Learning a new song



Learning a new song? The bloody chamber and the gothic

Angela Carter expert Merja Makinen explores whether these stories could be called Gothic, the relationship between the Gothic and fairy-tale genres and Carter’s re-writing of gender in these strange and powerful hybrid tales.

In the 1960s Angela Carter argued vigorously against being a Gothic novelist, ‘all owls and ivy and mad passions and Byronic heroes who were probably damned’. However, a writer can always change their mind and she did, writing a deliberately Gothic novel Heroes and Villains (1969) that did have all the four elements mentioned. But does The Bloody Chamber? Indeed, is this a good description of the Gothic anyway?

Gothic texts written during the late 18th and early 19th centuries share a number of typical features: they have gloomy, imprisoning castles, they are set in a past, ‘medieval’ time when superstition reigned, they have some fearsome monster or ghost that is threatening an innocent, virginal young woman and the atmosphere oozes threat and fear and even horror. They employ a twilight world where things are glimpsed, only vaguely discerned, until the final dreadful moment. And they abound with the colours of extreme – black for villainy, white for innocence and lashings of red for blood. Morals seem pretty straightforward: one is the evil predator, the other the virginal prey. Critics sometimes divide the Gothic into texts where the fear is experienced internally and we experience the young female character’s worries as she tries to unravel the mystery; and texts where the horror is external with bloody corpses and bones strewn around. Both, however, revel in the irrational themes of nightmare, madness, taboo and forbidden sexualities.

The Bloody Chamber and external horror

Clearly at least two of the stories in Carter’s collection easily fit these descriptions: ‘The Bloody Chamber’ can be read as an ‘external’ horror story, ‘The Erl-King’ fits the more internalised narrative of fear. Each explores the young female narrator’s fears of imprisonment and extinction by her monstrous partner. ‘The Bloody Chamber’ has its castle, ‘contravening materiality’ between land and sea. Though set in the late 19th century, with trains, cars and known artists (Redon and Puvis de Chavannes), the entrance to the bloodstained room is pure ancient horror, with its flickering tapers and worm-holed wooden door ‘barred with black iron’, as too are the instruments of torture. The colours of Gothic are prominent in the narrative, her white skin, the white shift that convey her innocence; the red jewels, the ‘unlucky’ fire opal and the necklace of rubies, ‘like an extraordinarily precious slit throat’, both disturbing and prescient in their representations. The events happen mostly at night or the twilight of dusk or dawn, and the depths of the chamber hold the ‘illimitable darkness’. The sexually depraved Marquis is unnaturally white and waxy, like the funereal lilies, conveying the mask of his social demeanour, powerful, rich, but with eyes that convey ‘absolute absence of light’ implying the darkness of his soul, the ‘atrocious loneliness of the monster’. The sadism of his bedding his bride and the corpses of his other wives in the torture chamber fits the taboos and forbidden sexualities, and the terrors of the nightmare are incorporated in the frantic scrubbing of the fateful key from which the blood cannot be erased. Finally the entrapped maiden accepts she has ‘Lost, as the victim loses to the executioner’ and obeys his demand to put her head on the block.

The Erl-King – internalised fear

‘The Erl-King’ has fewer external horrors; indeed it is hard at times to visualise the scenes, so firmly is the reader embedded within the narrator’s confused sensibility. Here, the monster is supernatural, a wood-goblin who entraps young girls with his magic whistle and turns them into caged birds. The wood is darkening and decaying and dying with the onset of winter, but scarlet with ‘goblin’ berries and white with ‘Devil’s spit’ or cold moonlight.

The representation of the woods holds a nightmarish quality of labyrinthine enclosure and the narrator uses the metaphors of losing herself, and of being swallowed up, both key elements of this ‘internal Gothic’ story. The narrative too, shifts inexplicably between third (she), second (you) and first (I) person, and between past and present tense, giving a further experience of internal conflict. The Erl-King’s magic draws the girl to him so that she both desires to be with him and fears being entrapped in his cage, and it is this ambivalence of wanting and fearing that the story explores. The reader is confused, because so is she: ‘His touch both consoles and devastates me’. Some aspects of the goblin are attractive – his naturalness, his kinship with the wild animals and the fact he is skilled in nature’s lore, but the plants the text dwells on are the disturbing fungi, growing ‘in lightless places and thrive on dead things’ and he is sharp-toothed, green-eyed and ‘cruel’. Much like the Marquis, his love-making is represented as torture: ‘a tender butcher’ who will ‘skin the rabbit’, and her descriptions of herself as ‘thirsty, cankered, goblin-ridden’ points to the inhuman unnaturalness of her lover and the nightmarish fear his gaze engenders.

Your green eye is a reducing chamber…I will diminish to a point and vanish.

In entrapping her as a bird, she will lose her sense of self and so, metaphorically, he would indeed be ‘the death’ of her.

