3. Bluebeard’s Wives

About this Lecture

Lecture

In this section, we think about the causes of death for some of Bluebeard’s wives in ‘The Bloody Chamber’, focusing in particular on the literary allusions that Carter weaves into the story, including Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde, Sheridan le Fanu’s Carmilla, and Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca.

Course

In this course, Professor Marie Mulvey-Roberts (University of the West of England) explores Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber. We begin by providing an introduction to Carter herself, focusing in particular on the range of her literary output and her interest in folklore and fairy tales. In the five modules that follow, we focus on four of the constituent stories in The Bloody Chamber: in the second and third modules, we focus on the first story in the collection, ‘The Bloody Chamber’; in the fourth module, we focus on ‘The Erl-King’; in the fifth module, ‘The Lady in the House of Love’; and in the sixth module, ‘Wolf-Alice’. The seventh module provides some conclusions to the course as a whole.

Lecturer

Marie Mulvey-Roberts is Professor of English Literature at the University of the West of England, Bristol. Her research is mainly in the area of Gothic and gender. She is the author of Dangerous Bodies: Historicising the Gothic Corporeal (2016), winner of the Alan Lloyd Smith Memorial Prize and has edited several books on Angela Carter. She co-curated the exhibition: Strange Worlds: The Vision of Angela Carter at the Royal West of England Academy, Bristol (December-March 2017), co-created the website getangelacarter.com, produced two musical adaptations of stories from Carter’s The Bloody Chamber and is a co-founder of The Angela Carter Society.