Angela Carter’s Gothic-inspired short story collection The Bloody Chamber is a work that illustrates Carter’s fascination with monsters, monstrous figures, and, more specifically, monstrous women. Carter casts many of the women in her stories as marginalized, ghastly women with horrific features. This is especially interesting in part because she utilizes Gothic tropes to tell her stories, and also because the women in Carter’s stories reflect the liminal position women hold in patriarchal discourse. A striking...
Angela Carter’s Gothic-inspired short story collection The Bloody Chamber is a work that illustrates Carter’s fascination with monsters, monstrous figures, and, more specifically, monstrous women. Carter casts many of the women in her stories as marginalized, ghastly women with horrific features. This is especially interesting in part because she utilizes Gothic tropes to tell her stories, and also because the women in Carter’s stories reflect the liminal position women hold in patriarchal discourse. A striking instance of a monstrous woman occurs early in the collection with “The Tiger’s Bride.” A young woman’s father gambles her away to a mysterious being merely known as The Beast. By the end of the story, however, the young woman embraces the monstrous being that has been lurking within her all along. In a Gothic twist, the woman only becomes fulfilled after she has accepted her status as a monster:
“And each stroke of his tongue ripped off skin after successive skin, all the skins of a life in the world, and left behind a nascent patina of shining hairs. My earrings turned back to water and trickled down my shoulders; I shrugged the drops off my beautiful fur” (67).
Another interesting case of a woman acting as a monster is in “The Lady of the House of Love.” The sensual female vampire is condemned to a life of loneliness, occupying an obviously Gothic castle like a wispy Poe heroine. She inhabits a liminal space between living and dead, animal and human:
“She herself is a haunted house. She does not possess herself; her ancestors sometimes come and peer out of the windows of her eyes and that is very frightening. She has the mysterious solitude of ambiguous states; she hovers in a no-man's land between life and death.... The beastly forebears on the walls condemn her to a perpetual repetition of their passions” (103).
These obviously Gothic monsters are pervasive influences in Carter’s stories. She uses these monstrous figures, and specifically monstrous women, in order to establish Gothic tropes and question women’s marginalized position in patriarchal society.
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