"A Reciprocal Pact of Tenderness"

Sadean Pornographic Structures in Angela Carter's The Bloody Chamber

Ma Thesis Janneke van Engeland

Master Thesis

Title: “A Reciprocal Pact of Tenderness”: Sadean Pornographic Structures in Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber Name: Janneke van Engeland Student number: 10549013 Programme: MA English Literature and Culture, University of Amsterdam Supervisor: Dr N. D. Carr Date: 25 June 2019

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Statement of Originality

This document is written by Student Janneke van Engeland, who declares to take full responsibility for the contents of this document.

I declare that the text and the work presented in this document are original and that no sources other than those mentioned in the text and its references have been used in creating it.

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Contents

Abstract ...... 4 Introduction ...... 5 1. Feminist critique of the fairy tale and pornography ...... 9 2. Angela Carter and Sade: materialism and demythologising ...... 17 3. Responsibility and “The Bloody Chamber” ...... 24 4. Reciprocity and “The Company of Wolves” ...... 36 Conclusion ...... 44 Works Cited ...... 46

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Abstract

When Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber was published in 1979, it sparked a feminist debate which is continuing to this day. Some feminist critics have read the stories as victim- blaming stories of rape that reinscribe patriarchal attitudes towards sexuality, whereas others have read the stories as successful rewritings of fairy tales which portray women fight back against patriarchal attitudes and discover a female desire. Most criticism has focused on the fairy tale aspect of The Bloody Chamber, but has neglected its pornographic aspect. In this thesis, I will argue that it is necessary to read The Bloody Chamber in conjunction with Carter’s feminist polemic The Sadeian Woman (1978) and the Marquis de Sade’s libertine novels in order to open up the full feminist potential of the stories. I will analyse two of the stories on the basis of three Sadean pornographic structures: firstly, the dichotomy of mythical roles of femininity; secondly, the basis of male pleasure in the sexual objectification of women; and thirdly, the solipsistic conception of pleasure and its consequent victimiser- victim relationship between sexual partners. I will argue that the two stories from The Bloody Chamber address and subvert these structures. I will conclude three things: firstly, that Carter’s feminism cannot be categorised as either pro- or anti-pornography, but that it reaches its own conclusions; secondly, that the addressing and rewriting of pornographic structures lies at the heart of The Bloody Chamber and that the fairy tale is a vessel through which these structures are addressed; and finally, that the strength of Carter’s feminist thinking is its ambiguity and its insistence on the complexity of human sexuality.

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Introduction

There’s a story in The Bloody Chamber called “The Lady and the House of Love,” part of which derives from a movie version that I saw of a story by Dostoyevsky. And in the movie, which is very good, the woman, who is a very passive person and is very much in distress, asks herself the question, “Can a bird sing only the song it knows, or can it learn a new song?” Have we got the capacity at all of singing new songs? It’s very important that if we haven’t, we might as well stop now. Can the marionette in that story behave in a way that she’s not programmed to behave? Is it possible? – Angela Carter1

Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber and The Sadeian Woman

When Angela Carter’s short story collection The Bloody Chamber was published in 1979, it gave her a wider audience than she had ever had before and it meant the breakthrough of her career as a writer. The stories in The Bloody Chamber are usually seen as reworkings of well- known fairy tales such as “Snow White”, “Bluebeard”, “Beauty and the Beast” and “Little Red Riding Hood”. Using pre-existing narratives and then changing and subverting them, Carter rewrites these traditional fairy tales from a self-proclaimed feminist perspective, or as she described it herself, “putting new wine in old bottles” and then “mak[ing] the bottles explode” (Carter, “Notes from the Front Line” 69). These new fairy tales bring out the latent content in traditional fairy tales: the violence, the sexuality and the misogyny. In 1978, a year before The Bloody Chamber, Carter’s feminist polemic The Sadeian Woman & The Ideology of Pornography was published. In The Sadeian Woman, Carter analyses the work of the Marquis de Sade, the eighteenth-century French pornographer, and makes the bold claim that his writings hold a feminist potential. Based on Sade’s analysis of sexuality, Carter presents the idea of a “moral pornography”: a pornography that offers a critique of current relations between men and women and that in this way can be used in the service of women.

The critical debate

It is now 40 years after the publication of The Bloody Chamber and 26 years after Angela Carter’s death, but there is still a lively interest in Carter’s work and persona. In 2017, a

1 Katsavos, Anna. “An Interview with Angela Carter.” Review of Contemporary Fiction, vol. 14, no. 3, Autumn 1994, p. 16.

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biography was published,2 and in August 2018 a BBC documentary aired on TV (Angela Carter: Of Wolves & Women). Much of this interest focuses on Carter as a feminist writer. At the time of publication, both The Bloody Chamber and The Sadeian Woman were strongly criticised by anti-pornography feminists. The controversial use of the world’s most notorious pornographer for a self-proclaimed feminist argument in The Sadeian Woman caused “shock and disgust” (Gamble 112). Most criticism, however, has focused on The Bloody Chamber and asks the question: does Carter succeed in changing patriarchal fairy tales into new feminist tales? Some critics have read the stories as reinscribing patriarchal attitudes towards women and “eroticising … sexual violence and victimisation” (Gamble 111), whereas others have read them as successful rewritings of misogynistic fairy tales in which “women grab their own sexuality and fight back” (Makinen 3). Most of the criticism approaches the stories in The Bloody Chamber with the starting point that they are rewritings of fairy tales, which is certainly an important aspect but certainly not the only one. What has been neglected in the debate on The Bloody Chamber are the pornographic dimensions of the story collection: the influence of the Marquis de Sade on the stories and the collection’s connections with Carter’s The Sadeian Woman. As the only work of non-fiction, The Sadeian Woman stands out from the rest of Carter’s work consisting of novels and story collections, and it has not received as much critical attention. A few recent critics, such as Nanette Altevers and Sally Keenan, have analysed The Sadeian Woman as the main work in their research and have argued that working through Sade has been a watershed moment in Carter’s feminist thinking (Keenan 134). Still, only a small number of recent critics (Robin Ann Sheets, Elaine Jordan and Heta Pyrhönen, for instance) have dedicated a substantial part of their argumentation to reading The Bloody Chamber in conjunction with The Sadeian Woman.

The present study

In my view, the pornographic dimensions of The Bloody Chamber and the influence of the Marquis de Sade’s writings on the collection have been given too little attention. I think that it is necessary to read The Bloody Chamber in conjunction with The Sadeian Woman, and also to look beyond this book and to go back to the original Sade, in order to open up the full feminist potential of Carter’s stories. In this thesis, firstly I will argue that, rather than as a

2 Gordon, Edmund. The Invention of Angela Carter: A Biography. Vintage, 2017.

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rewriting of traditional fairy tales, a feminist reading of Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber is best approached as a story collection that imitates and at the same time distances itself from Sadean pornographic structures. Secondly, I will argue that the stories “The Bloody Chamber” and “The Company of Wolves” negotiate the requirements of and eventually conceive of an equal and reciprocal sexual relationship between men and women. With this thesis, I aim to join the critical debate on Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber and The Sadeian Woman as feminist works. In my analysis, I will identify three key structures from Sadean pornography that, in my view, form the basis for the feminist set-up of the stories “The Bloody Chamber” and “The Company of Wolves” from The Bloody Chamber. I will return to these three Sadean structures, which are not necessarily representative of all pornography, throughout the thesis. The first pornographic structure that I will use in this thesis is the dichotomy of mythical roles of femininity. In this dichotomy, women are either good, passive, virginal, virtuous and victims, corresponding to Sade’s character Justine, or bad, active, sexual, sinful and victimisers, corresponding to his character Juliette. The second pornographic structure is male pleasure based on the sexual objectification of women, which makes pornography inherently violent. The third pornographic structure is the solipsistic conception of pleasure, which requires that sexual partners always relate to each other in the form of master-slave, predator-prey, victimiser-victim. In chapter one, I will examine the first pornographic structure, which is the dichotomy of mythical roles of femininity which feminist critics, especially Andrea Dworkin, have identified in both pornography and fairy tales. I will connect these dichotomous roles to Sade’s characters Justine and Juliette. Furthermore, I will provide Carter’s reading of this dichotomy, especially her rejection of the Justine role as suitable for feminist change and her argument that women are complicit in their own oppression by identifying with this role. Finally, I will provide an overview of the critical reception of The Sadeian Woman and The Bloody Chamber by anti-pornography feminists. In chapter two, I will argue that, in contrast to what anti-pornography feminists accused her of, Carter also rejects the aggressive victimiser role of Juliette as a proper feminist model. Furthermore, I will argue that Sade’s materialist analysis of sexuality is useful for Carter’s aim to demystify mythical roles of femininity. Next, I will make some critical remarks on Sade’s limitations as a pre-feminist philosopher. Finally, I will argue that the fairy tale is a suitable genre for engaging with political reality.

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In chapter three, I will analyse “The Bloody Chamber”, a rewriting of Charles Perrault’s “Bluebeard”. I will argue that the story rejects the feminist value of the Justine role of the virtuous victim and that it urges women to take responsibility for their own behaviour. The story also begins a fusion of the Justine and Juliette roles by showing the onset of a female desire. Next, I will argue that the story analyses the pornographic objectification of women with the help of Laura Mulvey’s concept of “the male gaze”. Furthermore, I will argue that the story connects the violence inherent in pornography through its objectification of women to the violence inherent in male power itself, by analysing how myths of female curiosity and disobedience reveal that male power is exerted and maintained through violence. Finally, I will argue that the story is wary of not presenting any new mythical roles through the characters of the mother and the alternative husband. In chapter four, I will analyse “The Company of Wolves”, a rewriting of Perrault’s “Little Red Riding Hood” and the Grimm Brothers’ “Little Red-Cap”, which resolves issues raised in “The Bloody Chamber”. I will argue that Carter’s story resists pornographic male objectification of women, that it deconstructs the pornographic predator-prey relationship and that it synthesises the roles of Justine and Juliette. Moreover, I will argue that the story conceives of an autonomous female desire and of a reciprocal and mutually pleasurable sexual relationship between men and women. Finally, I will draw three general conclusions. Firstly, I will conclude that The Sadeian Woman and The Bloody Chamber cannot be categorised in either the pro- pornography or the anti-pornography side of the feminist debate on pornography, but that Carter’s work has features of both and reaches its own conclusion. Secondly, I will conclude that it is the addressing and rewriting of pornographic structures that lies at the heart of The Bloody Chamber and that the fairy tale is a vessel through which she addresses these issues. Thirdly, I will conclude that the strength of Carter’s feminism is its ambiguity. In this time of a new feminist wave with new polarised debates, Carter’s work still points us towards the murky sides, the unsolvable contradictions and the human complexity of sexuality.

