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

Style, Fall, 1995 by Becky McLaughlin

sometimes that face, in stillness when he listened to me playing, with the heavy eyelids folded over eyes that always disturbed me by their absolute absence of light, seemed to me like a mask, as if his real face, the face that truly reflected all the life he had led in the world before he met me, before, even, I was born, as though that face lay underneath this mask.

(9)

Even the absence of light in the marquis's eyes is reminiscent of Leroux's phantom. For, as is said of the phantom, his "eyes are so deep that you can hardly see the fixed pupils. All you can see is two big black holes, as in a dead man's skull" (12).

Of course, what the marquis hides beneath his "waxen stillness" are centuries of sadism and murder. Although the narrator knows that her husband is far older than she is, what she does not know is that he has survived for eons - like the figure of the vampire - on the bloody murder of young women. As the blind piano-tuner tells Carter's heroine, there once lived a marquis who hunted "young girls on the mainland; he hunted them with dogs, as though they were foxes. My grandfather had it from his grandfather, how the Marquis pulled a head out of his saddle bag and showed it to the blacksmith. . . . And it was the head of the blacksmith's wife" (33). In his naivete, the blind piano-tuner assumes that this is mere legend, but as both he and the marquis's hapless bride soon discover, the marquis of yore is none other than the narrator's new husband, still "alive" after all these years, but forced to find a new hunting ground, the salons of Paris.

Like any figure of the living dead, including Leroux's phantom and Bram Stoker's vampire, Carter's marquis confronts those who get too close with what Joan Copjec calls "an absence of absence - an Other - who threatens to asphyxiate [them]" ("Vampires" 33). Although the narrator of "The Bloody Chamber" does not refer to the affect of anxiety by name, her references to the oppressive heaviness that imbues the marquis suggest the anxiety that accompanies the surplus body of the real. Early in the story, for example, the narrator describes the marquis as older, much older than she. And yet, she says, "his strange, heavy, almost waxen face was not lined by experience" (9). Later in the story, when describing how her new husband's embraces affect her, she says that he creates in her both arousal and a repugnance "for his white, heavy flesh that had too much in common with the armful of arum lilies . . ., those undertakers' lilies with the heavy pollen" (15).

The lily, with which I began my discussion of Carter's story, turns up here in all its ambiguous glory, functioning as part of the cloying, claustrophobic atmosphere into which the narrator is thrust after her marriage to the marquis. These lilies "that are white. And stain you," says the narrator, "I always associated with him [the marquis]" (15). In fact, the lilies, which sit in a tall jar, their stems distorted by the thick glass into dismembered arms, represent that massive, oppressive presence Zizek refers to as the stain of the real - that is, a dramatic surplus of the real - a mute object of enjoyment. Still later, the narrator refers to the marquis's "monstrous presence, heavy as if he had been gifted at birth with more specific gravity than the rest of us" (20) - a presence that always subtly oppresses her, even when she believes herself most in love with him. Finally, at the end of the story, the young bride finds her husband's proximity almost too much to bear. "The chthonic gravity of his presence," she tells us, "exerted a tremendous pressure on the room, so that the blood pounded in my ears as if we had been precipitated to the bottom of the sea" (35). The suffocating surplus that the narrator encounters in each of these moments with the marquis suggests a moment of anxiety, in which there is a doubling of the subject's self. In fact, what Zizek refers to as the "anal father" is the subject's double, a figure who follows him or her like a shadow and embodies a particular surplus. What the double gives body to is, as Zizek says, "the phantom-like Thing in me" ("Grimaces" 55): "In my double, I don't simply encounter myself (my mirror image), but first of all what is 'in me more than myself,' yet . . . conceived under another modality, that of the other, sublime, ethereal body, pure substance of enjoyment" (55).