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Angela Carter. The Bloody Chamber. 1940-1992. Angela Carter. Demythologising Amongst the postmodern writers , she is was the more daring, more inventive, and more incisively critical of social injustices in our contemporary society.
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Angela Carter • The Bloody Chamber
Angela Carter • Demythologising • Amongst the postmodern writers, she is was the more daring, more inventive, and more incisively critical of social injustices in our contemporary society. • From her first novels in the mid to late 1960s, which boldly confronted the pervasiveness of androcentrism traditional ideas about gender roles, and the roots of female masochism, Carter distinguished herself as a stylistic and thematic innovator.
Angela Carter • (Greek: ανδρο, andro-, "man, male", χεντρον, kentron, "center") is the practice, conscious or otherwise, of placing male human beings or the masculine point of view at the center of one's view of the world and its culture and history) • In retrospect, it is clear that as she matured she was at the cutting edge of a new movement of writing which, while retaining the discontentedness of the "angry young woman" crowd, led the British novel out of its regressive and male-dominated social realist trend.
Angela Carter • When one compares the ideas and stylistic methods of Carter to successors such as Rushdie, Barnes, Winterson, and many others, it is evident that she was tremendously influential in shaping contemporary British literature and women writing in general. • Carter's death in 1992 was followed by numerous encomiums of her life and work. • Though most praised her for her visionary contributions to world literature, not all the reviews were entirely favorable.
Angela Carter • John Bayley's appraisal of her work for the New York Review of Books bears particular attention. • Bayley implied that Carter's works would not endure the test of time because they were too embroiled in articulating the politically correct fashions of the present. • Because of his underlying conservative belief that postmodern art is always in service of the most simplistically conceived notions of political correctness, Bayley undervalues the work of an important con-temporary writer.
Angela Carter • Postmodern writing does rethink conventional ideological positions, but fictions such as Carter's are inquiries into and critiques of social values rather than literal prescriptions for how things should be. • Carter's work is self-consciously connected to the fleeting liberatory spirit of the sixties, an era in which, to reiterate Carter's assessment, "all that was holy was in the process of being profaned" ("Notes" 70). • Carter herself articulates this "profanity" through a variety of registers. She skips gaily and deviously among science fiction, dystopian fiction, pornography, the gothic, magic realism, fairy tale, burlesque, tragedy, and myth.
Angela Carter • Carter was not only an important precursor for Winterson, but was arguably the most influential figure in British women's writing since World War II.
Angela Carter • Many of the "postmodern" strategies of contemporary women's writing (e.g. rewriting androcentric, socially conservative genres and male-authored texts from a feminist viewpoint; self-consciously analyzing how gender structures social relations; using fantasy to imagine worlds where androcentrism and traditional gender roles have come undone) were brought to a new prominence by Carter during the height of the feminist movement, marking a break with the conservative social realist traditions of the immediately postwar period. • Carter’s ongoing project was to investigate and debunk “the social fictions that regulate our lives” (“notes” 70).
Angela Carter • She viewed religion, psychoanalysis, capitalism, patriarchy, and even certain kinds of feminism as responsible for perpetuating damaging myths: • "I'm in the demythologising business. [ ... ] I'm interested in myths [...1 because they are extraordinary lies designed to make people unfree" ("Notes" 71). • The myths that occupy Carter's attention throughout her fiction and essays are the ones related to gender, especially femininity.
Angela Carter • She mocks, debunks, and revises myths that have contributed to androcentric sexual gender roles. • Carter uses and revises the conventions at fairy tale, pornography, speculative-fiction, and the gothic to critique myths which perpetuate out-moded values about gender.
Angela Carter • A "moral pornographer," then, would use pornographic forms, language, and other conventions to "denaturalize" (3) commonly held values about sex and gender. • Gender Archetypes • Carter's interest in pornography can partly be understood by the fact that, similar to fairy tales, pornography offers archetypes for sexual behavior and sexual "ideals," especially with regards to women. • For Luce Irigaray, there are three central female archetypes which define and limit women's social behavior:
Angela Carter • "Women, animals endowed with speech like men, assure the possibility of the use and circulation of the symbolic without being recipients of it. Their nonaccess to the symbolic is what has established the social order" (189). • Irigaray's comments suggest that men's power is predicated on his ability to exclude his harem from speech.
Angela Carter • Without language, there can be no autonomy of thought or action: they remain enslaved and utterly dependent on him. • In her essay "Notes From the Front Line," Carter suggests that language itself is androcentric and leads women, including herself, to unconsciously "posit a male point of view as a general one" (71). • Language, she writes, "is power, life and the instrument of culture, the instrument of domination and liberation" (77).
Angela Carter • It is for this reason, she asserts, that "it is so enormously important for women to write fiction as women—it is part of the slow process of decolonialising our language and our basic habits of thought" (75).
Angela Carter • The Bloody Chamber: Postmodern Fairy Tales and Pornography • Because written literary traditions historically have been shaped and institutionalized by men, women writers have had to respond to literary forms that carry an androcentric bias—forms that have traditionally, often subtly, helped subordinate women to men. • Portraying new social values about gender, then, requires new representational conventions.
Angela Carter • A popular strategy of postmodern writers has been to rewrite stories from scripture, mythology, folk literature, and classic literature to parody, invert, or otherwise alter their traditional conventions and so draw attention to their ideological messages.