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1. Feminist critique of the fairy tale and pornography

1.1 The feminist debate on pornography

From the second feminist wave onwards, feminists have criticised well-known fairy tales for being harmful towards women. A substantial part of criticism is that these traditional fairy tales are expressions of and create mythical roles of femininity: they present social expectations for women that consist of “feminine passivity and martyrdom” (Harries 13). The dominant tradition of the fairy tale divides women into two kinds: the passive, beautiful young girls in need of rescue and the active, powerful and often grotesque older women (Harries 137). Andrea Dworkin described the dichotomy of the archetypal female characters in fairy tales as follows: “There are two definitions of woman. There is the good woman. She is a victim. There is the bad woman. She must be destroyed. The good woman must be possessed. The bad woman must be killed, or punished. Both must be nullified” (Dworkin, Woman Hating 48). In other words, the fairy tale presents a straitjacket dichotomy of female roles.3 In the late 1970s, when The Sadeian Woman and The Bloody Chamber4 were published, the role of pornography in the oppression and emancipation of women was a key topic within feminist debates. Part of the debate approached pornography as violence against women, a movement which, amongst other things, came to be associated with the “Reclaim the night” walks (Sheets 98). Well-known radical anti-pornography feminists dedicated to the anti-pornography movement are Andrea Dworkin and Catharine A. MacKinnon. Dworkin argued that pornography incorporates the same principles and characters that are seen in fairy tales. In pornography, “[t]he female as a figure of innocence and evil enters the adult world” (Dworkin, Woman Hating 55). Pornography has the same prescriptive and oppressing roles of

3 Besides the canonised fairy tales of Charles Perrault and the Brothers Grimm there is, of course, a multitude of other fairy tale traditions told and written by people from outside of the cultural elite or by women. Elizabeth Wanning Harries, for instance, has drawn attention to the late-seventeenth-century French conteuses, such as d’Aulnoy, Lhéritier, La Force and Bernard, who in their time “dominated the field of fairy tales” with fairy tales that were “often long, intricate, digressive, playful, self-referential, and self-conscious” - in other words, very different from the more compact and self-contained style usually associated with the fairy tale (Harries 15-16, 17). 4 In in-text citations, The Sadeian Woman will be referred to as SW and The Bloody Chamber will be referred to as BC.

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female and male behaviour, Dworkin writes: “Pornography, like fairy tale, tells us who we are. It is the structure of male and female mind, the content of our shared erotic identity, the map of each inch and mile of our oppression and despair” (Dworkin, Woman Hating 53-54). Thus, one of the key structures of pornography is its dichotomy of mythical roles of femininity. Moreover, Dworkin argues that the major theme of pornography is not sexual pleasure, but male power and that “[p]ornography reveals that male pleasure is inextricably tied to victimizing, hurting, exploiting” (Dworkin, Pornography 24, 69). In other words, a second pornographic structure is its inherent violence. Apart from pornography being an expression of violent male power, the negative critique of anti-pornography feminists is related to wider issues of representation itself. Susanne Kappeler has argued that pornography exists within a larger system of representation that is problematic. According to her, the view that pornography, but also art and literature, are disconnected from political reality is a false one (Kappeler 133). The dichotomy of female characters in pornographic fiction and fairy tales originates from the all-permeating patriarchal structures of society, and in cultural artefacts we see “the rearticulation of an unchanging archetype … which recites the same tale over and over again, convincing itself through these rearticulations of the impossibility of change and of alternatives and confirming the eternal recurring” (Kappeler 146). Pornography therefore is not only a reflection of oppressive patriarchal values, but repeats these values and in this way actively oppresses women. The pro-pornography side of the feminist debate included feminists like Ellen Willis, Pat Califia and Gayle Rubin. Willis, who coined the term “pro sex feminism”, described the anti-pornography movement as “the repressive, neo-Victorian moralism that has been strangling feminism for two decades” and argues that pornography actually is a valid medium for negotiating female sexual freedom (Willis 24).

1.2 The Marquis de Sade

In the debate between pro- and anti-pornography feminists, the writings of the Marquis de Sade take a central place. The Marquis de Sade, full name Donatien Alphonse François de Sade, was born in France in 1740 and is most well-known for his four pornographic novels: The 120 Days of Sodom; Philosophy in the Bedroom; Justine, or The Misfortunes of Virtue; and Juliette, or The Prosperities of Vice. These novels, all written between 1785 and 1797,

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are known as the libertine novels (Phillips, Libertine Novels 1). In a structure which is characteristic for Sade, the novels switch between two narrative modes, of dissertation or theory on the nature of power and sexuality followed by the description of this theory put into practice (Phillips, Libertine Novels 34). The master-slave power structures of sexuality that are depicted in these novels, a third pornographic structure, lent Sade’s name to the term “sadism”. Literary critics and philosophers have shown an unwavering interest in Sade and his writings and include, amongst others, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Roland Barthes, Jacques Lacan, Gilles Deleuze and Phillippe Sollers (Phillips, Libertine Novels 24, 26). The depiction of Sade’s female characters Justine and Juliette, as well as the representation of a, aggressive and violent sexuality, has led to widely differing feminist evaluations of Sade. What has been central in many of these feminist readings of Sade is the issue of the “pornographic effect”, that is: “does the representation in writing of sexual crimes lead to their enactment in the real?” (Phillips, Libertine Novels 2). Many of the positive evaluations of Sade, such as by the Structuralists, read Sade within a solely literary dimension, not directly connected to a political and social reality. This approach avoids the moral dilemmas that would otherwise arise from reading Sade.5 The anti-pornography feminist Dworkin takes the opposite approach and situates Sade centrally within the context of political and social reality, drawing a line from Sade to pornography in general and from pornography to political reality: Sade, as “the world’s foremost pornographer … both embodies and defines male sexual values” (Dworkin, Pornography 70). She calls his work an “advocacy of rape and battery” which celebrates “brutality as the essence of eroticism; fucking, torture, and killing were fused; violence and sex, synonymous” (Dworkin, Pornography 99, 70). Sade’s cultural influence is enormous, Dworkin says, and she likens the power structures in his works to contemporary “snuff” films and magazines which depict “the mutilation of women for the sake of sexual pleasure” (Dworkin, Pornography 71). Dworkin’s answer to the question of whether the representation of sexual crimes in Sade’s literary work leads to their enactment in real life is an unequivocal yes.6

5 Roland Barthes has summarised this approach as follows: “Language has this property of denying, ignoring, dissociating reality: when written, shit does not have an odor.” Barthes, Roland. Sade, Fourier, Loyola. 1971. Translated by Richard Miller, University of California Press, 1989, p. 137. 6 For another key work in the radical anti-pornography movement, see: Linden, Robin Ruth, et al., editors. Against Sadomasochism. Frog in the Well, 1982.

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Other critics have, in contrast, read Sade and especially his libertine character Juliette as an emblem of female liberation and empowerment. The surrealist poet Guillaume Apollinaire saw Juliette as a role model for the woman of the future and called her a “creature that we cannot yet conceive, but which is freeing itself from humanity, which will take wing and will renew the universe” (Phillips, Libertine Novels 120). Feminist critics such as Annie Le Brun and Jane Gallop have also emphasised the aspect of female liberation in Sade (Phillips, Libertine Novels 120).7 Gallop writes that “Sade insisted that one must distinguish between the explicitly eroticized acting-out of domination and real political domination” and argues that desire and political discourse should not be equated (Gallop 18-19).

1.3 Carter’s use of Sade in The Sadeian Woman

In The Sadeian Woman, Angela Carter analyses Sade’s four libertine novels from a feminist perspective. She connects the dichotomy of mythical roles of femininity from pornography and fairy tales to Sade’s two most well-known female characters, the sisters Justine and Juliette. Carter also questions the validity of the female roles of both characters in terms of their feminist agency. She emphasises the black and white nature of Sade’s writings, which defines human nature and consequently also female roles in stark opposites. Sade’s writings depict a Manichean world, in which virtue and vice are natural traits that one is born with and that are unchangeable (Phillips, Introduction 97-98). Carter writes that this dichotomy “relates his fiction directly to the black and white ethical world of fairy tale and fable” and in this way draws a parallel between Sade’s texts and the fairy tale (SW 93). Carter sees the dichotomised definition of women in Sade’s writings as indicative of the same dichotomy in other pornographic texts, the fairy tale and other cultural expressions. The virtuous Justine is a passive, Christ-like victim figure, “a good woman according to the rules for women laid down by men and her reward is rape, humiliation and incessant beatings” (SW 43). Carter draws a parallel to the passive heroines in fairy tales: Justine is “the living image of a fairy-tale princess in disguise but a Cinderella for whom the ashes with which she is covered have become part of the skin … she is the heroine of a black, inverted fairy-tale” (SW 44). This view of good women in the fairy tale dichotomy turns them into passive, helpless victims: “To be the object of desire is to be defined in the passive case. To

7 See especially chapter 4, “The Female Body.” Thinking Through the Body, by Jane Gallop, Columbia University Press, 1988, pp. 55–90. Gallop came to revise her reading of Sade as a champion for female freedom in a later article.

12 exist in the passive case is to die in the passive case - that is, to be killed. This is the moral of the fairy tale about the perfect woman” (SW 76-77). Carter sees Justine as “the prototype of two centuries of women” (SW 64-5) and traces her legacy to Hollywood actresses such as Marilyn Monroe, showing how Sade’s influence is still with us in modern culture. In a controversial part of her argument, Carter rejects the feminist value of Justine’s behaviour by insisting on Justine’s complicity in her own oppression. Because of the passive and docile nature of her sense of virtue, Justine’s suffering is at least partially self-inflicted, Carter argues. She “knows how to make a touching picture out of her misfortunes” and “presents herself emblematically in the passive mood, as an object of pity and as a suppliant” (SW 54-5). Despite having several opportunities to act out and improve her plight, Justine chooses not to, because she wants to preserve her virtue. This virtue is “not the continuous exercise of a moral faculty,” Carter argues, but “a sentimental response to a world in which she always hopes her good behaviour will procure her some reward” (SW 62). Justine is a good woman according to the rules which men have prescribed her, and hoping for a reward is naive and futile, leaving her fixed in her role as a victim. Justine is the embodiment of many women who identify “with images of themselves as victims of patriarchal oppression” (Keenan 134). Women who believe and use the myth of the passive virgin will not be rewarded and win new freedoms, but are complicit in their own oppression. Sade puts his finger on this complicity in his female victims and shows women how they are going along with mythic female roles: “In the looking-glass of Sade’s misanthropy, women may see themselves as they have been and it is an uncomfortable sight” (SW 41). Sade poses an alternative to Justine in the shape of her sister Juliette, who is “Justine- through-the-looking-glass, an inversion of an inversion” (SW 91). Whereas Justine pursues virtue and destroys herself in the process, Juliette reacts to the abuses directed at her “by turning herself into the perfect whore” (Keenan 137). She is not a victim, but has become a libertine, leaving a trail of destruction wherever she goes, and she is “just as calculating, just as immoral, and just as cruel” as the male libertines (Phillips, Introduction 101). Juliette “acts according to the precepts and also the practice of a man’s world and so she does not suffer. Instead, she causes suffering” (SW 90). Juliette’s reward is that, in contrast with her abused sister, she prospers: she has gathered wealth and independence. In the figure of Juliette, Sade offers women the chance of sexual freedom: “the right of women to fuck” as “aggressively, tyrannously, and cruelly” as men (SW 31). In Philosophy in the Bedroom, the Juliette figure is repeated in the character Eugénie. Having laid bare the bonds of female virtue, a virtue which for Justine consists of not deriving any pleasure from sexual intercourse, Sade encourages

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women to “break those irons” like Eugénie and Juliette and to satisfy their sexual desires (Sade, Philosophy in the Bedroom 110). However, Carter sees neither role, Justine as the virtuous victim or Juliette as the evil aggressor, as ultimately satisfactory. She therefore proposes a negotiation between the two states, which may be brought about by a so-called moral pornographer:

A moral pornographer might use pornography as a critique of current relations between the sexes. His business would be the total demystification of the flesh and the subsequent revelation, through the infinite modulations of the sexual act, of the real relations of man and his kind. Such a pornographer would not be the enemy of women, perhaps because he might begin to penetrate to the heart of the contempt for women that distorts our culture even as he entered the realms of true obscenity as he describes it. (SW 22)

Sade, Carter claims, lays bare the power structures that are at work in the sexual relations between men and women and therefore shows us the way towards such a moral pornography. In a mirroring of the composition of the libertine novels, “the uniquely Sadean rhythm of orgy following dissertation …, of practice following theory” (Phillips, Libertine Novels 34), after The Sadeian Woman Carter undertook the project of deconstructing Sadean pornographic structures and offering alternatives to them in The Bloody Chamber.

1.4 Critical reception by anti-pornography feminists

Both The Sadeian Woman and The Bloody Chamber were met with strong criticism from anti-pornography feminists. Part of the negative criticism of The Sadeian Woman amounts to the accusation that Carter reads Sade as a literary artefact and ignores the political reality attached to his writings. Andrea Dworkin calls The Sadeian Woman a “pseudofeminist literary essay” and argues that Carter ignores the violence that Sade caused his victims in real life in order to glorify him as a literary author (Dworkin, Pornography 84). Susanne Kappeler makes a similar argument by accusing Carter of “lolling in the literary sanctuary” and in this way protecting Sade from political criticism (Kappeler 135). The idea of a moral pornography is “utter nonse”, Duncker argues, since pornography may mirror the realities of male power and desire but does not leave room for “the expression of feminist eroticism” (Duncker 8). Robert Clark also argues that a moral pornography is impossible, “the

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ideological power of the form being infinitely greater than the power of the individual to overcome it” (Clark 153). Carter’s insistence on women’s complicity in oppression by going along with mythic archetypes, somewhat redolent of victim-blaming, was met with resistance by feminist critics (Keenan 138). Carter’s apparent advocacy of Sade’s victimiser Juliette as an alternative to the victimised Justine was criticised as well. Despite Juliette’s seemingly transgressive sexuality, the male libertines ultimately still are the ones that are in control, and “[t]he freedom Sade is credited with demanding is freedom as men conceive it” (Dworkin, Pornography 93, 89). In this form of sexuality based on male desire, Dworkin writes: “if you can’t do anything about it (and I will see to it that you cannot), lie back and enjoy it” (Dworkin, Pornography 94). This argument is repeated in other critics’ evaluations of Carter’s The Sadeian Woman, which argue that the only option that Sade offers women and which Carter takes over is a binary one: “to suffer or to cause suffering, to belong to one half of ‘mankind’ or the other” (Kappeler 135), or, as Lewallen put it, to “fuck or be fucked” (Lewallen 149). Carter’s advocacy for a more sexually aggressive role for women is not liberating because it does not offer the choice of not choosing that option (Lewallen 157). When Sade encourages women to satisfy their sexual desires and to “break those irons”, what he offers them is merely the possibility to change their attitude and to enjoy their irons, which is not a proper free choice (Kappeler 135). Critics have made similar arguments about Carter’s depiction of female desire in The Bloody Chamber. In an article that draws heavily on Dworkin’s texts on pornography, Duncker argues that Carter conceives of female desire not as autonomous but as a response to male arousal and that “all we are watching, beautifully packaged and unveiled, is the ritual disrobing of the willing victim of pornography” (Duncker 7). Similarly, Clark reads “The Company of Wolves” as written as a form of male voyeurism which, admittedly, suggests that the girl enjoys her own sexual power, but that this meaning “lies perilously close to the idea that all women want it really and only need forcing to overcome their scruples” (Clark 149). “Old chauvinism, new clothing”, Clark concludes: the new fairy tale falls back into reinscribing patriarchal attitudes (Clark 149). In short, negative critical evaluations of Carter argue that, both in her envisioning of a moral pornography in The Sadeian Woman and in the female heroines in The Bloody Chamber, Carter does not succeed in transcending Sade’s dichotomy of female roles. As the practical development of the theory laid out in The Sadeian Woman, The Bloody Chamber reproduces rather than deconstructs harmful pornographic structures.

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1.5 New Justines versus new Juliettes

The feminist debate on pornography in the late 1970s and early 1980s was strongly polarised. Anti-pornography feminists accused feminists supporting pornography of being brainwashed into being consenting victims, nicely illustrated by Robin Morgan calling pro-pornography feminists “Sade’s new Juliettes” (Sheets 98). Feminists in support of pornography, on the other hand, characterised the anti-pornography feminists as “good girls” who blame men for their victimised position and in this way settle into the victim role, turning themselves into “new Justines” (Sheets 98). Apart from illustrating how sadomasochism is a crucial dividing point in the debate, the feminists name-calling each other “Juliettes” and “Justines” shows how both sides of the debate fall back into the essentialising descriptions of women that they are trying so hard to avoid. The debate surrounding pornography had its influence on the criticism of Angela Carter’s work. The negative criticism of The Sadeian Woman and The Bloody Chamber seems to place Carter on the side of the “bad girl feminists” or “new Juliettes”. Carter’s provocative use of Sade for a feminist argumentation in The Sadeian Woman certainly does seem to align Carter with that side. Her acceptance of sadomasochism as a valid element of a feminist conception of sexuality is controversial as well. A number of later critics, however, such as Robin Ann Sheets and Merja Makinen, have argued that Carter’s reading of Sade, although it may have its limitations, is more nuanced than negative critics have given her credit for and that Carter cannot easily be placed in the pro-pornography side of the debate. In the next chapter, I will argue that Carter escapes a dichotomised categorisation with regard to the feminist debate on pornography. Furthermore, I will argue that Carter’s feminist thinking is strongly aimed at demystifying mythical roles of femininity and that Sade’s materialist view of sexuality is therefore useful for her project.

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2. Angela Carter and Sade: materialism and demythologising

2.1 Neither Justine nor Juliette

When Duncker, Clark, Kappeler and Lewallen assume that Carter sees Juliette, a figure of an aggressive sexuality, as a proper feminist model, they are misreading her: Carter rejects Juliette’s role as aggressive victimiser. “[Juliette’s] triumph is just as ambivalent as is Justine’s disaster”, Carter writes: “[w]ith apologies to Apollinaire, I do not think that I want Juliette to renew my world” (SW 90, 127). In Sade’s conception of freedom, it is still the male libertines who in the end are in control: “Juliette lives in a country where the hangman rules” (SW 114). Carter acknowledges that, however powerful Juliette as a libertine may be, this is only possible because she acts like a man: she “has identified all her interests with those of the hangman” (SW 114). And even though Carter does not see this as a proper alternative for female empowerment, it is why she may show a slight preference for Juliette over Justine, because Justine at least “has her political analysis correct” (Keenan 141). Although Carter questions the feminist agency of Justine as the virtuous victim, she does not actually blame her: “let us not make too much of this apparent complicity. There is no defence at all against absolute tyranny” (SW 163). Justine and Juliette are two sides of the same coin, Carter argues, and it is the entire power balance itself that she criticises:

The life of Juliette exists in a dialectical relationship to that of her sister. The vision of the inevitable prosperity of vice, as shown in her triumphant career, and the vision of the inevitable misfortunes of virtue that Justine’s life offers do not cancel one another out; rather, they mutually reflect and complement one another, like a pair of mirrors. (SW 89)

Neither of the two roles, Justine nor Juliette, are appropriate models for female empowerment because they preclude an equal relationship between people. The moral of Sade’s Justine and Juliette is, writes Carter: “the comfort of one class depends on the misery of another class” (SW 89). Moreover, Carter has stated how she disapproved of Sade’s dichotomised world

17 view because his conceptions of good and evil “can never change from one to the other, there’s no possible mediation in his world. It’s a very frightening and distressing one” (Gamble 113). Being content neither with the behaviour of Justine as a resigned victim nor with that of Juliette as a violent aggressor, Carter argues for a “synthesis of their modes of being, neither submissive nor aggressive, capable of both thought and feeling” as a proper model for a feminist change of female roles (SW 91). This non-essentialist, versatile mode of being would enable fair relations between people, “a reciprocal pact of tenderness” (SW 9).

2.2 The material Sade

In Sade, Carter finds an ally in the sense that just like her, Sade situates truth in the physical, material body: “he treats the facts of female sexuality not as a moral dilemma but as a political reality” (SW 31). Sade’s philosophy is materialist rather than idealist: for him, matter and material interactions are primary in nature, and the human condition is not located in soul or spirit but in the sexual body (Phillips, Introduction 34). The title of Sade’s novel Philosophy in the Boudoir, sometimes translated as Philosophy in the Bedroom, is telling. The boudoir, a woman’s private sitting-room, often near her bedroom and defined as a female space, often signified a place of feminine desire in libertine novels (Deininger 564). The juxtaposition in the title of the boudoir and philosophy “seems to sum up the whole Sadean project, which is to bring the body, in particular the female body, back into philosophy” (Phillips, Libertine Novels 63). Sade’s use for Carter is his analysis and rejection of the two major mythical roles of women, that of the virgin and that of the mother. The most horribly violated victims of the libertines in Sade’s novels are the virgin daughters of noblemen. Sade shows how “female virginity is the precious jewel of the ruling classes, token and guarantor of their property rights” and exposes the “central role of sexuality in the maintenance of the social status quo” (Keenan 138). Through his relentless degradation of Justine, Sade shows how virginity is worthless and, in this way, rejects the myth of the virgin. Other beloved victims of Sade are mothers. By ranking pleasure above reproduction in female sexuality, Sade refuses “to see female sexuality in relation to its reproductive function” (SW 1). This, in combination with the degradation of mother figures, undermines the myth of women as primarily mothers. For this reason, Carter views Sade as a liberatory figure who claims rights of free sexuality for

18 women, unlike pornographers and other writers in his time or even in our time (SW 36). Sade demystifies the Christian myths of the mother and the virgin, “the most sanctified aspects of women” (SW 41), and founds a new, materialist religion - “the cult of the body” (Phillips, Libertine Novels 18).

2.3 The demythologising business

What I think lies at the heart of Carter’s feminist thinking, and what should be central in every feminist reading of her work, is the aim to deconstruct mythical roles of femininity. On the topic of her work, Carter has written: “I believe that all myths are products of the human mind and reflect only aspects of material human practice. I’m in the demythologising business” (Carter, “Notes from the Front Line” 71). Carter is averse of essentialising conceptions of women, which she calls “false universals”, be they negative or positive (SW 5). There is a political danger in believing in these roles:

If women allow themselves to be consoled for their culturally determined lack of access to the modes of intellectual debate by the invocation of hypothetical great goddesses, they are simply flattering themselves into submission (a technique often used on them by men). All the mythic versions of women, from the myth of the redeeming purity of the virgin to that of the healing, reconciling mother, are consolatory nonsenses; and consolatory nonsense seems to me a fair definition of myth, anyway. (SW 5-6)

These myths make women comply with their appointed roles, allowing for the repetition of oppression. This is the origin of Carter’s rejection of Justine’s behaviour. Carter actually shares this aversion of mythical roles with Andrea Dworkin, who targets the Christian myth of divine virgin birth and related myths of passive virgins in fairy tales and pornography. These are myths that have become exemplary, consequently repeatable, and finally a justification for human behaviour. Dworkin argues that myth “still operates as the substructure of the collective” in modern society (Dworkin, Woman Hating 163-4). Carter also rejects new, modern notions of mythic roles for women: “Mother goddesses are just as silly a notion as father gods. If a revival of the myths of these cults gives women emotional satisfaction, it does so at the price of obscuring the real conditions of life” (SW 6). These myths “dull the pain of particular circumstances” (SW 5) – in other words, as abstractions

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they deny the importance of individual personal experiences, and in this way they oppose change in the material reality of the oppression of women.

