It has been said that “only female characters who can muster enough inner strength to make some gesture of non-conformity survive with any integrity intact.” Looking at Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen and The Bloody Chamber by Angela Carter, explore the presentation and results of female non-conformity and the extent to which the authors seem to promote a defiance of societal conventions.
Historically, women in literature have been expected to adhere to a patriarchal society, remaining submissive to the male figures in their lives. However, often these women who remain in their societal ‘place’ suffer as a result, being shamed or embarrassed, and, at times, even killed. Both ‘Pride and Prejudice’ and the short stories retelling fairy tales in ‘The Bloody Chamber’ detail the lives of women navigating a male dominated society, and the writers of both texts express the repercussions – both positive and negative – of female non-conformity. By defying social limitations placed upon women the protagonists survive with their integrity intact. However, the two writers promote this defiance to different extents, Carter more so than Austen; ‘The Bloody Chamber’ was published in 1979, during the second-wave feminist movement, whereas Austen was a proto-feminist writing in 1797. Because of the differences in society at the times both were published, they promote societal defiance to different extents (Carter more so than Austen), although both were ground breaking when published.
In both ‘Pride and Prejudice’ and ‘The Bloody Chamber’, the form and genre (and subversion of them) are used to express non-conformity, allowing female protagonists to maintain integrity by preserving their autonomy. ‘The Bloody Chamber’ is an example of how feminist writers have kept fantasy at the front of the Gothic genre. Figes argues that “the Gothic mode eventually became an imaginative vehicle for feminism…offering a dark world of the psyche in which women were the imprisoned victims of men” (1982). By exploring ideas of female entrapment and subjugation, Carter is able to draw attention to them. She achieves this powerfully through the narrative voice of the eponymous story, ‘The Bloody Chamber’. It was written as a first-person narrative, producing an intimate relationship between the reader and the protagonist, as well as increased sympathy for her. It also represents an example of female non-conformity because “the protagonist narrates her own story – this happens seldom in traditional fairy tales” (Notaro, 1995). By subverting the expected form, Carter is able to emphasise the differences between her story and the original source, the tale of Bluebeard, highlighting female independence and allowing us to explore the relationship between the protagonist and the Marquis; we can see how she responds to his sexual advances, and how the imbalance in power affects her. This first-person narration is also present in ‘The Tiger’s Bride’, ‘Puss-in-Boots’ and ‘The Erl King’, the latter of which is made further intimate because it begins in the second person, creating a much stronger bond with the reader. ‘The Werewolf’ is also biased towards the female protagonist, but it is written in the third person to emphasise our distance from a girl who seems barely human.
This use of the narrative perspective is also poignant in ‘Pride and Prejudice’, although Austen employs a third-person narrative and an omniscient narrator, with Elizabeth as the centre of consciousness. Mullan describes Austen as the first novelist to use free indirect style, combining the “internal and external”, merging “third-person narration with the habits of thought or expression of a fictional character” rather than choosing between first- and third-person narratives to present the story like the authors before her had done (2015), which in itself is an expression of non-conformity. We can see Regency England in the eyes of Elizabeth, but the readers are not restricted to her judgement; the narrator remains objective, allowing us to trust their description of event. Although we clearly sympathise for Elizabeth, we are also able to criticise her when she is wrong. This is in part due to the genre of ‘Pride and Prejudice’: the novel is a social commentary and so readers are given insight into Elizabeth’s beliefs and able to support her for defying social expectations and appreciate her independence compared to other female characters in the novel, but also simultaneously criticise her for falling into the status quo – Austen is “allowing her audience to see what her characters cannot” (Bochman, 2005). Upon discovering that Charlotte has accepted Mr Collins’s proposal, Elizabeth exclaims “Engaged to Mr Collins! My dear Charlotte, – impossible!” but the narrator clearly condemns this as a “reproach”, which would allow the reader to criticise Elizabeth for looking down on a woman who did not have the luxury to wait to potentially marry for love the way that she could. Both Carter and Austen subvert literary tradition to exemplify how non-conformity allows female protagonists to maintain integrity: the protagonist in ‘The Bloody Chamber’ and Elizabeth both interact with the readers, which was not the case in the source tale for ‘The Bloody Chamber’ and was a new approach to narrative perspective championed by Austen. Carter’s protagonist survives the story unlike the women who came before her, and Austen’s protagonist marries for love and is able to rise in the social hierarchy, and so it is clear that they are able to maintain integrity by defying a patriarchal society.
