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reginasrandomthoughts · 6 years

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The Bloody Chamber (short story) rambling analysis

TBH, I am posting it only bc I said I would. But boy, it is long. I am totally sure that I changed tone and style at least twice and that I left out some words here and there (I am not reading through all 8300 words at 2am. or ever) And this wasn’t even a school essay... it was meant to be fun.... *cries in the corner*

Enter at your own risk! Also, this is exactly as it was in my goodreads progress update feed bc I wrote it there, bc... I thought it would be shorter?

Oh, boy, where do I start the ramble fest so I would get some use out of it pre-exam? (yes, this is purely for me, and if a poor soul who is not me by accident reads it, please forgive me for not taking you into consideration) That being the preface, let me start.

First thing first, this is obviously a fairytale reimagining, and of the fairy tale Bluebeard. Love that one and loved how it even name dropped it on

pretty much the last page of the story. That was both a polite and bold move and I respect it. The fact that this text is based on that is very obvious and i would go as far as to say that The Bloody Chamber depends on the reader to know the story of Bluebeard before reading it, as, as the story says "Anticipation is the greater part of pleasure," (p15) and this way we can anticipate what is going to come and we understand the context of the story, where it is different, a bit more. It also gives the story a great deal of liberty as now it can gloss over some portions, such as the girl trying the many keys first, her taking her time exploring the castle and trying to behave and her falling for the other guy. These are elements that can be left out or done with shortly because we already know the story, know what is coming and thus do not need it and leaving them out can make the story shorter and keep the flow intact. I truly think that any longer than this, any more details than this and the story would probably have collapsed a bit. This is not the fairy tale style that you can tell near a fire, it banks on building up tension and anticipation so much that it needed to get to the climax quickly or else the tension would have broken on its own and would have killed the story.

Now, I have cited the flow of the story, and so let us talk about it. But first, let me drop it in: retelling Blue Beard as the erotic horror story that it always had the potential of being is amazing. A+ idea, 10/10 would reread again.

Now as for the technical part of the story, I truly admire how tightly crafted it is, the interconnectedness of it, where there are no truly wasted words as the similar words and expressions come back so often that they can just build up this truly sensuous image. There are words like voluptuous and sinuous and so many words that as a result of them appearing frequently and through the explicit evocation of sexual desire just make you think of sex. It fills it with sexual tension on one side.

But on the other side there are the words and images that hint at a darker nature. The husband is many times connected to animal brutality, and just brutality in general, and in two ways.

On one side there are several times when the imagery of food is evoked in connection with her, she is treated as some kind of delicacy that just might be eaten up, a pound of flesh brought on the market, or as in the end it is revealed, a fine game hunted and trapped.

On the other side the brutality comes from the history of the husband (fuck spelling the rank, but for the record, he is a Marquis). first of all, we he is connected through a gift to Catherine to Medici, a (by reputation, do not know much about her) ruthless woman, who has given the family quite a while ago a ring, made of fine gold and an opal the size of a pigeon’s egg (p9). dunno if has anything to do with it but found some info that says the opal is also connected to seeing a change of colour (which might reference how post marriage she will see his true colours) and in the short story it is explicitly stated that opal is a bringer of bad luck (p9). So we can see that the marriage is doomed from the beginning and through the connection to the brutal queen, the long line of dead women we almost didn't even need the reminder of the Marquis's own line of dead wives who wore and "returned" the ring to him to see how this will end badly.

Another piece of ancestral jewelry that is a gift from him is a choker with rubies in it, it is described as an "extraordinarily precious slit throat". And is explained in the next paragraph to be a remain of the trend by French nobility to wear chokers as a reminder of the mass beheadings (p11) and this is something that she must wear during sex as well, as a matter of fact he especially makes her put it on for it. (p17) Now this is a combined foreshadowing. On one hand, it tells us how he wants to kill her: chop of her head the same way St. Cecilia's was (the portrait of whom, another musician, is put up in her piano room. But on the other hand the choker is a symbol of escaping the blade, which us explicitly pointed out as well.

Another brutal element from the past is his seeming nostalgia that back in the times he could have hang, like a flag, their bloody bed sheets to prove her virginity to everyone. (p19)

on p33 it is also revealed that the castle is called the Castle of Murder by the locals and there are stories about the brutality of its former owners, esp. a story about how one of them literally hunted women in the woods like foxes.

