Ms.

The Bloody Chamber

By Angela Carter

How far, and in what ways, do you think that the narrative variety is important to the overall effectiveness of The Bloody Chamber collection?

Carter's The Bloody Chamber is a collection of fairy tales which cleverly address and question modern issues using contemporary and experimental narrative devices. The tone is set by a chorus of characters that Carter creates by using a number of narrators throughout the collection. She makes a large number of intertextual references, a very modern technique which sometimes serves as a joke between the reader and the writer breaking down the wall between them. She uses different kinds of language that seem to clash violently at times. These devices display the tone of the book and also the period in literary history that Carter was writing in, where previous boundaries were being broken down and writers were exploring new areas and testing the current conventions. All of this affects The Bloody Chamber's effect on the reader.

Fairy tales have been rewritten and modernised by various writers, but none of these versions are quite like Carter's. 'The Bloody Chamber' is a retelling of the classic 'Blue Beard', but rather than sounding like an epic fairy tale, it could be argued that Carter writes too much like a simple romance novelist, in this story in particular. This tale of a wealthy older man scooping up an young and innocent young girl may sound like something a reader would find in a Mills and Boone novel, but she has reasons for using this story and the "tender, delicious" language within it.

Carter uses this story and the others, to try and break through the feminist section of the literary and cultural wall and tries to give women back their sex by writing and exploring the fairy tales of a little girl, the 'trashy' romances of a teenaged girl and the harsher, more graphic issues of young adulthood.

The language of the stories, for the most part, does give the impression of a fairy tale atmosphere.

"And, ah! his castle. The faery solitude of the place; with its turrets of misty blue, its courtyard, its spiked gate, his castle that lay on the very bosom of the sea with seabirds mewing about its attics..."

But this dreamy and almost poetic language is punctuated with bursts of sharp, course language,

"... her cunt a split fig below the great globes of her buttocks..."

In The Bloody Chamber, this mixture of language could be said to mirror the way the lead character is in two minds about her husband and her own sexuality. But the use of clashing language like this throughout the book is how Carter manages to write fairy tales about more adult themes.

She discusses issues such as male domination, sex and unusual fetishes, but disguises it cleverly with a more innocent language. For example

"when he'd finished with the agent, he turned to me and stroked the ruby necklace that bit into my neck, but with such tenderness now, that I ceased flinching and he caressed breasts."

This passage is taken from a rather sensual scene from 'The Bloody Chamber.' The sexual nature of it is quite plain, but is written with a softer language that suggests comfort with words such as "tenderness" and "caressed." But another element of the sexual acts that have just taken place is exposed with the sudden use of a much harsher word "bit." This, paired with "now, I ceased flinching" shows that the narrator has experienced some pain or distaste in the act she was recently engaged in. The pleasure the narrator's husband finds in women's pain is clear when the narrator later discovers the contents of his 'bloody chamber'. The passage is a reflection on the conflicting tones of the story that also run throughout the book.

Another theme Carter explores is the fine line between non-humans or animals, and humans by using different narrative techniques. Throughout the book, the stories' protagonists change. They are mostly women who experience a metamorphosis of either themselves, or another character of the story into something more animal or human. Others are told from the point of view of some omniscient overseer of all that takes place in the story. Some of the narrators, like in 'Puss in Boots' for example, are actually animals.

The theme of animalistic men and human-like animals gets stronger the deeper the reader travels into the heart (or Bloody Chamber) of the book, as if the book its self is experiencing the same metamorphosis as the characters themselves. The protagonists in the first three stories all seem like very refined young women. But from one story to the next the plot involves the female narrator becoming more animalistic, in 'The Tiger's Bride' for example, the narrator does actually turn into an animal when the skin is licked away to reveal shiny fur. Then after this story, the reader has come to the very centre of the collection, and here they encounter the first completely animal narrator, Puss of 'Puss in Boots.' Having the stories in this order creates an effective build up towards the centre of this book where the boundaries between men and animals appears to have been smashed completely, and the stories can be written from the point of view of a cat, who has the abilities to speak and wear clothes like a human. No story from here on is narrated by someone quite so human as the women in the first three stories.

This changing of the narrator does not only happen once in each story. At various points in the texts, the tense changes from past to present, which makes it appear as if the narrator is switching between the voice of the character in the story, to an external narrator of their story. There is a good example of this at work in 'Company of Wolves,'

"He strips off his trousers and she can see how hairy his legs are..."

This part of the story is written in present tense, as if from the mouth of someone who is a part of the story and experiencing it as the reader reads it. But then it changes almost instantly to a different perspective,

"The last thing the old lady saw in all this world was a young man, eyes like cinders, naked as a stone, approaching