Angela Carter's The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories Commentaries

Joseph Chamberlain Sixth Form College English Department

Angela Carter's The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories COMMENTARIES

Section 3: Commentaries Commentary: ‘The Bloody Chamber’

Introduction:
- Analysis is split into sections based on paragraphs or ranges of paragraphs in the story.
- Each section is prefaced by a quotation indicating the paragraph(s) concerned.
- You should locate the relevant sections in your copy of the text first.
- It is highly recommended to have a dictionary to hand to look up unfamiliar words.

“I remember how, that night, I lay awake in the wagon-lit in a tender, delicious ecstasy…”

Introduces an unnamed first-person female narrator on a train journey.
She has just married an extremely wealthy, bearded French aristocrat - “the Marquis”.
The Marquis has murdered all of his former wives (see the Perrault ‘Bluebeard’ story).
He will sexually humiliate her and then try to kill her.
She will eventually be saved by her mother, who shoots the Marquis at the end of story.
She will then marry a blind piano tuner called Jean-Yves.
The recently married couple appear to be travelling from Paris to Brittany, where the Marquis has his ancestral home, a fairy-tale castle on the coast.
The story is set around 1900, in Fin de Siècle France.
This was a time when great progress was being made in the arts and in society generally, but it was also a time of decadence and unrest.
The French setting satisfies the Gothic connection (foreign locations) and reminds us too of the Marquis de Sade.
The title of the villain in this story – “Marquis” – is obviously not a coincidence.
It also evokes a supposedly cultured but basically corrupt society in which males have the freedom to exploit females.
Carter provides only tangential details about time and place in the story, perhaps because this helps to universalise its themes in the manner of fairy tales
First person narrative point of view: it allows Carter to provide intimate and perceptive insights into female psychology and into the suffering that males can cause in females.
The first paragraph sets the scene and immediately alludes to its Gothic sources by symbolising a female “journey” through life.
This journey starts with the innocence of childhood or “girlhood”: the “enclosed” and maternally protected “space” of the early years.
It then moves through courtship and into marriage, which is here metaphorically called a mysterious “unguessable country”.
A common Gothic plot line is thereby referenced immediately and Carter is using it self-consciously and intertextually.
This is also the journey that many real women make in their lives and Carter may feel it is one which results in the “imprisonment” of marriage and the subsequent disempowerment of the female.
Carter also subverts the traditional Gothic character of the very moral and sexually innocent female.
In this first paragraph, for instance, there are clear indications of her sexual excitement at the forthcoming wedding night – look at the imagery and vocabulary: the noun “ecstasy” and the adjective “burning” are a prelude to the obvious phallic symbolism of “the great pistons ceaselessly thrusting..".
A clear feminist strategy throughout The Bloody Chamber is the deliberately frank portrayal of female sexuality, a topic that patriarchal society and its literature before the 20th century tended to ignore, deny, or demonise.
Carter will shock us with such frankness later in this story (and in others), especially by describing female sexual body parts and female sexual activity.
She sees this robust approach as necessary in order to overcome the way in which female sexuality has been ignored or vilified over the centuries.
The method should therefore be regarded as a liberating strategy rather than an indecent one, even if it is sometimes challenging for the reader.

“And I remember I tenderly imagined how…“:

This paragraph stresses the importance of the mother figure and takes us back to the “safety” of the narrator’s childhood before she entered the world of men.
Carter will later show the mother to be the narrator’s greatest ally against the Marquis, when she kills him at the end.
This appears to be a form of female solidarity, in opposition to the exploitative predations of males.
Note some important details: the “concert programme” and the “scores” indicate that the narrator is musical, as does the reference to the “Conservatoire” later.
In fact, she is a pianist and this is also an ironic reference to the “feminine skills” of Gothic heroines.
The symbolism of the wedding ring as a representation of the female being “given” to her husband as a possession is prominent here.
It will be will be revisited in one of the key symbols of the story later: the ruby choker that the Marquis gives the narrator, a symbol of male control, amongst other things.
Carter also captures the narrator’s regret at having to leave her childhood and her mother behind, using emotive language like “pang of loss”, “ceased”, “relics” and “half-sorrowful”.

