The next three stories, at the centre of the book, fit less easily into this collection. In each one of them, lovers are lethal, traditional romantic patterns kill, and sex leads to death. ‘The Erl-King’ is based not on a fairy tale but on a German legend where a malignant goblin haunts the Black Forest and lures wanderers to their doom. Its forest setting is described with extraordinary painterly precision, studded with plant names and descriptions of perspective and light. The accumulation of small, sharply observed details gives it a closely stitched, embroidered quality – quite different from the stark black, white and red of the story which follows it. ‘The Snow Child’ is only a page long, just a few hundred words, and yet in some ways it is the most shocking piece of all, with its incestuous rape and murderous sexual rivalry. It is based on a variant of the fairy tale Snow White which the brothers Grimm collected but chose not to publish, in which Snow White’s birth is a result of her father’s desire (rather than her mother’s, as in the more familiar version of the story). ‘We are dealing with . . . creations of fantasy and wish-fulfilment,’ wrote Carter in her 1990 introduction to The Virago Book of Fairy Tales, ‘which is why the loose symbolic structure of fairy tales leaves them so open to psychoanalytic interpretation, as if they were not formal inventions but informal dreams dreamed in public.’ ‘The Snow Child’ has just such a dream-like atmosphere and symbolism, with its snow hole filled with blood and the weeping count sorrowfully raping his dead daughter before giving his wife a toothed rose that bites.
‘The Lady of the House of Love’ is different again, being a Transylvanian vampire tale rather than a fairy story. It started life as a radio play, Vampirella (first broadcast in 1976, so probably written well before the rest of this collection, which Carter said she wrote mostly during her time in Sheffield, where she was Arts Council Fellow from 1976–8). Carter, an avid reader of Anne Rice’s vampire novels, said the idea for the radio play came to her when she was sitting idly trying to work and ran a pencil along the top of a radiator – ‘It was just the noise that a long, pointed fingernail might make if it were run along the bars of a birdcage.’ She found she had to cut a great deal of discursive matter rewriting the play into a story, so that it ‘became leaner, more about itself, less about its own resonances, and more consistent in tone.’
Finally, three disparate werewolf tales work and rework the story of Red Riding Hood, borrowing variants from different centuries, compulsively circling the figures of the werewolf, the old woman and the young girl. ‘The Werewolf’ is brutal and short, its tone chillingly laconic. The girl cuts off the wolf’s paw, but finds that it is really her grandmother’s hand. The old woman is stoned to death as a witch. ‘Now the child lived in her grandmother’s house; she prospered’ reads the last sentence of this story, which is less concerned with sexuality than with survival. ‘The Company of Wolves’ is longer, less bleak, and far more luxuriant in style. Its first pages are given to a zestful atmospheric essay on the wolf, ‘carnivore incarnate’, with vivid werewolf anecdotes. Not until over a third of the way into the story does the Red Riding Hood narrative begin.
‘The Company of Wolves’ eventually grew into a film, after much rewriting and inclusion of additional material. The film-maker Neil Jordan remembered, ‘What she had written – the adaptation of the story basically – was too short for a feature film. I suggested to her that we develop it into a Chinese box structure . . . thereby enabling us to integrate other stories and themes of Angela’s own.’ Carter loved narrative proliferation, forks in the road and red herrings. In her novels, too, she was attracted to the picaresque. The narratives in The Bloody Chamber, by way of contrast, have relatively linear plot-lines, thanks to their fairy tale sources.
So, a third of the way in, Red Riding Hood is introduced to ‘The Company of Wolves’. At the end of Perrault’s familiar version of the story, she gets into bed with the wolf and is gobbled up. ‘What else can you expect if you talk to strange men, comments Perrault briskly,’ wrote Carter in the preface to her translation of his stories, ‘Let’s not bother our heads with the mysteries of sado-masochistic attraction. We must learn to cope with the world before we can interpret it.’ But, of course, interpreting these mysteries is just what Carter does attempt in ‘The Company of Wolves’, at the end of which Red Riding Hood refuses to feel fear (she ‘burst out laughing; she knew she was nobody’s meat’) or disgust (she will delouse the wolf and eat the lice ‘in a savage marriage ceremony’), and ends sleeping ‘sweet and sound’ in bed with the now ‘tender wolf’.