Both writers also emphasise the importance of independence in female non-conformity in the lives of their protagonists, especially how this allows women to survive with their integrity intact. Both authors promote defiance of social convention and reclaiming of control over their voices and actions to maintain integrity and escape the oppressive patriarchal society. “Austen makes sure that her heroines’ successful courtships are motivated by love” (ibid) and Elizabeth Bennet is no different. She is expected to marry Mr Collins because, due to entail laws in Regency England, if her father dies, she, her sisters, and her mother do not inherit their home, but rather it is given to their closest male relative, Mr Collins. When she rejects him, Mrs. Bennet declares that if Elizabeth does not marry Mr Collins, she will “never see [Elizabeth] again.” (Austen, Jones and Stafford, 2004). Entail laws would have been deeply entrenched in the society of Regency England, and both Austen’s caricaturing of Mrs Bennet’s exaggerated response as well as the frustration the reader feels towards these laws is part of how Austen criticises a society in which women are stripped of rights and given no liberties, although this is not something that modern readers understand as well as a reader at the time would have. Elizabeth also exemplifies female independence from a society that expects women to be reliant on men in her rejection of Darcy – readers at the time would have expected her to agree to ensure financial security for herself and her family, and yet she scathingly turns him down, telling him that “I have every reason in the world to think ill of you.” (ibid). Her language throughout the scene remains hyperbolic, but rather than adopting the hysteria with which her mother speaks (seen in her use of exclamatives and repetition of the effect of any event on her “nerves”), her speech is cutting, methodically listing her grievances with Darcy, and especially refusing to back down when he challenged her. Austen waits until they have “mutual respect” (Bochman, 2005) for one another, and so their marriage is not founded on an imbalance of power or a lack of understanding of one another, so that it is mutually beneficial to both of them.
by her ease and liveliness, his mind might have been softened, his manners improved; and from his judgement, information, and knowledge of the world, she must have received benefit of greater importance (Austen, Jones and Stafford, 2004).
The ideal marriage and, in Austen’s eyes, the only marriage that can survive, is one in which there is respect and love for one another – Elizabeth and Darcy learn from one another and so their marriage is ideal because they are on equal footing.
Carter also explores female independence and defiance of the patriarchy in ‘The Tiger’s Bride’. In this retelling of ‘Beauty and the Beast’, Beauty gains power by not conforming, actively transforming the Beast into something human and then choosing to transform herself rather than allowing the metamorphosis to come as a result of a man, as in the other stories. In this short story, Carter subverts the traditional depiction of the story of ‘Beauty and the Beast’. In Beaumont’s original story, although the heroine shows “great resolution” in giving herself to the Beast to save her father, as the story continues, she becomes “more and more submissive to male will, and any possibility of real independence is denied” (Notaro, 1995). Carter continues to explore female independence and the defiance of a society that oppresses them in ‘The Courtship of Mr. Lyon’, which modifies the original story rather than altering it (ibid). The narrator tells us: “Do not think she had no will of her own; only, she was possessed…” (Carter, 2006), but we doubt this because the passive voice used after the reassurance that she had free will negates this idea (Notaro, 1995). Carter herself wrote that:
To be the object of desire is to be defined in the passive case.
To exist in the passive case is to die in the passive case that is, to be killed. (Carter, 1979).
Clearly the passive voice indicates female conformity and, consequently, subjugation. Furthermore, the narrator informs us that “she would gladly have gone to the ends of the earth for her father” (Carter, 2006), which emphasises the Swiss psychoanalyst Bruno Bettelheim’s argument that ‘Beauty and the Beast’ (and as a result this adaptation) exemplifies the transfer of the oedipal bond from the father to another man (1976). The final line of the story is extremely simple: “Mr and Mrs Lyon walk in the garden; the old spaniel drowses on the grass, in a drift of fallen petals.” By addressing the girl as “Mrs Lyon”, Carter indicates a transformation that, as Bryant describes, is “rapidly re-inscribing Beauty back into her womanly supported role.” (1989). By ending the story in such a simple way, Carter also instils this presentation of women into the real world, making the subtle comment of women’s reliance on men seem commonplace. In contrast, Carter subverts the traditional tale of ‘Beauty and the Beast’ in ‘The Tiger’s Bride’, where “Beauty herself narrates the story” (Notaro, 1995). The power of this is made most clear in the first line of the story: “My father lost me to the Beast at cards” (Carter, 2006). The tone seems resigned, as if she expected nothing better from her father, and highlights clearly that she is viewed by both men as nothing but an object to be exchanged as collateral in a bet. Bryant comments that:
By appropriating the personal voice, the girl in this second tale not only takes charge of telling the narrative tradition of her life, and consequently of the narrative tradition of the fairy tale, but she also makes clear from the start that what blame there is to be assigned lies not with her but to with the dominant systems to which she is only a bargaining chip. (1989).
