Feminist Retelling of Bluebeard in Angela Carter’s ‘The Bloody Chamber’
Angela Carter’s “The Bloody Chamber” is based on the legend of Bluebeard. Carter preserves the legend’s plot, casting the Marquis in the role of Bluebeard, who kills his wives and stores their corpses in a secret chamber. Like Bluebeard, the Marquis entices each new wife to explore the forbidden chamber and then kills her once she has discovered his secret. Carter goes so far as to reference the Bluebeard legend toward the end of “The Bloody Chamber.” When the heroine’s mother storms the Marquis’s palace, he stands still in shock, “the sword still raised over his head as in those clockwork tableaux of Bluebeard that you see in glass cases at fairs.” This allusion, rather than likening Carter’s story to the legend, has the effect of distinguishing “The Bloody Chamber” from it. By likening the Marquis to Bluebeard, Carter makes it clear that he is *not* Bluebeard. In doing so, she draws attention to the ways her story is distinct from the legend of Bluebeard and, moreover, from fairy tales in general.
Narrative Voice and Female Empowerment
One distinguishing feature of “The Bloody Chamber” is its narrator. Unlike a traditional fairy-tale narrator, generally an impartial third person, this narrator is the heroine herself. By giving the heroine a voice, Carter challenged the fairy-tale tradition of seeing, from the outside, events befall an innocent girl. Letting the heroine tell her story empowers the figure of woman by putting her in the traditionally male-dominated roles of storyteller and survivor instead of relegating her to the role of helpless princess. In *The Bloody Chamber*, the heroine tells us personally about how her suffering became the source of her enlightenment.
The Heroine’s Namelessness and Its Significance
Of the heroine’s namelessness, Rosemary Moore writes, “Carter acknowledges that in fairy tales characters are generally abstractions and her young bride is nameless because she is defined by her role as Marquise.” Indeed, without her title, the heroine is of little importance to the Marquis or anyone but her mother and Jean-Yves. However, it is also significant that Carter never actually refers to the heroine as “Marquise.” One reason is that the heroine tells the story in hindsight, when she has already settled into a new and modest life far from the castle. She has become wise through her experience and no longer considers herself a Marquise, a title that only implies deference to the Marquis. Secondly, by leaving the heroine nameless, Carter universalizes her triumph so that she represents all women.
Marriage, Wealth, and Subjugation
Even though Carter empowers the heroine on a literary level, in the story she is forced into a position of subjugation and ignorance. She marries primarily for money and position because, as a peasant woman, she has little opportunity or encouragement to earn these for herself. As she tells her mother, she may not be sure that she loves the Marquis, but she is “sure [she wants] to marry him.” The narrator takes on a gently mocking tone to describe how she viewed love as a young woman. She recalls how the romantic opera *Tristan* made her feel as though she loved the Marquis, saying, “And, do you know, my heart swelled and ached so during the *Liebestod* that I thought I must truly love him.” The heroine smirks at how she conflated her love of music and romance with love for the Marquis. Then she makes it clear that her desire, while real, was for the wealth and position that the Marquis gives her; she follows the first statement with, “Yes. I did. On his arm, all eyes were upon me.” In addition, she refers to her husband as her “purchaser” and herself as “his bargain,” and makes a point to tell us that when he takes her virginity, he kisses the rubies around her neck before kissing her mouth. Clearly, the Marquis is more concerned with his wealth than with his wife; in fact, he loves his wives more when they are dead—and truly objects—than when they are alive.
Foreshadowing and the Marquis’s Destructive Nature
Despite her excitement at being married, the heroine’s early statements tell us that she is afraid of her husband and mistrusts him. She describes him as both beast-like and plant-like; he is strong and imposing like a lion but so emotionless that he reminds her of a “funereal lily.” With these references to devouring and death, the heroine establishes the Marquis as a destructive force. She also connects his passion explicitly to destruction when she describes her anticipation at losing her virginity: “It was as though the imponderable weight of his desire was a force I might not withstand.” The heroine feels instinctively that the Marquis’s desire for her is tied with a love of destruction. The heroine also equates her marriage to the Marquis with banishment when she states, “into marriage, into exile.” Instead of feeling as though she is escaping poverty, she considers her marriage a forced isolation. With these words, the heroine indicates that by getting married, she is not gaining but surrendering power.
Sexual Awakening and the Journey to Womanhood
Power in the story is located primarily in sexual interactions. What makes the heroine appear so powerless to the Marquis, and perhaps to herself, is her virginity. Being a virgin, the heroine has not yet learned to access her sexual power and is submissive to the Marquis, relying on his experience as a non-virgin and a man. Because of her youth and inexperience, “The Bloody Chamber” is for the heroine a story of sexual self-discovery. She delights in her newfound sexual awareness, which Carter brings to life with vivid words such as, “I lay awake in the wagon-lit in a tender, delicious ecstasy of excitement, my burning cheek pressed against the impeccable linen of the pillow and the pounding of my heart mimicking that of the great pistons ceaselessly thrusting the train that bore me through the night, away from Paris, away from girlhood, away from the white, enclosed quietude of my mother’s apartment, into the unguessable country of marriage.” Carter’s use of the word “bore” compares the heroine’s journey to her married life to a rebirth. The comparison emphasizes how the heroine is not just getting married but being transformed from a girl, “away from girlhood,” into a woman.