“Are you sure, she'd said when they delivered the gigantic box…”:

Here Carter continues the theme of marriage and extends the characterisation of the narrator’s doughty mother: “indomitable” foreshadows her later defeat of the Marquis, as does the adjective “eagle-faced”, which has undertones of power and admirable ferocity.
The account of her “outfac[ing]” “Chinese pirates” and shooting “a man-eating tiger” is funny, too, partly because of its implausible, adventure-book quality but also because symbolically the mother is a “man-eater” herself when she later kills the Marquis.
The paragraph also alludes to the wealth of the Marquis, given the implied cost of the dresses he’s bought for the women, and draws our attention to Carter’s ornate or “bejewelled” written style, with the simile “like…fruit” and the rich resonances of the phrase “dull prismatic sheen of oil on water”.

“ ‘Are you sure you love him?' TO “…she was surprised by footpads on her way home from the grocer's shop.”:

The poor bride who marries the rich man (note the metaphor “the spectre of poverty”) is another trope from traditional romantic literature or melodrama.
Carter uses it ironically.
The absence of the father, who died in a war, is very deliberate: fathers in The Bloody Chamber are often portrayed as weak, flawed, or absent, and here his absence allows her to put more emphasis on the solidarity of females - the mother and daughter.
The detail about the service revolver is significant and intentional – it is the gun that will later be used to kill the Marquis, when the female (mother) appropriates the power of the male, symbolised by the father’s gun, in order to defeat him.
The mother’s question at the start of the paragraph “(Are you sure [you love him]?”) is repeated a little later and is met with the ambiguous reply “I’m sure I want to marry him”.
This introduces a note of uncertainty regarding the relationship which may foreshadow the dire turn of events later on.
It also raises the question of why women agree to get married, hinting perhaps at the hope of higher social rank and thus wealth.
It might even imply the ways in which women sometimes overlook the faults of their husbands if they have comfortable or luxurious lives to offset their previous lack of status.

“Now and then a starburst of lights spattered the drawn blinds…“:

The eroticism in this paragraph is another good example of the point we made above, about Carter’s candid depiction of female sexuality.
Here it takes the form of the narrator’s sexual arousal.
This is produced partly by the stimulating effect of the silk nightdress but also by the anticipation of having sex for the first time on her wedding night, an act which the Marquis is deliberately or “teasingly” “delay[ing]”.
Sexual qualities are evoked by phrases like “slipped over my…breasts”, “ teasingly caressed me”, “nudging between my thighs” and “voluptuously”.
Once more, the use of sibilance is effective in producing the implications of sexual arousal, as is the repetition of “His kiss, his kiss”.
Notice, however, that this already seems to be soured by a rather unpleasant sense of dominance in the male: “his kiss with tongue and teeth in it and a rasp of beard”.
Also, there is clearly an age difference between bride and groom, implied by the phrase “young girl’s…”, which additionally hints that the narrator has only just reached sexual maturity.
We will see later that this is one of Carter’s criticisms of the Marquis (and thus perhaps of men in general, if he symbolises them): she is perhaps hinting that men like younger females and in this story virgins, presumably because they are seen by sexist males as “unspoilt goods”.
Carter stops short of calling the Marquis a child molester here (the narrator’s age is 17 – over the age of consent), but the implication may still hover in the background.
Note the brief description of the Marquis’s ancestral home: “that magic place, the fairy castle”.
Both Gothic and fairy tale settings are self-consciously alluded to here and the effect is also to show the patriarchally conditioned naivety of young women: the narrator may think that her marriage will have a fairy-tale quality, in the way that some women may over-romanticise their “destiny” in marriage, but it won’t.
Or it won’t until she gets married for a second time to Jean-Yves in the deliberately clichéd “happy ending” to the story.
For many women, Carter suggests, marriage may turn out to be a rather disappointing – or in this case disastrous – relationship, characterised by the domination of the male and the subjugation of the female.