But this bit is revealed very late in the game, after the chamber and everything else. Still even without it he has a very creepy vibe to him. She feels it too, she describes him as oppressive and at a part she likens the place to like a huge cage and notes how the tides will cut her off from the world. Another part to note is the terms in which their "love-making" is described.

Their room is the ancestral room, many have lain in it before, including, most likely, his previous wives. For her specifically, a row of mirrors that multiply her are added and when they have sex it is described from the perspective of someone looking at these mirrors: " a dozen husbands impaled a dozen brides". (p17) 'impaled' is a word that connects both to the erotic and murderous components. (Switching over to phone, will probably have more mistakes bc my phone is a little bitch. ) we also get to see what it is like to have sex with him. "As if he had been fighting with [her]" (p18) he "shrieked" and cursed when he orgasmed, his "deathly [or perhaps deadly] composure" shattered. When he was done he was like a felled oak (p17-18). None of these are peaceful or loving images but they are connected to those.

After they are done we can see phrases such as "my husband, who, with so much love, filled my bedroom..." , "reminiscent of papered flesh" "stroked" "caressed" "with tenderness" and he comforts her with murmuring "[she had] never heard before, a voice like the soft consolation of the sea" (p18). He apologizes for hurting her. But the brutality seeps into it as well: the word "embalming" is potent with what is yet to be revealed in the chamber and so does incense. Beyond that she has bled in the process of love making, afterwards the necklace still bites into her neck and her husband says that he couldn't help hurting her. How odd it is to say that but it will tie into a rather odd theme of the story. After this of course, he has to break the idyllic honeymoon by leaving and he also insults her by both diminishing the honeymoon's importance and by saying that he has bought her with "a handful of colored stones and pelts of dead beasts". This again brings in the element of death and foreshadows the moment he will call her whore.

Another element that enters here is the element of ownership. He is ire she won't run bc he owns her (though such allusions were made previously as well).

Circling back a bit to the sex scene and its violence.

The act is violent and is followed by something more tender yea, but what is even more important is that she believes that it might have given her a glimpse into who he truly is without his masks. This is going to be a motivating desire for her just a bit later, to know who he truly is and the placement of this idea connect his real self to all of the following: pain, violence, sensual pleasure, comfort, death, corruption. Yes corruption. I guess it is time we talk about the lilies. (Or more accurately I ramble on about them). P15: "The lilies I always associate with him; that are white. And stain you". This, next to her innocence what comes up the most. She might have been an innocent but he claims that her white face promises a "debauchery only a connoisseur can detect". This makes her his potential equal, his pair as he (Prev quote from p20) is described in terms as "satyr" (p19) , "lecher" (p15). He is a perverse who collects books with phonographic images in them (p17), has painting of erotic nature ( p20) and poses her into a very pornographic situation and makes comments on her like that on several occasions (p15, p11, p19). She is aware of the nature of these situations at each occasion and she is not immune to them and their effect. She responds to his desire as early on as p11: " for the first time in my innocent and confined life, I sensed in myself a potentiality for corruption". She is also the one who recognizes how pornographic her undressing is on p15, she does want to read a yellow covered book and is enchanted by the pornographic images in his book (p16 and p17) and after they have sex a "queasy craving" awakens in her. She has "dark newborn curiosity" she "longs for him" at the same time she is "disgusted by him" , which can suggest that she is resisting the corruption (p22). Nevertheless she lusts for him and at this point the question of ownership comes in again. She accuses him that he left ther to suffer in her inability to fulfill her newfound desires to "show his mastery" over her (p22). Which brings in the idea of sexual domination.

And I think we arrived to the point where we must enter, or at least approach the bloody chamber.

First of all, let me tell you straight out of the gate that I am not quite sure what the bloody chamber is representation vise. Story vise, it is a trap. Now, where does this enter into the story: they had some good sex, he received the call, announces his upcoming departure, they eat dinner, and then they go to the library (coincidentally, where she found the lewd book).

This means that she already got a taste of what pleasures the flesh can offer (I am really trying to not be vulgar hear), she thought that she got a glimpse of the true him, and she knows that in theory she will be lonely and on her own, as the mistress of the house, for the next 6 weeks. at least (p18).

And into this he drops the bomb of the key chain.

"Then, slowly yet teasingly, as if he were giving a child a great mysterious treat, he took out a bunch of keys from some interior hidey-hole in his jacket" p19.

