Subversion of the Fairy Tale in Angela Carter’s “The Bloody Chamber”

Example of academic work. Written for ENGL 318: Science Fiction and Fantasy.

Women in fairy tales have often not been provided the opportunity to become active agents in their own stories. They have been underrepresented in popular fantasy literature, and when they have been given visible roles, they frequently occupy an unnecessary space in the story and do not push the plot forward, having been relegated to passive observers of their own lives. They must be kissed by the prince, saved by the hunter, and taken by the man. They are made the victims of opposing forces which intend to stop them from taking control of their stories. However, the fantasy genre is innately malleable. Authors can do whatever they please with their worlds, their characters, and their plots, so long as the story makes some amount of sense as a whole. Despite this, authors have continuously excluded women from their narratives, whether consciously or unconsciously. In Angela Carter’s “The Bloody Chamber,” she crafts an inherently fantastical story, but one which is undoubtedly rooted in gender and sexual politics. There can be no avoidance of or ignorance towards the social commentary and political implications in this tale. Through the use of allegory, Carter addresses the real-life consequences of abuses of power, the taking advantage of younger women by older men, and the lack of agency typically afforded to women in fairy tales. In creating a story which is accessible to a young female readership and reminiscent of the real-life experiences of women in abusive relationships, Carter exposes the implicit gender and sexual politics inherent in many well-known fairy tales and subverts the reader’s expectations for the heroine’s fate, which renders “The Bloody Chamber” uniquely socially conscious.

“The Bloody Chamber” is based on “Bluebeard”, a French folktale about a wealthy man who murders his wives and the attempt by his most recent wife to avoid the same fate as those who have come before her. “The Bloody Chamber” follows the same basic plot structure as the original legend, wherein a young woman is married off to an older, wealthier man. After being married, only a short amount of time passes before the husband leaves his property and his wife is given the keys to the castle under one condition – she must never enter one specific room. Despite being given this explicit instruction, the wife becomes curious and inevitably unlocks the room and goes inside only to discover an actual “bloody chamber” filled with the dead and mutilated bodies of the wives who preceded her. However, before she can fall victim to the same fate, she is saved and her husband killed. Despite the similarities in structure and concept, Angela Carter’s story takes important and obvious liberties with the tale which completely subvert and alter the meaning and moral teachings of the original folktale. Through the use of evocative, lush, and blunt prose, as well as sexual imagery and symbolism, Carter situates her narrator in a distinctly feminist tale.

Carter’s use of a retrospective voice immediately establishes tension between the narrator as she once was – a naïve, innocent, and wanting child – and who she now is – a woman who has grown and learned from the experiences detailed in this story. In using this narrative strategy, Carter subverts the traditional expectations of the fairy tale, which signals to her reader that even if they are familiar with the original story, they are in for an entirely different account of it. In many original fairy tales, such as those by The Brothers Grimm or Hans Christian Andersen, the stories are told through a third-person omniscient perspective. An assumed objective, impartial narrator recounts the horrors and mysteries which have befallen their subjects, and they leave it at that. Events must happen to innocent little girls – they cannot be created by, and they cannot be stopped or changed. Angela Carter, in using first-person point of view in “The Bloody Chamber,” is therefore subverting the traditional narrative structure of the fairy tale. She is giving a true voice to her narrator, giving her agency and authority over her own story. Instead of being the object of the narrative, she is the subject of it, and she is in control of how the tale will be told and perceived. Furthermore, in using a retrospective voice, Carter sets up the expectation that the narrator will experience a tremendous amount of character growth. While the narrator herself is reflecting upon her experiences, the narrator as a character begins and ends the story in two entirely separate places. The innocent child matures into the wiser woman, although it is only through trauma that she is given the opportunity to grow. While Carter could have easily fallen into the trap of traumatizing her main character without good reason, as many traditional fairy tales do, it is because she gives her narrator her own voice that the reader is better able to understand that the narrator has not merely been hurt without much payoff in either characterization or plot development. Carter’s narrator is not stagnant – she is given room to grow and to change, and it is part of what makes her feminist revision of “Bluebeard” so compelling and most importantly, refreshing.

