Erotic Infidelities explores Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories, which won the 1979 Cheltenham Literature Festival, inspired radio, film, musical, and theater adaptions, and led to Carter becoming one of the world’s most studied authors. Carter aimed to extract the latent content of traditional fairy stories, and create fabulous gothic narratives of desire and sexuality, gender identity and performance, that critiqued their social and psychological underpinnings.
Kimberly Lau starts the book by examining the traditional fairy tale as the epitome of the narrative incarnation of love. She discusses how its formulaic structure, bare plotting, and minimal character development make it a narrative of tradition and trope, with a comfortable allure that sustains the cultural ideologies at its heart. She introduces Angela Carter’s understanding of the gendered politics of enduring narratives, and her challenge to them in The Bloody Chamber, which she describes as working to free love from its existence as a clichéd universalizing myth in which the woman is complicit within its oppressive power relations. She describes how Carter highlights patriarchal legacies and theoretical inheritances in her tales, but reweaves them in provocative retellings that conjure love in hitherto unimagined ways and forms, and how it is in this radical reimagining that Carter intends love to liberate itself, and our own subjectivities and desires.
Throughout the book Lau focuses on Carter’s use of multiple intertextualities to create “alternate erotics,” which she describes as “investment in imagining unforeseen possibilities for heterosexual love and desire, for an alternate erotics...unexpected enchantments...erotic infidelities, by which I mean both an infidelity to her source tales and other intertexts through an erotic energy and an infidelity to a hegemonic and singular erotic (whether defined by patriarchal society or in an alternate vein, by feminists)...Carter’s erotic infidelities work against our culturally determined expectations and longing, against what we think we know and what we think we want, and, in so doing, they usher us into fresh and welcome enchantments” (10-11).
Lau explores Carter’s use of intertexual narrative from a vast array of sources to rebuild a fantasy world from our own. Thus Carter can “reveal the historical sediments and multilayered nature of enduring narratives, the cultural trappings that render them trite while also conveying the weight of their gendered burden” (5). She also explores the rich intertextualities within The Bloody Chamber that repeatedly address its central concerns from different viewpoints.
Lau highlights Carter’s uses of psychoanalytical theory to engage with late-twentieth-century feminist critique of Freud’s psychosexual theories, and Lacan’s post-structuralist psychoanalyses, particularly the conceptualization of the Oedipus concept, and the phallus as privileged signifier in Western culture. She shows how Carter draws upon this to create the transformative enchantment of The Bloody Chamber, in “an affective and reciprocal recognition, an identificatory metamorphosis” (Lau 2015:4), that also has transformative political potential.
Lau seeks to recontextualize The Bloody Chamber within contemporary cultural theory, and vis-à-vis its critiques and counter-critiques. She personally accepts but disagrees with those who find Carter too heterosexual in focus, referring to Carter’s biography and personal journals to state that “Carter’s devotion to the possibility of heterosexual love and desire outside of dominant cultural scripts—her commitment to exploring how we might recuperate love and erotic desire for heterosexuality—was, in many ways, a lifelong obsession” (9). Lau is careful to point out that she does not see Carter as writing her life into her work, nor using her life to interpret it, but that she seeks to “draw from Carter’s journals to highlight her deep, lifelong investment in retrieving love, desire, and sex from their cultural constraints, their deceits and veiled appearances” (10).
She interrogates Carter’s “infidelity” to all antecedents, including Carter’s own work, as a destabilizing force for patriarchal constructs and hegemony. She says of Carter, “her women and wolves move away from language, speech, articulation, inspiring us to consider the possibilities of truly alternate erotics” (15). Like Lorna Sage, Lau reads The Bloody Chamber as a collection rather than a set of individual stories. She demonstrates how the stories form a structure in which the book as a whole moves from a cultured world of phallogocentric symbolic order and patriarchal narratives of women’s propriety, regressing though spaces invoking their demise and degeneration. She explores Carter’s use of language and gender as constructed cultural edifices, and how Carter intervenes in feminine incarceration with increasing force, from the bloody chamber in Bluebeard’s perfect castle via the Beast’s neglected palace to the Elf King’s woods, to the natural world; thence down into the cave below the ruined castle where pre-symbolic, feral Wolf Alice silently licks the reflectionless revenant Duke into life and form.
Lau is fluent in the language of feminist theory and psychoanalysis, well able to traverse the labyrinthine wonders of Angela Carter’s writing and to convey the multiple layers of meaning that make The Bloody Chamber so vivid. Thus the book under review deserves to become required reading for English studies, women’s studies, gender, feminism, fairy tale studies and courses in other fields that use such material. It is also an excellent introduction to the mass of extant Carter scholarship.
My only disappointment is that the subtitle, Love and Enchantment in Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber seems misleading. Although Lau does engage in Carter’s disagreement with Bruno Bettelheim’s view of enchantment, discussion of enchantment is mainly left until the seven-page epilogue. This focuses on a critique of a gendered logic of enchantment within the study of Western fairy tales, and introduces some fascinating scholarship that there is no room left to engage with. This means that the book might been have more accurately titled Erotic Infidelities: Transformation and its Potential in Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber.
However, the rich intertextuality of Lau’s own writing means that her convincing psychoanalytical critique also conveys the claustrophobic strictures that Carter reimagined into new enchantments, and the psychological and social transformations inherent in these texts. Although this book is possibly beyond the undergraduate level, Erotic Infidelities will still engage many Angela Carter fans. Lau refers in depth to Carter’s other work and biography, and eloquently places Carter in context as an academic feminist who wove a very special literary magic to question and reimagine the world, thus engaging an enduring fan base that may or may not have fully understood what magics she wove in their psyches. Thus Lau not only explores and interprets the work of Carter, but also elucidates Carter herself in an excellent book that is well worth buying.
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[Review length: 1075 words • Review posted on February 17, 2016]