Angela Carter's "The Bloody Chamber"

Read: July 9, 2011

In the Disney version of Sleeping Beauty, the princess Aurora is cursed to prick her finger on a spinning wheel at age 16 and fall into a deep sleep for years until Prince Charming rescues her. In Charles Perreault’s version, a king finds the sleeping beauty and impregnates her (either waking her up first or not). Beauty raises her two children and meanwhile, the king’s queen discovers this liaison and asks her chef to cook the children in dishes and serve them to the king. The chef hides the children in his own house  and cooks a dish with pork instead. When the king discovers his wife’s treachery, he has her killed and Beauty and their two children come to live at the castle. Happily ever after, right?

In Angela Carter’s version of Sleeping Beauty, “The Lady of the House of Love,” Sleeping Beauty is a sleepless vampire, the last in a long line of vampires descending from the original Dracula. The nearby town is deserted after years of “hunting” has either killed or scared off all the inhabitants. The Countess spends her nights reading her Tarot cards, hoping for any prognostication other than Death when one day her cards turn up Love. A young soldier on leave is traveling Europe on his bike (“the bicycle is the product of pure reason applied ot motion”) when he comes across this picturesque village. The soldier is brave and almost foolishly courageous; he does not know how to shiver. His fate is to learn true fear in the trenches of Europe except for this brief detour: “This being, rooted in change and time, is about to collide with the timeless Gothic eternity of the vampires, for whom all is as it has always been and will be, whose cards always fall in the same pattern.”  The Countess’s modus operandi is to invite the guest to dinner, which is served in an empty hall, and then ask the guest to join her for coffee. She wears the only gown she owns, an ancient wedding dress spotted with blood, and she woos her guest before dining on him. When she was young, she could content herself by feeding on small rabbits, “But now she is a woman, she must have men.”Except this time, her Tarot cards have shown her an outcome that is not Death but Love and she is both bewildered and excited to meet this young soldier who does not know how to shiver. Though she does not want him to die, she has yet to see her story play out in any other way.

Carter’s The Bloody Chamber is a collection of short stories based off of the original fairy tale collections, mostly those collected by Perreault and the Grimm brothers. Carter displays a deep knowledge of these original tales, playing off of themes and references (the “does not know how to shiver” characteristic actually comes from another Grimm fairy tale). I read this book as a part of a free course offered this summer at my library. We read the original fairy tales alongside Carter’s versions and our very knowledgeable instructor pointed out the intricacies of Carter’s imagination. In addition to this careful weaving, however, Carter is a master of the language with descriptions that linger and imagery that can be both dreadful and beautiful. Perhaps most enjoyable is the feminist twist Carter gives to the tales. In the Bluebeard tale, for example, the new wife escapes her husband’s sadism and turns him out of the house. A very highly recommended read.