Content Synopsis
“The Bloody Chamber” (1979) is a series of short stories that rewrite fairy tales, including several collected by Charles Perrault in 1697. The first and eponymous story is based on Perrault's “Bluebeard.” In Perrault's version, a nobleman named Bluebeard gives his wife the keys to every room in his castle, and tells her she may enter all of them but one. In his absence, she enters the forbidden room only to find the dead bodies of Bluebeard's previous wives. Upon his return, Bluebeard sees blood stains on the room's key and knows his wife has disobeyed him. He threatens to behead her on the spot, but she is saved by the fortuitous arrival of her brothers, who slay Bluebeard. The plot is much the same in Carter's “The Bloody Chamber,” except that it is set in twentieth-century France and is told from the first-person perspective of Bluebeard's wife. As the story begins, this nameless narrator describes her courtship and honeymoon with the noble, worldly, and monocle-wearing Marquis. She is a seventeen-year-old piano player, much younger and poorer than her suitor. Despite her mother's quiet disapproval, she has been wooed by his gifts of fine furs and expensive outings, and agrees to marry him. He then gives her the most precious gift of all, a choker of rubies “bright as arterial blood” (11) and designed to mimic the cut of the guillotine. Before the narrator is taken away to her new husband's castle, we learn that the Marquis has been married before, and that his previous wives are all dead. We are also forewarned that the Marquis is a sexual predator, since he watches the narrator “with the assessing eye of a connoisseur inspecting horseflesh” and a “sheer carnal avarice” (11).
After marrying, the couple retires to the Marquis's seaside castle, where he undresses his bride for the first time. In the bedroom's many mirrors, the narrator sees “the living image” of a pornographic sketch he had shown her: “the child with her sticklike limbs” and “the old, monocled lecher who examined her” (15). However, the Marquis postpones their first sexual encounter, leaving the narrator to wander into his library. She discovers its shelves are filled with sadistic pornography. Excited by her exposure to this material, the Marquis takes her to the bedroom once more; there, a “dozen husbands impaled a dozen brides” in the many mirrors (17). This marks the end of a brief honeymoon; as per the “Bluebeard” formula, the Marquis must leave the castle on business. He gives the narrator his keys and extracts her promise that she will not enter one of the rooms. In his absence, she uses the keys to explore the castle, hoping for a glimpse into the Marquis's heart, but finds nothing that satisfies her curiosity: she “wanted to know still more” (26). When she accidentally scatters the keys over the floor, the first key she picks up is the key to the forbidden room. This coincidence prompts her to follow the passageway to the Marquis's secret den, where she hopes to “find a little of his soul” (27). Within, of course, she finds the bodies of her predecessors. Here, Carter's rewriting renders the sadomasochistic undertones of the original “Bluebeard” story explicit. As the narrator, herself, points out:
“There is a striking resemblance between the act of love and the ministrations of a torturer,” opined my husband's favorite poet; I had learned something of the nature of that similarity on my marriage bed (27–28).
The Marquis's former wives have all been subjected to torture; the blood of the latest wife is still seeping from a spike-lined cage known as the “Iron Maiden.” The narrator drops the key into this blood, giving it the telltale stain that will not wash off.
Going to the piano to calm herself, she is joined by the new piano tuner, a young blind man named Jean-Yves. Overwhelmed by his “lovely, blind humanity” (32), she confides in him. However, they soon realize the Marquis has returned to the castle, and try to pretend nothing has happened. The Marquis sees the stained key, however, and knows his wife has broken her promise. Her punishment will be death by beheading, just as her ruby choker foretold. As the narrator prepares for her execution, she sees a figure on horseback, racing toward the castle. It is her mother, who arrives at the last moment to shoot the Marquis. Thus, Carter offers a revised happy ending: the narrator inherits the Marquis's estate, marries Jean-Yves, and transforms the castle into a school for the blind.
