"A Reciprocal Pact
of Tenderness"
Sadean Pornographic
Structures in Angela
Carter's The Bloody
Chamber
Ma Thesis
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Master Thesis
Title: “A Reciprocal Pact of Tenderness”: Sadean Pornographic Structures in Angela Carter’s
The Bloody Chamber
Name: Janneke van Engeland Student number: 10549013
Programme: MA English Literature and Culture, University of Amsterdam Supervisor: Dr N. D. Carr
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Statement of Originality
This document is written by Student Janneke van Engeland, who declares to take full responsibility for the contents of this document.
I declare that the text and the work presented in this document are original and that no
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Contents
Abstract ... 4
Introduction ... 5
1. Feminist critique of the fairy tale and pornography ... 9
2. Angela Carter and Sade: materialism and demythologising ... 17
3. Responsibility and “The Bloody Chamber” ... 24
4. Reciprocity and “The Company of Wolves” ... 36
Conclusion ... 44
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Abstract
When Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber was published in 1979, it sparked a feminist debate which is continuing to this day. Some feminist critics have read the stories as victim-blaming stories of rape that reinscribe patriarchal attitudes towards sexuality, whereas others have read the stories as successful rewritings of fairy tales which portray women fight back against patriarchal attitudes and discover a female desire. Most criticism has focused on the fairy tale aspect of The Bloody Chamber, but has neglected its pornographic aspect. In this thesis, I will argue that it is necessary to read The Bloody Chamber in conjunction with Carter’s feminist polemic The Sadeian Woman (1978) and the Marquis de Sade’s libertine novels in order to open up the full feminist potential of the stories. I will analyse two of the stories on the basis of three Sadean pornographic structures: firstly, the dichotomy of
mythical roles of femininity; secondly, the basis of male pleasure in the sexual objectification of women; and thirdly, the solipsistic conception of pleasure and its consequent victimiser-victim relationship between sexual partners. I will argue that the two stories from The Bloody
Chamber address and subvert these structures. I will conclude three things: firstly, that
Carter’s feminism cannot be categorised as either pro- or anti-pornography, but that it reaches its own conclusions; secondly, that the addressing and rewriting of pornographic structures lies at the heart of The Bloody Chamber and that the fairy tale is a vessel through which these structures are addressed; and finally, that the strength of Carter’s feminist thinking is its ambiguity and its insistence on the complexity of human sexuality.
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Introduction
There’s a story in The Bloody Chamber called “The Lady and the House of Love,” part of which derives from a movie version that I saw of a story by Dostoyevsky. And in the movie, which is very good, the woman, who is a very passive person and is very much in distress, asks herself the question, “Can a bird sing only the song it knows, or can it learn a new song?” Have we got the capacity at all of singing new songs? It’s very important that if we haven’t, we might as well stop now. Can the marionette in that story behave in a way that she’s not programmed to behave? Is it possible?
– Angela Carter1
Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber and The Sadeian Woman
When Angela Carter’s short story collection The Bloody Chamber was published in 1979, it gave her a wider audience than she had ever had before and it meant the breakthrough of her career as a writer. The stories in The Bloody Chamber are usually seen as reworkings of well-known fairy tales such as “Snow White”, “Bluebeard”, “Beauty and the Beast” and “Little Red Riding Hood”. Using pre-existing narratives and then changing and subverting them, Carter rewrites these traditional fairy tales from a self-proclaimed feminist perspective, or as she described it herself, “putting new wine in old bottles” and then “mak[ing] the bottles explode” (Carter, “Notes from the Front Line” 69). These new fairy tales bring out the latent content in traditional fairy tales: the violence, the sexuality and the misogyny. In 1978, a year before The Bloody Chamber, Carter’s feminist polemic The Sadeian Woman & The Ideology
of Pornography was published. In The Sadeian Woman, Carter analyses the work of the
Marquis de Sade, the eighteenth-century French pornographer, and makes the bold claim that his writings hold a feminist potential. Based on Sade’s analysis of sexuality, Carter presents the idea of a “moral pornography”: a pornography that offers a critique of current relations between men and women and that in this way can be used in the service of women.
The critical debate
It is now 40 years after the publication of The Bloody Chamber and 26 years after Angela Carter’s death, but there is still a lively interest in Carter’s work and persona. In 2017, a
1 Katsavos, Anna. “An Interview with Angela Carter.” Review of Contemporary Fiction, vol. 14, no. 3, Autumn
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biography was published,2 and in August 2018 a BBC documentary aired on TV (Angela
Carter: Of Wolves & Women). Much of this interest focuses on Carter as a feminist writer. At
the time of publication, both The Bloody Chamber and The Sadeian Woman were strongly criticised by anti-pornography feminists. The controversial use of the world’s most notorious pornographer for a self-proclaimed feminist argument in The Sadeian Woman caused “shock and disgust” (Gamble 112). Most criticism, however, has focused on The Bloody Chamber and asks the question: does Carter succeed in changing patriarchal fairy tales into new feminist tales? Some critics have read the stories as reinscribing patriarchal attitudes towards women and “eroticising … sexual violence and victimisation” (Gamble 111), whereas others have read them as successful rewritings of misogynistic fairy tales in which “women grab their own sexuality and fight back” (Makinen 3).
Most of the criticism approaches the stories in The Bloody Chamber with the starting point that they are rewritings of fairy tales, which is certainly an important aspect but
certainly not the only one. What has been neglected in the debate on The Bloody Chamber are the pornographic dimensions of the story collection: the influence of the Marquis de Sade on the stories and the collection’s connections with Carter’s The Sadeian Woman. As the only work of non-fiction, The Sadeian Woman stands out from the rest of Carter’s work consisting of novels and story collections, and it has not received as much critical attention. A few recent critics, such as Nanette Altevers and Sally Keenan, have analysed The Sadeian Woman as the main work in their research and have argued that working through Sade has been a watershed moment in Carter’s feminist thinking (Keenan 134). Still, only a small number of recent critics (Robin Ann Sheets, Elaine Jordan and Heta Pyrhönen, for instance) have dedicated a substantial part of their argumentation to reading The Bloody Chamber in conjunction with The Sadeian Woman.
The present study
In my view, the pornographic dimensions of The Bloody Chamber and the influence of the Marquis de Sade’s writings on the collection have been given too little attention. I think that it is necessary to read The Bloody Chamber in conjunction with The Sadeian Woman, and also to look beyond this book and to go back to the original Sade, in order to open up the full feminist potential of Carter’s stories. In this thesis, firstly I will argue that, rather than as a
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rewriting of traditional fairy tales, a feminist reading of Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber is best approached as a story collection that imitates and at the same time distances itself from Sadean pornographic structures. Secondly, I will argue that the stories “The Bloody
Chamber” and “The Company of Wolves” negotiate the requirements of and eventually conceive of an equal and reciprocal sexual relationship between men and women. With this thesis, I aim to join the critical debate on Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber and The
Sadeian Woman as feminist works.
