The Bloody Chamber and Dr Faustus Exam Questions

“It is ironic that the beasts are often more humane than the humans.” Consider at least two of the stories from the collection in the light of this comment.

It can be considered ironic that the beasts are often more humane than the humans. For example, the beast in the Tiger’s Bride is a placid creature that lives in an ‘uninhabited’ place; the girl in the story starts to understand that ‘he was far more frightened of me than I was of him’. Despite the girls’ preconceptions of the beast he does not treat he badly. He ultimately frees her from the constraints of her unreliable, gambling father. The beast recognises the girls’ importance, something that her own father failed to see, ‘if you are so careless of your treasures, you should expect them to be taken from you’. The beast shows more kindness and compassion towards the girl than her father; he gambled away his daughter for superficial reasons; he thought he was going to get some kind of financial gain from the game he was playing.

It can also be considered ironic that many of the beasts in The Bloody Chamber are more humane than the humans because the Marquis in The Bloody Chamber is cruel and can be considered more of a beast than many of the other characters in the book. The Marquis finds pleasure in murdering his wives, ‘and where was she, the latest dead, the Romanian Countess who might have thought her blood would survive his depredations?’ The Marquis has power and wealth, this is what attracts beautiful, young women to him; and because of his power he believes that he is entitled to do whatever he wants to them. His actions show that he is an inhumane character that Angela Carter has created to highlight male power and male ego.

However, The Bloody Chamber is not without humans that act in kind and humane ways. For example, the young soldier in The Lady of the House of Love. The young soldier is kind and gentle towards the Lady, ‘he puts his mouth to the wound. He will kiss it better for her.’ The soldier does not take advantage of the Lady, however his love is ultimately what kills the Lady because every other man that she has encountered took what she offered. This representation of a humane person is Angela Carter showing that not all men are beasts. 

How far do you agree with the view that the play exposes the corruption of religious beliefs and practices?

In the play Dr Faustus by Christopher Marlowe the corruption of religious beliefs are exposed many times. For example, the use of magic within the play can be viewed as a corruption of religious powers, 'a sound magician is a mighty God.' Magic can be interpreted as a link to the devil therefore showing that these magical powers are being used for evil; and Faustus is undermining the power of God which is subsequently a corruption of true religion.

Another example of the corruption of religious beliefs and practices in Dr Faustus is highlighted through the portrayal of the Pope and the Cardinals. They charge people money and claim that this is going to rid them of their sins, however the Pope and the Cardinals are making a profit from these people. This shows the corruption of their religious practices because they would rather make as much money as they can through the church than teaching people to repent for their sins. Christopher Marlowe has included his atheist views within Dr Faustus; he has made the character of the Pope someone the audience would laugh at instead of somebody that they would usually treat with respect. However  the Pope and the Cardinals are symbols of Christianity and they bring contrast to Faustus' 'devil-inspired magic.'

In the time that Christopher Marlowe wrote Dr Faustus people were devoutly religious and would have attended church every Sunday. Faustus is a character that goes against these values; he places knowledge above religion because if he has the most knowledge then he will  be the most powerful man on the earth and therefore he believes that he does not need to have faith in God.

The fate that Faustus has to endure at the end of the play could act as a warning to everyone that the corruption of religious beliefs and practices has consequences and because Faustus did not repent soon enough, God could not save him and he paid the ultimate price.

How do you respond to the view that in the stories in The Bloody Chamber Angela Carter presents a sinister distortion of family relationships?

In The Bloody Chamber by Angela Carter there are many different family relationships that are portrayed. Some of those family relationships can be described as having a sinister distortion. For example, in The Tiger's Bride, a father gambles his own daughter away because he is careless and he thought that he might be able to get a financial gain. Carter may be implying that because he has a daughter and not a son it is easier for him to make the decision to gamble her away because she has no value to him, all he can do is try and marry her to a rich man.

Carter also presents a sinister family distortion in the vignette of The Snow Child. The Count and the Countess in The Snow Child conform to the typical patriarchal society of that time; the Countess has to watch as the Count rapes the young girl, 'the Countess reined in her stamping mare and watched him narrowly.' This shows a sinister distortion of their family relationship because after the Count has raped the girl, he and the Countess carry on as if nothing happened, 'the Count picked up the rose, bowed and handed it to his wife.' The Count and Countess are oblivious to what the Count did to the girl.

