Critically examine the presentation of sexuality and gender issues in 2-3 short stories from Angela Carter's collection, 'The Bloody Chamber' - by K. D. Braithwaite
Critically examine the presentation of sexuality and gender issues in 2-3 short stories from Angela Carter's collection, 'The Bloody Chamber' - written by K. D. Braithwaite
Subject: English Literature -
Type: Literature Term Paper
Description of this piece: complete essay, without footnotes
Critically examine the presentation of sexuality and gender issues in 2-3 short stories from Angela Carter's collection, 'The Bloody Chamber'.
Through the inversion of traditional myths and fairytales Angela Carter’s fiction seeks to eradicate patriarchy from literary discourse, and awaken women to the nature of their gendered environment. Carter’s fictional worlds tend to be ostensibly male-dominated and yet follow the rising authority of a woman protagonist who is eventually victorious. This trend represents Carter’s own belief that women need to define their authority in a post-feminist world that all too often wrongly, and retrospectively, considers the strength of feminism to be a phenomenon of the past. As Harriet Blodgett says of Carter’s fictions - they have been ‘designed to enhance, not corrupt, the nature and quality of female life, and they do so in distinctively original ways.’
In ‘The Bloody Chamber’ we see the traditional fairytale motif of the Bluebeard legend inverted so that the ultimate power rests with the feminine figure of the protagonist’s mother. Throughout the story Carter repetitively associates the murderous aristocrat with death imagery and symbolism. For example, he is described as being akin to a lily, and as having inhuman characteristics - ‘possessed of that strange, ominous calm of a sentient vegetable’# - and living in a castle that is ‘amphibious’ in nature. This close association leads the reader to believe that the male character is to assert his violent and winning authority over his young wife - however, it becomes clear as we read that these associations point us towards the event of his own death, at the hand of the girl’s mother, who arrives, dressed in black, just in time to prevent the execution of her daughter. This inverts the traditional ending to Love in the Western World. Moreover, these associations of the male figure with ‘pale’ stems of lilies, and the frequent portrayal of his skin as white, is analogous to the vampire in folklore; who, traditionally, tends to be male. Carter again inverts this tradition by ascribing her feminine character with vampire-like characteristics, such as pale skin, and a developing ‘potentiality for corruption’#. Furthermore, the ostensibly fragile and delicate flower of the woman harbours a robustness - both physical and emotional - typically associated with men; this is suggested by Carter’s description of the girl’s neck muscles sticking out ‘like thin wire.’
Blodgett describes Carter as ‘an independent-minded feminist with small tolerance for the cultural determinism that distorts female being’ whose writing stays close to her belief in the importance of women writing in order to decolonialise language and habits of thought. As Carter defined her literary ambition: ‘The creation of a means of expression for an infinitely greater variety of experience than has been possible heretofore, to say things for which no language previously existed.’# ‘The Bloody Chamber’ is full of contrasts - both expected and unexpected. It challenges conventional expectations of the grotesque and the bizarre, which are associated with fairytales. The murderer’s castle both belongs to a traditional fairytale - standing in ‘faery solitude’# while harbouring a torture chamber containing the dead bodies of his previous wives. This points us towards Carter’s inferring that gender cannot be construed upon appearance alone; that knowing the true nature of a person’s desires relies upon entering their personal space, and unlocking metaphysical doors. A further important contrast to the subject of this essay is between the murderer being described as having a ‘waxwork stillness’, while the heroine’s mother is ‘eagle-featured’. This contrast associates the feminine, matriarchal figure with that of a bird, that has ultimate freedom to reign over the world of fairytale and put an end to the turn of events engineered by the male, while the male figure remains essentially impassive and trapped within his own world of fantasy, realising only too late that his dolls can ‘break free of their strings, abandon the rituals he had ordained for them since time began and start to live for themselves.’# Carter uses traditional motifs to portray her own ideas concerning gender and identity. For example, the Cinderalla motif - where the heroine undergoes a moment of transformation from ordinary to exquisite - is ominously endowed with erotic and macabre imagery:
‘That night at the opera comes back to me even now…the white dress; the frail child within it; and the flashing crimson jewels round her throat, bright as arterial blood.’
