Angela Carter is one of my favourite authors of all time, and while most know her for her fairy tale retellings in The Bloody Chamber, she did write nine novels and three other short story collections. Her works are widely known as feminist with magic realism, but a lot of her stories contain elements of horror, making her a huge inspiration for my own horror fiction.
This essay mostly focuses on the horror elements in The Bloody Chamber and how they were always there in the fairy tales she reimagined. Carter is not generally a name you would think of if someone said ‘British horror authors’ but this collection of stories is classic Gothic horror blended with visceral feminism and a dark aftertaste.
Five things Angela Carter taught me about Horror:
- Feminism and horror are heavily interlinked.
- Horror is personal, and the personal is political.
- Women are driven by different fears to men.
- Female horror is based on abuse and subjugation.
- You cannot erase the darkness of the fairy tale.
I studied Carter as part of my English Literature degree at Liverpool Hope University. It was probably the darkest, most visceral literature I’d come across on the course so far, therefore really standing out to me. Her novel The Passion Of New Eve really drove home the violence of the female body and female-centred horror of vulnerability, loss of bodily autonomy and objectification.
‘Carter’s texts were known for the excessiveness of their violence and, latterly, the almost violent
exuberance of their excess. Many a reader has found the savagery with
which she can attack cultural stereotypes disturbing, even alienating.
Personally I found (and find) it exhilarating – you never knew what was
coming next from the avant-garde literary terrorist of feminism.’ – Merja Makinen.
Feminism and horror are heavily interlinked.
Carter’s reimaginings of classic fairy tales brought abuse and violence to the foreground, sometimes reshaping the female protagonist as the predator (The Lady Of The House Of Love) or carving out enough room for the female character to grow (The Courtship Of Mr Lyon) after an initial period of immaturity and selfishness.
In The Bloody Chamber, the woman enters the husband’s world to find her place in it. In the story, the narrator describes ‘the viscera of the castle’–a body that she then explores. Discovering his dead wives, she knows she will suffer the same fate, but who would help her? She asks ‘Who, on this distant coast would believe the white-faced girl from Paris who came running to them with a suffering tale of blood, of fear, of the ogre murmuring in the shadows?’ The system supports the aristocracy of lords ‘who must be obeyed’ and her powerlessness creates a sense of inevitability, the image of the fantastical ‘ogre’ supporting her fear that they’d think she was hysterical.
The terror of not being believed haunts the female Gothic and female horror stories: The Woman In White, when Laura can’t prove she’s really Laura, watching others sign her death certificate, or in Dracula, it’s Lucy Westenra’s three suitors who cannot believe that her illness is caused by something supernatural, her fiance still refusing to believe it when she becomes a vampire. Could Lucy have been helped earlier if they’d accepted her version of events before Van Helsing had to step in?
Sexual desire and female sexuality.
Many classic horror novels focus on the unnatural desires of female characters ie Carmilla, the lesbian vampire, or Lucy Westenra, the devourer of children (a modern interpretation being the rejection of the role of mother in Victorian society). Female desire was feared, as women were traditionally seen as vessels for male desire, having no desires of their own (challenged famously by Marie Stopes, author of the once-banned book Married Love [1918]). Desire can be presented as monstrous and unnatural, and we see this notion explored in Carter’s the lady of The House of Love.
In her fairy tales particularly, Carter also put a lot of emphasis on the beast being the driver, or the symbolism of the female desire (as opposed to a heavily repressed/uniformed male lead such as a Prince or a King). Carter presents ‘leonine’ male characters to give the heroines something wild and untamed: a male vessel for their desire, something overlooked in traditional teachings of male and female sexuality. Both Mr Lyon of The Courtship of Mr Lyon and the tiger in the Tiger’s Bride are outsiders compared to the other male characters, a playground for the heroines to explore. The beasts in horror stories or some other outside threat (the vampire) can represent repressed female sexual desire and the process of engaging with it.
Horror is personal. The personal is political.
This slogan came about in the 1960s as part of second-wave feminism highlighting how every aspect of a woman’s life (domestic labour, reproductive rights, pay, opportunities, marriage, education) was political and required political intervention in order to generate change. Horror centred on women is often personal, and affects their bodily autonomy, emotional well-being, rights and freedoms.
Both classic fairy tales and Carter’s retellings emphasise the personal lives of the female characters and how patriarchal systems directly affect them on an intimate level: the narrator in The Bloody Chamber marrying for security and wealth, the young girl in The Snow Child being a product of a man’s wish, (and his to do as he pleases) and Mr Lyon and the tiger of The Tiger’s Bride presenting the heroines of the other stories with a wilder, riskier alternative than the traditional options available to them, symbolising the beast, or the object of their own desires.
The transformation of child to woman.
A common theme across these stories and many female Gothic stories is the loss of innocence, whether it be psychological or physical. A transformation of some sort takes place, and in Carter’s work it usually involves menstruation or marriage (or both). The narrator of The Bloody Chamber leaves her mother’s house, a childhood home, to become property of a wealthy man. Her worth rests on whether she bears an heir or not. She cannot see her own desires, only the desires she hopes her new husband has for her.
Breasts, blood and bodies are frequently mentioned to show us the physical and emotional turbulence of the female body, once unable to be explored by its own owner within historic societies and passive heroines of 19th century fairy tales (Little Red Riding Hood allows herself to be eaten and is rescued by the woodsman) but now, it is a vessel of power wielded by the heroines who control their own destinies.
The Female Predator.
