The Bloody Chamber: Interpretations (OCR A Level English Literature)

The Bloody Chamber: Interpretations

AO5 assesses your ability to understand different ways of reading and interpreting texts. Those different readings can take different forms, from interpretations by critics to watching and analysing different productions of a text.

There are numerous ways to explore different interpretations in order to meet the AO5 assessment criteria, and you must explore a range of secondary reading and perspectives to supplement your understanding of the text. These can include:

• Exploring critics

• Interpretations over time

• Dramatisations

Exploring critics

Different critics will offеr variеd insights and intеrprеtations of The Bloody Chamber, and citations will lеnd crеdibility and authority to your analysis. Rеfеrеncing well-known critics demonstrates that your interpretation is groundеd in literary criticism. It will also еnhance thе validity of your argumеnt. By citing multiple critics, you can prеsеnt a morе comprehensive and balanced analysis and demonstrate the different range of perspectives and interpretations surrounding the novel.

Below are two notable critics who have commented on The Bloody Chamber:

Merja Makinen: “Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber and the Decolonization of Feminine Sexuality” (1992)

Merja Makinen is the director of communication and culture at Middlesex University. She has written on the feminine aspects of popular genre fiction and is an expert on feminist writing of the twentieth century, with a particular focus on the works of Angela Carter. In her essay, she explores how Carter attacks “cultural stereotypes” and feminine sexuality.

• Makinen states that the short stories in The Bloody Chamber emphasise violence and abuse, but offer a feminist deconstruction of fairy tales that actively engages the reader:

  • The titular story, The Bloody Chamber, is a re-imagined version of a French story written by Charles Perrault called Bluebeard

• Angela Carter viewed fairy-tales as the oral literature of the poor, which spanned Europe and concealed dark elements of the human psyche:

  • She argued that even when aristocratic writers during the 17th and 18th centuries wrote down these stories and tried to “fix” them by adding morals, they could not erase the magic and darkness within them

• Carter felt that folktales were easier to adapt to allow for feminist reinterpretation:

  • Some of her short stories therefore had female narrators who were also the protagonists

  • For example, The Company of Wolves portrays a strong female Red Riding Hood who defies the werewolf

• Makinen also highlights that there are some feminist critics who have accused Carter of being locked into the sexist ideologies of the original fairy tales and of reproducing “rigidly sexist psychology of the erotic”

• Others, she claims, argue that Carter reproduces male pornography as she cannot successfully revise the stories for feminist purposes

• However, Makinen argues that this is not Carter’s failing but the critics’, who cannot see beyond confined gender roles

• Makinen argues that the role of the reader is crucial and that Carter’s stories are open-ended, which emphasises the reader’s active role in her fiction

• She argues that, while the reader does not need to be a feminist to read the stories, they need to appreciate Carter’s attack on gender stereotypes, otherwise the reader cannot gain the pleasure and satisfaction intended:

  • If the reader does not understand the intentions behind the stories, then reading them could prove to be uncomfortable

Kari E Lokke: “Bluebeard and The Bloody Chamber: The Grotesque of Self-Parody and Self-Assertion” (1988)

Professor Kari E Lokke’s interests combine philosophy, feminist theory and the literature of England, France and Germany. She has published several articles on British women poets of the Romantic era. In this particular article, she explores the aesthetics of the grotesque and the sublime with a focus on The Bloody Chamber.

• Lokke states that Carter uses the ancient fairy tale of Bluebeard to make statements about violence, exploitation and loneliness in contemporary male-female relationships

• Lokke states that Carter, an English feminist, often portrays outsider figures in her writings, drawing inspiration from myth and folklore to infuse popular culture into British literature:

  • Therefore, the collection of The Bloody Chamber contains versions of several well-known fairy tales, including the title story, which retells the tale of Bluebeard

• The details of the story, from the husband’s appearance to his library full of explicit content and the “bloody bandage of rubies” he forces the narrator to wear, intensifies the horror as the death of the narrator seems inevitable

• The story creates a tension that is common in both erotic fiction as well as horror stories, even though the reader knows from the start of the story that the narrator will survive:

  • Lokke argues that Carter’s story has the power to create suspense even when the conditions for suspense do not truly exist

  • The reader is, therefore, emotionally involved in the story, but is also able to detach and admire Carter’s storytelling ability

• The irony and reader involvement, she states, is at its highest when the narrator is rescued by her brave mother, which challenges the “tradition of Love in the Western World”

Interpretations over time

Angela Carter published The Bloody Chamber in 1979 and society has changed in a number of ways since its publication. Below are some examples of critical reactions that have evolved in relation to the key themes and ideas in The Bloody Chamber.

