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.

The Tiger's Bride Questions

1. How would you characterise Belle's father?
  Belle's father is obsessed with material things and is addicted to gambling. This becomes his downfall as he loses his daughter because of it. He sees his daughter as an object and would rather have money and wealth than a family.

2. When the carriage comes for Belle to take her to the Beast's castle, her father wants a rose. What does the rose symbolise in this passage?
  The Rose that Belle gives her father is tainted with her blood. The rose is supposed to symbolise Belle's forgiveness to her father, but it shows that she resents him for gambling her away.

3. What is the significance of the maid that Belle gets? What could it symbolise? How does what ultimately happens to her help develop it as a symbol?
  Belle gets a soubrette as her maid, this could symbolise Belle being robotic and living a false life, the kind of life that society wants her to live. The soubrette could symbolise society's ideal woman and the unrealistic nature of these expectations.

4. What is the significance about the diamonds that the Beast gives Belle?
  The diamonds could link with The Bloody Chamber and how the Marquis gives the girl a ruby choker, he has malicious intentions and he wants to kill her, whereas the Beast gives Belle diamonds which are pure and clear and they show that the Beast holds no ill intentions towards her.

The Lady of the House of Love- Critical Extract

'In Gothic fiction, Angela Carter wrote in 1974, 'characters and events are exaggerated beyond reality, to become symbols, ideas, passions...style will tend to become ornate and unnatural- and thus operate against the perennial human desire (especially to Britain) to believe the word as fact...(the Gothic) retains a singular moral function- that of provoking unease.' 
Christopher Frayling, 'Introduction', in Gothic Reader- A Critical Anthology

This extract furthers our interpretation that Carter has created her characters to shock and cause the reader unease by giving her characters extreme mannerisms to make the reader feel uncomfortable. After all, the Gothic is an exploration of the supernatural, the unnatural, something that the reader is not comfortable with because it is the unknown. The reader also feels uncomfortable when they realise that the characters and events are an embodiment of a bigger debate, such as feminism.

Carter argues the Gothic deliberately portrays something unnatural, to 'operate against' the human desire to believe everything we read. This means that we can questions the fairy tales that we were told as children, linking to Bruno Bettelheim's 'Fairy Tales and The Existential Predicament'.

Carter's portrayal of a young girl stuck in the role of a vampire 'provokes unease' in the reader, as we sympathise with 'the maiden', an unnaturally beautiful young girl, cursed by her family's heritage, forced into a role which isolates her from the rest of society.

In what ways is this a Gothic tale?

Angela Carter's 'The Tiger's Bride' is a subverted version of 'Beauty and the Beast' and it includes many different gothic elements. For example the description of the setting in the story includes gothic language, 'how starveling, how bereft the dead season of this spurious Eden in which all the fruit was blighted by cold'. When the girl is heading towards the Beast's 'palazzo', Carter has described the journey and the surroundings as being bereft, the 'Eden' is a religious allegory that is described as being false, this therefore could create a sense of fear in the girl because the setting is not comforting.
When the girl is inside that Beast's 'palazzo' she sees 'suites of vaulted chambers', the place is in no way inviting.

Another Gothic element that Carter has used in The Tiger's Bride is the supernatural. The beast, for instance, 'wears a mask with a man's face painted' on it. This shows that the beast is not human and he has tried to create a way to compensate for that by wearing a mask that covers his face. In addition to this, the supernatural is portrayed when the Servant to the Beast tells the girl that 'nothing human lives here', implying that the Beast is not human and that he himself may not be human as well.

Carter blurs the role of humans and animals. The Beast is seen as having human characteristics, such as the ability to speak, and understand what other humans are saying to him, yet his actual body is a tiger. This is also shown again in the line 'the Beast had given his horses the use of the dining room'. When the girl walks into the 'palazzo' this is what she sees and it is incongruous because under normal circumstances horses would be kept outside because they are animals but because the lines between human and animal have been blurred this can be viewed as normal.

The Gothic element of class is also explored by Carter in The Tiger's Bride, the girl adresses the Beast as 'Master' or 'milord'. This shows that even though she is there against her will she is still speaking to him with respect.

