by Jordan Kasko
While in the process of researching, cogitating upon, and writing this essay, I took various opportunities to discuss my subject matter with others. Almost invariably, my sounding board would seem puzzled as to how I could connect the Gothic (and I’m sure that each person has a slightly different concept of what the Gothic actually is) with the Orientalism of Edward Said and his protégés. For those that are familiar with both the literary style and the theory, however, the stretch shouldn’t seem too great: the darkness, mystery, and superstition of the Gothic lends itself well to the Occident’s interpretation of the Orient, even if the majority of Gothic stories are set in the Western world. Additionally, the true Gothic – the romance; the woman leaving her home for a strange, faraway castle or mansion with its secrecy and apprehension – reflects a journey to the East, to the unknown, to the land of the fantastical and occasionally horrific. Particularly, the man who draws the woman away – usually a Byronic character of sorts, hero or villain as he may be – mirrors the Orient because of his magnetic, sexual, opaque, and mystical personality. It is my intention to show that, by utilizing the Western paradox of fear of and obsession with the Orient in its role as the “Other,” Angela Carter creates the Gothic in her story “The Bloody Romance.”
Obviously, this application of Orientalism to the Gothic through Carter’s story is merely a case study; I believe that Gothic writers constantly utilize Orientalism to create many of the Gothic’s essential characteristics. First, there is the movement at the beginning of a tale to a foreign abode. Carter wastes no time setting up this premise: at the end of the first paragraph, she describes her character taking a train “away from Paris, away from girlhood, away from the white, enclosed quietude of my mother’s apartment, into the unguessable country of marriage” (7). Her diction is symbolic here: though the protagonist is merely moving to another part of France, her marriage is an “unguessable country,” not unlike those countries of the East which Westerners could barely fathom. She does not know what to expect, and she can only understand it through her Parisian eyes. In addition, there is the word “white,” which seems to add nothing more to the sentence (beyond, perhaps, revealing the proclivity of Gothic writers towards endless adjectives) other than a sense of race. If her home in Paris was white, and she is departing it, then the assumption is made that she is moving somewhere that is not white. Somewhere that is black, perhaps – an allusion to the bleak Gothic as well as to the racist “Other” that lives outside of the Western world. The “Other” that was “born” in a “marvelous castle” (9) which she now approaches as if it were a foreign land.
Secondly, the descriptions of both the castle and the man in “The Bloody Chamber” are blatantly idealized in a tradition that nearly screams of Orientalism. The mansion has a “faery solitude;” it is “a mysterious, amphibious place, contravening the materiality of both earth and the waves;” it is a “lovely, sad, sea-siren of a place” (13). It is full of Eastern books (17), china cabinets (20), and “Russian leather” (12) – in fact, one could almost imagine it as a Turkish khan or an Indian palace. When the narrator describes “gold bath taps” (24), she is talking about them in terms of a strange luxury, one that exemplifies the extreme wealth of the Marquis, something often associated with the nobles of the East. Money sets a man apart from his peers; it makes him unreachable and unknowable on many levels, adding to the Orientalist view of the Bluebeard-character in “The Bloody Chamber.”
Further, the antagonist is portrayed as a bearing a “male scent of leather and spices” (8); his eyes are “dark and motionless as those eyes the ancient Egyptians painted upon their sarcophagi” (12). His face is “like a mask” (9), and the narrator cannot even describe him in terms of humanity: the analogy she uses for her husband is a “cobra-headed, funereal [lily]” (9). All of these descriptors are archetypal views of the East from the West’s perspective. The East contained spices and rich scents; they were traded to Europe in vast amounts. If a European’s only experience with the East was by way of a bottle of perfume or a sip of tea, wouldn’t he associate these pungent and fragrant smells with the faraway lands? The narrator’s comparison of the Marquis’ face with “a mask,” particularly an Egyptian death mask, adds to the morbidity and esoteric mysticism of the antagonist. Finally, a lily, while not necessarily a symbol of the East (it is native to both Asia and Europe, though many lilies in Europe were of the Asian variety [Explanation: Lily]), is depicted as one through the descriptor “cobra-headed.” Cobras were, of course, most often associated with the Middle East and/or India.
