The Bloody Chamber By Angela Carter Analysis and Summary

A teenage girl marries an older, wealthy French Marquis whom she does not love. When he takes her to his castle, she learns that he enjoys sadistic pornography and takes pleasure in her embarrassment. She is a talented pianist, and a young man, a blind piano tuner, hears her music and falls in love with her.

The women’s husband tells her that he must leave on a business trip and forbids her to enter one particular room while he is away. She enters the women in his absence and realizes the full extent of his perverse and murderous tendencies when she discovers the bodies of his previous wives.

When the Marquis returns home he discovers that she has entered the room and proceeds to try to add her to his collection of corpses through beheading. The brave piano tuner is willing to stay with her even though he knows he will not be able to save her. She is saved at the last moment at the end of the story by her mother, who arrives and shoots the Marquis just as he is about to murder the girl.

The girl, her mother and the piano turner go on to live together, and the girl uses her now considerable fortune to convert the castle into a school for blind children.

Here are some points we can make about the summary of the story:

• This is a simple melodrama with a piano tuner twist. This is a ‘good vs evil’ story where good is captured by evil and then rescued.
• It is a expected story with an unexpected outcome. This makes the reader question their assumptions. The bilnd piano turner should have been the hero. However, it turns out that the mother is the hero.
• ‘Sadistic pornography’ is when people cause pain for pleasure. The male character is called the ‘Marquis’ after a man from the French revolution called the Marquis de Sade. He wrote a book ‘120 days in Sodom’ which is basically a perverted pornographic book.

• The denouement (climax of the story) is when the Marquis is shot by the mother.
• There is an Epilogue which is the story after the main story, P41 ‘We led a quiet life…’.
• There are lots of Freudian symbols scattered through the story. These are symbols with obvious sexual connotations.
• There is intertextuality where there is deliberate referencing of other texts that the reader is likely to know. The Bloody Chamber was wrote 100 years after the Marquis de Sade wrote 120 Days in Sodom.
• There is menstrual taboo which is the cultural uneasiness and reluctance to speak about the menstrual cycle.
• There is olfactory imagery. This is imagery that appeals to the readers sense of smell and taste.
• This is a pastiche. This is the self-consciously retelling and altering a well know tale, possibly for witty effect. In the case of ‘The Bloody Chamber’, the Carter is retelling is Bluebeard’s castle.
• There is lots of pornography in the story – sexual explicit representation in art, literature or other media.
• Sadomasochism – sexual gratification by the giving or receiving of pain (word comes from the Marquis de Sade).
• Simile – deliberate comparison using the word ‘like’ or ‘as’ in the phrase.
• Symbolism – using the familiar qualities of an object to represent an abstract notion (e.g. dove = peace).

• Gothic setting of being remote, imprisoning and strange.
• Gender representations.
• Passivity and sexual aggression – sadomasochism.
• Fairy tale referencing – an “aware” non-realistic text: ‘I really do believe that fiction absolutely self-conscious of itself as a different form of human experience than reality (that is, not a logbook of events) can help to transform reality itself”. (Carter letter to a friend).
• Transgression – She opens the door to find out what is inside. This could be seen like the Bloody Chamber is the womb where she opens herself up to knowledge, like Eve did in the Garden of Eden.

• ‘The Bloody Chamber’ is a pastiche of Bluebeard’s Castle.
• It is a Novella – between a short story and a novel.
• The narrative form is 1st person subjective, past tense, ‘I remember how, that night..” (opening).
• Creates empathy with the young bride.
• Allows tension to develop since the narrator only foreshadows the danger rather than the ultimate happy ending.
• Historic setting gives scope for many cultural reference points in music, literature and art.

Chronological Analysis

Here are some more quotations that are worth pointing out.

