Critics on Carter & The Gothic
“Angela Carter’s writing is fascinated by the macabre and the erotic, the dissolute and the grotesque. Inhabited by vamps and vampires, dandies and decadents, sadistic puppet-masters and disconsolate masochists, her textual landscapes conjure images of desire and deviance which have at once captivated and disquieted readers. One of the most exercising aspects of Carter’s work is that it eludes easy categorisations and unambiguous classifications. Yet, from the spectacles of suffering femininity and highly stylised displays of cruelty in her early novels to the representations of theatricality, illegitimacy and disguise in her later fiction, Gothic appurtenances and acts produce some of the most compelling and unsettling effects of Carter’s work. […] Vampiric, menacing and sly, [Carter’s fictions] are conspicuously Gothic creations, built, like Frankenstein’s creature, from the dusty vestiges of previous literary and cultural forms” (Rebecca Munford, Decadent daughters and monstrous mothers: Angela Carter and the European Gothic, pp. 1-2).
“waxworks, clockwork dolls, dark doubles and automata, uncanny repetitions and phantasmal projections” all appear in Gothic literature (Ibid., p. 110).
“Confusing the boundaries between the animate and the inanimate, the human and the non-human, the automaton serves as an emblem for the Enlightenment’s simultaneous championing of human autonomy and freedom and fascination with the mechanical and the automated” (Ibid., p. 112).
“Brimming with automata, dolls and mannequins, Carter’s writing is inhabited too by a macabre cast of toy-makers, puppet-masters and mad scientists” (Ibid., pp. 112-13).
“A semantic deliberation over the title of the collection reveals its application to female sexuality. ‘Chamber’ carries two differing connotations. On one level, it is a room (usually a bedroom) and therefore suggestive of two related behaviour patterns: the activities of the erotic and the inactivities of sleep. Herein lies the crux of the debate over female sexuality in these stories: are the women active or passive, erotic or inert? The violence inherent in the world ‘bloody’ leads us to expect the chamber to be the location for hideous and violent sexual excess. But what if we read the word ‘chamber’ not as a room, but as a vase or a vessel for carrying liquid? In this case the blood is the liquid with which the vessel is filled (indeed the substance that gives the vase its definition). The associated excesses are those of overspill, not those which threaten containment. In this case it is not the chamber that contains and thus constrains the woman (who then becomes a terrified victim), but the woman herself who takes control as the body of excess” (Lucie Armitt, ‘The Fragile Frames of The Bloody Chamber’, in The Infernal Desires of Angela Carter, eds. Joseph Bristow and Trev Lynn Broughton, pp. 88-99 [pp. 91-92]).
“Carter’s work often uses the strategies of the literary Gothic against itself. Where the Gothic is used to destabilise complacencies but ultimately reinforce obedience and conformity, Carter reinvigorates its characteristics and refuses comfortable endings, leaving readers and characters with a mix of wariness and agency, even if only potentially. The locations and the metaphors are similar, the underlying message quite different” (Gina Wisker, Contemporary Women’s Gothic Fiction, p. 35).
“Her modes of seeing and writing are eclectic and in this she also produces a postmodern Gothic, at once baroque and embellished. It harks back to the traditional forms and concerns of the Gothic, both replaying yet upsetting them, exploring and exposing women’s entrapment, deceits, haunted histories, with layers of reference to those Gothic horror writers who have influenced her: e.g. Poe, Stoker and Le Fanu. Her work queries their resolutions” (Ibid., p. 38).
“Angela Carter revisited, recast and rewrote the Gothic for the late twentieth century, taking a relatively neglected perspective and mode of writing, and turning its tropes inside out, upside down. She undercuts and exposes the constraining myths and cautionary tales behind the familiar Gothic, reappropriating its spaces, tones and tensions from a simultaneously wise and wicked feminist perspective, and utilising an agenda of exposure, explosion of nonsense, and agency. In so doing she revitalises the power of the Gothic to highlight constraining narratives by which we live our lives and express hopes, desires and fears in fictions and film, art and popular culture” (Ibid., p. 39).
“In ‘The Bloody Chamber’, Carter rewrites the Bluebeard tale and critiques romantic fiction, using Gothic spatialised horror, entrapment and reification. It is a favourite, archetypal male control fantasy, which Carter exposes as constructing the wife as commodity, an ornament and feast for the eyes, to be disposed of when she starts to question and query male control of power and knowledge” (Ibid., pp. 50-51).