AO4 CRITICS & TINGS

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.