However, not all of the relationships in The Bloody Chamber can be classed as sinister distortions of family relationships. For example, the mother and daughter relationship portrayed in The Bloody Chamber is one of love. The girl's mother rides all the way to the Marquis' castle on horseback to save her daughter from his sadistic ways, 'now, without a moment's hesitation, she raised my father's gun...and put a single, irreproachable bullet through my husband's head.' The girl's mother's instincts save her life.

Another example of a family relationship in The Bloody Chamber that does not have a sinister distortion is the father and daughter relationship portrayed in The Courtship of Mr Lyon. Beauty gives up her own freedom so that her father can have his, 'her visit to the beast must  be...the price of her father's good fortune.' Beauty and her father do not have a sinister relationship, they would do anything for each other. 

Reading Journal

http://www.inter-disciplinary.net/ati/Evil/Evil%208/ozum%20paper.pdf - Deconstructed Masculine
Evil in Angela Carter's The Bloody Chamber Stories

http://londongrip.co.uk/2010/10/love-terror-emancipation/ - Jenny Fabian considers Angela Carter's interrogation of authority in The Bloody Chamber

http://www.scribd.com/doc/125743642/Angela-Carter-Interview-Marxism-Today-1991 Interview with Angela Carter

Pornography, Fairy Tales, and Feminism: Angela Carter's 'The Bloody Chamber'- Robin Ann Sheets (Printed out)

http://www2.stetson.edu/library/green/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/prize_2010Formisano.pdf  Angela Carter and 'Glam Rock' Feminism

Christmas Homework- Polemical

http://www.themodernword.com/scriptorium/carter.html 
Angela Carter was, without question, a 20th Century original. No matter what one thinks of her writing, no one can argue that she was ever less than unique. Magic Realism, Surrealism, Fantasy, Science Fiction, Gothic, Feminism, Postmodernism – all of these categories apply, and yet all are one-dimensional in their application to Carter; none of them, with the possible exception of Surrealism, encompass the full spectrum of her accomplishments.

Carter's maiden name was Stalker, perhaps more fitting than the surname of her first husband, which she retained as her own. The daughter of socialists, Carter grew up in South London. All of her immediate female relatives were strong women of striking candor and pragmatism. And yet, paradoxically, Carter fought to overcome teenage anorexia caused by low self-esteem.

Well-off but pro-active, Carter anguished over the closing of mines and the breaking of mining strikes in the 1960s, and over the failures of the socialist revolution in general.(1) While a student at Bristol College, Carter hung out in sidewalk cafes and at smoky backroom poetry readings. In addition to absorbing the bohemian nightlife, Carter studied psychology and anthropology. She also developed a strong liking for Rimbaud and Racine, and for French literature in general.

A devout atheist who first dabbled in poetry and journalism, she metamorphosed into one of the most original writers of the post-World War II period. Her creativity was fed by travels to Japan and Russia that greatly influenced her fiction. When she did finally come to the United States, it was almost as an afterthought, although she captured the essence of the country in The Passion of New Eve (1977).

Lorna Sage makes the excellent observation that Carter seems to have lived her life out of the normal order:
Angela Carter's life – the background of social mobility, the teenage anorexia, the education and self-education, the early marriage and divorce, the role-playing and shape-shifting, the travels, the choice of a man much younger, the baby in her forties – is the story of someone walking a tightrope. It's all happening "on the edge," in no man's land, among the debris of past convictions. By the end, her life fitted her more or less like a glove, but that's because she'd put it together by trial and error, bricolage, all in the (conventionally) wrong order. Her genius and estrangement came out of a thin-skinned extremity of response to the circumstances of her life and to the signs of the times.(2)

Neither did her work ever fit, as Salman Rushdie pointed out, the definition of "moral fiction" as championed by John Gardner: Angela Carter was a thumber of noses, a defiler of sacred cows. She loved nothing so much as cussed – but also blithe – nonconformity. Her books unshackle us, toppling the statues of the pompous, demolishing the temples and commissariats of righteousness. They draw their strength, their vitality, from all that is unrighteous, illegitimate, low.(3)

A literary guerilla and 20th Century Bosch, Carter infused her work with humor and wonderfully profane wisdom. At the heart of her fiction lay a sturdy, non-didactic Feminism. Few writers have as successfully told stories within stories, created dense, baroque prose, and still, in the end, delivered on an emotional level. Carter's untimely death from cancer in 1992 at the age of 51 was a great loss for fiction.