Moreover, the narrator is never given a name, nor is she ever referred to by the title she would have received in marriage of “Marquise.” While this could potentially be seen as stripping the narrator of some of her agency and identity, her namelessness actually plays a more complex role. Although the actual experiences Carter writes about are inherently fantastical and therefore implausible, the underlying power structures which inform the details of the plot are not. Abuses of power by men of wealth and high station, the marrying off of younger women to older men before they are able to make an informed decision for themselves about that relationship, and the physical abuse of women are all real, unfortunately prevalent issues in the world. In leaving her narrator without a name, Carter is creating space for her readership, and especially her female readership, to see themselves within the story. Identification is a powerful tool which works to Carter’s advantage here, as young women who have faced physically or emotionally abusive relationships may see themselves within the tale and be able to connect with it on a deeper, more meaningful level. Furthermore, those women who have not faced abusive relationships but who fear that one day they might, or anyone who has merely been socialized as a woman, will pick up on the red flags which are established from the very beginning of the story and see what a dangerous situation the narrator is about to involve herself in. Here, Carter subverts the traditional structure of the fairy tale yet again, as female characters are frequently given names or titles which reflect their distinct characteristics, i.e. Cinderella. In not referring to the narrator as the Marquise, either, Carter is suggesting that the narrator is not defined by her relationship to a man. The narrator’s growth towards the end of the tale is more reflective of who she actually is, and in putting distance between the narrator and the plot, she is crafting a distinct character poised be remembered past the pain and trauma she experiences.

From the very beginning, Carter establishes warning signs which signal that the narrator’s grand expectations for a luxurious and content life with the Marquis will probably not be met. When asked by her mother if she loves her prospective husband, she states “I’m sure I want to marry him,” (Carter 7) but wanting to marry someone and actually loving that person are two entirely separate things. Love implies genuine connection, but the narrator of this story is so convinced that marriage to this – or really, any – man is her destiny that, even when given the choice to back out, she follows through. Here, Carter is explicitly recalling the gender politics of the time, for while this is a fantasy story, it is clearly rooted in the 18th century. For young women then, marriage was the only viable option, and to veer from that path was considered dishonorable and abhorrent. For the narrator, the chance at wealth and a higher social status, combined with the thrill of first love and first lust, would have been extraordinarily compelling. The Marquis is offering her the chance at fulfilling all of her childhood fantasies of wealth, station, and glittering jewels. She is enraptured by the fancy life that she is set to live, and she believes that she will have receive everything she wants and more from this man, so long as she just puts aside her own feelings towards the man himself. She imagines the Marquis’ “great ancestral bed in the sea-girt, pinnacled domain that lay, still, beyond the grasp of my imagination…that magic place, the fairy castle whose walls were made of foam,” (Carter 8) which establishes that she has high expectations of a magical, luxurious life. However, these desires are the product of childhood fancy and innocence. No matter how wealthy and established the Marquis is, he cannot make her happy with material goods. While this may be clear to the reader, at the age of seventeen, it is not clear to the narrator. She knows she is innocent and ignorant to a degree, but it is only in hindsight that she can recognize those things about herself. Therefore, she is clearly established as unprepared for the events which are about to unfold.

The narrator’s innocence is most starkly revealed when she describes how she has lusted after her husband, but suggests that she is completely unprepared for what a physical relationship would look like with another. Moments before the narrator consummates her marriage with the Marquis, she discovers a collection of pornography that he owns. She states that she is “innocent but not naïve,” (Carter 17) and that while she has knowledge about sex, she is still stunned by what she sees and what is expected of her from her husband. The Marquis taunts her for being so clearly out of her depth, teasing her in asking “Have the nasty pictures scared Baby? Baby mustn’t play with grownups’ toys until she’s learned how to handle them, must she?” (Carter 17) He infantilizes her, then subsequently takes advantage of her. It is only through humiliating her that the Marquis can feel that he has physical and intimate power over a woman, and Carter’s explicit and disturbing imagery does more to reveal the repugnant character of the Marquis than it does the narrator and her innocence. Therefore, it becomes clear that no matter how unprepared the narrator may be for intimacy, the sexual situation she has found herself in with the Marquis is violent and should come off as concerning. She describes the sex later as a “one-sided struggle” (Carter 18) that clearly only benefitted her husband. The fact that the two are married and she does not openly object to sex does not make it any less obvious that the narrator has been coerced and hurt by the Marquis, and that the abuses will continue, for it is in the man’s very nature to be violent towards women.