This is a decent place to start untangling this whole mess (btw, @me: yes, i switched back to desktop, much easier). He is teasing her, trying to arouse her curiosity. It is sort of offered as a reward, perhaps for her doing well previously (yes, I do mean in the bedroom). The keys are mysterious not only bc she doesn't know what they open, but also bc she doesn't know the true reason of why she is getting them. The keys also represent him and his wealth. There are keys to trivial areas like the kitchen but also to the picture gallery with priceless paintings.

And here taking a break from the quote analyses I bring me the disturbing stuff: daddy issues and incest:

So it is not surprising that the Marquis, who collects lewd images tells his young wife about them. But there is one image that stands out even though it is glossed over: "a pair of very special Fragonards, commissioned for a licentious [promiscuous] ancestor, who it was said, had posed for the master's brush himself with his own two daughters...." (p20)

Knowing what kind of paintings he likes, and what kind of titles these invented (yes I tried looking them up, source says invented) paintings have "Sacrificial Victim", "The Foolish Virgins" "Out of the night we come, into the night we go", we can safely assume that those, as well as this specific painting are... explicit. Which means that one of his ancestors had erotically charged paintings made of himself with his daughters. And our present Marquis left them on the wall and is not ashamed to talk about them. As a matter of fact, talking about them triggers him to tell her how her face has a promise of debauchery. He assigns a daughterly role to her AS WELL AS that of a wife. He calls her child" on many an occasion even when he is talking to her RIGHT AFTER they had sex ("My dear one, my little love, my child, did it hurt her") and before that as well "Have the nasty pictures scared Baby?" (p18 and p17). He even talks to her in 3rd person like you would to a young child. Disturbing. Well at least she is canonically seventeen.

He is also much older than she is and she is also a girl who lost her father so she has no male authority figure in her life. I really don't want to spell out what this adds up to, but it certainly adds a whole new dimension to the conclusion.

Now back to the quote. He goes on to explain how much he has a king's ransom worth of fine China from this brand, a queen's ransom's worth of China from the other brand (p20), (yes he keeps those locked up) he has keys to safes that have enough jewelry in them that she can change her necklaces and earrings three times a day and he has share certificates that are worth even more.(p21)

She can have at them all.

He purposefully leaves one key unaccounted for. and she asks if that is the key to his heart (p21) and demands it away from him. He "dangled the key tantalizingly above [her] head, out of the reach of [her] straining fingers" and he answers that it is not a key to his heart but to his "enfer". This word triggered my mostly forgotten French, it means hell.

Be back to that in a moments. Than he goes on to say these: "Every man must have one secret, even if only one, from his wife" "promise me you'll use all the keys on the ring except for that last little one" "make toy boats out of my share certificates, if it pleases you" "promise me, if you love me, to leave it well alone" "there I can go... to savour the rare pleasure of imagining myself wifeless" (p21). With these words he placed the highest possible value on this room, above the worth of the certificates that are worth millions. This is something money cannot buy. But this is also the ultimate, hands off, don't touch me, ever. She caught only a small glimpse of his true self and now she wants all of him, his heart, she wants to know who he is, and he especially set that place up as his own private place where he can be himself. He says that the room is at the end of "a dark little corridor full of horrid cobwebs that would get into your hair and frighten you if you ventured there". She warns her specifically: it is a dark place where the past dwells, and my past would frighten you, because there I go specifically to imagine what it would be like if I had no wife. It is a warning that she cannot understand especially because of her innocence: that is a room where "husband" and "wife" cannot coexist. There is no place in it for the both of them. She shows that she doesn't get the warning by replacing the keyword "wifeless" with "bachelor" later (p26).

This room is a dangerous place, where his most private and sinful desires live but he is trying to contain them. He calls it his hell which means that he suffers from it as well.

The problem is that this "one secret" is his true self, the core of his being that she desires to know. He is willing to offer her all the material wealth and is willing to settle for these odd substitutes for his fantasies (the choker and St. Cecilia instead of the beheading) so long as she can leave him in his solitary existence. Now. This is the text. What is the subtext?

Sexual desire. She caught a glimpse of who he is during sex, as a result she wants to see more of it, she wants to have all of him, pretty much the first thing she misses about him is his touch, the room itself is about his sexual desires... and in the middle of his whole explanation of what he has we get this sentence: "in my innocence, he sensed a rare talent for corruption. Combined with everything that came before it this has to refer to her feelings.