2.4 The limits of Sade’s demystification

However, Carter sees the limits of Sade’s demystification of the maternal function (Keenan 145). Carter identifies a point where a synthesis of the Justine and Juliette roles could have been achieved in a scene in Philosophy in the Bedroom, in which fifteen-year old Eugénie, libertine in training, rapes her own mother, Madame de Mistival, as punishment for trying to preserve Eugénie’s virginity. Madame de Mistival’s dubious exclamations, which can be read as either expressions of pain or of pleasure, make it seem as if she is deriving pleasure from her rape. If she were to reach orgasm, Carter writes, then transcendence over Justine’s and Juliette’s modes of behaviour would have been attained: “[b]eing would cease to be a state- in-itself; it would then be possible to move between modes of being in a moral and not a sexual sense” (SW 150). However, Madame de Mistival loses consciousness before she is able to orgasm; it is impossible for Sade “to violate the last taboo of all” and to demystify the maternal function completely (SW 150). Sade’s dualist world view of unchangeable vice and virtue remains intact. He denies “the possibility of corruption”, which the other way around also “denies the possibility of regeneration” (SW 150). Sade is unable to manage the possibility of change. Still, we should make two more critical remarks on the idea of Sade as a champion of free sexuality for women which Carter does not include in her argumentation in The Sadeian Woman. First of all, Sade does want women to have rights of sexual freedom, unconnected to reproduction, but eventually this is “because he wants them to be sexually available” (Phillips, Introduction 101). Moreover, female libido is still defined against male libido. The pamphlet in Philosophy in the Bedroom states that “Never may an act of possession be exercised upon a free being” (318), and the female libertine Madame de Saint-Ange encourages Eugénie to “fuck” since “your body is your own, yours alone” (221). At the same time, the pamphlet argues that men should have the power to possess women’s bodies (Phillips, Libertine Novels 75). Sade’s notion of individual freedom, therefore, “is more beneficial to men than to women”, like any form of libertinism will benefit those with existing power (Phillips, Libertine Novels 76).

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A second remark is that, apart from Sade’s failure to demystify the maternal function completely, we should be sceptic of Sade’s demystification of the maternal function in itself. Sally Keenan asks if “we [can] accept the claim that Sade demystifies the maternal function when his hatred of it is based on the very mystification [Carter] is talking about?” (Keenan 146). Ward Jouve asks if Carter, “in her rejection of the mother, produce[s] another form of suppression?” (Jouve 163). In other words, Sade’s claim on free female sexuality depends on the degradation of the mother figure: “If Sade’s religion is of the body, it is of the male body, and the sacrificial victim is female and maternal” (Phillips, Libertine Novels 76). Although Carter is right that Sade offers an insightful analysis of the structural material oppression of women, we should have some serious reservations about Carter’s claim that Sade is a champion of female freedom.

2.5 Carter as a materialist feminist

From a pro-pornography point of view, reading Sade as a liberatory figure means reading the violence depicted in his texts not as literal physical violence but “the physical as it violates the rational categories that would contain and dominate it” (Gallop 18). This is the approach that Carter seems to be taking in The Sadeian Woman when she emphasises the transgressive and therefore liberating nature of Sade's depiction of sexuality. She does, however, acknowledge Sade’s misogyny and his “hatred of the mothering function” (SW 41). Carter also acknowledges the dangers of (most) contemporary pornography, which, according to her, “assists the process of false universalising” and serves “to reinforce the prevailing system of values and ideas in a given society” (SW 13, 20). The criticism that Carter reads Sade only within the literary realm and leaves him exempt from political critique is therefore undeserved. Robert Clark has argued that Carter’s “primary allegiance is to a postmodern aesthetics” which “precludes an affirmative feminism founded in referential commitment to women’s historical and organic being” (Clark 158). I want to disagree with Clark and argue that the material dimensions of women’s lives are actually one of Carter’s main concerns as a feminist. Focusing too much on the notion of the moral pornographer in The Sadeian Woman is not doing justice to Carter’s wider argument about demythologising, which places her firmly in a tradition of “a feminist politics that would rectify the material oppression that women experience daily” (Altevers 20). Carter's aim to dismantle the false essentialising of

21 sexuality shows how she places the situation of women in a historical context (Altevers 21). “Flesh comes to us out of history,” Carter writes (SW 12), and the “relationships between the sexes are determined by history and by the historical fact of the economic dependence of women upon men” (SW 7). Sade's claim of free sexuality for women is so relevant for Carter because she attaches great importance to the reproductive freedom of women (Altevers 21). Reproductive freedom is a topic that is, unfortunately, still very relevant within feminism and perhaps now more than ever in recent years, with several states in the US passing bills to ban abortion. Carter’s feminism, as Altevers phrases it, “all comes down in the end to the question of women’s autonomy” (Altevers 22).

2.6 The demystified fairy tale

The folkloristic and fantastical basis of Carter's texts, together with their highly baroque style, makes her fictions vulnerable to the criticism that they are not in a suitable mode for offering an analysis of the material circumstances of women. In an interview with Angela Carter, John Haffenden suggested that “the highly stylized and decorative apparatus of your novels might appear to be disengaged from the social and historical realities you want to illuminate” (Haffenden 85). However, such a folkloristic basis does not automatically preclude a solid line to political reality; in the interview, Carter replied that “there’s a materiality to imaginative life and imaginative experience which should be taken quite seriously” (Haffenden 85). However fantastical and unrealist Carter's fiction may be, it is still, through its demythologising, concerned with the economic, sexual and political position of women. Her fiction can be said to “explore the real material world of fantastic appearances, of representation” (Jordan 130), and to question the “metaphysical systems [that] belie the actuality of the flesh” (Tucker 13). Jack Zipes has argued that well-known, canonised fairy tales have been used “to reinforce the dominant patriarchal ideology throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries” and that they have been retold so often “that they became almost ‘mythicized’ as natural stories, as second nature” (Zipes 1). I think that fairy tales, since they are seen as widely distributed instances of a limited and dualist conception of female roles, both by anti- and pro-pornography feminists, actually are a good place to start an attempt at a demythologising of these female roles. It is this second nature, the myths of femininity, that Carter aims to demystify in The Bloody Chamber. In an interview from 1985 Carter states

22 that what interests her “is the way in which these fairy tales and folklore are methods of making sense of events and certain occurrences in a particular imaginative way” (Watts 170). Her aim in The Bloody Chamber is, thus, “to bring [the] fairy tale back down to earth in order to demonstrate how it could be used to explore the real conditions of everyday life” (Gamble 112). Thus, the fairy tale is a suitable genre for engaging with political reality. The Bloody Chamber puts the analysis and subversion of pornographic structures into practice in the literary field. The dichotomy of mythical roles of femininity, the roles of Justine and Juliette, is addressed and rejected. Whereas Sade could never bring himself to fuse the modes of behaviour of Justine and Juliette into one woman, Carter here undertakes this task, beginning with the insistence that women acknowledge their complicity in these myths and take responsibility for their own behaviour. Only after that can there be a reciprocal relationship between men and women. In my opinion, these two notions of responsibility and reciprocity are central in the tales in The Bloody Chamber. I want to argue that the titular story, “The Bloody Chamber”, specifically develops the notion of responsibility, while the penultimate story in the collection, “The Company of Wolves”, builds on this notion of responsibility and from there develops the notion of reciprocity. A second pornographic structure which Carter addresses in both “The Bloody Chamber” and “The Company of Wolves” is that of the inherent violence of pornography, which results in the conception of male pleasure as based in the sexual objectification of women. A third and final pornographic structure that is analysed and dismantled in both tales is the relationship between sexual partners as master and slave, predator and prey, victimiser and victim. Through an analysis and a renegotiation of these three structures, Carter addresses the questions that lie at the heart of the pornography debate: "Is it, or is it not, possible for women to conceive of, and enjoy, an active pleasurable engagement in sex with men? Is it, or is it not, possible to see women as empowered agents of heterosexual desire?” (Keenan 141).

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3. Responsibility and “The Bloody Chamber”

3.1 Perrault’s “Bluebeard” and Carter’s “The Bloody Chamber”

In The Sadeian Woman, Carter argues that it is necessary for women to stop identifying themselves with mythical roles of femininity in order to attain freedom from patriarchal structures. In other words, women need to take responsibility for their own behaviour. In this chapter, I will argue that “The Bloody Chamber”, the first story in the collection of the same name, addresses the mythic role of the passive and virtuous virgin and shows how conforming to this role does not lead to larger freedom but to a masochistic self-destruction. Moreover, I will argue that the story exposes the workings of the pornographic objectification of women and that it connects this objectification to larger patterns of male power based in violence. Carter explores these ideas through a rewriting of the fairy tale “Bluebeard”. The story of “Bluebeard” exists in many different versions. The most well-known and seen as the most authoritative one is Charles Perrault’s “La Barbe Bleue”, which was published in his collection Tales of Passed Times by Mother Goose in 1697 (Tatar 15). Perrault ends each of his fairy tales with a lesson, which is intended to illustrate the morals that were upheld at the French court at the time (Orenstein 33). Perrault includes two morals at the end of “Bluebeard”, in which he warns about the dangers of curiosity:

O curiosity, thou mortal bane! Spite of thy charms, thou c[a]usest often pain And sore regret, of which we daily find A thousand instances attend mankind. (Perrault 36)

“Bluebeard” has been read as preaching wifely obedience in a particularly gruesome and bloody way. Maria Tatar has argued that the tale is about marital discord: “It stands virtually alone among our canonical fairy tales in a negation of a ‘happily ever after’ ending. It gives us an up-close-and-personal view of marriage, confirming everything we didn’t want to know and were afraid to ask about it” (Tatar 53). Some critics read the tale as the epitome of domestic abuse: “Nowhere, perhaps, has the violence inherent in domesticity been more forcefully rendered than in this depiction of slain wives literally hanging from the walls of the

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conjugal house” (Hannon 943). As a striking story of extreme physical violence against women, “Bluebeard” has been the topic of much feminist criticism. “The Bloody Chamber” joins this feminist debate around “Bluebeard” and combines a reworking of Perrault’s tale with an analysis of mythical roles of femininity informed by Sade’s writings. “The Bloody Chamber” is told from the perspective of an unnamed, seventeen-year old piano student, a “poor widow’s child” (BC 5) who lives with her mother. She marries a much older Marquis, “[t]he richest man in France” (BC 8), who has already been widowed three times. His wives are said to have died of accidents. The couple live together at the Marquis’s ancestral home, a castle. Shortly after the marriage, the Marquis leaves on a business trip and tells his wife not to enter one of the rooms, which she does the same night. There she finds torture devices and the dead bodies of his three previous wives. The wife confides in the blind piano tuner who works at the castle but he cannot help her. The husband unexpectedly returns and finds out about his wife’s disobedience. He plans to decapitate his wife, but she is saved at the last instant by the unexpected arrival of her mother, who shoots the husband in the head. The protagonist starts a music school with her husband’s money and lives together with her mother and her new husband, the piano tuner.

