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OCR English A Level The Bloody Chamber
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Analysis of the Titular story 'The Bloody Chamber', with a supporting summary and quotes
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The Bloody ChamberSummary:
"The Bloody Chamber's" heroine narrates the story in retrospect. At the time of the story she is a
poor, seventeen-year-old Parisian pianist. She begins her tale by describing the night she traveled
alone to her new husband, the Marquis's palace. She lies in her train compartment, excited to be
leaving her childhood behind and entering into womanhood. She imagines her mother back at her
childhood apartment, putting away her girlhood belongings, and is suddenly struck by a sense of
loss. She feels as though she has "in some way, ceased to be her [mother's] child in becoming a
wife."
The heroine recalls how when her wedding dress arrived, her mother asked whether she was sure
she loved her husband-to-be. She replied, "I'm sure I want to marry him." Even though she seemed
unconvinced that her daughter was making the right choice, she kept silent out of her wish for
financial security. She herself married down in society, and when her husband died at war, she and
the narrator were left penniless.
Back in the train compartment, the heroine can hear the Marquis's heavy breathing and smell his
scent. He is big, strong and catlike, but also gentle and romantic. He is much older than the
heroine and his eyes have an "absolute absence of light." He reminds the narrator of a lily, because
he is so quiet and emotionless that he seems to be wearing a mask all the time. Even when he
proposed to her, he did not show emotion. These characteristics make the heroine fear the
Marquis, and she hopes that once they are at the castle, he will reveal his true self to her.
One explanation for the Marquis's seriousness is that he is still in mourning for his last wife. She
died three months into her marriage, supposedly in a boating accident, although her body was
never recovered. The wife before that was the model for a famous painting. The Marquis's first wife
was a renowned opera diva, whose performance enthralled the narrator as a child. The narrator is
bemused that the Marquis would choose her to be his wife after having been with such enchanting
women. She describes herself as "the poor widow's child with my mouse-colored hair that still bore
the kinks of the braids from which it had so recently been freed, my bony hips, my nervous,
pianist's fingers."
The heroine recalls the night before their wedding when the Marquis took her to see the opera
Tristan. All eyes were on her, her massive opal wedding ring, and her wedding gift, "a choker of
rubies, two inches wide, like an extraordinarily precious slit throat." The necklace belonged to his
grandmother, who had it made as an ironic reminder after she escaped the guillotine. At the opera,
the narrator notices for the first time that her husband looks at her as though she is "horseflesh."
When he looks at her as a sexual object, the heroine is shocked and excited; 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."
The heroine reaches the castle at dawn. It is cold November by the seaside. She is delighted with
her bridal suite, located in a tower overlooking the ocean. It has a music room furnished with a fine
piano and a portrait of Saint Cecilia playing an organ. The heroine is touched by the fact that the
Marquis compares her to a saint. The bedroom is filled with lilies, which are reflected in twelve
mirrors that surround the bed so that the room appears to be an "embalming parlor." The narrator,
like the lilies, is reflected in the mirrors so that she becomes "a multitude of girls." She watches her
husband undress her-undress his "harem" of girls-in the mirrors. She tells us how the Marquis
seems unexcited at the prospect of taking her virginity; "he approached the familiar treat with a
weary appetite." She is both aroused and disgusted. Then the Marquis abruptly says he must
attend to business and leaves her. The heroine dresses and wanders into his library. There, she
finds a book with sexual and violent images including one called "Reproof of Curiosity." Just then,
the Marquis enters and mocks her for finding the images. Then he forces her back to the bedroom
and makes her put on the ruby choker, "kiss[ing] the rubies before he kiss[es] [her] mouth." Then
he takes her virginity. As the narrator describes it, "A dozen husbands impaled a dozen brides."
In the morning, business in New York compels the Marquis to leave the castle for over a month. He
and the heroine enjoy a sumptuous dinner before his departure. Then the Marquis gives the
narrator her instructions. She is not to take off the choker. He hands her a ring of keys to every
lock in the house, all of which she is free to open, explore, and enjoy the contents of save one that
leads to a private chamber. He calls it "the key to my enfer." He quips before leaving, "There I can
go, you understand, to savour the rare pleasure of imagining myself wifeless."
, The next day, the narrator meets the piano tuner, a kindly blind man named Jean-Yves. She
promises he can listen to her play occasionally. After a distraught call to her mother, she satisfies
her "dark newborn curiosity" by exploring the castle and ordering the staff around like a spoiled
child. While exploring the Marquis's office, she finds an envelope filled with remnants from his past
marriages. The discovery puts her in a momentary, sober trance that makes her accidentally open
the key ring and drop all the keys on the floor. The first key she picks up is the one to the forbidden
room.
Convinced that the room holds the key to her husband's identity, the heroine ventures fearlessly
there. Her search takes her to a far, dark corner of the castle. When she enters the room, she sees
instruments of torture: a rack, a wheel, and an iron maiden. In the middle of the room she finds a
bier with candles around it and lights them to the embalmed corpse of the Marquis's first wife, the
opera singer. It is clear from the marks on her neck that she was strangled. Behind the bier hangs
the skull of the Marquis's second wife, dressed in a bridal veil. Then the heroine finds the corpse of
the last wife inside the Iron Maiden, run through with "a hundred spikes." Seeing how the murdered
woman's blood is still flowing onto the floor, the heroine wonders how recently the Marquis
murdered her. She drops the key into the blood and bursts into tears. Regaining her presence of
mind, the narrator decides to escape the Marquis. She covers up all evidence of her snooping and
flees the chamber.
The heroine tries to calls her mother, but the phone is dead. She tries to calm herself by playing
the piano until the piano-tuner, Jean-Yves, comes to return the keys she dropped. His presence
calms her so much that she faints. When she awakes, he is cradling her. She tells him that the
Marquis is a murderer and is planning to kill her. He says that the locals' nickname for the castle is
"the Castle of Murder" and that villagers have spread tales of murderous Marquises for ages.
In the breaking daylight, the heroine sees the Marquis's car returning to the castle. She and Jean-
Yves try to wash the key to the forbidden room, but a bloodstain remains no matter how hard they
scrub it. She sends him away, undresses, and awaits the Marquis in bed. Despite her attempts to
put on an unaffected air and seduce him, he senses what has happened. The thought fills him with
dread and then primal excitement. He commands the narrator to retrieve the key ring. Upon
inspection, he finds that the bloodstain on the key has formed a tiny, perfect heart. He orders the
narrator to kneel and presses the key against her forehead, leaving an equally perfect mark
between her eyes. Then he proclaims, "My virgin of the arpeggios, prepare yourself for
martyrdom."
The Marquis tells the heroine he will decapitate her. He orders her to bathe, put on the dress she
wore to Tristan and the ruby choker, which he calls "the necklace that prefigures your end."
Although the Marquis has sent all the servants away to the mainland, the narrator does not see
Jean-Yves leaving amongst their ranks. When the heroine goes downstairs to the music room, she
finds him waiting for her. Then she looks out the window and sees her mother riding frantically
toward the castle. With newfound hope, she leads Jean-Yves to a courtyard where the Marquis
waits by a chopping block, holding a sword. Upon the Marquis's order, she gives him back his ring.
He says it "will serve [him] for a dozen more fiancees." Then he commands her to approach the
chopping block and swears to kill Jean-Yves after he kills her. The heroine tries to stall, but the
Marquis lays her head on the chopping block and cuts her dress off of her. He raises his sword, but
is distracted by her mother's loud arrival. The mother's fury freezes the Marquis in his tracks
momentarily, "as in those clockwork tableaux of Bluebeard that you see in glass cases at fairs."
Then he charges the Marquis and kills him with a single bullet through the head.
The narrator brings us to the present. She, Jean-Yves, and her mother have converted the castle
into a school for the blind. They have given her fortune away to charity, disposed of the corpses of
the Marquis's other wives and sealed the door to the "bloody chamber." They all live together on
the outskirts of Paris where they run a music school and live modestly. As for how the narrator's
mother knew to rescue her-she intuited from her daughter's first phone call that something was
terribly amiss. Even though she the heroine escaped the Marquis, no amount of washing or
makeup can cover the red mark on her forehead. She says she is glad Jean-Yves cannot see the
mark, because it spares her shame.
Analysis
"The Bloody Chamber" is based on the legend of Bluebeard. Carter preserves the legend's plot,
casting the Marquis in the role of Bluebeard, who kills his wives and stores their corpses in a secret
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