Why I love Angela Carter's The Bloody Chamber
Opening up the first pages of The Bloody Chamber in my A-Level Literature class, I was not expecting to discover a lifelong love of Angela Carter, a writer who has had so much influence for me.
So far, all I had learnt at school was that literature belonged to, and was written by, dead white men – anything funny or refreshing was not worthy of serious study. Reading Angela Carter changed all that, and in doing so, changed my life and my perceptions of creative writing itself. This was a change from our usual dry study; our class laughed together at the shockingly sexual content, her graphic depictions of revulsion and desire in the stories. Here was a woman writer talking openly about sex, with no hint of shame, no recognition of this taboo topic as anything other than natural and human.
At the age of 16, I had never read anything quite like it. Her indulgent, unapologetic prose and her fearlessness in tackling gender, violence, menstruation and identity opened up my eyes to what literature could be. These stories weren’t dusty, realist, watched over by the male gaze; they involved liberated women, seduction, vampires and werewolves.
I found a favourite short story in The Erl King, a disorientating and vivid tale about a girl who steps into the woodland to meet the oddly desirable Erl King, eventually strangling him with his own hair when she realises her entrapment. Carter’s feminism, then, is anything but conventional. When analysing tales such as these, I am always struck by Carter’s refusal to confine herself to a genre. Is her work magical realism, gothic, fantasy, feminist? Even from beyond the grave, she laughs at those trying to categorise her work as anything but simply unique to her. In borrowing tropes from folklore and fairy tales, Carter is able to rewrite her characters into a curious mix of the familiar, comforting fairy story, and the violent reality of the female experience.
But what really fuelled my obsession with Angela Carter and her eccentric life was her bold female gaze, leading her characters to be complex, flawed and problematic. Women who enjoyed their own subjugation, women who brutalised other women in pursuit of success, or who were happy to accept their inferior role under patriarchy. Women, like men, can be aggressive, fallible, and horrible, she seems to say. In the most dangerous of landscapes, isolated castles, forests, graveyards, circuses, she gave women agency, a voice of their own.
Since studying The Bloody Chamber at college, I have read much of Carter’s other work obsessively, taking refuge in her colourful prose and witty characters during difficult times. First, Fireworks, a collection of nine stories published in 1974. Strange, beautiful, subversive, several based on her time spent living in Japan. Of the stories in the collection, the most striking to me was Flesh and the Mirror, seemingly detailing a sexual encounter in a hotel with a stranger. But much more than that, it is a devastating tale of an attempt to find intimacy when alone and far from home, and losing yourself in the mirrors of desire and fantasy. I find much of myself in these stories, as I think we all know what it is to feel adrift during times of change.
In her novel Nights at the Circus, Carter’s heroine Sophie Fevvers relies on her mythical image as an acrobat performer with wings. The question through the novel remains – are her wings real or fake? Does it make a difference to her talent if they are? Underneath this is the age-old query – if femininity is merely a performance, or something innate, natural. This is a theme explored in a lot of Carter’s work, with heroines who revert to animalistic states in search of true identity, or must be ruthless in order to maintain feminine pretence.
The women in her work use stereotypes and stigma to their advantage, and have inspired me to do the same. Whether actresses, wives or wolves, these women are pushing and subverting boundaries in the most imaginative of ways. In reading the work of a woman who so openly and boldly pushed the boundaries of literary representations, I have found the courage to peel back the layers of expectation and live life on my own terms. I hope Angela Carter’s work will give you this courage too.
Written by Millicent Stott
I am an English Literature student and writer from Teesside and currently living in Durham. I love feminist literature, cats and fruity cocktails!
My insta is @millicenteve_
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