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THE BLOODY CHAMBER
COLLECTION

STRUCTURE
NARRATIVE
LANGUAGE

STRUCTURE
Being a collection of short stories, the structure of The Bloody Chamber
collection is not entirely cohesive
...
The
Bloody Chamber, The Courtship of Mr Lyon and The Tiger’s Bride form a trio of
tales about women marrying monstrous men
...
The Snow Child follows the fairy-tale formula that events
happen in related patterns of three
...
The last three stories, The Werewolf, The Company of
Wolves and Wolf-Alice are concerned with how to deal with the big, bad wolf
...
But the ‘bloody
chamber’ of the opening story provides the title that unites the collection
...


NARRATIVE TECHNIQUES
Carter employs a different narrative style for each story; most particular tales
move from one narrative style to another
...

Carter uses first person narrative forms in The Bloody Chamber, The Tiger’s
Bride, Puss-in-Boots and The Erl-King
...
Although
clearly a female, the narrator never becomes a defined character as the other
narrators do
...


NARRATIVE TECHNIQUES
The Erl-King begins its narrative in the third person in the past tense; moves to
direct address in the second person, present tense and shifts to the third person,
future tense, over the first three paragraphs
...


The effect is dislocating and disorientating; time and space are not fixed
entities
...
The
processing of words that follow words on the page creates an expectation of
narrative: something that is bound to happen
...


NARRATIVE TECHNIQUES
In The Erl-King, Carter suggests a place that is not yet dead but is dying: ‘All
will fall still, all lapse’
...
The
reader relies on the narrator to guide us back to the path, but has the uneasy
suspicion that Carter is in no hurry to find the quickest way home
...
It
is safe to assume that this is the voice of Carter herself; she is only a participant
in the events of these stories as far as ordering and creating them
...

Occasionally characters will speak through the narrator without their speech
being identified as dialogue with conventional punctuation
...


NARRATIVE TECHNIQUES
By using this, Carter presents a narrative device that implies the words are the
inner thoughts of the character being shown to us, something that happens naturally
when stories are verbally exchanged
...
In The Lady of the House of Love, the narrative links between an image of the
Countess being cleaned up after devouring her prey and the introduction of the
hero through the refrain from Jack and the Beanstalk: ‘fee fie fo fum / I smell the
blood of an Englishmen’
...

With the idea of metamorphosis being a significant feature of the collection, it is
worth considering how the narrative changes its form throughout the tales
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This metamorphosis of narrative form has been the
focus of recent critical interest in Carter, instead of sexual identity and feminism
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This is the definitive characteristic of Carter’s language used in
every story of the collection, despite their stylistic differences
...
Her use of symbolic objects as
‘a system of signification’ is conscious for Carter but optional for the reader
...
Her
use of words such as ‘prothalamion’ (The Company of Wolves) and ‘chthonic’
(The Bloody Chamber) evoke the mythology of earlier civilisations and display
Carter’s academic interest in literature
...
In The Bloody Chamber, the ‘misty blue’ turrets of the Marquis’s
castle are presented with ‘seabirds mewing’ and the ‘green and purple,
evanescent departures of the ocean’ to establish the main location
...

This complements the description of the ‘refracted light from the waves’ on the
walls to create the ‘luminous, murmurous castle’ as a place that inspires a sense
of awe in the narrator: it is, literally, an awful place
...
Sometimes this is done through omitting details or not stating the
obvious fact
...
The
paragraph – from ‘a great, feline, tawny shape’ to ‘eyes, like twin suns’ –
functions as a partial list of the Beast’s imposing features, conveying a sense of
wonder
...
Carter deprives this narrator, otherwise adept with
language, of coherent thought under the spell of the animal
...
The Lady of the House of
Love makes extensive use of this complex sentence construction
...
The ‘beautiful queen of the vampires’
is introduced in one sweeping sentence that describes her ‘antique bridal gown’;
her ‘dark, high house’; the ‘baleful posthumous existence’ of her ‘atrocious
ancestors’; her sad and obsessive reading of Tarot cards; her desire to escape
and her fatal youth
...

In addition, this tale makes use of the shortened sentences – found in other
stories – to create moments of tension or heightened impact of details
...


LANGUAGE AND STYLE
In other tales, Carter’s narrative prose approaches a poetic voice, deliberately
slipping between two registers of language that operate in different ways to
create meaning
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Green as
dead sea fruit’
...

In The Bloody Chamber, Carter makes a morbid link between the disconnected
telephone line and the murders the Marquis has already committed, again in a
line that stands alone as if poetically isolated: ‘Dead as his wives’
...
Once again, this
land stands alone in the text as a turning point in the narrative
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To operate at many levels of
meaning is the sign of a skilful writer, and by embedding eclectic cultural
knowledge into her stories, Carter courts literary recognition
...
It is still a
feature that has contributed to her posthumous popularity as a writer for study
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The Erl-King presents a number of hyperbolical
passages addressing the ‘profane mysteries’ of desire and its effects: the
description of the Erl-King’s embrace ‘made of water’ is lessened by the sentence
that ends ‘the stream I have become’
...
Her language paradoxically
fails because it is inconsistently simplistic
...


An important aspect of Carter’s style is its playfulness and her willingness to
enjoy the ambiguities of meaning that exist in familiar, colloquial language
...
People very rarely notice these … sort of private jokes with myself and
with whoever notices, and I used to enjoy doing that very much’
...
Her language paradoxically
fails because it is inconsistently simplistic
...


An important aspect of Carter’s style is its playfulness and her willingness to
enjoy the ambiguities of meaning that exist in familiar, colloquial language
...
People very rarely notice these … sort of private jokes with myself and
with whoever notices, and I used to enjoy doing that very much’

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