Carter includes the Gothic elements of fear and horror in The Tiger's Bride, such as the fear that is created in the girl's father when he realises that he is going to lose his daughter to the Beast. However, her father grief can be seen as insincere and he only wants to gain the girls forgiveness so he can soothe his guilty conscience, 'My tear-beslobbered father wants a rose to show that I forgive him. In the same sentence Carter is able to create some horror in the story because as the girl gives her father the rose, 'I prick my finger and so he gets his rose all smeared with blood'. The pure, white rose has been tainted with her blood.

The Erl King is the most innovative and experimental

“The Erl King’ is the most innovative and experimental of the narratives.’ How far does this quotation support the statement? 
‘The woods enclose and then enclose again, like a system of Chinese boxes opening one into another; the intimate perspectives of the wood changed endlessly around the interloper, the imaginary traveller walking towards an invented distance that perpetually receded before me. It is easy to lose yourself in these woods.’

The Erl King can be described as the most innovative and experimental of the narratives in The Bloody Chamber, and this is supported by the quotation because the narrative perspective in The Erl King is the most unusual out of all the stories in The Bloody Chamber. The narrative perspective changes so quickly that Carter has created a sense of confusion within the reader. 1st, 2nd and 3rd person are all used, this is a contrast to the other stories in The Bloody Chamber, for example The Bloody Chamber is written fully in third person without a change in the narrative perspective. This shows Carter's experimentation with different aspects of narrative.

The Erl King can also be described as innovative because Carter has incorporated many different intertextual references but has created her own story around them. The fairy tale that The Erl King is based on is Little Red Riding Hood. The Erl King himself is supposed to embody the wolf in the fairy tale and the girl is supposed to be Red Riding Hood, however at the end of the story Carter uses a twist that portrays her views as feminist, the girl does not become the 'victim', she kills the Erl King instead, going against the original story therefore creating a new one. Other intertextual references in The Erl King are drawn from old German poems and ballads, where the main character was a malevolent creature who haunts forests and carries off travellers to their deaths. However, Carter's use of intertextual references could be seen as unoriginal and not innovative because she has not created her own ideas

Another way in whichThe Erl King can be seen as innovative in The Bloody Chamber is Carter's deep description of the forest and it's environment. 'It struck the wood with nicotine stained fingers','the woods enclose and then enclose again', Carter uses two pages to fully describe the forest, this is different to other stories in The Bloody Chamber, such as The Snow Child, which has little description about the surroundings because they are so minimalistic.

In conclusion, The Erl King can be described as innovative and experimental because Carter has tried to develop different ideas to try and tell her own version of the Erl King story.

When and where is the story set?

When and where is the story set? Why might this be?

In Angela Carter's The Erl King, the setting is a very important part of the story. The reader knows this because the first two pages are dedicated to describing the setting, 'there is no way through the wood anymore, this wood has reverted to its original privacy.' Carter's description of the woods creates a threatening and dreary scene, however a lone, young girl is unfazed by the threatening woods, 'A young girl will go into the woods as trustingly as Red Riding Hood', she enters them without hesitation.

The forest setting represents a place away from civilisation and its influences for the narrator, this means that she is able to show different aspects of her personality and Carter has portrayed this by changing the narrative perspective. It implies that the narrator is telling the story, but she is also somewhat like an outsider looking in on her own story and learning from it.

Angela Carter's use of colour in The Erl King are dull and give a sense of death, which is unusual because a forest is expected to be full of bright colours and life, 'a sky hunkered with grey clouds', 'it struck the wood with nicotine stained fingers',Carter has created a typically Gothic setting.

Another aspect of the setting that Carter has developed into a Gothic theme is the wildlife in the forest. The Erl King keeps birds in cages in his house, 'cage upon cage of singing birds', creating the Gothic theme of entrapment, birds which are usually free animals trapped inside without escape.

What do you consider to be the key themes of this short story?

What do you consider to be the key themes of this short story? Does the story have one or more messages for the reader? If so, what might these be?

