Erotic Infidelities: Love and Enchantment in Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber by Kimberly J. Lau (review)

The subtitle of Kimberly Lau’s Erotic Infidelities, “Love and Enchantment in Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber,” is somewhat misleading insofar as the mostly positive connotations of “love” and “enchantment” are challenged, dismantled, and recast in her interrogation of Carter’s tour de force of fairy-tale retellings. Successively taking on each of the tales in The Bloody Chamber (1979), Lau examines Carter’s underlying critical project by revealing her sustained thematic grappling with “the near impossibility of heterosexual love and desire under patriarchy” (8). Lau demonstrates Carter’s endeavor to break out of the phallocentric mold in which traditional fairy tales are lodged and establish a potential for an “alternate erotics” (15).

Lau reads Carter’s “Bluebeard” tale, “The Bloody Chamber,” through an intricate network of literary, cultural, and theoretical allusions, which include Charles Baudelaire, the Marquis de Sade, Sigmund Freud, and the biblical story of Eve. As Lau sees it, Carter’s invocations of these staples of Western culture serve to delineate the arena in which the story’s heroine finds herself, that of hegemonic male power pitted against female curiosity and sexual desire. Foregrounding the critique of societal representations of women in “The Bloody Chamber,” Lau concomitantly underscores Carter’s insistence on her heroine’s complicity in her objectification and victimhood; the labyrinth of cultural scripts in which her heroine is ensnared—defined at every turn by religion, pornography, marriage, and other dominant phallocentric discourses—is not easily exited. Nevertheless, Lau discerns implicit attempts to elude the unyielding prison of gender construction. Carter, in Lau’s view, succeeds in undermining phallocentric ideologies and liberating her heroine not only from the bloodthirsty Marquis but also from the “dominant scripts of gender” in which she is implicated (28).

In the next three stories, which Lau dubs “the Feline stories,” Lau proposes a dialogic link between Carter’s two “Beauty and the Beast” tales and “Puss-in-Boots” insofar as all three of her retellings center on human-animal relationships that raise questions of gender and subjectivity. Whereas “The Courtship of Mr. Lyon” suggests the possibility of its heroine finding a way “outside the Symbolic Order” (59), which is never realized, “The Tiger’s Bride” succeeds in creating an alternate erotics to the dominant heterosexual one espoused by Madame Le Prince de Beaumont’s classic tale. Lau argues that Carter’s overt faithfulness to this tale in “The Courtship of Mr. Lyon” foregrounds not its timelessness but rather the timelessness of patriarchy’s primary oppressive institution: marriage. For Lau, Carter’s narrative fidelity to Beaumont’s tale constitutes a satiric critique of the classic tale and its socializing lessons. Although Lau maintains that the heroine of “The Tiger’s Bride” is no less an object of exchange between men than Beauty of the previous story, she also points out that the “typically consolatory myths of romantic love,” which work to dull the economic register of such exchanges, do not prevail in Carter’s rendition of the fairy tale (54). Lau demonstrates how Carter creates an alternate erotics by privileging reciprocity between two equal subjectivities over the putative hierarchical object-status of women in heterosexual unions.

In “Dangerous Articulations” Lau clusters Carter’s “Erl-King” and “The Snow Child” into one chapter because she identifies in both stories a critique of the British Romantic aesthetic and its gendered idealization of nature. Whereas Lau construes Carter’s rejection of “Lacan’s theory of language, gender, and desire” in the “Erl-King” (96), in her reading of “The Snow Child” she demonstrates Carter’s ongoing critique of both Freud’s Oedipal theory and Lacan. Carter, as Lau reads it, implies that women’s complete subjugation to “male articulation” undermines “any potential for subjectivity and mutual identification” (96).

In discussing “The Lady of the House of Love,” Lau expounds Carter’s conflation of the story of “Sleeping Beauty” with a female vampire story, “as a...