In my analysis, I will identify three key structures from Sadean pornography that, in my view, form the basis for the feminist set-up of the stories “The Bloody Chamber” and “The Company of Wolves” from The Bloody Chamber. I will return to these three Sadean structures, which are not necessarily representative of all pornography, throughout the thesis. The first pornographic structure that I will use in this thesis is the dichotomy of mythical roles of femininity. In this dichotomy, women are either good, passive, virginal, virtuous and victims, corresponding to Sade’s character Justine, or bad, active, sexual, sinful and
victimisers, corresponding to his character Juliette. The second pornographic structure is male pleasure based on the sexual objectification of women, which makes pornography inherently violent. The third pornographic structure is the solipsistic conception of pleasure, which requires that sexual partners always relate to each other in the form of master-slave, predator-prey, victimiser-victim.
In chapter one, I will examine the first pornographic structure, which is the dichotomy of mythical roles of femininity which feminist critics, especially Andrea Dworkin, have identified in both pornography and fairy tales. I will connect these dichotomous roles to Sade’s characters Justine and Juliette. Furthermore, I will provide Carter’s reading of this dichotomy, especially her rejection of the Justine role as suitable for feminist change and her argument that women are complicit in their own oppression by identifying with this role. Finally, I will provide an overview of the critical reception of The Sadeian Woman and The
Bloody Chamber by anti-pornography feminists.
In chapter two, I will argue that, in contrast to what anti-pornography feminists accused her of, Carter also rejects the aggressive victimiser role of Juliette as a proper feminist model. Furthermore, I will argue that Sade’s materialist analysis of sexuality is useful for Carter’s aim to demystify mythical roles of femininity. Next, I will make some critical remarks on Sade’s limitations as a pre-feminist philosopher. Finally, I will argue that the fairy tale is a suitable genre for engaging with political reality.
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In chapter three, I will analyse “The Bloody Chamber”, a rewriting of Charles
Perrault’s “Bluebeard”. I will argue that the story rejects the feminist value of the Justine role of the virtuous victim and that it urges women to take responsibility for their own behaviour. The story also begins a fusion of the Justine and Juliette roles by showing the onset of a female desire. Next, I will argue that the story analyses the pornographic objectification of women with the help of Laura Mulvey’s concept of “the male gaze”. Furthermore, I will argue that the story connects the violence inherent in pornography through its objectification of women to the violence inherent in male power itself, by analysing how myths of female curiosity and disobedience reveal that male power is exerted and maintained through
violence. Finally, I will argue that the story is wary of not presenting any new mythical roles through the characters of the mother and the alternative husband.
In chapter four, I will analyse “The Company of Wolves”, a rewriting of Perrault’s “Little Red Riding Hood” and the Grimm Brothers’ “Little Red-Cap”, which resolves issues raised in “The Bloody Chamber”. I will argue that Carter’s story resists pornographic male objectification of women, that it deconstructs the pornographic predator-prey relationship and that it synthesises the roles of Justine and Juliette. Moreover, I will argue that the story
conceives of an autonomous female desire and of a reciprocal and mutually pleasurable sexual relationship between men and women.
Finally, I will draw three general conclusions. Firstly, I will conclude that The
Sadeian Woman and The Bloody Chamber cannot be categorised in either the
pro-pornography or the anti-pro-pornography side of the feminist debate on pro-pornography, but that Carter’s work has features of both and reaches its own conclusion. Secondly, I will conclude that it is the addressing and rewriting of pornographic structures that lies at the heart of The
Bloody Chamber and that the fairy tale is a vessel through which she addresses these issues.
Thirdly, I will conclude that the strength of Carter’s feminism is its ambiguity. In this time of a new feminist wave with new polarised debates, Carter’s work still points us towards the murky sides, the unsolvable contradictions and the human complexity of sexuality.
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1. Feminist critique of the fairy tale and
pornography
1.1 The feminist debate on pornography
From the second feminist wave onwards, feminists have criticised well-known fairy tales for being harmful towards women. A substantial part of criticism is that these traditional fairy tales are expressions of and create mythical roles of femininity: they present social
expectations for women that consist of “feminine passivity and martyrdom” (Harries 13). The dominant tradition of the fairy tale divides women into two kinds: the passive, beautiful young girls in need of rescue and the active, powerful and often grotesque older women (Harries 137). Andrea Dworkin described the dichotomy of the archetypal female characters in fairy tales as follows: “There are two definitions of woman. There is the good woman. She is a victim. There is the bad woman. She must be destroyed. The good woman must be possessed. The bad woman must be killed, or punished. Both must be nullified” (Dworkin,
Woman Hating 48). In other words, the fairy tale presents a straitjacket dichotomy of female
roles.3
In the late 1970s, when The Sadeian Woman and The Bloody Chamber4 were
published, the role of pornography in the oppression and emancipation of women was a key topic within feminist debates. Part of the debate approached pornography as violence against women, a movement which, amongst other things, came to be associated with the “Reclaim the night” walks (Sheets 98). Well-known radical anti-pornography feminists dedicated to the anti-pornography movement are Andrea Dworkin and Catharine A. MacKinnon. Dworkin argued that pornography incorporates the same principles and characters that are seen in fairy tales. In pornography, “[t]he female as a figure of innocence and evil enters the adult world” (Dworkin, Woman Hating 55). Pornography has the same prescriptive and oppressing roles of
3 Besides the canonised fairy tales of Charles Perrault and the Brothers Grimm there is, of course, a multitude of
other fairy tale traditions told and written by people from outside of the cultural elite or by women. Elizabeth Wanning Harries, for instance, has drawn attention to the late-seventeenth-century French conteuses, such as d’Aulnoy, Lhéritier, La Force and Bernard, who in their time “dominated the field of fairy tales” with fairy tales that were “often long, intricate, digressive, playful, self-referential, and self-conscious” - in other words, very different from the more compact and self-contained style usually associated with the fairy tale (Harries 15-16, 17).
4 In in-text citations, The Sadeian Woman will be referred to as SW and The Bloody Chamber will be referred to
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female and male behaviour, Dworkin writes: “Pornography, like fairy tale, tells us who we are. It is the structure of male and female mind, the content of our shared erotic identity, the map of each inch and mile of our oppression and despair” (Dworkin, Woman Hating 53-54). Thus, one of the key structures of pornography is its dichotomy of mythical roles of
femininity. Moreover, Dworkin argues that the major theme of pornography is not sexual pleasure, but male power and that “[p]ornography reveals that male pleasure is inextricably tied to victimizing, hurting, exploiting” (Dworkin, Pornography 24, 69). In other words, a second pornographic structure is its inherent violence.
Apart from pornography being an expression of violent male power, the negative critique of anti-pornography feminists is related to wider issues of representation itself. Susanne Kappeler has argued that pornography exists within a larger system of representation that is problematic. According to her, the view that pornography, but also art and literature, are disconnected from political reality is a false one (Kappeler 133). The dichotomy of female characters in pornographic fiction and fairy tales originates from the all-permeating patriarchal structures of society, and in cultural artefacts we see “the rearticulation of an unchanging archetype … which recites the same tale over and over again, convincing itself through these rearticulations of the impossibility of change and of alternatives and confirming the eternal recurring” (Kappeler 146). Pornography therefore is not only a reflection of
oppressive patriarchal values, but repeats these values and in this way actively oppresses women.
The pro-pornography side of the feminist debate included feminists like Ellen Willis, Pat Califia and Gayle Rubin. Willis, who coined the term “pro sex feminism”, described the anti-pornography movement as “the repressive, neo-Victorian moralism that has been
strangling feminism for two decades” and argues that pornography actually is a valid medium for negotiating female sexual freedom (Willis 24).