While their marriage is still in its infancy at this point, and the narrator has yet to discover the actual “bloody chamber,” the loss of her virginity in the marriage bed, the bridal chamber, comes to symbolize another type of bloody chamber. The narrator states upon waking up next to the Marquis that “[she] had bled,” and that she feels “infinitely disheveled by the loss of [her] virginity.” (Carter 18) The Marquis has spilled the narrator’s blood in having sex with her, just as he intends to spill her blood in the real “bloody chamber” by killing her. The phrase recalls both the blood associated with the loss of virginity, as well as vaginal imagery with the use of “chamber.” Sex and violence are conflated throughout the story, as the Marquis sees the two concepts so deeply intertwined that one cannot exist without the other. All acts of sex are also acts of violence, of torture, and he consciously and deliberately wants them to be so. Only in harming another can he find his own pleasure. The narrator states that “he might have chosen me because, in my innocence, he sensed a rare talent for corruption” (Carter 20). There is a part of the narrator which is complicit in the violence wrought against her body, as she recognizes that she has lusted after him the same way he has lusted after her. Female sexuality and any discussion of women engaging in sexual acts is considered taboo not only for the time the story takes place in, but also for the time the story was published in. Once the initial shock has passed, the narrator begins to find a certain strength in herself through sexual acts, but she begins to feel guilt and shame for being openly sexual, too, and this scares her. In saying, “I was not afraid of him; but of myself,” (Carter 20) she clearly recognizes her capacity for finding the same pleasure in pain. It is the fear she still feels, however, that sets her apart from the Marquis and the life that he has made out of violence.

After the Marquis has left the narrator with the keys to his castle and she finds herself all alone in “this lovely prison of which [she] was both the inmate and the mistress,” (Carter 24) she feels overcome by her solitude. In an effort to bring her back to herself, to feel connected to the life she left behind, she calls her mother and shocks herself “by bursting into tears when [she] heard her voice.” (Carter 24) Although the relationship between the narrator and her mother is not emphasized throughout the story, the connection between the two women bookends their tale. The mother is the one who first expresses doubts about the narrator’s marriage to the Marquis, and the mother is the one whom the narrator returns to when her situation begins to take a turn for the worse. She attempts to convince her mother that she is happy despite the tears, but does not mention how she actually feels, only how many splendid things her life is now filled with, the material goods which she believes should make her happy but which inexplicably are not. Although when the narrator calls her mother she has not yet found the secret room filled with the Marquis’ dead wives, she is about to discover it. And though the reader is unaware of what she is about to see, what danger lurks around the corner, it is with this telephone call that Carter sets up her final subversion of “Bluebeard”, and her most important yet.

In the original “Bluebeard,” the narrator is saved by her brothers. In “The Bloody Chamber,” it is her mother who swoops in to kill the Marquis and take the narrator away from the castle. Whereas in the original tale, it was a man who had to come and save the innocent young woman, here, it is another woman. Women as a whole are so rarely given the opportunity to be the saviors, and are frequently relegated to being the ones who have to be saved. Older female fairy tale characters especially are almost always represented as either wicked witches or evil stepmothers, if a mother figure is alive and present in the story at all. Carter clearly subverts traditional expectations of the fairy tale by portraying the mother as the strong, competent, timely figure who saves the narrator. While mother was established from the beginning as a strong woman who had “shot a man-eating tiger with her own hand” (Carter 7) by the narrator’s age, it is here that we really see that characterization in action. When the mother arrives, she claims “maternal telepathy” (Carter 40) had led her to know that something was amiss with her daughter, and that she had “never heard [her] cry before.” Although she may not have known the severity of the situation then, the narrator was spared just in time. In emphasizing the mother-daughter connection here, Carter not only gives agency back to female characters in fairy tales through the role of the mother, but she also does not take away any agency from the narrator simply because she had to be saved. It is not an act of rescue which benefits the strong, comely man, such as in Hansel and Gretel, but rather an act of pure love between two equals with a proven and inimitable bond. It is this detail which sets “The Bloody Chamber” apart from “Bluebeard,” and this detail which stands out above the rest.

Angela Carter subverts the traditional tropes and roles associated with fairy tales in various and numerous ways throughout “The Bloody Chamber.” It is a distinctly feminist revision of the original tale it is based on, and one which stands the test of time in part because it is so socially conscious and openly political. While there are many aspects of “The Bloody Chamber” which contribute to its commentary on gender and sexual politics beyond the ones outlined above, there is no doubt that Carter’s narrative strategy, her unequivocal and sometimes uncomfortable prose, and her role reversals have changed the way the story of “Bluebeard” will be read and received from now on. To ignore the social commentary implicit and explicit within this story is to ignore the true meaning of the text. Women in fairy tales – and in fantasy texts more generally – have gone ignored for too long, and with her work, Angela Carter is both creating and ensuring a space for female characters to thrive, contradictions and all.