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Angela Carter
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Carter: The Bloody Chamber
In this course, Professor Marie Mulvey-Roberts (University of the West of England) explores Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber. We begin by providing an introduction to Carter herself, focusing in particular on the range of her literary output and her interest in folklore and fairy tales. In the five modules that follow, we focus on four of the constituent stories in The Bloody Chamber: in the second and third modules, we focus on the first story in the collection, ‘The Bloody Chamber’; in the fourth module, we focus on ‘The Erl-King’; in the fifth module, ‘The Lady in the House of Love’; and in the sixth module, ‘Wolf-Alice’. The seventh module provides some conclusions to the course as a whole.
Angela Carter
This module provides an introduction to Angela Carter and her writings, focusing in particular on the range of her outputs, her interest in folklore and fairy tales, and some of the key themes in ‘The Bloody Chamber’.
Angela Carter was one of the greatest writers
00:00:03of the 20th century, and she's associated with fairy tale,
00:00:06fantasy, and surrealism.
00:00:11And various labels have been applied
00:00:13to her, such as magic realism, feminism, and postmodernism.
00:00:15But for such a versatile, original, and complex writer,
00:00:20it can be very difficult to categorize her.
00:00:25She engaged with various different kinds of writing,
00:00:29such as poetry, radio plays, film scripts, and books
00:00:33for children, but she's most well
00:00:47known for her nine novels and four collections
00:00:51of short stories from which The Bloody Chamber is,
00:00:54of course, the most well-known.
00:00:58And that was published in 1979.
00:01:00Carter was fascinated with fairy and folktale,
00:01:05and she edited two books for Virago Press,
00:01:08and these tales are gathered from around the world.
00:01:13Before writing The Bloody Chamber,
00:01:17she also translated the work of Charles Perrault,
00:01:19the 17th century French writer who
00:01:23laid the foundations of the fairy tale genre.
00:01:25Like Perrault, Angela Carter was also
00:01:28fascinated by the oral tradition.
00:01:33And for her, it wasn't just folk tales.
00:01:36It was folk music.
00:01:40During the 10 years she lived in Bristol in 1960s, she
00:01:44and her husband Paul Carter recorded
00:01:47the singing of legendary folk singers
00:01:51before they were lost forever.
00:01:54Many years later after she'd left the folk scene, that's
00:01:58when Angela Carter returned to the folk tradition,
00:02:02and this was through the fairy tale.
00:02:06In regard to the short narrative,
00:02:10Angela Carter maintained that its limited trajectory
00:02:13concentrated its meaning.
00:02:17She once said that she started writing stories
00:02:20in a room she was living in, because it was
00:02:24too small to write novels in.
00:02:26And I think it's interesting to consider that The Bloody
00:02:28Chamber is a title denoting a room and a not
00:02:31very pleasant one at that.
00:02:34It's also worth noting that Angela Carter made
00:02:37a distinction between the short story and the tale,
00:02:39and she regarded the latter as a way
00:02:43of enabling us to look at symbolism and the unconscious.
00:02:46And it also links her to that most famous of writers,
00:02:51of Gothic tales Edgar Allan Poe.
00:02:55I mentioned the word Gothic here.
00:02:59And in the afterword to an earlier collection
00:03:02of short stories called Fireworks,
00:03:04Carter writes we live in Gothic times.
00:03:06There's certainly a Gothic strand going through her work,
00:03:11and I'm going to be drawing that out in the Bloody Chamber.
00:03:14Most of the stories are based on classical fairy
00:03:20tales, such as Little Red Riding Hood and Sleeping Beauty.
00:03:23But what Cartier manages to do so superbly
00:03:28is to de-familiarize and transform them.
00:03:31She saw her tales as a means of exploring ideas,
00:03:35and she regarded narrative as I quote, "the argument stated
00:03:38in fictional terms."
