Angela Carter’s collection of short stories The Bloody Chamber is a retelling of classic fairy tales that is famous for its beautiful imagery, prose, sexuality, and feminist themes. Through her stories, Carter explores the idea of villains trapped within repetitive cycles that lock them in time, and how the protagonists break the cycles. How is it that these characters begin to move forward? Paradoxically, it is by moving backward in time that they are able to escape. Carter specifically explores this idea in three of her short stories: The Tiger’s Bride, a retelling of Beauty and the Beast; The Bloody Chamber, a retelling of Bluebeard; and The Company of Wolves, a retelling of Little Red Riding Hood. In these stories, female protagonists break the cycles they find themselves in by rejecting patriarchal gender roles and taking control of their sexuality, thus undergoing a powerful transformation. This harsh rejection of the patriarchy and subsequent transformation shatters the cycles they are in, moving them away from both the contemporary, modern world they began in and towards the natural world, which represents true equality for these women.

The Tiger’s Bride

In The Tiger’s Bride, Carter begins by laying out the timeless cycles in the story: first, the cycle perpetuated by the patriarchy that the girl finds herself trapped in, and secondly, the cycle that the Tiger (the Beast) himself is in. The first cycle is that of the girl, sold to another man and never given a say in what to do with her life. The very first line of this story is from the girl’s point of view and states: “My father lost me to the Beast at cards” (Carter 61). From the beginning, Carter is brutal in laying out just how few rights women had in the olden times in which this story takes place, explaining how women were not seen as individual beings but as the property of the men in their lives, either their fathers or husbands or brothers. After being bartered away, the girl is forced to follow the Tiger to his castle and leave her life behind while still maintaining a strong mask and holding herself up to the exacting standards placed upon her by society. Her mother was the same; she “did not blossom long; bartered for her dowry to such a feckless sprig of the Russian nobility that she soon died of his gaming, his whoring, his agonizing repentances” (Carter 63). Readers thus see how the girl is trapped in a timeless cycle where nothing changes between generations; the same thing that happened to her mother happens to her, and it will continue to happen until the cycle is broken. The second cycle is that of the Tiger, who lives in his castle, all alone and desperate for companionship. When the father first loses the girl at cards, the girl notices that the servants of the Tiger act as though nothing is amiss, and “to look at them you would think that nothing of any moment had occurred” (Carter 65). This implies that she is not the first girl the Tiger has won at cards and taken back to his castle. None of the girls so far have been able to provide him with what he needs, and thus he is trapped in an endless cycle of purchasing girls and taking them with him in the hopes of finding what he is looking for.

At the castle of the Beast, the girl undergoes a mental transformation in which she realizes that although she does her best to assert her freedom, she has been playing the patriarchy’s game all along. The Tiger’s first action at his castle is to request that the girl strip naked for him and reveal herself; in return, he will return her father’s entire fortune and allow her to leave the castle unharmed, with riches and gold. The girl’s response is to scathingly state that he should only give her “the same amount of money that [he] would give to any other woman in such circumstances” (Carter 71). Her response is not only an assertion of her freedom but a demonstration of how the girl and the Tiger are looking at her body differently. The Tiger did not see the deal as demeaning in the way that the girl did because he was imitating the way he saw men act and viewing her body as an object. At her sarcastic comment, the Tiger sheds a single tear of shame upon the realization that when he acts like the men whose clothes and masks he wears—by attempting to purchase the girl’s body—he treats those around him with cruelty. His mimicry of men comes at the cost of treating others the way men would treat him had they known his true form: with cruelty. However, he also does not make a move to apologize because he knows no other way of acting around humans. The girl, on the other hand, knows the value of her own body—she is an innocent virgin, her body untouched and unseen by other men—but she also knows that she does not control what happens to it. 

The girl does not realize that the Tiger has as little power as her in their patriarchal society until later in the story. On a horse ride with the Tiger and his valet, she reflects that “the six of us—mounts and riders, both—could boast amongst us not one soul, either, since all the best religions in the world state categorically that not beasts nor women were equipped with the flimsy, insubstantial things” (Carter 76). She has been provided no true freedom in the men’s world, has done nothing but follow their cues and play their game because that was the cycle she was born into. The Tiger was forced to do the same and play the part he sees other men play in society and  “wear a mask with a man’s face painted most beautiful on it” because that is the only way for him to fit into that world (Carter 64). They had no freedom but the freedoms men gave them.