Carter's next two stories are versions of the French fairy tale “Beauty and the Beast.” Carter's “The Courtship of Mr. Lyon” reproduces the original plot in a modern setting. A man in financial difficulty is returning from a meeting with lawyers when his car stalls in the middle of a storm. He is granted use of the telephone at the nearest house, without ever meeting the owner. On his way out, he plucks a white rose from the garden, because he had promised to bring one home for his daughter Beauty. He is immediately accosted by a “leonine apparition” (44): this is “the Beast” and the master of the house. The man explains to the Beast why he took the rose, and the Beast lets him leave on the condition that he bring Beauty to dinner. Over this meal, the Beast promises to help her father's case; in exchange, Beauty must live at the Beast's house. During her stay, she forms a polite friendship with her host but cannot overcome her “indescribable shock” at his animal form (47). When Beauty's father is solvent once more, Beauty is allowed to leave, but promises the Beast she will return of her own accord before the winter ends. At home again, Beauty is so distracted by her father's new wealth that she forgets about her promise until the Beast's terrier appears at her door. She realizes at once that spring has arrived and she has broken her promise. She returns to the Beast at once, only to see he is dying. However, her tears of compassion and her promise to stay with the Beast revive him. He is transformed into human form, and the story ends with a view of Mr. and Mrs. Lyon walking in the garden.
“The Tiger's Bride” is set in Italy, and narrated by the unnamed daughter of a Russian nobleman. He has just bet and lost all his possessions and his daughter while playing cards with The Beast, the masked grand seigneur of the city. After her father leaves, a monkey-like valet presents the narrator to The Beast and informs her that if she will allow The Beast to look just once at her naked body, he will return her and her family's lost fortunes to her father. The narrator replies with a different offer, intended to shame The Beast: she will allow him to have sex with her as if she were a prostitute, so long as her face remains covered. The Beast is embarrassed by this reply, and the valet takes the narrator away to her room. There, she is attended by an automaton designed to look like a maid for, as the valet admits: “Nothing human lives here” (59). The valet returns to this room a few more times, plying the narrator with gifts from The Beast and repetitions of his request. Finally, the narrator is asked to go riding with The Beast. When they stop at a river, the valet tells her that because she will not submit herself to The Beast's gaze, she must look upon his unmasked, undressed form. Once she sees his true form as a tiger, she undresses herself and lets The Beast look upon her. She is then left alone for a while. Momentarily out of her father's and The Beast's care, she feels “at liberty for the first time in [her] life” (64). Back at The Beast's home, she realizes she is to be returned to her father. However, she sees her father in her maid's magic mirror and is disgusted with him. She decides to dress up her mechanical maid in her own clothes, and return the automaton in her place. The narrator herself goes to The Beast's room, where she sheds her clothing once more and draws him toward her; he licks her hand, and she feels him licking away “skin after successive skin,” leaving her covered with “beautiful fur” (67).
Four rewritings of different tales follow. “Puss-in-Boots” is a version of Perrault's “Puss in Boots,” in which the cat tricks a king into marrying off his daughter to Puss' master, a lowly miller's son. Carter's tale is also narrated by the cat Puss, and depicts Puss' conspiracy to advance his master's love affair with the young wife of Signore Panteleone, who is guarded by an elderly but strict chaperone. Puss and his master disguise themselves as rat-catchers to sneak into the lady's bedroom, while Puss plots with kitchen tabby to trip Panteleone on the stairs, and so enable the young lovers to marry and enjoy his wealth.
The next story, “The Erl-King” may allude to Goethe's poem of the same name, in which a child hears the promises of the fearful, invisible “Erl-King,” and dies as a result. In Carter's story, a young girl visits the Erl-King, who appears to have tamed the flora and fauna of the forest. She enters his garden “where all the flowers were birds and beasts,” and is enticed by his embraces. However, their strange relationship has undertones of vampirism and sadism. The Erl-King sinks his teeth into her neck, and the narrator describes being undressed as being skinned like a rabbit. As autumn nears, the narrator becomes aware that all the Erl-King's birds are caged, and she sees the cage he is building for her. One day, when he rests his head in her lap, she makes braids with his hair, intending to strangle him with them. The story ends with a vision of what will happen next: when the narrator lets the birds free, they will all turn into young girls, and the Erl-King's fiddle, strung with his own hair, will sing “Mother, mother, you have murdered me!” (91).
