DAMSEL IN DISTRESS AND GOTHIC FICTION

ANGELA CARTER’S

“THE BLOODY CHAMBER”1

Marina Farima2

farimamarina@gmail.com

Abstract

The following paper presents an analysis of the gothic elements and their significance
in the promotion of feminist ideals. It proposes to express their meaning and importance in the
twentieth century feminist literature.

Key Words: gothic; feminist literature; symbolism; Angela Carter; Bluebeard.

1
Paper presented at the 2nd PACES (Pamukkale Conference of English Studies) Pamukkale University,
Denizli/Turkey, 5 May 2017.
2
Bachelor of Arts in English Language and Literature, Ege University, Izmir/Turkey.
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“And, ah! His castle. The faery solitude of the place; with its turrets of misty blue, its

courtyard, its spiked gate [...] that castle, at home neither on the land nor on the water,

a mysterious, amphibious place” (Carter 13).

Gothic fiction has begun its battle of finding a place in literature with British writer

Horace Walpole, whose remarkable novel, The Castle of Otranto, published in 1764, succeeded

in establishing of a new genre, of a new literary tradition that involves castles, lofty towers,

darkness, fear, torture, women in distress, and everything that causes terror in the eyes of the

reader. The new genre was imitated throughout the years and this Gothic stream became so

broad that it experienced an abrupt increase in popularity especially at the beginning of the

twentieth century. Due to the flourish of the film market, printing development and mass media

of the time, this admiration for horror texts continued even after World War II. Especially,

among women writers who began to give life to such stories of terror. Daphne du Maurier’s

Rebecca, Anya Seton’s Dragonwyck and Victoria Holt’s The Mistress of Mellyn are just a few

novels that follow the same pattern: an innocent young girl marries a wealthy, old and widowed

man and suspects him of murder. Angela Carter adopted the same theme in her short story

published in 1979, “The Bloody Chamber”, but rather than being influenced by other female

writers of the period, Angela Carter has stated that ‘“[her] intention was not to do ‘versions’ or,

as the American edition of the book said, horribly, ‘adult’ fairy tales, but to extract the latent

content from the traditional stories.”’ (Haffenden 80) and she certainly succeeded.

Angela Carter was mainly interested in folk tales and she began to write them down at

the beginning of the 1970s, the period corresponding to the era of the second-wave feminism

in the United States. Feminists got inspiration from the Civil Rights Movement and they wanted

opportunities and rights equal to men (Tong 50). In spite of the fact that Angela Carter was a
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strong supporter of the feminist campaign and nowadays her writings are seen as feminist

fiction in which she definitely depicts her characters as powerful and brave heroines who can

conquer the world, her tales from The Bloody Chamber are marked with a strong touch of gothic

narration. The story which is going to be the subject of this essay bears the same title as the

anthology itself and it is a rewriting of a French tale called “Blue Beard” whose central plot

revolves around a nobleman who slaughters his wives one after another and keeps their lifeless

bodies hanging on the walls of a small room in his castle. By remodelling this story with gothic

elements, which definitely play a huge role in emphasizing the distress in which the heroine has

been trapped, Angela Carter succeeded in promoting her beliefs about feminist ideals and my

attempt here will be to point out and exemplify the gothic elements in it, trying to express their

hidden meaning and importance in twentieth century feminist literature.

As in most gothic narratives, the setting of Angela Carter’s story is essential. In A

Companion to Gothic Fiction, David Punter states that “Images of tyranny or incarceration –

within ruin, castle, prison, asylum or monastery – had their objective correlatives in the

architectural monuments of real institutional power” (38), and the gloomy castle of the Marquis

“With its turrets of misty blue, its courtyard, [and] its spiked gate” (Carter 13), highly affects

the mood of the story, making it full of terror and tyranny. Many gothic stories are also set in

distant locations, far from the human eye, which corresponds to the human unconscious, a

hideout in which all sexual desires and the thirst for violence and murder are veiled, and “that

castle, at home neither on the land nor on the water, a mysterious, amphibious place” (Carter

13) is the place in which the antagonist of “The Bloody Chamber” unleashes his animal

instincts.

The female character is always of tremendous significance in gothic stories, because she

is constantly portrayed as a little caged bird that waits for a strong man to come and rescue her.

Although Angela Carter uses this central image of “damsel in distress”, in spite of the usual
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masculine hero, she presents to the reader a new character, an androgynous person, a strong

woman, both physically and mentally. These women in need of saving are common to almost

all gothic writings and they are often described as attractive orphaned young girls without

parental guidance but with a sense of good taste. They are captive by a malevolent man who is

going to murder them. In “The Bloody Chamber”, the female protagonist is not more than

seventeen years old, without a father, and like the other three persecuted wives of the Marquis

who had a powerful taste for arts, she is also presented as a well-educated “little music student

whose mother had sold all her jewellery, even her wedding ring, to pay the Conservatoire”

(Carter 13). Like Mina from Bram Stoker’s Dracula, or Jane from Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s

“The Yellow Wallpaper”, the heroine of the story is introduced as the beauty in the house. She

is literally imprisoned among the cold walls of the castle and she is totally restricted the access

to one specific room. Breaking this rule is going to be the cause of her damnation as Eve was

cast out from the Garden of Eden by eating from the forbidden tree of life. Curiosity was

generally punished in gothic texts, for instance doctor Frankenstein is punished for his insatiable

curiosity with the loss of his family, because the monster he created, murders it. So is our

character, because of breaking the rule she is condemned to a great fear that rushes through her

veins acknowledging her future death. Of course, the controversial feminist Angela Carter is

not going to end her rewritten story by letting a villain kill the heroine. However, in spite of

sending a male character to help and save her, as it is narrated in the original story “Blue Beard”,

she empowers a “tiger woman” who fights for her daughter’s life and kills the antagonist. This

representation of the suffering mother rather than in gothic or feminist fiction, finds its roots in

