Women In The Bloody Chamber

There are a numerous amount of female characters in The Bloody Chamber who portray attitudes towards women in a variety of different ways. However, there are plenty of male characters who reflect these attitudes towards women and manage to portray them as weak and helpless. Some of these characters support and encourage the typical stereotypes surrounding women whereas others dismiss these ideas and portray women as strong and independent characters. As all of the stories are told from a female perspective the reader gets to see them as the protagonist for once instead of the victim. The Bloody Chamber was first published in 1979, this was an extraordinary time for women as new laws were being introduced which may finally put an end to gender
In this story the narrator is portrayed as the classic damsel in distress and could be described using the typical “cute but essentially hopeless” (Bertens, H) stereotype, however it is actually the mother who takes down the powerful marquis, the quote "now, without a moment's hesitation, she raised my father's gun, took aim and put a single, irreproachable bullet through my husband’s head" portrays the mother as a strong, ruthless character who would do anything for her daughter. The quote "on her eighteenth birthday, my mother had disposed of a man-eating tiger" not only dismisses the stereotype of women being weak and the victim, but the word "disposed" suggests that the mother had no trouble taking down a tiger therefore she is strong
The quote “I have a place prepared for your exquisite corpse in my display of flesh” supports the male-gaze theory as the Marquis preserves his wives so he can look at them whenever he likes, Carter also shows us how the marquis literally moulds the women in order to satisfy his erotic tastes with the phrase “the opera singer lay, quite naked”, it could also be argued that the Marquis kept his deceased wives naked to present them as pure. When the new wife sees the previous women before her she says “the worst thing was, the dead lips smiled”, this suggests that the Marquis positioned her lips in order to make her seem happy, is this his way of justifying what he has done and therefore relieving himself of some guilt? As well as being a pretty object for men to look at, women are expected to obey their husbands and Carter expresses this in The Bloody Chamber, the quote “‘Every man must have one secret, even if only one, from his wife’ he said ‘ promise me this, my whey-faced piano