“Above the syncopated roar of the train…“:

The animal imagery in this paragraph, used for the first extended description of the Marquis, compares him to a lion - note “leonine” and in a later paragraph “mane”.
This is a symbolic connection which reminds us of Carter’s other tales where men are likened to impressive but also dangerous beasts.
See particularly her ‘Beauty and the Beast’ tales - “The Courtship of Mr. Lyon’ and ‘The Tiger’s Bride”.
The comparison is extended later in the paragraph by the predatory qualities of the Marquis when he would enter the room unannounced during their courtship: “he moved as softly as if all his shoes had soles of velvet”.
While this is not yet overtly threatening, there is an insidious quality to it (stressed by the sibilance).
In other words, there is a submerged sense of male encroachment in female “territory” for nefarious purposes.
The reference to the Marquis’s “scent” combines a reference to animal scent with its human, supposedly “civilised” equivalent, the scent of “leather and spices” that announces the Marquis’s presence.
Olfactory symbolism, symbolism related to the sense of smell, is used elsewhere in the story (see the lilies) to suggest the simultaneous attraction and repulsion felt by females towards some males.
Here we see the beginnings of this: the scent is “opulent”, in the sense of being both “expensive” and “cloying”/”too much”.

“He had loved to surprise me in my abstracted solitude at the piano…“:

While playing a Debussy prelude on the piano, the narrator would sometimes be “surprise[d]” by the Marquis and would then mimic “surprise”.
Two different grammatical forms and two different semantic senses of the word are cleverly used in this paragraph: “surprise” (the noun) is the feeling we have when something unexpected happens and “surprise” (the verb) means, here, “to creep up on someone with predatory/violent intent”.
The overall effect is the same as the one we saw in the last paragraph; the male is symbolically stalking the female, and this creates a sub-textual implication of menace.
The fact that the narrator knew the Marquis was in the room before he announced his presence might make us think of the underlying knowledge females possess about the nature of men.
It might also suggest the possible tendency of women to pretend they do not have such knowledge and to “go along” with male power games.
The necessary deceptions that females must practise in a patriarchal society, so as not to incur the wrath or “disappointment” of males, is therefore another important theme in Carter.

“He was older than I. He was much older than I..“:

See ‘The Erl King’, which has virtually identical descriptions of the male.
One of Carter’s “favourite” ways of describing men is shown here.
Apart from the comment about the age difference, which we have discussed above, notice the emphasis in the imagery on smoothness and hardness (the simile “like a stone”), concealment and duplicity (again a simile - “like a mask”) and the absence or ambiguity of “light”.
The suggestion is that the Marquis is concealing his true nature from the woman.
Males who wear masks, real ones or metaphorical ones, appear throughout The Bloody Chamber.
The paragraph is also notable for the much-celebrated poetic qualities of Carter’s prose style – note the strong rhythm and repetition in the opening two sentences, the metaphors “washed” and “unsigned” and the sound effects here: “sometimes…stillness…listened”.
There is also effective manipulation of sentence length in places.
For instance, short sentences like “Or else, elsewhere” capture the confusion of the female as she enters the dangerous world of men and foreshadow later revelations about the Marquis/men.

“In, perhaps, that castle to which the train now took us…” TO “The next day, we were married”:

A relatively long flashback that introduces some vital information and themes:
This part starts with a reiteration of the narrator’s excitement about seeing the castle, but the castle is also the place where she will “see him plain”, in other words, where she will see his true (perverted and violent) nature.
Her anticipation is suspenseful, and this suspense contains a sense of threat as well as “normal” excitement.
The symbol of the lily used to describe the face of the Marquis is important.
It is introduced by a simile, “sometimes he seemed to me like a lily”, and it again combines attraction with repulsion, like his “scent”.
Normally a flower comparison would be a pleasant one, but here the negative connotations of words like “cobra” and “funereal” suggest death.
Lilies are often seen at funerals, hence the adjective use here.
It may also be another phallic symbol.
Another of Carter’s feminist assertions appears in this passage: the suggestion that men are like a heavy weight brought to bear on women, especially in terms of their sexual “desire”.
The key quotation for this is “it was as though the imponderable weight of his desire was a force I might not withstand, not by virtue of its violence but because of its very gravity.”
The gravity image is used again in ‘The Erl King’.
The idea that men draw women to them because of their apparent status and power is suggested here by a metaphor from physics.
The mention of the “old nurse” probably references the odd, eccentric, or otherwise characterful servants of Gothic literature.
Her comment that the opal might be “bad luck”, however, is an important piece of foreshadowing, deliberately positioned at this point in the structure of the narrative.
By the way, older women in Carter often have a reputation for perpetuating unhelpful myths about male-female relationships; see some of the grandmothers later in the collection.
The wedding ring symbolism has been discussed before but here the fact that the ring has been passed down through the generations allows Carter to bring up the Marquis’s former wives, another intertextual reference to Bluebeard.
The “history” of the wives (see below) suggests that male domination of females has been going on for centuries.
The use of ancestry in Carter often has this implication and again she is using a Gothic convention for a feminist purpose.
Many Gothic villains were aristocratic and their ancestry was often described in the course of the narrative.
The dead wives (à la ‘Bluebeard’) are described here.
The narrator is the Marquis’s fourth wife.
The third was a Romanian countess, the second a high society artist’s model and the first an opera singer.
They are the “silent women” of The Bloody Chamber, rather like Claribel and Sycorax in The Tempest - but we will meet what’s left of them later in the story.
Their number and their fates may symbolise the history and persistence of patriarchal power.
Also, their descriptions give us a sense of the Marquis’s exotic or ”specialised” sexual tastes.
To take this last point a little further, note how Carter appears to be suggesting that “high culture” (opera, paintings, the lavishly decorated castle etc.) is actually just a front for the male corruption beneath it.
The tone of naivety in the narrator’s description of some of the wives is deliberate.
Since she is telling the story with foreknowledge of how it will end (just as Carter is) it’s perfectly obvious to the reader what the ironic implication of a line like this is: “Dead just three short months before I met him, a boating accident”; or this: “They never found her body”; or indeed this: “And yet it was the absinthe doomed her, or so they said.”
Finally, note how the description of the second wife, the model, allows Carter to point out how “art” exploits women: “ until Puvis de Chavannes [a French painter] saw her and had her expose her flat breasts and elongated thighs to his brush”.
The narrator’s reflections on why the Marquis might have has chosen her (”I, the poor widow's child with my mouse-coloured hair…my bony hips, my nervous, pianist's fingers”) create further ironic implications – we might already have guessed from the suggestions above that his latest perversion is the exploitation and corruption of a virgin.
This sub-section also contains one of the most famous symbols in The Bloody Chamber: the ruby choker.
A choker is a piece of jewellery worn around the neck.
Here it is described as “His wedding gift, clasped round my throat. A choker of rubies, two inches wide, like an extraordinarily precious slit throat.”
An obvious symbolic implication here is male ownership – it’s like the collar one would put on a pedigree dog – but there are subsidiary implications of murder/death, sadomasochism, the commodification of women and possibly some vaginal symbolism.
The similes used to describe it (“like an extraordinarily precious slit throat…..Like the memory of an old wound”) place emphasis on the damage done to females by males, though the similes also allude to the days of the French Revolution and within it, The Terror, when many aristocrats were executed.
Does this hint at the Marquis’s final fate, perhaps?
The final paragraph of this sub-section is worthy of particular attention (the paragraph beginning “I saw him watching me in the gilded mirrors…").
Here the blood imagery from the previous paragraph leads to a series of reflections on how the Marquis (or men) tend to treat women like “meat” or “flesh”.
In other words, Carter suggests they are only interested in women for carnal reasons and regard them as bodies to exploit rather than human beings - “cuts on the slab” as the narrator puts it.
This interpretation may obviously be supported by the phrase, “When I saw him look at me with lust”.
More than this though, the narrator is also depicted here as the sacrificial victim (“I saw myself, suddenly, as he saw me, my pale face, the way the muscles in my neck stuck out like thin wire. I saw how much that cruel necklace became me”).
The paragraph also introduces a theme that will be developed later: the male gaze (“watching”, “saw”, “caught sight”) and its magnification or, in the symbol of the mirror, its multiplication.
In feminist literary criticism, “the male gaze” refers to how men look at women sexually in a way that demeans them, or objectifies them.
The line “I sensed in myself a potentiality for corruption that took my breath away” is equally interesting.
Some readers have suggested that the narrator is sexually aroused by the thought of being “corrupted”.
We do not need to return to Fifty Shades of Grey here but suffice it to say that elsewhere in The Bloody Chamber, Carter seems to suggest that patriarchal society has conditioned women to accept sexual domination as “normal” male behaviour and even, on occasions, to enjoy it.
Again, see ‘The Erl King’ for more on this – and indeed a particular scene in this story which come a little later.
The word “corruption”, or more precisely the “potentiality” for corruption, again reminds us of the Marquis’s cruel and exotic sexual tastes: he is sexually aroused by the thought of corrupting an innocent.
This is all very Sadeian of course, in its intertextual references.
Yet there are broader implications here for how “normal” male sexuality works in relation to women.
Why, for instance, is virginity considered an attractive quality to some men?
Why do some men use pornography for sexual gratification?
Why (in America) is the phrase “nice piece of ass” used?
Are most men characterised by what Carter calls “sheer carnal avarice” - or not?
And don’t women have the same capacity to objectify men?
One last, but very important point: you may have thought that Carter is portraying the Marquis in a very serious way, given all that we have said above – but you’ll soon discover that she’s not, or at least, not all of the time.
Depending on your sense of humor, you may detect - and sometimes you should detect – the presence of comic parody in ‘The Bloody Chamber’.
So far, the writing has suggested that we are dealing more with a pastiche than a parody (see above – allusions, pastiche and parody); it has been thematically serious in places and there have been no very obvious jokes.
However, one important feature of Carter’s post-modernist narratives is their deliberate instability of tone.
This story actually ends more like a farce than a gripping horror tale, for reasons we will discuss in some depth later.
There is a clue to this in this part of the story – the Marquis’s monocle: “the sheer carnal avarice of it…was strangely magnified by the monocle lodged in his left eye”.
Already in the narrative, therefore, we might sense the beginnings of humor or parody - and this will be confirmed quite soon when we discover what the Marquis uses his monocle for.
Of course, whether readers find Carter’s dark sense of humor amusing is very much up to them, but in the exam it would be very unwise to deny that there are comic elements in ‘The Bloody Chamber’.

