"And I know that she is wise, and she's the apple of my eye..."

There are two main female characters in The Bloody Chamber; the narrator (the new wife of the Marquis) and her widowed mother. Like the to male characters in the book, they are quite different from each other in both appearance and personality.
The narrator is young and naive and describes herself as "the poor widow's child with my mouse-coloured hair.... my bony hips, my my nervous, pianist's fingers". She is the quite the opposite of her mother who she describes as being a strong woman whose "adventurous girlhood in Indo-China" had led her to outfacing "a junkful of Chinese pirates" and shooting a man-eating tiger before the age of 17. The contrasts between the two female characters are referred to many times throughout the story and perpetuates our narrator's innocence and vulnerability, through having a stronger and more active female character to compare her to. The mother's strength is shown by the fact that she keeps her deceased husband's 'antique service revolver' in her handbag, and guns are very masculine objects which denote power. She later uses this gun to kill her daughter's sadistic husband.
The end of the story really shows the differences between mother and daughter. When our narrators realises her new husband's true nature she continues with her passive nature and does not seem to make any attempt to leave the castle and escape her impending fate; "then I went to my dressing room and put on that white muslin shift..." Her passive nature would have lead to her demise; "I've done nothing; but that may be sufficient reason for condemning me" unless her mother had not come to her rescue.
Her mother's "maternal telepathy" had caused her to sense that something was wrong with her daughter and she had travelled to the castle to arrive just in time to save her; "her hair was her white mane, her black lisle legs exposed to the thigh, her skirts tucked round her waist..." In traditional fairytales it is the man who saves the 'damsel in distress' but Angela Carter has twisted the structure of traditional tales to give them feminist themes, therefore it is the strong maternal figure who is the hero, or should I say heroine, of the story.