Mother knows best: maternalism in The Bloody Chamber

Angela Carter had an unusual relationship with her mother. A neurotic housewife with a penchant for overprotectiveness, she refused to allow Carter to use the bathroom on her own, terrified of what could happen to her if the door was closed on her. At 17, Carter decided to put some distance between her and her mother, beginning to rebel against the socially conservative values that her parents held, forcibly asserting her identity in a repressive environment. This relationship has perhaps imprinted itself in her short story collection The Bloody Chamber, a feminist intervention in the Gothic genre that seeks to liberate female sexuality from the chains of patriarchy, part of which parentalism is an underlying shadow.

In The Bloody Chamber, the mother figure takes on different roles, acting as the heroic savior in the title story, the background character in the coming-of-age stories in the Wolf Trilogy, and a jealous step-mother figure in ‘The Snow Child’ that seeks to destroy the child. It is clear that Carter’s mothers are not a simple binary, but something that Carter explodes to mirror each other and deconstruct motherhood in a patriarchal society dominated by male desire.

In ‘The Bloody Chamber’, the mother is a central figure. Carter portrays her as powerful, a figure that stands up against the patriarchy. An “indomitable mother” who “outfaced a junkful of Chinese pirates”, she is the type of woman that Carter champions, someone who takes her agency in her own hands. However, she is still the product of privilege, the “daughter of a rich tea planter”. Her agency is because of her family’s financial situation, and she becomes powerless when she loses that position. She “defiantly beggared herself for love”. It appears that she is punished for owning her desire or marrying below her station “for love”. However, the adverb “defiantly” indicates that it is a decision that she willingly makes against the oppressive patriarchal system. Her powerlessness is clear when she has to wear a “black silk” dress, the foreboding lucid, perhaps a silent taunt by the Marquis, yet she is unable to act. Where her daughter fails to read the latent warning signs, though, the mother recognises her daughter’s dangerous situation. Her refusal to act could be motivated in two ways: firstly, that she was unable to do so because it would be dangerous for both of them if the Marquis realises that they have caught onto him, leading to both their deaths; or alternatively, that she views her daughter needs to learn this lesson and experience this fall narrative. She is clearly able to decode the warning signs of the Marquis, as she functions as a deus ex machina at the end to save her daughter.

At the end of ‘The Bloody Chamber’, the mother arrives by horse: “one hand on the reins of the rearing horse, the other clasped my father’s service revolver”. She is the first person in the text to appropriate a phallic symbol, the “service revolver”, in order to save her daughter. Described as “Medusa”, a woman who punishes men for their scopophilic male gaze, the mother here executes the Marquis for his “eye of a connoisseur inspecting horseflesh”. Her claim to her own desire is also clear, through the symbolism of her “rearing horse”, that means that she cannot be controlled by men, unlike her daughter, who has to learn that lesson the hard way. She attributes the piano player’s salvation to her “maternal telepathy”, indicating how her intimate relationship has helped her recognise when her daughter was in trouble, and a necessity for women to support one another. The “telephone wire” could therefore symbolise something like an umbilical cord that connects mother and daughter. The “white, enclosed quietude of my mother’s apartment” can also be read as a womb that protected the piano player, and the “bloody chamber” of the Marquis acts as the birth of her recognition of her own sexual desire. The castle, in an ocean of “amniotic salinity”, is situated in isolation, and the liminal setting suggests that the Marquis has not had the same experience. He is trapped in an abortive state and though he has generations of aristocratic ancestry, he has not had such a close maternal figure who could educate him. Therefore, Carter makes clear that he is a victim of the patriarchy, but also one of capitalism.

In the eyes of second-wave feminism, the family unit is one that perpetuates the patriarchy. Kate Millett, in her seminal feminist text “Sexual Politics”, describes the family as “patriarchy’s chief institution” and it functions through the “socialisation of the young”, clear through the Marquis, who views his wives as a “gallery of beautiful women” and has a perverted view of sex, likely due to his upbringing, which could also explain why the Duke in ‘Wolf-Alice’ is also predatory in nature, but which is also clear through the mothers in the Wolf Trilogy. Parenthood is inextricably related to socialisation.

In the first two stories of the Wolf Trilogy, socialisation is an ever-present concept. Self-defense is instilled in the children. They “work hard and grow wise”, the narrator asserts in ‘The Company of Wolves’ and the girl the ‘The Werewolf’ is told “you know how to use it” by her mother, indicating the role of the family in raising their children. Carter implicitly criticises the way the female protagonists are raised: they are taught simply to survive with the dangers of male desire, symbolised by the wolves. She uses the form of fairy tales, a method of disseminating patriarchal ideas, to “extract the latent content”, in order to “de-mythologize them”. Perrault’s version of Little Red Riding Hood, which Carter translated in 1977, only enforces the regulations of the world, and its defence of the predatory nature of men upheld by patriarchy. It teaches girls to be wary but condones male desire, which is evident in the original story, where the girl is raped by the wolf, indicating a culture where desire is intrinsically linked to animalism.

