The Bloody Chamber | The Courtship of Mr Lyon | The Tiger’s Bride | The Erl-King | The Snow Child | The Lady of the House of Love | The Werewolf | The
Company of Wolves | Wolf-Alice | Context quotes | Critical quotes | Named critics | Key context | Key textual reference/quote
Theme Carter Frankenstein Critics + Context
Gender and The Bloody Chamber: “ceased to be her child in Victor: “I have a pretty present for my Victor—tomorrow Elaine Jordan: “Although it is the Count who
Patriarchal Power becoming his wife”, he shall have it.”, “I, with childish seriousness, creates and rapes the Snow Child, she does nothing
“my purchaser unwrapped his bargain”, interpreted her words literally and looked upon Elizabeth to stop him” — the Countess’s silence is the
“the assessing eye of a connoisseur inspecting as mine—mine to protect, love, and cherish.”, “All patriarchal contract internalised.
horseflesh”, praises bestowed on her I received as made to a
“bare as a lamb chop”, possession of my own.”, “till death she was to be mine Sandra Gilbert & Susan Gubar: Shelley writes “a
“Have the nasty pictures scared Baby?”, only.”, “The saintly soul of Elizabeth shone like a shrine- woman’s myth of creation” — Victor’s “I had worked
“My dear one, my little love, my child”, dedicated lamp in our peaceful home.” hard for nearly two years … infusing life into an
“the eye of God - his eye”, inanimate body” destroys the women around him as
“His forefathers had ruled this coast for eight Caroline / Elizabeth: “Elizabeth, my love, you must a structural consequence.
centuries”, supply my place to my younger children.”
“The puppet master... saw his dolls break free of Anne K. Mellor: Victor’s “mine—mine to protect,
their strings”. Safie: “an independence of spirit forbidden to the female love, and cherish” renders Elizabeth property. Mellor
The Tiger’s Bride: “My father lost me to The followers of Muhammad.”, “where women were allowed calls this “nature figured as a beloved woman” —
Beast at cards”, to take a rank in society was enchanting to her.” the same possessive logic as the Marquis’s
“I was a young girl, a virgin, and therefore men “assessing eye of a connoisseur.”
denied me rationality”,
“bought and sold, passed from hand to hand”, The Creature / Female Creature: “You must create a
“Take off my clothes for you, like a ballet girl?”, female for me with whom I can live in the interchange of Mary Poovey: Elizabeth’s role as “shrine-dedicated
“The tiger will never lie down with the lamb”, those sympathies necessary for my being.”, “she, who in lamp” is the “proper lady” — a sanctified object
“The lamb must learn to run with the tigers”. all probability was to become a thinking and reasoning whose silence permits male ambition. Compare
The Courtship of Mr Lyon: “Miss Lamb, animal, might refuse to comply with a compact made “Miss Lamb, spotless, sacrificial” in ‘Mr Lyon’.
spotless, sacrificial”, before her creation.”, “She also might turn with disgust
“possessed by a sense of obligation to an unusual from him to the superior beauty of man;”, “a race of Angela Carter: “To be the object of desire is to be
degree”, devils would be propagated upon the earth who might defined in the passive case. To exist in the passive
“one last single perfect rose”. make the very existence of the species of man a case is to die in the passive case — that is, to be
The Snow Child: “she was the child of his condition precarious and full of terror.”, “I almost felt as if killed.” Source theory for the deaths of Elizabeth,
desire”, “I wish I had a girl as white as snow”, “I I had mangled the living flesh of a human being.” the female creature, and the Marquis’s first wife.
wish I had a girl as red as blood”, “I wish I had a
girl as black as that bird’s feather”. Angela Carter, ‘Notes from the Front Line’ “I am in
The Company of Wolves: “she knew she was the demythologising business.” Her project is to
nobody’s meat”, “She has her knife and she is expose the ideological work of myth, not to
afraid of nothing”, “this strong-minded child insists reproduce it.
she will go off through the wood”.
