Gale - A Study Guide for Angela Carters Bloody Chamber

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ISBN 0-7876-2219-2
ISSN 1092-7735

Printed in the United States of America
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Angela Carter

1979

Published in 1979, The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories, which received the Cheltenham Festival Literary Prize, retells classic fairy tales. Angela Carter revises Puss-in-Boots and Sleeping Beauty, for example, from an adult, twentieth-century perspective. Her renditions are intended to disturb and titillate her audience, instead of lulling it to sleep. The title story recasts the legend of Bluebeard, the mysterious French nobleman who murders his many wives. The legend, as recorded by the seventeenth-century author Charles Perrault, begins with the marriage of a girl to an eccentric, wealthy man. Called away on business, the newlywed husband leaves his wife the keys to every room and cabinet in the house. This keyring includes one key that she must not use: the one to the room at the end of the great gallery. Of course, she eventually enters the room forbidden to her. In it she finds the corpses of her husbands previous wives, all with their throats cut. Startled, the girl drops the key, which is enchanted and permanently stained by the blood on the floor. From this stain, Bluebeard discovers her disobedience. He raises his scimitar, but just in time, her brothers arrive to slay the murderer.

Though it follows the original tale in basic structure, The Bloody Chamber adds details of character and setting that raise issues of sexual awakening and sexual depravity, of the will to live, and of life in hell. In having the young bride be the one to tell her story and in having her courageous mother come to the rescue, moreover, Carter revisits an age-old tale with her feminist viewpoint.

When Angela Carter died of cancer on February 16, 1992, she was only 51 years old. In her relatively short lifetime, she wrote nine novels, dozens of short stories, a volume of poetry, and numerous essays on cultural and literary themes. Her work is known for its lush, imagistic prose, gothic themes, violence, and an undercurrent of eroticism. Critics have considered her a female Edgar Allan Poe and compared her to the English decadent artist Aubrey Beardsley.

She was born Angela Olive Stalker in London, England, on May 7, 1940. In 1960 she married Paul Carter (the couple divorced in 1972). In 1962, she began her studies in medieval English literature at Bristol University in England, where she also developed an interest in anthropology and French literature. In 1966 her first novel, Shadow Dance, was published. Set in an antiques shop, it concerned a pathological love triangle and exhibited elements of the fantastic that bloomed fully in her later novels. Her next two novels, The Magic Toyshop and Several Perceptions, experimented with elements of science fiction and magic realism. They were well-received by critics and were awarded the John Llewllyn Rhys Memorial Prize and the Somerset Maugham Award, respectively.

In 1979, Carter published The Sadeian Woman and the Ideology of Pornography, a nonfiction work in which she took a feminist view of the Marquis de Sade, an eighteenth-century French nobleman and author known for his sexually explicit novels. She argued that in his female characters, either passionate sex objects or dominant tyrants, the Marquis de Sade was claiming rights of free sexuality for women. The Bloody Chamber, published the same year, combined Carters interests in feminism, fairy tales, pornography, and anthropology (the study of human beings and their environment) into adaptations of cultural legends. Reworkings of fairy tales became one of Carters dominant themes in the next two decades. Two of Carters last published works were scholarly collections of fairy tales: The Old Wives Fairy Tale Book (1990) and Strange Things Sometimes Still Happen (1992).

The Bloody Chamber begins with the narrator on her wedding night, traveling by train from Paris to her new home. Her husband is asleep near her, and she, a young pianist, lies sleepless, not knowing what to expect of her married life. She recounts their speedy courtship. Her husband, a marquis who is much older than she and much richer than she, had three wives before heran opera diva, an artists model, and a countessall of whom died under mysterious circumstances.

The couple disembarks the train at dawn and are taken to the Marquiss castle, which is on an island. However, the husband must attend to some business before they can commence their honeymoon. While he is gone, she discovers an out-of-tune piano in the conservatory and a library that includes many volumes of pornography. Her husband returns to find her perusing these volumes and brings her back to the maternal bed. He puts his grandmothers ruby choker around her neck and they consummate the marriage.