BIBLIOTECA TECLA SALA January 18, 2018 The Bloody Chamber Angela Carter
“I saw him watching me in the gilded mirrors with the assessing eye of a connoisseur inspecting horseflesh, or even of a housewife in the market, inspecting cuts on the slab. I’d never seen, or else had never acknowledged, that regard of his before… When I saw him look at me with lust, I dropped my eyes but, in glancing away Contents: from him, I caught sight of myself in Quote 1 About Angela 2 the mirror… I saw how much that Carter From the Magic 3 cruel necklace became me. And, for Toyshop... The Bloody Chamber 5 the first time in my innocent and themes confined life, I sensed in myself a In the era... 6 Fairy-tale Gothic 7 potentiality for corruption that took for a new age my breath away.” Notes 8
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About Angela Carter
Angela Carter was born as Angela famous short stories were Olive Stalker in the town of released on the radio and a Eastbourne in the year 1940. couple of her fictional works While still young, Angela and her were made into films. In addition maternal grandmother were to completing her own works, evacuated to Yorkshire, where she also attempted to write a she suffered from anorexia for the sequel to the famous book, Jane majority of her teenage years. Eyre, which was written by Charlotte Brontë. However, she Her first writing position was with passed away before it could be the Croydon Advertiser where completed. she worked as a journalist. She went on to attend the University Her novels include Shadow Dance, of Bristol and obtain a degree in The Magic Toyshop, Heroes and English literature. Villains, Several Perceptions, The Donkey Prince, Miss Z in 1970, Her first husband was Paul Love, The Music People, Carter, who she married in 1960. Moonshadow, Nights at the Circus After nine years of marriage, which was a winner of the James Angela left her husband using the Tait Black Memorial Prize, money which she had won Artificial Fire, Wise Children, and through the Somerset Maugham Sea-Cat & Dragon King which was Award and she moved to Tokyo released posthumously in for two years. Her experience in 2000. Her anthologies include Japan was immortalized in 1974 in Expletives Deleted in 1974, The Fireworks: Nine Profane Pieces, a Bloody Chamber, Comic and Curious series of short stories, as well as Cats, American Ghosts and Old in her book, The Infernal Desire World Wonders, Black Venus, and Machines of Doctor Hoffman which Burning Your Boats in 1995. Angela was written in 1972. Carter also published three After leaving Japan, Angela Carter works of nonfiction including The Sadeian Woman & the Ideology of spent many years writing at different universities in Europe Pornography in 1978, Nothing and the United States such as Sacred in 1982, and Images of Brown University in the U.S. the Frida Kahlo in 1989. University of Adelaide in She was diagnosed with lung Australia, and the University of cancer in the year 1991, the same East Anglia in England. She year she published her novel married again in 1977 to a man Wise Children, and passed away named Mark Pearce. Their the year after at the age of 52. marriage resulted in the birth of She was named one of the most one son. examined of English writers fifteen years after her premature Carter wrote many novels, works of nonfiction, anthologies, as well death. as several articles. Many of her [http://www.angelacartersite.co.uk/]
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From the Magic Toyshop to the Bloody Chamber, by R. Franklin
A six-foot-tall acrobat who fairy tale, an ancient structure midnight and forced her to wash claims to be the daughter of she excavated and rebuilt from with the bathroom door open Leda and her cygnine lover, with the bottom up. Gordon writes well into her teenage years. the wings to prove it. A man that while Rushdie, Ian McEwan Though they never talked about who undergoes sex-change and Martin Amis were hailed in sex, Angela, who later compared surgery in order to gestate a the early 1980s as the new Olive to the mother in Portnoy’s new messiah, created from his saviors of English literature, Complaint, recalled that Olive own sperm. A Little Red Riding Carter was largely ignored by would sniff her daughter’s Hood who willingly casts her prize committees and discarded underpants. In The cloak into the fire, eager to condescended to by critics. “She Bloody Chamber, Carter writes of seduce a handsome hunter- knew that she was Angela “nursery fears made flesh and turned-werewolf: “She knew she Carter,” Rushdie