The Erl King

There are many Gothic themes in The Erl King, one of those themes is entrapment, 'the woods enclose', 'cage upon cage of singing birds'. Angela Carter develops the feeling of entrapment because the narrator never leaves the woods, the birds are trapped in the cages just as the narrator is trapped in the woods. Carter also creates a feeling of claustrophobia, 'once you are inside it, you must stay there until it lets you out again'. This personifies the forest and shows how much power it has over an innocent girl all alone.

Another key theme of The Erl King is the supernatural. The girl in the story is drawn to the Erl King even though she knows that he could do her 'grievous harm', and it could be said that the supernatural element of the story is what draws the girl to the Erl King despite what the consequences could be. It has also been said that the supernatural element means that the story is received better by society because it shows that the events in the story are not real.

Romance is another key theme in the short story of The Erl King, 'When I realised what the Erl King meant to do to me, I was shaken with a terrible fear and I did not know what to do for I loved him with all my heart and yet I had no wish to join the whistling congregation he kept in his cages.' The girl in the story has to choose between her love for the Erl King and her fear of him doing to her what he has done to all of the other women that have entered the woods. In this short story Carter shows that a woman can be strong and make her decisions because at the end of the short story the girl decides that she is going to kill the Erl King, 'I shall take two handfuls of his rustling hair...I shall strangle him with them.' She wants to keep her own life and in order to do this she decides she needs to kill the Erl King.

The Erl King Notes

The Erl King

-An adaptation of a European tale.
-A character depicted in a number of German poems and ballads as a malevolent creature who haunts forests and carries off travellers to their deaths.

-The character is most famous as the antagonist in Gothe's poem Der Erlkonig.

-Emily Dickingson- 'Light is sufficient unto itself1, 'perfect transparency must be impenetrable.' This is also the opening line of The Erl King.
-There are references to Little Red Riding Hood.

The Green Man motif has many variations. Found in many cultures around the world, the Green Man is the personification of nature.

Shakespeare's Othello, 'O, beware, my lord, of jealousy! It is the green eyed monster'. The Erl King's eyes are described as 'quite green'.

-The Garden of Eden- It is possible to interpret the green apple's of the Erl King's eyes with the traditional symbol of temptation in the Garden of Eden. This means that the Erl King becomes identified with temptation and original sin to the reader.

Choose one setting Carter uses and discuss how it is significant in the telling of the story.

Choose one setting Carter uses and discuss how it is significant in the telling of the story.

In The Snow Child, Angela Carter sets the short story in 'midwinter', it is a cold time of year, and coldness is used a lot in the Gothic genre to create an uncomfortable atmosphere for the characters and it also disorientates the reader because the snowy barren landscape creates a feeling of isolation as there are no other things for the reader to focus on. Carter describes 'midwinter' as 'invincible. immaculate', these words can be put into the theme of the sublime and create a picture of an untouched powerful landscape covered in white snow, 'the whole world was white'. The white of the snow symbolises the purity and virginity of the girl that the Count creates, the reader knows that the girl is innocent and that the Count corrupts her.

The Count's three wishes, 'I wish I had a girl...', reflect his surroundings, 'as white as snow', it is the Count that is wishing for a child and not the Countess which is incongruous because it goes against what society would expect, normally it would be the woman wishing for a child. The Countess is riding next to the Count in this white frosty scenery, however she is wearing 'pelts of black foxes; and she wore high, black, shining boots with scarlet heels.' The Countess is a dark figure in this otherwise snow-covered countryside and it could show that because she has already been corrupted by the Count she has lost her purity and he no longer has any interest in her and that is why he longs for a new young girl to come along, and it is the reason why the Countess dresses provocatively to try and seduce him. 

In the middle of this 'immaculate' setting, in the snow there is a hole filled with blood, Carter could have used this to symbolise women and where children come from, where the snow child came from, it is a mark in the otherwise clear landscape. When the Count has taken the girl's virginity and she melts away, all that is left of her is 'a feather a bird might have dropped; a bloodstain...and the rose she had pulled off the bush.' The things left over from the snow child are the final symbols of her corruption, and Carter has shown how easily women can be corrupted by men, it is another blotch in the unmarred setting.

The Snow Child Notes

The Snow Child Notes

Key terms: Allegory- A story that can be interpreted to reveal a hidden meaning, typically a moral or political one.
Defiled- Connected to necrophilia.

