and bodily norms that constrained women. Though fiction rather than poetry, Carter's reworking of Bluebeard, Beauty and the Beast, and other tales engaged directly with the dressed and undressed female body as a site of male desire and female danger. The book became a landmark of feminist Gothic literature.

Carter's literary strategy of taking the tools of female constraint — including dress, corsets, and bodily idealization — and inverting them as instruments of feminist critique directly influenced a generation of British women poets including Carol Ann Duffy, whose The World's Wife (1999) used a similar revisionary strategy. The Bloody Chamber established that the female body in constricting clothing could be a site of subversive literary power rather than merely oppression. Carter's work is now foundational in the feminist literary canon.