nicely puts it. sinew” and that “earliest and was nobody’s meat.” “But she wouldn’t have minded most archaic of fears, fear of a few other people knowing.” devourment.” These are a few of the fantastic characters populating the fiction Carter’s unconventional At 17, Carter rebelled. She lost of Angela Carter, whom Salman background surely also played a weight and began to dress in the Rushdie called, upon her death role in her marginalization. Born flamboyant, eccentric style she in 1992 at age 51, the “high in 1940, she spent the war years would cultivated from then on: sorceress” and “benevolent at her grandmother’s home in spike heels, tight skirts, “ethnic” white witch” of English Yorkshire and grew up in dresses, even green lipstick. literature. All of her fiction is still working-class South London. When her mother vowed to in print in Britain, and The Bloody Her father, a night editor at the follow her to Oxford, Carter Chamber is among the Vintage Press Assocation, kept odd instead got a job, with her Classics top-10 best sellers. hours, and her only sibling was a father’s help, as a reporter. Her Jeanette Winterson, Ali Smith brother 11 years her senior, early work already shows signs and David Mitchell are just a few which left her alone with Olive, of the sharply witty, strongly of the contemporary writers her perversely demanding feminist voice of her mature who acknowledge Carter’s mother, for long stretches of years. Reviewing an early record influence. time. Gordon calls Olive’s by Marlene Dietrich, she wrote attitude toward Angela that women admire Dietrich Yet Angela Carter is still little “neurotic,” but “abusive” might “because she looks as if she ate known outside her native be a better description. She men whole, for breakfast, England. And even there, she coddled her overweight young possibly on toast.” tends to be treated “as an age- daughter with sweets and made Carter would one day say that old female archetype” rather her sit in public places with a her own work “cuts like a steel than the “complicated modern handkerchief behind her head to blade at the base of a man’s writer” she truly was, Edmund ward off lice. Olive “didn’t want penis.” But she spent the first Gordon argues in his Angie to grow up,” her future years of her career trapped in an sympathetic, cleareyed new sister-in-law would say, but unhappy marriage to a folk music biography. The problem, as he Olive’s intrusiveness went well producer eight years her senior. sees it, was largely Carter’s beyond overprotection. She In her journal, she is brilliant on attraction to “disreputable kept Angela awake “for her domestic miseries: “It never genres” like Gothic horror, company” until her husband ends, the buggering about with science fiction and especially the came home from work at dirty dishes, coal pails, ash bins,
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. . . I tumble, glazed & bladderful, takes pains to distance Carter an adolescent girl who comes to from bed & swing into the fire- from the radical feminism of the realize her sexual powers. It’s kettle-porridge-bread routine.” 1970s, arguing that her view of hard to overstate how She escaped into her writing. “I women was of a piece with the profoundly mysterious and need to be extraordinary,” she rest of her politics: “She never moving these stories are, or how confided to her journal. saw the oppression of women as radically Carter upends the categorically different from other familiar, creating something A visit to Tokyo in 1969 brought forms of oppression, and altogether new and strange. about her sexual liberation. Her believed that if femininity was a A judicious and diligent first attempt to be unfaithful was cultural construction, forcing the biographer, Gordon faces the unsuccessful: “Was it my mother individual into a cramped and obvious criticism that, as a man, rising up in my heart to thwart demeaning role, then so was he can’t fully appreciate Carter’s my desires once again?” She masculinity.” The sexually work. He argues convincingly found fulfillment with a Japanese empowered woman is a that his sex shouldn’t be held man, Sozo Araki, with whom she dominant trope in her fiction, against him, noting that Carter shared an appartment so tiny she but she also wrote The Sadeian “never thought of gender as the later said it was “too small to Woman and the Ideology of most important division between write a novel in.” She worked Pornography, a feminist work of human beings,” and that “almost briefly in a hostess bar, which she criticism reinterpreting