1.2 The Marquis de Sade
In the debate between pro- and anti-pornography feminists, the writings of the Marquis de Sade take a central place. The Marquis de Sade, full name Donatien Alphonse François de Sade, was born in France in 1740 and is most well-known for his four pornographic novels:
The 120 Days of Sodom; Philosophy in the Bedroom; Justine, or The Misfortunes of Virtue;
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are known as the libertine novels (Phillips, Libertine Novels 1). In a structure which is characteristic for Sade, the novels switch between two narrative modes, of dissertation or theory on the nature of power and sexuality followed by the description of this theory put into practice (Phillips, Libertine Novels 34). The master-slave power structures of sexuality that are depicted in these novels, a third pornographic structure, lent Sade’s name to the term “sadism”.
Literary critics and philosophers have shown an unwavering interest in Sade and his writings and include, amongst others, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Roland Barthes, Jacques Lacan, Gilles Deleuze and Phillippe Sollers (Phillips, Libertine Novels 24, 26). The depiction of Sade’s female characters Justine and Juliette, as well as the representation of a, aggressive and violent sexuality, has led to widely differing feminist evaluations of Sade. What has been central in many of these feminist readings of Sade is the issue of the “pornographic effect”, that is: “does the representation in writing of sexual crimes lead to their enactment in the real?” (Phillips, Libertine Novels 2). Many of the positive evaluations of Sade, such as by the Structuralists, read Sade within a solely literary dimension, not directly connected to a political and social reality. This approach avoids the moral dilemmas that would otherwise arise from reading Sade.5
The anti-pornography feminist Dworkin takes the opposite approach and situates Sade centrally within the context of political and social reality, drawing a line from Sade to
pornography in general and from pornography to political reality: Sade, as “the world’s foremost pornographer … both embodies and defines male sexual values” (Dworkin,
Pornography 70). She calls his work an “advocacy of rape and battery” which celebrates
“brutality as the essence of eroticism; fucking, torture, and killing were fused; violence and sex, synonymous” (Dworkin, Pornography 99, 70). Sade’s cultural influence is enormous, Dworkin says, and she likens the power structures in his works to contemporary “snuff” films and magazines which depict “the mutilation of women for the sake of sexual pleasure”
(Dworkin, Pornography 71). Dworkin’s answer to the question of whether the representation of sexual crimes in Sade’s literary work leads to their enactment in real life is an unequivocal yes.6
5 Roland Barthes has summarised this approach as follows: “Language has this property of denying, ignoring,
dissociating reality: when written, shit does not have an odor.” Barthes, Roland. Sade, Fourier, Loyola. 1971. Translated by Richard Miller, University of California Press, 1989, p. 137.
6 For another key work in the radical anti-pornography movement, see: Linden, Robin Ruth, et al., editors.
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Other critics have, in contrast, read Sade and especially his libertine character Juliette as an emblem of female liberation and empowerment. The surrealist poet Guillaume
Apollinaire saw Juliette as a role model for the woman of the future and called her a “creature that we cannot yet conceive, but which is freeing itself from humanity, which will take wing and will renew the universe” (Phillips, Libertine Novels 120). Feminist critics such as Annie Le Brun and Jane Gallop have also emphasised the aspect of female liberation in Sade (Phillips, Libertine Novels 120).7 Gallop writes that “Sade insisted that one must distinguish between the explicitly eroticized acting-out of domination and real political domination” and argues that desire and political discourse should not be equated (Gallop 18-19).
1.3 Carter’s use of Sade in The Sadeian Woman
In The Sadeian Woman, Angela Carter analyses Sade’s four libertine novels from a feminist perspective. She connects the dichotomy of mythical roles of femininity from pornography and fairy tales to Sade’s two most well-known female characters, the sisters Justine and Juliette. Carter also questions the validity of the female roles of both characters in terms of their feminist agency. She emphasises the black and white nature of Sade’s writings, which defines human nature and consequently also female roles in stark opposites. Sade’s writings depict a Manichean world, in which virtue and vice are natural traits that one is born with and that are unchangeable (Phillips, Introduction 97-98). Carter writes that this dichotomy
“relates his fiction directly to the black and white ethical world of fairy tale and fable” and in this way draws a parallel between Sade’s texts and the fairy tale (SW 93). Carter sees the dichotomised definition of women in Sade’s writings as indicative of the same dichotomy in other pornographic texts, the fairy tale and other cultural expressions.
The virtuous Justine is a passive, Christ-like victim figure, “a good woman according to the rules for women laid down by men and her reward is rape, humiliation and incessant beatings” (SW 43). Carter draws a parallel to the passive heroines in fairy tales: Justine is “the living image of a fairy-tale princess in disguise but a Cinderella for whom the ashes with which she is covered have become part of the skin … she is the heroine of a black, inverted fairy-tale” (SW 44). This view of good women in the fairy tale dichotomy turns them into passive, helpless victims: “To be the object of desire is to be defined in the passive case. To
7 See especially chapter 4, “The Female Body.” Thinking Through the Body, by Jane Gallop, Columbia
University Press, 1988, pp. 55–90. Gallop came to revise her reading of Sade as a champion for female freedom in a later article.
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exist in the passive case is to die in the passive case - that is, to be killed. This is the moral of the fairy tale about the perfect woman” (SW 76-77). Carter sees Justine as “the prototype of two centuries of women” (SW 64-5) and traces her legacy to Hollywood actresses such as Marilyn Monroe, showing how Sade’s influence is still with us in modern culture.
In a controversial part of her argument, Carter rejects the feminist value of Justine’s behaviour by insisting on Justine’s complicity in her own oppression. Because of the passive and docile nature of her sense of virtue, Justine’s suffering is at least partially self-inflicted, Carter argues. She “knows how to make a touching picture out of her misfortunes” and “presents herself emblematically in the passive mood, as an object of pity and as a suppliant” (SW 54-5). Despite having several opportunities to act out and improve her plight, Justine chooses not to, because she wants to preserve her virtue. This virtue is “not the continuous exercise of a moral faculty,” Carter argues, but “a sentimental response to a world in which she always hopes her good behaviour will procure her some reward” (SW 62). Justine is a good woman according to the rules which men have prescribed her, and hoping for a reward is naive and futile, leaving her fixed in her role as a victim. Justine is the embodiment of many women who identify “with images of themselves as victims of patriarchal oppression” (Keenan 134). Women who believe and use the myth of the passive virgin will not be rewarded and win new freedoms, but are complicit in their own oppression. Sade puts his finger on this complicity in his female victims and shows women how they are going along with mythic female roles: “In the looking-glass of Sade’s misanthropy, women may see themselves as they have been and it is an uncomfortable sight” (SW 41).
Sade poses an alternative to Justine in the shape of her sister Juliette, who is “Justine-through-the-looking-glass, an inversion of an inversion” (SW 91). Whereas Justine pursues virtue and destroys herself in the process, Juliette reacts to the abuses directed at her “by turning herself into the perfect whore” (Keenan 137). She is not a victim, but has become a libertine, leaving a trail of destruction wherever she goes, and she is “just as calculating, just as immoral, and just as cruel” as the male libertines (Phillips, Introduction 101). Juliette “acts according to the precepts and also the practice of a man’s world and so she does not suffer. Instead, she causes suffering” (SW 90). Juliette’s reward is that, in contrast with her abused sister, she prospers: she has gathered wealth and independence. In the figure of Juliette, Sade offers women the chance of sexual freedom: “the right of women to fuck” as “aggressively, tyrannously, and cruelly” as men (SW 31). In Philosophy in the Bedroom, the Juliette figure is repeated in the character Eugénie. Having laid bare the bonds of female virtue, a virtue which for Justine consists of not deriving any pleasure from sexual intercourse, Sade encourages
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women to “break those irons” like Eugénie and Juliette and to satisfy their sexual desires (Sade, Philosophy in the Bedroom 110).