Greek mythology. Demeter, the goddess of fertility, was extremely fond of her daughter

Persephone who was kidnapped by the God of the Underworld, Hades. Distraught with grief,

she seeks for her everywhere: she asks for help from the goddess of witchcraft, from the god of

the sun, she refuses to give crops, but she does not give up. Neither does the mother of our
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character, after hearing the cry of her daughter on the telephone, through fire and ice she comes

to the castle and saves her from the malicious hands of Marquis.

Another essential item for gothic literature is undoubtedly a tyrannical antagonist that

murders and paints the walls of his temple with the blood of his victims. Examples of this kind

of character can be found in the orally transmitted tradition of tales about beasts and monsters

that kill innocent girls. A great example can be One Thousand and One Nights; a powerful king

named Shahrayar kills all his wives because his first wife committed adultery. “The Beauty and

The Beast” is another tale which portrays an ugly creature who takes captive a young and

beautiful girl. In The Castle of Otranto, Manfred is the tyrant ruler who wants to take into his

possession Isabella, who actually was supposed to marry his son not him. All these tales were

a source of inspiration for gothic writers. However, Angela Carter’s antagonist is more than a

simple evil man who kills his wives. Even his name differentiates him and puts out the message

which Angela Carter wanted to affirm. His name recalls Marquis de Sade, the father of sadism.

Camille Paglia states that “For Sade, sex is violence. Violence is the authentic spirit of mother

nature.” (Paglia 235) and Carter’s character is the twin brother of Marquis de Sade: he finds

pleasure in violence towards his wives; he is in love with the pain he causes to them. Paglia

also points out that “Sade makes sex a theatre of pagan action” (235) and so does Marquis in

our story. On their first marital night he makes the young girl put on the choker made from red

rubies which was considered “the family heirloom”. The heroine narrates:

“He twined my hair into a rope and lifted it off my shoulders so that he could the better

kiss the downy furrows below my ears; that made me shudder. And he kissed those

blazing rubies, too. He kissed them before he kissed my mouth. Rapt, he intoned: ‘Of

her apparel she retains/ Only her sonorous jewellery’”. (Carter 17)

This full act of taking the girl’s virginity can be seen as a pagan ritual for preparing the deathbed

of the heroine.
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There remains a very important component to talk about when it comes to gothic fiction:

the terror. From this point of view, Freud’s essay “The Uncanny” is essential, because it gives

a theory of what is “uncanny” and what exactly are the elements that stimulate this immense

fear and Angela Carter uses a lot of these elements to induce terror in the reader’s eyes. A good

example are the paintings that hang on the walls of Marquis’s temple. One of them An Early

Flemish Primitive of Saint Cecilia at her Celestial Organ, which perfectly illustrates the current

situation of the heroine, sitting in front of the piano and playing her happy songs while her

husband has plans of decapitating her. Then another painting meets our eyes, The Rape of the

Sabine, which can be a perfect mirroring of the Marquis and the young girl’s first intercourse;

she trembling with fear when seeing his cold and disturbing face above her. Lastly, as might be

expected The Martyrdom of Saint Cecelia is a ‘tableau’ that reveals the truth about the bloody

chamber and foreshadows the death of our protagonist. Exactly this kind of double element, is

a phenomenon that awakes an uncanny feeling, states Freud (142). Another hypothesis of

Freud’s is “the castration-complex”, it is in the human nature to fear whatever threatens to kill

or injure us, especially when it comes to losing one of our vital organs. The moment when our

female protagonist finds her husband’s room of mutilation, she has literally seen how she is

going to be cut into pieces and how she will encounter her end. Without this dreadful scene and

the terror that takes captive one’s body, a gothic text cannot be called gothic.

Beginning with images of a gloomy setting, the figure of the villain and his victim,

paintings that portray violence or sadistic objects, and ending with the most important feature

that is crucial for the development of the plot of this story, the terror, Angela Carter succeeded

in shaping “The Bloody Chamber” as a very terrifying feminist narration. By using these gothic

elements, I believe she successfully promoted her beliefs about strong women who can escape

men’s tyrannical and despotic forces and claim equality in both sexuality and politics.
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Works Cited

Carter, Angela. “The Bloody Chamber”. The University of Sheffield. Web. 28 May 2014.

http://uspace.shef.ac.uk/docs/DOC-67875

Freud, Sigmund. “The Uncanny”. University of Pennsylvania. Web. 28 May 2014.

http://www.english.upenn.edu/~cavitch/pdf-library/Freud_Uncanny.pdf

Haffenden, John. "Angela Carter". Novelists in Interview, New York: Methuen Press, 1985.

Print.

Paglia, Camille. “Return of the Great Mother: Rousseau vs. Sade”. Sexual Personae. Art and

Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson. Yale: Yale University Press, 1990. Print.

Punter, David. A Companion to the Gothic. Archive.org. Web. 28 May 2014.

https://ia700400.us.archive.org/7/items/a_companion_to_the_gothic/ACompanionToT

heGothicblackwellCompanionsToLiteratureAndCulture.pdf

Tong, Rosemarie. Feminist Thought. North Carolina: West View Press, 2009. Print.