Why are you ruining my August?

The Bloody Chamber and other stories - Angela Carter. A summary

The Bloody Chamber

The short story opens at pace, as Carter frequently employs punctuation to elongate sentences, thereby mimicking the speed at which the nameless protagonist is traveling to meet her new husband; a highborn estate owner. Carter initially focuses on marriage as a perversion of love, at least in this particular setting, but arguably in the wider context of society at large.

I'm trying to do some degree of analysis, but it's half past ten, and I've realised that summaries do not require analysis. As such, I will stop analysing these thoroughly disturbing stories and attempt to 'summarise' them as best I can. Upon reflection, I could copy and paste from sparknotes, but I'm feeling sincere, so I won't.

The protagonist meets with her new husband and draws the reader's attention to his waxen features and gruff beard, creating a peculiar image of him. Their marriage occupies one very brief sentence, and they embark upon their honeymoon at the protagonist's spooky castle on the Atlantic coast of France (the protagonist is from Paris). Some frankly filthy scenes ensue, culminating in the eventual (albeit staggered) loss of the protagonist's virginity, and her increased unnerving. Following this, the protagonist's husband (who will be referred to as the antagonist from hereon in) mysteriously dashes away on a business trip to New York. At this point, the protagonist amuses herself at the expense of the castle's etiquette-ensnared staff; meets a blind piano tuner (whose tuning allows her to indulge in her love of music); switches all the lights in the castle on, runs around manically (which isn't very environmentally friendly. The ice caps are melting) and runs a bath. This is tempered by a hysteric phone-call to her mother. 

However, prior to this, the antagonist gave the protagonist a set of keys, and prohibited her from using one particular key, muttering some inarticulate claptrap about it being his 'den' where he could 'unburden himself from married life' (as if that's ever been possible). Naturally, the protagonist eventually opens the door using the forbidden key and discovers that her new husband is a dirty liar (his underwear may potentially have become engulfed in flames; alas, there is no such narrative focus). In fact, his 'den' is a genuine BDSM torture chamber, complete with Iron Maiden. The antagonist's various ex-wives (who burden the protagonist's flimsy self-esteem from the get-go) are strewn across a cacophony of torturous devices, all, surprisingly, dead. It becomes apparent that the protagonist is next, and she buggers up her chances even more by dropping the magical BDSM key into a pool of blood, thereby staining it. She flips her shit for a while and has a chat with the blind tuning boy. At this point, Carter becomes tired of actually constructing a story-line, and makes up some contrived nonsense about the antagonist magically and prematurely returning home from his trip abroad. He notices the stained key and gets a bit wound up. Then, he mysteriously imprints the key on the forehead of the protagonist and tells her he's going to cut off her head, but she needs to have a bath first. She seems cool about that, and off she pops to the bathroom. The blind boy finds her and decides to be noble and come with her. The protagonist is about to get her head lopped off, when her mum comes out of nowhere on horseback (she's portrayed as quite the femme fatale, since she had experience killing tigers in Vietnam) and shoots the perverted rapist fellow in the head. They all live happily ever after.

My conclusion from this is that Carter got about 30 pages into what was going to be a full blown novel, but ran out of archaic and pretentious words. Due to this, she decided to terminate the story by invoking the most ridiculous circumstances that could be contrived and substituting an intelligent explanation for maternal telepathy and magic.

Of course, there are more intelligent ways to look at this, but I'm bored of writing so much about 43 pages of filth and debauchery that E.L. James would be embarrassed to show her mother.