However, Carter sees neither role, Justine as the virtuous victim or Juliette as the evil aggressor, as ultimately satisfactory. She therefore proposes a negotiation between the two states, which may be brought about by a so-called moral pornographer:
A moral pornographer might use pornography as a critique of current relations between the sexes. His business would be the total demystification of the flesh and the subsequent revelation, through the infinite modulations of the sexual act, of the real relations of man and his kind. Such a pornographer would not be the enemy of women, perhaps because he might begin to penetrate to the heart of the contempt for women that distorts our culture even as he entered the realms of true obscenity as he describes it. (SW 22)
Sade, Carter claims, lays bare the power structures that are at work in the sexual relations between men and women and therefore shows us the way towards such a moral pornography. In a mirroring of the composition of the libertine novels, “the uniquely Sadean rhythm of orgy following dissertation …, of practice following theory” (Phillips, Libertine Novels 34), after The Sadeian Woman Carter undertook the project of deconstructing Sadean
pornographic structures and offering alternatives to them in The Bloody Chamber.
1.4 Critical reception by anti-pornography feminists
Both The Sadeian Woman and The Bloody Chamber were met with strong criticism from anti-pornography feminists. Part of the negative criticism of The Sadeian Woman amounts to the accusation that Carter reads Sade as a literary artefact and ignores the political reality attached to his writings. Andrea Dworkin calls The Sadeian Woman a “pseudofeminist literary essay” and argues that Carter ignores the violence that Sade caused his victims in real life in order to glorify him as a literary author (Dworkin, Pornography 84). Susanne Kappeler makes a similar argument by accusing Carter of “lolling in the literary sanctuary” and in this way protecting Sade from political criticism (Kappeler 135). The idea of a moral
pornography is “utter nonse”, Duncker argues, since pornography may mirror the realities of male power and desire but does not leave room for “the expression of feminist eroticism” (Duncker 8). Robert Clark also argues that a moral pornography is impossible, “the
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ideological power of the form being infinitely greater than the power of the individual to overcome it” (Clark 153).
Carter’s insistence on women’s complicity in oppression by going along with mythic archetypes, somewhat redolent of victim-blaming, was met with resistance by feminist critics (Keenan 138). Carter’s apparent advocacy of Sade’s victimiser Juliette as an alternative to the victimised Justine was criticised as well. Despite Juliette’s seemingly transgressive sexuality, the male libertines ultimately still are the ones that are in control, and “[t]he freedom Sade is credited with demanding is freedom as men conceive it” (Dworkin, Pornography 93, 89). In this form of sexuality based on male desire, Dworkin writes: “if you can’t do anything about it (and I will see to it that you cannot), lie back and enjoy it” (Dworkin, Pornography 94). This argument is repeated in other critics’ evaluations of Carter’s The Sadeian Woman, which argue that the only option that Sade offers women and which Carter takes over is a binary one: “to suffer or to cause suffering, to belong to one half of ‘mankind’ or the other” (Kappeler 135), or, as Lewallen put it, to “fuck or be fucked” (Lewallen 149). Carter’s advocacy for a more sexually aggressive role for women is not liberating because it does not offer the choice of not choosing that option (Lewallen 157). When Sade encourages women to satisfy their sexual desires and to “break those irons”, what he offers them is merely the possibility to change their attitude and to enjoy their irons, which is not a proper free choice (Kappeler 135).
Critics have made similar arguments about Carter’s depiction of female desire in The
Bloody Chamber. In an article that draws heavily on Dworkin’s texts on pornography,
Duncker argues that Carter conceives of female desire not as autonomous but as a response to male arousal and that “all we are watching, beautifully packaged and unveiled, is the ritual disrobing of the willing victim of pornography” (Duncker 7). Similarly, Clark reads “The Company of Wolves” as written as a form of male voyeurism which, admittedly, suggests that the girl enjoys her own sexual power, but that this meaning “lies perilously close to the idea that all women want it really and only need forcing to overcome their scruples” (Clark 149). “Old chauvinism, new clothing”, Clark concludes: the new fairy tale falls back into reinscribing patriarchal attitudes (Clark 149).
In short, negative critical evaluations of Carter argue that, both in her envisioning of a moral pornography in The Sadeian Woman and in the female heroines in The Bloody
Chamber, Carter does not succeed in transcending Sade’s dichotomy of female roles. As the
practical development of the theory laid out in The Sadeian Woman, The Bloody Chamber reproduces rather than deconstructs harmful pornographic structures.
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1.5 New Justines versus new Juliettes
The feminist debate on pornography in the late 1970s and early 1980s was strongly polarised. Anti-pornography feminists accused feminists supporting pornography of being brainwashed into being consenting victims, nicely illustrated by Robin Morgan calling pro-pornography feminists “Sade’s new Juliettes” (Sheets 98). Feminists in support of pornography, on the other hand, characterised the anti-pornography feminists as “good girls” who blame men for their victimised position and in this way settle into the victim role, turning themselves into “new Justines” (Sheets 98). Apart from illustrating how sadomasochism is a crucial dividing point in the debate, the feminists name-calling each other “Juliettes” and “Justines” shows how both sides of the debate fall back into the essentialising descriptions of women that they are trying so hard to avoid.
The debate surrounding pornography had its influence on the criticism of Angela Carter’s work. The negative criticism of The Sadeian Woman and The Bloody Chamber seems to place Carter on the side of the “bad girl feminists” or “new Juliettes”. Carter’s provocative use of Sade for a feminist argumentation in The Sadeian Woman certainly does seem to align Carter with that side. Her acceptance of sadomasochism as a valid element of a feminist conception of sexuality is controversial as well. A number of later critics, however, such as Robin Ann Sheets and Merja Makinen, have argued that Carter’s reading of Sade, although it may have its limitations, is more nuanced than negative critics have given her credit for and that Carter cannot easily be placed in the pro-pornography side of the debate. In the next chapter, I will argue that Carter escapes a dichotomised categorisation with regard to the feminist debate on pornography. Furthermore, I will argue that Carter’s feminist thinking is strongly aimed at demystifying mythical roles of femininity and that Sade’s materialist view of sexuality is therefore useful for her project.
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2. Angela Carter and Sade: materialism and
demythologising
2.1 Neither Justine nor Juliette
When Duncker, Clark, Kappeler and Lewallen assume that Carter sees Juliette, a figure of an aggressive sexuality, as a proper feminist model, they are misreading her: Carter rejects Juliette’s role as aggressive victimiser. “[Juliette’s] triumph is just as ambivalent as is Justine’s disaster”, Carter writes: “[w]ith apologies to Apollinaire, I do not think that I want Juliette to renew my world” (SW 90, 127). In Sade’s conception of freedom, it is still the male libertines who in the end are in control: “Juliette lives in a country where the hangman rules” (SW 114). Carter acknowledges that, however powerful Juliette as a libertine may be, this is only possible because she acts like a man: she “has identified all her interests with those of the hangman” (SW 114). And even though Carter does not see this as a proper alternative for female empowerment, it is why she may show a slight preference for Juliette over Justine, because Justine at least “has her political analysis correct” (Keenan 141). Although Carter questions the feminist agency of Justine as the virtuous victim, she does not actually blame her: “let us not make too much of this apparent complicity. There is no defence at all against absolute tyranny” (SW 163).