Re-writing the passive woman

Angela Carter is most famous for her challenges to the way female characters had previously been represented, particularly when it comes to feminine desire. While writing these stories she was also researching how women who fit into the cultural expectation to be passive, obsessed with their appearance and their ‘virtue’, assume the position of victim. Instead she was interested in exploring how young female characters can be active, embrace their emerging sexual desires, not expect a man to be the sole answer to their lives, and still be attractive as characters. To leave my reading of Carter’s Gothic as her endorsing the way women were presented as virginal victims, constructed as good heroines because they were sexually-innocent and passive, would be to belie her stories because, of course, Carter gives the Gothic a different spin when it comes to gender. The two virgins in ‘The Bloody Chamber’ and ‘The Erl-King’ do not fear rape; while inexperienced, they are not fearful of sex, just their sexual partner’s designs on them. When they realise what these are, both try to entice the men into bed in order to strangle them. The latter succeeds; the former does not, but her pistol-toting mother rides to the rescue. At the close, it is women who become active and saviours, not the men.

Lady of the House of Love

The wonderful ‘Lady of the House of Love’ twists the gender expectations even further, when it comes to the Gothic, since here the woman is the supernatural monster, the ‘predatory’ vampire, and the young virgin ‘prey’ is male. This narrative too has all the required atmosphere of a brooding ruined mansion, evil ancestors, white-skinned Lady dressed in white lace, red blood and moth-eaten velvet draperies, and black-draped rooms. The catafalque and funerary urns repeat the objects in ‘The Bloody Chamber’. But, even while it invokes the earlier story, this one re-writes it. The Marquis cannot change his script, must enact the predator, with his ‘stench of absolute despair, rank and ghastly’ that makes the young girl pity him. The Lady asks the question he never could: ‘Can a bird sing only the song it knows or can it learn a new song?’. Must she fit into the expectations laid down for her by past generations or can she learn to behave differently? She is apparently the young girl dressed in her mother’s clothes, standing beside a birdcage, entrapped by her vampire heredity. However, the spell of cultural expectations is broken with the shattering of the dark glasses and ‘improvisation’ between the two characters becomes possible, turning the predatory mouth-on-blood into a more nurturing, loving act. There is no happy ending – the vampire dies and the youth goes off to war – but this gender reconfiguration argues that no one is condemned to enact the past. As Carter herself argued, the ‘social fiction of my ‘femininity’ was created, by means outside my control, and palmed off on me as the real thing.’ In these stories she re-writes the nature and behaviour of the female heroines into something we are more familiar with in the late 20th and 21st centuries. As she herself said, she loved putting ‘new wine’ (modern views) in ‘old bottles’ (traditional genres) and watching the resulting stories ‘explode’.

Fairy-tale or Gothic?

Critics have often disagreed about whether The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories is a rewriting of the Gothic with fairy-tale elements or a rewriting of the fairy-tale with Gothic elements. What is perhaps worth noting in this debate is the similarity between the two genres. Fairy-tales also come out of a medieval period, an oral folktale culture. Fairy-tales often (not always) figure a dangerous, supernatural creature who threatens a young girl but they also have a powerfully transformative element, where the beast is transformed into a human or a poor girl into a princess. Something in the narrative changes a fundamental aspect of the tale to allow the conclusion. The oral tales were often sexually explicit (Sleeping Beauty is impregnated by the Prince as she sleeps and awakes to give birth to a whole bevy of babies) and the women were more active and self-reliant. In the oral Little Red Riding Hood, the young girl tricks the werewolf to let her out of the bed and into the garden, claiming she needs to shit, and then runs off home. It is only when men began to write the stories down in the late 18th and 19th centuries, that the female characters become more passive and chastity becomes important, since these were valued cultural expectations at the time and the writers were trying to teach young readers. Carter had just finished translating Perrault’s fairy-tales before she wrote her own versions of the Little Red Riding Hood, Snow White and Beauty and the Beast stories. Perrault’s Red Riding Hood is vain and is eaten by the wolf. The Brothers Grimm’s Red Cap doesn’t get into bed but is eaten nevertheless, and then rescued by a woodman who cuts open the wolf. Carter, in her own Gothic version of the tale, ‘The Company of Wolves’, includes lines from the oral original (‘What shall I do with my shawl?’ ‘Throw it on the fire, you won’t need it again’) but then also has the girl take the wolf’s clothes off and throw them into the fire too. By refusing to be passive and frightened the girl refuses the victim role and so can improvise a new resourceful role, like the original folk tale where the girl saves herself. Here girls can be equally interested in sexual desire – it is no longer taboo – and refuse the predator/prey dichotomy, ‘she knew she was nobody’s meat’, to allow a happy conclusion where the wolf is made ‘tender’. Her actions can transform him in a way the Marquis was unable to contemplate. Like the Lady, the wolf and the girl can ‘learn a new song’ and become new gendered characterisations different from the past but appropriate for the 1970s and beyond.

Merja Makinen is a lecturer at Middlesex University. You can find her writing on The Bloody Chamber in New Casebooks: Angela Carter, ed Alison Easton (2000).

