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THE BLOODY CHAMBER
COLLECTION

CHARACTERISATION

COMMENTARY
The nature of the short story as a narrative form allows for characters to be
defined by the use of carefully selected detail
...

Some are amalgamations of a wider variety of recognisable character types
drawn from other literary genres
...

Carter allows some of the characters to perform the role of narrator, though
none of them tell their stories in the same way
...
The revelation
of the true identity of Carter’s characters are often accomplished through an
thoroughly other-worldly moment of magic
...
The men are mostly figures of authority whose power of wealth
has been inherited in one way or another
...


THE NARRATOR PROTAGONIST
A protagonist is taken to be the first character to act or the principal character
causing most of the events in a narrative
...
She wants to
show who has the power to make things happen: the new bride in The Bloody
Chamber, the girl in The Tiger’s Bride and the eponymous character in Puss-inBoots all narrate the events of their stories as a first person narrative
...

All three of these narrators must be considered when looking at Carter’s
characterisation, in addition to their differences with each other
...
She introduces her experience as a sequence of
memories
...
She is a creature of sensations, delighting in
the description of the ‘impeccable linen of the pillow’; the gift of her mother’s
black silk dress ‘with the dull, prismatic sheen of oil on water’; her satin
nightdress, ‘supple as a garment of heavy water’; and the Marquis’s kiss ‘with
tongue and teeth in it’
...


THE NARRATOR PROTAGONIST
The girl only glimpses sight of the truth about the Marquis – and herself – in
‘gilded mirrors’: ‘And I saw myself, suddenly, as he saw me’
...
She reports
the moment of consummation of her marriage through the reflections in the
mirrors, as if she only exists in the Marquis’s frame of vision
...
Making
music is her escape, her gift of self-creation and self-realisation
...
She remains an odd combination of fearlessness and resignation – ‘I
knew I must meet my lord alone’ – dependent on her mother, her ‘avenging
angel’, for her ultimate salvation
...
She resents the way she cannot prevent her
circumstances growing worse under her father’s neglect
...

Her disappointment in her father is clear as she lists the items of the ‘king’s
ransom’ that prompted him to gamble her away
...
She initially feels she is part of a ‘humiliating
bargain’, but she changes her view when the Beast changes his demand
...
Typically, Carter’s female character understands this by turning it
around: ‘The lamb must learn to run with the tigers’
...
She rejects the values of her father’s civilisation but
confirms the possibility of a ‘peaceable kingdom’ by becoming the tiger’s
bride and rejoicing in the revelation of her ‘beautiful fur’
...


THE NARRATOR PROTAGONIST
Puss-in-Boots is an anthropomorphic caricature of masculine opportunism,
and an amusing buffoon who boats he is ‘a cat of the world, cosmopolitan,
sophisticated’
...

He relishes his role as a raconteur and his language is full of rhetorical
flourishes, embellishing his part in the story
...

Carter neatly connects politicians – ‘all cats have a politician’s air’ – and
‘villains’ through this allusion to Hamlet’s bitter observation that ‘one may
smile and smile and be a villain’
...


THE NARRATOR PROTAGONIST
It can be considered misleading to call Puss-in-Boots a protagonist, as the
real protagonist – the ‘sleek, spry tabby’ – is hidden in the story
...

Without her ‘keening encouragement’, Puss-in-Boots would not have jumped
up to the lady’s windowsill; the tabby feeds him and arranges the rats in her
scheme to bring the lovers together; the ‘shadow-camouflaged young tabby’
disposes of the old man
...
The old feminist jibe that history should
be rewritten as herstory is brought to mind
...
There may not be a
better answer than Carter’s own view: that a storyteller should ‘suit herself’
...
The exercise of their power and authority is
the opposite of the weakness of the aristocratic father in The Tiger’s Bride and
the businessman father in The Courtship of Mr Lyon
...
Whether powerful or weak, they are all patriarchs – Carter
presents no positive model of the father role in any of these tales
...
The
Marquis, his title alone being a reference to the Marquis de Sade (who was
known to be beyond the norms of sexual behaviour), represents selfish
indulgence
...


PREDATORY PATRIARCH AND ABSENT FATHER
The narrator compares him to a lily and almost immediately describes that
flower as ‘cobra-headed’
...
He has
the stealth of a hunter, creeping coldly around ‘as if his footfall turned the
carpet into snow’
...

