Andrew Green on (Edited )
She’s got the key of the door …
Doors are significant throughout The Bloody Chamber. On many occasions they act as potent and threatening boundaries. In ‘The Bloody Chamber’, for instance, the locked door of the forbidden chamber represents the boundary of secrecy that separates the young wife from true knowledge of her husband and his dark past. The locked door symbolises exclusion and separation and the door is envisaged as a solid, impassable barrier, the keys to which are the possession of the threatening husband. Likewise, in ‘Puss in Boots’ the young wife has to live behind the locked doors of her home, separated from the outside world by the will of her jealous husband. Both women in turn connect with the caged birds of ‘The Erl-King’, which are separated from the outside world by the doors of their cages.
The existence of these powerful (and male-controlled) barriers, however, is only one half of the equation. Doors are not solely methods of separating and excluding, they also offer the possibility of communication and of access, and keys play a significant role in these tales. In ‘The Bloody Chamber’ and in ‘Puss in Boots’ both young wives manage to come by keys that allow them to take control over the differing boundaries they face. The young bride in ‘The Bloody Chamber’ instinctively knows that the keys her husband gives her offer a dubious and threatening possibility, and she has to decide whether or not she wishes to exert her new-found power to cross the particular boundary she faces. Her husband makes it clear that the key to the secret chamber gives access not to his heart but to his ‘enfer’ – the infernal region. In order to understand her loneliness and isolation, however, she enters and in so doing sees all the more clearly the nature of the barriers that exist within her marriage. In ‘Puss in Boots’ – the only overtly comic tale in the collection – the young wife in gaining her husband’s keys finds the liberation of sex with her young and virile lover. The keys in these tales, like the telephone wires in ‘The Courtship of Mr Lyon’, and like the causeway in ‘The Bloody Chamber’, are intermittent and doubtful means of communication.
Men behind masks
Masks are another significant form of boundary or barrier in the tales in this collection. Naturally they represent an attempt to cover up, to protect or to deceive. The mask worn by the husband in ‘The Bloody Chamber’, for instance, conceals both his face and the truth of his personality. The young bride is deliberately kept from seeing his true face, although the act of concealment is, perhaps, in itself revealing. The thick beard he wears on his face – an almost bestial touch – also serves to cover up his face and to prevent her seeing the fullness of his features; and when he returns to the island after his intended journey to New York, the misting over of his eyes acts as a further and even more sinister form of masking. In order to try to penetrate the mask, the young wife, left alone in the castle whilst her husband leaves for an unexpected business trip, goes to the forbidden room looking for the ‘real man’ behind the façade.
Masks are also important elsewhere in the collection. In ‘The Tiger’s Bride’, the beast is ‘not much different from any other man, although he wears a mask with a man’s face painted most beautifully on it.’ Masks thus establish one of the major concerns of the collection – the extent to which the surface represents reality. This often hinges upon the boundary between the human and the beastly. The husband in ‘The Bloody Chamber’ is in many ways a beast, while the beasts in ‘The Tiger’s Bride’ and in ‘The Courtship of Mr Lyon’ are in many ways quite human. This connective-transgressive blurring of the human and animal worlds is, perhaps, at its most strident and complete in ‘Wolf-Alice’ of whom Carter tells us: ‘Nothing about her is human except that she is not a wolf; it is as if the fur she thought she wore has melted into her skin and become part of it, although it does not exist.’
Getting beneath the skin
Closely connected to Carter’s use of masks is her use of skin and fur. In many of the tales there is an uneasy and disturbing interchange between skin (humanity?) and fur (beastliness?). Which is inside? Which is outside? Which is better? Which is truth? Carter constantly challenges where the boundary lies. Thus when, at the end of ‘The Tiger’s Bride’ the girl has her skin licked off, it reveals not raw flesh but rather a new and hidden surface. The sheepskin coat (overtones of course of the wolf in sheep’s clothing of the fairy tale world) serves as a significant barrier to understanding, and the furry external appearance of the beast is a barrier to the development of relationship.
Skin is also important in ‘The Courtship of Mr Lyon’. The decadent shopping trip where the father plans to buy his daughter furs introduces the important idea that skin can be changed, and Beauty is later pictured ‘retreating nervously into her skin’ before her final transmogrification, when she is compared to ‘pampered, exquisite, expensive cats.’ Like many of the girls in these tales, the tiger’s bride has to strip back to her skin – nakedness and its attendant vulnerability (but also control) is often necessary in these tales in order for true self-discovery and illumination to take place. In Carter’s world, skin – like doors and masks – functions simultaneously as both barrier and entrance point. This is effectively illustrated in ‘The Erl-King’ where the central character, again stripped naked, imagines herself being subsumed into the Erl-King as ‘[his] skin covers me entirely.’