Angela Carter • Angela Carter's rewriting of classic fairy tales in The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories is an example of revising generic form for feminist purposes. • Because fairy tales have played an important role in teaching androcentric values to children, they have been frequently revised by women writers. • With The Magic Toyshop and The Bloody Chamber, Carter was one of the first of a number of contemporary women writers who have put fairy tales to unconventional uses.
Angela Carter • In addressing the issue of fairy tales and their social influence, Carter and others have suggested an alternative starting point for social critique—in the home and child-rearing, rather than just in public policy. • Changing society to promote gender equality is a difficult task, but, since gender roles are learned in early childhood, identifying and changing some of the sources of learned behavior (such as fairy tales) is an important step towards that goal. • Historically, folk and fairy tales have served numerous functions besides acculturating children.
Angela Carter • Fairy tales, Carter implies here, are socially important because they provide a set of common cultural scripts—a collective mythology which naturalizes certain types of behavior. • Genres are tied to different ideological trends at different points in history. • Carter's selection of fairy tales for the Virago collection, for example, is in part meant to demonstrate an alternative tradition of folk literature—one which exhibits "the richness and diversity with which femininity, in practice, is represented in `unofficial' culture: its strategies, its plots, its hard work" (xiv).
Angela Carter • Nevertheless, in certain historical and cultural eras there is a tradition of fairy tales being appropriated for the purposes of defining "proper" and "improper" conduct. • The Bloody Chamber returns the fairy tale genre to the more physiologically explicit and individualistic themes commonly expressed in its preliterary folk origins, while also transforming the tales so that they speak to contemporary feminist concerns. • The stories in The Bloody Chamberrevise the pedagogical subtexts of several classic fairy tales, especially Perrault's versions of "Bluebeard," "Little Red Riding Hood," "Beauty and the Beast," and "Snow White."
Angela Carter • Instead of passively accepting punishment for their transgressive behavior, Carter's female protagonists remain resolute and actively defy their male-determined fates. • Carter enables readers of received genres like the fairy tale to re-read them from a more critical stance, and this new process of reading sets in motion further challenges to the traditional identity of the old genres. • Carter took for granted that writing necessitates recycling and that fairy tales in particular are formed "out of all sorts of bits of other stories long ago and far away, and [have] been tinkered with, had bits added [...] lost other bits, got mixed up with other stories" all in an "endless recycling process" (Virago Book x–xi)."
Angela Carter • So The Bloody Chamber is not about the "evils" of pornography (or fairy tales) as such. • It is a critique of one tradition of ideological conventions in these genres—conventions which assume and even valorize female passivity, especially with regards to sexuality and desire. • ENd
Angela Carter • Perspectives on Pornography • The Bloody Chamber is mostly a collection of fairy tales rewritten to incorporate props of the Gothic and elements of a style designated 'magic realism', in which a realistic consciousness operates within a surrealistic context. • The characters are at once both abstractions and 'real'. • The heroine in 'The Tiger's Bride', for example, bemused by surreal events, comments, 'what democracy of magic held this palace and fir forest in common?
Angela Carter • Or, should I be prepared to accept it as proof of the axiom my father had drummed into me: that, if ‘you have enough money, anything is possible?' (p. 62). • Symbolism is prevalent: white roses for sexual purity; lilies for sex and death; lions, tigers and wolves for male sexual aggression. • Throughout the collection, specific attention is often drawn to the meaning of fairy tales themselves, and this has implications for the reading of Carter's stories.
Angela Carter • Most of The Bloody Chamber tales' have a direct ancestor in the folk and fairy tales of Charles Perrault, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Madame Leprince de Beaumont. • A rewriting of `Bluebeard' is the first story in the collection. The second and third tales are based on `Beauty and the Beast'. `Puss-in-Boots' and `The Erl-King' are next. • `Snow White', `Sleeping Beauty' and `Little Red Riding Hood' follow (two tales on this), with `Alice in Wonderland' (possibly) as the last story.
Angela Carter • The twists and expansions in Carter's tales, however, rely on new modes of representation—gothic, vampiric, pantomime and romance. • For instance, one critic identifies `The Bloody Chamber' story in the collection as the Bluebeard tale reworked as gothic romance.' • This process of reworking tales provides readers with new contexts that can liberate signs and patterns for contemporary purposes.
Angela Carter • Angela Carter appears to be most interested in Perrault's "Bluebeard," which was first published in his Histoires ou contes du temps passé, in 1697. Her own version, "The Bloody Chamber," in the book of the same name, is her best known reworking of the tale. • The tale weaves in and out of other works by Carter, where the forbidden chamber is motif for hidden desire' and Bluebeard's castle is motif for the soul. • In The Magic Toyshop, and the shorter tale, "The Fall River Axe Murders," in Black Venus Carter constructs a landscape of locked doors and endless corridors, through which her heroines….
Angela Carter • In Perrault's "Bluebeard" the castle is also a microcosm of patriarchy, and in "The Bloody Chamber" Carter shows this patriarchal power in its most extreme form. • The world inside this castle is one in which men rule, and women are looked' upon as children or pets. • The husband goes travelling on business while his wife stays home ordering icecream for dinner and switching on every light in the castle.