Now is as good as any to have the topic of sexual dominance re-enter into this discussion: it’s a matter of control. By entering into the chamber she is disobeying him, challenging his authority, his dominance and that is why she has to be punished. The story explicitly says via Jean- Yves that " you disobeyed him... that is sufficient reason for him to punish you". But the issue is also more complicated.

So now we are finally at the point where she has the keys. She meets with this new guy. He is blind. He cannot see her beauty that tempted the Marquis. he is shy. In this sexually charged world he is the new innocent one but one that does not seem to feel sexual desire himself. He is the safe option (more on that later).

Now let’s get to where she switches on all the lights. She creates artificial daylight, light that can reveal all the secrets her husband is hiding (btw I forgot to note that the bunch of keys came from a hiding place as well? that is a whole lot of hiding: the keys are hidden, he at first tries to hide the last key by ignoring it, the room is hidden though he reveals it too, later the drawer has a hidden compartment as well. he is hiding himself well, yet he wants to be seen, hence the reveals. )

Once there is light she is not afraid to explore and she goes for the study, after she proved that she is not a greedy mistress who will order everyone around and ask for whatever. Even the jewels she puts away bc "[she] would not find his heart amongst the glittering stones". (p25) she searches his drawers and even notes that he must have a lot to hide if he is doing it so thoroughly. She also finds some papers that hint at criminal activity and she even ponders if the crime alone is his reward. She gets so close to figuring him out, to sensing the danger but she is still impressed by "his zeal for secrecy". (p25) and then the hidden drawer pops up with the single folder marked as personal. "I had the brief notion that his heart... lay in this file. It was a very thin one". (p26) she is still looking for his heart, for him.

Now what does she find in that file? Trophies or keepsakes from the previous wives. (hard to tell the difference in this situation) Love notes to be exact.

The first she pulls is a napkin from the La Couple, a restaurant, on the Boulevard du Montparnasse, which is not in Montmartre, where the Her worked as a barmaid in a café (p10), but close enough. I will take it. The note says " My darling, I cannot wait for the moment when you may make me yours completely". This is important bc it is in part submissive, it is offering full control to him and him alone, but as another poem or work I have read said it "you cannot belong to me fully until even a piece of you belongs to someone else" so having her fully to him would mean severing all of her other ties, which means killing her. She can only be truly his, and his alone until she is alive. This note makes it sound like her murder was to a degree a shared desire, they both wanted to unite in that violent way.

Second note is from the singer and it has the single world Until scrawled across a score of Liebestod from Tristan. Liebestod means "love death" the erotic death of two lovers, the consummation of that love in or after death. Which also means something like "yeah, I totally wanna be in your erotic murder fantasy". or something similar. I am mildly sure that all the other women kinda knew what they were signing up for. The lat one is from the Romanian countess, it is a postcard of a graveyard where a grave is being dug. The note this time around says "On the occasion of this marriage to the descendent of Dracula - always remember, "the supreme and unique pleasure of love is the certainty that one is doing evil." Toutes amitiés, C.”

Blatant. These women have to have known what was going to happen. They all are making references to it. This note even reassures him that in love one has to do evil. Carmilla, the countess calls herself a descendant of Dracula and that is accurate due to intertextuality: she is Romanian, from Transylvania to be precise, just like Dracula. She is a countess, the female pair of the count, which was Dracula's title. Her name is Carmilla as in the novel Carmilla about a female vampire, but one that also came before Dracula, but this Carmilla lives after Dracula. Confusing? Well, I don't know how hard I was intended to think about this, but it feels like there is this monstrous woman (a vampire) who in a way gave life to his male counterpart and received new life (relevancy) through him. I am not saying f-ed up incest, but I am. It's complicated. Kinda like a self-birthing metaphor if I read really hard into it. The point that I am obviously supposed to get though is that she is a vampire, something that was a symbol??/metaphor??/way to discuss sexual repression. And a vampires sexuality is always predatory and connected to violence. Carmilla and the Marquis might just have been two monsters finding each other.

(p26, all of that). Back to our little lady: she does not understand these "grown up games" but she feels like "these were clues to his self that showed me, at least, how much he was loved, even if they did not show a good reason for it". (p26) She doesn't see the reason, bc she does not understand the game, that these people found death to be some kind of dark, erotic pleasure, an ultimate expression of love and ownership.

