The Bloody Chamber

I'm still wading through Dracula (I'm enjoying it but it's so long!!) but I've finished The Bloody Chamber so I thought I'd blog about that.

I spoke in my last post about liking the way in which The Bloody Chamber was written (with the rich metaphors e.t.c) and although I felt like that throughout, I must admit that the story 'The Bloody Chamber' was my favourite and felt a little lost with certain stories towards the end. In the 'fairytale' sort of style you get the sense that, because things at times are very metaphorical, there's a deeper meaning to the stories and I like the way that at the end of each story I felt the need to sit for a while and think aout what I'd just read and take it all in...however, some of the last stories in the book I just ended up writing a question mark afterwards because I just couldn't work out what the heck they were on about!! The Erl-King, for example.

There were a lot of things I liked about Carter's writing style - the way she stated certain things that characters did but didn't explain them leaving the reader to question the motives ('I shivered to think of that' p12)- the imagery...there seemed to be a continued metaphorical theme of women as meat ('cuts on the slab', 'lamb chop')

I liked the fact that although some of the plots were rather obscure, there were signifiers throughout some (namely 'The Bloody Chamber') that gave an indication of what was to come - for example, the fact that the husband in The Bloody Chamber had the wedding ring of his ex-wife despite the fact that she had apparently been lost at sea and her body hadn't been recovered raised suspitition regarding his part in his wife's death. Also - although the stories were 'out there', I found that in most of the stories, because the plots are driven by deep emotions as opposed to events, that characters could be empathised with. What I mean is - although the events of the stories may be wildly unrealistic, they're rooted in real human emotion which, to me, ensures a connection with the reader.

The way in which speech was documented interested me as direct speech wasn't used very often (in the typical sense), however, references to what people had said were made all the time. The stories seemed to be more like streams of consciousness than actual written interpretations of stories and, although this style of writing allowed the reader to feel closer to the protagonists, I found it difficult at times to get to grips with the jumps in speaker e.g. from first person to third person.

The links between Dracula and The Bloody Chamber I've found intriguing too and again, I've found myself looking back over the notes made in class as there are evidence of the different 'gothic features' in both texts - asleep/wake, dead/alive, light/dark, influence of the past e.t.c. When I finally finish Dracula, I'll probably blog on the similarities between the two texts as I think they share significant gothic elements...one element that I'm finding really interesting at the moment is the fact that both texts talk about things that could be dismissed as untrue or exaggerated (fairytales in The BC and superstition in Dracula) and both directly address the issue that fairytales and superstitions should not be dismissed so readily as not everything can be worked out with reason...again throwing up the gothic idea of what's real and what's not...interesting stuff.

P.s. I don't think I'm following everyone...I can't quite work out how to follow people so if anyone could tell me that'd be great :)