Justine and Juliette are two sides of the same coin, Carter argues, and it is the entire power balance itself that she criticises:
The life of Juliette exists in a dialectical relationship to that of her sister. The vision of the inevitable prosperity of vice, as shown in her triumphant career, and the vision of the
inevitable misfortunes of virtue that Justine’s life offers do not cancel one another out; rather, they mutually reflect and complement one another, like a pair of mirrors. (SW 89)
Neither of the two roles, Justine nor Juliette, are appropriate models for female empowerment because they preclude an equal relationship between people. The moral of Sade’s Justine and Juliette is, writes Carter: “the comfort of one class depends on the misery of another class” (SW 89). Moreover, Carter has stated how she disapproved of Sade’s dichotomised world
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view because his conceptions of good and evil “can never change from one to the other, there’s no possible mediation in his world. It’s a very frightening and distressing one” (Gamble 113). Being content neither with the behaviour of Justine as a resigned victim nor with that of Juliette as a violent aggressor, Carter argues for a “synthesis of their modes of being, neither submissive nor aggressive, capable of both thought and feeling” as a proper model for a feminist change of female roles (SW 91). This non-essentialist, versatile mode of being would enable fair relations between people, “a reciprocal pact of tenderness” (SW 9).
2.2 The material Sade
In Sade, Carter finds an ally in the sense that just like her, Sade situates truth in the physical, material body: “he treats the facts of female sexuality not as a moral dilemma but as a
political reality” (SW 31). Sade’s philosophy is materialist rather than idealist: for him, matter and material interactions are primary in nature, and the human condition is not located in soul or spirit but in the sexual body (Phillips, Introduction 34). The title of Sade’s novel
Philosophy in the Boudoir, sometimes translated as Philosophy in the Bedroom, is telling.
The boudoir, a woman’s private sitting-room, often near her bedroom and defined as a female space, often signified a place of feminine desire in libertine novels (Deininger 564). The juxtaposition in the title of the boudoir and philosophy “seems to sum up the whole Sadean project, which is to bring the body, in particular the female body, back into philosophy” (Phillips, Libertine Novels 63).
Sade’s use for Carter is his analysis and rejection of the two major mythical roles of women, that of the virgin and that of the mother. The most horribly violated victims of the libertines in Sade’s novels are the virgin daughters of noblemen. Sade shows how “female virginity is the precious jewel of the ruling classes, token and guarantor of their property rights” and exposes the “central role of sexuality in the maintenance of the social status quo” (Keenan 138). Through his relentless degradation of Justine, Sade shows how virginity is worthless and, in this way, rejects the myth of the virgin. Other beloved victims of Sade are mothers. By ranking pleasure above reproduction in female sexuality, Sade refuses “to see female sexuality in relation to its reproductive function” (SW 1). This, in combination with the degradation of mother figures, undermines the myth of women as primarily mothers. For this reason, Carter views Sade as a liberatory figure who claims rights of free sexuality for
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women, unlike pornographers and other writers in his time or even in our time (SW 36). Sade demystifies the Christian myths of the mother and the virgin, “the most sanctified aspects of women” (SW 41), and founds a new, materialist religion - “the cult of the body” (Phillips,
Libertine Novels 18).
2.3 The demythologising business
What I think lies at the heart of Carter’s feminist thinking, and what should be central in every feminist reading of her work, is the aim to deconstruct mythical roles of femininity. On the topic of her work, Carter has written: “I believe that all myths are products of the human mind and reflect only aspects of material human practice. I’m in the demythologising business” (Carter, “Notes from the Front Line” 71). Carter is averse of essentialising conceptions of women, which she calls “false universals”, be they negative or positive (SW 5). There is a political danger in believing in these roles:
If women allow themselves to be consoled for their culturally determined lack of access to the modes of intellectual debate by the invocation of hypothetical great goddesses, they are simply flattering themselves into submission (a technique often used on them by men). All the mythic versions of women, from the myth of the redeeming purity of the virgin to that of the healing, reconciling mother, are consolatory nonsenses; and consolatory nonsense seems to me a fair definition of myth, anyway. (SW 5-6)
These myths make women comply with their appointed roles, allowing for the repetition of oppression. This is the origin of Carter’s rejection of Justine’s behaviour. Carter actually shares this aversion of mythical roles with Andrea Dworkin, who targets the Christian myth of divine virgin birth and related myths of passive virgins in fairy tales and pornography. These are myths that have become exemplary, consequently repeatable, and finally a justification for human behaviour. Dworkin argues that myth “still operates as the
substructure of the collective” in modern society (Dworkin, Woman Hating 163-4). Carter also rejects new, modern notions of mythic roles for women: “Mother goddesses are just as silly a notion as father gods. If a revival of the myths of these cults gives women emotional satisfaction, it does so at the price of obscuring the real conditions of life” (SW 6). These myths “dull the pain of particular circumstances” (SW 5) – in other words, as abstractions
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they deny the importance of individual personal experiences, and in this way they oppose change in the material reality of the oppression of women.
2.4 The limits of Sade’s demystification
However, Carter sees the limits of Sade’s demystification of the maternal function (Keenan 145). Carter identifies a point where a synthesis of the Justine and Juliette roles could have been achieved in a scene in Philosophy in the Bedroom, in which fifteen-year old Eugénie, libertine in training, rapes her own mother, Madame de Mistival, as punishment for trying to preserve Eugénie’s virginity. Madame de Mistival’s dubious exclamations, which can be read as either expressions of pain or of pleasure, make it seem as if she is deriving pleasure from her rape. If she were to reach orgasm, Carter writes, then transcendence over Justine’s and Juliette’s modes of behaviour would have been attained: “[b]eing would cease to be a state-in-itself; it would then be possible to move between modes of being in a moral and not a sexual sense” (SW 150). However, Madame de Mistival loses consciousness before she is able to orgasm; it is impossible for Sade “to violate the last taboo of all” and to demystify the maternal function completely (SW 150). Sade’s dualist world view of unchangeable vice and virtue remains intact. He denies “the possibility of corruption”, which the other way around also “denies the possibility of regeneration” (SW 150). Sade is unable to manage the
possibility of change.
Still, we should make two more critical remarks on the idea of Sade as a champion of free sexuality for women which Carter does not include in her argumentation in The Sadeian
Woman. First of all, Sade does want women to have rights of sexual freedom, unconnected to
reproduction, but eventually this is “because he wants them to be sexually available”
(Phillips, Introduction 101). Moreover, female libido is still defined against male libido. The pamphlet in Philosophy in the Bedroom states that “Never may an act of possession be exercised upon a free being” (318), and the female libertine Madame de Saint-Ange
encourages Eugénie to “fuck” since “your body is your own, yours alone” (221). At the same time, the pamphlet argues that men should have the power to possess women’s bodies
(Phillips, Libertine Novels 75). Sade’s notion of individual freedom, therefore, “is more beneficial to men than to women”, like any form of libertinism will benefit those with existing power (Phillips, Libertine Novels 76).