So since she does not really get it, but only knows that this is a part of her husband she decides to go and find him. To quote (long quote) "Perhaps I half-imagined, then, that I might find his real self in his den, waiting there to see if indeed I had obeyed him; that he had sent a moving figure of himself to New York, the enigmatic, self-sustaining carapace of his public person, while the real man, whose face I had glimpsed in the storm of orgasm, occupied himself with pressing private business in the study at the foot of the west tower, behind the still-room. " (p26) There is it again sex and the true face, and also an issue I have not mentioned and will not discuss yet: doubling.

Anyway, she goes to the chamber. He called it his hell and suitably, it is underground, and the soothing sound of the sea does not reach it.

Before she enters there are some pretty neat similes: "the key slid into the new lock as easily as a hot knife into butter." (p27)

And now I got to one of the fun parts where I can start to throw in a theory: I already mentioned recently, that these women probably knew what they were getting into (further evidence is that the opera singer had a smile on her dead lips). I also already mentioned that the Marquis made this place sound like older than it was: cobwebs and all, like it was a part of his past. Like it is the past (not the present or her future). I also mentioned that he is trying to contain his murderous desires. He was suggesting that when the impulse comes to him he will lock himself away from her, far away from her. And here is another piece: the lock is new. I wonder was it made recently? in preparation for her? It was her innocence that attracted him. Maybe he did not want to devour her, and we will see further support for it a bit later on.

Anyway, we get another soft mention of how her innocence is already tainted (this is important bc she is quickly loosing to his desires (and to her own that were triggered by his, so really to his desires) the quality that attracted him to her, a.k.a. what was keeping her safe.

Also important to note before we enter is that she thinks that she "might find a little of his soul" inside. (p26)

Now after this there is a soft break, a single empty line before we enter and the entrance starts with a quote from the Marquis's favourite poet: "There is a striking resemblance between the act of love and the ministration of torture" (p26). this harkens back to Carmilla's note about the pleasure of love being doing evil. Weird thing is, that she says that she learned something of that sort in their wedding bed as well. Does she mean that the evil was hurting her (painfully taking her virginity) but it came with certain pleasures? Maybe.

Now the room is dark. Electricity does not reach it. Her man-made daylight doesn't reach it so she has to light and relight candles, even the ones around the dead body of the opera singer. So she explores. At first she believes that the torture devices are there for contemplation and that it is a "little museum of his perversity" (p28), which is yet again an explicit link between sex and violence. Then she sees the catafalque.

Now a catafalque, especially one of Renaissance workmanship is something, expensive and precious. It shows care. There is incense burning, there are candles, there are flowers. Care was taken with this place and it especially shows in the fact that he embalmed her. Then she sees the skull of the barmaid turned model. Then she opens the Iron Maiden to find the Countess. (who died only 3 months prior.

Now let's take a look at how these women were killed: The opera singer, the performer was strangled by hand (in my opinion a rather intimate but not too sexual way to kill someone, or at the very least Criminal Minds never told me that if someone strangles someone than it is a replacement for penetration (that is stabbing or so I've been told). She is covered with a thin sheet "such as the princes of Italy used to shroud those whom they had poisoned", which can here mean that he tainted, poisoned her with his desires. She is also given flowers, just like divas are after a good performance. Coincidentally (not) those are the same kind of lilies that her room was full of when she arrived.

The skull is crowned with white roses and has a bridal veil and is hung into the air, hung like it is on an invisible wall, like an art piece, bc the woman whose skull it is was a model. Care was taken again to make it personal, to fit the death to the one receiving it.

This brings us to Carmilla, the vampire. She is in the Iron Maiden, a coffin, like the ones vampires sleep in. When the little lady is looking for her body she notes this: "Then, for some reason - perhaps some change in the atmosphere wrought by my presence - the metal shell of the Iron maiden emitted a ghostly twang; my feverish imagination might have guessed its occupant was trying to clamber out" (p29).

This further builds into the vampire motive by implying that she is undead. But of course she isn't. She has been impaled by the spikes of the Iron Maiden. She is impaled. This is a nice throw back to how she described her lovemaking with the Marquis, and how vampires are impaled (Dracula was) and how many say Dracula's real life inspiration was Vlad the Impaler. And just to keep playing with the vampire theme there is also a lot of blood.

As a matter of fact, there is a truly unreal amount of blood. She drops the key into "her forming pool of blood" (p29) she instantly notes that she looks so newly dead and so full of blood. But how the hell would this happen? I am going on a bit of a tangent here.

