The Bloody Chamber:

"The Bloody Chamber" is based on the legend of Bluebeard. Carter preserves the legend's
plot, casting the Marquis in the role of Bluebeard, who kills his wives and stores their
corpses in a secret chamber. Like Bluebeard, the Marquise entices each new wife to
explore the forbidden chamber and then kills her once she has discovered his secret.
Carter goes so far as to reference the Bluebeard legend toward the end of "The Bloody
Chamber." When the heroine's mother storms the Marquis's palace, he stands still in
shock, "the sword still raised over his head as in those clockwork tableaux of Bluebeard
that you see in glass cases at fairs." This allusion, rather than likening Carter's story to the
legend, has the effect of distinguishing "The Bloody Chamber" from it. By likening the
Marquis to Bluebeard, Carter makes it clear that he is not Bluebeard. In doing so, she
draws attention to the ways her story is distinct from the legend of Bluebeard and,
moreover, from fairy tales in general.
One distinguishing feature of "The Bloody Chamber" is its narrator. Unlike a traditional
fairy-tale narrator, generally an impartial third person, this narrator is the heroine herself.
By giving the heroine a voice, Carter challenged the fairy-tale tradition of our seeing,
from the outside, events befall an innocent girl. Letting the heroine tell her story
empowers the figure of woman by putting her in the traditionally male-dominated roles
of storyteller and survivor instead of relegating her to the role of helpless princess. In The
Bloody Chamber, the heroine tells us personally about how her suffering became the
source of her enlightenment.
Of the heroine's namelessness, Rosemary Moore writes, "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." Indeed, without her title the heroine is of little
importance to the Marquis or anyone but her mother and Jean-Yves. However, it is also
significant that Carter never actually refers to the heroine as "Marquise." One reason is
that the heroine tells the story in hindsight, when she has already settled into a new and
modest life far from the castle. She has become wise through her experience and no
longer considers herself a Marquise, a title that only implies deference to the Marquis.
Secondly, by leaving the heroine nameless, Cater universalizes her triumph so that she
represents all women.
Even though Carter empowers the heroine on a literary level, in the story she is forced
into a position of subjugation and ignorance. She marries primarily for money and
position, because as a peasant woman she has little opportunity or encouragement to earn
these for herself. As she tells her mother, she may not be sure that she loves the Marquis
but she is "sure [she wants] to marry him." The narrator takes on a gently mocking tone
to describe how she viewed love as a young woman. She recalls how the romantic opera
Tristan made her feel as though she loved the Marquis, saying, "And, do you know, my
heart swelled and ached so during the Liebestod that I thought I must truly love him."
The heroine smirks at how she conflated her love of music and romance with love for the
Marquis. Then she makes it clear that her desire, while real, was for the wealth and
position that the Marquis gives her; she follows the first statement with, "Yes. I did. On
his arm, all eyes were upon me." In addition, she refers to her husband as her "purchaser"
and herself as "his bargain," and makes a point to tell us that when he takes her virginity,
he kisses the rubies around her neck before kissing her mouth. Clearly, the Marquis is
more concerned with his wealth than with his wife; in fact, he loves his wives more when
they are dead-and truly objects-than when they are alive.
Despite her excitement at being married, the heroine's early statements tell us that she is
afraid of her husband and mistrusts him. She describes him as both beast-like and plant-
like; he is strong and imposing like a lion but so emotionless that he reminds her of a
"funereal lily." With these references to devouring and death, the heroine establishes the
Marquis as a destructive force. She also connects his passion explicitly to destruction
when she describes her anticipation at losing her virginity: "It was as though the
imponderable weight of his desire was a force I might not withstand." The heroine feels
instinctively that the Marquis's desire for her is tied with a love of destruction. The
heroine also equates her marriage to the Marquis with banishment when she states, "into
marriage, into exile." Instead of feeling as though she is escaping poverty, she considers
her marriage a forced isolation. With these words, the heroine indicates that by getting
married, she is not gaining but surrendering power.
Power in the story is located primarily in sexual interactions. What makes the heroine
appear so powerless to the Marquis and perhaps to herself is her virginity. Being a virgin,
the heroine has not yet learned to access her sexual power and is submissive to the
Marquis, relying on his experience as a non-virgin and a man. Because of her youth and
inexperience, "The Bloody Chamber" is for the heroine a story of sexual self-discovery.
