In Carter’s Bloody Chamber, the theme of transformative love appears frequently throughout many of her stories such as; The Snow Child, The Tiger’s Bride, The Blood Chamber and The Courtship of Mr. Lyon. Carter explores the transformative love in many different forms whether it is paternal, maternal or sexual. Though sometimes the transformative power of love can be literal for example in The Tiger’s Bride others times the characters go through a change mentally and emotionally due to the different types of love they have experienced.
The first transformation carter introduces is in her fist story the bloody chamber, at the beginning of the story the narrator, who is the voice of the main female character, highlights her naivety in her naïve
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The first transformation carter presents in this story is in the creation of the snow child, after the count wishes for a girl “as white as snow/as red as blood/as black as that birds feathers” Carter implies there is a transformation between the objects and the snow child “as soon as he completed his description there she stood”. Carter uses both the power of paternal and sexual love of the count to transform the objects into the snow child; she uses this transformation to highlight the objectification of women in both 1970s British society and the gothic genre itself. Moreover, when the snow child transforms into her original objects after the bite of the rose, carter uses the roses to not only represent the negative aspects of womanhood and the way a woman is deemed worthless when her virginity is taken but to also represent the cynicism of love –in all its forms- and how it is never gained without a consequence. Similarly, in the Courtship of Mr Lyon Carter uses the love Beauty has for the beast’s true form to transform him into a human, unlike The Tiger’s Bride where the female character is transformed into a beast so that the she can be like him and quell his loneliness, in The Courtship of Mr Lyon, the lion possess human qualities and animalistic qualities unlike the tiger who just wants to be human, for instance in The Tiger’s Bride the tiger is translated by his valet whilst in the Courtship of Mr Lyon talks by himself. Carter uses the transformation of the lion into a human from the kiss Beauty places on his paw to represent how humans give up there animalistic instincts to become