Traversing the Labyrinth of Bloody Chambers

by Jonathan Olshefski
jolshefs@temple.edu
12/9/2003
.................In folklore and myth, there exists an abundance of tales hinging upon a character not doing something. That something can be almost anything: opening a particular box, saying a particular word, staying out past midnight, eating a certain food, or for the purpose of this paper: unlocking and entering a particular room. Even within this construct there are many examples, one of which appears in Arabian Nights, but the confines of this paper limit it to one particular situation:
  A woman marries a man who goes away leaving her with the keys to his entire household. On departure he tells her that she may explore his entire estate aside from one small room. Of course, the wife enters the forbidden room where she finds the bloody remains of her husband's past wives.
For the purpose of this paper the term bloody chamber story will be used to describe a story that entails this specific scenario. Bloody chamber stories originated as orally communicated folktales. The first published version appeared in 1697 in France. Charles Perrault's Tales from Times Past, with Morals: Tales of Mother Goose contains the story "Bluebeard," which acts as the literary root from which all other bloody chamber stories grow. Over a century later, in Germany, the Grimm brothers published Children's and Household Tales, which contains a story entitled "Fitcher's Bird," which fits the bloody chamber story criteria (aside from a matrimonial connection). Apart from versions rooted in folklore, there have been a number of modern retellings by authors such as: Angela Carter, Kurt Vonnegut, Margaret Atwood and Gregory Frost. The story has also been re-spun cinematically by directors such as Edgar G. Ulmer (1944), Claude Charbrol (1963) and Edward Dmytryk (1972). Finally, the story was recently retold through a completely new medium via Donna Leishman's interactive narrative (2002).
.................This paper will compare and contrast two of these stories, which employ the bloody chamber criteria, and also accomplish very new things aesthetically and thematically: Angela Carter's text, "The Bloody Chamber" and Donna Leishman's interactive narrative, The Bloody Chamber. Both of these retellings, in context, use the bloody chamber criteria as a template, but manage to create something much different from Perrault's original. This metamorphosis will be made apparent by examining the effect that each author's use of characterization, plot and form has upon the reader and upon the narrative itself. Perrault's "Bluebeard" will also be referred to in order to create the context for what this tale had originally been, and to reveal the full magnitude of its transformation as it manifested through these two artists.
.................Before beginning to support the thesis of this paper the term "interactive narrative" should be defined. Basically, an interactive narrative uses a computer as the tool for the creation (and medium for the experiencing) of a non-linear story environment, through which the reader/user is capable of traversing a variety of paths. Donna Leishman describes it as such in her master's thesis: "In an interactive narrative the person who is experiencing […] effects the way the story goes, and perhaps the way it comes out" (1). As it is so new the exact definition is still up for debate; according to the critic Janet Murray, it is a narrative medium that acts as a "conduit for an immersive aesthetic experience that invites readers' participation" (Douglas, 5). Two main categories exist within interactive narrative: hypertext fiction, which is text based and digital narrative, which is graphics based (Douglas, 6). Leishman's interactive narrative would fall under the category of digital narrative, as it is an audio/visual environment that can be explored by pointing and clicking with the computer's mouse. The person immersed in the narrative is not simply a distant reader, but is elevated to the rank of participator, or user. Leishman' s The Bloody Chamber is accessible through her website at: http://www.6amhoover.com/chamber/index_flash.htm . Unlike literature, the actual plot of a digital narrative can be very subjective. A detailed story environment is given, but it is up to the reader to create the actual sequence of events and to make sense of the story from the details that are given. Therefore, the explanation of Leishman's piece will be derived from my own subjective interpretation.
.................Of course, the ideal starting point is the end. Perrault's tale concludes by exemplifying the damsel in distress archetype. Just as the helpless protagonist is about to be executed for her disobedience her brothers come to the rescue: "[…] the two brothers pursued and overtook [Bluebeard] before he could get to the steps on the porch. They ran their swords through his body and left him dead. The poor wife was almost as dead as her husband, and had not strength enough to rise and welcome her brothers" (4). Once again, a benign heroine is saved by her male counterparts.