As if these copious depictions of the castle and the man were not enough to create a vision of the Orient in the reader, Carter goes even further. Because of their sexual conservatism, much of it religiously influenced, the West identified the East with liberal eroticism and sensuality, believing them to be much more open about nudity and sex. Thus, two Eastern concepts – the Turkish bathhouse and the polygynous harem – specifically entranced the Occident. While the bath is only hinted at in “The Bloody Chamber” (23-24, 33), the concept of the harem is a motif in the story. The heroine is well aware that her husband has been “married three times” before her, and that she is merely “join[ing] this gallery of beautiful women” (10). She is obsessed with finding out as much as she can about his previous wives (26), and when the narrator discovers the “bloody chamber” itself, with his deceased harem of wives, Carter invokes a cultural image of Henry VIII or, alternately, Bluebeard, the story that “The Bloody Chamber” is modeled after. Further, the bedroom where the narrator loses her virginity is covered with “a dozen” (15) mirrors, multiplying the virgin bride by twelve, a fact that is not lost on the Marquis. “I have acquired a whole harem for myself!” (14) he says, and the reader sees him as an Eastern Sultan, both because of his inferred polygamy and because of his wealth. He is as “rich as Croesus” (10) – an ancient Turkish king, predictably.
Speaking of mirrors, there is one more subject I would like to touch on before I discuss how all of these Orientalist images create the Gothic in Carter’s story . Namely, the notion of the Hegelian “Other,” and how the narrator of “The Bloody Chamber” defines herself in relation to her husband. She is only a “child” (7) at the beginning of the story, “seventeen and [knowing] nothing of the world” (9). In a Lacanian setting, she achieves self-awareness through mirrors, both at the playhouse to see Tristan and in her bridal bed. In the playhouse, she sees
him watching me in the gilded mirrors with the assessing eye of a connoisseur inspecting horseflesh …
When I saw him look at me with lust, I dropped my eyes but, in glancing away from him, I caught sight of myself in the mirror. And I saw myself, suddenly, as he saw me, my pale face, the way the muscles in my neck stuck out like thin wire … And, for the first time in my innocent and confined life, I sensed in myself a potentiality for corruption that took my breath away. (11)
She can only begin to build a self-image when she sees herself through his eyes, and because he is the Byronic character of darkness and corruption, the reflection on herself is parallel to him. She goes even further in the bedroom, defining herself Orientally in terms of her husband – the “Other” – by reversing the sexual and stylistic aspects of Orientalism. The narrator says, “I saw, in the mirror … the child with her sticklike limbs, naked but for her button boots, her gloves … and the old, monocled lecher who examined her, limb by limb. He in his London tailoring; she, bare as a lamb chop. Most pornographic of all confrontations” (15). She compares her nudity and vulnerability to his high-class gentility, swapping the East/West binary momentarily in order to define herself as the antithesis of her husband.
In fact, this is the root of Orientalism: some sort of a priori knowledge that all of the Orient is similar and, as a whole, is fundamentally antithetical to the Occident. The West comes to define itself, partially or mostly, as what the East is not. The West sees the East as intriguing yet subversively corruptive, and is therefore equally in love with it and afraid of it. Sound familiar? That’s the basis of the cultural draw toward the genres of Horror and the Gothic. Carter exploits this in “The Bloody Chamber” by painting her settings and characters in essentially Oriental terms. The movement to an extrinsic setting that is wholly congruent with traditional views of the East unsettles the reader; it creates a sense of exoticism and even barbarianism on an internal and perhaps unconscious level because of the reader’s cultural clichés. Carter further disturbs her readers by making her antagonist, the core of the horror, only superficially European. He is a “mysterious being” (22), wealthy and Sultan-like, a Byronic villain that is intended to scare the reader. Without the Eastern je ne sais quoi, however, he would merely be Rochester in Jane Eyre: dark and mysterious but not overly frightening. Lastly, by seeing the Marquis as capable of counterfeiting the Westerner and possibly corrupting the heroine through her definition of herself, the reader is rattled on a psychological level. Without these Oriental elements that prey on the West’s preconceived cultural assumptions and notions of the East, “The Bloody Chamber” would not agitate the reader, through the Gothic, as effectively.
Works Cited:
"Explanation: Lily." Wonder Flowers. Web. 10 Mar. 2010.
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