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Summary OCR English Literature A Level: Comparing Dracula and The Bloody Chamber & Other Stories
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From Gothic topic in Comparative and contextual study / Paper 2
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Dracula and The Bloody Chamber Storiescritics
ao3
Dracula 1897
The Bloody Chamber Short Stories: 1979
- All the stories in the collection are uncanny in the Freudian sense of the term,
they are simultaneously familiar and unfamiliar.
- Carter's text which in true Gothic fashion defies categorisation.
o It functions as a short story collection (this is how it is now marketed)
o And functions as an continuous text
o ^ a 'connected narrative' & echo chamber in which intra-textuality
(stories echo each other) competes with inter-textuality (references to
other texts) as its most characteristic features.
o The stories also bleed into one another.
- All of Carter's stories in the collection engage with material anterior to her and
in most cases to be identified with the fairy tale genre.
- Carter provides revisionist versions of stories belonging to European folklore:
o 'the Little Red Cap' narratives (The Werewolf, The Company of Wolves)
o 'Animal Groom' (The Courtship of Mr Lyon, the Tiger's Bride and
perhaps even Wolf Alice?)
- Carter also directs her revisionist lens towards vampire (and specifically
Dracula) and werewolf fiction (The Lady in the House of Love, Wolf Alice) .
Gender
- Carters decision to re-write fairytales is a typically post-modernist manoeuvre
and underlines a metafictional intention to challenge the patriarchal imprint
of fairy tales on the young mind.
- Carter says herself in Come Undo These Yellow Sands ‘a narrative is an
argument stated in fictional terms’
- She is happy to acknowledge the polemical nature of her fiction
- 70’s is also the decade of second wave feminism
‘Brittany’
- In her short stories we know exactly where the story is set unlike OG fairyales
- Perrault's moral is that its okay because its happening far away in a foreign
country to claim that the world is a better place now / that’s just how that
part of the world is.
- Carter sets TBC closer to uk (Brittany, which is also sonically close) and not
long ago
1
, - She brings male violence against women home
- Gilles De Rais – original medival model for bluebeard who murdered children
in Brittany, medival feudal lord
- The Brittany setting invalidates one of the two morals Perrault attaches to the
story: namely that the story need not distress its young readers unduly
because it is set (in time-honoured fairy-tale fashion) long ago and far away.
- Carter deploys the conventions of Second Wave Gothic to the services of
Second Wave Feminism. The ever-present reality of male violence against
women can only be acknowledged in this way. (modernity)
The Marquis (TBC)
- Modelled on The Marquis de Sade – wrote sadistic pornography (where we
get the word sadist)
- Carter wrote: The Sadien Women (same year as TBC) – study on de sades
pornography
- No distinction between discursive writing and fictional writing – she denies
that category.
- Her argument stated in fictional terms here is that the Marqui is a reflection of
western culture (seen in his taste of art & literature)
o “Rops’ the engraving carter speaks of exists, where the man is clothed
and the women is unclothed (Ecchymoses 1893)
o The fact that it isn’t made up has devastating implications
o She describes this as ‘the most pornographic of all confrontations’ (this
parallels the model wife and the painter – below )
o The wife finds extremely disturbing pornography in his library
o It features images of sati (Hindu practice where a woman must throw
herself on the funeral pyre of dead husband – women isn’t allowed to
survive husbands death, marqui loves this extreme patriarchy’
o Marquis has a taste for symbolist art – Counteract the new woman
(detailed in gender)
o Link to VH - ‘she look in her sleep more healthy ad more redder than
before. And I like it not’ VH is troubled by her healthy complexion (pre-
Raphaelite art)
Pre-Raphaelite art presents women as pale and wan parallels
cofl’s feminine ideal – Van Helsing is troubled by minas ruddy
cheeks and he arranges lucys hair as though returning her to an
imagined ideal.
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, Symbolist art is a reaction to this (women depicted as passive
and merely emblematic – they may inspire but are not
considered capable of inspiration – link marqui)
o Carter invents a painting by ‘Gauguin’ called ‘Out of the night we come,
into the night we go’, which sounds similar to the title of a real Gauguin
painting
o BUT the description carter gives does fit another painting by him that
exists
o ^ made up title but real painting of a vulnerable, naked pubescent girl –
troubling BUT this is high mainstream art which would sell
o Gaugin deserted his wife and five children and ended up in the south
pacific where he took 3 brides, one ages 13 and the other two 14. He
infected them and others with syphilis.
o ‘Rape of the Sabines;
o Painters such as Poussin painted 2 versions and sm male painters
wanted to pain this scene
o It’s a favourite subject matter in western culture – we understand that
the marqui would like this BUT its popular in culture
o ‘there is a striking resemblance between the act of love and the
ministrations of a torturer’
o ^ this is from Baudelaire (poet)
o Disturbing parallel, we’d hope there would be a difference between the
2, it becomes on person doing smt to someone else
- ‘his prick’ – male sexuality equated with violence
- When he finds her in the library he says ‘baby musn’t play with grownups
toys’ and his infantalising of her turns him on (he construed an image of
absolute innocenve) and he then consummates the marriage
- The marqui doesn’t want orgasm, he wants the big death
- Die was slang for cum in 17th century and therefore the little death of the
marqui doesn’t suit him
- He implies that times have changed as they do not hang the sheets out the
window to prove virginity anymore
- AO3; this exsted in spain/Italy until ww2 – also men don’t have to prove but
women do
- The marqui calls it a ‘flag’ – flag of occuptation
3
, - Objectication of women through art – objectification of women through
murder
- In Browning's My Last Duchess a psychopathic Duke has his wife painted then
murdered.
- This coincides with Carter's identification in The Sadeian Woman (1979) of a
parallel between female objectification and murder.
- His lack of a bluebeard allows him to inhabit the realm of the real as opposed
to the place of the phantasmagorical.
- MORE IN HUMAN AND ANIMAL
- ‘Isolde’
- By Richard Wagner (1813-83), Tristan und Isolde 1865 – the opera ends with a
Liebestod (love death), clue to the marqui’s bluebeard status
- ‘I saw him watching me’
o She's looking at him watching her
o Laura Mulvey 1975 The Male Gaze
- Bedroom filled with mirrors – allows him to threat women as objects
- Scopophilia – the marquis is into looking
- Male sexuality associated with sight, treating women as objects of male
scrutinity
- She ends up by marrying a man that cant look
o Jean-Yves (blind paino tuner)
o Sounds v. feminine (jean and eve), androgenous cos French name –
mina called gallant – she moves from scopophilia to someone blind
with female name
- ‘as if he were stripping the leave off an artichoke’ – as he strips her, man
consumes, women consumed – unlike moral pornography which celebrates
mutual consumption
- ‘he closed my legs like a book’
- Uxoricide – man guility of murdering his wife
Both the Count and the Marquis are consumers of women
- Just as Dracula bites his female victims as is said to have "banqueted" on
Mina, the Marquis is compared to a "gourmand" and the young wife to "an
artichoke" and "a lamb chop".
- But in contradiction of this it should be noted that Dracula allows Mina to
drink his blood.
- It could thus be argued that Dracula offers both Mina and Lucy the sexual
mutuality Victorian culture prohibits women.
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