Angela Carter • It is also a world in which male oppressor and female victim are inextricably intertwined, reinforcing, as Dworkin puts it, the "normal and natural sadism of the male, happily complemented by the normal and natural masochism of the female." • The wife is the unequal partner in a grossly oppressive marriage. • The violence which the husband perpetrates is a kind of marriage ritual; the repeated performance of a particular act in which the usual power relations between man and woman have been extremely deformed.
Angela Carter • After their marriage is consummated, for instance, the heroine clings to her husband "as though only the one who inflicted the pain could comfort me for suffering it."' • Carter, however, offers no such comfort. Rather, she constructs a metanarrative which draws our attention to the reticence of the "Bluebeard" fairy tale about its own topos. • In "The Bloody Chamber," the husband's capacity for violence, both psychological and physical, is very real.
Angela Carter • He is the typical patriarch; he regards himself as king of his own home, his own tiny kingdom in which he can rule over the female body. • The enlargement of the husband's acts of domestic violence in the tale into acts of brutal murder are simply fantastic events that impinge upon a recognisable world. • The husband Carter has constructed would fit with verisimilitude into the sex/ crime genre prevalent in current American realist cinema.
Angela Carter • "Stereotypes," as Angela Carter writes, "only become stereotypes, after all, because they correspond to certain kinds of real behaviour." • If the home represented by the castle is the husband's domestic kingdom, then the chamber is his throne-room. • This is the place that he visits, as he tells his wife in Carter's version, "when the yoke of marriage seems to weigh too heavily on my shoulders. • There I can go, you understand, to savour the rare pleasure of imagining myself wifeless.'
Angela Carter • This is not surprising, since the negation of the woman, her metamorphosis from equal partner into a tiny manipulable figure, is one of the characteristic features of acts of domestic violence. • It is significant, too, that the acts of atrocity which the husband performs upon women take place in private, within the home that is the castle. • In The Sadeian Woman, Carter writes:
Angela Carter • to show, in art, erotic violence committed by men upon women cuts too near to the bone, and will be condemned out of hand...It is a great shame we can forbid these bleedings in art but not in life, for the beatings, the rapes and the woundings take place in a privacy beyond the reach of official censorship . • The kind of world in which men inflict pain on women is, of course, never endorsed in Carter's tale. • Rather, the suffering and oppression of women function as consistent counterbalances.
Angela Carter • Furthermore, the patriarchal order of the fairy tale world itself is persistently invaded by an alternative, matriarchal, world view. • This is the appropriation of text as political instrument, and it is done in three ways. • First of all, the tale is narrated in the first person, so that the heroine tells her own story, from her own point of view. • This is an appropriate move, since the narrative has always been less about Bluebeard than about Bluebeard's wife.
Angela Carter • Secondly, Carter replaces the heroine's sister Anne who, in Perrault's version, watches for the rescue party, with the blind piano-tuner, Jean-Yves. • This is the man with whom the heroine will live at the end of the tale (we are not told if they actually marry), and who "sees her clearly with his heart " Carter's heroinehere is downwardly mobile, as if the trade off for capital gain is the absence of identity, and the annihilation of the soul. • She does not use her inherited wealth to buy herself another husband, as in Perrault's version.
Angela Carter • Instead, she gives most of it to charity and transforms the castle into a school for the blind. • Thirdly, it is the heroine's mother, and not her brothers (as in Perrault's version) who rescues her. • When men rescue women in fairy tales they are rewarded with money or marriage which, in the aristocratic economy of the genre, usually amount to the same thing. • This is one way in which fairy tales present the dispensation of punishment and reward as the privilege of masculinity, and physical and psychological power as a masculine acquisition.
Angela Carter • When the mother in "The Bloody Chamber" rescues her daughter, the reward she receives is very different: the safety and happiness of her own child. • Furthermore, the gun which she uses to kill her daughter's husband provides the close of the tale with a neat symbol: brute force is destroyed by the instrument of patriarchy itself; male violence turns in on itself: • On her eighteenth birthday, my mother had disposed of a man-eating tiger that had ravaged the villages in the hills north of Hanoi.
Angela Carter • Now, without a moment's hesitation, she raised my father's gun, took aim and put a single, irreproachable bullet through my husband's head." • But "The Bloody Chamber" is not only a matriarchal narrative, it is also a narrative of desire. • As such, it draws upon a particular myth which has permeated (some would say contaminated) the entire system of Western and Western European discourse, namely, Eve's temptation in the Garden of Eden. • The parallels between the heroine in Carter's tale and the biblical heroine are drawn with precision.
