Jane Austen Was Not the Feminist Icon Some (Bizarrely) Believe She Was

Jane Austen is globally renowned for her timeless, classic love stories - among them Emma, Pride and Prejudice, and Persuasion - that are centered primarily around the love lives of women, specifically British, middle to upper class women. In recent years, her works have spiked in popularity, thanks to both an upswing in the popularity of classical literature and high-profile screen adaptations, but which seems to have developed into a mischaracterisation of her stories.


Simply put, Jane Austen was not a feminist. It would be easy to take the simple route here and say that feminism did not exist as a defined concept during her life (Mary Wollstoncraft’s pivotal work A Vindication of the Rights of Wowas released when she was already into her late teens), thus rendering her incapable of partaking in it, but this would be inaccurate. If we were to commit to this, it would prevent feminism from developing in the first place, as there would never be a place for a ‘first feminist’


Instead, the key to Austen’s lack of feminism lies in her work. While many may claim that her tales being centered around the lives and social behaviours of women is criteria enough to earn her a spot on the ever-growing list of feminist writers, it is essential to go beyond this shallow interpretation to the flaws lying beneath it.


Pride and Prejudice specifically contains some glaring red flags, namely the perpetuation of harmful stereotypes of women and the clear influence of misogyny present in society at the time. The youngest three Bennet sisters - Mary, Kitty, and Lydia - are victims of a two-dimensional portrayal that presents them only as manifestations of vices, with little or no redeeming qualities.



Mary is the “boring”, “bookish” one, with only a life of spinsterhood before her, always seen atop a piano stool or with her nose in a book, speaking shortly without compassion or consideration of others. Kitty and Lydia are both shown as immature and comparatively unintelligent, with Lydia given the additional flaw of being “boy crazy”, fawning over the arrival of any prospective bachelor and running off with the first man to spare her a second glance.



This is, to me at least, a clear indication of the effect that societal misogyny had on, at the very least, Austen’s works, if not also her opinions. In her centering of the heroine Elizabeth, complex in her positives and negatives, the other female characters fall to the wayside, instead existing as manifestations of misogynistic stereotypes.



When considering feminist theory, it is vital to examine the relationships between characters and the representation of issues faced by women. Here, Austen’s work falls at the first hurdle. The extensive list of characters within Pride and Prejudice is primarily female, and yet the positive relationships between them are few and far between - mostly in Lizzy’s dynamics with her friend Charlotte and sister Jane, and, to an extent, the rapport between the youngest Bennet sisters, Kitty and Lydia.




In place of what one would expect from a sisterly relationship, there are instead Lizzy’s perhaps cruel perceptions of her youngest sisters, which only perpetuates the harmful idea that all women are “catty” towards each other. She describes Kitty as “Vain, ignorant, idle, and absolutely uncontrolled”, a sentiment that she echoes in her description of Lydia. Mary is the subject of more widespread ridicule, including by Austen herself, and is shown to be an outcast even within her own family.



In light of this we must ask ourselves: is this what is considered a marvel of feminism? A tale in which half of the substance derives from women’s hateful opinions of each other?



While it may be unfair to compare a 19th century writer to 21st century standards of feminism, this is exactly what should be considered when denoting someone the social status of “icon” - a term that implies current reverence, or a position to be aspired to. This could be mitigated if the effects on modern society had a clear reduction; if the majority of current perceptions acknowledged the flaws of this text and considered them in their interpretations.



Unfortunately for the Bennet sisters, the representations of their characters has persevered through the decades and into contemporary society. This is especially clear in Mary’s characterisation, which continues to show her as plain and boring, despite change and development in modern attitudes.



For example, from the pictures below, identify which girl is Mary Bennet:



Image: A still from the 1980 screen adaptation of Pride and Prejudice.



Image: A promotional photo from the 1995 screen adaptation of Pride and Prejudice.



Image: A still from the 2005 film adaptation of Pride and Prejudice.