, Publication context: The Bloody Chamber published
October 1979 by Victor Gollancz. The same month
saw the publication of Carter’s The Sadeian Woman
by Virago. Carter had spent 1976–78 as Visiting
Fellow in Creative Writing at the University of
Sheffield — the two books were written
simultaneously.
Second-wave feminism: Equal Pay Act (1970), Sex
Discrimination Act (1975). Germaine Greer:
“Women have very little idea of how much men hate
them.” Bloody Chamber appeared the year
Margaret Thatcher became Britain’s first female
Prime Minister (May 1979) — a victory feminists
received with deep ambivalence.
Mary Wollstonecraft: women kept without civil
rights “may be convenient slaves, but slavery will
have its constant effect, degrading the master and
the abject dependent.” Wollstonecraft died of
puerperal fever on 10 September 1797, eleven days
after Mary’s birth — her radical text haunts every
female death in Frankenstein.
Marriage law context: under English common law a
wife was ‘feme covert’ — her legal identity absorbed
into her husband’s. The Married Women’s Property
Act was not passed until 1882. In 1818 Elizabeth
has no legal existence independent of Victor; the
Marquis’s bride in 1979 has rights, but Carter’s
imagery shows how little the emotional structure has
changed.
Social Exclusion / The Bloody Chamber: “Into marriage, into exile”, Walton: “I have no friend, Margaret: when I am glowing Marina Warner Carter’s outsider figures — the
Outsiders “I would always be lonely”, “The atrocious with the enthusiasm of success, there will be none to Beast, the vampire Countess, Wolf-Alice — “reclaim
, participate my joy;”, “I shall certainly find no friend on the the monstrous feminine” rather than confirm it. The
The Tiger’s Bride: “‘Nothing human lives here,’ wide ocean, nor even here in Archangel, among Lady of the House of Love’s “perennial sadness” is
said the valet”, “He paced out the length and merchants and seamen.” the cost of being trapped inside a male-authored
breadth of his imprisonment”, “Market place, myth.
where the eyes that watch you take no account of Victor: “I was now alone. In the university whither I was
your existence”. going I must form my own friends and be my own Sarah Gamble: the Countess is “a prisoner of her
protector.”, “I shunned my fellow creatures as if I had own legend” — “the beautiful somnambulist
The Lady of the House of Love: “the beautiful been guilty of a crime.”, “I the only unquiet thing that helplessly perpetuates her ancestral crimes”
somnambulist helplessly perpetuates her wandered restless in a scene so beautiful and dramatises entrapment in inherited narrative
ancestral crimes”, “the perennial sadness of a girl heavenly”, “I was encompassed by a cloud which no identity.
who is both death and the maiden”, “In her dream, beneficial influence could penetrate.”
she would like to be human”, “horrible reluctance Lorna Sage: Carter’s stories are “a sustained
for the role”. The Creature: “All men hate the wretched; how, then, assault on a culture that wants women safely dead.”
must I be hated, who am miserable beyond all living The Countess’s death (“less beautiful and so… fully
Wolf-Alice: “nothing about her is human except things!”, “You, my creator, abhor me; what hope can I human”) is precisely the cost society demands of
that she is not a wolf”, “Little in common with the gather from your fellow creatures, who owe me the female outsider.
rest of us”, “who is not wolf or woman”. nothing?”, “I am alone and miserable; man will not
associate with me;”, “There was none among the Chris Baldick: the Creature is “a social outcast
myriads of men that existed who would pity or assist created by society’s own failures” — his “All men
The Werewolf: “they have cold weather, they
me;”, “I am solitary and abhorred.”, “Could they turn hate the wretched” speech makes exclusion
have cold hearts”.
from their door one, however monstrous, who solicited systemic. Carter’s Wolf-Alice (“who is not wolf or
their compassion and friendship?”, “children shrieked, woman”) is the same structural outcast, differently
and one of the women fainted.” gendered.