From the beginning Carter makes it clear that fairytale ending necessarily must be altered if women are to avoid being dominated by a male-orientated literary discourse. Thus, it is only through the deconstruction of the fairytale that the construction of gender identity can be fully understood. ‘The Bloody Chamber’ suggests that for all the wily planning on the part of the patriarchal Bluebeard figure - the matriarch will outwit him. This encourages a freeing up of perspective concerning the power relations between man and woman, suggesting that the act of performance contributes to our understanding of gender relations, rather than the automatically ascribing women to the weaker role - which traditional fairytales often do. In ‘The Bloody Chamber’ we see the heroine’s transformation from the pale girl who is referred to as ‘Baby’ by her husband to a woman who is called ’Eve’ by her lover, and who boldly dares to confront her husband alone. However, there is no one defining moment that embodies this transformation - rather it occurs as a result of a progressive change. As Judith Butler. In ‘Gender Trouble’ says on de Beauvoir’s ideas of becoming a woman:
If there is something right in Beauvoir’s claim that one is not born, but rather becomes a woman, it follows that woman itself is a term in process, a becoming, a constructing that cannot rightfully be said to originate or to end. As an ongoing discursive practice, it is open to intervention and resignification. Even when gender seems to congeal into the most reified forms, the ‘congealing’ is itself an insistent and insidious practice, sustained and regulated by various social means. It is, for Beauvoir, never possible finally to become a woman, as if there were a telos that governs the process of acculturation and construction.#
Gender Trouble describes how gender is not a pre-existent form - but rather is an ongoing and dynamic process reflecting our actions in everyday life. This ideas that gender is a performative construct is expressed in ‘The Bloody Chamber’ through the ambiguous gender of the piano tuner - that is never explicitly described. In comparison to the overtly feminine figure of the heroine, with thin girlish limbs, set in stark contrast to the ‘leonine’ figure of the man who smells of spices and leather - the piano tuner is initially presented as indistinctly androgynous. His being blind sets a certain distance between the character and his encounter with the heroine; he remains on the periphery of the story - never truly involved, and yet not quite separate. He cannot read situations by what he sees, and relies on sounds, and we come to know him - as does the heroine - through a succession of encounters contrived through the playing of the piano, which reveal his good nature. Thus, his gender is performatively constructed, and relies on the active shaping of his identity as the text progresses - rather than on his physical description. In this way Carter encourages the reader to question how they construe gender, and whether it is right to rely upon the traditional dichotomy between male and female. As she says in ‘The Sadeian Woman’, the feminine experience as distinct from the male is a ‘false universal’ and she warns of the inherent dangers in appreciating the sexual differences in mythologies, calling such texts ‘consolatory nonsense.’#
The Erl-King rewrites the Little Red Riding Hood tale, and also encompasses aspects of Romantic literary-poetic conventions, as well as containing Biblical allusions. We see in this tale how Carter uses literary devices in a consistent and similar way to ‘The Bloody Chamber.’ For example, the latter story is mostly told from the perspective of the heroine in the first person - only on a few occasions does this suddenly switch to the third person - reminding the reader that they are reading a fable, rather than a traditional fiction. For example, when the heroine is undressed on her wedding night her description is interrupted by a change in narration:
The child with her sticklike limbs, naked but for her button boots, her gloves, shielding her face with her hand as though her face were the last repository of her modesty; and the old, monocled lecher who examined her, limb by limb. He in his London tailoring; she, bare as a lamb chop. Most pornographic of all confrontations.#
The ‘He’ and ‘She’ exist side by side in the same sentence, almost as private pronouns - an ironic effort of Carter’s to exaggerate the complete lack of respectful distance that the husband keeps. The change in narrator from first to third person is essential in order to manifest this he/she or male/female dichotomy. This association of the feminine body with meat - ‘she a lamb chop’ - is also used in ‘The Erl-King’ when the male figure is described as ‘the tender butcher who showed me how the price of flesh is love.’# This association encourages the reader to liken the female body to a commodity, and to the real world - as opposed to the fairytale - where the body is made of flesh and is mortal. This technique of Carter’s gives added strength to the feminine power in both books, suggesting that the feminine identity is more real and ultimately more powerful than the masculine identities, which are associated with floral images, such as lilies, trees and leaves.