HOW THE HELL IS THERE BLOOD!? I understand the needs of the atmosphere and it is bloody brilliant and I will talk about it but first let me get this portion cleared. The Marquis was supposed to have been widowed 3 months ago (p10). Now at this page it also says that it was a boating accident and the body was never found. So either of two things happened: a) he killed her two months ago, stuffed her into the Iron Maiden, which impaled her and she died. Three months. Blood should have coagulated by the time of this incident. I did a quick search and it said that that should happen around 10 hours after death? And I can understand that the pull of gravity pulls the blood down and it flows out through the wounds on her legs (I looked up if it could work) but here is the thing. It should have flown out into the Iron Maiden and dried there.

Another possibility is that she died recently. That he stuffed her into this thing somewhere offscreen after they arrived back. BUT ten hours probably passed between point in time and his departure as well so same thing here (when he leaves there is a "little thin starlight in the courtyard" (p21) and now it is dinner time again bc she dismissed the servants for the night (p25). There is no logical reason why that corpse should or could bleed. Tangent over.

But of course, this ties into the vampire theme and so I will take it.

So, how does our little lady react to this all? With notions like she is "the next in the fated sisterhood of his wives" and she feels "pity for his other victims and also a dreadful anguish to know that [she] too was one of them". She counts herself amongst their ranks, has no illusions about escaping.

Now we have to note here that she dropped the key into the unlikely, undead blood of Carmilla. It is magic blood.

No, I am not even joking. Carmilla's blood is magic, because it shouldn't be flowing by then but also because you cannot get rid of it. When she realizes a bit later that her husband is coming back she tries to wash off the blood "but as if the key itself were hurt, the bloody token stuck"(p33). She can't wash it off.

Then later on when she is forced to retrieve it and show it to him she notes that the blood "had resolved itself into a mark of the shape and brilliance of the heart on a playing card. "(p36). This is the same blood that was not liquid enough to be washed off. But this is also the same magic blood that at the light touch to her forehead "had transferred itself" to it (p36) (the heart shaped mark) and that later on, even when he is already dead can be covered by "no paint nor powder, no matter how thick or white" (p41). The undead Carmilla, her predecessor, her newfound sister have marked her as a sinner, as the next in line to die and join them. With magic blood.

Anyway she goes back upstairs and tries to think of a plan (after she draws our attention to the portrait of St. Cecilia and wonders how she died bc she too already knows that she will share her fate.

She tries to think of a plan, but she thinks the servants might be in cahoots with the Marquis, prevent her escape or just plain old pretend that they don't know what she's talking about is she goes to them for help. She tries the phone, but the line went dead (yet not long ago she managed to get a call to her Mum in Paris during which she cried and this will be important bc of Deus ex Mama).

She still has the hope that her husband might truly have gone to New York, but in a moment of foreshadowing fake-out when she is playing her piano she hears the drop of a stick and thinks it is him in front of her door. It is not. It is the piano tuner brought in just today, just for her, safe and shy Jean-Yves who is very sympathetic to her plight. He also has a creepy crush on her bc of her piano skills. He was eavesdropping in front of the door. He also brought back to her the keys she dropped at her husband’s office, which is a nice gesture of giving her back some semblance of control.

So the theory here, my theory, is that Jean-Yves is an innocent who due to his blindness is impervious to the lady's charm and face that promises debauchery, he hears only her music that is tying her to St. Cecilia. Through his adoration and puppy dog love she gets absolved of her sins and that is why he is later on "her lover (p38 and p39) and why the Marquis thinks they are besotted and why they end up staying together. She on p41 notes that she is happy he cannot see her mark bc it "spares [her] shame". These are literally the ending words of the story yet I cannot make much of them. Spare her from having to be ashamed of being marked by an evil supernatural entity? Her shame of being in a past relationship? Her shame of her own sexual desires? (more on that later)

If Carmilla was a supernatural being then we can interpret Jean-Yves as one as well. He is the good guy, who ties the lady to the heavens through giving her back "her own particular magic" (p31) her piano music, bc he was the one who tuned it to perfection, He also has supernaturally good hearing and he could hear the change of the tides and the coming of her mother from one hell of a distance. He is an "angel". And as such he is chaste, there are no hints of sexual desire tying them together, which can bring this story out to have a very odd message I might not care for much.

It is also odd that while Jean-Yves is there to give her comfort he does not act. He listens to her, warns her of both the good and the bad, accompanies her to the courtyard but he cannot even open the gate on his own. She has to help with that. It's a but like he is not even tangibly, physically there.