Reactions on publication

• The collection of short stories received mixed reactions upon its publication and was not without its controversy

• The Chicago Tribune wrote a positive review in April 1980:

  • It states that her prose will “always make her a cult favourite; but to those who appreciated her voluptuous wit, these revisionist contes may seem her best work so far”

• However, Patricia Duncker in “Re-Imagining the Fairy Tales: Angela Carter’s Bloody Chambers” (1984) did not feel positively about the stories:

  • She felt that Carter did not do enough to subvert the old ideologies that were prevalent in fairy tales and that it proved “too complex and pervasive to avoid”

  • She believed that Carter was unsuccessful in her attempt to reimagine fairy tales, as it was impossible to do so without including ideas and values of the traditional tales

Reactions by the author

• Carter wrote The Bloody Chamber during the second wave of feminism and her collection of short stories in The Bloody Chamber is a collection of re-envisioned versions of classic fairy tales

• She states that her “intention was not to do ‘versions’ or … horribly ‘adult’ fairy tales, but to … use it as the beginnings of new stories”

• She was drawn to “Gothic tales, cruel tales, tales of wonder, tales of terror, fabulous narratives that deal directly with the imagery of the unconscious”

• She may have taken inspiration from the collection of fairy tales written by Charles Perrault (1628–1703), who wrote Bluebeard, which was the inspiration for the first story in Carter’s The Bloody Chamber collection

More recent reactions

• The collection of short stories in The Bloody Chamber is studied at A level and it continues to promote discussions around feminism, gender roles and the Gothic

• Carter adapted The Company of Wolves and Puss in Boots into radio plays in 1980 and 1982 respectively:

  • These were broadcast on BBC Radio 3

• In 1984, the film called The Company of Wolves by Neil Jordan was based on the werewolf stories from The Bloody Chamber collection

• There have been a number of theatre adaptations of the short stories, including The Tiger’s Bride in 2001

Dramatisations

Examining various productions on stage and radio of the short stories in The Bloody Chamber will help you to appreciate different interpretations of the characters and themes, and also how they may have evolved over time, reflecting shifts in society and culture.

The Curious Room by Angela Carter

This is a collection of radio plays, screenplays and one opera from Carter’s collection of works. This collection was one of three that was published posthumously after Carter’s death in 1992.  

The collection includes the following radio plays:

• Vampirella

• Come Unto These Yellow Sands

• The Company of Wolves

• Puss in Boots

• A Self-Made Man

• Carter enjoyed adapting stories into radio plays as it offered “a kind of three-dimensional story-telling”, which she found unique as it leaves much to the listener’s imagination:

  • She states that radio offers various possibilities for storytelling  

• Radio drama relies on the absence of visual aids to create its effects and so it sustains its illusion only through sound:

  • The sound archives can provide infinite resources from diverse locations to enrich the drama

• Carter felt that radio drama has the ability to go beyond reality:

  • It excels in depicting the inner voice and different interpretations of the world, which make it ideal to explore ideas such as madness and the private worlds of the alienated and lonely

• The Lady of the House of Love was turned into a short story from one of Carter’s radio plays called Vampirella:

  • Carter felt that it was not possible to include certain elements of Vampirella in a short story, as there was not enough room to include ideas such as the nature of vampirism or to include important characters from the play

• The Lady of the House of Love is a Gothic tale about a vampire. However, the radio play Vampirella looks at vampirism as a metaphor:

  • Therefore, Carter states that they are both quite different

• The “knife-edge tension” that could be sustained in a radio play could not be transferred to a short story effectively:

  • She felt that the human voice and all its subtleties and intonations was not as effective in the written word

• The Company of Wolves and Puss in Boots started off as short stories, which Carter “reformulated” into radio plays that are quite different:

  • The Company of Wolves is more of a horror than originally intended and Puss in Boots became more of a comedy

• Carter highlights how important the listener’s imagination is when listening to radio plays and how, if done successfully, a radio play can make you forget the actors and imagine the characters in your own head