This article first appeared in emagazine 45, September 2009.

‘The Snow Child’

Ray Cluley discusses Angela Carter’s enigmatic and disturbing short story.

It may be the shortest story of The Bloody Chamber, but Angela Carter manages to pack a lot into ‘The Snow Child’. It takes the theme of jealousy from its fairy tale origins, ‘Snow White’, and uses a Freudian focus to explore aspects of male power and desire and how these dictate female behaviour and appearance. Going back further than the widely accepted version which ‘leaves the oedipal entanglements to our imagination rather than forcing them on our conscious mind’, according to Bruno Bettleheim, Carter goes back to where the oedipal desires of a father and the jealousy of the mother ‘are much more clearly stated...than in more common versions’.

Once Upon A Time...

It begins in the present tense, an immediate departure from the ‘once upon a time’ tradition of fairy tales that shows Carter subverting the genre norm. It is, though, a technique typical of an oral narrative, which is how such tales were originally told, and it provides a sense of immediacy. ‘The Snow Child’ also retains the linear plot typical of the genre as well and uses the omniscient narrative voice that we expect of a fairy tale, revealing a great deal as early as the first line. ‘Midwinter’ prepares us for a story that will be cold, and as the story develops we see that this is more than a physical coldness, whilst the following ‘invincible’ identifies the thematic importance of power and ‘immaculate’ suggests purity. Each can be seen to represent one of the three characters in the tale, Countess, Count, and Snow Child respectively, whilst its brevity adds to its impact. Not bad for a minor sentence of just three words.

The Count

‘The Count and his wife’ is as revealing as the first line. The man is referred to respectfully via his title whilst the possessive pronoun ‘his’ identifies the woman as his possession. The syntax, too, highlights his importance in comparison by introducing him first. We are told directly of his thoughts and desires via his sequence of wishes, a feature typical of fairy tales, and to emphasise them Carter uses the formulaic device of repeating ‘I wish I had a girl’ three times. His is the first voice we hear in the tale, and any wishes the wife may have remain unexpressed. Indeed, to begin with she is little more than a physical description, marking her as an object, something to be appreciated visually. Unsurprising, perhaps, when her husband’s desires focus on the visual appeal of colours.

The Countess

This doesn’t mean we are without clues to his wife’s character. She wears ‘pelts of black foxes’, an association which suggests that she has a predatory and cunning nature. She also wears ‘scarlet heels, and spurs’ and it may be that the colour of the heels comes from the actions of the spurs, which adds to this idea of violence. Carter uses the appearance of the child to prove these ideas of cunning predatory violence are accurate. Replaced in the Count’s affections, ‘his wife’ becomes more of an individual, ‘the Countess’, something Carter emphasises by finally allowing the woman thoughts and feelings. We are told the Countess ‘hated’ the girl and we are granted direct insight into her character with the thought ‘how shall I be rid of her?’ establishing a focus on jealousy that will drive the rest of the narrative.

The Snow Child

Traditionally it’s the woman who wishes for the child in this story, so again Carter sees to be subverting the genre here. With a woman we’d assume a maternal desire, as even Carter ‘could never imagine Cinderella in bed with the Fairy Godmother’, according to Duncker, but with a man we are forced to consider whether his desires are paternal or sexual. Either way, it seems to point to some dissatisfaction with his wife and what she is unable to provide.

This is especially noticeable in the use of colours. These are more typical of the fairy tale origin. The girl has ‘white skin, red mouth, black hair’. The first colour represents her virginal purity, and in appearing ‘stark naked’ she seems all the more vulnerable and innocent. It may be that she’s naked because the Count did not express anything about clothes in his wishes, or because female nudity is such an obvious part of male fantasy that it didn’t need to be mentioned during the wishing process, but there is an obvious eroticism to her lack of clothing. Erotic or pure (or both), she is an obvious contrast to the Countess who was described primarily via her clothing. What’s more, the Countess’s clothing is red and black and not white, denoting a lack of purity, and whilst the Countess wears some of the colours of the Count’s desire, the girl has them all naturally, unadorned.

The ‘red as blood’ suggests danger and in this respect it foreshadows the girl’s doomed fate. To further prepare us for this, Carter uses the black of a raven’s feather, a bird so often associated with death. The red can also be seen to represent the girl’s sexual maturity, though, and rather than allowing either representation, Carter draws on both to link sex with death, giving the story a shocking climax (so to speak).

Three’s A Crowd

The girl’s death is due, in part, to the Countess’s jealousy and in this respect Carter has created a typical evil step mother. She attempts to command the girl but the Count dismisses her instructions, showing his power whilst denying the Countess any of her own, and the more she fights against the Count the more she finds herself out of favour. Each attempt to be rid of the girl results in the girl becoming more clothed at the Countess’s expense; the clothing comes directly from her own body, emphasising how one woman replaces the other.