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A second remark is that, apart from Sade’s failure to demystify the maternal function completely, we should be sceptic of Sade’s demystification of the maternal function in itself. Sally Keenan asks if “we [can] accept the claim that Sade demystifies the maternal function when his hatred of it is based on the very mystification [Carter] is talking about?” (Keenan 146). Ward Jouve asks if Carter, “in her rejection of the mother, produce[s] another form of suppression?” (Jouve 163). In other words, Sade’s claim on free female sexuality depends on the degradation of the mother figure: “If Sade’s religion is of the body, it is of the male body, and the sacrificial victim is female and maternal” (Phillips, Libertine Novels 76). Although Carter is right that Sade offers an insightful analysis of the structural material oppression of women, we should have some serious reservations about Carter’s claim that Sade is a champion of female freedom.
2.5 Carter as a materialist feminist
From a pro-pornography point of view, reading Sade as a liberatory figure means reading the violence depicted in his texts not as literal physical violence but “the physical as it violates the rational categories that would contain and dominate it” (Gallop 18). This is the approach that Carter seems to be taking in The Sadeian Woman when she emphasises the transgressive and therefore liberating nature of Sade's depiction of sexuality. She does, however,
acknowledge Sade’s misogyny and his “hatred of the mothering function” (SW 41). Carter also acknowledges the dangers of (most) contemporary pornography, which, according to her, “assists the process of false universalising” and serves “to reinforce the prevailing system of values and ideas in a given society” (SW 13, 20). The criticism that Carter reads Sade only within the literary realm and leaves him exempt from political critique is therefore
undeserved.
Robert Clark has argued that Carter’s “primary allegiance is to a postmodern
aesthetics” which “precludes an affirmative feminism founded in referential commitment to women’s historical and organic being” (Clark 158). I want to disagree with Clark and argue that the material dimensions of women’s lives are actually one of Carter’s main concerns as a feminist. Focusing too much on the notion of the moral pornographer in The Sadeian Woman is not doing justice to Carter’s wider argument about demythologising, which places her firmly in a tradition of “a feminist politics that would rectify the material oppression that women experience daily” (Altevers 20). Carter's aim to dismantle the false essentialising of
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sexuality shows how she places the situation of women in a historical context (Altevers 21). “Flesh comes to us out of history,” Carter writes (SW 12), and the “relationships between the sexes are determined by history and by the historical fact of the economic dependence of women upon men” (SW 7). Sade's claim of free sexuality for women is so relevant for Carter because she attaches great importance to the reproductive freedom of women (Altevers 21). Reproductive freedom is a topic that is, unfortunately, still very relevant within feminism and perhaps now more than ever in recent years, with several states in the US passing bills to ban abortion. Carter’s feminism, as Altevers phrases it, “all comes down in the end to the
question of women’s autonomy” (Altevers 22).
2.6 The demystified fairy tale
The folkloristic and fantastical basis of Carter's texts, together with their highly baroque style, makes her fictions vulnerable to the criticism that they are not in a suitable mode for offering an analysis of the material circumstances of women. In an interview with Angela Carter, John Haffenden suggested that “the highly stylized and decorative apparatus of your novels might appear to be disengaged from the social and historical realities you want to illuminate” (Haffenden 85). However, such a folkloristic basis does not automatically preclude a solid line to political reality; in the interview, Carter replied that “there’s a materiality to
imaginative life and imaginative experience which should be taken quite seriously”
(Haffenden 85). However fantastical and unrealist Carter's fiction may be, it is still, through its demythologising, concerned with the economic, sexual and political position of women. Her fiction can be said to “explore the real material world of fantastic appearances, of representation” (Jordan 130), and to question the “metaphysical systems [that] belie the actuality of the flesh” (Tucker 13).
Jack Zipes has argued that well-known, canonised fairy tales have been used “to reinforce the dominant patriarchal ideology throughout the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries” and that they have been retold so often “that they became almost ‘mythicized’ as natural stories, as second nature” (Zipes 1). I think that fairy tales, since they are seen as widely distributed instances of a limited and dualist conception of female roles, both by anti- and pro-pornography feminists, actually are a good place to start an attempt at a
demythologising of these female roles. It is this second nature, the myths of femininity, that Carter aims to demystify in The Bloody Chamber. In an interview from 1985 Carter states
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that what interests her “is the way in which these fairy tales and folklore are methods of making sense of events and certain occurrences in a particular imaginative way” (Watts 170). Her aim in The Bloody Chamber is, thus, “to bring [the] fairy tale back down to earth in order to demonstrate how it could be used to explore the real conditions of everyday life” (Gamble 112). Thus, the fairy tale is a suitable genre for engaging with political reality.
The Bloody Chamber puts the analysis and subversion of pornographic structures into
practice in the literary field. The dichotomy of mythical roles of femininity, the roles of Justine and Juliette, is addressed and rejected. Whereas Sade could never bring himself to fuse the modes of behaviour of Justine and Juliette into one woman, Carter here undertakes this task, beginning with the insistence that women acknowledge their complicity in these myths and take responsibility for their own behaviour. Only after that can there be a reciprocal relationship between men and women. In my opinion, these two notions of
responsibility and reciprocity are central in the tales in The Bloody Chamber. I want to argue that the titular story, “The Bloody Chamber”, specifically develops the notion of
responsibility, while the penultimate story in the collection, “The Company of Wolves”, builds on this notion of responsibility and from there develops the notion of reciprocity. A second pornographic structure which Carter addresses in both “The Bloody Chamber” and “The Company of Wolves” is that of the inherent violence of pornography, which results in the conception of male pleasure as based in the sexual objectification of women. A third and final pornographic structure that is analysed and dismantled in both tales is the relationship between sexual partners as master and slave, predator and prey, victimiser and victim. Through an analysis and a renegotiation of these three structures, Carter addresses the questions that lie at the heart of the pornography debate: "Is it, or is it not, possible for
women to conceive of, and enjoy, an active pleasurable engagement in sex with men? Is it, or is it not, possible to see women as empowered agents of heterosexual desire?” (Keenan 141).
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3. Responsibility and “The Bloody Chamber”
3.1 Perrault’s “Bluebeard” and Carter’s “The Bloody Chamber”
In The Sadeian Woman, Carter argues that it is necessary for women to stop identifying themselves with mythical roles of femininity in order to attain freedom from patriarchal structures. In other words, women need to take responsibility for their own behaviour. In this chapter, I will argue that “The Bloody Chamber”, the first story in the collection of the same name, addresses the mythic role of the passive and virtuous virgin and shows how
conforming to this role does not lead to larger freedom but to a masochistic self-destruction. Moreover, I will argue that the story exposes the workings of the pornographic objectification of women and that it connects this objectification to larger patterns of male power based in violence. Carter explores these ideas through a rewriting of the fairy tale “Bluebeard”.
The story of “Bluebeard” exists in many different versions. The most well-known and seen as the most authoritative one is Charles Perrault’s “La Barbe Bleue”, which was
published in his collection Tales of Passed Times by Mother Goose in 1697 (Tatar 15). Perrault ends each of his fairy tales with a lesson, which is intended to illustrate the morals that were upheld at the French court at the time (Orenstein 33). Perrault includes two morals at the end of “Bluebeard”, in which he warns about the dangers of curiosity:
O curiosity, thou mortal bane!