the all writing involves an act of called “the front line” of the Marquis de Sade. “My anatomy,” identification” with people who battle between the sexes, and she declared, “is only part of an are unlike oneself. Indeed, if found that Japanese society gave infinitely complex organization, there is a problem with this well- her a new perspective on my self.” researched, carefully assembled patriarchy: “The men in a society book, it’s not that the author is a which systematically degrades Carter’s unbridled imagination man; it’s that his approach women also become degraded.” reached its height in 1979 with doesn’t quite measure up to his She didn’t settle down again until The Bloody Chamber, a gorgeously subject. If Gordon has passionate 1974, when she met a written volume that brings the feelings about Carter’s work, his construction worker named Mark sexual undercurrents of fairy utterly balanced and evenhanded Pearce, 15 years younger than tales to the surface. In “The treatment leaves no air for them she. They had a child in 1983, but Tiger’s Bride,” which opens with to escape. Carter herself was so married only in May 1991, after the line “My father lost me to funny and stylish a writer that she was told she had lung cancer, the Beast at cards,” Beauty is one wishes a few more sparks to ensure his custodial rights transformed into an animal would rise from these cool after her death. through her erotic surrender to pages. Thankfully, quotations the Beast’s tongue. A comically from her letters and journals are Carter is marvelously quotable, raunchy “Puss-in-Boots,” retold plentiful. In one early journal, she and many of her most trenchant with shades of “The Barber of repeats like a mantra André lines have to do with the Seville” and the commedia Breton’s line “The marvelous relations between men and dell’arte, is the tale of a alone is beautiful.” She was both. women. Rejecting Elizabeth seduction accomplished with the Smart’s novel By Grand Central aid of a trusty feline. (“Love is [https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/24/ Station I Sat Down and Wept, a desire sustained by books/review/invention-of-angela-carter- biography-edmund-gordon.html] lyrical treatment of an unhappy unfulfillment,” the cat love affair, she wrote, “ By Grand pronounces wisely.) The theme Central Station I Tore Off His Balls of insatiable desire appears again would be more like it, I should in “The Company of Wolves,” in hope.” But Gordon correctly which Little Red Riding Hood is
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The Bloody Chamber Themes
some change from beast to human These archetypes of victim and SEXUALITY AND VIOLENCE or vice versa. These creatures, victimizer lead many of the exist in an in-between space in the Angela Carter was influenced by the stories to the stark objectification world, neither fully human nor fully writings of the Marquis de Sade in the of a woman, usually through a non-human. They are the writing of The Bloody Chamber, and scene where the woman is naked traditional creatures of the ancient and the man/beast is clothed. she especially illustrates his idea that fairy tales, but Carter also links This pornographic image, like the sex is often inextricably linked with their kind of “life on the threshold” sadistic pictures violence. The virginal heroine allows with the sexual awakening and loss the Marquis collects in “The herself to be corrupted and loses her of virginity that most of the stories’ sexual innocence, demonstrating one heroines experience. These Bloody Chamber,” is the ultimate of Carter’s more controversial ideas fantastic metamorphoses as part of example of the woman as object –that women can take part in the sexuality and virginity then lead to and the man as powerful sexual violence that oppresses them– Carter’s more subtle point –that manipulator. In a similar vein to and in the bloody chamber the even the women who experience the pornographic image is the Erl heroine gains the knowledge that her no magic metamorphosis still live -King’s hypnotic whistle new sexual freedom will lead to her on a kind of threshold, treated as and Signor Panteleone (of “Puss- violent death. both humans and objects (of sexual in-Boots”) viewing his young desire, usually). It is only through wife as another possession to All the other stories also involve some kind of extreme action that hoard. some link between sex and violence, the heroines can cross the like Figaro’s master having sex with threshold and become fully While in these situations (and the young woman next to Signor