When the girl realizes this, she simultaneously refuses to return to her father and rejects every societal norm men have imposed on her, instead choosing to take control of her body and play by her own rules. After the Tiger strips naked and willingly bares his own monstrous, animalistic body to her in the woods, she decides to reciprocate, and she “show[s] his grave silence [her] white skin, [her] red nipples” (Carter 78). Even after the Tiger leaves, she chooses to stay naked and wander along the shore for a bit. She states “I felt I was at liberty for the first time in my life” because she knows that back in the patriarchal society she grew up in, she would never have been able to take such an action because her body was not hers to control (Carter 78). Here, she is in control. After she has shown the Tiger her body, she is free to go home and sees that her father’s riches have already been returned to him. The transformation she has undergone at the castle stops her, however. She now knows that if she returns, she will no longer be at liberty as she was when naked in the forest, and will be back under the control of her father until he sells her to another man. She chooses the opposite path and takes control of her body and livelihood. Her maid, who originally was a wind-up animatronic that looked exactly like her but “whose face was no longer the spit of [her] own”—an indication of the transformation she has undergone in a couple of days—is to be sent in her place “to perform the part of [her] father’s daughter” (Carter 79). Indeed, this is what the girl’s life was back home: a performance in which she had no control over the script.

The girl’s realization and rejection are ultimately what break the cycles that the Tiger and the girl are in, and she joins the natural world of the Tiger as his equal. After she sends the animatronic doll off, she strips naked of her own accord and joins the Tiger, in his true form. in his room. He is scared of rejection that he expects from all humans and “snuff[s] the air, as if to smell [her] fear; he could not” (Carter 81). The girl is not scared any longer; instead, she approaches him in her natural state and lets him touch her for the first time in the story. She does what none of the other girls the Tiger brought to his castle have done—she shows him empathy and kindness. She has realized that they are not so different from each other and that they are both alone. When she was first sold to the Tiger, she realized that “[her] own skin was [her] sole capital in the world,” and it is here that she uses her body, not as the patriarchy would tell her to, but to carve her own path (Carter 68). When he touches her, “Each stroke of his tongue ripped off skin after successive skin, all the skins of a life in the world, and left behind a nascent patina of shining hairs. [Her] earrings turned back to water and trickled down [her] shoulders; [She] shrugged the drops off [her] beautiful fur” (Carter 81). The transformation is even physically represented by the collapse of the castle around them: “Tiles came crashing down from the roof; I heard them fall into the courtyard far below” (Carter 81). Thus the cycle is broken, and the Tiger and the girl are equals—neither lives in a man’s world anymore, forced to play dress up and act the parts expected of them. Now, she has returned to the natural world as a tiger, and the castle that the Tiger used to play pretend at humanity is destroyed at the same time as the cycle that the two were trapped in. The girl’s true nature has been revealed, showing that within her human skin lay a powerful predator. Now, the girl and the Tiger are equals, because she has approached him willingly and as his equal, and he has likewise accepted her. She has created a life for herself where she is free, unlike the life she would have had had she stuck to the patriarchy’s script.

The Company of Wolves

Similar to The Tiger’s Bride, the Company of Wolves has two cycles that must be broken: the patriarchal expectations that our protagonist, Red Riding Hood is trapped by, and the lonely cycle the wolves are trapped in where they never experience kindness. The narrator first explains how when a young woman’s first husband was transformed into a wolf, she was forced to remarry. Her first husband returns to her many years later, and upon seeing her married, proclaims “I wish I were a wolf again, to teach this whore a lesson,” and when she weeps for her first husband, “her second husband beat her” (Carter 144). In this way, Carter demonstrates how powerless women are in this small village. The second cycle is that of the wolves’ alienation because once transformed, they are never shown kindness and forced to starve in the woods and fight for scraps of meat, all alone. The narrator explains that when the wolves howl, there is “Some inherent sadness in it, as if the beasts would love to be less beastly if only they knew how and never cease to mourn their own condition” (Carter 143). The wolves are predators, but they are also alone, never to be shown compassion or kindness again due to their new, monstrous state. They are creatures in mourning trapped in a cycle of violence that both they and humans perpetrate upon one another out of desperation, and they are unable to escape.

Here enters our protagonist, Red (unnamed in the story), whose innocence and kindness give her strength and ultimately allow her to break the cycles she and the wolves are trapped in. Carter explains what singles out Red and makes her different from the others in her village: “this one, so pretty and the youngest of her family, a little late-comer, had been indulged by her mother” (Carter 145). Similar to the girl in The Tiger’s Bride, Red is a child—she “is an unbroken egg; she is a sealed vessel… she is a closed system” (Carter 146). There is incredible strength in how Carter describes Red in Company of Wolves because all the adjectives demonstrate how strong Red’s shields are. She cannot be harmed because there are no cracks in her shields, and thus, no place for a predator to strike. How can one corrupt a system if they can never enter said system in the first place? She is an innocent virgin, and this makes her incredibly powerful even though the society around her doesn’t realize it because many common human emotions such as fear haven’t entered her system to corrupt her yet. She only knows what she has been taught: kindness being the key emotion. Just like the girl in The Tiger’s Bride whose empathy and kindness towards the Tiger broke the cycles the two were trapped in, so too does Red’s kindness prevail.

