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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