3.2 The Bluebeard tales and Sade

There are striking similarities between “Bluebeard” and some of Sade’s libertine characters, such as the Comte de Gernande in Justine, who has killed three of his wives, whose bodies he keeps in a special chamber, and tortures his most recent wife (Phillips, Libertine Novels 95). “The Bloody Chamber” picks up on this association of “Bluebeard” with Sade and positions itself in relation to Sade through a number of references, such as the husband’s title of “Marquis”, his remote castle which is reminiscent of the isolated monastery in the forest in Sade’s Justine, and his library full of sadistic pornography. The Marquis’s attraction to the protagonist recalls the attraction of Sade’s male characters to Justine. The power structures in their marriage are those of predator and prey: the Marquis, with his “leonine” head and his “dark mane” (BC 2, 3), is a sexual beast and the protagonist is his virginal prey. The story references “Little Red Riding Hood” and likens the husband to the wolf: when the Marquis decides to consummate their marriage and the protagonist protests that “it is broad daylight,” the Marquis replies, “All the better to see you” (BC 13). Gradually, the protagonist becomes aware of the nature of the Marquis’s attraction

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to her: “Then I realized, with a shock of surprise, how it must have been my innocence that captivated him” (BC 16). Like the way in which Sade’s libertines lust after Justine, so the Marquis lusts after the protagonist because of her innocence, and the fantasy of tainting or corrupting this innocence: “Your thin white face, chérie; he said, as if he saw it for the first time. Your thin white face, with its promise of debauchery only a connoisseur could detect” (BC 17). In The Sadeian Woman, Carter argues that the attraction of “girly girls” such as Justine and Marilyn Monroe lies in the fact that their innocence makes them seem inaccessible as sexual objects (SW 77-79). Sadean pleasure is thus based on violating the female body, “on the fantasy of creating circumstances in which the inaccessible is made accessible” (Phillips, Libertine Novels 114). The protagonist goes along with the power balance in their marriage and plays the role of Justine; she “is so seduced by the part she is playing that she does not regret ‘the world of tartines and maman that now receded from me’” (BC 7, Jordan 124). In this way, the story imitates the structure of Sadean pornography of the sexual predator and the virginal prey. Significantly, Carter imitates but does not repeat the Sadean pornographic structure. We can take Carter’s story at face value but that it “can also produce wincing from this fascination of the girl with being acquired and seduced by a knowing and powerful man who ‘wants her so much’” (Jordan 124). Through this doubleness, Carter keeps a critical distance from Sade. The story analyses and exposes the workings of the power structures that are at work in Sadean pornography and then the story departs from the Sadean pornographic structure by changing the development of plot and characters. As Heta Pyrhönen has argued, “[i]t is this double allegiance – participation in Sadeian pornographic fantasies and critical distance from them – that allows Carter to develop a measure of autonomy, inviting readers to share it” (Pyrhönen 94).

3.3 The male gaze and objectification

In my view, the central focus of “The Bloody Chamber” is analysis of the pornographic structure of male objectification of women and a subsequent exposure of how male power is based in violence against women. Through this analysis, “The Bloody Chamber” works towards the dismantling of a second pornographic structure, that of the mythical role of the virtuous victim. I will explain the tale’s analysis of the objectification of women with the help of Laura Mulvey’s concept of “the male gaze”, which, besides film, has been applied to

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literature and other cultural manifestations. Mulvey bases her concept on the Freudian theory of scopophilia (“pleasure in using another person as an object of sexual stimulation through sight”) and voyeurism (Mulvey 836). Mulvey argues that film makes use of a certain look, the male gaze, which is a combination of these two phenomena and which facilitates the expression of male desire (Mulvey 836-7). The male gaze divides men and women into active and passive roles: the active male figure watches the female figure as a sexualised object, whereas the passive female figure is being watched. This gaze is erotic and is central to all kinds of erotic performances such as strip tease, Mulvey argues (Mulvey 837). “The Bloody Chamber” explores the objectification of women through emphasising the male gaze. The protagonist, who is the narrator of the story, notices the Marquis’s looks of lust and understands how his looks objectify her. The male gaze is expressed through images of commodities and food: in their relationship, the Marquis is the heroine’s “purchaser” and she is his “bargain” (BC 11). The Marquis treats her like a piece of food, a thing to consume: “He stripped me, gourmand that he was, as if he were stripping the leaves off an artichoke” (BC 11). Another image that “The Bloody Chamber” makes use of is that of mirrors. In Perrault’s “Bluebeard”, mirrors are prevalent: Bluebeard’s house contains “looking-glasses, in which you might see yourself from head to foot” (Perrault 26). “The Bloody Chamber” adopts this occurrence of mirrors and uses them to externalise and to amplify and in this way to further expose the workings of the male gaze. In Sade’s 120 Days of Sodom, there is a main hall covered with large mirrors to “facilitate the narration of stories and the communal orgiastic activities” (Phillips, Libertine Novels 42). Here it is not so much the body itself that generates pleasure for the libertines, “but its representation in an unlimited number of reflected images” (Phillips, Libertine Novels 155). According to Mulvey, in films with a male protagonist, the male spectator will identify his look with the look of the protagonist, “so that the power of the male protagonist as he controls events coincides with the active power of the erotic look, both giving a satisfying sense of omnipotence” (Mulvey 838). In “The Bloody Chamber”, the Marquis sets up the consummation of his marriage in such a way that it imitates an etching from his art collection, identifying himself with the “protagonist” of the etching and mirroring it:

[T]he child with her sticklike limbs, naked but for her button boots, her gloves, shielding her face with her hand as though her face were the last repository of her modesty; and the old,

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monocled lecher who examined her, limb by limb. He in his London tailoring; she, bare as a lamb chop. Most pornographic of all confrontations. (BC 11)

The inequality of the couple and the objectifying male gaze that emanates from the male figure makes the picture obscene in the eyes of the protagonist. There is a mirror-play of images, of the etching, the Marquis’s imitation, and the reflection of this imitation in the mirror, which all repeat each other and, in this way, amplify the girl’s objectification and the Marquis’s pleasure. The man plays the active role, and the girl is passive: in the mirror, “[a] dozen husbands impaled a dozen brides” (BC 14). Further on in the story, the images of mirrors and food, specifically meat, are combined. In The Sadeian Woman, Carter writes about the distinction between flesh, “usually alive and, typically, human”, and meat, “dead, inert, animal and intended for consumption” (SW 161). In an interview, Carter has stated how

[t]here comes a moment when many of the things of which you have a theoretical knowledge actually start to apply to oneself. You could walk your calf past the butcher’s shop for days, but it’s only when he sees the abattoir that he realizes that there is a relation between himself and the butcher’s shop - a relation which is mediated, shall we say, by the abattoir. (Haffenden 78)

In “The Bloody Chamber”, the protagonist has a similar moment of realisation, when the mediation of mirrors helps her to understand the nature of the Marquis’s predatory looks:

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, the sheer carnal avarice of it … . (BC 6)

Carter describes Sadean sexuality in terms of human flesh being changed into meat for consumption: “The strong abuse, exploit and meatify the weak, says Sade. They must and will devour their natural prey” (SW 164). The protagonist may have seen this carnivorous look before, but only now understands its sexualising and objectifying power. She has acquired “[c]arnal knowledge,” which is, Carter writes, “the infernal knowledge of the flesh as meat" (SW 165).

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3.4 The discovery of the bloody chamber and taking responsibility

Mulvey later expanded her notion of the male gaze with “the female gaze”, which entails that women look at themselves through the male gaze (Sassatelli 127). After the protagonist understands the nature of the Marquis’s look, the male gaze is turned back upon herself and she sees herself through the eyes of the Marquis as a sexualised object: “When I saw him look at me with lust, … I caught sight of myself in the mirror. And I saw myself, suddenly, as he saw me” (BC 6). It is here that Carter departs from Sade’s feminine roles and starts the dismantling of the third pornographic structure, which is to blend the role of Justine as victim with the role of Juliette as victimiser by depicting the onset of a female desire. The mirrors in “The Bloody Chamber” provoke a growing awareness within the protagonist of patriarchal images of women as objects of desire, but they also create an identification with these images. The male gaze enables the male figure to derive pleasure from looking, but at the other end of the male gaze “there is pleasure in being looked at”, too (Mulvey 835). The Marquis’s lustful look stirs a masochistic sexual awakening in her: “for the first time in my innocent and confined life, I sensed in myself a potentiality for corruption that took my breath away” (BC 6). Whereas Sade’s Justine does not feel any pleasure from the sexual attention she receives and is therefore incorruptible, the “Justine” in “The Bloody Chamber” is “glimpsing the possibilities of becoming Juliette” (Hill 101-02). This sexual awakening, a “dark newborn curiosity” (BC 19), troubles her too: “I was aghast to feel myself stirring” (BC 11); “I was not afraid of him; but of myself” (BC 17); “I lay in bed alone. And I longed for him. And he disgusted me” (BC 19). The protagonist is aware of the darker side of the Marquis’s predatory looks, their underlying principle of the “transmutation of the human body into meat … that is subordinated to a cruel system of sexual violence and patriarchal domination” (Duggan 63). Having a premonition of the violent nature of the Marquis’s sexuality, the heroine sets out to find “evidence of my husband’s true nature” (BC 22). “[I]n a cold ecstasy to know the very worst” (BC 26), she enters the forbidden chamber and finds the tortured bodies of the Marquis’s three previous wives. Here, the heroine realises the full extent of the Marquis’s objectification of women, and sheds the last pieces of her passive, acquiescent and masochistic behaviour: “Each time I struck a match to light those candles round her bed, it seemed a garment of that innocence of mine for which he had lusted fell away from me” (BC

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27). Whereas Sade’s Justine hopes that her virtue and her compliant behaviour will reward her in the end, the protagonist has learned that this hope is useless, but will instead lead to the ultimate annihilation of death. In The Sadeian Woman, Carter criticised women’s identification with passive victim roles and argued that “In the looking-glass of Sade’s misanthropy, women may see themselves as they have been” (SW 41). In “The Bloody Chamber”, Carter confronts her protagonist and the reader with looking-glasses that show how women partake in the mythical role of passive, virginal femininity. The protagonist’s complicity in her own near-demise is stressed. Her husband asks the piano tuner: “[D]oes even a youth as besotted as you are think she was truly blind to her own desires when she took my ring?” (BC 39), suggesting that the heroine was well aware that she was being seduced and let it happen. After the Marquis discovers his wife’s disobedience, he brands her on her forehead: “he pressed the key lightly to my forehead, held it there for a moment. … [W]hen I involuntarily glanced at myself in the mirror, I saw the heart-shaped stain had transferred itself to my forehead, to the space between the eyebrows, like the caste mark of a brahmin woman. Or the mark of Cain” (BC 36). The mark is simultaneously a sign of wifely disobedience and of sinful female curiosity. The branding is reminiscent of Sade’s Justine, who is branded on her shoulder by Rodin for trying to escape from her confinement. After Justine’s reunion with her sister Juliette, when her trials are over, her branding is removed surgically, leaving no trace of her “crime” (Sade, Justine 402, 410). Similarly, in Perrault’s “Bluebeard”, the wife “marr[ies] herself to a very worthy gentleman, who made her forget the ill time she had passed with Blue Beard” (Perrault 34). In “The Bloody Chamber”, however, the heroine’s brandmark cannot be removed from her forehead and she is not allowed to forget about her tribulations: “No paint nor powder, no matter how thick or white, can mask that red mark on my forehead; I am glad he cannot see it – not for fear of his revulsion, since I know he sees me clearly with his heart – but, because it spares my shame” (BC 42). There is no proper happy ending for the protagonist, since she still has to bear the shame of remembering “her half-conscious complicity in her own near-destruction” (Harries 156). After the manipulation and ordeals that she has been through, this mark of shame and guilt “seems somewhat unfair” (Lewallen 152). However, I think that the brand mark is not so much a sign of punishment as it is a reminder, a reminder that masochistic complicity in playing the role of Justine does not lead to larger freedom but to death. The mark reminds the heroine to take responsibility for her own behaviour and not to fall into the trap of identifying with the mythical role of passive, virginal femininity again.

