‘The Bloody Chamber’ by Angela Carter and ‘Bluebeard’s Egg’ by Margaret Atwood
Angela’s Carter’s story of ‘The bloody chamber’ sustains almost the same plot as Perrault’s version of ‘Bluebeard’: young girl gets amused by the wealth of the very rich, older man, get married, goes to his castle, then the husband leaves for business trip, wife enters the bloody chamber with corpses, husband’s back, claims he should kill her, her mother rescues her. Therefore, we shouldn’t forget that this story is rewritten, it is written by different author in different times, so there are some differences between Perrault’s and Carter’s plots. Two most important differences are: Carter adds young blind man, who comes to the castle as a piano tuner; and another – poor wife is rescued by her mother, not brothers – siblings – as in Perrault’s version. One of the great differences between the two narratives is that Carter writes the story in a great detail which is a sigh of ‘a modern fairy tale’, because, as B. Bettelheim’s mentioned, there is no details in ‘classic’ fairy tales, no detailed descriptions.
As I’ve mentioned, Angela Carter had her own attitude to fairy tales, she thought of them as if they were the source of rules and cannons which came to us through centuries. Although ‘to hypothesize the direct linkage of fairy tales to a peasant mentality is a hopeless quest for origins, one specially hopeless given the multiple reworkings of the ‘classic’ fairy tales even in just twentieth century’[1], the idea that fairy tales transfer the message from people who ‘created’ our world remains. This is the most important pretext of Angela’s Carter’s Bluebeard’s interpretation – to try to decode, deconstruct this message (rules and cannons) and transform it into nowadays form.
Atwood transforms fairy tale in a different way. In the book ‘Margaret Atwood: works and impact’, in the chapter ‘Mythological intertexts’, her essay ‘Bluebeard’s Egg’ is called the ‘Fintcher’s Bird’s’ watercolor’[2]. ‘Watercolor’ is a very suitable word for naming metaphorically Atwood’s technique of using the fairy tale in her fiction. As if the Grimm Brothers’ fairy tale would be seen as a watercolor painting in the text. Atwood transforms the Bluebeard fairy tale in an extreme extent. Wizard’s castle becomes a nice suburban house, the wizard himself is a heart surgeon and the wife is heart’s man’s wife, who is taking evening classes and is trying to find out what’s inside her husband’s mind, this trying doesn’t give much success so she calls him stupid. This ‘stupidity’ of her husband is a very characteristic issue in the story, because calling her husband stupid Sally suggests that she isn’t and this will led us to the woman’s personality, subjectivity questions.
First of all, look at the title of each story: ‘The Bloody Chamber’ and ‘Bluebeard’s Egg’. Even from the titles one can notice different emphasis and relations to Perrault and Grimm Brothers. Angela Carter emphasizes the chamber, the forbidden space, where husband keeps corpses of his murdered wives, the symbol the secret, which could not be known by woman. As I’ve mentioned before, the bloody chamber is always associated with sexual exploration, the thing which is forbidden for woman in the patriarchal community structure.
After the first night after the wedding the husband said to his wife: ‘The maid will have changed our sheets already,’ he said. ‘We do not hang the bloody sheets out of the window to prove to the whole of Brittany you are a virgin, not in these civilized times. But I should tell you it would have been the first time in all my married lives I could have shown my interested tenants such a flag.’’[3] The husband’s proud to show that he took away the virginity of his wife, of course, he declares that this is the ‘civilized times’, but still – the sigh of patriarchic system remains. This is the strategy which Angela Carter chooses – to make the patriarchic gesture look a little more ‘modern’, not so archaic, but the core of this gesture – showing the sheets after wedding night – remains the same, even if it isn’t so public as it used to be.
In the morning, after the wedding night, husband gives his wife a bunch of keys. He gives her the key to the forbidden room of desires – and this is not metaphorically. Fairy tale plot scheme allows Carter to use the symbol of the key to encode its meaning: ‘Then, slowly yet teasingly, as if he were giving a child a great mysterious treat, he took out a bunch of keys from his some interior hidey-hole in his jacket – key after key, a key, he said, for very lock in the house.’[4]
Carter’s narrator’s style indirectly suggests very erotic atmosphere in the story. ‘No. I was not afraid of him; but of myself. I seemed reborn in his unreflective eyes, reborn in unfamiliar shapes. I hardly recognized myself from his descriptions of me and yet, and yet – might there not be a grain of beasty truth in them? And, in the red firelight, I blushed again, unnoticed, to think he might have chosen me because, in my innocence, he sensed a rare talent for corruption.’[5] Carter purposely leaves sighs which translate that the girl changes from inside, she unconsciously knows that she will enter the forbidden door (‘I was not afraid of him; but of myself’.). In Carter’s story girl’s self-knowing establishes through romantic, erotic, sexual experience (remember Warner’s essay about A. Carter: ‘Fairy tales explore mysteries of love.’).