Spite of thy charms, thou c[a]usest often pain And sore regret, of which we daily find
A thousand instances attend mankind. (Perrault 36)
“Bluebeard” has been read as preaching wifely obedience in a particularly gruesome and bloody way. Maria Tatar has argued that the tale is about marital discord: “It stands virtually alone among our canonical fairy tales in a negation of a ‘happily ever after’ ending. It gives us an up-close-and-personal view of marriage, confirming everything we didn’t want to know and were afraid to ask about it” (Tatar 53). Some critics read the tale as the epitome of
domestic abuse: “Nowhere, perhaps, has the violence inherent in domesticity been more forcefully rendered than in this depiction of slain wives literally hanging from the walls of the
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conjugal house” (Hannon 943). As a striking story of extreme physical violence against women, “Bluebeard” has been the topic of much feminist criticism.
“The Bloody Chamber” joins this feminist debate around “Bluebeard” and combines a reworking of Perrault’s tale with an analysis of mythical roles of femininity informed by Sade’s writings. “The Bloody Chamber” is told from the perspective of an unnamed,
seventeen-year old piano student, a “poor widow’s child” (BC 5) who lives with her mother. She marries a much older Marquis, “[t]he richest man in France” (BC 8), who has already been widowed three times. His wives are said to have died of accidents. The couple live together at the Marquis’s ancestral home, a castle. Shortly after the marriage, the Marquis leaves on a business trip and tells his wife not to enter one of the rooms, which she does the same night. There she finds torture devices and the dead bodies of his three previous wives. The wife confides in the blind piano tuner who works at the castle but he cannot help her. The husband unexpectedly returns and finds out about his wife’s disobedience. He plans to decapitate his wife, but she is saved at the last instant by the unexpected arrival of her mother, who shoots the husband in the head. The protagonist starts a music school with her husband’s money and lives together with her mother and her new husband, the piano tuner.
3.2 The Bluebeard tales and Sade
There are striking similarities between “Bluebeard” and some of Sade’s libertine characters, such as the Comte de Gernande in Justine, who has killed three of his wives, whose bodies he keeps in a special chamber, and tortures his most recent wife (Phillips, Libertine Novels 95). “The Bloody Chamber” picks up on this association of “Bluebeard” with Sade and positions itself in relation to Sade through a number of references, such as the husband’s title of “Marquis”, his remote castle which is reminiscent of the isolated monastery in the forest in Sade’s Justine, and his library full of sadistic pornography.
The Marquis’s attraction to the protagonist recalls the attraction of Sade’s male characters to Justine. The power structures in their marriage are those of predator and prey: the Marquis, with his “leonine” head and his “dark mane” (BC 2, 3), is a sexual beast and the protagonist is his virginal prey. The story references “Little Red Riding Hood” and likens the husband to the wolf: when the Marquis decides to consummate their marriage and the
protagonist protests that “it is broad daylight,” the Marquis replies, “All the better to see you” (BC 13). Gradually, the protagonist becomes aware of the nature of the Marquis’s attraction
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to her: “Then I realized, with a shock of surprise, how it must have been my innocence that captivated him” (BC 16). Like the way in which Sade’s libertines lust after Justine, so the Marquis lusts after the protagonist because of her innocence, and the fantasy of tainting or corrupting this innocence: “Your thin white face, chérie; he said, as if he saw it for the first time. Your thin white face, with its promise of debauchery only a connoisseur could detect” (BC 17). In The Sadeian Woman, Carter argues that the attraction of “girly girls” such as Justine and Marilyn Monroe lies in the fact that their innocence makes them seem inaccessible as sexual objects (SW 77-79). Sadean pleasure is thus based on violating the female body, “on the fantasy of creating circumstances in which the inaccessible is made accessible” (Phillips, Libertine Novels 114). The protagonist goes along with the power balance in their marriage and plays the role of Justine; she “is so seduced by the part she is playing that she does not regret ‘the world of tartines and maman that now receded from me’” (BC 7, Jordan 124). In this way, the story imitates the structure of Sadean pornography of the sexual predator and the virginal prey.
Significantly, Carter imitates but does not repeat the Sadean pornographic structure. We can take Carter’s story at face value but that it “can also produce wincing from this fascination of the girl with being acquired and seduced by a knowing and powerful man who ‘wants her so much’” (Jordan 124). Through this doubleness, Carter keeps a critical distance from Sade. The story analyses and exposes the workings of the power structures that are at work in Sadean pornography and then the story departs from the Sadean pornographic structure by changing the development of plot and characters. As Heta Pyrhönen has argued, “[i]t is this double allegiance – participation in Sadeian pornographic fantasies and critical distance from them – that allows Carter to develop a measure of autonomy, inviting readers to share it” (Pyrhönen 94).
3.3 The male gaze and objectification
In my view, the central focus of “The Bloody Chamber” is analysis of the pornographic structure of male objectification of women and a subsequent exposure of how male power is based in violence against women. Through this analysis, “The Bloody Chamber” works towards the dismantling of a second pornographic structure, that of the mythical role of the virtuous victim. I will explain the tale’s analysis of the objectification of women with the help of Laura Mulvey’s concept of “the male gaze”, which, besides film, has been applied to
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literature and other cultural manifestations. Mulvey bases her concept on the Freudian theory of scopophilia (“pleasure in using another person as an object of sexual stimulation through sight”) and voyeurism (Mulvey 836). Mulvey argues that film makes use of a certain look, the male gaze, which is a combination of these two phenomena and which facilitates the expression of male desire (Mulvey 836-7). The male gaze divides men and women into active and passive roles: the active male figure watches the female figure as a sexualised object, whereas the passive female figure is being watched. This gaze is erotic and is central to all kinds of erotic performances such as strip tease, Mulvey argues (Mulvey 837).
“The Bloody Chamber” explores the objectification of women through emphasising the male gaze. The protagonist, who is the narrator of the story, notices the Marquis’s looks of lust and understands how his looks objectify her. The male gaze is expressed through images of commodities and food: in their relationship, the Marquis is the heroine’s
“purchaser” and she is his “bargain” (BC 11). The Marquis treats her like a piece of food, a thing to consume: “He stripped me, gourmand that he was, as if he were stripping the leaves off an artichoke” (BC 11).
