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

Style, Fall, 1995 by Becky McLaughlin

What I wish to illustrate, in drawing a parallel between paranoia and perversion, is the similarity of the positions out of which Carter's narrator and the marquis function. In other words, the narrator's paranoia is the mirror image of the marquis's perversion. The fact that both characters have been reared by powerful mother figures and that both are fatherless is of the utmost importance, for the pathology of paranoia and perversion arises out of a problematic relationship to the father or the paternal signifier. As we know from the beginning of the story, because the narrator loses her father when she is just a child, she thus grows up in an entirely female household, one that consists of herself, her mother, and her nurse. In a passage during which she describes her mother as "eagle-featured" and "indomitable," she says that her mother had "gladly, scandalously, defiantly beggared herself for love; and, one fine day, her gallant soldier never returned from the wars, leaving his wife and child a legacy of tears that never quite dried" (7-8). And although the marquis is old enough to have witnessed the death of both parents, his mother's influence lives on in the form of the opal ring that he gives to his new bride, of which I will have more to say later. As if one mother is not enough for the marquis, the housekeeper he employs has once been his foster mother; consequently, when he introduces her to his young bride, any vague hope the bride has of unseating the housekeeper or undermining her authority is immediately crushed, for, as the marquis says, she is "as much part of the house as I am, my dear" (14).

Because the intervention of the father disturbs the dyadic, narcissistic bond between mother and child, thereby creating difference, introducing lack, and setting desire in motion, his function is crucial. For the seventeen-year-old bride and her silver-maned husband, however, this intervention appears not to have occurred. Thus, both characters are involved in a "drama of seeing" that is related, in one way or another, to castration anxiety. In paranoia, on the one hand, the Name-of-the-Father is foreclosed, resulting in a disturbance of the relation between subject and object or an inability to distinguish between the two. In perversion, on the other hand, the Name-of-the-Father is disavowed rather than foreclosed, but the end result is virtually the same: the perverse subject refuses to acknowledge the difference between mother and father, insisting as he does that the mother, too, possesses a penis. In paranoia, the same mechanism that suggests a destabilization of oppositions is the same mechanism with which the paranoiac attempts to re-establish the opposition between subject and object - the mechanism of projection.(4) Similarly, in perversion the very thing the fetishist uses to avow the maternal penis is also the thing he uses to defend against psychosis by re-establishing the field of illusion necessary to a desiring or "normal" subject. In other words, it is only through projection and the fetish that desire and fantasy come into play.