She delights in her newfound sexual awareness, which Carter brings to life with vivid
words such as, "I lay awake in the wagon-lit in a tender, delicious ecstasy of excitement,
my burning cheek pressed against the impeccable linen of the pillow and the pounding of
my heart mimicking that of the great pistons ceaselessly thrusting the train that bore me
through the night, away from Paris, away from girlhood, away from the white, enclosed
quietude of my mother's apartment, into the unguessable country of marriage." Carter's
use of the word "bore" compares the heroine's journey to her married life to a rebirth. The
comparison emphasizes how the heroine is not just getting married, but being
transformed from a girl, "away from girlhood" into a woman.
The heroine's arousal on the train, heightened by sexual verbs such as "pounding,"
"thrusting" and "burning" comes not so much from her attraction to the Marquis but from
her curiosity at the "unguessable" act of sex that she anticipates. Even though the
Marquis evaluates her as though she is "horseflesh," his condescension excites her
because it makes her realize her own "potential for corruption," for sexuality and desire.
She does not find out until later how literally the Marquis makes love and corruption into
a single act with the fetish of murdering his wives. He takes his favorite quote, by
Baudelaire, literally: "There is a striking resemblance between the act of love and he
ministrations of a torturer." For him, the act of love is the act of torture. Because the
Marquis's objectifying remarks and actions excite the heroine, we can see that until she
realizes the extent of her dilemma, she is somewhat complicit in her own subjugation.
Images of rebirth and sexuality make the narrator's entrance into marriage seem full of
life. But the moment she arrives at the castle, this feeling is tempered with symbols of
death that foreshadow her own near-death. She arrives at dawn, a time of freshness and
possibility, but in the month of November in late fall, which traditionally represents a
decline into winter and death. The sea has an "amniotic salinity"-the word amniotic
referencing birth, but it surrounds the castle when the tide is high, so that for all its
majesty the palace resembles a prison. She describes it as, "at home neither on the land
nor on the water, a mysterious, amphibious place, contravening the materiality of both
earth and the waves ... That lovely, sad, sea-siren of a place!" To the heroine, the castle
seems like a place where reality is suspended and strange things happen. When she
compares it to a siren or mermaid, who lure sailors and then drown them, she evokes
another symbol of death and foreshadows her fate.
The bridal chamber itself is filled with symbols of death and martyrdom. On the wall
hangs a painting of Saint Cecilia, who died by decapitation. The Marquis sees the heroine
as his own personal Saint Cecilia, whom he plans to kill in a sick bastardization of
martyrdom. The heroine's necklace, which the Marquis instructs her not to remove,
references the same bloody death. At the time, she does not realize that the necklace
symbolizes the death that the Marquis has planned for her. Twelve mirrors surround the
bed, the number twelve symbolizing the twelve apostles and therefore referencing Christ.
Since Christ is the ultimate martyr, the mirrors comprise another death reference. Finally,
the Marquis has filled the narrator's room with so many lilies, which are reflected in the
mirrors, that it appears to be a "funereal parlor." The heroine connects sex with death
most explicitly when she uses the word "impale" to describe the Marquis's penetrating
her.
It is not the bridal chamber, but the Marquis's secret murder room, that lends the story its
title, "The Bloody Chamber." However, the bridal chamber is a 'bloody chamber' of sorts
because it is there that the Marquis spills the narrator's blood by taking her virginity.
Being a place for the consummation of marriage, it also represents the murder that always
follows. The events that surround the forbidden chamber echo Eve's temptation and fall
in the Garden of Eden, thus connecting each wife's downfall to the idea of original sin.
As Jean-Yves explains, the heroine "only did what [The Marquis] knew she would" just
as, he implies, God knew that Eve would taste the forbidden apple and be sentenced to
pain and (eventual) death. The Marquis sees himself as God because he is a man and a
royal figure; therefore, he feels it is his mission to tempt and punish women. But far from
being godlike or right, the Marquis's actions are perverted. He is like the man in his
engraving, "Reproof of Curiosity," who arouses himself by whipping a naked girl, only
he is worse for being a murderer. The allusion to Eve suggests that inasmuch as the
"bloody chamber" is a place of suffering and death for the other wives, it is one of
learning and rebirth for the heroine. In this way, the term "bloody chamber" can also refer
to the womb; it is a physical symbol of birth and of Eve's punishment; pain in childbirth
as well as the pain of knowledge.
