The Bloody Chamber, The Red Hair Bow & The Company of Wolves

"With love to Angela Carter."

Little Red Riding Hood getting in bed with The Wolf is canon. You learn this early on.

It dates back to The Story of Grandmother, the oldest oral variant of the tale. First, The Wolf convinces Red to eat her grandmother’s flesh and blood; a nearby cat calls her a slut for doing so. He then cajoles her into a striptease, urging Red to toss her clothes, piece-by-piece, into the fireplace. Finally he invites her under the covers to learn what big eyes, arms, teeth, etc, etc [eyebrow wiggle] he has. “Dark and sexy” isn’t foreign to this story; we know Grimm’s is grim, the wolf is hungry, and Red Riding Hood is a go-to Leg Avenue Halloween costume. But this illicit sequence is often lost to the archives—except in the case of Angela Carter and The Bloody Chamber, her book of adult fairy tales

ACTUALLY, sorry, she resented that term. Carter’s intention was to “extract the latent content from the traditional stories.” Her feminist leanings revamped the tales for a 1979 audience, but the gothic and erotic overtures? That’s both a subversion and a return to form, a perverse twist from someone who’s done their research.

So we see this seduction resurrected in Carter’s short story The Company of Wolves. But when the wolf delivers that hackneyed pick-up line, "the better to eat you with,” our heroine starts laughing because "she knew she was nobody's meat."

I think about this when I put on my red hair bow and go out.

Eyefucked on the Underground, the train screaming from Camden to Euston. At the Tracey Emin exhibit, viewing paintings of wide-open legs gushing blood and grief. Buying pink ribbons for my costume (a psychopath). On a park bench as a man tells me if I were his, he would kiss my boots everyday. Getting cigs and tips from two young girls on how not get stabbed or stolen from. Charming and chattering my way through free cocktails, but vanishing as soon as his back is turned. Any and every night I walk home with my keys between my fingers, and fall asleep to stories about a Big Bad Something-or-Other.

Halloween arouses a very feminine feeling for me, especially when there's an [shivers] election around the corner, one that determines *just* how unsafe it is return to America. Sometimes I find myself emboldened by flirtations with danger; I am The Wolf. Other times I’m more hyper-aware of my vulnerability, of the company closing in on me.

When November comes, what’s the solution? Run off again? Return to seclusion? Stay wild? I go back to The Bloody Chamber to see if there’s answers…

“The Bloody Chamber”

“I saw how much that cruel necklace became me. And for the first time and confined life, I sensed in me a potentiality for corruption that took my breath away.”

If you’re unfamiliar with Bluebeard, here’s the gist: rich multi-widower weds young girl. She’s left alone in his palace of wonder but overtly warned not to use one key. She succumbs to her curiosity, and WOOPS, opens a room containing Bluebeard’s viciously slaughtered wives. Bluebeard returns to add his latest bride to the bodycount, but she’s saved just-in-time. Nonetheless, there’s an eerie feeling when we open “The Bloody Chamber,” on this virgin bride fleeing the quiet nothingness of girlhood with her mother to plunge into the “unguessable country of marriage.” 

Carter’s sensual wordplay flourishes in Bluebeard’s castle, and no detail lacks meaning. The scent of Russian leather announces the bridegroom’s presence, funerary lilies forecast the hidden mortuary within the estate. But the biggest statement piece comes in the form of a ruby red choker, a wedding gift to the blushing bride. When the virgin is stripped in preparation of ~*marital proceedings*~ all that’s left are “those blazing rubies” on her throat. He kisses them before he kisses her lips: “Rapt, he intoned, ‘of her apparel she retain, only her sonorous jewelry.’

So [shrug] yeah, clearly a fucking murderer. He could only fly a redder red flag if he waved the bloodied bedsheets himself (luckily, he says the custom is unfashionable).

But babygirl is babygirl, and doesn’t fully see it. Moreover, she’s “infinitely disheveled by the loss of her virginity,” feeling the familiar pangs of disappointment, loneliness, and newly invoked lust. “Boredom” gets added to the mix when she’s left alone with a ring of keys—including one forbidden key—and finds out exactly what happened to Bluebeard’s other wives.

Honeyblood tells this story in their video for “Choker,” elevating her gash of necklace to star status. While the lyrics put The Bloody Chamber in laymen’s terms, they do a lovely job of expressing the bride’s lust-in-disgust: “And I have fallen madly in love/with a man I cannot trust/I don’t think he would hurt me/I know he would.”

Sensual language be damned, “I know he would” leaves me gasping every time.

“Lady of the House of Love”

“Wearing an antique bridal gown, the beautiful queen of the vampires sits all alone in her dark, high house, under the eyes of the portraits of her demented and atrocious ancestors, each one of whom, through her, projects a baleful posthumous existence…”

Wrapped in my grey fur blanket, I illicit a swoony-sigh, heaving bosom and all that. My covert joy is reading someone bedtime stories, and this one’s about The Countess, a Transylvanian Briar Rose.

In the ‘90s Daisy Chainsaw—an English band weighty with their own fantastical lore surrounding lead singer KatieJane Garside—released a music video based on “Lady of the House of Love.” But my heart’s tugged reading the description of the undead beauty Garside so accurately embodies. In her frail, taloned hands we witness The Countess in her state of arrested development, neurotically pulling tarot cards to the same frustrating result: The High Priestess, Death, and The Tower.