The very short “The Snow Child” alludes to the description of Snow White in the Brothers Grimm tale. On a midwinter horse ride, a Count wishes for a girl “as white as snow,” “as red as blood,” “as black as a raven's feather” (91). Suddenly, “the child of his desire” appears: a naked, white-skinned, red-lipped, and black-haired girl. Jealous, his wife the Countess is desperate to “be rid of her” (92). She asks the girl to fetch a dropped glove, and then a brooch flung into the lake. Each time, the Count prevents the girl from doing so, and the wife's clothing flies off her and onto the girl's body, leaving the Countess shivering in the cold. Finally, the Count permits the girl to pluck a red rose for his wife. When the girl pricks her finger on a thorn and dies, the Count “got off his horse, unfastened his breeches, and thrust his virile member into the dead girl” (92). The girl's body immediately melts into a feather and bloodstained snow. When the Count gives his wife the red rose, she drops it, exclaiming, “It bites!” (92).
“The Lady of the House of Love” draws on Perrault's “Sleeping Beauty.” In Carter's tale, the sleeping princess is replaced by the Countess, a beautiful vampire living in a dilapidated chateau in an abandoned Romanian village. The Countess is cared for by an elderly governess, who brings travelers using the village fountain back to the chateau. Although she feeds on these hapless victims, the Countess detests her nature: “Everything about this beautiful and ghastly lady is as it should be, queen of the night, queen of terror—except her horrible reluctance for the role” (95). When a young British soldier on bicycle (significantly, a virgin) stops at the fountain one evening, the Countess falls in love with him. She reluctantly lures him to her bedroom, using her familiar pretense of seduction to draw him toward his death. She drops the protective glasses she wears over her sensitive eyes, and the shattering glass startles and stops her: “She has fumbled the ritual, it is no longer inexorable” (105). Mistaking her shaken state for the hysteria of a sheltered, inbred, and unhealthy girl, the soldier takes pity on her. He sees she has cut her hand, and he kisses the wound: “A single kiss woke up the Sleeping Beauty of the Wood” (97). This moment of tenderness and the sight of her own blood marks a change in the Countess: “How can she bear the pain of becoming human?” (106) The soldier puts her to bed and falls asleep on the floor. When he awakens, he sees she had flung open the curtains and is sitting, dead, in the sunlight. However, she has left him a flower, “the dark, fanged rose I plucked from between my thighs, like a flower laid on a grave” (107). The soldier returns to his regiment, and much later discovers the faded rose in his pocket. When he puts it in a glass of water, it revives in all its “corrupt, brilliant, baleful splendour” (108).
Two versions of Perrault's “Little Red Riding Hood” follow. “The Werewolf” is a very short story set in a primitive village whose inhabitants fear vampires and witches. A child is told to go through the woods to her ailing grandmother's cottage, to bring her some food. On the way, she fights a wolf, cutting off its forepaw with her father's hunting knife. She puts the paw in her basket and continues on her path. When she arrives at the cottage, she discovers that the paw has turned into a hand, and she sees that the cause of her grandmother's fever is the wound from her missing arm. The girl's cries bring in the villagers, who stone the grandmother to death; the girl inherits her grandmother's house and prospers. “The Company of Wolves” has a similar setting and begins by outlining various tales about men turned into wolves, and vice versa. Despite the warning stories, a young, strong-willed girl dons her red cloak and insists on going through the woods to visit her grandmother. On the way, she meets a young man. Charmed by his flirtatious manner, she walks with him for a while. He shows her his compass but the girl refuses to believe it will guide them through the woods. The man laughs, and bets that he can beat her to her grandmother's house. If so, the girl will give him a kiss. They go their separate ways, and the young man does arrive first. He pretends to be the girl, fooling the grandmother into letting him in. He undresses and reveals he is a wolf, “carnivore incarnate” (116). He eats the grandmother and burns her inedible hair in the fireplace. When the girl arrives, she sees this hair and realizes she is “in danger of death,” and that “the worst wolves are hairy on the inside” (117). A pack of wolves surround the house, but the girl realizes that her fear will not save her. Instead of cowering before the young man, she flings her clothes into the fire. When he says his large teeth are “all the better to eat you with,” she laughs: “she knew she was nobody's meat” (118). She joins him in the bed, and the wolves and the rising blizzard outside become quiet. When the clock strikes midnight, ringing in Christmas Day, the girl is sleeping “sweet and sound” in her grandmother's bed, “between the paws of the tender wolf” (118).