As is clear from the above image, there has been no major shift in the portrayal of these characters to the greater public. Mary, by example, is still portrayed as plain and boring, despite an expected societal recognition of the potential harm that could arise from this sentiment, and movement away from such.



An additional problematic aspect of Austen’s work, especially Pride and Prejudice, is that nowhere are the issues befalling women attributed to the patriarchal society in which they live. Instead, any problems are shown to result either from disputes between women themselves, or instead from a more class-angled perspective of society. Neither the privileges of men nor the subsequent effects on women are explored, leaving the fault to lie somewhere else entirely.



This is a harmful angle to be exalting in modern society, in which women should be striving to uplift each other and take down patriarchal issues as a united force. If Austen’s works are considered a pinnacle of feminism, then that implies that modern feminism should at least somewhat align with the views presented within the stories. If this were to be true, the modern feminist movement would contain much more infighting, and women would constantly reduce others to only their flaws in order to promote themselves.



So while Jane Austen’s work can be considered a marvel of literature, as it already is, feminist idolisation is not appropriate within the modern movement, and feminist inspiration and interpretations should be done with careful consideration of the context and influence of such within her works.



It is then perhaps most appropriate to appreciate Pride and Prejudice as the great romance it is, rather than trying to befit it with inappropriate ideals.

Chemistry, Skeletons and... Dostoyevsky?!

an elemental analysis of "for the wake and skeleton dance"

"Textual chemist". If you search up Samuel Wagan Watson, these are likely to be some of the first words that come up to describe him. After a few more minutes of reading, you may be pleased – or disappointed, I don’t know – to discover that he does not, in fact, wear safety classes, swirl conical flasks or write dense academic papers. 

Fig. 1: A very 100% genuinely real photo
of today's author, Samuel Wagan Watson.

I’ll let him do the explaining:

"'Textual chemistry' is [...] a theoretical study of how a wordsmith has utilised all of the senses so a reader can relate to that work and interconnect, and for a brief moment be one with the writer."

It’s essentially referring to that moment of closeness between writer and reader where something sticks—sometimes before you even understand why.

That’s how "for the wake and skeleton dance" landed for me. Or more accurately, how it didn’t land—not at first. I remember reading it and feeling completely unmoored. I couldn’t tell where it was going, or even what it wanted from me. The images were sharp and strange, but they moved too quickly for me to make sense of them. I kept trying to bring the poem into focus, to tidy it up in my head. I’d been trained to expect a clear thread, some kind of message I could name and underline. But I didn’t find any. It just sat there, humming with this quiet, uneasy energy.

Eventually, I gave up on trying to crack it open and just let it hang around in my head. And that’s when it started working on me.

So without further ado, I invite you, dear reader, to grab your safety glasses, put on your lab coat, and join me in a journey of feeling this poem.

"the dreamtime Dostoyevskys murmur of a recession in the spirit world"  

There’s something uniquely jarring about Watson’s invocation of these “dreamtime Dostoyevskys”. This is a collision of metaphysical realms and ideological economies – two worlds not often seen in dialogue, yet here eerily coexisting. The Russian chronicler of despair now transposed into Indigenous cosmology, whispering not of nihilistic St Petersburg streets, but of spiritual drought on stolen land. There’s a cruel irony here - Dostoyevsky, a giant of Western literature, becomes the unlikely vessel to articulate the slow suffocation of Indigenous belief systems under Western rationalism. The “recession” here becomes a dirty term. It carries none of the usual lyrical grace we attach to spiritual decline, borrowed from the lexicon of capitalism, signalling a grand metaphysical decline.

 

The stanza continues to gnaw at this metaphor: “night creatures are feeling the pinch.” Watson literalises this to cast spiritual figures as creatures now starving under the weight of disbelief. The once-vibrant Dreaming is reduced to “ectoplasm on the sidewalk,” its sacred symbols mingling with “vomit and swill” outside pubs. The desecration becomes spectacle, ghosts of a cosmology once grand and instrumental are now waiting outside the drinking holes of a disenchanted world. The “black dingoes” that stalk the city are embodiments of a spiritual hunger, desperate for survival in a world that no longer believes in them.

Fig. 2: "dark riders in the sky signalling a movement"

The second stanza of Watson’s poem shifts into a mythic, almost prophetic register, echoing the ancestral weight of the Dreaming. The imagery evokes ancestral figures and apocalyptic omens, suggesting that historical trauma isn’t confined to the past but continuing to reverberate in the present. This is where Watson directly confronts the systemic betrayal Indigenous people have experienced – not only at the hands of colonial authorities, but also through intra-community complicity. Watson’s critique of internalised complicity cuts deep, exposing the uncomfortable reality that institutional power can corrupt even those it once marginalised. The poem grapples here with ideas of cyclical harm, showing how oppression doesn’t vanish, but shifts shape – like smoke, like shadow. The closing image, "no room to move on a dead man’s bed", one of immobility, of being trapped within the consequences of inherited trauma – reinforces the poem’s broader concern: that without meaningful structural change, progress will always come tethered to the memory of loss.

 “the white man didn’t bring all the evil / some of it was here already"

The third stanza takes this "Law of Conservation of Oppression" – the idea that harm merely transforms - one step further, painting a kind of systemic betrayal that somehow existed even before colonisation. Wagan Watson argues that this system - one which sealed the fate of all those who chose submission over preservation - had its roots not just in imperialism, but in some flaw which is not exclusive to colonial history but rooted in the darker recesses of human capability. That colonisation was not the sole parent of evil, but rather a welcome catalyst. Before colonisation this evil was merely "gestating" - a dormant force simmering just beneath the surface. Quiet. 

And it’s the uncertainty of that quiet, the idea that anyone, anytime, could be cultivating similar predispositions to allowing trauma and oppression, that underscores this stanza’s tone of dread.

I remember last year being struck by this line "the white man didn’t bring all the evil". What? This is Indigenous poetry, and this seems almost contradictory – wasn’t the purpose to condemn colonial evils!?

So with four years of high school English under my belt, I proceeded to pry open the text in search of a reading which conformed to my expectations of Australian Literature. 

… a mockery - Watson must be mocking the way in which colonial authorities shift the blame off themselves and onto the very people whom they are subjugating. Just look at this metaphor: "welcoming the tallship leviathans" - the absurdity of the notion of welcoming a sea serpent demon onto your land must serve as irony. 

I still don’t know which interpretation is correct, but maybe - just maybe - that’s the point. To make me, the reader, feel for myself the very real dissonance in feeling a sense of betrayal from your own people, whilst acknowledging the fact that the massive disruptive effect colonisation has on the cohesion of Indigenous communities cannot - neither logically nor morally - be understated.

Fig. 3: Fyodor Dostoyevsky.

To wrap things, up, I'd like to get all meta with you and offer my thoughts on what our exploration of "for the wake and skeleton dance" can say about reading poetry in general. I invite you to consider this quote from our boy Dostoyevsky (pictured above), in his novel Crime and Punishment:

"In order to understand any man one must be deliberate and careful to avoid forming prejudices and mistaken ideas, which are very difficult to correct and get over afterwards."

Now what happens when we replace the word "man" with "poem"?

On the one hand, we are told over and over again that there is no such thing as a "mistaken idea", and if you examine the syllabus for any longer than five seconds you'll come to realise that the thing about meaning is that it must necessarily be derived from our prior context, experiences and knowledge - meaning is not found in a vacuum.

Okay, so a poem is not the same thing as a "man" - so what?

Well, on the other hand, forcing your expectations onto a poem like a cookie cutter - like I did last year with "for the wake and skeleton dance" - can obscure your ability to see other perspectives, which are necessary to develop deep understanding.

There's a fine line between connecting to a poem and connecting to what you think it should be. The former, and what I've hoped to achieve in this blog post, requires surrender - to our pre-existing expectations of genre, author and context, but also to the poem, allowing it to be read for what it is.