But back to the juice part, the Marquis arrives home. He gives her a story of why he is home early that she does not believe. "I had been tricked into my own betrayal to that illimitable darkness whose source I had been compelled to seek in his absence and, now that I had met that shadowed reality of his that comes to life only in the presence of its own atrocities, I must pay the price of my new knowledge". (p34) She likens it to Pandora's box that she was always meant to open. Now remember that back a hella long time ago I said we were going to talk about doubling? We are talking about doubling.

With the little lady we are talking about mirrors. There are two selves: the innocent, naive self that is in the physical world and there is the more sensuous sinner, the version of herself that the Marquis sees, that she always sees only in the mirror. P11: she catches the first glimpse of what he sees when he looks at her in a mirror. The bedroom is full of mirrors (p14) she catches a glimpse of how they look when she is almost completely naked in a mirror (p15), their lovemaking is described from the perspective of someone looking into the mirrors as well (p17) and when she is preparing to meet him for her execution she, combing her hair she is again, looking into the mirror (p37). Now with her, this is interesting bc of two reasons: one she likens her mark to the mark of Cain (p36). The mark of Cain, as far as my vague knowledge of the Bible and 5 seconds of googling tells me, is the result of Cain's murdering of his sibling, Abel.

But who did she kill? I my opinion this is a reference that she merged with her reflection and became that sinful woman. She killed her innocent self, her "mirror sister" if you'd like. This idea is supported by her circumstances as well. The Marquis is the one that gives her the mark, and he is placed in the position of God, even as early as in the chamber: "as if to tell me the eye of God - his eye - was upon me (p29). His voice when he speaks before he gives her the mark sounds like "great cathedral organs that seem, when they are played, to be conversing with God" (p36) and she has to kneel before him. But likening her mark to the mark of Cain is also interesting bc the mark is supposed to protect Cain from a premature death. That protection was given to Cain by God and if this mark follows the analogy, then the Marquis gave her a similar mark that would protect her. This explains a lot: how she could get away with the loitering, how he took her time with the execution with kissing her nape and all that (39), how he froze up just long enough that her mother, who arrived just in time, mind you, could shoot him before he can do her harm. If this is, in its function Cain's mark then it did its job and the Marquis gave it to her, which I will gladly use in my reluctant killer argument.

Also, if the mark she is wearing is a mark of Cain then it makes sense that it does not come off and that she does not wish for the "angelic" Jean-Yves to see it.

Now, let's talk about doubling with the Marquis. With him it is more the personality. His projected and true selves. P18: she catches a glimpse of his true self while he orgasms. (he too gets doubled in the mirrors but it is alongside of her so it is not counted here) p21: with the key to your heart line his heart is separated off of the rest of his being, same happens with the file (p26) and his soul (p27). P26, she physically separates in her mind the public and the private by saying that he sent the public to New York and the private is in the chamber and again on p34 by saying that there is a self of his that comes alive only at certain times, when he encounters other beings like himself. There can be some duality sensed in how he plays both the role of the Devil, the tempter and God, who ultimately saves her. This duality is reflected in his attitude towards killing her as well: he feels both shamed and excited for what is about to happen. He comforts even as he threatens (p36).

So now we arrived to the question:

why did she have to die?

The answer is love. He told her that if she loves him she will leave the chamber alone (p21) but it was exactly because she loved him, that she wanted the true him that she had not obeyed. Alternatively we can make this about carnal lust, but just bc she caught her first glimpse of him during sex there is no need to go there. I think. I won't.

So as previously discussed she was looking for the true him, his heart, his soul, the phantom self that might have been waiting for her in the chamber.

Love was also the reason why the other women died, though as discussed, they might have been more willing participants in this weird love ritual than the little lady, with whom he might have expressed some reluctance.

So to revise my evidence for that so far: fair warning, new lock, talks as if in that is all in the past, mark of Cain, comfort giving.

Now here is a quote from when she returns back: "and it seemed to me he was in despair" "I felt there emanate from him, at that moments, a stench of absolute despair, rank and ghastly". She also observes that it was as if the lilies started to fester and his seductive scent was breaking down (p35), To me it communicates that his uglier nature is coming out in the presence of the sinner who has caught a glimpse of him and is tainted by him, but that his better part is not necessarily happy with the arrangement. "The evidence of that bloody chamber had showed me that I could expect no mercy. Yet, when he raised his head and stared at me with his blind, shuttered eyes as though he did not recognize me, I felt a terrified pity for him, for this man who lived in such strange, secret places that, if I loved him enough to follow him, I should have to die.