Last of all, ‘Wolf-Alice’ returns to Gothic territory and the gloomy mansion of a werewolf-duke. The story also borrows from an early medieval Red Riding Hood analogue, De puella a lupellis seruata, which tells the story of a feral child suckled by wolves. Again, there is a lice-borne rejection of disgust at animal nature in an evocation of ‘the Eden of our first beginnings where Eve and grunting Adam squat on a daisy bank, picking the lice from one another’s pelts.’ When the werewolf-duke is shot and wounded, Wolf-Alice saves him by tenderly licking the blood and dirt from his face.
This image of blood being licked away returns the reader to the moment in ‘The Lady of the House of Love’ where the young man kisses better the vampire’s wound and so, inadvertently, kills her; it also recalls the ending of ‘The Tiger’s Bride’, where the licking leads to new life and animal fur; which in turn refers on to the man who is ‘hairy on the inside’ in ‘The Company of Wolves’. There are a myriad such musical echoes in this collection – herbivores and carnivores, death and the maiden, the image of a system of Chinese boxes opening one into another – while certain phrases like ‘pentacle of virginity’ or indeed ‘the bloody chamber’ crop up repeatedly from story to story. Images of meat, naked flesh, fur, snow, menstruation, mirrors and roses (fanged or otherwise) recur fugue-like throughout, giving these stories an unmistakable family resemblance, different though they are from each other in approach and register.
In 1980, the year following publication of The Bloody Chamber, Carter said in an interview, ‘The short story is not minimalist, it is rococo. I feel in absolute control. It is like writing chamber music rather than symphonies.’ Her tone reveals elation and a sense of mastery. This story collection is attracting a new, wider audience of readers. With The Bloody Chamber she has uncovered fresh folkloric fields and a new literary hybrid admirably suited to her uncategorisable genius. From now on, the world will begin to take notice of what she writes; and she, in her way, will change the world.
Helen Simpson, 2006
THE BLOODY CHAMBER
I REMEMBER HOW, that night, I lay awake in the wagon-lit in a tender, delicious ecstasy of excitement, my burning cheek pressed against the impeccable linen of the pillow and the pounding of my heart mimicking that of the great pistons ceaselessly thrusting the train that bore me through the night, away from Paris, away from girlhood, away from the white, enclosed quietude of my mother’s apartment, into the unguessable country of marriage.
And I remember I tenderly imagined how, at this very moment, my mother would be moving slowly about the narrow bedroom I had left behind for ever, folding up and putting away all my little relics, the tumbled garments I would not need any more, the scores for which there had been no room in my trunks, the concert programmes I’d abandoned; she would linger over this torn ribbon and that faded photograph with all the half-joyous, half-sorrowful emotions of a woman on her daughter’s wedding day. And, in the midst of my bridal triumph, I felt a pang of loss as if, when he put the gold band on my finger, I had, in some way, ceased to be her child in becoming his wife.
Are you sure, she’d said when they delivered the gigantic box that held the wedding dress he’d bought me, wrapped up in tissue paper and red ribbon like a Christmas gift of crystallized fruit. Are you sure you love him? There was a dress for her, too; black silk, with the dull, prismatic sheen of oil on water, finer than anything she’d worn since that adventurous girlhood in Indo-China, daughter of a
rich tea planter. 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?
‘Are you sure you love him?’
‘I’m sure I want to marry him,’ I said.
