“…for the first time in my innocent and confined life, I sensed in myself a potentiality for corruption that took my breath away. The next day, we were married.”
Like many of Carter’s best-known stories, “The Bloody Chamber” is a reworking of a fairy tale. In this case, it is the dark tale of Bluebeard, murderer of wives. Carter never just looked back to mythic stories for revision for the sake of contemporary updating; there is always a more sophisticated twist to the underlying, fundamental psychopathology of the story. In this particular instance, the innocent virginal bride whose curiosity leads to her tragic fate is significantly deepened so that the center of the moral corruption in the tale is no longer limited just to the predatory husband. The bride must now take responsibility for more than mere feminine curiosity as Carter endows the character with a corrupted soul that crosses the previous boundaries of morality and sexuality and even extends to make her a partner in the groom’s corrupted lust for wealth.
“She stands and moves within the invisible pentacle of her own virginity. She is an unbroken egg: she is a sealed vessel; she has inside her a magic space the entrance to which is shut tight with a plug of membrane; she is a closed system; she does not know how to shiver.”
During her lifetime, Carter was criticized and denied her rightful entry into the academic canon in part because of what was seen as an overloaded interest in sexuality. This example is actually one of the less straightforward examples; others actually resulted in her work being deemed on the edge of pornographic if not tipping fully over the line. Of course, Carter was writing before the internet so the standard of what was pornographic was much less blurry. What we have here is a description of Red Riding Hood in another of Carter’s famous revisions of fairy tale and the major twist here is another one of a heroine no longer being quite the innocent she has been presumed. In this case, however, Red Riding Hood is not driven by a corruption of the soul, but an empowerment of female sexuality. This story was adapted into a film that served to announce the arrival of a major directorial talent: Neil Jordan.
To these upland woodsmen, the Devil is as real as you or I. More so; they have not seen us nor even know that we exist, but the Devil they glimpse often in the graveyards.
Carter’s fiction is a transaction with the curious, the supernatural, the occult and the unexplained. She treads into the world of the weird and the gothic, but treats it with the seriousness that Jane Austen treated looking for a husband or Charles Dickens treated the effects of class distinction. For daring to do so, her short life meant she didn’t quite live long enough to see pop culture fiction come to be treated as seriously literature. When one writes a story about belief in the Devil, it was a matter of simple wisdom to not title “The Werewolf” if one wanted the story to be treated worthy of scholarly study. When looking at the Carter’s short story canon in its entirety, it becomes easy to view these “upland woodsmen” within the symbolic context of academia who did not yet know existed what they had never seen.
“How far does a pretence of feeling, maintained with absolute conviction, become authentic?”
Carter took the prize she won from winning a British literary honor, left her husband and moved to Japan for a couple of years. This story of a British woman reflecting upon a romance with a Japanese man expands to explore the conditions of gender superiority in the culture of Japan before poking deeper to explore a thematic thread running throughout her stories. Puppets make frequent appearances in her fiction and even when there are no literal puppets, many of her characters are based upon iconic figures expected to serve a role in a predestined narrative much like puppets that only require the author to pull the strings in the expected direction. Carter rejects this concept with her demand for authenticity based not on a pretense of emotion, but the real thing. The unusually explicit autobiographical elements of this story suggest strongly that this quote is not just the voice of a character, but the voice of the author herself. The novels and multiple collections in which the greater bulk of the short stories contained within pursue this idea of emotional authenticity make the case even more strongly that Carter was publicly musing about something very integral to her fiction.
