As Red as Blood: Women's Temporality and Pain in Angela Carter's "The Bloody Chamber"

Abstract

As Red as Blood: Women's Temporality and Pain in Angela Carter's "The Bloody Chamber" The story begins with a young girl. She’s lanky, shy, and doesn’t know her body, a fact which becomes apparent the morning she wakes to find blood on her sheets for the first time. My adolescent years were painful, awkward, and bloody. Nonetheless, I learned how to wash the stains from my sheets and take care of my body when it was hurting. I learned that becoming a woman was something to be celebrated, but quietly. A woman’s menstrual cycle is used by society to dictate womanhood. It is difficult, however, to control something that is so persistent. Women’s pain is timeless—it is present each month whether society deems it acceptable or not. Fairy tales, too, are timeless, consistent in their punishment of women’s pain. Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber reinvents the fairy tale, encouraging us to ask more of those traditional stories by allowing women’s time to expand—much like a womb—making room for pain and desire. Between countesses with a taste for blood and girls who are more wolf than woman, Carter embraces the cultural anxiety that becoming a woman is a threatening and monstrous process. My paper blends research with the fairy tale genre to offer a performative analysis of The Bloody Chamber, asking readers to reach beyond the boundaries of academic writing, much like Carter’s retellings. Here, becoming a woman is a thing to be celebrated, and loudly. Here, we are allowed to exist, blood and all.