Angela Carter

Angela Carter

The Bloody Chamber

'delicious ecstasy of excitement'

'her mother had outfaced a junkful of Chinese pirates'

'Shot a man eating tiger with her own hand'

'a legacy of tears that never quite dried'

'a starburst of lights splatter the drawn blinds'

'syncopated roar of the train'

'he moved as softly as if all his shoes had soles of velvet'

'experience seemed to have washed it perfectly smooth, like a stone on a beach'

'sometimes he seemed to me like a lily'

'Her face is common property'

'deathly passion'

'a choker of rubies (..) like an extraordinarily precious slit throat'

'the white dress; the frail child within it; and the flashing crimson jewels round her throat, bright as arterial blood'

'I sensed in myself a potentiality for corruption that took my breath away'

'into marriage, into exile'

'part of the already familiar weight of the fire opal that glimmered like a gypsy's magic ball'

'this ring, the bloody bandage of rubies'

'like the tolling of a bell and I felt, all at once, a sharp premonition of dread'

'hovering, disembodied, above the sheets, illuminated from below like a grotesque carnival'

'I smelled the amniotic salinity of the ocean'

bare November trees, chauffeur by sleek black motor... her: b+w fur coat

'a landscape of misty pastels with a look about it of being continuously on the point of melting'

'contravening the materiality of both earth and the waves, with the melancholy of a mermaiden who perches on her rock and waits, endlessly, for a lover who had drowned'

'his face was as still as ever I'd seen it, still as a pond iced thickly over'

'he stripped me (...) as if he were stripping the leaves off an artichoke'

'the lilies I always associate with him; that are white. And stain you'

spooning, lace, clutching breast, necklance, holding tummy

'the rags on the floor, deep, pulsing blues of heaven and red of the hearts dearest blood'

'the girl with tears hanging on her cheeks like stuck pearls, her cunt a split fig below the great globes of her buttocks'

'he kissed those blazing rubies, too. He kissed them before he kissed my mouth'

'In the course of that one-sided struggle, I had seen his deathly composure shatter like a porcelain vase flung against a wall'

'I clung to him as though only the one who had inflicted the pain could comfort me for suffering it'

'he had cognac in the library with the purple velvet curtains drawn against the night, where he took me to perch on his knee in a leather arm chair beside the flickering log fire'

'little Poiret shift of white muslin, he seemed especially fond of it, my breasts showed through the flimsy stuff, he said, like little soft white doves that sleep, each one, with a pink eye open'

'not let me take off my ruby choker (...) nor fasten up my descending hair, the sign of a virginity so recently ruptured that still remained a wounded presence between us'

'do not hand the bloody sheets out of the window (..) such a flag'

'my innocence that captivated him'

'opal on my finger spurted green flame'

'heavy as if he had been gifted at birth with more specific gravity than the rest of us'

'Every man must have one secret'

'promise me you'll use all the keys on the ring except that last little one I showed you'

'I sat straight up in bed, under the sardonic masks of the gargoyles carved above me'

'Who knew how to pleasure him far better than a girl who's fingers had been exercised, hitherto, only by the practice of scales and arpeggios'

'The tall jar of lilies beside the bed, how the thick glass distorted their fat stems so they looked like arms'

'I understood at once that one of my principle functions as catelaine was to provide work for the staff'

'hats on wooden heads to keep their shape, the shoes on wooden feet as if all these inanimate objects were imitating the appearance of life, to mock me'

'a tank of goldfish who swam in and out of moving fronds of weeds, as bored, I thought, as I was'

'I grew calmer under the cold eye of her dissapproval'

'I had the brief notion that his heart, pressed flat as a flower, crimson and thin as tissue paper, lay in this file. It was a very thin one'

'I was too deluded by his apparent taste for me to think my disobedience might truly offend him'

'The wall of this stark torture chamber were the naked rocks; they gleamed as if they were sweating with fright'

'Stumbled only upon a little museum of his perversity'

Catafalque - 

• naked opera singer under thin sheet of linen, imprint of blue stranglers hands, 'the dead lips smiled'
• 'skull hung by a system of unseen chords', crowned with a 'wreath of white roses' and a veil of lace
• opened lid of coffin, dropped keys into blood, pierced by 100 spikes

'my first thought when i saw the ring for which I had sold myself to this fate, was how to escape it'

'I ran to the telephone, and the line, of course, was dead. Dead as his wives'

'Time was his servant, too , it would trap me, here, in a night that would cast until he came back to me, like a black sun on a hopeless morning'

'If my music had first ensnared him, then might it not also give me the power to free myself from him?'

'fear gave me strength'

'Any bride brought tho this castle should come ready dressed in mourning, should bring a priest and a coffin with her'

'The twin head-lamps of his great black car, gouging tunnels through the shifting mist'

'The secret of Pandora's box; but he had given me the box, himself, knowing I must learn the secret'

'The chthonic gravity of his presence exerted a tremendous pressure on the room , so that the blood pounded in my ears as if we had been precipitated to the bottom of the sea, beneath the waves that pounded against the shore'

'I held my life in my hands'

'The hand he stretched out for those counters in his game of love and death shook a little'

'That tell-tale stain had resolved itself to make the shape and brilliance of the heart on a playing card'

'My virgin of the arpeggios, prepare yourself for the martyrdom'

'The weather was grey, indeterminate, the sea had an oily, sinister look , a gloomy day on which to die'

'for do not fear that in death you shall be divided'

'My husband laid my branded forehead on the stone'

'My husband stood stock. Still as if she had been Medusa, the sword still raised over his head. 

She raised my fathers gun, took aim and put a single, irreproachable bullet through my husbands head'

This story fully freaked me out. It was soooo horrible reading and left my brain in a whirl afterwards. I really don't think I could study this further in depth.

Themes:

• colours (darkness, white, red, opal/turqouise)
• fate, destiny, choice, consequences
• fragility, corruption, youth
• nature (sea)
• mystical/magic (mermaids, playing music)
• secrets, terror

Author: