The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories

The murderous husband of “The Bloody Chamber,” simply called “the Marquis,” is closely based on the folkloric figure of Bluebeard, but also shares features with the Robber Bridegroom and numerous other murderous bridegrooms throughout folklore. In an era when women were often pressured into marriages with men they scarcely knew, these stories represented the very real fear that a husband who appears charming and kind in public might turn out to be monstrous in private. In the modern era, such stories evoke the ongoing prevalence of intimate partner violence.

In this story, the murderous husband is a French nobleman with an ancient lineage, who may be ageless himself; it is implied that his terrors extend back many years. He exhibits a predilection for pornography and sadistic sexual instruments, as well as a need for control. When this control is threatened, he reacts by “clearing the board” of his home and beginning anew. When faced with these perceived failures, he reacts with grief and despair. The narrator observes, “In spite of my fear of him, that made me whiter than my wrap, I felt there emanate from him, at that moment, a stench of absolute despair” (34). Later, she comes to understand that he carries an “atrocious loneliness” (35). The Marquis is desperate for love, yet destroys it at every opportunity because he fears the vulnerability it entails just as much as he longs for it. This gives the antagonistic character a complexity that makes him human as much as monster.

There are actually two vampire countesses in the collection: the last of the Marquis’s wives, who is implied to be a version of the title character of the gothic novel Carmilla, by Sheridan Le Fanu; and the vampire countess from “Lady of the House of Love.” Although it’s unlikely they are intended to be a single recurring character, they share many elements in common. In “The Bloody Chamber,” the narrator discovers the countess held in a coffin filled with spikes, “newly dead, so full of blood” (28). There’s an implication that this vampire woman may still be alive, held in captivity—her fate is left to the reader to interpret. Therein lies one suggestion that the two countesses could be the same person: The Marquis’s countess may have escaped following the man’s death and returned home. Alternatively, the Marquis’s countess may be read as a parent or ancestor of the vampire in “The Lady of the House of Love.”

In “The Lady of the House of Love,” the countess is descended from a line of vampires and lives in sheltered, self-imposed captivity. She obsessively reads tarot spreads, hoping to change a fate over which she feels she has no control: “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” (105). It is clear that the vampire loathes herself and her monstrosity, a trope common in supernatural storytelling today but less used in Angela Carter’s time. Once the vampire woman meets the young, virginal man who walks into her trap, she is disarmed by his innocence. Her pivotal turning point comes when she experiences a reversal of her usual feeding ritual: She cuts open her finger and her guest tastes it as an act of care. She dies having found brief, real love, and, through it, her own humanity.

“The Courtship of Mr Lyon” and “The Tiger’s Bride” both contain a folkloric motif known as “the beastly bridegroom” or “animal bridegroom,” in which an innocent human woman marries an animalistic man. Beauty and the Beast, which inspired both Carter’s tales, is the most famous example of this trope; however, there are many more throughout history. The beast of “Mr. Lyon” lives a solitary human life, extending generosity to those in need, such as Beauty’s father. However, he exhibits a short temper reminiscent of his animal nature when Beauty’s father takes his sole rose—an act that the beast perceives to be an abuse of his kindness.

Unlike the beast in “The Tiger’s Bride,” the one who comes to be known as Mr. Lyon shows a human love toward his new companion. He is aware of his strangeness and, like the countess in “The Lady of the House of Love,” despises it: “[H]e disliked the presence of servants because […] a constant human presence would remind him too bitterly of his otherness” (46). The tiger, by contrast, ventures into the human world. Although he does not speak directly, he embodies a sense of strength. He is much more proud and cold, treating the heroine of the story as a commodity more than a companion. His brief flirtation with humanity comes only when he goes riding with the woman, attempting to embody what he believes she wants to see in him. By the end of the story, however, it’s not her humanity that brings them together; it’s his own inner wildness, which he is finally able to share with another.

The first-person narrator in “Puss in Boots” is the only male protagonist in the collection. Puss’s character comes through the in his brash narrative voice in a way that the more intimate female narrators do not. He embodies sensuality and hedonism, preferring physical pleasures over emotional connection with others. When his master is taken by the malady of romantic love, Puss uses his schemes to try and purge him of it. The dynamic between the two of them echoes many literary pairings in which a servant or sidekick, of a lower status, is actually the one with the greater mental capacity. Yet while he is focused on rescuing his master from a life of boring domesticity, he unwittingly becomes entrapped by the same construct himself. Eventually, he decides that a stable domestic life isn’t as bad as he thought it would be, and the two couples settle down together as a family. In this way he shares a similar transformation to Mr. Lyon in that he eventually leaves his wildness behind to find a happy ending.