The Bloody Chamber

by

Angela Carter

Teachers and parents! Our Teacher Edition on The Bloody Chamber makes teaching easy.
Themes and Colors
Sexuality and Violence Theme Icon
Virginity Theme Icon
Metamorphosis Theme Icon
Power and Objectification Theme Icon
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in The Bloody Chamber, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Metamorphosis Theme Icon

Many of the characters of The Bloody Chamber are creatures who are half-human and half-beast, or else undergo some change from beast to human or vice versa. These creatures, like The Beast, the Erl-King, and the huntsman werewolf, exist in an in-between space in the world, neither fully human nor fully non-human. They are the traditional creatures of the ancient fairy tales, but Carter also links their kind of “life on the threshold” with the sexual awakening and loss of virginity that most of the stories’ heroines experience. So Mr Lyon is transformed from beast to human by the heroine’s love, while the heroine of “The Tiger’s Bride” is transformed into a tiger. These fantastic metamorphoses as part of sexuality and virginity then lead to Carter’s more subtle point – that even the women who experience no magic metamorphosis (like the young woman of “Puss-in-Boots”) still live on a kind of threshold, treated as both humans and objects (of sexual desire, usually). It is only through some kind of extreme action – like the young woman colluding in Signor Panteleone’s death to escape him – that the heroines can cross the threshold and become fully human.

Related Themes from Other Texts
Compare and contrast themes from other texts to this theme…

Metamorphosis ThemeTracker

The ThemeTracker below shows where, and to what degree, the theme of Metamorphosis appears in each story of The Bloody Chamber. Click or tap on any chapter to read its Summary & Analysis.
How often theme appears:
story length:
Get the entire The Bloody Chamber LitChart as a printable PDF.
The Bloody Chamber PDF

Metamorphosis Quotes in The Bloody Chamber

Below you will find the important quotes in The Bloody Chamber related to the theme of Metamorphosis.
The Bloody Chamber Quotes

He stripped me, gourmand that he was, as if he were stripping the leaves off an artichoke… And when nothing but my scarlet, palpitating core remained, I saw, in the mirror, the living image of an etching by Rops… He in his London tailoring; she, bare as a lamb chop. Most pornographic of all confrontations. And so my purchaser unwrapped his bargain. And, as at the opera, when I had first seen my flesh in his eyes, I was aghast to feel myself stirring.

Related Characters: Heroine (The Bloody Chamber) (speaker), The Marquis
Page Number: 15
Explanation and Analysis:

No. I was not afraid of him; but of myself. I seemed reborn in his unreflective eyes, reborn in unfamiliar shapes. I hardly recognized myself from his descriptions of me and yet, and yet – might there not be a grain of beastly truth in them? And, in the red firelight, I blushed again, unnoticed, to think he might have chosen me because, in my innocence, he sensed a rare talent for corruption.

Related Characters: Heroine (The Bloody Chamber) (speaker), The Marquis
Page Number: 20
Explanation and Analysis:
The Courtship of Mr Lyon Quotes

How strange he was. She found his bewildering difference from herself almost intolerable; its presence choked her. There seemed a heavy, soundless pressure upon her in his house, as if it lay under water, and when she saw the great paws lying on the arm of his chair, she thought: they are the death of any tender herbivore. And such a one she felt herself to be, Miss Lamb, spotless, sacrificial.

Related Characters: The Beast (The Courtship of Mr. Lyon), Beauty
Page Number: 45
Explanation and Analysis:

The Beast sunk his great head on to his paws. You will come back to me? It will be lonely here, without you.
She was moved almost to tears that he should care for her so. It was in her heart to drop a kiss upon his shaggy mane but, though she stretched out her hand towards him, she could not bring herself to touch him of her own free will, he was so different from herself. But, yes, she said; I will come back. Soon, before the winter is over.

Related Characters: The Beast (The Courtship of Mr. Lyon) (speaker), Beauty (speaker), The Beast (The Courtship of Mr. Lyon), Beauty
Page Number: 48
Explanation and Analysis:

She flung herself upon him, so that the iron bedstead groaned, and covered his poor paws with her kisses.
“Don’t die, Beast! If you’ll have me, I’ll never leave you.” When her lips touched the meat-hook claws, they drew back into their pads and she saw how he had always kept his fists clenched but now, painfully, tentatively, at last began to stretch his fingers. Her tears fell on his face like snow and, under their soft transformation, the bones showed through the pelt, the flesh through the wide, tawny brow. And then it was no longer a lion in her arms but a man…

Related Characters: Beauty (speaker), The Beast (The Courtship of Mr. Lyon), Beauty
Page Number: 50-51
Explanation and Analysis:
The Tiger’s Bride Quotes

And The Beast gave me the rose from his own impeccable if outmoded buttonhole when he arrived, the valet brushing the snow off his black cloak. This white rose, unnatural, out of season, that now my nervous fingers ripped, petal by petal, apart as my father magnificently concluded the career he had made of catastrophe.