The girl is excluded from any active part in this struggle and remains without a voice of her own, little more than a plot device. The married couple, however, are united in having dialogue. Rather than follow the standard rules of dialogue attribution, Carter has the Count and Countess share the same paragraph to present them as a single unit. It’s a relationship that, as far as the Countess is concerned, needs no third party and she does her utmost to be rid of the girl.

The Count is not without feelings for the Countess. When he sees her new nakedness he ‘felt sorry for his wife’ and her final command of the girl is allowed to go undisputed. She wants a rose, symbolic of romance and a common feature of the fairy tale. Interestingly, whereas previously we were told of the Countess’s intentions regarding her instructions, this time the simple imperative ‘pick me one’ is voiced without any explanation regarding motive. The girl ‘picks a rose; pricks her finger on the thorn; bleeds; screams; falls’ all in one fast paced sentence, her death isolated as a paragraph on its own and told in the present tense for extra impact.

...Happily Ever After?

The girl’s death marks a sudden and surprising turn of events in which the mood shifts from one of typical fairy tale surrealism to one which is sexually explicit and disturbing. Soman Chainani claims ‘The Snow Child’ is an attempt to ‘deconstruct fairy-tale and pornographic archetypes simultaneously by tracing their origin to the same source’, and though there is a lack of erotic detail here (the Count is ‘soon finished’) his actions meet the ‘morally offensive’ criteria of pornography in that he ‘unfastened his breeches and thrust his virile member into the dead girl’ (my italics). It’s all the more upsetting because the third person narrative voice distances the reader and makes them a helpless witness, powerless to stop what is happening. But Carter’s intentions go beyond the money making motivations and titillations of pornography to reveal the potentially incestuous desires of a father figure, and to illustrate that a passive woman will find herself victimised.

Not that the more aggressively active woman, the Countess, doesn’t suffer. She loses her clothing and husband to the girl, albeit momentarily, and even though she’s successful in causing the girl’s death she still has to watch her husband’s intercourse with her. He may be ‘weeping’ as he uses the girl, but it’s more likely for his own loss than for the girl’s sake, and the Countess watches his actions ‘narrowly’. The adverb reveals a distaste that seems more like anger than jealousy now that a compromise of sorts has been reached, with neither Count nor Countess entirely satisfied. It seems a certain amount of tolerance is needed for a relationship to work

‘It bites!’

The girl is pricked by the rose and the bleeding represents of the loss of virginity; she dies before the Count can ‘prick’ her and make her bleed himself, which may explain his upset. But how much is the rose to blame? The girl melts immediately after sex, the Count having no use for her anymore, and there’s nothing to suggest this wouldn’t have happened without the rose. All that remains is a feather and bloodstain, reminders of the components that inspired her creation. The simile ‘like the trace of a fox’s kill’ links the bloodstain to the Countess via her earlier association with the animal and marks her as responsible for the girl’s death.

With competition for the Count’s affections out of the way, the Countess becomes ‘his wife’ once again and to reaffirm this he hands her the rose, but ‘It bites!’ This deceptively simple exclamation adds a level of complexity to the story’s conclusion. In fact, the rose itself is a rather complicated symbol here. It’s a flower with thorns, beautiful and dangerous, and as such it represents the Countess and the threat she poses to the girl. As a representation of the Count’s love, the rose is not the girl’s to take or to give and she is destroyed by it. The Count is able to handle it freely but the Countess cannot receive it unscathed. She either accepts it and is hurt or discards it before it can do any further damage; the text makes no claim either way and Carter leaves it for the reader to decide.

But who is this reader? Much has been said about Carter writing feminist fiction, a woman writing for women, but this story uses a fairy tale which makes it more accessible and gives it a wider audience. Much has also been said about the presentation of gender in The Bloody Chamber stories, but simply dividing ‘The Snow Child’ into what it says about men and women is far from satisfactory or conclusive. For example, the girl remains voiceless throughout the entire text, but should we really assume this means a passive woman is part of male fantasy? It could simply be the girl’s a plot device to illustrate another woman’s jealousy, in which case Makinen’s claim that ‘it is the critics who can’t see beyond the sexist binary opposition’ seems well founded. Gender roles are clearly important, but there’s more to ‘The Snow Child’ than looking at representations of men and women, or how men represent women, or even how fairy tales represent men and women. Indeed, you can get into such a tangle here that you fail to appreciate ‘The Snow Child’ for what it is: a story. Carter says of her stories in The Bloody Chamber that allegory is intended, but also that she keeps ‘an entertaining surface’, that ‘you don’t have to read them as a system of signification if you don’t want to’. The heroine of ‘The Lady of the House of Love’ wonders ‘can a bird sing only the song it knows, or can it learn a new song?’ and it seems to be something that concerns Carter, too. She says ‘I am all for putting new wine in old bottles, especially if the pressure of the new wine makes the old bottles explode’ and in creating ‘The Snow Child’ she has produced something that is less a version of ‘Snow White’ than a new song all by itself. One that bites.