In the Erl-King we see early on in the story how Carter swings from the third to the first person - for example, one paragraph reads ‘A young girl would go into the wood as trustingly as Red Riding Hood’, yet the next changes the narrator to the first person. Thus, it is only once the girl enters the wood that the reader too enters the fairytale world:
The woods enclose. You step between the first trees and then you are no longer in the open air; the wood swallows you up. There is no way through the wood anymore, this wood has reverted to its original privacy. Once you are inside it, you must stay there until it lets you out again for there is no clue to guide you through in perfect safety; grass grew over the tracks years ago and now the rabbits and the foxes make their own runs in the subtle labyrinth and nobody comes [..] the silent blackish water thickens, now, to ice. All will fall still, all will lapse.#
This one paragraph is a condensed version of the progressive pattern of the whole story. The ‘original privacy’ of the wood is a metaphor for the patriarchal domination of the female subject - that can only be escaped once the wood ‘lets you out again.’ This idea is brought into clearer distinction in the figure of the Erl-King, whose male identity is synonymous with the infinitely progressive nature of the natural world: for example, he keeps wild birds - symbols of feminine identities - in cages in his home.
Furthermore, the Erl-Kings’ oppressive rule over these little birds can only end in death; hence the sentence ‘all will fall still, all will lapse’ in the above paragraph. The heroine ends the life of the Erl-King by strangling him in an inverted version of the scene depicted in Robert Browning’s poem ‘Porphyria’s Lover’, where the male figure strangles his female lover in a fit of jealous rage. As Harriet Kramer Linkin confirms, ‘Carter examines not only the ways in which male desire defines and confines the female, but also the ways in which female desire colludes in erecting the bars of the golden cage for the Romantic as well as the contemporary writer. Balancing desire with aesthetic empower.’#
In conclusion, Carter’s short fiction condenses a diverse range of literary ideas and motifs into a relatively short amount of words. This reflects the extent of Carter’s belief in the need for the eradication of the traditional female/male dichotomy; covering literary traditions from folk-lore to Biblical allusion. Carter cleverly incorporates aspects and characters from other stories in a combination that is uniquely her own. For example, she maintains a consistently rich and sensual prose that is reminiscent of Romantic poets, such as Wordsworth and Coleridge, while also alluding to Biblical figures, such as Cain and Judas:
‘Over the hearth hang bunches of drying mushrooms, the thin, curling kind they call jews-ears, which have grown on the elder trees since Judas hanged himself on one; this is the kind of lore he tells me, tempting my half-belief.’
‘Half-belief’ is the crucial word here; the key, if you like, to our understanding of Carter’s fiction and its implications for understanding the concept of gender. Her work is not completely rooted in reality, and yet not quite separate from fairytale, the emphasis is thus on the muddle in between - where gender is constructed actively. For categories do not exist in Carter’s world - there are no distinct boundaries between fairytale and reality, just as there are no such clear sexual differences between male and female. The inversion of tradition and convention is thus essential in the breaking down of these categories, and contributes towards Carter’s ambition that women might experience a freer habit of thought.
Bibliography
Blodgett, Harriet, ‘Fresh Iconography: Subversive Fantasy by Angela Carter.’ The Review of Contemporary Fiction. Volume 14. 3. (1994)
Brooke, Patricia, ‘Lyons and Tigers and Wolves-Oh My! Revisionary Fairy Tales in the Work of Angela Carter.’ Critical Survey. Volume 16. Issue 1. (2004)
Butler, Judith Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of "Sex" (1993)
Butler, Judith, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1990)
Carter, Angela, The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories. (London: Virago, 1995)
Carter, Angela, ‘The Sadeian Woman.’ (London: Virago, 1987)
Kramer Linkin, Harriet, ‘Isn’t it Romantic?: Angela Carter’s Bloody Revision of the Romantic Aesthetic in ‘The Erl-King’. Contemporary Literature, vol. 35, 2 (Summer, 1994)
Nancy K, Subject to Change: Reading Feminist Writing, (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988)
Pitchford, Nicola, Tactical Readings: Feminist Postmodernism in the Novels of Kathy Acker and Angela Carter. (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2002)
Robinson, Sally, Engendering the Subject: Gender and Self-Representation in Contemporary Women's Fiction. (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1991)
Salih, Sara, Judith Butler. (London: Routledge, 2002)
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