“The Bloody Chamber” is a short story by Angela Carter which reimagines the classic tale of Bluebeard. The reader is introduced to a young girl who has recently entered a loveless marriage with a rich, older widower who she knows very little about. She spends her time in his company curious about her husband, about how he sees her. Through his objectifying gaze she discovers her own sexuality, reacting with both horror and excitement. When her husband leaves on a business trip early on in their honeymoon, barely after their marriage has been consummated; her curiosity becomes her undoing. She discovers a secret, decrepit room within his castle in which he has hidden the bodies of his murdered wives. She runs to the phone, it is dead. She runs to the blind piano-tuner for which she holds more affection than any married woman should, he is only capable of offering her advice. The main character’s husband arrives home early to discover that his wife has uncovered his illicit fetish, and he very nearly kills her for it. At the last second, her mother bursts into his estate and shoots her daughters husband in the head. After the trauma of her first marriage, the main character sets up house with her mother and the piano-tuner, but she remains ashamed of the marks, both physical and mental, which remain. She enjoys a happy but seemingly asexual fairy tale ending and never resolves her issues with her own sexuality. “The Bloody Chamber” is a retelling which, similarly to many of Carter’s other works, elaborates upon themes of sex and corruption found within the original tale; and while this retelling clearly aims to subvert many of these themes, “The Bloody Chamber” ends up falling into similar cycles of sexual repression and arguably sublimating itself and its main character when her mother kills her husband, depriving her of the chance to undermine his fetish for murdering a spouse and satisfy herself sexually through the gaze of the narrative.
“The Bloody Chamber” is a story which brings to mind a particularly famous apocryphal Oscar Wilde quote; “Everything in the world is about sex, except sex. Sex is about power.” The tale’s title, the lillies carefully strewn throughout it by Carter, the purposefully perverse and titillating prose, even the train depicted in its opening pages, are all arguably sexual in nature. The sex itself is violently clinical. Words such as impaled, fighting, and shatter are employed, and the main character describes the act as “that one-sided struggle” (Carter 15). She then goes on to shudder through her loss of virginity – not with desire as she had pages earlier, but with anxiety and fear – as her husband falls into a deep sleep. There is no mention of her orgasm, and within the next few paragraphs of the story she is left behind not only sexually, but physically as well. Once the actuality of sex is introduced to Carter’s tale, the reader is able to more accurately understand the power dynamic between the main character and her husband: where healthy relationships are often fantastic in their sexuality while maintaining a loving reality, the opposite is true of the relationship between the main character and her husband. Once the two have sex, the fetish for power (which was only implied before) of the husband is revealed, if only implicitly. “All the better to see you,” the husband says once he has the main character (‘his’ bride) naked and prone. This dialogue is not put in quotes, and therefore it is left up to the reader as to whether or not the man actually uttered these words. That said, the explicit nature of the reference to Little Red Riding Hood in tandem with the ways in which the husband has made the main character feel as though she were a slab of meat, small, solidifies his fetish within the narrative. The extremes of this violent fetish will only be seen when the eponymous Bloody Chamber is later opened.
Throughout this tale, Carter sexually politicizes the act of looking, as well as seeing and being seen. Perhaps the most glaring example of this is when the main character understands herself as a sexual being by seeing herself as she is objectified through the eyes of her husband; “And I saw myself, suddenly, as he saw me… for the first time in my innocent and confined life, I sensed in myself a potentiality for corruption that took my breath away” (Carter 7). She enjoys the act of being seen as sexual and is subsequently horrified by that enjoyment; it is as though her husband's gaze has tainted her purity. This is only underscored by the act of losing her virginity to him. Carter describes this event with no erotica, and this as well as the lack of orgasm on the part of the main character show that her husband does not care about her satisfaction. The small comforts which he provides her are an afterthought:
“I clung to him as though only the one who had inflicted the pain could comfort me for suffering it... But then he unwound the tendrils of my hair from the buttons of his smoking jacket, kissed my cheek briskly and told me the agent from New York had called with such urgent business that he must leave as soon as the tide was low enough” (Carter 9).
