REWRITING GENDERS, bildungsroman) ก REVISING GENRES: ก READING ANGELA / (sadism/ masochism) ก CARTER’S “THE BLOODY CHAMBER” AS A FEMALE BILDUNGSROMAN1 ก ก ก ก 2 Phacharawan Boonpromkul ก ก ก ก ก ก ก ก ก ก ก ก ก ก ก ก ก กก ก ก ก ก ก ก ก ก ก ก (female ก 1979 bonding) ก ก กก ก ก ก Abstract
ก ก Built on the storyline of the traditional ก ก (gothic) fairy tale “Bluebeard,” Angela Carter’s short story “The Bloody Chamber” (1979) ก ก (female contains striking alterations in the use of the first-person narrator, ambivalent and complex characterization, explicit sexual 1 description and a revised ending; all of ก ก ก which have given rise to heated arguments among feminist scholars and ก ก literary critics. This paper relies on a 2 ( ก ) Lecturer, Department of close reading analysis and engages in English Language and Literature, Faculty of the ongoing discussions by considering Liberal Arts, the problematic categorization of the Thammasat University, Phathum Thani, story—as a fairy tale, a pornographic Thailand
Downloaded from Brill.com10/02/2021 01:03:14PM via free access Rewriting Genders, Revising Genres
fiction, a gothic horror, and especially as a tale, is more than 16,000 words long. It is bildungsroman novel—in relation to several true that the framework of her story gender aspects such as power relations remains indisputably “Bluebeard” but the between the sexes, the concept of gaze, added material and modification give a sadomasochism and the representation significant new life, as well as new focuses of men and women and their of interest and complexity, to the old story. relationship. By focusing on gender “The Bloody Chamber” has been issues in the short story and using the approached by scholars using several narrative structures of these genres as a disciplines; it has been read particularly framework, Carter’s ingenious revision of against the original tale, feminist criticism the norms becomes a sharper critique of and together with Carter’s own essay The the restrictions of the traditional genres, Sadeian Woman, which was also published as well as the oppressive social and in 1979 and received highly controversial patriarchal ideologies hidden in them. responses. This essay, in turn, pays Also, the study reveals how the short story particular attention to the issue of gender can be a totally different read with the within the multiple genres into which this education of the female narrator at the short story seems to fit. The discussion of center because the lesson learnt is not a genre involves that of a fairy tale, a reproof of female curiosity as the traditional pornographic fiction, a gothic horror and a “Bluebeard” endeavors to deliver but is her bildungsroman novel, with a particular own sexual awareness, readjustment of focus on the last genre as it seems to have certain values and the realization of female escaped critics’ attention so far. Within the bonding and realizable autonomy outside issue of gender, the essay includes the conventional realm of matrimony. arguments concerning power relations and the representation of men and women and First published in 1979, Angela Carter’s their relationship in the story. It will short story collection The Bloody explore how the representation of genders Chamber is “often—wrongly—described differs from stereotypical ones to which as a group of traditional fairy tales given a we have been accustomed in the genres subversive feminist twist” (Simpson discussed; and how using the 2006:vii). Carter explained in an bildungsroman structure as a framework to interview, however, that such was not the approach gender issues allows case—“my intention was not to do interpretations that would not otherwise “versions” or, as the American edition of surface. the book said, horribly, “adult” fairy tales, but to extract the latent content from the “The Bloody Chamber” centers on a traditional stories and to use it as the young pianist, the nameless narrator, who beginnings of new stories” (Haffenden at the opening of the story is travelling 1985:84). Her assertion is reasonable away from home after getting married to a enough because while the traditional fairy rich Marquis. Her arrival at his grand and tale of Charles Perrault’s “Bluebeard” or mysterious castle is followed by the “La Barbe Bleue”, which is actually “a consummation and her husband’s urgent widespread European folktale with many departure on business to New York. variants” (Lokke 1988:8), contains around Before he leaves, the Marquis hands all the 1,800 words, Carter’s new story “The keys over to his wife giving her Bloody Chamber”, which draws upon this permission to explore every room except
51
Downloaded from Brill.com10/02/2021 01:03:14PM via free access MANUSYA: Journal of Humanities Regular 17.2, 2014
for the little one which he claims to be his although early tale archivists, Charles private study. Unable to overcome her Perrault, the Brothers Grimm, and Hans curiosity to discover the secrets of his real Christian Andersen were male, “most of self there, however, she decides to enter the material they collected was provided the forbidden room. Within that bloody by women” (98). The fairy tale as a genre, chamber, the discovery of an embalmed however, is not typically seen by feminist body, a skull, and a corpse pierced scholars as healthy to women. It is throughout inside a coffin—all the considered to be oppressive tool informing remains of his three ex-wives—fills her female readers, especially children, of their with so much horror that she drops the key subordinate role in relation to men. Due to in the pool of blood, leaving it with a red its close similarity to “Bluebeard,” Carter, stain that cannot be removed. Realizing as the author of “The Bloody Chamber”, her own fate from what she has seen there, has thus been heavily criticized. According the young bride seeks refuge in the music to Merja Makinen in “Angela Carter’s The room where she meets and confides Bloody Chamber and the Decolonization everything to Jean-Yves, the blind piano- of Feminine Sexuality,” some critics argue tuner, who sympathizes with her. Her that the old fairy tale was a reactionary chance of escape is thwarted by the form that inscribed a misogynistic Marquis’s sudden return and his ideology and in using the form, Carter has immediate discovery of her intrusion to voluntarily accepted conservative sexism. the secret chamber. After pressing the key Therefore, she “is rewriting the tales on her forehead leaving a permanent mark within the strait-jacket of their original of red blood, the death sentence by structure,” and by failing to revise the decapitation is issued, only to be averted conservative form for feminist politics at the last minute by the girl’s mother. She creates only “a reproduction of male rides to her daughter’s rescue on a swift pornography,” to quote Patricia Duncker horse and shoots the Marquis to death. and Avis Lewallen respectively (1992:4). The story ends with the young narrator, These assumptions have been sharply now a widow, busily setting up a new countered by Makinen who points out house with her lover, Jean-Yves and her these critics’ inability to see beyond the mother. Generally speaking, “The Bloody sexist binary opposition and perceiving Chamber” closely follows the storyline of Carter’s work as a rewriting of the tales the traditional fairy tale of “Bluebeard,” centering on the female protagonist with which also deals with a young bride an active sexuality that subverts the earlier finding the dead bodies of her husband’s misogynistic version. Whichever stance previous wives in a forbidden room and one takes in this argument, it is difficult to who is about to be beheaded when her deny that Carter, as a fairy tale enthusiast, brothers come and save her. To consider draws attention to the flaws of the genre how this genre bears on the issue of and the long-standing inequality between gender it is important to know that the the two sexes by means of juxtaposition; fairy tale is by no means a gender-neutral and she does it so effectively via the fairy genre. Joyce Carol Oates in “In Olden tale which is one of the most accessible Times, When Wishing Was Having” genres to the general public. It is arguable, (1997) contends that “the fairy tale, as a too, that no other kind of prose deals with literary/cultural genre, has traditionally or encounters a traditional tale better than been associated with women” and that a modernized one. A recurring female
52
Downloaded from Brill.com10/02/2021 01:03:14PM via free access Rewriting Genders, Revising Genres
figure in fairy tales, i.e. the damsel in often explicit sexual activities renders her distress, still persists and is very much vulnerable to several anti-pornography abused in Carter’s story, but her point of critics. She is blamed, for example, for view, for one thing, helps us to better supporting pornography which is a sexual understand the female character’s practice based on domination and which is psychology and the nature of her always violent. Pornography is violent in suffering. The ending of the new tale, its content since it “involves scenes of moreover, offers more possibilities for its bondage, rape, mutilation, and torture— heroine other than that of the limited role and in its structures of representation, as a wife in the original text. This will be which silence, objectify, and fragment the discussed in detail later in this essay. female” (636-7). In opposition, a number of advocates of pornography defend it by Nevertheless, in terms of genre, “The stating that “the genre serves women’s Bloody Chamber” cannot simply be interests by offering them an escape from treated as a modern, subversive translation the repressions of bourgeois ideology: it or an extension of the traditional fairy tale, counteracts romantic love, undermines since it also borders on pornographic heterosexual monogamy, and subverts literature and gothic fiction. The procreative sex” (638). In spite of these discussion of the former category derives radical but plausible arguments of the from Carter’s depiction of sensuality and latter group, there remains the question of erotic images in several scenes, such as whether “The Bloody Chamber,” with its when the narrator finds one of her free use of pornographic imagery, is able husband’s illustrated collections in the to achieve such objectives. The fact that library— the story does not provide any alternative sexuality outside that of the marital the girl with tears hanging on her contract and that the narrator’s relationship cheeks like stuck pearls, her cunt a with her new lover is horribly romantic split fig below the great globes of seems incongruous with what the pro- her buttocks…, while a man in a pornography critics propose. However black mask fingered with his free shocking the overt pornographic hand his prick, that curved upwards description quoted above may seem, it is like the scimitar he held. (13)3 done entirely through a female perspective and can be seen as a necessary The contentious topic of Carter’s foreshadowing step towards sexual pornographic manner of expression is experience with the Marquis. Furthermore, fully discussed by Robin Ann Sheets in it is indeed the exposure to sexuality on “Pornography, Fairy Tales, and Feminism: the female’s part that makes the story most Angela Carter’s “The Bloody Chamber”” engaging and interesting. The young (1991). Again, Carter’s position as a pianist’s reaction towards the female writer who engages her female pornographic material in her hand is characters in extremely eroticized and remarkable—she does not put it down nor shun it but gasps and turns the pages in
3 Carter, Angela. 2011. The Bloody Chamber curiosity for more, a topic we shall return to later. Aghast as she is, the book she and Other Stories. New York: Penguin Books. finds serves far better as a part of her All parenthetical references in the text are to sexual education and stimulation than this edition.