Angela Carter • God's tree of knowledge and the husband's chamber are, after all, both forbidden precisely because of the corporeal and, implicitly, carnal knowledge they contain. • And Carter uses these parallels in order to exploit the contradictory messages about women which narratives of temptation convey. • First of all, like Eve, it is the heroine's capacity for temptation in "The Bloody Chamber" which instigates her search for that which is forbidden her. • But Carter makes it clear that it is the forbidden chamber itself which has been deliberately constructed to catch her out. • Taboo is a powerful piece of psychological equipment. • What better form of seduction is there than to make an extravagant offer and then place restrictions on it? "I only did what he knew I would," she later tells Jean-Yves. "Like Eve," he replies." • Carter's heroine is told precisely where she must not go; the husband carefully maps out for her the way to the chamber, forbidden and yet indelibly imprinted on her mind: • “All is yours, everywhere is open to you— except the lock that this single key fits. Yet all it is is the key to a little room at the foot of the west tower, behind the still-room, at the end of a dark little corridor full of horrid cobwebs”. • Secondly, the wife in "The Bloody Chamber" is threatened with severe punishment for her transgressions. • In Perrault's version of the tale, the only way in which she may be absolved from these transgressions is by performing, like Eve, the very rituals expected of a sinner — forgiveness and prayer.“ • As Margaret Olofson Thickstun writes in her feminist study of Puritan doctrine, "Eve's...recognition of her own guilt, her repentance, and her submission to her husband's rule become the model for female virtue. • However, the wife in Carter's tale does no such thing, as if the very substance of female desire itself cannot be contained by catechisms or theological rule books. • The fairy tale genre, with its stable of untouched, unmarried women, has never allowed much room for explicit, actualised desire. • That the heroine in the "Bluebeard" narratives is married at all makes the tale an anomaly in its genre. • Marriage precludes any possibility of "innocence;" sexual knowledge is something which the conventional function of marriage, with its insistence on procreation, demands. • As Thickstun writes, "In a system of metaphor in which sexuality stands for sinfulness, the contemplation of conception leads inevitably to conviction of sin."" • As a generic rule, most fairy tales end, as do most comedies, with the convention of the wedding. • As Carter writes in an essay in Nothing Sacred, 'The narratives stop short at the altar, as if they cannot bear to go on.." • She continues: • All such fictional narratives of women that end in marriage could just as well end with a death, because marriage means the death of the virgin, that is, the termination of her narrative as an individual, however hedged about with prohibitions that individualism might be. • In Carter's tale, however, female desire is treated as complex, contradictory state in which a plurality of needs converge. • The wife's perception of her own desire, for instance, is one of ambivalence. • As the eve of her wedding night approaches, she tells how she felt a both a strange, impersonal arousal at the thought of love and at the same time a repugnance “I could not stifle for his white heavy, flesh that had too much in common with the armfuls of arum lilies that filled my bedroom.“ • When the marriage is consummated, the wife feels "a certain queasy craving like the cravings of pregnant women for the taste of coal or chalk...I longed for him. And he disgusted me." • Furthermore, the desire which motivates her to enter the forbidden chamber is also marked by a similar ambivalence. • It is in this place that female bodies are shown in their most desolate forms — as the decaying corpses of the husband's previous wives. • These corpses are the chambers within the chamber itself, their gaping wounds are its inner doors. • They represent the ultimate site of the abject, and the wife is both fascinated and horrified by them. • As Kristeva has commented, the corpse itself is "death infecting life...Imaginary uncanniness and real threat, it beckons to us and ends up engulfing us." It shows us, quite literally, what is inside of ourselves. • She continues: • Corpses show me what I permanently thrust aside in order to live. These bodily fluids, this defilement, this shit are what life withstands, hardly and with difficulty, on the part of death. There, I am at the border of my condition as a living being. My body extricates itself, as being alive, from that border. Such wastes drop so that I might live, until, from loss to loss, nothing remains in me and my entire body falls beyond the limit — cadere, cadaver...the corpse, the most sickening of wastes, is an order that has encroached upon everything. • Carter's heroine examines these corpses in great detail: the opera singer, on whose throat "I could see the blue imprint of his strangler's fingers;" the artist's model, her skull "crowned with a wreath of white roses, and a veil of lace;" the Romanian countess, "pierced, not by one but by a hundred spikes."' • The wife's examination of the bodies is motivated by dual needs: for pleasure and pain, love and hate, life and death. • For the chamber itself is, incidentally, signifier not only for death, but also for life, for are not the womb and heart bloody chambers too? It is appropriate, then, that as the door creaks open, we are offered a quotation from the Marquis de Sade on the "striking resemblance between the act of love and the ministrations of a torturer." • For the forbidden chamber is also the place in which the softer fantasies of eroticism flip over into hard core, sadomasochistic porn. • At this point we are entering classic Carterian territory, where a variety of female representations are flamboyantly displayed. • If some of them (such as the one which suggests there is something pleasurable about forced sexual domination of the female by the male) may seem ideologically at odds with the notion of a feminist project; what is important is that we are constantly reminded that the ideologies Carter offers in her work are all, in the end, arbitrary constructs. • David Punter's comments on her representation of women in The Sadeian Woman are applicable here: • It is pointless to say in response to Sadeian Woman, as has been said,that the claim that women are "impregnated"with a will to submisson leads into a stance of political defeatism; according to Carter there is no eventual, Platonic essence of femininity which is done disservice by this claim, for the concept and stereotype of feminity [sic] is itself constructed within the overarching web of ideological forces which shape the substance of subjectivity?