The last story in the collection is “Wolf-Alice.” This tale alludes to several fairy tale motifs and is about a girl raised among wolves. When her wolf mother is shot by hunters, the girl is discovered and brought to a convent. The nuns train her to complete menial tasks but cannot convert her from her wolf-like ways, so they eventually leave her at the castle of the ancient Duke. The Duke is a body snatcher and cannibal who does not cast a reflection, and stirs trouble in the village for robbing the grave of a young bride, but he leaves Wolf-Alice alone. For some time, she lives with the Duke in an animal state of mind, “amongst things she could neither name nor perceive” (122). It is only when she begins to menstruate that she feels the “first stirrings of surmise” (122). Her menstrual cycle initiates “a punctuality” on her “vague grip on time,” and prompts a rudimentary system of hygiene based on habits the nuns taught her. She begins paying more attention to her body and to her reflection in the Duke's mirror, and in this way experiences a growing human sentience. One night, she experimentally puts on an old dress and walks outside, only to be caught in the middle of a chase. The husband of the young bride has come after the Duke, and is shooting silver bullets at him. Both the Duke and Wolf-Alice run back to the castle, where Wolf-Alice succumbs to her sense of pity for the wounded Duke. As she licks his wounds clean, the moonlit mirror catches both her and the Duke's reflections, as if her compassion has transformed them both from monsters into humans.
Societal Context
Despite, and perhaps because of, the prevalence and popularity of fairy tales, some feminist writers have challenged the idea that they represent universal values or teach helpful moral lessons, and have raised questions about their representations of women. In her own retelling of fairy tales, Carter also challenges their outmoded representation of gender roles and sexuality. The stories in “The Bloody Chamber” typically abandon the conventional omniscient narration of their source texts in favor of a first-person perspective. This has the effect of transforming the one-dimensional stock characters of fairy tales into fully developed subjects, and allows Carter to explore the encounter between conventional female roles (the princess, the helpless wife, and the victimized daughter) and contemporary female subjectivity. Carter also rewrites fairy tales from previously marginalized viewpoints, reverses the traditional gender of active and passive roles, and subverts expectations about characters' sexuality. All of these strategies enable Carter to depict familiar female characters as active and sexually confident rather than passive, victimized, or naïve. However, some literary critics have criticized “The Bloody Chamber,” insisting that it upholds rather than resists the problematic gender roles of the fairy tale. Patricia Duncker has argued that Carter's heroines are still defined by the “strait-jacket” of their fairy-tale fates, and that the erotic element of her tales reproduces “women's sensuality simply as a response to male arousal.” This is problematic, Duncker emphasizes, because “male sexuality has too long, too tenaciously been linked with power and possession, the capture, breaking and ownership of women” (Duncker 6–7). However, an alternative reading, such as that promoted by Margaret Atwood, views Carter's project as a subversion of the very way we define gender and sexual desire. Atwood reads “The Bloody Chamber” as a “writing against” the pornographic writings of the Marquis de Sade—the subject of Carter's study “The Sadeian Woman,” published in the same year as “The Bloody Chamber.” Atwood argues that “[p]redator and prey, master and slave, are the only two categories” de Sade “can acknowledge,” but that Carter's tales destabilize binary divisions such as aggressor/victim, passive/active, and animal/human: “in this respect, Carter's arrangements are much more subject to mutability than are de Sade's” and her text “celebrates relativity and metamorphosis” (Atwood 120–22). If we accept Atwood's reading, the stories in “The Bloody Chamber” represent identity as something fluid rather than fixed, and work against preconceptions about “acceptable” or “unacceptable” sexual behavior and desire.
