OI HAAIII HANNAH

;)

Women in 'The Bloody Chamber'

The mother in ‘The Bloody Chamber’ embodies a feminist’s dream. The ‘indomitable’ woman is a figure of strength and courage; shooting ‘a man –eating tiger with her own hand”, and holding all the traits of a masculine hero. The passing down of her husband’s “antique service revolver” symbolises her possession of the power traditionally held by men. Yet she is equipped with ‘maternal telepathy’, which adds another dimension to her empowerment as it is a feminine strength, suggesting Carter is employing the notion that women may embrace their femininity whilst still retaining an advantage over men. However, her masculine qualities cannot be ignored. The windswept image is one of strength, portrayed towards the end of the novel, when she saves the damsel in distress, a role usually dominated by men. Her ‘white mane’ alludes to the image of a hunting lioness, a symbol of strength. She is the embodiment of “furious justice”.

Contradicting societies’ expectations of women again, the mother promotes choice, a luxury not enjoyed by most young females at the time. She asks her daughter “Are you sure you love him?”, offering her daughter the choice of marrying the “richest man in France”. The fact that she is concerned over the issue of love, not money, illuminates her romantic side. She is not merely concerned with using marriage as an excuse to better oneself and provide security, as many women were concerned over at the time, but suggests she believes marriage is for love, a quality admired by strong, independent women.

Another more minor female character who holds significance is the Marquis’ Grandmother. She wore her “ruby choker” as a symbol to represent her escape from the guillotine. As the action of removing a head resembles Freud’s castration theory, it may be interpreted that the Grandmother is wearing the choker in “luxurious defiance” of her femininity, that she is not just a being defined by her lack of male genitalia. She is also described as the “woman who had escaped the blade”, suggesting her role is to foreshadow the fortune of our narrator who also “escapes” the Marquis’ blade. As the “blade” connotates to fallac symbolism, the grandmother may also represent women who escape the male dominance prevalent at the time, showing feministic qualities.

The character who is void of feministic qualities however, is our narrator. She epitomises the dependant, naive female void of any strength of character of her own. Merely an object of possession, she “ceased to be her child in becoming his wife”; she is always owned by somebody else. She is condemned to be objectified by all those around her, her husband asses her as if he was “inspecting horseflesh”, and even in what should be a passionate first sexual experience, she is merely described as an “artichoke” who’s leaves need to be stripped.

Her nativity is shown through her “potential for corruption”, and her childish characteristics. Her husband calls her a “little girl”, and she repeatedly refers to her lack of maturity; “Child that I was, I giggled when she left me.” She has the tendency to place herself in fairy-tale like stories, with “castles” and “mermaidens”, suggesting she lacks a mature grip on reality and highlighting her childlike dependence. Even when about to be killed, instead of trying to escape, she merely obeys the wishes of her husband, and like an obedient dog; “descended down the spiral staircase” to meet her death. This depicts her lack of independence, and how she conforms to the traditionally seen view that women submit themselves to men, whatever the circumstance. She is the complete antitheses to her mother.

Stéphane Mallarmé (1842-1898)

French poet and leader of the Symbolist movement in poetry with Paul Verlaine; Mallarmé was a provincial school teacher who came to Paris to live a bourgeois life on the rue de Rome, but published allusive, compressed poems, which suggested rather than denoted.

From the 1880s Mallarmé was the centre of a group of French writers in Paris, which had such members Gide, Paul Valéry, and Proust. Mallarmé's ideas on poetry and art were considered difficult and obscure. When Mallarmé started to write poetry in the 1850s', French poets were still rather obedient to certain conventions concerning rhyme, metre, theme, etc. Victor's Hugo's notion that 'pure poetry' is essentially 'useless' was widely accepted. Proust wrote once: "How unfortunate that so gifted a man should become insane every time he takes up the pen".

Challenging his readers, Mallarmé sought out from a dictionary the long-forgotten meanings of common words and used these. Naturally this provoked a hostility, that followed Mallarmé through his career.

According to Mallarmé's theories, nothing lies beyond reality, but within this nothingness lie the essence of perfect forms. It is the task of the poet to reveal and crystallize these essences. Mallarmé's poetry employs condensed figures and unorthodox syntax. He believed that the point of a poem was the beauty of the language. "You don't make a poem with ideas, but with words."

Each poem is built around a central symbol, idea, or metaphor and consists of subordinate images that illustrate and help to develop the idea. However, he preferred to hint between the lines at meanings rather than state them clearly. The reader must return over and over again to the lines, concentrate on the music of the words rather than the referential meaning. Once he stated: "I become obscure, of course! if one makes a mistake and thinks one is opening a newspaper."

Portrayal of Men

Carter's prominent male character in 'The Bloody Chamber' takes the form of the sadistic, "weighted" and powerful Marquis. His "dark mane" and "leonine" qualities highlight the animalistic, preditorial nature of his character. His seduction of our protagonist resembles a hunter stalking it's prey as he would "creep up" behind her.

The extent of the Marquis' power is shown through his exercising of control over his new, young wife. He can order her to wear the clothes he wishes her to wear, and by procrastinating bedding her, with no regard for her desires hints at a controlling sadism. If we consider the 1970's feminist discussion of the notion of the 'male-gaze', which depicts the aesthetic objectification of women as merely sexual, we can see how the marquis conforms to this notion. He "inspects" and "assesses", and she catches him looking at her with lust, illuminating his tendency to objectify her. Even the chauffeur "eyed" her, reinforcing that she is constantly judged through the "male-gaze".