One of Carter’s most provocative acts in these stories as a whole is to make
his female prey respond to his attentions with arousal, although this character is
incapable of considering the possibility of female fulfillment
...
He rejects his prey as soon as there is evidence of
a mature and independent sexuality
...
This is hinted at
when the narrator links the aroma of the Marquis’s cigars with ‘little girl’
memories of her father ‘before he kissed me and left me’
...
Carter’s sardonic
comment on his sexual prowess – ‘he was soon finished’ – shows the short-lived
nature of his virility and undermines the power of his sexuality
...
Carter uses the device of a wolf-mad man, with no real character, to show
how identities can be transformed through care and compromise
...
Mr Lyon is
a manipulator; his courtship of Beauty is conducted through the father, in a
patriarchal manner, but he persuades Beauty’s father to hand over his daughter
through economic blackmail and ensures Beauty’s return to him through the
emotional equivalent
...
He recovers
his appetite swiftly enough on her return
...
Both characters put business affairs and riches ahead of their
real ‘treasures’, as seen in The Tiger’s Bride through the father’s ‘careless’
gambling with his daughter’s life
...


THE INNOCENT MALE
Some of Carter’s male characters are relatively innocent in comparison with the
predatory examples of patriarchy
...
He is unable to see the evidence of his lover’s past
transgressions, which is a forgiving and unusual trait in a man
...
As Polly Toynbee observed in the
Guardian: ‘The New Man is not here, and it does not seem likely that we shall see
him in our lifetime, nor in our children’s’
...
His defining characteristic is ‘lack of imagination’, making this
‘blond beauty’ appear inhumanly dull
...


The pianist’s mother has all the traits of a masculine hero from the world of
adventure stories: she shoots wild animals, she fights off pirates and generally
has had an adventurous past
...
She is equipped with ‘maternal telepathy’ –
Carter avoids using the clichéd phrase ‘female intuition’ – and therefore the
mother is a model of feminist virtue
...


THE MATRIARCH
The mother is romantic, having ‘gladly, scandalously, defiantly beggared
herself for love’
...
Carter
is presenting an all-action female who does not abandon her femininity to
compete with men
...

Her reappearance at the end of the tale, however, crashing through waves on
horseback with her ‘black skirts tucked up around her waist’ is even more
romantic and glamorous
...

She is the Marquis’s nemesis, the embodiment of ‘furious justice’
...
Carter examines
the jealousies involved in competing for male attention with another woman
...
The rose, as a
symbol of romance, is a dangerous weapon in her hands
...
Carter uses a sensual gesture of possessiveness to
indicate the Countess’s reassertion of her position and identity: ‘With her long
hand, she stroked her furs’
...
The child’s dramatic discovery that the wolf’s severed paw has
become ‘a hand toughened with work and freckled with old age’ shows her
learning that she cannot trust women of previous generations who have taken on
the role created for them by men
...

The child’s act of resistance transforms her circumstances; her ‘hard life’ in a
hostile climate becomes less difficult
...
Carter seems to be suggesting that each generation of
women has to free itself not only from patriarchal society, but from women
whose identity and nature have been warped by men into something monstrous
...
Her
argument was that women did not need to accept that role, and she uses these
stories to explore how that can be achieved
...
The character is a submissive woman
who enables Carter to explore the attractions of dominance as part of the
sexual dynamics of human relationships
...


THE VICTIM
Beauty in The Courtship of Mr Lyon is an obedient daughter who becomes a
‘spoiled child’ and then, at last, is redeemed as a prodigal daughter
...
She is
manipulated by the men around her; first by her father and then by Mr Lyon,
courted into surrendering what little independent will she possesses
...

The Count’s ‘child of his desire’ in The Snow Child is a male fantasy who
vanishes almost as soon as she is called into existence; she is the ideal woman of
male fantasy, unrealistic yet impossible to compete with
...


THE VICTIM
The vampire Countess in The Lady of the House of Love is trapped in a limbolike existence of permanent youthful beauty
...
Her release from
this empty ‘imitation of life’ and her ‘balked tenderness’ is an accident of fate;
she experiences the ‘pain’ of being human - for Carter, to be human is to suffer
feelings for others - and then dies
...
Carter is adept at exploring
how binary oppositions can be transformed into one another
...
Carter
shows how the hunter and the hunted are interchangeable roles
...
The imaginary terrors of Gothic monstrosity are
dwarfed in comparison to the real and unimaginable horrors of France
...
However,
Carter uses these stories to explore the feminist notion of a female identity
existing independently of, and not limited by, male identity
...
Her two versions of Little Red Riding Hood, seen
as an anonymous child in The Werewolf and the clever virgin in The Company of
Wolves, are both far less passive than the girl in the original tale
...
The tiger, ‘La Bestia’, is the apotheosis of the
male, or of female desire realised in male form, for Carter
...
He is ‘impeccable’, ‘potent’ and ‘chaste’, a ‘dreadful’
warning to careless fathers
...


He has a ‘sculptured calm’ in his male disguise, concealing the ‘annihilating
vehemence’ of the animal
...
She becomes an animal, rejecting her father’s world, in a union of
sensual pleasure with the Beast
...
In becoming true to the animal
within, men and women become ‘fully human’

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