The Bloody Chamber: an alternative ending – Estelle L
Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories; a collection based on various well-known fairytales or folk tales renowned for its twist on the stories we are familiar with. While for many of us, fairytales are a comfort and perhaps remind us of childhood, in her collection Carter extracts and explores more mature themes within these stories.
The following piece is an alternative ending for the collection’s eponymous tale The Bloody Chamber, a tale originating from the fairytale Bluebeard. Here, the Marquis is representative of the character Bluebeard, a powerful aristocrat who traps his young wives in his violent and deadly chamber – in Carter’s tale, the heroine does not fall victim to him, being saved by her mother moments before her decapitation at the hands of her husband. In this rework, the female protagonist has enough agency to save herself…
The Bloody Chamber
The Marquis stood transfixed, utterly dazed, at a loss. The great ceremonial sword glittered, winking wickedly at him under the wintry sun. Gripping the hilt tight, I charged towards him; the solid hilt of the sword met his forehead with a resounding crack, reminiscent perhaps of the satisfying snap his wives’ bones had echoed while he malignantly stripped them of their dignity in his bloody chamber.
You are stunned now, Marquis.
He fell to the floor, and I withdrew my weapon, raising the sword above my head.
I looked down on him at the furious red mark embellishing his forehead, the rouge stain that would be the crown jewel of his monstrous atrocities; for each life destroyed at his hands, I was there. My mark was there now. He did not have my life. He did not possess my future. He did not even have me. I was no longer his! His reputation, once honourable of his murderous heritage, was as my victim. From that moment on, as he lay writhing in the dirt, like a sickened snake hypnotised and at the will of his snake-charmer, he belonged entirely to me.
The blade fell in one swoop, falling on him like a rain of bloody rubies, but he had not a look of fear in his face. It was one of shame. Shame clouded his features. I had turned the key to his bloody chamber fast. Shame bore into his soul, and shame impaled his dignity and honour as he had stripped me of mine, and the women before me of theirs. Shame was all that he was reduced to, and as I had marked him in this world, shame marked him irrevocably in the empyrean halls of his brutal forefathers.
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