Published in 1979, this collection of 10 stories is by Angela Carter (1940-92).

It's another book that shouldered its way in, past an orderly queue of previously chosen candidates. Two reasons: Firstly, it was mentioned in Mark O'Connell's astute critique of Anna Burns's Milkman ("in grappling with the singularity of Burns' style, I also found myself thinking of Angela Carter"); and secondly, I'm part of Simon Haisell's current read-along of A.S. Byatt's The Children's Book, and a big theme of that novel is fairytale in all its different modes and expressions.



Carter's stories all contain more than a nod towards the world of fairytale and legend. But we need to pick our terminology carefully. Helen Simpson, in a really useful Introduction to the collection, writes: "The Bloody Chamber is often -- wrongly -- described as a group of traditional fairy tales given a subversive feminist twist. In fact these are new stories, not retellings. As Carter made clear, 'My intention was not do "versions" or, as the American edition of the book said, horribly, "adult" fairy tales, but to extract the latent content from the traditional stories and to use it as the beginnings of new stories.'" In other words, she "took traditional fairy tales and used them to write new ones".

Simpson continues: "Her work caused shock waves when it appeared, and it continues to shock. The Bloody Chamber, which has been extensively studied in universities over the last decade, apparently elicits furious hostility from a significant number of students, who are outraged when they recognise the bedtime stories of their childhood newly configured as tales of sex and violence." But as Carter said, there's plenty in the latent content of those traditional stories that is "violently sexual". It's all there, just under the surface.



***

The stories are a psychological treasure trove, and -- I'm quoting Simpson's Introduction again -- "strikingly full of cultural and intertextual references -- you could spend five years on an annotation of The Bloody Chamber". I'm not going to do that... My post is going to be impressionistic, rather than thorough. For more detailed analyses, see Oliver Tearle and Nasrullah Mambrol.

My favourite was the piece that gives its name to the book. Based on the story of Bluebeard, this is a Gothic extravaganza, in which a young woman (poor, of course, and fatherless) marries an obscenely rich older man who turns out to have a predilection for murdering previous wives (there have been three).

It's so deliciously shuddery that you feel almost guilty reading it. We have a vast castle (a "sea-girt, pinnacled domain"); lilies everywhere (even the person of the Marquis resembles "one of those cobra-headed, funereal lilies whose white sheaths are curled out of a flesh as thick and tensely yielding to the touch as vellum"); a two-inch-wide choker of rubies that gives the impression of "an extraordinarily precious slit throat"; mirrors everywhere, reflecting "more white lilies than I'd ever seen in my life before"; Symbolist writing and art aplenty (our Marquis is keen on Baudelaire)... It's all pitch-perfect.


Brittany... The castle was in Brittany...

Anyway, the Marquis is called away, leaving his new bride with a complete set of keys to the castle. She may explore everything, he says, except one room. Guess what she decides to do... And sure enough, the room he has told her not to enter is the bloody chamber of the title, revealing to her in gory detail the fate of her predecessors. Her only ally at this point is the blind piano-tuner whom her husband has employed. She certainly needs an ally because all of a sudden the Marquis is on his way back, and there's now a blood stain on the key to the forbidden chamber, so it's impossible to hide that she's disobeyed orders...

Carter complicates everything in this story, though. Before the protagonist becomes aware of her husband's proclivities, her excursions into Symbolism make her wonder whether "he might have chosen me because, in my innocence, he sensed a rare talent for corruption", and she is conflicted by her feelings for him: "I lay in bed alone. And I longed for him. And he disgusted me." Even when she realizes her number's up, and she cannot conceal her expedition to the secret room, she still feels a kind of pity for him: "The atrocious loneliness of that monster!"

It all becomes very gruesome and grisly and twisted, and we're expecting the worst, as the Marquis prepares to decapitate his fourth wife. But no, wait -- here's Mum, riding to the rescue:

"I saw a horse and rider galloping at a vertiginous speed along the causeway, though the waves crashed, now, high as the horse's fetlocks...

"You never saw such a wild thing as my mother, her hat seized by the winds and blown out to sea so that her hair was her white mane, her black lisle legs exposed to the thigh, her skirts tucked round her waist, one hand on the reins of the rearing horse while the other clasped my father's service revolver and, behind her, the breakers of the savage, indifferent sea, like the witnesses of a furious justice...

"On her eighteenth birthday, my mother had disposed of a man-eating tiger that had ravaged the villages in the hills north of Hanoi. Now, without a moment's hesitation, she raised my father's gun, took aim and put a single, irreproachable bullet through my husband's head."

Yay!!