The atrocious loneliness if that monster"

He is looking at her with blind eyes not recognizing her, not seeing the temptation that he did from the very beginning. These are the last moments when he is still capable of these feelings because the worse part of him won this round and now that she knows what he truly is, what he truly is like she has to die. It is like he too met his double and him too was burnt up by it. She and him, they both saw the worst parts of each other (the disobedient wife who does not "love her husband enough" to respect his requests and the man that needs to own his lovers so completely only death will do). They are not on par, sure but there is this parallel.

Now I only want to highlight one more thing from here: "My little love, you'll never know how much I hate daylight' (p36). This ties back to how she switched on every lamp, how she flooded everything with light and how the sunlight illuminates the world and reveals the things that are hidden in the dark. He hates that his secret self keeps resurfacing, that room, that self is his hell, but he gets pushed back into it all the time, because once that self comes alive it takes over (as we see how he completely changes by the end, p36: still gives comfort calls her pet names p38: he calls her a wicked woman and a whore).

Now one more thing before we move on (yeah, I lie a lot about moving on from topics): the public self already married the young lady, that the chamber's self sees as St. Cecilia (actually calls her that on p38) but for the chamber's self this is the true wedding, the murder. This is the kind of union all the other women were hinting at and this is what is about to happen here too. He tells her that the castle is going to be empty because he had given the servants "a day's holiday, to celebrate our wedding" (p37). It is a ceremony too, like a wedding. She has to bath and get dressed in special dress for it and meet him at the "altar". When she is reluctant to go down to the courtyard to meet him he calls up to her: "Shall I come up to heaven to fetch you down, Saint Cecilia? You wicked woman, do you wish me to compound my crimes by desecrating the marriage bed?" (p38) She is still in the music room at this point so it is a metaphorical marriage bed, the place where he wants to execute her and he does not want to desecrate it by either moving the execution elsewhere or forcing her into it. She has to come on her own. When she appears with a boy she automatically becomes a "whore" for that same reason. She is cheating on him. This also makes the "why is he kissing her nape from p39 make sense. They are getting married, it is their Liebestod and she even notes that he gets her just as naked as the first time he undressed her (the time before they had sex), but this time around it is by cutting her clothes away.

Of course this wedding is interrupted by the mother crashing in on horseback and shooting the Marquis who is likened to a "man-eating tiger that had ravaged the villages in the hills of north Hanoi" (p40).

Ofc the mother sensing that her child is in danger (bc she never heard her child cry in happiness before and knew that if she is crying something is wrong) came in as a great hero is a kind of on the nose way to communicate that 'mother knows best'. She never really liked the Marquis and was sad about the marriage and now she came to protect her young and naive daughter from the predatory man who wanted to hurt her. It kind of says that it is a mother's job to do that because young girls still cannot recognize a threat like this.

Now before I wrap up the conclusion I want to point out one last thing. She had the castle transformed into a school for the blind so now there are children there (needed to explain to put the quote into context.

"I pray that the children who live there are not haunted by any sad ghosts looking for, crying for, the husband who will never return to the bloody chamber". (p40) Now she either understands that those women loved him and that through death they united with him or she is projecting a bit, so she is missing him. (though she mentions that Jean-Yves is living with them but she talks about him so briefly). Either way it is kind of poetic that now these women, who understood her husband better than she did are the ones who have to look for and cry for him though they had him more than she did when he was alive, though it can be viewed that the Liebestod was complete, but simply the other way around and she had him in his death (if we accept my mark of Cain line of thought. Also, the mark took the shape of a heart, which is the symbol of love, especially romantic love. Just throwing that in as well.

As for the conclusion, the part that we should learn from, let's see.... I kinda hate to say it but it is kind of a tale that warns against not only predatory men, but sexual desire, desiring and being desired as well, and especially against a woman taking charge of her own desires. (to be honest it can be understood as any sort of desires bc material wealth was what lured her in, sexual desire and love made her stay and at the end she gave away most of her inherited wealth and is in a non-sexually charged relationship.) Not really a moral i can get behind, but as a fairy tale it was made for a different time (and yes, I say that even though it is a retelling bc I don't feel like the core changed.).

#Regina shitposts literature #the bloody chamber #angela carter #yes i am the kind of person who thought it was going to be fun and it was fun until i entered the 4 hour of writing it #fuck #might take it down later

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