53
Downloaded from Brill.com10/02/2021 01:03:14PM via free access MANUSYA: Journal of Humanities Regular 17.2, 2014
what she “should have liked, best of all, a unfamiliar events, objects, people or novel in yellow paper” (13) that only experience become strangely similar and romanticizes idealistic love and thus create fear or discomfort, such as sentimental heroism. And might not the when the narrator knows what the book same thrill be happening to her female she is holding in the Marquis’s library is readers as well? According to Cristina all about—“I think I knew, I knew by Bacchilega, Carter’s approval of eroticism some tingling of the fingertips, even stems from her confidence that all before I opened that slim volume with no literature that “contains elements of title at all on the spine, what I should find eroticism... has the potential to force the inside it” (13). The murderous act of the reader to reassess his relation to his own Marquis, as well as his collection of sexuality” (2008:17). This view corpses in a secret chamber, narrated in corresponds with that of Michele startling detail by his fear-stricken wife, Grossman who, citing Caught Looking, a are in themselves both perversive and collection of essays and visual transgressive as infringements of law and representations on feminism, pornography human society. Obviously, incidents of an and censorship published in 1986, argues inexplicable supernatural nature occur that “by condemning pornography as the throughout the story—the narrator, for cause of female oppression and calling for instance, is branded with the indelible red its elimination or censorship…, feminists mark on the forehead like, in her own will assist in silencing all analysis and words, “the caste mark of a brahmin dialogue among women in the difficult woman. Or the mark of Cain” (39). The and contradictory domain of sexual young bride might have forgotten to expression” (1988:150). Thus, the free use mention yet another female character who of eroticism in this story might suggest suffers a similar fate in a classic gothic that to acknowledge the existence of novel, Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897), pornography and to be able to derive although the short story makes a direct sexual pleasure from it could be a step allusion to the famous text in a note towards self-realization, confidence, and written by his late wife, captioned the liberation of women. It is positively far “Typical Transylvanian Scene… [o]n the more liberating than treating the matter as occasion of this marriage to the descendant non-existent, to keep it latent as in typical of Dracula” (25). The resemblance, fairy tales; and thus keep the female nevertheless, cannot be overlooked on the eternally pure and invariably naïve. reader’s part. After the heroine of the novel, Mina Harker, is vamped by Count The question of “The Bloody Chamber” Dracula, Professor Van Helsing presses being a gothic fiction is also noteworthy, the Sacred Wafer on her forehead as a way although most of the scholars mentioned of safeguarding her life. As it touches her have paid little attention to this aspect. skin, however, it “burned into the flesh as The short story, in fact, is mainly about though it had been a piece of white-hot mystery and terror, and it also amply metal… she wailed out ‘Unclean! incorporates such elements as the Unclean! Even the Almighty shuns my uncanny, perversity and transgression; all polluted flesh! I must bear this mark of of which are prominent characteristics of shame upon my forehead until the gothic fiction. The uncanny is a Judgement Day’” (275). While Kari E. supernatural characteristic in which Lokke (1988) tries to see the mark of the
54
Downloaded from Brill.com10/02/2021 01:03:14PM via free access Rewriting Genders, Revising Genres
young bride in a positive light—“the heart is a German term signifying a “novel of on the heroine’s forehead is not only a formation” or a “novel of education.” In mark of shame… it is also a badge of general, the subject matter of these novels courage. She is rewarded for breaking the is the development of the protagonist’s patriarchal taboo with a knowledge of the mind and character, on the passage from human heart” (11), the focus on the word childhood through varied experiences into “shame” in both cases does imply the maturity, which usually involves the opposite. To both heroines, the red mark recognition of one’s identity and role in conveys a strong impression of guilt, of the world. (Abrams and Harpham having committed embarrassing, 2009:229). Jerome Hamilton Buckley’s disgraceful, or unforgivable acts. The Season of Youth (1974), a foundational study permanent mark as a source of shame and of the bildungsroman tradition in the agony, signifying indelible impurity, can nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century be seen as an unjust punishment for the British novels, lays out certain principles two female characters who must bear on of this genre. The broad outline of a their body the brand of the crime for typical bildungsroman plot concerns a which they cannot be wholly held child of some sensibility growing up in a responsible. Apart from this reference to a provincial town. Finding home and early Gothic classic, other supernatural, schooling smothering or frustrating, he inexplicable features of “The Bloody leaves the repressive atmosphere at home Chamber” include the “maternal for the city where his “real education” telepathy” (44), which spurs the narrator’s begins. His experience involves at least mother to the castle to save her and its two love affairs or sexual encounters and ancient setting with a secret chamber full demands that, in certain important of medieval devices of torture—the Iron respects, the hero reappraises his values Maiden, for example, a device believed to (17). So much is quite useful to an have originated in the Middle Ages. understanding of the rough course of male Elaborate descriptions of the scene and bildungsroman fiction during the Victorian instruments of torture are, particularly, and modernist periods but it has proved recurrent in classic gothic fiction, in spite inadequate in encompassing the more of the fact that no such violence is recent female novels of education. Carol described in action in Carter’s story. Lazzaro-Weis’s “The Female Bildungsroman: Calling It into Question” Michele Grossman’s “Born to Bleed” (1990) expands the definition of the genre (1988) asserts that Carter makes shrewd through a feminist-deconstructive use of “double play in her fiction, setting approach and suggests that, in contrast to genre against genre, gender against the coherent self and the confidence in the gender… to tease out in “The Bloody possibility of self-development in most Chamber” the treacheries posed by false male protagonists, the female universals” (153). Yet her discussion of bildungsroman greatly problematizes such genre is mainly devoted to mythology, a certainty. In its place, “nostalgia, loss, pornography and romance. Another genre home and community, and the generation that has been largely disregarded, most gap, spoken predominately in terms of the probably because it is overshadowed by mother-daughter relationship rather than the above classifications, is that of the father-daughter conflict…, are all bildungsroman literature. Bildungsroman themes which characterize the more recent
55
Downloaded from Brill.com10/02/2021 01:03:14PM via free access MANUSYA: Journal of Humanities Regular 17.2, 2014
exploitations of the Bildungsroman of leaving her girlhood. Unlike the original tradition by women writers” (24). Pin-chia version of the tale, there are a number of Feng in her book The Female specific references to her childhood, her Bildungsroman by Toni Morrison and childlike features and her family, stressing Maxine Hong Kingston (1998), which the magnitude of leaving this stage. focuses on ethnic women writers builds on these earlier works of the genre and I remember how, that night, I lay proposes that female bildungsroman awake in the wagon-lit in a tender, authors usually prioritize “the process delicious ecstasy of excitement,… instead of the product” of the novels and my heart mimicking that of the great “transform a traditionally personal and pistons ceaselessly thrusting the privatized genre into a political one” (36). train that bore me through the night, Lastly, Laura Pressman in “The away from Paris, away from Frauenroman” (2013) engages in girlhood, away from the white, contemporary female bildungsroman enclosed quietude of my mother’s literature and believes that female writers apartment, into the unguessable have been increasingly able to explore country of marriage. (1) “issues that those of the past were unable to mention. Sexuality, higher education, The journey motif is a prominent feature and other aspects of society that were once of bildungsroman literature and in contrast off-limits to female writers… are now to “Bluebeard,” “The Bloody Chamber” described and explored extensively contains a minute description of the because of the shift in cultural norms.” passage. Here, the girl’s physical journey These are only a small selection of parallels her psychological journey to countless studies on this subject but they another stage of selfhood—to becoming a prove, I think, extremely relevant as a start woman and a wife. The heroine is of our reading of “The Bloody Chamber,” travelling away from a familiar which embodies elements of what these environment, into not only a faraway, scholars observe about the genre. First of unknown place, but also into the strange all, while the focus of the original realm of matrimony. She is young, only “Bluebeard” is not on the growth of the seventeen. She “knew nothing of the protagonist but on its moral dimension as world” (4), and is clearly exhilarated by a cautionary tale, Carter’s adaptation is this experience. The very opening is seen much more prominently a bildungsroman by Kari E. Lokke as an irony, because story. It has the quality of a female from the brief use of the present tense “the bildungsroman, in which the young reader knows from the very first word that protagonist not only undergoes several the heroine survives to tell her tale” stages of femininity but also, finally, (1988:8). However, bildungsroman readers realizes important lessons about herself might be struck more by the emphasis on and her relationship with those around her. the emergence, in the story’s first two In its framework, the story involves the paragraphs, of fragmented or repressed narrator’s passage from girlhood towards memories from the past, which Pin-chia adulthood, which consists of wifehood and Feng believes is a characteristic of novels widowhood; all of which reveal different of education by ethnic women writers nuances of the female experience. The (18). At the same time, the opening story opens as the narrator is on the point recollection might suggest that although