When Red ends up trapped at her grandmother’s house with the wolf, instead of doing the traditionally feminine thing of screaming and cowering, she chooses instead to defend herself using what she had at her disposal—her body. She rejects ‘feminine fear’ and decides instead, “Since her fear did her no good, she ceased to be afraid” (Carter 150). Some would say that this is a mark of naivety, and that she does not know any better when faced with a predator, but this is untrue. She has heard the stories of the other women who showed fear and followed the script men laid out for them, and it gave them nothing but pain in return. Instead, she states “It is very cold, poor things… no wonder they howl so” (Carter 150). Red bravely shows the wolf kindness and empathy for the first time in his life as a werewolf. She further shows him kindness sexually, when “She freely gave the kiss she owed him” for reaching her grandmother’s house before her (Carter 151). She does not cower before the wolf, as others would expect her to do, but instead when he attempts to threaten her, she “burst[s] out laughing” because “she knew she was nobody’s meat” and strips him of his clothes so that both will be naked (Carter 151). She treats him as an equal, and he in turn, instead of forcing himself upon her, stands passively and treats her the same.

This harsh rejection of patriarchal ideals that would have expected Red to cower and be devoured breaks the cycle that both are trapped in and moves them backward in time towards the natural world, where they are equal. When the story begins, the narrator explains that “You are always in danger in the forest, where no people are… as if the vegetation itself were in a plot with the wolves who live there” (Carter 142). Red is human, and as such, near the beginning of the story, she is in danger in the forest—she is prey. After she takes control of her sexuality and willingly lies with the wolf, however, things change. The forest, which was originally separate from the domestic sphere that Red grew up in, invades. Now, “The forest has come into the kitchen with darkness tangled in its hair” (Carter 148). Red has become a part of the natural world; it does not hunt her any longer, but protects her. When the story ends, the narrator comments: “Sweet and sound she sleeps in the granny’s bed, between the paws of the tender wolf” (Carter 152). By rejecting the patriarchal standards, Red has done what no other has done before her; she has not only survived the deadly wolf and forest but made them both into her protectors. It is here that she finds equality because she is no longer beholden to societal standards; now, the only standards she is beholden to are her own, just like when she chose to seduce the wolf and he treated her as an equal. Just like the girl in The Tiger’s Bride, Red has been revealed as a predator deep down, with the power to manipulate wolves and the very nature around her. She has created a life for herself where she is powerful, instead of following the script and being eaten.

The Bloody Chamber

The Bloody Chamber yet again starts with two cycles that are meant to be broken: the patriarchal standards that the girls are trapped in, and the cycle of marriage to multiple women that the Marquis follows. When the bride is getting married, she explains that “[she] was seventeen and knew nothing of the world” (Carter 4). She is young and untouched—property, to be bought off by the Marquis. When she is married, she goes to him dressed in only the gifts he purchased for her: “a sinuous shift of white muslin tied with a silk string under the breasts” and “a choker of rubies” (Carter 6). She wears not only a delicate white dress that physically embodies her innocence and virginity but a literal collar that he has put on her. The Marquis, on the other hand, is older, more experienced, and on his fourth marriage with the bride. His other brides were all older and more experienced than her: A Romanian countess, a model who had been painted countless times, and a famous opera singer. The Marquis, who following the original Bluebeard fairytale murders his wives after they disobey him, is trapped in a timeless cycle that echoes the unequal dynamics of society—marriage and murder without end.

It is ultimately the loss of the bride’s innocence and the realization that she has been unknowingly following the script her husband laid out for her that breaks the cycles both are in. If she is to survive, she must reject his standards and take control of her own body and livelihood. After the bride has disobeyed the Marquis’ orders and used the keys he gave her to enter the bloody chamber in the basement, decorated with the bodies of his previous wives, the Marquis returns home and the bride realizes that she has been tricked. She reflects: “I knew I had behaved exactly according to his desires; had he not bought me so that I should do so? I had been tricked into my own betrayal to that illimitable darkness… The secret of Pandora’s box; but he had given me the box, himself, knowing that I must learn the secret. I had played a game in which every move was governed by a destiny as oppressive and omnipotent as himself, since that destiny was himself; and I had lost” (Carter 36). This is the crux of the bride’s transformation. She is no longer naive and innocent to the ways of the world, marrying her husband out of a combination of love and lust; she is angry. The blindfold has been pulled from her eyes and she sees the world as it truly is—she has been purchased like chattel and given an unpassable test, all while her husband has governed her every move without her even knowing. This is important because this is the first time in the story the bride sees the Marquis for who he truly is: a monster. She knows that the moment her husband discovers her treachery he will kill her, so she attempts the opposite: to kill him. The bride explains, “I forced myself to be seductive. I saw myself, pale, pliant as a plant that begs to be trampled underfoot, a dozen vulnerable, appealing girls reflected in as many mirrors, and I saw how he almost failed to resist me. If he had come to me in bed, I would have strangled him” (Carter 37). While her ruse fails, it is the fact that she tried, and is only now seeing her body as her own to use instead of her husband’s that truly signifies the bride’s transformation. It is not enough for her to have the knowledge that she has been tricked; she acts upon this knowledge, takes control of her body, and uses it as a weapon against her husband. She knows that he purchased her for her innocence and vulnerability, so she uses that against him and in this act, shows that deep down, she is just as powerful as her husband. She too has knowledge she can use against him, even if it is the knowledge of what appeals to him. 