How to Stop Being Eaten By Wolves in One Sexually Traumatising Step - The Company of Wolves

The short story collection The Bloody Chamber by Angela Carter shocked its readers in 1979, and remained shocking to audiences later in the future largely due to its explicit sexual content, and its address of unsavoury topics through the format and style of well-known and often beloved fairy tales. Indeed, when I found a pirated PDF copy online and read The Company of Wolves (a tale from the collection), I sat back after and just sort of went dang. That's a lot.

The story regales the reader with a series of folk tales regarding wolves and their relation to humans- 'carnivore incarnate' hunters with a taste for human flesh. In the winter, they starve due to lack of prey, and are the most dangerous of predators as they 'cannot listen to reason'. However, the link between wolf and man takes form in the lycanthrope, or werewolf. The lycanthrope is characterised as an insidious, vengeful and perverse creature, as much human as it is wolf through the violence that both beast and man enact on their victims. The misery of their existence is elaborated through legends passed down by the inhabitants of the village. One such story is that of a woman whose husband disappears on her wedding night, only to reappear as a werewolf and attacking her and her children when he sees that she has remarried.

The latter half of the story follows a young pubescent girl bringing a basket of treats through a treacherous wood to her reclusive grandmother (Sound familiar? Good.), only to meet a handsome man who challenges her to a race to her granny's house. He asks for a kiss if he wins, which she accepts as a condition. He reaches the house first, then strips off all his clothing and turns into a wolf. He then eats the grandmother, outright killing her and hiding her bones. When the girl arrives, she sees almost immediately that her 'grandmother' is truly a wolf, but instead of being eaten herself, she laughs in his face, burns her clothing and has sex with him, taming him in the process.

So that's the story. The connection between the story and the tale of Little Red Riding Hood is obvious, but was less intentional. Angela Carter herself said that The Company of Wolves (and The Bloody Chamber as a whole) was more inspired by "sources in the oral tradition, which I have a special relation with, I guess, and which is dying out now". True to her word, The Company of Wolves shares more similarity with an older folktale titled 'The Story of the Grandmother' than the earliest printed version of Little Red Riding Hood by Perrault. 

"Undress, my child," said the bzou, "and come and sleep beside me."
"Where should I put my apron?"
"Throw it in the fire, my child; you don't need it anymore."
"Where should I put my bodice?"
"Throw it in the fire, my child; you don't need it anymore."
"Where should I put my dress?"
"Throw it in the fire, my child; you don't need it anymore."

 The little girl in the old tale meets not just a wolf, but a bzou, a werewolf. Similarly, in Carter's story, it is highlighted that the aggressors are not plainly wolves, but men who turn to wolves to prey on women and children. One thing is certain, however- the werewolf is a metaphor for animalistic hunger and the violence that men enact on women, abusive and sexually perverse.

Representation of Virginity - Ew.

Throughout the text, it is highlighted that adolescent girl is a virgin. A lot. To a disturbing amount. 

"...she has just started her woman's bleeding, the clock inside her that will strike, henceforward, once a month.
She stands and moves within the invisible pentacle of her own virginity. She is an unbroken egg; 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; she does not know how to shiver."

Say it with me: ew.  One might say that for an author renowned for feminist literature, this sure seems like an unhealthy and disgusting depiction of a young girl. The ideas of puberty and virginity are wrapped in a series of overly flowery metaphors, and the description of her reproductive organs is grossly juvenile - her 'magic space' (what does that even mean? Is that supposed to be her uterus? Her vagina?) - and anatomically incorrect. 

However, this description is clearly intended to force the reader to view the young girl through the eyes of a predatory and likely male-centric society. The idea of her 'magic space the entrance to which is shut tight with a plug of membrane' is typical of the fundamental misunderstanding of the female sex organs- the hymen isn't a tamper-evident seal on the vagina. Such misconceptions are formed out of an unpalatable blend of misogyny, indifference for the wellbeing of women by men who have no interest in learning about them, and a societal obsession with virginity that labels women who have not had sex as 'new' and 'unbroken'. This aligns with the system of gender-based oppression that is the patriarchy, as defined by Dworkin. By forcing the reader to objectify a young girl, Carter comments on the wider patriarchal society that does so.

