Vampires in the Chamber

Disrupting the traditional fairy tale in nine lines.

An explicit and erotic retelling of the traditional Bluebeard fairy tale, Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber is a short story that, while remaining true to the form of a traditional fairy tale, subverts conservative values with content that is disruptive in its intertextuality. A close examination of a seemingly inconsequential scene reveals a treasure trove as rich as the strong box belonging to the Bluebeard Marquis himself.

The Bloody Chamber opens with a nod to traditional form, by indicating that the poverty stricken Young Bride, is on a journey to a new married life, “away from girlhood, away from the white...” and into the arms of a very rich man - indeed “The richest man in France.” (Carter, 1981, p.12) Yet at story’s end, reflected like the many mirrors littered throughout its telling, is the colour white again, now an insufficient cover for her shame.  By this stage the reader has been made aware, in no uncertain terms, that this is no conventional tale “perpetuat[ing] and inform[ing] the cultural norms surrounding the world [in which] the child lives.” (Kuykendall and Sturn, 2007 p.38) Instead, Carter peppers her retelling with intertextual references that create a pattern of disruption and undermines the conservative values that fairy tales have come to embody.

A telling example is that of The Young Bride’s most immediate predecessor, identified fleetingly while scrabbling through her new husbands personal portfolio, and revealed as the Romanian countess with a “pretty, witty face, and her name – Carmilla.” Carmilla is a name familiar to students of gothic vampire tropes, both as the name of one of two protagonists in Joseph Sheridan LeFanu’s 1871 short story of the same name, and the name of a hotel in the 21^st century television series based on True Blood - the adult fairy tale vampire novels of Charmaine Harris.

LeFanu’s Carmilla is the story of the eponymous adolescent lesbian vampire, who befriends and then seduces the young Laura. Carmilla pre-dates Bram Stoker’s Dracula by 26 years.[1]  Featured in two episodes of the second series of True Blood, the Hotel Carmilla provides an accommodating retreat in Dallas, Texas for vampires to indulge in their “marginal world of darkness, secrecy, vulnerability, excess and horror.” (Sceats). While True Blood arrived on the vampire scene well after the death of Carter, it marks the name Carmilla as an intertextual identifier – Carmilla is an important name, and note should be taken.

Having travelled to her new home with her new master, encountered his pornographic collection of art and literature and suffered the requisite deflowering, the Young Bride is granted the keys to the castle. Told in no uncertain terms what she can and can’t do, she immediately embarks on a transgressive exploration of the Marquis’ private space. It is here that the Young Bride finds a postcard from the dead Carmilla, featuring “a Typical Transylvanian Scene” addressed to the Marquis:

“On the occasion of this marriage to the descendant of Dracula – always remember, “the supreme and unique pleasure of love is the certainty that one is doing evil”. Toutes amities, C.” (Carter, p40)

With this discovery, the Young Bride soberly notes that her “most recent predecessor...

had been... the most sophisticated.” Referring to Carmilla’s quote from French poet 

Charles Baudelaire (intimate papers 213) she seems unaware that by recognising 

the quote herself, she is also acknowledging her own sophistication. 

Baudelaire wrote extensively, and at the time controversially, on themes of love, 

death, evil and notably, vampires and lesbians. The next line to the quote is “both men 

and women know, from birth, that in evil lies all bliss.” (Baudelaire, 1919)

In less than nine lines, Carter has laid bare both the heritage and the future of the Young Bride. Rather than a descendant of Dracula, her predecessor could be considered his forbear, or in vampiric parlance, “maker”. Sarah Sceats’ in depth analysis of the vampiric tropes ever-present in Carter’s work also makes reference to Sheridan LeFanu’s Carmilla, and Stoker’s Dracula. (Sceats, 2001)  But strangely, Sceats fails to mention that simple scene that brings key members of the vampire family tree together. Sceats focuses on Carter’s use of vampiric imagery to signify predatory behaviour that will ultimately be punished and destroyed. She argues that it is “the Bluebeard figure of the cannibalistic Marquis [with]...lips that are repeatedly described as red and often as wet” who represents the vampire figure of The Bloody Chamber. (Carter, p109)

In focussing her attention on the Marquis, Sceats ignores Carter’s descriptions of the Young Bride - uncannily like Sheridan LeFanu’s Carmilla - as thin and pale with a white face, who saw herself in reflection as a “child with sticklike limbs” and who slept throughout the day.  (Carter, p.15) In naming the Young Bride’s predecessor for a lesbian vampire and as Dracula’s descendant/maker, Carter has placed the Marquis’ murder of her as an assertion of patriarchy over lesbian gothic counter-culture.  By doing so, is Carter foretelling the Young Bride’s destiny for corruption and thus inevitable destruction?

In Sheridan LeFanu’s story, the young girl Laura describes her thinly veiled lesbian encounters with Carmilla:

“I experienced a strange tumultuous excitement that was pleasurable, ever and anon, mingled with a vague sense of fear and disgust... I was conscious of a love growing into adoration, and also of abhorrence.” (Sheridan LeFanu, Ch.4)

Likewise the heroine of The Bloody Chamber describes her burgeoning sexuality in terms of fascinated disgust:

“And, for the first time in my innocent and confined life, I sensed in myself a potentiality for corruption that took my breath away.” and later, “I was aghast to feel myself stirring” and again, “...even when I thought myself most in love with him...No I was not afraid of him; but of myself...I blushed again...to think he might have chosen me because, in my innocence, he sensed a rare talent for corruption.” (Carter pp 11, 15, 20)

Both vampirism and lesbianism, signified in the role of the sexually empowered woman, are challenges to conventional social order; and so by casting the Young Bride in the intertextual light of her predecessor’s fate, Carter’s fairy tale seems set to become a yet another lesson for young women, of avoiding sexual adventure for fear of mutilation and death. As the Young Bride goes on to discover the bodies of the Marquis’ three previous wives, including Carmilla, she becomes literally marked for destruction. At the last minute, Carter overturns the traditional fairy tale ending, and casts the avenging angel not in the form of patriarchal brothers exerting ownership, but in that of her mother - who had killed a man-eating tiger in Hanoi - penetrating the Marquis’ head with “a single, irreproachable bullet.” (Carter, p40)

Yet while she is spared death, the Young Widow must now wear her red heart on her brow, a permanent mark that “no paint nor powder...can mask.” (Carter, p41.) Her indeterminate status as someone who has challenged the social order is visible to all but her lover. Although the content is different, the fairy tale form remains, and it is within this structure that Carter disrupts the traditional aim of conveying and imposing a conservative value system.

[1] Even vampire geography is a significant flag to the reader. Carter places the scene depicted on the card in Transylvania “with a view of a village graveyard, among mountains, where some black-coated ghoul enthusiastically dug at a grave.” (Carter p26). Transylvania, in the Cartharpian Mountains of what is now Romania and where the Marquis’ third wife Carmilla is a Countess. Sheridan LeFanu’s Carmilla is set in Upper Styria in the Lavanttal Alps – now part of Austria – and where Stoker’s earliest draft of Dracula originally had that tale taking place. (Stoker, 2003) Stoker then changed the setting to Transylvania, and the cycle is complete.

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