The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories

“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 the visitation of the plague, shot a man-eating tiger with her own hand all before she was as old as I?”

Angela Carter takes a unique approach in the title story by making the hero not the protagonist’s brothers or even her sister (the only other female character in the original tale), but her mother. This quote takes some of the popular tropes of mid-century adventure stories and positions them through a feminist lens. It also foreshadows the ending of the story, as the mother later shoots the story’s villain in the same way she “shot a man-eating tiger” in the past.

“I saw how much that cruel necklace became me. And, for the first time in my innocent and confined life, I sensed in myself a potentiality for corruption that took my breath away.”

Beneath the atmospheric gothic horror, “The Bloody Chamber” is a coming-of-age story. This moment of awakening is a pivotal moment in this story archetype; the heroine not only emerges from a state of childhood innocence, but becomes self-aware enough to recognize the transition. While “corruption” is normally a negative quality, here it symbolizes the allure of the unknown.

“Then I realized, with a shock of surprise, how it must have been my innocence that captivated him—the silent music, he said, of my unknowingness, like La Terrasse des audiences au clair de lune played upon a piano with keys of ether.”

Innocence and virginity is a recurring motif throughout several of Carter’s stories, presented as both a protective force and a covetable prize. The narrator compares herself to a piece of classical music that is often used as a lullaby, suggesting a balance of comfort and security alongside the allure of the unknown.