Some final thought/opinions/analysis on the various stories. Please try to remember that the exam will be testing your understanding of the issues. The following notes are simply some general impressions from me-themes/characterisation issues and social or contextual points. However, they should help you to link the stories together and get a handle on what Carter is trying to do in this collection and what her characters represent and symbolise. These notes are only a checklist to go along with all the other work we have done. They do not provide an exhaustive list of issues-only a list (in no particular order of importance) of some of the key issues you will need to be conversant with. The only thing I haven’t added here are corroborating quotes-though as we have spent months looking at the text adding these should be well within your abilities. Read, think and reflect. Good luck with your last few days of revision.
Please try to keep in mind that it is likely you will be asked to focus on the attitudes and values of the characters and Carter herself. Try to refer back to these words when you are answering questions
Attitude-how you accept/face/deal with issues. Definition: manner, disposition, feeling, position, etc., with regard to a person or thing; tendency or orientation, esp. of the mind:
Values-your personal opinions/morals. Definition: the ideals, customs, institutions, etc., of a society toward which the people of the group have an affective regard. These values may be positive, as cleanliness, freedom, or education, or negative, as cruelty, crime, or blasphemy.
Viewpoint-the way that you think and look at the world around you. Definition: an attitude of mind, or the circumstances of an individual that conduce to such an attitude, standpoint, perspective, position, stance, angle.
The Bloody Chamber
First person Narrator-unusual as it is female/young/the heroine of the story. This inverts the normal fairy tale ideal. Story is related in retrospect after she has grown and transformed through her ordeal. Which may explain some of the overly mature and exotic phrases she utilises throughout the story. Also the role of narrator empowers the girl. By leaving her nameless Carter universalises her triumph so that she represents all women.
Narrator-young, naive, materialistic, interested in dynastic advancement
Marriage-critical presentation-money paramount. Heroine has a choice as to what she does. Is her mother complicit in this choice? Interesting as she married for love and indeed beggared herself. Marriage equated with exile-compare the mocking presentation of marriage in The importance of Being Earnest.
Marquis-libertine/animalistic/jaded/older/hedonistic
The story literally brims with foreshadowing-too many examples to list them all (the chocker/flowers/Saint Cecilia/Tristan and Isolde/the season in which the story is set)
The castle-liminal state-on the dividing line between land and sea/reality and unreality
Heroine is both attracted to and repulsed by the Marquis (see the first two beast stories to witness this issue replayed).
Subjugation of women key-she allows this throughout-the stripping/ voyeurism/ sexual acts. Even when she knows she is about to die she seems to be almost accepting of her fate. She is described as his “bargain” and he as her “purchaser.”
The issue of temptation rears its head-Eve links. Is curiosity good or bad or both?
Heroine-spoilt/materialistic at first-orders servants around/marries a man she does not love/chooses money over happiness. Though she does grow and develop.
Identity is important throughout the story-her attitudes and values change and develop. The chamber is the key to his identity.
The mother-a symbol of female empowerment and strength-her history her choices/she is the rescuer not some male Prince Charming.
Heroine’s changes-Bloody chamber brings torment/violence (or at least her the definite threat of such things)/growth/enlightenment and transformations. She gives away her wealth-moves back with her mother and the blind piano tuner. It can be said she has grown and imposed herself upon a patriarchal world. Her choice of male companion at the end is interesting, as he cannot see her-thus he cannot objectify her simply due to her beauty.
The mark of Cain at the end-her shame/a reminder that it is all to easy for women to allow themselves to be subjugated by men and male attitudes and society in general. She wears it as a badge to remind herself of what she almost lost.
Virginity-power in the story is located largely in sexual interactions. Her virginity is linked to the marquis’ desire for her and a realisation of her own “potential for corruption.” Her loss of virginity (the bridal bedroom being another Bloody Chamber ) is the first step on her road to enlightenment and transformation.
Again there is a great deal of symbolism in the story-by now you should be cool when it comes to analysing the role of mirrors/ the train/ art/ music/ pornography/flowers/ the seasons).
Bloody Chambers-the dungeon and the bedroom. Both see the heroine transformed/enlightened/changed. Both help provide her with wisdom and enlightenment. Bloody chamber can even refer to the womb-which leads us to the pain of childbirth as well as the pain we must inevitably go through on the road to knowledge and wisdom.
Happy ending-though it is again inverted-she rejects wealth and enters into a marriage of mutual affection and equality-What Carter would see as the ideal state of things.
Courtship of Mr Lyon
Third person narrator.
Tale of self discovery-like most of the stories the character arc witnesses development and enlightenment.
Inversion of the Beauty and the Beast story-she begins as penniless girl who the rich, world-weary beast forces to live in his house. She rapidly becomes the more adventurous, active and experienced character. Female empowerment again eh-marvellous! At the end he is wasting away and she has to rescue him.
City v county issue arises (a la Wilde) though here it is cleverly inverted. The county is innocent-but devoid of activity, here the Beast weakens and fades. The city is worldly and so full of superficiality that Beauty finds herself changing and hardening. Carter is using these long-term literary constructs as symbols to show that a person needs both the masculine (city) and feminine (country) to lead a real and fulfilled existence.
Choices-all Carter’s characters have them. Beauty chooses in the end to live with the beast, thus empowering herself. That she does so at first is done to protect her father (again the female becoming empowered through active decision making).
The Beast is another liminal creature-his otherworldliness condemns him to loneliness.
The Tiger’s Bride
Narrator (the female lead character) once again tells the story in retrospect.