56
Downloaded from Brill.com10/02/2021 01:03:14PM via free access Rewriting Genders, Revising Genres
the memory of that night is clearly paraphernalia of the everyday world impressed upon her, the experience has from which I, with my stunning become a past—as the shift of tense marriage, had exiled myself. indicates a distance in terms of time and Into marriage, into exile; I sensed it, indicates changes in the narrator as a I knew it—that, henceforth, I would person who has achieved maturity when always be lonely. (7) she starts narrating her story. The lengthy description of her restless time on the train It is a strikingly ambiguous projection of reveals her anxious expectation of the next marriage life. Instead of identifying herself phase of life but it is persistently undercut with the one who will belong in the new by the previous stage of her childhood, domestic surroundings as a wife or a especially concerning her mother and old mother, her anticipation and anxiety reflect nurse. The fact that her mother’s an ambivalent understanding of marriage. apartment is white, enclosed and quiet On the one hand, she may compare her reflects her boredom with the pure but marriage to exile with the sense of restricted condition of her early years, crossing the border—away from home, although it connotes safety and peace. Her homeland, or the earlier stage of maiden self-portrayal as “I, the poor widow’s life, to which she may never return. On the child with my mouse-colored hair that still other hand, exile can be seen as an bore the kinks of the plaits from which it involuntary isolation, if not a form of had so recently been freed” and the punishment that she must endure as a “young girl’s pointed breasts and consequence of her faulty decision to shoulders” and “bony hips” (2, 5) suggests marry. Although it seems dubious that she not only her youth but also her physical projects her married life as being always alteration from a girl to a woman that has lonely, it is actually relevant because her hardly been completed nor been fully husband seems a complete stranger to her, realized in her mind. Yet the most as is suggested by her inability to see his disturbing tension that occurs throughout real face. It is a “strange, heavy, almost this stage is her anxiety over the marriage waxen face,” a face which seems to her itself. It is a double-edged circumstance “like a mask” (3). In contrast with his that at the same time means a glorious invisibility, her own face and body are on victory as well as a terrible bereavement several occasions exposed in public or on the part of her mother—saying that in even in the limelight—when she plays this “bridal triumph” she also feels “a piano in the salon or during the opera pang of loss” of her status as a daughter before the wedding day where “everyone (1). Such awkward feelings continue in stared at” (6) her in the sensuous white her depiction of the realm of marriage as a muslin dress. Besides the disproportionate cold and unpleasant displacement. During exposure and accessibility that render her the journey she sees out of her window a acquaintanceship with the Marquis scene of domestic settlement where the shallow and distant, their relationship lamplight— continues in a highly reciprocal manner. The Marquis is a wealthy man and promised warmth, company, a strangely his gifts are listed and elaborated supper of sausages hissing in a on by the narrator, in even more detail than pan… children tucked up in bed the accounts of the giver himself. The asleep in the brick house… all the young bride even declares that these
57
Downloaded from Brill.com10/02/2021 01:03:14PM via free access MANUSYA: Journal of Humanities Regular 17.2, 2014
excessively extravagant objects are hours of travelling, the couple arrives at something she cannot resist—“This ring, the castle, the ancestral establishment the bloody bandage [choker] of rubies, the located “at the bosom of the sea” (9) with wardrobe of clothes from Poiret and a causeway as the only link to the Worth… all had conspired to seduce me mainland, suggesting the distance, the so utterly” (7). For one thing, her marriage uncertainty, as well as the isolated state of is not wholly a result of love, for the girl the narrator. She quickly settles herself does not answer “yes” when questioned into the new position—that of the mistress whether she loves him or not. In fact, she of the house—and for the moment is awed even makes fun of the notion of love when by the luxurious furniture and the many she slights her mother’s devotion to and special arrangements made by the host to love of her father with so little in return— welcome home his wife. Inside the “my mother herself had gladly… beggared spacious bedroom are so many mirrors on herself for love; [but]… her gallant soldier all the walls and white lilies everywhere— never returned from the wars, leaving his wife and child a legacy of tears that never He’d fill the room with them, to quite dried” (2). Thus, the daughter is now greet the bride, the young bride. The doing the opposite, banishing herself in a young bride, who had become that lonely exile in return for a tangible legacy multitude of girls I saw in the of wealth instead of tears or, in other mirrors, identical in their chic navy words, for the economic ascension from blue tailor-mades… bourgeois to aristocratic standing. She ‘See,’ he said, gesturing towards seems exactly what Oates would call one those elegant girls. ‘I have acquired of those exemplary “fairy-tale beings a whole harem for myself!’ (11) [who] yearn for nothing more than material comforts, a “royal” marriage, a In this scene and elsewhere, the mirror self-absorbed conventional life in which motif is seen by Kathleen E. B. Manley as social justice and culture of any kind are a medium that brings about the “dawning unknown” (1997:102); but this is not a of the protagonist's sense of subjectivity” fairy tale. In spite of all the assuring as it allows her to see herself in the way material implications of her marriage, the others, especially her fiancé, view her and narrator looks at her coming married life to “have a more complete sense of herself not with joyful expectation but with an as subject” (1998:71-3). Contrary to apprehension that reads so differently Manley’s interpretation I believe that from common stories of romance or of mirrors, instead of helping establish the fairy-tale princesses. Her marriage, an narrator’s identity, set a distance between exile in terms of distance and a literal her perception and her own body. Here the punishment of sort, starts to look grim and emphasis is given to, apart from her sinister even before she reaches the center fashionable outfit, her youth and her status of her husband’s horrid mystery. by the repetition of the young bride but the unusual use of third-person possessive The next phase of the protagonist’s rite of determiner “their” suggests the unsettling passage is that of wifehood, which will be effect of the setting on the narrator’s discussed together with power relations in mentality—as if she saw her reflections marriage and the representation of the from a different person’s view, a sort of genders of the three main characters. After uncanny displacement of herself. The
58
Downloaded from Brill.com10/02/2021 01:03:14PM via free access Rewriting Genders, Revising Genres
