In the following excerpt, Rose comments on the significance of the narrator's mother in "The Bloody Chamber."

When we turn to the fairy tales we are most familiar with, preserved and transmitted by Perrault and the Grimm brothers, what we see is that in our culture there are different developmental paradigms for boys and girls. In fairy tales, boys are clever, resourceful, and brave. They leave home to slay giants, outwit ogres, solve riddles, find fortunes. Girls, on the other hand, stay home and sweep hearths, are patient, enduring, self-sacrificing. They are picked on by wicked step-mothers, enchanted by evil fairies. If they go out, they get lost in the woods. They are rescued from their plights by kind woodsmen, good fairies, and handsome princes. They marry and live happily ever after. . . .

What Adrienne Rich calls "the great unwritten story" of the "cathexis between mother and daughter...