She is objectified-“pearl…treasure.” Her father “loses” her in a card game. Woman as objects with no real position of their own-a common Carter theme.
The Soubrette (the artificial maid) hammers home the way patriarchal society views women. It is a social perception of the feminine-societies idea (well at least male society) of the perfect woman-compliant, loyal, servile with no mind of its own.
Appearances-the Beast-awesome yet terrifying/beautiful yet capable of inspiring revulsion. His mask is too perfect and revolts the narrator.
Carter’s attitude-the feminist agenda-both the narrator and the beats accept (eventually) their animal natures-to make their mark on a male world women must embrace their strength and desire (not like Portia in The Merchant of Venice who has to pretend to be a man to make her way in Renaissance Venice) in order to break free of the human world of social constructs and assumptions.
Symbolism again is used heavily-flowers especially. The white rose=virginity. The flower covered with her blood after she pricks her finger=her transformation.
The bizarre ending-the easiest way to look at this is to consider that the heroine here is claiming herself (she is choosing/she is claiming power). She is being reborn by accepting her fierce, animalistic and vital nature. Though like all the transformations in the collection this rebirth or coming into one’s selfhood is a painful task. Though at the end she has been transformed and is fully alive.
Puss in Boots
The most comic of the stories-filled with puns and bawdy humour-it almost has a feel of Chaucer or Bocaccio’s The Decameron about it-Look these two literary masterworks up on Wikipedia if you feel the urge-or ask me on Monday (if nothing else this will prove some of you have been reading and using this blog).
Uses a number of literary and fairy tale clichés-the imprisoned virgin in the tower. Though this time the tower is in the middle of a busy town-thus we cannot absolve society of blame in regard to the girl’s imprisonment
Once again this story deals with the subjugation and objectification of women.
Women are seen as property in this story-indeed there is a deep streak of chauvinism running through the narrative. Look at Puss’ behaviour/dress/attitudes to examine this issue fully. His boots in particular represent his “maleness.” He is still as chauvinistic at the end of the story at least his lovesick master can be said to have undergone some sort of transformation. Look at the way the cat “takes” what he wants from Tabby.
The old miser in the story is another literary staple-though here he represents the unfairness, impotent lechery. Greed and dominance of the very worst of male dominated society. Once again we see at the end of the story that equal, mutally beneficial relationships are seen as the ideal by Carter. Though it must be said that there is a good deal of moral ambiguity in this story.
Deceit, adultery and murder are necessary here for sexual mutuality (two people living together as equals) to overcome sexual subjugation.
It might be worth considering how the young woman found herself married to her old lecherous husband-was it a financial and dynastic marriage (much like the heroine of The Bloody Chamber?) Do you feel sympathy for her?
The Erl-King
Heroine complicit in her won endangerment-though unlike the narrator of the first story she is mature and nowhere near the naïve child the aforementioned girl is.
Presentation of nature-the Romantic poets (Wordsworth, Keats, Coleridge etc) viewed nature as enlightenment and life. Here unfettered nature is seen as representing confinement and death. Another Carter inversion that might be worth considering.
The Erl-king is at harmony with nature though he does represent both the beauty and wonder as well as the destructiveness and violent power of nature. This duality is well worth noting when you discuss him in the exam. Look at the descriptions of his house.
He subjugates and shapes women to his will like many of the other “male/beast” characters. What does this say about the way Carter views the world and the way it treats women? Does society reduces females to beautiful objects singing for the pleasure of their male overlords?
The Erl-king is one of the key liminal creatures-she even describes him as a “tender butcher.”
Once again there is the sense of the female character caught between erotic desire of the dominant male presence and the desire to be her own person and strive for independence. If many of the other stories represent Carter’s Martin Luther King viewpoint then this is her Malcolm X story. Carter has suggested previously that mutual sociability and a merging of ones male and female characteristics ( or put simply an acceptance of both animal and human in all of us) is necessary for happiness then here she shows that to replace the dominant male presence the heroine has to kill and supplant him. This is not “working together” (MLK) it is taking the power back from those who would deny it to you (Malcolm X). At the end of the story the fiddle strung with the Erl-king’s hair calls her “mother” highlighting the fact that she is the master (pun intended) at the end.
The Snow Child
This is one weird story though in a very simple sense it sums up Carter’s feminist viewpoint and highlights many of her key thematic issues regarding the objectification and subjugation of women.
The child is an object, purely and simply the product of her creator’s mind. The girl is helpless (another point about male dominated society and the place of women within it). He creates her and is only interested in her value as a sexual object.
The count can be seen, like the marquis, as a pornographer- he (clothed/on a horse) imagines and then creates a sexual image of a young woman that he can deflower and defile (in many ways the parallels with the treatment of the girl in the first story-“impaled”-are obvious.
The Countess is a subject to the Count’s whims as the girl yet she sees her as a rival. Q. Do women co-exist only as rivals?
Symbolism-the rose=a symbol of femininity, so the bite represents the suffering that always accompanies being female.The girl was never real in any concrete sense-her character arc is relatively easy to summarise- when she appears she is still a girl, when the rose pricks her and she bleeds she comes of age. Once she has fulfilled her purpose of becoming a sexual object she can die. Just as in the Bloody Chamber/Erl-King becoming the idealized male objectification of a woman is a death sentence. This is one heavy story though it does link in with many themes-objectification/subjugation/powerlessness/pornography-voyeurism/male wishes regaring the ideal women/societies attitudes etc. It is well worth reading a few times so as to be able to reference it, even if only briefly.
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