young woman has become, even in her senses that he is “awake and gazing at own narrative voice, “that multitude of [her]… his eyes, dark and motionless… girls” and “those elegant girls,” losing fixed upon [her]” (7-8). The other three both the possession and the singularity of incidents when the Marquis looks and her self. It is immediately after this very appraises her are while she is forced to scene that she will be stripped off, leaving play the piano in the salon, at home when only the “scarlet, palpitating core” that he comes up behind her blindfolding her merges in the mirror into the living image with his hands while she is playing and of Rops, an erotic etching of a naked girl when the Marquis finally takes his bride to he had once showed her. Here the deflower her, under protest, in broad narrative becomes blurred that it is daylight because it is “all the better to see” impossible to distinguish which person— her (14), repeating the same power the narrator herself or the nude image—is structure through the gazing between the “the child with her sticklike limbs, naked couple. Throughout the story, the narrator but for her button boots, her gloves, is the object of the Marquis’s gaze, on shielding her face with her hand as though various occasions and in several analogies her face were the last repository of her of hunter-prey, performer-spectator, modesty” (11-2). connoisseur-animal/object; all of which suggest the male’s superior power to In this same scene we are faced with the execute, to take pleasure, to judge and to crux of gaze4, another important subject in purchase. In her essay, Robin Ann Sheets the study of power relations between looks at the episodes mentioned and finds genders and of pornographic fiction. a striking compatibility with the workings Generally speaking, the concept of gaze of the male gaze in pornographic films. involves the interaction between the active gazer, invariably male, and the passive, In both episodes—the disrobing and immovable object, the female. This the defloration—the contrast relationship is obviously applicable to the between the husband’s action and married couple in “The Bloody Chamber.” the wife’s immobility seems to That night before the wedding when the support the theory of male gaze narrator has on a white muslin Poiret dress articulated by film critic E. Ann and a ruby choker, she sees him “watching Kaplan: “To begin with, men do not [her] in the gilded mirrors with the simply look; their gaze carries with assessing eye of a connoisseur inspecting it the power of action and horseflesh” (6). Later when they are on the possession that is lacking in the train, she, under the streak of first light, female gaze. Women receive and return a gaze, but cannot act on it.
Second, the sexualization and 4 “In theories of the visual arts, such as film theory and art history, the gaze is a term used objectification of women is not to describe acts of looking caught up in simply for the purposes of eroticism; dynamics of desire—for example, the gaze can from a psychoanalytic point of view, be motivated by a desire for control over its it is designed to annihilate the threat object. Theories of the gaze have explored the that woman (as castrated, and complex power relations that are a part of the possessing a sinister genital organ) acts of looking and being looked at.” (Sturken poses.” (1991:646-7) and Cartwright’s Practices of Looking 2011:355)
59
Downloaded from Brill.com10/02/2021 01:03:14PM via free access MANUSYA: Journal of Humanities Regular 17.2, 2014
While it seems less relevant to identify the purely visual as a slight, slim or fragile narrator or her sexual organ as a threat to being. The story particularly details her husband, the process of gazing in “The images of her body, especially emphasized Bloody Chamber” can definitely be in its nudity, and is clearly one-sided— related to the first point of Kaplan’s whoever it is the gazer, the female body of argument, that is, as a manifestation of hers is the object, the center of desire. male power. There can hardly be any struggle for power on the female’s part Although the relation of male gaze and because when the narrator herself acts as a female object reinforces eroticism and, as gazer, it is done only on her own body. On it reasserts male-female positioning in a the opera night, she notices how her fiancé dichotomy of active-passive roles, is looking at her with so much lust, but condones male oppression, there seems to “glancing away from him, I caught sight be no model for sexual pleasure apart from of myself in the mirror. And I saw myself, that initiated and enforced by the male. suddenly, as he saw me, my pale face, the This is why the narrator in “The Bloody way the muscles in my neck stuck out like Chamber” cannot realize her own desire thin wire. I saw how much that cruel through the sight of the Marquis, or of necklace became me” (6-7). She does not herself without his agency. Yet the matter cast her gaze down upon her body to see does not simply end there, one step further herself—especially not the ruby choker from female objectifications of themselves tied so closely around her neck, worn leads us to the contentious topic of solely to gratify the viewer. Instead, she sadomasochism, another topic under looks in the mirror and perceives the sight heated debate among feminist scholars. On of herself, the sight that primarily belongs the one hand sadomasochism, seen as the to him, as he sees her. The incident is product of the phallocentric ideologies referred to again when he undresses her on initiated by the Marquis de Sade, a writer their arrival at his castle—“And, as at the held up by Carter but much despised by opera, when I had first seen my flesh in many feminist critics, might serve to his eyes, I was aghast to feel myself justify violence against women; on the stirring” (12) [emphasis added]. Towards other hand it is yet another channel the end of the story, to avoid getting the through which female pleasure can be keys from the music room, she even forces derived. According to E. Ann Kaplan, herself to be seductive in order to detain women, “assigned the place of object,… him in bed—“I saw myself, pale, pliant as the passive recipient of his gaze,… have a plant that begs to be trampled underfoot, learned to associate their sexuality with a dozen vulnerable, appealing girls domination by the male gaze, a position reflected in as many mirrors” (37). The involving a degree of masochism in episodes listed here serve to affirm that a finding their objectification erotic” (qtd. in female gaze may become possible through Sheets 1991:651). That the narrator is reflection but it is still the female body engaged in this masochistic whirlpool is that remains the sole object. Indeed, while revealed not only when she finds her own the Marquis is always characterized by the objectification erotic—to feel herself quality of his magnitude and through the “stirring” (12) at the reflection of her olfactory sense, with an emphasis on his naked body through his eyes—but also in size, his strength and his “opulent male her fascination with physical pain and scent” (3); the narrator’s representation is bondage. After she is “impaled” (15) by
60
Downloaded from Brill.com10/02/2021 01:03:14PM via free access Rewriting Genders, Revising Genres
her husband, there is a certain irrepressible Amsterdam or… to do with opium” (25); yearning for yet another sexual he has married such a young and intercourse—“a certain queasy craving… inexperienced girl as herself because “it for the renewal of caresses” (20). The must have been [her] innocence that choker that bites into her neck, his habit of captivated him” (17) or it might have been twining her long hair into a rope and because “he sensed [in her] a rare talent pulling it until she winces “a little” (16) for corruption” (18). In spite of our lack of and her admission of the validity of information about the Marquis, it remains Baudelaire’s “[t]here is a striking certain that he is a figure of authority. First resemblance between the act of love and of all, in the whole narrative framework the ministrations of a torturer” (28) in the story engages in a series of violence relation to her own sexual experience, are acts centered on him. He is described as all examples of their sadomasochistic inhuman or as a beast of prey with a head inclination. However radical it may seem, of “dark, leonine shape” and “dark mane” Carter in The Sadeian Woman approves of (3). While the Marquis’s animal-like Sade’s writing, seeing it as a liberating attributes connote his physical strength, his manifestation of female sexuality, because position as the lord of the castle, his he “declares himself unequivocally for the wealth, title, connections and aesthetic right of women to fuck” (qtd. in Sheets taste reaffirm his superiority financially, 1991:633). In my opinion, the narrator’s socially, and culturally. His freedom and view of herself as an object of desire is mobility also mark his power as a leader. unavoidable due to the impossibility of He can freely and independently traverse objectifying the male, from the absence of between the outside world and the castle power and the lack of a desirable model and within, while the female protagonist is for any other form of eroticization. The not—being always led, “handed down” (8) ability to derive pleasure from self- from the train, dragged or driven by him objectification can then be seen as a so that she “stumbled on the winding stair” struggle for power on the female’s part. In (14) to the bedroom. Lastly, the Marquis is spite of its dependence on male agency, it infinitely superior in their sexual is at least a chance to project her gaze, a relationship, being not only older and step towards a realization of her desire and more experienced with three marriages ultimately a better understanding of her before him, but also the one who decides own sexuality. upon the time and place of all their sexual encounters. The wedding night would be From the discussion of power relations in “voluptuously deferred until we lay in his terms of gazing, we now turn to the great ancestral bed” (2) and, once there, he problematic representation of gender in strips her bare until she feels herself “The Bloody Chamber.” The main male aroused simply to “close [her] legs like a character is the Marquis—the most book” (12) and, later, deflowers her under enigmatic of all due to the narrator’s protest in broad daylight. His insistence inability to grasp him physically and that she has on the choker of rubies and his mentally and her limited knowledge of the holding her twisted hair like a rope declare motives behind his abysmal behaviors. his ownership and claim to full control What we have are only inferences—the over her body, like that of a man over a source of his wealth is guessed to be from harnessed animal or a pet through collar “bankrupt[ing] a small businessman in and leash.