Like many traditional fairy tales, "The Bloody Chamber" ends 'happily ever after.' But
the heroine's happiness does not come from finding a stereotypical prince charming and
living out her days in luxury. Rather, she marries a blind piano tuner, gives away her
fortune, and lives with her mother and husband on the edge of town. This ending
 embodies a feminist perspective. The heroine starts out as a nave sexual object,
manipulated into submission with the promise of material comfort. The Marquis
condemns her to death for refusing to obey him blindly and remain ignorant. Her
triumph, as Moore explains, is in recognizing her own intelligence and mettle as a human
being, and rejecting the role of submissive child. Having learned from her experience, the
heroine rids herself of all remnants of that former identity. She rejects wealth, which is
what the Marquis used to win her nave trust. She marries a blind man, who cannot
objectify her for her beauty because he cannot see her. She even rejects the traditional
household of two in favor of living with her mother as well as her husband. By doing so,
Moore says, she "avoids the institution of marriage with its requirement to love, honor,
and obey a husband till death. [She] replaces a relationship between power and
submission with one of mutual affection and equality." Even though the heroine is
married, she does not rely solely on Jean-Yves for money or love, because she earns
money giving piano lessons and has her mother's company.
Even though the mark on the heroine's forehead proves her triumph over both death and
misogyny, she is ashamed of it. The key that made the mark was, as Moore says, "the key
to her selfhood," but she does not consider the mark a badge of success; to the heroine, it
is a permanent reminder that she let herself be lured, bought, and mistreated. In rejecting
wealth, earning a living, and residing with her mother, the narrator not only fulfills her
wish for independence; she does a sort of penance for allowing sexist abuse in her former
life. This penance she also does by telling her story, in hopes that other women might not
fall prey to a man like the Marquis.
The Courtship of Mr. Lyon:
It is based on a classic story, "Beauty and the Beast.
It has its own unconventionality, with its feminist themes and plot reversal.
It is a tale of self-discovery and rejection of female objectification.
In the classic tale, we are forced to see Beauty and Beast as diametrically opposed forces;
Beauty is feminine, beautiful, innocent, and gentle, while Beast is masculine, ugly,
experienced, and wild.
Carter's tale reverses the convention. Beauty begins as a penniless, helpless girl, whom
the rich, powerful and world-weary Beast forces to live in his house. However, she
rapidly becomes the more active, experienced, and adventurous character. While the
Beast hides from the world, she is confident enough to live a high-profile life in the city.
While at first she is afraid of him, she comes to realize that he is actually afraid of her. In
the end, Carter totally reverses the Beauty/Beast dichotomy; the Beast takes on the role of
fairy-tale princess, wasting away in his attic "tower," guarded by a beast (in this case
himself), and needing Beauty to rescue him from that beast or beastliness.
Carter uses symbolism in "The Courtship of Mr. Lyon" to emphasize her main feminist
agenda. She employs a paradigm commonly found in literature, distinguishing the city as
a masculine place of experience and corruption and the country as a feminine one of
inexperience and purity. However she uses this literary convention to undermine a gender
convention; the Beast is trapped in isolation in the country while Beauty has free range of
the city. Because the characters need to access both their "masculine" and "feminine"
attributes in order to be happy, they are both are unhappy when they are limited to being
in one place. The country is so "innocent" or devoid of activity that it weakens the Beast
almost to the point of death. The city is so "worldly" and full of superficial interactions
that it hardens Beauty and begins to replace her inner beauty with a spoiled, false air.
Carter uses the city and country as symbols to strengthen her contention that a person
needs to be both "masculine" and "feminine" to have an authentic and fulfilled existence.
Beauty proves herself to be more than a traditional fairy tale heroine, but in the
beginning, she conforms to the paradigm. Like many of Carter's heroines, she must start
within and then break free from the restrictions and assumptions of patriarchal society.