He leaves his unsatisfied and distressed wife immediately on what he says is ‘business,’ later revealed to be nothing more than a sick test of obedience which ends in murder. The sex act which leaves the main character unsatisfied creates a Chekhov’s gun of sexual climax, an open-ended question of What will need to happen for her to feel satisfied? Conversely, the blind piano tuner is automatically understood to be a pure and safe person who cannot inflict the same visual violence, the same objectification that the husband puts upon her: the piano tuner’s infatuation is benign. In this way, the story paints the main character as both an object of corruption (to her husband) and affection (to her love, the tuner).
It is clear that the primary reason the main character enjoys being objectified by her husband is because no one has ever shown any kind of sexual interest in her, positive or negative. As the train carries the newlyweds through French countryside “away from Paris, away from girlhood, away from the white, enclosed quietude of [the main character’s] mother's apartment, into the unguessable country of marriage,” (Carter 1) the main character then goes on to lament her lack of experience sexually and romantically, comparing herself to her husband’s previous wives (as well as mentioning their disappearances). Her characterization throughout the story shows her to be both naive as well as precocious, although any resourcefulness she displays may merely be a symptom of her dire situation. There remains knowledge which can only be provided by experience, and she does not have the requisite experience to understand that one can be desired without being reduced. The ‘desire’ which the piano tuner shows for the main character is devoid of any sexuality, and therefore pure in the eyes of the narrative. The equation of sex and corruption in “The Bloody Chamber” is absolute and, in true fairy tale form, fantastic. Carter purports sex to be the last step before death; the ultimate transformation, corruption. For instance, after losing her virginity the main character calls her bedroom an “embalming parlour” (Carter 15). Later, she is nearly executed in the same garb (or, more accurately, lack thereof) in which her marriage was consummated. The small-death of orgasm (which she does not even attain) is a death sentence. This foreshadowing of the husband’s attempt to murder his wife as well her discovery of his successful murders included in sexual scenes notably take place in front of mirrors; an allegory for the reflection and later sublimation of sexual desire in this triad of characters; husband, main character, and tuner.
In reality, enjoying sex and sexual dynamics is not inherently corrupting in nature. To have the desire to be desired and seen sexually can be (although often is not) entirely separate from objectification. It is made clear by the consistent pairing of shame and eroticism that the main character enjoys sadomasochistic dynamics in sexual situations. One instance in which her sexual desire is connected to her fear and shame of sex is during the post-coital conversation in which her husband gifts her the keys to the castle, “I was not afraid of him; but of myself,” she thinks, “And, in the red firelight, I blushed again, unnoticed, to think he might have chosen me because, in my innocence, he sensed a rare talent for corruption, (Carter 11). These instances where the main character must come to face her own desires as seen through those of her husband’s, which are antithetical to her personhood, illustrate how the malicious desire of her husband is the corrupt thing, not her. Carter deploys the most sexual language when describing the bloody chamber itself, “The walls of this stark torture chamber were the naked rock; they gleamed as if they were sweating with fright” (Carter 28), horrifying the reader by taking advantage of what is most associated with words such as naked and sweating. The subsequent and failed attempt at seduction the main character makes is described as clinically as the previous sexual experience between husband and wife had been. “I would have strangled him, then” (Carter 21) the main character remarks. This, in tandem with the main characters clear enjoyment of being desired carnally, as well as the foreshadowing of one spouse conspiring to murder the other seems as though it would naturally conclude with a subversion of the Bluebeard tale and a reclamation of the violence which has been equated with orgasms denied to the main character; or, with the main character killing her husband.
