The Bloody Chamber - Angela Carter - Textual Analysis & Secondary Source Analysis/Quotations PDF

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Lectures were given by Dr. Baker and Dr. Elliott, these notes contain both the notes taken from the lectures and are substantiated by notes from seminar discussion and secondary sources/analysis....

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The Bloody Chamber by Angela Carter Lecture 1 – Angela Carter’s Fairy Tales for Grownups  ‘Shaking a Leg’ – discusses the use of The Bloody Chamber as a feminist political writer - ‘It turned out to be easier to deal with shifting structures of reality and sexuality by using sets of shifting structures derived from orally transmitted traditional tales’  Equal call to freedom throughout these stories  Carter looks at mythological function in the modern world - ‘[A]ll myths are products of the human mind and reflect only aspects of material human practice. I’m in the demythologising business’  The primary myth that Carter attacks is that of ‘the fall’ - Myth creates a specific world, a world that rejects the idea of female sexuality and denies any opportunity for it to be explored  Folklore, in Carter’s view, is focused on women’s oral tradition - Provides a much more open framework for approaching the world  Fairy tales provide a ‘way-out’ of the oddity of the world, a way of accepting and understanding what is being dealt with in modern day life  ‘Fairy-tales resist symbolism’  Fairy-tales provide its reader with a way of responding to the incidents of modern life  The Bloody Chamber is an alteration to the story of Bluebeard: - Marries a woman (never given a name) she is left as he departs for meetings and as he leaves he provides her with keys to the house including a small room at the back which she must not go in. The end continues much the same way as that of the Bloody Chamber, however it presents various types of moral: 1. Money can buy happiness 2. Women shouldn’t be so curious and should listen to their husbands 3. Men are in the business of saving weak women  Perrault provides his own morals from the tale: 1. Don’t be curious 2. Reminder of past times  Bluebeard is a satanic figure - Leading his wife to her fate, like that of Eve and the great fall  Intertextuality is based on allusion, on relatability - Understanding one text through another text - Vast number of intertexts within The Bloody Chamber  Carter uses other stories that she believes her readers to know in order to further the understanding of her own story  No two readers, reading The Bloody Chamber, will read the same tale as Carter’s use of intertextuality will conjure up different recollections among different readers  Time is disjointed, technology of the 20th century, yet behaviours of many centuries before that  Stories are used as an index to character – we know about her before we are even introduced to her - She exists in the Bluebeard story merely to marry off her daughter, whereas in Carter’s version she becomes a key factor in the plot and the finale of the tale - She proves, unlike the Bluebeard version, that women do not need to be rescued by women  The narrator is always seeing herself through someone else - The story could be read as an understanding of the narrator’s education  Function of the mirror in regard to femininity and objectification - Carter’s character is defined continually as how her husband sees her - Mirror can be liberating or confining  Pornography is like the book of Genesis: prescribes an abstract view on relationships between people  She is made into an abstract woman/character in the episode after discovering the pornographic novels in her husband’s library

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The key is a phallic symbol; Lily is that of the female The novel forces the reader to reflect on how stories are formed and how they affect the reader themselves