As da Silva phrases it, "The daughter is conscious of her annihilation in the patriarchal
society but she doesn't have autonomy to overcome it." While Beauty is living with the
Beast, she finds amusement in reading fairy tales. It is as though despite living in a
modern world with telephones and automobiles, Beauty wants to believe in the
conventional "happily ever after." Her request for a single white rose also conveys this
wish for conventionality; the rose symbolizes her chasteness and delicateness. Carter
emphasizes Beauty's femininity, innocence, and virginity by comparing her to the
immaculate snow upon which she gazes. By saying the snowy road, and by association,
Beauty is "white an unmarked as a spilled bolt of bridal satin," Carter seems to insinuate
that Beauty's uniqueness lies in her gentle femininity and that her destiny is marriage.
However, knowing Carter's motives, we can assume that Beauty's virginity represents
possibility more than it does naivete. Beauty may be trapped within a society that
objectifies her, but her innocence empowers her; she is pure of mind enough to see
through its conventional dichotomies and claim her own destiny, as she does at the story's
end. In fact, Carter reminds us explicitly early on that Beauty has "will of her own"; she
actually empowers herself by consenting to live with the Beast because in doing so she is
choosing to step out of her role of child and act as protector to her father.
Like Beauty, the Beast does not conform to his side of the "irreconcilable binary" of
Beauty/Beast. Also like Beauty, in the beginning of the story, he seems to conform. As a
lion, 'king of beasts,' he is the embodiment of masculine power, strong, confident, and
rough. When we first encounter the Beast, this seems to be true of him. His very anger
ignites the house with "furious light" and he roars with the strength of not only one but "a
pride of lions." He is strong enough to "[shake] Beauty's father like an angry child shakes
a doll ... Until his teeth rattled." But it quickly becomes clear that the Beast's strength is
an impediment to human interaction. When he speaks, Beauty wonders "how [she can]
converse with the possessor of a voice that seemed an instrument created to inspire
...Terror." The first time he kisses her hands, Beauty is terrified by how rough his tongue
is until she realizes he is not trying to harm her.
The Beast is so ashamed of his appearance that his only companion before Beauty is his
spaniel. By the end of the story, we see that the Beast's loneliness makes him weak and
inactive. Beauty's absence weakens him so much that he is unable to do so much as feed
himself, and he almost dies of despair. At the end of the story, Beauty is still a beautiful
woman, but she is active and brave; she is a mixture of Beauty and Beast. So too is the
Beast, who retains remnants of his leonine appearance when he transforms into a gentle
human. He also retains the name Lyon, signifying his former identity. Beauty takes his
 name when she marries him. While taking one's husband's name can be seen as an act of
submission, in this case it is an acknowledgment of Beauty's own masculinity. She is
claiming her rightful title, for she too is a strong Lyon/lion.

The Tiger's Bride:

Like the heroine of "The Bloody Chamber," the heroine of "The Tiger's Bride" tells
her own tale in retrospect, therefore claiming control of both her life and the literary
tradition. The first theme that arises is the objectification of women, with the
heroine's father losing her to The Beast at cards. Arguably, we have seen a similar
transaction in "The Courtship of Mr. Lyon," where Beauty's father is forced to give
her to the Beast because he stole the rose. However in that story, the father agrees to
'trade' his daughter's company out of fear whereas in this story, the father wagers her
carelessly, as though she were a mere possession. Carter uses diction to emphasize
that this transaction, while seeming outdated and unlikely, is not far from the
objectification of women seen in our own society. How often does a woman blush
happily to hear herself called "pearl" or "treasure?" These words are considered
compliments, but Carter reveals their objectifying overtones by having both the
heroine's father and The Beast use them, respectively, in the context of her sale. From
the story's beginning, we are aware that the heroine is seen as an object that can be
bought, sold, and leveraged for her owner's pleasure and advantage.
The heroine's objectification continues throughout the story, culminating with the
surprise ending. When out riding, the heroine contends that men see women as
soulless, just as they see animals as soulless; she says, "the six of us, mounts and
riders both-could boast amongst us not one soul ... Since all the best religions in the
world state categorically that not beasts nor women were equipped with the flimsy,
insubstantial things." For this reason, she feels closer to Beast, the valet, and their
horses, than she ever has to a man. Instead of wishing for a soul, she denigrates them
by calling them "flimsy" and "insubstantial"; after all, the men who claim to possess
souls consider her no more than an item of physical worth.
Carter surpasses the heroine's comparison to animals by likening her to the soubrette.
