Note: English essay on Angela Carter's short story anthology, The Bloody Chamber.
Carter uses religion
to infuse The Bloody Chamber (story) with gothic elements. What religious
references she does incorporate are not usually overt, but much more subtle,
adding to the story’s air of mystery, but because we know the stories well, we
can pick up on the comparisons and identify with them more easily. By using
religion, Carter further adds to the gothic elements of her story due to the
fact that religion is something that defies cold, hard clinical sight; it
defies the way of the world and its natural laws and logic, giving it an almost
magical power. Religion propagates belief in a higher power.
Historically,
religion is very important in Gothicism. At the time of the Industrial
Revolution – where science was making enormous developments (and pushing
religion out), where advances in steam power and machinery were celebrated –
gothic works such as Dracula focused on the importance of religion e.g. Dracula
being warded off with crosses, holy water, etc. They largely focused on the
positives of religion, celebrating its power by giving readers such monsters as
Dracula that are so foul that they defy its laws. However, not only does Carter
use religion to infuse her story with gothic elements, she subverts the way she
uses it, for ‘God’, the Marquis, is not good.
By incorporating
religion into The Bloody Chamber, Carter creates an almost supernatural
atmosphere that increases the tension of the story, making it something more
than just a tale of a sexually depraved, egomaniacal murderer, because religion
instils a believer with the sense that there’s something greater than us, far
beyond our mere physical human limitations out there in the universe.
Such is the way that
the female protagonist feels towards her murderous Marquis. In the text, sex is
the ‘religion’ as such, of the Marquis; it is what he worships, what he
believes in. For the girl, though – naïve and initially innocent, ignorant to the
nature of sexuality – the Marquis is the god of this religion, likened to such
a position. When she discovered his chamber, ‘The light caught the fire opal on
[her] hand so that it flashed… as if to tell me the eye of God – his eye – was
upon me.’ Before, the Marquis had been likened to little more than a priest or
a mere worshipper of his ‘religion’, his pornography described as ‘holy books’,
and the Marquis himself even teasingly calling the girl his ‘nun’, his initiate
into the dark arts of his religion. He was nothing greater than that, though.
However, once the girl makes her discovery of the horrors he’s perpetrated, her
fear of him and the knowledge of what he’s capable of elevates him to
godliness, something beyond what any normal human would or could do to
another person, especially since she’s within the chamber itself, his ‘heart’,
where his presence is everywhere. The fire opal on her finger is his, the chain
and collar he keeps on her, much more than simply a reminder of him; it’s the
collar of all the previous wives and victims before her, a burden she now
possesses.
What’s more, due to
his wealth, she’s surrounded on all sides by his influence and the sheer power
that derives from his status, to which – as a ‘poor widow’s child’ – she’s completely
unaccustomed to. To a commoner, his power is extreme, and the extent of this
power, the true nature she’s learnt of him and this wide-eyed naiveté of hers
all combine to create the impression of the Marquis being almost omniscient, omnipotent;
it’s beyond anything she could ever imagine.
By forbidding her
entry explicitly to this room, he’s not only become teacher and preacher in the
arts of seduction, but her tempter as well, just like God tempted Adam and Eve
by placing the apple tree in plain sight within the garden of Eden whilst
forbidding them to eat the deadly fruit. Eve and the girl might seem to be
completely at fault for being tempted, but it was God and the Marquis who put
the temptation right before their eyes.
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