61
Downloaded from Brill.com10/02/2021 01:03:14PM via free access MANUSYA: Journal of Humanities Regular 17.2, 2014
To counter the Marquis’s powerful “Oh, my love, my little love who exertion, Carter nevertheless challenges brought me a white gift of music,” the demarcation of power between he said, almost as if grieving. “My genders by adding certain unlikely little love, you’ll never know how qualities that seem totally incongruous to much I hate daylight!” (37-8) the previous depiction of him. One such moment is when the narrator, even though Here his weakness is revealed at the most she realises that it is a “curious analogy” unlikely instant when he should be (4), compares her husband to a flower, a victimizing his transgressive wife; and lily. On the one hand, the lily is a within these seconds their roles are significant symbol since it is usually reversed. In spite of his superior position related to funerals and associated with as a master, he sinks into despair and female chastity, thus carrying both fatal draws sympathy from his young victim. and sexual connotations relevant to the Loneliness and grief, which up to this story. On the other hand, the lily is also a point have only afflicted the female phallic depiction, particularly in this protagonist, are suddenly upon him. The context where it is described as “cobra- Marquis, now seeming blind and passive headed… lilies whose white sheaths are as if in slumber, mourns for his love and curled out of a flesh [so] thick and tensely reveals his hatred of daylight. Although yielding to the touch” (4). In fact, the his weakness is betrayed only briefly roomful of lilies that release a weighing before he assumes his authority again and odor is just one among many prominent orders her to kneel before him, the yet oppressive phallic symbols associated description renders him a different sort of with him, such as the Romeo y Julieta villain—a pathetic figure behind the cigar “fat as a baby’s arm” (8) and the opaque façade of a demonic being. In fact, heavy, unsheathed sword with which he the Marquis’s mysterious background, his threatens to sever her fragile neck in the aristocratic position, libertine tendencies, end. Another incident that undermines the womanizing character, and isolated, Marquis’s might is far more complicated. melancholic life might even remind us of a At the very moment the young bride Byronic hero. In this case, the Marquis returns the key to her husband and is may not be easily termed an atrocious found guilty, the complex character of the monster who deserves to be get rid of as Marquis is revealed. happens in the end. This might signify Carter’s intention of defying the Strange. In spite of my fear of conventional villain stereotype in fairy him,… I felt there emanate from tales through the vision of an antihero and him… a stench of absolute to supply fascinating nuances to this despair… The evidence of that passionate character so that he is more bloody chamber had showed me I than just a formidable but heartless serial could expect no mercy. Yet, when killer. In a way that the original tale does he raised his head and stared at me not, the scene above sharply destabilizes with his blind, shuttered eyes as his previous role as an authoritative ruler though he did not recognize me, I and renders him a highly ambiguous felt a terrified pity for him… character. The atrocious loneliness of that monster!…
62
Downloaded from Brill.com10/02/2021 01:03:14PM via free access Rewriting Genders, Revising Genres
Almost as complicated as the ambivalent face as “a common property,” and the last character of the Marquis is that of his as a “sumptuous diva” whom “you could young bride, the female protagonist. On tell… would die young” (5). After her the surface, it seems that her portrayal husband is called away on business, she deviates not much from the general displays ungrounded jealousy toward portrayal of heroines in traditional fairy him—“Might he have left me… for an tales. She is young, innocent and, unlike importunate mistress… who knew how to all the Marquis’s former wives, virginal. pleasure him far better than a girl whose Robin Ann Sheets, citing Roland fingers had been exercised, hitherto, only Barthes’s argument that “the master is he by the practice of scales and arpeggios” who speaks,” sees the protagonist’s (21). Moreover, before entering the “control of language as evidence of a shift forbidden room, she is naïve enough to in power” (1991:649) yet, to me, she is for disbelieve that her “disobedience might the most part submissive to her husband. truly offend him” (26). To put it bluntly, Although Carter’s admitted discomfort she is utterly materialistic, vain, jealous with dialogue makes her avoid it in much and rather stupid. Still, that is not all—for of her work (Simpson 2006:x), it is she has in her certain rebellious and nevertheless notable that the young bride deceitful traits as well. For one thing, the has almost no voice at all in the presence Marquis sees through her and realizes her of the Marquis. Except for a single tendency to be corrupt and whorish. Apart occasion when she demands to know from the scenes mentioned earlier, in about the last key in the ring—“The key to which she readily admits her astonishment your heart? Give it me!” (19)—she is in at her darker, lustful side or her no position to argue or give orders but, masochistic zeal, the fact that she simply, to fear and comply. That is why welcomes the piano-tuner, Jean-Yves, as a she speaks so little to him when compared lover directly, and even asks for his with the extent to which she speaks to the assistance at the cost of his life, is also other male character, Jean-Yves. In spite very disturbing. of these characteristics of the sweet and gentle heroine of a conventional narrative, From the contradictory characteristics at a deeper level she by no means above, it seems that the female protagonist conforms to the good-girl stereotype. To in “The Bloody Chamber” is habitually begin with, she is drawn primarily by his drawn between two extremes, that of an wealth and the entailing power as a utterly submissive girl and that of her marquise of the castle. Her attitudes rebellious mother. Kathleen Manley says towards all the other female characters are the narrator “is not always passive,... but suspicious. She is condescending towards rather oscillates between being insecure the Marquis’s housekeeper, finding her and feeling sure of herself” because she is “bland, pale,… dislikeable,” while even still in the process of developing her her own maid whom she prefers is subjectivity (1998:71) while I would like described as a “cosily incompetent” to propose that the factor that brings about “snob” (10, 4). All the previous wives of her oscillation could largely be the the Marquis she disdains, even though presence of the Marquis. Using Michel they are all dead and unknown to her personally. She describes the first as a “witty, naughty monkey,” the second’s
63
Downloaded from Brill.com10/02/2021 01:03:14PM via free access MANUSYA: Journal of Humanities Regular 17.2, 2014