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3.5 The punishment of female curiosity and wifely disobedience

Following the story’s analysis of sexual objectification of women, “The Bloody Chamber” connects the violence inherent in pornography to the violence that is inherent in male power itself by exploring myths of female curiosity and disobedience. On the topic of Justine’s brand mark, Carter writes that she “wears her punishment on her skin, although she has not committed a single crime” (SW 48). Like Justine, the heroine in “The Bloody Chamber” has not committed a real crime either: “I’ve done nothing … I only did what he knew I would” (BC 38). “Like Eve,” the piano tuner replies (BC 38). Earlier, the story refers to the Greek myth of Pandora’s box. Relating her own predicament to the other mythological tales in which female curiosity is punished, the heroine understands their similar underlying mechanism:

I knew I had behaved exactly according to his desires; had he not bought me so that I should do so? I had been tricked into my own betrayal to that ill-imitable darkness whose source I had been compelled to seek in his absence and, now that I had met that shadowed reality of his that came to life only in the presence of its own atrocities, I must pay the price of my new knowledge. The secret of Pandora’s box; but he had given me the box, himself, knowing I must learn the secret. I had played a game in which every move was governed by a destiny as oppressive and omnipotent as himself, since that destiny was himself; and I had lost. Lost at that charade of innocence and vice in which he had engaged me. Lost, as the victim loses to the executioner. (BC 34)

In this mythical scenario, men deliberately provoke curiosity and disobedience in women in order to then punish them for it. The heroine understands that she has been a pawn in a game devised by her husband and that she has behaved exactly according to what was expected of her in that preconceived plot. As in Perrault’s “Bluebeard”, the Marquis’s “castle is a maze designed to make a woman partake in his game. The injunction against visiting the chamber is calculated to arouse her curiosity, make her explore the castle, and finally enter the room” (Pyrhönen 97). All the heroine has to do is to set that preconceived plot into motion. The Marquis’s scheme is put in the context of other male authorities. When she is in the bloody chamber, the protagonist sees her wedding ring flash, “once, with a baleful light, as if to tell me the eye of God – his eye – was upon me” (BC 28). Here, the power of the husband, who provoked his wife’s disobedience, is likened to the power of God, who

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provoked Eve’s disobedience. When the heroine plans to go to the gendarmerie for protection, she reconsiders:

[C]ould I trust them, either? His forefathers had ruled this coast for eight centuries, from this castle whose moat was the Atlantic. Might not the police, the advocates, even the judge, all be in his service, turning a common blind eye to his vices since he was milord whose word must be obeyed? Who, on this distant coast, would believe the white-faced girl from Paris who came running to them with a shuddering tale of blood, of fear, of the ogre murmuring in the shadows? Or, rather, they would immediately know it to be true. But were all honour-bound to let me carry it no further. (BC 29)

In this way, the story argues that the manipulative strategy of provoking female disobedience exists within a pact of male authority. Male authority, in whatever form (the husband, the police, the advocate, the judge, God), partakes in and preserves this scenario. This pact of male power is something which Carter also discusses in The Sadeian Woman. In Sade’s Justine, “[t]he monastery of St Mary-in-the-Wood is … a microcosm in which a small group of privileged men operate a system of government by terror upon a seraglio of kidnapped women” (Carter, SW 48). In the microcosm of the monastery in Justine, as well as in the worlds of “Bluebeard” and “The Bloody Chamber”, a pact of male power subsists on using violence against women, “whether this man wielding power is an ancient or a Christian god, a father, or a husband” (Pyrhönen 104). Violence is necessary to maintain male power. Philip Lewis has argued that, when Bluebeard told his first wife not to enter the forbidden chamber, there were no murdered wives yet and thus “the paradoxical core at the origin of his secret is that there is no secret” (Lewis 208). Instead, “[t]he victim’s ordeal was essentially a test of her obedience”, and only after her death a real secret has been established (Lewis 208). From Lewis’ argument follows that Bluebeard’s true secret is that “he has no power, that he is essentially impotent and not entitled to control women” (Zipes 163). This means that Bluebeard, and with him all men, knows that male power cannot be justified and can therefore only be obtained and maintained “through calculating manipulation of the other, more often than not, females and their offspring” (Zipes 163). Thus, Bluebeard’s power is “a fantasy sustained by female blood” (Hannon 943).

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3.6 Problematic figures: the mother and the alternative husband

How can women assert their autonomy within this pact of male power? Upon Bluebeard’s discovery of her disobedience, the wife in Perrault’s tale takes the Justine approach and “threw herself at her husband’s feet, and begged his pardon with all the signs of a true repentance, and that she would never more be disobedient” (Perrault 30). Sade’s Juliette, on the other hand, makes her interests coincide with those of male authority. Carter’s protagonist, however, does neither of these things. She has seen what the Marquis’s game consists of and she knows that a woman can never win this game, since the roles have been fixed in advance and the man will ultimately be the one in control. “The Bloody Chamber” refuses to follow these preordained roles, and instead of other male authorities in the form of the wife’s brothers, the mother figure is brought in to change the roles. When the protagonist’s mother arrives at the castle, “The puppet master, open-mouthed, wide-eyed, impotent at the last, saw his dolls break free of their strings, abandon the rituals he had ordained for them since time began and start to live for themselves; the king, aghast, witnesses the revolt of his pawns” (BC 40). In the end, it is the mother, the “avenging angel” (BC 39), who saves the protagonist from deadly objectification. This rescue scene has raised two different evaluations. On the one hand, critics have praised the intervention of and subsequent return to the mother. Duncker, for example, reads the end of the story as a mother-daughter idyll in which “the bond between Mother and Daughter is never broken” and states that the tale “carries an uncompromisingly feminist message; for the women’s revolution would seal up the door of the bloody chamber forever” (Duncker 12). Other critics have also praised the story for breaking free of oppressive patriarchal structures and reconnecting with matriarchal origins (Cronan Rose 221). On the other hand, the scene can be read as parodic and not to be taken literally. I think that this reading is the most convincing one for two reasons. First of all, it is a recurrent strategy in The Bloody Chamber to imitate certain patterns and then to question them by taking a step back – think of, for example, the “wincing” that the heroine’s willing seduction can evoke. This doubleness asks the reader to assume a sceptical attitude. The mother’s intervention does not fit in well within the story – the imagery is bombastic, almost parodic: “like a miracle, I saw a horse and rider galloping at a vertiginous speed along the causeway … A rider, … a crazy, magnificent horsewoman in widow’s weeds” (BC 38). The scene scene “is melodramatic, even stagy” and the protagonist’s return to the mother is troubled

33 through “its theatrical excess and magical unreality” (Harries 156). Thus, the story offers us many reasons for being on our guard. Secondly, we should not forget the connection between The Bloody Chamber and Carter’s feminist thinking in The Sadeian Woman, in which she aims to demythologise the mythical mother figure. The protagonist’s statement that she “can only bless … the maternal telepathy that sent my mother running headlong from the telephone to the station after I had called her” (BC 41) seems quite unconvincing in the light of this aspect of Carter’s feminism. Reading the story as a return to matriarchal origins is therefore not only “rather simplistic” (Gamble 124) but even faulty. Carter may have deliberately included this part of the narrative in her first story of the collection in order to mollify sceptical feminist critics, anticipating their criticism: “the tactic in ‘The Bloody Chamber’ … is less whole-hearted, more a matter of giving them what they want to buy them off” (Jordan 128). Since it is possible to read the rescue scene in a double way, we could say that Carter questions rather than endorses the idea “that there is a special kind of communication between mother and daughter” (Harries 157). In conclusion, I think that “The Bloody Chamber” is very much aware of not presenting any mythical roles of femininity, old ones or new ones, and that the story presents the view that “the virtuous victim does not, cannot exist”, and that similarly also “the heroic, avenging mother is a fantasy” (Harries 157). The blind piano tuner, who “was blind, of course” (BC 20) and who becomes the protagonist’s new husband, the alternative to Bluebeard, poses similar questions of credibility. Duncker reads the piano tuner’s blindness as a symbolic castration, similar to Mr Rochester’s blindness in Jane Eyre (Duncker 10). His “castration … may signal the end of male sexual aggression, [but] it is also mutilation” and he can therefore not be a proper model for a “new male erotic identity” (Duncker 11). Should we draw the conclusion that an equal relationship between men and women is only possible in an asexual way, when the man is mutilated or handicapped? Does equality between men and women “demand that the male be disfigured?” (Sheets 112). Harries and Jordan argue that we should read the piano tuner in the same way as the protagonist’s mother, which is that he “function[s] as a cipher, as anonymous as the princess that the prince may be awarded in a fairy tale” (Jordan 122), that he “is really a nonce figure, composed and fictionalized as the husband’s opposite, not as a possibility in the real world” (Harries 157). In its characteristic doubleness, the story imitates roles and subsequently distances itself from these roles: it “uses romance figures to refuse romance” (Harries 157). In this way, “The Bloody Chamber” is wary of presenting any new

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mythical roles through the characters of the mother and the alternative husband and leaves the reader with the possibility of reading its ending scene in a double way.

3.7 Conclusion: complicity in roles of femininity

In conclusion, “The Bloody Chamber” dismantles the pornographic mythical role of passive and virginal femininity and shows that it is useless as a tool for female empowerment. Moreover, the story exposes the pornographic mechanisms of the objectification of women by men and shows how the basis of male power lies in violence by exploring myths of female curiosity and disobedience. “The Bloody Chamber” also depicts the onset of a female desire. Finally, “The Bloody Chamber” leaves the reader with two loose ends: the story makes us question the adequacy of the mother figure and the mutilated husband as proper models for an equal relationship between men and women, and the fact that the heroine’s complicated morality is based in shame and guilt makes us wonder if this is a well-rounded feminist rewriting of a misogynistic fairy tale. However, in my opinion, Carter deliberately denies full closure to the story and refuses to provide an easily digestible solution to problematic power relations between men and women in “The Bloody Chamber”, because the complexity of real human relations does not allow for easily digestible solutions either. Carter refuses to believe in mythical roles of femininity and is therefore careful not to fall into the fallacy of portraying women as exclusively wounded victims. Some feminist rewritings of fairy tales entail only the reversal of roles, and in this way “merely redistribute guilt and responsibility” (Harries 100). “The Bloody Chamber” is not a simple reversal. In Carter’s work, women “are wronged, but they are also often wrong, collaborators as much as victims. It is not men only, but the whole interwoven construct of social relations that is under scrutiny” (Hill 67). In addition to this, Carter is careful not to present any new mythic roles of femininity. Furthermore, “The Bloody Chamber” presents just one view; the other stories in the collection return to the same question of power relations between men and women and offer other perspectives. In the next chapter, I will show how “The Company of Wolves” is a continuation and a resolution of issues raised and explored in “The Bloody Chamber”. Especially the notion of acknowledging responsibility for participating in mythical roles of femininity will be shown to be the first step towards a reciprocal and equal relationship between men and women.

