Perverse pleasure and fetishized text: the deathly erotics of Carter's "The Bloody Chamber." - Angela Carter

Style, Fall, 1995 by Becky McLaughlin

It takes an iron nerve to perceive the connection between the promise of life implicit in eroticism and the sensuous aspect of death. Mankind conspires to ignore the fact that death is also the youth of things. Blind-folded, we refuse to see that only death guarantees the fresh upsurging without which life would be blind.

Georges Bataille, Death and Sensuality

Angela Carter shows through her collection of short stories, The Bloody Chamber, that she has just such a nerve of iron as Georges Bataille suggests is needed for perceiving the connection between life and death. Even the illustration on the front cover of this slim volume suggests the eroticism of life and the sensuality of death: a dewy, white lily with a phallic stamen jutting from its hidden center emerges through a rupture in dry, flat ground. Around the base of the lily, thick black cords of stem wrap themselves in vertiginous, maze-like coils. Like the book itself, the lily is a kind of bloody chamber, for it has droplets of blood on its interior and exterior walls where the stem's sharp thorns have pricked it.(1)

What makes this illustration interesting is its kaleidoscopic quality. One moment the lily represents life and the next moment, death. Because of the lily's lush, white petals, it seems bloated with fecund vegetable vitality, and yet lilies are known as burial flowers, funeral decor, the stuff of a dead man's nosegay. Even the blood that trickles down the sides of the lily and splashes onto its leaves has an ambiguous quality, for it suggests both the vitality of the circulatory system and the mortality of flesh. One moment the lily looks female and the next moment, male. At first glance, for example, the lily appears to be a female receptacle, its stamen a clitoris, and the serpentine stem a phallus. On second glance, however, the penile shape of the lily begins to suggest the contours of the phallus and the coiled stem an all-encompassing vaginal "maw." This vaginal "maw" doubles as the mysterious place from which life emerges and that dark abyss into which man fears falling and from which he fears never to return: eros and thanatos, the life force and the death drive.

In a discussion of the partial drive and its circuit, Jacques Lacan makes reference to a fragment of Heraclitus: "to the bow is given the name of life . . . and its work is death" (177). The dialectic of the bow, says Lacan, is integrated in the drive. This bow or the curve of sexual fulfillment in the living being is represented by Lacan in the form of an inverted lily:

It is appropriate that the cover of Carter's collection evokes life and death, sexuality and aggression, female and male, the jouissance of the real and the dry cracked ground of the symbolic. For all of these elements are present in Carter's stories, overlapping and intertwining with one another just as they do in the best of fantasies. I do not, however, intend to discuss these intersections in each story. Instead, I intend to economize or, more accurately, to metonymize by allowing one story, "The Bloody Chamber," to stand in for the entire collection. Obviously, this casts me into the position of fetishist or pervert, as I realize but at the same time disavow Carter's symbolic castration, her inability to say it all. I take this perverted position because I am not entirely sure that it is possible to read Carter's story from any other. In fact, as I will argue in this paper, Carter herself writes from the position of pervert and thus forces her reader into perverse collaboration. But, then, perhaps this is as it should be, for in fantastic literature, says Rosemary Jackson, "[m]ovement and stillness, life and death, subject and object, mind and matter, become as one" (80). The impossible structures around which fantastic narratives are woven, she says, are "related to this drive towards a realization of contradictory elements merging together in the desire for undifferentiation" (80), a desire for that which is beyond the pleasure principle. This fantastic movement "towards an imaginary zero condition, without time or space, a condition of entropy" (79), produces an "other" region, one described by Maurice Blanchot as "the result of pure transgression" (qtd. in Jackson 79).(2) It is into this "other" region of perversion that Carter's first-person narrator goes when she travels by train to the "faery solitude" of her husband's castle, which is "at home neither on the land nor on the water, a mysterious, amphibious place, contravening the materiality of both earth and waves" ("Chamber" 13).

I. MIRROR IMAGES: PARANOIA'S DELUSION AND PERVERSION'S FETISH

The story of "Blue Beard" has been around a long time - at least since 1697, when it appeared in Charles Perrault's book of fairy tales. Although Carter renames the story, calling it "The Bloody Chamber," we know almost immediately who the rich marquis really is and the violent end he has in mind for his innocent young wife. Because his wife is the narrator of the story, however, we know that the marquis's murderous plot will be interrupted and his wife spared. What we do not know, until the end of the story, is who will get the credit for this heroic intervention. As we read along, we think perhaps that it will be the blind piano-tuner who befriends the hapless narrator. But as adept as he may be at keeping the narrator's piano in tune, he is useless as an opponent to the marquis. No, Carter's hero turns out to be none other than the narrator's mother, a woman who brandishes a gun and gallops up on a horse in a manner not unlike the cavalry at the end of a Cowboy-and-Indian movie. Except for its rather startling ending, Carter's story has much in common with gothic fiction and its celluloid offspring: the paranoid woman's film and the horror flick. I mention the gothic tradition because Carter seems to have drawn on it in her rewriting of "Blue Beard" and because its paranoid aspect is reflected in the perversion of "The Bloody Chamber."