Lecture 2 – Hairy in the Inside: Angela Carter’s Wolves  The 3 wolf stories are meant to lead on after the Bloody Chamber and are to be a reworking of the Little Red Riding Hood tale (werewolf trilogy)  Carter’s versions of the stories are meant to be drawn from Charles Perrault’s take on the fairy-tales - Carter produced a translation of the Perrault revisionist tales  The tales are not escapism, they are an imaginative portrayal of modern existence - Narratives that comment on and critique modern social practices  The oral tale of Little Red Riding Hood is meant to be a depiction of a young girl’s transition into adulthood through her apprenticeship etc.  Perrault’s version is meant to emphasise a young girl’s responsibility in protecting herself due to the likelihood of victimisation – normalises rape and victim blaming  Brothers Grimm version again emphasises the responsibility placed on the little girl with the mother’s words to [not stray from the path] - The nature of women is to be policed  Identifying the heterosexual relationships as a relationship of predator and prey  Carter’s version is a reiteration of the oral version – focusses on the replacement if the grandmother by her granddaughter - The werewolf means human wolf according to Anglo Saxon dialect - The distinction between human and animal may not be a fixed one, the ideas are permeable - ‘A werewolf is the problem of animal difference expressed in monster’s flesh’ – Jeffrey J. Cohen  According to Judaeo-Christianity, animals exclusively live to serve human interest  The wolf acts as a screen which Carter’s views on human nature are projected  Continuous imagery of the wolves being men - The idea that they are all around us - The wolves cannot be kept out – metaphor that there is no escape from human nature, no escape from the demands of the flesh  ‘The relations between men and women are often distorted by the reluctance of both parties to acknowledge that the function of flesh is meat to the carnivore but not grass to the herbivore’ - In The Company of Wolves the girls disdain and rejection of the idea that she is to be thought of as meat is reference to the possibility of a (forced) sexual relationship between her and the werewolf - Blurred lines between what an animal is in contrast to a human – a distinct comment on human nature and the attitudes of people in modern day relationships (mainly heterosexual) - Lacan’s mirror stage is utilised throughout Carter’s Wolf Alice as a way of presenting the view that ‘predatory’ and ‘animal’ behaviour is bread throughout society – does this through the wolf imagery of Alice and the Duke Secondary Reading: The World of Angela Carter: A Critical Investigation Dani Cavallaro  “On the more sensational plane, Carter’s fairy tales bear witness to the writer’s fascination with materiality by means of stories that throw into relief with no death of corporeal details the countless longings and perils lurking within sexual liaisons of both familiar and bizarre kinds” pg. 100  “One of the main reasons for that haziness is that the fairy tale as a form includes both orally disseminated narratives, supposedly attributable to anonymous and collective authorship, and literary texts with named individual authors, and that only the written variety is actually available for inspection and methodical investigation through scholarly lenses” pg. 102

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“Oral and written stories have promiscuously exchanged their yarns, themes and imagery with one another for time immemorial both within the scope of singular societies and across disparate cultural terrains” pg. 102 “…the fairy tale has increasingly thriven on the principle of heterogeneity, straddling numerous branches of literature and cultural history.” Pg. 102 “her fairy tale materials are consistently integrated with elements drawn from other fields and discourses” pg. 102 “Carter’s tendency not just to rewrite or adapt such traditional narratives but to combine them with other outlawed, disreputable, or ‘minor’ literary forms” pg. 102 – Sarah Gamble “In addition, the striking variety of approaches and styles invoked by Carter in handling of the fairy tale consistently throws into relief this form’s penchant to manifest itself virtually all over the world by recourse to archetypal topes and motifs” pg. 102 “At the same time, she obliquely prompts us to consider the degree to which this interaction might be deemed the result of an intentionally pursued plan and the extent to which fairy tales might, on the contrary, have accumulated in an accretional manner as an offshoot of the recurrent use of materials gleaned from random encounters (either among separate milieux or else of one specific civilisation with a communal tradition or consciousness)” pg. 102 “If there is any satire present in the tale, one thing must not be made fun of, the magic itself. That must in that story be taken seriously, neither laughed at nor explained away” pg. 103 – J. R. R Tolkien “Most crucially, Carter employs throughout particular storytelling strategies which unequivocally stand out as generic markers of her stories as fairy tales even when she brings other genres into the narrative mix. These encompass the self-conscious employment of indeterminate, fuzzy or explicitly fantastical locations suggestive of a never-never realm as the settings within which often underprivileged heroes and heroines manage to triumph over powerful and abusive rivals against all odds. Exemplary characters and symbols are consistently brought into play to abet this classic formula, while taboos and the unpredictable repercussions of their violation furnish the teller with effective plot activators” pg. 107 “The purpose of this move was to reconfigure the original materials so as to make them explicitly consonant with the moral and educational tenets treasured by a primarily bourgeois audience” pg. 108 “… erotic allusions were carefully expunged, and starkly polarized gender positions were enthroned as unquestionable and immutable standards” pg. 108 “As a stylistic practice, moreover, it entails that even as she employs stock characters and related narrative formulae, Carter nonetheless endeavours to vary both their presentation and their impact. Thus, even though her dispossessed females are in many ways stereotypical, they are nonetheless often infused with unconventional degrees of liveliness and humour, while her rapacious male often exhibits personalities so urbanely eclectic as to transcend the monolithic category of the villain” pg. 123 “Carter is quite prepared not merely to adopt but even to revel in typical situations and types, she simultaneously explodes conventionality and conformism by proposing varyingly audacious departures from tradition. This objective is frequently accomplished through an irreverent repositioning of established popular figures” pg. 124 “With the image of metamorphosing heroine, Carter honours most memorably the animal nested within each and every human both as a person’s intrinsic spirit (denoted by the word anima, or soul) and as the bestial energy that permeates and potentially connects all species on the planet in an invisible web of pulsating desire” pg. 125 “Through her unorthodox female characters, Carter is able to transcend the stereotype of the passive woman who is powerless to achieve freedom not only because of her subjection to an exploitative and selfish patriarch but also – and more ominously – because of her lack of imagination” pg. 126