Helen Simpson
“But while she used fantasy to discuss ideas, it is also obvious that it was the landscapes and imagery of fairy tales and legends that fired her imagination - bloodstains and ravens' feathers on snow, moonlight on a dust-grimed mirror, graveyards on Walpurgisnacht. The stories in The Bloody Chamber reverberate with deep and unmistakable imaginative pleasure. There is an astonishing extravivid materiality to this alternative world she invented, down to the last sensuous detail, like the candle which drops hot wax on to the girl's bare shoulders in "The Tiger's Bride". She loved to describe the trappings of luxury, to display rich scenery in rich language. Dialogue came less naturally to her and she avoided it for years, joking that the advantage of including animal protagonists in her work was that she did not have to make them talk.”

Much of contemporary women’s writing attempts to offer significant tactics for the reclamation of women’s bodies with the aim of mapping out new territories of female autonomy. The British author Angela Carter (1940-1992) demonstrates in the majority of her writings an intensive concern with how embodied sites of power are often created or reinforced through various mythological narratives or frameworks. More specifically, Carter interrogates the extent to which the privileging or reappropriation of the maternal body as a source of feminine power poses itself as a problematic terrain in various feminist discourses. In contrast to the majority of Carter’s earlier texts, which tend to remain focused on contesting patriarchal myths of femininity, in Heroes and Villains (1969) and The Passion of New Eve (1977), the author explicitly parodies matriarchal myths in order to examine how these do not necessarily guarantee a different symbolic order but often end up reiterating phallocentric representations of women’s bodies. Although these texts clearly rely on deconstructive tactics, unravelling the ‘blind spots’ that are inherently located in any ideological framework, Carter also begins to suggest possibilities for constructing a specifically feminine discourse of subjectivity, one that is located ‘elsewhere’ or outside of phallocentric parameters. [3]

http://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/t/text/text-idx?cc=mfsfront;c=mfs;c=mfsfront;idno=ark5583.0021.104;rgn=main;view=text;xc=1;g=mfsg
 Angela Carter’s critique of matriarchal myths is primarily explored through the narrative tactics of feminist dystopia. Generally, the speculative nature of dystopia works by pushing areas of representation to their extreme limit, portraying a ‘bad place’ (as opposed to utopia’s ‘good’ place) through the negative projection of existing social relations as they might play out in the near future (Mahoney: 74). According to Elisabeth Mahoney, feminist dystopia is an extremely discomforting realm, as its depiction of sexual violence and desire tends to implicate women as well as men in perpetuating those binary oppositions that keep gender relations confined to positions of “subject and object...master and victim” (73, 75). Feminist dystopia thus often challenges various feminisms to confront their own fantasies of power as a possibly ‘bad place’ (Mahoney: 75).

Christmas Homework- Viewpoint

Jayden Parkinson: Grave body inquest opens

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-oxfordshire-25494231

A girl was missing for more than two weeks, and recently her body was found buried in a disturbed grave.

 Woman murdered while house-sitting at Bosham seaside property

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/woman-murdered-while-housesitting-at-bosham-seaside-property-9032077.html
A woman was murdered whilst house sitting for friends that were on holiday. The woman was not alone in the house, other members of her family were staying with her, so was she targeted because she is an older woman? 

New Year honours list recognises more women than men for first time
http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2013/dec/30/new-year-honours-list-2014-women
It has taken 97 years for the honours list to recognise more women than men. 