Not only is the soubrette a doll, but she powders the heroine's cheeks so that she
resembles one. This symbolism is not lost on the heroine, who ponders, "that
clockwork girl who powdered my cheeks for me; had I not been allotted only the
same kind of imitative life amongst men that the doll-maker had given her?" Moore
points out that the soubrette is a "social creation of femininity"; she embodies the
vanity and vapidity that characterize society's idea of a woman. The soubrette needs
someone to wind her up so that she can perform her maid's tasks; so too, women are
thought unable to think and act for themselves. Once the heroine begins to claim her
own desires, she says that she no longer resembles the soubrette. Since she can no
longer submit to society's female stereotypes, she plans to send the soubrette home in
her place: "I will dress her in my own clothes, wind her up, send her back to perform
the part of my father's daughter." Carter tells us that this view of women weakens
their character and prevents them from fulfilling their potential.
In "The Courtship of Mr. Lyon," Beauty is unspoiled and content when she lives in
the country, away from society's influence. But when she moves to the city, she
transforms into a petulant young woman obsessed with her looks and belongings.
Until the spaniel reminds her of her authentic self, she is content with living as a
'social construct of femininity.' The heroine in "The Tiger's Bride" realizes that men
treat her like the soubrette, that no matter how hard she tries to equal them, they will
always see her as a poor 'imitation' of a person. Suddenly, she is no different from
The Beast, who wears his mask painted with a man's face in order to pretend he is a
man. The perfection of this mask "appals" the narrator because it represents the model
of perfection, civility and tameness to which she is bound. She does not want to be an
object and therefore is disgusted that he looks like one. The heroine again expresses
her hatred of objectification when she throws her present of diamond earrings into a
corner.
The surprise ending to "The Tiger's Bride" takes Carter's feminist bent farther than
the ending to "The Courtship of Mr. Lyon." In the latter story, Beauty must accept the
Beast in order for him to become a person, so that they can live happily in the human
world. In "The Tiger's Bride", the heroine and The Beast must accept the animal
nature in themselves and in each other so that they can be free of the human world
with its social constructs and assumptions. Women, Carter conveys through the tale,
must break free of their weak, doll-like social identities and embrace the parts of them
that are strong, alive with desire, and 'ugly'; "the lamb must learn to run with the
tigers." It is not that women are lambs and must learn to be tigers; they are tigers who
are made to think they are lambs. After all, the heroine has been a tiger underneath
her skin for all her life. Instead of Beauty and Beast being opposites, they are wed
into one stronger identity at the end of "The Tiger's Bride."
Sex and sexual desire are the catalysts for the heroine's transformation into a beast.
We see this fact foreshadowed by symbols early in the story. The rose that the heroine
gives her father when she leaves him represents her virginal self because it is white
and beautiful. When she pricks her finger on it and hands it to him "all smeared with
blood," she foreshadows her own loss of virginity and her transformation from
whiteness, the absence of lust and life, to blood-redness, the embodiment of those
things. The heroine also refers to The Beast as a "clawed magus," magus meaning an
ancient priest with supernatural powers; even though she fears him, the heroine has
some sense that he has the power to transform her. It is not just anything sexual that
causes the narrator to transform-it is her desire and willingness to be sexual. When
she first refuses to disrobe in front of The Beast, she hurts him. She does not know at
the time that his wish to see her is not mere voyeurism; he also deeply wants her to
accept him. If The Beast were a mere voyeur, he would accept the heroine's offer to
lift up her skirts for him while hiding her face. He is not interested in the heroine's
body so much as he is in her true, animal self.
The heroine's transformation into a tiger combines the acts of sex and birth into one.
When she takes off her clothes, she can already feel herself changing; she feels as
though she is "stripping off [her] own underpelt"; but she needs The Beast's action to
help her change. He rips off her skin by licking her, which can be seen as a sexual act,
but this gives way to the act of birth; the heroine is reborn as a tigress with "a nascent
patina of shining hairs." In this act, The Beast and the heroine reclaim sex as a
collaborative act of creation, casting aside the idea of sex as an act of fetish and
control wherein the man objectifies and claims the woman. The heroine here, in fact,
is claiming herself. Carter makes it clear that coming into one's selfhood is a painful
and arduous act that calls for more than the wave of a wand. It requires the heroine to
endure the excruciating pain of giving birth (to herself) in order to attain the relief and
freshness of being reborn.