Receive O Quarto Dos Horrores Conceived By Angela Carter Offered As Audio Books
Bloody Chamber and Other Stories is the second collection of short stories by the English writer Angela Carter, It was first published in, five years after her first collection “Fireworks”, Angela Carter had already published seven novels, and two collections of poetry but only with this collection did she really begin to be noticed by the critics,
Angela Carters style is ornate and unnatural her eye cruel and voluptuous, These stories feel by their style, as if they were written in theth century, She once said she always knew that she was drawn to “Gothic tales, cruel tales, tales of terror, fabulous narratives that deal directly with the imagery of the unconscious”.
These are the sort of tales she herself wrote you will find little in common here, with stories from theth century onwards, Angela Carter was not concerned with what she called “those fragments of epiphanic experience”,
These lush, literary tales are more similar to the scandalous “sensational” or “horrid” novels of theth century, There, a young bride might be taken to a luxurious gothic chamber by a depraved older lustful lecher, with unspeakable consequences except that this is thest century, and we do speak of them, and she describes them with gusto in great detail.
Angela Carters tales are tales of sadomasochism sensual and fantastical stories where:
“There is a striking resemblance between the act of love and the ministrations of a torturer.
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The blurbs invariably describe this collection as traditional fairy tales given a subversive feminist twist, They are not. Such a description is a travesty of these tales, These are all new stories, not retellings, Angela Carter had translated Charles Perraults collection of fairy tales fromshortly before she wrote her own, She drew heavily on the source material, but said:
“My 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.
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The fairy tales which have been handed down to us are only a selection of the ones collected by Charles Perrault, or those a century later by the brothers Grimm.
The familiar fairy stories we recognise are heavily sanitised, Nobody
has their toes cut off to fit into a glass slipper, for instance, There is no torture or rape in our modern fairy talesbut it is all there in the originals, Heres Angela Carter again:
“I was taking the latent content of those traditional stories and using that and the latent content is violently sexual, ”
Yes, females in traditional fairy tales are usually depicted as weak and helpless, Most fairy tales are patriarchal in nature, and the female characters are objectified, However, to glibly interpret these tales as “feminist”, merely buys into yet another narrative, They are not simplified retellings, with another set of values, as Walt Disneys are, These stories from aeons ago are completely reimagined, They are deliberately radical, and they are all very different from each other,
The most famous is the title story The Bloody Chamber, which is long enough to be a novelette, It is fulltimes as long as the shortest and arguably most disturbing story The Snow Child, and at least twice as long as any other.
It is a familiar style of narrative story, but the prose is very dense voluptuous and beautiful, despite the depravity, The year before, Angela Carter had written a nonfiction book about the Marquis de Sade, and some themes from there are uppermost in her mind, She even calls a main character “the Marquis”, a clear reference if not a tribute,
I found the story to be unsuccessful however, After a very short time I began to mentally tick off the gothic tropes, Set in a spooky castle with a dungeon, tick a damsel in distress, tick an atmosphere of mystery and suspense, tick an evil monster, tick tempestuous weather, stormy sea, nightmares, burdened male protagonist, melodrama and so on.
By the end, I was waiting for a feminist twist on all this, but what transpired is frankly laughable,
One ostensibly feminist interpretation of this is that the author has created a familial tie between the heroine and her mother, who in a traditional tale would would often have died before the story began.
However the mother only has a small mention at the beginning, and then a brief telephone call a nod to theth century, She is barely necessary to or involved in this tale, so her sudden appearance is simply ludicrous, It just comes across as a deus ex machina ending, Far from being feminist, or thinking outside the box of traditional fairy tales, here we have yet another weak heroine who does not think for herself, and has to be rescued.
It is trite.
However, it has to be said that The Bloody Chamber can stand close analysis, in terms of all the cultural and intertextual references, There are echoes of the Greek myths cannibalism, mutilation and devouring are allied with the sexual act, It is an elaborate structure, packed with signs, allusions and clues, with slowly building horror, Plus once read, it is possible to identify recurring motifs which permeate all the others, For instance there are many mirrors indicating selfawareness keys with which to imprison roses or white lilies, representing the female virgin who gives or receives them or blood, indicating one of Angela Carters themes here that love and violence are inextricable.
Interestingly, Angela Carter viewed the Marquis de Sade as being the first writer to see women as more than mere breeding machines: more than just their biology.
She therefore found him to be liberating rather than misogynistic, calling him a “moral pornographer”, who analysed the relationship between the sexes within his work, Because this contradicts patriarchal notions of sex and femininity, Angela Carter argued that Marquis “would not be the enemy of women”, But perhaps the main message picked up from the Marquis de Sade in this collection, is that passivity is not an intrinsically virtuous stateand specifically not in women.
This first tale comprises a third of the book, and is a gruesome version of the Bluebeard tale, It is the most conventional in terms of narrative style, but it is a difficult, bloodsoaked read, with Bluebeard himself a parody of an evil aesthete and voluptuary.
The “bloody chamber” itself has two quite literal meanings, before getting into any possible metaphorical ones, One is the torture chamber, with unimaginably barbaric devices the other the female uterus, Angela Carter is concerned with both the physical and the mental here, and also the realm of aesthetics, The concept of beauty comes into every tale, and although her language is savage, it is never crude but always crafted, There are a few AngloSaxon words, but not used as expletives such as in Stephen Kings horror stories, nor to shock as such, They are simply used as part of the vocabulary of the tale, much as she will choose to use the differently focused word “impale” in preference to “rape”.