Ray Cluley

Bibliography

Bettleheim,Bruno: The Uses of Enchantment

Chainani, Soman: ‘Sadeian Tragedy: The Politics of Content Revision in Angela Carter’s ‘Snow Child’’, in Marvels & Tales (edited by Donald Haase)

Jordan, Elaine: ‘The Dangers of Angela Carter’ in New Feminist Discourses (edited by Isobel Armstrong)

Simpson, Helen: Introduction to The Bloody Chamber

This article first appeared in emagplus 45, September 2009.

Wolves, Chokers and Cloaks – Symbolism in Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber

Robert Stevenson Brown discusses how Angela Carter has dissolved the traditional fairy-tale in order to reflect the social order of today.

Oscar Wilde said:

all art is at once surface and symbol. Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril. Those who read the symbol do so at their peril.

The word ‘peril’ in relation to the study of symbols is aptly used by Wilde because by analysing a symbol the reader may reveal more to themselves about the forces at work in their own unconscious than they do about the intentions of the author. Symbols were important to Angela Carter; she expressed a wish to return to a pre-literate world, the world of the medieval miracle play, where symbolism was a useful shorthand for communicating efficiently with the audience. In the light of this it seems that the A Level literature student must place themselves in peril, plunging beneath the obvious meanings of the short stories that form The Bloody Chamber and following the symbols wherever they may lead them.

At times it can be difficult to distinguish between metaphors and symbols. David Lodge offers a useful differentiation by saying that metaphors are comparative and symbols are suggestive. A symbol may function comparatively at one level, but it is likely to have many possible meanings and the reader’s cultural and literary knowledge – and even their desires – affect the way they ‘read’ a symbol.

The Roots of Fairytale Symbolism

In medieval texts such as the miracle plays, characters were made overtly symbolic by giving them names of human virtues such as ‘Good Deeds’ and ‘Wits’. This meant that the actions of the personified characters could communicate an explicit moral message to an audience who were literate in the signs and symbols of the church and folk tales but could not read. Fairy-tales can be seen as a development of the miracle play genre. They are highly symbolic; particular characters represent general human characteristics and particular events enlighten us about the human passage through life. The tale of Red Riding Hood can be seen as an analogy for the dangers faced by adolescent girls as they embark upon an independent adult life. The protagonist, Red Riding Hood, becomes like the Everyman character of the medieval miracle plays who we are supposed to identify with and accompany through the tale. The wolf, who tricks her and wants to consume her, symbolises the male sexual threat she may encounter, his wish to ‘see her’ more clearly suggesting the voyeuristic male gaze. The wood itself, which is the setting for the tale, is even more symbolically suggestive, playing on the primeval fear of the forest as well as linking to the dense dark wood of the fairy tale and the Gothic novel where bad things happen. In Freudian terms it can be seen as representing the unconscious; the darker, wilder realm of the mind over which we have little control.

The Grimm Versions

Carter believed that the oral narratives that had become known as folk tales or fairy-tales had been hijacked by patriarchal society so that their moral message encouraged women to take on a traditional, subservient role within a male-led society. The brothers Grimm, who produced one of the first collections of European fairy-tales, changed their source texts so that they extolled the values of the German middle class of which they were part. Crucially they removed any sexual reference which they found. In Jungian terms fairy-tales are archetypal narratives and the symbols within them form part of the collective unconscious of European culture. Whoever edits these tales wields a certain kind of power over the society of which they are part.

Accentuating the Symbolism and the Gothic

Carter’s own collection of fairy-tales reverses this process; she exaggerates the sexual content of the tales and uses her female characters not to tell girls what they shouldn’t do but to instruct female readers in how to behave if they find themselves in situations which threaten their integrity.

In many ways, both the humour and subversive moral message in Carter’s The Bloody Chamber rely upon the reader knowing traditional fairy-tales. Gothic literature and fairy-tales both use symbols as a way of imbuing the narrative with a moral message for the reader, warning them not to transgress the accepted social norms of the day. But in both genres the symbols also link to unconscious fears and desires which could be socially destructive, forming part of a subtext over which the author has little control.

Carter’s aim of returning to a world before the printing press, that of the oral narrative, ties in well with her re-writing of fairy-tales, accentuating their Gothic elements. But Carter went further than this, making The Bloody Chamber a truly postmodern reworking of the fairy-tale genre by using her tales to attack the ideologies and institutions of her day, and unsettling her readers by undermining their expectations of the symbols. What Carter does is bring the symbolism, the unconscious elements of the tales, to the fore, emphasising the subtext and using it to undermine the original moral message. Carter is indulging in what Roland Barthes called the mythologising of myth, which he saw as the best way to reveal to the reader the system of signs which operates below the surface of many texts.

‘The Werewolf’

In Carter’s version of Little Red Riding Hood, ‘The Werewolf’, everything is different. We can tell something is not right when the wolf comes off worst in the encounter with the young girl, losing a paw. If in the original tale the wolf can be seen to symbolise the sexual threat of the human world, Carter makes this link explicit using the concept of a werewolf. But typically Carter subverts the symbolism here because the werewolf is in fact the girl’s grandmother. Importantly, Carter strips both female characters of their innocence with the result that the reader is no longer sure who to sympathise with. In fact, Carter seems to imply that the werewolf grandmother is the victim of a narrow- minded and superstitious society whose members stone her to death at the end of the story, believing her to be a witch. Carter even makes the traditional heroine, Red Riding Hood, a villain because she is complicit in the lynching of her own grandmother.