The rescue is all over quite quickly. The meat of the story (if that's not too horrible a pun) is in the atmosphere it conjures up, of which I've not even given you a quarter. It's very, very powerful.

(In an interesting aside, Simpson notes that the moral message projected in Charles Perrault's version of the Bluebeard tale is that women shouldn't be curious -- seriously?? -- whereas "in the France of his time, where death in childbirth was commonplace and four-fifths of the resultant widowers remarried, the bloody chamber might surely have been seen as the womb".)


The Intrigue, 1890, by James Ensor, one of the painters the Marquis follows


***

Next we have three stories about felines, the first two drawing on the story of Beauty and the Beast.

The Courtship of Mr Lyon was another of my favourites. This stays quite close to (what I remember of) the original story. To make good a minor misdemeanor of her father's, Beauty has to stay with the Beast. He's sad when she finally has to go ("it will be lonely here, without you"). She promises to visit, but forgets, and he's fading away by the time she finally returns. Then comes the classic declaration: "Don't die, Beast! If you'll have me, I'll never leave you."

And he is transformed -- one of the many stories of metamorphosis in this collection:

"When her lips touched the meat-hook claws, they drew back into their pads and she saw how he had always kept his fists clenched but now, painfully, tentatively, at last began to stretch his fingers. Her tears fell on his face like snow and, under their soft transformation, the bones showed through the pelt, the flesh through the wide, tawny brow. And then it was no longer a lion in her arms but a man, a man with an unkempt mane of hair and, how strange, a broken nose, such as the noses of retired boxers, that gave him a distant, heroic resemblance to the handsomest of all the beasts.

"'Do you know,' said Mr Lyon, 'I think I might be able to manage a little breakfast today, Beauty, if you would eat something with me.'

"Mr and Mrs Lyon walk in the garden; the old spaniel drowses on the grass, in a drift of fallen petals."

Slightly edgier was The Tiger's Bride. Here, our protagonist's father loses her to the Beast at cards, and she's stuck in a house with two beings who "were not, in any way, as other men", plus a clockwork figure who acts as her maid.

Nakedness (another theme of the collection) is significant here. Finally, our heroine sees the Beast "naked". He's a huge, beautiful tiger: "A great, feline, tawny shape whose pelt was barred with a savage geometry of bars the colour of burned wood. His domed, heavy head, so terrible he must hide it. How subtle the muscles, how profound the tread. The annihilating vehemence of his eyes, like twin suns."

Even when she's free to leave the castle, she doesn't want to. The story ends with her exultant transformation into a tiger...

The third of the cat stories is Puss-in-Boots. This is my second-favourite of the whole collection, because it's so rollickingly funny, and therefore makes for a nice change of tempo. Puss's lothario master has finally fallen in love for real, and it's the job of the uber-smart feline to help him secure his girl. Full of bons mots from this irrepressible pussy cat, and full of very accurate observation of the ways of cats, this is absolutely hilarious.



***

The next three stories are very different, but all feature lethal lovers.

The Erl-King -- another that I really enjoyed -- is set in the forest. It begins, very evocatively, like this:

"The lucidity, the clarity of the light that afternoon was sufficient to itself; perfect transparency must be impenetrable, these vertical bars of a brass-coloured distillation of light coming down from sulphur-yellow interstices in a sky hunkered with grey clouds that bulge with more rain. It struck the wood with nicotine-stained fingers, the leaves glittered. A cold day of late October, when the withered blackberries dangled like their own dour spooks on the discoloured brambles... There is not much in the autumn wood to make you smile but it is not yet, not quite yet, the saddest time of the year. Only, there is a haunting sense of the imminent cessation of being; the year, in turning, turns in on itself. Introspective weather, a sickroom hush...

"It is easy to lose yourself in these woods."

How cleverly she conveys a beauty in which something is not only sad but subtly off...



Here the protagonist falls into the power of the Erl-King. He is not unkind -- either to her, or to all the birds he keeps in cages to sing for him. But then she realizes where the birds have come from... Again there's an ambivalence, a willingness to find excuses for coercion:

"When I realized what the Erl-King meant to do to me, I was shaken with a terrible fear and I did not know what to do for I loved him with all my heart and yet I had no wish to join the whistling congregation he kept in his cages although he looked after them very affectionately, gave them fresh water every day and fed them well. His embraces were his enticements and yet, oh yet! they were the branches of which the trap itself was woven. But in his innocence he never knew he might be the death of me, although I knew from the first moment I saw him how Erl-King would do me grievous harm..."

The resolution of this story is dream-like, as the change of narrative person (from "I" to "she") and of tense (from past to future) make you wonder exactly what has happened. But it seems she put paid to the Erl-King, freed the birds, and strung the old fiddle with his hair...

