That bloody woman downstairs

Femme fatale: Angela Carter's The Bloody Chamber

Carter claimed the stories in this collection could not have existed the way they did without the example of Isak Dinesen - "because in a way they are imitation 19th-century stories, like hers"; such stories are she described elsewhere "highly structured artefacts with beginnings, middles, and ends and a schematic coherence of imagery".

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Certainly this is an accurate description of The Bloody Chamber's title story, which, like each of the highly wrought stories in Isak Dinesen's Seven Gothic Tales, reads almost like a novella. Nearly all her writing is strikingly full of cultural and intertextual references, but this story is extremely so.

It is an artfully constructed edifice of signs and allusions and clues. On the walls of his castle hang paintings of dead women by Moreau, Ensor and Gauguin; he listens to Wagner specifically "Liebestod" - "love-death" - in Tristan und Isolde ; he smokes Romeo y Julieta cigars "fat as a baby's arm"; his library is stocked with graphically- described sadistic pornography and his dungeon chamber with mutilated corpses and itemised instruments of torture.

In this heavily perfumed story, the Marquis' smell of spiced leather, Cuir de Russie, is referred to more than half a dozen times, reverting at the end "to the elements of flayed hide and excrement of which it was composed". Descriptions of scented lilies, "cobraheaded, funereal", smelling of "pampered flesh", appear nine times, their fat stems like "dismembered arms".

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The words "immolation," "impalement", "martyr" and "sacrifice" occur, motif-like, at regular intervals but, abruptly - rather too abruptly for some critics - on the last two pages of this novella-length story the heroinevictim is rescued from decapitation by the sudden arrival of her pistol-toting maman, who puts a bullet through the Marquis' head.

Her fate is not immutable after all; she discovers that her future looks quite different now that she has escaped from the old story and is learning to sing a new song. There follow three cat tales. The first two are Beauty and the Beast transformations, as described earlier.

Carter writes with tremendous relish when describing skin, fur, fabric and snowcovered landscapes. To say she is wonderful at surfaces sounds a little disparaging, as if to say she is superficial. No; she is good at surfaces as the Gawain poet is good at surfaces. The third cat story, "Puss-in-Boots", is utterly different from its predecessors. It is "the first story that I wrote that was supposed to be really funny, out-and-out funny", said Carter.

Review by Sharu Delilkan and Tim Booth

Margaret Thatcher, 53, had just been elected Britain's first prime minister. Totally professionally run production and big ups to all concerned. Learn to Read with Phonics - Book 2. Carter claimed the stories in this collection could not have existed the way they did without the example of Isak Dinesen - "because in a way they are imitation 19th-century stories, like hers"; such stories are she described elsewhere "highly structured artefacts with beginnings, middles, and ends and a schematic coherence of imagery". Come with Joe as his unbelievable adventure reaches its dramatic conclusion.

It is a precursor in its ribald cynical tone to her last two novels, Nights at the Circus and Wise Children, and in its turningaway from the Gothic mode towards the determinedly benign. The first-person narrator, the cat himself, is a witty raconteur and master of innuendo, proceeding mainly by rhetorical questions and exclamations.

His language is a vivid mixture of Latinate elaboration and Anglo-saxon bluntness: The next three stories, at the centre of the book, fit less easily into this collection. In each one of them, lovers are lethal, traditional romantic patterns kill, and sex leads to death. It is based on a variant of "Snow White", which the brothers Grimm collected but chose not to publish, in which Snow White's birth is a result of her father's desire rather than her mother's, as in the more familiar version of the story. It started life as a radio play, Vampirella first broadcast in , so probably written well before the rest of this collection, which Carter said she wrote mostly during her time in Sheffield, where she was Arts Council Fellow from Carter, an avid reader of Anne Rice's vampire novels, said the idea for the radio play came to her when she was sitting idly trying to work and ran a pencil along the top of a radiator - "It was just the noise that a long, pointed fingernail might make if it were run along the bars of a birdcage.

Finally, three disparate werewolf tales work and rework the story of Red Riding Hood, borrowing variants from different centuries, compulsively circling the figures of the werewolf, the old woman and the young girl. The girl cuts off the wolf's paw, but finds that it is really her grandmother's hand. The old woman is stoned to death as a witch.

Its first pages are given to a zestful atmospheric essay on the wolf, "carnivore incarnate", with vivid werewolf anecdotes. Not until over a third of the way into the story does the Red Riding Hood narrative begin. The filmmaker Neil Jordan remembered: I suggested to her that we develop it into a Chinese box structure At the end of Perrault's familiar version of the story, she gets into bed with the wolf and is gobbled up. Open Preview See a Problem?

Thanks for telling us about the problem. Return to Book Page. That Bloody Book by Tony Flower. Happiness is but a brief transient moment where one's orbit coincides with one's dreams. If you're lucky then sufficient orbits are completed in a lifetime for this happy collision to occasionally reoccur. We each occupy our own trajectory and meet others along the way, sometimes with wonderful, sometimes with disastrous consequences. Follow Joe Stamford as he takes a humo Happiness is but a brief transient moment where one's orbit coincides with one's dreams.

Join him as his pointless career reaches its inevitable conclusion: Who is the unknown scar faced stranger who lurks menacingly in the background? Who is the mysterious woman with the UK shaped birthmark on her bum? How does this quiet, unassuming man end up in the midst of the most bizarre escapade imaginable?

Who are the innocent victims that are dragged along with him? Can his wife's patience and his marriage survive the strain? What is the real motive of his Nemesis?

That Bloody Woman - ENOUGH!

Come with Joe as his unbelievable adventure reaches its dramatic conclusion. You may even grow to like the deeply flawed, opinionated, self-pitying old fool. Paperback , pages.

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Published August 22nd by New Generation Publishing. To see what your friends thought of this book, please sign up. Hi Sharu- thank you- very much appreciated that you have so accurately expressed what we were trying portray with the costumes! Went to see this last night at Sky City Theatre. What a brilliant show, it made me laugh, it made me cry. Left so much more informed about the struggle and loved the quirky jabs at John Key.

REVIEW: That Bloody Woman (Auckland Theatre Company)

Totally professionally run production and big ups to all concerned. My feet were tapping the whole way thru to the awesome lyrics. Movers Basement Theatre Theatre Reviews.