Charles Perrault's The Bloody Chamber

In The Bloody Chamber, Angela Carter creates an absorbing collection of incredibly dark, sensual and fantastical stories that challenge the oppressive patriarchal world depicted in conventional fairy tales and folkloric legends. However, to subvert the patriarchal world of fairy tales, Carter revises the plot of well-known stories — like Charles Perrault’s Bluebeard — and incorporates an ensemble of unique characters with a complex characterization that challenges the stereotypical depictions of gender. By analyzing the complex characters of The Bloody Chamber, this paper will argue that Carter’s reversal of the stereotypical representations of gender depicted in Charles Perrault’s Bluebeard functions to combat patriarchal notions on gender

She relies “on [her] brothers” (Perrault par. 7) to save her from her tyrannical husband and is, quite literally, at the mercy of her husband’s “great cimeter” (par. 7) — a phallic symbol of destructive patriarchal authority— that threatens the female’s capacity to voice her opinion. In fact, the wife’s ability to speak is constantly threatened in Perrault’s tale; it is almost destroyed by the wife herself, who is so “eager to see what was in [Bluebeard’s] closet” (par. 3) that she is “in danger of falling down [the] stairs and breaking her neck” (par. 3), and by Bluebeard, who nearly “strike[s] off her head” (par. 7) as a punishment for her disobedience. As the wife is forced to obey the vocal commands of Bluebeard to “come down at once” (par. 7), she falls “on her knees, [and] beg him to spare her life” (par. 7) in a display of submission. While this display of behaviour suggests that the wife concedes to her husband’s authority — to be meek and submissive — she is still nearly killed for her disobedience. Consequently, some interpretations of Perrault’s fairy tale place more emphasis on the wife’s so-called transgression than on Bluebeard’s unforgiving and tyrannical behaviour. Bruno Bettelheim, an Austrian psychoanalyst, argues in favour of such an interpretation. With an emphasis on the wife’s disobedience, he claims the story of Bluebeard is “a cautionary tale which

However, unlike the wife in Bluebeard, who simply acted upon her child-like curiosity, Carter provides her unnamed female narrator with a motive other than simple curiosity to explore the Marquis’ castle: an inquisitive desire to find “some traces of [her husband’s] heart” (Carter 27) and a “little of his soul” (27) to understand him on an emotional level. This desire, which is founded entirely on a wish to possess the “key to [the Marquis’] heart” (21), provides the female narrator not only with insight on the Marquis, but, more importantly, on herself. While the traumatic “loss of [her] virginity” (18) has already forced the narrator to acknowledge the possibility that she may have “a rare talent for corruption” (20), it is the inquisitive nature of her desire — to attain more knowledge — that makes her physical presence in the Marquis’ subterranean dungeon significant because it allows her to discover that she “feel[s] no fear, no intimation of dread” (27). The female narrator’s successful ‘intrusion’ into a predominately masculine space — a violent space that victimizes women — is visually represented by the blood on the Marquis’ key. In essence, the Marquis’ key is an extension of himself that represents, like