Mary Poovey: argues that the Creature’s repeated
refusals of recognition (“You, my creator, abhor
me”) textually enact the experience of the woman
writer in a literary world that dismissed Frankenstein
on publication as “a disgusting absurdity.” Shelley
published anonymously in 1818 precisely because
female authorship invited exclusion.
Julia Kristeva: the abject is what “does not respect
borders, positions, rules.” Wolf-Alice’s state “locked
half and half between such strange states” and the
Creature’s self-description as “an abortion, to be
spurned at, and kicked, and trampled on” both
literalise abjection.
, Angela Carter: in Japan, 1969–72, she “learnt what
it is to be a woman and became radicalised”. Carter
used her Somerset Maugham Award (1969) to
leave her marriage and move to Tokyo — the
experience of racial and sexual otherness directly
informs her hybrid outsider figures.
Abolition context for Frankenstein (1818): the 1807
Slave Trade Act had outlawed the trade but not
slavery itself; abolition debates were at their height.
The Creature’s rhetoric — “I, the miserable and the
abandoned, am an abortion, to be spurned at, and
kicked, and trampled on” — consciously echoes the
language of contemporary slave narratives, raising
the question of which bodies society classes as
human.
Anonymous publication: Frankenstein was
published and dedicated to William Godwin.
Reviewers assumed a male author; when Shelley’s
authorship became known, the novel was reread as
an “ill-digested” female curiosity (Quarterly Review,
1818). Shelley’s own outsider status as author
mirrors her Creature’s exclusion.
Carter’s source: Perrault’s ‘Bluebeard’ (Histoires ou
Contes du Temps Passé, 1697) ends with the
rescued bride quickly remarrying “a very worthy
gentleman.” Carter inverts this: her narrator does
not re-enter society but lives apart with her mother
and the blind piano-tuner Jean-Yves. The outsider
refuses reintegration.
Entrapment and The Bloody Chamber: “this lovely prison”, “both Walton: “How slowly the time passes here, Ellen Moers: coined “Female Gothic” — women
Confinement the inmate and the mistress”, “spiked gate, his encompassed as I am by frost and snow!”, “we were writers use locked rooms, castles, and laboratories
Company of Wolves | Wolf-Alice | Context quotes | Critical quotes | Named critics | Key context | Key textual reference/quote
Theme Carter Frankenstein Critics + Context
Gender and The Bloody Chamber: “ceased to be her child in Victor: “I have a pretty present for my Victor—tomorrow Elaine Jordan: “Although it is the Count who
Patriarchal Power becoming his wife”, he shall have it.”, “I, with childish seriousness, creates and rapes the Snow Child, she does nothing
“my purchaser unwrapped his bargain”, interpreted her words literally and looked upon Elizabeth to stop him” — the Countess’s silence is the
“the assessing eye of a connoisseur inspecting as mine—mine to protect, love, and cherish.”, “All patriarchal contract internalised.
horseflesh”, praises bestowed on her I received as made to a
“bare as a lamb chop”, possession of my own.”, “till death she was to be mine Sandra Gilbert & Susan Gubar: Shelley writes “a
“Have the nasty pictures scared Baby?”, only.”, “The saintly soul of Elizabeth shone like a shrine- woman’s myth of creation” — Victor’s “I had worked
“My dear one, my little love, my child”, dedicated lamp in our peaceful home.” hard for nearly two years … infusing life into an
“the eye of God - his eye”, inanimate body” destroys the women around him as
“His forefathers had ruled this coast for eight Caroline / Elizabeth: “Elizabeth, my love, you must a structural consequence.
centuries”, supply my place to my younger children.”