And would say no more. She sighed, as if it was with reluctance that she might at last banish the spectre of poverty from its habitual place at our meagre table. For my mother herself had gladly, scandalously, defiantly beggared herself for love; and, one fine day, her gallant soldier never returned from the wars, leaving his wife and child a legacy of tears that never quite dried, a cigar box full of medals and the antique service revolver that my mother, grown magnificently eccentric in hardship, kept always in her reticule, in case – how I teased her – she was surprised by footpads on her way home from the grocer’s shop.
Now and then a starburst of lights spattered the drawn blinds as if the railway company had lit up all the stations through which we passed in celebration of the bride. My satin nightdress had just been shaken from its wrappings; it had slipped over my young girl’s pointed breasts and shoulders, supple as a garment of heavy water, and now teasingly caressed me, egregious, insinuating, nudging between my thighs as I shifted restlessly in my narrow berth. His kiss, his kiss with tongue and teeth in it and a rasp of beard, had hinted to me, though with the same exquisite tact as this nightdress he’d given me, of the wedding night, which would be voluptuously deferred until we lay in his great ancestral bed in the sea-girt, pinnacled domain that lay, still, beyond the grasp of my imagination . . . that magic place, the fairy castle whose walls were made of foam, that legendary habitation in which he had been born. To which, one day, I might bear an heir. Our destination, my destiny.
Above the syncopated roar of the train, I could hear his even, steady breathing. Only the communicating door kept me from my husband and it stood open. If I rose up on my elbow, I could see the dark, leonine shape of his head and my nostrils caught a whiff of the opulent male scent of leather and spices that always accompanied him and sometimes, during his courtship, had been the only hint he gave me that he had come into my mother’s sitting room, for, though he was a big man, he moved as softly as if all his shoes had soles of velvet, as if his footfall turned the carpet into snow.
He had loved to surprise me in my abstracted solitude at the piano. He would tell them not to announce him, then soundlessly open the door and softly creep up behind me with his bouquet of hot-house flowers or his box of marrons glacés, lay his offering upon the keys and clasp his hands over my eyes as I was lost in a Debussy prelude. But that perfume of spiced leather always betrayed him; after my first shock, I was forced always to mimic surprise, so that he would not be disappointed.
He was older than I. He was much older than I; there were streaks of pure silver in his dark mane. But his strange, heavy, almost waxen face was not lined by experience. Rather, experience seemed to have washed it perfectly smooth, like a stone on a beach whose fissures have been eroded by successive tides. And sometimes that face, in stillness when he listened to me playing, with the heavy eyelids folded over eyes that always disturbed me by their absolute absence of light, seemed to me like a mask, as if his real face, the face that truly reflected all the life he had led in the world before he met me, before, even, I was born, as though that face lay underneath this mask. Or else, elsewhere. As though he had laid by the face in which he had lived for so long in order to offer my youth a face unsigned by the years.
And, elsewhere, I might see him plain. Elsewhere. But, where?
In, perhaps, that castle to which the train now took us, that marvellous castle in which he had been born.
Even when he asked me to marry him, and I said: ‘Yes,’ still he did not lose that heavy, fleshy composure of his. I know it must seem a curious analogy, a man with a flower, but sometimes he seemed to me like a lily. Yes. A lily. Possessed of that strange, ominous calm of a sentient vegetable, like one of those cobra-headed, funereal lilies whose white sheaths are curled out of a flesh as thick and tensely yielding to the touch as vellum. When I said that I would marry him, not one muscle in his face stirred, but he let out a long, extinguished sigh. I thought: Oh! how he must want me! And it was as though the imponderable weight of his desire was a force I might not withstand, not by virtue of its violence but because of its very gravity.
