The Bloody Chamber (1979)

The source for Angela Carter’s short story is hinted at in the phrase ‘rasp of beard’ (l.47): ‘The Bloody Chamber’ is based on Charles Perrault’s fairy story of Bluebeard. Carter is aware of the different versions of the story and its possible basis in real life (see Duncker, 1986: 232–3). Her story also plays with a number of other fairy tales, such as Rapunzel, Cinderella and Red Riding Hood (for example, note ‘the antique service revolver that my mother, … kept always in her reticule, in case … she was surprised by footpads on her way home from the grocer’s shop’: ll.36–9). But Carter also parodies various literary genres, such as gothic (in the remote castle with its dungeon) and romance (in the rescue on a white charger and the rags to riches story involving music, money and marriage), as well as the narratives of religion and opera. She also toys with the conventions of realism. ‘The Bloody Chamber’ begins with the stock characters of a beggared-for-love widow, ‘daughter of a rich tea-planter’ (l.23), and her only daughter, who appears an icon of Victorian duty and respectability, living humbly in an apartment in Paris. Carter complicates this stereotype by making the unnamed narrator’s mother a kind of adventure hero who has shot tigers and fought Chinese pirates. Immediately, the story incorporates incongruity to make the reader think about the conventions of certain kinds of narrative, and Carter includes some interesting oddities in the story that mirror the way in which she blends genres. The impoverished lifestyle of the 17-year-old narrator includes a maid, and thus simultaneously evokes the ‘charm’ of poverty and the ‘allure’ of wealth. The world of castles and white horses is mixed up with telephone calls from agents in New York, uniting Romantic chivalry and high-tech modern lifestyles. Overall, the story seems to attempt to tantalise the reader with every form of narrative pleasure: horror, romance, pornography, adventure story and fairy tale. Also, the exaggerated use of rich description (‘from the white, enclosed quietude of my mother’s apartment: ll.5–6) and the overblown language (e.g. ‘into the unguessable country of marriage’: ll.6–7) draws attention to the artificiality and conventionality of the narrative process.