Peripeteia

An extract from the introduction in our newish critical guide to The Bloody Chamber

Forty years and counting after they were first published in 1979, critical debate continues about Carter as a writer and the nature of her collection of stories, or tales, as she preferred to call them, The Bloody Chamber. For some critics, Carter is fundamentally a feminist writer and this collection fundamentally feminist in agenda. Certainly in many of the stories the female characters are empowered, breaking out of gender conventions, escaping the clutches of male persecutors, neatly side-stepping conventional narrative paths to victimhood, sometimes even becoming persecutors themselves. As a writer, Carter herself also breaks free from stifling gender restrictions imposed on female writers, discarding lady-like propriety like an outdated corset. Her writing is fearlessly violent, sexual, bawdy, transgressive, full of passionate desire and excess. But Carter’s presentation of female characters, and especially female sexual desire, has also been controversial, with some feminist critics arguing that despite their apparent agency, her female characters remain caught in the nets of male desires. According to Patricia Dunker, for instance, ‘Carter is re-writing the tales within the strait-jackets of their original structures’. Moreover, according to Dunker, Carter ‘reproduces rather than alters the original, deeply, rigidly sexist psychology of the erotic’.

Other critics claim the Carter of The Bloody Chamber as an essentially Gothic writer, a Gothic writer who takes classic fairy tales and gives them a dark Gothic style. It’s not, however, just an eerie mood and a decadent prose style that Carter adds to the fairy tales. Rather she rifles through the Gothic stock cupboard and plucks out any items she can use. Many of the stories contain Gothic tropes – entrapment in castles, narratives of temptation, sin and punishment, liminal beings, such as vampires and werewolves, darkness, mirrors and moonlight. From the first wave of the Gothic she dusts down and re-engineers the innocent maiden and re-animates her oppressive male persecutor. From Victorian Gothic she picks up liminality, transformation and the collapsing of the distinction between hero and villain. But, as part of the third wave of the Gothic, Carter goes further than Stevenson in The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde [1886] and, like Anne Rice in Interview with a Vampire [1976] writes, in The Lady of the House of Love, from the perspective of the vampire itself, turning the human world into the disturbing other.

Some of these stories are, however, far more Gothic than others. The Courtship of Mr Lyon, for instance, does not have an oppressively gloomy atmosphere and its potential ‘monster’, the beast, turns out not to be very fearsome at all. Even more obviously, the ribald romp of Puss-in-Boots is tonally at odds with the Gothic – it’s a bawdy comic parable – and its only monster is the dragonish servant who guards the beautiful maiden.

Arguments could be put forward for Carter to be a re-writer of fairy tales, with adult or Gothic twists, or for The Bloody Chamber to be categorised as a type of English Magic Realism. Indisputably the book was influenced by Carter’s reading of the psychologist Bruno Bettelheim’s collection of essays, The Uses of Enchantment [1976] in which the author presents Freudian readings of a range of famous fairy tales. Carter herself wrote that her intention in The Bloody Chamber was to take the latent symbolic meanings of fairy tales and make these fully explicit. She believed that the original fairy tales had been tamed by their middle-class collectors and her job was to re-wild them to reveal their brutal, barbarous, uncivilised hearts.

However, rather than see her collection of tales as either decidedly one thing or another thing, dominated by this or by that aspect, perhaps a more helpful way of classing it is as a work of postmodernism. Carter certainly revels in hybridity, mashing-up of a whole host of disparate genres and kneading them into a collage of stories. She also liberates her characters from the metanarratives in which they were straight-jacketed and, simultaneously, liberates herself both from the straight-jacket of the ‘lady-novelist’ and from conventions of narrative, such as consistency of narrative perspective and of tense. The tone of the work, the exuberant sense of play, the self-conscious story-telling voice, is also characteristically postmodern.

Margaret Atwood argues that while there is a pervasive dynamic between the aggressor and a victim in The Bloody Chamber this relationship is not always defined by gender. Atwood’s contention can be used to counterbalance what could be argued to be Duncker’s over-emphasise on gender and on female victimhood.

Lucie Armitt and Merja Makinen perform the same reading strategy when they argue that earlier critics miscategorised Carter’s tales as re-workings of fairy tales. For both these critics, Carter is, fundamentally, a Gothic writer.

Merja Makinen - Argues against Duncker. Makinen says that Carter is re-assessing female sexuality and doesn’t ‘sanitize’ it - therefore it has things that aren’t great like perversion and violence. She also says that Duncker’s reading that the beasts = men is narrow; Makinen reads the beasts as ‘projections of feminine libido’. Makinen also asserts that genres do have certain ideological assumptions in many cases, but these can be changed (so the genre doesn’t necessarily = ‘straitjacket’). Makinen says Carter uses irony to both stabilise (and almost parody) sexist elements to the stories, but she also destabilises them. She uses TCOW as an example -

“All the better to eat you with. The girl burst out laughing; she knew she was nobody's
meat. She laughed at him full in the face, she ripped off his shirt for him and flung it into the fire, in the fiery wake of her own discarded clothing.”

The girl laughs at the original story, an example of where Carter is remoulding the tales. Makinen also emphasises (via Carter’s own writings) the role of the reader (Carter didn’t like books that told people what to do). The tales contain arguments and counter-arguments for the reader to consider themselves.

Whereas Duncker argued that Carter’s women remained trapped in the ‘strait-jackets’ of the tales, Helen Simpson opines that Carter’s women are struggling out of the strait-jackets of biological essentialism, history and ideology.

Added a little extra to the end of my essay on 'Wolf-Alice':

Happy ever after

When the young husband of the dead bride exacts his revenge by shooting the Duke with a silver bullet, it is Wolf-Alice who inadvertently saves her master from being hunted down, as, in her white dress, she is mistaken by the peasants for the vengeful ghost of the bride. Then she takes a more active role in saving him. Crucially, like the young soldier in The Lady of the House of Love, she feels pity for another creature’s suffering and ministers tenderly to his wounds: ‘She leapt upon his bed to lick, without hesitation or disgust, with a quick tender gravity, the blood and dirt from his cheeks and forehead.’ Recalling the end of another wolf-story, The Company of Wolves, once again, the moon, the mistress of transformations, appears at the crucial moment and there is a double transformation. Both Wolf-Alive and the Duke are metamorphised into new beings. By continuing to tend and nurse him, she saves and humanizes him with her ‘soft, moist, gentle tongue’, until, finally, his human face appears in that crucial object for the discovery of identity, the Lacanian motif of the mirror.

The final iteration of these tales, Wolf-Alice closely mirrors the first story, The Bloody Chamber. The differences between the two tales highlight how the last version is the most hopeful and positive in the collection. In this version, not only are the characters transformed at the end of the story, but so too is the central motif of the bloody chamber. The chamber metamorphizes at the end of Wolf-Alice from the horror place of violent desecration to the place of emotions and the seat of love, the human heart.