Foucault’s theory of Panopticism5, is it not nerves and a will from the mother who had possible to argue that the narrator’s defied the yellow outlaws of Indo-China” mentality is affected by the constant (28). Another brief moment that further vigilance of her husband? Whenever she is describes her evil intention against her about to do something, such as sneaking husband is when she plans to seduce him into the library for adult publications, he before he finds out about her crime—“If always seems to be lurking behind to he had come to me in bed, I would have surprise her. Panopticism is closely strangled him, then” (37), although we can associated with gazing and monitoring; rightly suspect the possibility of her therefore the narrator, under the success had she really done so. These two scrutinizing gaze of her husband, seems to scenes are interesting because they show employ a self-regulating surveillance and that while the young bride seems loving behaves perfectly like a meek and and compliant to her husband, she proves obedient wife. Even during his absence, that ultimately she cannot be trusted. The the foreign surroundings somehow give Carter woman is by no mean distinguished her a sense of discomfort as though she is in this quality because she is just one in a still under constant watch, such as when long line of Biblical and classical female one of his maids eyes her reproachfully characters before her—Eve, Psyche, for placing the keys carelessly, and when Pandora—all of whose curiosity and she feels mocked at by the water tap—the disobedience are notorious causes of their “leering dolphin” that “winked at [her] downfall. In “Bluebeard,” caution against derisively” (35). Even so, it is only when female curiosity is the primary moral of she is free from his presence that she can the story. “Curiosity, in spite of its appeal, attain self-confidence and autonomy. often leads to deep regret. To the While she seems ultimately helpless and displeasure of many a maiden, its weak when her husband is around, her enjoyment is short lived. Once satisfied, it capricious character is revealed at the ceases to exist, and always costs dearly” moment before venturing into the (Lang 2010). Robin Ann Sheets, quoting forbidden chamber. For once she is driven Jeanne Morgan’s Perrault’s Morals for by the bold, adventurous spirit of her Moderns (1985) and Maria Tatar’s The mother—“Until that moment, this spoiled Hard Facts of the Grimms’ Fairy Tales child did not know she had inherited (1987), explains in depth that there was actually the second warning against the husband making impossible demands on 5 According to Bertens’s Literary Theory, the their wives as well, but that it was Panopticon was a type of prison designed by superseded by the first warning in the the English philosopher Jeremy Bentham. The nineteenth-century— ideal prison consisted of a ring of cells that was built around a central point of observation from which one single guardian could survey “Bluebeard” had branched off into all the cells, while the prisoners could not see two separate narratives: one a the supervisor. The major effect of the cautionary fairy tale about the Panopticon is “to induce in the inmate a state hazards of curiosity [e.g. “Mary’s of conscious and permanent visibility that Child”], the other a folk tale assures the automatic functioning of power… depicting the triumph of a clever to arrange things that the surveillance is young woman over a bloodthirsty permanent in its effects, even if it is villain [e.g. “Fowler’s Fowl”]. Tales discontinuous in its action.” (2008:117)
64
Downloaded from Brill.com10/02/2021 01:03:14PM via free access Rewriting Genders, Revising Genres
of female triumph abound in the narrator enters the forbidden sphere, she is folk tradition, but it was the other fully aware of her mistake and type—the didactic story warning punishment—“I must pay the price of my against female curiosity—that new knowledge” (36); still, it is not so gained popularity on the stages and obvious that she genuinely repents her in the bookstalls of nineteenth- (mis)conduct. There is a sense of sadness century Europe. Maria Tatar has in her realization of her own fate once she found that “nearly every nineteenth- discovers the terrible truth in that room; century printed version of she “burst into a tumult of sobbing that “Bluebeard” singles out the contained both pity for his other victims heroine’s curiosity as an especially and also a dreadful anguish to know [that undesirable trait.” Thus, by the she], too, was one of them” (30). Yet her nineteenth-century the wife’s fear for deadly punishment has in it no disobedience had become a much guilty consciousness of having done more serious issue than the husband’s anything wrong. When the piano-tuner violence. (1991:643-4) declares her undeservingness of the death sentence— The question with “The Bloody Chamber” as a feminist text of the twentieth century ‘You do not deserve this,’ he said. is whether we can still say that it posits ‘Who can say what I deserve or any cautions against female curiosity. A no?’ I said. ‘I’ve done nothing; but number of feminist critics, of course, are that may be sufficient reason for more ready to defend Carter’s narrator and condemning me.’ “recast her transgression as a heroic search ‘You disobeyed him,’ he said. for knowledge” (Sheets 1991:644). For ‘That is sufficient reason for him to example, Kathleen Manley, citing Laura punish you.’ Mulvey (1992), identifies the narrator’s ‘I only did what he knew I “curiosity about the locked room as a would.’ (40) symbol for curiosity about female sexuality. The knowledge the protagonist Here the narrator defends herself by gains from the forbidden room is thus diverting attention from her disobedience knowledge of herself” (1998:76). Martine to her husband’s irrational request and the Hennard Dutheil de la Rochère and Ute perverted, sadistic intention of his scheme, Heidmann maintains that in “The Bloody fully aware that she would fail. In fact, Chamber,” the “curiosity is finally what contemporary feminist scholars rewarded,” as the knowledge gained from should point out is her culpability in opening the door “is the means through another aspect—i.e. her decision to do which Bluebeard’s awful secret is nothing against her husband’s fiendish revealed, and it triggers a chain of events behaviour which is a crime far more that ends his career as a serial killer and serious than her disobeying his orders. If enables his wealth to be redistributed more the narrator’s rebellious act is seen as a equitably” (2009:53). What has escaped praiseworthy display of courage or a these critics is that such an act of struggle to hold a better position in gender curiosity, either courageous or foolish, relation, her failures to strive to escape, to fails to impress upon the protagonist as speak the sentences quoted above to the being a disagreeable attribute. Once the face of her husband, or even to be defiant
65
Downloaded from Brill.com10/02/2021 01:03:14PM via free access MANUSYA: Journal of Humanities Regular 17.2, 2014
or independent in the face of her female role model, her part as a protective punishment are all very disappointing. In and devoted mother is still indisputably other words, she cannot declare herself emphasized. Although it seems too ideal to innocent of the crime and at the same time be true, Sheets has pointed out that “the submits so easily to the punishment, to the mother has performed legendary feats of nonsensical notion of “martyrdom,” male and female heroism” (1991:653). She “sacrifice” (39-40) or ever to feel ashamed does not in any way discard the female of the mark if her lover could see it at all. nurturing quality at the expense of her masculine capability—“my eagle-featured, To continue reading “The Bloody indomitable mother... had outfaced a Chamber” with gender in mind, we now junkful of Chinese pirates, nursed a village reach the representation of the narrator’s through a visitation of the plague, shot a mother. This glorious figure, very man-eating tiger with her own hand” (2). different from any mother in traditional Hennard Dutheil de la Rochère and fairy tales, does not even exist in Heidmann holds a slightly different “Bluebeard.” She is Carter’s unique opinion from Sheets and sees the mother’s creation. What is most remarkable about function as that of a “mock-heroic figure her is that she displays overt masculine that makes fun of alternative feminist characteristics in order to combat the myths” (2009:54); while Manley Marquis— conversely sees her as the role model, and the provider of her daughter’s story and You never saw such a wild thing as the opportunity to study music (1998:75). my mother, … her hair was her All these sound plausible, but focusing on white mane, her black lisle legs the development of the narrator one might exposed to the thigh, her skirts ask how this female character specifically tucked round her waist, one hand on contributes to the growth of the narrator. the reins of the rearing horse while The answer, I believe, rests in the final the other clasped my father’s identification of the narrator with her service revolver. (43) mother, in their similar status as widows.