“The puppet master... saw his dolls break free of Anne K. Mellor: Victor’s “mine—mine to protect,
their strings”. Safie: “an independence of spirit forbidden to the female love, and cherish” renders Elizabeth property. Mellor
The Tiger’s Bride: “My father lost me to The followers of Muhammad.”, “where women were allowed calls this “nature figured as a beloved woman” —
Beast at cards”, to take a rank in society was enchanting to her.” the same possessive logic as the Marquis’s
“I was a young girl, a virgin, and therefore men “assessing eye of a connoisseur.”
denied me rationality”,
“bought and sold, passed from hand to hand”, The Creature / Female Creature: “You must create a
“Take off my clothes for you, like a ballet girl?”, female for me with whom I can live in the interchange of Mary Poovey: Elizabeth’s role as “shrine-dedicated
“The tiger will never lie down with the lamb”, those sympathies necessary for my being.”, “she, who in lamp” is the “proper lady” — a sanctified object
“The lamb must learn to run with the tigers”. all probability was to become a thinking and reasoning whose silence permits male ambition. Compare
The Courtship of Mr Lyon: “Miss Lamb, animal, might refuse to comply with a compact made “Miss Lamb, spotless, sacrificial” in ‘Mr Lyon’.
spotless, sacrificial”, before her creation.”, “She also might turn with disgust
“possessed by a sense of obligation to an unusual from him to the superior beauty of man;”, “a race of Angela Carter: “To be the object of desire is to be
degree”, devils would be propagated upon the earth who might defined in the passive case. To exist in the passive
“one last single perfect rose”. make the very existence of the species of man a case is to die in the passive case — that is, to be
The Snow Child: “she was the child of his condition precarious and full of terror.”, “I almost felt as if killed.” Source theory for the deaths of Elizabeth,
desire”, “I wish I had a girl as white as snow”, “I I had mangled the living flesh of a human being.” the female creature, and the Marquis’s first wife.
wish I had a girl as red as blood”, “I wish I had a
girl as black as that bird’s feather”. Angela Carter, ‘Notes from the Front Line’ “I am in
The Company of Wolves: “she knew she was the demythologising business.” Her project is to
nobody’s meat”, “She has her knife and she is expose the ideological work of myth, not to
afraid of nothing”, “this strong-minded child insists reproduce it.
she will go off through the wood”.
, Publication context: The Bloody Chamber published
October 1979 by Victor Gollancz. The same month
saw the publication of Carter’s The Sadeian Woman
by Virago. Carter had spent 1976–78 as Visiting
Fellow in Creative Writing at the University of
Sheffield — the two books were written
simultaneously.
Second-wave feminism: Equal Pay Act (1970), Sex
Discrimination Act (1975). Germaine Greer:
“Women have very little idea of how much men hate
them.” Bloody Chamber appeared the year
Margaret Thatcher became Britain’s first female
Prime Minister (May 1979) — a victory feminists
received with deep ambivalence.
Mary Wollstonecraft: women kept without civil
rights “may be convenient slaves, but slavery will
have its constant effect, degrading the master and
the abject dependent.” Wollstonecraft died of
puerperal fever on 10 September 1797, eleven days
after Mary’s birth — her radical text haunts every
female death in Frankenstein.
Marriage law context: under English common law a
wife was ‘feme covert’ — her legal identity absorbed
into her husband’s. The Married Women’s Property
Act was not passed until 1882. In 1818 Elizabeth
has no legal existence independent of Victor; the
Marquis’s bride in 1979 has rights, but Carter’s
imagery shows how little the emotional structure has
changed.
Social Exclusion / The Bloody Chamber: “Into marriage, into exile”, Walton: “I have no friend, Margaret: when I am glowing Marina Warner Carter’s outsider figures — the
Outsiders “I would always be lonely”, “The atrocious with the enthusiasm of success, there will be none to Beast, the vampire Countess, Wolf-Alice — “reclaim
, participate my joy;”, “I shall certainly find no friend on the the monstrous feminine” rather than confirm it. The
The Tiger’s Bride: “‘Nothing human lives here,’ wide ocean, nor even here in Archangel, among Lady of the House of Love’s “perennial sadness” is
said the valet”, “He paced out the length and merchants and seamen.” the cost of being trapped inside a male-authored
breadth of his imprisonment”, “Market place, myth.