Even with the knowledge that her more powerful husband is going to kill her, the bride outwardly demonstrates kindness instead of revealing her fear, similar to the protagonists of the previous two stories. When she is about to give the bloody key to the Marquis, she realizes that she “felt a terrified pity for him… the atrocious loneliness of that monster!” (Carter 38). The bride does not need to demonstrate her kindness or reach a gentle hand out as the other two protagonists have done in their stories to break the cycles, however. It is by sheer virtue of the fact that she feels pity in the first place for this monster who seduced and tricked her, and the fact that even while feeling pity she simultaneously uses her sexuality as a weapon that she is able to break the cycle. Society would have had her cower, and feel nothing but disgust for the man before her, but she rose above that and looked into the Marquis’s soul even as she protected herself. She demonstrated that stereotypically feminine kindness and stereotypically masculine strength can coexist—neither is anathema to the other. It is society that demands that certain traits be assigned to certain genders. 

The bride’s transformation moves her from the timeless, never-changing cycle she was trapped in towards a natural world with no societal expectations, and this backward movement is reflected by the natural landscape adjusting with the bride’s actions. When the bride first arrives at the castle, she notes that the castle is surrounded by “a sky that melts into the sea—a landscape of misty pastels with a look about it of being continuously on the point of melting” (Carter 9). The castle itself is “at home neither on the land nor on the water, a mysterious, amphibious place” (Carter 9). The castle is as out of place as the bride is, upheaved from her sheltered life and dropped into ‘exile’. Just as the bride no longer has a home with other children and young girls, being married, but no place amongst adults, being a child bride, thus the castle is out of place and alone. On the day of her supposed execution by the Marquis, “the weather was grey, indeterminate, the sea had an oily, sinister look, a gloomy day on which to die” (Carter 39). As she moves closer and closer to her execution, the sea itself gets wilder and wilder; nature itself protests at the execution of one of their own. 

The changing weather reveals the truth of the bride’s transformation—having rejected the patriarchal standards she was born with and her husband imposed upon her, she is now one with the natural world. Just as in The Company of Wolves, where the forest protects its own, so too does the sea protect its own in this story. As her mother, riding to the rescue, gets closer and closer, “the waves crashed… high as the horse’s fetlocks” and the bride notes “you never saw such a wild thing as my mother, her hat seized by the winds and blown out to sea… behind her, the breakers of the savage, indifferent sea, like the witnesses of a furious justice” (Carter 41; 43). Her mother, aided by the natural world around her as it batters at the shore and rises to witness justice, kills him. In the end, the bride is able to live her life in a natural state. She reclaims the castle that was once her husband’s and lives with her lover, a blind piano tuner. The bride is able to find equality in this relationship and notes “I know he sees me clearly with his heart” (Carter 45). He cannot judge or command her in the way the Marquis did because not only is he blind, but he was originally in her employ—the piano tuner to her piano player, before the two became equals. She has rejected patriarchal standards and created a better life for herself where she is in charge, and no one can control her again.

Conclusion

Through her stories, Angela Carter demonstrates how female protagonists break the cycles around them by rejecting patriarchal gender roles and taking control of their sexuality, thus undergoing a transformation and loss of their innocence. This harsh rejection shatters the cycles they are in and moves them towards the natural world and true equality. While the meanings and messages behind Carter’s stories are never evident at first glance, they are scathing dissections of sexism, both past and present, and the very subtlety of the themes within her own stories, most especially The Bloody Chamber, mirrors society in how insidious sexist mindsets can be. Carter uses nature to point out the artificiality of societal standards and how her protagonists can coexist with stereotypically feminine and masculine traits. They can be kind and innocent, and still be predatory and powerful. The gender roles they were performing at the start of the stories were just that—false masquerades. Through these three stories, Carter asserts that true equality between men and women is possible and that the fight to get there is worth it. However, by using the fairytale genre, she also notes that it is incredibly difficult to reach that state, but if women are willing to go the distance, they can find freedom.

Works Cited

Carter, Angela. The Bloody Chamber: And Other Stories / Angela Carter. Penguin Books, 2015.