The Uspensky-Fowler model’s identified temporal plane is intended to loosely cover any analysis of any manipulation of time sequence; which in this particular text for the majority of the narrative includes unpredictable jumps from one time to another, signposted by the subtle lexicalisation. Of this type of study Simpson has also been dismissive, claiming that ‘it is rather less about focalization and viewpoint, and rather more about narrative structure.’ (Simpson:2004:79) Although Simpson advises caution in using this particular stylistic tool I intend to give evidence to support the proposition the manipulation of time and use of analepsis is of a good deal of importance in an analysis of ‘The Bloody Chamber’ and worthy of our attention.
Analysis of point of view on the spatial and psychological planes by the Fowler-Uspensky is, however, encouraged by Simpson in comparison to the previous two categories, and as Simpson writes ‘really do embody the characteristics of the concept.’(Simpson: 2004:79) The spatial point of you requires us to establish the physical place of the narrator but is logically almost inextricably linked with the psychological point of view. Uspensky defines cases where ‘the authorial point of view relies on an individual consciousness (or perception)’(Simpson:2004:79) as point of view on the psychological plane. I shall by focusing my analysis predominantly on exploring the modus found within the narrative and hence the weakly drawn line between the narrator and what actually happens and, therefore, shall be using the spatial and psychological planes as a grounded focus in my linguistic analysis.
In terms of general analysis of narrative, Michael Toolan (Narrative, 2001) divides Simpson’s nine classifications (1997) of different narrative as falling into two categories; the first categorised by the type of narrator in the text, and the second by modality. The ‘Bloody Chamber’ is written in the first person and therefore events and thoughts are put across by a narrator systematically involved with the text and is hence a homodiagectic narrative. As mentioned above, the narrator is also the female protagonist and tells of things that have happened to her without direct specification of when in relation to her relaying of the events they occurred.
These qualifying personal and emotive involvements are what is referred to in linguistics as Modality. Toolan more precisely defines modality as referring to ‘some of the crucial means by which a speaker qualifies what would otherwise by absolute statements.’ (Toolan:2001:71) whereas Simpson illustrates what he deems to be a clear link between modality and analysis of the psychological point of view claiming it is ‘that part of language that allows us to attach expressions of belief, attitude and obligation to what we say and write,’ and that ‘modality is therefore the grammar of explicit comment and [it]includes signals of the varying degrees of certainty we have about the propositions we express, and the sorts of certainty we have about the propositions we express, and the sorts of commitment and obligation that we attach to our utterances;’ (Simpson:2004:123) without such there would be a great deal of limitation in narrative. I intend to refer to Simpson’s methods of enforcing modality; positive shading and negative shading (he also includes neutral shading but I shall avoid paying too much attention the latter in an attempt to avoid what Toolan refers to as the trap of ‘item-spotting’ (Toolan:2001:75)
In ‘The Bloody Chamber,’ positive and negative shading becomes particularly relevant in a linguistic analysis by the contrast of their frequency of use at the varying stages of the story. The opening sentence of the story ‘I REMEMBER HOW, that night…’ (Carter:2006:1)we can identify a first person narrator who is familiar with the content of the story and also by the capitalization of the first three words identify the reflective/recollecting nature of the privileged narrative and the proceeding boulamaic language, the ‘delicious ecstasy’ the narrator describes herself at feeling at the time the story is set gives a positive shading in stark contrast to the negative modality expressed later in the story. The narrator describes her excitement at the anticipation of going to ‘that magical place, the fairy castle’,(Carter:2006:2) and she eagerly described this as her ‘destiny.’ In terms of point of view on the psychological plane, we can also see a contrast in the narrator’s perceptions of herself at the time that the story took place. While in the opening paragraphs she refers to herself, presumably in an assumption of grandeur, as ‘the bride,’ Carter:2006:2) she later refers to the transition to realization of the truth at a later time in the story as a ‘spoiled child,’(Carter:2006:26) marking a change in the character by the recognition of her naivety and childish beliefs. The anticipation, excitement and wonder is replaced by uncertainty about subject matter, speculative commentary and qualification of verbs in relation to the characters thoughts and decisions. For example, the narrator tells how at the time of the story, ‘Perhaps I half imagined’ which is then qualified/justified by the insertion of ‘then,’ arguably marking a passage from innocence to experience and almost implying the narrator feels the need to highlight this, ‘that I might find his real self in his den.’ (Carter:2006:24-25) This sentence clearly displays a lack of certainty and an element of cognitive speculation. The significance of identifying both at different stages in the story is more of importance to analysis of point of view of the psychological plane. On a lightly more literary level the change from positive to negative shading is symbolic of the narrator telling of her own passage from innocence to experience but on a purely linguistic level, the move to negative modality in the narrative marks what could be argued to be the narrator’s seeming desire to portray a realisation of what is almost a completely different character at the beginning of the story, to the character we see at the end.
There is a continuous creation of what I shall term multiple selves of the narrator. The narrative uses a confusing variation of proximal and distal dietics with a scrambling of present tense with conditional and past tenses. For example, the narrator exclaims ‘How my circumstances had changed since the first time I heard those voluptuous chords that carry such a charge of deathly passion in them! Now, we sat in a loge, in red velvet armchairs, and a braided, bewigged flunkey brought us a silver buckets of ice champagne in the interval’ (Carter:2006:5) This collection of sentences gives a number of examples of the confusion of tenses I described before. ‘How my circumstances had changed…’ is an evaluation of a previous self, thinking on a more previous self. ‘Now’ is not the present tense but in fact a reflection of her previous self, thinking on the present tense of ‘then’. This confusion succeeds in blurring the lines between different selves of the narrator and weaves the narrator of now with the younger versions of herself. Although it could actually be termed grammatically incorrect, here the psychological and spatial planes are merged creating an intimacy with the reader.