“ • Carter made known her interest in the critique of pornography when she published The Sadeian Woman, her study of the writings of the Marquis de Sade. • In her introductory 'Polemical Essay' she argues for a revision of the function of pornography, rather than its dispensation, to be carried out by what she calls a '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. • Precisely what these tasks would entail is never really clarified. Carter's blueprint for a pornography which is moral is clearly a theoretical model for a time which has yet to come. • However, in "The Bloody Chamber," Carter certainly articulates the paradox contained within the term, "moral pornographer," by appropriating aspects of pornography and then offering a critique of them. • Like pornography, "The Bloody Chamber" is preoccupied with those paradigms of oppression which pornographic fantasies require to operate. • But at the same time it is also preoccupied, most subversively, with the pleasure ofpornography, and the pleasure of pain. • The tale, as Duncker suggests, "creates the classical pornographic model of sexuality.“ • The wife looks at the pornographic tableaux in her husband's book with that same mixture of apprehension and curiosity with which she will later open the forbidden chamber: • I knew by some tingling of the fingertips...what I should find inside it...Yet I had not bargained for this, the girl with the tears hanging on her cheeks like stuck pearls, her cunt a split fig below the great globes of her buttocks on which the knotted tails of a cat were about to descend like pornography, too, there is a strong element of voyeurism in the tale. • The wife is always looking at herself, voyeur of her own erotic/pornographic postures. • When the husband inspects his new bride by stripping her naked, she looks in the mirror and is reminded of an etching by Rops in which an old lecher examines a young girl, "Hein his London tailoring; she, bare as a lamb chop. Most pornographic of all confrontations." • And when their marriage is being consummated, she looks in the mirror once again as "a dozen husbands impaled a dozen brides while the mewing gulls swung on invisible trapezes in the empty air outside." • Pornography, however, "remains in the service of the status quo... Libidinal fantasy in a vacuum is the purest, but most affectless, form of day-dreaming." • As Carter argues, it is only when: • pornography abandons its quality of existential solitude and moves out of the kitsch area of timeless, placeless fantasy and into the real world, then it loses it function of safety valve. I t begins to comment on real relations in the real world...The text that had heretofore opened up creamily to him, in a dream, will gather itself together and harshly expel him into the anguish of actuality. • In contrast, the commentary upon her husband that the wife offers politicises the tale. It is a critical or moral commentary. • It reminds us of those acts of domestic violence in which a man forces a woman to submit to psychological and physical pain. • As Carter argues in TheSadeian Woman,this is something that the pornographic text (and, I would add, the conventional fairy tale) can never successfully achieve because its heroes and heroines "are mythic abstractions...Any glimpse of a real man or a real woman is absent from these representations of the archetypal male and female." • The wife's commentary in Carter's tale also reminds us of our own fascination with the way in which sadomasochistic fantasies may be played out upon the body. • The husband watches his wife, the wife watches herself in the mirror, and we, as readers, watch it all. • "The Bloody Chamber" catches us off guard in the act of our own sexual/textual arousal and perhaps, like the wife, we are "aghast to feel [ourselves] stirring."' • Charles Perrault's "Bluebeard" is thought to be the earliest literary version of the tale, but there are earlier, oral, legends of "La Barbe Bleue," based on the murderer Gilles de Rais (1404-1440), who apparently killed at least 140 young boys. See Jean Benedetti, Cilles de Rais (New York: Stein & Day, 1972) 191-95 and A L Vincent dz Clare Binns, Cilles de Rais: The Original Bluebeard (London: A M Philpot, 1926) 210-14. Patricia Duncker, in "Re-Imagining the Fairy Tales: Angela Carter's Bloody Chambers," Literature and History 10.1 (Spring, 1984) 10, nominates another candidate, Gomorre the Cursed (500AD), a native of Brittany who murdered his wives when they fell pregnant. • Other tales which contain a prohibition on entering a secret or bloody chamber include "Mr Fox" (Anon, English), 'he Enchanted Pig," "Fitcher s Bird," "The Golden Key" and "Our Lady's Child" (Brothers Grimm), "Tale of the Third Calendar" (The Arabian Nights' Entertainments) and "The Sixth Diversion of the Fourth Day" (Giambattista Basile's Pentamerone). See Bruno Bettelheim, The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales (London: Penguin/Peregrine, 1978) 229-303. • Andrea Dworkin, Pornography: Men Possessing Women(London: The Women's Press, 1982) 109. Cited in Patricia Duncker, "Re-Imagining the Fairy Tales," 10. • Charles Perrault, "Bluebeard," The Fairy Tales of Charles Perrault, ed Angela Carter, Histoires ou Contes duTemps Passé aoec des Moralités (1697) 41. • Angela Carter,The Sadeian Woman and the Ideology of Pornography (New York: Pantheon, 1988)223. The forbidden chamber is also an inversion of domesticity and that ultimate symbol of the an tefeminist home—the housewife. Bluebeard is clearly no tidy housewife; he shoves the throwaway bodies of his wives, literally, behind the door and leaves his floor unscrubbed. The chamber is a mess; any wife who would dean it up can no longer do so, since she has become the mess itself. And the wife who makes an attempt at cleanliness does so in vain — Bluebeard's wife, for instance, scrubs and scrubs at the bloodstained key in a nightmarish ritual of domesticity