Female Sexuality in a World of Men

The feminist writer Andrea Dworkin, in her book Woman Hating (1974) analyses other popular fairy tales (Snow White, Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty) and notices one key feature- to be characterised as a 'good woman', the protagonists of these tales are passive, waiting to be saved. Indeed, the most well-known version of Little Red Riding Hood has the girl too be eaten by the wolf, with the serendipitous arrival of a hunter saving her and Grandma by cutting the wolf open. Dworkin derisively describes this literary phenomenon as 'The Beauteous Lump of Ultimate Good', where women are characterised by 'passivity, beauty, innocence and victimisation'. 

"The girl burst out laughing, she knew she was nobody's meat. She laughed at him full in the face, she ripped off his shirt for him and flung it into the fire, in the fiery wake of her own discarded clothing."

The Company of Wolves turns this on its head- the girl uses her sexuality to save herself from being killed and eaten. She has agency in her decision to sleep with the wolf, using his desire for sex and 'immaculate flesh' to prevent him from killing her. She sacrifices her virginity in the process, which implies losing her status of 'unbroken' and 'immaculate'. Taming the wolf through her sexuality means she abandons her innocence, passivity and status as a 'good girl', but saves her own life. Through this, Carter states that in a society defined by male sexual desire, female sexual desire is a powerful tool that can be used to control men.

Let's backtrack - Sinister Implications

Despite the apparent message of empowerment and the rejection of the literary standard of the 'good woman' identified by Dworkin, there are still... issues. 

First of all, we can't ignore that even though she consents to the sexual encounter, the girl is still very much a girl, her 'breasts have just begun to swell' and she 'has just started her woman's bleeding', which places her in the range of 10-14 years old. Her age alone makes her consent null and void as children lack the maturity and sexual understanding required to consent to sex. It would be disingenuous to discuss the subversion of the victimisation trope without acknowledging the fact that she is still a victim, she has underage sex to save herself from literally being killed and eaten. 

Taking this harrowing fact into consideration, the tale becomes a lot more sinister than it already was. Throughout the text, Carter has chosen to represent a misogynistic, male-centric society that is hard for young girls to survive in due to predation from grown men. This is a result of societal glorification of virginity and the sexualisation of youth as 'immaculate' and 'unbroken', 'Carnivore incarnate, only immaculate flesh will please him'. In a way, despite the girl '[knowing] she was nobody's meat', she is still preyed on, in a way still offering her body to the wolf. Through this, Carter acknowledges the bleakness of the idea presented; that women embracing their sexuality has power in a world focused on male sexuality, but this may come at the cost of sacrificing the innocence of younger girls. Hence, she laments the idea that women are forced to navigate society by cleverly avoiding their own victimisation by perverted and demanding men.

A Freudian Understanding of The Yellow Wallpaper (but is it all a lie????)

 

Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s mind ought to be studied for her ability to conceal layers on layers of criticism under the flawless cover of simplicity is remarkable. ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ (1890) has only recently been recognised as the mini masterpiece that it is, only becoming iconic 50 odd years ago- almost a whole century after its release (talk about late to the hype…). The notions she embedded were well ahead of her time, and they remained hidden in plain sight, until the rest of the world caught up to her speed, an  icon even after death. Her narrative describes the rapid descent of a female persona into a state of insanity, catalysed by her physician husband’s prescription of the infamous rest cure (aka the stop-being-dramatic-sweetheart cure), consisting of bed rest, isolation and the forbiddance of mental exertion. TYP is heavily inspired by Gilman’s own life, in which her experience with rest cure led her till the point of attempted suicide. Hence it is no surprise that this anecdotal piece, written 3 short years later, was efficacious in its contribution to the recognition that rest cure is a form (possibly one of the most destructive ones) of medical misogyny.

