The Chamber of Culture:

Femininity, Discourse, and Post-Structuralism in Carter’s ‘The Bloody Chamber’

EGL385: Wonderworlds: An Exploration of Theory and Fiction

University of the Sunshine Coast

Foucault famously theorised that “we are subjected to the production of truth through power, and we cannot exercise power except through the production of truth” (1977, p. 93). These “truths” of femininity, that a virgin is pure, that Eve is sinful, that a wife must obey, are not natural facts but cultural scripts enforced through patriarchal discourse. From a Foucauldian and feminist perspective, Carter’s short story “The Bloody Chamber” (1979) exposes these scripts and destabilises them through the very symbols that sustain them. She unravels the performances women are asked to enact through three interlinked critiques. First, Carter shows how the narrator is not courted but purchased, her virginity reduced to a transaction and her value defined by her ignorance and impressionable youth. Second, Carter subverts archetypal myths, particularly Eve’s fall and Bluebeard’s violence. In her retellings, women who seek knowledge or resist male authority are no longer framed as guilty or doomed but as conscious agents, exposing how traditional myths rewrote female curiosity as sin to justify punishment. Third, the narrator’s namelessness crystallises Foucault’s (1978) claim that subjectivity is not innate but produced through discourse and social hierarchies. Her lack of a personal name signals how women are often recognised only through patriarchal roles such as virgin, bride-to-be or wife, rather than as individuals. Overall, Carter dismantles the cultural chamber by exposing how myth, imagery and history have scripted femininity, rewriting them within the tale form itself.

Throughout the text, Carter positions the narrator not as a romantic partner but as a commodity, selected and purchased, her innocence underscored by constant references to age and schooling. The Marquis does not fall in love with her as an equal; he acquires her. He is described with the “assessing eye of a connoisseur inspecting horseflesh… inspecting a housewife in the market, inspecting cuts on the slab” (Carter, 1979, p. 6). Carter invokes marriage-market metaphors that reduce the girl to a commodity, valued for flesh and ignorance rather than personhood. Virginity functions as spectacle, proven by the “bloodstain” on the marriage sheets, Carter recalling the French custom of displaying them publicly as evidence of purity and transaction. Sexual inexperience itself becomes a symbol of value, staged for social recognition. The Marquis repeatedly reinscribes this imbalance of power. Not only are his previous wives mentioned as part of this legacy, he also casts her as child rather than equal: “Have the nasty pictures scared Baby? Baby mustn’t play with grownup toys until she’s learned how to handle them must she” (Carter, 1979, p. 13), and later, “My dear one, my little love, my child, did it hurt?” (p. 14). He emerges not as lover but as patriarch and buyer, his desire resting on consuming her naivety and youth. The narrator herself recognises the structural dynamic: “I realised, with a shock of surprise, how it must have been my innocence that captivated him… my unknowingness” (p. 16). Her clothing, a “costume of a student” (p. 20), signals the cultural scripting of youth as eroticised dependence, a uniform within the bridal house of horrors. As Makinen (1992) observes, Carter’s fiction “decolonizes feminine sexuality” (p. 4), exposing how patriarchal purity codes turn virginity into both transaction and proof of ignorance.

Carter exemplifies this constructed, male-desired ignorance through her evocation of the Bluebeard tale and the archetype of Eve’s Fall. In both, she reveals how women are punished for seeking knowledge, condemned as sinful for disobeying the husband, the all-knowing patriarch. The Marquis delights in her ignorance, teasing her like a child: “Then slowly yet teasingly, as if he were giving a child a great, mysterious treat” (Carter, 1979, p. 16). Here Carter shows him taking pleasure in her unknowing, laying out the rules of marriage as conditions that cannot be questioned. This scene recalls the myth of Bluebeard. In its earliest oral tellings, Bluebeard functioned not as a child’s tale but as a survival story for women (Zipes, 1986). These tales, often recited by women in communal settings, warned of predatory men, the dangers of marriage, and the violence that followed disobedience. Carter reinvigorates this feminist tradition by detailing the fates of the murdered wives, making visible how knowledge or refusal has cost women their lives and exposing the hidden violence embedded in patriarchal control. She ties this to collective history with the line, “Like Eve” (Carter, 1979, p. 38). The Eve myth, crystallised in Christian tradition under the Roman state, warns that women who disobey patriarchal authority and seek knowledge are sinners deserving punishment. Just as Eve was punished for eating the fruit, the bride is condemned for opening the forbidden door. This legacy extends beyond Christianity, as seen in the Greek tale of Pandora, the first woman, blamed for unleashing the world’s evils when she opened the forbidden jar. In both myths female curiosity is reframed as sin, and women are condemned not for malice but for seeking knowledge. As Foucault argues, “power produces knowledge… power and knowledge directly imply one another” (1977, p. 27). In Carter’s tale, patriarchal power disciplines female curiosity, reframing defiance as transgression and transgression as sin, echoing cultural traditions that have condemned women for millennia. By retelling these myths, Carter fractures their authority, revealing them not as timeless truths but as cultural scripts designed to discipline, silence and control women.

Finally, the narrator’s unstable identity crystallises Carter’s critique. She has no name, only “the bride,” “my little love,” or “the child.” She slips between roles: virgin, wife, victim, survivor. Foucault (1978) notes that the subject emerges as an effect of overlapping discourses, and the narrator’s namelessness marks this instability. The ruby choker the Marquis makes her wear before intercourse, “the family heirloom of one woman who had escaped the blade” (Carter, 1979, p. 14), materialises that script, binding her to a lineage of wives and cycles of possession and sacrifice. This symbol shows how culture functions as the chamber, enclosing women through blood, jewels, and marriage contracts. The universality of her victimhood emerges in, “I clung to him as though only the one who had inflicted the pain could comfort me” (Carter, 1979, p. 15), a trauma bond where harm and solace converge. Language here stages Foucault’s (1978) knot of power and intimacy. Furthermore, Gilbert and Gubar (1979) argue that patriarchal traditions consistently rewrite women as ‘angel or monster,’ reducing them to limiting archetypes, and Carter’s narrator unsettles this binary through her first-person narration of discovering the horrors around her. Bacchilega (1997) demonstrates how fairy tales, once reinterpreted and fixed in print, became instruments of cultural hegemony that reinforced bourgeois and patriarchal order. Warner (1994) corroborates, detailing how oral tales once told by women carried survival warnings and solidarity, only to be overwritten by male literary collectors into scripts of obedience, one main example being Perrault’s Bluebeard, which moralised female disobedience instead of warning against predatory men. Therefore, Carter’s rewriting restores that survivalist impulse while exposing how ruling-class institutions co-opted myth, history, and narrative to discipline women. By reclaiming these stories, Carter transforms the chamber from a site of silencing into a site of survival and resistance, where the old scripts fracture and new possibilities for women’s voices are imagined. Through Carter’s unnamed narrator, subjectivity is shown as bound to surrounding structures of power; yet, in collectivising her experience, she gestures toward a re-imagining of self through the deconstruction of patriarchal values.

Overall, read through post-structuralist and feminist lenses, the short story “The Bloody Chamber” (1979) exposed femininity as discursive construction rather than essence. Carter showed innocence selected and purchased, reframed Bluebeard and Eve to reveal punishment for knowledge, and staged a nameless subject whose body bore the marks of power. The text’s symbols of blood, jewels, keys, and sheets made culture visible as a chamber. In retelling the myth, Carter dismantles the script from within.

References

Bacchilega, C. (1997). Postmodern fairy tales: Gender and narrative strategies. University of Pennsylvania Press.

Carter, A. (1979). The bloody chamber. Gollancz.

Foucault, M. (1977). Discipline and punish: The birth of the prison (A. Sheridan, Trans.). Vintage.

Foucault, M. (1978). The history of sexuality, Volume 1: An introduction (R. Hurley, Trans.). Pantheon.

Gilbert, S. M., & Gubar, S. (1979). The madwoman in the attic: The woman writer and the nineteenth-century literary imagination. Yale University Press.

Makinen, M. (1992). Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber and the decolonization of feminine sexuality. Feminist Review, 42(1), 2–15. https://doi.org/10.2307/1395065

Warner, M. (1994). From the beast to the blonde: On fairy tales and their tellers. Vintage.

Zipes, J. (1986). Don’t bet on the prince: Contemporary feminist fairy tales in North America and England. Routledge.