gone awry. In Powers of Horror: An Esssay on Abjection (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), 158, Julia Kristeva writes, 'This kind of motherhood, the masochistic mother who never stops working is repulsive and fascinating, abject. • " Angela Carter, The Bloody Chamber, 40. • " "Little Red Riding Hood" is also a temptation narrative, to which "Bluebeard" may be compared. Like Red Riding Hood, Bluebeard's wife travels a path from which she is not permitted to stray; this time an internal path, comprised of dark corridors instead of forest tracks, its edges flanked by wooden doorways instead of trees. The forbidden chamber, like the forest, is dearly off limits. The acts of atrocity which Bluebeard performs upon his wives within it, and those which the wolf performs upon Little Red Riding Hood are instigated for similar reasons. Neither th e girl in the woods, nor Bluebeard's wives, can contain their (sexual) curiosity. • " Angela Carter,The Bloody Chamber, 37-8. There is a remarkable similarity, too, between Bluebeard's command to his wife in Perrault's "Bluebeard," The Fairy Tales of Charles Perrault, 33, "Open everything, go everywhere, but I absolutely forbid you to go into that little room and, if you so much as open the
Angela Carter • God's tree of knowledge and the husband's chamber are, after all, both forbidden precisely because of the corporeal and, implicitly, carnal knowledge they contain. • And Carter uses these parallels in order to exploit the contradictory messages about women which narratives of temptation convey. • First of all, like Eve, it is the heroine's capacity for temptation in "The Bloody Chamber" which instigates her search for that which is forbidden her. • But Carter makes it clear that it is the forbidden chamber itself which has been deliberately constructed to catch her out. • Taboo is a powerful piece of psychological equipment. • What better form of seduction is there than to make an extravagant offer and then place restrictions on it? "I only did what he knew I would," she later tells Jean-Yves. "Like Eve," he replies." • Carter's heroine is told precisely where she must not go; the husband carefully maps out for her the way to the chamber, forbidden and yet indelibly imprinted on her mind: • “All is yours, everywhere is open to you— except the lock that this single key fits. Yet all it is is the key to a little room at the foot of the west tower, behind the still-room, at the end of a dark little corridor full of horrid cobwebs”. • Secondly, the wife in "The Bloody Chamber" is threatened with severe punishment for her transgressions. • In Perrault's version of the tale, the only way in which she may be absolved from these transgressions is by performing, like Eve, the very rituals expected of a sinner — forgiveness and prayer.“ • As Margaret Olofson Thickstun writes in her feminist study of Puritan doctrine, "Eve's...recognition of her own guilt, her repentance, and her submission to her husband's rule become the model for female virtue. • However, the wife in Carter's tale does no such thing, as if the very substance of female desire itself cannot be contained by catechisms or theological rule books. • The fairy tale genre, with its stable of untouched, unmarried women, has never allowed much room for explicit, actualised desire. • That the heroine in the "Bluebeard" narratives is married at all makes the tale an anomaly in its genre. • Marriage precludes any possibility of "innocence;" sexual knowledge is something which the conventional function of marriage, with its insistence on procreation, demands. • As Thickstun writes, "In a system of metaphor in which sexuality stands for sinfulness, the contemplation of conception leads inevitably to conviction of sin."" • As a generic rule, most fairy tales end, as do most comedies, with the convention of the wedding. • As Carter writes in an essay in Nothing Sacred, 'The narratives stop short at the altar, as if they cannot bear to go on.." • She continues: • All such fictional narratives of women that end in marriage could just as well end with a death, because marriage means the death of the virgin, that is, the termination of her narrative as an individual, however hedged about with prohibitions that individualism might be. • In Carter's tale, however, female desire is treated as complex, contradictory state in which a plurality of needs converge. • The wife's perception of her own desire, for instance, is one of ambivalence. • As the eve of her wedding night approaches, she tells how she felt a both a strange, impersonal arousal at the thought of love and at the same time a repugnance “I could not stifle for his white heavy, flesh that had too much in common with the armfuls of arum lilies that filled my bedroom.“ • When the marriage is consummated, the wife feels "a certain queasy craving like the cravings of pregnant women for the taste of coal or chalk...I longed for him. And he disgusted me." • Furthermore, the desire which motivates her to enter the forbidden chamber is also marked by a similar ambivalence. • It is in this place that female bodies are shown in their most desolate forms — as the decaying corpses of the husband's previous wives. • These corpses are the chambers within the chamber itself, their gaping wounds are its inner doors. • They represent the ultimate site of the abject, and the wife is both fascinated and horrified by them. • As Kristeva has commented, the corpse itself is "death infecting life...Imaginary uncanniness and real threat, it beckons to us and ends up engulfing us." It shows us, quite literally, what is inside of ourselves. • She continues: • Corpses show me what I permanently thrust aside in order to live. These bodily fluids, this defilement, this shit are what life withstands, hardly and with difficulty, on the part of death. There, I am at the border of my condition as a living being. My body extricates itself, as being alive, from that border. Such wastes drop so that I might live, until, from loss to loss, nothing remains in me and my entire body falls beyond the limit — cadere, cadaver...the corpse, the most sickening of wastes, is an order that has encroached upon everything. • Carter's heroine examines these corpses in great detail: the opera singer, on whose throat "I could see the blue imprint of his strangler's fingers;" the artist's model, her skull "crowned with a wreath of white