Thoughts on: "The Bloody Chamber," by Angela Carter
“There is a striking resemblance between the act of love and the ministrations of a torturer.”
The fairy tale or fable, unlike the quaint pleasantness its name so often implies, has always been a fairly dark enterprise in the literary canon. Beautiful princesses and magical creatures colliding with murder, kidnapping, sexual assault, cannibalism, you name it -- some fairy tale out there had it! Disney did its darndest to repackage them in appealing terms to children and parents alike, but their true nature has always bubbled under the surface. The fairy tale is nothing but an enticing setup of beautiful things to finally reveal the darkness hiding in their very own shadows, something more primal and abject. In other words, sometimes the princess and the monster may be one and the same.
The late british writer Angela Carter knew this probably better than anyone, and The Bloody Chamber is its perfect demonstrator. This is a collection of ten reimaginings of several well-known fairy or folk tales, all of them filtered through her own penchant for poetic lyricism and gothic decay. In an interview while promoting the book, she claimed her intention was “not to do 'versions' or, as the American edition of the book said, horribly, 'adult' fairy tales, but to extract the latent content from the traditional stories and to use it as the beginnings of new stories.” She took what was already there to begin with and made room for it to develop itself naturally: points of conflict become points of attraction, two opposing characters that become a single one, the fantastical sprouting from the vulgar and vice-versa. Because of this, sometimes a single tale could produce several new ones!
Take The Werewolf and The Company of Wolves, for example, both directly based on Red Riding Hood. Each features a young girl venturing forth through dark woods to visit her very old grandmother, all the while under the insidious threat of a werewolf.
In the former, the werewolf is revealed to be the grandmother itself, while in the latter it’s the figure of the handsome huntsman that merges with the big bad wolf. These “What If?” scenarios then produce a sort of cascade effect on the rest of their respective tales. The country is dour and cruel, of “cold weather, and cold hearts”. Superstition runs afoul, people believe cemeteries are where the devil and his brides convene, old women are stoned for suspicions of witchery for the sorriest of things. There’s a monochrome veil over Carter’s text, the closest mention to a red hood being the moment when the girl cleans her bloody hunting knife on her apron after defending herself from the werewolf. Red Riding Hood is suddenly the Huntsman, and there’s no symbol of innocent purity here, simply the mark of a job done. Violence both as a means and an end, with the grandmother being stoned to death at the end of the tale, betrayed by her own granddaughter to her zealot neighbors who believe (or, at least, need to believe) the old woman to be a witch.
The Company of Wolves seems initially more similar to the original tale, with the young girl in her bright red shawl immediately poised as a symbol of virginity and innocence, but said innocence immediately subverted as a source of ominous strength instead of weakness:
“...she is a closed system; she does not know how to shiver. She has her knife and she is afraid of nothing.”
The werewolf is also brought down from its place as a cruel monster and viewed as a tragic character, unable to cleanse itself of its vicious appetites, many of which already existed inside the man before he was transformed into a beast:
“...grace could not come to the wolf from its own despair, only through some external mediator, so that, sometimes, the beast will look as if he half welcomes the knife that despatches him.”
The collision between these two points transforms the classical tale into one of coming-of-age and carnality, that manages to both depict the emancipatory virtues of the sexual body while also not shunning how naivety more often than not is a veil instead of a shield against predation by others, hiding us from the truth instead of truly protecting us from it.
All tales here are ones of psychological entanglement and gender dynamics, of sexual power not so much opposing some source of abjection, but instead deriving from the abject itself. Carter’s absolute devotion to the gothic tradition of Poe and Wilde forms the fertile ground where all of this becomes immediately possible. Narcissism and exuberance as direct gateways to decay, and decay as a portal to some sort of transcendence. The Bloody Chamber, a retelling of the infamous Bluebeard tale, finds the protagonist simultaneously repelled and aroused by the bestial tendencies of her new husband, the Marquis (referent to De Sade, of course). Their early train trip is filled with fallic and thrusting imagery, neckbands and rings earn the same symbolic weight as chains and cages, their matrimonial bed is surrounded by an exuberant number of mirrors, “'See’, he said, gesturing towards those elegant girls. 'I have acquired a whole harem for myself!”. She later finds the torture chamber in his castle where he murdered all of his previous wives and by accident lets the key to the chamber fall on a puddle of blood, still fresh. This key is later pressed against her forehead by the Marquis, a stain she is forever unable to wash off her skin, a symbol of her shame as she finds some sort of erotic recognition in his cruel desires. She too sees the weird kinship between destruction and pleasure, and all she does about it is hide it from the world.
The Courtship of Mr. Lyon and The Tiger’s Bride are my two least favorite tales of the bunch, maybe because I’m simply not that much of a fan of Beauty and the Beast to begin with, but I do feel none of the two goes much beyond the dynamics of desire outside the social norm. Either way, both of them are great showcases of Carter’s knack for lyrical ornamentation, so crucial it is for the gothic tradition. Everything comes at you with purposeful excess. Just take a look at the second paragraph of The Tiger’s Bride, where every single chosen word is ripe to the point of rotting:
“There's a special madness strikes travellers from the North when they reach the lovely land where the lemon trees grow. We come from countries of cold weather; at home, we are at war with nature but here, ah! you think you've come to the blessed plot where the lion lies down with the lamb. Everything flowers; no harsh wind stirs the voluptuous air. The sun spills fruit for you. And the deathly, sensual lethargy of the sweet South infects the starved brain; it gasps: ' Luxury! more luxury! '”
After this comes Puss-in-Boots, definitely the trojan horse of the collection. It bypasses much of the gothic aesthetic we saw until this point, and instead just goes all-in on this sort of absurd tale of crime and lust narrated by the infamous feline himself, overwrought with dry british humor, so pompous and cartoonish one can’t help but visualize it as a sunday morning cartoon (with a tons of sex and butthole licking added for good measure).