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“Carter’s capacity to make us see past the simplistic equation of the passive female to a victim by urging us to recognise the status of identity as a fluid and shifting endowment” pg. 126\ “the tale’s heroine could be said to epitomize the figure of the “woman in process” a social creature on the verge of examining “her subject position”” pg. 126 “Carter is eager to underscore, both in the title story and in its companion pieces, the ancestral coalescence of sexual passion and monstrosity, fascination and revulsion, Eros and Thanatos” pg. 126

Angela Carter: New Critical Readings Sonya Andermahr & Lawrence Phillips  “Carter’s story challenges male authorship of horror, the predominance of male protagonists and the assumption of male audiences” pg. 33 - horror-fantasy has become of great importance to female audiences  The Company of Wolves challenges masculine gender roles as well through her determination to bring the ‘abnormality’ of female gender norms to the fore. She does this by ‘contrasting an assertive female with protagonist with images of male abjection’ pg. 37  The werewolf transformation scenes create a sense of empathy among the female characters in Carter’s stories as it portrays them as isolate from society – ‘the werewolf’s position is conflicted, reluctant monster and helpless victim further blurs traditional gender roles’ pg. 37  In discussion of the film adaptation of The Company of Wolves, it has been said ‘the transformation scenes foreground the abject male body, not female terror’ pg. 37 – discuss this in relation to Carter’s abolition of gender norms and not just in relation to the female  ‘The inherent appeal of these monsters is their combination of hypermasculinity with feminized abjection and vulnerability’ pg. 37  The Company of Wolves ‘suggests a contrast between the safety of home and the danger of the forest, yet even supposedly safe spaces are disrupted in the Red Riding Hood tale’ pg. 39 - Carter tries to emphasise that there is no such thing as a safe place - ‘Life, including sexuality, is risky’ pg. 39  “‘The Company of Wolves’ and other stories from The Bloody Chamber match an assertive female protagonist with a violent male partner, seeking to rewrite the gender typing of classic horror through the examination of power dynamics” pg. 40  Market for female gothic comes from the desire to ‘deal with women’s fears of and confusion about masculine behaviour in a world in which men learn to devalue women’ pg. 40 – (Modelski 1998: 60)  Those who only view the ‘wolf trilogy’ as a depiction of misogyny and patriarchal myths of gender are failing to understand the attractions of violent sexuality in fantasy pg. 40  “Carter’s story gives voice to forbidden desire” pg. 40  Challenging combinations of violence and heterosexuality pg. 41...