Gilman presents a crystal-clear message: the rest cure CAUSES the illnesses it supposedly cures. A psychoanalytical reading of TYP (feat. Sigmund Freud), illustrates how this treatment promotes the development of neurosis and other mental disorders. With reference to 3 Freudian theories, we observe:

 

1.   Firstly, How the repression of an internal impulse leads to neurosis, which then causes regression to childlike behaviours.

2.   Secondly, the Double; an alternate form of self  that embodies the repressed parts of an individual, which in TYP eventually merges with persona.

And if you stick around, there’s a hot take at the end… so stick around!!

In Freudian theory, personality has three parts: the id (pleasure principle, raw desire), the superego (morality principle, shaped by external standards), and the ego (reality principle, mediator between id and superego). The ego’s strength determines mental stability.

Repression, Regression, and all things Depresssing:

Gilman’s choice to write this piece in the first person provides us with a personal outlook on the persona’s mental evolution, over the 3 months she stayed in an abnormally cheap mansion. From the beginning we see persona is already in acceptance of her helplessness (though not okay with it). She reluctantly confesses she believes she would get well faster without John, though she would not dare tell this to ‘a living soul’, for she is aware that if ‘a physician of high standing assures [others] there is nothing really the matter’ but ‘temporary nervous depression – a slight hysterical tendency’, then her opinion is as good as dirt.  She has a likeminded physician for a brother, and Gilman’s choice to have two characters representing the same traits strengthens the power division being established; a 2 vs 1, where our girl never stood a chance at being heard. The persona is voiceless in her own treatment, evident as she repeats ‘what is one to do ?’ thrice in the opening paragraphs alone, like some hopeless motto of sorts. Typical to the restrictive nature of rest cure, the persona is forbidden from the only emotional outlet she has, writing, regardless of her belief that ‘congenial work, with excitement and change would do [her] some good.’

Freud theorised that the repression of an internal impulse by ego is a defence mechanism which is a causative of neurosis. This explains the personas behaviour, where persona is taught her internal impulse to express herself through writing is simply unacceptable. This prompts the conflict of her id and superego; her id yearns for emotional expression, whilst her superego is taught by John to do nothing of the sort. The ego is torn, incapable of finding a compromise, and resorts to the unconscious repression of this desire. As she increasingly limits this outlet, her mental decline progresses. Freud said ‘unexpressed emotions will never die. They are buried alive and will come forth later in uglier ways’, which indeed is the result depicted in TYP, where this seed of repressed self-expression develops into the tree which grows the fruits of insanity and neurosis.

Furthermore, as her neurosis worsens, persona has an increase in childlike behaviours, evident when she seems to lose her grip on reality whilst pondering how the strange mark that runs round her room would’ve been formed; ‘round and round and round and round – round and round and round – it makes me dizzy!’. Her excessive repetition mirrors the simple and undeveloped mind of a child, as well as the playful expression of being ‘dizzy’. This response can be described by another Freudian theory; regression to childlike patterns of behaviour is a defence mechanism. This defence is against the internal conflict between the id and superego, and it is observed as an unconscious shift, facilitated by persona’s ego, as it attempts to juggle both the regulation of ids desires, and superegos taught standards. Hence, ego resorts to a mental state with reduced anxiety, associated to feelings of comfort: the mental state of a child.

The Double- You is I and I is you:

 Throughout the story, persona increasingly fixates on a disfigured woman trapped behind the wallpaper’s pattern, a figure that evolves from ‘a strange provoking formless sort of figure, that seems to sulk’, to ‘a woman stopping down and creeping about behind the pattern’, to ‘a great many women behind, who crawls fast’. As her mental state deteriorates, her perception of the figure becomes more specific, whilst her emotional response becomes more muted. Initially, when she perceives it, she is insistent on leaving the room though John will not allow it, but by the end, she is calmer as she describes multiple women, who freely ‘creep’ around, seemingly desensitised. The visual of a ‘creeping’ lady is uncanny, and while readers discomfort increases, personas reality blurs, as she believes she too is an escaped woman from the paper, wondering ‘if they all came out of that wallpaper as [she] did.’