In contrast, the piano-tuner is prevented from looking at women in the way that the 'normal' sighted man sees her. His blindness is at once symbol of his weakness and the possibility of a non-threatening relationship, one not based on selfish, primarily visual gratification for the man alone, as seen in her relationship with the Marquis. She later refers the the piano-tuner as her "lover", yet they have not shared any sexual experiences, highlighting that he symbolise a loving relationship can form without sexual objectification, as with the Marquis.

The piano-tuner in other forms is the antithesis to the Marquis. The latter is cruel, voyeuristic and blasphemous; the piano-tuner is gentle, blind and trained in his trade by a 'good priest'. It is significant that later on in the story, his gentle manner provokes a far greater reaction in her that the violent Marquis. In a romantic interlude, she faints, suggesting Carter is championing the gentle manner of men, while condemning the controlling, patriarchal tendency embodied by the Marquis.

The piano-tuner is identified with the natural order of the world; he is a natural man, speaking with the "rhythms" of the land and sea. Contrastingly, the Marquis with his "grotesque", "waxen" face, "deathly" composure and calm detachment project inhuman and unnatural characteristics. This portrayal of the two men in 'The Bloody Chamber' explicitly show Carter's perception of men, and which one she considers to be preferable.

Todays lesson..........

So we started on page 7, looking at the way our narrator has "exiled" herself from the everyday world, which suggests almost she will endure almost a punishment through the transition into her new life; for shadowing what is about to come.

We then explored the arousal she experiences around her new husband; "the train began to throb again as if on delighted anticipation", "my heightened, excited senses". She is inexplicitly expressing her sexual awakening again, through her language, not directly addressing it.

Following this is another description of her husband, and the pervasive deathly imagery is inescapable. His "dark, motionless" eyes are void of any life, and interestingly, a "sarcophagi" reference is included; a mask used to cover up the dead, reinforcing this aura of death surrounding him. He is also describes as having "too much in common" with white lilies, the funeral flower, again highlighting his connection with death.

The "male-gaze" theory concerning the objectification of women is prevalent in the pages we read earlier. Our narrator constantly mentions how men look at her; on page 7 she catches him "gazing" at her, the chauffeur "eyed" her, yet she seems to enjoy this sexual objectification. This is highlighted in the bedroom, after he has stripped her "as if he was stripping the leaves off an artichoke", or unwrapping his "bargain". She is objectifying herself, but instead of feeling degraded, she is only "disgruntled" and frustrated when her husband does not bed her after. This implies the narrator does not embody feminist qualities or views, yet embraces her status.

"Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema"

Voyeurism is the sexual interest in or practice of spying on people engaged in intimate behaviors, such as undressing, sexual activity, or other activity usually considered to be of a private nature, In popular imagination the term is used in a more general sense to refer to someone who habitually observes others without their knowledge, with no necessary implication of sexual interest.

Feminist Film Thoery: In considering the way that films are put together, many feminist film critics have pointed to the "male gaze" that predominates in classical Hollywood filmmaking.

What counts is what the heroine provokes, or rather what she represents. She is the one, or rather the love or fear she inspires in the hero, or else the concern he feels for her, who makes him act the way he does. In herself the woman has not the slightest importance."

Laura Mulvey's "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema" expands on this conception of the passive role of women in cinema to argue that film provides visual pleasure through scopophilia, and identification with the on-screen male actor.

"In their traditional exhibitionist role women are simultaneously looked at and displayed, with their appearance coded for strong visual and erotic impact so that they can be said to connote to-be-looked-at-ness," and as a result contends that in film a woman is the "bearer of meaning, not maker of meaning." Mulvey argues that Freud's psychoanalytic theory is the key to understanding how film creates such a space for female sexual objectification and exploitation through the combination of the patriarchal order of society, and 'looking' in itself as a pleasurable act of voyeurism, as "the cinema satisfies a primordial wish for pleasurable looking.

"Psycho" 1960; One of the most notable horror films, the female victim is indeed, attractive.

This theory is highlighted in film series such as the "James Bond", and "Indiana Jones" series. The extensive list of ""Bond Girls", all attractive and objects of the male characters desire proves many of Mulvey's arguments concerning the perceptions of women in films.

Mulvey identifies three "looks" or perspectives that occur in film which serve to sexually objectify women.
1) The perspective of the male character on screen and how he perceives the female character.
2) The perspective of the spectator as they see the female character on screen.
3) The third perspective allows the male audience to take the female character as his own personal sex object because he can relate himself, through looking, to the male character in the film.

In the paper, Mulvey calls for a destruction of modern film structure as the only way to free women from their sexual objectification in film, arguing for a removal of the voyeurism encoded into film by creating distance between the male spectator and the female character. The only way to do so, Mulvey argues, is by destroying the element of voyeurism and "the invisible guest" Mulvey also asserts that the dominance that men embody is only so because women exist, as without a woman for comparison, a man and his supremacy as the controller of visual pleasure are insignificant. For Mulvey, it is the presence of the female that defines the patriarchal order of society as well as the male psychology of thought.

Mulvey calls for an eradication of female sexual objectivity in order to align herself with second-wave feminism. She argues that in order for women to be equally represented in the workplace, women must be portrayed as men are: as lacking sexual objectification.