AO4 and ting...

Feminism
-          Carter gives females of traditional fairy tales a voice.
-          Werewolf stories open up different roles that women can play as opposed to the stereotypical ‘damsel in distress’ or ‘evil old hag’ and often shows change/growth in character. ‘I was seventeen and knew nothing of the world.’
-          The Bloody Chamber was written in the 70’s, during the period of second wave feminism where women aimed to be perceived as equals in society.
-          All women in the stories are nameless (except Wolf-Alice) as they are only defined by their role in relation to a man. Women referred to as: ‘Madame’, ‘Baby’, ‘Mother’, ‘his wife’, ‘bride’, ‘my virgin’, ‘his girl-child’, ‘his pet’, ‘his Beauty’, ‘Miss Lamb’,
-          It could be said that this allows the triumphs of the strong female characters to represent all women- or alternatively, that these women are defined solely in relation to men and their attractiveness.
-          Women have some autonomy
‘The Male Gaze’/Objectification
-          Women are objectified, particularly in The Courtship of Mr Lyon and The Tiger’s Bride as the girls are handed over to a ‘beast’ by their fathers (or owners): ‘his bargain’, ‘my purchaser’, ‘On his arm, all eyes were upon me’, ‘My father lost me the Beast at cards.’, ‘You must not think my father valued me less than a king’s ransom; but, no more than a king’s ransom’
-          Even when in first person narration, female characters are described through the ‘male gaze’ which shows that society has even conditioned women to objectify and sexualise themselves: ‘my satin nightdress […] slipped over my young girl’s pointed breasts […] teasingly caressed me, egregious, insinuating, nudging between my thighs’, ‘always the pretty one’
Fairy tales/Folklore
-          The Bloody Chamber is based on the legend of Bluebeard. There is a direct reference to the story and by doing so Carter distinguishes her story from it and highlights how it’s different. ‘the sword still raised over his head as in those clockwork tableaux of Bluebeard that you see in glass cases at fairs.’ It serves as a caution against female curiosity and tells women to be faithful.
-          The Courtship of Mr Lyon and The Tiger’s Bride are both based Beauty and the Beast. Beauty and the Beast are ‘binary opposites’ but in the Courtship of Mr Lyon the two have an ‘irreconcilable binary’ (grey areas for both of them), Beauty is a mixture of Beauty and the Beast: active, brave and beautiful.
-          Puss-in-Boots = itself
-          The Erl-King =  Danish folklore (seductive and deadly fairy/siren)
-          The Snow Child = Snow White
-          The Lady of the House of Love = vampire folklore
-          The Werewolf, The Company of Wolves and Wolf-Alice = Little Red Riding Hood, Wolf-Alice has elements of ‘Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There (Alice in Wonderland).
Intertextuality
Bloody Chamber references Hamlet- ‘into the unguessable country of marriage’

Courtship of Mr Lyon also references Alice in Wonderland- Drink me, Eat me

‘Saint Cecilia at her celestial organ’ – Patroness of music and Church music because she sang to God as she died. Also an only child. Parallels with the heroine? Desperate for salvation.

The Liebestod-  ‘And, do you know, my heart swelled and ached so during the Liebestod that I thought I must truly love him. Yes.’ This is a reference to Tristan and Isolde, a Wagner opera. The notable point is that the Liebestod is the final aria and it literally means ‘love death’ in reference to consummation of love at the point of death or in the afterlife. (see: Romeo and Juliet)

‘the supreme and unique pleasure of love is the certainty that one is doing evil’ > ‘What matters an eternity of damnation to one who has found an infinity of joy in a single second?’
This is a quote by Charles Baudelaire. The first quote appears in the text as a quote from Carmilla to the Marquis, but the second Baudelaire quote makes the Marquis’s philosophy very clear.

'There is a striking resemblance between the act of love and the ministrations of a torturer,” opined my husband’s favourite poet’
Another Baudelaire quote- Baudelaire was more interested in morals, vice and aesthetic/sensual pleasure than the Romanticism of the time which was far more kind and believing in the good of humanity.

Mention of the descendant of Dracula, Carmilla- Gothic, referential to the lesbian vampire of the novel Carmilla. Perverse and unnatural temptations, she slept in a coffin > links to iron maiden as final resting place

“The flame picked out, here, the head of a man, there, the rich breast of a woman spilling through a rent in her dress – the Rape of Sabines, perhaps?”
-          The Sabine people populated the region where Rome is now located. The Sabines refused to allow their women to marry Roman men. Subsequently, Sabine women were abducted but no sexual assault was ever took place.
-          A foreshadowing of what is discovered in the chamber.
-          The ‘head of a man’ compared with the ‘breast of a woman’ being the two anatomical parts of the painting that can be seen are representative of perceptions of gender: ‘head of a man’ implies intelligence and power, ‘breast of a woman’ implies vulnerability and sexuality.

‘I must pay the price of my new knowledge. The secret of Pandora’s box;’
All the evil in the world was contained in that box- as punishment for her sin, her husband must execute her for unleashing his evil