Another image that “The Bloody Chamber” makes use of is that of mirrors. In Perrault’s “Bluebeard”, mirrors are prevalent: Bluebeard’s house contains “looking-glasses, in which you might see yourself from head to foot” (Perrault 26). “The Bloody Chamber” adopts this occurrence of mirrors and uses them to externalise and to amplify and in this way to further expose the workings of the male gaze. In Sade’s 120 Days of Sodom, there is a main hall covered with large mirrors to “facilitate the narration of stories and the communal orgiastic activities” (Phillips, Libertine Novels 42). Here it is not so much the body itself that generates pleasure for the libertines, “but its representation in an unlimited number of
reflected images” (Phillips, Libertine Novels 155). According to Mulvey, in films with a male protagonist, the male spectator will identify his look with the look of the protagonist, “so that the power of the male protagonist as he controls events coincides with the active power of the erotic look, both giving a satisfying sense of omnipotence” (Mulvey 838). In “The Bloody Chamber”, the Marquis sets up the consummation of his marriage in such a way that it imitates an etching from his art collection, identifying himself with the “protagonist” of the etching and mirroring it:
[T]he child with her sticklike limbs, naked but for her button boots, her gloves, shielding her face with her hand as though her face were the last repository of her modesty; and the old,
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monocled lecher who examined her, limb by limb. He in his London tailoring; she, bare as a lamb chop. Most pornographic of all confrontations. (BC 11)
The inequality of the couple and the objectifying male gaze that emanates from the male figure makes the picture obscene in the eyes of the protagonist. There is a mirror-play of images, of the etching, the Marquis’s imitation, and the reflection of this imitation in the mirror, which all repeat each other and, in this way, amplify the girl’s objectification and the Marquis’s pleasure. The man plays the active role, and the girl is passive: in the mirror, “[a] dozen husbands impaled a dozen brides” (BC 14).
Further on in the story, the images of mirrors and food, specifically meat, are
combined. In The Sadeian Woman, Carter writes about the distinction between flesh, “usually alive and, typically, human”, and meat, “dead, inert, animal and intended for consumption” (SW 161). In an interview, Carter has stated how
[t]here comes a moment when many of the things of which you have a theoretical knowledge actually start to apply to oneself. You could walk your calf past the butcher’s shop for days, but it’s only when he sees the abattoir that he realizes that there is a relation between himself and the butcher’s shop - a relation which is mediated, shall we say, by the abattoir.
(Haffenden 78)
In “The Bloody Chamber”, the protagonist has a similar moment of realisation, when the mediation of mirrors helps her to understand the nature of the Marquis’s predatory looks:
I saw him watching me in the gilded mirrors with the assessing eye of a connoisseur inspecting horseflesh, or even of a housewife in the market, inspecting cuts on the slab. I’d never seen, or else had never acknowledged, that regard of his before, the sheer carnal avarice of it … . (BC 6)
Carter describes Sadean sexuality in terms of human flesh being changed into meat for consumption: “The strong abuse, exploit and meatify the weak, says Sade. They must and will devour their natural prey” (SW 164). The protagonist may have seen this carnivorous look before, but only now understands its sexualising and objectifying power. She has acquired “[c]arnal knowledge,” which is, Carter writes, “the infernal knowledge of the flesh as meat" (SW 165).
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3.4 The discovery of the bloody chamber and taking responsibility
Mulvey later expanded her notion of the male gaze with “the female gaze”, which entails that women look at themselves through the male gaze (Sassatelli 127). After the protagonist understands the nature of the Marquis’s look, the male gaze is turned back upon herself and she sees herself through the eyes of the Marquis as a sexualised object: “When I saw him look at me with lust, … I caught sight of myself in the mirror. And I saw myself, suddenly, as he saw me” (BC 6).
It is here that Carter departs from Sade’s feminine roles and starts the dismantling of the third pornographic structure, which is to blend the role of Justine as victim with the role of Juliette as victimiser by depicting the onset of a female desire. The mirrors in “The Bloody Chamber” provoke a growing awareness within the protagonist of patriarchal images of women as objects of desire, but they also create an identification with these images. The male gaze enables the male figure to derive pleasure from looking, but at the other end of the male gaze “there is pleasure in being looked at”, too (Mulvey 835). The Marquis’s lustful look stirs a masochistic sexual awakening in her: “for the first time in my innocent and confined life, I sensed in myself a potentiality for corruption that took my breath away” (BC 6). Whereas Sade’s Justine does not feel any pleasure from the sexual attention she receives and is
therefore incorruptible, the “Justine” in “The Bloody Chamber” is “glimpsing the possibilities of becoming Juliette” (Hill 101-02).
This sexual awakening, a “dark newborn curiosity” (BC 19), troubles her too: “I was aghast to feel myself stirring” (BC 11); “I was not afraid of him; but of myself” (BC 17); “I lay in bed alone. And I longed for him. And he disgusted me” (BC 19). The protagonist is aware of the darker side of the Marquis’s predatory looks, their underlying principle of the “transmutation of the human body into meat … that is subordinated to a cruel system of sexual violence and patriarchal domination” (Duggan 63).
Having a premonition of the violent nature of the Marquis’s sexuality, the heroine sets out to find “evidence of my husband’s true nature” (BC 22). “[I]n a cold ecstasy to know the very worst” (BC 26), she enters the forbidden chamber and finds the tortured bodies of the Marquis’s three previous wives. Here, the heroine realises the full extent of the Marquis’s objectification of women, and sheds the last pieces of her passive, acquiescent and
masochistic behaviour: “Each time I struck a match to light those candles round her bed, it seemed a garment of that innocence of mine for which he had lusted fell away from me” (BC
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27). Whereas Sade’s Justine hopes that her virtue and her compliant behaviour will reward her in the end, the protagonist has learned that this hope is useless, but will instead lead to the ultimate annihilation of death. In The Sadeian Woman, Carter criticised women’s
identification with passive victim roles and argued that “In the looking-glass of Sade’s misanthropy, women may see themselves as they have been” (SW 41). In “The Bloody Chamber”, Carter confronts her protagonist and the reader with looking-glasses that show how women partake in the mythical role of passive, virginal femininity.
The protagonist’s complicity in her own near-demise is stressed. Her husband asks the piano tuner: “[D]oes even a youth as besotted as you are think she was truly blind to her own desires when she took my ring?” (BC 39), suggesting that the heroine was well aware that she was being seduced and let it happen. After the Marquis discovers his wife’s disobedience, he brands her on her forehead: “he pressed the key lightly to my forehead, held it there for a moment. … [W]hen I involuntarily glanced at myself in the mirror, I saw the heart-shaped stain had transferred itself to my forehead, to the space between the eyebrows, like the caste mark of a brahmin woman. Or the mark of Cain” (BC 36). The mark is simultaneously a sign of wifely disobedience and of sinful female curiosity. The branding is reminiscent of Sade’s Justine, who is branded on her shoulder by Rodin for trying to escape from her confinement. After Justine’s reunion with her sister Juliette, when her trials are over, her branding is removed surgically, leaving no trace of her “crime” (Sade, Justine 402, 410). Similarly, in Perrault’s “Bluebeard”, the wife “marr[ies] herself to a very worthy gentleman, who made her forget the ill time she had passed with Blue Beard” (Perrault 34).
In “The Bloody Chamber”, however, the heroine’s brandmark cannot be removed from her forehead and she is not allowed to forget about her tribulations: “No paint nor powder, no matter how thick or white, can mask that red mark on my forehead; I am glad he cannot see it – not for fear of his revulsion, since I know he sees me clearly with his heart – but, because it spares my shame” (BC 42). There is no proper happy ending for the
protagonist, since she still has to bear the shame of remembering “her half-conscious complicity in her own near-destruction” (Harries 156). After the manipulation and ordeals that she has been through, this mark of shame and guilt “seems somewhat unfair” (Lewallen 152). However, I think that the brand mark is not so much a sign of punishment as it is a
reminder, a reminder that masochistic complicity in playing the role of Justine does not lead
to larger freedom but to death. The mark reminds the heroine to take responsibility for her own behaviour and not to fall into the trap of identifying with the mythical role of passive, virginal femininity again.