This makes it clear that, unlike in the first of Carter’s adaptations of and the original ‘Beauty and the Beast’, Beauty does not blame herself for any of the events that transpire. Carter writes: “she were speaking…in the name of all those women who are impotent before the folly of their men, the same men who govern their lives” (ibid). She utilises sibilance and fricatives, adding a caustic tone to her thoughts, creating hissing and biting noises – she is forced to whisper and be silent, stripping her of a powerful voice, effectively oppressing her as she cannot speak out. As the story continues, however, she regains her voice by “actively initiating herself into the dominant discourse, she bargains with the status quo to redeem her story and her subjectivity on her own terms.” (Bryant, 1989), and so retaliates against the oppression she faces at the hands of her father and regains independence. She is asked by the Beast to remove her clothes in exchange for her father’s fortune, and she agrees for a much smaller sum. She eventually does let the Beast see her naked, and in doing so
she rebels at thus being a mere item of barter, and strips herself of all clothing – that of her former daughter-role, that of her present sex-object – down to her ‘real’ nakedness, that of herself as subject rather than object (Atwood, 1994).
ensuring her freedom and preserving her integrity.
Just as Austen and Carter explore the positive aspects to non-conformity and societal defiance, both authors also explore the negative effects of female conformity to the patriarchy. In ‘Pride and Prejudice’, Lydia, Charlotte and Caroline act as foils to Elizabeth. Lydia conforms to patriarchal Regency society in her desire to marry, Caroline is desperate to marry Darcy, and Charlotte also conforms by marrying Mr Collins. Austen punishes all three for not marrying out of love and instead marrying solely as a result of physical attraction or desire for money (Bochman, 2005). Lydia would have been “ruined” by Wickham, “spoiling her family’s reputation as well” (ibid), clearly highlighting how destructive it can be to blindly follow social norms. Similarly, Caroline was punished because she had to watch Darcy marry Elizabeth in her place, in spite of Elizabeth’s significantly lower class, “inferior” family (Austen, Jones and Stafford, 2004) and upbringing. The most powerful example of a woman being punished for conforming is Charlotte’s marriage to Mr Collins. By marrying Mr Collins just for financial gain, she suffers from the embarrassment that is associated with him: as his wife, she cannot reprimand him despite his demeaning and often mortifying comments like “do not make yourself uneasy…about your apparel…Lady Catherine will not think the worse of you for being simply dressed. She likes to have the distinction of rank preserved.” (Austen, Jones and Stafford, 2004). In fact, due to the fact that “once married, [women] lost control over both their possessions and their fate and became their husbands’ property” (Golemac, 2014), Charlotte is associated with everything her husband says and does. Indeed, Golemac argues that, by marrying Mr Collins, “[Charlotte] pays the price for her choice as she becomes the same shallow person he is” (ibid), reflected in Charlotte’s sudden fascination with and dedication to Lady Catherine de Bourgh. Elizabeth, acting as a foil, rejects Mr Collins despite the fact that “society recommends that all women accept the marriage proposal they receive” (Reena, 2012). Bochman argues that Collins’s rejection represents a feminist victory: “with Collins symbolic of the prevailing patriarchy: an older, professional man with some money and a measure of power, Collins seems to hold all the cards. Yet he is defeated by a young woman who, other than her wit and will is otherwise socially powerless” (Bochman, 2005). Clearly, Austen wrote ‘Pride and Prejudice’ as a social commentary: “early nineteenth-century female readers may fantasize about achieving a measure of power, however momentary. Meanwhile, today’s readers may enjoy it as a kind of David and Goliath fantasy” (ibid). Either interpretation highlights Austen’s criticism of a society that forces women to marry, and encouragement of a female protagonist who refuses to conform to societal expectations.