It is also very important that the narrator of the story is the girl or the wife who will enter the bloody chamber: ‘I remember now, that night, I lay awake in the wagon-lit in a tender, delicious ecstasy of excitement, <…> away from girlhood, <…>, into the unguessable country of marriage.’[6] She remembers the whole story from the perspective of the woman she is now. She is telling the story of her conversion to what she is, from the virgin girl, who will explore the desires, enter the bloody chamber, to the woman who is rescued by her mother, inherited all her husband’s wealth and is married to the blind piano tuner. This is the way Carter chooses to retell the story of ‘Bluebeard’, to decode the meanings which are hidden in the tale, transform them into modern tale. Going though temptation, then punishment and in the end being rescued, inherit huge wealth – this is the way the Carter’s heroine went through to establish herself.
Let’s not forget the mother figure in the story. Mother gives strength to the daughter in a direct way – rescues her: ‘You never saw such wild thing as my mother, <…>. On her eighteen birthday, my mother had disposed a man-eating tiger <…>.[7]’ Mother is almost a mythical figure who has abnormal power and very strong senses; she felt that her daughter is in danger. This is the very difference from Perrault’s story, because in Perrault’s version the wife is saved by her brothers. Perrault chooses the strength of men to rescue the girl, the strength of siblings, family. As for Carter, it is the power of mother’s which could rescue the daughter and give her strength.
To begin with Margaret’s Atwood’s ‘Bluebeard’s Egg’, we should point that the story is told by the third person narrator; as if the voice who tells the story knows everything about Sally, the woman who is married to the heart surgeon, the Bluebeard of M. Atwood’s; as if somebody was reading her minds. Sometimes the narrator transfers Sally’s minds about her husband: ‘though picturing Ed at high school is not that difficult. Girls would have had crushes on him, he would have been unconscious of it, things like that don’t change.’[8] It’s the first time in the text when Sally reflects the relation between Ed and other women. It means that women have crushes on Ed now too, Sally sees it, but Ed doesn’t seem to notice that; or Sally just thinks like that.
Sally is active. She thinks of Ed most of the time, she analyses his previous marriages, what went wrong, Sally wants to know everything; she attends evening courses, she suppose she is clever. In comparison with the Bluebeard’s wife of Carter’s, who looks at herself in the whole story as if she saw herself in mirrors, who is passive most of the time, waiting her destiny to come, Atwood’s heroine is active, she creates her home, goes to classes, decorates, makes dinners and parties at home. But the most essential activity of hers is thinking about Ed, their relationship and their marriage: ‘Although she never looks directly, she’s always conscious of Ed’s presence in the room, any room, she perceives him as a shadow, a shape seen dimly at the edge of her field of vision, recognizable by the outline.’[9]
The third sister in The Grimm Brother’s ‘Fintcher’s Bird’ is also active and clever, she puts the egg in a safe place, when explores the secret room. Wiliness helps her to pass the husband’s test of the loyalty or fidelity, after passing the test he does everything for her. In Grimm Brother’s version it is power that is important. For Atwood knowledge is power. The protagonist of Atwood’s searches for knowledge all the time. And there she gets it: ‘<…> Marylynn is bending forward, one hand on the veneer. Ed is standing too close to her, and as Sally comes behind them she sees his left arm, held close to his side, the back of it pressed against Marylynn, her shimmering upper thigh, her ass to be exact. Marylynn does not move away.’[10] Sally enters the bloody chamber.
What is very characteristic to the story of ‘Bluebeard’s Egg’ is that it seems that the story has no end. The author leaves the question in the end of the story: ‘But what will come out of it?’[11] In the Grimm Brothers’ version the wife took revenge, she sets on fire Bluebeard’s house burning him and all his friends. The modern ‘Bluebeard’s Egg’ questions the problem: what should modern wife do when she has enter the secret room? Pretend she hasn’t, pretend she hasn’t got the information or find the way ‘to burn her husband to deaf’ as in fairy tale? What side to pick – to be buried corpse in her wedding day or leave as a bird and be rescued by her brothers – these are the answers which are suggested by Grimm Brothers in the fairy tale. M. Atwood doesn’t suggest any answer.
[1] Danielle Marie Roemer, Cristina Bacchilega ‘Angela Carter and the fairy tales’, p. 16.
[2] Reingard M. Nischik ‘Margaret Atwood: works and impact’, p. 218.
[3] Angela Carter ‘The Bloody Chamber’, ‘Burning your boats (collected stories)’, Vintage books, 2006, p. 122.
[4] Ibid, p. 123.
[5] Ibid, p. 124.
[6] Ibid, p. 111.
[7] Ibid. p. 142.
[8] Margaret Atwood ‘Bluebeard’s Egg and Other Stories’, London: Virago Press, 1987, p. 131.
[9] Ibid, p. 161.
[10] Ibid.
[11] Ibid, p. 164.
Žymos: Angela Carter, bluebeard, fairy tales, Margaret Atwood