The Erl-King is a folk horror romance, and makes the great use of Carter’s voluptuous prose within the usual trappings of the folk tale. A young girl stepping into the woods of the Erl-King, becoming then his constant companion. Nature living a secret life beyond our limited knowledge, this limited knowledge also unable to extend beyond our own fears and prejudices. The Erl-King, only visually described as having eyes “quite green, as if from too much looking at the wood”, is this symbol of the distance between fear and love and the inherent violence of its traversal:
“Falling as a bird would fall through the air if the Erl-King tied up the winds in his handkerchief and knotted the ends together so they could not get out. Then the moving currents of the air would no longer sustain them and all the birds would fall at the imperative of gravity, as I fall down for him, and I know it is only because he is kind to me that I do not fall still further.”
Carter is always bridging the distance between very antagonistic feelings and ideas, that either conceptualizing desire above all else or subtly, but firmly, changing its polarity and aiming into some unknown beyond the unconscious. Each tale here (besides Puss-in-Boots, for obvious reasons) has an unresolved air to it, something Other hanging in the background even as the final full stop is reached, some shadow the tale has no intentions of dissolving. Was not surprised to find out she was a Freudian girl at heart, and this proved a wonderful marriage with her love for the gothic. As she says in her essay Notes on the Gothic Mode:
“[The Gothic] deals directly with the imagery of the unconscious -- mirrors, the externalized self, the world under the moon, automata, haunted forests, forbidden sexual objects. Character and events are exaggerated beyond reality, to become symbols, ideas, passions. Its style tends to be ornate, unnatural -- and thus operates against the perennial human desire to believe the word as fact. And like psychoanalysis (...) it does not draw any moral lessons from the imagery. The moral lessons, perhaps, are implicit in the imagery. But it retains a singular moral function: that of provoking unease.”
No other tale in The Bloody Chamber showcases this half as well as The Snow Child, a very short and brutal retelling of Snow White, that in less than two pages devolves its beautiful opening lines into an increasing eruption of brutality that, of all possible things, culminates in a shocking act of necrophilia that goes completely unacknowledged in the following couple of paragraphs before it ends.
Take also The Lady of the House of Love, probably the most overtly gothic of all tales in the book, a peculiar spin on the Dracula tale retelling the night an english soldier spends in the decaying mansion of a disturbingly beautiful descendent of Nosferatu, who’s beauty is more disturbing than enticing. This one is filled to the brim with cobwebs and moving shadows, and in a way offers a mirrored alternative to Carter’s retellings of Beauty and the Beast. Desires repressed and urges inherited, a lineage of death and terror commanding the wills and ideas of new generations, before a moment of tender compassion transforms a haunting into a mourning.
And after The Werewolf and The Company of Wolves, we arrive at Wolf-Alice, in a way the thematic coda for the entire collection. A feral girl raised by a wolf is sent to be raised at the manor of an old dying Duke. This is the one tale in the collection where its main characters are already beyond the limits of human understanding, the girl practically a beast herself, inhabiting “only the present tense, a fugue of the continuous, a world of sensual immediacy as without hope as it is without despair,” while the Duke is quickly revealed to be a ghoul in his own right, who goes out at night to hunt for flesh across the city. The girl establishes a playful relationship with her own reflection in a large mirror, while The Duke, who “believes himself to be both less and more than a man”, is always invisible to this mirror, passing along it like “a wind on ice.” Both of them end up with a new sense of recognition of themselves through the mirror as its symbol. She soon realizes her reflection is no one besides herself, and in liking the wounds of a dying Duke his face is finally brought to life inside the mirror.
Carter’s fiction is one that works as a mirror as well, but a weird one, that refracts instead of reflecting and destabilizes the colors it contains, and because only in such acts of brazen deformity something new may be reached. All of her aesthetic flourish, all of her purple prose (“I’m an arty person. Okay, I write overblown, purple, self-indulgent prose. So fucking what?”), her firm belief that the new possibilities of meaning could be reaped from the old, all stems from the knowledge that truth in fiction goes beyond the limits of fact and logic. Folktales were, in their own way, the passing mythology that escaped the sometimes brutal clutches of organized religion, alternate sources of truth whispered from ear-to-ear during generations. These ten tales are all self-contained, immoral, celebratory and lend themselves to be passed on from person-to-person, ear-to-ear. She’s a reminder of how sexy and alluring the gothic and fantasy literature can actually be, particularly in a time where “romantasy” is essentially sterilizing the fantasy genre on all levels. For all intents and purposes, it may even hit harder now than it did when it was originally released, 45 years ago.
It’s just one of the best short collections I’ve ever read in my life, no hyperbole.