The Bloody Chamber CONTEXT

Feral children

- Notioned in the cliche phrase ‘wild child’

- Long historical tradition in folklore and legend- Greek mythology has many examples of the maternal role being fulfilled by animals

Second-wave feminism

- Greer

- Acknowledges the political differences between earlier feminists and later generations when she writes that for many women activists in the 1960s and 70s ‘the call for revolution came before the call for the liberation of women’

Set in Third Republic in France

- A period synonymous with corruption, decadence, and defeat

- Began following the collapse of Napoleonic imperialism in 1870, and the politically unstable situation saw the rise and fall of the Paris Commune, the Panama Canal Company bankruptcy scandal, and the famous Dreyfus Affair

- Third Republic ended with the capitulation to fascism in 1940 and the establishment of the Vichy regime

Bluebeard Perrault

- About a wealthy aristocrat who persuades a local girl to marry him, similar to The Bloody Chamber, but her brothers rescue her at the last moment, Bluebeard is killed and with her inherited wealth she restores the fortunes of her family and finds a husband

Edward Teach (English pirate)

- Bluebeard sometimes given to him, sometimes Blackbeard

- He had 14 wives and the 2 legends have been confused and sometimes deliberately blurred

Marquis de Sade

- He was condemned to death for his cruelty and sexual transgressions

- He escaped and later imprisoned where he wrote works of perversion and fantasy

- His writing reflects the revolutionary upheaval of the times in which he lived and though the content is undoubtedly offensive to many, his political and philosophical views have been largely overshadowed by the scandalous nature of his life and reputation

Sadism

- Term given to a number of sexual practices, associated with the Marquis de Sade, that share the characteristic of deriving pleasurefrom inflicting pain on someone else

Vlad Tepes/ The Impaler

- She is ‘impaled’ by him during sex. creating an allusion to vampirism, recalling a connection between Dracula and Vlad Tepes

- Vlad Tepes impaled his enemies on spikes and was a 15th century Romanian ruler, cruel and ruthless

Eve’s temptation in Genesis

- The woman is allowed to possess the key to the chamber, only on one condition- she must not use it

- This is reminiscent of the Bible and Adam and Eve in Garden of Eden

Male gaze

- Laura Mulvey wrote an essay that was a deliberate attack on patriarchal values in the visual media, particularly Holywood

- Argues that patriarchy regards the audience as men, and women are therefore obliged to adopt a masculine perspective when looking at images that represent women as objects for male satisfaction

Biblical connotations

- Connection between the Marquis and God- identical omniscient presences seeing her trespassing at this very moment, captures her vulnerability and her guilt

- When she says ‘to keep my hands clean’, this recalls Matthew 27:24: ‘when Pilate saw that he could prevail nothing, but that rather a tumult was made, he took water, and washed his hands before the multitude, saying, I am innocent of the blood of this just person’

Risk of childbirth

- Similie for his weapon was ‘sharp as childbirth’

- Pregnancy and childbirth historically posed high risks to mother

- Beginning of 20th century, 1/100 women would die gicing birth to their child