“The train slowed, shuddered to a halt” TO “The chauffeur eyed me”:

Building on the sense of threat we have noted above, these paragraphs pursue the theme of marriage as “exile” - exile from childhood, from the parental home, from the society and social class the narrator used to know.
Her consoling thoughts about “”sausages hissing in a pan” and “children tucked up in bed asleep” merely serve to emphasize her sense of trepidation and disorientation.
The Marquis’s ominous promise (”Soon”) does not help either and although it refers largely to what will happen on the wedding night, there seem to be even darker resonances here.
The narrator’s belief that she has been “seduced” by rich gifts and by the promise of a new life is important – and perhaps we should consider the implications of this word “seduced”.
It is often associated with the actions of males and, in the Bible, Eve is said to have been “seduced” by the snake or Satan in the Garden of Eden.
The listing technique used in “This ring, the bloody bandage of rubies…” adds weight to the notion of a seduction and the use of “conspired” suggests similar deceptions.
The word “child” returns in the simile of the “child’s toy” and we are again reminded of the narrator’s relatively young age (though she is not, at the age of 17, a “child” in the normal sense of the word) – see above for the implications of this.
Further impressions of the intensity of the male gaze are conveyed by “his eyes…fixed on me” and again this is combined with a sense of weight or pressure on the female (see above): “A huge man, an enormous man”.
The effect of this on her is to inspire “tension in the pit of [her] stomach” rather than love or sexual arousal.
Similarly, her husband’s voice, described with the ominous simile “like the tolling of a bell” produces “a sharp premonition of dread” in her.
The techniques here are not unlike those of the Gothic novelist Ann Radcliffe (see above); at this point they point to terror, as opposed to the horror that will soon come.
The tone/mood created by the setting at this point helps to intensify the sense of threat and despondency, too: “It was November…It was cold….that lonely wayside halt”.
References to the Marquis’s enormous wealth return in: “The richest man in France” (compare “rich as Croesus” earlier, a classical allusion which makes us associate great wealth with great vanity or selfishness).
This may represent the power of males more generally in patriarchal society and the mention of the Marquis’s cigar may further this symbolically, and/or it could be another phallic symbol.
Carter also references here the conflation (mixing together) of the father and the husband in the female mind – the smell of the cigar reminds the narrator of her father and brings up the issue of the two most significant male figures in a woman’s life.
Both, in this story, are problematic (one is dead and the other is a deviant abuser of women).
The “eyeing” of the narrator by the “ironic chauffeur” at the end of this section makes her the focal point of the male gaze again and suggests themes of threat, distrust and conspiracy.

