The first edition of The Bloody Chamber, published by Gollancz
Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber is her breakthrough 1979 collection of short stories in which several well-known fairytales are updated and given a modern twist. Several of the stories had previously been published elsewhere – only two were original to this collection. At the time of publication there was some debate about whether Carter had imposed a feminist interpretation on these stories; some forty years on that debate seems a bit irrelevant – the ten very varied stories can stand in their own right without the imposition of such limiting categorisation.
The first and longest of the tales is The Bloody Chamber, which is loosely based on the traditional story of Bluebeard. A teenage girl marries a wealthy French Marquis for his money. He seduces her with ostentatious gifts including
a choker of rubies, two inches wide, like an extraordinarily precious slit throat
and whisks her off to his mysterious castle. Left on her own she explores the library, quickly discovering his disturbing collection of pornography. This is a warning of what is to follow. After their first night together he is called away to business in New York, leaving her again alone in the castle. Before leaving he gives her the keys to the castle and tells her she can go anywhere except to one forbidden room, the bloody chamber of the book’s title. Guess what she does? She of course breaks her promise and promptly goes to his secret room, where she discovers the murdered bodies of his earlier wives, all gruesomely presented as trophies. But the latest wife, our narrator, is not going to go without a fight. Bluebeard has met his match. This story hints at the close relationship (for some) between violence and sex, without perhaps ever going the full Fifty Shades, observing
“There is a striking resemblance between the act of love and the ministrations of a torturer.”
The Courtship of Mr Lyon faithfully follows the traditional narrative of the Beauty and the Beast story. The only concession to modernity is that Beauty’s father seeks assistance at the Beast’s chateau after having car trouble rather than merely getting lost in the woods. But this conformity with the original story is presented as a contrast with the next iteration of the tale, The Tiger’s Bride. Here a woman is lost to the Beast (in the shape of a tiger) in the form of a gambling debt. In an ending to which Shrek owes a debt, instead of true love transforming the beast into a man, it is the heroine who transforms into a tiger.
The next story, Puss-in-Boots, is a comic interlude in the increasingly dark stories. Puss, a sardonic narrator of the story, helps his young dissolute companion seduce a young woman kept in a tower by a her miserly, older husband.
In The Erl-King a young woman is seduced by the sinister Erl-King, who plans to imprison her by turning her into a bird. She avoids this fate by strangling him with his own hair. If one were looking for feminist reworking of folklore outside the principal story this would be a good place to start – the Erl-King is a sexual predator and his intended victim a strong woman who sees past his sexuality and is happy to use violence to protect herself.
The Snow Child is the shortest and for me the most disturbing story in the collection. It is also the most heavily symbolic and allegorical. A Count and Countess ride out in deepest winter. The Count wishes for a child “as white as snow”. A young woman magically appears at the side of the road; she picks a rose, is pricked by a thorn and dies. Perhaps she is killed by the magic of the jealous countess?
The Lady of the House of Love is a retelling of the vampire myth. A soldier, travelling by cycle through Romania, is lured to a mansion where a beautiful vampire tries to seduce him. His virginity somehow protects him from her, and he escapes only to have to face the greater horror of World War I.
The final three stories are variants on the Little Red Riding Hood story. In The Werewolf A girl is attacked by a wolf on the way to see her grandmother. She cuts its paw off, but when she reaches her grandmother’s house it is revealed that the grandmother was the werewolf. She is stoned to death by the villagers, who were are told are always quick to dispose of older women suspected of witchcraft in this manner. The Red character is here an unreliable narrator, and the suspicion lingers that she has attacked her grandmother in order to secure her cottage for herself. The next version of this story is The Company of Wolves which of course was turned into a feature film directed by Neil Jordan. This is a complex narrative with a number of stories within the story. A witch turns a wedding congregation into wolves. A young couple are about to have sex on their wedding night, but the husband goes outside, never to return. She eventually remarries and has children, only for her first husband to finally reappear in wolf form. In the final story within the story yet another version of Red this time the wolf masquerades as the hunter before eating the grandmother. Red refuses to be scared by the wolf, and seduces him.
“See! Sweet and sound she sleeps in granny’s bed, between the paws of the tender wolf.”
In the collection’s final story, Wolf-Alice, Red is now a feral child raised by wolves. She lives with a vampiric Duke. When the duke is shot and wounded by the inevitable angry villagers, Alice saves him by tenderly licking the blood and dirt from his face.
In The Bloody Chamber Carter breaks multiple genre boundaries. On their own the stories are carefully crafted little gems, but the cumulative impact is unsettling and powerful.
The Reading Bug 