Meddling with Colour

Carter also meddles with the symbolism of colour. In the original story the red cloak represents both the literal danger of the wolf and the more general danger of becoming independent and encountering strangers. In Carter’s narrative the girl’s cloak is only red because she has rubbed on it the blood of the wolf she has maimed. The foregrounding of blood serves as a reminder that this tale can be read as an allegory for a pubescent girl developing the ability to menstruate. Her cloak comes to symbolise experience not innocence, proficiency not vulnerability.

Carter’s subversion of the symbolic order allows us to position her within the literary context of postmodernism as a post-structuralist. Post-structuralism moved away from the humanist ideal of the individual and towards the idea that our subjective conception of ourselves and the world around us is determined by the culture in which we live, the discourse we take part in and the symbolic order that we have imbibed through the texts we have read. The major difference here is that whilst humanists would view all knowledge as good, post-structuralists are concerned that the knowledge we gain from books and elsewhere may be culturally biased, prejudiced and incomplete. By changing how the ‘symbolic order’ works within her tales, Carter makes the reader aware of the unconscious effect that texts may be having on them.

‘The Bloody Chamber’

In ‘The Bloody Chamber’, the title story of the collection, Carter uses symbols to show that the female narrator is in serious trouble. She has married a man who she describes as ‘the richest man in France’, who has had several wives, all of whom have died young, and some mysteriously. The future does not look bright for the protagonist. Her husband is ‘much older than [her]’ and in this case age seems to signify lechery, as he regards her as if ‘inspecting cuts [of meat] on a slab’. She compares him to a lily, with all the symbolic associations that it has with funerals and death. Even his gifts are sinister; the choker that he buys her as a wedding gift is made of crimson rubies ‘like an extraordinarily precious slit throat’, harking back to ‘the terror’ of the beheadings of the French Revolution as well as the more traditional associations of the colour red with danger and passion. The Marquis’ desire to carry his wife off to a remote ‘faery’ castle, separated from reality, is symbolic of the danger of masculine possessiveness. Like the Wolf in the Red Riding Hood tale, he wants to possess and consume the female, destroying her individuality.

In Carter’s source text Bluebeard, the female character must be rescued from her marriage with a murderous male by her brothers; in this tale there are bad male characters and good male characters but only weak female characters. Significantly, in ‘The Bloody Chamber’ it is the protagonist’s mother who shoots her husband dead as he stands ready to decapitate her. Carter has created a female character who succeeds in escaping her entrapment in a way that ‘neither family nor myth has authored for her.’

After The Bloody Chamber, the symbolic order of the fairy-tale will never be the same again; women can wear red and get away with it, they can single-handedly wreak revenge on the possessive lover, they can take pleasure in sex and not be punished. Carter has succeeded in updating the symbolic order so that it reflects the modern social order.

Robert Stevenson Brown teaches A Level English at the Mirfield Free Grammar and Sixth Form.

This article first appeared in emagazine 55, February 2012.

The Kingdom of the Unimaginable – Gothic Writing in Dracula and The Bloody Chamber

Kieran O’Kelly argues that a 19th-century vampire novel and a 20th-century collection of short stories both exploit Gothic conventions to raise challenging ideas about identity.

Bram Stoker’s Dracula and Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber both seem to be concerned with taking their readers out of their comfort zone by challenging them to think the unthinkable about who we are and how we should behave. Both texts encourage readers to question certainties, and have at their core an exploration of the liminal, inviting the reader to cross the threshold between the homely and familiar and the fantastical and strange (a feeling often referred to using the German terms heimlich and unheimlich); the conscious and the unconscious, and enter into what Carter’s female protagonist in The Bloody Chamber calls, the kingdom of the unimaginable. But apart from setting out to shock us, both writers also address fundamental questions that men and women have always agonized about, summed up for us in Harker’s cry in Dracula of:

What does it all mean?

Change and Exploration

One particularly resonant theme that both writers focus on is how we might face up to change. The texts challenge us to cross the boundaries of orthodoxy and struggle with feelings and thoughts we may have within us which may conflict with accepted, traditional, conventional thinking. Particularly perhaps for the young person on the cusp of adulthood it focuses on an experience which dares us to recognize and embrace what the female protagonist in The Bloody Chamber describes when she talks about ‘the exhilaration of the explorer’. We are invited then, as readers, to embark on an adventure into foreign lands where, to quote Van Helsing in Dracula:

we have to keep an open mind as we do not know what to trust, even the evidence of our own senses

This supports the idea that as readers we should be as willing as the characters ultimately are, to accept Nature’s eccentricities and possible impossibilities and believe in things that you cannot prove and where ultimately there may be no comforting answers.