where the eyes that watch you take no account of Victor: “I was now alone. In the university whither I was
your existence”. going I must form my own friends and be my own Sarah Gamble: the Countess is “a prisoner of her
protector.”, “I shunned my fellow creatures as if I had own legend” — “the beautiful somnambulist
The Lady of the House of Love: “the beautiful been guilty of a crime.”, “I the only unquiet thing that helplessly perpetuates her ancestral crimes”
somnambulist helplessly perpetuates her wandered restless in a scene so beautiful and dramatises entrapment in inherited narrative
ancestral crimes”, “the perennial sadness of a girl heavenly”, “I was encompassed by a cloud which no identity.
who is both death and the maiden”, “In her dream, beneficial influence could penetrate.”
she would like to be human”, “horrible reluctance Lorna Sage: Carter’s stories are “a sustained
for the role”. The Creature: “All men hate the wretched; how, then, assault on a culture that wants women safely dead.”
must I be hated, who am miserable beyond all living The Countess’s death (“less beautiful and so… fully
Wolf-Alice: “nothing about her is human except things!”, “You, my creator, abhor me; what hope can I human”) is precisely the cost society demands of
that she is not a wolf”, “Little in common with the gather from your fellow creatures, who owe me the female outsider.
rest of us”, “who is not wolf or woman”. nothing?”, “I am alone and miserable; man will not
associate with me;”, “There was none among the Chris Baldick: the Creature is “a social outcast
myriads of men that existed who would pity or assist created by society’s own failures” — his “All men
The Werewolf: “they have cold weather, they
me;”, “I am solitary and abhorred.”, “Could they turn hate the wretched” speech makes exclusion
have cold hearts”.
from their door one, however monstrous, who solicited systemic. Carter’s Wolf-Alice (“who is not wolf or
their compassion and friendship?”, “children shrieked, woman”) is the same structural outcast, differently
and one of the women fainted.” gendered.
Mary Poovey: argues that the Creature’s repeated
refusals of recognition (“You, my creator, abhor
me”) textually enact the experience of the woman
writer in a literary world that dismissed Frankenstein
on publication as “a disgusting absurdity.” Shelley
published anonymously in 1818 precisely because
female authorship invited exclusion.
Julia Kristeva: the abject is what “does not respect
borders, positions, rules.” Wolf-Alice’s state “locked
half and half between such strange states” and the
Creature’s self-description as “an abortion, to be
spurned at, and kicked, and trampled on” both
literalise abjection.
, Angela Carter: in Japan, 1969–72, she “learnt what
it is to be a woman and became radicalised”. Carter
used her Somerset Maugham Award (1969) to
leave her marriage and move to Tokyo — the
experience of racial and sexual otherness directly
informs her hybrid outsider figures.
Abolition context for Frankenstein (1818): the 1807
Slave Trade Act had outlawed the trade but not
slavery itself; abolition debates were at their height.
The Creature’s rhetoric — “I, the miserable and the
abandoned, am an abortion, to be spurned at, and
kicked, and trampled on” — consciously echoes the
language of contemporary slave narratives, raising
the question of which bodies society classes as
human.
Anonymous publication: Frankenstein was
published and dedicated to William Godwin.
Reviewers assumed a male author; when Shelley’s
authorship became known, the novel was reread as
an “ill-digested” female curiosity (Quarterly Review,
1818). Shelley’s own outsider status as author
mirrors her Creature’s exclusion.
Carter’s source: Perrault’s ‘Bluebeard’ (Histoires ou
Contes du Temps Passé, 1697) ends with the
rescued bride quickly remarrying “a very worthy
gentleman.” Carter inverts this: her narrator does
not re-enter society but lives apart with her mother
and the blind piano-tuner Jean-Yves. The outsider
refuses reintegration.
Entrapment and The Bloody Chamber: “this lovely prison”, “both Walton: “How slowly the time passes here, Ellen Moers: coined “Female Gothic” — women
Confinement the inmate and the mistress”, “spiked gate, his encompassed as I am by frost and snow!”, “we were writers use locked rooms, castles, and laboratories