He had the ring ready in a leather box lined with crimson velvet, a fire opal the size of a pigeon’s egg set in a complicated circle of dark antique gold. My old nurse, who still lived with my mother and me, squinted at the ring askance; opals are bad luck, she said. But this opal had been his own mother’s ring, and his grandmother’s, and her mother’s before that, given to an ancestor by Catherine de Medici . . . every bride that came to the castle wore it, time out of mind. And did he give it to his other wives and have it back from them? asked the old woman rudely; yet she was a snob. She hid her incredulous joy at my marital coup – her little Marquise – behind a façade of fault-finding. But, here, she touched me. I shrugged and turned my back pettishly on her. I did not want to remember how he had loved other women before me, but the knowledge often teased me in the threadbare self-confidence of the small hours.
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. Indeed, was he not still in mourning for his last wife? Tsk, tsk, went my old nurse. And even my mother had been reluctant to see her girl whisked off by a man so recently bereaved. A Romanian countess, a lady of high fashion. Dead just three short months before I met him, a boating accident, at his home, in Brittany. They never found her body but I rummaged through the back copies of the society magazines my old nanny kept in a trunk under her bed and tracked down her photograph. The sharp muzzle of a pretty, witty, naughty monkey; such potent and bizarre charm, of a dark, bright, wild yet worldly thing whose natural habitat must have been some luxurious interior decorator’s jungle filled with potted palms and tame, squawking parakeets.
Before that? Her face is common property; everyone painted her but the Redon engraving I liked best, The Evening Star Walking on the Rim of Night. To see her skeletal, enigmatic grace, you would never think she had been a barmaid in a café in Montmartre until Puvis de Chavannes saw her and had her expose her flat breasts and elongated thighs to his brush. And yet it was the absinthe doomed her, or so they said.
The first of all his ladies? That sumptuous diva; I had heard her sing Isolde, precociously musical child that I was, taken to the opera for a birthday treat. My first opera; I had heard her sing Isolde. With what white-hot passion had she burned from the stage! So that you could tell she would die young. We sat high up, halfway to heaven in the gods, yet she half-blinded me. And my father, still alive (oh, so long ago), took hold of my sticky little hand, to comfort me, in the last act, yet all I heard was the glory of her voice.
Married three times within my own brief lifetime to three different graces, now, as if to demonstrate the eclecticism of his taste, he had invited me to join this gallery of beautiful women, I, the poor widow’s child with my mouse-coloured hair that still bore the kinks of the plaits from which it had so recently been freed, my bony hips, my nervous, pianist’s fingers.
He was rich as Croesus. The night before our wedding – a simple affair, at the Mairie, because his countess was so recently gone – he took my mother and me, curious coincidence, to see Tristan. And, do you know, my heart swelled and ached so during the Liebestod that I thought I must truly love him. Yes. I did. On his arm, all eyes were upon me. The whispering crowd in the foyer parted like the Red Sea to let us through. My skin crisped at his touch.
How my circumstances had changed since the first time I heard those voluptuous chords that carry such a charge of deathly passion in them! Now, we sat in a lo
ge, in red velvet armchairs, and a braided, bewigged flunkey brought us a silver bucket of iced champagne in the interval. The froth spilled over the rim of my glass and drenched my hands, I thought: My cup runneth over. And I had on a Poiret dress. He had prevailed upon my reluctant mother to let him buy my trousseau; what would I have gone to him in, otherwise? Twice-darned underwear, faded gingham, serge skirts, hand-me-downs. So, for the opera, I wore a sinuous shift of white muslin tied with a silk string under the breasts. And everyone stared at me. And at his wedding gift.
His wedding gift, clasped round my throat. A choker of rubies, two inches wide, like an extraordinarily precious slit throat.
After the Terror, in the early days of the Directory, the aristos who’d escaped the guillotine had an ironic fad of tying a red ribbon round their necks at just the point where the blade would have sliced it through, a red ribbon like the memory of a wound. And his grandmother, taken with the notion, had her ribbon made up in rubies; such a gesture of luxurious defiance! That night at the opera comes back to me even now . . . the white dress; the frail child within it; and the flashing crimson jewels round her throat, bright as arterial blood.
The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories Page 2