human. throughout the old versions of Panteleone’s body, or the wolf trying the fairy tales) the women seem POWER AND to eat Little Red Riding Hood but totally objectified and powerless, OBJECTIFICATION in Carter’s stories they can also being seduced by her instead. Other gain an agency of their own, like than this juxtaposition of images the The book’s sexual violence and the heroine killing the Erl-King violence Carter associates with sex Carter’s feminist worldview create and escaping his power. Instead and sexual awakening often leads to a theme of manipulative power and of rejecting the old fairy tales for objectification and manipulation as the objectification of women. This their objectification of women well. Even in a “happy” ending like is part of the “latent content” that and sexual violence, Carter that of “The Company of Wolves” or Carter tried to expose in the old retells them from a female point “The Tiger’s Bride”, sexual freedom fairy tales. In most of the original of view, giving the stories’ only comes at the price of some kind stories there is already a divide heroines greater agency in their of pain. This recurring theme results between a poor, virginal heroine fates. in the very gothic, sensual tone of the and a wealthy, powerful man/ stories as they show how fairy tales monster, but in Carter’s versions portray the darker side of human this divide also leads to sexual desire. [https://www.litcharts.com/lit/the-bloody- oppression. In “The Bloody chamber/themes] METAMORPHOSIS Chamber” and “The Courtship of Mr Lyon” the heroines are Many of the characters of The Bloody indebted to bestial men for lifting Chamber are creatures who are half- them out of poverty, and so they human and half-beast, or else undergo must endure their desires.
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In the Era of the Easy Feminist Fairy-Tale Remix..., by J. Berman
In the Era of the Easy two approaches as part of the purity and defilement surround Feminist Fairy-Tale same movement. Carter isn’t the girls (and sometimes boys) in Remix, Angela Carter’s primarily concerned with these stories. Refreshingly, ‘The Bloody Chamber’ Is inverting gender roles or making Carter doesn’t seek to resolve sure women come out on top in the contradictions between More Vital Than Ever any given fairy tale or even just them. A first sexual encounter I was worried about re- showing readers how deeply can lead to peril, or it can lead reading The Bloody Chamber, the misogynist some of these stories to agency — or it can lead to late British writer Angela Carter’s are (although she does often the latter by way of the most famous work, a collection succeed in doing that as well). former. Even in the realm of fairy of short stories based on the Instead, she sinks deep into their tales (a setting Carter often Western fairy-tale canon that imagery and language — and modernizes without distracting Penguin Classics has just released in delving into the symbolic from the timelessness of the in a deluxe edition to underpinnings of the myths that stories), there is an invigorating commemorate what would have constitute so many people’s first realism to this. been the author’s 75th birthday. encounters with literature, she ...The insight behind Carter’s Originally published in 1979, can’t help but manipulation of these stories is it preceded the recent wave of speak volumes about the social remarkable, but what eases her fairy-tale remixing by roughly expectations and psychological versions into the subconscious three decades, and I feared that pressures that govern women, as readily as the originals is the the Internet’s endless Disney men, and the interactions lushness of her language, which Princess variations might have between the genders. preserves the grandness of fairy- robbed Carter’s stories of the ...The outcomes of these stories tale diction while bringing sexual potency they possessed when I is very different —there’s subtext to the surface and first read them, over a decade revenge, romance, and a strange alluring the reader with an air of ago. Specifically, would the sort of metamorphic resolution decadence. insistently feminist tone of so that might preoccupy your much contemporary thoughts for hours afterward. ...We may be suffering from a reappropriation render The But what Carter gets across, surfeit of reimagined fairy tales Bloody Chamber‘s own celebrated without explicitly pointing to it, and too-easy feminist remixes of view of gender in our culture’s is how deeply embedded the sexist tropes, but The Bloody most