A nice bit of sex and violence...or not.

Well, we were asked to annotate pages 18-26 of The Bloody Chamber for our homework and after having done this write a blog post on something that caught our interest in the aforementioned passage. Really there were two things that caught my interest the most so here they are:

The imagery of the of the corridor leading towards the torture chamber is really interesting as the passage foreshadows to the reader what the narrator might expect to find in her husband's locked "den". The "Venetian, tapestries" depict images of violence with, "naked swords" and "immolated horses" which the narrator recognizes as "the Rape of the Sabines". The combination and association of violence and sexuality is certainly one that can be recognized in the narrator's husbands sexual tastes, with rape potentially being a climax in sexual ambition for him. The fact that the narrator recognizes the tapestry suggests that she is not quite so naive as the reader (and perhaps even herself) has been lead to believe up untill this point. The purpose behind the tapestries is interesting too as it is to hide what the very tapestries themselves show. The narrator describes how the "heavy hangings on the wall muffled my footsteps"  and the floor is "thickly carpeted". When I initially read The Bloody Chamber (not knowing there was going to be a torture chamber) this sent alarm bells ringing in my head as I recognized that the tapestries and the carpet serve to soundproof the corridor. The screams of the Marquis' victims would be audible were it not for the tapestries and carpets so their function ironically covers up in real life what it depicts in a corrupt fantasy. Pleasant stuff.

On a slightly more light hearted note- I think that the servants are definitely in on the whole torture chamber thing. They at least suspect if not know what the Marquis does to his wives. Evidence in the such as, "How careless I was; a maid, tending the logs, eyed me reproachfully as if I'd set a trap for her as I picked up the clinking bundle of keys" and "I knew by her bereft intonation that I had let them down again" certainly suggest that the servants are aware of the horrors that the keys connote. I think that the servants probably are the mechanism that the Marquis uses to spy on his wife and who keep him informed so that he can arrive back at the perfect time. One could argue that the "reproachful" look of the maid servant actually shows pity for the narrator in her naivety, yet also duty to inform the master which could be the "trap".

Just some ramblings, that's all till next lesson folks...