roses, and a veil of lace;" the Romanian countess, "pierced, not by one but by a hundred spikes."' • The wife's examination of the bodies is motivated by dual needs: for pleasure and pain, love and hate, life and death. • For the chamber itself is, incidentally, signifier not only for death, but also for life, for are not the womb and heart bloody chambers too? It is appropriate, then, that as the door creaks open, we are offered a quotation from the Marquis de Sade on the "striking resemblance between the act of love and the ministrations of a torturer." • For the forbidden chamber is also the place in which the softer fantasies of eroticism flip over into hard core, sadomasochistic porn. • At this point we are entering classic Carterian territory, where a variety of female representations are flamboyantly displayed. • If some of them (such as the one which suggests there is something pleasurable about forced sexual domination of the female by the male) may seem ideologically at odds with the notion of a feminist project; what is important is that we are constantly reminded that the ideologies Carter offers in her work are all, in the end, arbitrary constructs. • David Punter's comments on her representation of women in The Sadeian Woman are applicable here: • It is pointless to say in response to Sadeian Woman, as has been said,that the claim that women are "impregnated"with a will to submisson leads into a stance of political defeatism; according to Carter there is no eventual, Platonic essence of femininity which is done disservice by this claim, for the concept and stereotype of feminity [sic] is itself constructed within the overarching web of ideological forces which shape the substance of subjectivity?“ • Carter made known her interest in the critique of pornography when she published The Sadeian Woman, her study of the writings of the Marquis de Sade. • In her introductory 'Polemical Essay' she argues for a revision of the function of pornography, rather than its dispensation, to be carried out by what she calls a '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. • Precisely what these tasks would entail is never really clarified. Carter's blueprint for a pornography which is moral is clearly a theoretical model for a time which has yet to come. • However, in "The Bloody Chamber," Carter certainly articulates the paradox contained within the term, "moral pornographer," by appropriating aspects of pornography and then offering a critique of them. • Like pornography, "The Bloody Chamber" is preoccupied with those paradigms of oppression which pornographic fantasies require to operate. • But at the same time it is also preoccupied, most subversively, with the pleasure ofpornography, and the pleasure of pain. • The tale, as Duncker suggests, "creates the classical pornographic model of sexuality.“ • The wife looks at the pornographic tableaux in her husband's book with that same mixture of apprehension and curiosity with which she will later open the forbidden chamber: • I knew by some tingling of the fingertips...what I should find inside it...Yet I had not bargained for this, the girl with the tears hanging on her cheeks like stuck pearls, her cunt a split fig below the great globes of her buttocks on which the knotted tails of a cat were about to descend like pornography, too, there is a strong element of voyeurism in the tale. • The wife is always looking at herself, voyeur of her own erotic/pornographic postures. • When the husband inspects his new bride by stripping her naked, she looks in the mirror and is reminded of an etching by Rops in which an old lecher examines a young girl, "Hein his London tailoring; she, bare as a lamb chop. Most pornographic of all confrontations." • And when their marriage is being consummated, she looks in the mirror once again as "a dozen husbands impaled a dozen brides while the mewing gulls swung on invisible trapezes in the empty air outside." • Pornography, however, "remains in the service of the status quo... Libidinal fantasy in a vacuum is the purest, but most affectless, form of day-dreaming." • As Carter argues, it is only when: • pornography abandons its quality of existential solitude and moves out of the kitsch area of timeless, placeless fantasy and into the real world, then it loses it function of safety valve. I t begins to comment on real relations in the real world...The text that had heretofore opened up creamily to him, in a dream, will gather itself together and harshly expel him into the anguish of actuality. • In contrast, the commentary upon her husband that the wife offers politicises the tale. It is a critical or moral commentary. • It reminds us of those acts of domestic violence in which a man forces a woman to submit to psychological and physical pain. • As Carter argues in TheSadeian Woman,this is something that the pornographic text (and, I would add, the conventional fairy tale) can never successfully achieve because its heroes and heroines "are mythic abstractions...Any glimpse of a real man or a real woman is absent from these representations of the archetypal male and female." • The wife's commentary in Carter's tale also reminds us of our own fascination with the way in which sadomasochistic fantasies may be played out upon the body. • The husband watches his wife, the wife watches herself in the mirror, and we, as readers, watch it all. • "The Bloody Chamber" catches us off guard in the act of our own sexual/textual arousal and perhaps, like the wife, we are "aghast to feel [ourselves] stirring."' • Charles Perrault's "Bluebeard" is thought to be the earliest literary version of the tale, but there are earlier, oral, legends of "La Barbe Bleue," based on the murderer Gilles de Rais (1404-1440), who apparently killed at least 140 young boys. See Jean Benedetti, Cilles de Rais (New York: Stein & Day, 1972) 191-95 and A L Vincent dz Clare Binns, Cilles de Rais: The Original Bluebeard (London: A M Philpot, 1926) 210-14. Patricia Duncker, in "Re-Imagining the Fairy Tales: Angela Carter's Bloody Chambers," Literature and History 10.1 (Spring, 1984) 10, nominates another candidate, Gomorre the Cursed (500AD), a native of Brittany who murdered his wives when they fell pregnant. • Other tales which contain a prohibition on entering a secret or bloody chamber include "Mr Fox" (Anon, English), 'he Enchanted Pig," "Fitcher s Bird," "The Golden Key" and "Our