The Bloody Chamber (original) (raw)

Yuletide	[Oct. 21st, 2009|01:58 pm]the Angela Carter Community
Angela Carter's The Bloody Chamber and The Magic Toyshop are on The List of Nominated Fandoms for yuletide. The movie Company of Wolves is also nominated.If you are interested in writing or requesting these fandoms, be sure to sign up.
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Nights at the Circus	[Apr. 24th, 2008|04:35 pm]the Angela Carter Community
[**mood** |calm]I recently read Nights at the Circus for the first time, and I have to admit I didn't like it as much as The Magic Toyshop or The Bloody Chamber. I was first introduced to Angela Carter by watching the movie A Company of Wolves. I then read The Bloody Chamber, which I loved. I love fairy tale retellings, in general, but hers especially captivated me. Most older folk tales/fairy tales can be pretty gory or sexual in nature, so her stories felt a bit old and rural, which was fun. I also liked The Magic Toyshop and really felt like I had entered another mode of existence. Some kind of dreamlike place mixed with the less pretty parts of real life. Nights at the Circus gave me a somewhat similar impression, but it really didn't draw me in quite the way The Magic Toyshop did. I still liked it, but I was ready for the book to conclude. Though the ending really baffles me, and I don't know what to make of it.
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The Sadeian Woman	[Sep. 24th, 2006|10:37 pm]the Angela Carter Community
In The Sadeian Woman Angela Carter gives us a re-evaluation of the work of the Marquis de Sade from a feminist perspective. She sees de Sade as the prototype of the moral pornographer. He viewed the relations between the sexes (and between the classes) honestly and without hypocrisy. He shows sex as being about power, as being a social relation that is dependent on social and political structures. He also frees female sexuality from the function of reproduction and emphasises that it is not gender that matters but power. De Sade also demonstrates an understanding of the mechanics of the female orgasm that is a little surprising when you consider the complete ignorance on that topic that prevailed through much of the following century. Carter looks at de Sade’s best-known works, particularly Justine and Juliette. The eponymous heroine of Justine believes that virtue will be rewarded, and despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary continues to believe this. She is also convinced that virtue, in a woman, is entirely a matter of sex – as long as you don’t have sex, or if you must have sex as long as you don’t enjoy it you are automatically virtuous. In fact Carter tells us that Justine’s behaviour is often astonishingly selfish and even callous because of this profound misunderstanding of the nature of virtue. Her sister Juliette does not share her delusions. She embraces vice with enthusiasm, and she gets everything she wants. The fact that she is a woman does not prevent her from gaining both wealth and power. Justine is powerless not because she is female but because she misunderstands the nature of society.Carter also relates de Sade’s work to the way women have been depicted in Hollywood, with Marilyn Monroe being a version of Justine. The Sadeian Woman is Angela Carter at her most provocative.
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Nothing Sacred	[Sep. 21st, 2006|01:01 am]the Angela Carter Community
I’ve been reading more of Angela Carter’s Nothing Sacred. The essay on William and Dorothy Wordsworth and their junkie friends was amusing. And Dorothy’s rather pathetic devotion to her brother, which to Carter at least appears to have a very large element of repressed sexuality to it. I must confess I know little of Wordsworth and I loathe his poetry.I loved her piece on British television drama, and the essential folly of trying to turn Great Books into decent television. As she points out, great novels are by their very nature usually not suited for film or TV adaptation. It’s the things that make them great as novels that make them unsuitable for TV or movies. If you want proof you need look no further than the BBC’s disastrous adaptation of Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast novels.Her hatched job on Gone with the Wind was fun too. God I hate that movie.
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Angela Carter on Lulu and Lola Lola	[Sep. 19th, 2006|01:17 pm]the Angela Carter Community
Reading Angela Carter’s essay on Pandora’s Box and The Blue Angel in her collection of essays and journalism, Nothing Sacred, inspired me to watch The Blue Angel yet again tonight. While The Blue Angel is often seen as a film about a femme fatale who draws an innocent man to his destruction Carter sees it rather differently. She sees Lola Lola as a positive character, a strong woman in charge of her sexuality, who is in no way responsible for the unfortunate fate of Professor Rath (Emil Jannings). She sees the Professor as a monster who thoroughly deserves his fate. Watching the movie again I’m inclined to agree with her. He really is a very unpleasant man – a pompous ass, a bully, and a fool. The clown he later becomes is already there in embryo. Lola Lola really does nothing to bring about his downfall. He pursues her. Perhaps she should have discouraged him, but she was simply too soft-hearted to do so. Her crime was to be nice to him. She doesn't trap him into marriage – the marriage is entirely his idea. And it’s not as if she ever pretended to be anything other than she is. If he chose not to see the reality of the woman she was, if he chose to believe that she was going to become something different, then he’s simply made the mistake of falling in love with his own fantasy of her, rather than with the actual woman. His spiral downwards into degradation and depression, and self-pity, seems to be entirely his own work too. After all, did he really expect to keep his position as a professor at the grammar school after marrying her? And given the state that he gets himself into it’s remarkable that Lola Lola continues to have a certain affection for him, and continues to support him. Professor Rath’s fate may be tragic, but it’s a tragedy of his own making. With any luck tomorrow I’ll get a chance to watch Pandora’s Box again.
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