The Bloody Chamber Angela Carter

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 Page 2 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/] Page 3 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, Page 4 . 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.

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