The Gothic
-A fondness for the symbols of darkness and light- literally and metaphorically.
-A significant use of setting.
-The creation of unknown as a narrative priority.
-A fascination with the influence of the past.
-A different between male and female roles which themselves often follow particular conventions.
-A blurring of reality and fantasy, being awake and dreaming with the tales.
-A tendency for certain psychological traits to occur within the main character.

Form
-The Bloody Chamber is made up of short stories, which maximise the impact of the stories' messages.
-The Snow Child is the shortest of the stories and is written as a vignette, the shortness of which makes it poignant and increases its impact to disturb the reader.

Context
-Many of the stories can be linked to wider feminist messages. (For example, the image of the bloody chamber in the story of that name could be seen as a representation of the spiritual or physical death of the woman through childbirth and marriage). Angela Carter was herself a feminist.
-The metamorphoses in the stories also seem to be criticising society's imposition of gender roles through patriarchy.

Setting
-'Midwinter'- cold, 'immaculate', 'this hole is filled with blood', 'whole world was white'.
-Out of the hole filled with blood comes a child.
-The setting disorientates the reader, also implies a place that represents purity and virginity.

How does Carter use symbolism within the story?
-Feminist theory aims to understand the nature of gender inequality. Some earlier forms of feminism have been criticised for taking into  account only white, middle class, educated perspectives.
-Feminist activists campaogn for women's rights such as voting and equal pay. Because feminism seeks gender equality, some feminists argue that men are also harmed by sexism and gender rolls. The Count's ideal woman in The Snow Child is a young, white girl.

Countess
-"The Count and his wife"- Implies that she is not her own person, she is his possession.
-"High, black, shining boots with scarlet heels and spurs"- She is wearing provocative clothing to try and seduce her husband. She is always looking for the Count's approval.
-The Countess can have everything but the thing she wants.

Snow Child
-The Snow Child is the Count's version of the ideal 'woman' (in reality she is not a woman she is a child)- white, naked and a young girl, "there she stood".
-The use of the colour white symbolises the girl's purity and emphasises how the Count corrupts her.

Count
-He is not described in detail, the reader is not told what he looks like or the clothes that he is wearing, whereas the women in the story have what they are wearing (or not wearing) described in detail.
-The Count can be seen as greedy because he already has a wife and he is saying that he wants more, "I wish I had...".
-"I wish I a girl..."- this is repeated three times in the story. It is showing that he wants instant gratification.

How does Carter create her characters?

How does Carter create her characters? Choose one character we have not discussed in class and explain how this character is presented.

In Angela Carter's 'The Bloody Chamber' she is retelling the old, French literary folktale of Bluebeard. In Carter's version the heroine is saved by her mother, unlike Bluebeard, where the heroine is saved by her brothers. The narrators’ mother goes against all social conventions for a female of that time, she has fought pirates, shot tigers and 'had gladly, scandalously, defiantly beggared herself for love.' The narrator ignored the example that her mother set by marrying for money and social status instead of love.

Carter has portrayed the character of the heroine's mother as an 'indomitable' woman who is independent enough to make her own decisions. An example of this would be that she was the 'daughter of a rich tea planter' but she married for love to a man who was significantly poorer than she was. Her daughter mocks her for insisting on carrying around her dead husband's pistol, which is ironic because it is ultimately the thing that saves her life. 

However, once the protagonist has entered the bloody chamber her feelings towards her mother's temperament change, 'this spoilt child did not know she had inherited nerves and a will from the mother who had defied the yellow outlaws of Indo-China.' The narrator no longer mocks her mother, she is driven forward by her 'spirit' and obtains a new attitude. When the narrator finally embraces the example her mother has tried to set she 'walks as firmly as I had done in my mother's house'. Her mother has helped her escape from the corner that her husband has placed her in.

Carter ends The Bloody Chamber with a show of fearlessness from the protagonist’s mother, she does not flinch in the face of danger. It is not a clichéd ending to a fairy tale where a knight in shining armour comes to rescue the girl, it is her mother accompanied with an old pistol.

In conclusion Angela Carter has created a character that becomes an unlikely hero in a story of a world dominated by men.