The Lady Of The House Of Love presents us with a female predator, descended from a long line of aristocratic vampires, her basic needs as clear to her as they are restrictive. She’s a vampire countess, a woman now, and ‘she must have men’, devouring the young men who are lured into her castle. She dresses up for them in her negligee, leading them to her boudoir of death. This is my favourite tale as it is a twist on Sleeping Beauty, and while it reeks of human remains and rotted earth, the roses still bloom in the garden. You can almost see the skin caught between her teeth, but our vampiric countess is forever changed by the good-natured beauty of a kind-hearted young man, wanting nothing from her in exchange for his goodness. The passive, pure virgin is now a young man, and she must choose whether or not to defy her nature or accept it.
Women are driven by different fears than men.
Generally speaking, when it comes to horror, we can share a lot of fears that are predominantly human fears e.g. the dark, natural disaster, zombies, space horror. However, there are many fears that vary depending on the sex of the audience and the writer. You can see that female and male fears centre on different things. Female fear is mostly centred on vulnerability (The Bloody Chamber), the loss of bodily autonomy (Rosemary’s Baby) and inescapable domestic threat (Copycat). Male fear is slightly different, focusing on the loss of authority (The Shining), the unknown (Dracula) and physical inadequacy (Misery).
The female experience will often focus on vulnerability (whether this is the vulnerability the character herself is aware of or the audience’s perception of her vulnerability) and the constant threat of sexual assault, domestic violence or imprisonment. Carter emphasises the vulnerability of the heroines in a range of ways, but it often comes back to the patriarchal structure they’re held by. For example, the heroine in The Tiger’s Bride, once her father’s property, is lost in a bet and she is won by the tiger. The loss of your freedom and your future fully depending on your new owner is terrifying, and though not horror in any sense, this dark realisation permeates through literature (Pride And Prejudice: Mrs Bennett’s old age livelihood will be at the mercy of her husband’s nephew when Mr Bennett dies) and reminds us that women’s freedom and independence is still relatively new in the Western world. Feminist horror (and other speculative genres) tends to remind us that at any moment, the freedoms we enjoy could be taken away (The Handmaid’s Tale).
The Bloody Chamber collection focuses mostly on female vulnerability, and flips it on its head. Wolf-Alice and The Lady Of The House Of Love position the female as the night terror. The Bloody Chamber focuses on breaking the cycle of vulnerability, as it’s the mother who comes to take down Bluebeard, fighting against the system (patriarchal aristocracy) as much as she’s fighting her daughter’s attacker.
Female centred horror features female subjugation and abuse.
Emotional and physical abuse feature heavily in female-centred horror, and in fairy tales (a core genre I would argue is the trunk from which the horror tree branches), the female character is often unable to do anything about it. The mother is usually absent or just as passive, and the heroine suffers at the hands of a cruel parent-figure (Snow White, Cinderella, Rapunzel).
In Rumpelstiltskin, the boastful miller outright lies to the king to get him to take his daughter off his hands. The miller’s lies about how clever his daughter is and her ability to spin gold from straw will result in the death penalty if found to be untrue. The girl is offered the chance to become the king’s wife if she proves she can spin gold from straw, and if she can’t, he’ll execute her. What say did the miller’s daughter have in this? None whatsoever. Even better, now there’s a weird goblin man called Rumpelstiltskin who will help her, but only if she promises to give him her first child when she marries. Lovely. Another victim. Though the story ends with her becoming queen and discovering the little man’s name in order to free herself from her obligation of giving him the child (what did he want with it anyway? It doesn’t bear thinking about), she is still smiling within her gilded cage that other men made for her.
Carter takes the female prisoner or victim and gives her emancipation: whether that is through her own bodily autonomy, her choice of sexual partner, or her awareness of what is happening to her.
‘I have seen the cage you are weaving for me; it is a very pretty one and I shall sit, hereafter, in my cage of other singing birds but I – I shall be dumb through spite.’ – The Erl-King
The Erl-King perfectly emphasises the classic idea of the ‘gilded cage’: a prison that may not be of the imprisoned’s own choosing, but it is a societal or structural confine they’ve either brought upon themselves or been deceptively lured into. The heroine in the Erl-King loves her captor dearly, but she has known from the start that he ‘will do [her] grievous harm’, so she uses her feminine charms to calm him, and stroke his hair. She chooses her own trap for him: tenderness and violence that results in a dead Erl-king and the girl freeing all of the other imprisoned birds (girls).
You cannot erase the darkness of the fairy tale.
Fairy tales have been passed down for centuries, originating from even older folk tales. They’ve been adapted to suit the palate of the audience of each period in time, but their inherent darkness has never allowed for a full whitewash. Disney and other modern retellings for children have produced heavily-sanitised tales (Ariel’s happily ever after instead of turning into sea foam for example) but underneath the birdsong and fluttering eyelashes, it’s dark. Mothers are often absent, stepmothers are often cruel and motivated by jealousy of young women, and fathers are either passive or instrumental in upholding the patriarchal prison of the heroine. The forest, the unknown and the forces of the supernatural still haunt the fairy tale: bargains with beasts, gilded cages, loss of innocence, bites, pricks, poisons and even death just to name a few.
All of these elements work wonderfully well in horror fiction, too.
Carter not only embraced the fairy tale structure fully, but in her retellings for an adult audience, she brought the visceral, violent feminism to the forefront, and it fits within the genre of horror perfectly.
Other Horror articles:
- What Anne Rice taught me about horror.
- What is Gothic?
- What is Gothic Egyptomania?
- Horror Romance in Rice’s The Mummy.
Hanna Delaney is a horror author from Liverpool, UK. In 2024 she released her debut novel Oceanus, a futuristic thriller inspired by The Tempest. She has also published the Muldoon Supernatural thriller series set in Gothic 19th century Liverpool, and The Shade In The Sands And Other Stories, a collection of Egyptian Gothic Horror tales.
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