.................Angela Carter disrupts this convention as the narrator describes a very different heroic figure: "You never saw such a wild thing as my mother, her hat seized by the wind and blown out to sea so that her hair was her white mane […] without a moment's hesitation, she raised my father's gun, took aim and put a single irreproachable bullet through my husband's head" (142). Though Carter retains the dramatic final moment where the helpless heroine is saved, she is able to create something new through the transformation of the savior. The mother's killing of the husband accomplishes a two-fold task; she prevents the husband's ultimate domination over her daughter and simultaneously usurps the role of any other male who would save, and thus dominate her. The one who can give you back your life (the savior) has much more power over you than the one who can merely take it away (the destroyer). Throughout the entire spectrum of fairy tales the role of savior has been predominantly given to male characters; the handsome prince who saves the maiden and then gets to marry (own) her. In Perrault's version the heroine's brothers, though they are not her suitors, function as archetypes in a male dominated system where the men are strong and courageous and the women are weak and dependant. This is exemplified by the patronizing moral at the end, "Curiosity, in spite of its appeal, often leads to deep regret. To the displeasure of many a maiden, its enjoyment is short lived" (5). In the context of the story this moral implies that curiosity is detrimental to women because they are too frail to handle what they may find. Carter's world is one of weak, deficient characters, both male and female. The entrance of the female savior, who overwhelms both male and female, functions to disrupt the entire patriarchical system that had previously surrounded this story and the entire genre that it belongs to.
.................Donna Leishman's tale takes the end of this tale even further. The protagonist enters the bloody chamber and finds two bloody bodies of the husband's former wives, but that is not all, the husband is there as well with his eyes closed bleeding from the left hand. From this point there are two possible endings; if you click on the open window at the edge of the chamber there is a scene showing the two former wives escaping through a window and running through the woods, or if you just wait the protagonist will appear and take her husband's hand, he opens his eyes and they look at each. Then they fall off of the edge holding hands and are shown falling as if in a dream world. Both endings close with the words "and they all lived happily ever after;" this is fairly ambiguous, but ambiguity is where the piece finds its power. The endings can either be read as two separate realities or as two parts of the same reality. There are two possibilities: either the heroine goes to her husband and thus allows the former wives to escape, or, as I read it, she had to make a choice between saving her husband and saving his former wives (the wives remain incapacitated after she goes to the husband, so they would have to reanimate later for the first scenario to be true). In either case she is a savior. The husband and his former wives are locked in this bloody chamber, inanimate and it is the protagonist who has the power to save them from this state of being, whether she needs to choose who she will save or not does not alter the fact that she is the hero. The protagonist determines her own destiny, through the interaction of the reader. Leishman, in effect, empowers both the female protagonist and the reader, by allowing them to act as the determining force behind their own destinies. Until this point the protagonist and the reader have been impotent bystanders, within the bloody chamber story structure, but through the medium of interactive narrative and the choices created by Leishman, both protagonist and reader are able to participate. In this sequence, the protagonist is an extension of the reader. Where Angela Carter defies convention by allowing for the heroic female; Leishman defies it by allowing for the heroic reader.
.................The characterization of the husband is another element that drastically differs from permutation to the next. Perrault describes the husband in almost pitiful terms: "[…] this man was so unlucky to have a blue beard, which made him so frightfully ugly that all the women and girls ran away from him" (1). As the story continues the husband becomes much harder to empathize with as he refuses to show any mercy to his new wife: "she would have melted a rock, so beautiful and sorrowful was she; but Bluebeard had a heart harder than any rock" (4). He is not only cruel, but he also shows himself to be a coward when the brothers appear: "[…] he ran away immediately to save himself" (5). At this point the pitiable character that was initially introduced is forgotten and all that remains is a hideously, grotesque man who gets what he deserves.
.................If Perrault's husband is reminiscent of a Charles Manson, then Carter's would be a Ted Bundy. Carter's Marquis has none of the pitiable traits of Perrault's Bluebeard, rather he is described as an attractive gentleman: "I know it must seem a curious analogy, a man with a flower, but sometimes he seemed to me like a lily" (Carter, 113). The Marquis' cultured persona and the wealth that he can offer draws the protagonist to him, here it is described by the critic, Robin Ann Sheets: "from courtship through consummation, [the Marquis] uses art to aid in seduction" (Tucker, 105). As the protagonist came from humble means: "the specter of poverty [had] its habitual place at our meager table" (111), the high life, where she is free to pursue her musical ambition, is a very tempting offering and all of that wealth and opportunity is embodied in the character of the Marquis, who seems to be wealth and culture incarnate.
.................Unlike Bluebeard, Carter's Marquis begins to defile his wife long before he tries to kill her. Here the protagonist comments on the ordeal that had consummated her marriage: "I clung to him as though only the one who inflicted the pain could comfort me for suffering it" (Carter, 121). He reinforces his sadistic tendencies with macabre pornography depicting all sorts of misogynistic and sadomasochistic acts: "Here was another steel engraving: 'Immolation of the wives of the sultan.' I knew enough for what I saw in the book made me gasp" (Carter, 120). The Marquis not only degrades his wife physically, but batters her emotionally through patronization; to the protagonist's "painful, furious bewilderment" at finding his sick pornography the Marquis responds: "have the nasty pictures scared Baby? Baby mustn't play with grownups' toys until she's learned to handle them" (Carter, 120). Finally, he is not just alluring and domineering, but also calculating; according to critic Robin Ann Sheets he is: "…indeed a sadist - in terms of his sexual practices and in terms of his control of the narrative: he has arranged the setting, written the script and set the plot in motion" (Tucker, 106). The whole point of the forbidden room was not simply to test the protagonist, but rather to act as a device to lead the way to the ultimate domination over the women involved. The protagonist realizes this saying: "I had played a game in which every move was governed by a destiny as oppressive and omnipotent as himself, since that destiny was himself; and I had lost…lost as a victim loses to an executioner" (Carter, 137). Beneath the mask of upper class nobility is the calculating mind of a cruel sadist who systematically draws young women into his sadomasochistic fantasies; this is how Carter characterizes her Marquis.
.................Where Carter's depiction of the husband is a complex, detailed account, Leishman's depiction is not so straightforward, but it is complex and rich with ambiguous detail. Like Perrault's Bluebeard, Leishman's husband character starts off seeming very vulnerable, but unlike Bluebeard, he retains this state for the entirety of the piece. The opening screen of Leishman's piece reveals the husband looking out from his isolated tower over a mystical city with moving buildings and strange human-like creatures. The husband appears to be melancholy and has no hair on his head or his face. He also has a red line at the corner of his eye that resembles a streak of blood; this remains throughout the entire narrative, which could be seen as representational of some kind of emotional wound derived from his sight. (In context with Carter's piece this could symbolize the negative effects that the objectifying gaze has upon the objectifier.) After a period of time a clock behind the husband begins to spins around and around as to portray the passage of time, as the clock spins his beard begins to grow. This passage of time represents the long periods of loneliness and isolation that the husband has experienced; it exemplifies his sadness. Once his beard his full grown the piece cuts to the inside of the building where the husband's shadow is apparent and his breath can be heard. By clicking on the switches of a nearby monitor the reader can see what the protagonist is doing, apparently through different periods of her life. The husband is a voyeur and ultimately decides that he must make the protagonist his wife and scrawls it onto the wall with a red pencil. Through the interactive environment, where the reader can explore the husband's voyeuristic tendencies, Leishman portrays a man who is utterly isolated and suffering from acute loneliness.
.................Before the husband decides he wants to marry the protagonist the point of view shifts to her. She too is voyeuristic, she watches the husband character through two critical stages of his life: his first and second marriages. During the sequence of his first marriage the husband is portrayed as a younger man as he does not have any hair. He is also holding two keys crossed to look like a pair of scissors. When his wife appears she is taller than him and his clothes dissolve so that he is left standing naked. This implies some sort of dominance on the part of the first wife. The husband's nakedness seems to represent vulnerability or humiliation. The second marriage is depicted in very much the same way only the roles of husband and wife reverse. The husband, who now has a beard, stands over his second wife as she is sitting on a bed. Over time her clothes begin to fade away so that it is now the second wife who is naked and husband who is standing over her. The juxtaposition of the first two marriages is very interesting, especially the switch from the husband being naked to the second wife being naked. It seems as though the first marriage was a shameful, humiliating experience for the husband, so he did what he had to do in order to escape from that, and he made sure that he had the upper hand when he married a second time. This sequence of events gives the impression of a specific history of relational brokenness and disillusionment.
.................Finally, the fact that the husband was in the bloody chamber along with his former wives gives the impression that all three are trapped by their pasts. The husband is bound by his broken past, which is symbolically represented by the bloody bodies of the former wives. Along with the wounded characters the chamber contains a drawing of the protagonist, which seems to represents the hope. The husband is waiting to be saved, and when the protagonist chooses him they escape the bloody chamber together holding hands. He is not looking to dominate the protagonist, rather he hopes to become a part of her and mutually fill the voids that both of them have with each other. Leishman pulls away from the other bloody chamber stories by bestowing a history upon the husband character. Carter gives him a second dimension by delving into his psychological state, but Leishman was able to give him a third by drawing his emotional state out along the z-axis of time.
.................The characterization of the protagonist also shifts dramatically from story to story. In Perrault's version she is depicted as the archetypal damsel in distress who got herself in trouble due to her curiosity. Carter removes her innocence and replaces it with adventurousness, sexual curiosity and masochism. The protagonist is shocked by her own "potentiality for corruption" (Carter, 115), but at the same time she is excited by the possibilities that she now has, but as she is pulled deeper and deeper into her husband's sadistic world she begins to get scared and longs for the safe, boring life she had before. This longing is shown by the desperate phone call made to her mother: "I telephoned my mother. And astonished myself by bursting into tears when I heard her voice" (127). The fact that the protagonist begins sobbing at the sound of her mother's voice reveals the anxiety she feels about her new life and the wish to return to the old one. It is not a game anymore. According to the critic Sheets the initial degradation and objectification she experiences is exciting due to its exotic nature, but once her husband takes it to another level she decides she has had enough: "masochism may have served her interests during the courtship and the initial sexual encounter: perhaps she assumed a passive role as a way to disguise her curiosity about sex and her desire for wealth. But she did not contract for death" (110). Once the protagonist sees that it is her life that is at stake not just her innocence she loses her adventurous spirit and regresses to the role of victim, the damsel in distress. But the most interesting thing Carter does with the protagonist is the privileged function she bestows upon her by giving her the narrative voice. In the end it is she who has absolute control because it is she who describes the story; Sheets quotes Roland Barthes: "The master is he who speaks […] the object is he who is silent, who remains separate, by a mutilation more absolute than any erotic torture" (Tucker, 107). Though through the course of the narrative it is the protagonist who is objectified, through the powerful role of the narrative voice, it is she who in the end objectifies her husband.
Leishman's protagonist is much different. The protagonist does not function as a victim, but rather as a lonely dreamer who is looking for someone to accept her love-engorged heart, which is literally beating out of her chest. Unlike Carter's protagonist Leishman's retains her innocence, but this innocence is not benign like that of Perrault's protagonist. Leishman's protagonist has an innocence that is capable of saving herself along with the one she loves. When the protagonist is first seen through the voyeurism of the husband, she depicted as a young girl staring out blankly, then as a young woman kneeling in front of a window with rays of light striking her in the face as her heart lifts out from her chest, and finally as the same young woman laying naked in bed about to touch herself before the screen blurs out. All three of these depictions imply a sense of loneliness and longing. After the husband decides that he wants to make her is wife she floats up to him wide eyed and open armed with her heart still beating out of her chest. There is a sense of acute hopefulness here. Then after exploring the magical world that is the husband's house the protagonist as an extension of the reader enters the bloody chamber where she can choose whether she will save the former wives or save her husband. As was discussed earlier this represents power and the protagonist is a heroic character regardless of what choice she makes, this is a far cry from the childish protagonists that are left waiting to be saved at the end of the other narratives.
.................The narrative point of view is another element that separates the three narratives. Perrault's version is told from the third person omniscient perspective. It is very expository and dry, which prevents the reader from really delving into any of the characters. The explanation of the bodies that the protagonist finds in the forbidden room is told as a parenthetical reference: "(these were all the wives whom Bluebeard had married and murdered, one after another)," this way of telling the story almost makes the statement banal. The first person point of view employed by Carter, which was discussed earlier, functions to make for a much richer, more complex narrative experience, because we are getting the information from an involved party, not from a detached narrator. The perspective of Leishman's interactive narrative is more complex. The perspective is at times omniscient, but at other times aligns itself with the point of view of either the protagonist or the husband. This variety of narrative perspectives gives much greater depth to the piece, this depth appears formally as well as the reader can choose to zoom all the way in or all the way of the story environment. We are able to identify with both characters and, at times, we identify with one through the other. For instance, when the husband's past marriages are revealed it is shown over the shoulder of the protagonist. So while we gain insight about the husband, we also gain insight on the protagonist's understanding of the husband. Other times the point of view is from the eyes of the protagonist, which allows us to experience things with her and through her rather than from behind her. For example when she is given the keys to explore the house of the husband she is not shown; it is the reader who explores the house as the protagonist, and by doing this become an extension of the protagonist, just as the protagonist is an extension of the reader. This point of view though confusing at times allows for more complexity to emerge from a rather straightforward story.
.................To this point the paper has been discussing the differences in the narrative devices (plot, characterization, point of view) employed by the three different versions of the bloody chamber story. It is now time to pull back and actually look at the differences in form between the textual versions and the interactive version. The textual versions of the story give a concrete sequence of events and leave it up to the reader to take the details given and create an imaginary world in their own minds. In Carter's version the events will never change, though one critic may interpret the significance of one element differently from another critic, the mother will always shoot the husband in the head with the revolver. The sequence of events is concrete, what the reader will create in their imagination from that sequence of events is a realm of endless possibilities, i.e. the husband's expression as he sees the mother rise the gun. Whereas in Leishman's version the environment is concrete and will never change, but the path the reader may take through it has multiple possibilities, also one reader may interpret the visual elements very differently from another and thus create an entirely different narrative. Donna Leishman addresses the creation of narrative from an authored environment in her Master's Thesis: "the narrative will come from the world itself and our participation in it and the set pieces of linear experience. You the interactor are investing yourself and all your temperament, cultural experience, idiosyncratic nature of reading and interacting into this narrative environment" (7). It is a lot like a child who cannot read who looks at a picture and tells the story that they create from that visual experience. Both versions, textual and interactive narrative, ask the reader to create. The difference is they ask the reader to create different things.
.................According to Leishman interactive narrative takes advantage of "the human ability to read narratives into everything" (8). This is true, but the richer and more detailed the environment the more complex the narrative that is derived from it can be. As with Leishman's piece there were just enough symbols and enough to ambiguity to create a cohesive story that was not completely pre-authored. One might argue that ambiguity is lesser than concreteness because you are not saying anything specific, but if you can be ambiguous and still conjure complex plots and situations in the mind of the reader that is more powerful than forcing something into someone's mind. The critic Janet Murray argues that there is a place for interactive narrative because own lives can be very ambiguous: "because we see the world and even our own identities as such complex, centerless, open-ended systems, we need a story environment that allows us to make sense of them by enticing us into exploring a dense narrative world" (Douglas, 169).
.................In conclusion, both Carter and Leishman manage to successfully take an old narrative and create something new out of it, while still retaining the basic sequence of events. Carter transforms Perault's original into a dense, psychological and sociological exploration of the traditional characters, while simultaneously raising questions about gender and combating the formulaic way those roles are normally cast. Carter enters the bloody chamber of sadistic male gaze and pornographic objectification, but emerges heroic; she becomes a type of savior by empowering her two female characters; the protagonist, by giving her the narrative voice, and the mother by giving her the role of hero. Just as Carter creates something wholly new from the skeleton of Perrault's original, Leishman disrupts the story even further by expressing it by way of a totally new medium. The medium of interactive narrative is a bloody chamber in itself, because an artist does not yet know what will be found inside, nor can the artist be sure of the consequences they will have to face for choosing to enter such a precarious medium. They could easily be ignored or criticized for creating a toy, a gimmick and then parading it as if it truly were a rich narrative form. In this sense, Leishman is a sort of heroic figure, because it is hard to deny the compelling narrative that exists within her piece. Leishman does not merely switch mediums, but she uses the medium to recreate the story; this is achieved by giving the reader just enough information for them to rewrite it themselves.
.................Right now, we are still learning "read" interactive narratives, which is why it makes sense for artists to experiment by recreating old stories rather than trying to tell new ones. With an old story the reader has a context for looking at the new piece, and can take what they know about what the narrative was and then try to understand it through that lens. With an original story the reader has no context for understanding any of the symbols or conventions, which makes it much more difficult, or maybe even impossible, to read.
.................A retelling can accomplish many things just through juxtaposition with the original. An author who chooses to retell a story has the luxury of criticizing and reworking what had gone before it, rather than creating a whole new spectrum, which puts them into the dual role of creator/critic. A retelling can also be a cop out, or an easy path if it merely "retells," but as is the case with Carter and Leishman, I believe that the retellings are valuable because they do not merely retell, rather they transform and recreate, which is something that all art seems to strive for.
 
WORKS CITED
Carter, Angela. Burning Your Boats the Collected Short Stories
New York: Penguin Books, 1995.
Douglas, J. Yellowlees. The End of Books - Or Books Without End
Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2000.
Leishman, Donna. "Does Point and Click Interactivity Destroy the Story"
December, 2000, < http://www.6amhoover.com/destroystory.htm >.
Tucker, Lindsey. Critical Essays on Angela Carter
New York: G.K. Hall & co, 1998.