00:03:43Now this might not be how we think of fairy tale,
00:03:46but Carter through The Bloody Chamber
00:03:50does so many different things with the genre
00:03:54and radically subverts it.
00:03:56For instance, she brings about reversals of traditional gender
00:03:59roles and her exploration of sexuality forms
00:04:03part of her aim to bring out what
00:04:07is latent in the fairy tale, those things sometimes
00:04:09dark things that are lurking beneath the surface.
00:04:12So at the same time as giving us her version of these tails,
00:04:18she really transforms our understanding
00:04:22of the classical tales on which they're based.
00:04:25As she once said, I quote, "most intellectual development
00:04:27depends upon new readings of old texts.
00:04:32I'm all for putting new wine in old bottles,
00:04:37especially if the pressure of the new wine
00:04:40makes the bottles explode."
00:04:43And she certainly succeeds in exploding the traditional fairy
00:04:45tales as we can see in The Bloody Chamber.
00:04:49In this book.
00:04:52There are 10 stories.
00:04:53And we can put them into various categories, such as wolf
00:04:56stories and cat stories.
00:05:00Beginning with the cat stories, let's start
00:05:03looking at the big cats.
00:05:06We have the story of The Courtship of Mr. Lions
00:05:08and also The Tiger's Bride, and these are retellings
00:05:13of Beauty and the Beast.
00:05:16There's an important difference from the original story
00:05:18in the ending of The Tiger's Bride
00:05:21when the tiger turns beauty into a beast.
00:05:24"He dragged himself closer and closer to me
00:05:30until I felt the harsh velvet of his head against my hand,
00:05:34then tongue abrasive as sandpaper.
00:05:38He would lick the skin off me, and each stroke of his tongue
00:05:41ripped off skin after successive skin, all the skins of a life
00:05:46in the world, and left behind a nascent patina
00:05:50of shining hairs.
00:05:54My earrings turned back to water and trickled down my shoulders.
00:05:56I shrug the drops of my beautiful fur."
00:06:01Here we have the interchangeability
00:06:06of animal and human, and Carter collapses these boundaries.
00:06:09And this really gets us to think about what it really
00:06:15means to be human.
00:06:18Now a very human cat can be found in the third cat
00:06:20story, Puss in Boots, and this is
00:06:23a rather more raucous version of the original story
00:06:27of a speaking, booted cat.
00:06:32Turning now to the wolf stories, the most well-known
00:06:36is The Company of Wolves, which is a retelling of Little Red
00:06:40Riding Hood and was turned into a very successful film directed
00:06:43by Neil Jordan.
00:06:48Another tale is The Werewolf, which
00:06:50is another rewrite of Red Riding Hood.
00:06:53And the third is Wolf-Alice, which
00:06:57is a re-imagining of Cinderella, and it's
00:07:00about a feral wolf-girl.
00:07:04Now apart from the cat and wolf stories, we have Snow Child.
00:07:06And this is an adaptation or to use
00:07:12a term Angela Carter is more comfortable with,
00:07:17a reformulation of Snow White in which a count encounters want
00:07:19a girl as white as snow, as red as blood, and as black
00:07:25as the raven's feather.
00:07:30There's also the title story, The Bloody Chamber,
00:07:32which is based on the Bluebeard folk tale.
00:07:35And I'm going to look at three stories
00:07:39in this collection in connection with that particular folk tale.
00:07:41
Cite this Lecture
APA style
Mulvey-Roberts, M. (2018, August 15). Carter: The Bloody Chamber - Angela Carter [Video]. MASSOLIT. https://massolit.io/courses/carter-the-bloody-chamber-d25ade53-d626-4af9-919e-841203ffd4b7/angela-carter
MLA style
Mulvey-Roberts, M. "Carter: The Bloody Chamber – Angela Carter." MASSOLIT, uploaded by MASSOLIT, 15 Aug 2018, https://massolit.io/courses/carter-the-bloody-chamber-d25ade53-d626-4af9-919e-841203ffd4b7/angela-carter