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

Style, Fall, 1995 by Becky McLaughlin

According to Doane, "The delusion of paranoia is built up to . . . take the place of the missing paternal signifier, the Name of the Father, hence the Law. There is a sense, then, in which the paranoid delusion is a simulacrum of the law" (145). In gothic films, as well as in Carter's narrative, "this simulacrum of legality is constituted by a hyperbolization of the image of the aggressive, punishing, castrating Father - an image which compensates for a precise lack of castration anxiety on the part of the paranoid subject" (145). Needless to say, the marquis functions as this "simulacrum of legality" for the seventeen-year-old narrator, since he is precisely a hyperbolic version of the father image Doane describes. For the pervert, by contrast, the simulacrum of the law is constituted by an other who is securely situated within the respectability of the social order - by a priest or policeman, for example, or in the case of Carter's story by an innocent young classical pianist straight from her mother's nurturing bosom.(5) The pervert must recreate the place of the Law in order to transgress it, for no sense of debauchery can be achieved unless the other is wrenched out of his or her system by accepting the jouissance that the pervert has succumbed to.

Thus, the narrator's paranoid delusion functions in much the same way as the marquis's fetish does. Both serve as substitutes for something that is missing in the symbolic register - that is, the parental signifiers. While the narrator uses the marquis as the castrating father in order to compensate for her lack of castration anxiety, the marquis uses the narrator as his fetish (the thing that allows him to believe in the existence of his mother's penis) to mask his overwhelming fear of castration. Paradoxically, then, the narrator and the marquis are situated in positions of protection and threat to each other. What I mean by this is that a simulacrum is just that - a simulacrum: There is always the possibility that this counterfeit image will crumble and the traumatic truth reassert itself.

Although Doane suggests that the image of "a potentially murderous father-like husband" actually conceals a far more acute fear, one "concerning the maternal figure and the annihilation of subjectivity" (145), I am not convinced that Carter's story bears this out. According to Doane, the female fears the sameness of the mother because of its threat to her subjectivity, while the male fears the difference of the mother because of its threat to his bodily integrity. And yet Carter uses the figure of the mother to protect both the marquis and his wife. For the marquis, the opal ring and the housekeeper function to keep his young wife from upsetting the apple cart or changing the status quo - that is, from asserting her difference, a difference against which the marquis must protect himself at all costs. For the narrator, the galloping mother on horseback functions as her rescuer and as a part of the new household established at the end of the story. In fact, the marital bliss of the narrator and her new husband, the blind piano-tuner, is made triangular by the presence of the narrator's mother, who moves in with the newly weds on the outskirts of Paris. Apparently, Carter's narrator has no fear of losing her subjectivity. In any event, she appears to have recovered from her bout with paranoia by the end of the story, for she no longer has need of the castrating, voyeuristic gaze of a man such as the marquis. Once she escapes the clutches of her murderous husband, she gives herself to the blind piano-tuner, a man whose blindness signifies him as castrated. Though a man who could offer emotional support to her at the castle, he is completely ineffectual in saving her from the marquis.