The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories Read online

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  About the Author

  Also by Angela Carter

  Title Page

  Introduction

  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

  Copyright

  About the Author

  Angela Carter was born in 1940. She read English at Bristol University, and from 1976–8 was a fellow in Creative Writing at Sheffield University. She lived in Japan, the United States and Australia. Her first novel, Shadow Dance, was published in 1965, followed by The Magic Toyshop (1967, John Llewellyn Rhys Prize), Several Perceptions (1968, Somerset Maugham Award), Heroes and Villains (1969), Love (1971), The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman (1972), The Passion of New Eve (1977), Nights at the Circus (1984, James Tait Black Memorial Prize) and Wise Children (1991). Four collections of her short stories have been published: Fireworks (1974), The Bloody Chamber (1979, Cheltenham Festival of Literature Award), Black Venus (1985) and American Ghosts and Old World Wonders (1993). She was the author of The Sadeian Woman: An Exercise in Cultural History (1979), and two collections of journalism, Nothing Sacred (1982) and Expletives Deleted (1992). She died in February 1992.

  ALSO BY ANGELA CARTER

  Short Stories

  Fireworks

  Black Venus

  American Ghosts and Old World Wonders

  Burning Your Boats: Collected Short Stories

  The Virago Book of Fairy Tales (editor)

  The Second Virago Book of Fairy Tales (editor)

  Wayward Girls and Wicked Women (editor)

  Novels

  Shadow Dance

  The Magic Toyshop

  Several Perceptions

  Heroes and Villains

  Love

  The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman

  The Passion of New Eve

  Nights at the Circus

  Wise Children

  Non-fiction

  The Sadeian Woman: An Exercise in Cultural History

  Nothing Sacred: Selected Writings

  Expletives Deleted

  Shaking a Leg: Collected Writings

  Drama

  Come unto These Yellow Sands: Four Radio Plays

  The Curious Room: Collected Dramatic Works

  ANGELA CARTER

  The Bloody

  Chamber

  And Other Stories

  WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY

  Helen Simpson

  Introduction

  ‘The tale does not log everyday experience, as the short story does,’ wrote Angela Carter in the afterword to Fireworks, her first story collection, in 1974; ‘It interprets everyday experience through a system of imagery derived from subterranean areas behind everyday experience.’ She drew a sharp distinction between what she later described as ‘those fragments of epiphanic experience which are the type of the twentieth-century story’, and the ‘ornate, unnatural’ style and symbolism of her favoured form, the tale. She knew from the start that she was drawn to ‘Gothic tales, cruel tales, tales of wonder, tales of terror, fabulous narratives that deal directly with the imagery of the unconscious.’ When, in her second collection, The Bloody Chamber, she continued in this Gothic mode but with narratives suggested by traditional western European fairy tales, she found that she had conjured up an exotic new hybrid which would carry her voice to a wider audience than it had reached before.

  The Bloody Chamber is often – wrongly – described as a group of traditional fairy tales given a subversive feminist twist. In fact these are new stories, not retellings. As Carter made clear, ‘My intention was not do “versions” or, as the American edition of the book said, horribly, “adult” fairy tales, but to extract the latent content from the traditional stories and to use it as the beginnings of new stories.’ Nor are they that homogeneous, being strikingly different from each other in length and tone. The title story, for example, is more than twice the length of any of the other stories, and more than thirty times the length of the shortest. Its slow-moving Gothic intensity is quite different from the libidinous top-speed farce of ‘Puss-in-Boots’, for example, or from the laconic brutality of ‘The Werewolf’. And it is this very lack of homogeneity that gives this collection its impressive complexity – it uses the physical form of the story collection to approach its theme obliquely, variously, from ten strikingly different angles.

  The Bloody Chamber is like a multi-faceted glittering diamond reflecting and refracting a variety of portraits of desire and sexuality – heterosexual female sexuality – which, unusually for the time, 1979, are told from a heterosexual female viewpoint. This was the year, remember, that Penelope Fitzgerald’s Offshore won the Booker Prize, and Penelope Lively’s Treasures of Time won the National Book Award. Anita Brookner’s first novel, A Start in Life, would not appear for another two years. Margaret Thatcher, at 53 years old, had just been elected Britain’s first female Prime Minister. Angela Carter, at 39, had seven novels to her name, none of which had so far received more than marginal recognition.