Lady's Child" (Brothers Grimm), "Tale of the Third Calendar" (The Arabian Nights' Entertainments) and "The Sixth Diversion of the Fourth Day" (Giambattista Basile's Pentamerone). See Bruno Bettelheim, The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales (London: Penguin/Peregrine, 1978) 229-303. • Andrea Dworkin, Pornography: Men Possessing Women(London: The Women's Press, 1982) 109. Cited in Patricia Duncker, "Re-Imagining the Fairy Tales," 10. • Charles Perrault, "Bluebeard," The Fairy Tales of Charles Perrault, ed Angela Carter, Histoires ou Contes duTemps Passé aoec des Moralités (1697) 41. • Angela Carter,The Sadeian Woman and the Ideology of Pornography (New York: Pantheon, 1988)223. The forbidden chamber is also an inversion of domesticity and that ultimate symbol of the an tefeminist home—the housewife. Bluebeard is clearly no tidy housewife; he shoves the throwaway bodies of his wives, literally, behind the door and leaves his floor unscrubbed. The chamber is a mess; any wife who would dean it up can no longer do so, since she has become the mess itself. And the wife who makes an attempt at cleanliness does so in vain — Bluebeard's wife, for instance, scrubs and scrubs at the bloodstained key in a nightmarish ritual of domesticity gone awry. In Powers of Horror: An Esssay on Abjection (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), 158, Julia Kristeva writes, 'This kind of motherhood, the masochistic mother who never stops working is repulsive and fascinating, abject. • " Angela Carter, The Bloody Chamber, 40. • " "Little Red Riding Hood" is also a temptation narrative, to which "Bluebeard" may be compared. Like Red Riding Hood, Bluebeard's wife travels a path from which she is not permitted to stray; this time an internal path, comprised of dark corridors instead of forest tracks, its edges flanked by wooden doorways instead of trees. The forbidden chamber, like the forest, is dearly off limits. The acts of atrocity which Bluebeard performs upon his wives within it, and those which the wolf performs upon Little Red Riding Hood are instigated for similar reasons. Neither th e girl in the woods, nor Bluebeard's wives, can contain their (sexual) curiosity. • " Angela Carter,The Bloody Chamber, 37-8. There is a remarkable similarity, too, between Bluebeard's command to his wife in Perrault's "Bluebeard," The Fairy Tales of Charles Perrault, 33, "Open everything, go everywhere, but I absolutely forbid you to go into that little room and, if you so much as open the
Angela Carter • Taboo is a powerful piece of psychological equipment. • What better form of seduction is there than to make an extravagant offer and then place restrictions on it? "I only did what he knew I would," she later tells Jean-Yves. "Like Eve," he replies." • Carter's heroine is told precisely where she must not go; the husband carefully maps out for her the way to the chamber, forbidden and yet indelibly imprinted on her mind:
Angela Carter • “All is yours, everywhere is open to you— except the lock that this single key fits. Yet all it is is the key to a little room at the foot of the west tower, behind the still-room, at the end of a dark little corridor full of horrid cobwebs”. • Secondly, the wife in "The Bloody Chamber" is threatened with severe punishment for her transgressions. • In Perrault's version of the tale, the only way in which she may be absolved from these transgressions is by performing, like Eve, the very rituals expected of a sinner — forgiveness and prayer.“
Angela Carter • As Margaret Olofson Thickstun writes in her feminist study of Puritan doctrine, "Eve's...recognition of her own guilt, her repentance, and her submission to her husband's rule become the model for female virtue. • However, the wife in Carter's tale does no such thing, as if the very substance of female desire itself cannot be contained by catechisms or theological rule books. • The fairy tale genre, with its stable of untouched, unmarried women, has never allowed much room for explicit, actualised desire.
Angela Carter • That the heroine in the "Bluebeard" narratives is married at all makes the tale an anomaly in its genre. • Marriage precludes any possibility of "innocence;" sexual knowledge is something which the conventional function of marriage, with its insistence on procreation, demands. • As Thickstun writes, "In a system of metaphor in which sexuality stands for sinfulness, the contemplation of conception leads inevitably to conviction of sin."" • As a generic rule, most fairy tales end, as do most comedies, with the convention of the wedding.
Angela Carter • As Carter writes in an essay in Nothing Sacred, 'The narratives stop short at the altar, as if they cannot bear to go on.." • She continues: • All such fictional narratives of women that end in marriage could just as well end with a death, because marriage means the death of the virgin, that is, the termination of her narrative as an individual, however hedged about with prohibitions that individualism might be.
Angela Carter • In Carter's tale, however, female desire is treated as complex, contradictory state in which a plurality of needs converge. • The wife's perception of her own desire, for instance, is one of ambivalence. • As the eve of her wedding night approaches, she tells how she felt a both a strange, impersonal arousal at the thought of love and at the same time a repugnance “I could not stifle for his white heavy, flesh that had too much in common with the armfuls of arum lilies that filled my bedroom.“
Angela Carter • When the marriage is consummated, the wife feels "a certain queasy craving like the cravings of pregnant women for the taste of coal or chalk...I longed for him. And he disgusted me." • Furthermore, the desire which motivates her to enter the forbidden chamber is also marked by a similar ambivalence. • It is in this place that female bodies are shown in their most desolate forms — as the decaying corpses of the husband's previous wives.
Angela Carter • These corpses are the chambers within the chamber itself, their gaping wounds are its inner doors. • They represent the ultimate site of the abject, and the wife is both fascinated and horrified by them. • As Kristeva has commented, the corpse itself is "death infecting life...Imaginary uncanniness and real threat, it beckons to us and ends up engulfing us." It shows us, quite literally, what is inside of ourselves.