Both Carter and Austen emphasise the fates their protagonists have been saved from by not conforming to a patriarchal society. While Austen encourages non-conformity by showing readers the benefits of defying social expectations, Carter uses symbolism to allude to the repercussions of female conformity. In ‘The Bloody Chamber’, just like the original Bluebeard tale, the Marquis expected (arguably forced) the protagonist to enter the chamber he had banned her from. She is punished for her defiance by being sentenced to death by beheading in a rigid ritual – she is forced to wear white clothes, resembling her former purity and innocence, starkly juxtaposing the necklace of red rubies she has to wear. Even the beheading is “A metaphorical punishment…for the knowledge she has acquired” (Notaro, 1995), perhaps even alluding to Eve being punished for taking the forbidden fruit despite being tempted by the Serpent. By conforming to her fate, the heroine (had it not been for her mother) would not have survived, emphasising the deadly effects of conformity. Also in ‘The Bloody Chamber’, the protagonist falls in love with a blind piano tuner, who she marries after the death of the Marquis – she is no longer subject to the male gaze and so the “construction of the feminine self is once again accomplished” (ibid). Additionally, the protagonist is permanently branded by a mark on her forehead that Carter describes as “the caste mark of a Brahmin woman. Or the mark of Cain.” (Carter, 2006). Lokke interprets this mark in multiple ways:
Thus the heart on the heroine’s forehead is not only a mark of shame, a sign of complicity; it is also a badge of courage. (1988).
This mark is a symbol of her non-conformity, a motif also seen in Carter’s ‘The Erl King’. Here, we follow a girl coming to terms with her sexuality (as with most, if not all, of the stories in ‘The Bloody Chamber’) who makes a journey to the Erl King – one made by many women before her. We expect the protagonist to become trapped in the Erl King’s kingdom, but
This girl does not want to be defined absolutely and for ever by the Erl-King’s seductive but obliterating sexuality. In this match of inequalities it’s her freedom against his, and she chooses hers, afterwards opening “all the cages” to “let the birds free; they…change back into young girls…each with the crimson implant of his love-bite on their throats.” (Carter, 2006), (Atwood, 1995).
Carter also adopts the commonly used symbol of caged birds to represent women trapped by society as seen in ‘The Awakening’ and ‘I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings’. By placing herself above the Erl King, the protagonist defies the expectation that she follows a patriarchal figure and by acting in her own interests, she saves herself and other girls. In both stories, the girls are physically branded because they conform to the men who pursue them but, because they eventually rebel in order to liberate themselves, the marks double as symbols of independence and non-conformity, something to be proud of.
Non-conformity to a patriarchal society in ‘The Bloody Chamber’ is clearly presented in the creation of strong female characters. Not only is the protagonist of the story educated on sex, as so many of Carter’s protagonists are, but she has not been given a convoluted idea of it from maids as in ‘The Tiger’s Bride’, but instead an accurate depiction from her trusted mother. From the beginning of the tale, the protagonist’s mother is crafted to be strong, which her daughter describes with pride: “[my] mother had outfaced a junkful of Chinese pirates, nursed a village through a visitation of the plague, shot a man-eating tiger with her own hand”, immediately drawing to our attention the strength of the mother and alluding to the strength of the daughter and women in general. The protagonist finds comfort in her relationship with her mother, who remains the only companion she can fully trust. The bond between mother and daughter is inevitably what saves the protagonist:
On her eighteenth birthday, my mother had disposed of a man-eating tiger that had ravaged the villages in the hills north of Hanoi. Now, without a moment’s hesitation, she raised my father’s gun, took aim and put a single, irreproachable bullet through my husband’s head. (Carter, 2006).
Carter captures the strength of the mother that has not faded with age, and equates the man-eating tiger with the Marquis – both monsters that could not escape the fate of a woman. Her life in Indo-China left her with a “great love for independence and self-confidence.” (Notaro, 1995). Not only is the mother formidable, but she fulfils the role of a man in the original Bluebeard tale, highlighting the importance of women who defy confinement, especially that of a traditional form.
Austen’s presentation of mothers in ‘Pride and Prejudice’ completely contrasts Carter’s, however. Austen criticises women like Mrs. Bennet and Lady Catherine for their compliance with society – Mrs. Bennet is ridiculed by members of the upper class and “does more harm than good in attempting to better her daughters’ prospects” – she is what Bochman describes as a “marriage-market mamma”. (Bochman, 2005). Lady Catherine de Bourgh is similar; she is a widow who “fails to obtain her ends.” Austen presents her as “grasping” and “overly class-conscious” (ibid), and it is this adherence to the status quo that not only makes her so frustrating in comparison (and acting as a hinderance) to Elizabeth’s brazen rejection of prescribed societal norms, but also what causes her downfall – she is forced to watch Elizabeth, rather than her daughter, marry Darcy. Mothers are not presented as strong or formidable in ‘Pride and Prejudice’, largely because they choose to follow and, at times, even enforce societal convention. In this way, both authors’ approaches promote a defiance of these social conventions.