Flooding Continues to Threaten UK

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-25584221
Bad weather has effected Britain, many places have become flooded. The Thames flood
barriers have been closed. It is not just Britain that has faced severe weather…

North America Weather: Polar vortex
brings record temperatures

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-25609411
America has been suffering from weather that has come down from the Arctic. It has caused
more than 16 deaths. 

South Sudan Conflict
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-25617980

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

"We raise them to cater to the fragile egos of men. We teach girls to shrink themselves, to make themselves smaller. We say to girls you can have ambition but not too much. Otherwise, you will threaten the man. If you are the breadwinner in your relationship with a man, you have to pretend you are not in public, otherwise you will emasculate him... Because I am female I am expected to aspire to marriage. I’m expected to make my life choices always keeping in mind that marriage is the most important. Marriage can be a source of joy and love and mutual support but why do we teach girls to aspire to marriage and we don’t teach boys the same? We raise girls to see each other as competitors, not for jobs or accomplishments, which I think can be a good thing, but for the attention of men. We teach girls that they cannot be sexual beings in the way that boys are.

Feminist: A person who believes in the social political and economic equality of the sexes.”

- Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Christmas Homework- Carter

Carter
Angela Carter has written well over thirty pieces in her career. They include non-fiction novels, short fiction, poetry collections, dramatic works, radio plays, and children's books.

In 1967 Angela Carter’s novel ‘The Magic Toyshop’ was published. ‘It follows the development of the heroine, Melanie, as she becomes aware of herself, her environment, and her own sexuality.'

'The novel starts with Melanie stealing her mother's wedding dress and venturing out in the night into her family's property. However, on her way home, she realises she forgot the door key and is forced to climb up a tree to get back into her room, destroying the dress in the process.’ Melanie’s parents die and she is sent, with her two siblings, to live with their Aunt and Uncle. The Uncle is a horrible man who runs a toyshop and makes puppets for a puppet show. The narrator of the story becomes friends with another boy, Finn, who lives in the house. He kisses her but she is unsure of her feelings for him. Finn does something wrong in the puppet show and is beaten by the Melanie’s Uncle. After this he becomes defeated and stops washing. Then Melanie then has to take part in the puppet show in a scene where her character is to be raped, but she does not live up to her Uncle’s standards either and he hits her. Her Uncle leaves on a trip and Finn decides that he won’t stand for the Uncle’s abuse anymore and sits in his place at the dinner table. The Uncle returns, enraged, and burn the house down. Melanie and Finn escape knowing that they will get married and be happy together.

Christmas Homework- Society

Society
In the years before The Bloody Chamber was published women’s rights were very prominent in the media. In 1975 Margaret Thatcher was named leader of the Conservative Party and then in 1979 went on to become Britain’s first woman Prime Minister. In 1976 The Equal Opportunities Commission comes into effect to oversee The Equal Pay Act and Sex Discrimination Act.

In the late 60’s and early 70’s in America the Women’s Liberation Movement was forming. It was sparked by women trying to get their views heard in at the National Conference of New Politics (NCNP) in Chicago in 1967. They were told that their demands were not important enough for them to be brought to the floor so 5 women went up to the podium to speak and try and get their views heard. One of them was patted on the head by the Director of the NCNP and he said something along the lines of, “move on little girl; we have more important issues to talk about here than women’s liberation.”

In September 1981 the Greenham Women’s Peace Camp was established to protest against nuclear weapons being held at the Greenham Common RAF site. In December 1982 they held the ‘Embrace the Base’ event which involved 30,000 women who created a human chain in protest. After this the camp became well known and in 1982 70,000 protesters formed a human chain that was 14 miles long. The camp was gaining a lot of media attention and prompted other women around Britain and Europe to start similar camps.

The highest grossing film of 1979 was Kramer vs Kramer, in which it shows a couples divorce proceedings and the effect that it has on everyone around them. The father is left to look after his son without knowing what to do and after a while they become close. A custody battle ensues and custody is awarded to the mother because the court believes that the child will need his mother more. The film ends with the father being able to keep his son because the mother agrees that they need each other.

The second highest grossing film in 1980 was 9 to 5, this is a film where 3 women are able to ‘get even’ with their "sexist, egotistical, lying, hypocritical bigot" boss. Starring Dolly Parton and Jane Fonda.