Surprisingly, the role of male To resume our journey with the warrior/savior on a horse coming to the protagonist, we now reach the last stage of rescue of the heroine is not only given to a her experience, widowhood. The story woman but the description also closes as the narrator, now a young particularly highlights her garments and widow, inherits the wealth and establishes body as female, albeit disheveled, wild a new life with her lover and her mother in and unfeminine. The narrator even claims perfect harmony. In a way this differs from that the reader has never seen her before several archetypal female bildungsroman because a lady warrior is indeed non- of the nineteenth-century such as Jane existent in older narratives. Finally the Austen’s Pride and Prejudice and mother overcomes the Marquis, the figure Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, the of absolute authority so far, by way of accomplishment of narrator’s journey here violent and modern assertion—a bullet being not marriage so much as the through his head. While it is tempting to wrecking of it. Marriage, in Carter’s brand her as a male imitator and vision, is nothing but a terrible state in disapprove of her as a commendable which wife suffers a lack of autonomy and
66
Downloaded from Brill.com10/02/2021 01:03:14PM via free access Rewriting Genders, Revising Genres
is oppressed physically and mentally. Patricia Duncker, “while blindness, as Even before the narrator experiences symbolic castration, may signal the horror at the bloody chamber, she is end of male sexual aggression, it is isolated and out of place in her new also mutilation…” [D]id Carter feel residence. In spite of her eagerness to compelled to eliminate all signs of a marry, the fact that her whole life must be physical attraction? Must women shared with this stranger is so obviously choose between a dangerous but doubted and shunned that readers might exciting sexuality based on male rightly wonder, together with the dominance, or a sweet, safe, and protagonist, how soon it will come to an utterly asexual relationship between end. In fact, when compared with the equals? (1991:654-5) depressing experience of marriage, her time as a widow seems particularly To engage in Sheets’s argument it seems liberating and wonderful. Hennard Dutheil that the choice has been made and the de la Rochère and Heidmann observes woman in the story chooses the latter type sceptically that Carter’s happy ending is of relationship because to choose the first an irony to conventional narratives as the does not lead to an enjoyable or healthy three characters “live happily ever after in sexual relationship but suffering and death. a “ménage à trois” at the end” (2009:54). However, while the figure of Jean-Yves The household of three having a sexual could be a potential alternative for a happy relationship might not be an ideal feminist domestic life for women, it might seem vision when there are two women and one strange that the narrator is drawn towards a man but in this case the narrator has a type of masculinity so opposite to that of lover instead of a husband and, with a the Marquis. In fact, the two men have mother who provides love and security, it nothing in common except their sex and, becomes a small, comfortable, matriarchal perhaps, their shared notion of female community. This idealized domestic transgression as a punishable crime. In arrangement is all the more interesting terms of physical and mental strength, because its only male member is not a Jean-Yves seems to exemplify the image man in a typical sense. Robin Ann Sheets of effeminacy compared with the details the contesting receptions of this manliness of the Marquis. When the young character in her essay, pointing that the bride is trying to restore her senses in the second husband in “The Bloody music room after the shocking experience Chamber” in the bloody chamber, a knock on the door reveals “not the massive, has neither the power of the irredeemable bulk of my husband but the Marquis nor the glamor of a fairy slight, stooping figure of the piano-tuner, tale prince… Despite this limitation, and he looked far more terrified of me than he is a sympathetic listener, loyal, my mother’s daughter would have been of tender, and sensitive… However, in a the Devil himself” (32). While the culture that eroticizes domination, it is awkward narrative choice of “my mother’s not surprising that some readers are daughter” instead of “I” draws us away reluctant to accept Jean-Yves as the from the gravity of the situation and hero. His relationship with the reaffirms her position as a daughter instead narrator does not appear to have a of a wife, the fact that Jean-Yves is scared sexual dimension. According to of his mistress as an omnipotent figure
67
Downloaded from Brill.com10/02/2021 01:03:14PM via free access MANUSYA: Journal of Humanities Regular 17.2, 2014
greater than she is of the Devil seems in [her] trunks” and “the concert ludicrous. Another point I must differ programmes [she]’d abandoned” (1). As a from Sheets is upon how the relationship wife she could only play in the music room between the young pianist and the piano for the ears of her husband but now she can tuner can really be called “between set up a music school and has a real equals.” While the Marquis is much older profession to sustain her life. Furthermore, and wealthier than his wife, the piano- this blissful model of widowhood does not tuner is young—“scarcely more than a apply to the narrator alone but also to her boy” (34) and is positioned even below mother. Since her father never returns from the narrator in terms of wealth. Above all, the wars, her mother is freed from male Jean-Yves is not only underprivileged but domination although it entails poverty that he is also blind and has to be led by his forces her to sell all her possessions to send mistress to the execution yard and, her daughter to a music college. In the end, perhaps, in most domestic matters later in the description of the mother’s victorious their lives. His blindness does not only arrival contains the reference to her make it impossible for him to objectify the “widow’s weeds” (41) and the revolver, a protagonist under a gaze but, together with legacy from her husband; both of which his age and timidity, it also connotes remind us of the absence of masculine impotency. In spite of these womanly authority over her. qualities, Jean-Yves is still able to attract his young mistress with sweetness and heart- Discussion of the different phases of the throbbing gentility. While the Marquis narrator’s life might have ended here as impales his bride with his phallus, the the story closes, but our reappraisal of narrator says the piano-tuner “hurt me very “The Bloody Chamber” as a female piercingly” through “his lovely, blind bildungsroman can still stir up the question humanity” (33) that makes her faint. It of the absent stage in the traditional seems rather curious that the narrator, genre—the one that usually concludes having undergone sadomasochistic sexual female novels of education from the practice and so bravely witnessed nineteenth century up to present— evidence of the massacre, should be so motherhood. In fact, if all significant delicate and yielding towards his tender female phases were to be included, the looks and such a feeble version of young pianist should have undergone masculinity; yet it does surely threaten the parturition and parenting, since having stereotype of male sexual attraction and children has always been a very important prepare us for the union between the and specifically feminine role and a narrator and Jean-Yves in the end. prominent way of closing for a number of female bildungsroman novels from At this last stage of widowhood, apart Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre and George from love, domestic peace and safety, the Eliot’s Middlemarch up to Stephenie young woman finally has room for Meyer’s Twilight and Suzanne Collins’s personal aspiration and creative pursuit, as The Hunger Games. Michele Grossman can be seen in the little money she has and makes an interesting observation that the a business of her own. When she leaves bloody chamber might, apart from being home as a bride, she must also leave at the torture chamber of the castle and the home part of her musical career—there are metaphorical female heart, implicitly “scores for which there had been no room suggest “the bloody chamber of the
68
Downloaded from Brill.com10/02/2021 01:03:14PM via free access Rewriting Genders, Revising Genres
womb” (1988:157). If that is the case, the has given rise to wider possibilities for fact that, in the end, the narrator manages women to shape a fulfilling gender identity to “seal” the door so that the husband’s that is separate and uncoupled from the spirit “will never return” to it (44), could hegemonic ideal of motherhood” very well abolish the possibility of (2003:122, 134). This explanation goes childbearing. To explain this break with well with the focus of the protagonist’s tradition, one may argue that Carter is career instead of domestic role at the end simply following the original tale whose of Carter’s short story. Refusing to submit heroine only remarries “a very worthy to social expectation as a mother, the gentleman” (Lang 2010) but whether she childfree heroine is not at all troubled by has a child or not is unspecified or that, the social stigma attached to a woman since the mother position has already been being single and childless. On the taken and exemplified in this story, the contrary, she is exempted from the burden stage is dispensable. On the other hand, a of child-raising as she finds a freer and childless heroine might remind one of the more valuable role for herself as a music second-wave feminists, whose attitudes teacher in a community, as opposed to the tend to disfavour motherhood, or simply confined and secluded existence with the of a modern-day society in which the Marquis. As it is often an ultimate goal of concept of maternity is much devalued. bildungsroman stories that the protagonists Rosemary Gillespie, for example, studies are able to adjust themselves, to the increasing trend of the female being compromise between individual childfree6 in recent years and describes aspirations and social restriction and how “the notion of motherhood as finally to be reintegrated into the constitutive of feminine gender identity community; Carter’s heroine can be said to and social role, and as desirable and have achieved her goal. fulfilling for all women” began to fade away as many women’s “rejection of Finally, as our interest lies in the motherhood exemplifies how modernity bildungsroman genre, the development of the protagonist is of special importance and it is obvious that in the end the 6 As the terminology of the state of not giving narrator is significantly a different person birth to children has previously existed only in from that of the beginning. First of all, she terms of an absence or deficiency, as in has gained more self-confidence as she is “infertility” or “childlessness,” the term finally free from the panopticon, the childfree has been used by those who constant physical and psychological emphasize that childlessness can be an active vigilance of her husband. Kathleen Manley and fulfilling choice (Bartlett qtd. in Gillespie opines that while the narrator used to be 2003). Early studies of this phenomenon “so conscious of people’s whispering and include Elaine Campbell’s The Childless looking at her [at the opera, a] stronger Marriage: An Exploratory Study of Couples sense of her subjectivity now allows her Who Do Not Want Children (1985); Jane increased freedom from caring about what Bartlett’s Will You Be Mother: Women Who other people think [in the end as she Choose to Say No (1996); and Jean A. says]—“We know we are the source of many whisperings and much gossip but the Veevers’s “Voluntary Childlessness” in three of us know the truth of it and mere Contemporary Families and Alternative chatter can never harm us” (1998:80). Lifestyles (1983).