  Carter was later to come under attack for not busting more taboos than she did (‘She could never imagine Cinderella in bed with the Fairy Godmother,’ wrote Patricia Duncker, for example). But such criticisms seem wide of the mark. Her work caused shock waves when it appeared, and it continues to shock. The Bloody Chamber, which has been extensively studied in universities over the last decade, apparently elicits furious hostility from a significant number of students, who are outraged when they recognise the bedtime stories of their childhood newly configured as tales of sex and violence. But as Carter said, ‘I was taking . . . the latent content of those traditional stories and using that; and the latent content is violently sexual.’ It is also true that her imagination had a fierce and appetitive quality, turbo-fuelled by Gothic themes, particularly in her youth. (Later, after she had published Nights at the Circus, she was to comment, ‘You know, sometimes when I read my back pages, I’m quite appalled at the violence of my imagination. Before I had a family and stuff.’)

  She took traditional fairy tales and used them to write new ones. Fairy tales have been usefully described as the science fiction of the past; certainly Carter regarded them in this light, using them as a way of exploring ideas of how things might be different. She admired much science fiction with its utopian perspectives and speculative thinking – ‘It seemed to me, after reading these writers a lot, that they were writing about ideas, and that was basically what I was trying to do.’ Also, as dissident writers have so often found, the indirection and metaphor of fantasy can be helpful when airing controversial subject matter; not that Carter would have minded about causing offence, but, whether she minded or not, by using the time-sanctioned form of fairy tales she acquired readers who would not otherwise have read her. And she was using the forms of fantasy and fairy tales with conscious radical intent; in a letter to her friend Robert Coover, she wrote, ‘I really do believe that a fiction absolutely self-conscious of itself as a different form of human experience than reality (that is, not a logbook of events) can help to transform reality itself.’

  All this makes her writing sound over-schematic; but while she used fantasy to discuss ideas, it is also obvious that it was the landscapes and imagery of fairy tales and legends that fired her imagination – bloodstains and ravens’ feathers on snow, moonlight on a dust-grimed mirror, graveyards on Walpurgisnacht. The stories in The Bloo
dy Chamber reverberate with deep and unmistakable imaginative pleasure. There is an astonishing extra-vivid materiality to this alternative world she invented, down to the last sensuous detail, like the candle which drops hot wax onto the girl’s bare shoulders in ‘The Tiger’s Bride’. She loved to describe the trappings of luxury, to display rich scenery in rich language. Dialogue came less naturally to her and she avoided it for years, joking that the advantage of including animal protagonists in her work was that she did not have to make them talk. Naturalism or realism, the ‘low mimetic’ as she called it, was not her mode. Not that she wasn’t observant – nothing could have been sharper than her journalism with its gimlet anthropological eye – but in the end her genius did not actually lend itself to the ‘low mimetic’ (see ‘The Quilt Maker’, an uncollected story in this mode, which is interesting but possibly her least successful).

  Carter was an abstract thinker with an intensely visual imagination. What she liked about the short story form was (as she wrote in the afterword to Fireworks) that ‘Sign and sense can fuse to an extent impossible to achieve among the multiplying ambiguities of an extended narrative.’ She found that ‘though the play of surfaces never ceased to fascinate me, I was not so much exploring them as making abstractions from them.’ It comes as no surprise to find that she particularly admired Baudelaire and the nineteenth-century symbolist poets, and also much twentieth-century French surrealist and structuralist writing. The Bloody Chamber is packed with signs, symbols and signifiers. Ironically enough, though, the two Frenchmen who stand as true fairy godfathers to this collection lived in earlier centuries.

  First there is Charles Perrault, (1628–1703), a translation of whose collection of traditional fairy stories, Histoires ou Contes du Temps Passé, Carter had published in 1977. She praised his ‘consummate craftsmanship and his good-natured cynicism’ in her preface, adding that ‘From the work of this humane, tolerant and kind-hearted Frenchman, children can learn enlightened self-interest . . . and gain much pleasure, besides.’