The two female protagonists are taught to appropriate phallic power, symbolised through the use of knives, as a means to survival. Yet, in The Company of Wolves, it is not the use of the knife to defend herself that saves her, rather her acknowledgement of her own sexual desire, and an embracing of her own agency. In fact, she gives the knife in the basket to the hunter, perhaps recognising his gun as a more effective means to survival. There seems to be a generational disconnect, though. The grandmother, who should be wise to the ways of the werewolf, is frankly inept at defending herself, “hurling her Bible at him”. This appears to be incongruent, perhaps, with the suggestion at the beginning of the story, that it is a rite of passage passed down that children learn to handle a knife and protect themselves. However, I would argue that this fits in exactly with what Carter aims to propagate. The dynamic of a generation of women rapidly shifts to accommodate change, as is seen much in the political landscape of the last century, and Carter would argue that to adapt and to embrace this atmosphere is to escape the “passive case” that she ascribes. The grandmother tries to protect herself within the patriarchal structures, believing that the institution of religion would save her from a demonstration of male sexual violence. It is only by removing oneself from that institution that will save you.

In The Werewolf, though, the stakes are vitally different. Whilst the heroine in The Company of Wolves is a “strong-minded child” who “insists” on going into the woods, the female protagonist of The Werewolf “does as her mother bids”. The irony here, of course, is that the mother’s instructions appear to be useless. Just as the fairy tales of Perrault does not contain nor prevent sexual violence against women, the wolf still preys on Little Red Riding Hood, who did “not leave the path”. The other deviation from the hypotext is that the werewolf is embodied by the grandmother. Whilst she can be argued to be a Thatcherite figure who sacrifices other women for her own gain, I am more interested in the relationship between the heroine and her mother. She sends her daughter on a “five mile trudge” through “winter and cold weather”, which seems potentially negligent, and even as if she deliberately wants her daughter to encounter danger. An unanswered question is whether she was aware of her own mother’s bestial form. One could even argue that she may have wanted her daughter to encounter a beast, so that she could learn how to protect herself, or that she herself is a Thatcherite figure who wishes to rid herself of her daughter, who would eventually displace her, or her own mother. Whatever the speculation is, both end up happening. “Now the child lived in her grandmother’s house; she prospered.”

This female rivalry between generations is also reflected in The Snow Child, through the portrayal of a cruel step-mother figure. The disturbing relationship between the Count and the child is conveyed through the assertion: “she was the child of his desire”. The parental relationship turns predatory, reversing the dynamic of The Courtship of Mr Lyon, where the father tries to satisfy his daughter’s desire, and reversing the genders of the hypotext of The Snow Child.The Countess, though, is immediately hostile: “how shall I be rid of her?” Chiming with the step-mother figure of Snow White, the Countess schemes for ways to abandon the child, “galloping off and leaving her there”, or by preparing for her to “drown”. The Countess is portrayed as explicitly antagonistic, but the chilling nonchalance is perhaps the most disturbing aspect. When the Count “thrust his virile member into the dead girl”, an act of simultaneously necrophilic, paedophilic, and incestual sexual violence, she just “reined in her stamping mare and watched narrowly”. The image of the “mare” from the title story reappears here, but it is much more chilling: her calmness against the wild liberation of the mother in the title story. The mares act as symbols of sexual desire, and the Countess’ reining in of it could be read as a form of repression. However, she still competes with the child to be the object of the Count’s sexual desire, yet he only feels “sorry” for her. The story is intrinsically tied into commodification and capitalism. Both this story and The Courtship of Mr Lyon commodify the rose, but in this story, it is this that kills the child. The Countess throwing off her glove and diamond brooches mean nothing when the Count could just buy her new ones. It appears that she is dependent on his economic agency. However, this changes when she asks for a rose, which exists outside his aristocratic boundary of power, and he “can’t deny her that”. The Countess is forced to remove her opponents in order to survive, even if that opponent is her stepdaughter.

In conclusion, Carter’s view of motherhood is extremely ambivalent, exploring the ways in which capitalism and patriarchy influences the family unit. Mothers and daughters are indispensable aspects of this dynamic and Carter interrogates the way they are pit against each other, or support one another, in an oppressive system that targets both.