• ‘And did he give it to his other wives and have it back from them?’ – Melodramatic (i.e. obvious) foreshadowing.
• ‘Like an extraordinarily previous slit throat’ – necklace.
• ‘I sensed in myself a potential for corruption that took my breath away’ – This is not a simple presentation of gender stereotypes (repeated in other stories in the anthology).
• ‘He was awake and gazing at me’ – This is the “male gaze”: the feminist critique of patriarchy (Jean Yves’ blindness).
• ‘A remembered fragrance that made me think of my father’ – Freudian imagery, Oedipus/Electra complex.
• Good Quote ‘bare as a lamb chop’ – This is the most pornographic of all confrontations.
• ‘My little nun has found the prayer books, has she?’ – Gothic connection of religion and sexuality, e.g. Lewis’ The Monk.
• ‘I clung to him as though only the one who had inflicted the pain could comfort me’ – She is the complete control of the Marquis / sadomasochism.
• ‘To think he might have chosen me because, in my innocence, he sensed a rare talent for corruption’ – The Marquis knew that she would look into his chamber of dead wives.
• ‘A long winding corridor, as if it were the viscera of the castle’ – setting human mind or body metaphor.
• ‘The key slid into the lock as easily as a hot knife into butter’ – Freudian imagery.
• A quote from Charles Baudelaie – Les Fleurs du Mal, ‘There is a striking resemblance between the act of love and the ministrations of a torturer’.
• ‘The dreadful revelation of that bloody chamber’ – The bloody chamber has a double meaning: it could also mean the womb.
• ‘But the key was still caked with wet blood’ – Menstrual taboo.
• ‘The secret of Pandora’s box: but he had given me the box, himself knowing I must learn the secret’ – This has the connection to the Garden of Eden that it is the women that cause the problems because they are the ones that transgress.
• ‘The atrocious loneliness of that monster’ – Empathy.
• ‘That tell tale stain had resolved itself into a ark the shape and brilliance of the heart on a playing card’. This has connections to Macbeth but is also not realistic. It is instead symbolic to remind the reader of having blood on hands.
• ‘I only did what he knew I would’ / ‘ “Like Eve”, he said’ – This is anti-religious and blames women for doing bad things.
• ‘A crazy magnificent horsewomen in widow’s weeds’ – Questions gender stereotype and gender expectations (Jean Yves is useless).
• ‘No paint nor powder, no mark how thick or white, can mask that red mark on my forehead: I am glad he cannot see it…because it spares my shame’. She is marked by experience from transgressing. It is also the mark of discovery about herself and therefore the mark of shame.

• Courtship Of Mr Lyon – Loving the monster, ‘leonine shape of his head’ pitiful nature of the male protagonist.
• Tiger’s Bride – Marriage is a contract or bargain, fearful male protagonist, discovering the beast within.
• Puss In Boots – Fairy tale pastiche, but melodrama versus comedy makes them very different.
• The Erl-King – Loving the monster, male is powerful yet empty.
• The Snow Child – Sexual violence and colour imagery.
• The Lady Of The House Of Love – Mirror image with opposite gender roles.
• The Werewolf – Unexpected role for an older women.
• Company Of Wolves – Loving the monster, the beast inside.
• Wolf Alice – Exploration of female sexual development and awakening (psychoanalytic subtext).

• Freudian Psychoanalysis – Oedipus complex and phallic imagery.
• Jungian Patriarchal analysis – complex symbols.
• Sadomasochistic interpretation – deliberate ambiguity in destination.
• Deconstruction – Intertextuality, attempt to reinterpret fairy stories.
• Feminist and gender reading: patriarchy, male gaze, stereotyping, questioning gender roles

• Charles Perrault (1628-1703) Histoires ou Contes due temps passe – translated by Carter in 1977 (TBC 1979).
• “Bluebeard” French: (La Barbe bleue) is a French Literary Folktale, the most famous version remaining that written by Charles Perrault and first published by Barbin in Paris in January 1697 in Histoires ou Contes due temps passe’. The tale tells the story of a violent nobleman in the habit of murdering his wives and the attempts of one wife to avoid the fate of her predecessors. Gilles de Rais, a 15th-century aristocrat and prolific serial killer, has been suggested as the source for the character of Bluebeard, as he has Conomor the Accursed, an early Breton king.
• The Sadian Women – Carter 1979 about Marquis de Sade (1740-1814) “120 Days in Sodom” etc.