In TYP, the woman trapped in the wallpaper serves as the personas Freudian double; an alternate form of herself, which embodies what she represses, in internal conflict; her desire for emotional expression through her writing, supressed by rest cure treatment. So, as she increasingly identifies with this double, there is a symbolic collapse of the boundary between her conscious, and the unconscious that contains all she suppresses. Once again, the ‘unexpressed emotions, come forth later in uglier ways’, is clearly demonstrated, as she descends into madness.

 

Hot take coming right up....

Okay SO here’s an additional point to consider; though Freuds theories do accurately explain the dynamics depicted in the story, perhaps it’s a subconscious manifestation. Perhaps Freud is not too different from the male perpetrators of the story- being oblivious to his demeaning contribution to a system that forces subjects to fit the narrative, such that the persona may be perceived as instable female through a Freudian lens, but Gilman’s suggests her response is a rational response to an irrational system.

When we reconsider the previous points, it can be noted that personas developing neurosis is not necessarily because of her repression of expression, but because of the heavy opposition she faces from her all-knowing male counterparts, when she tries to entertain herself in the only way she can, as she confesses ‘it does exhaust [her], having to be so sly about it [reading], or else meet with heavy opposition.’

Likewise, maybe her childlike behaviour is not solely due to the neurosis caused by her repression, but perhaps a submission to the expectations of John in her weakened mental state. Even when she was sane, John referred to her with silly little nicknames like ‘little girl’ and ‘blessed little goose’, so it is plausible to consider that her mental degradation simply opened the opportunity for his ever-present infantilisation to pierce into her personal perception, prompting her childlike behaviours, and hence creating a positive feedback loop, of infantilisation.

I don’t deny that there is most definitely strong Freudian theories in practice embedded in TYP, but I simply present you with some food for thought; Freud himself admitted his ‘understanding of women was inadequate’, so his lack of consideration of the prewritten narrative for the lives of women, is explainable. Women are pressured into these narratives always, but in times of mental weakness it is amplified, such that it does have significant effect, which Freudian theories do not consider.

 

 

#blog #sigmundfreud #theyellowallpaper #charlottteperkinsgilman

 

Death, Sex and Virgins: It's The Bloody Chamber!

That’s right. Death, sex and virgins, the three key elements of The Bloody Chamber, and a lot of Angela Carter’s works. Oh right, Angela Carter, the author. Carter published the Bloody Chamber in 1979, and it is a gothic retelling of the folktale Bluebeard, with its central moral being that indulging curiosity has the potential to cause a lot more harm than it’s worth. In summary, a young woman marries a rich noble and is told never to open a little cupboard in his mansion, she does, and finds the dead bodies of the nobles' ex-wives.

death

The bloody chamber is a gothic text, with its tried and true staples: sinister castle, female victim, prophecies and even death! Carter exaggerates and reinvents these classic components in order to create a truly deceptive atmosphere whilst reading The Bloody Chamber. One example of this is when our young narrator dreams of the castle in which she and her new husband will live, “that magic place, that fairy castle”, a couple pages later and she finds that she’s at “the door of hell”. Having the main character be an unreliable narrator (as we see the world tinted by her own innocence and childlike wonder), creates a terrible sense of dread as you know she is being misled and that there is nothing you can do to save her. Additionally, the castle itself is deceptive, “that lovely, sad, sea-siren of a place!” The horror of it isn’t in the exterior, as is commonplace for the gothic, but hidden deep within, in The Bloody Chamber.

Guys, can we really quickly just get a round of applause for Angela Carter's ability to effectively and constructively use foreshadowing throughout THE ENTIRETY of The Bloody Chamber. Like literally she foreshadows some plot twist or how the story ends, i
n every single paragraph. Having read it entirely, every time I go back and read it again I catch myself screaming absurdities at my screen. The best and albeit most clear cut example of this amazing foreshadowing has to be the choker of rubies, the marquis’ gift to the narrator.

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

After the Terror, in the early days of the Directory, the aristos who'd escaped the guillotine had an ironic fad of tying a red ribbon round their necks at just the point where the blade would have sliced it through, a red ribbon like the memory of a wound."

Obviously, Carter isn’t trying to be sly about this one. The initial connection is that this naive girl is trying to fit into the aristocratic life of her new husband by accepting his morbid and vulgar wedding gift. When on a deeper level, it foreshadows the marquis attempting to behead the young girl after she betrays him by venturing into the bloody chamber. I think the most interesting part is how it shows the marquis’ sadistic erotic desire to punish his wife before she even betrays him, not to mention the fact that our girl is totally oblivious. 

sex

Angela Carter loves using sexual language, though not necessarily in the way you might expect. She uses vulgar and erotic words as if they work the same as any ol’ verb. At one point she mentions the “train ceaselessly thrusting” and on its own, it can be said that she literally just means the train is moving. Though, coupled with an earlier line about the young narrator being, “bore … through the night, … away from girlhood”, suddenly we see a deeper meaning, this erotic thrusting motion, is the driver away from her innocence and her being a child, a parallel to the motions of penetration, and the very first time the expectation of sex between the narrator and marquis is hinted at. It acts as a metaphor for the inevitable copulation between the two in which he steals her innocence from her and makes her into a woman. Shifting the usage of sexual language when it’s typically used to create a sense of lust and eroticism, but instead using it to create something morbid. In doing so she puts on full display the disgusting nature of the marquis' predation and his way of using sex as a means to corrode her innocence. A banger I fear.

When the marquis and the narrator do end up having sex, she describes it as, “A dozen husbands impaled a dozen brides,” with no essence of joy or love. Saying that he has impaled her, the act of sex has done nothing to her but hurt her and rid her of her virginity. And by being so ambiguous about the dozen husbands and brides, Carter makes a statement about the countless other women and young girls who undergo this consummation of marriage, and how it is not always the loving experience it can be made out to be. Honestly my heart aches for the narrator at this point, she just wants to be loved.

virgins

In Angela Carter’s The Bloody chamber, virginity is probably the most important theme. Angela Carter, being a feminist activist, used her writing as a means to make a statement about the perception of women in the 1970s during the height of second wave feminism. She uses this text to show the predatory nature of men in relation to young women, and how the fetishisation of virginity had become (and still is) commonplace. The entire text is pretty much just the Marquis creeping on the young narrator and lusting after her for her purity. 

At one point, the narrator spends an entire page on the three ex-wives of the marquis, talking about their high status. 

- “A Romanian countess, a lady of high fashion"

- “The artist’s model” … “everyone painted her”

- “The first of all his ladies? That sumptuous diva”

And yet, the narrator, albeit a great pianist, is totally ordinary. What is it that makes her stand out so much? Ah yes, her age, innocence and purity. What makes her worthy of being the marquis’ wife is that she looks good on his arm. She even says it herself, “That night at the opera comes back to me even now ... the white dress; the frail child within it,” “I sensed in myself a potentiality for corruption,” the thing that makes her so valuable is that she is a perfectly clean slate. She has been sheltered from any uncouth ideas about sex, she has no lovers or romances, her life has been entirely her own. Making her the perfect target for the marquis to corrupt, and presenting the idea that her worth is found in nothing more than her virginity.

conclusion

And that about wraps it up on my end. I seriously recommend reading the bloody chamber, it is a phenomenal piece of writing and I’m sure it’s much more enjoyable when you don’t have to stop and make annotations every single second (because Angela Carter’s writing is just that sophisticated and nuanced). Leave comments or questions because there is so much I wanted to say that just didn’t fit in the blog! 

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