Criticism by using a book has been used for a long time. An Angela Carter, famous by an aggressive writing tried to use her writing skills to criticize the male and white superiority. In bloody chamber, she showed how cruel the male was and how weak the female was. The story perfectly reflects how female were treated and male dominated them. By using feminism and oxymoron, she stood against male superiority society.
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A story starts with young innocent pianist ‘I’ married with much older and wealthy Marquis. When she opened the forbidden door, she found out that Marquis was a serial murder, and dramatically survives from it. In the beginning of the story, she says ‘I was seventeen and knew nothing of the world; my Marquis had been married before, more than once, and I remained a little bemused that, after those others, he should now have chosen me.’ (Carter 3)
As she tells us, she was a very innocent woman. However, by getting influenced by Marquis’s corruption, the main character gets a view to society and her. By risking her life, she starts to tell us what happened to her and what she learned from it.
Humankind begins about ten million years ago. As the entire living organism does, human is divided into male and female. They have to reproduce in order to survive and balance a number of species all the time. Male and female has a different role since they were biologically different. Males, usually stronger because of the biological factor made all the strong males to hunt outside for the tribe, while females stayed home and eat what males acquired by hunting. Naturally males got stronger and stronger by lots of physical activity and women instinctively started to rely on male.
The story begins with the young narrator, pianist who could not sleep. She is having a marriage with much older Marquis, who already married three times. However, because of old Marquis’s wealth, she decides to marry him. Those basic setting of the story contains and reflects how today’s society are recognizing, accepting, and identifying women. Old Marquis dominated three female wives already, and now dominating the pure and innocent main character now. In the past, women did not have a freedom even. Most of the females stayed in home and just cooked or knitted. Physical dominance that male had controlled everything of female. Women couldn’t learn and even take an action to males. In the story, the narrator is completely getting dominated by Marquis. He forbids her not to open the one room of the castle.
Carter borrowed a folktale and old story for ‘The Bloody Chamber’. Especially ‘the bloody chamber reminds me of the beauty and the beast, even though the ending is extremely different. An isolated castle, innocent main characters, and fearful background emphasize the corrupted society during the time period Carter lived. By rewriting a beauty and the beast, in the ‘bloody chamber’, she tries to tell that morality and sexual role is a result from a cultural restriction. Carter created a tough and tenacious female character unlike other women, and it represents the eager that Carter had against the male superiority society.
Curiosity that young pianist led her to explore the huge castle. She wants to know who her husband really is, and wants to know the true nature of her husband.” Until that moment, this spoiled child did not know she had inherited nerves and a will from the mother who had defied the yellow outlaws of Indo-China; My mother’s spirit drove me on, into that dreadful place, in a cold ecstasy to know the very worst. I fumbled for the matches in my pocket; what a dim, lugubrious light they gave! And yet, enough, oh, more than enough, to see a room designed for desecration and some dark night of unimaginable lovers whose embraces were annihilation.” (24) However, she decided to open up the forbidden area which her husband told her not to open, and the resolution comes from her mother’s mental strength. Her mother defeated Chinese pirates long time ago, and helped a village through a terrible plague, and shot the tiger by herself. “My eagle-featured, indomitable mother; what other student at the Conservatoire could boast that her mother had outfaced a junkful of Chinese pirates, nursed a village through a visitation of the plague, shot a man-eating tiger with her own hand and all before she was as old as I?” (Carter 2). She asks her daughter whether she loves him truthfully or not and worries about her daughter, but she does not stop him. With the telepathy came from their strong relationship, Pianist’s mother fortunately kills Marquis when her daughter was just about to die.
By making a mother of the main character very strong and full of love, Carter sets up an ideal model for women. Pianist’s mother is a copy of Carter’s dream, role model, and a Carter eager a freedom as a women in society, and want them to be equal.
The main character of ‘The Bloody Chamber’ is directly related to Eve from Genesis.
After the young pianist got caught because of the blooded key, the Marquis tells her to get prepared for decapitation and she returns to music room. In the music room, she has a conversation with a tuner.
“‘You do not deserve this,’ he said. ‘Who can say what I deserve or no?’ I said. ‘I’ve done nothing; but that may be sufficient reason for condemning me.’ ‘You disobeyed him,’ he said. ‘That is sufficient reason for him to punish you.’ ‘I only did what he knew I would.’ ‘Like Eve,’ he said.” (26) She complains that she didn’t do anything, but just moved as what her husband planned and the tuner answered, ‘Like Eve.’ The main character and Eve violated the promise which the man of power settled. After the main character came back from the ‘bloody chamber’, what she recognized is that. She realized that the promise which her husband settled is meant to be violated. Her each step of the violation was part of her fate and it has been controlled by others. Result of the violating the rule was learning and realizing. In Genesis, result of eating a forbidden apple for Adam and Eve is realizing that they were naked. The free will that the human has unlike the other animals, resulted deportation from the Eden mountain. Right after the main character returns from the secret forbidden room, she says “I had been tricked into my own betrayal to that illimitable darkness whose source I had been compelled to seek in his absence and, now that I had met that shadowed reality of his that came to life only in the presence of its own atrocities, I must pay the price of my new knowledge. The secret of Pandora’s box; but he had given me the box, himself, knowing I must learn the secret. I had played a game in which every move was governed by a destiny as oppressive and omnipotent as himself, since that destiny was himself; and I had lost.” (Carter 23). What she learned from opening the forbidden door is the true nature of the husband as a murderer who killed three of his wives, and realizing her danger that she is facing.
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The two very opposite characteristic that the main character has is innocence and corruption. As she said, ” I was seventeen and knew nothing of the world; my Marquis had been married before, more than once, and I remained a little bemused that, after those others, he should now have chosen me.” (Carter 3). Even though it was innocent main character’s wrong decision, it was herself who chose the marriage, and it resulted to set the corruption near him. After she lose her virginity, she thinks that only part of her innocence has been damaged, but after she entered the forbidden room, her purity, virginity, and innocence completely disappeared. After her husband’s death, she takes huge amount of wealth. Ironically, she donates most of her money to charity and lives with tuner and her mother in the castle. She have spare money to watch expensive opera, but she refuses to sit in the first class seat. It shows that her attitude totally changed. According to Manley, the reason that she changed so much is an identification of the main character itself, which oscillated like a pendulum finally has been settled up after her terrible experience she had in the castle. “The comments Carter has her protaonist make when she has finished telling about her marriage and rescue also show that protagonist is still struggling to establish her subjectivity.” (Manley 83)
*Makinen, Merja, “Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber and the Decolonization of Feminine Sexuality.” Feminist Review 42
*Manley, Kathleen. “The Woman in Process in Angela Carter’s “The Bloody Chamber.” Angela Carter and the Fairy Tale. Edited. Danielle M. Roemer & Christina Bacchilega. Detroit: Wayne State UP, 2001.
Renfroe, Cheryl. “Initiation and Disobedience: Liminal Experience in Angela Carter’s “The Bloody Chamber.” Angela Carter and the Fairy Tale. Edited. Danielle M. Roemer & Christina Bacchilega. Detroit: Wayne State UP, 2001.
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