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4. Reciprocity and “The Company of Wolves”

4.1 Perrault’s “Little Red Riding Hood”, the Grimms’ “Little Red-Cap” and Carter’s “The Company of Wolves”

In “The Bloody Chamber”, Carter developed the idea that women have to take responsibility for their own complicity in mythical roles of femininity. In this chapter, I will argue that the story “The Company of Wolves” works from this notion of responsibility as the first step towards a synthesis of the pornographic Justine and Juliette roles and a deconstruction of the predator-prey relationship in Sadean pornography, which will allow for a reciprocal and mutually pleasurable relationship between men and women. Furthermore, I will argue that the story resists the pornographic objectification of women and that it conceives of an autonomous female desire. The story addresses these issues through a rewriting of the fairy tale “Little Red Riding Hood”. Like “Bluebeard”, the fairy tale of “Little Red Riding Hood” is passed down in many different versions, of which Perrault’s “Little Red Riding Hood” from 1697 is one of the most well-known. “Little Red-Cap” by the Grimm Brothers, published more than a century later in 1812, is another authoritative version. In any version, the tale of “Little Red Riding Hood” has a strong sexual content. In Perrault’s version, the naive girl gets into bed with the wolf: “The Wolf seeing her come in, said to her, … come and lye down with me. Little Red Riding Hood undressed herself, and went into bed” (Perrault 10). Perrault’s tales were not aimed at children, but adults, to whom its sexual message would not be lost: “[a]ny courtier who read this tale … would have readily understood its meaning. … [W]hen a girl lost her virginity it was said that elle avoit vû le loup – ‘she’d seen the wolf’ (Orenstein 26). The chastened version of the tale by the Brothers Grimm, aimed at an audience of children, removes any direct sexual references: here, the wolf jumps out of bed and then “swallow[s] up Red-Cap” (Grimms 116). The literal consumption of flesh can alternatively be read as the figurative sexual consumption of flesh – in the sense that the wolf, with his carnal desire, rapes Red Riding Hood and her grandmother.8 Thus, it can be argued that “Little Red Riding Hood” “is

8 The strong sexual association that the fairy tale of “Little Red Riding Hood” evokes is evidenced by the large amount of pornography inspired by the tale. See: Orenstein, Catherine. “The Punishment of Red Riding Hood: Fairy-Tale Fetish.” Little Red Riding Hood Uncloaked: Sex, Morality and the Evolution of a Fairy Tale, Basic Books, 2002, pp. 205–218.

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a tale about rape and the survival or non-survival of a rape victim … about predators and how to deal with them” (Zipes 28). Both Perrault’s and the Grimms’ versions of “Little Red Riding Hood” draw moral conclusions which have been met with severe criticism from recent feminist critics. Perrault’s tale ends with the wolf eating Little Red Riding Hood, which is followed by a moral that states that “young, growing misses fair, /Whose orient rosy blooms begin t’appear” must learn to be careful of the dangerous wolves, alternatively read as sexual predators, who “Follow young ladies as they walk the street, / Ev’n to their very houses, nay, beside, / And, artful, tho’ their true designs they hide” (Perrault 10, 12). Perrault’s tale argues against female promiscuity and promotes chastity. In the Grimms’ tale, Little Red-Cap and her grandmother are saved by a hunter, the ending that most fairy tale books today will include. Red-Cap has learnt her lesson and “thought to herself: “As long as I live, I will never by myself leave the path, to run into the wood, when my mother has forbidden me to do so” (Grimms 117). Like Perrault’s “Bluebeard”, the Grimms’ “Little Red-Cap” promotes obedience. Thus, the responsibility of the whole ordeal is passed onto Red Riding Hood; and if we read the tale as a tale about rape, Perrault’s and the Grimms’ versions suggest that women are “eager to be seduced or raped” and that it is their own fault if they are (Zipes 35). Therefore, Zipes has rightly argued that “the key idea of ‘Little Red Riding Hood’ is that women are responsible for their own rape” (Zipes 37). Carter’s “The Company of Wolves” begins with short anecdotes and folklore beliefs about werewolves before recounting the main story, a rewriting of “Little Red Riding Hood”. An unnamed girl, a virgin, sets off to the woods to bring her old grandmother a basket with food. In the woods, she meets a handsome young hunter who joins her on her way and wagers with the girl that he can arrive at her grandmother’s house before she does. The young man arrives at the grandmother’s house and eats the old woman up, after which he puts on her clothes and gets into bed. The girl arrives and realises that the young man killed her grandmother. The girl takes off her clothes, throws them into the fire and gets into bed with the wolf – it is implied that they have sex. The story ends with the girl sleeping in the arms of the wolf. The story is the basis of the 1984 film A Company of Wolves, directed by Neil Jordan and co-written by Jordan and Angela Carter herself.

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4.2 Relationships of predator and prey

In Carter’s “The Company of Wolves”, the sexual dimension of Perrault’s and the Grimms’ tales is made more explicit, in line with her aim “to extract the latent content from the traditional stories and to use it as the beginnings of new stories” (Haffenden 84). The link between eating meat and having sex is emphasised: the wolf, who is “carnivore incarnate” (BC 136), is the embodiment of “a human’s disconcerting awareness of her own status as meat”, (Duggan 64). As Carter argued in The Sadeian Woman, this status as meat denotes both a literal consumption as food and a figurative consumption as a sexual object. The girl’s grandmother, or the narrator’s voice, recognises the sexual aspect of consumption when she sees the wolf strip naked and comments: “His genitals, huge. Ah! huge” (BC 136). The last thing the grandmother sees before she is consumed is “a young man, eyes like cinders, naked as a stone, approaching her bed” (BC 136). Instead of being eaten, the girl actually has sex with the wolf. Thus, the tale of “Little Red Riding Hood” is changed into a story specifically about sexual relations between men and women. The story of Sade’s Justine bears similarities to fairy tales that must have been known to Sade, such as “Little Red Riding Hood”, “in which a credulous young girl, lost in the woods, too willingly places her trust in those she encounters” (Phillips, Libertine Novels 95). Carter’s Red Riding Hood, on the other hand, is more cautious and distrustful. She is a “strong-minded child” who is “quite sure the wild beasts cannot harm her”, but who, to be absolutely safe, still takes a knife with her when she goes to her grandmother’s house (BC 133). It is not stated whether or not she knows that the young hunter she encounters is a werewolf, but when she enters her grandmother’s house, she does know that she is “in danger of death” (BC 137). Because of her cautiousness, Carter’s heroine does not completely fit the typical Justine role. The wolf, on the other hand, is the typical predator that is described in Perrault’s and the Grimms’ tales. In “The Company of Wolves”, there is no strong male figure as in the Grimms’ tale that saves the girl and her grandmother – here, the hunter and the wolf coincide in the same person: “a very handsome young [man], in the green coat and wideawake hat of a hunter” (BC 134). Like Sade’s libertines and Bluebeard, he has a taste for virginal, “immaculate flesh” (BC 138). He is the “mild and gentle-humour’d”, “simpering” wolf from Perrault’s moral that follows young women in order to ravish them (Perrault 12); he is good- looking from the outside but “the worst wolves are hairy on the inside” (BC 137). Thus, “The

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Company of Wolves” sets up a structure that recalls the relationship of predator and prey in Sadean pornography, but begins to subvert this structure by changing the ingenuous heroine into a more worldly and assertive one. This pornographic structure will be further dismantled later in the story.

4.3 Sadean pleasure: the lonely libertine

In “The Company of Wolves”, the Sadean pornographic structure of solipsistic pleasure is addressed. Sade’s libertine novels are solipsistic in the sense that they express the conviction “that every human being is utterly alone”, that “we are fundamentally cut off from all others” (Phillips, Libertine Novels 21). The solipsism of Sade’s libertines allows for an unrestricted self-interest, which gives them the possibility to use others to their own advantage. Thus, the libertines’ isolation is also a source of freedom. They isolate themselves physically in space, too, in order to be able to indulge their pleasures:

Ah, it is not readily to be imagined how much voluptuousness, lust, fierce joy are flattered by those sureties, or what is meant when one is able to say to oneself: ‘I am alone here, I am at the world’s end, withheld from every gaze, here no one can reach me, there is no creature that can come nigh where I am; no limits, hence no barriers; I am free.’ (Sade, 120 Days of Sodom 412)

The typical Sadean setting, such as the castle, is “a remote and isolated retreat, as if silence, distance, and stillness were libertinage’s potent vehicles” (Sade, 120 Days of Sodom 235) – the isolated setting facilitates pleasure. The isolated spaces of the Sadean libertine are repeated in the castle and the secret room of “Bluebeard” and “The Bloody Chamber”. Since people can have no real connections to each other, Sadean sexual pleasure is an individual thing. Rather than a partner, it requires a victim:

[T]here is no more selfish passion than lust; none that is severer in its demands; smitten stiff by desire, ‘tis with yourself you must be solely concerned, and as for the object that serves you, it must always be considered as some sort of victim, destined to that passion’s fury. Do not all passions require victims?” (Sade, Juliette 269)

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Sexual partners, for Sade, are either victimiser or victim. Carter argues that the only way in which Sade can think of a sexual reciprocity is by taking turns in these roles, but never both at once: “Mutual aggression can never take place at the same time but only in a serial fashion, now me, now you, and the cock … is passed from man to woman, woman to man, man to man, woman to woman, back and forth, as in a parlour game” (SW 170). In Sade’s world, mutual and intersecting pleasure is impossible. Sadean pleasure is, therefore, quite a lonely thing. We read this in Carter’s “The Bloody Chamber”: when the Marquis finds out that his wife has disobeyed him, the protagonist recounts how “it seemed to me he was in despair” (BC 35); “I felt a terrified pity for him, for this man who lived in such strange, secret places that, if I loved him enough to follow him, I should have to die. The atrocious loneliness of that monster!” (BC 35). The Marquis’s pleasure necessitates that he eventually kills his lover. Similarly, the extreme beastliness of the wolf’s sexuality in “The Company of Wolves” is not depicted as a desirable condition: the tale describes the howling of wolves as if it has “some inherent sadness in it, as if the beasts would love to be less beastly if only they knew how and never cease to mourn their own condition” (BC 131). Instead, the story attempts to synthesise the roles of predator and prey.