A third of the way through and you may decide that completing the first story: The Bloody Chamber is enough for you, The cruelty and depravity can be hard to take, but in fact when inured to this, what follows are nine unusually creative tales,
The first three are concerned with felines, and I found both The Courtship of Mr, Lyon and The Tigers Bride to be sensitive and poignant, Here, it is the melancholy which is stressed, rather than the gruesome, These first two are like mirror images of one another, and they both originate in the “Beauty and the Beast” story, We see in these metamorphic tales of transformation, that human beings are capable of change, These are the two I would choose as my favourites in the collection, with their detail and rich language, Angela Carter had an intensely visual imagination her writing reads like poetry, She particularly admired the French poet Baudelaire, and themes of luxury and decadence run throughout, while signs and symbols shout out to be noticed as signifiers, There is little dialogue in her writing, and since many of her protagonists are beastsor at least not humanthis is less noticeable for a while,
The third feline story is PussinBoots, whose source needs no explanation, This one is very different again, and made me laughsomething I never expected to do with this macabre selection, It is similar to “The Barber of Seville”, and Angela Carter herself described Puss in Boots as “the Cat as Con Man a masterpiece of cynicism a Figaroesque valeta servant so much the master already”.
It is, she said, the first story she wrote which was supposed to be really funny, and is a ribald and farcical read, featuring the evercynical Puss in Boots as our narrator.
He is witty and knowing a master of innuendo, Bawdy and blunt, this feels like reading a bit of Chaucer in the middle of a collection of Edgar Allan Poe stories another author she admired,
The next three stories: The ErlKing, The Snow Child, and The Lady of the House of Love, are also linked, Not this time by their protagonists, who are all very different kinds of beings, but thematically, In each, the lovers featured are lethal, The message is that traditional romantic patterns kill, and that sex leads to death,
The ErlKing is a wellknown chiller of a traditional fairy tale, about an elf who lingers in the woods, stalking children who stay in the woods for too long, and killing them by a single touch.
The first part of Angela Carters story is a masterpiece of painterly precision, featuring the most lyrical writing in the collection, Such a detailed description of the forest is simply breathtaking to read, This beautiful storyweb is spun to catch the child, but the fatal ending is even darker than might be supposed, It is packed with symbolism,
But worse is to come with The Snow Child, possibly the most extraordinary and disturbing story I have ever read, It is only a page long, but has a dreamlike, nightmarish quality, It is based partly on an Irish tale “The Snow, the Crow, and the Blood”, but also on a version of “Snow White” which the brothers Grimm collected but never published.
The third tale: The Lady of the House of Love however, I did enjoy, Perhaps it is my favourite of this collection, nudging the felines out of the top spot, It is based loosely on “Sleeping Beauty”, and started life as a play called “Vampirella”, Angela Carter wrote it for BBC radio in, before the rest of this collection, while she was an Arts Council fellow at Sheffield University, She had to cut quite a lot of the play for this story, but I found the melancholy story about a reluctant vampire to be emotionally very appealing.
It is noticeable that mostly these stories come across as beautiful artifices, but devoid of emotion, You could completely ignore the story, and yet still admire the vivid colour, gorgeous luxury and sensuous descriptions the dense prose full of allusions, delighting in the references and wit, but never truly engaging with the ideas.
The final three tales The Werewolf, The Company of Wolves and WolfAlice are all based on the werewolf theme, but again they are all very different.
The Werewolf is an extremely nasty version of “Little Red Riding Hood”, I particularly disliked the brutality of this tale, with its calculating, mocking protagonistbut I have to admit that it does have the feel of an authentic fairy tale.
The Company of Wolves is much a longer tale, without the chillingly laconic tone of The Werewolf, It is written in a narrative style, and eventually was to become a famous film, under the same title, For thisscreenplay, Angela Carter included more stories and themes, with red herrings as well as a Red Riding Hood, to bulk out the film,
The final wolf story: WolfAlice, as its title suggests, incorporates aspects of Lewis Carrolls two “Alice” books, as well as an obscure variant of “Little Red Riding Hood”.
The story is about a feral child suckled by wolves, and told from her perspective, It returns to a gothic feel, but the tone is savage and much of the imagery abhorrent,
Overall, Angela Carter did not break as many barriers as might be supposed, These tales have variations of style, but they feel unremitting, always examining the darker side of heterosexuality, exploring sadomasochism, mutilation, obsession, and the idea of fatal passion, Despite theth century style, they have a storytelling feel about them, a little like Neil Gaiman, Indeed, he cites Angela Carter as one of his major influences, But these fantasies read like an imaginary Neil Gaiman on L, S. D. If you read them please be warned,
What lifts them into literature in my opinion is their rococo style, They are unique creations, displaying an incredibly inventive imagination, but I hesitate to rate them, Did I enjoy them No, yet I can recognise their above average literary worth, Hence they stay at my default rating of three,
“It was the landscapes and imagery of fairy tales and legends that fired her imaginationbloodstains and ravens feathers on snow, moonlight on a dustgrimed mirror, graveyards on Walpurgisnacht”.
This anthology contains ten stories:
“The Bloody Chamber”,
“The Courtship of Mr Lyon”,
“The Tigers Bride”,
“PussinBoots”,
“The ErlKing”,
“The Snow Child”,
“The Lady of the House of Love”,
“The Werewolf”,
“The Company of Wolves”
“WolfAlice”.