On Carter and 'The Bloody Chamber'
Andrea Dworkin- ‘pseudofeminist’
Susanne Kappeler- ‘Carter is an apologist fleeing to a literary sanctuary outside of political criticism’
Amanda Sebetsyen- ‘the high priestess of post-graduate porn’
Robin Ann Sheets- ‘an intensely political criticism of pornography and patriarchy’
Lokke- ‘The Bloody Chamber is a about…. the dance of death and the maiden… for once the maiden is triumphant over death’
Carter’s work is about desire, violence and the body- the most contentious subjects which concern feminists
Individual stories - from Gradesaver:
The Bloody Chamber
Rosemary Moore - "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."
Moore - the mark on the heroine’s forehead is
"the key to her selfhood."
The
Courtship of Mr Lyon
Meyre Ivone Santana da Silva - the story's primary thematic difference from
"Beauty and the Beast" is its manipulation of that story's "act
of mirroring."
Da Silva - "The daughter is conscious of her
annihilation in the patriarchal society but she doesn't have autonomy to
overcome it."
The
Tiger’s Bride
Moore – the soubrette is a "social creation of
femininity"; she embodies the vanity and vapidity that characterize
society's idea of a woman.
Puss
in Boots
Aytyul Ozum -
"Carter, in
"Puss-in-Boots" combines evil with lechery and proposes the idea that
women have this potential and it is not less strong than the evil in men."
Ozum - "lechery goes hand in hand with
greed," and the master, mistress, and their cats plot to kill Signor
Panteleone out of greed for his wealth and the sexual, perhaps sometimes
lecherous want to be with each other.
Ozum - "the
foregrounded evil is not the cat's but the master's," that Puss and Tabby
help their master and mistress execute their own evil ideas.
The
Erl-King
Harriet Kramer Linkin - calls the female protagonist "a highly sophisticated
consciousness."
Linkin - confirms
that Carter draws on Romantic ideas in the whole of The Bloody Chamber.
However, while the Romantics looked to nature as a source of spiritual
enlightenment and life, in The Erl-King, it is a source of confinement and
death.
Linkin - Carter is playing on the Romantic hero's wish
to tame the women he encounters.
The Snow Child
Mary Kaiser - the Countess is also a pornographic image in
relation to the Count. She belongs to him because she has significance as
Countess only in relation to him as Count.
Ozum - the
Countess is "a female aristocratic voyeur" because although it is the
Count who creates and rapes the Snow Child, she does (and can do) nothing to
stop him.
Bacchilega -
because the woman can coexist only as rivals, having no power independent of
the Count, they cannot advance themselves. In fact, one of them must die in
order for the other to continue existing.
Ozum - referencing Elaine Jordan, explains that the
Snow Child's death is not "a killing of women," but rather a
"killing of masculine representations."
The
Werewolf
Bacchilega - calls "The Werewolf" the
first of "Carter's three 'women-in-the-company-of-wolves' stories."
Bacchilega - at the story's end, we do not know
whether to valourise or rebuke the heroine for her actions.
Bacchilega - suggests
that "the devil" in whatever form-witch, vampire, werewolf-is only
"the institutionalized projection of our fears and desires." We fear
our own potential for wrongdoing, so we create fairy-tale monsters as external
projections of it. If evil exists outside ourselves, then it cannot exist
within ourselves. The villagers and the heroine in "The Werewolf"
subscribe to this "scapegoating" by hunting and killing witches. Carter,
implicates not only them but us, the reader, as being violent.
The
Company of Wolves
Bacchilega - Carter keeps the werewolf and the
grandmother separate in order to focus on the wolf and child's interaction as
an allegory of the heterosexual relationship.
Bacchilega - while the narrator in "The
Werewolf" warns of evil in a removed and bemused manner, the narrator in
"The Company of Wolves" seems to believe, fervently, that werewolves
are evil and addresses the audience as "you" to convince us of this.
Bacchilega - the
female is able to embrace the werewolf's traditions as well as, literally
embrace the werewolf. When the wolf says he will eat her, she laughs because
"she [knows] that she [is] nobody's meat." Bacchilega interprets this
phrase to mean that, "by acting out her [sexual] desires, the girl offers
herself as flesh, not meat." Usually a sacrificial victim's body is not
seen as being his or her own; it belongs to the deity or other being in whose
honour the ceremony is given.
John McCrone - In his book, The Myth of
Irrationality, McCrone examines the case of Amala and Kamala, two children
raised by wolves until the ages of three and five, respectively. McCrone says
that just like babies, Amala and Kamala were "mentally naked" when
they were found because they did not have other humans to shape their thinking.
So, too, is Wolf-Alice "mentally naked" as well as physically naked.
She walks on all fours because no one has taught her to stand, goes naked
because no one has taught her to wear clothes, and howls because no one has
taught her to speak.
Bacchilega - calls Wolf-Alice "a new Eve"
because she retains an authenticity of being that has been lost on humans since
we tumbled out of Eden.