“Sea; sand; a sky that melts into the sea..” TO “No room, no corridor…”:

The description of the castle and its surrounding seascape is important.
Initially there seems to be a marked change of tone here to a more positive one: the sound effects are soft and beguiling (“Sea; sand; a sky that melts into the sea..”), the landscape is compared to music (“harmonies” by Debussy) and there is an emphasis on colour and on the magical qualities of the castle itself.
However, beneath the surface the themes are ones of indeterminacy and loss.
Look at the use of the verb “melts”, the repetition of “misty”, the implications of the word “solitude” and the central symbol of the sea, with its fluctuating forms and moods.
The castle too resists definition; it seems to have little stable identity; it is a “mysterious, amphibious place, contravening the materiality of both earth and the waves”, a place where one might imagine a “melancholy” mermaid waiting in vain for her dead lover.
Some readers have seen this as representing the “seductions” that males practice upon females; others point to the setting as a symbol of the female mind, confused by conflicting messages of how she should think and behave in a patriarchal society – see ‘The Erl King’.
Self-deception is another possibility here.
What is certain is that beneath the apparently beautiful surface of the language, there is a sub-text of ambiguity and impending tragedy.
The metaphor “sea-siren”, for instance, alludes to beautiful young women in classical mythology who lured sailors to their deaths with their exquisite songs.
Carter’s decision to have the castle cut off from the land “for half [the] day” and to later describe it using the extended metaphor of a ship, is a clever departure from what would otherwise be a fairly obvious Gothic setting: it connotes isolation or a kind of imprisonment, here of the female.
The Bluebeard associations continue too – especially in “the black fringes of his beard, now curved a little”.
Note the Gothic device of the portraits of the Marquis’s ancestors on the walls inside the castle – their “rank” is mentioned, another reference to power structures in patriarchal society.

“First of all, there was the small ordeal of my initial interview with the housekeeper” TO “But, here, it would be easy to be content.”:

These paragraphs are of interest for two things – firstly, the continued suggestion of conspiracy and the alienation of the new wife, achieved through the depiction of the housekeeper’s devotion to the Marquis (note the use of word “complicity”).
Carter may also be thinking of the Daphne du Maurier story ‘Rebecca’ here (and the Alfred Hitchcock film of the same name), which pursues analogous themes.
Secondly, there is the allusion to St Cecilia, the patron[ess] saint of music.
The St. Cecilia reference is doubly effective and very self-conscious on Carter’s part: the narrator is a pianist and St. Cecilia died by being beheaded, which of course is what the Marquis wants to do to the narrator.
St. Cecilia also took a vow never to lose her virginity; ironically the narrator loses hers in a few pages’ time.

“And there lay the grand, hereditary matrimonial bed, itself the size…” TO “This scene from a voluptuary's life was now abruptly terminated..“:

WARNING – the next part is rather shocking!
In this part of the story, the Marquis wastes no time in “inspecting” what to him is his new purchase/“piece of meat”, the narrator.
They go to the bedroom, in which there is a huge bed and lots of mirrors, and the Marquis takes off all of his wife’s clothes.
She is then required to lie on the bed while he inspects her genitals (he uses his monocle to get a better look).
However, he does not have sex with her at this point because making her wait increases his sadistic sexual pleasure.
The narrator is initially surprised at what he does, then she reminds herself that she shouldn’t be: the clues were there all along.
She is however, frustrated and “disgruntled” when he makes her wait, because in some ways she was quite looking forward to losing her virginity.
Scenes like this in Carter prompted one commentator, Amanda Sebestyen, to call her “the high priestess of post-graduate porn”.
It is certainly a very rude and perhaps disturbing scene and it may have shocked you, but Carter did not intend it to be pornographic in the normal sense of the word.
It is clearly another example of the male gaze and thus of the objectification of women by men - from a feminist point of view.
The reaction of some readers, in fact, is to laugh, because they think the Marquis’s behavior confirms that men are “only interested in one thing”.
We should remember though that the Marquis is a murderer, a sexual deviant, and (as you will later see) a user of violent and obscene pornography.
He is not, therefore, a “typical” man.
At the same time, there is a sense throughout the story that Carter is using the Marquis to make more universal points about the power of males in patriarchal society and what she sees as the concomitant subjugation of women.
Relevant contexts here are, therefore:
- Feminism – this scene could be read as a symbolic vignette of male sexual selfishness, male power and the subjugation of women,
- The Gothic – the scene is not hugely different to some of the passages you have seen earlier, from M. G. Lewis’s The Monk, for example (see Gothic villain, Gothic female etc. above),
- Post-modernism – the sudden change in the tone and the nature of the plot/action of the novel is shocking, surprising, ironic and self-conscious in its intention to make a broader statement about men/society/women (see above, feminism again)
- The influence of/intertextual relations with the work of the Marquis de Sade - his books are full of scenes of sexual humiliation like this one (again, don’t try to research this any further).
- We would assume that sexual scenes of this nature would not happen in a fairytale, though some psychoanalytic readings think do, symbolically – so Bluebeard could again be a relevant context here.

Here are the key points of analysis for this part of the story:

The mirror symbol (“so many mirrors”) could represent
- The sexual greed of men – through the (artificial) multiplication of pornographic objects of desire.
- As we have seen, the male gaze: the Marquis likes “watching” as opposed to “doing” (“scopophilia” and ”scopophilic” = “voyeurism” and “voyeuristic”). This may be why the actual act of sex later in the story receives only a cursory description (c).
- Male power in the sense that the Marquis can manipulate his environment to suit his own desires.
The sexualised language of the Marquis confirms his perversity: he says his mirrors give him a whole “harem” (“brothel”) of naked girls (note the metaphor here).
The passage self-consciously uses eroticized language to challenge the reader’s own assumptions/reactions: note the rhythm and listing of the adverbs here: “slowly, methodically, teasingly unfasten…“
There is a sense of shame and unspoken resistance in the female that suggests she rejects his advances and that she knows she is being humiliated (the exclamatory “Enough. No more! ” is spoken in the internal monologue of the narrator).
At the same time, she has no choice in the matter, because her marriage to him has effectively made her his property.
In spite of herself, she becomes sexually aroused by the Marquis’s actions (“I was aghast to feel myself stirring”), though her “arousal” is mixed with “repugnance”, which suggests that females are conditioned to regard such male actions as enjoyable but underneath realise they are wrong.
The allusion to her communion dress is ironic and shows that her purity has now been taken from her (communion = Christian religious ceremony); she is now part of a “ritual from the brothel”.
The Marquis’s language suggests exploitation and barely disguised brutality (note the adjectives “coarse” and “vulgar”).
He is also called at one point an “old monocled lecher” and associated with a virtually paedophilic lust for the narrator, who describes herself as “the child with…stick-like limbs”.
His own words suggest this too: “Anticipation is the greater part of pleasure, my little love…“
The artichoke metaphor is probably a symbol of the exploitation of women – reducing them to a “consumable” commodity.
The metaphor “gourmand” to describe the Marquis makes this even clearer – a gourmand is a person who enjoys eating/food – over-eating in fact.
Similarly, the “woman-as-meat” metaphor/symbol returns here with “lamb cop” and “flesh”.
The simile “he closed my legs like a book” reiterates previous references to women being the property of males or pornographic objects and thus makes them the subjects of the objectifying male gaze.
For the “lilies” symbol – see above (previous analysis of flower symbolism