In Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber, the theme of transformation appears throughout the short story cycle. The hero/heroine’s virginity acts as a source of strength that protects them from harm. Their lack of fear also saves them from death. Virginity acts as power of potentia, either literally or symbolically and results in a release of an observed transformative power. The bloody chamber serves a different symbolic purpose of transformation for Beauty in “The Courtship of Mr Lyon”, the heroine in “The Tiger’s Bride” and the Countess in “The Lady of the House of Love”. Each of these characters will embark on a journey that questions their selfhood in circumstances that are presented to them and ultimately each will go through a transformation involving maturation of the self, love, loss or magic.
In “The Courtship of Mr Lyon” Beauty’s father breaks a white rose from a rosebush and the Beast appears beside him and “[shakes] him like an angry child shakes a doll” (Carter 44). After this incident, the Beast allows him to take the rose home to Beauty, but in return he must bring her back for dinner. This is the beginning of Beauty’s journey that leads to her transformation. Beauty is portrayed as a pure ideal figure, associated with images of whiteness, virginity and purity. She is described as a “lovely girl, whose skin possess the same, inner light so you would have thought she, too, was made of all snow…white and unmarked as a spilled bolt of bridal satin” (41). Beauty is susceptible to change and corruptibility through access to material wealth, flattery, living in the city and the possibility of being independent of obligations to the Beast. These blind her to ideas of true value. When Beauty looks into the Beast’s eyes, she ...
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... to her pure better self, our heroine transforms into a tigress and the Countess is transformed into a human. They each enter their own destined selfhood through self reflection. However, each being must individually endure the reality of the battle and suffer in order to be reborn again and become what they are meant to be. Regardless of being human, beast or vampire, each undergo a transformation that encounter instances of loss, magic love and maturation.
Works Cited
Carter, Angela. The Bloody Chamber. New York: Penguin Books, 1993. Print
Carter, Angela. “The Courtship of Mr Lyon.” The Bloody Chamber. New York: Penguin
Books, 1993. 41-51. Print
Carter, Angela. “The Tiger’s Bride.” The Bloody Chamber. New York: Penguin
Books, 1993. 51-67. Print
Carter, Angela. “The Lady of the House of Love.” The Bloody Chamber. New York:
Penguin Books, 1993. 93-108. Print
She sees her father old and suffering, his wife sent him out to get money through begging; and he rants on about how his daughters left him to basically rot and how they have not honored him nor do they show gratitude towards him for all that he has done for them (Chapter 21). She gives into her feelings of shame at leaving him to become the withered old man that he is and she takes him in believing that she must take care of him because no one else would; because it is his spirit and willpower burning inside of her. But soon she understands her mistake in letting her father back into he life. "[She] suddenly realized that [she] had come back to where [she] had started twenty years ago when [she] began [her] fight for freedom. But in [her] rebellious youth, [she] thought [she] could escape by running away. And now [she] realized that the shadow of the burden was always following [her], and [there she] stood face to face with it again (Chapter 21)." Though the many years apart had changed her, made her better, her father was still the same man. He still had the same thoughts and ways and that was not going to change even on his death bed; she had let herself back into contact with the tyrant that had ruled over her as a child, her life had made a complete
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... need for hard labor but as they move to the country, Beauty has to learn to work alongside her future brother-in-law and do heavy work. She also moves away from her studies and turns to helping her family progress. After her year away from her family, she physically grows into a woman. She also finds herself dependant of the Beast rather than of her family as would a child.
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Elizabeth Bathory is known by many different names; ‘The Bloody Lady of Čachtice’, ‘The Blood Countess’, ‘Countess Dracula’, and not without reason. In the 16th century this murderess became obsessed with achieving mastery over nature; the countess had forsaken her humanity by drinking the blood of virgins for vitality and bleeding them dry to bathe in it for her skin to be clear of imperfections and signs of aging. Often the vain become delusioned that beauty and youth preserves the body forever, when in fact, life can just as easily be ripped away young than it is when old. With torture and a side of cannibalism, Countess Bathory was not the poster-woman for mental health, but her fear of death was what drove her to go to such extremes. Humans will go to endless lengths to maintain the illusion of mastery over nature and control over life and death. Throughout Oryx and Crake, Margaret Atwood explores human nature and puts forth that humans are driven by knowledge and fear of their own mortality. She argues that humans seek to play a divine role to control their own fate and in the process, sacrificing morals and ethics to quell that fear.
This essay explores the blurring of gender roles within Bram Stoker’s Dracula and Angela Carter’s The Lady of the House of Love, focusing on the presentation of a sexually assertive female and its threat to the patriarchal society, and the duality of the female characters as they are presented as enticing and thrilling, but also dangerous and somewhat repulsive.
After meeting with the knight, La Belle allows him to temporarily make her his object of affection. Quite coyly, she returns this affection with her looks of love and "sweet moans" (19, 20).
Ladies should be depicted as strong, gracious, beautiful beings that every man needs and respects, although Meyers portrayal of this strays away from other novels based on vampires such as Bram Stokers’ Dracula. Stoker’s women are Independent and describe the perfect picture of a heroine which is defined as “‘a woman distinguish...
Villeneuve uses personification in her writing to show that Beauty made her own conscious decision to stay and love the Beast, it was not because she was suffering from an illness where she falls in love with her captor. The first way that Villeneuve uses personification is when she brings monkeys into the fairy tale. She writes these monkeys to be servants to Beauty, waiting for her orders (Villeneuve 70). Villeneuve’s original version includes the birds and monkeys to have these human traits because when the fairy originally turned the prince into the Beast, another fairy turned the prince’s servants into monkeys and birds and everyone one else who was a witness of the transformation into stones, right where they stood. According to
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