However, while it is clear that female characters who have the inner strength to make some gesture of non-conformity survive with integrity intact, they are not necessarily the only ones who do. Furthermore, the extent to which the authors seem to promote a defiance of societal conventions can also be debated. In one of Carter’s Red Riding Hood retellings, ‘The Werewolf’, the protagonist is part of
a community whose members are as cruel as the wolves and with a girl who is perfectly at ease in it, able to use the typical instruments of a patriarchal society and self-confident enough to slash off with a knife the animal’s paw (Carter, 2005).
By adhering to the conventions of the society she lives in, she is able to save herself from the wolf, and gain her grandmother’s property. By conforming, she survives and thrives. Similarly, in ‘Pride and Prejudice’, although Elizabeth defies society, inevitably she remains entrapped in its expectations and, as a result, conforms. Although Elizabeth is lauded by Darcy and us for her wittiness and intelligence, Austen herself wrote that “Wisdom is better than Wit, & in the long run will certainly have the laugh on her side.” (Austen, 1814). Austen clearly supports marriage; “Austen sees marriage as a positive and indispensable part of society,” and in her novels “a person, regardless of gender, is viewed as incomplete unless they have married.” (Bochman, 2005). By the end of the novel, although they do so out of love and on their own terms, “Elizabeth and Jane end by making rich marriages of which their mother is proud. Ironically, they marry the very men Mrs. Bennet had wished for them.” (ibid). Although these acts of conformity are unintentional (they still perpetuate the idea that a woman needs to be married to a rich man to survive with their integrity intact; Charlotte or Lydia, for example, marry poor men and are ridiculed for their marriages), they still conform and thrive as a result – Ellmann explains that “…when the husband and wife exchanged vows, they became one person, and, in the words of the jurist William Blackstone, ‘the husband is that person’” (1988). Women in ‘Pride and Prejudice’ are tied to their husbands both literally by entail laws, but also metaphorically, by a society that has deemed rich, educated men (and by extension, their wives) to be acceptable, and condemned the men and women who do not and often cannot fulfil this role. Even Charlotte, who married Mr Collins out of a desire to survive and avoid the label of a spinster, was not criticised by Austen as much as critics like Golemac claim. The irony of the first line, “It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.” (Austen, Jones and Stafford, 2004) implies that every “single woman is in need of financial security, of a man with a fortune.” (Bochman, 2005). Austen creates pathos for Charlotte, especially amongst readers during the Regency period, because Charlotte is how Austen criticises “a society in which women have no choice but to marry for money if they are to live” due to a variety of reasons such as entail laws, and “a society that does not allow married women control over their own money and prevents genteel women from earning money.” (ibid). Austen herself says “Single women have a dreadful propensity for being poor, which is one very strong argument in favour of matrimony” (Austen, 1817). It is clear that Austen supports marriage and, as a result, all women in her novels conform to achieve it, thus making it clear that defying convention is not the only way women preserve their honour and integrity.
Although female characters who can muster enough inner strength to make some gesture on non-conformity survive with their integrity intact, they are not the only women in these texts who do. Particularly in ‘Pride and Prejudice’, Austen is sympathetic to the plight of characters who are not the protagonist and therefore cannot afford to challenge the status quo. Carter clearly encourages a defiance of social conventions by using the gothic genre, narrative perspective and the characterisation of women, but Austen’s attitude to defiance of social conventions is less black-and-white. Although she supports defying the restrictions of society through her use of a defiant female protagonist and a variety of foils used in juxtaposition to her, she still upholds the status quo as she supports marriage, particularly marriage borne out of love (although love is not a necessity). Bochman most accurately describes marriage – and women’s role in it – in ‘Pride and Prejudice’ as:
Elizabeth is a heroine who is spirited and knows her own mind. She wishes to marry based on love and to be prized not only for her beauty and “accomplishments,” but for her wit and intelligence. In this way, Austen’s character looks towards social change for women. Yet Elizabeth also makes a wealthy marriage to a chivalric nobleman. Her rags-to-riches tale is also one of old-fashioned romance. (2005)
It is evident that Carter presents female non-conformity in a largely positive light and promotes a defiance of societal conventions, Austen’s presentation of non-conformity is less definite and less rebellious, although this was likely revolutionary in Regency England.
Bibliography
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Carter, A. (2006). The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories. London: Random House.
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