From a broader analysis we are made aware of the narrators different thoughts and feelings at varying different stages with varying degrees of hindsight, with the only constant being the kind of language used. The narrator describes when talking about her mother ‘What other student in the Conservatoire could boast that her mother had…shot a man eating tiger with her own hand and all before she was as old as I.’ (Carter:2006:2) Here by the reference to age at a present time the implication is that the narrator means her age at the nondescript time of when the story is happening rather than ‘I’ in the present; hence in a semantically based extension we could add ‘old as I [had been at the time of the journey upon when I reflected over such a matter]’ the complexity being that the narrator is reflecting in what we might call the present tense, on reflecting in the past. This is then broken up with a couplet of direct speech. The next line, ‘Are you sure you love him?’ is not explicitly expressed to be her mother’s speech; there is no ‘my mother asked’ as there commonly is in direct speech. This again succeeds in involving the narrator as it seems all that it has been important for the narrator to include is that the question is asked. The fact that what might be termed descriptive detail is left out alludes to what we might suppose would be the mindset that is later described by the narrator of herself at the time she was taking the journey. It is at the same time jumping to narratorial self at the time of the conversation to her mother; hence why there is no ‘my mother asked’ as to that present self at the time that much would have been unnecessary. The narrative scope then broadens back into the present reflecting self, ‘And would say no more’ (Carter:2006:2) as such a statement is the result of a conclusion that requires the hindsight of all the events proceeding that conversation. The narrator can also be described as by Brinton, as [representing] ‘thoughts which may even be unformulated or unarticulated for the character, thoughts which are on the “threshold of verbalization” (Brinton:1980:366)
We can also note small short sentences evaluating her past self are inserted into descriptions of longer trails of thought. I find it appropriate to note here that Mills argues these long sentences combined with a mixture of subordinate and coordinate clauses linked by indecisive conjunctions to be a signature of gendered writing and regardless of whether Carter as an author would have been concerned with this herself it is still important to appreciate that this writing style would have generally been recognised to be decisively female, again resulting in subtly making the narrative more emotive and personal. In this particular text these clauses succeed in creating an awareness of the narrative self as not only different but self-consciously different from the character described at the time the story is being told. The narrator tells how her mother had been left an ‘antique service revolver that my mother, grown magnificently eccentric in hardship, kept always in her reticule, in case –how I teased her- she was surprised by footpads.’ (Carter:2006:2) Here the evaluation of the past self is hyphenated, and hence kept separate from remainder of the sentence the reflecting on her mother as the reflection is of her mother around the time of the story and the evaluation is starkly identified as a different temporal plane as it is an evaluation of a self at the time, which clearly indicates hindsight.
The proceeding passage is where the narrator first introduces the villain of the piece. The linguistic contrast to a more literary sweeping analysis of the presentation of this character falls into the ‘bucket’ category of the ideological plane but also, I shall seek to prove, can also align with an analysis of the point of view of the psychological plane. The narrative repeatedly uses an illusive ‘he’ or non-specific masculine pronoun; the narrative refers to ‘the wedding dress he’d bought me,’(Carter:2006:1) ‘are you sure you love him?’ and then ‘His kiss, his kiss with tongue and teeth’ (Carter 2006:2) Here I would argue again we see evidence of gender implications in these individual lexical items and generic almost childlike nouns used to refer to this male character. For example, the male character is described as a ‘heavy,’ ‘big man’ with the ‘male scent of leather and spices’ (Carter:2006:3) By Uspensky’s definition we analyse this point of view on the psychological plane as again closely involving not only the narrator but the childlike self that perceived such things at the time of the story (which I hasten to add again is not made clear). At this early stage in the story the repeated use of such pronouns indicates on a linguistic level that the clearly female narrative is acted upon by these masculine pronouns; although an active female narrator, this linguistic choice implies passivity on the part of the childlike self the narrator refers to which is then claimed by the narrator to be a previous self by an admission of the narrative being a different temporal plane; for example the narrative gives explanations of the psychological state of the previous self ‘…I know it must seem [implies must seem to you the reader in the present reading of the past] a curious analogy, a man with a flower, but sometimes he seemed to me like a lily.’(Carter:2006:3) The passivity of the female protagonist, even up until what the character describes to be her accepted, arguably highlights a contrast between thematic and linguistic implications by the fact that the narrator tells how her mother is the one to come and save her life at the end of the story by defeating the illusive ‘him.’
In conclusion Carter not only thematically challenges gendered assumptions by her version of a traditional fairytale but explores the effects of narrative voice skipping to different points in time, sometimes without direct grammatical signposting, highlighting some of the difficulties of narratology and producing a sophisticated and thoroughly individual narrative practice of her own. As fore mentioned, although some of the narrative is seemingly grammatically incorrect, the shift in focus, or the shift in what we might call the lens of the first person narrative; the evaluative insertions to passages designated to the characters psychological point of view that clearly identify and clarify the different versions of self and the thematic significance of the marked changes from positive to negative shading accompanied by the relishing of violence and sexual experience from the point of view of the female narrator intertwined with an ideological passivity are what gives the text its richness and what marks it as demonstrating ‘Angela Carter’s narrative gift at its most seductive and shocking.’ (Observer: Carter:2006)
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Angela Carter in the Afterword to Fireworks in 1974