cherished bedtime stories union of innocent girl and dark, Chamber retains its too obvious to be thrilling? animalistic male is in the power because there will never be enough writing this What I didn’t remember about Western subconscious. perceptive — or just plain Carter, who I haven’t read in This sort of repetition takes beautiful. years despite also loving her place within the stories as well, novels Nights at the Circus and The and among them on the level of Passion of New Eve, is how individual images. ... We come to singular her feminism is. In fact, [http://flavorwire.com/520449/in-the-era- see, as these images recur, how of-the-easy-feminist-fairy-tale-remix- it bears so little resemblance to connected they are to the rites angela-carters-the-bloody-chamber-is- the feel-good “badass heroines” more-vital-than-ever] of menarche and sexual and “strong female characters” of awakening; blood-stained sheets so much current revisionist appear just as often as storytelling that it almost seems pricked fingers. A whole misleading to characterize these constellation of ideas about
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‘The Bloody Chamber’: fairy-tale Gothic for a new age, by G. Buzwell
The Bloody Chamber is based on My husband, who, with so much the final triumph of dynamic Charles Perrault’s fairy tale ‘Barbe love, filled my bedroom with lilies matriarchy over the traditional Bleue’ (‘Bluebeard’, in English), the until it looked like an embalming patriarchy of the fairy tale. It is story of a French nobleman who parlour. quite fitting, perhaps, that in this murders his successive wives and modern variation on the fairy tale keeps their bodies in a locked The story also makes use of the sexually aggressive and room within his castle. Carter quintessentially Gothic settings murderous Marquis should meet called her variation on this story and props. The castle to which his end at the hands of his own The Bloody Chamber, a title laden the Marquis takes his virginal mother-in-law. Between with significance. In Perrault’s tale, bride, for example, is isolated Perrault’s 17th-century fairy tale a ‘bloody chamber’ could indicate and mysterious, like something and Angela Carter’s late 20th the blood-spattered room in straight from a tale by Ann century variation the men have which Bluebeard keeps the Radcliffe or Edgar Allan Poe. found themselves out- corpses of his butchered brides. Another quintessentially Gothic manoeuvred, and the stereotypes Alternatively, the bloody chamber touch lies in the way a threat to of dominant male, fey heroine could be a reference to the womb the heroine is foreshadowed by and rescuing prince have all been – seat of life, but also a frequent something seemingly innocent, overturned. source of death. And when such as the jewellery worn by viewed from the present day, and the young bride: ‘His wedding [https://www.bl.uk/20th-century- in the light of Carter’s version of gift, clasped round my throat. A literature/articles/angela-carter-gothic- literature-and-the-bloody-chamber] the tale, the bloody chamber choker of rubies, two-inches could refer to the marital wide, like an extraordinarily bedroom and the sadomasochistic precious slit throat’. sexual desires of the heroine’s husband, named in Carter’s Having set the scene with the version ‘the Marquis’, which trappings of a dark Gothic fairy inevitably puts the reader in mind tale, Carter defies our of the Marquis de Sade. Sex in The expectations by ensuring the Bloody Chamber is, after all, often nameless heroine of the story is couched in terms of exploitation, not simply going to wait for violence and murder. At one point rescue. Carter’s women are the heroine, never named, much more dynamic and watches her reflection in a dozen resourceful. In the original story mirrors as her husband takes her of ‘Bluebeard’ the last in the virginity: succession of brides survives when her brothers rescue her. A dozen husbands impaled a dozen brides while the mewing gulls swung In The Bloody Chamber salvation on invisible trapezes in the empty air comes not in the form of outside. dashing brothers, and nor does it come in the form of a heroic The link between the marital father or a handsome prince. bedroom, death and her husband’s Here, salvation comes in the murderous intentions are made shape of the heroine’s mother, explicit a few lines later: riding to the rescue and toting a pistol. The story concludes with
BIBLIOTECA TECLA SALA
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Notes
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