The Bloody Chamber
‘The role of women in the gothic genre is as victims always subjected to male authority’, compare and contrast to which this interpretation is relevant to your three chosen texts.
By Kristina Addis
Within My Last Duchess, The Bloody Chamber and Dracula, there is evidence to suggest that women within the gothic genre as portrayed as victims of male authority, as well as evidence to disprove this argument, instead suggesting that it is the women within the Gothic genre which makes themselves victims. ‘Angela Carter is particularly interested in the portrayal of women as victims of male aggression as a limiting factor in the feminist perspective of the time’[i] Carter, with her modern twist on traditional fairytales places a particular focus on women characters and the hardships they endure perhaps due to their own natural behaviour, whereas Stoker with his tale of vampires is more traditional with the female becoming victims, through his male authority. My last Duchess enhances this by showing how women in the gothic genre are victims of male authority, through her suspicious death and the duke’s obsession with her beauty. Angela Carter’s, The Bloody Chamber,’ when read as a young women’s initiatory quest for knowledge rather than as the story of an overly curious girl who makes a disastrous marriage, provides its readership with a women-centred perspective that both reflects and allows for social change through individual liminal experience’[ii]. The Bloody chamber takes different forms throughout the book, but continues to serve the same symbolic purpose; it is a place of transformation for the heroine that changed irrevocably. Each of these chambers is connected with violence and the blood shed when a woman looses her virginity and when she menstruates. Carter uses the chamber to make the connection between women’s sexuality, and the violence that they experience. This brings up the question of whether it is the men who make the women victims or
By Kristina Addis
Within My Last Duchess, The Bloody Chamber and Dracula, there is evidence to suggest that women within the gothic genre as portrayed as victims of male authority, as well as evidence to disprove this argument, instead suggesting that it is the women within the Gothic genre which makes themselves victims. ‘Angela Carter is particularly interested in the portrayal of women as victims of male aggression as a limiting factor in the feminist perspective of the time’[i] Carter, with her modern twist on traditional fairytales places a particular focus on women characters and the hardships they endure perhaps due to their own natural behaviour, whereas Stoker with his tale of vampires is more traditional with the female becoming victims, through his male authority. My last Duchess enhances this by showing how women in the gothic genre are victims of male authority, through her suspicious death and the duke’s obsession with her beauty. Angela Carter’s, The Bloody Chamber,’ when read as a young women’s initiatory quest for knowledge rather than as the story of an overly curious girl who makes a disastrous marriage, provides its readership with a women-centred perspective that both reflects and allows for social change through individual liminal experience’[ii]. The Bloody chamber takes different forms throughout the book, but continues to serve the same symbolic purpose; it is a place of transformation for the heroine that changed irrevocably. Each of these chambers is connected with violence and the blood shed when a woman looses her virginity and when she menstruates. Carter uses the chamber to make the connection between women’s sexuality, and the violence that they experience. This brings up the question of whether it is the men who make the women victims or