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The Bloody Chamber How does Carter present the female characters? -…
The Bloody Chamber
How does Carter present the female characters?
The Bloody Chamber
Through the male gaze
"my satin nightdress...had slipped over my young girl's pointed breasts and shoulders"
"i was seventeen and knew nothing of the world"
"flat breasts and elongated thighs "
"I ceased flinching and he caressed my breasts"
"he stripped me "
"he kissed my nape"
submissive
"he stripped me "
"he'd bought me"
"he twined my hair into a rope"
"he kissed my eyes "
naïve
"i was only a little girl, i did not understand"
"it must have been my innocence that captivated him"
"i was seventeen and knew nothing of the world"
Puss In Boots
Represented as a possession of the husband, by the clothing she wears, has to wear a veil and has a keeper who is made to follow her around.
the male is more sexually experienced and the woman even though she is married is still a virgin so she is portrayed as pure and innocent, which is reoccurring throughout most of the stories.
the women, like the other women in the book, is voiceless, beautiful, innocent and treated as an object. The cat however, has it's own voice.
her bedroom is where she loses her virginity (the bloody chamber of the story)
links to transformation
at the end she receives his fortune, typical puss n boots ending.
The Werewolf
"Here, take your fathers hunting knife; you know how to use it."
"it went for her throat, as wolves do, but she made a great swipe at it with her fathers knife and slashed off its right forepaw."
in this story, one of the female characters is portrayed as confident and in control of the situation. she already knew how to use a hunting knife which is usually uncommon in a fairy tale, and then she was able to defend herself from the wolf.
"The good child does as her mother bids" This shows that the child is quite obedient. This is common in many stories because a lot of young women are portrayed in this manner
The Courtship of Mr.Lyon
There is a lot of symbolism using white as a sign of purity/innocence
"his girl child, his pet, the one white rose
Global issues - gender inequality, Gender representation/gender balance.
"take her the rose ,then, but bring her to dinner" - stereotype that all women love roses/flowers.
Transformation in this story plays a big role because we see that beauty is able to transform the beast into a man after kissing him this comes to show that as much as the beast was dominant when it came to the emotional aspect of their relationship beauty was the one in charge.
This shows female empowerment as well as transformation
Beauty uses her "beauty" as a way to live a better lifestyle. "Next morning, her father kissed her and drove away with a renewed hope about him that made her glad, but, all the same she longed for the shabby home of their poverty." Angela Carter presents beauty as a girl who stays with the Beast for the sake of her father and for a higher social status
Beauty just like most of the other girls in the story is young naïve and a virgin which is something that attracts the beast to her.
We see how women do things because they feel obligated to. "Do not think she had no will of her own; she was possessed by a sense of obligation to an unusual degree"
The Erl-King
Metamorphosis
The Erl-King is a metamorphic creature living between the worlds of wildness and humanity foraging for food.
"The Erl-King lives by himself all alone in the heart of the wood in a house which has only the one room." a
"He chops fallen branches for his fire and draws his water from the stream in a tin pail."
Power and Objectification
The Erl-King keeps birds in cages. The heroine finds this cruel. The caged birds are first symbolized as objectification of free souls which relates to objectification of the book's heroines.
"That was the way I walked into the bird-haunted solitude of the Erl-King, who keeps his feathered things in little cages he has woven out of osier twigs and there they sit and sing for him."
The heroine and the Erl-King become lovers, though she is “at the mercy of his huge hands” and naked while he is clothed. This shows that the heroine is seduced by the Erl-King, but she initially accepts her objectification and succumbs to the Erl-King.
"I always go to the Erl-King and he lays me down on his bed of rustling straw where I lie at the mercy of his huge hands."
“What big eyes you have” is a reference to Little Red Riding Hood. The "big eyes" seem to have caputured the heroine. It indicates that the heroine fears that she is trapped and the Erl-King will soon put her in a cage with his other birds.
This does link to how female character is protrayed in the story as the historical petriarchial mindset within women and physcial aspect of the Erl-King, leads the heroine to fear the Erl-King.
"There are some eyes can eat you"
Unlike in "The Tiger's Bride", the heroine in "The Erl-King" refuses to transform for the Erl-King to a caged bird, as this transformation has no intention of being equal and lovers, but so that she can be even further objectified.
"I loved him with all my heart and yet I had no wish to join the whistling congregation he kept in his cages"
Virginity
The heroine starts as young, innocent, and trapped by a male fantastical creature, the Erl-King. The Erl-King is sometimes a force of evil, but other times merely mischief and magic.
"...in the evenings when the cold
darkness settles down, I always go to the Erl-King"
"He is the tender butcher who showed me how the price of flesh is love"
Sexuality and Violence
The Erl-King undresses the heroine “like a skinned rabbit.” Just like in "The Tiger's Bride" where the heroine is having her skin licked away, the heroine in "The Erl-King" is “peeled” and must reveal her true self to the Erl-King, who holds all the power in the relationship.
"He strips me to my last nakedness, that underskin of mauve, pearlized satin, like a skinned rabbit"
While the Erl-King plays songs on his pipe and lures in birds, the heroine thinks about the Erl-King controlling the winds and capturing the birds.
"Falling as a bird would fall through the air if the Erl-King tied up the winds in his handkerchief and knotted the ends together so they could not get out."
Once the heroine strangles the Erl-King with her own hair, she realizes the gained enlightenment about the nature of her relationship and herself.
"I shall take two huge handfuls of his rustling hair"
"I shall strangle
him with them."
"She will carve off his great mane with the knife he uses to skin the rabbits; she will string the old fiddle
with five single strings of ash-brown hair."
"
Then
it will play discordant music without a hand touching it."
"
Then
she will open all the cages and let the birds free"
The company of wolves
"Here I am again missus...Get me a bowl of cabbage and be quick about it
This displays the behavioral trait women are meant to posses.
"Her second husband beat her"
" A witch from up the valley once turned an entire wedding party because the groom settled on another girl"
"She used to order them to visit her "
The words used to describe the female character implies that she may be one of the beings that lurk in the dark. However the following statement may prove to be because of her pride in her own power, as she is able to order the wolves to visit her"
“She is an unbroken egg, she is a sealed vessel; she has inside of her a magic space, the entrance to which is shut tight with a plug of membrane, she is a closed system, she does not know how to shiver" - she is seen as a virgin and an innocent character
The lady of the house of love
"She shakes, she trembles, her great eyes close beneath her finely veined, nervously throbbing eyelids"
"The beautiful queen of the vampires sits all alone"
"She is so beautiful, she is unnatural, her beauty is an abnormality."
"He has chosen the most rational mode of transport in the world for his trip"
The man is being portrayed as a typical "rational" man in contrast to the female who is portrayed as emotional.
"A child putting on the clothes of her dead mother"
In the dress she wears she looks like a young girl
"I shall wait for you in my bride's dress in the dark"
"She only knows of one kind of consummation"
She too is a virgin and she does not know of sex but only eating him.
"She has no mouth with which to kiss, no hands with which to caress"
"We shall turn her into the lovely girl she is"
The cyclist thinks he can cure her
"She looked much older, less beautiful"