(A propos of the Erl-King, I must mention Johann Wolfgang Goethe's poem of the same name. It was set to music by Franz Schubert, and there's a beautiful performance here.)

The Snow Child is the shortest and by far the weirdest of the stories. According to Tearle, it draws on a number of snow-themed tales, and subverts them one by one. Blood and roses (recurring motifs in this collection) are vividly present here too.

Kari Sawden's exigesis argues that its central theme exposes a central reality: That "women are to be possessed and used; consent is not of concern to those who wield power".



The Lady of the House of Love is a vampire story: "Wearing an antique bridal gown, the beautiful queen of the vampires sits all alone in her dark, high house under the eyes of the portraits of her demented and atrocious ancestors, each one of whom, through her, projects a baleful posthumous existence." The Countess's castle is decaying (shades of Mexican Gothic, especially when we get to the carpet "partly encroached upon by all kinds of virulent-looking fungi").

Then the Countess draws the tarot sequence that connects love and death. And into the village wanders a young officer from the British Army. His is a curious position: "He is more than he knows -- and has about him, besides, the special glamour of that generation for whom history has already prepared a special, exemplary fate in the trenches of France. 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." He's invited to the castle, fed, and beckoned to the Countess's usual "vile and murderous room".

But this time the script changes. The Countess accidentally cuts herself. She has never seen her own blood... Her beau tries to staunch the wound: "He will kiss it better for her, as her mother, had she lived, would have done." This is what she needs to turn from vampire to human, but "the end of exile is the end of being". When the officer wakes, he finds she is dead: "I will vanish in the morning light; I was only an invention of darkness."

She leaves him a rose:

"When he returned from the mess that evening, the heavy fragrance of Count Nosferatu's roses drifted down the stone corridor of the barracks to greet him, and his spartan quarters brimmed with the reeling odour of a glowing, velvet, monstrous flower whose petals had regained all their former bloom and elasticity, their corrupt, brilliant, baleful splendour.

"Next day, his regiment embarked for France."

What a brilliant ending...



***

The collection closes with three wolf stories.

The Werewolf is a reworking of Little Red Riding Hood. Here, the granddaughter takes oatcakes to her grandmother, who turns out to be a werewolf... She's condemned to death. "Now the child lived in her grandmother's house; she prospered." Kind of chilling...

The Company of Wolves also features the Little Red Riding Hood theme. This time the granddaughter, heading off to visit her grandmother, meets a young man. They agree to go by separate routes, but by the time the granddaughter arrives, the werewolf -- for such the young man is -- has done away with the old lady, and next in line is the granddaughter. But she's absolutely no push-over. Essentially, by deploying her sexuality, and refusing to be afraid, she tames him: "See! sweet and sound she sleeps in granny's bed, between the paws of the tender wolf." It's a controversial one, this, says Oliver Tearle. "In order to save her own life, she must give herself to the male by making love to him, giving up her virginity as only 'immaculate' flesh will satisfy him. However, the story's feminist 'message' is apparent in the girl's refusal to be anybody's 'meat', and in her demonstration of agency at the story's conclusion."



Wolf-Alice is the last of the stories. It features a young woman who has been raised by wolves, and is now struggling to adapt to the world of humans. When the nuns who have rescued her can't handle her, they ship her off to "the bereft and unsanctified household of the Duke". Who's a werewolf... This means he doesn't appear in mirrors, and he cannot die. He hunts humans, and if he can't find any living ones, he digs up the dead.

Eventually, the Duke is shot by a young man out for vengeance. Our werewolf is not dead, but he has been caught in the middle of his transformation, so he's neither completely human nor completely animal. He staggers back to his castle, and Wolf-Alice takes care of him. Bit by bit, he starts to be visible in the mirror:

"The lucidity of the moonlight lit the mirror propped against the red wall; the rational glass, the master of the visible, impartially recorded the crooning girl.

"As she continued her ministrations, this glass, with infinite slowness, yielded to the reflexive strength of its own material construction. Little by little, there appeared within it, like the image on photographic paper that emerges, first, a formless web of tracery, the prey caught in its own fishing net, then in firmer yet still shadowed outline until at last as vivid as real life itself, as if brought into being by her soft, moist, gentle tongue, finally, the face of the Duke."

***

These are very creepy stories, weird and atmospheric and endlessly surprising. I won't pretend to have grasped more than a few key ideas. But Carter offers a rich reading experience. Her language is exquisite. Recurring images -- such as nakedness, blood, metamorphosis, roses, mirrors -- draw the separate stories together. And the recurring theme of resisting passivity -- celebrating women who won't consent to tamely become victims -- is one we can never hear too much of.