Bloody Chamber Essay

Carter’s The Bloody Chamber, uses pornography to critique the inequity of sexual relationships between males and females by focusing on the objectification and violence inherent in normative sexual gender roles. The text analyses and exploits the style and language of pornography to satirize the objectification of women (Barry 1995: 126). Additionally, The Bloody Chamber integrates that if a through the objectification of the woman, she becomes the subject of violence.  The only means of change is through self realization and self actualization, when she liberated from the position of dehumanization. Cater utilizes numerous literary devices, such as symbolism, imagery, and satire to scrutinize the relationship between the oppressed and objectified female and the dominant male.  

The text uses the occurrence of sex as an act of aggression, erotic brutality, and dominance in which the male partner is seen as sadistic and the female partner is seen as oppressed. This is portrayed by The Marquis’ wives, both past and present, as he objectifies them by placing them on display, enabling him to manipulate and mold them to satisfy his perverse erotic tastes. Additionally, all of the female roles are unnamed, only referred to by jobs for example the Mother, the Opera Singer, the Evening Star Walking on the Rim of Night, and the Romanian Countess (Carter 1990: 4), drawing attention to the idea of gender inequity as the women are not worth of a name (Barry 1995: 126). The act of sexual objectification by The Marquis lends itself to interpretation as The Bloody Chamber depicts the darker side of sexual relationships, exploring the essentialist idea that men and women are different beings. The text symbolizes the inequality between men and women in the ‘[m]ost pornographic of all confrontations’ (Carter 1990: 8), through the satirical images by Felicien Rops, where a fully clothes man is sizing up a naked women as though she is “a lamb chop” (Carter 1990: 8). From the protagonist’s view, being stripped naked reveals herself as a generic pornographic representation, or object of desire, as opposed to a genuine version of herself. The vivid description of the girl’s objectification, using imagery such as a man who ‘examined her limb by limb’ (Carter 1990: 8) draws attention to how the idea that men seem to universally operate women rendering them powerless.

Within The Bloody Chamber, The Marquis continuously places his child wife into intolerable scenarios in which she has no option but to violate and be punished as an unwilling possession to inflict the idea that objects can have violence committed upon them. The Marquis’ wedding gift, a choker full of red rubies, encased the heroine’s neck ‘like an extraordinarily precious slit throat’ (Carter 1990: 4), as a symbol of her entrapment in bondage to her husband. His constant fixation with the choker represents his inherit violent nature, and disrupts ‘normal’ expectations of love and passion with the Marquis’ thirst for murder and compulsion with violence and sadism (Sheets 1991:12).  As soon as the narrator starts wearing the necklace, her oppression is evident as The Marquis objectifies her like a ‘connoisseur inspecting horseflesh’, (Carter 1990: 5) interlacing sex and violence. The heroine has conflicting reactions to her sudden integration into a sexual relationship based upon pornography, violence, and punishment, yet begins to act in an almost positive manner, ‘aghast to feel myself stirring’, (Carter 1990: 8), learning more about her husband, as well as herself. It is only when she believes that her life is at risk does she seek to leave the ‘Castle of Murder’(Carter 1990: 26), but this can be inferred as an expression of the power, because through her flight, she has denied her husband the ultimate declaration of his male superiority and rejected the final submission.