  And then there is the Marquis de Sade (1740–1814). Carter’s reading of Sade, and her decade-long argument with him, colour two earlier novels, The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman (1972) and The Passion of New Eve (1977), while her white-hot aphoristic account of his pornographic writings, The Sadeian Woman, appeared alongside The Bloody Chamber in 1979. ‘I really can’t see what’s wrong with finding out about what the great male fantasies about women are,’ she declared, reasonably enough, when The Sadeian Woman came under attack. It is a difficult, provocative book whose polemical preface is subtitled ‘pornography in the service of women’ – and a continuing bone of contention for many contemporary readers.

  One shining aperçu which emerges from its pages to spread light through the stories of The Bloody Chamber is that passivity is not an intrinsically virtuous state, even – in fact, especially not – in women. ‘Justine marks the start of a kind of self-regarding female masochism, a woman with no place in the world, no status, the core of whose resistance has been eaten away by self-pity,’ wrote Carter, tracing the descendants of Sade’s heroine Justine down to Marilyn Monroe. Another passage might have been written specifically as an epigraph for The Bloody Chamber:

  To be the object of desire is to be defined in the passive case.

  To exist in the passive case is to die in the passive case – that is, to be killed.

  This is the moral of the fairy tale about the perfect woman.

  The stories in The Bloody Chamber are fired by the conviction that human nature is not immutable, that human beings are capable of change. Some of their most brilliant passages are accounts of metamorphoses. Think of ‘The Courtship of Mr Lyon’ which ends with Beast transformed by Beauty – ‘When her lips touched the meat-hook claws, they drew back into their pads and she saw how he had always kept his fists clenched, but now, painfully, tentatively, at last began to stretch his fingers’; or of the story with which it is twinned, ‘The Tiger’s Bride’, where this time Beauty is transformed by Beast – ‘And each stroke of his tongue ripped off skin after successive skin, all the skins of a life in the world, and left behind a nascent patina of shining hairs. My earrings turned back to water and trickled down my shoulders; I shrugged the drops off my beautiful fur.’ The heroines of these stories are struggling out of the straitjackets of history and ideology and biological essentialism. ‘There’s a story in The Bloody Chamber called “The Lady and the House of Love”,’ said Carter, ‘part of which derives from a movie version that I saw of a story by Dostoyevsky. And in the movie . . . the woman, who is a very passive person and is very much in distress, asks herself the question, “Can a bird sing only the song it knows, or can it learn a new song?” Have we got the capacity at all of singing new songs? It’s very important that if we haven’t, we might as well stop now.’

  The unnamed first-person heroine of The Bloody Chamber’s title story appears at first to be a Justine-like sacrificial virgin in a white dress, routinely destined for immolation; however, she changes during the narrative, and finishes by escaping her inheritance – female masochism as a modus vivendi (and morendi) – after a full-scale survey of its temptations. The story is set in a castle on sea-girt Mont St Michel in fin-de-siècle France, with more than a nod to Sade’s cannibal Minski and his lake-surrounded castle with its torture chamber and captive virgins.

  This story is also a version of the Bluebeard fairy tale which appeared in Perrault’s collection, where a new bride unlocks the forbidden room in her husband’s castle to find the murdered corpses of his former wives. Perrault drew the moral that female curiosity leads to retribution, though in the France of his time, where death in childbirth was commonplace and four-fifths of the resultant widowers remarried, the bloody chamber might surely have been seen as the womb. In Carter’s twentieth-century version, the menace is located not in the perils of childbirth, but in the darker side of heterosexuality, in sadomasochism and the idea of fatal passion.

  As well as all this, The Bloody Chamber is a tour de force in its recreation of late nineteenth-century France. Carter claimed the stories in this collection could not have existed the way they did without the example of Isak Dinesen – ‘because in a way they are imitation nineteenth-century stories, like hers’; such stories are (she described elsewhere) ‘highly structured artefacts with beginnings, middles, and ends and a schematic coherence of imagery’. Certainly this is an accurate description of The Bloody Chamber’s title story, which, like each of the highly wrought stories in Isak Dinesen’s Seven Gothic Tales, reads almost like a novella.

  ‘I wanted a lush fin-de-siècle décor for the story,’ wrote Carter in a letter to a friend, ‘and a style that . . . utilises the heightened diction of the novelette, to half-seduce the reader into this wicked, glamorous, fatal world.’ It was, she added, ‘a deliberate homage to Colette.’ Its unnamed seventeen-year-old heroine wears a schoolgirl’s serge skirt and flannel blouse, just like the eponymous heroine of Colette’s Claudine novels, and there is more than a little of Colette’s first husband, that cliché of a roué, Monsieur Willy, in the unnamed husband character.

  Nearly all Carter’s writing is strikingly full of cultural and intertextual references – you could spend five years on an annotation of The Bloody Chamber – but this story is extremely so. It is an artfully constructed edifice of signs and allusions and clues. The Marquis, as he is called (suggesting, of course, the Marquis de Sade), is a parodic evil aesthete and voluptuary with his monocle and beard, his gifts of marrons glacés and hothouse flowers, and his penchant for quoting the juicier bits of Baudelaire and Sade. On the walls of his castle hang paintings of dead women by Moreau, Ensor and Gauguin; he listens to Wagner (specifically the Liebestod – ‘love-death’ – in Tristan und Isolde); he smokes Romeo y Julieta cigars ‘fat as a baby’s arm’; his library is stocked with graphically described sadistic pornography and his dungeon chamber with mutilated corpses and itemised instruments of torture.

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p; In this heavily perfumed story, the Marquis’ smell of spiced leather, Cuir de Russie, is referred to more than half a dozen times, reverting at the end ‘to the elements of flayed hide and excrement of which it was composed’. Descriptions of scented lilies, ‘cobra-headed, funereal’, smelling of ‘pampered flesh’, appear nine times, their fat stems like ‘dismembered arms’. The words ‘immolation,’ ‘impalement’, ‘martyr’ and ‘sacrifice’ occur, motif-like, at regular intervals but, abruptly – rather too abruptly for some critics – on the last two pages of this novella-length story the heroine-victim is rescued from decapitation by the sudden arrival of her pistol-toting maman, who puts a bullet through the Marquis’ head. Her fate is not immutable after all; she discovers that her future looks quite different now that she has escaped from the old story and is learning to sing a new song.

  There follow three cat tales. The first two are Beauty and the Beast transformations, as described earlier. Carter writes with tremendous relish when describing skin, fur, fabric and snow-covered landscapes. To say she is wonderful at surfaces sounds a little disparaging, as if to say she is superficial. No; she is good at surfaces as the Gawain poet is good at surfaces. ‘I do put everything in to be read – read the way allegory was intended to be read,’ she declared; but also ‘I’ve tried to keep an entertaining surface . . . so that you don’t have to read them as a system of signification if you don’t want to.’ And it is true that you could ignore the ideas in these stories if you wanted to, and still enjoy the colour, beauty and vivid sensuousness of the language, the densely allusive prose alight with sly verbal jokes, cross-cultural references and dandified wit.

  The third cat story, ‘Puss-in-Boots’, is utterly different from its predecessors. It is ‘the first story that I wrote that was supposed to be really funny, out-and-out funny,’ said Carter. It is precursor in its ribald cynical tone to her last two novels, Nights at the Circus and Wise Children, and in its turning away from the Gothic mode towards the determinedly benign. In this story, set in the northern Italian town of Bergamo, all the stock types and jokes of the commedia dell’arte are used to pantomimic effect, and sex is bawdy and farcical, the young lovers ‘at it, hammer and tongs, down on the carpet since the bed is occupé’ with the corpse of Signor Panteleone the dotard-husband, who has broken his neck falling downstairs after tripping over the cat. The first-person narrator, the cat himself, is a witty raconteur and master of innuendo, proceeding mainly by rhetorical questions and exclamations. His language is a vivid mixture of Latinate elaboration and Anglo-Saxon bluntness: ‘I went about my ablutions, tonguing my arsehole with the impeccable hygienic integrity of cats, one leg stuck in the air like a ham bone.’