The Heroine’s Complicity in Her Subjugation
The heroine’s arousal on the train, heightened by sexual verbs such as “pounding,” “thrusting,” and “burning,” comes not so much from her attraction to the Marquis but from her curiosity at the “unguessable” act of sex that she anticipates. Even though the Marquis evaluates her as though she is “horseflesh,” his condescension excites her because it makes her realize her own “potential for corruption,” for sexuality and desire. She does not find out until later how literally the Marquis makes love and corruption into a single act with the fetish of murdering his wives. He takes his favorite quote by Baudelaire literally: “There is a striking resemblance between the act of love and the ministrations of a torturer.” For him, the act of love *is* the act of torture. Because the Marquis’s objectifying remarks and actions excite the heroine, we can see that until she realizes the extent of her dilemma, she is somewhat complicit in her own subjugation.
Symbols of Death and the Castle’s Foreboding Atmosphere
Images of rebirth and sexuality make the narrator’s entrance into marriage seem full of life. But the moment she arrives at the castle, this feeling is tempered with symbols of death that foreshadow her own near-death. She arrives at dawn, a time of freshness and possibility, but in the month of November in late fall, which traditionally represents a decline into winter and death. The sea has an “amniotic salinity”—the word amniotic referencing birth—but it surrounds the castle when the tide is high, so that for all its majesty the palace resembles a prison. She describes it as, “at home neither on the land nor on the water, a mysterious, amphibious place, contravening the materiality of both earth and the waves … That lovely, sad, sea-siren of a place!” To the heroine, the castle seems like a place where reality is suspended and strange things happen. When she compares it to a siren or mermaid, who lure sailors and then drown them, she evokes another symbol of death and foreshadows her fate.
The Bridal Chamber and Its Ominous Symbols
The bridal chamber itself is filled with symbols of death and martyrdom. On the wall hangs a painting of Saint Cecilia, who died by decapitation. The Marquis sees the heroine as his own personal Saint Cecilia, whom he plans to kill in a sick bastardization of martyrdom. The heroine’s necklace, which the Marquis instructs her not to remove, references the same bloody death. At the time, she does not realize that the necklace symbolizes the death that the Marquis has planned for her. Twelve mirrors surround the bed, the number twelve symbolizing the twelve apostles and therefore referencing Christ. Since Christ is the ultimate martyr, the mirrors comprise another death reference. Finally, the Marquis has filled the narrator’s room with so many lilies, which are reflected in the mirrors, that it appears to be a “funereal parlor.” The heroine connects sex with death most explicitly when she uses the word “impale” to describe the Marquis’s penetrating her.
The Bloody Chamber: A Symbol of Death and Rebirth
It is not the bridal chamber but the Marquis’s secret murder room that lends the story its title, “The Bloody Chamber.” However, the bridal chamber is a ‘bloody chamber’ of sorts because it is there that the Marquis spills the narrator’s blood by taking her virginity. Being a place for the consummation of marriage, it also represents the murder that always follows. The events that surround the forbidden chamber echo Eve’s temptation and fall in the Garden of Eden, thus connecting each wife’s downfall to the idea of original sin. As Jean-Yves explains, the heroine “only did what [the Marquis] knew she would,” just as, he implies, God knew that Eve would taste the forbidden apple and be sentenced to pain and (eventual) death. The Marquis sees himself as God because he is a man and a royal figure; therefore, he feels it is his mission to tempt and punish women. But far from being godlike or right, the Marquis’s actions are perverted. He is like the man in his engraving, “Reproof of Curiosity,” who arouses himself by whipping a naked girl, only he is worse for being a murderer. The allusion to Eve suggests that inasmuch as the “bloody chamber” is a place of suffering and death for the other wives, it is one of learning and rebirth for the heroine. In this way, the term “bloody chamber” can also refer to the womb; it is a physical symbol of birth and of Eve’s punishment: pain in childbirth as well as the pain of knowledge.
A Feminist ‘Happily Ever After’
Like many traditional fairy tales, “The Bloody Chamber” ends ‘happily ever after.’ But the heroine’s happiness does not come from finding a stereotypical prince charming and living out her days in luxury. Rather, she marries a blind piano tuner, gives away her fortune, and lives with her mother and husband on the edge of town. This ending embodies a feminist perspective. The heroine starts out as a naïve sexual object, manipulated into submission with the promise of material comfort. The Marquis condemns her to death for refusing to obey him blindly and remain ignorant. Her triumph, as Moore explains, is in recognizing her own intelligence and mettle as a human being and rejecting the role of submissive child. Having learned from her experience, the heroine rids herself of all remnants of that former identity. She rejects wealth, which is what the Marquis used to win her naïve trust. She marries a blind man, who cannot objectify her for her beauty because he cannot see her. She even rejects the traditional household of two in favor of living with her mother as well as her husband. By doing so, Moore says, she “avoids the institution of marriage with its requirement to love, honor, and obey a husband till death. [She] replaces a relationship between power and submission with one of mutual affection and equality.” Even though the heroine is married, she does not rely solely on Jean-Yves for money or love because she earns money giving piano lessons and has her mother’s company.
The Mark of Triumph and Penance
Even though the mark on the heroine’s forehead proves her triumph over both death and misogyny, she is ashamed of it. The key that made the mark was, as Moore says, “the key to her selfhood,” but she does not consider the mark a badge of success; to the heroine, it is a permanent reminder that she let herself be lured, bought, and mistreated. In rejecting wealth, earning a living, and residing with her mother, the narrator not only fulfills her wish for independence; she does a sort of penance for allowing sexist abuse in her former life. This penance she also does by telling her story, in hopes that other women might not fall prey to a man like the Marquis.