Related Characters: Heroine (The Tiger's Bride) (speaker), The Beast (The Tiger's Bride)
Related Symbols: Roses
Page Number: 52-53
Explanation and Analysis:

The valet held out his master’s cloak to screen him from me as he removed the mask. The horses stirred.
The tiger will never lie down with the lamb; he acknowledges no pact that is not reciprocal. The lamb must learn to run with the tigers.
A great, feline, tawny shape whose pelt was barred with a savage geometry of bars the colour of burned wood. His domed, heavy head, so terrible he must hide… I felt my breast ripped apart as if I suffered a marvelous wound.

Related Characters: Heroine (The Tiger's Bride) (speaker), The Beast (The Tiger's Bride), Valet
Page Number: 64
Explanation and Analysis:

He dragged himself closer and closer to me, until I felt the harsh velvet of his head against my hand, then a tongue, abrasive as sandpaper. “He will lick the skin off me!”
And each stroke of his tongue ripped off skin after successive skin, all the skins of a life in the world, and left behind a nascent patina of shining hairs. My earrings turned back to water and trickled down my shoulders; I shrugged the drops off my beautiful fur.

Related Characters: Heroine (The Tiger's Bride) (speaker), The Beast (The Tiger's Bride)
Page Number: 67
Explanation and Analysis:
The Erl-King Quotes

In the evenings when the cold darkness settles down, I always go to the Erl-King and he lays me down on his bed of rustling straw where I lie at the mercy of his huge hands.
He is the tender butcher who showed me how the price of flesh is love; skin the rabbit, he says! Off come all my clothes.

Related Characters: The Erl-King (speaker), Heroine (The Erl-King) (speaker)
Page Number: 87
Explanation and Analysis:

When I realized what the Erl-King meant to do to me, I was shaken with a terrible fear and did not know what to do for I loved him with all my heart and yet I had no wish to join the whistling congregation he kept in his cages… His embraces were his enticements and yet, oh yet! they were the branches of which the trap itself was woven. But in his innocence he never knew he might be the death of me, although I knew from the first moment I saw him how Erl-King would do me grievous harm.

Related Characters: Heroine (The Erl-King) (speaker), The Erl-King
Page Number: 90
Explanation and Analysis:

I shall take two huge handfuls of his rustling hair as he lies half dreaming, half waking, and wind them into ropes, very softly, so he will not wake up, and, softly, with hands as gentle as rain, I shall strangle him with them.
Then she will open all the cages and let the birds free; they will change back into young girls, every one, each with the crimson imprint of his love-bite on their throats.

Related Characters: Heroine (The Erl-King) (speaker), The Erl-King
Page Number: 91
Explanation and Analysis:
The Lady of the House of Love Quotes

She is not sleeping.
In death, she looked far older, less beautiful and so, for the first time, fully human.
I will vanish in the morning light; I was only an invention of darkness. And I leave you as a souvenir the dark, fanged rose I plucked from between my thighs, like a flower laid on a grave. On a grave.

Related Characters: The Countess (The Lady of the House of Love) (speaker), The Countess (The Lady of the House of Love)
Related Symbols: Roses
Page Number: 107
Explanation and Analysis:
The Company of Wolves Quotes

Every wolf in the world now howled a prothalamion outside the window as she freely gave the kiss she owed him.
What big teeth you have!…
All the better to eat you with.
The girl burst out laughing; she knew she was nobody’s meat. She laughed at him full in the face, she ripped off his shirt for him and flung it into the fire, in the fiery wake of her own discarded clothing…
Carnivore incarnate, only immaculate flesh appeases him.

Related Characters: Child (The Company of Wolves) (speaker), Huntsman (speaker)
Page Number: 118
Explanation and Analysis:

It is Christmas Day, the werewolves’ birthday, the door of the solstice stands wide open; let them all sink through.
See! sweet and sound she sleeps in granny’s bed, between the paws of the tender wolf.

Related Characters: Child (The Company of Wolves), Huntsman
Page Number: 118
Explanation and Analysis:
Wolf-Alice Quotes

The wolves had tended her because they knew she was an imperfect wolf; we secluded her in animal privacy out of fear of her imperfection because it showed us what we might have been, and so time passed, although she scarcely knew it. Then she began to bleed.

Related Characters: Wolf-Alice
Page Number: 122
Explanation and Analysis:

Poor, wounded thing… locked half and half between such strange states, an aborted transformation, an incomplete mystery, now he lies writhing on his black bed like a Mycenaean tomb, howls like a wolf with his foot in a trap or a woman in labour, and bleeds.

Related Characters: Wolf-Alice, The Duke
Page Number: 126
Explanation and Analysis: