When I first read Angela Carter’s famous Gothic short story, “The Bloody Chamber,” it was midnight, or close enough to it. I was curled up in my lopsided twin-sized bed, the page illuminated solely by my bedside table lamp whose lampshade was imprinted with cut-out butterflies. The air in my basement bedroom was blessedly cool, a welcome reprieve from the Midwestern summer humidity. Though I tend to read while listening to music, as is my habit in all solitary activities, I didn’t turn on Spotify before cracking the already-broken spine of my used copy of The Bloody Chamber. Perhaps I wanted to create an atmosphere of silent ritual for this reading experience; perhaps I already sensed how completely this book would enrapture me.
I was not yet twenty years old, almost a sophomore in college, trying to understand and construct my taste as a reader and a writer. I had just finished reading Her Body and Other Parties by Carmen Maria Machado, a bloody, sexy, feminist horror short story collection that reverberated to my core. Horror had always captivated me for its bombast, high stakes, and the primal emotions it elicits, but I had not yet read horror written by another woman with such a rich, arresting evocation of female sexuality. I’d attended a Catholic school from the time I was four until I graduated high school—the institution went all-girls for secondary school starting in 7th grade––and it was safe to say that sex was a topic that perpetually enticed as much as it unnerved me, even after a few rolls in the hay myself. During a podcast interview, Machado mentioned how much Carter’s writing influenced her, particularly Carter’s collection of Gothic, sexed-up fairytale retellings, The Bloody Chamber, published in the late 70s. She described Carter’s voice as “decadent.” That was all it took to pique my interest. I was looking for models to emulate, figures to aspire to, and stories that demonstrated all of language’s capabilities for awe and bewilderment and beauty. I followed this breadcrumb trail of influence.
After reading the first sentence of the title story, I knew Angela Carter and her work fulfilled my needs. In full, it reads:
I remember how, that night, I lay awake in the wagon-lit in a tender, delicious ecstasy of excitement, my burning cheek pressed against the impeccable linen of the pillow and the pounding of my heart mimicking that of the great pistons ceaselessly thrusting the train that bore me through the night, away from Paris, away from girlhood, away from the white, enclosed quietude of my mother’s apartment, into the unguessable country of marriage.
I’ve yet to encounter another writer with sentences as baroque as Carter’s, with her ornate prose and sweeping, elaborate, hypotactic syntax. The opening sentence of “The Bloody Chamber” might be the most famous example in her oeuvre. Technically, it’s also the story’s first paragraph, it’s just that circuitous. But that circuity is largely what makes the sentence feel so luscious: it takes its time to build suspense, to describe, to luxuriate in the sensuality of information it conveys—it unabashedly revels in its own magnificent language. Even now, I can’t help but revel in that language as well.
Immediately, the reader is given a sly hint as to how the story will end: the heroine, the first-person speaker who remains nameless throughout the story, survives. The first clause, “I remember how,” positions the entire rest of the story as a recollection, situating it gently but definitively within the heroine’s past, meaning that, to recount it later, she must be alive to do so. This is a subtle, almost imperceptible spoiler, but I could only discern it as such in hindsight after understanding the danger the heroine faces as the protagonist in a retelling of Bluebeard: the fairy tale of an aristocratic murderer who has killed his three previous wives with the intent to kill his fourth––the heroine––as well. The opening clause also alludes to the oral tradition of fairy tales by positioning the rest of the text as a story being explicitly told—with this clause, the heroine ushers us into her specific experience of this mythic story.
This is followed by a short prepositional phrase, “that night,” which places the story within time while also highlighting how its events have impacted the heroine. The night she refers to only requires the determiner “that” to be comprehensively specified to her and requires no other details to be remembered. This insinuates that the night looms large in the heroine’s life and is oft recounted. I was left wondering, even if only subconsciously, what made this night so critical. My eyebrows furrowed slightly. The seemingly innocuous phrase created a small question—what happened that night?—to propel the reader forward in search of an answer. A spike in tension, constructed in two simple words.
As the sentence continues to unfurl, the setting becomes more firmly established as intertwined with the heroine’s emotional state. She is in bed, meant to be asleep in a “wagon-lit,” a term I admittedly had to Google to understand, which is a sleeping car typically found on European trains. However, the heroine cannot rest because she is so exorbitantly excited that she must describe it not just with two sensual adjectives, but also a noun modifier. Each word adds a new ingredient to the cocktail of the heroine’s psyche. “[T]ender,” brings a degree of vulnerability and softness, “delicious” indicates the heroine is enjoying the feeling, and “ecstasy” is the final garnish on top that emphasizes how utterly enraptured, even beholden, the heroine is to this sensation. But I still couldn’t discern what, exactly, had gotten the heroine whipped up in such a frenzy, though by this point I had an inkling. And where was she headed on this train? My intrigue as a reader—and the story’s tension—quickly and quietly continued to escalate, stoking my desire for answers.
In the subsequent dependent clause, the heroine’s emotional interiority is further elaborated through physical embodiment: “my burning cheek pressed against the impeccable linen of the pillow and the pounding of my heart mimicking that of the great pistons ceaselessly thrusting the train that bore me through the night[.]” The flush of the heroine’s cheeks conjures her a body that expresses her excitement and hints that she might also feel a degree of embarrassment. The adjective “impeccable,” describing the quality of the pillow linen, demonstrates that the heroine has access to a certain degree of lavishness in even the most mundane of objects, and the implication that the pillow is unused or otherwise unblemished from previous use gestures at a potential recent class elevation for her. Her heart is “pounding,” a gerund that solidifies the heroine’s physicality and is another symptom of her excitement, though it also indicates a dash of fear since the word is commonly used to describe states of heightened, intensive emotion, whether positive or negative. Not only is her heart “pounding” but it is doing so with such ferocity it is “mimicking that of the great pistons ceaselessly thrusting the train[.]”
And if creative workarounds of the Hays Code have taught me anything, it’s that trains make wonderful stand-ins for the phallus. “Thrusting” easily evokes the image of a man in the heat of passion; the mention of how “great” the pistons of the train are emphasizes their size and power, indicating the member is quite up to the task. However, the adverb “ceaselessly,” while certainly indicating virility, also implies that the thrusting won’t stop for any reason, potentially even if unwanted. Since the heroine is presumably the one who will be thrust upon, her conceptualization of the act as “ceaseless” already indicates she may view sex with a certain degree of weariness, if not awareness.
Her turmoil and the sensual language used to describe it click into place: she is excited and aroused and anxious at the prospect of someone potentially ravishing her. That the train “bore [her] through the night” indicates this journey—and the sexual encounter it alludes to—will be a rebirth for the heroine, that she will be born new upon arrival. There’s a hint of menace to this—will this rebirth be a pleasurable or painful process? My own sexual initiation—and I’d wager a good number of other women’s—was also tinged with this double helix of fear and arousal. How could it not be, when purity is what categorizes a woman as a person? When that is placed in jeopardy, it’s understandable why the heroine’s—or any woman’s—self-conception is thrown into question. When I breached the shores of sexual activity, I felt like a fundamentally different person. I mourned myself in the backseat of my mother’s car, sobbing along to sad musical theater songs, even though I’d felt ecstatic during the act itself. The heroine, too, will never see herself in the same way after the alluded-to encounter, but that night on the train, she is still encased in anxious anticipation.
Before we learn where the heroine is headed, we learn from whence she departed: “away from Paris, away from girlhood, away from the white, enclosed quietude of my mother’s apartment[.]” First, the literal point of departure is established, then the symbolic importance of this location: it is where the heroine was raised, where she spent her adolescence, which she is only just now leaving behind, further reinforced by the fact she leaves straight from her mother’s apartment. “[T]he white, enclosed quietude” that characterizes the space indicates that while the heroine’s home is pure and safe and has kept her innocent—presumably virginal—it is also secluding. The repetition of “away from” in each subsequent phrase not only builds momentum but also heightens an undercurrent of loss by enumerating each component of home the heroine is leaving behind. It also further spins out the tension until it is unbearable: but where, oh where, is she actually going? I needed to know.
The heroine is heading “into the unguessable country of marriage.” The sexual connotations woven throughout the sentence are brought into sharper focus: it is the heroine’s wedding night. Marriage is positioned as a physical place one can enter, its own daunting territory hitherto unexplored; this adds a metaphoric, heightened emotional layer to the literal tradition of wives moving in with their husbands upon marriage that, when compounded with the stark difference in class and experience between the heroine and her husband, emphasizes just how foreign this new world is. Due to her youth, the heroine is so unaware of the nature of adult relationships that marriage is rendered completely “unguessable”—she has no idea what to expect whatsoever from this relationship, sexual or otherwise. Is it any wonder she is aroused and anxious?
According to Angela Carter’s biographer, Edmund Gordon, given Carter’s own repressive and infantilized adolescence, she herself was “someone whose childhood had been a state of grace from which she had longed to fall. It was a theme she would visit again and again.” Lying down on my lumpy twin-sized bed in a room with three white walls in the quietude of my mother’s bungalow, I couldn’t say I didn’t find it a relatable theme. I renounced my Midwestern, Catholic upbringing as soon as I hung up the wedding dress I’d worn for graduation. I fled to a liberal arts school in Boston where I learned how to read tarot and discovered my big three in astrology and threw myself upon the male populace. I toyed with debauchery, cracking raunchy sex jokes to my roommates, scouring Tinder, dropping my gaze whenever a lover disrobed in front of me, skittish when I was touched but rarely undesiring. Now that I was back home for the summer, my only options for indulging in perversity were masturbation and salacious literature.
Much like the journey the heroine experiences on the train, Carter’s sentence is long, with each word, phrase, and clause building on top of one another, heightening tension with each detail-filled elaboration, until, eventually, the tension cannot be contained and must be resolved with an explosive revelation that grants relief. The sentence follows the cycle of tension and release necessary to sustain the erotic. What I’m really trying to say is—it’s like an orgasm.
Carter’s hypotactic writing—characterized by the syntactical subordination of clauses—is heavily gendered as female, as Ursula K. Le Guin notes in her essay, “Introducing Myself”: “He shot himself. A short sentence. Anything rather than a long sentence, a life sentence. Death sentences are very, very manly. Life sentences aren’t. They go on and on, all full of syntax and qualifying clauses and confusing references and getting old.” These male-coded, short, climactic “[d]eath sentences” could be considered erotic in that they mimic the male orgasm, with its faster, more pronounced arrival (after all, the French call an orgasm “a little death”), while Carter’s “[l]ife sentences,” with their protracted length and elaborate grammar, specifically mimic the female orgasm. This syntactical style is all the better for a story—and a holistic collection—dedicated to unraveling the psychosexual undercurrent of fairy tales through a subversive female lens. There could be no better overture to open Carter’s fantastical work.
With each word, arranged in its particular configuration, Carter crafted a spell that couldn’t help but enthrall me with its salacious, artful, dexterous voice. As I read her work, I was left in a state of ecstasy myself. I felt my pulse quicken with every sweepingly decadent phrase. Her sex scenes were lush, unconventional, alluring, disturbing, and completely, utterly captivating. They did not always depict positive sexual experiences, as the heroine’s loss of virginity is described as an “impale[ment],” entwining her husband’s murderous intent into the consummation of their marriage, but always these sexual moments were richly written and dripping with meaning. Carter showed me a way to explore my subjectivity as a young, female sexual agent through linguistic splendor.
When fall came shortly thereafter, along with my birthday, I began studying abroad in a medieval castle in the Netherlands for the first semester of my sophomore year. I listened to the audiobook version of The Bloody Chamber as I wandered echoing, sloping halls said to be haunted by a ghost named Sophie. I was in my own version of a Gothic tale with Carter’s voice guiding me. On weekend excursions to other cities in far-flung countries, I scoured English-language bookshops seeking more of her work. I wrote my own feminist fairy tale retellings with the most verbose language I could muster and lyric essays centered around urban mythology and a haunting sexual encounter of my own. When classmates commented on how difficult they found it to follow my writing, I responded with, “I’m no Angela Carter.” Circuity needs intention to make it legible—I was still seeking mine.
I couldn’t finish “The Bloody Chamber” that summer night. It was late. My eyes were drooping. I could feel the chamber of my mind expanding with every word, and it was overwhelming. I needed to properly process Carter’s writing. This was a story to be savored. Some time later, I closed the book, clicked off the butterfly lamp, burrowed under my sheets, and drifted off into indulgent dreams.