69
Downloaded from Brill.com10/02/2021 01:03:14PM via free access MANUSYA: Journal of Humanities Regular 17.2, 2014
Secondly, on the narrator’s part, one money to charity and turns the castle into a valuable lesson she receives from school for the blind, something that would transgressing her husband’s rule is the be unimaginable for her to do at the recognition of a certain level of female beginning of the story. She possibly does bonding with the Marquis’s previous so because she wants to disassociate wives. This happens in a situation similar herself from her late husband’s property, to that which Buckley calls “moments of but more likely because she has now insight… when the reality breaks through realized something of immense value the fog of delusion” found in many male beyond the material level, that is herself, bildungsroman novels (1974:22) or “the her autonomy and the family/maternal awakening… [consisting of] brief internal bond, which simply annoyed her before epiphanic moments” which is common in marriage. That she has gained knowledge the female bildungsroman (The Vogage In about female sexuality has been discussed qtd. in Feng 1998:11). While in Perrault’s earlier and, together with that, she has also “Bluebeard,” that moment of revelation in discovered the meaning of female the bloody chamber only strikes terror in compassion and has outgrown naïveté and the young wife, in Carter’s it enlightens the adolescent appetite for material the female protagonist and thoroughly matters. These are the culmination of the affects her intellectually and emotionally. narrator’s lesson and are the markers of Although the narrator at the beginning is her personal adjustment to enter maturity jealous and makes spiteful observations in the end; and except for the resignation against all of the Marquis’s ex-wives, she of material obsession, these seem to apply finally identifies herself with them after much more meaningfully for the female their horrible encounter. She finds that she characters and readers than males. differs but little in terms of fate from those predecessors, all victims of male Having been through the journey with brutality—“one false step, oh, my poor, Carter’s female protagonist, it is obvious dear girl, next in the fated sisterhood of that “The Bloody Chamber” only partly his wives; one false step and into the abyss conforms to the conventions of of the dark you stumbled” (29). Her later bildungsroman novels. The use of the first- sobbing contains deep pity for these person narrator, which is “a point of view female sufferers, now acknowledged as foreign to the traditional folklore” (Lokke sisters, which connotes a common 1988:8), is common in bildungsroman experience and an emotional bond that fiction as it best captures the personal replaces the hostile feeling against them as experience and strong emotions of the young one time-competitors/lovers of the same protagonist. The choice of narrative voice, in man. Lastly and most importantly, as spite of the few words she has against her Buckley suggests that a bildungsroman husband, can also signify the power of hero essentially “reappraise[s] his values” language of the woman, whose thoughts and in the end (1974:17) and the young widow expressions used to be marginal, if not in “The Bloody Chamber” clearly gets altogether absent, in traditional narratives. over the infatuation that brings about her It is even apt to say that Carter has greatly earlier misfortune and almost costs her her expanded the potential of the long- life—she lets go of material obsession and established genres as well as that of the wealth. This striking change is clear when female characters; and when these two she gives up almost all her inherited combine, the short story no longer simply
70
Downloaded from Brill.com10/02/2021 01:03:14PM via free access Rewriting Genders, Revising Genres
preaches the flaw of female curiosity or References disobedience as in the original fairy tale, nor does it trace the apprenticeship and Abrams, M. H. and Geoffrey Galt social ascension of the traditional male Harpham, eds. 2009. A Glossary of bildungsroman, nor does it culminate in Literary Terms. 9thed. Boston: marriage and motherhood as in a number Wadsworth Cengage Learning. of female novels of education. Instead, this coming-of-age story of Angela Carter Bacchilega, Cristina. 2008. Preface to the demonstrates that sexual knowledge, Special Issue on Erotic Tales. Marvels freedom and healthy companionship in & Tales 22.1: 13-23. place of oppressive patriarchy can be central parts of female education and Bertens, Hans. 2008. Literary Theory: The maturity. The writer not only subverts the Basics. Wiltshire: Routledge. common stereotypical gender representation but also argues how Buckley, Jerome Hamilton. 1974. Season controversial issues such as eroticism and of Youth: the Bildungsroman from sadomasochistic sexuality can possibly be Dickens to Golding. Cambridge: desirable while matrimony, principally of Harvard University Press. social value, can be tyrannical. Lastly, the discussion of “The Bloody Chamber” Carter, Angela. 2011. The Bloody within the framework of various genres Chamber and Other Stories. New can prove rewarding because Carter’s York: Penguin Book. ingenious adaptation, as it deviates from the norm, helps to uncover the patriarchal Feng, Pin-chia. 1998. The Female ideologies that have always been hidden Bildungsroman by Toni Morrison and under these genres. The fairy tale, for Maxine Hong Kingston: A Postmodern example, usually draws a sharp distinction Reading. New York: Peter Lang between good and bad women and allows no Publishing. variations in between; whereas pornography perpetually eroticizes or objectifies female, or Gillespie, Rosemary. 2003. Childfree and renders them thoroughly passive. Gothic Feminine: Understanding the Gender fiction has almost always violently victimized Identity of Voluntarily Childless and oppressed its female characters, apart Women. Gender and Society 17.1: 122 from depicting them as two-dimensional 136. afterthoughts. Bildungsroman novels normally seek to reintegrate a grown-up Grossman, Michele. 1988. Born To Bleed: woman, presumably mature and sensible, Myth, Pornography and Romance in back into society not through social Angela Carter's “The Bloody accomplishment but through conformity— Chamber.” Minnesota Review 30/31: via marriage and maternity. These are only 148-160. parts of convention and elements of restriction, which remain to be exposed, Haffenden, John. 1985. Novelists in questioned and redefined in order to Interview. Suffolk: Methuen & Co. reestablish a better understanding of—and fairer relations between—genders, in literature as well as in the real world.
71
Downloaded from Brill.com10/02/2021 01:03:14PM via free access MANUSYA: Journal of Humanities Regular 17.2, 2014
Hennard Dutheil de la Rochère, Martine Sheets, Robin Ann. 1991. Pornography, and Ute Heidmann. 2009. New Wine in Fairy Tales, and Feminism: Angela Old Bottles: Angela Carter’s Carter’s “The Bloody Chamber.” Translation of Charles Perrault’s “La Journal of the History of Sexuality 1.4: Barbe Bleue.” Marvels & Tales 23.1: 633-657. 40-58. Simpson, Helen. 2006. “Introduction.” The Lang, Andrew. 2010. “Bluebeard” from Bloody Chamber. London: Vintage The Blue Fairy Book first published in Books. 1891.July 2010, University of Pittsburgh. April 24th, 2013. Stoker, Bram. 2011. Dracula. Oxford:
Lokke, Kari E. 1988. Bluebeard and The Bloody Chamber: The Grotesque of Self Parody and Self-Assertion. Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies 10.1: 7-12.
Makinen, Merja. 1992. Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber and the Decolonization ofFeminine Sexuality. Feminist Review 42: 2-15.
Manley, Kathleen E. B. 1998. The Woman in Process in Angela Carter's “The Bloody Chamber.” Marvels & Tales 12.1: 71-81.
Oates, Joyce Carol. 1997. In Olden Times, When Wishing Was Having...: Classic and Contemporary Fairy Tales. The Kenyon Review 19.3/4: 98-110.
Pressman, Laura. 2013. The Frauenroman: a Female Perspective in Coming-of-age Stories. April 2013, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. May 23rd, 2014.
72
Downloaded from Brill.com10/02/2021 01:03:14PM via free access