Feminist rewritings of fairy tales and myths do not offer new stories so much as participate in the evolving history and transmission of fairy tales; to this end, “The Bloody Chamber” both questions problematic representations of women in existing narratives and calls attention to the contextual nature of stories we take for granted. As Patricia Brooke puts it, “Carter reveals the false universalizing inherent in many so-called master narratives of the Western literary tradition” (Brooke 67). In rewriting fairy tales, Carter recalls and participates in an oral tradition in which stories were not fixed authoritative texts, but changed from teller to teller. Carter's attention to this history signifies a postmodern awareness of the constructed and intertextual nature of fiction. The writer John Barth defined postmodern fiction as “the literature of replenishment”: “literature can never be exhausted, if only because no single literary text can ever be exhausted—its ‘meaning’ residing as it does in is transactions with individual readers over time, space, and language” (432). In keeping with this perspective, Carter's text is a blend of genres and intertexts. While Carter's primary sources are fairy tales, she also recycles the sexually charged, castle-strewn landscapes of the gothic novel and employs the imperative of magic realism, which dictates that unreal and improbable events are treated as normal. Carter also alludes to specific texts. In “The Bloody Chamber,” the Marquis' first wife died in a mysterious boat accident that recalls Daphne du Maurier's “Rebecca” (1956); in that novel, a similarly young and nameless narrator marries a wealthy man, and finds herself metaphorically haunted by his previous wife. In “The Erl-King,” Carter reproduces the themes, and even paraphrases some of the lines, from Christina Rossetti's “Goblin Market” (1862), a verse fairy tale in which a young girl falls prey to the temptations of the goblins.
Biographical Context
Angela Carter was born as Angela Stalker in Eastbourne, Sussex in 1940. At the age of eighteen, she worked as a reporter for the Croydon Advertiser before marrying Paul Carter in 1960. The couple moved to Bristol the same year, where Carter studied English at the University of Bristol, specializing in medieval literature. She received her degree in 1965. Her writing career began in 1966, with the publication of her novel “Shadow Dance” (published under the title “Honeybuzzard” in the United States). “Shadow Dance” was followed by “The Magic Toyshop” in 1967, which was awarded the John Llewellyn Rhys prize. “Several Perceptions” was published the next year, and “Love” in 1971. These two novels, along with “Shadow Dance,” form Carter's “Bristol Trilogy.”
In 1969, Carter separated from her husband and used the proceeds from a Somerset Maugham Travel Award to relocate to Japan, where she lived for two years. When she returned to Britain in 1972, she wrote “The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman” (1972), “Fireworks: Nine Profane Pieces” (1974), and “The Passion of New Eve” (1977). However, her work from the 1970s failed to gain the positive reception of her earliest novels. This changed with the publication of “The Bloody Chamber” in 1979, which received good reviews in newspapers, and caught the attention of academic critics. In the same year, Carter published “The Sadeian Woman,” a study of the Marquis de Sade's erotic writings. Carter continued producing short stories, journalism, and non-fiction throughout the 1980s, and by the time “Nights at the Circus” was published in 1984, she was an established figure in the British literary scene. She had also developed a career as a teacher of writing. From 1976–78 she was an Arts Council Fellow in Creative Writing at Sheffield University; this was followed by writer-in-residence posts at Brown University in the United States in 1980–81 and at the University of Adelaide in Australia in 1984. From 1984–87, she contributed to the Master's program in Writing at the University of East Anglia.
In 1991, Carter's last novel, “Wise Children,” was published. This is considered one of her best works, but preceded her untimely death from cancer in 1992. Obituaries written by well-known writers and scholars, including Salman Rushdie, Marina Warner, and Margaret Atwood, lauded Carter's work. Soon after her death, Rushdie edited the collection of Carter's short stories, “Burning Your Boats” (1995). Her dramatic works were collected in “The Curious Room: Collected Dramatic Works” in 1996, and her non-fictional writings in “Shaking a Leg: Collected Journalism and Writings” in 1997. Since her death, Carter's work has been the focus of several academic studies. Critical discourse on “The Bloody Chamber” and “The Sadeian Woman” in particular has raised productive questions about Carter's representations of sexuality and her rewriting of cultural master narratives; as she herself put it, “I'm in the demythologizing business” (Carter, “Shaking a Leg” 38).