The Bloody Chamber

The Bloody Chamber, by Angela Carter, is one of a collection of fairy tales in the book ‘The Bloody Chamber’ , published in 1979. The Bloody Chamber is about a young girl (narrator) who is married to the Marquis and taken away to his castle, where she is unable to leave or communicate with the outside world. She soon learns that the Marquis has a dark secret and finds herself fall victim to her marriage.

The novella revolves around violence, exploitation, alienation and loneliness, as well as the female and male relationship. The young girl is not a heroine narrator, she remains a victim who is seduced and imprisoned in a dark marriage with her monstrous husband, who K Lokke calls an “inhuman embodiment of sexual perversion and destructive power” (1988:9). The monstrosity, that is her husband, makes Carter’s novella one of a grotesque nature, containing an abundance of excess that creates an erotic, lush, fearful, apprehensive atmosphere. The story starts with the young girl wait to be married,

I lay awake in the wagon-lit in a tender, delicious ecstasy of excitement, my burning cheek pressed against the impeccable linen of the pillow and the pounding of my heart mimicking the great pistons ceaselessly thrusting the train that bore me away through the night, away from Paris, away from girlhood, away from the white […] into the unguessable country of marriage.

                                                                                                                           (2006:1)

Kirsten McNee

From the start it can be said that the story is going to be an erotic one, as well as following the young girl’s movement from ‘girlhood’ into ‘womanhood’.

When we, the readers, first read about the Marquis, he is described like that of an animal as she describes his hair as a “dark mane” (2006:9). There are constant descriptions of the Marquis’s mask like face, “waxen face […] perfectly smooth […] like a mask” (2006:3), the young girl also believes that there is more too him, “as though the face lay underneath the mask” (2006:9). Carter is giving us the impression that the Marquis is someone to be weary of, not trustable, building up suspense as to the unravelling of the Marquis character.

As the story progresses, Carter continues to build up the tension and suspense, hinting at what will happen to the young girl, for instance, the Marquis wedding gift to her,

His wedding gift, clasped round my throat. A choker of rubies, two inches wide, like an extraordinarily precious slit throat.

                                                                                                                           (2006:6)

Carter works through the ironic genre parody and that even though Carter hints to the girl’s decapitation, the reader knows that the girl will live to tell the tale. Lokke calls the Marquis the “symbol of death itself” (1988:9), meaning that the girl is triumphant over death, as the Marquis is killed and she survives. Lokke goes on to say that

The Bloody Chamber is a contemporary transformation of that quintessentially grotesque motif, the dance of death and the maiden, a modern, feminist transformation

                                                                                                                           (1988:9)

White Lilies

Continuing on with the theme of death, there are constant referrals to lilies and their link to funerals, “armfuls of arum lilies […] those undertaker’s lilies” (2006:11), “funeral lilies” (2006:3) and “white sheaths” (3). The girl even relates the Marquis to the flower, “but sometimes he seemed like a lily […] Possessed of that strange, ominous calm” (3). They seem to for warn the girl, and as she retells her story, she describes the Marquis as the flower which he surrounds her with; the Marquis is himself, is a symbol of death.

The Marquis castle is an excellent example of Carter’s ability to write the grotesque, the Marquis castle being something that looks like a fairy-tale castle, surrounded by sea, yet the sense of it being repellent also.

At home neither on the land nor on the water, a mysterious, amphibious place, contravening the materiality of both earth and waves […] That lovely, sad, sea-siren of a place!

                                                                                                                           (2006:9)

Not only is the outside something to behold but the inside is full of excess extravagant belongings. Carter describes the library as smelling of Russian leather, with “row upon row of calf-bound leather volumes” (12), a “deep-buttoned leather sofa” (12) and rugs of “deep, pulsing blues of heaven and red of the heart’s dearest blood” (12). Carter describes a room that sounds so grand and rather intense that it is seems hideous, especially when she describes the painting that hangs in the room. Lokke also says that “Carter's perverse craft shows that the beautiful can in fact be extraordinarily ugly” (1988:10), like that of the grotesque. Occasionally, other grotesque ‘features’ are pointed out, such as the gargoyles that adorn the matrimonial bed, “the sardonic masks of the gargoyles carved above me” (2006:19).

Kathryn Corlett

After the girl has lost her virginity and the Marquis relinquishes his keys to her, she realises that she has grown and, as linked with the grotesque, she is ‘reborn’; “I seemed reborn in his unreflective eyes, reborn in unfamiliar shapes” (2006:17). The girl realises that she has been lead, lamb to slaughter by the Marquis, tempting her with his own ‘Pandora’s box’, his torture chamber, the ‘bloody chamber’.  By the end the girl comes to accept that there is some evil inside her and ‘acknowledges the beauty of the blind lovers’ heart” (1988:10).

Carter finishes her novella with a strong female character, coming to the rescue of her daughter. The mother kills the Marquis, in grotesque terms the mother’s womb then becomes a tomb, another ‘bloody chamber’, her motherliness saves her daughter from the sado-masochistic Marquis.