Growing Love and Thorns

“Growing Love and Thorns While Reading Carter’s ‘The
Bloody Chamber’”

My
husband and I, fatigued from pandemic fear and wishing to travel as Covid-19
restrictions had decreased, planned a trip to Europe this summer. We wished to
visit friends in Austria and Belgium who couldn’t attend our wedding in 2021,
and my husband had a conference where the organizers invited him to give a
keynote lecture. We planned the Paris conference first, then Belgium to visit
his alma mater and his godson, then Austria to see godparents. We were
vaccinated and boosted against Covid-19 and thus far had not gotten the virus.
Although we masked while traveling, a small gathering where we were less
careful wrenched our plans from our hands: my husband tested positive two days
after, then I too began to show symptoms. A friend graciously offered her
country home in Normandy as an easy place for us to self-isolate while we
recuperated.

So
off we drove to Normandy in a rental car to a little village without even a
grocery store, just a small green with a map showing all the kilometers of
walking and biking trails around. We examined the map with perturbation, our
muscles fatigued by the mere effort of driving. We had been logging miles by
foot in Paris, particularly me since I was too chicken to use the metro while
he attended the conference, plus I struggle with subways that speak English,
let alone French, and prefer the logic of deer trails; but suddenly the idea of
walking even a few hundred feet overwhelmed us.

The
house offered to us had over an acre of lawn and tree groves, a swimming pool,
and patches of herbs and flowering roses. As much as I wanted to admire
Normandy’s beautiful countryside with its cool 70 degrees, soft sunlight,
fields of ripening wheat, and half-timbered houses, I immediately laid in bed
and shivered with a fever. But I couldn’t sleep.

My
husband made me tea and retrieved the book I had just begun while in Paris:
Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber, a collection of her short stories,
and I was re-reading the story of the same title. What I quickly realized was
the sheer oddity of reading this tale and how similar in place the story
occurred. The main character, never named, begins her first-person narrative
while traveling on a train from Paris to the Normandy coast. I pieced together
that her Normandy coast and castle lie somewhere near Le Havre, for she
mentions a telegram going to Le Havre, which was the closest coastal town to
where we were staying.

I
had read “The Bloody Chamber” before, but read it this time with new experience,
new light, new sounds. This time I read it to the call of a cuckoo in the
forest, I read it beneath the Normandy sun, the Paris sun, France’s summer
globe casting a pale golden slant that shone deep into the evening. I shuddered
as much this time as before at the horror of her husband the Marquis’s violence,
at her dire situation, although the narrator realizes it was inevitable: she
was doomed, she was destined. Yet someone intervened for her: her mother. I
read with new wonder at Carter’s boldness, as Kelly Link calls it in the book’s
75^th anniversary addition introduction, her daring storytelling as I
sat weakened by the illness plaguing our world, feeling like I had no words
left in me, let alone boldness.

What
was I to do with this uncanny serendipity? Is there some lesson to glean in the
synchronicity of reading a story set in Paris and Normandy, places I was then visiting?
We planned Paris, but not Normandy, and I chose Carter’s collection rather at
random. But what I’ve realized is the synchronicity occurred not from place,
but from time and subject: our trip coincided with the three-year date of me
having been sexually assaulted by a friend (now not a friend of course).
Although that once-friend was no Bluebeard to the degree that the Marquis
murdered his wives with torture devices in a castle dungeon, contained within
both “The Bloody Chamber” and my assault resides a degree of possession,
unsatiated and unattainable desire. And betrayal.

I
thought about the solitary castle in “The Bloody Chamber” while walking along
the beach of Cabourg (at a safe distance from others), the castle that sounds
so like the nearby chateau Mont Saint-Michel which is inaccessible when the
tide surges to shore. The Marquis’s castle that seemed to be almost made of the
ocean itself, the sea and mist. What does the narrator learn in her isolation, what
does she learn from her near murder? I’ll quote from the text where she speaks
with the blind piano tuner, Jean-Yves, as she tries to prolong her coming
demise by her sword-wielding husband:

“‘You
do not deserve this,’ he said.

‘Who
can say what I deserve or not?’ I said. ‘I’ve done nothing; but that may be
sufficient reason for condemning me.’

‘You
disobeyed him,’ he said. ‘That is sufficient reason for him to punish you.’

‘I
only did what he knew I would.’

‘Like
Eve,’ he said.” (pp. 40-41)

She realizes the
Marquis knew she would disobey him. He planned it so. Like the rendition of the
Adam and Eve story in Genesis where the text (or translation of the text)
suggests that regardless of whether God meant for the fall to occur, he created
the world in such a way that the fall would happen. What can be done with a
doom such as that? Carter sends in an “avenging angel” to save the young woman
from utter destruction. Here, in this fated place of death, only someone from
elsewhere, a Deus ex machina, can change the course of the narrative: her
bad-ass, tiger-fighting mother, a character which deviates from the traditional
Bluebeard tale, making Carter’s rendition stunning.

Should
the young woman have suspected when the Marquis adorned her in jewels and furs?
Should she have recognized something was amiss when she witnessed in mirrors herself
change from a poor peasant to a haughty noble? These questions are like me
asking whether I should have known the fate of my friendship. I’ve learned to
not ask myself why I was sexually assaulted by someone who I thought a friend,
as women raped by strangers in the night also have no answer to the question
why.

All
of these threads, the Bluebeard figure dooming her, the mother coming to rescue
her, stem from someplace beyond, from fairy-tale motifs that govern the fate of
the main character. Yet Carter’s narrator breaks this device of a morality tale
about the danger of curiosity in women and instead she creates a school for the
blind out of the dead Marquis’s castle and uses most of her inheritance to
create and run a music school, afterwards living simply with her mother and
lover, Jean-Yves. Carter alters the fairy-tale framework to reveal a new way to
perceive the world, a new way to think and act. And although Carter’s narrator
feels glad that her dead husband cannot see the mark left by the bleeding key
he pressed into her forehead, for, she says his absence “spares my shame,” that
the story ends recognizing shame persists, albeit relieved, spares the guilt I
feel for my own shame.

I
recently attended a concert at a small venue where, if the man who assaulted me
had been there as I realized he could have, I would have had to face him. And I
knew I would have felt humiliated before him, as small as a fieldmouse to a
tiger. From where does the young woman’s shame originate and from where does mine
come, when neither of us had control of the situation, as Eve did not have
control? I felt humiliation at his taking advantage of me. Shame at being
altered, my humanity—my animality—taken from me, rendered into something
exploitable. I feel regret not at not recognizing the unchangeable, but,
afterward, realizing the inevitable. All of this is blended together as shame
inside of me, but shame turned ugly because I still feel guilty despite having
no reason to.

Carter’s
ending tells me we can shake off our disempowerment as a horse shakes off its
freeze response to a predator’s attack who fails to make the kill.[1] We slip away, licking our wounds, and we
lucky ones work our way out of the dissociative state induced by that traumatic
event. The young woman chose to love even after this. I can choose to love even
after this.

Perhaps
as time passes I will discover some new synchronicity from reading “The Bloody
Chamber” while visiting Normandy and Paris. For now, however, my new
understanding of Angela Carter’s “The Bloody Chamber” suffices, a reading that
can help me release my culturally driven guilt, cleave my fear, and gird myself
with a new type of thorn. 

 References:

Carter, Angela. “The Bloody Chamber.” The
Bloody Chamber. 1979. New York: Penguin Books, 2015.