The Bloody Chamber: A Feminist Adaptation Of Bluebeard

Exploring similar societal concerns surrounding the rigidity of class structure and attitudes towards female agency, both Charles Perrault and Angela Carter utilise a seminal reshaping of the folktale Bluebeard to appeal to contemporary readers. Perrault’s Fairy tale of the same name Bluebeard (1697) examines the stratification of society into strict social classes, and the potential for human happiness set against the dominant patriarchal ideas that presented a limited perspective on the role of women in society. Similarly, Angela Carter’s titular short story The Bloody Chamber (1979) creatively reshapes the tale of Bluebeard for her postmodern audience, but in this instance to challenge Perrault’s traditional messages and establish both feminist and egalitarian morals. 

In Bluebeard Perrault explores the value of social status and wealth, and its correlation with capacity for contentment. Born into a wealthy bourgeois family, and as someone who worked closely with the French Minister of Finances for several years, Charles Perrault supported absolute royal power and upper class superiority; Perrault’s agenda to reinforce conservative views, including the value and significance of class, is therefore clearly evident throughout Bluebeard. The female protagonist, though initially repulsed by the prospect of marriage to a man with a blue beard, is persuaded to marry him upon observing the scope of his wealth. Her rise in wealth initiates increased social status, and despite disobedience to her husband, leads eventually to her prosperity “She gave some of her vast fortune in a marriage dowry to her sister Anne… the rest formed a dowry for her own marriage with a very worthy man, whose kind treatment soon made her forget Bluebeard’s cruelty.” This shows that the form of the text itself follows the quintessential fairytale resolution, in which the protagonist overcomes class barriers and acquires ‘happiness’, which is measured by domestic satisfaction, principally marriage. The protagonist’s sudden affluence enables her idealistic ‘happily ever after’ through its application in her sister’s and her own dowry - leading to domestic satisfaction. Perrault thereby utilises conventions of folktale form to place social status in direct correlation with the protagonist’s happiness and liberation, illustrating the value of social class and reinforcing upper class superiority.

Carter carries forward Bluebeard’s discussion on the relevance of social status to the pursuit of happiness, but reshapes the tale’s resolution in order to redefine ‘happily-ever-after’ to exclude social climbing, and hence challenge the elitist upper-class values evident in Bluebeard. Though Perrault represents the past perspective that social prominence is a symbol of happiness and success, Carter’s context occurs after a pronounced growth in the middle class, so The Bloody Chamber reflects a shifting belief that contentment can be achieved regardless of one’s social status. Carter’s adaptation of the story aligns with Perrault’s version in that the protagonist marries from greed and vanity, and the belief that her rise in affluence will liberate her from “the spectre of poverty”. However, conversely, Carter subverts the classic form of the fairytale, notably through her reimagination of the story’s resolution. Rather than the story ending with the previously impoverished protagonist marrying into a higher class and assuming an extravagant lifestyle, the protagonist is instead branded with a mark that will forever bring her shame, and voluntarily reverts back to her previous state of low social status, “scarcely a penny richer”, having given away the majority of her wealth to charity. Rather than gaining liberation through wealth, she gains enlightenment, liberated from her previous self’s limited ideals of prestige and elitism. Further demonstrating her character development is her relationship with the blind piano-tuner. Her marriage to a humble blind man who “sees [her] clearly with his heart” is a symbolic representation of her moral enlightenment and understanding that image and status do not constitute happiness. Carter’s adapted ending conveys a poignant message about the role, or lack thereof, that wealth and status play in an individual’s happiness, providing her contemporary audience with a more progressive moral in opposition with Perrault’s, to align with society’s evolving values. Hence, Carter manipulates the prototypical fairytale form to reshape and recontextualise Bluebeard’s exploration of social hierarchy and its impact in the pursuit of happiness. 

Additionally, in Bluebeard Perrault touches on the notion of female agency in a way reflective of the era’s patriarchal principles, promoting female passivity and dependency by constructing a female protagonist who lacks agency. As seen in “she was in such a hurry that she was two or three times in danger of breaking her neck”, the third person omniscient narration, characteristic of folktales, by nature depicts the female protagonist’s actions as a result of her circumstances; seemingly predetermined, not directly due to her decision-making. Restricted female agency is further evident at the climax of the story, as the protagonist calls “Anne, sister Anne, do you see anyone coming?... Is it my brothers?... Heaven be praised!”. As she waits for her brothers to arrive to her rescue, she is portrayed as the archetype of the helpless ‘damsel in distress’, dependent on men and fortune, or even a higher power of ‘Heaven’, to rescue her, yet unable to play an active role in determining her own fate. She additionally lacks control over her desires, giving in easily to temptation when “so great indeed was her curiosity about the mysterious closet that, forgetting how impolite it would be to leave her guests” she goes to enter the chamber. Thus Perrault portrays the female protagonist as possessing a primitive level of control over her desires and lacking capacity for independent thought, thereby diminishing the female right to agency and reinforcing patriarchal authority and male dominance.

In contrast to the patriarchal values central to Perrault’s Bluebeard, Carter reshapes the concept of female agency in The Bloody Chamber to challenge the disempowerment of women. In using first-person narration Carter enables the heroine to tell her own story from her perspective. From the very opening of the story, as the protagonist vividly recounts “I remember how, that night, I lay awake in the wagon-lit in a tender, delicious ecstasy of excitement,” Carter characterises the text as a ‘survivor’s story’, whereby the heroine is empowered through her acquirement of a dynamic, evocative and ultimately compelling voice, transforming her into the subject of the story, rather than a passive victim to the circumstances of her environment. Thus, Carter establishes the protagonist’s agency, however, she then further extends upon this notion by encouraging her audience to question how the heroine chooses to exercise her power. When the Marquis overtly views her as a sexual object “in the gilded mirrors, with the assessing eye of a connoisseur inspecting horseflesh… inspecting cuts on the slab,” the heroine is shocked and excited, as she recalls “For the first time in my innocent and confined life, I sensed in myself a potentiality for corruption that took my breath away.” She does not resist the Marquis’ objectification of her, but rather her vanity and distorted ideals of romance, resulting from unconscious social-conditioning, impel her to comply with the exploitation of her sexuality and incidentally encourage her objectification. This operates in conjunction with the diminutive labels the protagonist uses for herself, such as “the orphan”, “a little girl”, “child” and “his bride”, reflective of the Marquis’ condescending labels for her - “my little nun”, “baby”, “my child”, to indicate the protagonist’s tendency to adopt a male perception of herself and her role. 

Thus Carter reshapes Bluebeard to convey her feminist concerns, warning society that cultural conditioning and ingrained patriarchal ideals can lead to dangerous female passivity and objectification, and encouraging women to think critically, not to be passive expectation-fillers but to use their agency to control how they are perceived rather than perpetuating sexual objectification.