Bloody Chamber

What happens?

1. Heroine marries a rich marquis, who already had 3 marriages

2. She travels to his castle to move in and loses her virginity before they’ve had lunch

3. He leaves because of business call and he leaves his keys with her, warning her not to go into a forbidden room

4. She enters chamber and finds the bodies of his 3 previous wives. He tells the young piano tuner what she saw

5. Marquis returns and learns what she did due to blood on the key. He prepares to hill her by beheading

6. As he swings the sword, heroines mother appears and shoots the Marquis

7. Heroine, mother and piano tuner live happily together with Marquis’s fortune

Narrative Perspective

• Bride (nameless)

• 1st person

• Personal, immediate identification of emotions

• Feminism (female character perspective)

Terror vs Horror

Ann Radcliffe (Early Gothic Writer)

Terror - The anticipation of fear. Excitement

Horror - The gore and scary part. Grotesque and disturbing

Setting

The castle feels as though stuck in the past

Marquis’s attitudes and way of living is not up to date with modern world

Castle is isolated at times depending on the time. Gothic feature (modern)

Brittany, France

Narrator’s mother

• Woman rescuer compared to the usual man saving his lover

• “When I thought of courage, I thought of my mother”

• In fairy tales the mother is usually dead or no longer part of child’s life

• “Ceased to be her child in becoming his wife”

Narrator/Bride

• Virginal “bare as the lamb chop”, she is seen in sexual terms (object), meat. “Lamb” = innocence

• Dead father and grew up in poverty, with her “eccentric” mother

• Independent, making her own choices

Piano-Tuner

• Only character with a name (Jean-Yves). Points him out as significant

• “Shyly”

• She is above him, looking after him as a blind man

• “Scarcely more than a boy”

• “You do not deserve this” morals

• “Like Eve” been told not to eat the fruit but did. Goaded into it

• “Blind” unable to see her to objectify her as a sexual being

• “Would come with me if I would lead him”

• “Boy” vs “huge man”

Marquis

• Wealth, material possessions

• Focus on age and experience with other women, emphasising lack of experience the bride has

• Animalistic qualities

• “Smells like Russian leather”

• Obsessed with interiors (bedroom, chamber, mirrors)

The Chamber

• “I felt no fear, no raising of the hairs on the back of the neck, no prickling of the thumbs”

  • Terror

  • No use of “my” = disconnect

• “The Iron Maiden”

  • Beginning of horror

• “Yet at the centre of the room”

  • Unknown as to what is there

  • Suspense and fear (terror)

• “Long white candle”

  • Horror, ominous

  • White = Gothic colour

• “Same lilies”

  • Linking to funerals

  • Filling bedroom foreshadows place of death he would have put her

  • Matrimonial and funeral

• “Easily as a hot knife into butter”

  • Did not have to put effort into accessing the chamber. He prepared it

  • Temptation

  • Foreshadowing her supposed death using painful imagery

• “Naked rock”

  • Hard, cold imagery

• “Skull”

  • Emphasises death

  • No going back once the skull is seen

Key themes

• Death

• Torture and violence

• Marriage

• Sexuality

• Power

• Pornography

• Isolation

• Wealth

The Castle

• “Silent still ocean”

  • Exaggerating the isolation. If something was to happen, saving seems impossible

• “Itself the size, almost, of my little room at home”

  • Sexualisation is expanded. She is small in comparison

• “The electricity did not extend here”

  • He has gone to New York, modern, compared to the corridor she has isolated herself in

Symbols and motifs

• Lilies - Stains like key. Funeral and marriage

• Blood - Death, stain on key, foreshadowing the beheading

• Red choker - Slit throat (beheading)

• Castle - Isolated setting. Hear the sea but unable to access the escape

• Sea - Changing tides changes isolation

• Chamber - Relate to ‘ladies chamber’ (bedroom). Sexual connotations to bloody chamber

• Keys - Key of knowledge. Should be to escape whereas does opposite for her

• Corridors - Lead her to chamber. Only one way to go. Gothic feature

• Mirrors - Surrounded by her husband but also by herself. She choose to marry him

• White Muslin Shift - Funeral sheaf. Foreshadows what she finds and her almost death

• Piano - Sea air is bad for piano as though the sea is bad for the bride

• Gun - Mother’s gun carried in her handbag ends up saving her

Chekhov’s Gun

Dramatic principle that every memorable element in a fictional story must come back at the end.

If a gun is mentioned in Chapter 1, it will go off later.

Mother’s gun mentioned at the start to portray her as different/stronger. Goes off at the end, to kill Marquis.

Gina Wisker

• Demythologising

• Adam and Eve - easy to see the Marquis as godlike, putting his wife in charge of Kent and charging her with not opening the door. She succumbs to temptation

• Or is she resolutely searching for knowledge

• Challenges the myth that Adam and Eve were expelled from Garden of Eden as a result of female behaviour

• Clear that Marquis set deliberate trap

Helen Simpson

‘She was using the forms of fantasy and fairy tales with conscious radical intent; in a letter to her friend 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’

→ Functional point to the story

Rescue

• “You never saw such a wild thing as my mother”

  • Different to the norms

  • Sea mimics her behind “blown out to sea”

• “White mane”

  • Comparison to Marquis’s hair described as a “mane”

Postmodernism

Challenges the core religious and capitalistic values of the Western World and seek change for a new age of liberty.

Intertextuality - References to other tales or stories. Bluebeard. Adam and Eve. Direct

Pastiche - Combining multiple elements. Fairy tales and Gothic

Fabulation - Fairy tale is unrealistic. Key. Medusa and siren

Historiographic Metafiction - Fictionalise actual historical events or figures

Magical Realism - Themes and subjects are imaginary, outlandish and dreamlike quality

Temporal distortion - Not conventional timings. Seems to be set late 19th century, yet has technology, such as cars and phone