Angela Carter - The Bloody Chamber
Angela Carter
Angela Carter believed in the importance of style, as well as ideas. At times this can look 'floral' and she said herself some of her writing did not always succeed as well as she wanted- I think she had doubts about the 'Sadeian Woman'. But at its best it is clear, striking, allusive and powerfully direct: The Bloody Chamber?
Angela loved daring stylists such as Ronald Firbank and Peter Greenaway. OK, they can lapse into pretentiousness at worst, but most other art is boring and predictable.
Angela's prose is wonderfully fresh and defiantly exhibitionist
think you have misinterpreted Carter's unique and often disturbing mastery of language. She is not flowery, elaborate, or extravagant, but fearless and direct in her ability to examine feminist politics and human malice in fairy tales, in relationships, in the world. I question how much you have read of Carter. Do you think it is enough to warrant this assertion against her? Perhaps an example of what you believe to be floral language (with some sort of explication) might help Carter fans at least appreciate and consider your opinon.
"The Bloody Chamber", as much for the macabre content as the fact that she massacred our beloved fairytales. However, I can see how a student of English (as I am) could get frustrated by the seeming lack of soul these characters have. Carter takes black and white fairytale characters and attempts to express them in modern, human terms. It doesn't quite work and we are left with the feeling of having read some naughty stories for Adults, based on stories for kids.
Well, maybe tha's the point...
Maybe she wanted us to think about it:
what's a character?
What do you mean when you say a
character has soul or psychological
depth or consistency?
And what about people? Could some people
be as two-dimensional as fairy-tales
characters? For example, because they
just play the role everybody expects
them to play, without even being aware
of it?
If this isn't clear, think of Stephen
(if I remember his name correctly - the
guy who started this dicussion), he is
the perfect example of a
stock-character. He makes me feel like
...
This is a preview of the whole essay
character has soul or psychological
depth or consistency?
And what about people? Could some people
be as two-dimensional as fairy-tales
characters? For example, because they
just play the role everybody expects
them to play, without even being aware
of it?
If this isn't clear, think of Stephen
(if I remember his name correctly - the
guy who started this dicussion), he is
the perfect example of a
stock-character. He makes me feel like
I've known him all my life,
unfortunately...
I think Angela Carter did not only aim
at being "naughty" (or do you actually
mean "a pervert"?) when she wrote The
Bloody Chamber, I think she wanted to
shock the reader into realizing that
what we call reality is not given, but
shaped by ideas that are forced on us,
from the cradle, and presented to us as
"truth", even through fairy-tales.
ex: "stories for kids" ? Do you mean
innocent stories, as opposed to
"naughty" ones? How come these innocent
stories have so much violence in them?
But then again, I'm not saying Angela
Carter had all the answers . At least,
she asked the questions... no wonder
people who take their own superiority
for granted don't like her writing !
(hello, Stephen, this is for you, even
if I'm pretty sure you
I am a (female)teacher of English Lit. at a university which shall remain nameless and I am in agreement with Stephen that she is over-rated. A dislike of one contemporary feminist author does not make a person a snob or anti-feminist, and an irritation at the pretentious verbosity of Carter's prose doesn't mean he is illiterate. Did anyone else notice that the guy who criticised S's spelling wrote 'at lease', by the way? I merely ask.
Hey stephen. I too thought that Angela Carter was femenist drivel, that was until I read it! I mean, she makes her cases perfectly clear - all she wants is for this male-dominated world to wake up and realise women do have power, are able to use it and are not all pink and flowery. Her writing isn't flowery and neither are her morals!
Hey, Stephen,
I'm also a student of English (at AS level) and I was warned by friends in years above me that Angela Carter was boring flowery weird drivel.
And I believed it, even after the first time I'd read the bloody chamber.
But I suggest that if you still think this, you should be having serious thoughts about getting extra help from your English teacher.
Carter's style of writing is called 'opaque' writing - it means the way in which she conveys her meaning is very important, as well as the actual meaning. Her use of words not found in most people's vocabulary are not to challenge or demean her readers but to allow her to say *exactly* what she means (for example, Prothalamion). She uses the language she does not because she is over-decorative or hiding a gap in her narrative ability, but because it is important to her how her message is conveyed.
I think, anyway...
Like everyone else in the West, I grew up with them: the tales of curious virgins, mysterious heroes, vampires, witches and werewolves. We heard them as fairytales in our childhood, saw them again as the vampire films of the l950s, but I thought I had mainly forgotten them until I picked up a remarkable book.
In The Bloody Chamber Angela Carter reworks some of the West's best known fairy- tales, transforming them with brilliantly baroque imagery and from a perspective that owes almost as much to Freud as it does to feminism.
In the first and the longest story of the collection - The Bloody Chamber - the virgin protagonist is transported in a tender, delicious ecstasy of excitement, 'into the unguessable country of marriage'. It's a familiar tale - that of Bluebeard's Castle - and one which could be taking place at any time in history or anywhere throughout the world where the woman marries into a strong patriarchy and gives herself up to powerlessness.
As a child the Bluebeard tale left me with the moral that 'nasty things would happen to girls who were too curious'. In Carter's reworking things happen rather differently. The new bride unlocks the secret chamber and finds the bodies of Bluebeard's earlier wives. As she puts it: 'I only did what he knew I would'. And as the story unfolds she knows that her impending doom is not merely a punishment for disobedience: the castle is stuffed with the trappings of power turning into sadism, and tales of the ancestral family's murderous woman-hunts are whispered through the neighbourhood. Our protagonist knows that she is in the hands of a psychopath and she is saved because she is crafty enough to play for time and because her mother tucks up her skirts, gallops up and rescues her. It's a fine feminist departure from the traditional tale in which the vulnerable damsel is saved by some burly male. Carter's women are allowed a vigour that enables them to save themselves or rescue each other.
They also experience sexual desire. The central character of The Bloody Chamber realizes that the Bluebeard character was drawn to marry her because 'I sensed in myself a potentiality for corruption that took my breath away'. Carter explores the tale's inherent sadomasochism. In her husband's secret drawer the bride finds a note from a murdered wife proclaiming: 'The supreme and unique pleasure of love is the certainty that one is doing evil'. As soon as this patriarch persuades his wives to join in the fun he punishes them with death.
In the world in which we grow up, women are currency: 'My father lost me to The Beast at cards' begins The Tiger's Bride. When she rides out with the beasts, she notes: 'The six of us - mounts and riders, both - could boast amongst us not one soul... since all the best religions in the world state categorically that not beasts nor women were equipped with the flimsy, insubstantial things'. Small wonder then that she chooses to become a beast herself, sending back to her father the obedient clockwork maid 'to perform the part of my father's daughter'.
In this collection, questions of women's sexuality come up time and time again. At times Carter's work seems to come close to pornography. Published in 1979, this book looks more closely at women's sexual liberation and orgasm than most writers do today.
So what can a woman's life and her sexuality be? With Carter it is not always clear. Take the case of her Little Red Riding Hood, pubescent and as fearless as the handsome werewolf she longs to kiss. This tantalizing tale ends at its climax, and I still don't know what the moral of it is. But perhaps the wish to find a 'moral' is suspect. Perhaps, in the relatively liberated late twentieth century we should be reading the old tales quite differently. Angela Carter gives us a chance to do so.