Challenging Orthodoxies

These texts speak to us about the feelings and thoughts we have which conflict with the accepted orthodoxies of our time. This need to be true to ourselves and at the same time conform to society’s expectations provides the tension in the texts and explains the hold they have over the reader. The texts then present us with the paradox of what it is to be human. How do we resolve the very human dilemma that Aidan Day sees as being revealed in Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chambe,r of ‘the two competing desires for freedom and engulfment’?

Gothic Protagonists

Both Stoker and Carter present us with characters who dare to be different: overreachers who rebel against accepted mind-sets, hierarchies, political systems and moral beliefs that have traditionally been set up to instruct us how to behave. They are sceptics, iconoclasts, anarchists and barbarians challenging the world influenced by rules and conventional expectations; it is through them we can explore and question received ‘wisdom’. The vicarious thrill readers experience when encountering questioning protagonists is undoubtedly one of the reasons for the Gothic’s enduring popularity.

Exposing the Shocking Truth

Stoker and Carter want, of course, to sell their wares by causing controversy, so readers will read their texts but this focus on the wild, sensational, shocking and extreme, is not their sole aim. As Day points out, with regard to Carter’s work:

the spirit of The Bloody Chamber, is not escapist, but ironic and critical

In other words the value of the Gothic, as a genre, is that by its very nature it encourages us to examine ourselves for the damaging tendencies within us – whether they be too egotistical, or too passive. As Day says:

In the collection The Bloody Chamber Carter points out that, passivity is not an intrinsically virtuous state, even – in fact especially not – in women

The female protagonist in The Bloody Chamber points out:

Who can say what I deserve or no? ... I’ve done nothing; but that may be sufficient reason for condemning me

Thus Day argues:

A rational and ethical self is central to Carter’s strategy in The Bloody Chamber collection, and it cannot sustain itself by evasion and repression.

Day believes:

The idea of springing forward from recoil... seems to touch the heart of Carter’s strategy in The Bloody Chamber.

Female Roles and Behaviour

How women are presented in the two texts encourages us to examine our society’s power structures. This is particularly so for Angela Carter who Aidan Day claims:

is concerned not simply to point out what is wrong with conventional representations of gender; (but) she is concerned at once to offer different representations, different models.

An example of this is her presentation of the female protagonist’s mother in ‘The Bloody Chamber’ who provides her daughter’s inspiration in deliberate contrast to the traditional male heroes who usually come to the rescue:

My mother’s spirit drove me into that dreadful place, in a cold ecstasy to know the very worst

The last five words sum up a message that is echoed in Dracula, where admitting to whatever lies within us is repeatedly stated. As Mina points out:

There must be no more concealment ... Alas we have had too much already.

Carter’s protagonist in The Bloody Chamber at the end of her tale echoes similar sentiments:

No paint or powder, no matter how thick or white, can mask that red mark on my forehead.

Dracula: Lucy and Mina

In Dracula, Stoker seems to present two sharply contrasting female characters, Lucy and Mina. The former conforms to the submissive disposition women were expected to adopt. She goes to her death blissfully unaware of the part played by the men close to her, in allowing the Count to attack and kill her:

How good they are all to me! I quite love that Dr Van Helsing... I shall not mind any flapping outside the window.

To begin with Mina shows a similar acceptance of how a woman should behave and think, but she also shows a willingness to think for herself and eventually shows the courage to act contrary to male expectations:

meanwhile they have told me to go to bed and sleep; as if a woman can sleep when those around her she loves are in danger – I felt in my heart an icy cold, but it did not occur to me to go back …

‘As for me’, she said, ‘I have no fear’.

She also becomes more proactive:

I have an idea – I shall get the maps and look over them... I am more than sure I am right

and like some of the female characters in Carter’s stories, she ultimately helps to effect her own victory and escape.

Sexual Honesty

Honestly facing up to who and what we are is important for the characters in these texts. In The Bloody Chamber the female protagonist says:

I was aghast to feel myself stirring... No, I was not afraid of him; but of myself... I felt both a strange, impersonal arousal at the thought of love and at the same time a repugnance

while in Dracula, both Jonathan Harker and Van Helsing (and even Mina) admit feelings of sexual attraction they never normally would countenance:

I lay quiet, looking out from under my eyelashes in an agony of delightful anticipation.

Tested by the Setting

The settings provide a context in which the characters are forced to face truths about themselves, as Harker’s anguished cry emphasizes in Dracula:

What shall I do? What can I do? How can I escape from this dreadful thrall of night and gloom and fear?

For as Van Helsing points out:

It is a wild adventure we are on... We seem to be drifting into unknown places and unknown ways; into a whole world of dark and dreadful things.

It is a world where:

There are caverns and fissures that reach none know whither.

