Clearly at least three of the stories in Carter’s collection easily fit these descriptions. The ‘Bloody Chamber’, the ‘Lady of the House of Love’ and the ‘Company of Wolves can be read as ‘external horror stories’; texts with ‘bloody corpses and bones strewn around’. The entrance to the bloodstained room in the ‘Bloody Chamber’ is pure ancient horror with its flickering tapers and worm holed wooden door ‘barred with black iron’, as are the instruments of torture. The ‘Lady of the House of Love’s’ gloomy bedroom too evokes foreboding with its ‘ancient catafalque’ and ‘trapped porcelain vases’. The horror inherent in the ‘Company of Wolves’ is more subtle, utilising the oral tradition of folk tales in order to create a sense of fear and expectation. Carter tells her readers:
‘You are always in danger in the forest where no people are.’
This sense of desolation coupled with the image of the ‘wicked trees’ who ‘go fishing on the behalf of their friends’ imbues the forest with malevolence and threat. The colours of Gothic are prominent in the narratives, the Marquis’s wife and Red Riding Hoods white skin, the soldiers fine throat ‘like a column of marble’, the white shift that conveys their innocence; the red jewels in the ‘Bloody Chamber’, the ‘unlucky fire opal’ and the necklace of rubies ‘like an extraordinarily slit throat’, Red Ridings Hood’s scarf and the countess’s lips. The vampiric central female protagonist, the werewolf and the Marquis are depicted as metamorphic figures oscillating along the boundaries between the human and the bestial, because they are anatomical representations of the rasngressive and untamed excesses of their own sexual practices.
Despite this, nothing in Carter’s work is ever ‘exactly as it seems. Conventionally the Gothic narrative shackles the night-dream world and situates the reader safely beyond its limits. The Bloody Chamber itself follows this dynamic, luring us into a sense of false narrative security in which the precise boundaries between the internal (present) and the external (retrospective) time sequences remain clear. However, as we progress through the tales as a whole, these apparent limitations imposed as ‘discrete spatio-temporal’ entities are breached by a form of ‘narrative overspill. In the ‘Lady of the House of Love’ we are told that the lady’s ‘ancestors sometimes peer out of the windows of her eyes’. In the Company of Wolves the folk myths of the past haunt the protagonists steps as she steals through the haunted forest. The ‘Bloody Chamber’ is populated by images of modernity, ‘trains’ and ‘bicycles’ in defiance of Gothic temporal conventions.
Yet, Carter is most famous for her challenges to the way female characters had previously been represented in pre-modern literature. As well as rewriting fairy tales, Carter also edited two collections of them in the early 1990’s, which included tales collected by Charles Perrault in the 1690’s. Perrault rewrote and sanatised the older, darker oral tales in order to use them to make moral points about the conduct of middle class children. In the Bloody Chamber Carter attempts to reclaim these tales from their seventeenth century recomposition and draw out their more covert gender implications. Two of the tales also rework elements familiar from the Female Gothic concerning absent mothers, most notably in the ‘Bloody Chamber’ when it is the mother’s presence that promises salvation. The tale concludes with the arrival of the young bride’s mother, summoned by ‘maternal telepathy’ (reworking Radcliffe’s heroines unconscious pursuits of their mothers) ‘, who ‘took aim and put a single irreproachable bullet’ through the head of her maddened husband. In the ‘Lady of the House of Love’ Carter twists the gender expectations even further, when it comes to the Gothic, since here the women is the supernatural monster, the predatory vampire, and the young virgin ‘prey’ is male. Yet, even while this story evokes much of the ‘Bloody Chambers’s, it rewrites it. The Marquis who features in the former cannot change his script, must enact the predator in true sadeian fashion; yet the lady ask the question he never could:
‘Can a bird sing only the song it knows or can it learn a new song?’
The vampiress’ cultural expectations are broken with the shattering of dark glasses and the ‘improvisation’ between predator and prey becomes possible, turning animalistic desire into a more nurturing, loving act. There is no happy ending – the vampiress dies and the youth goes off to war and possible death in the trenches of World War One – but this gender reconfiguration argues that no one is condemned to enact the past.
Carter has been criticised in Feminist circles because her heroines often appear complicit in – because at some level they appear to find pleasurable – the dangers that they are ostensibly threatened by. Merja Makine, has argued that such an approach overlooks the playful nature of Carter’s rewritings, which mock notions of misogynistic complicity, and moves beyond it by challenging the whole idea of a binary gender divide. Indeed Carter rewrites such tales so that the typical female victims are able to gain some rapprochement with their supposed aggressors (with the obvious excemption of the Marquis). In the ‘Company of Wolves’ (a reworking of ‘Little Red Riding Hood’), for example, the girls resists the sexual threat posed by the werewolf. When he restates the familiar refrain ‘All the better to eat you with’, she ‘(bursts) out laughing; she knew she was nobody’s meat’. The tale closes on an implied post-coital moment in which ‘sweet and sound she sleeps in granny’s bed, between the paws of the tender wolf’. These reworkings of older narrative forms suggest an engagement with post-modernism , but in one key respect they compromise such an association – their attempt to establish alternative models of rationality.
Aidan Day has claimed that Carter was a rationalist who deliberately worked against Enlightenment theories of reason indebted to the work of Rene Descartes. Descarte’s famous dictum ‘I think therefore I am’ emphasised a binary between inner consciousness and the outer material world – between self and other. This binary opposition underpins such pairings as unconscious/conscious, rational/irrational, and masculine/feminine, the kinds of pairings which the Gothic, in its more radical guises, challenges. Carter breaks down what she regards as an artificial distinction between masculine/feminine. The roots of Carter’s thinking on this are to be found in her critique of the Marquis de Sade. The Bloody Chamber may be read as an exploration of the possibilities of the kind of synthesis de Sade himself ‘could never find because he wasn’t looking for it’. Predator and prey, master and slave, are the only two categories – or roles; one person may play both, although only alternately. Above all, sex between unequals cannot be mutually pleasurable because pleasure belongs to the eater and not the eaten. What Carter seems to me doing – among other things is looking for ways in which the tiger and lamb parts of the psyche, can reach some sort of accomadation. The nature of men is not fixed by Carter as inevitably predatory, with females as their natural prey. Lambhood and tigerishness can be found in either gender , and in the same individual at different times. Indeed the chamber in the ‘Bloody Chamber’ can be read as metaphysical representation of the Marquis’s tigerishness which awakes in the marriage bed and the closing scene but is kept under lock and key in the dark recesses of his mind for the remainder of the story. It is this repressed human emotion that is a key point of exploration in the Gothic and fairy tale forms.
The Sadeian Women and the Bloody Chamber, Gamble