The main character is castrated by her mother’s rescue, an act which denies her the catharsis of spousal murder. Killing one’s spouse has been sexualized; it is evident from the women whose corpses lie within the bloody chamber that the main character’s husband has a fetish for control which he enacts through murder. If the main character were to kill her husband, she would effectively take control of herself within the narrative. After barely resisting her forthcoming demise with an attempt at seduction, she submits herself shortly, thereby accepting her fate as an object within his life and desires. While this retelling subverts some events of Bluebeard – the mother rescuing the main character rather than her brothers is an obvious example – this tale nonetheless illustrates the repressions of society. The main character’s objectification is validated within the text when her mother frees her from the execution block that is her marriage. The three people in her life who see her – her mother, her husband, and her lover – are all juxtaposed with her prone, naked self, projecting their own conceptions: her mother sees her as the child she was, her husband sees her as a sexual object for him, and her blind lover does not actually ‘see’ her at all. In the last sentences of “The Bloody Chamber,” Carter reveals that this lack of sight – the fact that the piano tuner cannot see the mark borne by the main character as evidence of this trial – is in fact comforting. “[I]t spares my shame,” she states. In that same paragraph, the main character arguably contradicts herself: “I know he sees me clearly with his heart,” (Carter 45) however, if she is truly spared her shame, this cannot be true. The shame which she feels surrounding the mark is the same shame which she feels for her sexual inclinations, a shame which is never resolved within the narrative. The main character’s happy ending is a sexless life in which she is not only not objectified, but also not seen at all. The two options which she is presented in the story are to be abused and objectified, denied orgasm but ‘seen’ as a sexual being (more accurately: seen as a sex object), or, the option she chooses, to repress whatever sexual side of herself may exist and enjoy a happy yet plain marriage. In this way, she sublimates herself and her sexuality; arguably continuing the cycle of marital secrets which began with her murderous first husband.
Throughout “The Bloody Chamber,” the main character recalls instances in which her mother’s bravery inspires her to be courageous, such as upon entering the husband’s bloody chamber. “My mother's spirit drove me on, into that dreadful place,” (Carter 16) she thinks before lighting a match, illuminating the crimes which had taken place in her husband’s castle. The mother’s courage is seen as an extension of the main character by some, however it is arguable that the mother’s ability to be brave and commit acts of violence exists in stark contrast to the main character’s narrative ineptitude. To fall back on her mother is to effectively erase all that she has gone through and regress to a child protected when in fact she has been forced into the world of adulthood as her husband forces her to execution. It is impossible to erase the past; she is marked with evidence of it. The mother’s rescue of the main character is an erasure of all maturity the main character has gained and a desexualization of the act of murder, which Carter has eroticized. The castration of murder as well as the main character is shown by Carter’s allusion to myth, the main character remarking: “And my husband stood stock-still, as if she had been Medusa,” (Carter 25). The use of Medusa in this way is potent in that she symbolizes castration within many forms of feminist and/or Freudian analysis. Shooting the husband in the head has clear sexual undertones: the mother removes his ‘head’ during an act which is canonically sexual. That being said, her bullet also deprives the main character of sexual satisfaction via eroticized murder. This shot directly leads to her sexless happily-ever-after.
The main character is ashamed of her sexuality throughout Carter’s tale and remains so even after the very last sentence. This is not necessarily a flaw, however; the story’s castration of her can be seen as a depiction of how marriage, loving or unloving, invariably contains some form of trapping. The main character may not have killed anyone, but she nonetheless has innumerable secrets hidden within the depths of her subconscious which she will never reveal. Intentions of the author aside, when Carter wrote this story she created a narrative which, because of where it succeeds and fails to subvert Bluebeard as well as tropes about feminine sexuality, sublimates its own main character. Her castration does not have to be seen as a flaw, but rather a feature of the narrative. The main character sees sex (especially sex which incorporates the elements of domination, sadism, and masochism which she enjoyed from her last marriage) as the corrupting element in her life. Therefore, when she enters a new marriage she forgets all of her sexuality and attempts to life a ‘normal’ life. However normal life often includes sex or sexuality, even if only in its negative space. Sex is an important aspect of the human experience and to pretend that one has no relationship to it is a futile endeavor. In this way the mark of the key to the bloody chamber which has permanently marred the main character’s flesh is an allegorical sign to the outside world that she has been corrupted, and the fact that the only person who cannot see and understand the symbol is her husband shows how she has, in a way, become the very thing which she fears.