Book Review: The Bloody Chamber, Angela Carter
The Bloody Chamber, Angela Carter
Read: 10/11 - 11/12/2023
My rating: 4 /5 stars
Book of 2023: 15
From familiar fairy tales and legends - Red Riding Hood, Bluebeard, Puss in Boots, Beauty and the Beast, vampires and werewolves - Angela Carter has created an absorbing collection of dark, sensual, fantastic stories.
I bought this a while back, for once I don’t remember the story of how I got it, or where I got it from. It’s obviously been on my radar since I discovered Gothic fiction. I’ve read another of Angela Carter’s works (Heroes and Villains). As usual, I struggled to get through it at much of a pace because of the fact it is a short story collection. I struggle to pick the book up when I’m between stories, because there isn’t a current narrative rattling around in my head.
The stories inside:
The Bloody Chamber
The Courtship of Mr Lyon
The Tiger’s Bride
Puss-in-Boots
The Erl-King
The Snow Child
The Lady of the House of Love
The Werewolf
The Company of Wolves
Wolf-Alice
I started this on the train to Manchester. The first story is the main one: The Bloody Chamber. A new story, devised by Carter, of a young girl travelling to her new husband’s house. There, she finds herself lonely, disgusted by her husband, piano playing her one solace. We see her husband’s desire for her change her own self-image. She suddenly sees herself from a different perspective, “away from girlhood” (1), into marriage, with his gift, or collar, of ruby-red choker necklace, “like an extraordinarily precious slit throat” (6).
It’s a story of corruption, of the desire to corrupt. The innocence of the virgin, then the disposal of the tainted. “He might have chosen me because, in my innocence, he sensed a rare talent for corruption” (17). Our protagonist’s husband desires her, while she is pure, untouched, until he has had his marital way with her, and then once she has been defiled, and used, he must destroy her.
We have a juicy tension building scene where our protagonist discovers her own fate, the truth about her husband, by Pandora's-box-ing her way to his bloody chamber, by using the one key he told her not to use. This story being the longest, was probably my favourite.
Overall, it was a joy to return to the world of the Gothic, the haunted old buildings. The vampires, the werewolves, the deranged men with their predatory-murderous wanting. It reminded me why I fell in love with these tropes the way I did.
Seeing these stories take on a new turn was a joy. Another of my favourites was puss-in-boots, with the vampire-queen close behind (for obvious reasons). Carter insists the stories are not retellings, they are in fact NEW stories, new narratives, inspired by the ones we know. In each one, the frequent thematic explorations include gender. Or more, the power struggles between them.
In some of the stories, we see a swap of the usual narrative - with elements of the supernatural allowing for female agency. Some of the stories that maintain male-dominance end in the humiliation of these characters, or expose their cruel ways so as to ridicule them.
Carter constantly reveals the complicated nature of cruelty, of cruel characters - almost humanising them, or revealing their own struggles, instead of building a black and white picture of good and evil, captor and prisoner, monster and angel.
These stories are a TREAT. I love gothicness.
Carter’s writing is beautiful. These stories are so much more than just reimaginings, they lure you in, intrigue you, shock you, build you up with suspense, break you down with atrocities, and they’re brilliant. It is brimming with exciting descriptions, vivid imagery, and subverted tropes.
I’ll leave you with my favourite quote from the entire collection:
“If you spy a naked man among the pines, you must run as if the Devil were after you.” (132)
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