4.4 Carter’s Red Riding Hood as a mediating figure

For Carter’s wolf, redemption can only come “through some external mediator” (BC 131). Such an external mediator is presented in the figure of Red Riding Hood. In the beginning of “The Company of Wolves”, the girl is still a virgin: “she is a sealed vessel; she has inside her a magic space the entrance to which is shut tight with a plug of membrane; she is a closed system” (BC 133). Virginity is a central theme in Sade’s texts: it is of the utmost importance to Justine that she preserves her virginity, whereas Juliette aspires to become as little virginal as possible. Gallop has identified virginity as the central divide between the two sisters, that in “the space between Justine the virgin and Juliette the whore, lies the mysterious break between innocence/ignorance/virginity and experience/knowledge/sexuality. The hymen is the emblematic wall partitioning these two realms” (Gallop 52). In “The Company of Wolves”, Carter does not recreate the mythical role of the virgin. Instead, the story identifies the hymen as the place where Sade conceives of the differentiation between girl and woman, between virginity/innocence and sexuality/experience, between Justine and Juliette. At the end of the story, the heroine gives in to a bestial sexuality and sleeps with the wolf:

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[S]ince her fear did her no good, she ceased to be afraid. What shall I do with my shawl? Throw it on the fire, dear one. You won’t need it again. … The firelight shone through the edges of her skin; now she was clothed only in her untouched integument of flesh. … What big teeth you have! She saw how his jaw began to slaver and the room was full of the clamour of the forest’s Liebestod but the wise child never flinched, even when he answered: All the better to eat you with. The girl burst out laughing; she knew she was nobody’s meat. … See! sweet and sound she sleeps in granny’s bed, between the paws of the tender wolf.9 (BC 138-9)

Whereas Sade can only conceive of women as either Justines or as Juliettes, the heroine’s loss of virginity here does not automatically turn her into a Juliette figure; the predator-prey relationship is not deconstructed by reversing the roles and turning the girl into a predator. In contrast with the Marquis and the protagonist in “The Bloody Chamber”, and the girls and the wolves from Perrault’s and the Grimms’ tales, the girl and the wolf in “The Company of Wolves” can maintain a sexual relationship with each other and both live. No one has to kill the predator and, in this way, annihilate beastliness, but the girl could just get into bed with the predator and reconcile humanity with beastliness. Thus, Carter does not fall into the binary trap that Sade sets for women, “to suffer or to cause suffering, to belong to one half of ‘mankind’ or the other” (Kappeler 135). Carter’s rewriting of “Little Red Riding Hood” does not change the girl from a victim into a victimiser in the fighting-fire-with-fire way that Orenstein calls “feminism that confuses female emancipation with the power to consume” (Orenstein 164). In other words, Carter does not change Little Red Riding Hood into a Juliette figure, a woman that uses an aggressive sexuality in order to stand her ground in a male-dominated world.10

9 This passage in “The Company of Wolves” bears a strong resemblance to an oral folktale recorded as “The Grandmother’s Tale”, a variation on the “Little Red Riding Hood” fairy tale collected around 1885 in France (Orenstein 65). In this version, Little Red Riding Hood strips off her clothes, asks the wolf what to do with each piece of clothing and one by one throws them into the fire. The girl then gets into bed with the wolf, but escapes. See: Delarue, Paul, and M.L. Tenèze. Le Conte Populaire Français: Les Contes Merveilleux. Érasme, 1957. 10 The Grimms’ “Little Red-Cap” is followed by another shorter tale, a kind of “sequel”, in which the girl and her grandmother together trick and kill the wolf, after which “Red-Cap joyously [went] home, and no one ever did anything to harm her again” (Grimms 118). In this tale, the women use violence in order to protect themselves against male violence.

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Instead, the tale depicts a sexuality that is reciprocal. The girl gains some of the wolf’s sexual nature; the wolf, in contrast, becomes “tender”, like a human. This is not to say that the girl tames the beast, but that both prey and predator have gained some of the other’s characteristics. As Little Red Riding Hood’s mother says in the film A Company of Wolves: “If there’s a beast in men, it meets its match in women too.” The fusion of the Justine and Juliette modes that Sade never was able to conceive of, Carter accomplishes here: the girl’s sexual corruption allows for “the possibility of the redemption from virtue”, and the wolf becoming tender allows for “the reciprocal possibility of a fall from vice” (SW 151). Rather than being a passive prey, the girl in “The Company of Wolves” shows an active desire. Thus, there is no question of deadly objectification and consumption here: the girl “knew she was nobody’s meat” (BC 138). The story in this way presents a more reciprocal and equal sexual relation between men and women: “Entry into the sexual world of adults need not necessitate violent objectification and crude consumption” (Duggan 65). Whereas Sade’s conception of pleasure is one-sided and has fixed roles, “The Company of Wolves” depicts sexuality as a negotiation between roles - the wolf and the girl are both tender and aggressive at the same time - and pleasure as coming from both sides. It is an optimistic view of future heterosexual relationships that “looks towards sexual reciprocity between men and women” (Keenan 141).

4.5 Conclusion: towards a reciprocal sexuality

The passage above from “The Company of Wolves”, in which Red Riding Hood strips off her clothes and sleeps with the wolf, has not been read by all critics as a successful renegotiation of female and male sexuality. Some have argued that the tale depicts a girl giving into rape: “Red Riding Hood sees that rape is inevitable … and decides to strip off, lie back and enjoy it. She wants it really. They all do” (Duncker 7). When read in this way, the story seems to blame victims of rape, and the moral of the story is that “all women want it really and only need forcing to overcome their scruples” (Clark 149). The story would then repeat the binary choice that Sade offers women: “The point again is the acceptance of animal sexuality, but with a choice between rape and death such acceptance might seem merely logical rather than natural” (Lewallen 154). Carter’s decision to stage her fusion of the Justine and Juliette figures at the point of a threat of being raped is certainly a precarious one. However, I think there are three things we

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should keep in mind when reading this scene which will lead to a non-victim blaming reading of the story. As Elaine Jordan has argued, “to query the political value of speaking as a victim can only be a hairsbreadth away from blaming the victim. But that space does exist” (Jordan 120. Firstly, we again have to remember that one of Carter’s main aims is to dismantle the pornographic mythical role of the virtuous virgin. “The Bloody Chamber” rejects the feminist agency of the virtuous victim, which, as Carter writes in The Sadeian Woman, makes “the victim so defenceless against predation” (SW 163). In “The Company of Wolves”, Carter aims to provide an alternative to this defencelessness. This leads to my second point, which is that it is necessary to read Carter’s stories not as isolated tales in themselves, but in relation to each other. The stories in The Bloody Chamber are “not like Romantic works of art in which the whole significance might be read off from any sample” (Jordan 123). Instead, the stories are constructed as a series and each tale, story and motif comments on each other, offering different perspectives on a larger struggle between men and women, predator and prey, beast and human, vice and virtue. In this thesis I have examined two of these stories in closer detail. In “The Bloody Chamber” we read about a young woman who gradually becomes aware of the patriarchal structures that aim to objectify her and we see the onset of a female desire. In “The Company of Wolves”, this female desire is brought to full expression and is put in a dialogue with male desire. Only reading these stories in relation to each other will make the full extent of Carter’s feminism visible. Finally, I do not think that Carter intends to prescribe a clear-cut solution to the struggle between men and women. In reality, relationships and sexuality are complex and multifaceted, and Carter does not deny this complexity. “The Company of Wolves”, as well as “The Bloody Chamber” and the other stories in the collection “explore the explosive and complicated properties of sexual attraction and sexual union” (Orenstein 168). Female desire has its murky and unpalatable sides, too: in Carter’s stories, female desire is “healthy, but also challenging and sometimes disturbing, unbridled and feral lust that delivers up contradictions” (Orenstein 167). Read in this way, “The Bloody Chamber” and “The Company of Wolves” propose a relationship between men and women, and between all people, that is always in an ongoing renegotiation, a relationship that consists of, as Carter writes in The Sadeian Woman, “a reciprocal pact of tenderness” (SW 9).

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Conclusion

In this thesis, I have analysed Angela Carter’s story collection The Bloody Chamber in conjunction with The Sadeian Woman and the four libertine novels by Marquis de Sade. In this way, I have attempted to demonstrate how addressing and subverting pornographic structures lies at the heart of the feminist implications of The Bloody Chamber. In the first chapter, I have shown how feminist critics have identified a similarity in structures in pornography and in fairy tales. I also presented an overview of Carter’s feminist argumentation in The Sadeian Woman and described how both The Sadeian Woman and The Bloody Chamber were judged negatively by anti-pornography feminists at the time of their publication. In the second chapter, I have argued that Sade’s materialist analysis of sexuality is useful for Carter’s aim to demythologise mythical roles of femininity, and that Carter aims to synthesise Sade’s roles of Justine as victim and Juliette as victimiser. In the next two chapters, I have analysed two stories from The Bloody Chamber in connection to Carter’s feminist thinking in The Sadeian Woman and Sade’s libertine novels and I have argued that both stories imitate and distance themselves from Sadean pornographic structures. In chapter three, I have argued that “The Bloody Chamber”, a rewriting of “Bluebeard”, rejects the role of Justine as a suitable feminist model and that it instead urges women to take responsibility for their collaboratory role in their own objectification. In chapter four, I have argued that “The Company of Wolves”, a rewriting of “Little Red Riding Hood”, builds on this notion of responsibility and that it achieves a synthesis of the Justine and Juliette roles and a deconstruction of the victim-victimiser relationship, and that as a result, the story portrays a sexual relationship between men and women that is reciprocal and that allows for mutual pleasure. Furthermore, I have argued that the two analysed stories in The Bloody Chamber deliberately deny closure and refuse to provide any final answers to problems of power relations between men and women, because the complexity of real human relationships does not allow for easy solutions either. What my analysis has shown is, first of all, that it is impossible to define Angela Carter’s feminism as either pro- or anti-pornography, since it has features of both. Her daring use of Sade for a feminist argumentation and her acceptance of sadomasochism as a valid element of a feminist sexuality aligns her with pro-pornography feminism, whereas her

44 political criticism of contemporary pornography as well as her aversion of mythical roles of femininity align her with anti-pornography feminism. She escapes classification in this dichotomised debate. Secondly, I want to conclude that addressing and rewriting pornographic structures is central in The Bloody Chamber as a feminist work, and that fairy tales are used as vessels to address these larger pornographic structures. Since the fairy tale is so similar to pornography in its mythical roles of femininity, it is one of the most obvious genres to start a rewriting other than pornography itself. Finally, I want to conclude that The Bloody Chamber leaves room for open endings and ambiguity, and that it is precisely this ambiguity that is the strength of Carter’s work. I want to argue that, rather than as ready-to-use solutions to power struggles, Carter’s work should be approached as experimental attempts at redefining relationships between men and women. Her work attempts to break free from and therefore has its origins in patriarchal pornographic structures - of course the writing of a new feminist eroticism is going to be troubled and muddy. However, rather than to wait until “the division of sexual polarity is destroyed” and “male and female sexual identities are reborn” (Duncker 8), taking a more experimental approach to feminist rewriting allows for immediate action. Carter “has no time for Utopias or ‘that great commune in the sky’” (Jordan 123). Besides, it is the question if relationships between people will ever be easy and unproblematic. In a time of new feminist debates with new forms of polarisation, the age of #me too, the question of consent and political correctness, Angela Carter’s work forces us to consider the inherent contradictions, the ambiguity and the complexity of human sexuality.

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