Day points out that in The Bloody Chamber Carter:

uses the forms and fantasy of fairy tales... s

to exile her female protagonist from all the paraphernalia of the everyday world. The settings externalise the inner demons of the characters. The way in which Carter’s characters face up to the temptations determines their mettle and the measure of their character:

It was imperative that I find him, should know him; I feel no fear... no intimation of dread

Van Helsing in Dracula expresses a similar fearless determination:

come, we must act. Devils or no devils, or all the devils at once, it matters not; we fight him all the same.

Optimism and Belief

Dracula and to an even greater degree The Bloody Chamber end with a degree of confidence; it is difficult to disagree with Helen Simpson’s view in her introduction that:

The stories in The Bloody Chamber are fired by the conviction that human nature is not immutable/fixed irretrievably, that human beings are capable of change... and that Carter’s voice is the voice of self-assertion.

This is emphasised by what Simpson sees as an optimistic vision of the possibility of a balanced and mutually fulfilling relationship between the sexes.

The Grotesque and Absurd

If the Gothic aims to shock and unsettle, then it is perhaps not too surprising that dark humour, grim irony and an evocation of the grotesque and the ridiculous are an important means by which these aims are achieved. The Gothic deals with the extreme, uncanny, supernatural and therefore often teeters on the edge of the absurd – but then this is entirely appropriate for a genre in which nothing is held sacred.

The use of black humour to reinforce Gothic themes is also seen in the disillusionment and ironic realisation of characters who have sought to achieve their desires at any cost, only to see them turn to dust. A wry appreciation of the futility of battling against the odds and a recognition of the grotesque ironies of life is evident in the most perceptive of characters in the Gothic. In some small way, this attitude is shown to help them to cope. Van Helsing points this out at some length in Dracula:

it is a strange world, a sad world, a world full of miseries and woes and troubles and yet when King Laugh come he makes them all dance to the tune he play... he come like the sunshine, and he ease off the strain again; and we bear to go on with our labour, what it may be.

His response to Lucy’s death makes the moment all the more poignant:

Oh it was the grim irony of it all – that this so lovely lady garlanded with flowers were truly dead

Stoker in Dracula could be poking fun at some of the Victorian era’s most cherished beliefs, such as the importance of men keeping a stiff upper lip at all times. There is an hilarious moment when Lord Godalming, no less, breaks down in Mina’s arms and we are told:

in spite of being a true gentleman he grew quite hysterical.

Dracula, particularly when read from the modern reader’s perspective, is full of moments of grotesque incongruity when the prim, stuffy, pedantic, meticulous adherence to standards of behaviour are juxtaposed against such extreme situations:

When the Count saw my face, his eyes blazed with a sort of demonic fury, and he suddenly made a grab for my throat... It was very annoying, for I do not see how I am to shave

This concern with the trivial at the expense of the serious is not just funny in itself but helps the writer to point up the importance of seeing clearly the true nature of men and women.

Similarly, Carter’s young female protagonist does this when, in a typical Gothic moment, she confesses:

perhaps, I had seen his face without its mask

The latent tendencies in all of us that we would rather not admit to are revealed:

I saw myself suddenly as he saw me. And for the first time in my innocent, confined life, I sensed in myself a personality for corruption that took my breath away.

Seeing oneself as others see us is a quality many writers celebrate and stress the importance of. It complements both the importance of self-knowledge and the acceptance of change from innocence to experience that Gothic writing deals with. That interest in the mysterious, the inexplicable and the willingness to understand the ‘other’ is something we find interesting, as the rebel or overreacher sets out to challenge and conquer his or her world’s unsatisfying ideologies.

Furthermore we are encouraged to sympathize with the ‘monster’ – for that ‘monster’ only dramatizes to an extreme degree our own incipient desires. In The Bloody Chamber Carter is concerned not just with the female objects of male desire or the male gaze and how they should ‘start to live for themselves’, but also the nature of male sexuality and ‘The atrocious loneliness of the monster’.

The Passive and the Active

In both texts there is a tension between the passive and the active state; entrapment and freedom; the pursued and the pursuers. Caged birds, an obvious image of human confinement, occur in Carter’s tale of ‘The Lady in the House of Love’, as Day points out:

with its Lady Vampire and man as virgin victim (it) asks the question of whether sadists are trapped within their nature: ‘can a bird sing only the song it knows or can it learn a new song?’

At the heart of the texts lies a conflict between the temptation of succumbing to, or remaining in, a comforting paralysis, and its opposite perhaps equally dangerous state of raging egotism. Their analysis of the human psyche’s constant war between these two outlooks explains, at least in part, the popularity of these texts. In Dracula, Mina, who becomes more and more active as the novel goes on, urges her male companions not to see their task of killing the ‘monster’ as a work of hate:

That poor soul who wrought all this misery is the saddest case of all ... You must be pitiful to him to ... some day... I may need such pity too.

Both Stoker and Angela Carter liberate their readers by revealing that hidden world of our inner selves in which we debate where to draw the line between transgressing moral and social codes of behaviour and conforming to the expectations of others.

Kieran O’Kelly teaches English at Xaverian Sixth Form College in Manchester.

This article first appeared in emagazine 51, February 2011.

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