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The Bloody Chamber 'And The Courtship Of Mr. Lyon'

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“How strange he was. She found his bewildering difference from herself almost intolerable; its presence choked her” (Carter 52). Based on fables, myths, and fairy tales, Angela Carter’s short stories “The Bloody Chamber” and “The Courtship of Mr. Lyon”, demonstrate brave women who at one point are put into a difficult situation and have to find their way out, in order to either survive or help a loved one. Both of these short stories are intriguing in the sense that they incorporate concepts based on magic that somehow end up having a connection to the every day real world. The magic realism portrayed in these stories allows the characters to show their enchantment and their gender roles. Angela Carter reflects magic realism through “The Bloody Chamber”, “The Courtship of Mr. Lyon” and her other short stories in a literal way. Magic realism plays a huge role in her stories because it changes the reader’s perspective of the “normal” world we are accustomed to. In Carter’s stories, women are their own heroes and the males are portrayed as weak. In real world stories, we are accustomed to reading about men saving the day and getting the women but not in her story, “The Bloody Chamber”. “You never saw such a wild thing as my mother, her hat seized by the winds and blown out to sea so that her hair was her white …show more content…

Lyon”, Beauty takes on the male role. “Do not think she had no will of her own; only, she was possessed by a sense of obligation to an unusual degree and, besides, she would gladly have gone to the ends of the earth for her father, whom she loved dearly” (Carter 53). Taking on that male role by first taking on the responsibility of helping her father get back his fortune, which most would expect the opposite because he is the male and should be the one financially supporting her (based on the common fairy-tales). Beauty’s father treats her like an object and uses her as a way to pay the Lyon back for what he has helped him

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The comment on Beauty’s freewill accentuates the lack of volition in Beauty’s case for she had to pay for her father’s transgression and the Beauty, as other women in the patriarchal social setup is aware of it and willingly accepts her plight. The magic realist tendencies of Angela Carter’s writings also come to the fore in the intermingling of the world of humans and animals, and the mundane and the magical. It is a type of postmodern gothic, which treats a ghost at the table as an everyday occurrence rather than something to be afraid of. In contrast to the “The Courtship of Mr. Lyon,” “The Tiger’s Bride” is explicitly sexual and more radical in its exploration of feminine-masculine stereotypes and relationships.

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